Chapter 25
#25 Newbie Adventurer Bern (23) - Prelude to the Subjugation
“So the newly arrived adventurers found the culprit and even brought the victims back?”
The next day.
The lord's reaction to Bern's report was bordering on disbelief.
After all, they were claiming they'd wrapped up a problem that his predecessors couldn't solve even after more than a month, and done it in just three days.
“To be exact, we rescued about ten of the missing people who were being held at a temporary base, but the rest of the victims were taken by the organization the culprit belonged to, so it will be difficult to bring them back right away.”
At the treasurer's words, the lord's expression became even more bizarre.
“An organization? Are you saying some slaver was behind this case? What a bunch of damned bastards!”
“W-Well, that is….”
“Why are you hemming and hawing? Speak at once!”
Under the lord's prodding, the treasurer reluctantly opened his mouth.
“It's a lich.”
“What?”
“So, the culprit testified that he was a lich's disciple, and that he had been kidnapping people in order to offer living sacrifices demanded by his master. The other subjects we couldn't rescue in time are now being held in the lich's dungeon somewhere we don't know.”
“…….”
A long, terribly long silence followed.
After rubbing his face for a moment, the lord looked over his retainers' faces.
The retainers who would normally have scoffed or barked that he was taking the joke too far were all blinking in silence, unable to say a word.
Because Gudrun, who would normally have stepped forward first and raised the loudest protest in a situation like this, was quietly gauging the mood and waiting very docilely.
If he had belatedly realized that he'd been far too reckless up to now and was waiting for his lord's judgment, one might have praised him for growing as a knight, but that wasn't the case.
‘He’s reading the room.’
The treasurer's mood? No way. There was no way Gudrun, who had repeatedly looked down on the treasurer for being a commoner, was suddenly worrying about his feelings now.
And he wasn't watching the lord's mood either.
‘Bern, was it?’
That red-haired adventurer.
He was too busy worrying about that adventurer—the one who had practically toyed with Gudrun before crushing him so thoroughly—to step forward.
Even if the treasurer was the one who had spoken, the actual report had been brought in by Bern and his party.
Silently lowering his evaluation of the escort knight, the lord asked the treasurer,
“So, what happened next?”
“The subjects have now returned to their families, and the adventurers have submitted a request to you and are currently waiting for your answer.”
“To me? What did they ask for?”
“The culprit. That is, they said they wanted to take the lich's disciple with them. They said having a witness would make it easier to report this incident to the guild. However, they also said that if you, my lord, wished to execute the culprit yourself, they would hand him over.”
“Hmm….”
The lord fell into thought for a moment.
If Bern and his party had said they were going to take the culprit away on their own without his permission, he would naturally have flown into a rage and ordered them captured, but now that the choice had been handed to him, he found himself thinking more carefully.
If he were being honest about his feelings alone, he would of course want to thoroughly beat those bastards to a pulp and then turn their corpses into crow food.
But what if it was true that a lich stood behind the culprit?
Was there any law that said a lich enraged by his disciple's death couldn't try to take revenge?
“Then for now, there's no longer any possibility of further damage on our side?”
“If what the culprit confessed is true, then yes.”
“I see.”
The lord could feel the scales in his heart tilting more and more to one side.
The loss of several dozen young women was certainly painful, but on the scale of all Francia, it was not beyond recovery.
In the first place, the reason the lord had wanted to resolve the case wasn't the civilian casualties themselves, but rather that the frightened subjects had fallen into helplessness.
Now that the culprit who had been causing trouble here had been captured, as long as no new victims appeared, the subjects would gradually calm down.
The lord opened his mouth.
“Make this offer to them. Tell them that if they accept these terms, we will hand over the culprit.”
***
-The culprit will be officially recorded as having been executed in Francia. If you acknowledge that, I won't care whether you take some unidentified person away or not.
Hearing the lord's proposal relayed through the treasurer's mouth, Renya blinked in confusion.
“What is this supposed to mean? In the end, are they saying they themselves will execute the culprit?”
Bern shook his head.
“No, they will hand the culprit over to us. Instead, they'll point to some suitable criminal on their side and execute him as the so-called culprit.”
“What meaning does that have?”
“If the subjects can be told only this: ‘The lord of Francia has punished the evil wretch who stirred up Francia.’ then whether the real culprit dies or not doesn't matter. And if the lord's side secures the culprit, it would also prevent the risk of making an enemy of the lich.”
It was a petty trick, but Bern didn't care.
If the lord insisted on killing the culprit with his own hands out of some pointless inferiority complex, that would only be more troublesome.
After wrapping up the backroom agreement, the group loaded the culprit—disguised as luggage (though that was only in name; he had literally been stuffed into a huge bundle, so he was being treated like actual baggage)—into the carriage's cargo hold and delivered him straight to the guild.
Soon enough, the guild was turned upside down, as if that were only natural.
“There's a lich behind this? They're preparing a living sacrifice ritual on the scale of thousands? And his disciples are scattered across the land acting in secret?”
The guild was not exactly an organization that proclaimed justice or the protection of the weak as its creed.
So without a request, they generally didn't go out of their way to stick their necks into dangerous matters. That would just be free labor.
But this time, the information Bern had brought back was different.
“A lich is a monster that at the very least boasts 5th-tier power. If such a lich tries to ascend by means of mass human sacrifice, and if that succeeds, it means a 6th-tier monster will be born.”
“A 5th-tier expert can stand against a territory alone. And a 6th-tier expert can stand against a nation alone. If a monster that sees living humans only as test subjects for its own training, or as sacrifices for human ritual offerings, gains that kind of overwhelming power, the damage would be beyond imagination.”
“Before that bastard finishes that ritual and advances to the next realm, we have to strike first and end it! Otherwise Birka, and all of us, are doomed! Contact headquarters at once and request reinforcements!”
The hardliners who insisted the guild should move immediately and kill that lich.
“Hold on, aren't we being too rash? In the end, it's just the testimony of one mage, isn't it? What guarantee do we have that that mage told the truth?”
“To bring down a lich, we have to conquer the dungeon it created. We're not just intercepting some already strong foe; if we invade to kill it, we'll have to bear enormous casualties.”
“Why should we solve the kingdom's crisis in the first place? And who says anyone's going to reward us for it? Tell that damned king and those nobles to handle it themselves!”
The faction opposed to the guild taking action.
“We need further investigation. To put it bluntly, isn't there also a chance this is a lich's trap?”
“Let's inform the kingdom of the facts and see how they react. I don't think this is a problem we can handle on our own.”
Even the cautious camp that argued they should act only after seeing how the situation unfolded.
The conflict that broke out within the Eastern Branch spread into a guild-wide dispute after a branch chiefs' meeting, and soon the following request notice was posted at each branch.
-Title: Subjugation of the Lich
-Requester: Adventurer Guild
-Participation requirement: Adventurers of Grade 3 or higher.
-Information has been received that Mortius Barmor, a lich with multiple prior sightings, is preparing a large-scale human sacrifice in order to seize immense power. Rescue the living sacrifices, stop the ritual, and subjugate the evil lich.
“A lich? How are we supposed to catch that?”
“For the guild to issue a request directly—it really is a rare occurrence.”
“Wow, the reward is huge. At this rate I could live in luxury for years.”
“I'll pass. No matter how good the money is, what good is it if you're dead?”
Hearing the adventurers whispering among themselves, Bern turned his gaze aside.
There, Blanca was staring at the request notice with a very complicated expression.
“You seem to have a lot on your mind.”
“…To be honest, yes. The opportunity came too suddenly, so it doesn't really feel real.”
If things had gone according to Blanca's original plan, there would probably have been many steps to go through before reaching the lich subjugation, even after rising to Grade 4.
Even if the guild had some information on the lich, narrowing down its exact location from those clues and assembling the force needed to subjugate it would never have been easy.
But once the guild went all in, informants in every region conducted additional investigations at a shocking speed, deduced the location of the dungeon where that bastard was hiding, and the lich's disciples, who had been covertly operating everywhere, were either taken down by high-ranking adventurers from other branches or forced to flee after cutting off the supply of living sacrifices.
In a sense, it was only natural.
A 5th-tier mage can take on a territory alone. And a 6th-tier expert can take on a nation alone.
“I hear the guild master will be taking part in this request personally, so no matter how strong that bastard is, there's no way he'll survive. At last, it's time for him to pay for the sins he's racked up all this time.”
It was a joyous thing.
Being able to definitely kill the enemy, being able to free her mother sooner—how could that not be a good thing?
But Blanca, for some reason, couldn't shake the uneasy feeling.
If this was the end, if it was something that could be accomplished this simply.
What, then, had all the effort she had put in until now—meant?
At the question she'd blurted out, Blanca herself found it ridiculous.
How ungrateful, how heartless this feeling was.
“Bern, are you all right? This situation seems like it'll differ in many ways from the adventure Bern originally expected.”
After blurting out the question without thinking, Blanca found herself even more baffled.
At this rate, it almost felt as if she were expecting Bern to be dissatisfied with the situation.
There was no way this red-haired adventurer, this man who seemed to embody perfection itself, would share such ugly feelings with her.
“Well, it is a little disappointing.”
But Bern, as if it were nothing,
truly, as if it were nothing, he accepted Blanca's feelings.
“An adventure where you break through a dungeon with a handful of companions and a hunt where a crowd goes charging in are different things. Honestly, I was hoping for the former, so it is a little disappointing.”
“…That's irresponsible. More victims could appear in the meantime.”
What on earth was she expecting him to say?
Doing this would only hurt Bern's feelings, and yet for some reason Blanca couldn't stop herself from speaking.
But instead of getting offended, Bern gave a bitter smile and honestly agreed.
“Yes, it is irresponsible. Still, one is free to have personal feelings, isn't one?”
“Even if, by the world's standards, it's not a good thing?”
“Being an adventurer isn't a job where you act by weighing good and evil, is it?”
“You're different, though. You ran off to do something even when it clearly wasn't to your own benefit.”
“No, I just do it because I think it's ‘cool.’ I'm extremely shallow, really.”
Bern said that and smiled.
“And if you think about it, this is all thanks to us, so I think we're entitled to feel this way. If we hadn't caught the culprit and handed him over to the guild in the first place, that lich and his disciples would still be running wild now. We were the ones who stopped them.”
-So your efforts were not meaningless.
Was it just her imagination that she'd heard those words in the subtext?
Blanca gazed at Bern's face in silence.
He was such an unfair man, seeming to see right through other people's inner thoughts while revealing none of his own.
But it was also true that merely talking with him somehow made her feel better.
“Well, that's true. You're officially a meritorious contributor, after all, so you're allowed to feel however you want. Still, don't let your guard down. In this line of work, accidents usually happen precisely when it seems like everything is going well.”
“If that's advice from a senior adventurer, I'll take it to heart. I'll be prepared for something to blow up, no matter what.”
After tossing words back and forth like a ball, the two of them chuckled together.
“Big bro! Big sis! We've finished replenishing consumables and checking the camping gear!”
The two of them headed toward Renya, who was running over from afar.
The lich subjugation was now right before them.