∗ ∗ ∗
“This is not what I expected...”
“Meow.”
“Woof, woof woof. (Very true, milord.)”
Cath, Mataza, and I shared in our misfortune, shivering as we huddled around a campfire in the middle of the night. We were here because of what we had been told earlier.
There were some houses around us, but they were all decrepit—actually, they were practically falling apart. There were various structures that looked to have been a chapel of some religion, a water well, and a house of gathering at one point, but they had all been abandoned for many long years. This was, in point of fact, a ghost town.
People had resided here in the past, but then they abandoned their homes and the years passed by. Not just one or two years either; more like five or ten. I couldn’t say for certain, since no detailed records of the town remained.
But as for why we were spending the night in a ghost town, it was due to the job Katarina had given us through the adventurer’s guild. This was the matter she wanted us to settle. She’d gone through the adventurer’s guild for this so that it would count on our guild record. Besides, she might’ve wanted to provide details to Fresco as well, to inform him of the manner of job she’d assigned us. That way, she’d know right away if I did anything to betray her trust.
In that sense, Katarina was certainly not as benign as she looked. I’d been well aware that she wasn’t someone I could drop my guard around, but it was better that way if we were going to cooperate with each other. She’d be much easier to make use of than some clueless, innocent girl.
Although, with the way things were going, it felt more like I was going to get taken advantage of. She was using me right now, in fact. Recent events had led me to wonder if I’d been born under an unlucky star. However, I eventually chose not to continue pursuing such a depressing line of thought.
Regardless, the job request involved a highway which came near this ghost town. Merchants traveled along it on their way from city to city as they distributed their goods. But for the past month, the distribution chain had been disrupted as monsters cropped up around the ghost town and attacked the merchants.
Naturally, the merchants had hired escorts to deal with them, but it was an exorbitant cost that ultimately affected the price of goods. Bit by bit, prices had jumped all across Midrogue. The city council had recognized this as an issue and dispatched investigators to see what could be done, but unfortunately, none of them had had any success.
This was why I had been brusquely requested to find out what was happening here, and then fix it. If monsters were popping up, I had to eliminate the source. I understood that much. But first, I’d have to uncover what the source was. And for that, I’d have to find the monsters. That was where we were at right now.
“But really, we aren’t seeing any. They’re supposed to be coming from around this ghost town,” I muttered as I examined the map we’d been provided for the job. There were several red X marks on it. Each mark represented a spot where people were reported to have been attacked. Most of them were clustered around this area. Some of the marks might have just been from getting attacked by regular monsters, but anyone could tell that this concentrated pattern of incidents was unnatural.
There has to be something here. In the first place—
“Woof!”
“Meow!”
Mataza, Liber, and Cath all sprang up and yelped almost simultaneously.
I could tell why as soon as I looked in the same direction as them. There stood, with their sunken eye sockets, fleshless arms, and rattling footsteps, a horde of eerie skeletons.
I’d been on the lookout too, but everyone else had probably noticed them first by the smell. As they came closer, so did the distinctive reek of corpses.
Undead monsters like these mostly spawned from dead bodies. It had been a long time since they’d passed away, but the indelible scent of death still clung to them. Cath and the kobolds’ sharp noses had caught it early on.
The other kobolds hadn’t come along, so it was just Cath, Liber, and Mataza with me. According to the job details, there was a chance that the monsters wouldn’t show up if our group was too large. But...that might’ve been a needless concern. On the contrary, I was starting to regret coming with such a small party.
“There’s a lot of them... Are you guys ready for this?”
There were twenty skeletons, meaning each member of our one-person-and-three-beastmen party would have to take on five each. But everyone nodded in response to my rally, as if to say “got it!”
“All right, let’s do this!” At my shout, everyone kicked off the ground and dashed forward.