Chapter 33
The situation was quite serious.
It made sense, then, since even the game had described the situation as serious. However, one thing was strange: in the game, I didn't think Ruril had met us while injured, but for some reason, Ruril had met us after being attacked by goblins.
We hadn't met Ruril in the middle of an attack; Ruril had already been attacked.
The wounds had been so severe that Ruril could have died without immediate treatment. Looking back, that was strange. It was almost as if the future wasn't unfolding properly.
Of course, it was too early to consider the events in the game the future.. but even the Hero hadn't found it strange on seeing Ruril badly injured. So I shouldn't jump to conclusions.
“Please.. If you find and put an end to whatever is causing the undead to appear, we'll repay you as best we can..”
The old man said this and bowed to us. Since this was serious enough to endanger the village if it wasn't resolved quickly, I understood why he went that far.
The Hero said with an embarrassed expression that there was no need to bow and plead like that, since this was something we had to do anyway. I'd worried the Hero might even say there was no need to reward us, but fortunately, that didn't happen.
Given the Hero's personality, that possibility wasn't impossible, so I had to be careful.
Asking for a reward might make us look materialistic, but we still had to accept one. If we helped people without receiving anything, they might start treating us like pushovers.
That's what I think.
Perhaps the original Lumia thought so too.
“What will we do now?”
In response to Cecilia's question, the Hero turned to me and said there was no need to worry. Why was the Hero suddenly looking at me?
“Lumia's magic should let us find the necromancer quickly.”
What?
He wasn't wrong, of course, but..
My magic could certainly find the necromancer quickly, but there was one problem.
I had no idea how to use magic to find where the necromancer was.
I'd only recently started using magic in the first place, so it was absurd to think I could cast a spell that found someone's location from a mere trace. Of course, I couldn't say that, so all I could do was tilt my head.
Please, I really wish he wouldn't ask me to do this.
Or at the very least, I wish I'd been given time to practice until I could use magic properly..
But no such luck..
“Please, Lumia.”
I suddenly hated the Hero.
I stared down at the hand the Hero held out toward me for a moment, wondering how I could mess with the Hero.
Yeah, why not play a little prank?
There was only one prank I could pull here.
I pretended to place my hand over the Hero's and cast an ice spell.
“Ah, cold!”
Startled by the sudden chill, the Hero looked down in confusion at the lump of ice now resting on the Hero's hand. Instead of answering, I walked past the Hero and moved toward the outskirts of the village to find the necromancer.
I'd said I was going to mess with the Hero, but this was a little strange. What else could I do when nothing else came to mind?
I couldn't use attack magic, and knocking the offered hand away didn't feel like something Lumia would do. After wondering what else I could do, I put a lump of ice on it.. But now that I thought about it, this didn't really seem like something Lumia would do either..
Given Lumia's personality, using magic for something pointless didn't seem very Lumia-like..
Lumia wasn't the type to play pranks in the first place, so there was no point in discussing it at all.
Hmm..
I don't know either.
Even the Hero didn't seem to find it strange, so it was probably fine.
For now, I needed to think about how to catch the necromancer rather than this.
In the game, once Lumia found a trace, the game would take care of finding the necromancer. But now that I was Lumia, waiting for someone else to find the necromancer was foolish.
Even if the Hero knew the location, the fact that neither Cecilia nor I had been told about the Hero's return from the future meant that the Hero intended to keep that identity hidden as much as possible. So even knowing the location, the Hero wouldn't reveal it right away.
Perhaps the Hero would claim to be acting alone, kill time for a while, and then tell us the location.
But if that didn't happen, and the Hero instead asked me to tell the Hero the location as in the original history, there were two possibilities. Either the Hero had asked me to keep events on their original course.. or the Hero was testing me because the Hero suspected me.
It was hard to believe it was the latter.
This was probably just my paranoia acting up, and it was best to assume the former. Judging by everything so far, the Hero didn't seem to suspect me at all, so this must have been a request to keep events on their original course.
The problem was that I didn't know how.
“...”
I want to cry.
If I found even a single trace and begged it to help me find its owner, maybe I could find them..?
Yeah, that would probably work.
I'd used that approach every time I'd cast magic so far, so I believed it would work this time too.
...
Actually, I didn't trust myself.
Save me..
“Are there any traces left?”
“When you say traces..”
“The skeletons or.. zombies that were defeated.”
“Since they're undead, we couldn't subjugate them.. but we have monsters we've rendered powerless.”
“Could you guide us there?”
Nooo..
.
.
.
.
We couldn't bring an ominous monster like an undead into the village, so it seemed they'd confined the undead in an abandoned building outside the village. Apparently, someone had suggested leaving them there in case priests came and demanded them.
Undead were undead, after all, so keeping them somewhere like this was probably for the best. I wouldn't want undead in the village either.
As soon as we entered, I saw the undead pounding on the iron bars as they tried to attack us, seemingly reacting to the presence of life. I knew they were disgusting monsters with no intelligence, having already died, but seeing them up close made me feel sick.
The smell of rotting corpses stung my nose.
“Lumia.”
The Hero turned toward me and called my name.
So this moment had finally come.
Even in the game, perhaps because it was a tutorial, these incapacitated monsters had already been subdued.
Things had followed the game's course so far, but what came next was the problem.
I'd never used magic to find something before. Could I do it..?
I wondered as I looked down at one of the undead.
Honestly.. the farther I went, the harder it became to pretend to be Lumia. Before, simply staying still had at least gotten me halfway there, but now they were calling me over and making me do things, so one wrong move could easily expose me.
The biggest problem was..
‘How did Lumia do it in the game..?’
I couldn't remember exactly how Lumia had acted.
I remembered only that Lumia had found the location and led everyone there; there was no way I could remember the details of where we went and how we got there. It felt like trying to recall the details of a game I'd played several weeks ago—how could I possibly remember that?
Besides, since the game skipped some paths, it was impossible to assume I could follow them exactly. Pretending I hadn't used magic and simply following the route shown in the game was effectively out of the question.
This was bad.
I broke into a cold sweat.
The only option left was to somehow find the location with magic and guide everyone there; otherwise, I had no future. I was worried about the guiding part too, but I had no choice except to trust the Hero. Besides, how could I guide them if I couldn't even find the location?
I trusted the Hero to deal with the various monsters threatening my chastity, and for now I had to find the location.
That was my role.
I had no choice.
Let's try using magic.
I didn't know how, but if I didn't use magic now, they'd suspect me, so I had to try something. Normally, whenever I used magic, it manifested when I formed the intention to make something specific happen.
Yeah, let's do that.
I squeezed my eyes shut and cast a spell at the undead ravenously gnawing at the bars in an attempt to break them. I raised my mana and activated the magic, inwardly praying for it to tell me where its master was.
That was when it happened.
“..?!”
It was as though something flashed through my mind: the necromancer's current location appeared, then vanished.
It had appeared only for an instant, but the necromancer's location was already lodged in my mind.
How I could locate someone through something like that wasn't important.
I could use magic because of some Star Child setting or whatever, so things like that didn't matter.
Only one thing mattered now.
‘I found it.’
I had found the location.
I smiled inwardly in triumph.