Chapter 294: The Witch and The Ash-Covered Bride (4)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 294: The Witch and The Ash-Covered Bride (4)
Surprisingly, the Tin Knight’s head was not crushed into a U-shape.
This was because it was all too obvious that the cinder-covered girl would be terrified if the self-proclaimed mage suddenly started bashing her companion’s head in with a staff.
Dorothea was merciless to her enemies, but conversely, this meant she maintained certain boundaries with those who were neutral or friendly.
She had a tendency to be even more lenient with those who were innocent and powerless.
The cinder-covered girl was a perfect fit for these conditions.
Of course, this didn’t mean Dorothea had forgiven the Tin Knight for his taunts. She had merely postponed his punishment.
Thinking it would look strange for four people to crowd into a house where only one girl lived, Dorothea had her companions wait outside as she stepped into the building.
In contrast to the girl’s generally grimy appearance, the inside of the building was quite clean.
It was as if the girl had absorbed all the dirt from the building herself.
Considering the nature of cleaning, this interpretation might have been surprisingly on point.
As Dorothea looked around the building, the girl spoke with a hint of anxiety.
“Um, excuse me, but will it take long to find that thing? I don’t know when my mother and sisters will be back…”
She had let Dorothea in, overwhelmed by her presence, but she would be in serious trouble if her family saw the current situation.
Dorothea watched the girl with a peculiar expression.
By normal standards, the girl’s behavior would be interpreted as ‘a child afraid of being scolded for letting a stranger into the house while her family was away.’ Yet, to Dorothea, she looked more like ‘a servant terrified of being caught by her master for doing something wrong.’
Dorothea shrugged.
“It’ll be over soon, so don’t worry. I’ll give you a reward, too.”
Having finished the raid on the Witch of the West, she was now financially very well-off.
Changing the girl’s grimy clothes into a beautiful dress would be no problem at all, and if she felt like it, she could even rebuild the entire house. Not that she intended to go that far, as a transaction so heavily skewed to one side would be bad for both her and the girl.
‘The traces of necromancy… are they over there?’
“What’s behind that door over there?”
“That’s the door to the backyard.”
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Oh, yes. That place is fine.”
Perhaps because she didn’t have to let her into any other rooms, the cinder-covered girl looked visibly relieved.
Casually ignoring her reaction, Dorothea stepped out into the backyard.
She found her target right away.
The backyard itself wasn’t very large, and a likely candidate stood there plainly in sight the moment she entered.
A single hazel tree, about five meters tall.
Dorothea frowned.
She could feel the mana around her body being drawn toward the tree.
To be precise, it wasn’t the mana itself being absorbed, but the remnants left after using necromancy.
As if reacting to a presence of a similar nature, Dorothea’s staff began to vibrate faintly.
‘So that’s why there was a strange lack of spiritual presences around here.’
The stray spirits, vengeful thoughts, negative mana, and curses of the surrounding area.
The hazel tree before her seemed to be sucking them all up as nutrients.
What was unusual was that a tree that absorbed such negative things would normally become a medium for curses itself, driving people nearby to suicide or spreading misfortune. This tree, however, simply absorbed those energies as pure nutrients without affecting its surroundings at all.
“What is this tree?”
“Um…”
The cinder-covered girl seemed to be choosing her words.
Seeing her hesitate over whether to tell her or not, Dorothea snapped the fingers of her gloved right hand.
As the power of the Gloves of Haider activated, a gold coin materialized out of thin air and fell into the girl’s palm.
“I have no intention of harming you, and as you can see, I pay well. So I’d appreciate it if you’d answer honestly.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoaaaa!”
Dorothea had spoken in a relatively composed manner, but the girl’s reaction was dramatic.
Dorothea wondered if the girl was that excited about a gold coin, but the source of her excitement was something else entirely.
“I-It’s real magic! Real! It was real! It’s not a fairy tale! You’re a real witch!”
“Uh, uh, yeah.”
Dorothea flinched and took a step back at the sight of the girl, whose eyes seemed to be shooting out starlight.
After dealing with the Tin Knight, who was like a self-propelled rocket Moai, Dorothea found it hard to adjust to a girl who got worked up over every little thing. Adelaide still had much of her innocence, but she was a different case, having been stained by the Tin Knight’s influence.
Dorothea thought one should be more wary when a stranger displayed mysterious powers, but the girl seemed to have taken a liking to her simply for being a witch, and she began to speak with much more enthusiasm than before.
“They say that when my mother was younger than me, she got lost in a place called the Forbidden Forest. She was almost eaten by a big, smelly green monster that lived there, but a witch who lived in the forest saved her.”
Dorothea’s body twitched.
Oblivious, the girl continued her story excitedly.
“As payment for saving her life, the witch took my mother as a servant and had her do chores and run errands for a year. The errand on the last day took quite a long time, so my mother ended up working for another week. When the Witch of the East later realized she’d made her work past the promised time, she clicked her tongue and said…”
The girl cleared her throat and then spoke, as if imitating the witch from the story.
“Tsk. Since I’ve received more than what was agreed upon, I must pay the price. I will permit you to take any one item from this house.”
Dorothea remained silent.
The image of a certain ‘witch’ uttering those words perfectly matched someone she had in mind.
“My mother was trying to decide between a staff with a skull on it and a wooden doll with a strange sheen, and the witch told her this.
The skull staff is for you. If anyone tries to harm you, it will burn them to ashes.
The wooden doll is for your child. When you one day leave this world, it will protect your child from sickness and curses.
My mother chose the wooden doll. She said the skull staff seemed too scary. If it were me, I would’ve chosen the skull staff!”
Dorothea thought.
Is this kid secretly aggressive?
And there was something strange, too.
“Wait, you said it was a wooden doll? Then why did it turn into a tree?”
“Oh, um. Well, my sisters are always taking or breaking any decent personal belongings I have. I was afraid they’d take or throw away the wooden doll, so I buried it near my mother’s grave, a place my sisters never go. But for some reason, it turned into a tree. It’s only been three years since I planted it, you know? But it’s already gotten this big.
And just as the witch said, I’ve never once gotten sick. I live in such a wretched environment, so it wouldn’t be strange if I’d already caught consumption or some skin disease! Isn’t that amazing!? Well… though it would’ve been nice if it had some other effects besides just preventing sickness.”
The girl’s mood swung from excitement to dejection in an instant.
It wasn’t something that could be dismissed as her simply being expressive.
‘She’s appealing to me.’
I’m suffering, I’m going through such misfortune, can’t you help me?
She wasn’t asking outright, but her words and actions were subtly laced with such expectations.
Dorothea let out a small laugh.
She had thought the girl was just dazed and naive, but she had a subtly cunning side to her.
Not that she thought it was a bad thing. Compared to being a naive pushover who just took whatever came her way, her attitude of trying to seize any opportunity was even commendable.
Unlike a certain friend she had met in this kingdom long ago.
“—Dorothea, help me.”
Erasing the memory of the tiny, black-haired girl who had desperately pleaded for help, Dorothea spoke.
“Thanks. I’ve found out everything I needed to, so I’ll be going now.”
“Huh.”
A look of bewilderment crossed the girl’s face.
As if this wasn’t the development she had been expecting.
“B-But didn’t you say you came here because you sensed mana?”
“And I confirmed it, didn’t I? It’s not like it’s a problematic item, and as you said, it’s a beneficial tree for you. As long as you’re near it, you won’t get sick and you’ll be able to avoid things like curses. The people around you will also benefit, though not as much as you.”
A person’s appearance is partly innate, but it’s also heavily influenced by their environment.
There was a simple reason why so many nobles of this era were handsome or beautiful.
Unlike commoners who had to endure harsh labor just to survive day by day, nobles who could eat well, sleep well, wash in warm water, and apply fragrant oils had fundamentally different living conditions.
And yet, despite living in a rather poor environment, the cinder-covered girl was exceptionally beautiful.
Without so much as a common rash or eczema.
The tree had absorbed even those things, classifying them as ‘sickness.’
Dorothea summoned two more gold coins from thin air and handed them to the girl.
“One for letting me in, and two for telling me the story of the tree. That’s not a bad payment, is it?”
In fact, it was more than just ‘not bad’; it was an extraordinary reward.
Even if the girl worked as a maid in another house, doing the same level of chores she did at home, she wouldn’t earn even a single silver coin a day, let alone a gold one.
It was just that Dorothea wasn’t the kind of ‘witch’ who would conveniently take care of everything without asking for anything in return, as the girl had hoped.
As someone who knew the personality of the witch the girl’s mother had met, Dorothea could only let out a dry laugh.
It seemed that because the item her mother received from the witch had only been helpful, the girl had mixed that up with the image of witches from fairy tales and mistaken her for some kind of benevolent, gullible being.
The girl hesitated, unsure of what to say, and Dorothea turned her back as if she had said all she needed to.
Just as she was about to step out the door.
“—Please!”
the cinder-covered girl cried out in a strong voice.
“I don’t want to live like this anymore! I’m sick and tired of my stepmother and my sisters! I’ll do chores for a year like my mother did! So, please, help me…”
Her voice was almost a sob by the end.
Dorothea turned around.
She spoke, her posture askew.
“I don’t know the specifics of your wish, but I don’t do charity work, so I’ll expect proper payment. However, I don’t need a maid, and while that tree seems moderately useful as a magic catalyst, I don’t want to touch it for fear of getting caught in the crossfire. Do you have anything else to offer?”
The girl’s expression darkened at Dorothea’s words.
She was a girl who couldn’t even have proper belongings of her own.
She had nothing that could serve as proper payment for a witch who casually handed out multiple gold coins for a simple chore.
But perhaps she was grasping at straws.
The girl asked her to wait a moment, ran to the backyard, and then returned.
With hands covered in dirt as if she had been digging, the girl held out a small wooden box.
Inside were several copper coins that she seemed to have painstakingly collected, a well-shaped glass marble, and a handkerchief that, while old, looked to be of good quality.
She had said she’d hidden the wooden doll near the grave to keep it from being taken or broken by her sisters; it seemed she had dug up other things she had hidden there as well.
“W-Will this be enough?”
Dorothea narrowed her eyes.
Frankly, to her, most of it was just junk.
Besides, she had other things to do, and a wish that would take a long time was difficult to grant, even for proper payment.
Still, the fact that she didn’t dismiss it outright and was at least checking to see if it was valid payment was the least she could do to acknowledge the girl’s courage.
It was then that the compass at Dorothea’s hip moved on its own.
The Animal Compass seemed to emit a faint light, and then a golden lizard leaped toward the girl.
“Kyaa?!”
The girl shrieked and fell backward, and the contents of the box she was holding scattered across the floor.
The golden lizard ignored all the other items and thrust its head toward one of the rings.
Dorothea muttered blankly.
“…The ‘Ring of Dracaena’?”
A new sacred treasure had just appeared before her, all too conveniently.