Cantatien and Evian
Two-person room, they said — but the moment they stepped inside, there was no mistaking it. This was a single room with a second bed crammed into it, nothing more.
The floor space couldn't be hidden or fudged, so it stayed exactly as small as it had been, and the forced addition of an extra bed made even standing in the room feel like a negotiation. Two beds instead of one, and not even pushed together — each one bolted against a facing wall, so at least sleeping wouldn't be a problem. That much was the lone mercy.
In exchange, the shower was purpose-built and ready to use, which made it precisely the kind of room Yona had asked for.
This feels weirdly familiar somehow...
The thought crossed Alec's mind as he looked the place over. That sense of déjà vu pulled an old scene up from the back of his memory. The only difference was that Rubina had been there then and wasn't now — everything else about the situation was exactly the same.
"What are you standing around for? Unpack."
Yona had already started pulling clothes out of her pack, sorting them into piles — things that needed washing, things that could wait, things to throw out, even the dishes they hadn't managed to clean. She glanced back at Alec as she worked.
Out on an expedition there was no chance to deal with any of this, so whenever they took an inn, it all piled up at once. Some adventurers did their own laundry, but most slipped a few coins to the inn's servants and let them handle it — which was exactly why gathering everything in advance like this made life easier.
"Ah, right. Yeah. On it."
At Yona's prodding, Alec quietly set down his own pack and started sorting through his things. Once they'd called a servant over and handed off the laundry and dirty dishes along with a couple of coins, the unpacking was finally done.
The laundry wouldn't come back until tomorrow evening at the earliest, which meant they were stuck at this inn until then whether they liked it or not.
"Ahh, it's soft. This is the good stuff."
After days of sleeping on bare, unyielding ground with nothing but a bedroll between them and the dirt, her whole body had been aching to the point of protest. Sinking into a mattress stuffed plump as a sack of straw husks, she finally felt like a living creature again.
Yona sprawled across the bed and stretched until her joints popped. Even through the window, the noise of the city filtered in — voices chattering and bustle rising from every direction. The festival wasn't until the day after tomorrow, but the crowds had already slipped into festival spirits, savoring the fun ahead of time. She could hear it in every shout and laugh.
Then Yona bolted upright on the mattress.
Alec, who had been half-sitting on his own bed, flinched at the sudden movement and stared at her.
"Baldy, let's go eat. I'm starving."
"Uh — yeah. Sure. Let's."
Alec smiled, an expression that would have looked awkward to absolutely anyone watching.
"Come on, hurry up. Hurry."
Yona reached out first, took his hand, and pulled. Letting himself be drawn up by that grip, Alec rose to his feet, and the two of them walked out with their hands naturally intertwined — down the stairs to the first floor, where they claimed a table and sat.
"Looks like there's an adventurers' guild here too."
Yona murmured it to Alec as she scanned the room. He'd already been doing the same survey before she said a word — the attire, the speech, there were quite a few patrons who screamed adventurer at a glance.
If anything, Yona and Alec looked like the tidy ones, because the rest of the crowd was a sorry sight — gear poorly maintained, clothes rumpled and stained. Judging by all of it, they were almost certainly low-ranked adventurers.
"I'm telling you, I saw it. You know the pond up north, coming down from Lizardden? The whole thing had gone pitch black."
"You mean that big pond?"
"Yes! I saw it with my own two eyes, I swear. You know — the one the lizardmen treasure as the Sanctuary of the Water God!"
"Why would it turn black?"
"How should I know, you ass."
"You must've seen wrong. Ink got in your eyeballs, that's why everything looks black to you."
The table around them roared with laughter. Only the man who'd been insisting in dead earnest went scarlet, stewing in humiliation, his face twisting with no idea where to direct his outrage.
"Humans can't even set foot in that place. How exactly did you get in? Make some sense, will you."
"That's my whole point! A place humans can't enter, and I got in anyway! And the water was black!"
"This gentleman's still drunk, apparently. You're just embarrassed because you got knocked out up north and had to be rescued, that's all. Drink your ale. Drink."
"This is driving me insane. I'm telling you it's real!"
"Then which is it — the tavern's inside or outside? Now drink before I make you."
Not a single soul in the room gave the man's story the time of day.
The sacred pond of the lizardmen — deep, deep water that the flow from Lizardden ran through on its way down. It was a place where blue-green water always shimmered and swelled, a place that never flooded, never dried, holding its waterline steady through any drought and any deluge. No one alive believed that water could have turned black.
But Yona couldn't laugh it off.
Neither could Alec.
They had already lived through any number of phenomena that everyone else ignored and refused to believe. And one of those phenomena was currently residing in Yona's left arm — a demon, bound into her very flesh.
Maybe this is another storm brewing, Yona thought, and swallowed dryly.
Adventurers were, at their core, people moved by money. Money came before every other value they held.
If Vigrind stood up and warned them about a disaster looming on the horizon, they wouldn't grasp the seriousness of it for an instant unless it appeared right in front of their eyes — and even then, the response of her profession's adversaries would be, And how much are you paying? That was simply what the word "adventurer" meant.
"Can't the cathedral spare some funding?"
Vigrind held up the application papers — still painfully blank — and sighed.
Across from her, Bishop Pobi sighed back, his enormous bulk sunk into the sofa as though the cushions were swallowing him. It was a deeply theatrical sigh, exaggerated beyond all honesty, and timed precisely for Vigrind's benefit.
"That's easier said than done, Saintess. As you well know, the Evian diocese is absurdly small. The kingdom it belongs to, Lucasia, borders the Catus Empire, so it's perpetually on a war footing, and the Marea Republic is forever left holding the rear. Asking a diocese this modest to produce funding enough to hire adventurers is truly a difficult matter."
Had Yona been in this room, she would have slammed back — why don't you cut down on your own food budget instead — before he'd even finished the sentence. It was that insufferable a tone. And obvious as the excuse was, Vigrind had no rebuttal to offer.
She was naive to the ways of the world, and having grown up barely ever setting foot outside Evian, she could only take Pobi's words at face value. Perhaps it really was as he said.
The mist that had appeared in the Catacombs had dealt heavy losses to the adventurers' guild as well. So the guild had put up funding of its own, and that subsidy had convinced a handful of adventurers to volunteer for the expedition.
But after Ludwig interviewed every one of them, he'd failed the entire lot.
Bringing these people along would only mean more bodies to carry out, had been his verdict, and Vigrind hadn't offered a word of objection.
So there she sat, sighing at the cathedral's hypocrisy — how it would absolutely not tolerate any damage to the treasures in the Catacombs, yet couldn't bring itself to produce a single coin of funding.
At this rate, I won't have the face to see the Hero...
Left as things were, the Catacomb expedition would end up being Ludwig, Vigrind, the cathedral's priests, and the cathedral knights, and nothing more. Whatever waited down there was no ordinary monster, that much was certain. She guessed it wasn't yet at the level of a demon — but that was only a guess. Nobody knew what was actually down there.
The Hero is strong, but he isn't invincible. If I could be even the smallest help...
As the Saintess — as the companion meant to stand closest to the Hero's side — she had to prove herself useful somehow. The thought had Vigrind in its grip, and she could only resent Pobi, fobbing her off with excuse after excuse.
"Oh my, Saintess. You were here? I've been searching everywhere for you."
Without so much as a knock, Ludwig flung the door open and strode in.
Pobi glared at him, his eyes brimming with irritation — but the glare melted away in the space of a blink, like snow under morning sun, leaving only a face full of welcome.
"H-His Holiness the Hero, he simply barged—"
The priest who'd been posted to guard the door had apparently tried, in his own way, to stop him, and now stood frozen in the doorway in a half-crouched, flustered posture. Catching Pobi's eye, he hastily straightened himself up, dipped his head in a bow, and retreated, pulling the door shut behind him.
"I wanted you to be the first to hear, Saintess — though as it happens, this works out even better. With the Bishop here too."
Without waiting for so much as the Bishop's permission, Ludwig dropped heavily onto the sofa. Even as he sat, he angled himself, almost casually, so that his body blocked Pobi's line of sight to Vigrind.
"What news, Hero? For you to rush in like this, it must surely be good news."
Pobi watched in silence as Ludwig crossed one leg over the other with practiced ease. And he watched in silence as half-dried mud dropped in clumps from the man's boots, staining the red carpet.
"Oh, it's good news all right. The cathedral — which ought to be giving its fullest, most unstinting support to me, Ludwig the Hero, and Saintess Vigrind — has produced not a single coin of funding. But in its place, Viscount Cartein has lent us his personal knight order."
"Wh-what — is that true?"
Pobi very nearly shouted the words what nonsense right in the man's face.
His withholding of support from the Hero and the Saintess had been entirely deliberate. He hadn't said as much to Viscount Cartein outright, of course — but given how long the two of them had exchanged views and moved in step with each other, Cartein could hardly be hoping for the Hero and Saintess to distinguish themselves either.
And now Cartein had handed over his knights. To Pobi, the news landed like a bolt from a clear sky. One thing, at least, was certain: the infamy of starving the Hero and the Saintess of support now rested on Pobi's shoulders alone.
"It is true. I told them that if this couldn't be resolved within Evian, I would have no choice but to request aid from the Kingdom of Lucasia itself. And if I appeared before Lucasia — a kingdom growling at the Catus border — and demanded troops... well, that would deal a serious blow to the Capathia Empire's security, wouldn't it?"
"And... after you said that, the Viscount lent you his knights?"
"He did."
Ludwig propped a boot up on the table outright, mud still dripping onto its surface. Pobi no longer had the composure to care about such things.
"Such a devoted patriot, that man. I merely mentioned that both the Purifying Knights Nation and the Kingdom of Lucasia — our checks against Catus — might be weakened, and he surrendered his entire knight order on the spot. Ah, a patriot, truly a patriot."
"I-I see."
Pobi could not understand Ludwig.
Or to be precise, he could not understand how this foreigner knew the political landscape of the northern continent at all. The Catus Empire and the Capathia Empire, locked in a snarling standoff at each other's throats — and the Kingdom of Lucasia and the Purifying Knights Nation positioned at the very tip of that blade. How, in the world, did he grasp any of it?
Pobi could not make sense of it.
"And it's all thanks to our Saintess here. I did exactly as she instructed me, and look how it turned out. She's so brilliant, it's as if she's reading the whole grand design before it unfolds."
Ludwig said it with his shoulders squared in pride.
Pobi's gaze swung to Vigrind — and Vigrind, her throat gone tight, could not manage a single word.
It was true that she had been the one to explain the rough shape of the continent's inter-nation relations to Ludwig. But it had been exactly and only what the cathedral taught — nothing more than that.
That he had taken such meager instruction, understood it, and parlayed it into actual military support left Vigrind utterly flustered. And yet denying it outright felt somehow wrong too, so she pressed her lips shut and said nothing at all.