To offer a brief comment in the interest of defending Clarice’s reputation and excusing my own actions, the location of the rescue request beacon was in a residential area quite far away from the city’s main corridor. It was coming from a house far removed from and with no connection to the area Clarice was in charge of patrolling that night, is what I’m saying.
In other words, regardless of whether or not Clarice had run into me, the same thing was sure to have happened.
“What an awful sight…”
Clarice rushed up beside me and let out a huge sigh.
Standing before our eyes was a single-family house where one part of a wall had peeled away, as if it had been carved off. Fortunately, the residents were all unharmed, but the mother stood gaping up at their battered house in amazement, and her daughter was clinging to her, crying.
The Crescent Moon Company member who had been responsible for that area reported to Clarice that some dreadful ghoul had been there until just a little while earlier. The man behind him, who seemed to be the father of the family who had been victimized, was repeatedly and furiously denouncing Clarice’s employee.
“What in the hell were you doing? You incompetent idiot. My house has collapsed, and my wife and daughter could have been hurt. What would you do if they had died? Why did you even join the Crescent Moon Company?”
The man was violently hurling his anger at him. If two other company members hadn’t been holding him back, he probably would have been throwing punches at that point.
“Miss Clarice, I’m terribly sorr—”
Clarice put her hand up to command the man who was trying to apologize in a panic and asked him, “Did you clear the dead?”
“……No, the fact is, it fled from us—”
According to the story Clarice’s deputy told us then, the thing that had appeared on the road under his jurisdiction had looked just like a lump of blubber. He said this round, fat body had been crawling down the street. Just the head of the thing had been about as tall as a human. He imagined that, if the thing stood up, it would have been tall enough to rival the buildings in that part of town.
The man told us that, faced with such an unusual instance of the dead, he got cocky.
What he really should have done was to call for his colleagues and Clarice right away. It was obvious that he couldn’t deal with the thing by himself.
But supposing I can subdue this thing by myself, he’d thought, that might earn me recognition from my other colleagues, and by extension, from Miss Clarice, too—
“However, you can see how things turned out.”
Then as soon as it had destroyed the house, the ghoul had apparently vanished. Just as if it had never existed in the first place.
“Considering the characteristics you described, that sounds like a wandering dead.”
Wandering dead?
I didn’t actually ask the question, but standing behind Clarice, I did tilt my head just a little bit. Even though there was no way she should have been able to see me, she explained what the wandering dead were like.
“The ordinary dead take human form, and you can more or less understand their behavior. However, once in a while, one of the dead appears with a strange form, and the dead like that are hard to predict. These dead are a little different, you see. They’ll struggle violently if you provoke them, and on top of that, they sometimes vanish and flee before you can bring them down. Those ones are called the wandering dead. They’re very dangerous opponents, so I’ve decided that I’ll deal with them on my own, and if any of my subordinates encounter one, I’ve instructed them to let me know right away and to find shelter. What a mess…”
Clarice looked up at the partially demolished house with an exceedingly composed look in her eyes and said, “Sounds like you’ve had plenty of scolding from the residents already.”
Actually, they’re still currently scolding him, but…
“…Yes, ma’am.” Her employee hung his head.
Clarice placed her hand on the man’s shoulder.
“It’s a good thing they’re able to scold you. If they had died, they wouldn’t even be able to do that.”
Then Clarice said in a very cold tone of voice, “You don’t need to come in anymore, effective immediately. Having someone incompetent like you around only exposes your colleagues to danger, you understand.”
Then she shot a sidelong glance at the man, who was standing there in a daze, and walked back over to the house.
She promptly kneeled in respect.
“Please find some way to forgive the failure of my subordinate. We will return the partially destroyed building to its original state immediately. Please, just be patient for a little while—”
It looked like a sincere response on her part.
And it also seemed like a swift reaction designed to deal with the failure.
But for the residents in question, her behavior was apparently intolerable.
“M-Miss Clarice! Please raise your head!” The father, who until a moment earlier had been ruled by his anger, was flustered.
“Th-that’s right! We’re not the least bit bothered by something like our house being destroyed!” And the mother bowed much, much deeper than Clarice had bowed.
The course of events that followed was over in the blink of an eye.
Clarice finished apologizing and swung her big scythe, firing off a spell. As if the hands of the clock were winding backward, the damaged house was back to normal in a flash. While that was happening, I saw her hand over some amount of money, as an apology. It was an amount of money that made the residents’ eyes go wide as they insisted they couldn’t possibly accept so much, but Clarice put it into their hands herself.
“Truly, I am so sorry, Lady Clarice. Please—”
The employee who had committed the failure in this case followed Clarice around for a while after she had finished settling things, begging for forgiveness, but she did not withdraw his dismissal.
“What possible reason could I have for keeping a useless tool on hand?”
She clearly refused him with a smile that did not waver one bit and once again announced the man’s termination.
“Please return your uniform by the end of the day.”
Looking on as an outsider, it seemed like a harsh punishment for a one-time mistake.
But I could be sure there was nothing to be done about it.
“I’m sorry you had to see something so unpleasant, Elaina.”
Some distance from the incident, on our way back to the main avenue, Clarice said, “Our job is an important one. We carry responsibility for people’s lives, and so—we can’t be allowed to compromise in any way, no matter what.”
This time, it had happened that no one had been injured, but it was easy enough to imagine that if they’d been unlucky, the whole family, parents and child alike, might have perished.
“Really, I’d rather not have to discard one of our own like that. But you know, if I don’t do it, I know a kid like him will do the same thing again.”
“……”
“Next time, in the same situation, the boy might be the one to suffer a permanent injury. He might even die. Before something like that can happen, it’s better for him to find a different path. A human life is short, after all.”
“And that’s why you fired him?”
What a kind thing to do.
“Why did you think I fired him?”
“I was sure it was because you wanted to nip the people’s anxiety in the bud.”
“Ha-ha-ha. That was part of it, too.”
Clarice laughed and looked up at the moon.
As she stared at the moon, which was really not all that bright, she let out a sigh.
“Ah, man. We’re gonna be shorthanded again.”
Apparently, the turnover at such a dangerous job was pretty intense.