episode_0026

“There you are!!”

The galley’s soldiers and oarsmen were working hard, even on the half-broken ship, to defeat the monster and find the adventurer and his slaves who had fallen below the surface.

It would be extremely unfortunate to succeed in killing a monster and then lose the hero who did it.

And finally, a soldier who was closely looking through the remains of tentacles on a watchtower raised his voice and shouted.

“Get over there right now! Bring a rope and a plank to help you climb up!”

At first, the commander was worried that the soldiers would have to go down and collect him, but it seems he still had enough strength left to come up on his own.

The soldiers’ gaze towards Liber, the gold-level adventurer who had just risen, was quite different from before.

Well, when Libert first came aboard this galley, they didn’t particularly look down on him.

The weight of the adventurer’s medal hanging around Liber’s neck was as heavy as the gold.

Although they simply admired such a great adventurer, there were also those who were embarrassed by the fact that the despised vampire and centaur, who were close to livestock, were calmly led around like a companion, with nothing more than a horse slave.

However, there was no one on this ship who dared question the hero who had just three of them charged at the gigantic sea monster that had just threatened the lives of all of them, and eventually succeeded in defeating it.

Only cheers and shouts greeted him back on the ship.

The galley commander also immediately came out and welcomed him.

“You were truly amazing!

You captured a monster with only a spear, even though you attacked it with a ballista, but failed to kill it!”

It was not simple flattery, but the sincere admiration of someone who would have been drowned in the sea without a move if River had not succeeded in the task.

“Phew… It was quite close. If I had missed at the end…”

“As expected, you are humble. I have never seen a warrior like you in all my years of battle.

Then please come inside. It will be difficult to give you the utmost hospitality right now because the ship is in this state, but as soon as it returns to port-”

Then the commander noticed that one of the men returning to the ship was empty.

Also, the vampire they were most wary of was nowhere to be seen.

For a moment, he was lost in thought about how to tell the adventurer in front of him.

If the vampire slave was dead, bringing up the story could be extremely unpleasant for a gold-level adventurer.

On the other hand, if they somehow escaped during a fierce battle, the nightmare that occurred in the southern part of the empire may be repeated again.

“It will be okay.”

As if he sensed the concern, River resolutely stopped the commander before he could speak.

Immediately afterwards, he passed by, responding to the cheers of the soldiers.

The commander wondered for a moment whether he should follow him and get a confirmation, but soon gave up and started moving to return the ship to port.

It seemed like there was nothing he could do right now anyway, and it was unlikely that someone the Empire trusted enough to directly entrust the job to would openly abet such an accident.

Thinking that way, he believed that it would have worked out somehow.

And in reality, Luvia was neither dead nor escaped.

-Sigh!

They were just moving separately according to Liber’s words.

Rubia, rising through the salt water in the space beneath a steep cliff facing the sea, lifted the purple-haired woman who had not yet regained consciousness with her arms.

“Phew…”

As she was lightly shaking off the sea water from her body, she noticed that a scent similar to the scent of blood that rose when Liber’s spear pierced the woman earlier was rising from a deeper place.

Perhaps this was the home or headquarters of that unknown woman that Luvia’s master had ordered her to find.

‘Now, if we wait here for the owner and the horse to return… Huh? ‘What is that?’

Then the vampire’s keen senses caught something else.

“This?…”

——

After hearing the news that the monster had died, we left the banquet held at the port and quietly headed back to the sea.

There was no need to take a boat this time.

The token that Rubia left us, along with her blood, led us to the place she would have found, and the cliff we finally found could be reached by land.

At least up to that point.

To enter the cave below, you had to climb down the steep cliff.

Although I, as well as an ordinary human being, could go down, it would take a long time.

If you were human.

“Hold on tight. Owner.”

“…Okay.”

Emma, a centaur, could have used her legs as a stepping stone to jump across the cracks all over the cliff.

Of course, for that to happen, it would be more useful to move on two legs like the typical centaur of this world, rather than the extremely heavy half-man, half-horse figure.

This also meant that I once again had to carry Emma on her back as she ran on her two legs.

It certainly didn’t seem that strange from the perspective of this world, but I couldn’t help but feel a strange sense of shame every time I took this stance.

Still, it was comforting to know that there was no one watching this right now.

“…You are here.”

…Except for Rubia.

However, as I quickly got off Emma’s back and approached Luvia, leaving her regretful behind, I realized that my vampire’s frozen expression was not simply because I was close to Emma.

“…This way.”

She arrived here before us and found something.

Elixirs of unknown origin contained in various jars, red liquid bubbling in a spring carved out of the rock without fire, and a strange scent wafting from them.

Nearby, there were piles of various materials of unknown origin or whether they were animals or plants, and tools of various shapes made of metal were placed there.

“…Are these magic potions and laboratory tools? As expected…”

Although I pride myself on having extensive knowledge about ‘Slave Makers’, this is a race I have never seen before.

From then on, I considered the possibility that the girl who attacked our galley was born artificially.

I didn’t know it would be possible to confirm the identity so quickly.

“…Did she change her legs like that herself? Or… did it become like that because it was subjected to some kind of experiment?”

Emma, with a puzzled look on her face, looked alternately at the numerous tools and materials and at the nameless woman who was still tied up and unconscious, and asked.

“Well… First of all, I couldn’t find much traces of her in those tools.”

Those words implied that there was a high possibility that the original owner of those numerous medicines and tools was not that woman.

“But… didn’t you say that that woman used magic during the battle? Then isn’t that woman a wizard too?”

The question Emma raised was equally suspicious.

Luvia, whose usual sly demeanor had completely disappeared, was looking at her with a complicated expression.

If someone was forced to change from a human to another race… I guess it wouldn’t feel like it was someone else’s business to her.

If it were the other way around, she wouldn’t feel at ease as she would think of the despicable people who did that to her.

I quietly held Luvia’s trembling hand and waited until the trembling subsided little by little.

When her expression finally relaxed, I nodded and spoke to her.

“Either way… you’ll find out if you talk to her.”

As Luvia lifted the hypnosis that had been placed on her by my words, the nameless woman slowly began to open her eyes.

Of course, they did not release the restraints in case he went on a rampage again.

During the battle, only the tentacles were running wild, and the human upper body was crying with her face covered with her hands, so this was the first time I saw her face with her eyes open.

“Ugh.. what on earth…”

She opened her mouth with a moan, shaking her purple hair back and forth and feeling as if her head was about to break.

“Where on earth is this… huh?”

She blinked like that, and the next moment, she opened her eyes wide and looked at the scene unfolding before her, as if she had been greatly shocked.

“Huh?… Huh?! What?!… What on earth did you do to my leg?!”

When removing her from the tentacles, I cut off almost all of them with my spear, but some of them were too close to her legs, so it was dangerous to spear them hastily.

Even while she was unconscious, the few remaining strands slowly but steadily multiplied and took on their current appearance.

Even so, compared to before, when it was big enough to wrap around a galley and destroy it, it was about the length of a human body…

If she remembered herself as still having human legs, her current appearance would have felt like a nightmare from which she could not wake up.

An unbelievable sight before your eyes, and your five senses coldly declaring that it is true.

The movement of the writhing tentacles transmitted through her nerves to her awareness.

“Ah…ah…”

Her gaze finally reaches us.

“…Is this what you guys did?”

Extreme anxiety, doubt, and slowly boiling anger were contained in her gaze.

To calm her down, I slowly put down the spear I was holding and said,

“Just calm down first. We don’t know what’s going on either-”

The only problem was that in the rush to get here I forgot to wash the windows.

And the bodily fluids of the tentacles still on the blade of the spear made it easy to guess that I had swung the weapon at the thing that was now attached to her leg.

Of course, without knowing the context, she had no choice but to conclude that I had already tried to harm her.

“Aaaah!”

He immediately screamed in anger and rushed at me.