Chapter 269: First Encounter

"He only told me one thing: ’What you need to do is take all of you to the scene of that incident.’ That’s all."

"The scene of the incident? Is that what he meant when he said to leave the rest to you?"

Igor nodded, but then his expression grew troubled.

"But that’s all he told me. He didn’t explain anything in detail. I’d already intended to take you all to the scene of that incident, but it was almost as if he’d seen right through me..."

"Where exactly did this incident take place?"

"...The Demon King’s territory."

"What!?"

"Back then, I knew nothing about what was going on. All the Rank A adventurers had been issued a mandatory quest to defeat the Demon King, and the reward was enormous. So I went to the Demon King’s territory along with the other Rank A adventurers."

"Wait, Igor was Rank A?"

"Yeah, I was back then. A lot of things were a pain to deal with, so I didn’t bother raising my rank that high the second time around."

Now that Igor mentioned it, Qiu Nuoya vaguely remembered Viktor saying something about how Igor seemed to deliberately avoid increasing his rank.

After all, becoming a Rank A adventurer meant being forced to participate in subjugation quests whenever something like a dragon appeared. It didn’t sound as though there were only benefits to reaching that rank.

"Back then, I thought defeating the Demon King was practically an annual event, something that happened every year like clockwork. So I joined the military expedition to subjugate the Demon King without giving it much thought. But looking back now, I realize it was never the kind of quest anyone should have accepted so casually. None of us adventurers, myself included, had been told a single thing about the monster stampede. The truth is, my life was a mess back then, and part of me genuinely didn’t care whether I lived or died."

"Huh...?"

Igor gave a faint, bitter smile.

"I’d even made arrangements for at least a small portion of the quest reward to be sent to my family if I died. That’s why I didn’t mind the possibility of dying."

Qiu Nuoya understood. Back then, Igor had already left the royal capital following the incident in which he had injured his companions. That much matched everything Igor had told them before.

Igor continued explaining that the monster stampede had been caused by an excessive supply of magical energy, which sent monsters into a frenzy. Even creatures that would normally have been easy to defeat had become as powerful as dungeon bosses.

Only a small group of elite adventurers had managed to fight their way deep into the Demon King’s territory, battling desperately every step of the way. Igor had been among them.

"And you were there too, Viktor."

"Me...?"

Viktor looked as though someone had just pulled a trick on him. That was only natural. There was no way he could remember something like that, because it was a future that had yet to happen.

"You were strong. You fought several monsters at once without showing the slightest fear. I was genuinely astonished that a mage like you could exist. After all, I’m the kind of idiot who relies on brute force in close combat, and most of the people I’d teamed up with before were the same. I’d occasionally worked with mages, but, to put it bluntly, they were only good for healing and providing support from the back lines. Well, that’s because I’d never recruited anyone other than that sort of mage before. My fighting style has always been to charge straight into battle without worrying about defense."

Viktor had been the strongest fighter among all the adventurers present, yet he had not a single companion by his side.

He had defeated monster after monster with overwhelming strength, but he had barely coordinated with the other adventurers. His fighting style practically screamed that everyone else was just getting in his way. Igor had apparently thought it was such a waste of Viktor’s talent.

"If you’d coordinated properly with the others, the battle would have gone much more smoothly. Instead, it was almost as if everyone was getting in one another’s way, and the other adventurers were starting to get irritated. But you didn’t seem to care in the slightest. You kept charging into battle alone, like a lone wolf. It was almost as if you were looking for a place to die."

Igor gave another wry smile.

"Watching you was almost like looking at myself."

"A place to die...? Heh, that’s quite an apt description. I suppose I really was living as though I were already dead. The long life of an elf had worn me down. Yet I lacked the courage to take my own life, so I continued adventuring out of sheer inertia. If that was the future awaiting me had I never met you or Nuoya, then I suppose it would not be surprising if I had turned out that way. You were pushy from the very beginning and constantly dragged me around against my will, but in a way, you also saved me."

"Well, hearing you say that makes all the trouble I went through tracking you down and sticking with you feel worthwhile."

There was a stretch of time between the Igor and Viktor of the present that Qiu Nuoya knew nothing about, a period during which an invisible bond of trust had formed between them.

But in Igor’s first life, the two of them had never even met. Somehow, that was hard to believe.

Ever since Qiu Nuoya had first met them, the two had always been together. In his mind, they had always been a pair, so the idea that they had once been strangers to each other seemed almost unreal.

And the fact that Igor had gone out of his way to track Viktor down and become his partner in his second life surprised Qiu Nuoya even more.