The Death Mage that doesn't want a fourth time

48 It seems I've become a place for insects

Vandalieu and his companions had built their walls, solidified their defenses and prepared their weapons. Undead and Golems had been successfully placed for surveillance purposes at locations where Vampires and humans were likely to cross the Boundary Mountain Range.

Vandalieu had personally tried stepping into the entrances of the route that had been used by Eleanora's party and the tunnel that led to the Hartner duchy after the surveillance Golems had been placed at these locations.

There had been no particular problems on the route that Eleanora's party had used. But things had been strange at the tunnel.

From the outside, the tunnel looked as if it had simply caved in, but Vandalieu had used【Golem Transmutation】to turn the rubble into Golems and【Spirit Form Transformation】to go inside and investigate. He had found that the inside of the tunnel had been destroyed too thoroughly.

According to what he had heard from Nuaza and the other Undead Titans, two hundred years ago, the First Princess Levia and the other Undead Titans used this tunnel to escape and then used some hidden mechanisms to seal the tunnel. But the inside of the tunnel was had been like an impossible puzzle.

There hadn't been a single large rock among the rubble, only large amounts of soft dirt and sand. When he had tried to remove the rubble to rebuild the tunnel, more and more dirt and sand kept falling from above. That was the state the tunnel had been in.

Vandalieu hadn't investigated through the entire tunnel to the end but the first few hundred meters were all in this state, even though the tunnel was covered by mountains high enough to reach the clouds.

It was as if someone had used sophisticated earth-attribute magic to turn the boulders and hard bedrock above the tunnel into tiny grains of sand in order to make it impossible to rebuild the tunnel.

With this being the case, the tunnel would remain sealed forever if Vandalieu's【Golem Transmutation】skill didn't exist; it would have been completely impossible for the Mirg shield-nation army of two hundred years ago to reconstruct the tunnel.

Nobody knew how Princess Levia had collapsed the tunnel. It was possible that the mechanism or magic used to collapse it, which only Talosheim's royal family knew about, was just that incredible. However... Vandalieu found this suspicious.

He wondered whether the Vampires had something to do with this.

If he thought about it, the commercial trade between Talosheim and the Hartner duchy would have been nothing but an eyesore for the Pure-breed Vampires who worshipped the evil god and feared the Pure-breed Vampires who worshipped Vida that lived in the southern regions of the Bahn Gaia continent beyond the Boundary Mountain Range.

If trading had become very prosperous in Talosheim's geographical location, the people there would have eventually started exploring the southern regions of the continent. This could have caused the Vampires worshipping Vida to possibly make a move.

That might have been why they had chosen to mobilize the Amid Empire and the Mirg shield-nation without making any movements themselves. They had probably wanted to reduce the strength of the Empire and the Mirg shield-nation around then anyway, and with the Vampires' influence extending into the Empire, starting a war would have been a simple matter.

Eleanora knew nothing about this. She seemed to have been considered an individual with great promise, but she hadn't been in an important position in the community as a whole, and not even a decade had passed since she had even become a Vampire.

Since the Vampires in the same faction that worshipped the evil god didn't seem to be on good terms with each other, it was only natural that she didn't know.