Chapter 315

The regular beeping sound reached Tatsuro’s ears, waking him up.

Immediately, he fumbled above his head and silenced the sound coming from the smartphone he had set as an alarm.

“I only slept for a little over an hour, but I’m not sleepy or tired at all. The title effect of Endeniente is really something.”

Despite living a lifestyle that would normally kill someone—sleeping only one or two hours a day, or sometimes not at all, to spend time with Ai—Tatsuro still woke up refreshed and without fatigue every day. He hadn’t quite gotten used to it.

While thinking about this, he used Life Magic to wake the girl clinging to him like a koala and kissed her forehead.

“Morning… Tatsuro.”

“Good morning, Ai.”

And so, another new morning began.

They got ready, prepared food for Leah, who had already started working, and ate their own meal before heading outside. Today, they planned to do some preliminary investigation.

To be safe, they left Athena behind, gathered the wooden puppets that had been keeping watch outside, recharged them with a large amount of Spirit Magic, and tasked them with searching for and eliminating approaching monsters. Jeanne, meanwhile, was on standby within Tatsuro.

After that, they flew through the sky and landed about two hundred meters from the entrance to Banramonte Forest.

Since they weren’t hiding their presence, guild staff and what appeared to be Casapisti soldiers had noticed two people and a bird descending from the sky and were waiting at the landing spot.

As soon as they landed, a woman wearing a robe with the guild’s logo, likely the person in charge, spoke to them.

“This area is currently sealed off due to the sighting of dangerous monsters. Please leave.”

“I’m Tatsuro Hasami, here to investigate on the Guild Master’s request. Haven’t you received the notice?”

As Tatsuro presented his Identification, the woman quickly stepped back.

She had heard a child was coming, but it seemed she had expected someone more imposing.

“What kind of investigation will you be conducting today?”

“For now, we’re gathering necessary items, so today we’ll just do some light probing from outside the barrier.”

“Huh? Probing from outside the barrier? We can’t have you making holes in it!”

“Hm? I have no intention of making any holes.”

“Eh?”

The guild staff woman, confused, let out a dumbfounded sound.

The barrier was designed to block Magical Power. Breaking through it with attack magic was one thing, but passing non-aggressive magic like Dispel Magic through it without creating a hole was supposed to be impossible—normally.

As the person responsible for managing the barrier and a user of Dispel Magic herself, she knew this better than anyone.

“Well, it’ll be faster to show you. Do you have Magic Vision?”

“Yes, I do, but…”

“Then just follow us for now.”

“Alright…”

When they reached the area where the barrier was maintained, several curious glances were directed at Tatsuro and his group, unfamiliar faces.

But seeing the guild staff accompanying them, the others assumed they were the high-ranking adventurers and returned to their tasks.

With the staff standing beside him, Tatsuro readied Amaterasu and, together with Cardina, began using Dispel Magic.

Even though it wasn’t attack magic, the overwhelming power made those nearby with skills to sense Magical Power or Dragon Force flinch in fear.

Undeterred, Tatsuro entrusted the control to Amaterasu, dispersing the Dispel Magic’s Magical Power into even finer, smaller particles than usual.

If the Black Fungus causing the Mysterious Illness or typical Dispel Magic particles were the size of a speck of dust, the particles Tatsuro, Cardina, and Amaterasu were now deploying together were broken down to an atomic level, far smaller.

Upon investigation, Tatsuro and Cardina had discovered that the barrier, when viewed at a microscopic level, was structured like a net.

To the naked eye, it appeared as a flat surface, and particles the size of typical Dispel Magic or Black Fungus couldn’t pass through—more accurately, they were too large to do so.

However, with Amaterasu’s Magic Brain Computing Power and the combination of two high-level Dispel Magic skills, Tatsuro and Cardina succeeded in dispersing their magic into particles small enough to slip through the barrier’s mesh effortlessly.

Once that was achieved, they could manipulate those particles to pass through the mesh and conduct probing on the other side.

“There we go. Now, let’s gather them on the other side to make them visible. How’s that? Can you see the Dispel Magic’s Magical Power gathering on the other side?”

“…Uh, what? No way… It’s not a lie… Yes, I can clearly see the Magical Power concentrating on the other side without any holes in the barrier… But, how exactly?”

“Trade secret.”

“I see…”

As a Dispel Magic user, she was dying to know, but she quickly realized Tatsuro had no intention of explaining and didn’t press further.

“Now that you understand, we’ll do some probing from the air.”

“Yes. Please be careful.”

“Got it—Cardina.”

“Peewee!”

“—!?”

“Here we go, Ai—”

“Yup!”

The moment her name was called, Cardina activated True Form, causing a stir among the onlookers.

Tatsuro called to Ai, and they climbed onto Cardina’s back.

Leaving the stunned crowd behind as if frozen, they ascended along the barrier.

“This barrier is pretty massive, huh.”

The barrier enveloped the forest and mountain in a dome-like scale so vast that Tatsuro couldn’t even imagine how many people were needed to maintain it without interruption.

With that thought, they arrived above the center of the forest’s barrier and began the ultra-fine particle probing magic they had just demonstrated.

The Dispel Magic’s Magical Power, finer than usual, passed through the barrier and was reassembled on the other side to its normal size.

This was to counteract the drawback of reduced information when particles were made too small.

Having successfully infiltrated the barrier with Dispel Magic, they spread the Magical Power throughout the entire area.

“Peewee!”

“Oh, thanks, Cardina.”

“It’s so convenient to be able to see it visually, too.”

“Peewee♪”

With the range of the probing magic, Cardina could display visuals anywhere using Spirit Division: Far Sight Near Slash.

They deployed all five of her divisions to visually observe the forest while gathering information through the probing magic.

“I’m picking up twelve powerful monster signatures, likely the same species. These are probably Shubelg Fungus.”

“Twelve Imomu bugs, huh? Wonder what they look like. Cardina-chan, can you show us one?”

“Peewee.”

At the request, Cardina displayed what was presumed to be a Shubelg Fungus on one of her divisions.

“So this is an Insectoid Dragon. Definitely nothing like an Imomu.”

“Wow, that’s what it looks like? The shape’s kinda dragon-ish, maybe.”

“Peewee”

The image showed a creature about five meters long, based on the size of nearby trees.

Its head was trapezoidal with two large green compound eyes like a praying mantis, three simple eyes between two hard, pointed red antennae resembling horns.

Its body had four dragonfly-like wings and a long, flexible, segmented exoskeleton, with a tail ending in a bifurcated spear-like tip.

Its six legs were sturdy like a beetle’s, each with two sharp, curved claws at the tips, between which a retractable poison stinger peeked out.

The surface of its neck, body, tail, and legs was covered in a tough-looking exoskeleton, green with black splotches.

“Those black splotches on its body might be the influence of Black Fungus. There are other monsters too, and they all have similar black splotch patterns.”

“But they’re not dying like humans would. Could the Black Fungus be what turned them into a subspecies?”

They also viewed other monsters, all of which had black splotches on their original body colors.

However, they showed no signs of abnormality and were thriving in the forest.

“We thought the Black Fungus didn’t affect monsters since there was a request to hunt Shubelg Fungus, but it might actually be enhancing them.”

“Yeah. And considering they’re supposed to be eaten as pupae within a hundred years or so, having twelve in one forest is definitely abnormal.”

“Maybe the Black Fungus has some kind of growth-promoting effect on monsters. Let’s check with Dispel Magic.”

Since circumstantial evidence wasn’t enough, Tatsuro concentrated the Dispel Magic on a single Black Fungus particle for analysis.

“Hm… Even with Dispel Magic, I can’t figure it out.”

“Is it some super complex, mysterious virus?”

“The opposite. It’s too simple to understand. I can tell it’s a single-energy particle with some kind of power, but there’s too little information to analyze further, so I still don’t know what it is.”

“…Well, if you don’t know, you don’t know.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Looks like we’ll need Leah to take a look at this. For now, let’s investigate something we might understand.”

“Like what?”

“The source. It doesn’t feel like it’s just appearing out of thin air. There has to be a source somewhere in this forest.”

“Right. Finding that might give us a clue.”

Tatsuro nodded enthusiastically at Ai’s words, and with Cardina’s help, they focused on searching for the likely source of the Black Fungus.

Even in the vast forest, with Amaterasu’s Magic Brain Computing Power aiding the analysis, they expected to find it quickly.

However, after searching the forest two or three times from end to end, they couldn’t locate anything resembling a source.

“Hm? Could the source be in the mountain instead of the forest?”

“Let’s check!”

“Yeah.”

They had assumed the forest was the source based on the Adventurer’s Guild’s information, but it seemed they were wrong. They shifted their precise probing to the mountain.

Tracing a zigzag pattern from the base of Banramonte Mountain, they conducted a focused search.

“Found it.”

“Whoa, it’s in the mountain!”

At an elevation of four thousand meters, slightly to the right of the mountain’s centerline, they found a spot where the Black Fungus density was significantly higher.

It was spreading downward along the mountain, extending across the entire forest.

Noting the approximate location, they had Cardina display it on one of her divisions, but…

“What’s going on here?”

“It’s all noisy, can’t make anything out.”

“Peewee…”

Normally, Cardina’s divisions produced clear images, but at this critical source point, the visuals were filled with noise, making it nearly impossible to discern anything.

“…It’s because the Dispel Magic’s Magical Power is being scattered by something at the source, preventing us from spreading the probe properly.”

“Peewee”

“Cardina-chan’s nodding too.”

“Looks like we’ll have to go there in person to check it out. Alright, that’s enough for today. Let’s take this info back and think it over.”

“Yeah.”

“Peewee”

With that, Tatsuro and the others decided to return for now. After a brief farewell to the staff, they headed back to a spot outside the town where their Mobile Home was set up.