Cooperation
Cooperation
It was true that no one threw stones at us while we walked the streets, but aside from when we ducked into an inn, we had to endure the discomfort of those terribly icy stares.
"Hmm. We haven't even committed a crime, and they're acting like that—it's a bit irritating."
Seneran, who had been scowling and glaring around, finally couldn't hold back and said that in a fairly loud voice, but the citizens didn't get angry or fly into a rage—they just clicked their tongues in displeasure and turned their heads away.
In that reaction, along with hatred and irritation, there seemed to be a subtle fear as well. Seneran, wrinkling her nose as she observed the citizens, asked.
"For the whole city to be this hostile to adventurers, just how much did they have to plunder?"
"Rather than looting, wouldn't the problem be mass slaughter?"
The answer came surprisingly from Asilie. When Seneran and I silently questioned her with our eyes, Asilie tilted her head as if surprised and continued.
"Huh? Is it something to react to like that? I thought it was obvious."
"I didn't have anything specific in mind, but... specifically mass slaughter? Why?"
When I asked, unable to grasp why she'd single out mass slaughter from the information about murder and plunder, Asilie scratched her cheek and explained.
"Think about it. They wouldn't have gone through all the trouble to infiltrate the city just to loot ordinary households, would they?"
"Well... that makes sense, I guess."
"They would have targeted the city's wealthy or those of comparable means, but looting such people's assets doesn't normally generate this much hostility. Ordinary citizens treat rich people's losses as gossip rather than sharing their anger. And the city patrol and guard forces aren't so soft that they'd just stand by and let bandits raid and plunder. You saw that, didn't you?"
Now that I thought about it, the gate guards had really moved in perfect unison. It was the kind of movement that came from extensive repetitive training.
"So, Big Sis, what you're saying is... the bandits infiltrated the city somehow and tried to loot it, but in the process, for whatever reason, they ended up slaughtering citizens, and that's why this antagonism exists?"
"Isn't that a fairly reasonable conclusion?"
Hearing it, it did seem that way.
I myself hadn't even entertained the thought that mere bandits could have such ability, but from Asilie's perspective, stories about bandits dominating the city's logistics, or turning into cultists and seizing all the village maidens, were the far-fetched ones. The idea that they'd use the only things they could do well—murder and plunder—to leave a record that would go down in history wasn't all that far-fetched.
"If it's as Asilie says, and the bandits massacred ordinary citizens, then this atmosphere makes sense, as does why the city is investigating so vigorously. After all, just allowing such a surprise attack would already undermine their prestige, so they'd want to wrap it up quickly. But... even if they were caught off guard by the attack, why haven't they managed to resolve the situation yet?"
Even to the point that the guild issued a request, it was a situation that sounded like nothing more than they couldn't find something in their own front yard. If they hadn't dug some secret tunnel and come and gone that way, then like Seneran's question implied, the situation should have been resolved immediately. But Asilie just shrugged and replied calmly.
"Maybe some deserters slipped in among the bandits and provided military knowledge? Englem is a city built over the ancient underground waterways that existed long ago, so perhaps they learned a route that connects from outside."
"Hmm... if they figured out something like that, then the bold idea of attacking the city and putting it into action makes sense, but..."
So it's a city with deep history. Ancient underground waterways, huh. I wondered if somewhere a monster had coiled up and was plotting to overturn the city...
"Wait, military knowledge?"
It was only a possibility I'd thrown out in passing, but as soon as I heard it, one name flashed through my mind.
And seeing my reaction, Asilie wore a sour expression, as if the same possibility had occurred to her.
"Envelde."
The rebel forces that super-coward had gathered. A good number of them were the bandits and mountain brigands that littered the countryside. If he had trained those bastards and prepared in his own way to seize cities that wouldn't cooperate with his rebellion?
"What? Why bring up Envelde out of the blue?"
Seneran, who had no direct connection, expressed her confusion with the context, but having gone through the trouble of thoroughly butchering every bandit around the capital, Asilie and I couldn't shake the thought that this was quite plausible.
We had pretty much smashed the mountain brigands wherever we could reach, but calling it extermination was a stretch. Those bastards were only a tiny fraction, the ones who'd dealt with the slave traders.
"Among the scum that bastard tried to rally and use as rebel forces, there were quite a few criminal fuckers."
"...So in the process, he might have given them military training or passed on secrets useful for occupying cities."
As expected of someone who made a fortune in trade, Seneran was quick on the uptake.
"But how did you find that out?"
"We had a capable connection and some luck. Big Sis, I think we need to look into this a bit more carefully. What do you think?"
"You want to intervene?"
Asilie's question was tentative. After a long moment of thought, I answered with a deep sigh.
"Depends on how it goes."
Even if it really was tied to Envelde, this kind of shit wasn't something they'd be carrying on out of loyalty to him. Bandits were bandits, after all. With Envelde gone and only the knowledge he'd given them remaining, the actions those bastards would take were obvious, and they fit the current situation far too well.
If they had a perfect plan in their hands that let them pull off a city raid they'd never have dreamed of otherwise, there was no way bandits with that kind of self-restraint would pass up the city right in front of them.
"Let's do some investigating first. We might need to meet the gravediggers, too."
Barely suppressing the urge to leave the city right then, I moved my feet to gather information.
It wasn't an easy process. Even finding people who weren't hostile to us was an ordeal. Proper information didn't start coming until after Gaendal and his party's efforts got us settled in an inn large enough to accept us.
Just as Kunz had said, the innkeeper seemed truly pleased by the unexpected boom in business. After we added a massive meal order on top of that, we managed to extract the location of the cemetery and some specific firsthand accounts of the incident.
To cut to the chase, Asilie's prediction hit the mark.
I caught wind that a mob that had appeared out of nowhere tried to loot a noble's mansion, clashed with the private soldiers and city guards, and in the process of fleeing, killed a significant number of people or took them hostage and then murdered them without mercy. Afterward, I split off from the group and headed with Asilie toward the cemetery.
"Son of a bitch."
To a cemetery that hadn't even been able to properly bury the bodies of over a hundred citizens, at that. Asilie watched the hurried gravediggers and clergy with a hardened expression and said,
"I think I understand why the guild was so insistent on posting the request."
I had no choice but to agree. But the reason we were reacting like that wasn't the bodies—it was the wounds that looked to be the cause of death.
The wounds were horrifically ragged, as if a wild animal had bitten and torn at random, shredding the victims' flesh like it was straw.
"Were they really just bandits?"
"...I'm not sure."
The people at the cemetery didn't stop us. It seemed to be because, besides us, a number of citizens were desperately searching for their dead family members among the barely presentable corpses. In fact, quite a few people who looked like adventurers were mixed among them, so we blended in naturally.
"The wounds are extremely unusual."
"Why?"
"Look there."
What Asilie pointed to was the corpse of a young man.
The man was clearly an adventurer, and his body was on the cleaner side, comparatively. But that wasn't the important part.
"Did someone enchant their sword with an explosion spell?"
Unlike the clean sword wound that ran diagonally from the left trapezius to the heart, the wound extending from the heart to the right flank was the same ragged, bite-like injury. At first, I thought maybe he'd been struck twice by chance, but after looking around a little more, I found far more corpses with that kind of wound than I'd expected.
I had no idea what kind of shit they'd pulled. Then Asilie, who'd been studying the wounds for a while, spoke with an unusually tense expression.
"This might be the work of a Demon Sword."
I couldn't crack a joke. Asilie's expression was far too serious for that. But even so, I couldn't help but ask back with a dubious look.
"A real Demon Sword?"
"Yeah. A real Demon Sword. I've heard of a Demon Sword that leaves wounds similar to this."
She said there was genuinely enough of a difference that she had to qualify it as 'similar,' but it was also true that she'd never heard of anything other than a Demon Sword that could leave wounds like these. That was why she'd reached that conclusion.
Thanks to that, I was burning to hear an eyewitness account... but neither I nor Asilie could stomach the scumfuck move of chasing down people lost in grief to pump them for information.
In the end, what we managed to learn at the cemetery was the bizarre wounds we saw with our own eyes, the fact that a massive number of people had died, and, judging by how little the corpses had decayed, that the incident hadn't happened long ago.