Stray

“I am very sorry, but we have a sudden emergency,” Oliver said with a sincere expression. “We have no way of contacting, so we could only leave without saying goodbye.”

Jesse Dylan raised his beautiful, sharped eyebrows enlarging his blue eyes that were like a frozen lake. “Oh— Is that so?” He covered his chest sadly and let out a well-acted sigh. “That’s too bad. I had a hunch that we would be able to talk! Alas, Noer is really a heartbreaking place, so I can only say goodbye to you here—”

While talking, he casually opened the Black Chapter tasks list and signed a task without even looking at it. Oliver took this opportunity to quickly input the coordinates on the operation board of the teleportation array and threw out a golden page with some distressed. The surveillance beam swept across their faces and stayed on the black badge for a moment before the next second dizziness and bumps unique to the teleportation array grabbed them.

Vincent Town was extremely remote so the large teleportation array could only send them to the nearest medium-sized city. This time, the teleportation distance was extremely far. After the light flashed, only Ann and Adrian were still standing. Nemo himself had a terrible headache and with such a toss, he laid on the ground blankly as he started to doubt whether his head was still connected to his neck. The gray parrot struggled to get out of his robe, took a few steps askew, and shook its head desperately.

Oliver covered his mouth and supported the wall with one hand, looking like he was fighting a desperate battle with nausea.

The guard on duty glanced at them amusingly, but when he saw the snake heads on their black badges, he stood straight up and pressed his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“Anyways, we got rid of him.” Ann didn’t really want to take care of the two struggling inexperienced boys, so she turned to Adrian. “I recall that Willard believes in Manichaeism* here?”

*Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came.

*Clarity: Note that religions in this novel is not from real religions though they are based off of it (like Laddism is close to Christianity/Catholicism). I’m unsure at this time whether Manichaeism is actually based on the real-life religion or if the author is has a different version unique to the novel.