The Slave Trader of Tetra Mountain (2)
Raul was the first to react, yanking the crescent blade from his waist and hurling it at the mercenary who moved.
Clang!
Of course the man blocked it in time, but he seemed not to notice the dagger that came in after it, hidden behind the blade as it spun through the air.
Thud!
The dagger sank in below the left side of the chest, exactly where the heart was.
“L-Leed!”
“Fuck, what are you doing? Take him down together!”
The armored female mercenary and the peddler leading the caravan shouted over one another.
Right after that, one of the peddlers raised a massive crossbow and pulled the trigger at Raul.
Whoosh—!
But for all the cold hiss of something slicing through the air, its accuracy was laughable.
“You idiot! You could’ve hit one of us!”
“Use clubs! If you kill him by accident, his freshness goes down!”
The peddlers were already starting to turn on one another, the atmosphere souring fast.
Raul had expected this much, but it looked like the three remaining mercenaries were still the ones he had to watch.
For a brief instant, he felt a chill brush the nape of his neck.
The sensation of steel about to slice flesh.
He twisted his body, and sure enough, a massive halberd came flying at him.
“Die!”
Maybe because Leed had just been killed, the skinhead mercenary wielding the halberd had gone completely out of his mind.
Was he a good man?
The thought flashed through Raul’s head in an instant, but the answer came just as quickly.
No. No sane person would be escorting slave traders tied up with Valentia.
Raul stomped down on the halberd as it struck the ground with a heavy thunk, pinning it in place.
“Y-You bastard!”
The man tried to wrench the weapon free with a shout, but Raul poured the holy radiance of Halo into his legs and doubled the force behind his weight.
“Aaagh!”
In the end, the burly man gave up on the halberd and charged Raul barehanded.
That was exactly what Raul wanted.
He dropped his upper body low and grabbed the halberd.
Its overwhelming weight screamed against his meager strength, but as the pure white light spread through him and soaked in, the burden lightened at once.
Raul met the skinhead’s eyes at close range.
The sharp dagger in the man’s hand.
But Raul was confident.
“You want to kill me?”
Instead of backing away, Raul thrust his own face toward the dagger.
The pure white Holy Armor would still protect his face, but the skinhead hesitated for a split second.
He had been told to capture Raul alive, after all.
Even after losing his reason, that professional instinct for profit and loss was helping Raul more than anything else.
That hesitation would be his last thought.
Slash—!
The halberd, drenched in white light, tore the mercenary open from bottom to top.
Then the female mercenary, tears welling at the corners of her eyes, attacked in tandem with the towering man beside her.
-Clang, clatter, clang!
One blow Raul blocked with the halberd shaft, and another he caught with a hand charged full of divine power.
Their chained attacks were certainly fast and precise, but all they could do was leave Raul with shallow cuts.
No matter how skilled a fighter might be, if he or she had not reached knight-level control of aura, there was no way to penetrate the pure-white Holy Armor.
At the first opening, Raul swung the halberd hard and brought down the remaining mercenaries one by one.
“Told you. Thin, long weapons are the best.”
He wore a faint smile, apparently pleased with the newly “gifted” halberd in his hands.
When he turned his head, he found the peddlers clutching a huge crossbow, a wrist-mounted ballista, clubs, and crude knives.
For all their earlier noise, they hadn’t been able to move a muscle.
“You spend all day on tricks, so when it comes to the real thing, you can’t do a damn thing.”
Raul offered them one last lesson, like handing fare for the road to the underworld.
Then the halberd he raised high flashed brilliantly once more.
Already, the peddlers had lost the will to fight.
But then, suddenly, the leader of the caravan said, “Eat it, all of you.”
It was a bizarrely abrupt order, but to Raul’s surprise, purple light flickered in the peddlers’ eyes at those words.
It was a clear, concentrated surge of magi, sharp enough to stab straight through the Saint’s skull.
There wasn’t any of this until now. Why is there magi all of a sudden?
There was no way those dim-witted peddlers had secretly stored and hidden magi of their own.
Besides, Raul was the Saint.
His senses could detect even the smallest trace of magi.
So this had to be...
Something beyond the knowledge of his 6,000 hours of game experience.
What the hell is this?
Raul could have slaughtered them all at once, but for the moment he chose to stand still and see what happened.
The peddlers pulled pale gray beads from their pockets with vacant eyes and stuffed them into their mouths.
“You fucking bastard. I don’t know what the hell you are, but after seeing the elixir, you’d better give up on coming back alive!”
“Elixir?”
Was he talking about those grayish beads?
The man bared a triumphant smile, but Raul simply watched the people before him convulsing on the ground and making a ghastly, choking sound.
Before long, something began to surge backward out of their mouths.
Twisting their throats and every joint in their bodies as it burst free, the things spilling out from the peddlers were long, thin parasitic worms.
“Hmph...”
Raul’s face twisted sharply.
He knew exactly what they were.
They were neither undead nor monsters.
Their name was Desecration Bug.
They were parasitic demons—true demons, no less—usually seen only when four-star and five-star classes reached the final act of a scenario and were forced to visit the demon realm.
“How could that...”
As far as Raul knew, Desecration Bugs could not exist in this world in a whole state.
Because those lowest of demonkind, so common in the demon realm, could not survive the passage across dimensions and were burned away completely.
“Surprised? As expected, you recognized them, holy man! Yes. Those aren’t just monsters. They’re real demons personally raised by the teacher!”
“Teacher?”
The caravan leader was already grinning like a man who had won.
“And what was that? Raised?”
Well, in any normal case, his arrogance would have been justified.
A dozen or so ordinary peddlers had transformed into bona fide demonic entities, even if they were only the lowest rank.
The numbers had shifted, and he probably thought the situation had turned completely in his favor.
In any normal case.
“One question, merchant.”
“So now you’re going to beg for your life? Fine. Even if you’re some so-called holy warrior, standing in front of a real demon—”
“Shut up and answer the question. What’s this teacher you keep talking about, the one who raised these demons? And what exactly is this so-called elixir?”
From the sudden appearance of magi, to the Desecration Bugs that should not have been able to cross into this world bursting out of human bodies...
Raul wanted to know more about the phenomena that lay beyond his knowledge.
So he asked, but naturally the man only gave a slimy smile and said, “If you can defeat every last one of these demons, I might tell you! Ha ha ha!”
The merchant laughed uproariously, setting an impossible condition from the start. But he didn’t know who Raul was standing in front of him.
“Is that so?”
Raul lowered his voice and drew the holy radiance of Halo up until it left pale white afterimages in the air.
What followed was a brutally simple swing.
“Ha! Have you lost your mind? That pathetic attack could never hurt a true demon—”
And yet the Desecration Bugs split apart as if by magic beneath the force of Raul’s sweeping halberd.
It made no difference whether they were cut in half by the blade or knocked aside by the wooden shaft.
As if they had suddenly been infected by some deadly poison, the demons’ bodies, tougher than rubber, dissolved into dust.
“What?”
It didn’t take long for the merchant leader’s face, previously stained with smug amusement, to turn into one of utter shock.
“Satisfied? Now talk.”
In an instant, Raul had cleared away the demons, and he pressed the vicious blade of the halberd to the peddler’s neck as he spoke.
***
When the edge touched his throat and a single drop of blood ran down, the man opened his mouth with a ease Raul found almost insulting.
“W-We were only doing what we were told... We just brought materials and requested goods to the teacher! Th-these slaves here were the ones the teacher rejected as useless...”
“That’s not what I asked. What the hell is that teacher? You saw him, didn’t you?”
“The teacher is...”
Something was wrong.
Just as the man had been about to spit out something about this teacher, his throat bulged grotesquely, swelling like a rubber balloon.
Raul then saw magi rushing upward at high speed from deep within the man’s body.
“Tea... cher... Aaaaagh?!”
It was the same as with the others.
The suddenly generated magi burrowed into the man’s head.
Cough—!
Then red-black fluid gushed from every opening in his face, turning his features into a ruinous mess.
He collapsed face-first onto the ground.
“So he set up insurance.”
So that leaking information would mean death.
Raul placed a hand on the corpse.
He swept through the body with divine power, searching for the true nature of the magi that had crawled from the heart and climbed into the brain.
Thk—!
Raul suddenly shoved his hand into the dead man’s mouth, clenched his fist, and yanked it back out.
At the incomprehensible sight, the surviving boy and girl slaves curled in on themselves and trembled, while even the other slaves with the odd trace of muscle on their bodies went wide-eyed.
In Raul’s opened palm, an insect no bigger than his thumb lay dead.
“Corpse bug?”
It was an insect-like familiar used heavily by shamans, possessing the traits of both undead and demons.
Raul didn’t know the “teacher’s” identity yet, but he thought he knew the man’s profession now.
A shaman who had chosen to become a demon’s slave himself—a so-called Fallen Shaman.
They were also traitors to their own tribe, the natural enemies of shaman classes, which were two-star jobs.
***
Raul removed the shackles from each slave’s neck one by one with his palm washed in holy light.
Even then, the vacant-eyed boys and girls only slumped where they were, but there were a few exceptions.
“Mm, mmph!”
These were the ones pointing at their own throats even after the shackles had been removed.
Raul understood what they meant and laid a hand on them, and a white light melted away the brand around their necks—the Curse of Silence.
“Whew! Thank you!”
“May endless blessings be upon this feat of the holy warrior!”
“The great Motala has surely led you to us!”
Each time he lifted a curse, they raised their voices as if their tongues had been suddenly freed from a spell.
“Let’s try to keep it down.”
Raul stopped them in a calm tone.
This mountain was already strange enough to have people who could detect divinity without being demon-contractors, and who could hide magi inside familiars.
It wouldn’t be surprising if something else came crawling out of the woodwork, so this was not the kind of place where making a racket was a good idea.
Raul had expected as much, but the four men mixed in with the peddlers’ wagons were clearly not ordinary slaves.
“My apologies for the late introduction. My name is Lergal. I am a knight dispatched under Lord of Zern’s orders to investigate the so-called medicine these men were distributing. These are the silver-plate adventurers I hired.”
A knight sent from Zern...
A figure came to mind at once.
A noble-born knight named Rembrandt.
An idiot who treated people beneath him as though that were the natural order of things, arrogant and so obsessed with puffing up his own nose that he could think of nothing else.
Unconsciously, Raul’s mouth flattened.
“I see.”
His expectations dropped at once.
But whether he knew it or not, Lergal appeared before him after hastily putting on the armor and weapons he had found among the peddlers’ bundles, and said without preamble, “Saint. Please, I beg you! Help us!”
What a bold, direct man.
If there was any merit to him over Rembrandt, it was only that he had no hesitation in bowing his head when he asked for help.
“You’re the knight dispatched to investigate the medicine? Then that medicine is the same thing those bastards took, right?”
Raul started the conversation first, keeping a lid on his instinctive discomfort.
“Yes! That’s right!”
The knight answered with a thump to his chest, already seeming to accept Raul as his superior.
The way he adjusted his sword and gave a formal bow made that much obvious.
But before they went any further, Raul made his position clear.
“I should say first that I have nothing to do with the Lord of Zern. I’m just a pilgrim. How much information can you share with someone like me, sir knight?”
He emphasized that he was, at most, an outsider.
Knights tended to be a little strange.
He might dump everything he knew about the medicine on Raul, then insist that because he had shared the information, Raul had to stay with him until the whole matter was resolved.
He wasn’t joking; that was a fairly average knight in this world.
“An outsider... If you put it that way, then I should indeed be careful.”
Lergal, who had looked ready to pour out some quest-NPC-sized backstory on the spot, had also found his composure again after Raul’s one remark.
That was not a bad thing for either of them.
Still, the knight did not remain in thought for long.
“Even so, I believe I must tell you everything I know, Saint. Some of my comrades were taken. This merchant caravan you just dealt with was only a tiny fraction of the whole.”
“Those men, you mean?”
“A coalition of bandits and merchants based on Tetra Mountain.”
“A coalition of bandits and merchants...”
“Yes. It works if they share the same purpose.”
Lergal answered without hesitation.
And unlike most knights, he didn’t seem to be censoring himself or deliberately hiding the most important details.
Raul took this surprisingly honest conduct as a good sign and let the wall in his mind, which had risen nearly as high as the Great Wall, crumble a little.
Then he asked directly, “So what exactly is this medicine?”
“I’m not certain, but... the men here call it the ‘Devil’s Egg.’”
Devil’s Egg?
Once again, a term Raul had never heard in his life made his brow twitch.
Elements that had not existed in the original game.
Even to him, those were dangerous variables.
And yet why was the corner of his mouth lifting the other way?
“That’s an interesting name.”
Raul was smiling brightly, a rare and almost unsettling sight.