The items—capitalizing on the fear in people’s hearts—sold like hotcakes. They completely sold out in a matter of seconds.
“Buncha suckers.” He scooped up some gold coins from his signature top hat, staring at them with glee. “I’d thank the Demon Lord myself, if I could.”
“About that…”
“A-Alice… Seb? What’re you two doing here?” he asked, whipping his head back.
“We’re looking for a certain someone named Hatta. You might be familiar with the name.”
“You mean me? Sorry, I’ve got places to be. Bye!” He tried to make a run for it, only to be cut off by Alice.
“Hear us out first.”
“Alright, alright. Quit glaring at me.”
Seb filled Hatta in on the situation now that he’d given up on running.
“Well, he does give even the hottest chicks a good run for their money, looks-wise,” Hatta said afterward, grinning and scratching his cheek.
“And that’s where you come i—”
“Nuh-uh. I want nothing to do with this!” he declared.
“You didn’t let me finish.”
“Nothing good ever comes out of your ideas, Alice.”
“Well, now you’re just being rude.”
“Oh really? Did you forget the time I almost got burnt to a crisp when we were harvesting dragon scales because you thought I’d make for a good shield? Or the time you used me as bait in that cave? I almost saw the light, Alice. The light! Or the time you—” He continued to rattle off all his grievances with Alice for what felt like an eternity.
✦ ✦ ✦
❤❤❤
“I’M going to need both of your help, Hatta.”
“That’s still an easy ‘No’ from me. I wanna expand the business; I don’t have time to be playing your silly games,” Hatta continued to decline.
“I have a little something that might just interest you then.” Alice took off her necklace and handed it to Hatta, smirking. “It’s worth five hundred gold coins. That’s more than ten years of your life.”
The jewel-encrusted necklace shined brilliantly.
“…What’s the job?”
“I need you to help me take down the Demon Lord of the North.”
“…Wait, what about Jean? Aren’t you going to rescue him?”
“Jean could get turned into a girl and give birth to the Demon Lord’s child for all I care. What matters is the fact that he chose Jean over me. That I simply can’t forgive.”
Poor Jean. Pity for the prince washed over Hatta.
“Ideally, I’d like to introduce his face to my fist, treat him to a lead salad, chop him up into pieces and tenderize them into nothing. But that’d be a little too gruesome, so I’ve decided to settle for the classic punch-trample-condescending-stare combo!” Alice huffed.
“Are you crazy? This is the Demon Lord we’re talking about here, not some generic slime monster.”
“That’s where our boy Seb comes in. He can take on the Demon Lord, apparently. Provided it’s one-on-one.”
“Huh.” Hatta tilted his head in surprise, to which Seb responded with a courteous bow.
The screams of horrified townsfolk filled the town square not a moment later.
“We’ve got a monster on our hands!” someone screamed as a monster attacked people in the square.
“Seb, you can beat the Demon Lord as long as we clear out all the trash, right?”
“In all likelihood.”
Mere trivialities, such as the incessant screaming, did not faze the two in the slightest.
“Guys? There’s a monster trashing the place, you know,” Hatta pointed out.
“Who cares?”
“What do you mean who—actually yeah, you’re right. That mushroom thing looks mighty weak anyways.”
“Mushroom?”
Alice and Seb finally bothered to look at the chaos.
“Oh, that. It didn’t taste too good…”
“I’d say it tasted awful, even,” Seb agreed.
“You put that thing in your mouth?!”
“It didn’t taste anything like a mushroom. Strange, isn’t it?”
“It’s a mushroom monster, not a mushroom! Also, not only does that sound disgusting, you could’ve gotten poisoned, too!”
“No worries, Seb prepared it and force-fed it to some other monster first just in case.”
Seb bowed.
“Is that really where you should bow?!”
“If you really want one, just say so already, jeez. There’s some left over in the coach; you can have them.”
“Were you listening to a single word I just said?!”
These two are going to drive me up a wall. I can’t do this. Hatta glanced at the necklace. But this is over ten years of work resting in the palm of my hand.
“If Seb goes down, I’m bailing.”
“Fine by me.”
And so, Hatta joined the party, unable to resist the allure of wealth.
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❤❤❤
AFTER spending a night at the inn, the three replenished their food supplies and headed out north to recruit Hatta’s little sister.
“A coach, huh? Living the high life, I see. Well, maybe not Seb. I can’t imagine he’s having the time of his life.”
“Hey, Hatta, Haigha’s at the Mysterious Forest, right?”
“Yeah, she is.”
“She got her hands on a Boundary Stone, didn’t she?”
Hatta flinched, sweat dripping down his brow.
“Don’t even try hiding it from me. I know that this rare item, capable of deploying a barrier so powerful, even the Demon Lord himself couldn’t pass through, can only be activated with Holy Water—an ingredient only found in the Mysterious Forest.”
“You don’t plan on taking it from us, do you? We worked hard for that stone. Bundled with the Holy Water, that’s thirty gold coins we’re talking here.”
“Quit your whining. I’m offering more than ten times that. Anyway, how big is it? From what I understand, the bigger the stone, the larger the radius.”
“Twenty-meter radius big.” Hatta took the Boundary Stone out of his item bag and showed it to Alice.
“With this, we can set up the ideal one-on-one environment.”
“Oh, I see! You plan to trap the Demon Lord inside since no one can enter or exit the field so long as it’s active. Sounds like a no-brainer, now that I think about it. Beating the Demon Lord might be easier than I thought.”
“We’ll need healing magic to activate it. That’s where Haigha comes in. How fast can we get there?”
“A week, give or take.”
“Won’t do. Any other ideas?”
“Haven’t had a chance to use it myself, but we could try an alternate path through some monster lair I’m not too intimately familiar with. Wouldn’t take a day.”
“Monsters, hm? Seb, stop here. Let’s have an early lunch.”
Seb pulled over in a beautiful grass field and got straight to cooking.
“That right there’s the sound of a skipped breakfast.” Hatta was doing some light stretches when his stomach suddenly started growling.
“Want some?” Alice held out a plate. On it rested a most delectable sandwich.
“How oddly kind of you. Don’t mind if I—bleurgh! What’d you put in this?”
“Mushroom monster.”
“You WHAT?! Don’t feed me weird stuff, Alice!” Hatta’s cry echoed across the grass field.