“Y-yes! There’s a small pond . . . look for that!”
“I think we just passed it. I’ll keep going!” They were zipping along, 100 feet high. The speed was about what a fast horse might gallop, but for Kain, the terror was so great he could barely open his eyes. Even if he did, he didn’t possess the Night Vision skill and couldn’t see much.
“We already passed the pond?!”
“Yes. Can you please stop squeezing my neck so hard?”
Vandal’s Flight was fast when compared to walking speed, of course, but it also allowed for direct routing to his destination without negotiating the ground terrain. He expected to reach the village in about ten minutes. Of course, all of this drained a lot of magical power.
Thanks to Magical Power Auto Recovery, normally I’d spend as much as I recover if it were just me and the pack. The extra weight of Kain, though . . . I need more training, clearly. I should ask about this pest, anyway.
“About this sickness,” Vandal spoke up. “Can you tell me a bit more about it?” Vandal had already heard the basics, but something still sounded out of place.
“I came back from the hunt, and most everyone had collapsed. They were feverish, vomiting, dazed . . . some were coughing blood.”
“Was anyone okay, other than you?” Vandal asked.
“Other than me? Yes, I think . . . old man Jozef was doing okay. The young babe wasn’t sick yet, either.”
“Tell me about Jozef.”
“He’s an old woodcutter. He had a terrible cold yesterday and was sleeping until I came back. I left him tending to the sick. A strain on his old bones.”
“He doesn’t have the pest?”
“I don’t think so. He had a fever, and his nose was running, but he wasn’t vomiting or coughing blood. That’s why I asked for his help. He might be mobile, but I couldn’t ask him to run all the way to the next village over, and the babe won’t last half a day without care.”
In other words, all the villagers are sick with the same symptoms, apart from Kain who was out hunting, an old man who was sick in bed, and a baby. Vandal hadn’t seen any hint of the specter of death on Kain, either. He certainly wasn’t infected with a deadly disease. Just to be sure, Vandal had carefully used Spirit Bodification to check Kain out— with the panicked man clinging to him so tightly, it hadn’t been hard to find an opening—and confirmed that Kain was in great health. He would probably live longer than Iwan when all was said and done.
Vandal had already used Death to Bacteria over the Seventh Pioneer Village prior to setting out, in order to get rid of any harmful germs or bacteria. However, he was starting to think this sounded less like a disease and more like poison. That begged the question of how almost all the villagers would have been poisoned at once—and why.
“Did anything else strange happen today?” Vandal asked.
“No, everything was like normal. It was the merchant’s first time through in a while, but that’s it,” Kain replied.
“What merchant?”
“A great man. He lost his store, but rather than give up, he started over as a traveling merchant. He’s been a big help, taking the pains to come to our village, so far off the main road. Hmmm, but I didn’t see him among the sick. I hope he didn’t collapse after he left us . . .”
Sounds more like he’s the culprit, Vandal thought. Still don’t know why, though. In any case, he needed to play doctor before he played detective.
“Is that the village?” With Night Vision, Vandal could see an open space with a few wooden buildings, as clear as if it were day.
“Yes, most likely! Please, the sick—”
“I’ll cure them all from up here!”
“Huh?”
“The village looks to run from there to . . . over there. Three million should do it! Detoxify! Detox!”
As Vandal chanted, a wave of something like black fog rolled over the village.
“Husband! You’re alive!”
“Daddy!”
“Oh, my darlings! You’re all better! Thank goodness!”
Vandal had seen a similar sight earlier that same day. Now it was playing out all over this new village, including with Kain’s family.
The villagers’ suffering all ended at the same time. Their fevers broke, their vomiting stopped, and their mental fog lifted. The same went for Kain’s family. As they celebrated, they had heard a voice from outside. Looking out the window, they saw Kain, illuminated by a pale light. The villagers first thought their recovery was a miracle, caused by none other than Kain’s ghost, but that misunderstanding was quickly resolved, and the celebrations began in earnest.
“Phew. They should be safe now,” muttered Vandal. Flying over here carrying an adult—or, more accurately, with an adult strapped to him—had definitely done a number on his MP. Flight wasn’t the most efficient spell to start with, so it couldn’t be helped. As a result, Vandal had spent close to 70 million MP. It was also late, meaning he was tired. A good little boy his age should be tucked up in bed by now. He wondered if he should return to the Seventh first.
It was the least he could do to create some Lemures and search for the merchant who had caused this, even with his head-start of a few hours. Vandal didn’t know the surrounding terrain, of course, so it was likely the culprit would give him the slip if he had left the main road.
He might still be jumping the gun by placing blame on the merchant, but the fact that Detoxify had cured the villagers made it clear this wasn’t a sickness. The merchant himself wasn’t here, either.
“Please, everyone. The poison is gone but your strength is yet to return. Try not to get too excited. Just take it easy for tonight,” Vandal advised.
“Husband, who is this child?”
“The savior of our village, that’s who! He cured the sickness. Thank you, thank you!” Kain seemed to have completely ignored the word “poison.” His face was running with tears and snot as he lifted Vandal up into the air.
“What?!”
“Oh! The savior of us all!”
“A messenger from God! From Ald—”
“Vida, please,” Vandal corrected the villager, wanting to avoid any associations with the wrong deity.
“From Vida, from Goddess Vida herself!”
“Like I said, please, try to take it easy—” But the villagers were crowding around, stroking and patting him. Don’t come crying to me if you can’t move tomorrow, Vandal thought, but kept it to himself. It looked like he was staying here for the night.
The Lemures turned up nothing, meaning the merchant in question had made his escape. Vandal might have gotten more clues if someone actually died. Kain’s efforts and Vandal’s healing had prevented that, but that also prevented any aid from the afterlife in terms of solving this case.
The living villagers could at least explain some of what happened. The merchant had proclaimed the day was a celebration of a god he worshipped (most likely, in retrospect, a fictious name, as none had heard it before), so he had shared tea and confections with the villagers. Kain’s wife had saved one of those confections for him, since he was out hunting, and it indeed contained poison. Another strike against this merchant fellow. The merchant had tried to get the villagers to eat them, saying they would soon go bad, not expecting some evidence to survive the night.
Of course, that poison had now been removed by Vandal’s magic, so the confection could no longer serve as evidence. Vandal didn’t expect that anyone else on Ramda could sense traces of poison that had been removed by death magic. It also seemed unlikely that a merchant going around doing things like this would be properly registered with the merchants’ guild. It was also possible that he thought he had killed all the villagers and was just carelessly heading straight to the nearest town.
In any case, Vandal soothed the people, shaken at this betrayal by a man they had trusted, and spent the night in the village. Then he placed a few Lemures around the perimeter to keep watch, before—
“Alllll of them, everyoooone . . . ” Singing a simple song, Vandal flew up into the air. He decided to do a circuit around and make sure the merchant from the day before hadn’t pulled a similar trick at other reclamation villages. He could have just ignored that question and flown to the town, putting his actual purpose here—registering as an adventurer—ahead of this side quest. But if there was another village out there suffering, it wouldn’t sit well with him to ignore it.
We’re all in this together, so they say—and a good deed is its own reward, Vandal pondered. In this case, he hadn’t wanted to take money from the village folk, and so he had asked them to erect a simple shrine to Vida. It needed to be nothing more than the one he had already seen to Alda: a large stone, with the holy heart mark symbol carved into it, placed under a simple roof. But because it was so simple, it was easy to ask for.