The Promised Land (1)
Victory reports kept rolling in from the sea. Groll's privateer fleet had raided and plundered an imperial warship. Privateer vessels were faster than men-of-war but more lightly armed, so the fact that they had beaten a warship with fewer cannons meant Groll's ship-handling had reached the realm of the divine.
However, the imperial navy had numbers on its side, and we still only had a handful of ships fit for operation. A vessel that took so much as a single hit had to be docked for weeks of repairs, so in the end, the pace at which we could accept the refugees slowed to a crawl.
And in the meantime, I received news I did not welcome at all. The kind of news that made me doubt my own ears.
"...What? Chris escaped?"
"Th-that is correct, Your Grace. He apparently fled through a window of the tower before dawn yesterday."
The messenger stammered, fidgeting nervously. He probably assumed I was about to fly into a rage — hang the officers in charge of security, that sort of thing.
"I'm going to the holy city."
It wasn't as if I could simply let the matter of those responsible slide. But the primary fault lay with me, for imprisoning the bastard in the tower rather than the dungeon. I had been confident in my arts — six layers of barriers, topped with hundreds of suppression talismans.
After ascending to the Deification stage, I had upgraded the barriers even further, which made it all the harder to believe he had actually broken free.
Even before I crossed the city gates, something felt wrong. Smoke rising from the prison tower was staining the sky above the holy city a dull gray.
The closer I drew, the thicker the demonic miasma became, tightening around my throat. It was a sinister, oppressive aura that reminded me of the Demonic Realm itself.
"Your Grace!"
An enormous woman came striding toward me. It was General Varga, commander of the defense forces.
"Any casualties?"
"Sir Botten and Sir Jeremy, who were on night watch, gave their lives."
"Take me there."
The inside of the tower was a war zone. The walls were charred black, and nearly everything else had been reduced to ash.
"This is the spot."
The prison bars, forged from sylmite, had been torn apart as if an elephant had burst through them. Sylmite was the metal that suppressed mana — demolishing it like that would have required tremendous strength and technique.
But the greater problem was the barrier and the talismans layered over the sylmite. Someone had neutralized my full defensive preparations and extracted Chris from within them...
"Curfews have been imposed on the nearby cities and fortresses. Sir Vitten has assembled a pursuit detachment and is tracking the traitor as we speak."
"Tell him to come back."
"...Pardon?"
"Find Vitten by any means necessary. Now!"
Fortunately, Vitten was apprehended not far from the islands. He had gotten a late start in the first place, so he hadn't made it very far.
"Wh-what is the meaning of this?"
Vitten was dragged before me by the knights.
"Do you not know your crimes, Vitten?"
"Cr-crimes?"
Vitten turned pale and stammered.
"If you're calling it a fault, then the only one I can think of is that I was slow to receive General Varga's message because I was busy grilling meat for Laszlo..."
"And?"
"And... that I took advantage of your absence to throw out that insufferable cat's food bowl...?"
I couldn't help but chuckle. Looking at that guileless expression of his, it was impossible to keep up a stern front no matter how hard I tried. No wonder Thalia's guard dropped around him too.
"That was a joke. The pursuit detachment is being disbanded, so go rest, Vitten."
"Pardon? If I rest, then who's going to bring in the traitor?"
"I am."
It wasn't as if I hadn't anticipated this outcome. Only a fool would expect Chris to sit quietly in his cell.
That was why I had cast a tracking art on him beforehand — a technique so subtle that even its target would never suspect they'd been marked. Of course, precisely because it was so covert, I couldn't pack many functions into it. It could only give me a rough sense of his direction and speed.
According to the tracking art, he was heading north at a decidedly unhurried pace. It looked like he was traveling to the Demonic Realm on foot, which meant I could easily catch up on horseback.
In case there was any follow-up provocation, I ordered General Varga to raise the alert level one more notch.
Once matters were settled, I took on a new form and set off after Chris. I briefly folded my wings at Stormrock — the settlement where the refugees of Alkaraz had taken root.
Construction was in full swing in every direction. Loki and Ragus, formerly admirals of the Alkaraz navy, were hauling logs with their shirts off.
"Your Grace!"
Loki turned and called out to me.
"Once the work here is done, you really will send me back to the admiralty, won't you?"
"Do you want to return to the sea that badly? Even though I'm offering you lordship over this land?"
"I said this before, and I'll say it again! If I'd wanted to be a lord, I never would have become a pirate!"
Refusing power when it was handed to him — forget piracy, the man should've become a Daoist.
Loki set down the log he was carrying with a heavy thud and came over to me. His upper body was slick with sweat, glistening as though it had been slathered in tar.
"Is there anything I can help with?"
"You see over there?"
Loki pointed ahead with a towel. Half a dozen or so Alkaraz refugees were gathered where he indicated, sawing at logs.
"I've spent over a decade as a wanderer, but I have never once seen our people wearing such bright expressions as they do now."
"That's good to hear."
"We needed this. Even if it's something small... just the experience of building something with our own two hands."
"You don't need my help, then?"
"Giving us this land is more than enough. That alone has put us in your debt for a lifetime. From here on, we'll manage on our own. I mean that sincerely."
Loki's expression was earnest to the utmost degree. He was right. If I lent a hand with my arts, a little construction like this would be done in no time — but people who had wallowed in helplessness for so many years needed the experience of sweating for their own future.
"...Though no matter how I look at it, you're lord material."
"I'm really not. There are far more capable men than I."
Loki scratched the back of his head, looking embarrassed.
"If you truly insist on helping, though, a share of food would be welcome."
"Haven't you received plenty of supplies?"
"We have. But we were raided by thieves recently. Part of our stockpile vanished from the warehouse."
"Thieves?"
I glanced around. This was the very threshold of the Demonic Realm. No thief in his right mind would crawl all the way out here.
"We were baffled as well. There were faint footprints around the warehouse — and they weren't ours."
I inspected the warehouse with Loki. The area around it was thoroughly ransacked. It could have been the traces of humans, but the notion of a band of cutthroats plundering inside the Demonic Realm strained belief.
Don't tell me it was Chris.
The warehouse was also piled high with weapons and armor. Yet the thieves hadn't so much as glanced at the valuables — they had touched nothing but the food.
The fact that only food had been taken only deepened my suspicion. And the tracking art's arrow pointed to this very area.
"Fine. Leave this to me."
I ordered the soldiers to stack everything they'd brought inside the warehouse. Then I deliberately let the guard on the building lapse.
When night fell, small shadows emerged from the darkness. They were creatures so tiny they could have passed for halflings. Making a show of caution, the intruders crept stealthily toward the warehouse.
Creeeak...
The moment they opened the warehouse door, I closed the distance in a flash of Qinggong and seized one of them by the collar.
"Kyaahhk!"
Kyaahhk?
"Mercy! Mercy! Don't kill me, human!"
The thief turned out to be a greedy-looking dwarf with green skin and a hooked nose. Clutching my wrist, the little creature flailed wildly.
"...A goblin."
I had seen goblins when I infiltrated Demon Count Grimscale's domain. They served as the merchant class of monster society — which was probably why every goblin I'd seen back then had been gaudy and prosperous, while these ones were uniformly gaunt and ragged as beggars.
"What are you doing out here, goblin?"
The creature's eyes darted every which way.
"Don't try anything clever. Or else—"
I flicked a finger toward a nearby tree. The tree uprooted itself with a squelching pop and went flying.
"I'll make you into something worse than that."
"H-hiiiek!"
The goblins collapsed where they stood, clutching their heads. Their kind was cunning and cowardly by nature — endlessly weak before the strong and vicious toward the weak — and nothing communicated better than a demonstration of force.
"Forgive us, Master Human! We were only starving, so we came to beg a little food off you!"
"Why did you leave your master's side to wander a place like this?"
"Our master was done in by a treacherous human... I mean, by the great hero of the humans!"
"And who was this master?"
"Grimscale."
...Hm?
"You served Grimscale?"
"Yes! He was a truly worthless little wretch, Master Human. Filthy, foul-tempered... honestly, it's a blessing he died when he did!"
Still gripping its collar, I turned the creature over this way and that. Goblins were even harder to tell apart than lizardmen. And yet, for some reason, this one looked oddly familiar.
"What's your name?"
"Zagnak, at your service! Heh heh."
Zagnak.
Now I remembered — Grimscale's steward. I had shapeshifted into this very creature to land the killing blow on Grimscale.
Apparently, after Grimscale's death, he and his kin had been reduced to vagrancy. Which was to say, I had ruined his fortune.
The deeper I dug into their circumstances, the more pitiable the story became. Goblins, it seemed, filled the merchant class in peacetime, but in wartime they were demoted to rations for the other monsters. To avoid being eaten, they had to pay up their earnings as war tribute — but with their domain collapsing overnight, they'd had no money left to pay.
"So that's why you work so hard at trade normally? To keep from being eaten?"
"Partly that, and partly because... we simply do love anything that sparkles, you see!"
"Story heard."
I raised a tongue of brilliant blue flame between my fingers. The goblins went white as sheets, flailing their limbs.
"W-wait, Master Human! Teacher! O Great King!"
"I have no taste for eating your kind, so I was thinking of wrapping things up here."
"W-we're useful too!"
"That's right! We assure you we can be of service to you, Master Human!"
"One minute."
I set Zagnak down on the ground.
"You have one minute to convince me of your usefulness."
"We're excellent at making money!"
Zagnak cried out desperately. Judging by the way the others defered to him, he was clearly the leader of this little goblin band.
"Plenty of merchants around."
"W-we know every nook and cranny of the Demonic Realm! We can broker trade with any nation or race beyond it — every single one!"
"Hoh."
A flicker of interest stirred in me. It was true — humans had no idea what lay lurking beyond the Demonic Realm. Lester had marked the northern limit of human settlement. Merchants couldn't simply be pushed in wholesale, either; the demonic miasma was so dense that a person couldn't so much as breathe there unless priests came to purify it for them.
"Denied."
"Wh-why...?"
"Interesting, certainly. But would you hand a trading company over to men who served the demon race until days ago?"
I grabbed Zagnak by the collar again.
"But if what you say about knowing the Demonic Realm inside and out is true..."
As I gazed down at the terrified goblin, the corner of my mouth curled upward.
"Then you can help me hunt down a certain traitor."