Chapter 39: Avenue of Heroes

In the afternoon, the carriage departed from the east gate of Auric City and entered the relatively desolate wilderness.

This was the main road connecting to other cities, much smoother than the country lane leading to Valais Town. Even an ordinary carriage could travel along it without shaking too violently.

A short while later, the carriage rolled onto the wider Avenue of Heroes, and its speed increased noticeably.

"If you want to grow rich, you must first build roads..." Eric leaned back against the carriage, narrowing his eyes as he looked ahead. The avenue stretched on indefinitely into the distance, seemingly without end, much like the highways of his past life.

The Avenue of Heroes was a military expressway commissioned by King Utu the Hero after he established his capital in Lutia. Starting from Lutia, it radiated outward, connecting over a dozen provinces in the north, south, east, and west, firmly keeping every region under the control of the empire's power center—during the early days of the empire, of course. Though these paved stone roads still faithfully performed their transportation duties, the Deran Empire itself had already declined.

Back when they were leaving the city, Eric had already stepped out of the carriage and moved to the driver's box—he simply could not bear the increasingly loud snoring inside, and lacking the heart to wake them, he had effectively banished himself.

The view outside was much better anyway; he would just treat it as a scenic drive.

"What did the young master say just now?" The driver asked timidly, having failed to catch his words and fearing he might have missed an instruction, only summoning the courage to ask after a moment's hesitation.

"Hm? ... I said this Avenue of Heroes has a very long history." Eric adjusted his posture. "Must be five hundred years, at least."

"Five hundred years... Y-yes. Must be five hundred years..." The driver still appeared somewhat nervous.

Eric glanced at him, though he could hardly blame the man. After all, it was rare for a noble to sit in the co-driver's seat alongside the coachman, so the driver's apprehension was entirely natural.

"Don't mind me, just focus on driving."

"Yes, young master..."

Eric said no more, turning his gaze to the other carriage ahead.

The lowered curtains swayed from time to time, seemingly stirred by the breeze, but the occasional glimpses through the gap suggested matters were not quite so simple.

"..."

Sophie pulled back her head and firmly closed the curtain.

Did he see her?

Uncertain. Let me look again.

It really seemed like he saw her.

...Let me look one more time.

Sophie slowly tugged at the swaying curtain once more, parting it just a sliver.

"ገለ... Sophie." Her sneakiness was becoming too much even for Alana to bear.

Sophie started, slowly turning her head to meet Alana's gaze. "Mother Superior... Mister Eric has moved to sit next to the driver."

"I know, you already told me just a moment ago."

When the Mother Superior continued to stare fixedly at her, Sophie had no choice but to sit back down. "Do you think he was bored?"

"Perhaps." Alana had no wish to divert her attention to such trivial matters—the myriad events of recent days had left her barely able to process her own thoughts.

Such a simple task as delivering a token of remembrance—how had it encountered so many unexpected twists and escalated into the current situation... and how much of the responsibility for this fell upon her shoulders?

Sophie gazed back through the curtain, letting her mind drift once more. When she eventually turned her head back, she finally noticed the Mother Superior's absent-mindedness and thinly veiled anxiety—her hands, resting in her lap, were twisted tightly together.

She had been in this state ever since receiving that letter from the Saintess.

"Mother Superior, are you still worried the Saintess will scold you?"

"..."

Alana took a deep breath and shook her head.

"We didn't do anything wrong," Sophie blurted out, before slowly lowering her voice and looking at her uncertainly. "We didn't do anything wrong, right...?"

"No." Alana gave her a firm reply, as much to comfort herself as Sophie.

Reviewing every choice she had made from the day of the ceremony until now, her judgments and actions were utterly beyond reproach, let alone those of Sophie, who had merely followed her lead.

Yet still, she could not set her mind at ease.

She was terrified of making a mistake, or rather, of having someone pick out a flaw in her actions.

"Teacher Dania..."

Sophie looked up at the Mother Superior. The latter's hands were clasped together, her gaze lowered and her lips pressed tightly shut, almost making it seem as though that low murmur had been a hallucination.

Sophie chose silence as well, offering no further words.

She had always known that Mother Superior Alana held a very special teacher in her heart—apparently a nun as well, though Sophie had never met her, nor ever heard the other nuns in the convent speak of her.

What kind of person was Sister Dania, really?

With the Mother Superior in no mood for idle chatter, and forbidden from secretly watching the person in the carriage behind, Sophie sank into a dull void of nothingness. She cast her gaze out the carriage window instead, only to suddenly realize something.

—According to what she had been told upon departure, for the next seven or eight days, they would apparently remain cooped up in the carriage until they returned to the Holy Capital.

"..."

The young nun unconsciously shrunk her shoulders, her gaze glazing over slightly.

While their journey here could hardly be called a leisurely vacation, they hadn't rushed either, stopping whenever appropriate and pressing on when necessary, which was why it had taken them a full month to arrive.

Were they really expected to gallop back to the Holy Capital in seven or eight days...? The Saintess's letter hadn't carried such frantic urgency, had it?

As Sophie sat daydreaming against the window frame, the carriage suddenly lurched. Caught entirely unprepared, her entire body tumbled forward toward the front of the carriage.

Alana, sitting opposite her, was nearly thrown over as well.

"What is going on...?" Sophie was steadied by Alana, who had already deduced the cause.

The carriage had come to an abrupt stop.

Alana peered out the window to see a man sprawled motionless across the main road ahead, though whether he had been struck by their carriage or had simply been lying there all along was impossible to tell.

"What happened?" Alana turned her head. The rear carriage had also halted, and Eric had already jumped down to walk over.

"Young master..." The driver stared, his face pale and lingering terror in his eyes. "This man was walking along and suddenly just collapsed... We almost hit him."

Eric walked over and looked down. The figure sprawled on the ground was an old man in tattered clothes, who appeared to have already stopped breathing.

Noticing how thin and emaciated the old man was, Eric pressed a hand to his chest and found a faint, lingering heartbeat.

"He must be a refugee." Eric looked up to see that Alana had also stepped out of the carriage, and said to her, "Looks like he fainted from hunger."

Alana nodded. She knelt, grasped the pendant at her chest, and silently began to cast a healing divine spell.

A pale green light seeped from her fingertips, flowing into the old man's body. His sickly complexion gradually returned to normal, and a moment later, he slowly opened his eyes, looking blankly at the few people surrounding him.

Eric retrieved a few strips of dried meat and a pouch of water from the carriage and handed them to the man, having no intention of lingering. "Let's move on."

The carriage resumed its journey, but this time, Eric took a seat on the carriage of the two nuns—specifically, the co-driver's box beside the coachman.

"Where is that old man going?" Sophie asked, watching him from the small window.

Eric gazed ahead and shook his head. "Probably a wanderer fleeing from Fribourg. Famine broke out over there. He doesn't even know where he's going himself, just walking until he can't go any further... Perhaps death is a kind of destination, too."

"How pitiful..." Sophie turned back, able to see only the soft cloth curtains hanging down inside the carriage.

"We can only be grateful it isn't winter," Alana said softly. "Otherwise, a single snowstorm would ensure the majority of refugees never wake up again."

Sophie looked at her in incomprehension. "When it snows, even without fire crystals for warmth, can't you just burn things to stay warm? Can people really freeze to death?"

"..."

Alana raised her eyes in silence, meeting Eric's backward-glancing gaze from the front. Both of their faces bore the exact same expression.

"They freeze to death. I've seen it. There aren't nearly that many things available to burn," Alana said, her gaze dropping once more. "If not for a stroke of luck, I probably would have frozen to death long ago."

Sophie widened her eyes in disbelief.

Eric's voice sounded from just behind her head: "Just as the heroes of the past have faded away, today's empire has already lost the brilliance it possessed when this Avenue of Heroes was first built. To be precise, it is already riddled with countless holes."

Even without an invasion by the demon race, the collapse of a top-heavy edifice was an inevitability that would not be long in coming.

Eric looked ahead into the boundless, hazy avenue.

Merely striving desperately to escape the tragic fate awaiting himself and his younger sister had already left him utterly overwhelmed. Did he truly have the spare energy to save an empire built single-handedly by his ancestors?

Or rather, was this twilight empire even worth saving at all?