Why is someone that busy here already, when he has so much to do?

Fine sand was pushed aside to either side of Leonardo Blaine as he cut across the desert like he was charging into battle. A fairly deep canal formed along his path. It was covered over by a gust of swirling wind soon after and vanished without a trace.

In the middle of the desert, which was no different from the open sea despite being land, Leonardo Blaine drew his brows together sharply as grains of sand clung to his eyelashes.

Even so, the lips hidden behind his mask twitched before he bit down on them. He simply could not suppress his smile.

“I need to get there quickly. He’ll be waiting.”

It had been Leonardo Blaine himself who said they should meet first after the match ended, but at the time it had been closer to an impulsive outburst born from tangled emotions. He had not said it with some ticklish date or dreamlike meal in mind. He had just wanted to hear that man’s voice.

But perhaps because he had run into such a completely unexpected situation, the instant he saw him, even at a distance where his expression was impossible to make out, his mood lifted just a little.

Leonardo Blaine charged at full speed in the direction the shot puts had flown. The only regrettable part was that there were no spectator stands in the desert where His Grace could stand and watch. Still, he could show his abilities little by little.

Wind alone could not possibly alter the trajectory of a lightning strike, so Leonardo Blaine assumed that if he just kept going like this, he would eventually find the heated shot put giving off smoke. ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ But for some reason, even after deciding he had come far enough, he saw nothing resembling smoke. Nor was there any trace to help him estimate where the shot put had landed.

Leonardo Blaine, who had set his goal on clearing the section in the shortest time possible, came to an abrupt stop in midair around then. Then he looked around in all directions. He had been told the oasis island was to the west, but all he could see in the distance was a dark hill, and whether it was really the destination remained unclear.

Did I come the right way?

If there were really an oasis, there’s no way I wouldn’t be able to sense it. Ordinary participants are supposed to cross this place with only the additional twenty throws, but whether that’s even possible is questionable.

Just as one doubt after another was beginning to pile up, he heard the soft sound of sand sliding somewhere nearby. Leonardo Blaine turned his head on instinct and moved toward it. He was worried the shot put, after being heated by the geothermal warmth as well, might be boiling or melting down together with the sand.

The sand was being sucked toward a single point in the center, as if the earth itself were hiding a swamp beneath it. The borderlands of Turandos, where Leonardo Blaine had gone in and out until he was sick of them, were an even more desolate and hotter desert region than this, so phenomena like this kind of sand vortex or collapsing ground were common enough there. And as someone who had been thoroughly drilled in terrain-related information, Leonardo Blaine knew very well that this was not a good sign.

“Damn it, if it sank into the ground, this is going to be a headache.”

Running a hand over the back of his neck, he moved toward the center as the vortex spun faster and faster. Even if it was going to be a headache, Ero’s shot put that had been launched along with his could not be allowed to take damage too. He had just been about to trigger an air explosion to clear away the sand for a moment and check whether the shot puts were still there.

Rumble rumble rumble—

...?

The sand that had been pouring downward suddenly splashed upward like boiling droplets of water. At the same time, the whole area began to tremble. Leonardo Blaine’s fingertips paused as he sensed something was wrong. The ground surged like waves on the open sea, then collapsed at insane speed as if a sinkhole had opened.

Along with it came a deep, resonant roar of wind. Leonardo Blaine reflexively shifted backward, and his pupils widened as the world before him abruptly darkened.

Then he slowly lifted his head, following the unknown shape that burst upward from the ground as though erupting past the tip of his chin.

“Tur’ark?”

The giant shadow rising endlessly from the exploding earth resembled an armored sturgeon of the sea. Along its sleek, sharp body and shell-like hide lined with short spikes, streams of sand rippled like water and poured down in a waterfall.

“What the hell is that doing here?”

He had run into a lot of unexpected faces today. Tur’ark was a reptilian magical beast that mainly inhabited arid desert regions. Its name came from combining the national name of Turandos, where it had first appeared, with the meaning of desert dragon. The creature swam beneath the sand as though it were water, then used the vibrations transmitted through the tiny particles of sand to locate its prey and devour it in the blink of an eye.

The one that had leapt up was roughly thirty meters long. Considering that a fully grown Tur’ark reached a minimum length of fifty meters and weighed close to a hundred tons, this one still looked juvenile. But it was by no means an easy opponent. Its temperament was foul beyond belief. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

And yet, thanks to the creature’s dark shadow contrasted against the dazzlingly bright sky, Leonardo Blaine immediately spotted two dented balls near its towering head. The two spheres hanging in midair began to fall in slow motion into the creature’s jaws, which had opened nearly one hundred forty-five degrees.

“Huh?”

Leonardo Blaine cursed under his breath and shot upward through the air at once. But the creature had apparently already taken the shot puts for prey. Its eyes rolled once, and then, like a bear trap snapping shut after a successful hunt, its mouth slammed closed.

Then, unable to support its own massive body, it toppled sideways like a collapsing sand tower.

Kwoooom—!

A deafening crash erupted as its huge body slammed across the dunes like a whale diving through the surface. The mounds of sand it shoved aside immediately picked up speed in the wind and rose into a surging tidal wave. Tur’ark burrowed into the middle of that sand wave, and then, leaving only its tail exposed, disappeared underground.

Normally those things were omnivorous and would eat humans just as readily, so Leonardo Blaine found it strange that it intended to ignore him and leave. But only for a moment. He barely managed to seize the tip of the tail before it could fully vanish.

“You bastard, where do you think you’re—”

He swung the hard but flexible flesh up over his shoulder, rotated his body in midair, and yanked with all his strength. The sand that the creature had been dragging inward changed direction and gradually began to flow in reverse. Tur’ark let out a shriek that was almost never heard, then was ripped back out like a fat radish and flailed in the air.

***

“How far the hell did you go?”

Meanwhile, Ero was riding on the back of an animal called a Sabla, wandering through the desert in search of Leonardo Blaine. Like Tur’ark, Sabla lived in desert regions, but it was not a magical beast.

It had a long snout like an anteater’s, with long, powerful claws and tail, but its temperament was mild, so it did not display aggression. Its legs were long compared to its body, allowing it to avoid the heat rising from the ground, and its thick flesh was soft enough that it was often used as a mount.

If it had one flaw, it was that it was quite slow, but for Ero—who had been on the verge of dying after walking directly across the blazing sand—it was still a decent option. Besides, the vines he had used earlier in the maze to bind participants had been fairly useful in taming a wild Sabla. For creatures that lived by tearing apart cacti and eating them, the moisture-filled subtropical vines must have felt like a delicacy and an entirely new world.

Thanks to that, Ero had even fashioned convincing footholds and reins. He was advancing while dangling the vine tied to the front of his pistol in front of the Sabla’s snout.

“Boss, where are you... Can’t you see your drying-up partner over here?”

Thanks to Leonardo Blaine launching both shot puts away at once, Ero did not have to panic every time he moved over whether the number on the shot put would decrease. But that was only useful if he actually knew where the boss and the shot puts were.

Ero was muttering to himself and struggling in the suffocating heat when a voice suddenly came from behind him.

“If you mean Lion, he’s over there slaughtering a magical beast.”

Ero flinched and spun around. His eyes went round.

“Huh?”

Silence stretched for a while. For a fleeting instant, he wondered whether it might be a mirage conjured by the shimmering heat.

But after grasping the situation, Ero let out a shriek and pitched forward.

“Aaagh!”

The moment the almost-touching vine finally brushed its snout, the Sabla stuck out its tongue, bit down on the bait in one gulp, and stopped on the spot. The recoil nearly threw Ero from the saddle, but the owner of the voice caught him by the nape and pulled him back into place.

“My apologies. It seems I startled you.”

“...W-who are you? Since when were you...!”

“Not long. The seat was spacious, and I thought you might be lonely all by yourself.”

His tone was that of a refined middle-aged gentleman, but what he was actually doing was no different from a thug. The rear seat that Ero had been saving for his boss had been forcibly and illegally occupied, and Ero could only blink, unsure how he was supposed to react. Clutching at his startled chest and jerking his shoulders, he quickly looked the mysterious companion up and down.

The man wore a black cloak and a top hat. His face was hidden behind a bird-beak mask, and the combination of the metal gauntlet on his hand and the black briefcase he carried was strangely mismatched. Even the trouser hem and shoes visible beneath the cloak made him look like someone dressed in a formal suit for an important occasion.

Ever since long ago, participants who appeared in the League dressed in outfits that plainly did not belong there tended to fall into one of two categories.

Either they were attention-seeking fools with no skill who just wanted to stand out, or they were battle-hardened League veterans who had gone a little bit insane.

In that brief span, Ero decided this man was much closer to the latter. For one thing, he had not noticed at all that someone had climbed on behind him. The man seemed skilled at hiding his presence.

Suddenly recalling what he had just heard, Ero hurriedly questioned him.

“W-wait. What did you say my boss was doing? You saw him?”

The eyes beyond the mask stared at Ero for a long while. Then the beak turned in the opposite direction, and the man lifted his chin slightly.

“He’s coming from over there.”

At those words, Ero also turned his head. At the same moment, the Sabla, which had been quietly chewing on the vine, started walking again.

Not understanding what was happening, Ero kept looking back and forth between both sides when a bizarre phenomenon came into view.

The sand-covered ground was heaving again and again like waves. Something seemed to be approaching from beneath the earth, and the speed was anything but ordinary. It looked like a shark cutting against a current with the fin on its back raised like a sail. The problem, if there was one, was that this was a desert rather than the sea—and that the scale of the disturbance was far beyond anything a mere shark would make.

“Boss...?”

Given that his boss possessed abilities so far beyond common sense, maybe splitting the sand and swimming through it was as easy for him as eating porridge. Trying to reassure himself, Ero moved his lips soundlessly, craned his neck, and narrowed his eyes. He was focused on the distant dunes, which kept collapsing and swelling over and over again.

Boom—

With a strange tremor, the earth shook, and thousands of tons of twisting sand surged upward. Beneath it, a gigantic shape thrust up its head. It was so vast that it was hard to grasp its full scale at a glance, and a dark shadow fell over Ero and the bird-beaked man’s heads. At the same time, unbearable wind pressure crashed over them and mercilessly seized the hair Ero had worked so hard to tidy.

The roar of the magical beast spread across the sky like the ultrasonic cry of a whale. Sand thrust upward like a tsunami and came crashing back down in a torrential sheet. Through that cascade, scales catching the light flashed gold as the creature revealed itself in all its majesty. Ero’s mouth fell open.

His gaze fixed on the head of the monster that had appeared out of nowhere. There, gripping one of Tur’ark’s long feelers like a rein, was Leonardo Blaine.