Caterpillar

Just as Thor continued to venture deeper into the Inner City of Kaositer, which had turned into a ruin of dust, Keli, whom he had left behind in the deserted town, suddenly looked up from her magic book.

"I think I heard someone talking." The two strands of red hair by Keli's ears perked up, acting like antennas receiving a signal.

Sitting beside Keli and occasionally answering her questions, Agu paused slightly. "An just finished a lap around the town, and it really has been uninhabited for a long time. Could someone else have come by to rest?"

An, who had been keeping watch on the roof, leaped down.

She used her Mental Power to scan the surroundings once more, but discovered nothing.

"Miss Keli, can you tell where the sound is coming from?"

Keli tilted her head to listen for a moment longer, her long red hair falling down. "There's no sound now, but the voice I heard just a moment ago didn't sound far from us."

This was even stranger, as An had been monitoring the vicinity the entire time.

If Keli could hear someone talking with just her ears, there was no reason why she and Agu wouldn't have heard it too.

Yet, they truly hadn't detected a single ripple of Mental Power.

Keli was not yet Second Rank, and logically, her strength should be inferior to An's, nor did her primary field of study involve spiritual entities; it was baffling that she had heard a disturbance that An and Agu had missed.

However, An did not assume Keli was hallucinating just because she herself had found nothing.

She transformed her lower body into that of a spider, crawled up the wall, and scurried across the surfaces, thoroughly inspecting the small courtyard they were using as a