Chapter 19
I quickly pieced the situation together in my head.
Hans and Duke, covered from head to toe in the orc shaman's aphrodisiac spores.
In the end, their private parts ruptured, and they were carried to the infirmary.
'Looks like Elena followed my advice.'
Regardless of the tragedy that had befallen Hans and Duke, I was pleased with the result of Elena's actions.
I visited the infirmary.
The infirmary on the street before the city gates was crowded with adventurers.
Regardless of their clans, adventurers returning from hunts stood in line to receive treatment.
The temple was this world's hospital.
It primarily treated external injuries.
Priests who wielded healing powers bestowed by the gods were universally revered by adventurers.
In an adult game, even they couldn't escape becoming villains, but...
'...Now isn't the time to worry about that.'
The musty smell of herbs and the rotten stench peculiar to patients stabbed at my nose.
At the beds in the back of the infirmary.
Hans and Duke were staring blankly into space.
Hans had lost the sturdy build of a young man; his body had grown slender, and his hair had grown long.
Breasts had swelled beneath his loose patient clothes. He was sitting up, and his waist between his upper body and the blanket was so thin it looked as though a tap would snap it like an ant's waist.
Duke had lost the thick, heavy build he had possessed as a tank and had shrunk to an unbelievable size.
He lay on the bed beneath a blanket, but his feet, which had once belonged to a man taller than me, had shrunk to half their former size, making him look like a child.
"Seeing them in person, it was beyond anything I had imagined."
Elena hadn't been exaggerating for nothing.
Their sexes had really changed.
'Should I call this lucky or not?'
Mira had been fidgeting between them, but her face brightened when she saw me.
Hans also spotted me and gave me a frightened, delicate smile of the sort an orc would love.
"M-Mr. Eck..."
A thin, tearful voice slipped out.
If I hadn't known, I would have thought they were different people.
The orc shaman's green magic.
Since orc shamans primarily use mushrooms found in the forest, the effects of their magic vary depending on which mushrooms they use.
The orc shaman's standard magic heightened sensitivity through aphrodisiac spores.
Depending on the shaman's ability, it could increase the body's sensitivity by up to 30,000 times, so as it grew stronger, even a famed knight could be subdued in an instant, unable to twitch a finger.
But to the orcs, the shaman's existence was a means of ensuring the tribe's survival.
If they incapacitated an adventurer party with aphrodisiac spores, they killed the men and took the women for themselves.
But if they could take the women and transform the men into women, the orcs could obtain twice as much prey as other orc groups and lay the foundation for establishing a small kingdom.
Orcs were an exclusively male species, so they needed females of other races to bear their offspring in order to reproduce.
They even forcibly transformed male prey into females.
The vicious ability to use even males as breeding stock was rare, even among orc shamans.
"Elena, you said you collected all the loot from the shaman, right?"
"Huh? Yes."
"Good."
Rare-monster loot had to be collected without fail.
Hans's voice trembled.
"What are we supposed to do now? Our bodies... My body... Sob... Something this hideous..."
"Sob..."
Hans gripped his own breasts forcefully and wailed, while Duke pulled the blanket over his face and trembled violently.
It was a calamity so horrific that, by any normal standard, it was hard to even open one's mouth about it.
'This may be a little awkward to say...'
Eck didn't care about things like that.
"Good."
""""Pardon?""""
Everyone in front of me had question marks floating over their heads at my words.
"Hans, Duke. You came to me because you wanted to succeed as adventurers. To put it bluntly, you would have died before long."
I pronounced a cold death sentence.
Hans and Duke would have died before they got very far.
Even judging by this incident alone, if I simply stood by and watched, this party would soon be wiped out.
Adventurers were responsible for themselves, first and foremost.
They should never assume someone else would take care of them.
All fools who held that belief were already on their way to the afterlife.
How could it make sense not to even investigate a monster whose rank was obviously higher than theirs—the orc shaman?
"Elena, clean out your ears and listen carefully, too. I've chosen your prey based on what I judged you could defeat. But you never once asked what kind of monster your prey was or what habits it had."
You should at least have asked what kind of monster it was and how to fight it, but you didn't.
I had hoped she would realize it herself, but the habit of charging in blindly and destroying herself, just like the Elena in the game, was still intact.
Knowing the reason behind it, I couldn't keep berating her.
But Eck could.
"To let you experience green magic, I chose creatures you could handle even if you were ambushed. Without that, some of you—or all three of you—wouldn't be here now. You failed as a party leader, Elena."
"...."
Elena fell silent.
"But even I didn't expect things to turn out like this. We can call it good luck."
Hans and Duke had become women.
Both were beautiful women that orcs would go wild over.
"For an adventurer, being male is a serious handicap. If you want to keep adventuring, consider this a blessing in disguise."
Under my cold insistence, Hans and Duke flinched and forcibly swallowed their sorrow.
"And be more careful from now on. If you'd done even a little research, there would have been plenty of ways to avoid its magic. Mira."
"Y-yes."
"You were a hunter and didn't know about green magic?"
"...I'm sorry."
"This happened entirely because of your carelessness and ignorance."
I shattered their complacent attitude of waiting for someone to spoon-feed them a walkthrough.
They had to go through it at least once.
"Don't blame anyone. Be grateful that you're still breathing. Learn that every part of this outcome is your own responsibility. If you fail to learn, every one of you here will become a monster's mother."
Someone swallowed dryly.
Eck's memories suddenly flashed through my mind. When I had first become an adventurer, I had been beaten until my seniors' lessons were etched into my flesh.
I raised a hand and pointed east.
"Go to the eastern forest first thing tomorrow."
The three lying in the beds all raised their bowed heads at once, their faces stricken.
The awkward silence broke with a start.
"T-tomorrow? Our bodies are like this right now..."
Hans clutched his breasts with both hands and recoiled in horror at my order.
"You're alive with all four limbs intact, aren't you? Just because your body turned female doesn't mean you can't hold a sword. Go take a walk to get used to it."
I lightly tapped Elena on the shoulder.
"Elena, the deadline is tight. Instead of whining, get all of them discharged and make them run at least one more lap around the parade ground."
I narrowed my eyes and bore down on them with an oppressive gaze.
"B-but..."
"If you don't like it, leave the party right now. If you want to be thrown onto the street in a woman's body, keep running your mouth."
"""...."""
Silence settled over the corner of the infirmary.
Be afraid.
That was better.
Rather than growing complacent with the flimsy hope that I would accept their opinions, the shortcut to survival was to face the situation they could not escape and start thinking about how to overcome it.
Their frightened eyes watched me warily, and their trembling lips pressed tightly shut.
They had no way out.
If they quit adventuring, they would have to go to a back-alley brothel and sell their bodies.
Otherwise, they would have to work as servers in a restaurant like Jeina, endure sexual harassment, and eventually be haggled into selling their bodies anyway.
Perhaps they had reached the same conclusion, because the mood around Hans and Duke changed.
"I'm sorry..."
"...We'll work hard."
Hans bowed his head, and Duke threw off the blanket and sat up.
"Elena."
"Yes."
"You handle the rest."
"M-me?"
"A party leader has to know how to manage the party members, too."
I left the infirmary, leaving Elena behind.
As I left, I paid the treatment fee disguised as a donation to the priest who greeted me with a bright smile.
***
The next day, Elena took her party to scout the eastern forest.
This time, she asked what the mission was, what they needed to investigate, and detailed questions about the target's characteristics before returning with information.
The mission was a troll scouting operation.
She observed the troll's movements herself and prepared the party in advance for its subjugation.
Meanwhile, I headed into the back alleys.
There was a door at the end of a dead-end alley.
At a glance, it looked like a dead end, but when I looked up, I noticed something odd.
That wall wasn't the exterior wall of a building.
It was a false wall filling the space between two buildings.
I approached an iron door disguised as the wooden door of an ordinary home, set in the middle of the false wall.
Knock, knock.
I knocked.
After a moment, the chain rattled on the other side of the iron door, and a small barred hatch opened.
A man showing only his eyes recognized me as the visitor from yesterday.
The chain came loose with a rattle, and the iron door creaked inward.
Beyond the iron door was a narrow, dark alley leading into the building.
The sour smell of ammonia hung heavily over the street.
Alchemists' Street.
Unlike mages, alchemy was subject to particularly strict oversight.
It was a place where people authorized to conduct research in a semi-isolated area gathered.
I passed the gatekeeper guarding the entrance and went deeper inside along the route I'd taken yesterday.
As I walked down the street, the sour ammonia smell constantly irritated my nasal passages. It wasn't pleasant.
I moved around heaps of unidentified waste strewn in every direction.
A shabby, unclean building.
When I turned the doorknob, a long, grating squeal rang out.
As soon as I stepped inside, the smell of medicinal ingredients and minerals mixed together assailed my nose.
It was the distinctive smell that invariably hung around an alchemist's workshop.
It was different from the ammonia outside; in addition to bitter herbs, it was heavy and stuffy, as if something had been mixed into steam.
Bottles of medicine and chunks of minerals were packed tightly onto shelves all around the room, while bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling and swayed.
At the workbench in the back, a white-haired old man was handling ingredients without turning his head, even though a customer had entered.
"Old man, what are you doing instead of seeing your customer?"
"You're here."
He jerked his chin and pointed in a direction.
An object covered with cloth sat in a corner behind the workbench.
When I lifted the cloth, I found the red log, its refinement complete.
Its rough surface had been smoothed, and red magic shimmered faintly along the grain as though pulsing.
By grinding away the unnecessary bark and concentrating the red magic in the heartwood, the red log had become a hard red mineral.
I obtained the high-grade material known as 'Red Woodstone.'
'After awakening Elena in the dungeon, if I use this...'
I could have her learn an advanced skill immediately.
By then, she'd be stronger than I was.
While I was struck anew by the thought that we were still in the tutorial section, the fact that the time of my death in the original timeline was drawing near made my heart race for no apparent reason.
'Not much longer.'
The dungeon that would appear soon would awaken Elena.
When that happened, no one would be able to stop her.
'Before then, I need to make her rely on me.'
The preparations were daunting even to imagine, but I had to make them.
I let out a bitter chuckle.
"As expected, your craftsmanship is impeccable, old man."
"Hmph. You're stating the obvious."
The old man looked sheepish and turned his back.