“Hey, Toshi. Is Isalas really that impoverished?” Yui asked.
“Yeah. Their food situation’s pretty dire,” Ado replied. “They don’t have much diplomatic influence either, so they were on the brink of becoming Metis’s puppet.”
“Isalas is lucky it’s so mountainous, if nothing else,” Shakti said. “Precious medicinal plants grow all over the place out there. We were able to gather enough to build a good stock of medicine for the sick.”
“It sure wasn’t easy collecting it, though, was it?” Lisa said. “Most of the plants were growing out of cliff faces. We could’ve died!”
While the mountainous nation was short on food, it wasn’t so bad that its people couldn’t survive.
The abundance of precious medicinal plants helped, for one. The problem was you had to have a pretty high level, not to mention the ability to take down monsters that appeared along the way, to harvest them without dying in this process. Still, nabbing even one could make you rich.
“We saw a fair few corpses lying around, didn’t we?” Ado said.
“People are probably just desperate to earn as much money as they can, but... Yeah. There are a lot of people who die out there because they’re not strong enough,” Shakti said. “Isalas basically gives you two options: starve to death, or throw yourself into danger. The nation being extorted into selling minerals dirt-cheap didn’t help anything.”
“Monsters kill a lot of the people trying to harvest those plants, yeah,” Lisa said. “Others who make it back alive are so badly injured that they can never work again. Even the monsters seem desperate there. Desperate enough to attack the livestock, at least...”
Isalas had a small population and was surrounded by mountains.
Most of the country’s income came from minerals, but it had been forced to sell those minerals for paltry sums until only recently.
People had to raise grazing livestock to survive, and even then, they’d get stuck living in towns and cities overrun with crime, which unemployment only exacerbated.
Law and order were lacking everywhere, but Isalas was particularly bad.
“Ah, yes... Rainbow lilies and icebloom grass can fetch a pretty penny, but they grow on cliff faces, don’t they?” Zelos said. “And I imagine the few places where they are easy to reach are always picked bare.”
“Yeah, that’s the thing,” Ado said. “You need a special container and tools to properly harvest the plants growing in remote areas, but clueless idiots hoping to get rich still sweep through, plucking everything they see. Then, when the herbs go to waste, there’s nothing left for the people who need them.”
“Remember that time I nearly fell into that huge gorge?” Shakti said. “If Ado hadn’t been there—”
“Hmm? If Ado hadn’t been there?” Yui repeated, giving her a large, strained smile.
“Then I wouldn’t be standing here today. You know that trope where a person’s losing their grip on a cliff, about to fall to their death, and someone grabs them at the last second? It was basically that. Surely it’s okay for him to have lent me a hand in that situation, right?”
“I suppose.”
“N-Nothing like what you’re imagining happened, okay, Yui?” Lisa said. “We were all just trying to survive, and sometimes we had to help each other out. That’s all it was.”
“Nothing ‘like what I’m imagining’? What is it you think I’m imagining?”
“Huh? U-Uh... Um...”
Lisa’s attempt to de-escalate the situation had only added fuel to the fire.
Despite Yui’s smile, her aura was anything but friendly.
“Such as, uh... Oh! One time,” Lisa said, “we were running away from some rocs and I tripped, and Ado picked me up and carried me...”
“W-Wait! Don’t—” Ado started, panicked.
You could almost hear Yui’s aura flare—FWOOM!—as if some malevolent god were about to manifest in the room with them.
Her smile couldn’t conceal her murderous intent.
“O-Oh! Yeah! Yui! I passed a hot spring town on my way here!” Ado said, clearly trying to change the subject. “How about we visit after you give birth? It can be our honeymoon!”
“Ah—would you be talking about Lysagr?” Zelos asked. “I actually dug that hot spring up myself by accident. With a washing machine.”
“With a washing machine?!” the other four repeated, baffled.
Well, that had succeeded in changing the topic.
After a moment, Yui hummed thoughtfully. “A honeymoon? Well, I don’t think I’d be able to until the baby’s about a year old, but...” She didn’t seem to hate the idea.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Ado and Zelos had executed quite an impressive alley-oop.
“So you were the one who made that hot spring, Zelos?” Shakti asked. “There were a lot of people there, you know. You must’ve really helped out the economy.”
“The water there’s effervescent, so it should be good for your health, right? Maybe that’s part of it,” Lisa said. “Oh, that reminds me—I was relaxing in the open-air bath there once, and Ado just walked in. He didn’t know it was women-only at that time of day! Jeez, what a surprise that was!”
“U-Uh— Lisa?!”
FWOOOOOMPH!
Yui’s deadly aura roared back to life, even more intense than before.
Zelos and Ado might’ve scored some points, but Lisa had just cost them the game.
The party could practically feel the malevolent god beginning to form within the young woman once more.
And this time, Yui’s jealousy was paired with Zelos’s unsightly envy.
“Ado? I think we need to have a little chat, just the two of us, hmm?” Zelos said.