Itefeil was a senior police inspector in Sville City. Her main duties were keeping travelers safe on the Divine Road and cracking down on criminal gangs outside the city.
The Divine Road’s power had once been enough to ensure that travelers would never be attacked. But that was years ago. At some point, a number of bandits learned how to ignore its protection and attack people traveling along the road.
When word spread, the entire Empire was shaken. The miracle of the gods’ descent had been defiled by bandits, and the safety of its people was under threat.
The Empire’s king would not tolerate such a thing for even a moment. He immediately organized an investigation and assembled a special cleanup unit made up of elite warriors and mages. Acting on the king’s orders, they would hunt down those responsible for the robberies and killings on the Empire’s Divine Roads, while helping investigators uncover how the bandits were able to run rampant there.
Just after Itefeil received a report from one of her subordinates, she learned that a traveler had been killed on the stretch of Divine Road under her jurisdiction. Only one girl had escaped from the entire caravan.
The moment Itefeil saw the girl, she was struck by her presence. The girl had long, pale brows and shimmering silver hair. Even covered in blood, her cool, striking beauty remained undiminished—instead, the stains lent her an eerie, murderous air, like a Valkyrie on the battlefield.
But what frightened Itefeil even more than the blood was the pair of severed heads the girl carried in her hands.
The girl tossed the two heads onto the ground in front of her. They rolled forward and came to a stop at her feet.
“I ran into a band of thieves on the Divine Road. Everyone in my caravan was killed there—about a dozen of them, I think. I didn’t pay close attention. Go take care of it.”
The girl stared at her and delivered those words in a voice utterly devoid of emotion. Then she turned and walked away. A dead horse lay at the gate of the police headquarters. According to her subordinates, it seemed to have been the girl’s mount. From experience, Itefeil could tell that the girl had pushed the horse forward with magic until it could go no farther. It had already been unable to endure such an intense run; once it stopped and the magic sustaining it faded, it collapsed and died on the spot.
“Cold and heartless…”
Itefeil watched the white figure walk away and summed her up in those words.
Then she immediately ordered her subordinates to prepare their gear and head for the scene.
Still, she knew that after a journey long enough to run a horse to death, the thieves would probably be long gone by the time they arrived.
But the incident had happened within her jurisdiction. Even if she couldn’t catch anyone, she still had to go and deal with the aftermath.
Besides, this wasn’t really her problem to handle.
“You, report this to your superiors at once. There are Woodworms on the Divine Road west of Sville City. Notify Woodpecker to come clear them out.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
One soldier hurried out of the compound as soon as he received the order. By then, the other team members had already prepared their travel gear.
It looked like a saddle, but it was actually meant to be fitted onto the back of a bipedal running dragon. Still, the gear alone wasn’t enough. The Divine Road imposed its own speed limit: without the proper equipment, the fastest you could travel along it was the normal speed of a carriage.
But if travelers equipped themselves and wore a badge, they could increase their speed on the Divine Road according to the badge’s rank.
Even though Itefeil was a senior police inspector, her badge was the same basic black iron as her subordinates’. Still, even the lowest-grade black iron badge, paired with the saddle, could boost their speed by nearly 100 percent. And since they were riding bipedal running dragons, moving at more than twice their normal speed, the naked eye could barely catch sight of them.
They formed up in a wind-breaking formation and set out toward the scene.
