Chapter 70: Faceless Witch & Matriarch of Time

"Magnaaaa!" Faye called out, walking with small steps, her eyes darting between the trees.

Between her hands against her chest, she was holding a big and perfectly round sunberry.

She had just found it, the biggest, roundest sunberry she had ever seen. Even reaching deep into the bush to get it had left her hands and arms covered in scratches.

So as soon as she managed to take it, she wanted to immediately show it to Magna, but he wasn’t around at all.

"Where did he go?" she muttered with her brows furrowing. Then her face lit up with a proud smile. "I bet he just ran off once he realized I was going to win."

That proud look didn’t last long, though. When she couldn’t find Magna, or even Harlan, her lips began to press together with worry.

For some reason, the forest had gone eerily quiet as well. She couldn’t even hear the birds that had been chirping just moments ago.

"Magna." She called again, though this time her voice came out as barely more than a whisper.

Fear crept in at the thought of being left alone in the middle of the forest, and her steps quickened as she checked behind every tree, inside every bush, desperate to find them.

"Hey, if we’re playing hide and seek, you win. Just come out." She called, desperate now, her voice starting to tremble.

She kept walking, kept searching, every second of being alone twisting her stomach tighter, her heart pounding faster in her chest, until a scream suddenly echoed from somewhere nearby.

Overwhelmed by sudden fear, she dropped down at the base of a nearby tree, clutching the sunberry tightly between both hands, and began sobbing quietly.

"Magna, where are you? I don’t want to play anymore." Her words came out broken between sobs.

She was too frightened to even open her eyes as the terrifying screams kept coming, one after another, never seeming to stop.

She was so scared that she desperately wanted to slip into her serene state, shutting down every emotion overwhelming her. But frustratingly, it wasn’t triggering on its own. Even worse, she couldn’t focus enough to force it either.

Just as despair started to take over, she suddenly remembered the acting game she used to play with Magna.

Whenever she got into character, she always seemed to slip into her serene state without meaning to, so she decided to try it now.

Focusing on her acting was hard right now, with the screams growing louder and more terrifying by the second, making it nearly impossible to concentrate.

She covered her ears with both hands, trying to block them out. She began picturing the moments she used to spend playing that game with Magna, murmuring the lines he had taught her almost like a chant.

"Panicking leads to an early grave. Only weak minds shake, and the weak are destined to lie beneath the boots of the strong..."

As she kept murmuring, her voice gradually steadied, the trembling fading, and a cold chill began radiating from her body.

Finally, she slowly opened her eyes, still wet with tears, but now unmistakably calm.

The screams were still echoing in her ears, but she no longer let them affect her much.

With her mind finally free of the emotions weighing her down, she started thinking clearly about her situation and arrived at a terrifying realization.

"I’m lost, aren’t I?"

—

"So you’re saying you found yourself in that dimension the moment you touched this hat?" Celeste asked, her expression completely calm, her eyes fixed on the red Witch Hat lying on the ground at the base of the tree.

After Titus and the other hunters failed to find Faye, they immediately called for Celeste, since she was the only one capable of solving something entirely beyond their own power.

"Yes." Magna confirmed, watching her closely from the side.

Celeste knelt down, picked up the hat, and studied it for a moment with emotionless eyes.

Titus, standing nearby, spoke up. "My Lady, I tried touching it several times myself. Nothing happened."

He was currently fully clad in his frost body armor, including his helmet.

A little while ago, while searching frantically for Faye, he had spiraled into a near feral state, nearly killing several of the hunters, blaming them for failing to protect his daughter.

Several trees had ended up shattered and broken in his fit of rage, splintered apart as he vented his anger by punching them.

At that moment, Magna realized that at the training ground, his life was not only saved by luck and his upgraded stamina and endurance, but Titus had simply held himself back.

If he had taken one of those punches, he was sure all that would be left of his body would be pieces of flesh and bone.

It was only once Celeste arrived and forced him to put his helmet on that he finally calmed down enough to think clearly again.

"As I suspected." Celeste murmured, still holding the hat, before turning her attention to Magna. "You said the body hanging from the tree was wearing a red Witch robe, correct?"

Magna nodded, then added a detail he thought might help, also taking out the ring he had found earlier. "I found it close to the hat. Also, the screams sounded like they belonged to a woman."

Celeste took the ring and examined it for a while.

"I see..." Her expression and demeanor stayed steady, but her eyes flickered slightly as she spoke. "Quite a while ago, I heard that a 9th Trial Witch from the Cinder family went missing in this forest. So this must be where she ended up."

The Cinder family was one of the allied families holding territory in the northern lands.

Magna hadn’t studied much on the subject himself, but he had gotten the chance to read a few reports on the region’s current families and territories, ones he had come across in Celeste’s study.

The northern side of the forest belonged to an alliance formed by several families, including the Winterborne, governed by a council made up of shared decisions from each family’s leaders.

The southern side of the forest, meanwhile, belonged to a rival alliance with the same kind of structure, one they were currently at war with.

The hostility between the two rival alliances mainly came down to resources, especially those found within the forest itself.

Over the years, these ongoing resource conflicts had gradually pulled entire families together into alliances, eventually escalating into a full-scale war between the two major powers.

Thinking it over, Magna noticed one detail that didn’t quite add up. "So what about that faceless woman? Is she from the rival alliance?"

Capturing and torturing a 9th Trial Witch alone was more than enough proof of just how powerful that faceless Witch really was.

In Magna’s eyes, having an enemy that strong operating so close to the border, close enough that villagers regularly came out to gather fruit in the very same area, seemed like an enormous security risk.

But Celeste shook her head. "I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of, or seen, a Witch matching the description you gave."

She was fairly confident that if there were rumors of anyone that powerful, she would have heard about it by now.

She then turned her gaze toward Titus. "The dimension Faye disappeared into is most likely created by that Witch’s spell. She’s probably a follower of the Matriarch of Time."

Even with his frost helmet still on and his body outwardly calm, the moment Titus heard the words Matriarch of Time, a faint tremor ran through his entire body.

It wasn’t that any of the Matriarchs held power over the others, but each one seemed to complete a certain balance, standing as the opposite of another in some way.

As for the Matriarch of Time, her spells stood in complete opposition to those of Life, which meant Celeste had no way of entering that dimension to reach Faye, trapped somewhere inside it.