Grendel Mountains (4)
"...So you're saying the Turk fellow isn't here?"
"If by that you mean the master of the Turk Merchant Guild, then yes. This is just a passenger train passing through. As you can see, there are no Turk Merchant Guild employees aboard."
Sian sat across from the old man as they talked.
The adventurers watched the scene with curiosity.
After all, they had nearly been beaten with a club for trying to speak up, accused of being rude and ill-mannered, yet for some reason the old man wasn't doing that to Sian.
Just by appearances, they looked like nothing more than a grandfather chatting with his granddaughter, and that alone was strange enough.
"Hmm. So that human and the High Elf...? Anyway, don't tell me you're heading to Sabna right now?"
Grendel Mountains gravekeeper Mars stroked his beard as he spoke.
He looked at Sian's group with an air of fascination, as though asking if they were out of their minds.
"Has something happened in the Beastman Kingdom?"
Maybe there was something she didn't know. Sian decided to ask the gravekeeper, who seemed to know at least a little about Sabna.
What she needed right now was information.
She did have one likely story in mind, but it seemed to be unfolding in a slightly different direction than before.
"Mm, I don't live in Sabna, so I don't know the details. But I do know something strange has been happening."
"Strange?"
As he said, something certainly was going on.
Mars pointed out the village near Sabna visible through the train window.
It seemed about the same size as the village Sian had visited the day before, the one occupied by undead monsters.
"There used to be a lot of residents around here."
"There were a lot of people living here?"
If that was true, it had to have been a fairly large settlement.
"...Hm, doesn't look like it."
But Sian soon turned away as if she had lost interest and spoke again.
She couldn't feel a trace of life from that village.
It was a fair distance away, but there were no lights burning and no human voices carrying over.
It was practically a ghost town already.
"That's right. But about half a year ago, people started disappearing. Looks like there aren't any left now."
The gravekeeper shook his head.
Mars clicked his tongue and tapped his staff against the floor.
"Do you know why they were disappearing?"
As he said, there had once been at least several thousand Beastmen living around the Grendel Mountains.
But now, they were no longer here.
"Hmm, if you ask why they disappeared..."
What had the reason been?
The people who had lived in this region half a year ago were gone now, vanished somewhere without a trace.
All because of that thing.
"...I suppose you'd have to say the devil lured them away."
1,
"...The devil?"
Gravekeeper Mars had brought up the word devil.
Why was a devil suddenly coming up here? If he had said a demon from the demon king's army, that would have made sense, but the word devil itself felt oddly out of place.
Even though an actual devil was standing right here, to be fair.
Still, I knew he wasn't talking about me.
Besides, he'd just called me a High Elf a moment ago, so the thing he meant couldn't have been me.
"People all started acting strange. Folks who'd been living ordinary country lives, farming in the fields, suddenly began leaving for the city."
Simply moving to a city wasn't that strange in itself.
But the number was suspicious, and apparently they all started doing it at once, without any warning signs.
Could it have been mass mind control?
I hadn't seen it myself, so I couldn't know. Still, I was a little reluctant to read the old man's memories.
To read someone else's memories, I didn't need their consent, but my tentacles had to touch the target. And judging by how they were reacting right now, they all seemed oddly intimidated.
Maybe because of the dragon's appearance.
A dragon with a tremendous amount of holy power had shown up, and naturally there was also someone with magic power on par with that brat, so it wouldn't have been strange for monsters to keep their distance.
"What exactly did that devil do to make everyone leave? And how are you still here?"
"Ummm... I don't know the details either, but I think that devil gave some kind of speech or something."
"A speech? So he used brainwashing magic."
"Not sure I'd call it magic that quickly. In fact, I don't even know if it was magic at all."
I couldn't tell what kind of mind-control magic had been used.
There were dozens of types of mental manipulation spells alone, and if I considered the nature of devils as a species, then just using their racial traits might be enough to seduce people.
Wasn't there a devil race called succubi? Not that there was a separate succubus species, but if a devil was powerful enough, they could all invade dreams.
Even I could do it, and I hadn't even touched the mental category traits, so there were just too many methods to count.
Still.
I looked steadily at the old man in front of me.
Now I think I understood why my tentacles hadn't reacted at all.
-rustle
"Lady Sian? What are you... gah!"
"...So that was it."
I reached out toward the old man in front of me.
"I don't know whether I should call you a High Elf... but you're quick on the uptake."
And, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, my hand passed through the old man's body and touched the chair on the other side.
Well, beastmen weren't exactly a long-lived race.
At most they lived two to three hundred years, so there was no way someone from five hundred years ago would still be alive.
"A, a ghost...!"
Rain was horrified.
Seeing a ghost wandering around in broad daylight was certainly enough to startle me a little too.
"Ghost-type beings aren't supposed to be able to move around in sunlight. How are you doing that?"
Undead and ghost-type monsters usually couldn't function once the sun was up.
The reason the undead could move around in that abandoned village was because of the fog surrounding it.
They were like the zombies from fiction.
They vanished when they saw sunlight, and only emerged when the moon rose, hungry for the living.
"...If we're talking about the area around the Grendel Mountains, then I can manage this body there. I'm the gravekeeper of these mountains, responsible for tending the spirit of the mountain."
A gravekeeper.
So he was something like a hidden NPC.
I had seen plenty of ghost-type NPCs besides this old man.
In the lost underwater world alone, there were enough so-called water ghosts to fill the place over and over, and even in the underground of the Ares Empire, all kinds of ghosts threw themselves at the souls of the living as a matter of course.
That didn't mean every one of them was hostile.
In that sense, you could say the Transcendent of Time, Divabella, I'd seen before was the same sort of being as this old man.
"But that doesn't mean I can't interfere with the living..."
-thunk!
"...!"
Then, all of a sudden, he grabbed my wrist.
"Lady Sian!"
Come to think of it, this was the same guy who had just whacked Rain on the head with his staff. That was pretty unbalanced.
So a being that physical interference can't touch can still interfere physically itself, huh. And from what I just saw, it doesn't seem like holy power purifies it either.
The cold, hollow sensation on my wrist carried the energy of death, the kind only a dead soul could have.
Ghosts violated the living in order to fill that emptiness. By corrupting a living soul, they satisfied their own hunger. In other words, it meant they could be laid to rest.
But if a ghost immune to physical interference could interfere however it pleased on its own...
Then it would be a grotesque monster, father and daughter both.
There were ways to deal with ghost-type monsters, but if something like that showed up, it would be a real nuisance.
I might be fine, but the others probably wouldn't be able to hold out against one. If I ever ran into a similar monster, I should seal it first and ask questions later.
Still, this old man didn't seem hostile, so that was fine.
"So the others were able to stay on even after being hit with mental magic because of you?"
"That's right. My wife's protection makes this possible too."
"Your wife, then... is she in the Grendel Mountains?"
Rain asked, tilting his head.
Was the wife also still around?
Dragons lived longer than elves, so it wouldn't be strange if she were still alive.
But if she were a dragon that old, I should have been able to feel her presence here, and besides, the original game setting never mentioned the story of these two at all.
"She's up in the sky."
"Up in the sky...? Don't tell me—"
Rain clapped a hand over his mouth, as if he thought he might have misspoken.
-smack!
"Agh!"
"My wife isn't dead yet, you little punk! Where do you get off turning someone else's wife into a dead dragon!"
And then, with the old man's shout, the fierce wooden staff struck Rain square on the crown of his head.
Watching that made me wonder whether that staff was alive itself or whether it belonged to the dead spirit, but I could figure that out later.
"So up in the sky means the home of the White Dragon, then."
I asked after the dragon's whereabouts.
If she was a dragon of at least five hundred years, it felt like it would be worth seeing her with my own eyes, but I couldn't see her anywhere.
"That's right. When I said the side dish tasted bad, she got so angry she went back to her parents' home a month ago. Even so, picking on snake meat for a whole week was a bit much."
...He got mocked for cooking snake meat?
What the hell?
Still, it seemed even a dead ghost ate meals, and the fact that he was wearing such a fed-up expression meant he could probably taste them too.
Ah, well. Come to think of it, I wasn't that surprised.
Compared to the scene I'd seen before in the underworld, where one of the gods of this world was doing who-knows-what in a ghost body, and that tangle of women I had witnessed then, this was practically normal.
"A ghost, and you still eat meals—"
-whack!
"Ack!"
"What's so strange about a dead man eating rice! Do you think dead people can't eat? You'd make all the dead feel sorry for themselves!"
"But you're already de—"
-smack!
"Agh! It hurts! Enough already!"
"I've never seen such a rude brat in my life. Fine, if you die here, I'll bury you somewhere especially unpleasant. I'll put you in a place with underground water veins and an ant nest too, so remember that!"
"W-why are you doing this? And besides, I have no intention of dying here!"
...What on earth was this?
Whether it was a ghost beating a man or a ghost being beaten with a staff, how many times in a lifetime could you ever witness a scene like this?
Probably even long-lived elves never saw anything like it.
Come to think of it, I couldn't see the other adventurers anywhere.
No, wait. Thomas was over there, eating what looked like snacks while watching Rain get thrashed.
...Where does that tentacle even have a mouth to eat snacks?
Still, let's ignore the fact that Thomas was handing the snacks over to the tentacle, and the tentacle was happily munching them down.
Honestly, that tentacle had already slipped beyond my control.
It did follow my orders, but in terms of living evolution or whatever, it always went beyond what I'd expected.
Well, if they were getting along in their own way, I supposed that was fine.
"I'll go to the other carriage for a moment. It won't take long."
That left Aria...
I remembered her being in this compartment a little while ago, but strangely enough, she was nowhere to be seen now.
The tentacle I had given her was in the compartment across the way, so she hadn't gone far.
Had she gone to the bathroom or something?
I should go look for her. If someone else went missing now, I might end up having to play treasure hunt in the Sabna desert.
-creak!
I got to my feet and headed toward the passenger compartment.
Since Mars behind me seemed to have started lecturing Rain, it would probably be best to come back only after that was over.
-slurp! slrrrk! slrrrk...!
"Hm?"
Then I heard the squirming sound of the tentacles.
-slurp!
"...What are you doing now?"
-slurp! slrrrk!
The tentacle came running back alone, without Aria, and landed straight on my chest before beginning to drip white slime everywhere like a crying child.
Just when I was wondering if something had happened again—
-creak!
"Ha, haa... hahh, you're playing tag, right? Where did you go— oh, Lady Sian! Ah, so that's where you'd gone."
"...And what the hell are you doing?"
Aria opened the door to the opposite compartment and appeared.
Breathing hard, she came running toward me in a state of complete excitement. At some point the tentacle had hidden itself behind my neck, but Aria had already noticed it.
"...Well, I, I didn't really have anything to do here, so I made this in my spare time. Hehe."
With that, Aria held something out like doll clothes.
She showed me a tiny, handmade mini dress, the sort you might put on a childlike doll.
And it was about the same size as the tentacle I had given to Aria.
...
Seeing that, I could roughly understand why the tentacle had run over as if fleeing for its life.
Were these guys always this kind of party?
And then I peeled the tentacle off me and handed it back to Aria.
-slrrrk!!! slurrk!!!
"Hehehe, found it... I'm making other things too, you know? Come on, let's go into that quiet place over there together?"
The tentacle seemed to be screaming at me, How could you do this to me! but I had no interest in helping after my chest had been smeared with that disgusting white slime.
For some reason, I started missing Louis.
Even that brat was at least somewhat normal... no, not really.
...Honestly, it might be better to ignore all of this, go back to the villa, and just sleep.