At Ambella's ready acceptance, Vierano, who had been anxiously watching the situation, let out a sigh of relief.
"Then when should we..."
"Ah. Before we talk about such trivial matters, let's clear up other curiosities first."
She called sothing that might involve rebellion against the kingdom trivial.
The fact that she truly thought so showed once again how extraordinary Ambella was.
One of Ambella's eyes remained fixed on Rudger.
"You're quite a bold human. Usually, people are intimidated by right away."
"I've lived with soone worse for over 10 years."
"Oh? This slightly hurts my pride. I don't think I'm inferior to anyone, but to hear there's soone worse than . How interesting. I'd like to et this person."
At those words, Rudger imagined the scene of Grandel and Ambella eting in one place, and he was already getting dizzy.
He couldn't even imagine what would happen.
For him, just dealing with one master was already overwhelming enough.
"I find it more interesting that the head of House Birk uses human items."
It was a comnt about Ambella smoking a cigar.
Elves don't smoke tobacco to begin with. Only humans and so chain-smoking dwarves who've assimilated into their society do that.
Yet Ambella smoked it naturally.
While it might suit her outward appearance, her essence was still that of the head of a family protecting the elven forest.
From this, Rudger could roughly guess what kind of place House Burke was.
"You never had any attachnt to the inner forest from the start. Rather, like Dentis, you were interested in the outside."
"You figured that out just from that?"
"I vaguely felt it from how you're not particularly hostile despite having a human present. Seeing how comfortable you seem, you must have been quite close with humans."
At those words, the family proxy Viela swallowed hard.
She looked at Ambella as if asking how that could be possible, but Ambella didn't even glance at Viela.
"Everyone says that since House Burke suffered the greatest losses in the war 100 years ago, we must hate humans more than anyone."
Indeed, everyone thought that because it was natural to think so.
"That's actually true. Do you know why I wear this eye patch? I got this when shrapnel from a mortar fired by humans hit in battle. The scars all over my body are the sa."
Most of the scars etched on Ambella's exposed skin were scars from gunshot wounds.
"While my life hasn't been smooth sailing, the interspecies war 100 years ago was on a different level. It left the most marks among all the scars on my body."
"Yet you still took interest in the human world?"
"Let ask the opposite. What do we gain from blindly hating them?"
No one could argue with that piercing point.
Of course, Ambella too had been very angry and sad because of the war.
She lost precious vassals, and her body was left with indelible scars.
Nevertheless, this punishnt with no end in sight continued to push them to the frontlines.
If bla had to be assigned, first would be House Plante who provided the cause, and second would be the humans who invaded the forest.
"It's aningless. Getting angry and being hostile won't get us anything. My position isn't one where I can be caught up in such trivial matters."
Rather, Ambella saw possibility.
The humans she knew were certainly good at uniting, but not threatening; however the interspecies war 100 years ago was different.
Humans invented gunpowder and created guns and cannons.
The sturdy armor worn by knights beca powered exoskeletons.
Without fire spirits and magic, they spewed fire and electricity with flathrowers and tesla guns.
Ambella was greatly shocked.
While the elves stayed only in the forest, the humans outside had continued to develop but they couldn't just leave it be.
If eradication was impossible, she thought they needed to learn the sa things.
Her sense of responsibility as a leader guiding a family manifested more strongly than anger and hatred from the war.
The war ended, and the elves protected their territory.
But would that be possible in the future too?
What if they ca with stronger guns? What if they demonstrated firepower that could truly burn down the forest this ti?
Would the elves still be able to face them with spirits, arrows, and the power of life?
Ambella, who had always watched outside the forest, looked inside the forest for the first ti.
The disgusting sight of other families fighting amongst themselves, having forgotten even the scars of war was revolting.
While external enemies could grow stronger and return at any ti, these so-called leaders are just fighting over scraps.
But even if this side called out with all sincerity, those arrogant ones wouldn't listen to the voices of those receiving punishnt.
Then.
"We'll just have to learn on our own."
"..."
"When I changed my thinking, I saw many things. I realized the world isn't just this forest. There are mountain regions, deserts, huge cities built by humans, and vast oceans. Eternal glaciers. Endless mountain ranges that monsters are said to have crossed. Even unknown continents beyond. Compared to all that, this elven forest is so insignificant."
Ambella's words denied the foundation of elves.
However, Ambella didn't think her words were wrong.
The more she interacted with the outside, the more convinced she beca of this thought.
"Dentis. Isn't that what you thought too, watching the outside?"
At Ambella's question, Vierano also silently nodded.
Vierano is also a long-lived elf and of the generation that experienced the war.
Yet the reason he teaches spirit arts at an academy teaching magic in the human empire is because he saw the possibility of spreading out into a wider world in the future.
In the midst of war, they saw beyond the wounds and scars of war, not getting buried in them.
Ambella lit another cigar with a smirk.
"When I tried to look broadly like that, I started seeing things I hadn't seen before. Actually, it's not that I couldn't see them. They were there from the start, but we deliberately ignored them, pretending they didn't exist."
The reason House Burke wasn't interested in the forest interior was simple, there was no need to be.
You all play around with your little rice bowls amongst yourselves while we'll look at the wider world.
"That's why I helped that brave young lady over there too."
Ambella pointed at Bellaruna while exhaling white cigarette smoke.
"I heard she secretly hacked the World Tree. Can you believe it? Not so noble family, but a common elf did such a thing. And then sohow safely escaped from the capital all the way to our territory. That's quite remarkable, isn't it?"
"Is that why you helped?"
"Yes. Just looking at her, she was clearly extraordinary. Touching the World Tree that everyone considers sacred. While those high and mighty forest nobles struggled even with authority, a child with no lineage did that? That's exceptional talent. At the sa ti, she properly showed those bastards up, so I helped her get out of the forest. Giving her a way to contact out of personal curiosity was separate."
Thinking back to that ti, Ambella's shoulders shook with amusent.
"The world really is full of surprises the longer you live. Who would have thought that favor from that day would co back like this? Who could have known we'd hear news that the last bloodline of Plante was alive this way?"
"You don't seem very surprised. As if you were confident at least soone was alive."
"Right. I figured at least one person was alive. Though I didn't expect they'd fall in love with a human in the outside world and even have a child."
"C-Could it be...?"
Vierano asked with a trembling voice.
"That day. Were you the one who helped her escape outside the forest?"
Who Vierano ant by 'her' was clear without asking.
It was the last head of House Plante, a traitor whose na shouldn't even be ntioned among elves and Sedina Roschen's mother.
"I heard she went missing."
They thought it would be difficult to break through that encirclent, but to think Ambella had helped.
"It was the last gift I could give her."
Ambella exhaled smoke with a bitter expression.
Rather, she regretted not being able to help more back then.
Though 500 years had passed, that day's mories were still vivid for Ambella.
Her eting with the one who beca head of House Plante at a much younger age than herself would be hard to forget even after a lifeti.
-Ambella. Why do elves insist on staying only in this forest?
Every ti she received that seemingly naive question, Ambella would scold her.
Saying elves were born in the forest, so they should be born and die in the forest.
That they had sacred trees to serve, and this was everything to elves.
Whenever she heard those words, the her in mories would shake her head saying that wasn't right.
-The world is vast. Yet we insist on living only in this small well. Is that really the right thing to do?
She said that she wanted to see the wider world until her mouth wore out.
Perhaps being able to properly look outside after experiencing war was thanks to the conversations they had that day.
'What I realized after 400 years, you already knew.'
That's how she sent her off.
But fate is truly cruel, isn't it?
With no news of her, now her daughter has been dragged here, caught by Lifrey's touch.
"Let ask one thing. What kind of child is that Plante child?"
"Sedina Roschen, is the daughter of House Roschen, a half-elf and one of my students."
"If she's a student, she must be very young."
"In human years, she's not even 20 yet."
"What? She's practically a baby in elf terms."
Ash fell as the end of the cigar burned down but a wind spirit imdiately collected the ash and blew it far out the window.
"Head of House Dentis. Your being here ans you know everything, right? What happened to her, to the head of House Plante?"
"...The head of House Plante has passed away."
Ambella calmly accepted this shocking fact.
"Passed away, you say. How?"
"That's..."
"No. Never mind. Just from that reaction, I can guess who killed her and how. No doubt those bastards who only play politics kept chasing her."
At least when she sent her off that last ti, she bid her farewell hoping she would live freely as just a person, forgetting about family and everything else.
Telling herself she had done her duty with this, she only blessed her future path with words and heart.
"So even after I sent her away, she continued to be harassed."
By the forest's trackers.
By assassins targeting her life.
By fellow elves wearing masks approaching with smiling faces.
For 480 years she walked that difficult path alone.
Ambella's heart grew heavy but there was no way to resolve this.
The person herself had already passed away but this old grudge would forever remain in her heart.
That's when Rudger's voice pierced through Ambella's contemplation.
"You don't need to worry about it so much."
"What?"
"I said you don't need to worry about it."
Ambella showed a vicious smile.
Unlike her previous elf-like smile, this one carried the energy of soone ready to tear apart their opponent at the slightest misstep.
"Rudger Chelici, was it? Who are you to tell that? Do you know the years I spent with her? You human who won't even live 100 years?"
"I don't."
"Then why do you speak so confidently?"
Anger tinged Ambella's voice.
Though she tried to laugh off whatever was said, at least the head of House Plante was like a reverse scale to her.
It was a situation where one wrong word could completely destroy all the good atmosphere built up until now but even in this situation, Rudger spoke calmly and composedly.
"Because Sedina was born in this world."
"..."
At those words, Ambella had to close her mouth.
"I saw her daughter. She dearly loved her mother. And recently, I t her husband. The person I thought was cold and ruthless has been constantly making ti in his busy schedule to grow plants in mory of his dead wife."
Rudger rembers Walter bowing his head asking him to please save his daughter.
He rembers Sedina's eyes filled with sadness and longing when talking about family.
"There were two such people."
Though the end was marked with a tragic period, nevertheless, the path they walked wasn't negated or erased.
Loving soone, being loved by soone, the happy mories of those days remain.
"So surely, it wasn't only painful things."
Ambella suddenly overlapped past mories with Rudger's words.
-Are you sure it's okay to go like this? The trackers will keep chasing you.
-It's fine. I'm grateful just for what you've done up to now. And I'm sorry. If only I hadn't failed, it wouldn't have turned out like this.
-Ella.
Ella Plante.
Even while losing everything and leaving her beloved holand, she didn't lose her smile.
-Don't worry. The outside world will surely be harsh and difficult for , but it won't be only painful things.
-I see. I hope so.
-Who knows? In that vast unknown world, I might et soone I love.
-You who rejected all noble n's proposals?
-Those people were all just superficially flashy so I didn't like them. I prefer soone who seems indifferent to on the outside but cherishes inside.
-What a picky personality.
-eting soone like that and having a child would be nice. If I have a child, I'd like a cute daughter. The na, hmm...
After thinking for a mont, Ella Plante smiled brightly at Ambella and said.
-Would you na her, Ambella?
-?
-Yes. I heard humans call it being a godmother? Then I'd like Ambella to be that, because Ambella is like both a sister and mother to .
Ambella didn't tell her not to joke about that.
She was sending her off for the last ti anyway so she could go along with this small stubbornness.
-Is that so. A daughter who takes after you. While I can't really imagine it, if I had to na her.
In the mory, Ambella clearly said.
-Sedina would be nice.
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