Chapter 26
Unlike us, who had only gone back and forth between the cave and the beach, it seemed likely that Kaiden had wandered around this place quite a bit—that was the thought behind the question.
Kaiden shrugged.
“I didn’t see any people. In the first place, I was only going around to hunt monsters.”
“You could’ve just avoided them. Why go out of your way to hunt them? It’s dangerous.”
At my question, Kaiden rubbed his chin and alternated his gaze between Enoch and me, looking as though he were debating whether or not to tell us something he’d been hiding.
He seemed to come to a decision and opened his mouth.
“There’s something I wanted to find out.”
“……Find out what?”
“Isn’t it strange? On this island, you can’t use magic at all, yet monsters—whose very existence is based on magic—are here.”
“……!”
At Kaiden’s words, it felt as though I’d been struck on the head.
Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“There are quite a few strange things, honestly.”
Enoch, who had been quiet until now, replied as if he’d been waiting for this moment. He pressed his fingers against his temples and continued.
“I went out scouting today and saw something carved into a cliff—words whose meaning I couldn’t decipher.”
Alea
The word Enoch wrote on the ground with a stick was none other than English.
Alea.
“Ah, I saw that too. It was engraved on the monsters’ bodies as well.”
Kaiden chimed in.
Suddenly, I remembered the flare I’d picked up in the mountains. I hurriedly rummaged through the pocket of my dress. Thankfully, it was still there.
When I pulled out the red flare, Kaiden leaned in close, his face full of curiosity.
“What’s that?”
“I picked it up while I was in the mountains a few days ago. You know that firework that exploded in the sky? That was set off with this.”
“What? That was you? With this thing? How?”
Kaiden asked again, his eyes wide with surprise. Enoch looked at me for a moment with an expression that suggested he had a lot to say.
“It’s not that I was trying to hide it. I just… forgot because of everything else going on.”
Between Enoch’s and Kaiden’s consecutive strange confessions, the matter of the flare had completely slipped my mind.
“To think that such a big firework came from something this small—it’s fascinating. How does it work?”
Kaiden asked again, brimming with curiosity.
“I didn’t know it was something that exploded either. I was fiddling with it, and then suddenly it went off…”
Kaiden finally took the flare from my hand and examined it from every angle.
Enoch, looking at it along with him, asked,
“Is it a magic tool?”
“I’m not sure about that.”
I almost added that flares were originally used to send distress signals and that this one seemed modified for another purpose, but I swallowed the words.
It would be strange for me to know the function of an object that no one else recognized.
Kaiden opened the chamber and looked at the cartridge, then stared at me with a shocked expression.
“This looks like a magic tool. There’s a faint trace of a magic formula engraved on it.”
A trace of a magic formula? Did that mean it wasn’t a modern item after all? I frowned and looked closely at the cartridge he was pointing at.
There did seem to be scribble-like writing on it, but it was so small that it was hard to make out. That was a magic formula?
Kaiden turned the cartridge around and continued explaining.
“It seems like condensed magic power.”
Could it be that someone named Alea had taken a modern object and modified it? That was entirely possible.
“When I pulled something that looked like a trigger, the flare shot out. But what’s important isn’t that—look at this.”
I showed them the word Alea written on the side of the flare.
“I told you I studied the language of the Eastern Continent, right? This reads as ‘Alea.’ It sounds like a person’s name. Could it be the name of the owner of this magic tool?”
‘But what does alea mean, anyway?’
Was it Latin? Greek? I was sure I’d seen the word somewhere before. It felt like I’d learned its meaning back when I studied physical education.
I wracked my brain, but nothing came to mind, so I gave up. I’d have to think about it again later.
“There’s no doubt that people lived here before us.”
That would explain the hut and the bunker.
“Alea, huh… We can’t rule out the possibility that someone lived on this island. They might even still be here.”
At Enoch’s speculation, Kaiden nodded.
“The owner of that magic tool could still be alive. They might even be the one who kidnapped us.”
If the person named Alea really was the culprit, then was this island actually part of Korea—or some other country?
Like in movies or dramas, perhaps we were trapped on an island being used for experiments.
But if that hypothesis were true, how had people from another world ended up here?
For now, everything was still a mystery. I couldn’t be certain what exactly the name referred to, but even so, Alea was the first concrete clue we’d found since waking up on this remote island.
“We need to gather more information first. This isn’t enough to make any definite conclusions.”
At Enoch’s words, both Kaiden and I nodded.
“Yes. For now, we should clean up. The sun’s setting.”
Enoch glanced once at the sky glowing with sunset and extinguished the campfire.
After that night, Enoch’s hostility toward Kaiden seemed to soften a little.
Still, whenever Kaiden tried to get close to me, Enoch would bristle and remain sharply on guard—unchanged as ever.
