“I’m the cheerful mercenary! Another exciting day of thrilling, thrilling fun!”
Flark, the criminal slave who had belonged to Green Gale Spear Raily in life, was singing to himself as he hoed the ground and spread more fertilizer around.
“What’s that? Some more of the crushed-up shell? Leave it to me, my honey!” He was currently tending to the monster plants and going about the task with aplomb.
Since becoming a zombie, one would expect him to have moved on from things like “excitement,” “thrills,” and “fun,” but for some reason, he always behaved like this. He was always singing, even in the middle of the night. He actually managed to creep out the other zombies.
For some reason, Flark was also able to understand immediately whatever the monster plants needed, even though they had no eyes or mouths to communicate. When asked about it, the zombie himself had a rotating selection of answers. The one he gave the most often was that he could hear the voices of the fairies.
“Hey! Flark! You handle these fields while we’re gone, okay?”
A bunch of giantling undead came along, all of them seething with anger. They were apparently about to start some kind of operation to save their children, who had been taken by—someone. No one told Flark much of anything that was happening, but he didn’t care.
“The Child said to let you care for the monster plants! Don’t let him down!”
“Of course I wooooon’t!” Flark howled back happily. Vandal trusted him and expected big results from his zombie farming. That knowledge was all it took to blow his blues away.
Not that a zombie got the blues, either.
He skipped happily around the fields, gathering produce, harvesting wheat using a Tractor Golem, and checking in on the Immortal Ents.
“Oh my! Oh me!” In the Immortal Ent forest, he found a big gate, created from a number of trees all twisted together.
It looked like a dungeon had popped up. Flark had no idea why.
Kanata was sitting in the driver’s seat of his wagon, proceeding along the paved road. He was slowly moving toward Vandal’s position, as relayed to him by his Target Radar, but there was something odd about the proceedings.
“What tricks is this undead-loving dickbag using?”
The radar gave him precise details on Vandal’s position. Not just the distance but also things like his elevation in relation to Kanata. That information had told him, the previous night, that Vandal had been proceeding through the air at a height of around 300 meters. Kanata didn’t have an accurate timepiece, so he couldn’t be entirely sure, but based on what he could estimate, Vandal had likely been traveling at thirty or forty miles per hour. That continued for hours, with him only returning to the ground when dawn was almost breaking.
Kanata also didn’t have an accurate map, but he presumed Vandal’s destination was here, the capital city of the Heartner Domain. But his means of travel was the far bigger concern.
“His Divine Holiness mentioned his ridiculous volume of Magical Power, but I thought he could only use death attribute magic. How is he flying around, then? There are no jets or helicopters in this world, more’s the pity.”
The only things Kanata knew about death attribute magic came from the materials that had been left on Origin and more incomplete information from Rodocolte. From his data, Kanata’s analysis was that—whatever it was called—death attribute magic specialized in the medical field and could be handled fairly easily if measures were put in place to avoid poison and sickness. It seemed to have nothing but the kind of abilities that would be considered fringe in a video game. Niche, but not nasty.
His understanding did not allow for flight like a bird.
“I know he didn’t get any affinity for other attributes. So how is he flying around? Did he build a plane or something?” Kanata considered that Vandal had somehow used his knowledge from Earth to create a vehicle of some kind, but that also felt like a stretch. Kanata had been trained hard by the military and obtained all sorts of useful skills. If he had the materials, he could probably fashion a decent glider, or use magic to make a hot air balloon. However, a glider could only do that—glide. It couldn’t move at car-speed. That was even more true for a balloon.
Kanata therefore considered that Vandal had built some kind of aircraft, but that seemed improbable as well. In theory, sure, it might be possible. But he would need to make not only every nut and screw, but the tools to make them all first. If he was an aircraft geek of the highest order, he might be able to fashion a propeller aircraft, given a few years; Hiroto Amamiya hadn’t seemed like an aircraft geek to him.
“Ah, but this is a fantasy world, isn’t it? I keep thinking I’m just back in the dark ages. They have gods and dragons and all that shit here. Maybe he’s friends with a monster that can fly or has some flying undead. What do you think?” Kanata turned to look into the wagon bed and at the half-naked women lying there.
After taking the first wagon from the merchant, Kanata had gathered food and equipment in the closest town. That said, he didn’t fancy the “leather” armor made from the skin of some crazy monster, nor did he want to encumber himself with heavy metal. So he ended up only buying some shoes and beast hide gloves. For weapons, he selected a knife and arrows coated with silver to provide anti-undead properties. He also purchased a short staff, which was useful as media when casting magic—all the while muttering about how, on Origin, they had used rings, gloves, or even implants embedded in the arm for that purpose.
He wanted a crossbow, but he needed to provide identification to make that kind of purchase here in Heartner, so he had given up on it. He also wanted to give himself a little hero treatment with a nice meal and clean bed, but even a large town on Ramda couldn’t provide him with the kind of pampering he craved. He had no interest in eating monster meat.
He had therefore turned his attentions to women. The prostitutes on offer were beast girls, dwarves, and giantlings.
“Does everything on this world have fur or a beard?” he despaired. All the more human-looking whores had happened to be already occupied, as the madam told it, but Kanata wasn’t about to pay to screw something with a tail. He left the red-light district behind.
The following day, just before his departure, Kanata happened to see an adventurers’ guild. He remembered what Rodocolte said and decided it was worth registering after all. He figured that it might allow him to purchase that crossbow.
Things went well at first. When he saw the elf on the reception desk, he had even had the leeway to recall that he hadn’t ever watched the third movie in that popular fantasy series about a ring.
That leeway vanished when he found himself surrounded by soldiers and adventurers.
As it turned out, the stolen stuff Kanata had been selling off included items only handled by one merchant—the guy Kanata had killed. That had put an unwanted spotlight on him.