The Third Guests – A Diamond-Rank Party (1)
The warrior, having heard the old Wyvern Hunter’s message from me, let down his guard. The other three, however, still regarded me with open suspicion.
I could tell as much from the way none of them took their hands off their weapons.
“Hey, Warrior. If it’s that old Wyvern Hunter, is it that guy? The one who told you about Dragon Canyon?”
“Probably. Among the people skilled enough to enter Dragon Canyon, he’s the only old man who’d ever let me call him Grandpa.”
“…Didn’t you meet him right before leaving Coreloot? The timing doesn’t add up…”
“Like I said a moment ago—if it’s that old man, he could pull it off and still have time left over.”
The warrior soothed his companions, insisting there was nothing to worry about.
Incidentally, the reason he was being called “Warrior” instead of by name was almost certainly because this was a hastily assembled party.
According to Grace’s knowledge, there’s an unspoken rule in ad-hoc parties: you don’t ask each other’s names.
Adventurers never know when or where they might die, so unless they’ve worked together for a long time, they simply address one another by class to avoid getting too attached.
This party was clearly one of those.
“More importantly, this is an inn, so let’s order something. We’ve been living off jerky for days—I’m starving. Innkeeper! What’s good here?”
“For something available at any time, we have stew.”
“Perpetual stew?”
What the warrior meant by “perpetual stew” was the kind some inns kept simmering day and night in a cauldron, tossing in whatever ingredients they had so it could be served whenever a guest asked.
“No. This was made fresh this morning.”
“Oh! Then that’ll do!”
“Is there meat in it?”
“It contains wyvern tail meat the old Wyvern Hunter left with us.”
“Then I’ll have some as well. Will this cover it?”
The warrior and the thief ordered stew one after the other and produced their coin. When I nodded, the archer and the nun, reading the room, asked for stew as well.
I glanced sideways at Rain. She understood at once and headed for the kitchen.
“Um…”
Once Rain had gone to prepare the stew, the nun—who had been watching me carefully—spoke up.
“Are you a transmigrator, by any chance?”
“……”
Is it that obvious just by looking? How do most of the people who visit this inn immediately see through the fact that I’m a transmigrator?
“I am.”
Whatever my private doubts, I saw no reason to hide it, so I answered her honestly.
“Ah! I see! That’s a relief.”
A relief?
“The reason we entered Dragon Canyon was to find you, Transmigrator!”
“Aha? So the one the oracle told you to find was a transmigrator?”
“Then the request is complete.”
…This entire party had been formed just to find me?
Feeling a surge of absurdity, I asked the nun,
“Why were you looking for me?”
“Because it was our church’s turn this time.”
“……”
“……”
Her bright, cheerful delivery left me speechless for a moment.
Hmm…
“I think I’m going to need a little more explanation.”
“Ah, right. A transmigrator might not know.”
“…Sister. It’s not just the transmigrator over there—we don’t know either.”
“I only learned today that transmigrators actually exist.”
As if to prove I wasn’t the only one lost, the archer and the thief chimed in.
“Well… I don’t know the full story myself, but I’ll explain what I was taught at the church…”
When the first transmigrator appeared, the churches hadn’t paid much attention. But after that transmigrator’s knowledge greatly advanced the civilization of the region they lived in, transmigrators became highly valued.
“The problem was that once word of their existence spread, nations all over the world began trying to claim them for themselves.”
The churches were no different. Some of the knowledge brought by a transmigrator from a world without gods was judged dangerous in this world that had gods, and so they were branded heretics.
“…Aren’t you a nun belonging to a church? Is it all right for you to speak so poorly of them?”
“Our church records the past exactly as it happened. So that we never repeat the same mistakes.”
She continued.
“One day, while the churches were still persecuting transmigrators as heretics, the same oracle was delivered to every church in every land—even though each church worships a different god. In other words, that day’s oracle was the unanimous will of all the gods, issued only after they had finished deliberating.”
Do not persecute transmigrators.
Protect transmigrators.
“Unlike the usual vague oracles, this one was crystal clear. And the high officials of the churches, upon hearing it, decided that having a single church monopolize the protection of a transmigrator would be unfair. So they agreed that whenever a transmigrator appeared, the churches would take turns protecting them.”
And this time, it was our church’s turn.
“We harbor no other intentions. Of course, if you were willing to share your knowledge and abilities with us, nothing could be better—but even if you are not, our church swears to serve you so that you want for nothing.”
So, will you come with me to the church?
“No. I’m not going.”
I refused the nun’s proposal on pure reflex.
“…I thought as much. Coming from a world without gods, you naturally find it hard to trust the church.”
“……”
She was right—I couldn’t trust the church right now.
After all, the church was the very institution that raised the heroes who had once attacked Grace.
There was no guarantee that the gods they worshipped were truly benevolent.
And that wasn’t even the biggest reason.
The far greater reason was…
I can’t leave this inn.
Because I am its owner.
Unless the inn itself can be moved, the right place for me is right here, living out my days.
If the inn’s level rose high enough, I might one day be able to relocate it…
Even then, I mustn’t move it.
If I moved the inn then… I had a gut feeling I would lose my position as master of the Dragon Vein.
The biggest reason I became master of the Dragon Vein is probably… because the place my inn sits is a critical node of the vein.
So I could not follow the nun to her church.
I had no desire to lose either the inn that was essentially my power, or the Dragon Vein that granted me near-infinite mana.
“Stew’s ready.”
While I was thinking that, Rain set four bowls of stew on a tray down in front of the four of them.
“Whoa, this looks proper.”
“Sister. Let’s fill our stomachs first and talk afterward.”
At her companions’ words, the nun checked the table for a moment, then said to me,
“We’ll continue this conversation later.”
Apparently she preferred a full belly to more talking right now; she said as much and sat back down.
Then they began to eat.
“…! Mmm!”
“You said it was made this morning? That must be why it’s better than the usual inn stew.”
“The price is a bit steep, but given the location that’s only natural… and there’s plenty of ingredients. I’ll have to come here often.”
“…In the middle of Dragon Canyon, and you want to come often?”
“Ah—never mind.”
As they ate, their wariness gradually eased.
“How about we stay the night here?”
“I’m in favor.”
“We haven’t slept properly in days… I’m in favor too.”
“I like that idea as well. I needed time to persuade him anyway.”
“All right, then that’s settled… Excuse me—four of us would like rooms. Could we settle the bill?”
The warrior approached me as their representative and paid.
I finished the calculation according to the rates Grace, Rain, and I had already agreed upon, then told him,
“If you go out that way, you’ll find another building. Rooms 201 and 202 are yours.”
At first I had expected guest rooms to appear on the second floor or higher of the main inn building, but contrary to my expectations, an entirely separate building had been constructed, and the rooms were inside that.
For the record, the rooms had no keys.
Keys and locks were complicated to make and therefore classified as luxury goods.
Even so, the doors could still be locked from the inside.
“Is it all right for us to take two whole rooms?”
“If we had many other guests it might be different, but right now you’re the only ones.”
Hearing that, they rose at once, clearly eager to unpack.
Before I knew it, their stew bowls were scraped clean.
“This bed’s soft. Nice.”
The red-haired warrior sprawled across the bed in Room 201 as he said it.
The black-haired thief felt the mattress, then checked the door and the window.
“What’s wrong?”
“Something’s off.”
How could an inn like this exist right in the middle of Dragon Canyon?
“What do you mean?”
“This place sits where monsters could attack at any moment. Even if the cliffs are too steep for running monsters to reach it even if they spotted it, flying monsters like wyverns should have targeted it by now. That’s the normal way of things.”
“Ahh, so that’s what you meant.”
Both the warrior and the thief were seasoned adventurers.
They knew monster behavior inside and out.
To their eyes, the fact that no wyvern had ever attacked this inn was deeply strange.
“The sister said it, didn’t she? He’s a transmigrator. You know transmigrators all have special skills, right? Maybe the reason the inn never gets attacked is because of the owner’s power.”
“A transmigrator, huh…”
The thief murmured the word, then nodded.
“I know nothing about transmigrators, so I’ve got nothing to say.”
With that, he began inspecting his weapons.
Meanwhile, in the neighboring Room 202…
“I thought an ‘oracle site’ meant we’d be looking for some kind of ruins. Never imagined we were hunting a transmigrator…”
The archer was wiping herself down with the cloth and water the inn staff had provided as she spoke.
The nun, likewise cleaning herself, answered with an apologetic air.
“I’m sorry. If I spoke about transmigrators in public, people who target them might try something.”
“No, I’m not blaming you.”
The archer soothed her.
“I just never thought transmigrators actually existed. I figured they were only fairy-tale stuff.”
When our world faced crisis, a hero from another world arrived and saved it…
“When you think about it, it’s hard to believe, right? Someone who barely knows our world saving it… I can’t even remember why I found those stories fun as a kid.”
“…Um…”
At the archer’s words, the nun’s expression turned peculiar.
“That… actually happened about three thousand years ago.”
“…Huh?”
“And fairy tales are usually based on true events.”
“……”
The archer fell silent for a moment.
Then, just to be sure, she asked the nun,
“What about the one where the vampire lord who was going to destroy a kingdom raised the kingdom’s little princess and married her?”
“When you put it that way it sounds a bit strange, but there really was a case where a wise princess sent as a hostage reformed a vampire lord’s thinking and married him.”
“…And the story of the thief who became king with a single lie?”
“Ah, that one had quite a bit of embellishment. In reality he wasn’t a thief but a prince, and the anecdote of him escaping a crisis with a lie got exaggerated into that form.”
After that, the archer asked the nun whether every famous fairy tale in this world was based on real events.
And the nun confirmed that, however exaggerated they might have become, all of them were rooted in things that had actually happened.