Home Alone at the Mage's Tower (Or So I Thought) (1)
Somehow, coming back to Coldon felt like it had been ages.
The moment Karem laid eyes on the city he now thought of as home, he let out a disgusted groan.
"Ugh, what the hell is that?"
And no wonder. Every sort of undead he had seen while leaving Obsidianberry was now wandering the outskirts of Coldon, reaching for any living soul that drew near.
It was practically the brink of a post-apocalypse.
The sight of Coldon under threat from the undead shocked Karem all over again, no matter how used to them he had become. Life in Iceland had been the perfect reward after ten years of hardship since his reincarnation—comfortable, satisfying, complete. The idea of that life being threatened was more than enough to make the boy freeze in terror.
Catherine looked at him like he was fretting over nothing.
"You're seriously worried about that?"
"Huh? No, look—Coldon and everything around it is crawling with undead!"
"Nothing to get worked up over. We've already cleared plenty of them, and take a closer look outside. You don't see a single person running away, do you?"
Catherine's completely casual tone made Karem peer out of the slowly rolling carriage.
...Now that she mentioned it.
Beyond the distant walls of Coldon, farmers under the escort of soldiers and adventurers were hard at work tilling the fields, while woodcutters moved in groups. Other adventurers were scattered about, hunting undead and looting the spoils.
And it wasn't just the adventurers doing the hunting.
A farmer casually smashed the skull of a skeleton that had wandered too close with a club, looking for all the world like this was just another ordinary nuisance. Woodcutters cleaved zombie heads with their axes. Skeleton packs? Draugr groups? Adventurers raced ahead of the soldiers in competitive swarms, smashing them apart and stripping the half-rotted gear for loot.
"This is weird. These aren't the undead monsters I know."
"Well, you were from Kingsland, even if it was the sticks. Never had a reason to see undead, so I guess the misunderstanding makes sense."
"There's something to misunderstand about undead?"
"There is. In short—naturally occurring undead are weak. Ones someone deliberately creates are strong."
"That just sounds like some weird claim that cultivated fruit is always tastier than wild fruit. I mean, it's not exactly wrong, but the analogy is off."
Karem shook his head in disbelief.
Weren't undead supposed to be monsters that returned from death seething with grudges, hungry for the life force of the living? By every cliché he knew, the natural, in-season undead should have been the stronger ones.
Yet here they were, talking about an entire category of monsters that refused to die—some of which couldn't even be put down without meeting special conditions—as if they were nothing more than a swarm of autumn locusts.
No, wait. Thinking back, every undead pack they had met on the road had dropped like autumn leaves, hadn't they? Something felt off.
The long-unfamiliar sense of cognitive dissonance made Karem's head throb.
Olivier stroked his beard as he gazed outside and gave a thoughtful nod.
"It's not actually a bad analogy."
"Sorry? What was that just now?"
"Hmm. How should I put this..."
Olivier twisted the tip of his beard between his fingers and rubbed his temple, looking exactly like an old teacher trying to simplify an extremely complicated explanation for a child.
"All right, try this. When a young servant is learning to cook, who does better—the servant left alone with nothing but ingredients and tools, or the servant who has a working chef right there supervising every step?"
"...Obviously the second one. They can watch and learn the techniques and training."
"Exactly."
So basically, naturally spawned undead were low-grade monsters that never received that kind of care—malnourished and uneducated—while monsters raised by someone's hand were the silver-spoon undead with every advantage? What kind of nonsense...
"Even allowing for that, the undead that spawn naturally in Iceland are relatively weaker than the ones elsewhere."
"What, because Iceland is so barren that even the undead come out scrawny, like the crops?"
"Oh, that's remarkably accurate."
"Excuse me?"
What? Were undead basically walking plants now?
Karem just blinked at Catherine.
"In a place as barren as Iceland, where life itself struggles to take root, an undead that rises craving blood and life force was never going to come back in peak condition."
"So those things out there are starving."
"Right. Attack a few people or animals and they bounce back to normal, but even then they're still lower-tier undead. With a little preparation, even you could take one down."
"Come on, that's exaggerating."
"I'm serious."
While the two archmages, the chef, and the house elf chattered away inside the carriage, the procession crushed every approaching undead—magically and physically—and rolled into Coldon.
Any space left empty for too long was bound to get filthy fast.
Considering Iceland's spring humidity—so thick that just breathing felt like drinking water—the state of the Mage's Tower interior should have been obvious.
The second you opened a door or window, dust would lie over everything like a thick blanket, fattened on the spring damp, while dust bunnies rolled about like tumbleweeds, gathering size as they went. Furniture tops, floors, shelves—nothing would be spared.
Except that wasn't what they found.
The Mage's Tower was clean.
Not as spotless as when Mary, the tower's dedicated worker, cleaned it, of course, but from the first-floor entrance onward, everything in sight sat well within the range of human cleaning standards. The other floors were the same.
How did they know? The moment they stepped inside, Mary knew.
While the house elf silently screamed at this appalling reality, Catherine looked around and scratched her chin.
"Hmm. We've been away from the tower quite a while, yet it's cleaner than I expected. The servants must have cleaned while I was gone—no, they wouldn't have."
"Obviously not. Just having me take over the kitchen as a chef used to give them fits. Look at her right now."
Karem gave Mary a light poke. She had frozen stiff as a mannequin; his finger met nothing but hard muscle.
"Man, so who had the guts to touch a brownie's work?"
"Hmm. In that case we'll have to move the luggage ourselves. Not that there's much to carry, so it hardly matters."
Olivier picked only his own bundle from the pile the servants had stacked waist-high at the tower entrance and headed inside.
"What about us?"
"It doesn't look like it'll rain today, at least... Once she snaps out of it, she'll move things on her own, won't she?"
"Yeah. Just in case, I'll grab anything that absolutely can't get wet."
Everything he had received while exchanging recipes with the chefs of Adobis and Obsidianberry had already been tightly sealed before departure. The only thing Karem needed to carry was a single sack stuffed full of dried kelp.
"I'll head in first, then."
"Sure."
Catherine gave him a casual little wave. Karem slung the sack—larger than he was—over his shoulder and left. Of course, the kelp had been compressed until its volume was almost nothing, so even his frame could handle the weight without trouble.
Just as he had seen at the entrance, the tower interior he passed on the way to the pantry was a realistic mix of clean and dirty—unlike Mary's daily, merciless sweeping and scrubbing. Visible surfaces were reasonably clean; corners and out-of-sight spots were a little neglected.
"Did the servants really come in and clean?"
He said it aloud, but Karem had already decided it was impossible.
This wasn't just some facility inside the duchy; it was the residence of not one but two archmages. Catherine had said security magic and devices forbidding unauthorized entry were already in place, and they would only have grown stronger after Olivier moved in. What exactly those magics and devices were, Karem had no idea—and no particular curiosity either.
"Well, I am a little curious what happens to an intruder. Maybe I'll ask later."
The kitchen was much the same as the rest of the tower—reasonably clean. Nothing much had changed since he left on his trip. Aside from the few utensils he had taken with him, everything sat neatly in its proper place. The insides of the cabinets were the same. He had cleaned them out thoroughly before leaving for a long absence, so almost nothing remained. A little salt, maybe.
Nothing to see, so—
Crunch.
"Huh? What's this. Jerky powder?"
Karem immediately bent to examine what he had stepped on. A small, rock-hard scrap of dried, seasoned muscle fiber—the remains of jerky—rolled between his thumb and middle finger and scattered across the floor. Looking closer, it wasn't just one crumb. Tiny fragments trailed out of the kitchen and down the corridor in a single direction.
"What now, an intruder? A rat?"
Just in case, Karem grabbed a frying pan for self-defense and followed the trail of jerky dust, feeling for all the world like Hansel and Gretel. The sparse trail ended at none other than the food storage room.
"Come to think of it, I did leave a few kinds of hardtack behind..."
He also remembered leaving long-lasting jerky, root vegetables, and spices. An actual rat? At this point he wasn't even that scared. In his previous life he would have screamed at a pitch that put any girl to shame and fled faster than anyone, but after reincarnation, rats had long since become an excellent source of protein.
How could he eat a rat? Spend a week surviving on bugs and your perspective changes real fast.
Creeeeak—
When Karem carefully opened the storage door, the damp hinges gave a small but drawn-out squeal of friction. Unlike its usual state, packed with every kind of ingredient, the room was empty. Of course it was—he had cleaned it himself. But as he had also said earlier, it wasn't completely bare.
For example, the bundle of jerky sitting against the far wall opposite the entrance. Turning his head, he saw root vegetables and dried greens still neatly stacked. Stepping farther in, he found the sack of hardtack he had gathered in one place—and someone was there.
A robed figure was gnawing on bread that must have been hard as stone. The figure turned its head and met Karem's eyes.
Unexpectedly, inside the robe was a beautiful elf woman. About on Mary's level, maybe a little less. Fatigue had left her golden hair dry and lifeless, and dark circles bruised the skin under her eyes, but her round, puppy-like gaze, pointed ears drooping with exhaustion, and a dusting of freckles still lent her a touch of charm.
Her features and build were clearly different from the storehouse keeper Augher. The elf woman had been chewing that rock-hard bread so diligently that both cheeks bulged. When her eyes met Karem's spear-sharp stare, her eyelids fluttered. She swallowed whatever was in her mouth with an audible gulp, then forced a trembling smile onto her lips.
Wilted by fatigue though it was, the smile still bloomed like a single perfect flower—true to her elven blood.
But that was that, and this was this.
Karem drew power into his core.
"..."
"...INTRUUUUUDEEEEEEER!!!!"
"N-no! H-hey, wait! I'm not an intruder!"
"INTRUUUUUDEEEEEEER—!!!"