When we stepped inside, I immediately noticed the sledgehammers and saws on the floor of the entrance. These had most likely been abandoned by the commerce guild’s original contractors. The tools weren’t looking so good, though; unlike the mansion, they hadn’t had any sort of preservation enchantment or spell cast on them, and you could tell that they had been in there for a while. The same went for the furniture and clothes that had been left behind by their previous owners.
“Let’s incinerate the furniture and clothes. They’re not going to be of any use to us. As for all the rusty metal stuff, I suppose we can melt it down,” I said as I shoved everything that was lying in the entrance into my magic bag. Then I used Wind Magic to air out the room.
“Lady Witch, there are plates scattered all around this room,” Teto said, returning from a room connected to the entry hall with a metal plate in her hands.
“Is that silverware? We might actually find something good in here.”
Most of the things inside the mansion must’ve been left virtually untouched for over three hundred years.
It’s surprising that no one has ever attempted to plunder this place, I thought. All of a sudden I felt mana filling the room.
“Well, that’s quite the rough welcome!”
Clatter, clatter.
The furniture, candlestands, dinnerware, and tools scattered around the mansion started levitating all at once.
“Look, Lady Witch, everything’s floating!”
“So we’re dealing with a poltergeist, huh? That’s a bit cliché, isn’t it?”
The furniture and tools were clattering and colliding against each other loudly, most likely in an attempt to startle us and drive us away. But Teto and I knew that we weren’t really in any meaningful danger, so we didn’t budge. Seeing as we weren’t leaving, the poltergeist seemed to grow more agitated, banging the furniture together even louder.
“Leave. Leave this place at once!”
“Oh, look, it’s trying to talk us out of it now,” I said, turning to Teto. “So, have you noticed what I noticed yet?”
“Yup! The ghost is hiding in this room!”
Teto and I had managed to locate the poltergeist based on the direction its mana was coming from.
“Let’s capture it and hear what it has to say. Psychokinesis!”
Releasing my mana into the air, I overpowered our opponent and seized control of the levitating furniture and tools. I quickly maneuvered them to the sides to clear a path, allowing Teto to dash directly towards the hidden poltergeist.
“I got it! Ah...”
Teto had managed to grab our invisible opponent, but it slipped from her grasp and ran away.
“Lady Witch, it escaped!”
“It’s okay. All we have to do is follow its mana signature.”
Gathering mana into my eyes, I followed the trail of mana left behind by the ghost.
“Go home, go home!” it taunted. I could detect a note of panic in its voice. In another attempt to scare us away, one of the rusty candlestands in the hallway lit up, making it look as if it had a life of its own.
The flames reached high, but lacked any real power. They were nothing more than an empty threat. I quickly set up a barrier to prevent them from reaching us, and they extinguished on their own.
However, something else had caught my curiosity.
“Teto, have you noticed?”
“It wasn’t the same mana signature that lit the candlestand!”
And that wasn’t all.
“Lady Witch, look! A human silhouette!”
“An illusion, huh? A mix of Water and Light Magic, I’d say.”
A woman with long hair and bluish-white skin was staring at us from the other side of the hallway, but I couldn’t detect any miasma coming from her, like there should have been if it was a true evil spirit. With a light swing of my staff, a gust of wind scattered the water on which the illusion had been projected, and the silhouette vanished.
“So we’re dealing with several invisible creatures using different magic types. I think I’ve figured out our opponent.”
As we chased our opponent around the mansion, it hit us with yet another would-be scare—albeit a far more impressive one.
“Leave, leave right this instant!”
A figure in full armor, complete with a sword and shield, emerged from the depths of the mansion, its clattering approach echoing through the hallway. The suit was empty, which might have led a less seasoned adventurer to mistake it for living armor—a monster that I had encountered in the past.
“Lady Witch, Teto can feel mana like hers coming from the armor,” Teto told me.
“They’re controlling it using Earth Magic, huh?”
As we stood there discussing the true nature of the armor, it had more than enough time to rush towards us, its sword raised over its head. But when it tried to land a blow, Teto easily blocked it with her own sword.
“Take this!” she said, kicking the armor in the abdomen and making it collapse backward. The impact scattered its component parts, revealing a lump of mud at the center.
“That’s what they used to make it move,” I noted.
Fire, Water, Earth, Light, Dark, and I was pretty sure that the voice from earlier used Wind Magic to carry through the mansion.
I followed the invisible beings’ mana signatures, which led me to a small study on the ground floor.
“How about you show yourselves?” I asked.
The creatures did just that. Some of them were little fairies with fluttering wings on their backs, while others were small transparent animals, each having created their own form using the magic type they wielded. Spirits.
They were all huddled together, shaking like leaves in the wind.
“Go home, go home. Don’t come here...” one of them said, its voice trembling as the little spirits stood in front of the bookshelves as if they were standing guard over its contents, ready to fight to the bitter end.