Ruger panted, the smell on his body already beyond description. Demon flesh, blood, and filth had mingled with the stench of his Foul-Smelling Skin, all working together to concoct an even more wondrous odor.
The only hope?
Ruger carefully savored those words, treating them as a respite for his mind, as spiritual comfort against the nauseating stench.
Most wizards were rather rigorous when they spoke. Even those who were usually flighty and fond of nonsense and jokes became meticulous once serious matters were involved. If that Succubus who prided herself on wisdom had been sufficiently precise and truthful in relaying the words, then this sentence was well worth pondering.
The so-called only hope.
It did not say it was the wizards' only hope, nor humanity's only hope. When the wizards withdrew from their wars and explorations of other worlds, the conclusion had already been reached. In other words, the wizards had confirmed something—something that had even made them halt everything. Ruger did not understand this so-called conquest of other worlds, but it surely was no simple matter. It seemed the wizards had done it often in the past, yet a single conclusion, the confirmation of a single matter, had made them end that way of life and focus instead on the Cavern World.
Ruger had once entertained a hypothesis: that the Supreme Council of Wizards had been born after this transformation. But now, another hypothesis had come to him—a bolder one.
Or perhaps it did not conflict with the time when the Supreme Council came into being. Something enormously important had happened in the Cavern World that everyone was always talking about, and the wizards had decided to turn their gaze toward their own world. By the same reasoning, the Cavern World becoming what it was now was also an