The Max Level Hero Has Returned!-Chapter 1050

Daphne didn’t say another word. The atmosphere had turned rather uncomfortable after the illusion’s brief appearance.

“Hey... Davey.”

As Daphne walked away into the depths of the forest, Fildyr, who had been watching from behind, cautiously spoke up, “That illusion just now... Didn’t it look exactly like your senior?”

“Yeah. Though the vibe was a little different, it was almost like they were twins.”

“Couldn’t it have been the real one?”

“Maybe, Fildyr. But if the atmosphere is that different, wouldn’t it make more sense to assume it was a twin rather than the real thing?”

As they debated, Lucia suddenly noticed Davey’s calm gaze.

“You don’t seem too concerned about the illusion itself.”

“Yeah, because the flow of mana in this Dark Forest is different from the rest of the continent.”

“And?”

“I've heard stories from other seniors who’ve come here for reconnaissance. They’ve seen illusions before. No one knows the conditions for them appearing, or who they show up to, but the key thing is a certain trait—more than one person can see them at the same time.”

Daphne, who had remained silent during Lucia’s explanation, finally spoke up in a complex tone, “Davey. Hurry up.”

Davey quietly followed after her without another word.

So far, twelve beast lairs had been discovered within the Dark Forest. After taking care of one, eleven remained.

Daphne had provided Davey with the locations where the cores of the lairs—the hidden statues—were.

“Davey.”

After a moment of thought, she called out to him again.

“I gave you the locations, so from here on out, you’re on your own.”

“You’re not coming with us?”

“I’ll be moving separately—there’s something I need to go look into.”

With that, she curled her index finger and flicked his forehead. Then, leaning in so no one else could hear, she whispered, “Don’t slack off. Smash them quickly.”

Despite her vulgar personality, she gave a faint smile as she stepped away.

Illyna looked slightly disappointed, while Lucia Shelman and Fildyr seemed puzzled by her sudden departure from the group.

Following the directions she had given, Davey made his way to a place impossible to find by normal means. There, he discovered one of the beast lair cores—a hidden statue. This time, it was a small statue in the shape of another animal.

Lucia, who had spotted it first, murmured in amazement, “If it weren’t for her, we never would’ve found this. If we destroy this one, that only leaves ten more beast lairs, right?”

“Presumably, yeah.”

“Whatever interfered before was taken care of by your senior earlier, so we should hurry up and destroy the—”

“No. That thing from before is probably still alive.”

“What?!”

It was a creature capable of tearing an Evil Beast King to shreds. Davey knew there was no way Daphne, with her current strength, had managed to kill it outright.

Davey gathered holy power into his hand, preparing to destroy the statue. “Illyna, can you take care of the flies while I take care of this?”

“Got it.”

Lucia and Fildyr, eager to prove their usefulness, stepped forward as well.

“We can reinforce our vision with holy power and help, too!”

“Yeah!”

Whenever a statue was about to be destroyed, something invisible would always try to stop them. Whether those entities came from within the lair or were a creation of the statues themselves was unclear, but one thing was certain. They would show up once again to defend it.

Just as Davey was about to shatter the statue, Lucia suddenly spoke up.

“Huh? There’s an inscription here. The previous statues didn’t have anything like this.” She peered at the writing with sparkling eyes.

Fildyr stepped closer as well, furrowing his brows at an inscription etched on the base of the statue.

“This isn’t written in continental script. I’ve never even seen these characters before.”

“May harmony be restored,” Davey muttered to himself.

Lucia looked at him in confusion. “You can read it?”

“It’s an ancient script. Hardly anyone can read it nowadays.”

It was an archaic writing system that originated from the era Daphne had lived through.

“How does it work?” Lucia asked curiously.

Davey paused what he was doing and pointed out each character one by one.

“The method is simpler than you’d think. Each syllable is a combination of letters. Depending on the arrangement, you can form different syllables, words, and sentences. You figure out the individual characters and words by following this pattern here...”[1]

“Ohh. That’s amazing!” Intrigued by his explanation, Lucia pulled out her notebook and started jotting down notes on how to read the script.

“There are a lot of essential words, but I’ll just teach you some basic pronunciation for now.”

He couldn’t go into too much detail, but while giving her a simple breakdown of the script, he also read the inscription.

“It reads ‘May creation be restored. May harmony be restored. May salvation be restored.’ Hm,” Davey muttered.

“What does that even mean?” Lucia wondered.

“It... sounds like a prayer,” Fildyr offered.

“Next, it reads ‘In the name of the divine, I engrave my name. In Daphne’s name, may the light of the heavens be reached.’ Interesting.”

Honestly, it was just a collection of meaningless phrases. Prayers tended to be vague and impractical like that. Even as he translated, Davey couldn’t help but think it was a load of nonsense.

But the moment the name Daphne appeared, Lucia’s eyes lit up.

“A prayer!! It’s Saintess Daphne’s prayer! I can’t believe I’m seeing this here—this feels like a dream!”

“Hmm.” Illyna wore a strange expression.

“What?” Davey asked.

“No, it’s nothing.” She shook her head and said no more.

Davey then gathered holy power in his hand, preparing to destroy the statue. As expected, the moment he began, an eerie scream echoed from the statue before invisible entities began attacking.

Clang!!!

But with Illyna wielding Caldeiras, and the rest of the group also channeling holy power, even if they couldn’t see the entities clearly, they could still sense them with relative precision.

Having faced them once before, Illyna didn’t fall for the same tricks again. With swift, decisive strikes, she began cutting down the insect-like creatures swarming toward them.

Crunch. Crack! Crackle! Boom!!

Eventually, the second statue was finally shattered. The attacking entities then instantly vanished, and from somewhere deep within the forest, a massive shockwave pulsed through the air. A wave of annihilation washed over—the second beast lair had been erased.

“Let’s keep moving. There’s still a lot left for us to take care of,” Davey said firmly.

The three others silently nodded.

* * *

Surprisingly, every statue they reached had an inscription. But unlike the first one they had found, the later ones had different messages.

[She possessed the power to wield holy power. Wherever her touch reached, evil was purified, and the sick were healed.]

Another statue, crumbled.

[‘Though her origins were humble, her noble heart moved the world. In time, the people came to revere her as a Saintess.]

Each inscription was different, but one thing was clear. They were all records about Saintess Daphne.

“Could that illusion we saw earlier have actually been the real Saintess Daphne?”

“No way,” Fildyr scoffed. “It looked almost exactly like his senior. If Daphne had a living twin, that’d make no sense. After all, the First Saintess disappeared ages ago.”

Lucia, however, wore a conflicted expression. “Fair point, but I have heard stories of people with appearances eerily similar to those from the past. Maybe this is one of those cases?”

“It’s possible, though there’s no real evidence to prove it.”

The pattern of inscriptions continued with each subsequent statue. They all chronicled Daphne’s achievements and life, yet the more Davey read, the less convinced he became of their authenticity.

‘First “crying in sorrow over the wails of the sick and praying for their salvation,” and now “ending a war fueled by hatred with a miracle after praying nonstop for a hundred days?” That woman? Not a chance.’

The Daphne he knew would have stormed in, grabbed the nearest warlord by the collar, and threatened them to either end the war themselves or else die by her hands.

In short, every inscription was bullshit. But Lucia Shelman—practically a fanatic when it came to Saintess Daphne—was overjoyed, claiming they had discovered previously unknown records of her life. Davey knew it wasn’t Daphne, and yet the records were nonetheless attributed to her. Even if they were widely accepted as historical fact, Davey couldn't help but doubt their authenticity. He then wondered if Daphne had perhaps been more gentler in the past. Considering the woman he knew her to be, it seemed impossible. But then again, people did change over time.

Every time they destroyed a statue, more enemies emerged to stop them. At one point, even the tentacled beast—that they had previously thought to have escaped—showed itself again. Illyna made short work of it, forcing the creature to flee once more before it could even put up a fight.

Watching her effortlessly take down a monster that had once devoured an Evil Beast King, Fildyr and Lucia were left utterly speechless. Davey, however, just shrugged as if it were nothing special.

They continued their relentless assault on the statues until only one remained. Once they destroyed that last one, they could finally cleanse the area of beast lairs and seal the gate for good.

- The final statue will appear after six hours, Davey, so be ready.

Having received Daphne’s tips, Davey knew that the statues only manifested at set intervals—a peculiar gimmick that left them no choice but to wait.

Eager to kill time, Davey started a campfire inside a cave that offered shelter from the forest’s cold.

“I’m going to tell all my classmates about this when we get back! These records of Saintess Daphne’s achievements... This is an unparalleled discovery!” Lucia chattered excitedly.

Fildyr, meanwhile, rubbed his temples with a look of exhaustion. The long journey had clearly worn him down.

“You should get some rest. A lot of time has passed.”

“Okay. We’ll sleep first and then swap shifts later.”

Fildyr dragged Lucia by the scruff of her neck into their respective sleeping bags.

“Illyna, you should rest too,” Davey insisted.

“This much isn’t enough to tire me out.”

“But what have you been occupied thinking about for the past while?”

Illyna hesitated for a moment before asking, “Davey, you said this script is read by following the character combination patterns, right?”

“Yeah.”

She let out a small sigh.

Lucia, peeking out from her sleeping bag, then curiously asked, “What’s wrong, Illyna?”

“Nothing... I just think I might’ve misinterpreted something.”

She carefully transcribed the exact inscription they had found on the second statue—the one that contained the name Daphne. “If I follow the method you taught me, then yeah, this is definitely a record of Saintess Daphne.”

“And?”

“But what if you read the inscription from a different angle?”

Following her suggestion, Davey recalled the text and rotated letters around in his mind. And when he did, characters formed an entirely new sentence.[2]

“To my precious true Saintess... Persephone,” he muttered, looking up.

“Daphne’s name... Indeed, if you arrange the letters a little differently and read it that way, it really does spell out Persephone. Ha. It’s probably just a coincidence, right?” Illyna let out a light laugh.

Davey, however, remained silent. After a brief pause, he stood up to leave. Wandering into the dark forest alone was a reckless move, but Illyna didn’t try to stop him.

“Where are you going?”

“I need to think.”

She simply nodded in response.

Alone after walking for a distance in the pitch-black forest, Davey spoke into the silence, “What is your relationship with Persephone?”

Of course, the empty air gave no response. But then, as if she had been waiting for him, Daphne emerged from the darkness.

“My relationship?” Her voice was calm, but there was an undeniable gravity to it.

“Yeah. It doesn’t seem like you two were really just close friends or colleagues.”

Daphne had never spoken of any siblings, let alone a twin, so the idea that she had a long-lost twin sister seemed absurd. Moreover, the atmosphere between them wasn’t that of twins. It was something different.

“Persephone.”

Davey immediately ventured a guess, “Don’t tell me it’s you.”

Daphne fell silent for a moment. Then, instead of answering right away, she nodded and used a tree branch to carve something into the ground. It was the ancient script that spelled out “Daphne,” but rearranged, read “Persephone.”

“That’s right. If you shift the placement of the characters in Persephone...”

“It becomes Daphne.”

“That Illyna... She sure is sharp. So quick to catch on.”

“Then what about the story you told me before?”

He was referring to the tale of Persephone—the one who fell into a beast lair and became the Monster Queen. If what Daphne said was true, then she herself was the one who had died back then.

And yet, there she was, standing before him. Even if she existed only as a spirit, she had continued to leave monumental achievements in the world after that incident.

Persephone and Daphne were the same being. Yet at the same time, they couldn’t be the same. That was the conclusion Davey reached.

Daphne quietly began to tell her story. “A long time ago, the church conducted an experiment. A cloning project that broke taboos. The official name was the Mass-Produced Saintess Project. The project failed miserably... with the exception of one success.”

That single word—clone—explained everything.

“Persephone was a clone created from my genetic material. Haha. Now that Goddess Freyja is asleep, I can finally speak about it.”

Davey closed his eyes for a moment. He had always suspected that Daphne and Persephone weren’t just acquaintances. But if Persephone was her outright clone, then their uncanny resemblance made perfect sense.

“The illusion we saw earlier—was that her?”

“Yes. A dummy Saintess, sacrificed for the church’s twisted greed. The records of Saintess Daphne that exist today? Truth is, half of them belong to her.”

He had not expected this.

Daphne was the type who loathed taking credit for things she hadn’t done. The idea that she had knowingly taken on someone else’s legacy felt completely out of character.

“Why? I thought you hated doing that kind of thing.”

“Davey. Let me ask you something.”

He nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Why do you think I abandoned my original name and took the name Daphne? Why do you think I hid her records like this?”

The word taboo suddenly flashed through his mind.

The overlapping of existence. Two identical beings could not coexist in the same world.

Unlike Reina and Illyna’s case, Persephone had been created through an absolute taboo—one without any loopholes. And if that was the case, then it was obvious what punishment the Goddess Freyja, who cherished her Saintesses, would have enacted to protect Daphne.

- I shall not allow any record of Persephone to remain.

Every trace of her existence, erased from history. The church had committed the sin, but in the end, Persephone was the one who suffered the punishment.

“Not bad, for a dumbass. You catch on pretty quickly,” Daphne said while smirking.

“I once asked Teacher Boris to look into Persephone. He said the name sounded familiar, but he couldn't find a single record of her.”

Teacher Boris, despite his rugged appearance, was well-versed in ancient languages. That meant he, like Illyna, had likely glimpsed the name Persephone at some point.

Daphne nodded at Davey’s words. “That’s right. Not a single trace of her achievements could remain under her name. That was why I changed mine—to carry the weight of hers as well.”

No one would ever recognize it, but as long as Daphne’s records existed, Persephone’s legacy would, in a roundabout way, remain in the world.

Davey couldn’t help but marvel at how deeply she had thought it through. By transcribing her records into the ancient script and shifting the placement of the name, they became Persephone’s history. Of course, it was a stretch to discover unless someone like Illyna, who had a unique perspective, took the time to analyze it. Even if they did notice, it was little more than wordplay—not something that could be formally acknowledged with certainty.

And yet, Daphne went so far as to change her own name, just to ensure those records existed.

“Now that the beast lairs are active again, I’m going to free her soul from its endless suffering. I’d thought her soul had already been erased, but when you told me about the lairs, I realized the truth.”

Though her will had been completely silenced, remnants of her soul still lingered within the lairs.

“Sounds good to me.”

Davey had no reason to object. He still didn’t fully understand the connection between the statues and the lairs, but if breaking them was severing the lairs’ influence, it made sense to keep doing so.

From what he had read of Persephone’s supposed records, she had been just as worthy of the title ‘Hero’ as Daphne.

“Thanks, Davey.”

“It’s nothing difficult. But what about the creature that was born from the Monster Queen? Was that her child?”

“No? That, even I don’t know.”

Her answer was vague, leaving Davey feeling uneasy. Even so, he pushed the thought aside.

Dealing with the lairs was one thing—preventing them from interfering further was another, and that part wasn’t difficult.

But two lingering questions nagged at him.

‘Why did she say she couldn’t destroy the statues herself? And why did the statues—the very catalysts of the beast lairs—contain those cryptic inscriptions?’

He felt like something inside the lairs was sending him a message.

“Daphne.”

“What?”

“You’re hiding something from me, aren’t you?”

Instead of a verbal response, she simply raised her middle finger at him. “There’s nothing to hide.”

“I’ll believe you. So don’t go getting any weird ideas,” he grinned.

She let out a breathless laugh.

“Don’t worry. Saintess Daphne isn’t planning on dying just yet.”

1. This is how the Korean alphabet (hangul) works. Vowel and consonant letters combine to form syllables (which are one unit), e.g. the letters ㄱ(k/g), ㅗ(o), and ㅁ(m) can be combined to form the syllable 곰(gom=bear). Also, since this is an alphabet, it can be used to write any language, not just Korean. In this case, the inscription is in the language they are speaking, so they may not recognize the letters, but when Davey reads the inscription, Lucia can understand it (because, again, it’s her language written in [mysterious ancient script], not [mysterious ancient language]). The reason this is relevant will come up later. ☜

2. This is probably based on an old middle-school joke known as the bear-door pun. It relies on the fact that some hangul letters can be read in a different way when they are flipped. ㅁ (m) still looks the same no matter the angle, but ㅗ (o) turns into ㅜ (u) when flipped, and ㄱ(k/g) turns into ㄴ(n). And if you flip the entire syllable 곰(gom=bear) upside down, it turns into 문 (mun = door). In this case, the rearrangement is a bit more complex; it’s not just the syllables being flipped but the letters being rotated and rearranged into what basically is a more complex kind of anagram. ☜

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