Explosion (6)
"Yes, I've confirmed everyone on the passenger list we received from Kay Trading Company. We've also identified the bodies of several company employees and escort personnel... There is no one left unaccounted for."
The one checking the list as she spoke was Lize, a clerk of the Guild. As the one who had issued the emergency request, she had come all the way out to the site as the Guild's interim supervisor, and she addressed Haru, who had led the people out of the cave.
"The seriously injured, including Kay Trading Company's branch manager, are being transported to the city as we speak. All that remains is mopping up the remnants."
"Here. The second-in-command."
"...Understood. We'll handle the interrogation of this one ourselves."
At Lize's businesslike words, the Guild staff standing around her seized the bandit lieutenant by the arms and dragged him away.
"Just bind his hands and feet and toss him in the wagon. I have things I need to confirm immediately."
"Yes, ma'am!"
Watching the lieutenant and the Guild staff recede into the distance, Haru turned her head.
"...Then I'm off."
"Where are you going?"
"To help Ain."
The instant she said it, Haru turned on her heel, ready to run — then stopped.
"...These two."
"Pardon?"
"Ain's family."
"...Ain's parents?"
"Yeah. Take care of them."
As if she had finally said everything that needed saying, the corner of Haru's mouth curled into a faint smirk. Then she vanished back into the mountain, and Lize, left suddenly face-to-face with Ain's parents, spoke in a slightly awkward voice.
"...It may take some time before the two of you can return to Karpe. We're concentrating our transport on moving the wounded first, so..."
"Ah, that's quite all right, miss."
"We have no intention of going to Karpe, you see."
"...I beg your pardon?"
Unsure what to make of that, Lize's eyes widened — a rare sight on her face.
"In addition to taking your statements, the trading company will also need to pay compensation for failing in their duty of protection. And yet..."
"Taking statements? The others will suffice for that. As for the company's compensation, give Ain's share to him."
"...Ain's share, you say."
"That's right. And we intend to take our leave from here."
Unlike the other hostages, the two of them spoke in voices of utter, unshaken calm.
"We've finished everything we needed to do here. There's no reason to stay any longer."
"So would you pass a message along to Ain for us? Tell him we've gone."
"...Wouldn't it be better to see your son's face before you leave?"
"We've already said our goodbyes, and we'd rather not trouble our boy for no reason."
With that, the two of them shrugged and turned to go.
"Well then, miss. We'll leave it to you."
"Collect whatever we owe you from Ain. Asking him to buy you a meal sometime would be just the thing."
"A meal, you say?"
"Yes. You need that, don't you? A little socializing."
"..."
Something about it felt off. Ain might well have told his parents about her. But something — her instincts kept sounding a quiet, persistent alarm.
"Oh my, was that too forward of me?"
"Dear, that's enough. Let's go."
"Yes, of course. Well then... we'll leave it in your hands, miss?"
Ain's mother smiled with her eyes, then turned her back. The couple walked off in the opposite direction without the slightest hesitation.
An utterly ordinary gait, the kind you might see anywhere. A couple who looked reasonably fond of each other. Their appearance was so perfect it might have been stamped from a mold — which was precisely why it felt wrong. Or was that just her imagination? There was not a single reason she should feel that way, and yet...
...Hah. I've gotten jumpy.
Lize shook her head twice, sweeping the thought aside. A band of adventurer-turned-bandits had caused a major incident. Of course she was on edge. Having dismissed it as such, she immediately turned on her heel.
They had captured the man who appeared to be the bandits' second-in-command. There was plenty to interrogate him about. According to the Guild's intelligence, the ringleaders of this incident were nothing more than mediocre former adventurers hovering around Iron rank. She needed to find out how people like that had obtained the power to slaughter the escorts of a reasonably large trading company and pull off a robbery. Preventing something like this from happening again was a manager's job, and she intended to fulfill her duty.
However.
"L-Lady Lize..."
"W-we're sorry. That man... he had a weapon hidden..."
Inside the Guild-crested wagon where the so-called lieutenant should have been bound, Guild staff sat with deep wounds carved through a thigh and a shoulder, their faces twisted in pain.
"Nothing else around?"
"No. Aside from traces of the bandits living here, there's nothing."
Filthy dishes, soiled clothes, bedding tossed in a heap — none of that was particularly unusual. In the end, the only thing Ain and Er needed to concern themselves with were the fragments of black magic stone that had come from the man with a hole blown through his chest.
"This was the source of the mana. It's similar to the ones we got from those skeletons before, isn't it?"
"Yes, except these are smaller from being shattered."
"...This is weird. Why does something related to mana or black mages pop up everywhere I go?"
As if someone were doing it on purpose. Ever since Ain had left the temple and become an adventurer, he had kept running into them.
"We've heard that anomalies have been occurring all over, but... with us, it's on another level."
"Yeah. Almost like someone is... targeting me deliberately."
It couldn't be the black mages. Veronica herself had stated with certainty that they wouldn't know Ain's true identity. Was it just coincidence? Or was there something he didn't know? Turning it over in his mind right now produced no answers — only frustration. Ain furrowed his brow, lost in thought, and irritably pressed his fingers against his temples.
"Ain."
"Haru! What about the others?"
"With Lize. Ain's parents, too."
"...If it's Lize, I can trust her. She does her job thoroughly, if nothing else."
With that, Ain shook off the last lingering anxiety about his family's safety.
"Haru, look at this. What do you make of it?"
"Magic stone. Mana. And... black magic."
"It was embedded in his chest. I wish we could have recovered it intact..."
The magic stone, smashed to pieces by the Divine Power Ain had poured into it, barely left a usable trace.
"...This one's a dead end."
"What?"
"Already dead."
"...Dead?"
Ain frowned, not following. Haru went on in the same flat tone.
"Not breathing. Residual mana left in the body is leaking out."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Especially..."
Haru picked up something resembling a fallen tree branch and, without the slightest hesitation, smashed it into the bandit leader's head. Blood burst out as if a gourd had been split open.
"Urgh...!"
"Hey— what the hell are you—?!"
"Wasn't me. It was already smashed."
"...What?"
"Looking at the traces, someone struck his head hard enough to finish him. Hit so hard the skull shattered."
"Wait a second, then..."
Er recalled Jina driving her fist into the bandit leader's head during the earlier fight.
"...So by the time he started pouring out mana, he was already dead? From Jina's punch?"
"Death was probably the trigger condition. And once that formula activates..."
Haru's face twisted with rare disgust.
"Immediate undeath conversion."
"Undead?"
"There would've been oddities. Wounds healing fast. Attacks having no effect. That kind of thing..."
"..."
Every example Haru listed matched perfectly. Er, who had faced the man herself, closed her mouth and silently agreed.
"If that's true..."
"...How many more people like this are out there?"
"Nobody knows. But..."
Haru crushed a fragment of magic stone underfoot and turned her pale blue eyes on Ain.
"They'll keep showing up. Black mages. Persistent like that."
"...Yeah. They would."
Which meant they couldn't go on like this. They needed to change. They couldn't keep being dragged around forever. So—
"Er. Haru. We need to talk. Jina too."
"Talk?"
"Yeah. Once we're back in Karpe, and Jina wakes up."
Ain's voice was ice-cold.
"Hah... hah...!"
Clutching an arm that streamed blood, the man tore through the undergrowth, scrambling over the mountain. Sweat soaked his face, and perhaps because of the bleeding from his arm and leg, his vision kept blurring. He forced it into focus and ran.
"I-I can't die. If I die here...!"
The black beings who had bestowed tremendous power upon a two-bit thug of a former adventurer. The first time he had met them, he had felt as though he were dying. The agony of a giant serpent snapping his neck. The hallucination of his entire body being ground down, reduced to nothing but a lump of blood. Unable to endure it, he had led them to his boss.
They had embedded a magic stone in the boss's chest. A sinister black magic stone, utterly unlike any ordinary one. Only the boss himself and this man had known that fact. Of course they had — because the boss was not the only one with a magic stone in his chest.
The stone embedded in the man's own chest was smaller and weaker than his boss's. When they had first implanted it, he had overheard the black beings muttering that they had failed. Just as they had said, the man had not grown strong the way his boss had. Compared to a washed-up Iron-rank nobody who had become strong enough to smash a wagon to splinters and bring down a cave wall, all this man had gained was a slightly superior healing factor. That was all.
But even that had been enough. If he had fallen into the Guild's hands and been transported to Karpe, the best he could have hoped for was execution. If luck ran against him, he would have ended up as someone's experimental subject.
But that was not his fate. From his utterly brainless boss. From the black beings whose intentions he could not fathom. And from something even more terrifying than either of them—
"My, where are you off to in such a hurry?"
"We still have unfinished business, don't we?"
And in that instant, figures blocked the path the man had been fleeing down. A man and a woman — one with black hair, the other with brown. Despite appearances that looked unusually young, they wore the kind of everyday clothes a middle-aged couple might put on, and they sat waiting for him, leaning against a boulder and a tree.
"E-eeeeek!!!"
The moment he saw their faces, the man crumpled to the ground as if his legs had given out. No. His legs had not given out.
"M-my legs, my leeeegs!!!!"
He could see it with his own two eyes. The two legs that had been standing on the ground just a moment ago were now tumbling across the dirt like severed chunks of timber. Pain arrives through recognition. The moment he understood that he had lost his legs, the agony crashed over him, and he howled.
"WHYYYYYY!!! I did everything — everything you told me to!!!"
"Mm, sorry about that. We get a little emotional."
"Who told you to sneer at our son, anyway?"
The eyes of the two people who said this were astonishingly cold. Those were not the eyes one used to look at a person. They were the eyes of an absolute predator regarding a worm crawling on the ground. The pain was greater than the fear. The man screamed at the top of his lungs.
"I DID WHAT YOU SAID!!! I got the boss to move and raid the trading company, I even provoked them into fighting the adventurers!!!"
"Well, that's true enough. I'll give you that much."
The man among them rose from his seat and approached.
"You really were a helpful fellow. Couldn't just stand by and watch us in a bind, so you rolled up your sleeves and jumped right in. Ah — I suppose you haven't any feet left to jump with. Sorry. I wasn't trying to mock you."
"Why — why are you doing this!! I-I did everything you people told me to!!"
"Now, now, let's be precise with our words. People got hurt, didn't they?"
Who did he mean by people who got hurt? The woman swordsman who had fought the boss? The blond man this fellow had faced himself? Or the escorts who had been protecting the trading company? As if reading those thoughts, the man flicked his fingers, toying with a flicker of blue light.
"Mercenaries... adventurers, bodyguards — those aren't the problem. Not even if it's my own son. Not even if it's a girl who might become my daughter-in-law. They pick up a weapon knowing they might die at any time."
"Then — then why...!!"
"Why did you hit that old gentleman?"
The branch manager of Kay Trading Company's Karpe branch, the man who had been in overall charge of the caravan. They remembered watching this fellow beat the rather elderly man to a pulp to shut him up, and they asked.
"Y-you people didn't stop me either!!!"
"That's true. In fact, that's just an excuse. We simply want you silenced."
And then it happened. The man flicked his fingers. At the same time—
"Ugh... I told you to keep it clean."
"Sorry. His heart must have been unnecessarily healthy. I didn't expect the blood to spray quite that far."
Watching the headless body, the man was about to move his hand again when the corpse, now missing its head, twitched as it was wrapped in a black aura. He spoke in a distasteful voice.
"And what is that supposed to be? An undead?"
"Ah, those things really do keep crawling out, now as ever."
The woman rose to her feet. A sword had appeared in her hand at some point.
"Going to do it yourself?"
"Yes. If you smash it to pieces again, cleaning up will be a pain."
In that instant, the man's torso — still radiating a thick black aura — was carved apart. Like filleting a fish on a cutting board, her face utterly devoid of emotion. Having sliced apart the body that had been transforming into a zombie, she sheathed her sword without a single drop of blood on the blade.
"Ain is doing well, don't you think?"
"Of course. We already confirmed it, didn't we? Those young ladies are worth leaving him with."
They had even staged this pathetic little play for his sake. They had thought he was mixed up with some strange characters, but they hadn't expected black mages to be involved. Even if they had let him leave Karpe as they had originally promised, he would have been destined to die in the end.
"I suppose a parent's heart can't be helped. We even put him through a test just to check, and I still can't stop worrying."
"Don't worry so much."
He looked at his wife, whose face was still clouded with concern.
"...That's true, isn't it?"
"It is. So all we need to think about is what to give Ain the next time we see him that he'll actually like. We're heading south, so maybe jewelry? That stone ornament last time didn't get much of a reaction..."
"I told you from the start that one was a no."
"No, I was sure about it!"
Chattering away like that, the two of them left. And watching their receding backs was nothing at all.
Nothing.