The Wizard's Story (10)
The Wizard's Story (10)
#
"Wh-what do you intend to do to me?!"
"Well, that depends on how cooperative you are. Talk. Who put you up to this?"
"I-it was a coincidence. I was merely leading the ostriches when I accidentally..."
"If it was a mistake, why did you attack us so persistently? Looks like words aren't going to cut it."
"Wh-what is that?!"
The black-haired man had released a pink jelly onto the ground. The jelly soon began to squirm...
"A slime?!"
"That's right. A slime. Since you know what it is, I don't need to explain."
Orma's body went rigid with terror.
'How did it come to this? He said it would be a simple job.'
Orma recalled the events from the day before.
On his way back to town after delivering food-grade monsters to the Arena as usual, an employee had suddenly stopped him.
Following the employee's guidance, he'd met a masked pig in a secluded room. The pig said he had a personal request.
A personal commission that didn't go through the Guild was illegal. Everything that happened in a dungeon fell under Guild jurisdiction by regulation. Failure to comply could, depending on severity, at worst strip him of his adventurer's license and banish him from the city.
What the pig proposed was downright sinister. He wanted Orma to attack fellow adventurers!
"‘Attack’ is such an ugly word. You are merely leading some monsters when you happen to make a small mistake. Yes, there is no need to kill anyone. It will be enough to leave them unable to move for a while."
Orma had tried to refuse, but when he saw the sum being offered... yes. It was simply too much money to turn down.
Enough money to plaster over whatever twinges of conscience he felt.
The old Orma would never have accepted, but now he was desperate for that money.
He hadn't been like this from the start. Back when he only supplied monsters to the Arena, he never would have taken a job like this.
But dabbling in arena gambling out of curiosity had been his undoing. He had the talent of a Tamer to lure monsters, but no talent for gambling.
The cliché story of a man who lost everything, frittering away his earnings into thin air. If only it had stopped there.
But then he'd tried to fix matches to recoup his losses. Doping the food-grade monsters he delivered...
Unsurprisingly, Orma's clumsy attempt was instantly exposed. From then on, he was completely beholden to the Arena, and in this fashion, he sometimes found himself in positions where he couldn't refuse their illegal requests.
Following the pig’s request, Orma had intended to have the adventurers trampled a few times and teach them a lesson.
But they'd fled in an instant, and then a single spell had annihilated his entire ostrich flock. He'd bolted the moment that happened, but even that proved futile.
Then came the interrogation. Orma had a bit of insurance. The Guild could detect any direct harm exchanged between adventurers. If he could just smooth-talk his way out...
But the black-haired man had tied him to a tree as if Guild regulations meant nothing at all.
The black-haired man approached Orma, rummaged through his pockets, and confiscated his coin pouch and Rescue Signal Kit.
"You said they could only detect direct harm, right? Then what about a slime? I think we need a little test."
He crossed his arms, wearing the smile of a psychopath who treated torture as a hobby. The slime began squirming toward Orma's feet.
"N-no!"
A monster that obeyed human speech. Orma could handle monsters to some degree himself, but that was only in the sense of studying their habits to provoke specific behaviors.
But the black-haired man was controlling the slime like an extension of his own body. How anyone could freely command a monster driven purely by instinct, Orma had no way of knowing.
Terror of the unknown.
Orma's fear grew and grew.
"If you don’t talk, there’s no telling which part of you this thing will dissolve first."
At that moment, Orma felt a strange sensation. His manhood sprang up rock-hard!
"Kuh—! The hell? You into that kind of thing? No wonder you've been fooling around with monsters—"
"N-no! This isn't—!"
"It's fine. I'm a generous guy, so I can respect unusual tastes. And honestly, I'm a little curious myself. Is cross-species breeding between a slime and a human even possible?"
"No!!"
The slime began climbing up his leg...
"I'll—I'll talk! I'll tell you everything!!"
...
Orma did everything in his power to tell them everything he knew. How he'd managed to track them, exactly what the commission had been, how he was supposed to report back.
After hearing his story, the black-haired man's face settled into contemplation. But Orma couldn't wait. The slime was still squirming at his feet. No, not just squirming—it was starting to engulf his shoes...
"I told you everything! Aren't you supposed to let me go now?!"
"No?"
In answer to Orma's desperate cry, the black-haired man smiled and poured the slime over his head.
"Aaaaaaargh!!!!!"
Orma screamed, eyes squeezed shut.
He knew the slime's notorious reputation well. Its movements were sluggish, like a snail, but inside it contained a potent acid that burned any living thing it touched. He'd once seen an adventurer who'd been attacked by a slime pass by covered in full-body burns.
The searing agony would overwhelm him any second now. To meet his end like this. He never should have accepted the commission. No, he should never have gotten involved with the Arena in the first place...
"Aaaaa... ah?"
But the expected pain never came. Instead, an extremely bizarre sensation assaulted him. As if all the nerves and blood in his body were flooding into his lower half...
"Hngh... ngh...?!"
The area between Orma’s legs suddenly began to ‘itch’ unbearably. He felt as though he was going insane.
The black-haired man observed Orma and nodded, then dropped something at his feet and left. A moment later, the rope binding Orma came loose.
Orma looked around with bloodshot eyes... and his gaze snagged on the object the man had tossed to him.
The corpse of a rabbit with a strangely bright-red ass.
Orma's eyes glistened with lust.
#
"...Is he going to be okay?"
"Dunno. He won't die, at least."
When Reni's expression turned a little alarmed at the mention of death, I added an explanation.
"It's fine. I'll let him go after a while. There's something I want to confirm."
I hadn't poured the Aphrodisiac Slime on him just because I was bored. I needed to verify whether it had any additional effects beyond inducing Heat. Couldn't exactly test that on our girls, right?
I watched the man's figure carefully. We'd settled near the ostrich carcasses, so he was just a dot in the distance, but I could at least confirm he was still under that tree. That squirming motion was probably his hand, moving with enthusiasm.
"Whoa..."
Yuri gasped. Wait, was her face a little flushed? Hold on. This girl had excellent eyesight. That meant she could see every last detail of what that bastard was doing?!
"Hey, hey, stop. Why are you watching something like that?"
I covered Yuri's eyes. Her lips jutted out, and she turned her head away.
"...You’re the one who made him like that, aren’t you?"
"No—I didn't do it because I was bored. There's a reason I did that. We can't keep the guy tied up here forever, and if we let him go, he'll scurry straight back and tattle, right?"
"So?"
"But that slime erases roughly a day’s worth of memories. He won’t even remember why he’s here."
"Hmm... then why'd you give him the rabbit?"
"..."
Th-this girl had watched the whole thing. Her excellent eyesight really got me into trouble at times!
"N-no, no. I don't know what you're imagining, but it's not like that. I had to help him, uh, work off some steam. If he went crazy with lust and came after you guys, I wouldn't be able to hold back, you know?"
"...You have an answer for everything."
Yuri glared at me, her face slightly flushed. From her deeply suspicious expression, there was no telling what she was imagining now.
"We're all done here."
While I'd been interrogating the man, the others had gathered up the ostrich carcasses and were following Ariel's directions to harvest the usable parts.
"Hm. M-maybe this isn't quite the right moment... b-but still, there's something I want to get settled first."
Ariel spoke haltingly. She couldn't meet my eyes and kept fidgeting with her hair... Not sure what had her so embarrassed. The mood was similar to the last time we'd discussed the quest reward...
"H-how are we going to divide the monster carcasses?"
"..."
That was what she brought up at a time like this?! Was she that strapped for cash?!
"I know it's improper to speak of this after being in your debt in so many ways. But I have my own circumstances as well..."
"No, let's talk about that a little later. First, we should discuss what I got out of that man."
I pulled out the item I'd extracted from him and showed it.
"He said he received this to track you."
"..."
A necklace with a small magic stone attached. Ariel took it, examined it closely, and frowned deeply.
"...Indeed. So that's how it is. This is a replica of the necklace I received from Sivter. With something like this, tracking me would be easy."
No wonder they'd found us so easily. The necklace meant they'd simply been following Ariel from the start.
"So he was the one who put him up to it. I asked to meet inside the dungeon precisely to avoid his interference, and yet for him to go this far even here..."
Ariel's face turned somber. But hearing that, Yuri still looked bewildered.
"That's weird. Didn't you say he's your fiancé? A fiancé attacks you even when he's right there with you? Didn't seem like he cared if you got hurt, either. Those ostriches weren't exactly being picky."
"It is futile to try to understand how that man thinks. His sense of ownership is twisted beyond anything an ordinary person could imagine."
Ariel spat the words as if chewing them up and spitting them out.
"Hm. Clearly you're not thrilled about marrying that pig. So why are you still going through with it?"
"...I'd rather ask you the same thing. Why are you so interested in me?"
"..."
...That would be because you were connected to the Main Quest.
I felt like I was starting to grasp how the system worked.
[A change has occurred in the observation.]
[The probability of ## has decreased to ##.]
Resolving events that had been directly mentioned in the original story ahead of time reduced the probability of a crisis occurring in this world.
Although the hero’s party would eventually resolve those incidents, the novel had implied that a great deal of blood would already have been spilled by then. The Author Goddess was practically showering me with Golden Tickets to tell me not to stand by and let that happen.
There was another reason I couldn't just stay idle.
The hiatus.
The original story had gone on hiatus right before the sex scene, so I had no way of knowing whether those hero bastards ever actually brought lasting peace.
When I thought about it, it was a pretty serious problem.
Since I had no way of knowing how those heroes handled the final event, I had to resolve anything that looked like a main event, if only to protect my peaceful harem life.
And this woman was clearly tied to a Main Quest, which was why I was sticking to her like this. But would it really be okay to tell her all this?
While I was choosing my words, Ariel abruptly spoke.
"Was it love at first sight?"
"No..."
"There's no way that's true!"
Reni's shout—and a moment of dead silence.
Once the silence fell, Reni floundered in embarrassment. She was the one who had shouted, so what was she doing...? But the priestess’s impulsive outburst did not end there.
"S-sometimes p-people do good deeds without expecting anything in return! It's not—not love at first sight..."
Her face turned bright red as her voice trailed off. Watching her, Ariel's lips curled up just slightly.
"It was a joke."
"Eep."
Ariel furrowed her brow a little.
"...This is something that might be called my family's shame, but since you've been dragged into it, the proper thing is to tell you."
The story Ariel proceeded to tell was... a little clichéd and not very interesting. She seemed to know it too, because she kept skipping over details.
"A common tale. I came to owe him a debt, and in exchange for forgiving it, he demands marriage."
Right. I'd expected that much. It was obvious at a glance that she was strapped for cash. But that wasn't the end of it. The most important part was missing.
"So, why exactly did you go into debt?"
"..."
Ariel let out a deep sigh.
"I shall invite you all to the manor. Then you will understand."