The Magma Forge—the Nacha Tribe’s highest work of civilization—rests beneath the volcano at the heart of Lama City, like an iron cathedral built around a living mountain.

It drinks the volcano’s savage heat as its engine, a giant machine carved into the earth’s throat.

Most famous is the ten‑thousand‑ton Forging Hammer at its core, whose blows hit like flash floods and tidal waves.

With that borrowed wrath of nature, it forged nearly every divine weapon still known today.

To Elves, born attuned to mana like trees to rain, it remains a riddle.

The Nacha built it before the gods remade their bodies.

How did they shape something so complex and vast—an engineering wonder even today called impossible?

Yet this wonder tastes of ash for the Nacha: more shame than pride.

Not just because its forging craft has been lost, like a song with no last verse.

Not just because it fell during the Chaos Uprising, like a city swallowed by storm.

Even now, hundreds of thousands of their kin’s souls lie trapped in that lightless underworld.

They suffer without dawn.

The Nacha know it, and still their hands feel bound like wrists under iron frost.

The story’s root runs back to the Chaos Uprising, thousands of years ago, like a black river.

It was slaughter aimed at all life.

Chaos Spawn, empty of soul and feeling, unraveled meaning like rot eating silk.

That faceless disaster united almost every race in the world.

Even proud, greedy dragons stood with life and order.

And yet one exception rose like a black star.

Soul Devourer Sormaidon—the dragon whose name means the eater of souls—chose betrayal.

He was never the strongest of his kind, but bowing to Chaos gave him forbidden power like fire poured into iron.

He struck Lama City while the Lionheart Hero led forces at the front, a shadow under the noon sun.

In two days and nights, he razed the city like wind felling a forest.

When the Lionheart rushed back, it was done.

Sormaidon had swallowed the souls of every Nacha he had slain, like a bottomless pit closing.

The Nacha do not birth new souls.

They propagate through rebirth, so their souls are tougher than those of Elves or humans, like tempered steel.

That toughness became Sormaidon’s edge.

Armored in harvested souls like chainmail of frozen stars, he was nearly unstoppable.

Even the Lionheart Hero at his peak could not pierce that soul‑forged plate, like a spear dulled on night.

Worse, the sly, wicked dragon used the Magma Forge’s maze‑like, hard‑to‑breach design to lurk underground.

He dragged the fight out like tar.

Meanwhile the front against Chaos buckled like a cracking ice sheet.

The Lionheart and the Nacha warriors made the hard choice—abandon their proud capital and pour all strength back into the front.

That farewell lasted millennia, a goodbye laid in stone.

When Chaos finally broke and dust settled, nine out of ten Nacha warriors were gone like candles snuffed.

The Lionheart Hero fell sealing a Chaos rift in the last battle, like a star burning out.

From then on, the Nacha had no way to retake Lama City or the Magma Forge.

The tribe of deft hands became wanderers, driven from their soil like leaves on the wind.

They would not bow, though, their pride a blade left upright.

The fall of their capital remains the stain carved deep in every Nacha heart, like soot under skin.

When they withdrew from Lama City, the chieftain took no personal belongings.

As he turned his back on home, one thing stayed in his grip.

A badge bearing the image of Goddess Isylia, a moon pressed in metal.

It was the key to the Magma Forge’s gate.

From that day, the badge passed from chief to chief like a torch.

It warned of shame and pointed to the road ahead like a compass.

One day, the Nacha would open that gate again and take back their honor, like sunrise over lava.

Now, the badge rests in Adelaide’s palm, gleaming with a steady moonlit sheen unchanged for thousands of years.

Varie stares and sinks into a long silence, like a lake with no wind.

Her narrow pupils flicker—first disbelief, then hesitation, like clouds crossing a red moon.

At length, she raises her head and meets Adelaide’s gaze, a line drawn taut.

“Hey, fidget—”

“First, I’m not ‘the finger‑fidgeter,’” Adelaide says, a cold smile like frosted glass. “Then, what is it?”

Varie closes her eyes and drinks a slow breath, like a swimmer before a plunge.

“Adelaide, can you promise you’ll bring down the Carne Family?”

What kind of question is that?

Her mind drops like a stone, then steadies.

Adelaide frowns, then spreads her hands.

“Honestly, it’s not a choice for me.

To claim the Savia Rose, I have to beat their people, like climbing a cliff.

So why ask?”

“Because I think I understand what the old man meant.”

Varie’s eyes fall to the Elven Realm map on Adelaide’s table like rain on paper.

She points at the blue line at its center—the Amei River.

“This river is basically the Elves’ mother river; over seventy percent of the country’s water comes from it,” Varie says, her finger gliding along the blue like a fish.

“But its source lies in our former Nacha lands.

With the seal loosening lately, not only has living there grown hard for us, the river itself has begun to foul, like ink in clear water.

How to heal it has become one of the Elves’ core problems.”

Adelaide doesn’t know why she’s hearing this, but she reins in her tongue like a rider and lets Varie reach the point.

“By coincidence, our old capital Lama City faced a similar problem.

Because we lived in volcanic terrain, any water we touched was badly polluted—unfit even for industry, never mind drinking, like ash in every cup.

To solve it, Goddess Isylia granted us a sacred item: Isilia’s Glow.

A vial of her tears, a holy vessel that purifies any water it touches, like dawn bleeding into night.”

Hearing this, Adelaide’s tight brows ease, like knots undone.

“You mean I can win the trial of Good with this…!”

“Yes.

Place it upstream on the Amei River, and today’s pollution vanishes like mist.

Only work of that scale can drag those Carne scoundrels down, like hauling a wolf off the throne.

Except…”

“…Except?”

Varie pauses, sighs, and takes the badge, turning it under moonlight between her fingers like a coin.

“That’s why I’m sure that, even if the old man didn’t know you’d come in person, he meant for me to help the family that favors us with this path, a lantern in fog.

Because the relic hides behind the inner gate this key opens in the Magma Forge.

Right now it’s likely lying under the belly of the Chaos dragon called Soul Devourer Sormaidon, like treasure under a sleeping avalanche.”

Adelaide’s joy freezes mid‑bloom, a flower caught by frost.

Varie explains they couldn’t take it during the retreat, so it fell with the Forge.

Adelaide can’t help looking disappointed, like rain chilling a fire.

“Then what’s the point?

By your own words, that Chaos dragon devoured hundreds of thousands of souls.

Your ancestors and the Elves never went to slay it, leaving a walking calamity next door, like thunder behind a wall.

It can’t be just laziness, right?

How can you be sure you can take the relic from it?”

“Because we don’t need to take it by force.”

“Uh…?”

Varie gives the badge one last look, then slips it into the pocket by her breast, like tucking a promise close.

Her voice has a plan’s steadiness, no more quiver.

“Ancient dragons, Elves—species without a lifespan limit—must enter deep hibernation from time to time.

It isn’t ordinary sleep; unless a great shock hits, they never wake, like mountains under snow.

This Chaos dragon hasn’t shown itself in millennia.

If luck favors us and we don’t disturb it, it probably won’t be a problem, like a storm that never breaks.”

“You mean we don’t rob; we steal?”

“That relic is ours.

We’re just taking it back,” Varie says, giving Adelaide a sidelong glance like a cat.

“I’ve planned it.

The team shouldn’t be big.

The brothers who returned with me are enough to slip into the Magma Forge and retrieve Isilia’s Glow, like shadows in firelight.”

She adds that this, of course, hinges on Adelaide promising to pull down the Carne Family.

Adelaide’s eyes flicker sun and cloud.

After half a minute, she lifts her head.

“I promise you.

And I won’t sit here with empty hands while you handle it.”

“I’m coming too—”

On hearing that, Varie naturally looks baffled, like a sparrow at thunder.

“What are you thinking?

Setting anything else aside, without array support, how many steps can you run, sickly girl, without a wind at your back?”

Adelaide looks at her feet, then the door, like measuring a trail.

“About that far—”

Varie’s face says you’re joking.

Adelaide hurries to add: “—about thirty times that.”

“That’s still barely two steps!”

Varie almost claps a hand to her face, like a wave to the shore.

“Seriously, lady.

You think we’re going on a picnic?

Enter that dragon’s domain and you can’t cast; the air itself will bite.”

Adelaide tilts her head like a curious bird.

Varie explains, “Channeling mana is, in a sense, your soul made visible.

As a soul‑devouring dragon, Sormaidon can wake to any related fluctuation like a wolf sniffing blood.

So this run relies on pure muscle; no arrays.”

Without spells, Adelaide, whose heart makes walking a problem, would be a drag, a stone tied to a boat.

But she holds her ground.

No retreat shines in her eyes, like iron under silk.

“What if it’s awake already?

Believe it or not, then you’ll need a mage at my level to hold the line like a dam.”

“So?

You expect me to carry you?”

“Don’t trouble yourself, Lioness.”

She says it with thorns, then hesitates.

She draws a breath and closes her eyes, like a diver before the drop.

In that instant, under window moonlight, Varie sees a blush rise on her face like dawn.

Then Adelaide lifts her skirt in front of Varie, raising it until her thigh shows, the motion smooth as water.

Silence floods the room, like snow falling on pines.

Since formally tying herself to the Fana Family, Adelaide has worn their Chinese‑style outfits.

That’s no issue.

Qingning and the other Fana heads have taste; they account for her white hair and red eyes.

They choose cream long dresses and amber hairpins that don’t clash, fitting her better than Empire fashion, like light on snow.

But the harmony lives only on the surface.

When Adelaide lifts her hem and reveals the white stockings wrapping legs not voluptuous but slender and lovely, dissonance washes in like a cold wave.

It isn’t ugly.

Truth is, the deliberate, gentle lift of her skirt plus that shy blush on a charming face lends the odd choice a strange allure, like perfume in smoke.

That’s why both fall silent at once.

After a spell, Adelaide lets the skirt fall and clears her throat, a sparrow cough.

“So? Do you feel anything?”

“I feel like you’ve got an exhibition kink???”

“You’re the one with a kink!”

Adelaide nearly fails to keep her voice down, like a kettle at boil.

Movement rustles outside the door like grass.

She shuts her mouth, waits for it to fade, then speaks again.

“Bottom line? You didn’t sense a thing, did you?” Adelaide kept her tone sour, like frost under silk. “I’ve had a mobility array humming the whole time. These pantyhose are stitched from special fabric. They barely conduct mana at all, so nothing leaks for outsiders to feel.”

Yes—Adelaide never does anything pointless, not even the way she dresses. From Holywell Academy to a foreign land, she kept her white stockings like a quiet banner. It wasn’t just taste; it was calculation, beads ticking on an invisible abacus.

Varie stared at the ankle peeking from Adelaide’s hem, porcelain under shadow. She stared until a blush, thin as sunset mist, touched Adelaide’s cheek. Then she nodded.

“I really can’t feel any mana ripple. So this should be fine… But you have to cast outside the domain and carry it in. Re‑casting inside is a hard no. Can you hold that long?”

“How wide is that dragon’s sensing range?” Adelaide’s voice was calm, like asking about a storm across the mountains.

Varie said a round trip would take about a month. Adelaide thought for a heartbeat, then said it was fine.

“My blood can stretch the array’s duration, ink in the water. And I’ll shut it down when it’s not needed, save power like a lamp dimmed. As long as I cast once before entering its range, it should cover the whole journey.”

“But when you shut it off, you still need someone to look after you, right?” Varie shook her head, disgust flicking like a horse’s tail. “For the record, I’m absolutely not carrying you.”

“Same as before—don’t trouble yourself,” Adelaide shot back, wearing the same disdain, cool as glass. “My sister’s coming anyway, isn’t she?”

Exactly. That was the real reason Adelaide insisted on going. Yes, there was a practical thought about claiming a share of the merit. But at the core, she knew Mira would join this expedition no matter what.

For anything that could help her win the trial of “Good,” Mira would never sit back like a spring left uncoiled. She’d fight to seize that holy relic for Adelaide—even if the dragon were still awake.

Letting Mira go alone into that danger? Adelaide couldn’t sit easy, a taut string in the chest. Varie saw the resolve burning in those red eyes, a ruby catching firelight, and finally sighed.

“Fine. If you’re coming, I couldn’t stop you anyway.”

She said it, and inside she knew Adelaide was right. Adelaide claiming she could cover the worst wasn’t arrogance; it was iron under silk.

Even by Elf standards, someone who could instant‑cast several legion‑class spells was rare as phoenix feathers. You couldn’t recruit that by handing out flyers in a market. If something went wrong, one more Adelaide could be the line between life and death.

Varie used that logic to convince herself and agreed. She didn’t yet know she’d soon regret that choice, like a sailor eyeing calm water before the squall.

Two days later, outside the city walls, Varie’s team was ready. Adelaide had settled her affairs like stones stacked in order. They met—and Varie saw Adelaide wasn’t alone.

Beside her stood a long‑eared Elf with gold hair and blue eyes. Elves were often that mix of sunlight and lakewater, but this one was the most beautiful—Varie had to admit it, bitter as tea—and the one she disliked, even loathed.

The moment her gaze met those eyes, gentle as green bamboo, Varie couldn’t help stepping back.

“You—(Nacha curse)—why the hell did you bring her?!”