Meanwhile in Fungusby
After the subjugation force set out for the forest, those left behind to defend Fungusby kept a tense watch on the treeline.
It was only natural. If the subjugation force was the first line, then the people remaining in Fungusby were the second and third—or not a fighting force at all. A few C- to B-rank veteran adventurers had stayed behind just in case, yet most of the village’s strength had already gone into the woods to solve the problem. Considering the power of the mushroom golem packs they had faced before, the tension was inevitable.
They were mushrooms, yes, but they were still golems. And among them were giants whose bulk made even the wooden palisade look small.
It was not long before the mushroom golems came pouring out of the forest.
Thud—thud—thud—
Shhhk-shhhk—
“Archers and mages, ready!”
“Don’t get jumpy and shoot early!”
“Skirmishers, hold! I said hold, you crazy bastards!”
By the time the deep creases on the Akusare mushroom golems’ surfaces were clearly visible from the palisade—
“How long are we supposed to wait?!”
“Now! All at once! Mages, conserve your spells after this! No fire magic! No fire magic! Not yet!”
Ice, lightning, water, and stone magic, along with a volley of arrows, flew from the palisade and the battle began. The pack of large and small Akusare mushroom golems that had been lumbering forward picked up speed under the assault.
Being golems, they were still slow—but size made a difference. The giants, with their enormous strides, pulled ahead of the relatively smaller ones.
“Moneybags coming in!”
“Don’t get greedy—hit them with your partners!”
“Let’s gooooooo!!!”
As if answering the call, the adventurers waiting in front of the palisade charged out to intercept the giant mushroom golems. The tactic looked reckless at a glance, yet it had its reasons.
Whether hunting animals or monsters, the rule was the same: always pick off the ones that break from the pack first. The massive mushroom golems, born from Akusare mushrooms and shaped like oversized walnuts, looked intimidating—but that also meant they moved slowly and left plenty of openings. Even their powerful, threatening attacks often struck their own kind more than the adventurers they were aiming for, the golems getting in one another’s way.
One by one their cores were shattered by the adventurers and the golems fell silent.
“Whew, I was tense, but it wasn’t as bad as I—”
“Hey, dwarf. Better get that tension back.”
“Huh? Ah.”
There was no time to rest. The next wave came right on its heels: the (relatively) smaller mushroom golems that had been lagging behind. There were clearly more of them than there were adventurers. The fight naturally dissolved into a chaotic melee, and the battlefield crept ever closer to Fungusby itself.
That did not mean they were losing. Closer to Fungusby meant closer to the palisade.
“Careful not to hit our people! Not the center—outside—”
“They’re right under our noses and you think we can’t hit them?!”
“Skirmishers!”
Arrows, spells, and stones rained down on the mushroom golems as if they had been waiting for exactly this.
“One! Two! Three!”
“Throwing like this, don’t they kind of feel like the spring undead?”
“Right? Whoops—over there!”
Harsh, dangerous Iceland forged people hard, and ordinary villagers were no exception. Stones. After snow, the most common thing you could find in Iceland. People might scoff at “just rocks,” but they were still rocks. Even a casual toss could put someone down, and here they punched holes through mushroom golems without so much as grazing a single adventurer.
“Right side! Right side!”
“Shit! What’s so damn dangerouuuus—?”
“A giant one’s coming!”
And belatedly, a truly enormous mushroom golem—tall enough to reach the top of the palisade—was closing in, slow but steady.
Hum—hum—
Waaaaaah—
Even from the shelter, Karem could hear the faint sounds and feel the vibrations from outside the village. Surrounded by the palisade, Fungusby might have been a wealthy settlement, but it was still only a small village. It would have been stranger not to hear anything.
Karem turned his head and looked around. The people in the shelter were either too old to hold a weapon or children too young to be any use in a fight. He paid that little mind. His focus stayed on the pot set over the campfire in the center of the shelter.
The oil that had hardened overnight began to melt. As the rich aroma rose and ripples spread across the surface, he immediately scattered bite-sized pieces of broken hardtack into it.
Ssssssssssss—
Bubble-bubble-bubble-bubble—
The last thin threads of anxiety on the faces of the old people and children were swept away by the nutty fragrance that bloomed as the hardtack fried in the bubbling oil.
Of course, that had been Karem’s plan. This was a kind of disaster the village had never once experienced. They might starve in a famine, but monster attacks—aside from the undead—were almost unheard of, and even those were the sort a small village could handle. No one had starved to death in decades. Now the village was facing an unprecedented crisis. A heavy gloom had settled over the shelter, and every distant vibration or noise from outside made people flinch. Karem could not stand that stifling atmosphere.
To flip the situation he had quickly run back to the village chief’s house, which he had been using as lodgings. All he needed was a single pot of Akusare oil.
Anyway, one of the biggest reasons useless worries crowded the mind was an empty stomach. Or lack of sleep. Luckily the shelter was well-stocked with preserved food, as befit both a proper refuge and a prosperous village like Fungusby. Granted, that mostly meant jerky hard enough to sharpen on a whetstone and use as a knife, hardtack harder than stone, and cheese harder still. Still, there were plenty of places like Moston Village that did not even have that much. And every scrap of preserved food in the shelter was dry and rock-hard, free of mold or damp.
The old folks who had been eyeing Karem with suspicion dropped their doubts at once.
“My word. Smell that rich aroma.”
“That much oil… Teacher, where on earth did you get all this? Doesn’t seem like lard—”
“It’s Akusare oil.”
“Akusare? Isn’t that stuff deadly if you eat it?!”
Suspicion crept back onto the elders’ faces. To the old people of Fungusby, who had lived through lean times in Iceland, Akusare oil was practically pure poison. After all, the village still talked about how the chief two generations back—the current chief’s great-grandfather—had downed a ladleful and dropped dead on the spot.
“Ah, don’t worry, elders! I ate some yesterday and I’m perfectly fine.”
“Isette! I’ve told you since you were little not to just pick up and eat strange things!”
“Oh my, our sharp little Isette. Sometimes you really are such a scatterbrain—”
“That’s not—ugh!”
Under the elders’ blazing attention, the village chief’s daughter answered with blazing filial piety: she stuffed pieces of the fully fried hardtack Karem had just fished out straight into their mouths without a word of explanation. The combination of burning daughterly devotion and scorching hot hardtack made the old people jump. Not one of them spat it out, though.
The distinctive nutty richness of Akusare oil flooded their mouths. Because the bland hardtack had been fried for a good while, the deep aroma of the oil had soaked all the way into its core.
“Mmm… it’s hardtack, but it’s not that hard. Because it was fried?”
“I knew the smell was this rich, but this much…?”
“Ha. Hahaha! Then does that mean all the oil we used to throw away was…?”
The hard hardtack had been fried in high-temperature oil. Once the fried pieces met saliva, the hardness vanished and they became crisp enough for even an old person’s teeth to crush. With every crunch an even denser wave of nutty fragrance filled the mouth.
Curious, hungry eyes were already fixed on those elders. The children who had been sniffling in gloom now stared at the old people and at Karem with bright, sparkling eyes, as if none of that had ever happened. What they wanted was obvious.
“Well, they’re all done frying. We need bowls—”
“Here they are.”
Karem heaped the fried hardtack into the bowls the chief’s daughter handed him, then passed one bowl to the children and the other to the elders. Conversation began to flow and the atmosphere lightened. Feeling as though he had pulled off something worthwhile, Karem let out a breath.
Come to think of it, between the mood and everything else he had not had a chance to look around. The place had a strangely antique feel. He wondered what kind of building it had originally been.
Seeing him, the village chief’s daughter approached.
“Is there something you’re curious about?”
“You said this was the shelter, right?”
“Yes. Shall I show you around?”
“Please.”
Yet there was too much that did not fit a mere shelter. Located in the center of the village, the building was larger and more spacious than the chief’s house Karem had been lodging in. The stone floor was laid without a single gap, and solemn black-wood pillars supported the structure. Animal statues stood here and there, seeming almost to watch over the people who had taken refuge. At the far end of a wide chamber, among countless animal sculptures and candle stands arranged like a small organ, stood the statues of an axe-wielding warrior and a woman; before them lay a stone altar. No—it looked more as if the statues were enshrined there.
“For a simple shelter, this is awfully luxurious. It looks like it’s been carefully maintained, too.”
“Ah, I heard it used to be a temple.”
“A temple? To whom?”
“They say it was dedicated to Lady Skadi.”
Karem nodded in understanding. That explained the refined interior and the space larger than any other facility in the village. Or rather… “used to be.” Past tense.
“You said ‘used to be’—does that mean it isn’t anymore?”
“It still is a temple, but—”
“I didn’t see a priest.”
“Yes. The priest who managed the temple left on a long journey during my great-grandfather’s time, and no new priest ever came. Still, when the subjugation force arrived, a priest of Lady Skadi who works as an adventurer came and looked after the temple for a little while.”
“Left on a long journey” meant he had died. Something about it still bothered him. Karem tilted his head and asked the chief’s daughter,
“Normally when a temple seat is vacant, doesn’t a priest from another temple of the same god come to fill it?”
“From what Father told me, there aren’t many priests, and since our village is relatively safe it takes a long time—”
Hearing that, Karem more or less understood. In the end it was a problem born of how few people there had been in Iceland. Even though the current Duke of Iceland, Alfred Felwinter, had made things less scarce if not exactly abundant, population simply did not grow that easily. On top of that, Iceland was absurdly vast. And, Karem carefully thought, relatively safe villages had probably been pushed down the priority list for priest assignments compared to those that were suffering right now.
“No… more than that, if this is a temple…”
“Is something bothering you?”
Karem nodded without a word. He quickly prepared more hardtack, fried it in the oil, heaped it high in a bowl, and set it on the altar before the warrior and the woman.
“Even if we took shelter here in an emergency, it still feels wrong to have just walked in like this.”
“Ah… you’re right.”
The chief’s daughter, who had only been blinking, agreed with Karem’s thinking and knelt before the altar with her hands joined. After a moment of awkward standing, Karem set the basket down beside him and, a little stiffly, closed his eyes and began to pray as well.
To say he felt no unease would have been a lie. While Karem followed the chief’s daughter in offering prayer, the eyes of the statue carved in Skadi’s likeness seemed to catch the sunlight and gleam as they looked down at the basket on the floor.
One, two, three.
The seasoned chicken inside the basket gradually faded away, accompanied by a soft light.
Karem only noticed something was wrong after he finished praying.