The sun was still high in the sky, so they decided to go to Damuro. Haru wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but Yori wanted to see the place, and Manato was curious about Skullhell’s thralls. Riyo would follow Yori wherever she went.
Damuro was a settlement on a far greater scale than the ruins of Deadhead Watching Keep or even the former Alterna had been. Tsunomiya in Japan had been a big city, and in terms of the land area it covered, Damuro wasn’t any smaller.
According to Haru, Damuro could basically be divided into the New City in the northwest and the Old City in the southeast.
The broad strokes of Damuro’s history were that it had once been a human city but had been laid to waste by another race about two centuries ago. The Old City remained in ruins, and the new masters of Damuro, the goblins, had subsequently built the New City.
About a century ago, a bunch of stuff had happened, and those goblins had been wiped out.
After that, Skullhell’s thralls had come along and settled there.
“Most of the thralls are in the New City. The outskirts of the Old City are still in ruins, as you can see for yourselves.”
Damuro had once been fully enclosed in a defensive wall. There were still traces of those glory days here and there, but they amounted to little more than the occasional pile of stones. Nothing that was still fit to be called a wall. On the other side of what remained of the fortifications, there was scattered rubble that had once been buildings all over the place, sometimes piled up fairly high. Dense grass was growing everywhere, and there were even a few groves of trees. Though they spotted small animals and bugs fairly often, there was no sign of any thralls.
“The Old City’s uninhabited, then?” Yori asked, but Haru shook his head.
“No. This is where their farms are.”
“Their farms? They keep animals?”
“You might call them that, I suppose. They are animals.”
The four of them proceeded through the outskirts of the Old City that had been reclaimed by nature. They had only covered a short distance, though, when a wall came into sight. Beyond it was the dark shadow of a tall building. Once, long enough ago that he didn’t remember exactly when it’d happened, Manato had found a large beehive in the mountains. It had been a bulging growth near the roots of a tree, rather than being up in the branches. The building they were looking at was like that hive, only blown up to be much, much bigger. Was it really a building? He couldn’t believe it was natural.
But before he could take a closer look at the building, there was that wall to consider.
Haru led Manato and the girls into a grove where they could more easily hide themselves. There was still some distance between them and the wall. Even at a run, it would have taken ten seconds to reach it.
“It’s maybe six meters high?” Yori said as she poked her head out of the grove, doing something with her hands. “As for width, it’s two hundred...maybe two-fifty meters across. What’re they keeping in there? Is that a farm?”
Haru neither confirmed nor denied it as he pointed at the wall.
“There’s a guard. The surface of its body has become malignant. That’s a slave soldier.”
It was true. There was someone standing where Haru had pointed. It was human in form, but it looked like it might have been clad all in black like Haru. Its whole body was dark in color. Manato had better eyesight than Juntza and the other Canaries, and he could see well even at a distance or at night. Even at this range, he would normally be able to make out a person’s face. However, he was having trouble making out the features of the slave soldier that was standing guard.
“Roughly how many guards are there?” Yori asked.
“I’m not sure,” Haru said, tilting his head slightly. “The thralls aren’t well organized the way the converts are. I’ve scouted Damuro quite a few times, and each time I’ve come here, the number has been different than the previous time. There’re always two or three thralls posted at a farm. I doubt there’s ever just one. And when it’s shipment time, other slave soldiers come too.”
“Shipment... Wait, y’mean shipping out the animals they breed there?”
“I’ve never seen the converted eat anything. At least, not so far. But thralls do eat.”
“They’re meat eaters, then? And they mainly eat meat from their farms?”
“Yes, but they don’t cook, as far as I’m aware.”
“They eat sashimi?” Manato asked. He had eaten raw meat and innards from animals he’d hunted before. That wasn’t something you could do with every kind of game, but as long as the kill was fresh, there were a lot of animals that had parts that were delicious that way. He’d learned that from his parents.
“Is that the word for it...?” Haru wondered aloud. “I really wouldn’t know. But anyway, the thralls either eat their prey alive, or right after killing it without any further preparation. They apparently hunt too, but they aren’t able to catch enough food that way.”
“Oh! Haru, you were saying that the number of large animals around here has gone down. Is that ’cause the thralls hunted too many of them?”
“Yeah. They increase their numbers by eating.”
“But isn’t that just how living beings work?” Yori asked with a shrug. “It’s fundamentally the same for all of us, right? We have to eat to survive, and we reproduce for our own benefit.”
“What they farm in there...is goblins.”
“Huh?”
Yori and Riyo looked at one another, both having been surprised by what he had said.
“Wait, aren’t goblins...?” Manato asked, trailing off. He didn’t think he had ever heard of any kind of creature with that name in Japan, but the word had come up in his conversations with Haru a number of times. He tried to search his memory. “They’re the...uh, race...that took, or occupied Damuro? Like humans, but a bit different? Huh? They’re eating...things that are like humans?”
†
There were a number of farms in Damuro. According to Haruhiro, behind the stone walls, the farms where the goblins were kept were pits dug into the ground.
The group was currently hidden within a complicated mess of trees growing in a large pile of rubble, watching the single gate that was built into the walls—a badly rusted iron grate that was barred on the outside to keep things in.
The sun eventually began to set, and as it did, something approached from the New City. It looked like some kind of freight cart with four wheels. It was fairly big. Way larger than the flatbed minitrucks Manato had seen so often in Japan. He figured it had to be easily twice the size of one of those. But instead of having a flatbed, this cart was like a cage with wheels. Also, trucks moved using their engines, but this cart didn’t have one of those. Instead, there was a thing sticking out of the front of the cage that was used to pull the cart by hand. There were two creatures pulling it, and they were awfully big. Were those humans? They had green skin.
“Orcs,” Yori murmured.
The green-skinned race. Orcs. Yori mentioning their name reminded Manato that there had been some orcs among the divine soldiers. The two orcs were walking side by side, holding the handle and pulling the cage cart along. The divine soldier orcs had had shining eyes, but these ones’ eyes were dark. They had no whites. The thrall orcs’ eyes were completely black.
They weren’t transporting any cargo. The cage was empty. But a dark humanoid creature was sitting on top of it. That one was no orc. It was like the guards. The surface of its body had become malignant—that was how Haru had described it before. A slave soldier, huh?
The cage cart stopped at the gate. Then the orcs removed the gate’s bar and began opening it. They looked pretty strong, but they were still struggling with it. Probably because it was rusted, or maybe it was warped too? It didn’t look like it was fitted properly.
The slave soldier on top of the cage cart crossed its legs, then raised one knee, but it didn’t move from where it was sitting. It didn’t look like it was interested in helping the orcs.
Finally, the gate opened. The orcs began pulling the cage cart once again, taking it inside the farm.
They knew there were guards on top of the wall, but none were visible from where Manato and the others were.
The gate was wide open.
The cage cart soon vanished from sight.
The breeding grounds were located in pits, so they were lower than the surrounding terrain. The cage cart might have descended into that lower level.
Manato heard something resembling a voice. He didn’t know what language it was speaking, but it was definitely shouting at someone. What were those shrill cries? They sounded like they were coming from multiple different voices. Were they screams? It was really noisy.
“What’re they doing?” Yori asked Haru, or perhaps she was just wondering aloud. Haru remained silent.
Yori was the one who’d wanted to investigate the farm. Haru had wanted to turn back. Manato honestly didn’t know what he wanted to do.
For him, it was perfectly normal to hunt animals to live. And sometimes, humans were hunted and eaten by animals instead. He didn’t think there was anything particularly awful about that. But no matter how hungry he got, would he ever kill and eat a fellow human? He felt like he wouldn’t want to. But no matter how much he disliked the idea, if it was a matter of eat or die, he’d have no choice. And yet, even if he were starving, could he eat a comrade like Juntza? That, he wasn’t so sure of. No, actually, he was. He wouldn’t eat a comrade.