Chapter 40
Chapter 40
I felt the open sky above and a refreshing breeze.
"Where in the world is this?"
By the time Alpheus had scooped me up and taken a defensive stance.
"......What is the meaning of this?"
A baffled voice rang out.
Held in Alpheus's arms, I blinked slowly.
Standing in the tomato field with a dumbfounded expression was Leopold. He was dressed in armor, as though he had come leading his knights.
Looking around, I saw fields stretching endlessly beyond the Warp.
One thing was certain.
This place was not the Forman Baronial Residence. It was a fairly quiet stretch of farmland.
"You...... what business do you have here? And where is this?"
Baron Forman asked, glancing around.
Leopold answered slowly.
"This is the east."
Good heavens, it was not even the west.
All of us were thrown into confusion by the unexpected situation.
'Had the Warp really gone haywire? Already—even in the west?'
But looking around, something was definitely strange.
The tomatoes planted in rows across the wide field were wilting. It was harvest season, so they ought to have been ripening red.
Leopold sighed and explained.
"A problem arose in the field, and they requested support saying monsters seemed to have appeared...... but when I checked, there don't appear to be any monsters."
He looked at us and spoke with a dubious air.
"This is another rather intriguing situation. To think all of us would meet in the east."
* * *
Baron Forman explained the circumstances. He had invited us to the baronial residence, but the Warp had brought us here.
"Could you perhaps have entered the coordinates incorrectly? This Warp's coordinate values are similar to those of the Warp in the cave in front of the Nozen Magic Library."
After hearing the situation, Leopold narrowed his eyes.
"Since this is the east, after all."
To be precise, this land was the Dibostan Duchy in the east.
"They're coordinates I've entered hundreds of times over my lifetime."
Baron Forman denied it, sounding aggrieved.
"I have never once made such a mistake."
Wendy whispered softly to me.
"They say he's always been a bit scatterbrained....... We shouldn't have let him enter the coordinates."
She had now become my escort knight. Her skills were excellent, but above all, she was fiercely loyal to me.
"Wendy yields readily to anyone she acknowledges as her superior, but getting her to yield in the first place is not easy. I had to spar with her before I could bring her under me. How in the world did our Brisa earn Wendy's loyalty? Hm? Did you coax her with gentleness and warmth, as the sun rather than the wind stripped the traveler of his cloak?"
"I didn't coax her."
I answered Alpheus's question truthfully.
"I starved her."
The potato ban had been as effective as sparring. Hunger was a powerful negotiator.
"What strips the traveler of his cloak is neither the wind nor the sunlight, but simply a stronger wind."
Alpheus had been shocked by my reinterpretation of a children's fable.
"Alpheus, put me down."
I whispered to Alpheus, and after stealing a glance at my expression, he set me down.
I narrowed my eyes and looked around. The wide tomato field was deserted. It was midsummer, the very height of the tomato harvest.
"Leo, why did you come here?"
When Baron Forman asked, Leopold sighed with a weary expression.
"Gilav asked for help rather urgently."
Gilav was the third son of House Dibostan in the east. He was also our academy classmate.
For Leopold to use the word 'urgently'...... that meant Gilav had truly thrown a fit and raised a ruckus.
"He said the tomato field suddenly turned strange, and asked whether it might be the western monsters."
"What nonsense is that?"
Baron Forman scoffed as though dumbfounded.
"Why ask the west about an eastern matter, and even then, why summon the heir to the western grand duchy?"
That was when it happened. The Warp we had come through shone, and soon a pale-faced boy appeared.
"Because it is not a problem confined to the east, is it?"
A boy with silver hair and violet eyes appeared with an arrogant expression, accompanied by a servant.
It was Gilav Dibostan.
"Monsters do not ordinarily appear on the eastern plains. The only monsters that appear on the plains are the monsters of the west."
The boy in splendid clothes strode briskly over and stood before Baron Forman.
"If a tomato field turned like this overnight, there is a high probability that monsters are involved. And if monsters have appeared now, in midsummer, then the very premise that the Monster Wave has stopped may be wrong. Was it not an unprecedented phenomenon to begin with?"
Gilav raised an eyebrow and folded his arms haughtily.
"So it is worth asking the Young Grand Duke of Nozen, who has dealt with more western monsters than anyone else in the west, to take a look."
"What the......."
I sighed and muttered.
"So Gilav just pulled a Gilav."
Since we were all academy classmates, I knew Gilav well too.
He was an exceedingly arrogant and haughty boy who believed everything ought to move for his sake.
On top of that, he was prone to fussing and was timid. So he had been startled by this phenomenon and had even called for Leopold.
And the west, having proposed talks to share information, could not ignore such a request.
"Yeah, that's right. Exactly that."
Leopold agreed calmly.
"Gilav pulled a Gilav."
"What does that mean?"
Gilav glared at us, and we both shrugged at the same time.
As Gilav began to fume, I blinked and asked.
"Then is Gilav not Gilav?"
"......."
At any rate, shutting him up was easy.
Leopold and I chatted leisurely.
"Well, at the entrance banquet he said the soup was green and claimed it was poison......."
"That was broccoli soup."
"One day during class, a bee he'd never seen before flew in and he ran to the infirmary......."
"Saying he was preparing for some unknown pollen allergy the bee might have brought."
"Ah, and when he fell during physical education and scraped his knee, he got a tetanus check too......."
"It was a grassy lawn with no metal anywhere."
In the end, Gilav shouted in a burst of anger.
"What are you talking about! That lawn had been under construction three years before! There could have been metal left in the grass!"
"Sure, Gilav."
Leopold sighed.
"Similarly to those incidents...... you must have judged that there might be monsters here too."
"But it's strange!"
Gilav gestured at the tomato field and jumped up and down.
I folded my arms and surveyed the tomato field in question. The coloring was certainly uneven, with patches turning greenish.
"These were tomatoes ripening perfectly red. They turned like this overnight."
Gilav pointed at the color of the nearest tomato as he spoke.
"Are you saying this isn't serious? What if monsters come all the way to flat ground?"
I answered very seriously.
"Then the tomatoes would be ruined."
"Is now the time to worry about tomatoes?"
As Gilav lost his temper, Leopold sighed and said,
"Your head is also a problem."
I straightened my expression and objected to that.
"But that's always been broken. Pointing it out now is meaningless."
Ignoring our words, Gilav shouted sharply.
"They could advance all the way to the ducal residence! The precedent that monsters outside the west only appear on hills would be broken!"
Gilav shouted sharply.
By then, his imagination had probably sent a horde of monsters all the way into his bedroom.
I glanced around the empty tomato field and asked.
"Then what about the farmers of this field? Where did they all go?"
"I had them all evacuated as soon as I received the report! How could I leave our territory's people here? This is land my father said he would pass down to me!"
So there was a reason Gilav had come in person.
As the third son, he had not inherited a title. Instead, he was to receive part of the eastern territory, and this appeared to be it.
"Who knows what kind of monster might appear and how? This is completely a crisis situation!"
Hearing that, Leopold retorted leisurely.
"You'll truly make a fine lord who takes good care of your own people, Gilav."
That was an elegant rebuke meaning 'you don't take care of outsiders at all.' Then he looked around and added calmly.
"First of all, there are no monsters around here. And I'll say it once more: unless monsters suddenly gain human-level intelligence and ride the Warp themselves, western monsters cannot come to the east."
At that, Gilav stared at Leopold with a suspicious look.
"Are you sure? You didn't just investigate half-heartedly because this isn't your land, did you?"
And only after that did he turn to me as though he had just remembered.
"But why are you here, Brisa?"
I answered unenthusiastically.
"I don't particularly want to say."
"I know you're not the sort of rude child who sets foot on someone else's land without an invitation."
As Gilav said, this was the east. Now that I was here, I had to explain why I had come whether I wanted to or not.
"Answer me. I asked why you came to the east, Brisa."
There was no helping it.
In the end, I sighed and spoke.
"It's a Warp malfunction. We didn't enter the coordinates for this Warp."
At that, Gilav jumped in alarm.
"See! See! See! I knew this would happen!"
His face was already stricken with panic.
"Even if the Magic Tower said it was all over, I didn't believe it! Would the Magic Tower really understand the first event of its kind in imperial history? The disaster isn't over! The Warp is in this state, so surely the monsters are also......!"
"As expected, exactly the reaction I imagined."
I shrugged.
"This is why I didn't want to say."
It truly was a situation where Gilav was pulling a Gilav.
I trudged into the middle of the field. Then I bent down, took hold of a tomato, and examined it slowly.
'It went bad overnight, huh.......'