Chapter 107
We checked our equipment one last time before setting out.
Karen’s weapon was the short sword she had used during her adventurer days. Stia, by contrast, carried a thin, long rapier.
Aba’s weapon was an ordinary sword that seemed to combine the characteristics of the other two weapons appropriately.
Diana and I were mages, so we didn’t need any special weapons.
The carriage Aba had requisitioned from the Roun family was overwhelming in size alone.
I was left speechless by the size of the carriage, which was pulled by three spirited chargers.
“Since we’re going on an emergency mission, my father let us use it specially.
These fellows have distinguished themselves on the battlefield, so even if a band of bandits attacks, there won’t be a problem. They aren’t afraid of swords, either.”
Aba chattered excitedly.
“Hmm, it’ll do. I suppose we can ride in this.”
Diana lightly climbed in first, went all the way to the innermost seat, sat down, propped up her chin, and looked at us.
“What are you waiting for? Aren’t you getting in?”
“……Do you think she’s the owner?”
“Hahaha……”
Aba laughed awkwardly.
I followed Diana and sat beside her.
Karen sat beside me, while Stia and Aba took the seats opposite us.
“Can we leave the driving to a single coachman?”
“Yes. He’s a veteran. He’ll get us safely to our destination.”
Aba answered brightly.
“Let’s work out a plan while we’re on the way.”
“Good idea.”
Stia enthusiastically agreed with my suggestion.
It would be awkward to simply sit around during the journey, and more importantly, I wanted to discuss things in advance so that there wouldn’t be any confusion once we got out of the carriage.
I didn’t have a good plan.
But I knew whom to ask.
“Stia, what do you think we should do?”
“As I said before, I’m thinking of proceeding in three broad stages.”
“Three stages?”
“Yes. First, we investigate what’s happening in the village.”
There was no room for disagreement.
Everyone must have thought it was obvious.
“Then we determine the size of the enemy forces.
By the size of the enemy forces, I mean everything we can learn: where they are, their total numbers, the level of their armaments, and so on.”
“And the final stage?”
“Once we understand the enemy’s strength, we attack using whatever method seems most suitable at the scene.”
After hearing Stia out, Diana snorted.
“If we do all that, dawn will break before we’re done. Find out where the enemy is and attack them. Isn’t that enough? We’ll each handle the fighting ourselves anyway.
It’s not as though there’s anyone here who doesn’t know how to fight, right?”
“Unless the situation is truly urgent, an investigation could obviously take several days or more.”
“Ugh……”
Diana’s face was colored with irritation.
She didn’t seem to like Stia’s cautious approach.
I took Diana’s hand. Diana flinched and looked at me.
“A plan is only a plan. We can investigate properly and fight properly, can’t we? Right?”
“……Well, that’s true.”
Diana intertwined her fingers with mine and played around affectionately, then suddenly let go as if she had realized what she was doing.
“Hey, how long are you planning to keep touching me? You really can’t let your guard down around you.”
“You liked it too.”
“……”
Diana pretended not to hear me and looked out the window.
“Let’s proceed according to Stia’s plan.
First investigate what happened in the village, then determine the enemy’s strength, and attack. Does everyone agree?”
“Yes!”
Karen answered brightly.
“I’ll do my best!”
Aba was full of enthusiasm as well.
Why had someone who hated even getting out of bed volunteered for this mission?
I had no idea.
At least I was certain he wasn’t acting for the sake of a woman, as I was.
I thought I could notice such signs more sensitively than anyone.
Aba was a good friend and someone I could trust.
“Decal.”
“Yes?”
Stia looked at me and spoke with a serious expression.
“If I may add one request to the plan, I’d like to stay in the village for a few days even after the matter is resolved.”
“Stay in the village? Why?”
Wouldn’t there be nothing left to do once the matter was settled?
“I want to prevent any additional damage that might occur because remnants of the Red Soulstone remain.”
“Ah, you mean making sure there are no embers left to flare up?”
Stia blinked.
“Making sure there are no embers left to flare up…… What a wonderful expression. Decal’s vocabulary is very sophisticated.”
“……”
This was bad.
Stia was so serious that I almost laughed.
It was just an exceedingly common saying.
I couldn’t even remember where I had seen it. A public service announcement?
In a world without media, it might sound novel. It was a good saying, in any case.
After all, the people who lived here were exposed to overwhelmingly less information than modern people.
Even though I had the goddess’s emissary skill, which bridged the differences in perception caused by language as much as possible, I sometimes remembered like this that I had come from another world, and felt a strange sense of warmth.
“Decal, what do you think……?”
“Sounds fine.”
Staying leisurely for a while after the matter was over sounded fine, too.
If anything, I was grateful to Stia for giving me a suitable pretext.
It wasn’t possible to have sex without a care in the world while carrying out a dangerous mission.
When Karen and I had been in the Black Forest. Sex hadn’t been the cause, but it had ultimately led us into a dangerous situation.
There had also been talk that taking the Red Soulstone into one’s body caused monsterization, so there was a strong possibility that hypnosis might not work.
The best way was to eliminate the actual threat first and then spend time together.
Then, even if I took the women to Eight-Colored Shell Castle, the residents of Kepa wouldn’t suffer any unexpected harm.
“Including Stia’s proposal, let’s make the plan four stages in total.”
“Thank you, Decal. It’s a relief that you’re taking charge as leader.”
“It would have been a disaster if Diana had taken charge, right?”
Stia waved her hands in panic.
“Ah, no. That’s not what I meant……!”
“……”
Huh? By now, it wouldn’t have been strange for Diana to try kicking me.
But Diana didn’t react.
“Diana. Weren’t you going to say, ‘Are you two planning to make fun of me!? I’m not doing anything like a party!’?”
“Pfft!”
Karen burst out laughing.
Aba and Stia covered their mouths to keep from laughing aloud, but it was futile.
My imitation of Diana had finally touched her sore spot.
“W-What do you take me for!? Do you think I’m the kind of woman who nitpicks everything I say?”
“I thought you’d dismiss it by saying, ‘That’s just a pointless waste of time!’”
Diana grabbed my sleeve.
“Stop imitating me, or I’ll kill you!”
“Ahahaha!”
Stia and Karen were now laughing freely.
“It seems you need to be taught a lesson. You dare make a laughingstock of a young lady of Vanguard? Such disgrace, such an insult……! Do you think I’ll forget this?”
Despite her words, I no longer felt that she disliked me as she had before.
It looked like adorable sulking. In fact, that was exactly what it was.
“Sorry. You’re just so cute.”
“You two, stop laughing as well!”
Karen laughed until she cried, while Stia held her breath until her face turned red.
Aba seemed unable to burst out laughing in front of Diana, and simply sat there looking as though he had died inside.
Once the laughter subsided, Diana sighed and spoke calmly.
“I only thought it was a reasonable suggestion.”
“What, that you can’t be the leader?”
“Not that!”
“Then, the plan about making sure there are no embers left to flare up?”
“Yes. Vice President Neris said so herself. The directive had multiple objectives.
To strike the bandits, confirm the location of the Red Soulstone, and confirm the Soulstone’s destruction.”
Hearing Diana say it brought the details vividly back to me.
That was definitely how it had been.
While listening to us, Diana had been recalling the contents of the directive.
“Destroying the bandits is a given. The order must have been issued because a report reached Melbrit that the village had suffered serious damage in some form or another.
Not a single one can be left alive. Second, confirming the location of the Red Soulstone means tracing its origins far enough to find out how the bandits acquired it. That has a lower priority than the first objective.”
Diana continued without hesitation.
“But the third objective is extremely important: confirming the destruction of the Red Soulstone.
Going back to the first point, that means at least one of the bandits is using the Red Soulstone.
The Soulstone must lose its power and be destroyed. It means we have to settle things so that no more problems related to the Red Soulstone can occur.”
“……”
“Understand? So there was no reason for me to oppose Stia’s final plan just now.”
“Diana, you’re amazing.”
I was honestly impressed.
“W-What!? Why all of a sudden……? Examining a problem carefully and grasping the intent of the person who wrote it are the most basic of basics. And you call yourselves candidates for Melbrit’s heroes?”
Diana’s face reddened at my praise.
“There’s a reason she’s ranked near the top of the Wolf class……”
Aba chimed in.
It seemed everyone felt the same way.
That was why I couldn’t hate Diana.
A haughty and rude noble young lady.
Having lived an exalted life in which even those meeting her for the first time would kneel before her, she could be willful, but as a member of the privileged class, she never neglected her responsibilities.
In other words, she wasn’t all talk.
Like any girl her age, she was ruled by her emotions in the moment and had a tendency to speak carelessly, but if she continued to grow older like this and gained the insight to look into other people’s lives as well, she would surely grow into a wonderful woman.
That is, unless she happened to meet some worthless trash of a pervert before then, got repeatedly ejaculated inside, and ended up pregnant.
Indeed.
When I thought that I was the one who had filled the womb of this noble young lady, whose future was so bright, with semen, my erection refused to go down.
“Enough with the pointless remarks.
There’s no use regretting now that it would have been better to make me the leader.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Tch…! You always have to argue over every little thing!”
“Still, it’s reassuring to have you here.”
“……”
Diana turned her gaze toward the window, her ears flushed red.
“That’s all I needed to hear.”
I took Diana’s hand.
Her slender, pretty white fingers twitched slightly before clasping my hand tightly, as if finding their way to their proper place.
I felt as though I had grown even closer to Diana.
It would have been a beautiful scene if things had ended there.
But my other hand was busy kneading Karen’s buttocks.
To keep Stia and Ava, seated across from us, from noticing, I kneaded her side breast with my fingers, gently drawing it toward me.
“……”
One might think she would grow annoyed if I kept doing this, but whenever Karen’s eyes met mine, she smiled prettily.
She even leaned her shoulder lightly against me, as if she wouldn’t mind doing this all day.
Touching her openly was enjoyable, but so was touching her with the thrill of anxiety, afraid that someone we knew might catch us.
“We’re here. I can see Kepa.”
Stia spoke with a tense expression.
I stopped my little game and waited.
From this point on, it was time for work. I wasn’t going to take it lightly.
After getting down from the carriage, we first stared silently at Kepa.
It was supposed to be a village that had suffered heavy damage at the hands of bandits…
Yet, unexpectedly, the village looked perfectly intact from the outside.
The people wandering through the streets appeared to be ordinary villagers.
But when I examined the place more closely, there were certainly signs that something was wrong.
There were no guards at the village entrance.
The wooden palisade erected as an outer wall showed signs of damage in several places.
“Let’s go in.”
I led the way into the village.
At once, the few villagers who recognized us crowded around.
“Ah! You’ve come!”
“The hero candidates from Melbrit!”
“We’ve been waiting for you.”
They must all have been going through a difficult time, because the moment they saw us, their eyes filled with tears.
Strangely, there wasn’t a single young person among them.
It was easy to assume that the men had died fighting. Had the women been taken away?
“What happened to this village?”
When I asked, an old woman stepped forward from among the people.
“I’ll explain.”
The situation was quite serious.
As Stia had predicted, the bandits had not tried to occupy the village,
but the village had already ceased to function because of the bandits’ depredations.
There had been several attacks so far, each announced in advance, and every time, the village’s young men had resisted and been killed.
The women had been taken away.
Once there were no men left who could take up weapons and fight, the bandits had shamelessly made a demand.
If the villagers handed over the young women in the village, along with alcohol and meat, the bandits would let them live in peace for the time being.
That night, those who wanted to accept the demand and those who insisted they could not fought among themselves, resulting in bloodshed throughout the village,
and some had even gone so far as to leave the village.
Only those who had no choice but to accept the bandits’ demands remained.
Powerless old people and children.
And the few women who remained…
It was beyond appalling.
“So until we arrived, this village received no help at all?”
“Kingdom soldiers did come. But they were all defeated…”
The old woman let her voice trail off and began to sob.
Several elderly people pulled up their clothes or rolled up their sleeves, revealing their bodies.
“Those bastards whipped the people who remained mercilessly, simply because we had called for soldiers and asked for help…”
The old people’s bodies truly bore terrible scars from the whippings.
The untreated wounds had swollen so badly that they were difficult to look at.
I took out the Starry Shell.
“Let’s treat the injured first.”