Obtaining the Antidote (1)
“Sniff! Orlando! Oh, Orlando! How could you leave your father behind like this! Sniff……”
Lord Roton spent every night drowning in grief. Already frail in both body and mind, the shock of losing his son had pushed him to the brink of madness. Nirgof approached him quietly and whispered like a devil.
“Lord Orlando’s death is the fault of the Lion Heart Unit.”
Nirgof ensnared the lord with a sly, wicked smile.
“If they had never come to our territory in the first place, this cruel sorrow would never have bloomed. It is all their doing. Those outsiders brought misfortune to our land.”
“Those damned Lion Heart bastards deserve divine punishment……!”
Lord Roton clenched his fists and trembled. Nirgof’s words sank into his ears and pressed down on his heart. Every single one of them felt undeniably true.
“Drive the Lion Heart Unit out of here at once. Lord Orlando, watching from heaven, would surely wish for the same. He would say this.”
Nirgof mimicked Orlando’s voice.
“Father! If those Lion Heart scoundrels hadn’t caused such a ruckus, I would still be alive!”
“Kuhk! My son!”
Lord Roton burst into tears. To his ears, Nirgof’s performance sounded exactly like the spirit of his dead son speaking through him. Nirgof, knowing this, continued the act.
“I deeply regret not listening to Nirgof, the loyal vassal who warned me to stay away from the Lion Heart!”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I’m truly sorry! I should have listened to you!”
In his deranged state, Lord Roton clung to Nirgof and apologized repeatedly.
“Father! Please borrow Nirgof’s wisdom and drive those demons from this land!”
“I understand! I understand, my son! I will do exactly that! I will only trust Nirgof’s words!”
Nirgof smiled inwardly. Lord Roton had completely lost his mind and was now fully under his control. All that remained was to use the lord to deal with the Lion Heart Unit.
“As Lord Orlando said, listen to my words from now on.”
“Of course! If you have a good plan, tell me at once! We must drive those Lion Heart bastards out immediately! Ugh! It feels like hives are breaking out all over my body! Uuuuugh! These hives won’t stop until they’re gone! Uuuuugh!”
Lord Roton scratched his skin so violently that wounds appeared on his arms and chest. Nirgof frowned at the mad behavior and stopped him with a hand.
“Please calm yourself, my lord.”
“Quickly! Save me! My whole body itches!”
“I have a plan. First, calm down and listen.”
Lord Roton stopped scratching and looked at Nirgof.
“H-how should we proceed……?”
“We must drastically weaken their forces. If they lack supplies and manpower, they will have no choice but to return to the capital.”
“Should I have the soldiers kill them?”
“That would be disastrous. If our hostility toward the Lion Heart becomes obvious, we will be the ones in trouble. The Wittelsbach Knights and His Majesty stand behind them. We must proceed in secret, without anyone noticing.”
Nirgof curled his lips upward.
“We will use parasites.”
***
Early in the morning, Sinclair came to the house. Her expression was grave. She was breathing heavily from running, and it was clear something serious had happened. She said she had an urgent request for our mercenary group and asked me to come with her to the Lion Heart headquarters right away.
I washed up quickly, put on the clothes Adelia had bought for me, and followed her. When we arrived at the Lion Heart headquarters, the building was strangely empty. It was just past seven in the morning, yet none of the soldiers who should have been on duty were in sight.
When we reached Adelia’s office, she rose abruptly from her desk the moment she saw us, her face heavy with worry.
“I need your help.”
She explained that most of the soldiers had been infected by parasites and were bedridden. They had lost consciousness and were hovering between life and death. Only Adelia, Sinclair, and a few officers remained unaffected. The cause was the beef steak served for breakfast. The undercooked meat had been laced with a massive number of Restsitoma Worm eggs. Every soldier who ate it had fallen unconscious.
Adelia and Sinclair had avoided the disaster because they never ate the food served to the soldiers. They always had their three meals at high-class restaurants nearby.
“As expected, the food the subordinates eat is dangerous. It doesn’t even taste good, and they use cheap ingredients, so it’s filthy.”
“You’re right about that.”
Adelia and Sinclair both sighed in relief, grateful they had narrowly escaped such a terrible fate.
“Still, no matter how poor the ingredients were, finding this many parasites at once feels suspicious.”
Adelia continued. After all the soldiers lost consciousness following breakfast, she immediately arrested the head chef and cooks who handled meals for both the Blue Arrow Unit and the Lion Heart Unit. During interrogation, it was revealed that the Blue Arrow Unit had been served bread and cheese that morning, while the Lion Heart Unit—paying a higher meal allowance—had received the more expensive beef steak. The chefs claimed they had thoroughly inspected the raw beef when it arrived from the slaughterhouse the previous day and found nothing unusual. They all denied any knowledge of how the parasite eggs had gotten in.
“This is why I called you.”
“Please listen carefully to Lady Adelia’s words.”
I took a sip of the tea the maid had brought and nodded silently at Sinclair, who kept chiming in after every one of Adelia’s sentences.
“The situation is serious.”
“It’s no ordinary crisis.”
Adelia explained that the soldiers’ stomachs now contained Restsitoma Worm eggs. The eggs would absorb the host’s life force and hatch in four days. In other words, sixty-eight infected Lion Heart members would all die in four days.
The situation was dire, and Adelia had no way to help. She couldn’t cut the soldiers open, and even if she did, finding and removing dozens of eggs scattered throughout their organs would be nearly impossible. Fortunately, there was one solution. To kill the Restsitoma Worm eggs inside the body, a special medicine was needed—and that medicine was with the Steel Destroyer Vincentius’s unit, currently deployed in the neighboring territory.
When the nine knights had originally been dispatched from the capital, Vincentius’s “Teresa” unit had been sent not only to suppress bandits but also to serve as a medical support unit for the other forces. It was staffed with many medics, military doctors, and priests. Their special mission was to respond immediately to outbreaks of cholera, plague, or other infectious diseases, as well as biochemical terrorism or mass curses by black mages, eliminating the source and treating the infected.
“So you want me to go there and back?”
“Time is short. It will be faster if you go yourself.”
“What about you two?”
“Ninety percent of the soldiers are infected, so we’re short on investigators. Sinclair and I will focus on uncovering the full truth of this incident.”
“We’re short on hands, so we have no choice but to use you.”
Sinclair cut in.
“All you have to do is bring back the medicine. It shouldn’t be difficult. We’ll discuss the reward with Secretary Kelly and make sure it’s generous. You’ll do it, right?”
Adelia and Sinclair both fixed their eyes on my lips. After a moment of thought, I spoke.
“The soldiers only have four days left. As far as I know, even riding a horse, it takes three days to reach the neighboring territory of Nublang. Are you telling me to fly there?”
I spread my palms and asked in disbelief. Adelia answered as if it were no problem at all.
“Given the gravity of the situation, I am willing to lend you my personal steed.”
“The horse you ride? Is it fast?”
“You should feel honored. It is the finest horse in our kingdom, of the noblest bloodline. It can run a thousand li by day and eight hundred li by night. Lending such an exceptional steed to someone of your lowly status is a difficult decision for Lady Adelia—much like forcing herself to drink garlic soup, which she despises most.”
Sinclair added, shooting me a jealous glare.
“Even I, who assists Lady Adelia most closely, have never ridden it. Yet someone like you gets to ride it first. It feels as though my beloved has been stolen away.”
“……”
Unable to think of a reply, I simply closed my mouth. Adelia shrugged with a triumphant air.
“It bothers me that someone as lowly as Hyunwoo will sit upon my steed’s back, but it is better than losing my soldiers. This crisis threatens the very existence of the Lion Heart Unit. I will set aside personal feelings for now. I will think only of the unit.”
“You are sacrificing the small for the greater good!”
Sinclair’s eyes sparkled with admiration.
“If the bedridden soldiers heard your words, they would gain great strength and rise up to defeat the parasites within them. That was truly an inspiring statement.”
“Really? Hehe, I didn’t even practice it. How strange.”
The two of them played off each other perfectly.