A Home Visit (4)
"Young Master Iden, look over here!"
A young scholar called out to me, dagger in hand. The blade, shimmering with pale brilliance, hummed softly within his grip.
"It's Oradium. It appears a vein of it runs across a wide area."
"You're telling me all of this is Oradium?"
"Yes, without a doubt."
He nodded emphatically.
Oradium was a rare mineral sitting just one rung below Doomsteel.
It housed powerful mana within itself and had the additional property of transferring that power to its surroundings, which was why—so I'd heard—you could identify it by this simple method of pressing a piece of metal against it.
There was no dedicated Oradium mine in the duchy; as far as anyone knew, its entire output amounted to the traces that surfaced like impurities whenever iron was mined from the iron ore deposits.
"We'd need to bring in a geology expert to properly assess profitability, but even if we only took what's scattered around here, it would be a staggering quantity."
The scholar's voice was trembling. It was hardly surprising that he was worked up. I mean, how much money would it even be if we gathered all of this up and sold it?
I looked down at Ruby.
"Peep!"
The little thing puffed out its chest and let out a chirp, its posture practically a protest march: This much should be more than enough, shouldn't it?
Right... it seemed the money problem could be sorted out with this. If we set up a mine here, we'd plug the hole in our finances and have plenty left over.
But at this point, money wasn't the important thing. If anything, you'd just given me a whole mountain of explanations to make.
Why was the mausoleum connected to the Underworld? Who built the base camp here, and for what purpose? And how did this little creature even know about this place in the first place?
The questions piled up faster than I could count them, but above all, this wasn't the creature's home. There had to be a separate passage by which it had climbed from the depths up to the surface.
I grabbed the thing by its tail and lifted it into the air.
"Eek! Eek!"
Ruby dangled from side to side like a pendulum.
"What on earth are you?"
They say three coincidences stacked together make a certainty, and it hadn't happened just once or twice that this creature had somehow outpaced me and smoothed the way forward.
When we discovered Marbel's farm. When we rooted out the demons lying in ambush above the Floating Castles. And now, uncovering a passage linking the bottom of the mausoleum to the Underworld.
What are you, exactly?
"I'm guessing this wasn't everything you wanted to show me?"
Ruby shook its head side to side. Behind it, a vast forest of giant mushrooms spread out in every direction.
Something was slithering about between the towering stalks—large creatures, by the looks of them.
The ecology of the Underworld remained almost entirely unexplored. Most of the tales told by adventurers who claimed to have gone in and come back out were little more than fabricated bluster.
I set Ruby down on my shoulder.
"Simon!"
"Yes, Young Master!"
The elderly historian came hurrying over.
"We have quite a few scholars down below right now, don't we?"
"Yes, we do."
"We'll need to assemble a survey expedition for the Underworld. I'd like to leave the selection to you—but see to it that it isn't dominated by the history academy alone."
"You mean increase the proportion of geologists and ecologists? Understood. Just leave it to me."
The old man's face brightened considerably. He must have been delighted at the prospect of excluding his rival, Joris.
"Although, Young Master—my colleagues would gladly walk into a pit of fire for the sake of research, but the surroundings of the camp are a bit..."
"A bit what?"
"Dark and dreary. It feels as though a monster could come bursting out at any moment."
Simon cleared his throat in embarrassment. He had evidently noticed the creatures prowling between the mushroom stalks as well.
"Don't worry about security. I'll summon the knightly order."
"We would be most grateful if you did."
After all, I had no intention of cutting corners on guarding this place.
I had no idea what Ivan Esterzy had drilled a hole into his own domain for, but I couldn't imagine anything a Grand Master would need to fake his death over being some ordinary affair.
It wouldn't be strange at all if a Class 1 monster came charging out of that pit down in the Underworld with its eyes blazing.
For now, I returned to the ducal residence and summoned Frost. Why else would I have built a personal knightly order, if not to use it for occasions like this?
"Full assembly complete."
Thalia reported after lining up the knights across the rear courtyard.
"Seventy-two in attendance. Three are standing watch duty at headquarters."
Together, she and I conducted a brief inspection.
Frost's members were sharpening into an elite force at a respectable pace. Now that they had matching uniforms as well, they made for quite a presentable sight.
"Not a single soul gets through without Lord Iden's approval."
Thalia commanded in an icy voice, and the members sealed off the entrance to the mausoleum without so much as a crack to spare.
In the meantime, the squad-leader-level personnel headed down with me to the underground base camp.
Thalia, Vitten, Srudal, Shaka, and even Bishop Colin, our guest advisor.
"Um, and why exactly am I here...?"
Laszlo was included as well. The boy was still reeling from the fact that he'd been slotted in among such a formidable lineup.
"It's fine. You're my disciple."
"I'm... I'm Lord Iden's disciple...?"
Laszlo murmured in a tone of pure disbelief.
Thanks to eating well and resting deep, his damaged muscles and bones had nearly healed. At last, he was in condition to begin learning the Daoist arts.
"I'll teach you one thing at a time from here on, so keep up."
"Yes, Young Master."
The boy answered in a voice faint as an ant's footstep.
"Ah, I'm jealous. I wish I could learn directly from you too, Lord Iden."
Shaka pushed out her lips in a pout.
"You do fine on your own."
Vitten said with a hint of disgruntlement.
Shaka was the self-proclaimed and universally acknowledged genius of the knightly order. Her talent bordered on the outright unreasonable—people said her realm climbed simply from breathing.
"Being a genius and being starved for your praise, Lord Iden, are two entirely different matters."
Shaka giggled.
"Enough chattering—keep your eyes on our surroundings. If my hunch is right, this is a base our ancestor built three hundred years ago."
I gave the officers a brief account of how we had come to discover this place, touching as well on the mystery surrounding Ivan Esterzy's death and Ruby's past.
"What's strange is that our ancestor left a perfectly good Oradium vein untouched, and that he had countermeasures in place against intrusion."
"To cast aside Oradium of all things—he must have been in quite a desperate hurry, I'd say."
"The defenses were prepared, yet the base was breached?"
They surveyed the camp's perimeter with curious eyes.
"We'll be bringing in the scholars to investigate before long, but until then, we need to secure the site ourselves. As you can see, there appear to be quite a few monsters in the vicinity."
We moved outside the camp. Thick mycelium carpeted the ground, making every step sink soft as a mattress. Below thigh height, a dense mist drifted slowly along like a stream.
Shhhfff—
All at once, a mushroom cap quivered and belched out a hazy cloud of spores. Shaka and Laszlo flailed their hands, coughing. What we'd taken for fog turned out to be spore clouds.
"Srudal, are you sure this stuff is safe?"
At roughly the Origin-Returning realm, all poisons were supposed to be harmless to me.
But there was no guarantee that their poison applied to my poison. The ecosystems of that world and this one were far too different—and for all I knew, my constitution might simply decide that a few mushrooms inside the body didn't count as poison at all.
"That would be a red-cap mushroom."
Srudal answered as though he'd been waiting for the question.
"A fungus native to the Underworld. The mushroom itself is not at all dangerous—the flavor is so superb that it is considered edible. The problem is its symbiotic relationship with the Gulrok."
"What's a Gulrok?"
Srudal pointed at the grotesque creatures prowling between the mushrooms.
"A native species of the Underworld. They are classified as monsters on account of their violent disposition, though little is known about them."
"Strong?"
"By the bestiary, Class 5."
Class 5 meant lower-knight level. They were no match for any of our officers.
"Then it seems it is my turn to step forward?"
Shaka stepped up confidently, extended her right hand, and closed her eyes. Some hundreds of meters away, a single Gulrok flinched and shuddered.
Her sensory ability seemed to have advanced to the point of penetrating the minds of nonhuman species. She held her focus for two or three minutes, then opened her eyes and spoke with evident amusement.
"...Their heads really are filled to the brim with base impulses. And here they are, reduced to gnawing on mushrooms."
"Do they have intelligence?"
"They do, but it's meaningless. Their violent urges are strong enough to rule out any rational thought. And besides—those things, they've noticed us."
"The creatures are aware of us?"
"Yes, they appear to share their senses through the mycelium. They're currently plotting to tear us limb from limb."
The Gulroks didn't charge outright, but their numbers were swelling rapidly within the spore mist.
Sniff, sniff.
Vitten took a whiff, his nose partially shifted into its beast form.
"I'd say roughly five hundred of them."
"You can count them by smell?"
"With a stench this foul, it'd be harder not to."
Vitten flared his nostrils and pointed due north.
"And... if we're looking for Ruby's nest, I'd wager it's that way."
"Peep?"
Ruby cocked its head as if to ask how he could possibly know that.
"The smell of aged earth dragon droppings carries, you see."
"...Ah."
I decided against asking how he knew what earth dragon droppings smelled like. The direction Vitten pointed lay at the very heart of the mushroom colony. Since the Oradium deposit also extended that way, we'd have no choice but to clear out the colony, if only for the sake of orderly mining operations.
"Very well. We will eliminate the hostile species and secure the safety of the camp's surroundings."
I turned to the officers.
"Ready?"
Shing.
Srudal drew the two-handed sword strapped across his back. His swordsmanship had a certain elegance to it that never failed to impress, no matter how many times I watched.
Shaka's weapons were twin blades. She held them in a reverse grip, swaying them loosely as she spoke.
"At last, my darling blades get their first taste of blood."
"Don't get careless, slave."
Thalia cautioned her in a dry tone. Apparently Shaka's oath to become Thalia's slave remained very much in effect.
"Grrrrrr..."
Vitten was already transformed, his upper body covered in thick, bristling beast fur.
"I-I'm ready..."
Laszlo gripped a longsword and set his expression with resolve.
"Just watch my back. Any wound short of a severed neck, I'll have mended before you know it."
Colin chuckled good-naturedly.
"My lord, your orders."
The officers turned to me in unison.
A strange sense of déjà vu washed over me—and the one who had felt it before wasn't me, but my ancestor, Ivan Esterzy. Three hundred years ago, he might well have stood in this very place, watching the very same scene.
I drew two talismans from my pocket and clutched them in my hand.
"Right. Let's sweep them away."