We got tangled up.
It was because the priestess, Bella, swept her gaze around the inn the moment she came in.
I tried my best to avert my eyes and act as if I didn’t know her, but despite my desperate efforts, she noticed us.
What made it even more lamentable was that Cassian reacted after recognizing her as someone we’d seen before, which forced us, half against our will, to share a table.
It wasn’t as if there were no seats left, so why…….
“Wow! What a coincidence! This must all be God’s guidance.”
Still, the table was fairly large, with enough room left over even after six people sat down.
So I thought three of us could sit on this side and three on the other, each group together.
But that thought of mine was crushed in an instant when Bella, without warning, planted herself in the seat beside me.
No sooner had Bella taken her seat next to me than she stroked my hair with an utterly natural touch.
After doing that a few times, when I showed no reaction, her hand moved to my cheek, and she began gently rubbing my cheek as I chewed my stew.
It was only because this was an age where views on such things were generally open, but if this had been the old days—or even older than that—I felt like she would have been dragged off long ago.
With a criminal record to go along with it.
At least it was fortunate that I had seated Illiana on the inside of the chair and myself on the outside.
Even now, despite the fact that I was acting as her shield, she was on guard in case that hand might reach her.
“Wow, your skin is so soft! Were you actually a priest too, by any chance?”
“……No.”
“Then without holy magic, you’re like this? I’m jealous…….”
This time, Bella grabbed both my cheeks and began rubbing them with her hands.
I could only wonder how a person could have so little sense of distance…….
“That’s enough, Bella. The kid doesn’t like it.”
“Ah, oh! Sorry!”
Just as I was in the midst of being tormented, the red-haired mage appeared like a savior and stopped those merciless hands.
Only then was I freed from Bella’s grasp and able to continue my meal.
After we continued eating in silence for a short while, Bella spoke up once more.
“By the way, what brought you here? It’s pretty far from there to here.”
“We just ended up here somehow.”
There was no need to tell her anything in particular, so I answered vaguely, but Bella kept talking.
“Then did you come here to investigate too?”
“Investigate?”
“You didn’t know? Well, you see……”
“Bella!!”
Just as Bella was about to say more, the black-haired swordsman shouted and cut her off.
“Heiken?”
“How much are you planning to tell them? They’re outsiders, and children at that.”
“What’s the big deal? It’s not a secret, and it’s public information anyway.”
“Even so, telling unrelated children like this……”
“And you never know, do you? They might be helpful in an emergency.”
While the two of them were having a conversation I couldn’t understand, the mage who had been silently eating bread beside them joined in this time.
“Bella might be right this time. You saw it last time too. This little one took down that huge beast in one shot.”
He pointed at Cassian, who was sitting right beside him, as he spoke.
He was probably talking about how Cassian had dealt with the two-headed, six-legged bear that appeared on the final day of our caravan escort job using Arc Discharge.
“Even you, Draut……. Ha, I don’t care anymore.”
“Then you don’t mind either, Heiken?”
“Fine, do whatever you want.”
Cassian, who had suddenly been pointed at, tilted his head slightly as if he had no idea what they were talking about.
Then, once their conversation was over, he raised one hand slightly and spoke.
“What are you talking about?”
“Ah, right! To continue, you see. This village, just by looking at it, has had an incredible harvest, hasn’t it?”
That was true. The fields were large compared to the size of the village, and all of those fields were dyed yellow.
“But when we actually investigated, this place had a harvest this good last year too, and the year before that was the same.”
While Bella continued explaining, Illiana tugged lightly on my sleeve beside me and asked.
“……Is that strange?”
“Well. It’s something you don’t see often.”
In general, it wasn’t all that common for farming itself to result in a good harvest.
The average was barely enough to get by without starving, with a good harvest or a bad harvest happening once every few years.
“And how far back does this go? Exactly ten years. And the strange thing is, for three years before that, there were poor harvests.”
That was definitely strange.
A region that had suffered famine severe enough to have poor harvests for several years in a row had suddenly started farming well and then had ten consecutive years of abundant harvests.
After farming once, the soil’s fertility tended to decline, making it difficult to have another good harvest the following year.
Unless they had some miraculous fertilizer that made bread out of air, it was hard for something like this to happen.
“So the ‘Guild’ conducted its own investigation, and they said this might be something like a witch’s scheme.”
“……A witch?”
“It’s still under investigation, so nothing’s certain yet. That’s why I just thought of it, but do you want to investigate with us? If you succeed at anything, we’ll pay you properly.”
A witch.
I thought for a moment, then nodded, thinking it wouldn’t feel right to pretend I hadn’t seen anything, and besides, they were offering money, so there was nothing bad about it.
◇
By the time the sun had almost set, after we finished dinner and returned to our respective rooms.
“What’s a witch?”
Cassian, who had come into my room for a moment, asked.
“……A really bad person, maybe?”
This time, Illiana offered the conclusion she seemed to have drawn from fairy tales about witches.
I crossed my arms and thought for a moment about how to explain it, then opened my mouth.
“Something like a superior species of humans.”
Strictly speaking, it was a little different, but if you traced their roots, they had branched off from humans, so it wasn’t wrong.
“What does that mean?”
“Just what it sounds like. Other things are similar, but they live much longer than humans, have several times more mana than humans, and are better at using magic too.”
Even if they lived long, most of them couldn’t make it to even a thousand years.
Still, considering that even great mages, whose lifespans were overwhelmingly longer than average, almost all died after living around two hundred years at most, it was a long time.
“But as the name suggests, witches are only women. There are very few of them too.”
Since witches had branched off from humans, they could only have children with human men.
The problem was that unless the witch and her partner had similar mana wavelengths, she couldn’t get pregnant.
I had once read a thesis about it, and I think it said the probability was roughly one in eight thousand.
Because of that, the number of witches had decreased sharply with each generation, and now they were practically on the verge of extinction.
Were there even three hundred of them in the entire world?
On top of that, there had once been a large-scale hunt carried out by the Holy Council, so most of them were living in hiding.
Although the cardinal who did that had been declared a heretic and had his head smashed in, there was no telling when something like that might happen again.
However, at the time, even if they were few in number, the atrocities committed by some witches had been severe, so witches had come to be regarded as evil beings by most people.
“Are they strong?”
“Probably? Most of them would be stronger than you are right now.”
They were an absurd race whose mana increased and whose proficiency in magic rose just by breathing, without any training.
It was enough to make me suspect that whoever created witches made it difficult for them to get pregnant out of concern that witches might rule the world.
They were like dragons, who could grow to the very threshold beneath transcendents just by living for a long time.
Like Rutina, sleeping carefree in the corner over there.
◇
The next day.
To avoid Bella, we deliberately hid until she left, then ate a late meal and began our investigation.
Thanks to that, the children who had been able to sleep in looked to be in even better condition, so perhaps I should say it was actually a good thing.
We diligently went around here and there, asking people for information that might serve as clues.
However, the villagers’ reactions were more exclusionary than expected.
“I-I don’t know anything like that! Get lost!”
“I’ve n-never heard of such a thing.”
“I’m not sure? Isn’t that some strange rumor?”
Judging by their reactions, it did seem certain that there really was something, but they showed no sign of wanting to tell us anything.
Just in case, we asked the children who were playing around as well, but the children, if anything, seemed to truly know nothing.
We went around to various places until the sun rose to the middle of the sky, but it would be fair to say that what we had learned by then was almost zero.
In the middle of that, we ran into Bella and her companions, who were likewise going around the village.
We stood under the shade of a nearby tree, cooling off as we talked.
“Did you find out anything?”
“Not really. They won’t say much of anything.”
“Right? We started asking yesterday too, but no one would answer. But something is definitely strange……”
At that moment, a farmer came out of a shabby house over there and slowly approached us.
Looking at her face, she seemed to be just about to enter her thirties, but compared to that, her face looked terribly haggard.
“A-are you perhaps…… asking about the witch……?”
She checked her surroundings again and again to make sure no one was nearby, then spoke in a quiet voice.
“I-I…… have something to tell you. Would you please follow me to my house……?”