The Desert Town

The Royal Sorcerers’ Academy should’ve been a safe haven for its students—sons and daughters of the foremost noble houses of the Kingdom of Claydale. Yet it was there that the nation’s princess, Elena Claydale, had been attacked and had gone missing.

Eyewitnesses had provided detailed accounts of the kidnapping, and the authorities had initially assumed that the blame lay with a faction of dark elves, also known as demons—the race that had gone to war with humans over five decades ago. However, when the corpse of one of the attackers, who had been defeated by the princess’s guards and left outside, had turned to ash in the morning sun, the court sorcerers and royal physicians had examined the remains left indoors and determined that the attackers had, in actuality, been vampires.

It was unclear whether the attack had been driven by the demons’ political agenda or simple vampiric instinct. Among those at court who were not partisans of the princess, some speculated that she might’ve been killed, but her attendants and servants, who had been grievously injured in the assault, had testified that this was untrue.

They’d confirmed that the perpetrators’ goal had been to take the princess alive.

To that end, the attackers had used a special gem—of the sort that could only be sourced from dungeons—to unleash a teleportation spell and whisk her away. At the moment the spell had activated, however, the demon using the gem had been killed by the princess’s personal guard. The young woman, an adventurer and the daughter of a baroness, had successfully prevented the worst-case scenario of the princess being abducted by the demons.

But the princess and her guard had been caught in the active teleportation spell and vanished somewhere.

According to the chief court sorcerer’s assessment, they had likely been sent somewhere between the Kingdom of Claydale and their probable intended destination, the Demonic Nation of Dais. How far from Claydale they were depended on the amount of aether sealed within the gem, but it was presumed they’d ended up somewhere around the midpoint between the two countries.

Interrogations and investigations, aided by sorcery, were con