“Please, Sora! I need your help! I need...your strength!” Raz shouted upon noticing my arrival, bowing deeply. Since he was already sitting, it looked more like he was kowtowing.
I couldn’t help but feel bewildered. I had no obligation whatsoever to hear him out, of course, but I’d never seen him look so weak and helpless. I was curious about what could have happened to put him in this state. More than that, though, I was curious about why he was alone. Obviously Iria wasn’t with him, but where was Miroslav?
I invited him in to explain what had happened. I’d been away for long enough that dust had accumulated inside, but Raz didn’t seem to notice as he repeatedly begged me to help him. This was what he told me:
He and Miroslav had temporarily hired three more adventurers to join their party before heading to the Skim Mountains after I’d made my way to Merte. Around the time I’d met Sela, he and his group were mountain climbing. Their goal was to defeat the griffin at the peak, a guild request from some aristocrat.
But I already knew that much without Raz needing to tell me. After all, Miroslav had told me all of it in her report. What I didn’t know yet was what had happened to the five of them while they were there. And according to Raz, just before he reached the griffin’s habitat, he had found himself turning back the way he’d come.
The reason? While he was on lookout duty with Miroslav at camp the previous night, something had ambushed him and knocked him out. The Skim Mountains were just as dangerous a monster hive as Titus Forest, so Raz assumed one of the monsters nesting in the mountains had assaulted him. When he’d woken up, though, he’d been confused. He’d no longer been on the mountain, but in a carriage on his way back to Ishka—without Miroslav. The other party members, determining that they couldn’t kill the griffin without Raz’s help, had carried him down the mountain while Miroslav stayed behind.
At that moment, I frowned. Raz must have thought I was admonishing him, because he started making excuses.
“I told them to go back to her right away! I really did! But...”
His spirit seemed to deflate. I could guess the rest: The three new party members hadn’t obeyed their leader’s orders. Upon asking, I learned that they weren’t so much temporary members of the Falcon Blades as direct hires by Miroslav to take down the griffin. In other words, Raz was only their leader on paper, and she was their true boss. Which meant Miroslav had ordered them to protect Raz and return him to Ishka. Then, on the way back, they’d slipped him a note.
“This letter,” he said, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket and handing it to me.
It was written in Miroslav’s handwriting. In it, she apologized for acting out of line, but she hadn’t wanted any harm to come to Raz while he was down, so she’d decided to take the griffin on by herself. She promised him she’d return to Ishka as soon as the job was done, so he just needed to wait until then. Upon reading it, Raz had been unable to hold himself back and attempted to head back up the mountain on his own, but the other members had forbidden him from doing so. Miroslav had ordered them to prevent him from returning to the mountain no matter what, even if they needed to use force. It was one against three, and Raz was already weak after losing consciousness, so he couldn’t win. Defeated, he let them carry him back.
Once they’d arrived, the new members had left Raz in the lurch and disappeared without a trace. Their agreement with Miroslav had only been to escort him as far as the city gates, so they’d had no more need to involve themselves with him. Of course, Raz had immediately turned back toward the mountain once they were gone, but in his condition, he’d struggle to even defeat a lower-level monster on the city’s outskirts. He was in no state to climb back up the mountain.
He tried recruiting more adventurers to go with him, but the Falcon Blades’ reputation had plummeted, and his destination was the peak of a hazardous mountain, so there were no takers. He’d tried asking the guild for help directly, but since Miroslav hadn’t escaped in spite of having ample opportunity to do so, she was staying on the mountain of her own free will. That hardly merited a rescue, and in the guild’s eyes, if she died up there, she’d only have herself to blame. Finally, he’d asked Ridelle and Parfait for their help as a personal favor. They’d agreed but needed time to get ready. Raz didn’t want to wait—Miroslav could be dead by then.
It had taken Raz four days to make it from the mountain back to Ishka. Including the time it had taken to go back down the mountain and the time he’d spent in Ishka since, it had already been ten days since he and Miroslav had parted, and leaving her that long had left him at the end of his rope. He simply couldn’t wait any longer.
That was when he’d heard that I was back from the royal capital. Someone had most likely spotted Claimh Soras on the road and spread the news that I’d returned. And Raz had swallowed his pride and decided to ask me for help.
As I’d guessed, his request was for me to take him up to the mountain on my wyvern so he could rescue Miroslav. I’d wondered if he was going to ask me to help fight it too, but he didn’t. When I asked if he wanted my help, he shook his head. It seemed that since his own desire to redeem himself and restore his honor had led to the situation, he wanted to solve it on his own. Sensing the regret in his expression, seeing him bite his lip in chagrin, I narrowed my eyes ever so slightly.
Raz was probably thinking Miroslav had stayed behind on the mountain so she could be useful to him. And to be fair, anyone who knew how infatuated she was with Raz would have also thought so. But was that really her motive?
Of course, I didn’t think for a second her earlier subservient letter was suggesting she had eyes for me now instead of Raz. I just found her behavior here far too suspicious. Why in the world would she stay behind and fight the griffin alone? Even if she was capable of beating it, how did she plan to carry its body back? The client probably wanted it so he could have it stuffed and displayed, so she’d have to get it back before the body rotted, and she couldn’t damage its face, or she might fail the request. By the time she made it back to Ishka on her own, the corpse could very well be unusable. It’d be a waste of effort.
I was also curious about what she planned to do about food and water. And most questionable of all, Miroslav taking the monster out on her own wouldn’t restore Raz’s honor in any way. Rather, since Raz had left her behind to fend for herself and escaped to safety on his own, he’d be thought of even more poorly.
As much as she cared for Raz, there was no way she hadn’t considered that. As a matter of fact, if I was being honest, it looked to me like she was doing it to ruin his reputation even further. And if that was the case, her mission was already accomplished. That meant there’d be no issue with blowing Raz off and calling it a day. As I said before, I had no obligation to hear him out. Rather, I wanted to point and laugh at his misfortune. But then a voice spoke up in the back of my mind.
Hey... If it’s all right with you, would you like to join our party?
Those were the first words he ever said to me. And when I remembered that, my plan to scorn him naturally faded away. I was still grateful to him for inviting me to join the Falcon Blades that day. It went without saying that, given everything that happened years later with the Lord of the Flies incident and the confrontation at the guild, I didn’t feel indebted to him anymore, but much like a debt with no concrete deadline, it was enough for me to at least give him some consideration.
In the end, I decided to repay him. Not in the way he wanted me to, of course. I wasn’t going to carry him up the mountain on my wyvern. To begin with, I wasn’t sure he could handle the journey in his current state, since riding Claimh Soras took a lot of stamina. Rather, I planned to head to the mountains alone. Raz would probably be dissatisfied with that, but his priority right now was to rescue Miroslav, not slay the griffin. As long as I brought her back safely, he probably wouldn’t complain. Even if he did, I’d just ignore him.
In the meantime, I planned to ask Miroslav what her true motive with this stunt was and confirm whether she was still on Raz’s side. So after Raz bowed his head and pleaded with me a final time, I agreed to his request.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Invisible bird of prey, take to the skies! Transparent Hawk!”
The moment Miroslav finished her incantation, a blade imperceptible to the eye flew from her hand into the sky. The Category 2 wind spell struck the monster harpy in the air with perfect aim, severing its right wing.
The harpy was an abomination: It had the face and upper body of an old woman but the lower half of a bird. It screeched as it descended to the ground in a tailspin. Whether it collided with the mountain or got impaled by a conifer branch in the treetops below, it was dropping with such velocity that it wouldn’t survive the fall.
Having finished the harpy off, Miroslav moved on to the next one.