kscans

Chapter 24 - # The Adventurers' Guild and the Little One

"How did it come to this!"

A raging boar and two fleeing twins.

After finding some tracks near their target cave, the Little One had followed them out of curiosity and found a boar deep in the left side of the cave. The quest flower was right beside the crouching boar. As the two were wondering what to do, the boar suddenly began to eat the flower.

"Ah."

The flower was supposed to be poisonous. Reacting to the small, involuntary sound, the boar glared at the twins, its guard up. Its eyes shone with a ferocious red light.

This is bad.

No sooner had the thought crossed their minds than the two of them bolted. The boar, letting out a roar, charged after them in a straight line, and a cave chase began.

A snarling sound closed in from behind. Sharp tusks grazed their sides as they dodged. Because they were dodging by a hair’s breadth in the narrow space, their ponchos were being sliced with fine cuts.

Uh oh, Mom’s going to strike me with lightning for this.

Thinking such useless thoughts, the Little One lightly pushed off the grazing tusk and leaped into the air. With a series of backflips, she killed its momentum. Her soft touch on the tusk had been so natural that even the boar didn’t know what had happened and stopped in its tracks. Putting on such a display, Chihiro clung to the rocky ceiling and murmured in a nonchalant tone.

"What should we do? Defeat it?"

Chihaya, who was similarly clinging to a ledge high up on the cave wall, shook his head vehemently at his sister’s words.

"Let’s run. We can’t hurt it, Hiiro."

Huh?

She looked quizzically at Chihaya’s serious face, and the two of them dashed through the cave. Fortunately, the rocky walls served as a good foothold, and the twins, leaping about, skillfully dodged the boar’s charges. But the boar’s rage only grew, and its momentum did not wane. Aiming for the moment the boar charged and turned, Chihaya nocked his shortbow and fired arrows, pasu pasu. With each arrow that struck the ground, aimed just shy of its hooves, the boar grew more cautious, and its movements slowed. Chihiro, clinging to the cave ceiling and watching the events unfold, felt the boar’s will to fight gradually fade as it glared at Chihaya with a mix of exhaustion and wariness. The boar was outmaneuvered by the twins, who darted around the cave, attacking from the ceiling and upper walls where its tusks could not reach. Panting heavily, it watched them cautiously, but its stamina seemed to have run out, and the boar returned to the back of the cave.

The twins had won by endurance.

"I guess it gave up? Good."

If they could avoid defeating it, all the better. Even if they had, carrying it would have been a pain.

But why had he not defeated it?

For the two of them now, a wild boar was not a significant opponent. But Chihaya had missed with every attack. He had been aiming for tricky spots, but it was clear his only goal was to hold it back. When she asked him about it, he glanced towards the back of the cave where the boar had disappeared and whispered.

"It had children. Three of them."

The Little One’s eyes widened.

Chihiro hadn’t noticed at all, but apparently, there had been piglets behind the crouching boar. He had seen small balls of fur huddled together in a narrow gap under the rock wall. He said they were clearly still nursing.

Ah, so that’s why it was extra aggressive.

So as not to take the mother away from her children, Chihaya had held out with only intimidating shots until the boar gave up.

That’s just like Nii-ni.

Her eyes curved into a gentle arc, and the Little One, composing herself, went to look for the quest flower. She should have realized it then.

The thrill of their first cave, their first battle with a beast, had clouded the Little One’s sharp senses.

It was winter. There was little food in the forest. The fact that a boar with piglets was holed up in a cave, eating poisonous grass. Normally, a boar would give birth in early autumn and finish raising its young by the end of autumn. This boar had started raising its young much later than usual, giving birth at the beginning of winter and now having nursing piglets in the middle of winter, an exceptional situation. Even in winter, when it should have been mostly inactive, it had to search for food for nursing and ended up in this cave eating poisonous grass. There was some food in the forest, but it couldn’t leave its newborn children behind to go outside. In the winter forest, the trees had lost their leaves, visibility was good, and if it walked around with its children, they would be targeted by other beasts. If they were grown, it would be different, but young children who needed to nurse would become easy prey. Therefore, the boar had holed up in the relatively safe cave, raising its young on the white flowers and whatever wild mushrooms and insects it could find.

However, this white flower had a cardiotonic effect. The components, contained even in its pollen, could cause severe heart palpitations just by smelling the flower’s scent. For a large boar, the effect was diminished, but not entirely absent.

The Little One had witnessed the boar regularly eating such a flower, yet she had carelessly overlooked what it implied.

The boar with its ferocious eyes, drooling and panting heavily. And the cave.

It was only after she had ventured further in that the Little One realized.

"This flower is pretty nasty, huh."

Putting on thick leather gloves and spreading open a densely woven bag, the twins carefully collected the white flowers, roots and all. They wrapped the roots in damp paper, carefully wrapped the entire thing in a large sheet of paper, and placed it in the bag. Then they tied the mouth of the bag tightly with a thin string. This way, the pollen wouldn’t leak out.

"Alright, I think we’re done."

Inside the bag were the white flower, the white mushrooms, and the green bagworms. All the quest items were accounted for. As the twins patted the bulging bag with satisfied smiles, a faint growl reached their ears. They spun around instinctively, and their eyes froze.

A group of monsters stood there.

Sharp fangs peeked from behind cruelly curled lips. Their red eyes glittered as they took aim at the twins. The monsters switched from low growls to roars and attacked all at once.

"Why?"

Wolf-like monsters, bat-like monsters. There were even some horned rats mixed in, attacking relentlessly without giving them a moment’s pause. As the twins were fully occupied with parrying the attacks, several wolves leaped high from behind another wolf. Just as one of them aimed for Chihiro’s shoulder and was about to bite down, zan, the wolf’s head was lopped off. Bluish-black blood spurted from the rolling wolf. Standing before the stunned twins was Dorfen, his blue eyes glinting ominously.

"Dorfen!"

"I was told not to interfere, but this is an anomaly. Leave this to me."

The Little One looked up at Dorfen, who stood with his sword ready, glaring at the monsters, and realized that hearing about something and seeing it were two very different things. In the knight order’s training exercises, he had handled many knights with ease, but that was because he was facing humans. The Dorfen with genuine killing intent was nothing like the one she had seen in training or at the Adventurers’ Guild. Even the twins, who were used to the knights’ killing intent from their training, trembled at the sheer malice and hatred he exuded. His aura of anger swelled, and the magic rising from his sword shimmered like a heat haze. The difference in power between him and the monsters was obvious. Dorfen sliced through the attacking beasts as easily as if they were butter.

But something was strange.

The Little One felt a sense of unease watching the battle unfold before her. Despite being shown such a clear difference in power, the monsters were not cowering. Instead, they were attacking Dorfen with even greater fury. Their eyes were red, they were drooling strings of saliva, and foam clung to the corners of their mouths. It was a bizarre atmosphere.

Wait, haven’t I seen this somewhere before?

It was then that the Little One finally remembered the boar from earlier.

Monsters’ eyes turn red when they are in a rage state. That’s what her tutor had taught her. But that boar wasn’t a monster. Yet its eyes were red, and it was drooling just like the monsters before her now.

Something was nagging at her.

Many creatures. A cave. And… poisonous grass.

Poison?

The Little One’s head snapped up, and she scanned her surroundings. A space isolated from the outside world, filled with a toxic substance that festered with numerous monsters and beasts.

Kodoku?

It was an ancient curse from her past life on Earth.

A horrifying curse where poisonous insects and snakes were packed into a single container and made to kill each other, with the survivor used as a medium for its ultimate poison. The current situation was very similar to that curse. If that was the case, this vicious slaughter would continue until only one was left. The monsters, drooling with glittering red eyes, were clearly not in their right minds.

"Dorfen, we’re running!"

"What?"

She didn’t know what was happening, but they were still sane. If they stayed, however, they might get caught up in the madness of the Kodoku. With Dorfen creating a protective barrier with water magic, the three of them ran for the cave entrance. As they passed, Chihaya glanced at a branching path in the cave. The boar and her children should be there. They too must have been unwittingly caught up in the Kodoku.

With a small pang of pain in his chest, the three of them burst out of the cave.

At a certain point, the monsters lost interest in them and returned to the dark abyss. In that darkness, a gruesome, bloody conflict was likely unfolding.

Moving away from the cave, the three of them reached the edge of the forest and stopped, exhausted.

"What on earth was that?"

Panting heavily, Dorfen looked at the Little One. Chihaya followed suit with a questioning look.

But how should she explain it? She didn’t know if they had truly been caught up in a Kodoku ritual. The situation was very similar, but she couldn’t be sure. It was a curse from another world. It couldn’t possibly be related to this place…

Her thoughts came to a halt, and Chihiro’s expression turned sullen.

Was it really unrelated?

Here too, an apple was an apple, a sword was a sword, green was green. Just by comparing words and objects, it wasn’t so different from Earth. If so, couldn’t the same be true for other things?

"Dorfen. This world is called Arcadia, right? What does it mean?"

Dorfen blinked at the out-of-the-blue question, then let out a small breath and smiled faintly.

"Utopia. I have heard it has that meaning."

"Then what about Frontier?"

"That would be New Frontier."

Ah…

It’s exactly the same as Earth!

Since when? From where?

It had to have been that way since before Frontier was founded, at least.

With a new seed of doubt planted in her heart, the three of them headed back to the city for the time being.

That was an abnormal situation. Dorfen agreed, saying he would report it to the knight order, and the twins nodded to each other, knowing they would have to report it to the Adventurers’ Guild as well. At the time, the three of them had no way of knowing that a truly malicious plot would later come to light.