Gathering Herbs
Evelyn collapsed before she could so much as leave a review of the dish I had been so sure would win her over.
Thinking back on her last words, I had a feeling it was the poison in my cooking.
"Poison? Don't tell me..."
How was I supposed to know? That the mushrooms and grasses Unit 3 had brought back from the forest might be toxic plants was a variable I had never once imagined. The first time I cooked them, I had even thought, This is delicious — why doesn't a single person in this world eat it? There had been a reason after all. They didn't eat it because it was poisonous.
Having unintentionally laid Evelyn out, I spent half the day clutching her hand, checking on her, and drowning in guilt.
"She isn't even trying to wake up..."
Her temperature seemed fine, and her heart was still beating steadily, yet she simply would not come to. Had all those inflated stats left her poison resistance exactly as it was? She had gone down smiling, so I had assumed it was nothing serious. At this point, though, even I couldn't help but worry. What if she actually died?
"...No."
A chill raced up my spine, and I shot to my feet. Evelyn, dying? Impossible. There was no way a person could die from food I had made. All I had wanted was to show her the flavors of the modern world. But once a dark thought takes hold, it is not easily shaken off. I have never been on particularly good terms with positive thinking. The face I usually wear is nothing more than the result of shutting myself inside an environment where grim thoughts have no room to surface.
If something happened to Evelyn here, I was finished. She was as good as the village's guardian. Should she vanish, the villagers would realize something was wrong and come looking for her — and if, along the way, they discovered me living in this mansion without permission, and found me there with Evelyn's corpse... To keep that gruesome imagining from coming true, I had to save her first. But how? She had eaten poison. There was no chance of an antidote just lying around.
"That's it — an antidote!"
Struck by a sudden flash of genius, I clapped my hands and lifted my head. If there was no antidote, I would simply make one. I had a living plant search engine, a full set of alchemy tools for brewing potions, and loyal summons besides.
That evening, I left the mansion at once, a basket for herbs in one hand and a rusty old trowel in the other.
I couldn't just send Unit 3. I needed someone who could tell poisonous plants from the rest, and Unit 3 was a tree spirit in the end. Whether the toxins a plant produced were actually harmful to a human was not a distinction it readily felt. What if I sent it out and everything it hauled back was toxic? Unit 3 was slow to begin with; one round trip too many and the whole errand would drag on forever. I was hardly an expert on poisonous herbs myself. But I had this botanical guide tucked against my chest, and that was enough.
Books of that sort had, surprisingly, been well preserved in the mansion. Evelyn had said the family was ruined by a plague; they must have been trying to devise a cure. Why they had hidden the volumes and the research equipment so thoroughly was another question. For the moment, I set such doubts aside. Right now, the only ones who could look at the guide and judge anything by it were Unit 1 and I, so there was nothing for it but to go together.
More than anything, if the villagers went searching for Evelyn, found my mansion, and discovered me there with her at death's door... I had already pictured what came next, and I had no intention of picturing it again. The grounds outside the mansion were hardly free of danger either, so the whole venture was, for me, a considerable challenge.
Creak, thud. Creak, thud.
Still, one look at Unit 3 and I decided I might not need to worry quite so much. Faced with the heavy tread of a tree spirit the size of an actual tree, almost no wild animal dared come near. If only it could drive off wolves the same way. That wish, of course, proved hollow.
"Eeng-eeng! Eeng-eeng—!"
From where I rode on Unit 3's shoulder, Unit 2-1 suddenly bounced and jabbed its head toward one side. So we were not to go that way.
"Unit 3, let's circle around here. Find us somewhere else."
At my words, Unit 3 slowly changed direction, as if to say it understood. Looking at that bulk, anyone would assume it would be a tremendous help in a fight, but the truth was that we could not afford a fight at all. For all its size, Unit 3 was so shoddy that even in the game it had not a single combat animation, a tree spirit treated more like a structure than a unit. If a real battle broke out, the matchup would hardly favor us. It moved so sluggishly that attacking anything at a useful speed was out of the question. That was why I had sent the Unit 2s ahead as scouts. They were to range out, survey the surroundings, and come straight back to warn me the moment they spotted anything dangerous — a wolf, a monster, anything of the sort. Without Evelyn, who could actually fight monsters and aggressive wildlife, their role was heavier than ever.
And Unit 1... Unit 1 was bait, for the last possible moment. Something to throw to the wolves. If she hurled her whole body into luring them off, the rest of us could flee straight back to the mansion, and her body could be recovered later. From what I had seen last time, they didn't seem to crush and eat the bones.
"......?"
The moment I thought it, Unit 1's gaze seemed to glare at me all over again. What was that? Could she read my thoughts too, and not only Unit 3?
Anyway. With every scrap of fighting strength I could currently muster brought along, I made my way into the forest, and so far the search was proceeding smoothly.
A short while later, we finally arrived at a place where the herbs were supposed to be.
"Uh... uh. Here?"
Unit 3's shoulder swayed far more than I had expected. I had been staring at nothing but the sky, fighting off motion sickness, and the sudden sight of a wide-open space pulled a gasp out of me before I knew it.
"Whoa..."
A broad clearing, pink blossoms spilling over in full bloom. What was this place? It was stunning. Had there always been somewhere like this near the village? Moonlight lay over a beautiful field of flowers, and the mystery of it was so complete that I forgot why I had come at all and simply stood there, lost in the view. I came back to myself only because Unit 1 gave me a light jab in the ribs.
"Unit 3. The flower field might get ruined, so you wait here."
Rustle...
Watching the leaves sway lightly in agreement, I took up the basket and started into the flowers.
"Right... the herbs I need to take are..."
I drew the botanical guide from inside my coat and opened it. If I dug up whatever happened to be growing and it turned out to be poisonous again, we would be in real trouble. I couldn't read the letters, of course. I was only looking at the pictures. Following the page Unit 1 indicated, I sought out the plants I needed, carefully worked the trowel down to the roots, and set them in the basket. Unit 1 dug just as diligently beside me. Before long we had gathered enough to fill it. Good. Now we only had to go back.
But that was the moment.
"Eeng! Eeng!"
Unit 2-1's voice started blaring like a siren. I jerked my head up, and only then, between the trees, did I catch several pairs of bleak, gleaming eyes. They were already right in front of us. What had happened to the Unit 2 scouts?
"Unit 2, what on earth is going on?"
When I asked in a panic, Unit 2-1 shook its head, utterly at a loss. The look said it had no idea how things had ended up this way either. If you don't know, then who does? But there was nothing to be done about it now. We each settled into the best stance we could manage and braced for a fight.
"Tch..."
I swept a glance around us. A wide-open flat, with no terrain advantage to exploit and certainly no tactical edge. For fighting while surrounded by wolves, it was about the worst ground imaginable. It was, however, unmistakably a location I had never seen before. In that case, what I could do right now was...
"I'm going to try summoning something, so buy me time."
A nod. The one who answered in earnest at moments like this was, as ever, only Unit 1. She really did look cool when it counted.
Grrrr...
While Unit 1 held the wolves in a standoff, I extended a hand and focused. Before long, black mist began to gather toward where I stood. The summoning had succeeded again, without fail. The question now was what would come through.
Please! Something strong and impressive!
A hair-trigger moment. And then—
"Come forth—!"
All at once the world seemed to brighten. Fwoosh—! What appeared was a small flame, glowing blue. I don't know what I was thinking. As if bewitched, I reached a hand toward it. And yet...
It's cold.
A flame, and it wasn't hot in the slightest. Cold fire. What was this? It wasn't even bitterly cold — only faintly cool. The thing wasn't a real flame at all, only something with the shape of one. Which meant that, once again, what had come out was completely useless in a fight. I might get some use out of it as a lantern. Every time I summoned, the same thought occurred to me: a summon that actually looked the way I wanted never showed up. And since the location hadn't changed, calling again and again here would only multiply the same creature. A truly hopeless situation. I hung my head, despairing over the future closing in.
And yet, for some reason, the wolves were not coming any closer. They seemed... afraid? Thinking it over, I realized that what they were looking at might be a fairly frightening sight. Moonlight, a hooded stranger accompanied by a skeleton, a hand stretched out to conjure a blue flame. If I played this right, I might be able to threaten them into running.
Oho...
Now that I looked at it, this wasn't entirely useless.
"Stop. Don't come any closer."
I set my hand beneath the summoned flame at once, posing as though I were some sort of proper mage — as though I could hurl this tremendous fire at them at any moment. The visual was a little weak, though. Couldn't I make it burn bigger? The moment I thought it, the blue flame floating over my palm swelled all at once and began to blaze with tremendous force. Pressed by that momentum, the wolves edged backward, then vanished into the forest.
And so, having won my first fight (?) against wolves, I couldn't hide my delight and laughed out loud.
"Yes, run! Flee from my flame... Ahahaha!"
Unit 1, subjected to a line dripping with middle-school edgelord energy, looked me over as if she were thoroughly sick of me. I let the gaze of a skeleton — a face that couldn't even form an expression — slide right off me, and simply stared at my new summon, thinking. Unit 4. No. No, Unit 4 was far too ordinary a name for this one. Calling out Unit 4! in a moment like this would have no impact at all. In that case...
Said that way, even calling it sounded like a skill name. Much cooler.
"......"
Watching the new summon receive a name other than Unit 4, Unit 1's gaze upon me seemed to deepen further. That, however, was not something I particularly needed to worry about.