Missing
1.
Sabna, the Beastman Kingdom.
In the distant past, it had been the homeland of the beastmen, a land built beside a great river and wrapped in green forest.
But there was little trace of that now. As the centuries passed after the kingdom’s founding, nature and climate slowly changed, and in the end the river dried up completely.
Because of that, the land around Sabna was now a barren desert.
Even if this had once been a place of broad greenery and abundant life, it was no longer that way.
“...What did the human merchants do?”
“We’ve currently locked them in the underground labyrinth. The others aren’t much of a problem, but there’s a dragon in the mix, so we can’t get in at all.”
So it was.
Several beastmen knelt before a colossal beast.
The beastman with the form of a massive lion slowly began listening to the others, and just as he seemed to be doing nothing more than hearing their report—
-GRAAAAH!
“Kgh...!”
Suddenly, he roared at the empty air, and the beastmen around him clutched their heads and cried out in pain.
The lion’s immense bellow felt as if it were drilling straight into their skulls, a sound so primal that living creatures instinctively rejected it, echoing all around them.
It was the mark of the beast king.
[King of Beasts, ‘Nemea’ – Lv.380(★)]
Nemea, King of Beasts. Among the beastmen, he was said to be the strongest being in the world, their king.
With a single roar, heaven and earth could be transformed; with one sweep of his forepaw, the ground itself was said to split apart.
He possessed a massive frame worthy of that majesty.
At the moment he was shrinking his body on purpose, but if he ever returned to his true form, an elephant would surely be no bigger than a rat before him.
“You tossed the humans we’d finally thrown into the underground prison away just because of those lousy lizards?!”
Nemea barked in fury.
His sharp fangs glinted as he glared down at the beastmen before him. With a lion’s head and a human body, he was an imposing handful indeed.
“We’re terribly sorry! That dragon was far more troublesome than expected, so there was nothing else we could do.”
He had certainly once been a fine and benevolent king of the beastmen, but recently he had become suddenly savage, refusing to rise from his throne.
Then, out of nowhere, he ordered preparations for war against the humans, and insisted that any exceptional human adventurers must be captured and brought to him.
Even if a person changed, this was changing in a deeply strange way.
At least, that was how it seemed to the old beastman who had served Nemea since long ago.
“Grrrr...! That damned dragon, those fucking lizards... and we’re getting pushed around by them again...!”
And the fact that he wouldn’t leave his throne.
That was odd, too.
Even now, raging that a single dragon had interfered with his plans, he was trying to rise to his feet with the intent of dealing with the dragon personally.
To be sure, he could handle a dragon that powerful.
It was he who had once invaded Sabna and executed the dragons that tormented the beastmen there, and the reason the beastmen had recently been able to reclaim even a little green space was because he had driven off the Green Dragons, rulers of the forest.
-CRACKLE!
“...Grrrr.”
But lately, even when he grew angry, he would calm down again before long.
It looked almost like he was searching for inner peace.
At a glance, he might even seem like a self-controlled king.
And yet he was the king of the beastmen, a leader who was supposed to step forward and solve problems himself whenever trouble arose.
For someone like that to possess such bizarre restraint, to hold himself back instead of moving as he always had? It was unnatural.
A king who should be rushing out right now to smash anything blocking the beastmen’s path was acting far too strangely.
“Y-you’ve calmed down, have you, Your Majesty?”
“...Yes. I understand. I’ll keep the matter of the dragon in mind. I’m going to meet that one, so the rest of you keep gathering the humans as ordered.”
As expected, the cause seemed to be the sudden appearance of her.
Half a year ago, a woman had appeared in Sabna, the Beastman Kingdom.
Ever since that woman approached Nemea, the king of the beastmen, he had changed in such a bizarre way.
A mysterious woman with black horns on her head.
The woman whom the beastmen who met her referred to as “that one.”
More precisely, ever since he had spent the night with that suspicious woman who called herself a “Follower of the Transcendent,” he had been like this.
From that moment on, the King of Beasts had slowly become stranger and stranger, and even now he was growing less and less like a king.
And it wasn’t just the king—every beastman who had come into contact with that woman was in a similar state.
“Ugh, my head hurts... I’m going to go meet that one. Everyone, get ready!”
Even the royal guards and the greatest beastman adventurers had all changed strangely after meeting her.
...As though every one of them had been bewitched by a demon.
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2.
“...”
I sat quietly in my seat and sorted through the situation.
Now that Louis and the train staff had vanished, the last thing I remembered seeing was Louis shifting into dragon form and trying to take on those beastmen.
No matter how young and weak a dragon she was, she was still a dragon in name. There was no way she’d lose to a few beastmen like that. Not even if it was Louis.
...And yet, why did she disappear?
After calming the tentacles that had been attacking the adventurers, I’d read through the memories left in them again.
But, once again, the memory cut off from that point onward.
The moment Louis started really trampling the beastmen, everything around her suddenly went white, and the memory vanished.
It was probably because the body split apart.
I could roughly guess why the memory was severed.
[Holy Cursed Black Tentacle – Lv.160(★)]
※Special Trait: Split apart
The reason was obvious if you looked at the “Split apart” mark on the tentacle.
As far as I knew, that had originally been something only slime-type monsters could use, but since this tentacle seemed able to do it too, I decided to let it go... for now.
The memories after that should be in the remaining half.
Even now, looking at the current situation, I still had questions.
Fine, Louis and the train staff disappearing could be explained somehow. But why had this tentacle been left behind, and why was it in a split state like that?
“Hey. You doing all right?”
For the moment, there was no other way to find out.
After quietly checking the situation in the halted train and finding nothing useful, I got to my feet and said,
“Ah, yes... I’m fine now.”
The priestess, Aria, was wrapped in a thin cloth and wearing spare clothes she had borrowed from the train. She’d discarded the outfit she’d been wearing originally.
The clothes she’d worn before had been thoroughly toyed with by the tentacle along with her, and even though I’d wiped away every trace of the white, sticky mess with Clean Magic, the clothes still felt somehow wrong to her, so she couldn’t bring herself to wear them.
And now she was crouched there, sniffling.
Still, one small mercy was that the tentacle hadn’t gone any further with the adventurers.
At most, it had restrained them. Unless I explicitly ordered it to do more, it hadn’t acted out the same things it had done to Louis.
-Slip, slip.
“Oh, thanks. This is cocoa?”
Aria smiled at the tentacle.
And once I’d roughly explained the situation, that tentacle could probably be considered fairly friendly with the other adventurers now.
-Shlk
This time, it even offered some to me.
But the whole thing felt deeply suspicious, so I decided to refuse.
“...No, I’m fine.”
Somehow, I didn’t know where or how it had been brewed, but the tentacle had a tray loaded with cups of steaming cocoa on it.
Like it was apologizing, it handed the cocoa to Aria first, then made its way toward the room where Rain and the dwarf were.
“I knew elves used tentacles as pets, but I got confused and thought this was a wild one, so I attacked it by mistake. It’s really our own fault.”
It was truly bizarre, but apparently in this world tentacles were surprisingly familiar creatures, and elves in particular were said to use them for all sorts of purposes.
I’d been wondering how I was supposed to explain keeping a monster, but seeing how naturally those adventurers took to the tentacles, I understood.
This still isn’t something I can get used to.
Besides, it hadn’t even been the tentacle’s first attack. Aria had thought the tentacle was attacking me, tried to forcibly pull it away, and that was how she’d ended up in that state.
Was Novel Online always like this? I do remember there being a tentacle-shaped pet long ago, I’m pretty sure.
In this world, tentacles seemed to be treated like ordinary dogs or cats.
“By the way, Lady Sian, what species of tentacle is that? Gray and that size would be a schnauzer—”
“No, it isn’t. And don’t ask. I just picked it up because it looked useful lying by the road.”
“Wow, so you tamed it yourself, Lady Sian? I’d love to keep one like that, but we priests aren’t allowed to keep pets...”
In my head, I wondered if the bigger problem wasn’t keeping a pet but its appearance.
That seemed likely, but I didn’t bother saying it.
“...By the way, does taming one hurt a lot? According to the Adventurer’s Gazette, elves and tentacles have sex—”
“Shut up. Say that one more time and I’ll feed that tentacle to you until your belly’s full.”
“S-sorry?! Why are you suddenly so angry...?”
Yeah, disguising myself as a high elf, no, as an elf at all, had been a mistake. A huge one.
No matter how much cultures and perceptions differ from world to world, this was open-minded to the point of absurdity.
And if elves really did keep tentacles like pets, then what exactly was the method they used to tame them?
They supposedly made the tentacles become accustomed to their masters’ bodies by offering their own bodies, engaging in acts resembling mating on purpose.
I knew elves used tentacles as pets, sure. But I’d never heard that such a thing was necessary to tame a wild tentacle.
In the end, I let out a deep sigh.
No matter how I thought about it, calling myself a high elf had been a mistake.
“Haa... whatever. Forget it. Don’t worry about it. I’m just the weird one.”
“N-no, it’s fine! I respect Lady Sian’s preferences. I’ve heard there are even elves who enjoy mating with dragons, so a tentacle like this is pretty normal!”
“...”
Even dragons...?
The dragons Aria was talking about weren’t humanoid ones like Louis, but dragons in their true, massive form.
...Was Novel Online actually an eroge?
Before I even got around to asking whether that was physically possible, I started worrying that if I kept hearing about this world’s culture, I might really end up like that myself.
“I’m going to go wash up. The bathroom should be at the very end of the car, so feel free to use it. I’ll handle the explanations later, so use it as you like.”
“Really? Thank you.”
Looks like it would be best to turn in early today.
Don’t think about it. I just need to wash up.
Everything I needed to do right now was already done, and there were even basic supplies and bedding laid out in the room.
Come to think of it, this train even had a simple shower facility.
Stran had also installed all sorts of amenities, including a dining car, while he was experimenting with different things.
Among them was, naturally, a place where you could shower, and that made me think it would be better to wash up here than go all the way to the village with all those mummies wandering around.
Besides, it was scary to go alone.
Undead monsters were a pain in the ass in more ways than one, since they could pop out of nowhere in the middle of the night, no matter how strong they were.
“Ah, um, Lady Sian, would you perhaps like to wash with me—”
“No. Declined.”
It was a little disappointing that I couldn’t sink my exhausted body into a bath, but right now I just wanted to empty my head of all these tangled thoughts.
I made a disgusted face and headed to the opposite side.
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