Mariela couldn’t fight. She had no combat skills, and she’d always been clumsy.
Normally, she would have run away at once, but she’d been on her feet since she woke up, and her senses were dulled. There was too much going on that she didn’t understand; curiosity born from the desire to comprehend the situation before her led Mariela to turn toward the direction of the noise. She hid herself in the trees along the edge of the road as she crept forward, keeping an eye on things from the shadows.
Forest wolves and… Are those carriages?
The drivers of three ironclad carriages were under attack.
Each vehicle was covered with crude iron plates and had only a small window at the front for visibility and holes for shooting bow guns. Upon further inspection, she saw that the iron plates had been pieced back together many times; scars from monsters’ claws and teeth remained along the exterior. She could tell this crowd had frequent brushes with death.
Two bipedal carnivores called raptors were tied to the armored carriages. These ferocious creatures had tough skin, and they shrugged off the likes of low-grade monsters, but they were difficult to train and rarely seen within the Citadel City. Mariela had never seen any carriages this heavily armored, period.
But more than anything, it was the sheer number of forest wolves swarming the carriages that made Mariela gasp. They had surrounded the armored vehicles from the rear as they made for the Citadel City. There must have been around a hundred of them.
Forest wolves were twice the size of a normal wolf. They were a comparatively weak type of monster within the Fell Forest, closer to regular beasts, but they moved in packs and followed a designated leader. Once they’d chosen something as their prey, they would chase it down for miles upon miles, even teaming up with other packs of forest wolves if they were unable to take down their target alone.
Perhaps the situation here was the same. How long had these carriages been traveling along while enduring these forest wolves’ attacks? Their iron exterior showed numerous scratches, and some of the plates had fallen off.
The raptors’ riders were fighting back—one with a black spear and one with a sword—but their heavy armor impeded their movement. Though protected from the fangs of the beasts, they seemed to be having a difficult time against the rapid succession of incoming attacks.
The wind began spiraling into a vortex around the spear (a spear technique, perhaps?), and a moment later, a sharp blow to one of the frontline forest wolves turned it into a piece of meat. However, it was all for nothing as another of the beasts rushed in to fill the gap.
Crossbow arrows flew out of the holes in the armored carriages at the forest wolves trying to tear off the wheels. The arrows struck them in the head and sent them tumbling to the ground. Just before their fangs and claws could strike the rear carriage, the beasts appeared to crash into an invisible wall. Any skilled combatant would have recognized this as an extremely safe and reliable extermination tactic. The group of armored carriages had rushed through the Fell Forest while avoiding monsters, and now the forest wolves that had followed them this close to town were being herded for collective slaughter.
However, Mariela, who’d never witnessed a battle before, didn’t know this. All she saw was a massive pack of forest wolves attacking the armored carriages on all sides, depleting their defenses.
They’re completely surrounded! And those things are forest wolves, right?
Such a horribly large group of them surrounding the carriages and attacking in waves with sharp fangs and lightning-quick movement!
This looks bad! I’ve gotta help. After all, they’re in just as much trouble as I am.
Mariella opened the monster-warding potion and tossed it toward the center of the pack with a “Hiii-ya!” Due to her poor control, the throw sent the bottle hurtling through the air and scattered the contents of the potion all over the place.
“GRARARRR!”
All at once, every single forest wolf turned and fled.
These were wolves, after all. They had a sharp sense of smell, sharp enough to be repelled by the stench of this particular potion.
That’s why sprinkling one of those potions on yourself would ensure you’d never encounter the beasts—or at the very least, you could easily drive them away.
Mariela’s monster-warding potion must have been strong. To a human, it was nothing more than plain, odorless water, but it would be an especially pungent stench to a forest wolf. That foul-smelling concoction had fallen from the sky and landed on the pack. Their tight formation ended up backfiring as every last drop of potion spilled onto them. Those it landed on desperately chased after their pack mates, who in turn fled from the stench. All par for the course for close-knit monsters like forest wolves. This was a perfect demonstration of their preference for traveling in packs as well as their energy to chase enemies to the ends of the earth, and now they’d begun a fierce game of tag with one another.
It used to be customary to purchase monster-warding potions when preparing to travel along the main road, and you could do so cheaply even at the border between the kingdom and the forest. Just five coppers could allow you to travel through the sparse areas of the forest—let alone the main road—without encountering any monsters.
I mean, even a little kid would know that, right? Maybe they forgot to buy one. Or maybe they lost it along the way? There’s no way they don’t know, right?
Once she’d confirmed that the forest wolves had dispersed, Mariela approached the main road. The two iron-carriage cavalrymen who’d been fighting the wolves appeared dumbfounded as their eyes traveled from the direction in which the wolves had disappeared to the potion bottle on the ground. One of them turned and addressed Mariela.
“Was that a monster-warding potion just now?”
Aha, they do know.
She felt a bit awkward, but in any case, these were the first humans she’d run into since waking up. Surely they’d be able to give her some information.
It’d be real nice if I got a reward for saving their necks…
With not even a single copper coin in her purse, Mariela summoned her friendliest smile as she answered.
“Yes. I wasn’t sure if you needed it, but I wanted to help however I could.”
The taller cavalryman dismounted his raptor, removed his helmet, and took several steps in her direction. As he got closer, he was so overwhelmingly large that he seemed to tower over her.
His lean features gave the impression of a seasoned adventurer, and he looked to be around thirty years old. His watchful eyes, common for skilled adventurers, gazed down from under thick dark-brown eyebrows. This man appeared to be the leader of the iron carriages. Along with his strong build, he carried an air of dignity about him.
“No, you really did us a service there. Bringing those forest wolves all the way to town would have put the people in danger, and we weren’t having an easy time of things. My name is Dick, captain of the Black Iron Freight Corps. Might you be a forest spirit?”
His speech was very courteous, but he was bizarrely mistaken about her.
“F-forest spirit?”
Mariela tilted her head to the side ever so slightly, her most practiced smile still plastered across her face. Certainly, there were spirits who took on the form of humans, but she was an actual, physical person, and she didn’t glow like a spirit, either. How strange it would be if she did.
“Th-these are just to keep monsters away!” she hastened to explain, thinking he’d gotten that impression from her grass skirt. It was bad enough to be mistaken for a forest spirit, but she had no intention of having this guy think she was part of some tribe of grass skirt–wearing natives.
“Oh, no, that’s not it. It’s just, forest spirits don’t attack people like monsters do; in fact, I hear they actually help. There are stories of spirits giving herbs to a child gathering them for her sick mother and then showing her the way out, or leading an injured hunter to a spring. You often hear those kinds of tales about the Fell Forest, too. I was just speaking hypothetically.”
The giant of a man introducing himself as Dick scratched his cheek, somewhat embarrassed. Forest spirits, unlike those of fire or water or the other Four Great Elementals, didn’t lend their powers to people who performed certain skills or magic spells, nor was there any known way to summon these beings. They were inherently friendly toward people and considered to be symbols of good fortune, so perhaps he was hoping to meet one.