I grabbed the bolt in midair and threw it to the ground. This was no issue for me. I’d been able to avoid getting hit by Leen’s random attacks, so dealing with an attack I knew was coming was easy.
“It doesn’t matter who’s wielding it, a crossbow’s only so strong.”
They were easier to operate than bows, but they were machines that fired bolts automatically. Therefore they didn’t receive the physical boons that a Sphere gave.
As soon as the enemy realized that his crossbow wouldn’t work, he threw it to the ground and drew a dagger from his waist. Perhaps this was his main weapon. He lowered his stance and lunged at me.
The sword-wielding outlaw quickly closed the gap with Tiesel. He jumped into action to prevent another Flarema spell from coming his way. I glanced over and saw Tiesel’s lips move.
“Columina,” he muttered.
I followed Tiesel’s command and closed my eyes. I caught a brief glimpse of an incredible amount of light spilling forth from his Sphere. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell that it was powerful enough to blind you if you looked directly at it. I wondered what happened to the outlaw who got a full serving of this blinding light.
“GYAAAAGH!”
By the time he had seen what was going on, it was too late. When I opened my eyes, I realized that he’d dropped his sword, flung his hands over his face, and was on the ground writhing in agony.
“I told you I’d destroy your eyes. I just didn’t say I’d do it first,” Tiesel said, his voice thick with bloodlust. His face was still as terrifying as earlier.
Light magic was called Luminari. It wasn’t simply the kind of handy, inoffensive magic that could provide light in a dark spot or something—it had the level of firepower to blind humans and monsters alike. Light, too, possessed heat, and so even I felt a wave of warmth despite not being right up close to Tiesel. That outlaw’s eyes had not come out of this unscathed.
“Ngh...”
Whereas the crossbow-slash-dagger-wielding outlaw hadn’t received a direct hit, he’d instinctively reacted to the light and had turned his face away from Tiesel. It was more than enough time for me to strike.
“Gyaaagh!”
For how quiet they’d been, their screams were unrefined. I watched his right hand thud to the ground before I put away my sword.
“Right, let’s tail him!” I said.
The spear-wielding outlaw shouldn’t be too far away. With Leen, who knew the quickest route through this place, we’d be able to catch up to them soon.
However, my Sphere started ringing an alarm bell in my brain. Something was coming from above.
“Tiesel!” I shouted.
Just as Tiesel reacted, a man wielding a hand axe came crashing down from the trees above. Crap, there had been another! He must have been hiding in the trees and reduced the efficacy of Tiesel’s Luminari spell.
“Ngh!”
Tiesel managed to dodge forward and avoid the attack just in time, but he tripped. The outlaw then put a boot on Tiesel’s back and raised his axe.
Can I throw my sword from this distance? No, I need to try—
“Hakura, get down!” Leen shouted.
It was a miracle that I reacted in time. I crashed to the ground, and a split second later...
“Miiii...FOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
...a beam of light shot through the trees!
This wasn’t like a Luminari spell, which spread light in all directions—this was a laser-thin beam of light that was directed at one spot. It traveled at the speed of light and razed right through the outlaw’s shoulder.
“GWAAAGH!”
The outlaw’s arm went soaring into the air, axe and all. The flesh was singed and burning; the blood evaporated as soon as it poured out. Neither the outlaw nor Tiesel understood what had just happened. I myself was facing away from Leen and had only barely caught what had happened.
“What just ha— No way!”
Tiesel’s voice was filled with shock. I looked in the direction of his gaze.
“Mi mi miii!”
“H-He’s skinny?!” Tiesel and I exclaimed in unison.
The creature waiting for us wasn’t the chubby carbuncle that we knew well. What leaped from Leen’s arms cut such a sharp figure that I wouldn’t have thought it was the same monster. With quick paw steps, it jumped into Tiesel’s lap and nuzzled into him with a satisfied sound. Tiesel was sitting up and neither of us could follow what had occurred.
“What just happened?” I said.
“That was a carbuncle’s lightray attack. They can store mana in the gemstone on their forehead and fire out a compressed beam of light. All excess fat is consumed in the process, so this carbuncle’s attack ended up being quite powerful.”
“Oh, it can fire a lightray... Are you serious?!”
“Many people don’t realize this since carbuncles aren’t all too aggressive, but these monsters live in mana-dense places...and they’re incredibly powerful.”
We had a carbuncle on our hands that had packed up so much mana that it had gotten fat... Leen had said that I’d end up getting “burned” if I continued to bully the carbuncle, but that was a huge understatement—if I was unlucky, I’d be killed on the spot.
Before a single drop of blood could touch the floor, the outlaw’s wound had carbonized and was smoking. It probably hurt like hell, but they’d come to kill us—they’d long lost any chance of sympathy.
“We lost the spear-wielder, though... Leen, is there a way we can catch up to him?” I asked.
Having Leen here to guide us through the hazardous zone was a real boon. If the spear-wielder was struggling to escape from here, then we could quickly find him.
“No. It’s already over,” Leen said bluntly.
“Huh?”
Just as I was about to ask what she meant by that, we all heard something.
“WAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
Accompanied by a scream and the crunching of branches up above, the spear-wielder came crashing down from the sky.
“Gurgh... Ngh...”
Well, he didn’t so much as “fall” as seemed to have been violently thrown here, I supposed. There were vines tangled up around his legs, and as we followed them to their source, we saw it.
“Th-The treant?!” I exclaimed.
“Yup. Thank you for catching him!” Leen said to it.
Was this the same one that I’d accidentally leaned on...? I couldn’t identify the differences, but whatever the case, this treant had delivered the outlaw right back to us.
Leen stroked its trunk, and it shook its body (in glee, maybe, I didn’t know) and some leaves fluttered down.
“When did you ask it to do that? And how?” I asked.
“Heh heh. I’m a monstermancer. Communicating with monsters is all part of the job.”
As she puffed out her chest in pride, she pointed. I followed the direction of her finger. Some dryads popped their heads out from between the branches of the treant.
“There!” “Shiny!” “Glowy!” (or so Leen claimed they said.)
“Treants and dryads live in harmony with one another. I had the dryads deliver my message to the treant nearby,” Leen said. A dryad hopped onto her hand and she gently petted it. “While I was hiding behind the tree, I asked the dryads for assistance. I told them that I needed help catching someone, since there were some bad people who were messing up the forest.”
“Easy!” “Did best!” “Yahoo!” they shouted.
“So you didn’t even need us,” I said.
“No, no, without you, Hakura, I would’ve been squished flat! Like a pancake!”
“I guess so. Well, we can say we’ve made up now and—”
“I can’t waaait to see what you got for me...”
I wouldn’t be let off the hook so easily it seemed.
Anyway, it was about time to calm down Tiesel. He was still kicking the collapsed outlaws in his anger.
“Cool it, Tiesel. We need at least one of them alive,” I said.
“Then I can do what I want with the other three?!” he replied.
“Yeah. It’ll be too much of a pain to carry all of them.”
I spoke in a voice loud enough for all of them to hear and noticed each outlaw flinch in response. One had his eyes burned out, one had lost his hand, one had his arm razed off, and one probably had all of his bones broken. Their fates were pretty much decided at this point, but from our standpoint, we needed at least one alive to prove that they were in cahoots with the merchant. We could just take the Spheres from the others and deliver them to the guild.
“W-Wait...!” the sword-wielder said in a feeble voice, a hand still covering his eyes. “I’ll talk! So please, have mercy...”
“On who?”
“On...all of us... Please.”
“You do realize that when we hand you over to the guild, you’ll be getting the death penalty, right?”
If an adventurer resorted to robbery or murder for their own gain, they would be punished with the most severe method in the guild’s rule book. Either they would have their Spheres ripped out and be sentenced to the chopping block, or they’d be transferred to the nation’s own judicial services. Violent theft and murder were treated pretty similarly wherever you went.
“We can negotiate! We have...important intel...”
“Hmph...”
Well, I supposed it was a hassle to kill them ourselves. We’d leave the rest to the people whose job it was to sort out these issues. The question we needed to ask was clear.
“Who ordered you to come here?” I asked.
I asked the obvious question and received an obvious response.