Chapter 544:
Ring
OH NO. IF I FAILED, that means…
My arms and legs were shaking in fear.
What do I do now?
“It’s okay, Ivy. Take a look.”
When the gentle voice reached my ears, I shook all over.
“It’s all right. Come on, look up.”
The gentle voice made my shaking calm down just a little. I cautiously looked up and saw Zinal smiling kindly down at me.
“Oh!”
I noticed he was gently rubbing my head, and then I realized his hands were no longer covering my ears.
“Thanks, Ivy.”
Why was Zinal thanking me? His gaze left me, and I followed it to see the summoning circle glowing white. I stiffened up for a moment, but a gentle pat on my back relaxed me. The circle was embraced in a gentle glow.
I mustered up my courage and looked at the kamice’s face. And as it lay in the glowing light of the summoning circle, it now looked unbelievably peaceful.
“That little angel is okay now,” Zinal said.
Thank goodness. The thought of it suffering even in death was just too sad. It had already lost the family it loved.
“It’s beautiful,” my father said.
I nodded at him and just stared at the light. After a while, the glow melted into the air and disappeared.
“Oh! The kamice…”
The kamice’s body turned to droplets of light in the glow and vanished into the air.
“I think it’s completely free from the summoning circle,” Fische said.
So it’s free now.
“Huh?!”
For a moment, I couldn’t process what I’d just seen. Surely my eyes were playing tricks. I mean, the kamice was long dead…
“Did you just see that…?” my father asked in a daze as the four of us stared at the spot where the kamice had once lain.
So that means the grown-ups saw it, too. Which means…my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me?
“It was dead, right?” Fische asked.
Zinal nodded. “Yeah, no mistaking it.”
“But didn’t it open its eyes and look at us right before it disappeared?”
It was just as Fische described it. Right before the kamice disappeared, it had opened its eyes and looked at us…or so it seemed. But it was too vivid to write it off as imagination, especially since I wasn’t the only one.
We all stared in silence, remembering the kamice just before it vanished.
“It’s just a vague sense I got…but I think the kamice was really happy,” I said.
You would usually be terrified if a monster’s eyes shot open as it died, but we weren’t. We were terribly surprised, but not at all terrified.
“You’re right. It did look happy,” my father said.
As I nodded, my vision blurred a little. I wiped the blur away and smiled at the men.
“I’m so happy for it.”
All three of them smiled back at me.
“And now the real question, Zinal…” My father’s tone was suddenly serious.
“What is it?”
I looked at him worriedly, wondering what it could be. For some reason, my father was glaring at Zinal.
“How much longer are you gonna hug Ivy like that?”
Huh? Oh, right, Zinal’s been holding me up all this time…huh? He’s hugging me?
“Hold up. There’s nothing weird about me hugging her,” Zinal argued.
Nope. It’s weird. I looked at my father, who was smiling so hard at Zinal that I could almost hear it.
“The danger is completely, perfectly gone now. So get your hands off her…”
With a loud sigh, Zinal let go of me. “Druid—is it just me, or did you almost add a threat to the end of that sentence?”
Now that he mentioned it, there was a strange hostility in the way he spoke. I looked at my father, who shrugged his shoulders innocently.
“Not really.”
…Yeah, I don’t buy that.
And neither did Zinal, from the frustrated look he was giving my father. “You know, for a guy who’s usually good at hiding his feelings, you sure let them rampage when they want to.”
I almost laughed listening to the two. They had become very close friends when I wasn’t looking.
“Wait a minute…” I looked at the spot where the kamice had been and noticed something on the ground in its place. I approached it to find something shaped like a box. I picked it up and found it was a stamp.
“What’s a stamp doing in here?”
I looked around and found another stamp on the ground. I picked it up to discover it was a ring. It looked like it would be too big for me even if I put it on my thumb, so it must have belonged to a man.
“What’s up?” Fische’s eyes landed on the objects in my hand. “That’s it!”
I looked at him in shock.
“Can I see the box-shaped one?” he asked.
“It’s not mine, you know. I found it on the ground.” I handed Fische the boxlike stamp. As he looked it over, Zinal and my father turned their attention to him.
“Found something?” Zinal asked.
“This is the guild master’s seal!”
With a tired look in his eye, Zinal eyed the thing in Fische’s hand.
The guild master’s seal… We’d assumed he had hidden it somewhere.
“Is it genuine?” Zinal asked.
Fische examined it further. “Looks real to me. I sense a faint but unique magic energy coming from it.”
A unique magic energy? I didn’t sense it at all.
“No doubt about it—that kamice was his tamed monster. Hearing its voice all but confirmed it, though.”
Okay, so the kamice had the guild master’s seal. Did the guild master ask his monster to keep it safe? And is that why the kamice was sealed up inside this cliff?
“That did cross my mind earlier. Don’t you think the kamice was powerful enough to escape this cliff?” my father asked.
I gave him a curious look.
“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Zinal walked over to the wall and pressed his hand on one of the rocks. “Uh-huh, this is just a normal rock. So the kamice couldn’t have come out from the one that had the summoning circle, but any other rock could have been smashed through. Like over there.”
I looked where Zinal was pointing to find a tiny hole in the wall with light shining through it.
“Judging by the light, these rocks aren’t all that thick. The kamice could have easily broken free through that area.”
Then why didn’t the kamice run away? Because…it didn’t feel the need to? But why? Maybe because somebody whom it trusted shut it inside here. But maybe the kamice wasn’t actually shut in here. What else could it be…? Was the guild master protecting the kamice? No, no, that summoning circle was meant to lock somebody up and steal their magic energy—oh, no! Wait, that’s wrong. Zinal and Fische said the summoning circle was like that other one…
“Maybe the guild master didn’t trap the kamice in here…” I murmured.
We had discovered this hiding place because the summoning circle glowed. Without that, we wouldn’t have found it. Though there was no telling why the summoning circle even glowed in the first place…
“Ivy?”
“This is just a theory…but maybe the guild master made that summoning circle to protect the kamice,” I said.
My father fell into thought. “Yeah, that’s possible. It’d explain why the kamice didn’t run away. Maybe it was waiting for somebody to find it.”
Waiting for somebody… But the guild master died. When a tamer dies, the bond with their monster is severed, so the kamice must’ve known what happened. What did it think about that? I looked at the guild master’s seal in Zinal’s hand, then at the ring on my thumb.
“What’s that?” my father asked.
“I found it near the guild master’s seal,” I explained, handing him the ring.
“This is a man’s ring,” he remarked. “Oh, did you see this part?” He pointed to the inside of the ring. I shook my head. I had promptly slid it onto my thumb once I found it, so I hadn’t noticed.
“I think this is the guild master’s ring,” my father said. “See? It’s engraved with Rulu and Ruzzy.”
I took the ring back from my father and examined the inside of it. It was indeed engraved with the words Rulu and Ruzzy.
“Are those names?” I asked.
“Yeah, Okanke’s guild master was named Rulberth, Rulu for short.”
That must’ve meant the kamice’s name was Ruzzy. If the guild master had the name engraved on his ring, they were definitely very close.
“Ruzzy… That’s a nice name,” Fische said.
I nodded.
“We can’t know for sure, but maybe Ruzzy didn’t want to leave this place,” Zinal said. He was staring at the guild master’s seal. “Ruzzy may have been able to leave but didn’t. That might be because this place was…where Ruzzy and the guild master spent their final moments together. Maybe Ruzzy knew nobody would come back but waited all the same. This is all just conjecture, of course.”
I clenched my fists to keep the anger from boiling out of me.
“Ivy…why the grim face?” my father patted my head.
“I’m just a little peeved. I’m sure the guild master wanted to spend his last moments with Ruzzy.”
Zinal had said that the reason Rulberth became the guild master was because his tamed monster had been getting on in years.
“And I’m sure Ruzzy wanted to spend its final moments with the guild master, too…”
But somebody got in their way, and that makes me infuriated. If it were me…
I looked at my slimes. They had turned into a blur.
I sniffled hard as my father held me tight.
I hate this… It’s just not fair.