Chapter 19
Goblins clustered among the bushes!
We hid in the trees and watched those bastards. They hadn't noticed us yet, but they were heading toward the cave we were going back to.
‘I should've known from the footprints.’
Those bastards must have left footprints while hiding somewhere from the rain. Now that it had stopped, they'd come out and wander around looking for a new lair.
…Should we just strike first? We could slaughter every last one of them.
‘No, hold it in. My inner Vector Man.’
Ten was quite a lot. How many times had I already nearly gotten myself killed by letting my guard down?
If I got cocky just because I trusted Beast Regression's defense, things could go horribly wrong. Even if I was fine, Francesca could be badly injured by a blind goblin attack.
“…What should we do?”
Francesca whispered from behind the tree beside me. I answered, lowering my voice as much as possible.
“Let's wait until they leave. It would be better to set up a trap inside the cave to serve as an alarm and wait until the relief watch arrives….”
My attempt to sound out her opinion was abruptly cut short. Something had changed in the place where the goblins were.
─Rustle.
A sandal landed on the rain-soaked ground. Her light footwork was the complete opposite of the noisy stomping of goblins trudging through the mud.
A woman suddenly appeared from the sky.
What was astonishing was that she had descended from a place higher than my field of vision. Even as she dropped down from one of the surrounding trees, she made almost no sound.
“…Too few.”
The sky-blue-haired woman spoke in a soft voice.
Then she vigorously shook her short hair from side to side. Raindrops flew everywhere, and some of her hair stuck to the corner of her mouth.
Veteran trait) Having gone all-out on character customization, her outfit exposed her sideboob completely, and the rain made her underwear plainly visible. It was a sleeveless dress in the style of Narmer-Nile. It looked exactly like something a dancer would wear.
‘A Narmerian?’
I tensed up at the appearance of a woman whose identity I didn't know.
That woman radiated the vibe of a fucking hardcore veteran adventurer. In this world, scanty clothing suggested a high level of naked-body defense.
That thin, fluttering outfit was an expression of confidence that attacks from scrubs might as well not land.
Her expression was so blank that I couldn't tell what she was thinking at all. Every one of her movements exuded the boredom of a veteran who had come out to clear a daily quest.
“Kyaak!! (Food!!)”
“Kyaak!! (Food!!)”
But there was no way those green brats possessed the ability to recognize a veteran. They picked a fight with the veteran woman who had descended silently from a height that would have killed them if they fell, brandishing stone tools.
The result, needless to say, was obvious.
─Whip-crack!
Craaaack!!!!
The woman's weapon was a whip. Short like a riding crop, it stretched out like the Ruyi Jingu Bang when she swung it once, sweeping across the entire area. It had to be a fucking cash-shop item.
If that had been all, I could have consoled myself by calling her a cash-spending loser, but the destructive power of that insane whip was beyond fucking crazy.
Boom-boom-boom-boom!!
That was the sound of her swinging the whip.
They say the tip of a whip exceeds the speed of sound when it reaches its peak, but this wasn't just the speed of sound or some damn nonsense—it was a jet. I honestly thought a supersonic jet whose pilot had declared a mayday and bailed out had crashed right beside my head.
“…!!”
Francesca clutched her mouth and trembled. My legs were shaking too. They say your knees go weak when you encounter a tiger, and that was exactly what had happened to us.
Patter-patter-patter.
The goblins, given a crash course in dismemberment and decapitation, came raining down from the sky as yukhoe. A green brat with only its arms and head left dangled from a tree, swaying. It seemed to be telling me to die too and come over there.
It was right then.
“─Who?”
The veteran woman looked directly toward where I was.
Even though I was crouching behind the bushes, our eyes met through a small gap between them. Even if someone aimed a laser pointer at me and fired a BB gun, they couldn't have pinpointed my position that accurately.
‘Fuck, that's scary!!’
I gave up on running. If I bolted from here, one of those fourth-job skills was bound to fly at my back.
Swish─.
Just as I was forcing myself to stand up and surrender, I saw Francesca rise with tears streaming down her face.
─Sheepish grin.
Though she was standing away from me, she forced a smile when our eyes met.
Francesca was planning to step forward in my place. If that woman was a psychopath who got pleasure from killing newbies, Francesca would be blown apart by that jet whip!
Grab.
I caught Francesca by the shoulder and stood up before she could. Francesca's eyes widened until they looked ready to split.
“I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to spy on you.”
Step. Step.
I stepped out in front of the silent woman.
It wasn't because I was some saint who intended to sacrifice myself for Francesca. That woman was a ridiculously powerful veteran, but there was still no evidence anywhere that she was dangerous.
Whether I ran or hid, if she took offense, I could end up turned into N/o/r/d, so hiding behind someone else was fucking pointless. And I was better at running my mouth than Francesca was.
“I'm Nord of the Audumra Guild. Since yesterday, we've been on a request to guard the ruins discovered around here, and we came out to see if we could gather some firewood with our companion.”
After explaining the situation, I swallowed hard. From up close, I noticed something I hadn't seen earlier.
Glint─.
The sky-blue-haired woman wore earrings in both ears. The one on the left was an ordinary earring, but the one on the opposite ear was a silver plate.
She wasn't Silver class. Fuck, there was no way someone with specs like that was Silver class. If Silver-class adventurers could do that, then what did Gold-class Professor Brammathon do—punch holes in the stratosphere with a dragon punch?
That plate was different from ordinary silver.
It was a special metal infused with mana.
‘Mithril’—the divine silver.
“Nefertiti.”
The blue-haired woman spoke.
“Nefertiti of the Sekhmet Guild.”
After giving her name, she fastened the whip at her waist. She had put away her weapon after I tried to speak with her. Since she didn't seem to intend to attack me, I was relieved.
But if she'd finished her business, why didn't she just go on her way? Why was she staring at me so quietly?
“Um, is there something you'd like to say?”
“Yeah.”
“Ah, yes. I see. Feel free to ask me anything.”
I said that while trying not to let my eyes linger on the traces of the jet whip. Without even wiping away the water running over her pale skin, Nefertiti asked:
“Ruins. What was there?”
“There was a stele inscribed with writing from the primitive age.”
It was a question within the expected range. A Mithril-class bigshot who had stopped an Iron-class adventurer like Nord could only be asking about that.
Of course, I didn't say anything unnecessary. I couldn't have her decide to come take a look just because I let something slip. If that happened, my companions would see me as the idiot who brought a two-star general into the barracks.
They say silence is golden and eloquence is silver. If I wanted to go toe-to-toe with Mithril, it made sense to bring out gold, which was worth more than silver.
“Which civilization?”
“I don't know that much….”
I genuinely didn't know. The writing on the stele and cave walls was primitive pictographs. I didn't know where it had originated.
A more accomplished archaeological researcher might have known, but it wasn't within the scope of what I had studied.
“Right.”
Nefertiti gave another terse reply. She seemed like a veteran who couldn't even be bothered to type in chat. Middle-aged guys who had gotten sick of a game but couldn't bring themselves to quit often talked like that.
They say veterans usually enjoy chatting more than hunting, but Nefertiti didn't seem to be one of them.
“…Yeah. Got it.”
Nefertiti stared blankly at the sky before suddenly saying it. Her tone never changed, so I wouldn't have been surprised if she had suddenly swung her whip and said, Now die, newbie!
“Goodbye.”
Whoosh!
Fortunately, the veteran woman didn't grind down the Iron-class rookie she'd just questioned. Just as when she'd first appeared, she leaped away with silent footwork and vanished from in front of me.
But even after Nefertiti left, I stood there motionless for quite some time.
Chirrrrr─.
Once the surroundings grew quiet, insects began chirping somewhere nearby again.
Only then did the strength leave my legs, and I braced myself on my knees.
“Fuuuck… I thought I was going to die….”
It had been fucking terrifying.
I wasn't just saying that—it was genuinely fucking terrifying.
She had a face that could make a living on looks alone, and her sideboob stretching to her armpits was incredible, but I could only look at the whip. It felt like facing a rhino one-on-one with a gold bar stuck in its horn.
“Mr. Nord!”
Francesca came running out, crying. There are beautiful women who remain beautiful even when they cry, and Francesca was the type whose tearful face actually shone more brightly than usual.
“Are you all right?! Are you hurt anywhere?!”
Patter-patter-patter!
Francesca came running with legs that were slender yet miraculously short in one sense, pumping them wildly.
But her shorter-than-average legs couldn't withstand that uncontrollable speed. Francesca tripped over a stone root jutting from the ground and rolled through the dirt.
“Gyaaaagh!”
Roll, roll─.
“Oh dear. Ms. Francesca, are you all right?”
I grabbed the fallen Francesca and helped her up. She had a wet leaf stuck to her poncho, so I pulled that off too. Francesca sniffled and wiped away her tears.
“Why did you do that?! I'm the party leader this time, so I should have been the one to step forward and explain!”
“Well, it worked out, didn't it? She was pretty reasonable, despite her scary first impression.”
It had been an unusually concise conversation by otherworlder standards. They usually tacked one unnecessary qualification onto another until every sentence became a basilisk. It stood out even more right after my conversation with that fake-monk bastard Paragon.
But that wasn't what Francesca was pointing out.
“That person was from the Sekhmet Guild!”
Perhaps she was afraid Nefertiti might be hiding somewhere and listening, because Francesca's voice was extremely quiet.
“They don't charge a guild membership fee, and nearly all the requests they accept are monster extermination jobs and bounty hunts. Their patron goddess is the goddess of slaughter! There's even a rumor that the guild was created by the Sekhmet Church of Narmer-Nile to spread its followers across the world!”
“Ddet?”
It sounded like some kind of otherworldly Freemason backstory.
I had also gathered information about the Sekhmet Guild before coming to Sargadis.
The Sekhmet Guild. The deity it followed was Sekhmet, a goddess of Narmer-Nile, and it was a guild operating in the monster-hunting business throughout the world.
But according to Francesca, it was practically an assassination guild targeting monsters and criminals.
And it even had connections to the politically religious Sekhmet Church. Wasn't this basically a mob outfit used by a cult religion to do its dirty work?
─Shiver.
Once I realized that, the back of my neck prickled. It was the same kind of horror as learning later that the drunk I'd chased away while working part-time was a serial killer who had finished serving his sentence.
“…I understand. I'll be careful from now on.”
I said that while rubbing the back of my neck.
“Let's return to the ruins for now. After trembling for so long because of her, I want to warm myself by a campfire, goblins or no goblins.”
“Sniff. Yees….”
Francesca answered with a sniffle. She didn't object to the suggestion of lighting a campfire.
Goblins? Let them come. Even if a hundred of those goblins charged us, it wouldn't be even slightly as frightening as facing Nefertiti had been.
‘By the way, why was Nefertiti hunting goblins?’
That part was a little strange. Nefertiti had been soaked from the very beginning. That meant she had been hunting goblins before the rain stopped.
Had an adventurer from the Sekhmet Guild failed to deal with the goblin lair properly, with Nefertiti now cleaning up the mess?
I tried to piece together the whole incident, but it was pointless. If she really was a brutal criminal, then her way of thinking would be fundamentally different from ours.
There was no greater waste of time than trying to understand a villain.
People are busy enough simply living while thinking about good things.
***
The first thing I did after returning was light a campfire.
I stripped the firewood with a utility knife, leaving only the dry wood inside, and lit it. Once the fire began to grow, I carefully kept it from going out and started adding the wet firewood as well.
─Whoosh!
“Fuck! The campfire's lit!”
After several hours of bitter struggle, I finally succeeded in lighting a campfire.
“And the relief watch is here too.”
“Motherfucker.”
Just as I was about to boil water over the fire, the relief watch arrived.
Apparently, the shift change had been moved up a little starting today. They must have adjusted it to match the archaeologists' arrival time.
Anyway, after all that fucking effort, I ended up no-look passing the campfire I'd made straight to the relief watch. Fucking life.
“I am Frederick, in charge of the relief watch for the ruins guard duty request.”
A dwarf who lived up to his damn name appeared to announce the shift change. I sobbed while warming myself by the blazing campfire, while the dwarf was horrified by the state of the completely fucked-up dolmen ruins.
“Why are the ruins in this state? Is this really all right?”
“It's fine. These ruins were originally like this.”
“Huh? What kind of joke is that? Didn't the rain all night make them like this?”
“That's a misunderstanding. None of this was our fault.”
Ah, these fucking hao-speech bastards. Hearing the two of them go hao-hao and ding-hao at each other was driving me insane.
“Don't worry. Ruins being damaged by wind and rain is quite common.”
I spouted complete bullshit. It was something an archaeologist should never say, but I said it anyway.
I was already pissed that I had to part with the campfire I'd only been with for a day, and watching these bastards go ding-hao-whatever was going to turn me into the Joker.
“Tch. Then we'll just leave it alone.”
“Yes. That too is simply the way of nature.”
It was utter bullshit, but adventurers normally handled ruins this way whenever they explored them. Even when sent to explore ruins, these bastards treated half-assed work as their default passive.
They thought it was too difficult to move a large stele, so they smashed it instead of bringing it back. Destroying artifacts that were a pain in the ass and didn't look profitable, then burying them somewhere, was also perfectly ordinary.
Restoring and studying the wrecked artifacts was liable to get dumped on us graduate-student slaves, so I couldn't even begin to count how much I had cursed adventurers back when I was a fucking slave (graduate student).
But I didn't do that kind of thing anymore, did I?
So I was going to live comfortably too.
Because I could get away with it here.