“In fact, I should’ve used that spell as my first attack to begin with,” I muttered.
My wyvern whined in response.
“No, don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing you! That really was a good ground slam back there! You did great!”
It chirped as if to say, “You mean it?”
“I mean it, I mean it! So cheer up already!” By the time I’d successfully encouraged Claimh Soras, we were about to finish circling around the enemy. Looking down at the ground, I could see most of the adventurers had already retreated. Unlike actual soldiers, who had to wait for their superiors’ orders to do anything, adventurers acted according to their own judgments. And for better or for worse, when they determined they were in danger, they could immediately make themselves scarce. Now that nearly all of them had escaped safely, I could take out just two or three more monsters, then consider my job done. I was concerned about how the ailing villages were managing, so I wanted to wrap this up as soon as I could. With that thought, I braced myself atop my saddle, preparing to swoop down into the horde once more.
Once I’d confirmed that all the adventurers had safely escaped, I headed to the villages upstream of the Kale River as planned. As I flew, I noticed there was more than double the normal number of seacraft on the river’s surface, most likely carrying refugees who’d had to evacuate their homes due to the stampede. Considering the monsters were charging along the main road, it stood to reason they’d use a sea route to escape.
When the passengers on the ships saw my wyvern in the sky above, they mistook it for a monster at first and cried out in fear, but when they noticed me on top, waving at them, their screams of terror became cheers and shouts of joy. They were probably thinking a dragon knight from the royal capital had come to save them. They were misunderstanding, of course, but I didn’t particularly feel like correcting them either.
Anyway, I arrived at the first village in question, and as I’d expected, there were signs that monsters had attacked here as well. But it had been such a minor attack that the village’s guards and residents had taken care of the threat by themselves. Apparently, after the attack the majority of the villagers had boarded the evacuation ships dispatched by Ishka’s government and escaped. But a few villagers had stayed behind—in other words, the ones who were too sick to move—and the local officials were at a loss as to how to handle them.
I told these officials that I’d brought a cure even more effective than their current antidotes, but their expressions didn’t change. Overhearing one of them mutter that “no medicine could possibly save us now” as I walked away, I entered the hut where the patients were being quarantined. The moment I set foot inside, an intense rotting stench assaulted my nostrils. It was so bad that I had to cover my nose and mouth with several layers of cloth the officials had handed me.
It was dark inside the hut and eerily quiet. No one was speaking, and there weren’t even any moans of pain. I instinctively furrowed my brow—for some reason, my feet didn’t want to move any farther. It was as though the very atmosphere here was rejecting my presence as a living being.
That said, turning back now wasn’t an option. Steeling myself, I forced my feet forward, approaching one of the sickbeds in the room. I glanced down at the face of the person sleeping there...and I immediately wished I hadn’t.
There’s a game called fukuwarai in which blindfolded players place cutouts of facial features, like the eyes, mouth, and nose, onto their proper positions on the outline of a face. Of course, because the participants are blinded, most end up putting those features in bizarre places, making everyone present erupt with laughter. If I had to describe what I saw when I looked down, it was as if a demon had tried to play the game using a living human as the outline.
In other words, despite still being alive, the patient looked like a rotting corpse. It was an appalling sight—enough to make you think an assassin’s poison that killed on the spot would be far more merciful. Now I knew what that official had meant by his offhand comment as I turned away. He’d been absolutely right.
Most likely, the reason I hadn’t heard any moans upon entering the hut was that none of them even had the strength to moan anymore. Either that, or the poison had gotten into their vocal cords as well. I tried squeezing the juice from a Jirai Ao Ochs fruit into the mouths of one of the diseased, just in case, but as I’d already suspected, it had no effect. One would need a miracle as powerful as Resurrection to cure anyone this ill.
I left the hut in a hurry, then continued to walk until I was out of the village. I mounted my wyvern and flew back toward Ishka. The village officials probably assumed I’d fled in terror. And in fact, they wouldn’t have been wrong. Each time what I’d seen in the hut replayed in my mind, I felt a fresh layer of cold sweat cover my body. The basilisk’s venom had been formidable, but nothing like what I’d just witnessed. A normal poison would gradually cause the body to deteriorate, eventually leading to death. But with this poison, it looked more like it had first killed the victim, then toyed with their corpse by eating into their body afterward.
In other words, there was no hope of saving them. Even the soul transfer method that healed Claudia wouldn’t work. And if poison like that was to spread even beyond the village, the outcome would be obvious.
“I have to eliminate the poison’s source. Otherwise not just Ishka, but all of Kanaria could fall into ruin.”
Luckily it didn’t appear to be contagious, which was a silver lining, but I also couldn’t definitively say it wasn’t. It was possible some were already infected and wouldn’t fall ill until a certain period of time had passed. In a sense, this poison was an even greater threat to the kingdom than a monster stampede. And it was even possible that the origin of both threats were one and the same. Truthfully, I wanted to head to the forest right away and check, but I couldn’t leave Ishka to fend off the monsters by itself while I searched the forest for days on end with no concrete leads. Besides, if I was going to search, I wanted Lunamaria and Miroslav to accompany me. Lunamaria the sage and Miroslav the mage might be able to pick up on a hint or clue that I couldn’t. So rather than heading straight to the forest, I urged Claimh Soras to fly faster and made a beeline for the town.