Missing
Crreeeak!
I pulled open the door, its hinges packed with sand.
But there was no sign of anyone living inside. Only a suffocating silence answered me.
As expected, there were no traces of life in the building either. The only thing hanging from the ceiling was a spiderweb so abandoned that even spiders hadn’t bothered to claim it.
So this house is empty too.
An attacked village.
In Novel Online, that wasn’t an ordinary village that existed from the start, but a random event that triggered when you happened to head toward a small settlement in a neutral field.
There were no survivors in a village that had been overrun by the undead.
And then the game would throw up a message to the player—Lost adventurer, will you share this village’s fate?—before unleashing the same swarm of monsters as before.
No special items here, huh.
If the player survived, they’d get a chance to investigate the ravaged village. If they didn’t, they’d be dragged away by the undead monsters just the same.
You could call what followed a BAD END.
So there aren’t any survivors hiding around either.
Still, if you did make it out alive, you could search the village—and in that case, you might even find the adventurers who had been attacked before you arrived.
If you managed to find and rescue a living adventurer, the reward was pretty generous, but most of the time they turned up as corpses or undead, so the odds were terrible.
“Hmm. It’s cleaner inside than I expected.”
Also, although it never made it into the game proper because of censorship, the setting notes that came later revealed that the event was surprisingly brutal.
If I’d been alone, I might’ve let myself get captured just to figure out their hideout. But this isn’t something I can do now, I guess.
Usually, adventuring parties in this world were split almost evenly between men and women.
When those adventurers lost to the undead, the undead would kill the men and take the women back to their lair—some place underground in this desert, supposedly—and use them as living breeding stock to bear undead infants.
In the actual event, the rescued NPC adventurers were all women, and every one of them was found in badly damaged armor.
And unless you used holy water or something similar to break the curse, they’d turn into undead before long.
It was an awfully harsh piece of lore.
But I didn’t hate the event.
If you handled the undead raid and got lucky enough to uncover their base, you could find some incredibly rare items.
Among them were soul stones, and you could even pull expensive desert jewels out of treasure chests.
So, really, it was a little disappointing.
“Sian! There’s nobody in this building either!”
“If there’s nobody there, then that’s that. There’s nothing else worth checking in this village.”
But even if there were treasures like that, they weren’t something you could weigh against a human life.
Well, if they were strangers, I wouldn’t care much whether they lived or died. But if it was someone I knew, then I’d at least consider helping them…
Strange. I’m not normally this soft-hearted.
Even as I answered Rain, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something about me had changed.
Could my personality be changing because my body had become younger?
The thought didn’t seem impossible.
Honestly, I didn’t think this was who I had ever really been.
Back in the past—at least when I first came to this world—I probably had a personality more like the adventurers over there.
But not anymore.
If anything, I was closer to the demons now.
Maybe the cause was the magi flowing through this body—the demonic energy unique to devils.
“Did you find anything, Sian?”
“No, nothing. Just empty spiderwebs.”
Demons also usually treated humans as inferior life-forms, using them like slaves or livestock…
At least I wasn’t like that.
Probably.
“Still, what happened? We’ve been to this village before. It was the village we stopped in when we were heading for the Grendel Mountains with the adventurers, and it wasn’t like this then.”
“When was that?”
“A little over a week ago, I think. But for the villagers to disappear in that time….”
Hmm. I still didn’t understand the mechanics of this world.
I understood that it was the same as Novel Online and yet not the same at all.
But how, exactly, did sudden events and personal quests work here…?
I wasn’t even sure whether repetitive grind quests—the true essence of labor—were possible in this world or not.
I wonder if you can respawn after dying?
Well, I do revive when I die, but I meant respawning as a player would, separate from my passive ability.
…No idea.
I’d have to find out little by little.
It wasn’t something urgent right now, after all.
What mattered to me now was something else: one, finding the portal leading to the “crack in the world” through that Grendel Mountains bastard… no, through the Heavenly Demon. And two—
“Sian! Isn’t that the iron carriage you were talking about? The one you said was a train?”
“……!”
Aria’s voice rang out from outside.
I’d told her and the dwarf to keep a close eye on the rails over there, and it seemed the train was arriving a little earlier than planned.
“Let’s go over there for now. We can look at the rest later.”
“Ah, yes. Of course.”
I’d only been away from the train for less than a day. There shouldn’t have been any serious trouble.
Besides, Louis was there, and even if it was a little ridiculous, the tentacle was stronger than a dragon. Unless some demon attacked again like last time, there wasn’t much in the mortal realm that could actually beat those two. At the very least, anything on that level would have to be a Grand Sage-class monster, and those bastards were bound by restrictions, so they couldn’t just wander around outside.
The Heavenly Demon had similar restrictions, which was why she could only operate around the mountains.
Tap, tap, tap.
I headed toward the rails.
The Turk Merchant Guild’s train was scheduled to stop in this village.
Normally, it would rest here for a day before resuming its route, but with the village looking like this, there wasn’t much chance of a comfortable break.
“Where is the train now?”
“It’s far off. Should still take a little while to get here.”
The train hadn’t arrived yet.
Still a ways off.
The train in my sight was running on the far side of the desert.
This area had unstable terrain, so places that looked like you could just walk straight across often hid traps like antlion pits.
If you slipped up, you’d get buried in the desert whole.
That was why the rails had to snake around like this.
At this rate, the number of people dying while crossing the desert should drop a lot. Once it’s operating formally, it’ll probably have plenty of customers.
I didn’t remember trains existing in Novel Online.
As far as I recalled, the world’s main means of transportation were carriages and airships. Those modern, engine-powered vehicles definitely hadn’t existed.
But because I got involved, an NPC named Stran from the Turk Merchant Guild ended up focusing entirely on running the guild.
And that created a new setting unlike the original one.
Honestly, setting aside his personality, he really was an outstanding merchant, and the lore itself called him a genius, so it wasn’t strange.
How else would he have run a guild with tens of thousands of people in the medieval era? If you stripped away the fantasy elements, he’d be comparable to a major warlord.
Besides, I can squeeze money out of him whenever I need to, and get him to bring me items I’d otherwise have to fetch myself. Yeah, I’m definitely glad I kept him alive.
Humans really did need to use their heads. Well, I’m a demon, but still.
“Sian, do you know your expression is kind of demonic right now?”
“Thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“……Huh?”
Whoosh!
“I’ll be back in a minute, so wait here.”
Heavenly Demon Footwork - Shrinking Earth
Attribution: Physical / Range: None / Maximum Targets: 1
A special footwork technique that folds space and moves through it, essentially the physical manifestation of magical blink.
It wasn’t especially urgent, really.
Still, I was worried about Louis, who’d probably been left alone, and since I was technically in charge of guarding the train, the staff might be panicking if their escort suddenly disappeared.
Thud!
I ran across the desert and leapt onto the train.
It was a fast-moving train, sure, but to me that speed was no more impressive than a newborn crawling along the floor.
Honestly, if I’d had the tracks in sight, I could’ve chased it down on foot. This was nothing.
Creak.
First, I opened the door to the engine room.
“Hey. Sorry I stepped away for a bit. Still, it looks like nothing happened, fortunately.”
The train was still running just fine, so it didn’t seem like it had been attacked or damaged in any way.
?
But somehow, the inside of the train was too quiet.
The train was racing across the desert with plenty of force, yet I couldn’t hear a single voice from the staff inside.
Still, I couldn’t smell blood, so there didn’t seem to be anything seriously wrong….
“What?”
…Or so I thought.
As it turned out, there wasn’t just nothing wrong with the train.
There was nothing else there, either.
“Hey! Is anyone here?”
There were no passengers.
Bang!
“Louis! Where are you? Answer me if you can hear me!”
I opened the compartment door where Louis was supposed to be, but all that remained was the box I’d once trapped her in.
Obviously, there was no way Louis had crawled back into that box. Still, I checked just in case. It was empty.
…Where did everyone go?
Nothing.
No matter how hard I searched, there were no passengers anywhere.
Not the Turk Merchant Guild staff, not the adventurers who had come along as escorts, and not Louis either.
Plip!
“Hngh?!”
As I was searching for the passengers, something slimy suddenly slipped into my clothes and slid down between my breasts.
It wriggled. Something disgusting was licking along my body.
That vile sensation was…
“Ugh…! Cut it out and come here!”
Churrrk!
I shoved a hand into my chest and peeled it off.
The others were nowhere to be seen, but for some reason that black tentacle had stayed behind in the train.
And it had been stuck to the ceiling the whole time.
“……You really want to be salted, don’t you?”
Churuk.
In that short span of time, the little bastard had smeared itself all over with sticky slime. I’d just cleaned everything with a cleansing spell a moment ago—how much time had even passed?
“What the hell? Why did you get so small?”
But its condition was strange in another way, too.
Hadn’t it shrunk down to the size of a small cat?
Even if it could control its own volume, it had usually been about as big as an adult man….
What happened here?
And worse, this thing’s level had dropped too.
Holy Cursed Black Tentacle - Lv. 160(★)
Special Trait: Split
What the hell happened while I was gone?