Valentia’s Monstrous Hybrid (1)
It had been exactly one day since the black-haired man vanished among white clouds and blue forested ridges, and by then the holy warriors had reached the Thieves’ Basilica.
As Raul had predicted, it would have been impossible had they not already been climbing Tetra Mountain.
-Soon, people will come to clean up this mess.
Knight Lergal could not help but marvel as he watched Raul’s parting words come true as if they had been prophecy.
They had said they would ask him what had happened, and that they would suspect he might be in league with the demon contractors as well, but...
“Can you prove your innocence, knight?”
That suspicion had been real enough.
A giant of a man, glaring down at him and thrusting a hammer larger than Lergal’s helm into his face.
If not for the faint gold sheen that clung to their armor and weapons, Lergal might well have mistaken them for bandits.
And yet, when he lifted both hands without any sign of resistance, despite the vicious vigilance typical of clergy, they ran several tests and soon released Lergal and his companions.
That, too, was exactly as Raul had said.
“Hah. Hahaha.”
The knight grinned so widely his gums showed.
The holy warriors began to sort out this so-called Tetra Mountain Alliance in their place, since the group lacked both numbers and experience.
How long had it been?
A white-haired woman who had spent the whole time scanning her surroundings from start to finish approached Lergal.
“So where did he go?”
There was no need to ask who she meant by “he.”
“He said he was heading north.”
The knight pointed toward the peak of Tetra Mountain, where pale moonlight and white clouds hung like a painting, his eyes full of awe and admiration. The woman’s pupils turned gold as she stared in the same direction.
Then Celia narrowed her brow, relaxed it again, and studied something with careful attention.
“He played an interesting little trick on us, didn’t he?”
“Pardon?”
Startled by the sudden remark, the knight voiced his confusion at once. Celia blinked her sapphire-bright blue eyes slowly, then answered in a voice as clear as glass beads.
“I wasn’t talking to you, sir knight. Sorry, but could you keep quiet for a moment?”
At her oddly sharp request, Lergal pressed his lips together and fell silent. Celia once again turned her gaze slowly along the mountain ridge.
But something was strange.
At first she had been looking north, yet as she rotated her head along the long range, she was now, somehow, staring south.
“You left this work behind knowing I wouldn’t be able to ignore it, didn’t you? So I wouldn’t be able to come after you right away. Right?”
For some reason, her tone sounded both indignant and wronged.
“You really are a bad man, Raul.”
And yet, strangely enough, the corners of Celia’s mouth began to lift, very slowly.
Hmph.
Before long, the faint and bewitching smile on her lips was so beautiful it nearly stole the breath from that young, innocent knight.
With a creak, the weathered wooden door groaned open and someone entered a tavern.
It was not yet late, so the place was quiet, but the master of the tavern glared at the visitor with a distinctly unwelcome expression and said, “I think you’ve come to the wrong place, sir. This is a shop that only receives special guests.”
A robe stained with dirt and dust, as though its owner had spent several nights camping on Tetra Mountain.
The hood was pulled low, and a huge halberd was tied to his back.
Clearly not the sort of getup the master was expecting from a guest.
“If you go to the tavern in the east, you’ll be treated much better there.”
In that same gentle tone, he sent the traveler away at the door.
But the other man only plodded forward, step by step, without hesitation, and took a seat as if he owned the place.
“Second from the top, fourth from the left. Two drinks.”
At those words, the master, who had been frowning at the muddy footprints left by the visitor, stopped moving.
He looked at the order of the seat the visitor had taken.
The fourth seat, exactly.
“Were you the one?”
When the master asked in surprise, the black-haired man beneath the raised hood, Raul, answered, “That’s not the password.”
“My apologies. I hadn’t heard that a distinguished guest was coming in today.”
Cough.
In awkward silence, the master poured two glasses of strong liquor into spotless, crystal-clear tumblers.
As he held one out, he asked, “Do you know the legend tied to this liquor, the Witch’s Tears?”
Raul looked quietly at the two glasses that had been set before him, then gave a faint smile.
“The witch who gave in to greed was stoned to death, the witch who fell in love was betrayed and killed, and only the witch who calculated the world survived. Stay cold where money is concerned, and never covet both drinks.”
With that, Raul pushed one of the two glasses back toward the master.
The master immediately clasped both hands together and bowed deeply.
“My deepest gratitude for your visit, honored guest.”
Raul dropped a dozen silver coins onto the table and walked to the back of the display shelves where the master pointed.
A corridor running black as pitch, without even a single candle.
And then, suddenly, the far end of the passage swung open, revealing a hidden hole.
When Raul flicked two gold coins into the opening, a wrinkled gray hand crawled out and held something up.
What that hand offered was a ring.
More precisely, a very special ring forged of frost steel, its bluish aura particularly vivid, and engraved with the rune letter ᚹ, Wunjo.
It was the ticket to the underground auction house held regularly in this slave market of Valentia.
In the commercial city of Valentia, there were especially many secret facilities that ordinary people could never enter.
Outwardly it styled itself as the greatest commercial city in the west, but beneath that surface, various gangs and shadow guilds ruled the streets.
That wasn’t anything particularly unusual in Exeria.
Back when Raul still played ED as a game, hidden content like this had served as a kind of barrier to entry.
A quest would suddenly tell you to go to the eighth basement level of the Clocktower Auction House and recover this thing or that thing, and yet...
There was no such building as the Clocktower Auction House anywhere on Valentia’s map.
I quit that way so many times.
People deleted ED again and again, saying they had never seen such an unfriendly game.
And that despite the fact that those places were not hard to find at all if you just paid attention to the scraps of conversation the surrounding NPCs slipped out now and then.
In fact, that was exactly why Raul had ended up writing and posting a walkthrough on the community board.
It would have been a shame to drop a game that had held a top-tier share of the market without a single follow-up update.
And so Raul’s first landmark guide was born under the title Valentia’s Hidden Elements (1).
Perhaps because of that, Valentia, which everyone else saw as a dangerous jungle and a maze like Daedalus’s labyrinth, looked entirely different to him.
A city so transparent he could see its insides as clearly as a person on an X-ray.
For Raul, Valentia was that kind of place.
Then the next step is...
After successfully obtaining the ticket, Raul returned to his inn room and spread out the map.
He marked with his quill the places where the roads were unnaturally broken off or blocked.
That, too, was one of the city’s hidden elements.
Broken roads.
At first glance they simply looked like dead ends. But by presenting a certain marker or decoding the correct password, a hidden passage would be revealed.
Raul planned to make full use of those passages to pull out the elves imprisoned in the slave dungeon.
In truth, now that he had more than forty gold coins in hand, buying one or two elves outright would not have been difficult for him.
However, if it became known that he had “purchased” them, those dear elves of theirs, with their utterly foul personalities, would never sit still.
To them, the act of being bought is the greatest possible humiliation and insult.
In some cases, elves who regained their freedom through “purchase” would even take their own lives without hesitation.
Come to think of it again, elves really were insane.
Well, with personalities like that, it made sense they had no real allies even after several thousand years.
And yet it was Raul who had to ask those very “elves” for an alliance.
“Sigh.”
As Raul mapped out the most efficient escape route in Valentia, a sigh escaped him and his hand stopped.
“How did I end up...”
How had he ended up in the position of having to ask for an alliance from that hopeless pack of stubborn old bastards?
Raul let out one dry breath after another, showing his frustration without even trying to hide it.
No, if he thought about it, the strange thing was not the Saint’s position but the factions that opposed him.
A saint was, no matter what anyone said, a savior who had protected the continent long ago.
Then why did the Three Great Churches and the Seven Magic Towers oppose such a saint?
As for the Empire, maybe that made some sense, but why the Four Great Kingdoms, too?
“My head’s killing me.”
Raul remembered those long-buried questions that had not disturbed him in a long time, then pressed at his brow with his index finger and thumb.
It only made his thoughts more tangled.
At this rate, he was afraid even things that should go well would get twisted, so Raul pushed himself up from the chair and went to the window.
Dong-!
When he opened it, the bell from the clocktower, as much a symbol of Valentia as any emblem, struck his ears.
“Hooo.”
Raul listened to the sound and closed his eyes for a moment.
Perhaps because he had moved closer to the southern sea, the wind carried a faint saltiness.
It felt a little damp, but still cool.
Fortunately, Raul emptied his mind quickly, then stared for a moment at the table where the map and quill lay before shaking his head.
If his mind kept growing tangled, it was surely because he had not rested a single day since the day he climbed Tetra Mountain until now.
“Right. If a person has days to work, they need days to rest too.”
Raul muttered to himself like someone casting a spell, then opened the door and headed for the first floor.
“Huh? It’s been a while since you came downstairs, sir!”
As he descended the stairs, he saw the inn’s signature girl waving at him.
Her brown hair fell in wave-like curls, and the jade tint in her eyes had a warmth that made anyone looking at her feel at ease.
Raul, after wandering the city in search of a decent inn, had fallen for that girl’s lovely smile and taken a room here.
Why had that been?
Why had that bright smile reminded him of the serene, elegant woman with white hair?
It was a little irritating, but Raul was still a man.
When you were suddenly dropped into a world full of beauties like this, your judgment could slip sometimes.
“Should I just prepare something light like bread and milk again today?”
“No. Today I’d like some soup and meat. Ah, could you put this in the soup for me?”
When Raul held out his hand with a smile, the girl blinked and took it.
A moment later, her eyes went round as rabbits’.
“This is... pepper, isn’t it?!”
It was a spice more valuable in this world than salt.
It was only natural for her eyes to go wide when a traveler suddenly handed it over.
“If the food tastes good, I might share a little more with you?”
At Raul’s teasing words, the innocent girl made a show of rolling up her sleeves and said, “I’ll tell my father to prepare the most delicious dish possible!”
Raul gave a faint smile and nodded.
“And the drink?”
“Ah, do you have a 42-year White Louis?”
“Ah... we don’t have anything that expensive. We do have a 21-year.”
“That will be fine, then. Thank you.”
“Yes~!”
The girl smiled brightly, evidently convinced she had made a real sale.
White Louis 42-year.
That was the liquor she loved very much, the one who had first taught Raul about alcohol in this world.
Where was she now?
Raul let the face that had been lingering oddly in his mind these past few days remain there this time instead of pushing it away.
It had happened before, and last time she had actually appeared right in front of him.
A kind of... Saint’s intuition, maybe.
Well, the church’s saints were said to see the future outright, so why shouldn’t the Saint have something similar?
After all, all the divine power that existed in this world was nothing more than something derived from Raul, the Saint of the Beginning.
“Sir! Your food’s ready!”
Raul sipped from the glass filled to the brim with strong liquor and bit into the mouthwatering barbecue.
Hah.
The flavor was excellent, without question.
A smile came to him of its own accord.
He ate a spoonful of the mellowed soup and took a big bite out of the meat.
Delicious.
For the first time in a while, it felt as though his head were filling with juice instead of thoughts.
And then there was the White Louis 21-year warming his throat.
“Aaaah.”
It was perfect.
What else was this but a life of wine and meat?
Raul went on eating, once again reminded that no matter the world, your pockets had better be deep.
Then the tavern door opened and several robed figures entered.
“Hey! Innkeeper! Get out here right now!”
Even at a glance, the fine fabric glimmered in a way ordinary travelers’ clothes never would.
In a city like this, walking around dressed like that was practically the same as saying, Please empty my pockets for me.
But the emblem embroidered on those robes carried such force that it made such worries trivial.
The flame pattern sewn in gray on white robes.
Mages from the Red Magic Tower.
Before long, a man with a face full of panic came running from the inn kitchen.
“M-may truth ever dwell anew in the Red Magic Tower! Thank you for visiting our inn again this year, young lady.”
“Tch! How can you be so slow on the uptake! Shouldn’t you hurry up and guide the lady to her seat after such a long journey?!”
Young lady?
At that abrupt term, Raul, already a little drunk and staring blankly, frowned.
Then he saw it: a small mage who wore a white robe with a gold-embroidered emblem all by herself.
Gold embroidery, huh...
Raul immediately understood what it meant.
A noble.
Ugh.
The moment he recognized that, his expression soured.
A noble steeped in classism, and a mage from the tower steeped in authoritarian arrogance at that...
What kind of terrible hybrid was this?
And so Raul, who had been quietly planning to finish the rest of his drink and leave, witnessed something strange and immediately spread holy power across his entire body.
His mind, which had been pleasantly tipsy until then, cleared at once.
And with a clear head, it became even more distinct.
The young lady in the gold-embroidered robe.
A tiny clump of magi visible in the left side of her chest.
That is...
A thing Raul had already grown quite familiar with by now: a Demon Egg.
Cold.