Three Shall Come
Just like Present, Afterglow Fortress was in the thick of cleaning up the battlefield.
They might have been undead, but every last one of them had been a powerful high-rank monster or a ferocious beast in life. Thanks to the eternal frost of the region, there was nothing from head to toe that went to waste. The rest of the corpses were no different. Bodies stripped clean of everything useful were thrown into the bonfires and cremated under the prayers of priests who had not yet collapsed from exhaustion.
"Hah… Looking down from above it was nauseating, but this much is actually pretty—"
"Last time we got new armor. This time maybe we get new weapons?"
"Highlander who could not return home… you have come back to your soil—"
"Rally up, damn it! Monsters caught the scent of the corpses!"
From noble knights down to the lowest servants and maids, no one was exempt from the labor. Battlefield cleanup was traditionally the work of the lower ranks, and Afterglow Fortress was no exception. Even so, there simply were not enough hands. The undead horde had been far too numerous, and the corpses left behind after the caster’s death were just as many. On top of that, the Highland Expedition had yet to return, leaving them short on manpower. Then beasts and monsters, drawn by the smell, began to gather as well. Between processing byproducts and corpses and driving off or hunting the scavengers that came sniffing around, Richard finally lost patience. After hearing how Present had handled things, he took drastic measures.
"Cremate the human remains and dump the rest!"
"You lunatic! At least finish the butchering before you throw them out!"
"Catch! Fresh, still-warm corpses that were moving just a minute ago!"
"We already stripped the meat for easier eating—everything else is yours!"
Every undead monster and beast carcass that was useless or already fully harvested—everything except the human dead—was tossed out as free food for the uninvited guests. The monsters and beasts that had been circling, sizing each other up for a free meal, suddenly forgot their rivals and enemies entirely and froze in confusion. Some even backed away in bewilderment. Of course they did. What predator throws away perfectly good meat when it is still hungry? Especially with winter right around the corner. Discarding food like that was unnatural.
Monsters and beasts were not mindless. When survival was on the line, they were sharper than humans. An owl bear, unable to endure its hunger any longer, finally lunged forward. That broke the tension. The wary scavengers began carefully eyeing Afterglow Fortress while tearing into the meat.
Not every carcass was thrown away, of course.
"Whoa."
Karem stepped outside the fortress and broke into a straight run. The moment he stopped, his eyes lit up. There lay mammoth carcasses. Not one—piles of them. At a rough count there were easily more than ten. At a glance it was hard to believe they had ever been undead; they looked almost perfectly intact. Beyond the mountains where snow fell year-round, the sub-zero cold had frozen them solid instead of letting them rot.
"Lord Karem. It’s cold and potentially dangerous out here. Why not stay inside?"
Richard approached with a war hammer slung over his shoulder and gave a firm clap to the back of a soldier who was peeling frozen mammoth hide.
"But… there are mammoths right in front of me."
"Ah, I understand that feeling completely. I’ve only ever hunted one or two at a time myself. Seeing dozens piled up dead like this is a first even for me."
"Last autumn, when we had to leave a mammoth behind and move on… I was so disappointed."
"What? You abandoned a mammoth carcass? Why?"
"We were in too much of a hurry."
Just thinking about it still pained Karem. Mammoth meat. Even ordinary elephant meat was enough to spark deep curiosity in any man who loved a good steak; practically every man felt that way. And this was mammoth. He had had one chance before, but he had been forced to pass it by. Now the chance had returned.
There was just one catch.
"Margrave… can we actually eat that?"
"Hm? Eat what? The mammoth?"
"Yes. It was undead, after all."
"Hahaha! Well, that would normally be a problem."
"‘Normally’? Meaning these ones are different?"
"Exactly. They froze to death beyond the mountains where it’s cold year-round. They’re as fresh as if they were still alive a moment ago."
"Even so, they were undead—"
"The time they spent as undead was extremely short. Aside from a few parts, most of it is edible. The caster is dead anyway, so a sprinkle of holy water and a purification by the priests will take care of it."
"Wow… that’s…"
Karem’s heart was pounding. Richard looked down at him with an expression that said he had expected exactly this reaction.
"Looking forward to it that much, are you?"
"It’s mammoth, after all."
In every record and account he had dug up in his previous life, the common verdict was the same: elephant meat was far superior to beef, wonderfully sweet, and even older animals remained tender despite having almost no fat. There were a few rare notes that claimed it tasted bad—but those people had simply boiled it and sprinkled salt on top. Beef would taste terrible that way too.
"So how did you prepare mammoth, Your Grace?"
"Hm? How? What do you mean?"
"You know—sirloin and lamb chops as steak, shanks braised, the skin crisped up, that sort of thing. Lord Iona said everything was delicious no matter how you cooked it."
"Hmm. I’ll have to think about that."
"You need to think about it?"
"Because Iona was absolutely right."
Richard rubbed his forehead, pondering.
"Mammoth meat tastes good no matter what you do with it. Grilled as steak, boiled into stew, roasted, baked into pies—everything’s delicious. Even raw it’s good."
"So that’s why they say the price is whatever you name?"
Richard nodded and casually stroked a mammoth tusk as soldiers carried it past.
"That’s right. But while we’ll sell the bones and tusks, we won’t sell the meat."
"Even when the price is whatever you name?"
"Why would I sell something this delicious? This isn’t the old days."
Then Richard twisted his thick beard between his fingers.
"Personally, their trunks are the best part."
"Trunks? Mammoth trunks?"
"Yes."
Richard smacked his lips as he looked at a mammoth trunk thicker than a grown man’s arm. For all the power that could uproot trees and crush a predator’s skull with a single flick, a mammoth’s trunk was pure muscle—nothing but lean meat without a scrap of fat. As a hard-working part of the body it was firm and springy, yet in the hands of a skilled cook it became chewier than short rib and more tender than a perfectly seared sirloin steak.
"And half the mammoths here, plus every last trunk, belong to me."
Finished speaking, Richard glanced down at Karem and lowered his voice.
"Of the remainder, one whole mammoth is yours."
"Yes, one mammoth—wait, what?"
Karem’s head snapped up. He looked at Richard, then at the mammoths.
That enormous thing… is entirely mine?
It was wonderful, but… why?
"What exactly did I do?"
"I heard about the well."
"Ah."
Thud—thump. Richard set his hammer down and sat beside Karem.
"I don’t know where or how you obtained it, but you lent out a holy relic that could have become a symbol of the Three Gods Sect without a moment’s hesitation."
"Well, that was just…"
"If things had gone wrong it could have been completely consumed."
Karem scratched his head.
"The caster—the giant—and his collaborators the Grizzly Beavers turned out to be complete pushovers. But if the special forces had failed and we had run short of holy water, the town would have fallen. The fortress would have been even more isolated, and you can imagine what that would have done to morale."
Richard was completely serious. Casualties in the town had been so light relative to the size of the invading undead force that they might as well have been nonexistent. The sole reason for that was the holy water—sprinkled so lavishly that anyone watching would have called them insane. If that holy water had run dry… the rest was easy to picture.
"Then I’ll gratefully accept it."
"Mm. Honestly, if things had truly reached that point a knighthood wouldn’t have been enough, but—"
"Well, isn’t it best that things never got that far?"
"Oh? Not the reaction I expected."
"Yeah. A title just feels… vague."
"Vague? Ah."
Scratching his beard, Richard finally recalled Karem’s background. The boy had only escaped serfdom a year ago. Normally a year of living among the gentry would be enough to adapt, but given his youth and rather unique personality, it was understandable. Anyone who casually ate poisonous fruit and used monster scent glands as spices probably had some odd trait buried deep inside.
While Richard entertained these half-biased thoughts, Karem had sunk into deep contemplation.
Delicious no matter how you cook it?
That was an incredibly inconvenient condition for a cook. Usually people said things like that just to elevate an ingredient in the abstract. But he could not simply dismiss it—not with the lingering regret still thick in Iona’s eyes even after a year, and not after watching Richard smack his lips just moments ago. Both men held positions high enough to have tasted every delicacy imaginable. Which meant the claim was not abstract at all. It was literal.
After long thought, Karem reached a conclusion.
Whatever. I’ll just try everything on the way back.
"What in the world are you plotting this time? Some new absurdity?"
"Hm? Mary?"
At the familiar cool voice, Karem looked up. Where Richard had stood a moment earlier, Mary now stood watching him.
"The Margrave was just here—"
"Yes. He said he had business and left. He also said he would grant a total of three mammoths—including one each for the contractor and Sir Stark."
"Oh, not one but three."
"No—before that. Weren’t they undead?"
Ah, I know that feeling. Karem immediately repeated everything Richard had told him, word for word. Mary’s expression, which had been ready to explode the moment she opened her mouth, grew more and more unsettled the longer she listened. Even to her ears it sounded plausible. More importantly, the speaker was who he was; the reliability was guaranteed.
"I’ve heard frozen meat doesn’t spoil, but… undead… and you’re saying this works?"
"Anyway, if possible I’d like to test all sorts of things on the way back."
"…Test? What now?"
"Whether we grill steaks or simmer stews—he said it’s delicious no matter what you do."
Have you ever tasted it yourself?
Karem’s questioning look made Mary shake her head firmly. Even Mary, who had served countless contractors before Catherine, had never eaten mammoth—the absolute pinnacle of delicacies that money alone could rarely buy. She had never even considered it.
And now it’s undead mammoth meat, of all things.
Mary still could not shake the queasiness. Whether her workplace colleague cared or not, Karem gazed at the mammoths being skinned and dressed, already running through recipes in his head.
Twinge—
"Ugh. Huh?"
Karem unconsciously clutched his chest. What was that just now? His heart had hurt terribly. Arrhythmia? Yet the pain vanished as if it had never existed.
"Junior Karem. Why are you clutching your chest?"
"Ah, because of the holy water problem I dropped the holy relic into the well—"
"Is that sooooo? You just said you did what with whatwhere?"
"I threw the holy relic into the well. I asked Sir Hartman to fish it out; they’re retrieving it now."
"…I will report this matter to the contractor."
"Huh?"
What on earth does that mean? Karem swallowed hard under the pressure radiating from Mary’s blank face, which somehow made it feel even stronger.
"…Am I going to get scolded badly?"
"Worse than the last time you were punished, not less."
Mary stated it flatly. This was a holy relic gifted by a god themselves. It was not something one treated carelessly. Even respectful use would have earned a lecture; tossing it in casually meant he deserved every bit of the scolding coming his way.