“Also, I’m not sure if it’s related to this incident or not, but there has been one other concerning development. The villages upstream of the Kale River have once again fallen ill, it seems.”
“Guildmaster?! That information has yet to be confirmed!” Ridelle blurted out in apparent shock and panic.
“It’s all right, Miss Ridelle,” Elgart said calmly. “I called him here so we could exchange information, after all.”
“Y-Yes, guildmaster. My apologies for speaking out of turn.” She clearly didn’t agree with his decision, but she bowed her head and fell silent. I was the only one here out of the loop, but I could at least take a guess as to what this news might be pointing to.
As I explained before, Titus Forest was the source of the Kale River, and the villages and towns upstream were the ones closer to the forest than Ishka. According to Elgart, the epidemic caused by the Sea of Rot polluting the river had reared its ugly head once more. The antidote created from the Jirai Ao Ochs fruit should have cured all of the affected areas, but now the disease was back. Meaning...
“The antidote stopped working, I take it?”
“It seems so. Either the toxin is potent enough to render the medicine ineffective, or the potency of the medicine simply diminished. To be honest, we only just learned about it this morning, so some guild staff headed to the afflicted towns and villages to investigate. We haven’t heard back yet.”
“I see.”
“It goes without saying, but that information needs to stay confidential. At the moment, we don’t want to alarm the townsfolk who are confident in the medicine’s ability to protect them.”
I nodded. Of course, I didn’t want to cause a panic among the populace either. That wasn’t the way I wanted to take my revenge on the guild. Still, I had to consider the gravity of what I’d just learned. While in the forest with Suzume, I hadn’t sensed any trace of a Sea of Rot. Yet the disease had come back, and so strongly that the Jirai Ao Ochs no longer had any effect? What’s more, the river water would have diluted the poison. In other words, it had originally been even more toxic. If that was the cause of the monster stampede and the imminent threat to Ishka, then...
Just as I’d thought that far, however, there was a sharp knock on the door. “Excuse the interruption, guildmaster, but we have an emergency!” came the voice of a panicked woman.
“Come in,” Elgart said.
But before could speak further, Parfait flung open the door and ran into the room. Her expression was the exact opposite of the one she’d had in the guest room—deadly serious. “Smoke signals have been spotted coming from Titus Forest! White, black, and red smoke!”
Upon hearing that, Elgart’s eyes glinted with the sharpness of a blade. Ridelle’s face also tensed. Most likely Elgart had sent some of his staff to monitor the situation in the forest, and they’d decided beforehand on color-coded smoke signals as a means of communication. Based on Elgart’s and his receptionists’ faces, the smoke must have signified something grave.
That day, Ishka’s government office, in conjunction with the guild, issued an emergency declaration to all of the town’s residents. The announcement: A horde of monsters from Titus Forest was stampeding toward Ishka. The town went on emergency lockdown, and the bustling adventurers’ hub grew quiet.
However, probably only a small fraction of those residents felt like they were actually in danger. For one thing, adventurers who dwelled in Ishka were used to monster attacks. If monsters appeared, they took them out—problem solved. It happened frequently, and it wasn’t uncommon for emergency announcements like this one to be issued on occasion either.
But none of those monsters had ever broken through or passed over the fortress walls to attack the town. The Skim Mountains incident twenty years ago had happened before those walls had been built. Since their completion, the town had never been invaded. So Ishka’s residents didn’t know what real danger was like. They were naively optimistic, certain that no monsters would ever come into the town, and that even if they did, it’d only be on a small scale. After all, with all the fighters and adventurers in Ishka, they’d surely make short work of any intruder.
Having left the guild and returned to my house, I thought back on the town’s current mindset with a grimace. I didn’t want to criticize their optimism; after all, if the people weren’t confident in their safety, Ishka wouldn’t be able to run as well as it did in times of emergency like these. Because of their familiarity with monster attacks and trust in the fighters and adventurers guarding the town, the townsfolk were able to stay calm, and business went on as usual. In fact, that was one of Ishka’s strong points as a town...which was why I felt this was so ironic.
After all, Elgart had thrown me away in order to protect the town. If he had actually allowed the wrongdoings of the Falcon Blades to be exposed and made public the truth that they’d used me, a regular citizen, as bait and left me for dead, it might have made some residents more apprehensive now. They might have worried that the adventurers meant to protect them would use them as decoys to flee Ishka and save themselves. There was no denying that it would have made things much worse. In that sense, as loath I was to admit it, Elgart’s judgment back then had been correct. Or, no, I couldn’t bring myself to say that, but at the very least, it hadn’t been wrong.
“As frustrating as it is, I’ve got to give him that much,” I muttered once I was in my room. Well, whatever. Just because he’d made the right call as guildmaster didn’t change the fact that he’d thrown me away, so I had no reason to discard my grudge against him either. Once I chased these monsters back to Titus where they belonged, Phase Three of my plan to pick a peaceful fight with the guild would proceed as intended. In fact, perhaps I could coordinate that plan along with my newfound rapport with Sergei to get Ridelle out of the guild next. She probably wouldn’t agree through normal negotiations, but if I suggested to her that leaving would protect Elgart in the end, it might be enough to move the needle.
Right now, her wariness and animosity toward me were about on par with Miroslav’s before I’d abducted her. In other words, I could safely consider her a genuine enemy. I continued to mull this over while preparing to depart once more.
This time I wasn’t heading to Titus Forest, but to the afflicted villages and towns upstream of Ishka. Not all of the monsters would be heading straight for the fort town; some would surely attack the villages along the way. Elgart had planned to send adventurers and the town’s soldiers over to help, but none of them could travel as fast as I could with my wyvern. I’d immediately agreed to help out—not only was it a golden opportunity to raise my clan’s reputation, but it’d also be a chance to learn why the Jirai Ao Ochs had stopped being effective.
The antidote being distributed to those towns and villages had been produced by the slave trader association using the Jirai Ao Ochs. More specifically, it had been mass-produced by diluting the fruit from the tree. Now then, was it the antidote that was ineffective or the fruit itself? I wanted to find out as quickly as I could. If it was the former, then we’d just need to adjust the antidote’s potency to fix it. But if it was the latter, we’d have to take more drastic measures.
I already had one possible method in mind: the draconic properties inside me that Lunamaria had mentioned. If the fluid in my body was like that of a dragon, I might be able to use it to make an extremely effective antidote.
“Miroslav, you get to work on that antidote.”
I’d selected Miroslav for the job rather than Lunamaria because I figured a mage would be better suited to such experimentation. I’d already spent several nights with her at this point, so she too had experienced a boost in her abilities. Because of that, she wasn’t shocked to hear about draconic properties at all.
“Right away,” she said with a nod. “I’ll be sure to live up to your expectations.”
“Good to hear. Lunamaria, Seele, Suzume, you three go get Claimh Soras’s food supply from the stable and bring it here.”
If the monsters were heading for the town, I couldn’t use the stable outside anymore. Thankfully, Elgart had gotten me special permission from the government to bring my wyvern inside the walls. And as luck would have it, my current home had more than enough space to house a wyvern or two. Claimh Soras might pout at being left out in the open garden, though, so I’d probably need to build a stable with a roof. I decided to task Lunamaria with that project.
“Feel free to hire whoever you need to get the job done. Don’t worry about the cost,” I told her.
“Yes, master. Leave it to me.”
“Er...you know I’m not your master anymore, right?”
“Then leave it to me, darling.”
“O-On second thought, ‘master’ is fine.”
She’d said it with such a serious expression that I reflexively took back my comment. I mean, I was sure she had to be joking, but there was something about her smile that unnerved me regardless. Could the addition of Miroslav have made her worry about her own status within my clan? True, ever since Miroslav had started living with us, I’d only been spending the night with Lunamaria half as much as usual. No, that couldn’t be it—Lunamaria wasn’t that type of woman. That said, if someone asked me what type of woman she actually was, I wasn’t sure I could answer.
Seele had been casting hopeful looks in my direction every night as well. What a bizarre situation this was. I now had more people to eat the souls of, as I’d wanted, but things were almost going too well, and it was a little nerve-racking. At this rate, I felt like my actions were going to backfire at some point.
“Well, whatever happens, I’ll have no one but myself to blame,” I muttered under my breath so no one could hear. Whenever misfortune struck, it was always easier to accept when it was your own fault rather than uncontrollable happenstance. So I nodded to myself, bottling up my anxiety for the time being.