Chapter 138

In the Empire, the term “Magul” had various meanings.

Narrowly, it referred to the “Magical Realms” where ancient things attempted to cross over, the “Lair of Foreign Objects” where these foreign entities gathered, and the habitats of monsters. Broadly, it could also signify the slums, red-light districts, and assemblies where many people clashed over their own interests.

“Monsters are out! Run!”

“We’ll kill those bastards today. Capture them!”

Outside the gate, to be precise, the land north of the Ivory Tower Territory fit both of those definitions.

Just then, a frog about the size of a person jumped out of a small stream, snagging a child, while people wielding broken bottles and wooden planks were brawling in a small clearing, reminiscent of the old slums.

“Was there a place like this in the capital?”

“Have you never been here? …Then again, I’m unfamiliar with it as well. It wasn’t this large before.”

“This is my first time here as well.”

Sererassie let out a low sigh as Lady Trentia scanned the area with trembling eyes.

While the slums were dirty and dangerous, they still had people living in them; this place, however, felt like a place where people were dying.

Trash and tents made of waste piled on the flat ground, the stench wafting in the air, and a latrine and well were very close to each other.

However, the reason this place felt even more unfamiliar wasn’t just that.

Children, women, and the elderly were nowhere to be seen.

In general, in a slum, these three would engage in casual work or petty crimes like pickpocketing, while men performed manual labor or fought.

But here, all that could be seen were men digging through trash.

It was a place where the weak had no options.

I stopped feeling sorry and pondered why such a place had come to be.

Unlike slums, this place was surrounded by dirt.

If they could farm, they could make a living…

I realized.

“Oh dear.”

You could not farm here.

The walls of Solentalouon stretched high enough to pierce the sky, casting shadows all day long to the west of those walls.

Without sunlight, the discarded garbage had not decomposed, slowly rotting away with venom.

It was fundamentally uninhabitable land.

Thinking this way made it easy to understand why this place had grown to be a problem.

“Lady Trentia.”

She responded as if to drive away those brawling.

A young boy, likely around Konel’s age, was putting his dislocated arm back in place, and the boy knelt at her feet to bow.

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Do you remember last year when the Greenskin horde caused refugees to flock to the slums?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Back then, the number of refugees was so much that the slums were almost overflowing. We saw brawls with hundreds of participants. You, I, and Konel tried to reduce those numbers.”

“Those were the ones who couldn’t all make it in back then…”

A sense of sadness lingered in Lady Trentia’s voice.

She gently lifted the boy who had bowed at her feet.

* * *

“Brother, we need to find a way to tackle this place somehow.”

Sererassie unusually brought up a topic unrelated to magic first.

Even she felt it was serious.

“My mission was to find monsters or foreign objects… but I suppose so. I must talk to Konel as well.”

“If even one instance of corruption starts here, it will spread in an instant. Judging by what I see, it seems some people have already started.”

Among the people, there were those particularly large or with strange veins on their bodies, despite the lack of food.

Lady Trentia placed her hand on the handle of her sword, Hwanhan, and I shook my head.

“Let it be for now.”

“Your Highness?”

“It’s much better than I initially expected. It’s still in a recoverable state.”

Lady Trentia narrowed her red eyes.

“Are you perhaps deliberately waiting for their corruption to worsen and run amok, intending to use that as an excuse to obliterate this place?”

“What do you mean?” I asked in surprise, but Lady Trentia did not back down.

“Your Highness, that is not something a human should do. You have been crossing too many lines recently. Please act as befits the royal family and a knight. Not long ago, you made a deal with a criminal…”

Hmm… she probably thought I would come up with such an atrocious solution.

“…You should be a strategist rather than just a pawn. Yet you keep throwing yourself into the middle of the board. I truly cannot understand what you are thinking.”

Lady Trentia let out a deep sigh.

A sorrowful and bitter light crossed her handsome face.

It genuinely seemed she was worried about me.

I felt a tightness in my chest.

I had to continue my reckless ways, but I had no desire to treat those who cared about me poorly.

Recently, what I had done… The aftermath of the Saint’s kidnapping was too enormous.

She would know about the deal involving the two council members and Sererassie, and this time I had fought alongside the enemy, the masked warrior.

For the devout Lady Trentia, it must be unimaginable wickedness.

This time, I needed to provide certainty and calm.

“I know. I have no such intention.”

I met her gaze directly and replied seriously.

As Lady Trentia still showed signs of doubt, I added one more thing.

“And that is a highly inefficient plan for handling the people.”

Letting something happen knowing it would and then using that as an excuse to eliminate the target.

I had used this strategy several times against neutral lords showing signs of siding with the rebels before the return.

This worked well for removing one or two targets, but not when it came to all these ‘people’ at once.

The core of it was justifying the elimination of the target through the pretext of them having caused an accident, but no justification could convince everyone to accept that they should die together.

Even as much as I was a rogue, I wasn’t the kind of trash that would order a wyvern bombing on people when infiltrators weren’t crawling up the walls immediately.

Furthermore, wyvern bombing was ridiculously expensive, and using that money to help with resettlement would be far cheaper.

“I promise. When we tackle this issue, I will not commit any atrocious acts. As you wish, I will resolve it fairly, like a knight.”

I would manage it.

Probably.

“Really?”

Lady Trentia’s face brightened.

The red short cropped hair swayed in the spring breeze, and a smile of exhilaration appeared on her handsome face.

It was like a father meeting a reformed son.

“Of course, would I dare lie to you?”

“You’ve done so a few times… but that’s not important. I will forget all of that. You’ve thought this through. This marks a new beginning.”

She seemed so touched that there was a hint of tears in her eyes.

Cherry blossom petals drifting from somewhere filled the air, and she soon burst out laughing heartily.

The boy who had been following Lady Trentia, as well as those who had been eavesdropping on our conversation, were startled and prostrated themselves.

Honestly, there was no need to act like a rogue in this matter.

What Jeilliris had commanded was not to hunt monsters or foreign objects, but to look around and report back.

I glanced around and spoke.

“I suppose I need to think more about the refugee issue. For now, let’s focus on the mission at hand. Let’s start looking for traces of monsters or foreign objects.”

* * *

The search proceeded quite peacefully.

Click, click, click.

Even as Lady Trentia walked around in full armor humming a tune, everyone scattered in fear.

Though there might usually be some brats hiding within the crowd throwing stones or engaging in reckless pickpocketing, there were none of those here.

Smoke was rising from places, the smoke of burning corpses.

If they weren’t buried in the church graveyard, they would have reacted to the scum in the atmosphere and turned into undead, and there was no church to be found here.

The frog I had seen earlier seemed to not even qualify as a monster here.

Some men gathered by the riverside, spearing it with wooden spears, skinning it, and roasting it before taking it back to their tents.

Lady Trentia bore a mixed expression watching that, while Sererassie squinted her differently colored eyes, finding it interesting.

“Valencianus, do you see that frog?”

“Of course.”

“That’s a species that originally does not have horns.”

“!”

Lady Trentia asked.

“Then it has been corrupted, hasn’t it?”

Sererassie shook her head.

“The Southern Giant Frog grows quickly and is quite large, so it’s often used as a specimen. Giving frogs horns or cultivating claws or leaving tails behind is the first lesson in creating non-mammalian chimeras.”

I understood what she was hinting at.

“If it’s a chimera, a creature that is already inherently unstable would mutate immediately once exposed to corruption.”

…But that meant.

“That means there’s no corruption or foreign objects here.”

“You grasp the point quite well. Yes. My brother. Whether it’s an infiltrator or a foreign object, it’s unlikely to be something ancient. In the end, it will probably just be a monster.”

Monsters.

There were sentient beings like orcs and goblins, and beasts like direwolves and dire tigers that had grown large due to exposure to mana, and there were also foreign entities from long ago like mermaids that had bred and integrated into this world.

If there is a commonality among them, it’s that they pose little danger now.

“Then… the royal family will also just issue appropriate requests to the Adventurer’s Guild and be done with it.”

Humans, at least the noble class including knights, had become much stronger, inheriting the good bloodlines of various races and compared to the past, monsters had become objects of rescue and extermination rather than war.

The reason why infiltrators and foreign objects were dangerous was that they could multiply through mental waves, but the combat power of each individual was manageable.

“Right. Then is there anything more to find? If you don’t want to stay here any longer, let’s head back already.”

Sererassie quickly said.

“I have mountains of research I want to do and must do, what do you want to keep me detained in this garbage dump for?”

Strangely, she seemed oddly restless.

I felt I had seen that kind of anxiousness before.

It was when we went to Magic Street and the Street of Learning regarding the issue of the illegitimate spawn and infiltrators.

When Jeilliris learned that the illegitimate children had been corrupted, she feared that we might also be purged, wondering if it wasn’t better to just kill them all.

Sererassie had just recently been granted the right to learn magic and was now fully aware of the fears of someone who had much to lose.

Even now, she was acting like she had then.

It felt like she had much to lose, like she didn’t want to be caught.

Lady Trentia narrowed her eyes and headed toward the river.

The boy warned her it was dangerous, but she ignored him.

I caught that out of the corner of my eye as I looked up to where Sererassie stood at a higher elevation.

“Sister.”

She was beaming with radiant beauty.

The softly felt waves of mana seemed to be on the verge of justifying the honorific ‘Great’ before ‘Mage’ now, and the luxurious robe, pointed hat, and long staff she received from her teacher were filled with gloss and authority.

“What’s wrong?”

“About that chimera…”

“….”

“Are there many others like it, aside from frogs?”

Worst-case scenario!

The sound of water splitting filled the air.

From within the river, a crocodile that had changed color like a chameleon lunged at Lady Trentia.

And then.

Bang!

Its skull shattered in one hit as it rolled on the ground.

The boy gaped at Lady Trentia in shock.

“…There may well be things like that.”

“Perhaps?”

Sererassie’s gaze turned cold.

“In the end, it seems mixing human blood would be the final stage.”

She did not shake her head.

I chose my words carefully.

“If that came from the Ivory Tower…”

If she perceived my mention of attacking the Ivory Tower, where she came from, because a few chimeras had harmed some refugees, Sererassie might summon a lightning storm to obliterate all of this area or perhaps even me.

“How could it possibly have escaped?”

Sererassie smiled coyly.

“Thank you, brother.”

It was as if she understood my heart.

A spring breeze blew her dark blue hair.

She cleared her throat and began to speak.

“Perhaps the merchants stole them from the incinerator, or those soft-hearted students released them thinking it was cruel.”

At that moment, Lady Trentia dashed toward us.

“Be careful!”

“Huh?”

“That thing will not feel pity for His Highness!”

Something was looming over us from behind a pile of trash.

A scorpion-human?