I took out a leather bag from [Storage] and dumped it out on a table in Parent. Ende, who was sitting across from me, looked at both me and the bag in confusion.
“What’s all this?” he asked.
“Quos fragments. Remember how I mentioned defeating a bunch when we found Leylle?”
“I do remember that, but...why are you giving them to me?”
Technically, I was giving them to Leylle, not Ende. According to Doctor Babylon’s analysis, these Quos fragments were almost no different from real gemstones in both structure and characteristics, and that meant they could be sold off as such, so long as we let the buyer know they were fake—the last thing we needed was to become con artists.
Usually, any materials dropped from magic beasts—if you could call them that—belonged to the adventurer who killed them, but Leylle was the one who created these Quos. As I was discussing it with Kuon, he’d mentioned that she should have at least half of the rights to them, so I decided to simply give them back.
“You can put it toward your family’s finances.”
“Do you really think this is gonna make us much...? Not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, though,” Ende remarked after taking a look at the contents of the bag and then storing it away with his magic.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got a hundred more bags waiting for you.”
“You serious?!”
I hovered my [Storage] above the entrance to Ende’s own and directly dropped the bags inside it. This alone would make them a fortune. Though, given the fact that Ende was a gold-rank adventurer, he could make this by himself easy.
“It’s not as strong a material as phrasium, but you can use them like spellstones, so you might make more money if you market them that way instead of as gemstones.”
“Wait. Do you mean that Leylle can make all the gemstones and spellstones she wants?”
He wasn’t wrong, but those artificial Phrase were born from Leylle; would she really want to mercilessly destroy them just to make a profit?
“...Yeah, no way. I heard she’s already gotten attached to the Phrase that Allis tamed, so I doubt she could bring herself to destroy a life that she herself created. Besides, I don’t think Leylle can even make any Phrase right now.”
“You ‘heard’? Don’t tell me she’s still avoiding you?” I asked, surprised.
Inside Leylle’s mind was the consciousness of the current Sovereign Phrase and Melle’s younger brother, Halle. It wasn’t exactly Halle himself, but more like a transcribed personality. Said transcribed personality held an unnaturally strong hatred for Ende as the man who stole his sister. Whenever Leylle caught sight of Ende, Halle’s personality would forcefully take over.
What was odd was that I had heard that after a lot of intervention from Melle and Allis, Halle no longer immediately attacked the man.
“He doesn’t suddenly attack me anymore, but he still gives me the dirtiest glares, like he’s gonna stab me the second I take my eyes off him... Plus, Leylle’s always with Allis nowadays, so I don’t even get the chance to speak with Allis face-to-face anymore. The calls and emails I get from her are the only thing keeping me sane...” Ende spoke wistfully as he stared out the window with a distant gaze. Honestly, he kind of sounded like a single dad the way he was acting right now.
“It’ll suck if this keeps up all the way until Allis goes back to the future. You’ve got to reconcile with...” I began saying, but Ende’s eyes suddenly widened.
Why are you looking at me like a pigeon that got hit with a slingshot?!
“Go back to the future? Allis?”
“What? Uh, well, yeah, of course.”
What’s he on about? Isn’t that why we’re working so hard right now?
Apparently, that had completely escaped his mind. Actually, what would Leylle do when the kids returned? Would she go back to the future with Allis or would she remain in our time? If she stayed with us, would that make her the big sister instead? Though, given the fact that Leylle didn’t seem to exist in their future, it would make more sense for her to go with them.
As I calmly pondered that question to myself, Ende’s eyes only got progressively wilder.
“Allis is gonna leave! No... What should I do?! Right, right, if I just interfere with Touya’s plans...! I’ll make it so they can’t go back to the futu— Ow!”
In the middle of Ende’s crazy ramblings, a karate chop landed right on the back of his head, hard enough that even I could hear it.
“What are you going on about, you loon?”
I looked up and was greeted by an annoyed-looking Ney, who was standing behind him.
“We knew from the start that Allis would have to return to the future eventually. Lady Melle in the future will remain sad if we don’t return her. Is that what you want?”
“N-No, of course not, but...”
He’d likely been saying those words in his panic, though I was sure he’d end up incredibly depressed when Allis did end up going back home. I doubted I would be much different, though. Allis was around the same age as Kuon, so it would take at least six or seven years before she would be born. In our case, we had older kids, so we wouldn’t have to wait anywhere near as long to see them.
“Hey, at least she shouldn’t be going back for a little while longer, right?” I said in an attempt to console him.
“Don’t tell me someone like you is struggling against those, uhhh...wicker trouts, are you?” Ney remarked.
I frowned and replied, “You mean ‘wicked devout.’ We’re not struggling exactly, but we can’t quite figure out their goal, so we’re being a little cautious in terms of where to begin our assault.”
Assuming their goal was to revive the wicked god, the question then became how. I thought it was possible they’d try to bring the wicked god to our time from the past when he was still alive, but Grandma Tokie said that was impossible.
The fact that wicked vessels remained in the world meant that some semblance of the wicked god’s power had to have remained. Maybe he split himself up before he fought us, and those fragments were doing his work now. Given how much of a sore loser he was despite acting so high-and-mighty, it wasn’t out of the question, especially since it looked as if they were attacking countries all over the world to harvest negative emotions from them. They could maybe try to use those to revive the wicked god, but...something still didn’t sit right with me. It just didn’t feel that simple.
Even the wicked devout didn’t seem like they were unified under the goal of reviving the wicked god. The purple spear wielder looked as if he had nothing but fighting on the brain, and that guy with the meat cleaver was doing nothing but following orders. Even the crazy old goat-skull guy looked like he was just enjoying his messed-up experiments, as if he couldn’t care less about the wicked god.
Despite that, they were all definitely receiving the blessings of the wicked god.