You Must Be Careful with Marriage (1)
You Must Be Careful with Marriage (1)
Holding a single torch while squeezing through a narrow gap between rocks was exhausting and incredibly difficult.
Where would it end? Would the gap narrow until I couldn't move at all? Would I suffocate halfway through? All kinds of thoughts kept flashing through my mind.
"Huff. Huff."
Fortunately, the ragged breathing behind me helped dispel some of the fear creeping over me, though it did nothing to ease the physical strain.
"Huff. Huff. Will both of them be all right?"
"Hoo... How much farther do we have to go?"
"..."
Adria's voice kept drifting through her heavy, ragged breathing.
Adria, following behind me, was in a similar situation. No, since she was a little bigger than me, it must have been even harder for her.
"Even a younger kid like me isn't complaining, so hang in there a little longer."
"Hmph, you're basically an old man in a kid's body..."
Though she grumbled, she seemed to draw some strength from my words.
After a while, she seemed to get a little more used to moving through the narrow cave.
Her heavy breathing subsided, and she began talking more often instead.
Was she scared?
"Is this the kind of thing you have to go through to become a knight? Seeing Sir Hugo and Bianca, I've lost my confidence."
I deeply sympathized with her.
Well, in a stable country without war like the one in my past life, soldiers or knights would be little more than civil servants. But this world was far more terrifying than I'd expected.
In my past life, political warfare meant politicians grabbing each other by the collar in parliament. Around here, not only did they literally chop off their opponents' heads, but they also led armies to invade just to kill their opponents' daughters.
But it was precisely because this was the kind of world it was that one had to build up strength all the more.
"If you hadn't learned the sword, you wouldn't even have been able to run away."
"Is that so? But Alex, you didn't have to come with me."
'That's because you dragged me along.'
"More importantly, how did you know I was learning the sword?"
"When Young Lord Simon... came to our estate, the knight commander who accompanied him saw me practicing the sword and told me."
Don't tell me the rumor about "The Hidden Blade of the Duchy" had come from the knight commander!
He always looked at me with disapproval, yet he'd gone to the marquisate and spread such weird rumors...
I thought he'd gotten a little better lately, but apparently not.
Once she started talking, Adria began pouring out her story.
"Suddenly getting engaged, taking refuge at my fiancé's house not long after, and now running away like this..."
Maybe it was because the cave was dark. Her voice grew increasingly subdued.
"I learned the sword because I wanted to live differently from other noble ladies, but at this rate, there's no difference. No, has it gotten worse?"
As she went on, it turned into a full-on vent.
I understood, but I had no intention of listening to her complain endlessly. I was a bodyguard, not a therapist.
Just as I was about to find a way to shut her up—
Whoo.
A faint sound echoed from up ahead.
Fwoo.
Then a gentle breeze ruffled our hair.
The air blowing toward us wasn't the stale air we'd been breathing until now.
"Oh? It's wind!"
Adria noticed it immediately, too.
"It must be the exit!"
Her dark tone brightened in an instant.
The two of us eagerly picked up our pace.
The farther we went, the more we could feel the fresh air.
Though there was still no sign of light, the fresh air alone gave us hope that the passage connected to the outside.
After a short while, we escaped the narrow, continuous cave passage.
I raised the torch to inspect our surroundings.
"It's not the outside?"
Just as she'd said, we hadn't emerged outside.
Still, we weren't in a cave completely blocked by rocks, either.
The walls, floor, and ceiling weren't rough rock, but rectangular stone blocks fitted together.
"An underground stone chamber?"
A large iron door stood in the center of one wall, and a massive coffin rested on an altar in the middle of the chamber.
Adria's eyes sparkled as she looked at the coffin.
"Could it be a tomb from the Old Empire era?"
I didn't know if it was from the Old Empire era, but judging by the coffin, it was definitely a tomb.
Since we had to pass the coffin to reach the iron door anyway, I held up the torch and cautiously walked toward it.
"Are we the first to discover this?"
Adria asked from behind me, her voice full of expectation.
As expected, she really wasn't suited to being a marquis's daughter.
Whenever I saw Adria get excited at the sight of ruins and tombs, I was reminded of a game character from my past life who ran around raiding tombs with a pair of pistols.
"There's no way we're the first."
I shook my head.
There was no way some miraculous stroke of luck would just fall into my lap.
We were merely following a path someone else had already trodden. Since there were no forks in the road, we couldn't possibly be the first.
The coffin lid had also been pushed aside.
It seemed a previous visitor had already raided the tomb.
"Looks like they were a tomb raider, not a hero."
Inside the coffin, only scraps of clothing and fragments of bone remained.
"Seriously. They took everything."
Adria lamented after looking inside the coffin.
"Maybe there was nothing there to begin with. It's been in the coffin for so long that it probably would've been useless anyway."
Since it was an ancient relic, it might have been worth some money. But seeing how even ruins had been neglected during the Great War, making big money off it was out of the question.
And since this was from the Great War era, it might actually have been more of a nuisance to deal with...
"Why would it be useless? The weapons and armor famous as divine relics are all items from the Old Empire. The divine relics used by the heroes during the Great War were like that, too. They're things that can never be made again after the fall of the Old Empire."
Lost technology? Is this a world where lost technology just pours out of ruins?!
Ugh, I need the internet.
As expected, the books in the study and the lessons from the scribe alone left me woefully short on information.
"Ah, there's something like a keyhole here. Is there a mechanism?"
Adria examined the inside of the coffin a little more and discovered a hole pierced through the bottom.
Above the hole, which looked like a short slit about the length of a finger, the same pattern we had seen on the door and the cave entrance was marked in miniature.
"It looks like a sword would fit perfectly if you stabbed it in..."
Adria examined the hole from several angles.
"Then could the sword buried with the corpse be the key? If you push the sword into the hole, the mechanism will trigger, and a hidden treasure chest will appear, right?"
She rambled on, letting her imagination run wild.
"The person who came before us couldn't see this hole because of the corpse and only took the sword. Then, as time passed and the corpse rotted away, we were able to see the hole."
Clap. Clap. Clap. I applauded her in my mind.
Lady Adria had graduated from the King of Tomb Raiders to become a Great Detective.
I had a mountain of counterarguments, but I grabbed her arm and headed toward the iron door.
"Now is not the time for that. We have to move quickly."
"...Yeah."
Though she answered cheerfully, Adria's hands were trembling slightly.
The sacrifices of others, the events she'd been dragged into, and even what lay ahead.
Adria, still just a teenage girl, was terrified right now.
But we couldn't just stop because we were scared.
Creak.
Fortunately, the iron door opened easily.
It didn't seem like a door designed to open easily, but it didn't stop us from going out that way.
"So this is the original entrance. The path we took was just a bypass created by a crack in the rocks."
I spoke up on purpose, but she didn't answer. She still didn't seem to have pulled herself together.
I decided not to dwell on it, either.
The cave continued beyond the iron door. Fortunately, it was reasonably spacious this time, so moving through it wasn't difficult.
Unlike the previous passage, this cave was home to various animals.
Large, blind rats, moles with massive claws, and insects as thick as my forearm. They were all creatures I'd never seen before.
Fortunately, there were no beasts that Adria and I couldn't handle, but in this cave, I truly felt for the first time that I had come to another world.
After traveling through the cave for a long while, we finally reached a place where there was light.
We raised our heads.
The sky was visible above a vertical, cylindrical wall.
"It's a well."
"An abandoned well."
We immediately began climbing the walls of the well.
Though we were still young, we had strength and skills that surpassed those of average adults.
Wedging our fingers and feet between the dirt walls and stones, we climbed straight up.
A moment later, we safely emerged outside.
We were covered in dirt, but neither of us cared as we basked in the warm sunlight.
The area around the well was dense with trees.
Though old house foundations could be glimpsed here and there, the forest seemed to have swallowed the village long ago.
"Is this a village forgotten by everyone?"
I couldn't tell whether it was a village destroyed during the Great War or one that had already been abandoned before then, but it was certainly a village no one remembered.
If it was here, it would certainly be hard to know that a cave leading to an ancient tomb lay inside an abandoned well.
"At least one person must have known."
But finding out who that was at this point would be difficult. Not that I had any intention of looking.
Right now, we had to rejoin the domain's army as quickly as possible.
"If this is a forest near the fortress, it must be Onsu Forest. Since it's west of the fortress, we should head northeast."
"Yeah! Let's go quickly."
Adria replied energetically. Fortunately, she seemed to have snapped out of it.
We brushed the dirt off our bodies and cautiously made our way forward.
By now, the domain's army might have driven off the enemies and be searching for us, but we still had to be careful.
I thought about hiding in the forest until the domain's army found us, but we weren't prepared at all to spend the night in the woods.
Honestly, since the probability of encountering enemies was almost zero, it was better to get out of the forest as quickly as possible.
But, as expected, probability wasn't to be trusted.
How could I forget there was a game where, even with a 99% chance to hit, you missed every single time?
"Hoho, looks like I caught you this time."
At the sight of the mercenary who had suddenly appeared, I cursed the god of dice.
"I was truly surprised. To think there was a cave leading all the way here. If it weren't for my ability, I would have missed you."
Damn, she tracked us with an ability? Then I take back the curse.
While she was speaking, I looked around, but there was no way out.
Before we knew it, mercenaries had surrounded us.
As I scanned our surroundings, the female mercenary held up a handkerchief between two fingers and waved it.
"How did you get my handkerchief..."
Seeing it, Adria let out a groan.
Adria's handkerchief?
Was the handkerchief the medium for tracking us? Chasing us down with a handkerchief. What a doglike ability.
"Someone close to you, young lady, provided it. Thanks to that, we were able to keep chasing you."
"I have never been close to anyone who steals my handkerchiefs!"
"No way, he's the one who recently became the new master of the Hierro Marquisate, you know?"
The female mercenary delivered this unbelievable news with a smile.
The corpses of mercenaries and domain soldiers were scattered around the fortress.
The Duke frowned at the sight of the battlefield, something he hadn't seen in a long time.
"Most of the enemies outside the fortress have been dealt with. Some mercenaries have fled, and we're currently pursuing them."
A knight beside the Duke was reporting on the battle.
"What about underground?"
"The Knight Commander went in himself. You should hear the results soon."
The Duke nodded.
Simon was nowhere to be seen. The Duke had sent him back to the estate with the soldiers.
The Duke gazed at the fortress.
After hearing that the enemy's main force had gone underground in pursuit of the children, everyone had already given up hope.
Although the Knight Commander had gone in personally with the intention of at least getting proper revenge, rescuing the children would be difficult.
The Duke still held on to a sliver of hope, but his mind was cluttered with other thoughts.
Why on earth had they sent a force so large it was practically an army?
He couldn't understand why they had sent so many people of knight-level strength just to kill a single young girl.
Fortunately, his curiosity was satisfied before long.
"Urgent news!"
A messenger arriving on horseback resolved his question.
"The Hierro Marquisate mansion has been burned down! The entire family has been annihilated! Count Lapalma led his knights there and installed the Marquis's surviving bastard son as the new head of the family!"
"So that was why they wanted to kill Adria?"
The Duke furrowed his brow.
They weren't just trying to stop an engagement.
They intended to swallow up the entire marquisate territory.