“Soooo good.”
I’d used the last of our hell chimera meat to make big strips of jerky. They were around thirty centimeters long, and thick too. We’d been eating so much lately that small ones just weren’t cutting it anymore, so I’d decided to go ahead and make bigger pieces.
“Here’s some for you,” I said to Milène.
“Thank you.”
I’d already told her about my storage. I’d really mulled over whether I should tell her, but it wasn’t possible to pull out food or stash beasts without her noticing.
“This is incredible!” said Milène, her eyes sparkling.
For some reason, Shiro and Kuro were looking smug.
“Thor’s cooking is the best!”
“The ultimate fooood.”
“Did you make this yourself?” asked Milène. “I’ve never had dried meat this good, even outside the dungeon. What kind of meat is it?”
“It’s hell chimera,” I said.
She couldn’t seem to process what I’d said. “Huh?”
“I made jerky from the hell chimera we took down in the dungeon.”
Milène’s eyes went blank. I’d figured it was rare meat, but I’d been way off—it turned out rare was quite the understatement.
“H-Hell chimera?! What?! Th-The legendary—?”
“Legendary? Is hell chimera something really crazy?”
“Oh, absolutely! There’s even a story about a hero from long ago who raved about its flavor! Hell chimeras are so rare that even sightings are practically nonexistent! If you sold it, who knows what kind of price it’d fetch! And to think they appeared in this dungeon!”
To us, it was just tasty meat with strong magical effects, but outside, it was apparently some kind of unicorn-level ingredient of legends.
“If this is hell chimera meat, one strip of jerky might go for a gold coin.”
“What? A small gold coin? Seriously?” For just a piece of jerky? Well, if there was jerky made from a rare cut of wagyu, maybe it’d cost like ten thousand yen? Maybe even more, depending on the size. But once again, I was way off.
“No, a large gold coin.”
“No way! You’re joking, right?”
“I’m not joking.”
“You’re serious?”
She looked dead serious. Isn’t a large gold coin worth like a hundred thousand yen? All that for a piece of jerky?!
“Are the other parts besides the meat expensive too?”
“Of course. Not as much as the meat, but they’re rare too.”
Damn. Now I can’t throw away the hell chimera materials just anywhere. People would try to find out where they came from, maybe even try to steal my stash.
Milène seemed to pick up on my troubled look.
“You should only tell people you trust.”
“Okay.”
As we ate, I decided to ask Milène about something that had been bugging me.
“What’s the lord planning to do with Shiro and Kuro?”
“I found out just now myself... He’s going to offer Shiro and Kuro as sacrifices in a ritual to extend his lifespan.”
The lord was apparently a well-known high-ranking sorcerer in this country. Although Milène was also pretty famous herself as a combat sorcerer, she didn’t know the details of the ritual. When it came to rituals and research, the lord was supposedly in a class of his own.
“He’s already extended his life multiple times with the dungeons’ blessings. He’s nearly 150 years old—a monster.”
There were apparently dungeons in this country with known routes, and if you had the skills, getting their blessings wasn’t that hard, but they were low-level dungeons, so the blessings weren’t anything great. That was probably why he’d been aiming for a larger-scale ritual sacrifice. Still, something didn’t add up.
“Why is he so obsessed with Shiro and Kuro, though? Is it because beastfolk are rare? I heard a soldier say they’re tiger and wolf beastfolk...”
I glanced at Shiro and Kuro, who were both gnawing on their second pieces of jerky. I’d assumed they were cat and dog types, but apparently not—though they didn’t seem like an ordinary tiger and wolf either.
“Technically, they’re rare species known as silver tiger and hell wolf.”
“Rare species? So they’re not just ordinary beastfolk?”
“Right. Their ancestors conquered a dungeon and wished for their race’s prosperity and strength. As a result, their descendants became rare species, gaining powers that set them apart from regular beastfolk.”
The lord had fixated on their power as rare species and plotted to use them as sacrifices. He’d been chasing them for a year, probably because they were so rare, they were irreplaceable. From now on, we’d have to keep Shiro’s and Kuro’s species a secret. Even if we avoided the whole sacrifice thing, they’d be prime targets for slave traders.
Milène and the others had also long wondered why the lord was so obsessed with the beastfolk girls. They hadn’t imagined he’d use them in ritual sacrifice, but rather had assumed they’d escaped with some critical secret.
“There’s no teleportation circle,” I said.
“There isn’t.”
We hadn’t been running blindly; we’d been searching for an escape teleportation circle. We couldn’t find one, though, and I could feel us getting pretty desperate.
The jerky had taken the edge off our hunger, but fatigue and wear were piling up, and Carolina still hadn’t woken up. We didn’t know when that lord-turned-monster might come after us either.
Milène, however, stayed calm. At first, I’d thought she was feigning composure so as not to worry us, but that hadn’t been it. In fact, she’d even smile here and there. Noticing my puzzled look, Milène gave me an awkward smile.
“I’m sorry. I understand this is an absolutely horrendous situation for you all.” She apologized, but the smile didn’t disappear. “It’s just, I can’t help being happy.”
“Happy?”
“Yes. I’m so glad he pulled himself together.”
She must’ve been talking about the knight, Geos. Before I could say anything, Milène started to talk.
“Sir Geos was once called the Sword Saint. His strength was renowned throughout the neighboring countries, and he was undefeated in battle. The number of warriors he’d cut down in one-on-one combat must have exceeded a hundred.”
Milène clearly revered Geos, and her story kept going. After just a few minutes, I felt like I knew quite a lot about him. In short, he’d been an insanely strong and famous knight, but an enemy nation’s trap had cost him his land, and that was when he’d lost his beloved daughter. Worse, the king—jealous of Geos’s fame—had pinned the blame for the defeat on him, and he’d been disgraced. He’d delved into dungeons hoping to revive his daughter but failed, and after that, he’d lost all motivation and sense of responsibility. It was a story that read like the fall of a man.
If he could have drowned himself in drugs or alcohol, maybe it would’ve been easier, but since he had one of the strongest bodies around, they had no effect on him. After being driven from the capital, he drifted from place to place, living day-to-day, pretending to be a mercenary—simply living. Milène and other former subordinates looked for places that might take him on, but no noble wanted a retainer hated by the king. And even if someone had taken him in, it wouldn’t have been anyone even half decent—it would be, for example, someone like this town’s lord, Viscount Holm.
Many of his former subordinates had left him, and Geos remained nothing but a living corpse. While Milène fretted over whether he would end his life as a spiritless tool of Viscount Holm’s, this whole ordeal had happened. What had been a crisis for us had actually been the revival of the man she’d admired. There wasn’t a trace of anxiety on her face. Isn’t she worried about Geos?