Missing
“...What happened here?”
For now, the train could be left alone.
According to Stran, it ran on magic, stopped at predetermined points, and then started moving again after a few hours. If it headed toward the town where the adventurers were, it would stop on its own. Of course, the lack of a conductor meant it would have trouble dealing with sudden problems, but that wasn’t something I needed to worry about right now.
There are traces of a fight. No, this is just stab marks from blades.
When I looked around the inside of the carriage, there were plenty of gouges left by spears, swords, and the like. Nothing especially strange seemed to be going on.
Those beastkin were rough types, so it made sense that marks like these would remain. But there was something else: a faint lingering trace of mana.
And from within it, a familiar magical presence...
“Huh.”
That was Louis’s mana.
Louis had been here, and even if there hadn’t been a full-scale battle, she’d probably threatened someone at the very least. The other weak traces suggested that the Turk Merchant Guild’s employees had also been gathered here.
...What in the world did they all do together?
Did they start dancing in a group or something? If they’d all crowded together and gone at it like a club, I could almost understand it.
“No way.”
-Chururuk!
If I wanted to know exactly what had happened in this train, I’d have to look through this thing’s memory after all.
But there was one problem: I’d read memories through it before, but I’d never tried reading the memory of this tentacle directly.
Would this be okay?
“...Ugh.”
-Wriggle, wriggle.
It was sticky, slimy, with a grayish body oozing pale mucus. Honestly, even touching something like that with my skin felt disgusting.
If it had been an ordinary monster, I could’ve just dealt with it however I wanted, and that would’ve been fine. But this thing was useful, and its level was high enough that it felt wasteful to get rid of it casually.
If I got my real body back, finding Louis’s location would be easy enough. But there are still three days left before the potion wears off.
Did I really have to do this?
That writhing, unpleasant tentacle... inside my body, that tentacle... Ugh. Just thinking about it made my skin crawl.
If only Louis had disappeared, it wouldn’t have been much of an issue, but the employees of the Turk Merchant Guild had gone missing too.
And the adventurers who had come along as guards were gone as well.
There weren’t any signs of a major fight. No obvious signs of resistance either.
“Haa...”
Another option would be to just blow up the whole area around here, but then they might get caught in it too.
Fine. I’d just close my eyes and do it.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t used it during my bath last time, and while it looked disgusting, the sensation itself was just about the same as a snail crawling over my skin.
“Hey. I’m going to read your memory now.”
I grabbed the tentacle and said that.
“Which means I’m going to... put your tentacle inside... my body. If you pull any funny business, I’ll salt you until you dry out.”
Come to think of it, it wasn’t all that bad, really.
Compared to everything I’d done to Louis so far, this was nothing. It was just an act for the sake of reading memories.
I shrank the tentacle to the minimum size, then made it as thin as possible so it looked almost like an earbud. Thank goodness it had shapeshifting abilities.
-Squirm!
“Ugh...”
Even so, it was still wriggling, sticky, and dripping mucus, so when I grabbed it with my hand, the sensation was revolting.
Then I lay down quietly on the seat and placed the tentacle on my stomach. The writhing feeling made me want to rip it off immediately.
-Sneak, sneak.
“...I’ll say this one more time. If you try anything stupid, I’m putting you in a salt jar and sealing you there—ngh...”
The tentacle burrowed into my clothes, passed over my chest against my skin, and slid up through my neck toward my ear.
When I used this tentacle to manipulate or read someone else’s memory, I essentially used it as a point of connection and invaded their mind directly.
But this time, the target of the memory was the tentacle itself.
For that, I needed to link its mind with mine. In other words, I had to make contact between its head and my own.
And among the possible ways to do that, whether by shoving it into my mouth or touching my head through some other passage, I decided that using my ear was the least awful option.
“Hhng...!”
Now that tentacle was burrowing into my ear...
-Srrrk!
Something cold and hot at once began to enter my body.
The wet sensation felt as if it were swallowing me whole. Even though it was only touching my ear, I still felt as if I were being eaten by it.
“K-kh...!”
Like before, my arms and legs had already been restrained by it, and it felt as though Louis’s earlier treatment was continuing now.
As the tentacle touched my ear, my body jolted, and translucent sweat even formed along my chest and thighs.
My body was hot.
Since its mind and my body were in contact, it was probably some kind of overload.
“Ugh...”
I really did think I’d done this for nothing.
-Srrrk!
I could feel the tentacle wriggling as it pushed deeper inside. Normally I wouldn’t care much, but now my senses were heightened, so it felt even worse.
Yeah. It was exactly like a feather tickling my ear.
Except that feather was soaked in sticky mucus, and it kept being shoved in farther and farther to fill the inside completely.
-Chuurk!
Forcing itself in. Pushing. Even though it felt like it shouldn’t be able to go any farther.
So I clamped a hand over my mouth to keep any sound from escaping, kept my trembling arms and legs still, and focused my mind in silence.
Now it was time to connect my mind to this thing’s.
Slowly letting my awareness melt into it, I concentrated and waited for it to sink all the way in.
By now, after enough time had passed, I’d gotten used to this.
“Kh... ngh...”
My body was still hot, but this much I could endure.
What concerned me a little was that I was lying defenseless in the train, but the adventurers would probably board it soon enough, so I didn’t need to worry about that.
“Haa... haa...”
-Crackle!
The moment that tentacle reached into my memory, I also connected my mind to it.
...Now, little by little, I could start to see it.
What had happened in the train.
Everything this tentacle had seen began to come into view.
At the same time, my consciousness sank beneath the surface.
* * *
It was about five hours earlier.
The train was moving across the dark desert.
Only the stars and the moon lit the night, but even so, the scenery carried a strangely romantic air.
-Rustle.
“Hey, did you see Sian?”
Louis, staring out the window, asked the tentacle beside her.
-Chuurk.
The tentacle shook two of its appendages horizontally.
“Figures... there’s no way you’d know, huh...”
Sian hadn’t come back after saying she was stepping out for a bit to take care of something.
And once Sian had deliberately reduced her body, the contract link had grown faint, making it impossible to properly sense her thoughts, let alone determine where she was.
“...She’s not off somewhere weird and bullying some innocent person, is she?”
So the only thing Louis could do was sit quietly on the train and wait for Sian to return.
As she stared vaguely up at the night sky, she kept nodding off. Watching her, the tentacle draped a blanket over her from inside the carriage, then kept gazing outside through the still-shaking train, waiting for Sian to come back.
-Wriggle!
Then the tentacle suddenly sensed something strange.
An unknown hostility inside the train.
Realizing that something was happening aboard the carriage, the tentacle carefully climbed along the ceiling and headed for another car.
-Thud!
A strange booming sound rang out.
The tentacle quietly stretched out a small limb to observe what was happening inside. This was the car where the beastkin adventurers who had been guarding the train with Sian were gathered.
-Bang!
“Aaaagh!”
Then came the scream of a Turk Merchant Guild employee.
“Kh...”
“W-what is the meaning of this, adventurers?! Weren’t you supposed to be guarding us?!”
Unexpectedly, the adventurers hired to protect the Turk Merchant Guild were attacking the employees.
A furry beastkin with a sword drawn ground his teeth while glaring at the employee crumpled before him. Other beastkin were also subduing the guild staff one by one inside the train.
“Don’t smash the train too much. We still can’t leave behind any trace that we started moving.”
A brown-haired beastkin scolded another one.
That beastkin had forced a staff member into the corner with a spear, but for some reason, he didn’t go any further.
No, more accurately, he couldn’t.
-Clang!
“Hiiik?!”
Just as the beastkin tried to stab a staff member with his spear, red mana surged from the employee’s body and blocked the spearhead.
He tried stabbing from different angles, but it was the same every time.
“Anyway, there’s a barrier around these guys. No matter how much we attack them, not a scratch will show.”
That was the barrier Sian had cast before departure, each one secretly placed as personal protection for every employee boarding the train. So no matter how hard the attackers struck, their blades couldn’t make contact.
Originally, Sian had set it up in case her magic accidentally dragged the employees into danger, but now it was functioning in a different way, protecting them instead.
“Th-this is a clear breach of contract! You filthy beastkin... We never should have trusted the likes of you!”
“Hmm?”
At that moment, the one called the train manager shouted at the beastkin in the carriage.
He had never liked the idea of bringing beastkin onto the train in the first place, and now that those beastkin had betrayed them too, it was only natural that he was furious enough to burst a vein.
-Thuk!
“...Hey. You disgusting human.”
“Huh?!”
But the moment a spear was planted right beside his head, he fell silent.
The beastkin’s spear pierced the wall and exuded a chilling aura. If not for the barrier Sian had put up, that one strike alone might well have severed his head.
But even if he hadn’t been physically cut down, the mental shock of having a spear thrust right next to his head was more than enough.
“...He fainted. Humans really are something else.”
In the end, the employee lost consciousness on the spot.
The beastkin clicked his tongue and tossed the man to the floor.
Sian’s barrier protected only against impacts serious enough to cause actual harm; mere acts like grabbing or touching didn’t trigger it.
Even if their lives weren’t in immediate danger, those with weak bodies couldn’t resist at all.
“Hey, so what are we doing about that little elf? We looked for her a bit ago, but she’s nowhere to be seen.”
“...Doesn’t matter. We just leave before she gets back. Honestly, it’s better this way. We got what we wanted without much effort.”
Then the beastkin searched for Sian, the owner of this magic, but couldn’t find her anywhere.
Where had she gone? They didn’t need to bother looking, anyway. It was actually better not to face her.
Instead—
“Hey! There’s some other kid asleep over here.”
“What? We already subdued all the employees. There’s another one?”
“Yeah, but this one... looks like a dragonkin?”
They came across something else.
A beastkin with red horns and golden-blond hair.