Chapter 170: The Tin Knight and the Short but Distant Voyage (2)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 170: The Tin Knight and the Short but Distant Voyage (2)
The Locria Federation was, in many ways, a nation with deep ties to the water.
About half of its borders met the sea, and it had many wide, deep rivers that flowed into it.
Therefore, many of the domains belonging to the Federation owned ships.
They were useful for paying taxes, good for commerce, and could even be used for leisure cruises when the occasion arose.
And Dorothea had extorted the Donnengarten ship from the lord's wife.
Donnengarten, whose main source of income was selling fresh produce, would surely have a hard time filling the void left by the loss of a useful means of transport, but she didn't need to concern herself with that.
Splash!
As Dorothea waved her navy-gloved hand, a large ship appeared on the sea, creating waves.
Then, when she touched the carriage again with her glove, the carriage that had served as their lodging and transport, along with the golem horse, was sucked right into the glove.
Dorothea muttered, her eyes glinting with a hint of obsession.
“I wonder if there's any way to pry these gloves from the kingdom. They're incomparably more convenient than some stupid key.”
She casually muttered something that would have made every thief and treasure hunter in the country go mad with envy.
Indeed, unlike thieves who had to secretly raid someone else's treasure vault, Dorothea's party could boldly charge in from the front, behead the owner, and plunder their assets. For them, a pouch to hold the treasure was far more important than a key to pick a lock. The Wicked Witch of the West, who had so graciously donated her assets, was proof of this.
“The ship is bigger than I thought. How are we going to handle it?”
Adelaide asked, gazing at the ship bobbing on the water.
This was the second time the party had been on a ship.
Unlike Franka's ship, which was small and nimble as its sole purpose was ‘transport’, the ship extorted from the lord's wife was originally for transporting agricultural products, giving it a large and cumbersome appearance.
Even to Adelaide, who knew little about ships, it looked like it would require dozens of skilled sailors, yet there wasn't a trace of anyone else nearby besides the party.
Of course, Dorothea had a plan.
“No need to worry. I didn't bring the ship out here for no reason.”
The place where the party currently stood was an area people avoided because they would often fall in and drown, or commit suicide there.
To put it in the Tin Knight's vernacular, it was a haunted spot, plain and simple.
A normal person would have avoided it out of sheer bad omen, but for a necromancer, such a warehouse of natural resources was rare.
Sure enough, when Dorothea took out her birdcage and called forth the spirits, all sorts of souls shot up from the surroundings like mushrooms after a rain.
No, to be more precise, something other than souls rose up with them.
“Um, Witch. I think something is swimming out of the water!?”
“Groooaaan...!”
Ashen blue faces. Hair plastered down by water. Eyes with so much white showing it was as if they had no eyelids.
Beings that could be called the very archetype of water ghosts were crawling onto the shore, possessing physical forms.
And those were the ones with relatively neat appearances; among them were quite a few whose bodies were so bloated and ruptured that their forms defied description.
At the apocalyptic, gruesome sight, Rapunzel trembled and Adelaide also looked somewhat horrified, but Dorothea herself was unfazed.
“Hmm. I guess it's because this place is steeped in grudges. Looks like they were already halfway to becoming undead before I even did anything.”
Sophia asked, “Does that mean you can't control them?”
“I can, but it's easier to break their spirits first.”
Dorothea replied simply, then added, “Go.”
A single word, excessively short, making it difficult to even know who it was addressed to.
But no one in the party pondered its meaning. It was obvious what would happen.
[The 'Tin Knight' joyfully welcomes the impromptu combat event!]
CRACK!
With an excited air, the Tin Knight delivered a knee kick, and the head of the female water ghost at the front spectacularly exploded.
Ghosts with physical forms that could harm people were a nightmare for ordinary folk, but to the Tin Knight, they were just easy targets to hit. In fact, even if they didn't have physical forms, he would just beat them with his sword energy, so it didn't make much of a difference.
Above all, the mental attacks and physical debuffs from the sinister energy, characteristic of the undead, had no effect on the Tin Knight whatsoever.
The horror genre was effective against humans, but its potency fell short against the non-human.
As the horde of water ghosts was reduced to something that used to be a horde before the Tin Knight's spirited rampage, Dorothea began the 'retraining' process.
“Alright, any of you who think you know how to sail a ship, get over here. No, leave your bodies and just come as spirits. Your bodies are in bad shape anyway, so I'll have to dissolve everything but the bones.”
“What? You want revenge on the woman who cheated on you with another man? Forget it. Payment is a one-time deal: peaceful passage to the afterlife. If you don't like it, you can stay in the cold water forever.”
“And what's your deal? You want to leave a letter for your mom saying you're sorry? You too? Hah… seriously. Fine, everyone write one. Sophia, take dictation. Adelaide, go catch some birds.”
About an hour later.
Following the preferences of a witch who, despite being a necromancer, was quite sensitive about hygiene, a legion of skeletons—their bodies bleached white and odorless after undergoing various processes of discoloration, deodorization, and magical filling of missing parts—saluted Dorothea in unison.
“Thank you, Witch! My mind was always clouded and full of dark resentment, but now it is clear and pure!”
“Thanks to you, I was able to send a final message to my homeland!”
“We will ensure you have a safe voyage!”
“Uh, um. Right.”
Dorothea nodded, looking a little bewildered.
The truth was, she hadn't had high expectations for the quality of the souls she had summoned.
She had summoned numerous artisans to work for her in Tik-Tok, but that was only possible because it was an urban center.
Just because people died in a certain place didn't mean their souls would necessarily linger there, and the probability of finding those with the specific skills Dorothea wanted was even lower.
Since she was conducting this urgent recruitment not in a port but in a haunted spot people avoided, her original calculation was that it would be enough if even a tenth of them knew how to sail.
And that calculation had been proven wrong—in a way that was more profitable than her original plan.
“Even so, it's quite a coincidence. To think that victims of a naval battle from a nearby area were trapped here.”
Sophia remarked, blinking her eyes.
The various magic tools flowing out of the Magic State had long been famous for their outstanding quality.
From refrigerators that could keep food cold, to simple bathtubs that provided hot water without needing to be boiled in advance, to bags that greatly reduced the weight of their contents.
After the Witch of the South obtained the position of the Empire's Crown Mage and began mass-producing Wizards as a national project, it was said that the Empire's magic no longer lagged far behind the Magic State's, but this was a story limited strictly to combat.
The magic tools that were convenient for daily life—and thus all the more effective at prying open the wallets of nobles—still couldn't catch up to those of the Magic State.
The 'Garden' was situated squarely between the Empire and the Magic State, and in places where the Garden wasn't, soldiers from both nations stood guard grimly over the border. As a result, trade was impossible except for a very few companies that had received permission from both nations.
The only remaining options were the land route through the eastern continent and the sea route through the western continent.
Since everyone knew that sea routes were more convenient than land routes for transporting goods, the waters between the Magic State and the Federation were always teeming with merchant ships, pirate ships, and warships.
Among the souls Dorothea had summoned, there was a fair number of former navy personnel mixed in.
“Hmm.”
Even though she had, in a way, easily acquired a high-quality workforce, Dorothea's brow remained furrowed.
She had heard rumors that the sea routes in this area were rough, but for pirate ships to invade this close to the coast and get into brawls with the navy seemed to indicate the situation was quite serious.
The Locria Federation wasn't stupid; they would know the profits from trade with the Magic State were immense and would have invested in their naval power accordingly. The fact that they still couldn't drive out all the pirates meant the pirates were just as formidable.
'I thought we could just sail in a straight line. Is it more dangerous than I thought? It'll be a huge pain in the ass in many ways if that idiot falls into the sea.'
The Tin Knight displayed nearly unrivaled combat prowess on land, but he had a major weakness: he couldn't swim.
To be more precise, it wasn't that he couldn't swim at all, but that he had to consume an enormous amount of mana to keep his metal body from sinking.
Dorothea took out the Animal Compass and infused mana into one of its characters.
The silver horse that appeared leaped straight into the sea without a hint of hesitation and began to swim.
As if to prove that the sacred treasure Dorothea had to find lay beyond this sea.
“Tsk, I guess there's no choice.”
Dorothea clicked her tongue.
She felt uneasy in many ways, but it was absurd to come this far only to be unable to proceed because she was afraid the Tin Knight might fall into the sea.
“You, try to be careful if you can. If you fall into the sea, I'm just going to leave you behind. Got it?”
[The 'Tin Knight' beats his chest, signaling that there's no need to worry!]
*
The greatest advantage of sailing with the undead was, without a doubt, its cost-effectiveness.
The undead do not eat. The undead do not sleep. Their bodies don't break down from rowing too much. No, even if they do break, they are quickly repaired with a bit of mana.
In other words, there was no need to prepare food for the crew, no need to give them breaks, and they wouldn't even defy the captain or express dissatisfaction.
Of course, they consumed a corresponding amount of mana, but for Dorothea at least, that was a meaningless drawback.
Operating fewer than a hundred undead day and night barely even registered as a drain on Dorothea's mana.
To put it bluntly, the Tin Knight alone consumed far more mana.
Just when it seemed they would reach their destination smoothly...
'It' appeared.