Seeing the uncertain expression on Freya's face, Rowan smiled faintly.
He ignored Freya and instead called Esdeath and the others over to eat.
Esdeath, Mez, and Suzuka had spent the entire previous day fighting inside the Dungeon and were already starving. Faced with the lavish spread before them, they immediately began devouring the food without the slightest hesitation.
They even crunched the bones apart bite by bite and swallowed them.
Before long, the entire table had been swept clean.
Freya stared at them in stunned silence.
If one wanted to know what it meant to wolf down food, this was it.
She had seen people eat quickly before, but this was the first time she had ever seen anyone eat this fast.
Appetites like these were definitely not normal.
Once she had eaten and drunk her fill, Esdeath asked Rowan,
"Where is that man called Ottar?"
She was already impatient to fight him and find out just what level the strongest experts in this world had reached.
While eating, Rowan had already used farsight magic to scan Orario and locate Ottar.
Seeing how eager Esdeath was, Rowan stood up with a smile.
"Follow me."
After paying the bill, the group left the Hostess of Fertility.
Freya raised an eyebrow when she saw this.
That woman actually wanted to challenge Ottar of her Familia?
Interesting.
Freya also wanted to see exactly what kind of person this woman with such astonishingly crimson brilliance in her soul was.
She actually dared challenge the strongest monster in the Freya Familia.
With that thought, Freya left through the back door of the Hostess of Fertility.
Meanwhile, Rowan brought Esdeath and the others to the area near Babel.
Babel towered into the clouds, standing as the absolute center of the Labyrinth City of Orario.
The area beneath the tower was packed with people. The shouts of adventurers, the clashing of weapons and armor, and the hushed voices of information brokers blended together into the city's eternal background noise.
Rowan pointed toward a towering figure.
"See that boaz over there? That's Ottar."
Esdeath followed the direction of Rowan's finger.
Sure enough, she saw an enormous man.
Even in Orario, where adventurers of every race and body type gathered, this man's physique was extraordinary.
He stood over two meters tall, with shoulders as broad as a wall. The outlines of his muscles remained clearly visible beneath his coarse clothing, each one seemingly cast from steel.
His face was rugged and composed, utterly devoid of unnecessary expression, like a statue carved from mountain rock with hammer and chisel.
An absurdly enormous greatsword was strapped diagonally across his back.
It was Ottar's weapon—
the Supreme Black Sword.
The moment Esdeath saw him, she knew Rowan had not deceived her.
This man known as the Warlord was indeed powerful.
Esdeath stopped twenty paces away from Ottar and slightly raised her head to look at the mountain-like man standing silently before her.
His presence resembled a piece of steel that had been hammered and tempered countless times.
Heavy.
Steady.
Hard.
He radiated a pure, almost primitive pressure.
Esdeath could feel her blood beginning to heat up.
That long-lost excitement surged beneath her calm exterior like an undercurrent beneath a frozen lake, gradually breaking through her usual composure.
"You're Ottar?"
Her voice was not loud, yet it clearly pierced through the stagnant air of the plaza.
"I heard you're the strongest adventurer in this city."
Ottar finally raised his eyes and calmly looked toward the woman questioning him.
He had never seen her before.
But his instincts told him that she was strong.
Long, ice-blue hair fell all the way to her waist, gleaming coldly beneath the sunlight.
Her features were so exquisite they almost seemed sharp, and an excited smile rested at the corner of her lips.
The way she looked at him was like someone examining an interesting prey animal.
It was the gaze of the strong.
Clearly, this unfamiliar woman believed herself stronger than him.
Otherwise, she would never have looked down on him with such confidence.
That made Ottar somewhat puzzled.
Where did her confidence come from?
"Who are you?"
Ottar's voice was low and deep, like distant thunder.
Only a few words.
Nothing unnecessary.
"My name is Esdeath."
"The woman who is about to crush you."
Esdeath slowly raised her right hand.
A fist-sized crystal of ice condensed from thin air and spun above her palm.
The instant her words ended, she moved without warning.
Within a tenth of a second, the ice crystal elongated, took shape, and hardened into an ice spike nearly half a person's height.
It tore through the air at a speed almost impossible for the naked eye to follow, stabbing directly toward Ottar's chest.
A piercing shriek exploded through the air.
It was the roar of the ice spike breaking the sound barrier.
The air pressure generated by its passage carved a shallow groove into the stone tiles of the plaza, sending dust and fragments spraying to both sides.
There had been no mercy whatsoever in that attack.
But Ottar reacted even faster.
An instant before the ice spike reached him, his body shifted half a step sideways.
The movement was so small it was nearly imperceptible, yet it allowed him to precisely evade an attack powerful enough to pierce a city wall.
The ice spike brushed past his shoulder and buried itself in the stone pavement behind him with a dull cracking sound.
Fragments of ice scattered everywhere.
"Crush me?"
Ottar's voice remained calm.
But his right hand had already closed around the hilt of the greatsword on his back.
He drew the enormous blade with one hand.
Its edge reflected the sunlight, dark and steady like a mirror.
"Then try."
His foot sank into the ground.
The stone tiles cracked beneath him as his entire body surged forward like a moving mountain.
There was no fancy technique.
No unnecessary movement.
Only the simplest possible downward slash.
Yet the trajectory of that greatsword carried a suffocating pressure.
The air in front of the blade was compressed into a visible white wave, exploding with a thunderous roar.
This was the Warlord's way of fighting.
Pure strength.
Overwhelming violence.
Esdeath burst into delighted laughter.
"Excellent! That's exactly how it should be!"
As the strongest general of the empire, she naturally had no intention of retreating.
She thrust both hands forward.
A wall of ice half a meter thick erupted from the ground.
Demon's Extract combined with Ice-Make Magic, giving the ice wall a hardness far beyond steel.
The greatsword crashed into the ice wall.
Boom!
The entire plaza trembled.
Countless cracks exploded outward from the point of impact.
Shards of ice shot in every direction like shrapnel, smashing dense pits into the walls of the surrounding buildings.
But the ice wall did not break.
And using the cracked wall as cover, Esdeath had already leaped into the air.
Her body stretched gracefully through the sky, her long ice-blue hair fluttering like a banner.
She spread her arms to both sides, fingers slightly curled.
The instant her palms faced inward, freezing air gathered violently within three meters around her.
The moisture in the atmosphere froze within fractions of a second.
Then, as though squeezed together by invisible hands, the ice rapidly took shape.
One sword.
Two.
Five.
Ten…
Dense rows of ice swords appeared behind Esdeath, their points aimed downward as they hovered in midair like an army waiting for the order to charge.
"Ice-Make Magic: Ice Swords."
She softly spoke the words, her voice carrying an almost reverent delight.
The next instant—
every ice sword fired at once.
It was an attack as dense as a torrential downpour.
Every sword carried enough kinetic force to penetrate a city wall, sealing off every possible escape route around Ottar.
The sound of the sword rain striking was not a light series of metallic chimes.
It was a continuous, dull bombardment—
like divine punishment descending from the heavens.
Large sections of the plaza's stone pavement shattered beneath the barrage.
Dust and fragments of ice mixed together, forming an expanding white storm.
An ordinary person would not survive even a single second inside that sword rain.
But Ottar was not ordinary.
The moment the ice swords descended, he made his decision.
If he could not dodge—
then he would not dodge.
He violently raised his greatsword in front of himself, using the broad blade like a shield to block the densest cluster of ice swords from the front.
At the same time, he slightly curled his body to minimize the area exposed to attack.
The ice swords smashed against the greatsword and the stone pavement.
Shattered fragments of ice carved countless small wounds across his body.
Blood seeped along the contours of his bulging muscles.
Yet Ottar did not even furrow his brow.
He was waiting.
Waiting for the sword rain to end.
And the instant it did—
he moved.
From within the cloud of dust and ice mist, an enormous figure shot forward like a cannonball.
His speed was completely inconsistent with his massive size.
Ottar's footsteps shattered the ground.
Each step left deep cracks in the stone tiles.
His greatsword dragged behind him, its tip scraping across the ground and throwing up a dazzling trail of sparks.
Then, borrowing the momentum of his charge, he swung upward from below.
The blade rose like a waterfall flowing in reverse, intending to split Esdeath in half while she was still airborne.
The force behind the strike was so tremendous that a visible arc-shaped shockwave formed in front of the blade.
Esdeath's pupils contracted slightly.
Her excitement reached its peak.
She twisted her body in midair, raised her right leg high, then brought it down like a battle-axe.
Along the path of her descending kick, freezing air condensed violently.
Layer after layer of ice crystals wrapped around her leg.
In an instant, they formed an absurdly enormous blade of ice.
It was more than three meters long, with an edge as thin as a cicada's wing, refracting rainbow-colored light beneath the sun.
Leg and sword—
collided violently in midair.
Boom!!!
A visible shockwave exploded from the point of impact and spread outward in every direction.
Loose objects and shattered stones around the plaza were blown away.
Every adventurer below Level 2 near Babel instinctively lowered their body.
The pressure carried by that shockwave was simply too terrifying.
It felt as though an invisible giant hand had descended from the heavens and was trying to crush everything into the ground.
The ice blade shattered.
The greatsword was knocked aside.
The direct collision of those two tremendous forces sent both fighters backward.
Ottar's feet carved two deep trenches into the stone pavement.
He retreated five full steps before finally stabilizing himself.
Esdeath, meanwhile, flipped through the air and landed lightly ten paces away.
The instant her feet touched the ground, a layer of white frost spread across the stone beneath her.
Her breathing had become slightly heavier.
But the pure, exhilarating excitement filling her was like magma that had been trapped beneath an ice sheet for far too long and had finally found an opening through which to erupt.
She looked at the wounds carved into Ottar's body by the fragments of ice.
She watched the blood dripping down his arms and falling onto the ground.
She saw that despite all of it, his stance remained as steady as a mountain.
And the smile on Esdeath's lips grew wider and wider.
This man was incredible.