Chapter 63: Rain
The dark clouds that had been covering the entire sky since morning finally ran out of patience, releasing a fine drizzle.
Gazef Stronoff, Warrior Captain of the Kingdom, clicked his tongue and gave up on waiting for the rain to stop inside the castle. He pulled up the hood of his cloak and stepped out into it.
The main street of the capital was nearly empty. Only a few figures moved carefully on the wet, darkened pavement.
The rain soaked through his cloak, making it heavier and heavier. The damp clung to his skin in a way that was hard to ignore.
Gazef picked up his pace toward home. The thought of being out of these wet clothes soon was enough to make him breathe easier.
Then something caught his eye.
Through the rain — like a fine gauze curtain — at the turning from the main road into a side lane, a man was sitting on the ground. He made no attempt to get out of the rain, and he was covered in filth. His head was down, wet hair plastered to his forehead, water dripping continuously from the ends.
What made Gazef stop was not the strangeness of a man sitting in the rain without any cover. It was an indescribable sense that something was wrong. Specifically: the weapon gripped in the man's right hand was entirely at odds with his filthy state.
It was a kind of blade from a city said to lie in the distant southern desert — a type called a katana, and exceedingly rare.
A peculiar feeling moved through him, the specific discomfort of a button done up in the wrong hole. Gazef looked at the man's profile, and memory broke over him like a wave.
"You couldn't be... Unglaus?"
The moment it left his mouth, it seemed impossible. Brain Unglaus — the fierce rival who had fought him to a standstill in the Kingdom's Royal Tournament finals. The man whose fighting spirit had burned from every pore.
How could that man look like this?
But when the man slowly raised his head, Gazef drew a sharp breath.
That lean profile, those eyes with all the light gone out of them — unmistakably Brain Unglaus. Hollowed cheeks, deep shadows beneath his eyes, a complexion pale as a corpse. Not a trace of the man he remembered.
Brain swayed to his feet. His movements were heavy and listless, nothing like a warrior.
He lowered his eyes and turned without a word to walk away. His figure grew smaller in the rain.
A premonition rose in Gazef — if he let him go now, he would never see this man again.
"Brain Unglaus!" He stepped forward and called out.
A voice barely louder than a mosquito drifted back: "...Stronoff?"
No presence in it at all. Nothing like the voice that had accompanied those sword strikes in his memory.
"What happened to you?" Gazef asked, unable to help it.
Their eyes met. The expression on Brain's face made Gazef's chest tighten. It was the face of a man who had already stopped living.
"Finished," Brain said. "Answer me something, Stronoff. Are we strong?"
Gazef couldn't answer. His mind went to Carne Village.
If that powerful, mysterious magic caster had not appeared and intervened, he and all his men would have died there. The man called the Kingdom's strongest warrior — that was what it was worth, in the end.
Brain gave a hollow, self-mocking laugh. "Weak. Humans are just weak. Everything we know with a sword is worthless. I saw real power — a height that no human being can reach no matter how hard they try. And what I saw was barely even playing around. It wasn't even the edge of the iceberg."
Gazef had seen people broken this way before. An outsider's help rarely mattered.
But when Brain turned to leave and said, "I can die without regrets now," Gazef could no longer stay quiet.
"Wait."
He grabbed Brain's shoulder.
The pull made Brain stagger several steps, but he didn't go down. His footwork was still there — the foundation hadn't been destroyed.
Gazef felt a small measure of relief. His old rival's actual strength hadn't declined. There might still be time.
"You're coming to my place." Gazef gripped Brain's arm and walked, not asking. "Change your clothes. Eat something. Sleep."
Brain didn't resist. He just stumbled along beside him.
That quiet, docile compliance stirred a feeling in Gazef that he couldn't quite name, and didn't like. But he knew — he could not leave the man who had once been his strongest rival to die in the rain.
The rain outside the window had been falling all morning.
The grey sky hung low, washing the capital's buildings in a dim and lightless color. Shallow puddles had formed in the cracks of the stone pavement, and each raindrop sent fine rings spreading outward as it landed.
Sebas stood at the window, looking at the blurred street through the rain.
His mood matched the weather.
Neither of the two tasks Lord Ainz had given him was going well.
Collecting information on powerful Martial Arts — that had been the first assignment.
Sebas went to the Adventurers Guild nearly every day, speaking with adventurers who had traveled widely, trying to draw out anything of value from their experiences.
He had heard many stories — about a warrior here or there who had defeated a powerful enemy using some unusual Martial Art.
But when he pressed for details, those stories came apart like paper soaked in rain. The writing blurred. They dissolved the moment he touched them.
Some people said the most powerful Martial Arts had been lost long ago, buried with the Thirteen Heroes.
Every account was different, and none of them held up.
What frustrated Sebas most was that the scattered pieces of information he had painstakingly assembled at the guild were, for the most part, already recorded in the notebook Mr. Lucian had given him.
More than that: Mr. Lucian's entries were more thorough than anything Sebas had gathered since. The classification of Martial Arts. The physical demands each technique placed on the body. The ways different Martial Arts could complement or counter one another.
All of it was there, laid out with a systematic clarity that Sebas's own collection couldn't match.
Sebas opened the notebook, its edges slightly worn now, and looked at those neat, careful lines of writing.
He had to be grateful to Mr. Lucian. Without that notebook, what he had managed to gather in this period would have been even thinner.
But a second assignment had made the situation considerably harder.
Dragon intelligence.
Lord Ainz's newest directive: collect information about dragons.
Sebas turned his attention to anything relevant. He listened in on adventurers' conversations at the guild, talked with traveling merchants at the capital's taverns, and worked through some travel accounts and records of sightings available for public purchase.
Dragon intelligence was simply scarce.
When it came up at all, it amounted to generalities too vague to be worth anything. "Dragons like shiny things." "Dragons are very strong." "Dragons can fly."
Sebas asked the ones who claimed to have seen a dragon: how powerful, specifically? What kinds of abilities? What did they observe?
No one could say.
The best he managed was "I caught a glimpse from very far away — the dragon was bigger than a house," or "My grandfather's grandfather's generation, apparently a dragon flew over the village once."
Intelligence like this, Sebas couldn't bring himself to report to Lord Ainz.
Every time the [Message] connected and Lord Ainz asked about progress, Sebas could only answer honestly: "Still gathering."
He could feel the brief silence on the other end. Lord Ainz never reproached him. But that silence alone was enough to weigh on him.
The rain was still coming down.
Sebas closed the notebook and let out a soft exhale.
Of course.
He said it to himself.
He still needed to rely on Mr. Lucian.
As one of the Kingdom's oldest noble houses, the Aindra family's history stretched back hundreds of years. A family like that — their accumulated library might contain genuine records of dragons. The kind worth having.
Sebas turned from the window and straightened his black tailcoat.
He had decided to pay Mr. Lucian a visit.