“D-do you think you can get away with this?!” the merchant howled. “One day, one day, you will face judgement!”
“Seriously, my dude, what are you getting so worked up for?” Kanata sighed. “You’re an NPC in a video game world. It’ll be fine. His Holiness Rodocolte will pump you back out before you even know it. That’s what’s going to happen to me, long before anyone gets a chance to judge me for anything I do here.”
Kanata laughed off the sadness and anger the man felt at losing his daughter and then repeated the same thing he did to the bandits, burning away their bodies.
“I’ve never handled a horse before, but I do have the skill. Should be fine.” Kanata loaded up the wagon with the items and equipment from the merchant and the adventurers. Then he climbed onto the driver’s seat and set off for the town. In his belt, he tucked the knife he had taken from the merchant, which was decorated with some kind of lightning design on the handle, maybe for good luck.
This was the greatest mistake that Rodocolte had made: he hadn’t vetted the souls of the resurrected.
Yes, Rodocolte had removed the terrorists themselves from the pool souls killed in the ferry explosion. But he had only asked the remaining passengers and crew if they wanted to take part. He hadn’t examined them and actively made selections. Personality, proclivities, mental fortitude, and world view—he hadn’t considered any of these things whatsoever. Any attempt to determine if the individual had been a bad person at the time of their death on Earth had been perfunctory at best.
Despite all that, he proceeded to subject them to serious mental trauma, with plans of having them die and be reborn multiple times in completely different worlds. As a result, there were some like Hiroto Amemiya, who had achieved great things on Origin. But there were also those like Kanata. Rodocolte hadn’t expected Kanata to be quite so extreme in his methods, but he was already on Ramda. The god could no longer do anything to restrict or control him; his only way to even get in touch was with unreliable Oracles.
“This wasn’t exactly my intention when I sent him down there,” Rodocolte murmured. “But . . . I suppose it’s only a minor issue.”
Considering the abilities Kanata Kaito had at his disposal, he wasn’t close to the scale of disaster that Vandal could wreak. Even counting innocent bystanders and miscellaneous crimes he might commit along the way, Kanata’s death count likely wouldn’t exceed one thousand. That wasn’t a number that was going to affect the fabric of the world itself.
“Still, he really doesn’t plan to get a Job, or raise his level, or learn any battle techs? Ramda might be backward in terms of culture and civilization, but the average fighting strength of each individual is much higher than on Earth or Origin . . .”
Flot had never been lucky, but he always thought he had something to offer. Concerning his latest plan, he had been hoping to finally get a little of that luck he always missed out on. He had been convinced that, with a sprinkling of luck, everything would go smoothly, and he would obtain his reward—a position as a Magician serving the new Duke Heartner.
So much for that dream! Who the hell is this brat?! Flot was walking with Kasim, his party, and Vandal, back toward the Seventh Pioneer Village, but Vandal was the one he was constantly looking at.
The house of Duke Heartner was currently embroiled in a fairly common occurrence: family feuding. The current duke was still clinging to power, but he was sick, laid up in bed, and unable to conduct his duties. He had two sons, both with an eye to succeed him.
The first was Lucas, the duke’s oldest son but the product of union with a concubine. He was brave and skilled in military matters, the current captain of the knights, and had unshakable support from the duke’s army.
The second son was Belton, mothered by the duke’s actual wife. He was skilled in politics, with supporters among the ministers and his connections in the capital, meaning he could likely bring great wealth to the Duke Heartner domain in the future.
Normally, the post of duke would fall to Belton, as he was the son of the duke’s wife. Meanwhile, Lucas would use his military chops for the sake of the duke’s army, which held a great importance now that their territory was on the frontlines of the war with the Amidd Empire.
However, the two brothers did not see things that way.
Belton believed that they needed to shore up their defenses against the Amidd Empire, then focus on internal politics. First and foremost, that meant protecting their lands from the threat of invasion. One way he sought to achieve this was with his refugee policies. These interlopers were a significant reason for unrest, and so he had created the “pioneer” project as a plan to simply abandon the refugees, packing them off to the boonies and greatly reducing their numbers in the cities. He would then send residents who failed in their development efforts to the slave mines to produce metallic resources or transfer them to bolster security personnel.
On the other hand, there was Lucas, the eldest. He wanted to apply military might to the noble goal of taking back the Saulon Domain, piercing the shield of the Amidd Empire, and bringing glory to the Heartner Domain. The refugees were certainly a cause of unrest, but he planned to conscript them as low-ranking cannon fodder. He would pour money into the armed forces, increasing their size. Soldiers and adventurers would handle keeping the peace domestically.
The two ideas were directly opposed, but both brothers had also given them a lot of thought and believed them to be the best for their domain. Thus, they fought. Supporters flocked to one brother or the other, in pursuit of the wealth they hoped to receive if their chosen side won out.
Flot was at the bottom of the barrel of the Lucas faction. He had failed to secure any kind of position for himself in the magicians’ guild and was on the brink of spending his days forgotten in petty bureaucracy when a knight from the Lucas faction had taken notice. The man had been looking for someone to infiltrate the reclamation villages by pretending to be a priest of Alda.
The reclamation project had originally been a way to get rid of the refugees. Unexpectedly, however, it was going pretty well. One of the villages had failed, but the remaining six—with a little variance in overall wealth—looked to last longer than five years.
However, the plan had been predicated on its failure. If it were to succeed, the Belton faction would get more ammunition, fostering further talk of how only the trueborn son was suitable to rule, especially compared to his roughrider brother. It wasn’t going to decide the fate of the feud, but the Lucas faction wanted Belton to have as few successes as possible under his belt and as many failures.
That was where Flot and some others came in. He had become a traveling priest of Divine Alda a few years previously, and now he moved between the villages—working separately from other Lucas faction spies, which included a merchant—to obtain information and pass it back to his masters.
It hadn’t been hard to earn the trust of the villagers. Priests didn’t have a system like the adventurers’ guild cards, and there were plenty of wandering priests in the world. Even large-scale shrines didn’t keep track of them. High priests might have ranks and titles, but there was nothing like that lower down the ladder, and if a priest didn’t work at a shrine, there would be no record of them at all.
At its most extreme, anyone could call themselves a priest if they dressed the part, carried some scriptures, and memorized a few lines to interject at opportune times. Proper manners and a dose of magic, not even necessarily light or life magic, and the ruse was set.
There was such a thing as a Clergy skill on Ramda, but that was mainly held by individuals with certain abilities like performing ritual purifications or giving sermons. It was easier than Flot had imagined to work around that stuff. Clergy who visited small villages like these were expected to share their knowledge of medicine and reading and writing and provide entertainment with bible readings and tales of the great heroes and saints.
Based on the information Flot and other such spies had collected, a plan had finally been put into motion to eradicate the villages. It would reduce the potential for conscripted cannon fodder, but making Prince Belton look as bad as possible was well worth it.
That’s all in the crapper now! Thanks to this flying waif!
Each plan had been haphazard. Flot and the others might be acting as spies, but they didn’t have training as agents of clandestine mayhem. But sending in elites only gave the Belton faction a better chance of realizing something was going on. The only ones with a chance of pulling this off, ironically, were those without proper training, like Flot. These were small villages, teetering on the cusp already. Just a little push should’ve done the job.
Vandal had saved Kasim’s party and then Iwan, but that shouldn’t have caused any problems. The Seventh was located close to the road, meaning they had planned to come for it last. However, the merchant-spy’s failure to wipe out the Fifth with poison was a huge hindrance. All because the man hadn’t poisoned Kain, the hunter. Flot was sure he had selected a day when Kain was supposed to be at home, but either Kain had changed his plans, or the spy had screwed things up. In any case, Kain had shown up at the Seventh, seeking help.
Of course, Flot would never have saved the villagers, and there hadn’t been time to reach them anyway. They would have arrived the following day to find everyone dead, and Flot would proclaim it to be the pest, burying this mass-murder along with its victims.
That, of course, had been the plan—before Vandal flew off to the rescue with Kain on his back. Kain had shown some trepidation, but Vandal had already cured Iwan. Everyone in the Seventh spoke up for him, and Flot couldn’t say otherwise. He couldn’t stop the situation from spiraling. Still, at the time, Flot believed that it would be a wasted trip. Vandal might save a few individuals, if that. Indeed, commonsense suggested that he would fall from the sky due to lack of MP before they even reached the village.