I entrusted Coco with a teleportation scroll and told her to inform my mother, my mother-in-law, and Mrs. Molière of the possibility that my sister had been kidnapped.
“Gabriel, let’s ask Prince Axel for help too,” I said.
“Ah, yes, let’s.”
If something were to happen to my sister, it would become an international incident. Prince Axel had arrived in the morning as planned and was staying at the slime duke family’s residence. I felt sorry for making him deal with this trouble while he was still settling in, but we really needed his assistance.
“Wibble, can you explain the situation to Prince Axel and ask him to search from the sky on his dragon?” Gabriel asked.
“Leave it to Wibble!”
Gabriel used his teleportation magic to send the slime to Prince Axel. He and I then headed for the central festival grounds.
“I’d like to call off the festival and conduct a proper investigation, but I doubt we’d be able to keep the crowds under control,” Gabriel said.
If we weren’t careful, we would only invite more chaos. It would be safer to continue with our current strategy.
Gabriel summoned his slimes and ordered them to look for my sister. He also cast an invisibility spell on them to avoid scaring the festival attendees. The many slimes scattered in different directions.
“We’ll go around and inquire with the locals,” Gabriel said. “The stalls and stores were probably too busy dealing with customers to take notice of anyone suspicious. And I imagine the culprit would have wanted to avoid getting stuck in the crowds.”
Following that reasoning, we headed for a street lined with many inns. The area was relatively deserted because the tourists were all attending the festival. We spoke to a woman selling refreshments outside one of the inns, and she said that she had been standing there serving customers all day.
“Did you see anyone suspicious in the past few hours?” I asked.
“Suspicious?”
“Perhaps they were acting strangely, dressed differently from tourists, or had a sharp look in their eyes?”
The woman thought for a bit, but when I mentioned that it might have been multiple people rather than an individual, she seemed to recall something.
“Oh, come to think of it, there were two men this morning who headed towards the forest instead of the festival,” she said. “I think one of them was middle-aged, in his fifties or so.”
“The forest?” There was dense woodland to the southwest of the village, but it tended to be full of slimes, so people typically stayed away.
“Yes. Earlier, I saw them again as they rushed by, and I wondered what they were doing. The cart they were pulling had some kind of large load on it. They seemed like they were in a hurry.”
The cargo had probably been my sister. That was a blind spot—there were many carts coming and going from the festival grounds and the duck race venue. It had never occurred to me that my sister could have been on one of them.
“They came from the direction of the festival, even though I didn’t see them return from the forest,” the woman continued. “That made it even more suspicious.”
Perhaps the culprits had used a mythical beast that could fly through the air or a special spell of some sort. We thanked the woman and left the village for the southwestern forest, which turned out to be overwhelmingly vast.
“Fran, we’ll need more people if we’re going to search here,” Gabriel said.
“Indeed...” If we went in without a plan, we’d never find my sister.
“It would be possible to search from above with Prince Axel’s dragon, but the dense trees would make it difficult to spot her.”
“Should we go back and report this to the imperial delegation and royal diplomats?”
As we were talking, a large shadow passed overhead.
“That’s—”
“It’s Prince Axel’s dragon!” I exclaimed.
I waved my hands, and Prince Axel descended, landing his dragon in the open space of the fountain square. Wibble sat atop his shoulder as he made his dashing entrance.
“Prince Axel!” I shouted on our approach.
“Sorry for the delay,” he said. “Update me on the situation.”
Gabriel told him about the sighting of the suspicious men.
Prince Axel’s suggestion surprised me. “In that case, why don’t we use the dragon’s special organ to search for their mana? I can fit one more person on my saddle, so Lord Gabriel can accompany me.”
“I’m coming too!” I replied. Naturally, I didn’t mean sitting on the dragon—Wibble would bring me along inside its body.
Prince Axel gave me a confused look.
It’ll be faster to demonstrate than to explain. “Wibble, if you please,” I said.
“Got it!” Wibble opened its mouth wide and swallowed me up in a single gulp.
After carefully lifting the slime and me up, Gabriel cradled us in his arms. He said to Prince Axel, “Let us make haste!”
“Right,” said Prince Axel.
We mounted the dragon to begin our overhead search.
It hasn’t been that long since my sister disappeared, so they shouldn’t have gone too far from—
The dragon shot into the sky. It had used the force of its flapping wings, forgoing any sort of running start.
“Ahhh!” I screamed, my body folding under the momentum.
“Don’t worry, Fran,” said Gabriel. “I have you.”
“R-Right, thank you.”
In no time at all, the dragon reached the forest and detected the mana of humans within.
“There’s no space to land,” Prince Axel muttered.
Just when we were about to find them... How frustrating.
“What should we do?” I asked.
“Fran, I’m going to descend from here, but you may want to close your eyes,” said Gabriel.
“Huh?!”
“Also, clench your teeth so that you don’t bite your tongue.”
Before I could ask why, Gabriel leaned over the side of the dragon...and jumped off, carrying Wibble and me under his arm.
“What?!” I screamed. That was when I noticed Gabriel’s black slime wrapped around his upper body like a rope. The rope extended upwards, seemingly anchored to the dragon’s leg, and was currently holding us aloft.
Prince Axel shouted to us, “Wait on the ground while I call for reinforcements!”
Before I could respond, we were already plummeting down, the dragon’s figure growing more and more distant. As we approached land, Gabriel did something unexpected.
“Slimes, to me!”
He summoned a great number of slimes and had them combine into one large slime to cushion our fall.
“Fran, are you all right?” he asked.
“Y-Yes...” Wibble’s body had absorbed all of the impact for me. I wasn’t injured at all.
The black slime unraveled itself from Gabriel’s torso and returned to its original form.
“How far are we from the duck race venue?” I asked.
“About an hour by foot, perhaps? They likely used teleportation magic.”
“I see.”
“They would’ve drawn attention if they used it inside the village, so they probably went outside first. At any rate, please stay inside Wibble for the time being.”
“Understood.”
Gabriel cautiously proceeded forwards. After a bit of walking, we arrived at a small clearing.
“What?!” he exclaimed in a whisper.
There was a tent set up, with human silhouettes visible from outside. Perhaps because I was inside Wibble’s body, I felt as if my senses were heightened. I listened closely and was able to hear the figures’ voices.
“I wonder if this girl will behave until nighttime.”
“She seems like a stubborn one, so I might have to cast another sleeping spell on her.”
One of the men was in his forties or fifties, while the other was around thirty. They were wearing leather jackets, which were uncommon in this region. There was something shiny sewn into their sleeves. I told Wibble this, and it transformed into a pair of binoculars, magnifying the suspects for me.
Those are aurora pearls!
Now I could be sure that the men had come from the ogre duke’s territory. Gabriel seemed to have noticed too. He raised his finger to his lips, instructing the slimes to stay quiet.
“Fran, I’m going to capture those two,” he said. “In the meantime, can you and Wibble find the princess?”
We both nodded. My sister was undoubtedly sleeping inside the tent. I prayed that she wasn’t hurt.
Gabriel first sent the black slime out as a decoy. The long grass rustled loudly when the slime sprang forwards, startling the men.
“Whoa!”
“What the hell?!”
“Rawrrrr!”
I was fairly certain that slimes didn’t normally go rawrrrr, but at any rate, it had succeeded in catching the men off guard.
“What’s with this thing?! How’d it get past the ward?!”
“This must be no ordinary slime!”
The men seemed to be well-versed in magic. They wouldn’t have been able to hide in this slime-infested forest otherwise. Incidentally, tamed slimes weren’t considered monsters, so they were able to pass through monster-repelling wards without issue.
With the kidnappers distracted, Gabriel ordered his other slimes, “Capture those men!”
The slimes transformed into ropes. They ensnared the men, wholly wrapping about their bodies, and leveraged their weight over surrounding tree branches to suspend them in midair.
“Gyaaaaah!”
“Aaaaahhh!”
Gabriel shot Wibble and me a look. We hurried to the tent to see if my sister was inside.