Grendel Mountains (5)
1.
The train had come to a dead stop and refused to move.
Every mana stone used as fuel for the engine had been ruined, and with the engine itself stalled, nothing worked anymore.
“So it’s the same here, too.”
-Thud, thrum.
“...Figures.”
Just to be sure, I opened the mana-stone storage in the cargo compartment, and as expected, gray stones spilled out in a clattering heap.
The mana stones here had also been tainted by the dragon’s influence and rendered useless.
It was another reminder of just how much mana a dragon burned through every time it used its breath.
I’d searched every mana stone left on the train, but there didn’t seem to be a single one fit to serve as fuel.
“Hmph.”
Well, if I followed the tracks, the road would lead somewhere eventually.
Walking would be fine, I supposed.
If I actually wanted to, I could get there with time to spare, and frankly, I was faster if I just ran, so there wasn’t much reason to stay on the train in the first place.
What bothered me was those adventurers over there. I didn’t care about the dwarf, but taking the others to Sabna was another matter entirely.
The beastmen probably don’t like humans very much.
And if those beastman trackers I’d heard about were the type to openly treat humans as enemies, that would turn into a real pain in the ass.
Maybe I should use Transform on them and make them look like beastmen? But their clothes and behavior didn’t look the least bit beastman-like.
Sharp-eyed bastards would see through it in no time.
-Creak.
For now, I had no choice but to go back to where the adventurers were.
There wasn’t much else to find by rummaging through this train anyway, and if I put preservation magic on the goods meant for the upper route, they could sit here for a hundred years and still be fine, so that wasn’t a problem.
What I would have to put up with was the delay.
“Ah, Lady Sian. You’ve returned?”
“Don’t move, Rain.”
“Oh—sorry.”
I could feel a faint sacred power in the train car.
“...Right. So where did the rest of them go?”
When I returned to the passenger car, Rain and Aria greeted me.
Aria was using holy power to heal the wound on Rain’s head.
That thing he got from being smacked by the tombkeeper earlier—she was tending to that part.
Hm. Could holy power heal baldness, too?
I should look into that sometime.
“Master Thomas and that old man went to the engine car, I think? They said they were going to check the train’s problem.”
To the engine car?
Hmm. From what I could see, this was just a fuel problem.
Fixing the engine itself wouldn’t solve anything.
“Alright, got it.”
Still, maybe I should go take a look.
Thomas might be a mage, but she was a dwarf, so she’d probably know more about magecraft engineering than I did. She might even know another way to get the train running again.
Besides, if we could just find mana stones that matched the specs, it should work fine again. And with the engine shut down, none of the other facilities on the train could be used.
In other words, it was no different from the power being out.
Which meant no baths and no lights.
...That, I wanted fixed as soon as possible.
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2.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. This thing’s no good anymore, is it?”
As soon as Sian moved to the engine car, Mars’s tongue-clicking voice reached her first.
-Clack.
When she opened the door and stepped inside, Mars was inspecting the gray mana stones, while the dwarf Thomas was examining the engine.
Gray mana stones rolled across the floor.
They were the same kind Sian had just checked a moment ago.
“Hm? A high elf... no? What brings you here?”
Then Mars noticed Sian and tilted his head in surprise.
He seemed genuinely taken aback that she had come here.
“I’m looking for a way to get this train running again. I was originally headed to Sabna, but as you can see, your daughter ruined the fuel mana stones.”
“...Ugh, she really is just a troublemaker. Who on earth does she take after?”
When he heard my explanation, Mars made a vexed face. It looked like he was upset that his daughter had caused trouble for someone else.
He actually seemed like an upright person.
And Mars himself seemed to think of his daughter as nothing more than a troublesome brat.
Which, to be fair, she was.
“I told her not to mess with the Turk Merchant Guild, but puberty hit, and now she won’t listen to me either.”
“Does the Turk Merchant Guild get special treatment?”
Come to think of it, Mars had seemed to know about the Turk Merchant Guild even earlier.
I asked because I couldn’t figure out how a ghost trapped in the Grendel Mountains would know about them.
“Back when they were tunneling through the mountain, I helped out. If they’d just tried to bore through the Grendel Mountains on their own, my daughter would never have let it slide.”
Come to think of it, it really was strange.
Sure, modern excavators and other construction equipment could be replaced with magic, but even so, there were plenty of monsters around here—and a bratty troublemaker living in the area besides.
And yet they’d carved a tunnel through a place like this. That hadn’t been something you solved just by hiring adventurers.
In the end, it had only been possible because her father, Mars, held the line.
“I see. So that’s why she backed down earlier.”
And the reason that brat had retreated when I said I’d finish this, was because Mars had appeared and started scolding her then.
“Even so, she still doesn’t listen to me these days. When that bastard disappeared, I traveled the world looking for my daughter, even called for my wife up in the heavens and went all the way to seek out the Great Sage... and after all that, she still doesn’t know how good she had it. Tsk, tsk, tsk...”
Mars sighed over his miserable lot in life.
His story was certainly a grand one.
Traveling the world to find his daughter, going all the way to the heavens to call for his dragon wife.
And later even seeking out the elves’ village to meet the Great Sage—he could safely be called a truly remarkable adventurer.
And yet his one and only child, found after all that effort, was that kind of brat. No wonder he reacted like this.
Come to think of it, she was like some shut-in warlord.
She hadn’t once left the Grendel Mountains in over a hundred years, and rather than get married, she went around beating up anyone she saw and driving them off. What parent wouldn’t feel like their heart was collapsing in on itself?
I understood there was a reason for it, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Not even if he was dead and a ghost now.
Leaving Mars aside for the moment, Sian moved over to Thomas, who was inspecting the engine.
“Find anything out?”
Thomas quietly nodded.
She was focused on examining the train’s engine.
As expected of a dwarf, she seemed to know quite a bit about things involving magecraft engineering.
“This train’s body was built with thirty-year-old Aruk Mountain mithril, and it uses a hybrid operating system, custom-ordered from Hestos Forge...”
“...Alright, that’s enough.”
Of course, I never said all that knowledge would actually be useful.
“So can it be started again?”
“To run the engine, you naturally need a power source, and for that, you need specially processed mana stones...”
“Then there’s nothing we can do about it after all.”
Before she could start spewing a bunch of words I wouldn’t understand anyway, Sian cut the conversation short and stood up.
As expected, she hadn’t gained anything.
“...Haah, this means I can’t even bathe. For now, I’ll spend today on this train. We’ll be delayed a little, but there’s no helping it.”
At this point, the only thing to do was keep moving along the tracks as far as possible, and as for bathing, she’d have to find an oasis somewhere or check the ghost village side.
Still, if nothing else worked, using magic to imitate a bath might do, though water made from mana felt completely wrong somehow.
Would adding bath salts make it any better?
“...Hm. It’s full of sand.”
Wanting to salvage a little comfort, Sian had thought of sitting down and fixing her hair, but the sand piled around her made even that impossible.
The train had air-purifying filters and the like, but with the engine stopped, that function seemed to have gone with it.
Come to think of it, the engine was also what supplied mana to all the various magical devices on the train, and now that the engine itself had stopped, there was no way those barriers would still be working.
The mana used in the ritual is a different attribute. That said, I don’t really want to build an entirely new, complicated magical array for this.
-Tap, tap.
“Whew. You planning to spend the day in this sand-filled train?”
“What else can I do? Your daughter caused this mess. We were originally maintaining a decent level of cleanliness.”
With a sigh, Mars came over to Sian.
Even to a ghost, the train was clearly in a terrible state now.
Any place you put your hand on came away gritty with sand, and every step on the floor produced a crunching sound as pebbles grated against each other.
On top of that, a weak sandstorm was blowing outside, sending more and more sand in through the gaps by the windows and the open entrance.
The same went for the passenger car.
Sian had gone there earlier, thinking she might lie down for a while, only to give up the moment she saw the bed shedding sand in little cascades.
“Hmm, well, there’s no help for it. Would you perhaps come to my house? Since my daughter is the reason for this, I can put you up for the night.”
“Your house?”
As if apologizing for what his daughter had done, Mars asked whether Sian and the others would like to stay in his house.
For a moment, Sian thought, Wait, if it’s Mars’s house, isn’t that a ghost house? But she quickly corrected herself.
“Is it cleaner than here?”
“I can promise you that much. It’s also fairly spacious. There’s even a bathhouse filled with spring water flowing through the Grendel Mountains.”
“...How big is it?”
Just in case, Sian took the adventurers down from the train and headed toward the mountains.
Of course, she put up a barrier before leaving, in case anything tried to break into the train or a monster wandered in.
This should be fine.
Mars climbed the mountain with surprisingly steady steps for a ghost. The path was more well-kept than she’d expected, almost as if it had been made for sightseeing, so the trip was comfortable.
The Grendel Mountains, much like in the game, had many valleys, and the ground was covered in rustling, colorful fallen leaves.
Sian looked around and thought there wasn’t much difference from Novel Online.
But that was only true for the parts she knew.
“That’s my home right there. It’s also where I take care of the tombs buried in these Grendel Mountains.”
Before long, they reached their destination.
《~Neutral Stage~ The Mysterious Shrine of the Grendel Mountains》
There, in the valley of the Grendel Mountains, a vast shrine appeared before my eyes—a shrine to a dragon, hidden among the trees so completely that its form hadn’t been visible from outside.
It was so large it didn’t lose out to even a well-sized mansion.
No wonder Mars had been so full of confidence when he invited us.
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(The finished version will be in the next chapter.)
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