Peep! Peep!
Following the soldier who had styled himself our guide, we rode a carriage to the lord's castle.
After wandering for what felt like forever through halls stuffed with pointless ornamentation, he finally pointed to an elaborately decorated door somewhere near what I guessed was the top of the castle.
"This way."
He told us Frederica was inside, that we should just go in — and then he vanished.
"…Ren. You're sure this is okay?"
"I followed you this far, but… thinking about what she looked like earlier…"
Huey and Lucy hesitated at the threshold, as if opening the door itself made them nervous.
"It's a little late for regrets now that we're here. Just open it."
Besides, if she'd truly meant us harm, she would have come after us while we were still at the inn.
"Ren is right. Please open it quickly, Master."
"…Fine. Why is it always me who has to do this stuff."
Huey grumbled under his breath, looking thoroughly unsettled as he pushed the door open. Hoping to put him even a little more at ease, I stepped through first.
"Don't worry."
Creeeak — thunk.
The workshop door shut behind us.
"Frederica's got a nasty personality, sure, but she wouldn't just attack us out of nowhe— PEEEEEEEP!!"
Something snared my ankle without warning. Before I could react, I was hanging upside down from the ceiling.
"Tch — a trap?!"
"Ren!!"
I thrashed desperately, but the white threads only tightened, winding around my whole body. I hadn't felt so much as a ripple of mana.
"Damn it. Mechanical trigger, then."
"Ufufu. And who exactly is calling whose personality nasty?"
I was still clicking my tongue at a trap so precisely aimed at me when a familiar mana signature brushed my senses, followed by Frederica's voice.
"Well then — welcome to Frederica's doll workshop, everyone."
Her tone was bright and cheerful, nothing like before. I twisted my dangling body toward the sound — and found myself staring into a bizarre, aggressively pink space so saturated it threatened to melt my brain.
…And, while I was at it, at Frederica herself, lounging arrogantly on a pink sofa in the center of the room.
"Ah, right. Ren? If you try to get free by lighting up that weird fire from earlier, I'm going to be very cross with you."
"Then how about you just let me down."
"I don't wanna. Not when you're still thinking about catching me off guard like before."
"Urgh."
"Honestly. Even if you don't die, you attack way too readily. It still hurts, you know."
Frederica's mana unfurled to blanket the entire workshop. The way she was even raising a barrier suggested she had something serious to discuss.
"Ahem. At any rate, nothing said in here will leak outside, so please speak freely."
"Uh… so, basically…"
"Could someone first explain what exactly is going on here…?"
Huey and Luciella stood frozen, looking completely lost in the face of an atmosphere so different from before. I was just as bewildered, so I asked Frederica with a thoroughly dubious expression.
"…Don't tell me that whole thing earlier was an act?"
"I was genuinely startled, you know. I nearly got the lord suspicious of me, Ren."
Since when did she care about keeping a client happy?
"Wow, that face. For the record, I had the captain's full permission for this."
"The captain's?"
"Do you even know this lord's name?"
The lord of Swinford…
"Nope. No idea."
"Of course you don't. Earl Harold Swinford. One of Vista's founding heroes, no less. The man whose face you kicked earlier."
Frederica looked at me like I was beyond help. I pictured the narrow-eyed idiot who'd gone flying after I booted him in the face.
"So what?"
"You're insane."
"Wouldn't it have been perfectly reasonable for your head to come off right then and there?"
"Right?! That's the normal way to think about it!! Do you have any idea how hard I worked calming the lord down after that?!"
Huey and Luciella's reactions only fueled Frederica's sense of genuine injustice, and she raised her voice accordingly.
"Augh, honestly. At least you two are nothing like that idiot. Here — I've prepared tea."
A moment later, little bear dolls set steaming cups of tea on the only white table in the entire pink room.
"Huh?"
"Master. Didn't you say you saw a moving doll earlier?"
Huey and Luciella stared in surprise. This was going to need an explanation.
"Fufu. Behold and be amazed!"
"She's a dollmaker."
Ah. We talked over each other.
Frederica had struck an exaggerated pose as she rose from her seat — and then froze solid mid-gesture. I broke into a cold sweat watching her.
"…Ren."
She lifted her right hand toward me and clenched it into a fist.
"Guehk."
Instantly, the threads cocooning me bit deeper into my body.
"Sigh. These children are all ones I made myself. If you saw one of them in the streets earlier, then yes — you saw correctly."
Three tiny bear dolls waved cutely at Huey and Luciella. …They looked adorable, sure, but knowing those things could tear a real bear apart with their bare hands made the cuteness a little hard to appreciate.
"Hmm. Huey, Luciella — it seems the two of you have something you'd like to ask me?"
As the bear dolls returned to their places, Frederica beamed and turned the question on them.
"You… know our names."
"Yes. I already received your information through the captain. Gold-rank adventurers, I hear."
"…I overheard people talking in the city. Today's attack failed, but you've been assaulting people for some time now."
Huey finally brought up the topic he'd been unable to raise in the earlier tension, staring at Frederica with a face that refused to smile.
"Yes. I needed to stay on the lord's good side to extract information from him."
"That doesn't mean—!"
"Even so, I was careful to keep fatalities to a minimum, and I made sure everyone received proper treatment and compensation."
A proper letter of apology for the injured, a generous sum of gold, and healing potions on top of it. Frederica shrugged at me as she said it.
"This time I honestly spent more out of my own pocket than I earned from the job. I'll be wringing every coin back out of the captain later, though."
As she spoke, she parted her robe and drew something from between her breasts.
Ah. That.
"…Hey. You actually used that?"
"What choice did I have? It was the only recovery potion I had on me."
"If Beatrice gets mad, I'm not covering for you."
"Urgh. Let's just say it was the captain's fault."
"What is that thing, anyway?"
"It appears to be some kind of expensive potion."
Huey and Luciella eyed the transparent vial with its mysterious, red-glowing liquid sloshing inside. She'd already used half of it.
"Ever heard of an Elixir?"
"What?"
"Elixir? What's that?"
An Elixir. Simply put… a miracle cure?
If a potion accelerates the healing of a wound so it mends faster, an Elixir is a mystical medicine said to regenerate even severed limbs that are simply gone.
"One bottle of what she's holding right now could buy this entire castle we're standing in."
"…Just who the hell are you people."
"Good heavens."
"Sniff. That blunt little girl finally gave me a gift, and I was treasuring it so carefully…"
The part where Beatrice had handed one bottle to every member so nobody would die, only to realize afterward that Frederica hadn't needed one and sulked about it — yeah, better leave that unsaid.
"Anyway. The point is, I was extracting information from the lord on the captain's orders."
"Since when do you actually listen to the captain?"
"Hmm? But he said he'd send Ren to whoever brought back the most useful information first."
What did she just say?
"He said the current Ren is toy-level weak, so I could play with her as much as I wanted."
"…That old man, I swear."
Ugh. His grudges really did last forever.
"Tch. Whatever. Just tell me about that thing they found in the southern desert."
"Hmm… how much did the captain already tell you?"
At Frederica's question, I repeated the information I'd received from the captain earlier, word for word.
"He didn't leave anything out. It's exactly what you heard from him. And as it happens, new information came in today."
"Great. New information or not — are you planning to let me down anytime soon?"
"Hmm… well, I've finished explaining, so."
In the next instant, the threads binding my body vanished.
Hold on a second.
Until just now, I had been wound up so tightly I couldn't even tell what position I was in. So what happens when the threads holding you up disappear all at once?
"Peep!?"
…What happens is you fall. Headfirst.
"Pfft—!"
"P-peep… I heard it earlier too, but… pff."
I'd honestly expected her to lower me properly.
"Ahaha! Peep — that's just too cute! Aah, the captain is so unfair. Hogging a Ren this adorable all to himself this whole time—!"
I was so mortified I couldn't even bring myself to get up, covering my face with my wings — and Frederica barreled into me anyway, nuzzling her cheek against mine without the slightest concern for the fact that I was face-down on the floor.
"Haa… honestly, you're so cute I could just eat you up."
"PEEEEEEEP!!"
Terrified that she might actually eat me in more ways than one if I stayed put, I threw every ounce of strength I had into escaping her arms. In the end I was caught again, and only after I'd been settled onto the sofa in Frederica's lap did we finally get to hear about the new information that had come in.
…That aside.
Why did my scream sound like that?