Chapter 15
Vieta looked at the little elf, Ugo, slumped in front of her.
The boy who had initially charged at her with such swagger now had an utterly docile look in his eyes.
All she had done was take his cudgel away a few times and give him a few merciful strokes, yet Ugo had become remarkably obedient.
Smack!
Whenever Ugo swung his stick, Vieta lightly dodged and gave him a sharp flick on the forehead.
“Damn it! Again!”
For the first ten or so times, Ugo cursed and got back up as soon as he was sent flying.
“I can’t believe it.”
For the next ten or so, he gradually began denying reality instead. By then, his forehead had turned so red that Vieta simply gave it a firm push with her finger instead of flicking it.
“I lose. I’m sorry.”
It took exactly twenty-nine tries before he knelt before Vieta.
It had all happened within ten minutes.
'What the hell am I even doing?'
Vieta rubbed her temple.
Ten minutes might not seem like much, but in a missing-person case, it was an extremely precious amount of time.
Vieta hoped that Ugo possessed information valuable enough to justify the ten minutes she had spent.
“All right. What were you doing in that forest?”
“I’m waiting for a bad person.”
Judging by how he was repeating something he had already said, perhaps this boy was incredibly stupid.
Vieta hesitated for a moment.
“No, not that. Tell me why you were there.”
Ugo answered while rubbing his reddened forehead.
“There was a rumor that a scream had been heard in this forest a few days ago.”
“When was that?”
“Two days ago.”
That was the day Simaril disappeared.
“Ugo, do you happen to know an elf named Simaril?”
“…Simaril?”
The name sounded familiar.
Ugo muttered, his eyes shifting from side to side for quite some time.
“Ah! You mean the elf auntie who lives outside? I know because the messenger uncles asked me about her recently.”
“Messengers?”
“A wagon comes from the World Tree about once a month. They have to exchange letters and necessary supplies, you see. But recently, the messenger uncles have been coming quite often.”
Vieta had heard the same thing from Iseria.
Iseria had ordered things the elves needed, but apparently had to wait an entire month.
She would have liked to increase the number of trade caravans, but the road was so long that once a month was the best they could manage.
“How often did they come?”
“I think about once a week.”
Even when the formidable Iseria requested something, the messengers came once a month at best—yet they had been coming once a week?
Vieta had a bad feeling about this.
“Any other rumors?”
But something was still missing.
“Ah, there have been a lot more instances of God hiding things lately. Come to think of it, a lot of elves who ran into the messenger uncles have disappeared too.”
Ugo’s testimony was worth the ten minutes she had invested.
***
Faint starlight beginning to appear beyond the window seeped into the office.
A carpet woven from leaves covered the office floor, while shelves and bookcases had sprouted from the walls.
Nothing from the outside world could be found here. Everything had sprouted and bloomed directly from the trees.
“Phew.”
The office’s owner, Iseria, furrowed her smooth brow.
More than ten elves had suddenly disappeared from the Empire this month alone.
Those were reports from elves she normally supported. Once cases involving elves she did not support and unreported cases were included, the number would certainly exceed twenty by a wide margin.
The problem was that it was impossible to determine whether these elves had run away of their own accord or had actually gone missing.
“I hope they’re just runaways….”
Around this time last year, there had been only three at most.
Even taking into account the increase in the Empire’s elven population over the past year, the number was clearly abnormal.
“Could that mage be right that something is being plotted around the World Tree….”
Iseria recalled the report Fulcare had sent her.
[Traces of World Tree leaves, albeit in minute quantities, were detected in the medium apparently used for the first monster summoning….]
[…Some high-ranking elves are aware of a method for controlling the monster in question….]
[Although it is unlikely that the elves of the World Tree directly masterminded this incident….]
[The number of elves harboring resentment toward the Empire has been increasing since the recent change in the elven leadership.]
At the time, she had been so angry that she crumpled the report as soon as she saw it, but it had not been entirely wrong.
The conflict between elves and humans was as old as the Empire’s history.
No matter how hard she tried or how much the Empire cooperated, there was no way the long-standing resentment between elves and humans would be resolved so easily.
Despite the agreement made during the Demon World War, the gap between the Empire and the World Tree only continued to widen.
That was understandable, since the World Tree had lost everything in the Demon World War.
Although the Empire had given them substantial compensation for their sacrifices, this had never been something that money could solve in the first place.
With frustration welling up inside her, Iseria took a sip of black tea.
“Elves harboring resentment….”
If she had not personally attended the banquet, she might have been dragged to the Imperial Palace as a suspect on the spot. Even if her status as the Hero’s companion meant she would be treated gently, being summoned over something so disgraceful would have been an unparalleled humiliation.
Iseria checked the contents one more time to make sure she had made no mistakes, then rolled up the parchment. Thanks to spending three straight days on it, she had barely managed to organize the investigation orders for the missing elves and the consolation payments for their families in time.
One might wonder why the missing persons’ families needed consolation money, but if the head of the household disappeared, the remaining family members would go hungry, making the payments essential. Fortunately, the Empire had covered the shortfall.
“Now I just need to write the reply.”
Iseria took out a clean sheet of parchment and picked up her pen. The letter recently sent from the World Tree had urged Iseria to abandon the Empire and go to the Kingdom of Madak. It was a truly strange order, telling her to abandon the home she had worked so hard to establish and go to the Kingdom of Madak.
[I have read the letter you sent.]
[I have already established a residence in the Empire, so please ask someone else to go to the Kingdom of Madak….]
“I hope this isn’t anything serious.”
The World Tree leaf found in the medium, the elves who kept disappearing, and the World Tree’s order that she go to the Kingdom of Madak—none of it seemed likely to be resolved easily.
***
The early-summer night air was still chilly.
The farther Fulcare traveled from the Imperial Palace toward the outskirts, the cooler the air brushing past his face became.
“Vieta.”
Fulcare called out to her from ahead.
Vieta had stormed into his office and demanded, out of nowhere, that he cast a tracking spell, so Fulcare had abandoned everything he was doing and followed her.
He had tried to calm the agitated Vieta and hear her out rationally, but that had not worked this time.
“What is it? You have to tell me so I can come up with a plan.”
“An elf has been kidnapped.”
Vieta’s voice was low and heavy.
“No matter how I look at it, something strange seems to be happening. It wasn’t my jurisdiction, so I hadn’t planned to investigate too deeply, but things are different now. An elf I know has been kidnapped.”
The image of Simaril smiling happily with the sunset behind her flashed before Vieta’s eyes.
She had honestly thought that God had hidden Simaril.
But that was not the case.
No matter how much she racked her brain, there was only one answer.
The scream said to have been heard in the forest.
The sudden increase in the messengers’ visits and the elves’ runaway cases.
Simaril’s unwillingness to return to the World Tree.
Putting all of this together led to one conclusion: Simaril had been kidnapped by her own kind.
“The commission is one thing, but I can’t turn a blind eye when someone I know has ended up like this. I’ll take care of turning everything upside down, so just show me the way.”
Vieta’s voice grew even more serious.
The trees and fields around them swept backward as they raced across the open land.
As a precaution, Fulcare silently cast support spells on both Vieta and himself.
“Captain, wait a moment.”
After they had run for quite some time, Fulcare called Vieta to a stop.
“That way.”
Fulcare pointed to a hut standing in the middle of a small cultivated plot, looking as though it might collapse at any moment.
It was a temporary shelter where farmers stayed while working their fields, when they needed to escape the rain, heat, or cold.
The white sphere was pointing in another direction, but it could not fool his senses.
“Then I’ll go and take a look.”
Vieta seemed to trust his words without a shred of doubt.
“What, you’re going alone? Of course I’m coming too. I can’t sit this out when you’re going, Captain.”
Fulcare rolled his neck and shoulders to loosen them after many long nights of overtime.
“Lead the way, Captain. I’ll watch your back.”
Fulcare had always been the one to clean up after his troublemaking captain, and he loved it.