Side:
Zinal the Bystander, Part 1
ZINAL’S PERSPECTIVE
“HEY THERE. Haven’t seen you in a while.”
As I watched the criminals running away, I heard somebody call out to me from behind. His aura was faint as it ever was. (But I noticed it, of course.)
“Yeah, long time no see. You’re looking well.”
My friend shrugged his shoulders in reply. His name was Galtos. He did secret work with me, and he was somebody I could trust. He’d saved my life too many times to count, and I’d saved his ass plenty as well.
“So…was it really okay for you to do that?” he asked.
I followed Galtos’s gaze to the fleeing criminals, who had already vanished into the darkness.
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
I sensed an ominous energy from him when I said that.
“I didn’t exactly let them get away.”
“Um, yeah, you did. I just saw them run off.”
“He’s right. I tried to stop them, too, but he insisted—said we could let them run.” Juss, another one of my friends, raised a dissenting voice, his irritation on full display next to me.
Well, to those not in the know, of course it looks like I let those guys escape. Especially since that’s literally what I did.
“So, what’re we doing about the ones who ran?” Galtos asked.
“We’ll catch them, of course,” I answered.
Both Galtos and Juss looked at me like I was crazy.
“You’ll catch them? If you wanted to catch them, why did you let them get away in the first place? Are you dumb?”
Juss hit my shoulder, and it hurt. He was seventy years old and retired from adventuring for many years, yet he was just as crazy-strong as he’d always been.
“Well, I thought you were dumb, but I had no idea you were that dumb.” Galtos unsheathed his sword. He was probably going to run after the guys who’d just escaped that very minute.
“You don’t pull your punches, do ya? I’m telling you, it’s fine. They’re gonna make a move soon.”
The pair gave me a strange look when I said that.
Huh? Ah, it looks like one of them has already arrived.
“I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. This is a monster who’s been helping us a lot in this fight.”
A silhouette suddenly surrounded the three of us.
Wow, this serpent’s a big guy.
“What?!”
Barely after Galtos and Juss’s jaws hit the ground, the trees shook with a collective roar from the forest. It sounded like our escapees had just made friends with the serpents, though I suppose that was the last sort of friendship the boys wanted.
“Hey…Zinal?”
“What’s up?”
Juss’s shaky finger pointed at the serpent.
“Don’t point, man. It’s rude.”
Juss’s fiery eyes shot at me.
This guy’s funny. So this is what stoic Juss looks like when he freaks out.
“Isn’t that a serpent?”
“Can’t you tell? Good evening; thanks for all the help.” As the serpent bowed its head to me, I mimicked Ivy and delicately tickled its nose. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Galtos and Juss scoot back a few paces.
“We’re safe,” I assured them.
Juss cautiously approached the serpent. “Incredible…” He timidly reached out to the serpent, who stared intently at his hand. Maybe it was starting to feel impatient, as its nose swooped forward and nuzzled Juss’s hand. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the way Juss’s hand shook, and I got quite the death glare from him in return.
“The guild master’s tamed monster…it wasn’t a serpent, right?” Galtos also approached cautiously and softly touched the serpent.
“Right, it wasn’t a serpent. And this one isn’t tamed by anybody,” I said.
“Yeah, thought so.” Juss nodded, eyeing the serpent’s forehead.
“I’ve heard that special tamers can form bonds with monsters they haven’t tamed.”
I thought back to the way Ivy interacted with the serpents. She let them crowd around her like it was nothing The sight was not only abnormal; it was impossible. The first time I saw it, I was so shocked it took everything in me not to scream. And when she introduced us and said, “Aren’t they cute?” I struggled quite hard to find an answer.
Serpents were highly intelligent monsters. They weren’t in the Top Three, but you could call them a special monster. A few of them coexisted with humans, but that was incredibly rare. Most serpents lived deep in the forest and tried not to interact with humans. If they suspected you were an enemy who had barged into their forest, they would make sure you’d never come out alive. In the ancient texts, there was even an account of a serpent destroying a village because humans made it angry. And that same type of serpent let Ivy ride on its back with a big smile on its face.
“That so? I’ve never heard of that…” Juss mused in bewilderment.
I nodded in understanding. Of course he wouldn’t have heard of it.
“Probably because there are hardly ever any tamers special enough that monsters would want to help them,” I said.
Hardly ever wasn’t quite it—more like only Ivy. Juss thought over what I’d said.
“Zinal…have you met that special tamer?”
I slightly shifted my gaze toward the terrified cries coming from the forest. They were probably running around a lot, since their screams were coming from a wider range now.
“I have.”
I assumed the serpents were treating the men to that little game of tag because they’d made Ivy cry. The moment Ivy cried inside that cliff, the air around the serpents changed right away. And it wasn’t just them. Ciel and the slimes changed—only for an instant, but I noticed. I don’t understand monsters very well, but they were probably very angry at the people who made Ivy cry.
“May we ask who it is?” Galtos asked, his eyes brimming with curiosity.
“It might make the serpents mad, but if you’re okay with that…”
The serpent suddenly jutted its face away from my petting hand and looked down at us.
“Ah! Zinal, don’t you dare drop that name,” Galtos sputtered. “Sorry, I promise I’ll never ask again. By the way…just out of curiosity…exactly how many serpents are helping this tamer?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I dunno.”
“From the way the trees are moving, I’d say there’s around fourteen of them?” Juss suggested.
I looked into the forest. I knew the serpents could move without a sound, yet the trees kept swaying and rustling wherever they were.
“No, more than fourteen?”
There were about twenty-eight guys on the run, and since they could possibly have scattered, there might be more than twenty serpents now.
“Yeah, I think there’s at least twenty,” I said.
“Twenty! Just one is scary enough…” Juss muttered. “Well, they’re only getting chased because they’re running. If they hadn’t run for it, they wouldn’t be in this mess.”
I smiled cynically in reply.
“So, wait, Zinal, how did you join this task force?” Galtos asked.
“A couple days ago, we finally got the guild master’s assistant to tell us where the master died. When we went out to the forest to look into it, we found two serpents waiting for us by the dump.”
My explanation seemed to surprise Galtos. I guess that was fair, since serpents don’t make a habit of hanging around dumps waiting for people.
“They were probably looking for my aura,” I explained. “They wanted to tell me about what happened. It was quite the ordeal. We knew they wanted to tell us something, but it was hard to understand.”
To be honest, I wanted to give myself a medal for being able to understand as much as I did.
“It really is amazing you understood anything.”
“Anyway, the serpents brought some smaller monsters along and pushed them so they’d run. Then when they ran, the serpents caught them and brought them back. After they did this three more times, I suddenly got an idea and asked them, ‘Do you want me to let them escape while they’re in the convoy?’ And it turned out I was right. You can’t imagine how relieved I was.”
From an outsider’s perspective, two serpents and I were terrorizing a bunch of terrified little monsters. It was probably quite the brutal sight. Still, I really was glad I’d managed to understand the serpents.
“Oh! So the serpents…they’re toying with the ones who escaped?”
I followed Juss’s gaze and smiled. Since it was nighttime, I couldn’t see much, but I could make out a serpent holding and waving something in its mouth. I assumed it was one of the escapees.
“So, what’re we gonna do about them?” Galtos asked.
I looked back at the village gate, where two men were sneaking out. We hid behind some trees and checked out their faces.
“No doubt about it: It’s our old friends.”
I hadn’t thought I’d bump into any church bastards in this village. Okanke Village didn’t have a church. The guild master had destroyed the church, using some rather vicious methods. Thinking about it now, that guild master must have been some guy. After doing that, he methodically quashed all the church’s opportunities to build, so they couldn’t steal money from the village. That was why there was no church presence there. So what were clergy from the royal capital doing here?
“What should we do?” I asked.
“Secure them and take them with us,” Juss answered.
Galtos nodded. “Okay, we’ll just catch—aaand they fainted.”
Just then, I noticed that the serpent who’d been next to us had lunged at the two clergymen from up high in a tree. The men fainted without so much as a whimper.
Were you bored, buddy? Well, I don’t blame them for fainting. Seeing you lunge at them from above must’ve been traumatizing.