“We need your help to deal with a crazed water spirit. Would you assist us?” A priestess belonging to White Lake named Martena approached me. To put it simply, she was one of Airena’s teammates.
White Lake had been away from the city for a long while, working on some mission or other. After over a month, Martena was the only one to return, and she had sought me out at the blacksmith as soon as she’d arrived.
There was no way I could grasp the whole situation with how suddenly she’d sprung that request on me, but what I did understand was how much of a scene we were making. Our blacksmith shop was frequently visited by adventurers, and here was a member of the strongest team of adventurers in the city all but begging me for help. Glancing to the side, I saw Master Damned Dwarf give me a nod and jerk his chin to the side, so I took Martena out of the shop.
I didn’t know what was going on, but she was a friend of Airena’s, whom I owed considerably. Of course it depended on the details of her request, but I wasn’t about to ignore her out of hand. That being said, her request had me confused right from the start.
She had mentioned a water spirit. Spirits were immaterial, indestructible beings. That applied to their minds as well, so it shouldn’t have been possible for one to go insane. But even so, I took Martena back to the inn and asked her to explain things in detail. White Lake had a yearly contract at the same inn I’d been staying at, so their rooms were reserved even when they were away on long-term excursions. If we wanted to talk without having to worry about curious eyes and ears around us, this was the best place to do it.
After hearing the story from Martena, I pressed a hand to the side of my head, trying to suppress a growing headache. The situation seemed like far too much trouble for me to want to get involved, but I couldn’t imagine anyone else who was capable of resolving it. And besides, if I ignored her request, the consequences would probably affect me here anyway.
White Lake had received the mission from Garalate, a city about two weeks’ worth of travel from Vistcourt. That struck me as somewhat odd. White Lake was certainly the strongest group of adventurers in Vistcourt, but they were hardly the best in the country. Garalate likely had plenty of their own adventurers, and together with the cities around them, there should have been plenty of six-star teams to call on. But they had specifically requested the help of White Lake.
There was only one reason they would do that: they needed someone who excelled in Spirit Arts, an elf like Airena. Apparently, the mission had been to purify the river from the curse of a mad water spirit, since it served as the city’s main source of water. That seemed reasonable enough to me. If someone in Garalate had done something to anger the water spirit, it wouldn’t be surprising if people had started getting sick from drinking the water there. I could understand why they would call a spirit of nature “mad” when it tried to hurt them, seeing as they were making no attempt to find what they themselves might have done wrong. Of course they thought everything would be resolved if they simply called upon an elf for help.
But when Martena told me that fish in the river were dying and trees nearby were starting to wither, I realized there must have been a deeper problem. If the water spirit was trying to curse the town, there was no reason for the fish or trees to be affected. If nature was being affected in the same way as the townspeople, I could only imagine it was because the river was being polluted. Of course, it was unthinkable that a water spirit would pollute the water it lived in. So then, what was the source of that pollution?
When looking into the city of Garalate itself, I learned that it had been founded just ten years ago when a mine had opened in the area. In short, the source of the issue was pollution caused by mining, and the people were shoving that responsibility onto the water spirit. The lord in charge of Garalate was a newly ascended noble. He had likely been entrusted with developing the mine by order of the king, and so he had focused all his efforts on producing results, paying no mind to its effect on the environment. I didn’t know if he was actually unaware of the damage he was causing or if he really had intended to pass responsibility off onto the water spirit. In either case, nothing would be resolved unless we dealt with that noble.
It took everything Airena could manage to keep the raging water spirit from destroying the city, so she couldn’t leave her place there. As such, White Lake had decided their only hope for resolving the situation was asking me for help. Another member named Clayas had stayed behind to defend Airena while Martena returned to Vistcourt alone as fast as possible.
While the situation itself was a huge pain, the fact that it clearly showed Airena’s growth in the field of Spirit Arts made me a little happy. If she was only interested in completing her mission, she could just dispatch the allegedly mad water spirit. Destroying the water it inhabited would get rid of the contaminated water, which would temporarily prevent the spirit from affecting the world around it. Of course, that wouldn’t solve the actual problem at all. The pollution would continue to worsen, and the water spirit would return with even greater fury. Airena grasping the true nature of the situation and coming up with a plan to resolve it was exactly the kind of behavior expected from a friend of the spirits.
And while I was reluctant to help, I realized it would be difficult for me to resolve this situation alone as well. I decided to get Master Damned Dwarf involved, since he was an expert when it came to metals. The pollution problem at Garalate would affect every blacksmith in the country. It was hardly something we could ignore.