Chapter 277: The Tin Knight and The Enchanting Demon (3)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 277: The Tin Knight and The Enchanting Demon (3)
After Marquis William finished his explanation.
The room was filled with a thick, heavy silence.
“Haaah…”
And as if to break that silence, a deep, a ve-ry deep sigh escaped Dorothea's lips.
William flinched so dramatically it would have been amusing to watch.
“I-I did everything I could! I got the lady out safely! I treated her as best as I possibly could! It's not my fault a mad swarm of mice suddenly appeared in my domain, is it!?”
“You're being distracting. Shut up for a moment.”
“Hmph.”
William's mouth snapped shut like a clam.
For a trusted vassal cherished by the king, a man of power said to hold sway over the kingdom, he cut a truly pathetic figure.
But it couldn't be helped.
Things like power and authority only worked on those bound by the common sense of the mortal world. Trying to act high and mighty in front of madmen who had screwed over the continent's strongest nation not once, but twice, would only make one's own shoulders lighter.
After all, if the part above one's shoulders physically ceased to exist, wouldn't they naturally become lighter?
Seeing the marquis furtively glancing around, Adelaide's gaze softened into one of pity.
Ever since hearing that he had flatly refused the traveler's demand for the lord's wife, her view of the marquis had grown considerably gentler.
“Witch.”
“…I know. Taking it out on this man won't solve anything. More importantly, I think we've been scammed.”
“Scammed?”
“It's become less common recently, but I've heard that back in the chaotic old days, many mages and witches used this kind of trick. They'd intentionally mislead someone into a contract, then use that contract to extort the price they truly wanted.”
At Dorothea's words, the Tin Knight tilted his head.
[The 'Tin Knight' asks if it wouldn't be faster for someone with that kind of power to just take what they want from the start!]
If the lord's wife was the goal from the beginning, he could have just incapacitated the people of the marquis's domain with his sleep-inducing power and taken her.
But the traveler went out of his way to eliminate the mice first, then demand the lord's wife as payment.
To the Tin Knight's question of whether that wasn't too roundabout a method, the witch replied.
“No, in this case, the very act of 'following a complex procedure' becomes a source of power. The process itself is a kind of ritual.”
It was hard to tell because Dorothea often just substituted mana for all sorts of procedures, but necromancy originally often required convoluted processes to achieve a single desired result.
For example, a curse where you put the target's hair into a straw doll, hold a knife in your mouth in the dead of night when no one is watching, and stab the doll with a nail and hammer.
Actions that seem intuitively unnecessary and wasteful actually hold meaning and become power.
“Ah, now that you mention it, I think there were quite a few stories like that in fairy tales. A powerful mage who could turn someone who broke a promise into a mouse with a single gesture might be defeated anticlimactically by unrelated soldiers, things like that.”
“Mages and witches from the old days had a stronger tendency for that. This is less like modern magic and more like an ancient esoteric art. The problem is, just as they're tricky to establish, they're also a pain to dispel…”
[The 'Tin Knight' asks if they can't just split that traveler fellow's head in two!]
“Sometimes that works, but other times it just makes the situation worse.”
Dorothea clicked her tongue as if to say this had become a nuisance.
“Tsk, no choice then. We'll have to look into a few things first.”
At her words, Marquis William's face brightened instantly.
“Y-You'll help!?”
“Don't get too excited. We won't know if we can solve it until we take a look.”
“I understand. Please, I'm begging you! If the children never wake up, the townspeople might rise up en masse!”
[The 'Tin Knight' says that most nobles he's seen would probably just commit a massacre if a rebellion broke out, but this old guy seems simple!]
No, maybe he just lacks the power.
Thinking this to herself, Dorothea sighed once more.
Lamenting that this damn journey never seemed to go smoothly.
*
The first place the Tin Knight's party visited was the guest annex where the lord's wife was staying.
The annex was surrounded by numerous guards, their vigilance extremely strict.
“Anything unusual?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Don't overlook even the slightest anomaly. Be vigilant. It's a hundred times better to overreact than to let things escalate.”
“Yes, sir! We won't miss a single shadow!”
It was the very picture of an ideal superior and his subordinate.
Though it also looked suspiciously like he was trying to show off to Dorothea's party, as if to say, 'Look how hard I'm working!'
And inside the mansion.
The gaze of a female knight, standing proudly before the bedroom door as if guarding it, recognized the party.
Her eyes, tinged with fatigue and wariness, widened in surprise, and a single word escaped her lips.
“My lady…?”
“Ronnie!”
Before the other guards could even think to stop her, Adelaide rushed forward and threw her arms around her former page.
After an exchange of greetings filled with joy, sorrow, and longing, Adelaide wiped her tear-filled eyes and spoke.
“I'm sorry to have kept you waiting so long. Are you hurt anywhere?”
“No, my lady. The marquis has been very accommodating. And I've been kept informed of your activities.”
Ronnie forced herself to swallow the words she was about to add—that the stories she'd heard were so absurd they were hard to believe.
The truth of those stories was plain to see just by looking at Adelaide.
‘…She's grown so much. She's reached a level I can't even begin to fathom.’
Ronnie hadn't been idle for the past year, either.
Though originally closer to an ordinary talent, she had used her experience with the Tin Knight's party as a fortuitous opportunity and, through steady effort, had long since grown into a knight in her own right.
Even to Ronnie's eyes, Adelaide's transformation was dazzling.
Her gait, her posture, every trivial gesture exuded an inexplicable power and confidence.
The aura of a beautifully blossomed flower remained, but while she had once been a flower pure in its ignorance of the world, she now possessed a resilience forged by worldly hardships, one that refused to yield.
“I came to see my mother.”
At Adelaide's words, Ronnie, who had been lost in thought, returned to the present.
She nodded, then opened the door and led the party inside.
“—”
Seeing the woman lying quietly on the bed, Adelaide fell silent, a lump forming in her throat.
Then, she walked to the bed and clasped the woman's hand.
Watching the quiet mother-daughter reunion from a slight distance so as not to disturb them, Dorothea asked Ronnie a question.
“I can understand being in shock after losing her husband and son one after the other, but to remain unconscious for over a year is still strange. It's not like she has any physical injuries, right?”
“We brought in some well-known doctors to examine her, but they all said it was due to severe psychological shock and nothing more. The royal family even sent a priest for a time, but holy power had no effect…”
“Hmm.”
Dorothea twirled a lock of hair that fell over her shoulder.
Her gaze fell upon Sophia, who also seemed to be lost in thought.
‘The traveler singled out the wife who wouldn't wake up. And when his demand was refused, the children of the town fell into a sleep from which they wouldn't wake.’
It felt far too coincidental to be a simple accident.
Thinking some kind of curse might be involved, she had tried to perform a dispelling, but it had no particular effect.
The next place they visited was the temporary lodging where the sleeping children had been gathered.
They weren't managing all the children in the domain, only those of the servants and soldiers, but even so, the number was not small.
Marquis William spoke with an air of impatience.
“It's obvious, but even if people are asleep, they can't go without eating. We have to feed them at least thin porridge or something, and even that isn't very effective. We managed to keep the lord's wife going for a long time with the help of magic and what-not, but it's impossible to give that kind of treatment to each and every one of these children. At best, they have a few months. And that's only for the children here; the ones at their own homes are likely in worse condition.”
In other words, the incident had to be resolved as quickly as possible.
The marquis's own children were already grown and working at the royal castle, so they weren't caught up in this, but that fact was, ironically, creating a distance between him and the victims.
“Hmm.”
Dorothea once again tried dispelling the curse and sensing for magical energy, but just as with the lord's wife, there was no reaction.
There were three possibilities.
First: It wasn't a matter of mystical power at all, but a simple illness.
If it were just the wife, that might be plausible. But the fact that all the children of the domain fell asleep immediately after the traveler's demand was refused was clearly unnatural. Ruled out.
Second: The magic was cast by a mage far superior to Dorothea, making it undetectable to her.
Honestly, this was also unlikely. The first person who came to mind was her teacher, the Witch of the East, but the teacher Dorothea knew was the type to simply reduce a place to ruins when angered, not someone who would use such petty tricks.
Third and last: It was indeed a mystical power, but not the mana that Dorothea used.
The foreign mana of the underground. Or, the holy power of the heavens.
Dorothea had encountered both forces before, but her understanding of them was somewhat lacking compared to her mastery of mana.
If the user of the power was intentionally trying to hide their identity, it wasn't impossible that she would fail to detect it.
[The 'Tin Knight' asks if she's figured anything out!]
“…I have a rough idea, but I don't know if this was aimed at us or if the timing is just a coincidence.”
Dorothea scratched her cheek and asked the marquis a question.
“Do you know anything about the whereabouts of that traveler fellow?”
“After the children fell ill, we searched the area around the domain several times, but we couldn't find anything plausible.”
“Then let's first try treating them with Sophia's holy power, and if that doesn't work, we'll just have to intervene in their dreams—”
Before Dorothea could finish, a commotion suddenly erupted nearby.
Marquis William turned to the servants with an irritated expression and demanded.
“We have esteemed guests here! What is all this commotion?”
“M-My lord! It's him! That man has appeared in the streets!”