Chapter 246 : Chapter 246
Chapter 246. A Dire Situation
Blake, the lord of Snow Bear Territory, now found even breathing difficult.
Every time he woke from bed, he felt grateful that he had survived another day, because staying alive at this point truly was no easy thing.
Ever since the third day after Fulan had secretly left for the mine to kill that necromantic monster, Blake had felt as though Fulan had already been gone for three years.
After Fulan left, the situation in the city only worsened. By now, he had nearly reached the point where, as the lord of this territory, he could decide nothing at all.
The first problem was the ever-increasing number of mercenaries. He had no idea why so many of them were flooding into Snow Bear City, or what exactly they wanted.
Then there were the followers of the Church of the Goddess of the Currents. Their numbers were also growing, and they had enormous conflicts with the mercenaries.
Nearly every day, he heard reports of fights breaking out between the two sides.
And the guards he had sent out to carry out the task Fulan had assigned—capturing a large number of small animals—had reported:
“To the east and south of Snow Bear Territory, there are almost always several people on the roads every hour, all heading this way.”
The problems these people brought to Snow Bear Territory were nothing short of disastrous. Blake had already stopped reading reports about which village had been destroyed by which mercenary or which follower of the Goddess of the Currents.
Because he simply had no way to deal with it. He only had a few First-Tier Professionals under his command. There were not even as many of them as there were mercenaries.
If he were only facing a single mercenary squad of a dozen or so men, he would absolutely have been able to rely on his subordinates’ support and the strength granted to him by his territory to solve the problem.
But the issue was that there were not merely a dozen such mercenary squads coming here...
What was more, by now, it was not only those people he had to face, but also the beastmen watching hungrily from the north.
Through the castle window, he looked outside. There stood a small number of humanoid creatures with tufts of fur around their heads. Those were beastmen, and they had come as representatives of their tribes.
Those beastmen had arrived at dusk yesterday. Blake had already been warned by both the Church of the Goddess of the Currents and the mercenaries, so when the beastmen arrived, he had almost immediately ordered the city gates shut.
At the time, when he saw the nearly thousand beastmen below, his heart trembled twice on its own, and he had nearly failed to catch his breath.
At that moment, he could not stop cursing the neighboring territories around his own. How had all of these beastmen reached this place without anyone warning him?
In the past, those beastmen would also head south from time to time, seizing resources from the lords of these lands.
Ordinarily, whenever there were signs of beastmen moving south, people would spontaneously form a coalition army and gather the lords of several nearby territories to drive them back together.
Normally, that was how things went. His territory was far from where the beastmen lived, so in most cases, the beastmen would have been driven off by the coalition long before they ever reached his land.
But now, he truly had no idea what was going on. Could it be that these beastmen had come only for his territory, and had not attacked a single defensible lord’s castle anywhere along the way?
No matter how wildly he speculated, the present reality remained the same: he no longer had control of the situation.
The beastmen wanted to negotiate, and all he could do was allow a group of them into the city.
But those beastmen had not come to negotiate with him. They had come to negotiate with the mercenaries and the people from the Church of the Goddess of the Currents.
That made his brows knit tightly, yet there was nothing he could do. After all, among all the forces present, his was the weakest one. It was only natural that they would not include him...
Still, it would have been one thing if these people were merely holding a brief negotiation on his land.
Instead, all these different factions had gathered inside his Snow Bear City.
By now, he had abandoned all illusions and resolved to prepare for the worst.
He had already sent soldiers to the Northern Society to request aid from the Alliance.
And now, more than anything, he hoped Fulan would return at once and serve as the bridge between him and the Alliance.
“Didn’t she say she’d be back in two days? So where is she now?” Blake covered his face with one hand. He was terribly anxious, but he also knew that no matter how anxious he became, it would be useless.
The current situation was simply not something he or the forces in his territory could resolve. The only hope now was help from the Alliance.
Even the way those mercenaries and Gillian from the Church of the Goddess of the Currents looked at him had already changed.
He was certain that those people were all plotting how to kill him, the lord of this territory. They simply had not acted yet because the demands of the various factions had not been settled.
Just then, a familiar voice made him freeze in his seat.
“Hey! Blake, did you get the thing I told you to handle done?”
It was Fulan’s voice. In such circumstances, hearing her voice sounded to him like heavenly music.
Blake shot to his feet from the chair and stared at Fulan with wide eyes. He rubbed them. Fulan did not vanish from his sight. Only then did he finally let out a breath of relief. So it had not been a hallucination after all.
“Mage, I had finally begun to hope you would return...” Blake was so excited that his words came out in a jumble.
Fulan raised an eyebrow and asked curiously:
“What happened to you?”
Blake steadied himself a little, and only then did he notice the unfamiliar face standing beside Fulan.
One look was enough to tell that this person was not from the Northern Lands, but a human from some other region.
Still, Blake hesitated only for a moment. It was not strange for a mage like Fulan to hire an outsider as a mercenary. Perhaps Fulan knew this mage already.
He then said:
“Mage, when you came back through that secret passage, you probably didn’t know...” Blake then explained in detail everything that had happened recently, including the arrival of the beastmen and the flood of people into the city.
When Fulan had slipped away without anyone noticing, she had naturally used Snow Bear Territory’s secret passage to leave.
As a secret passage, it was naturally meant to be used at critical moments. Blake had understood that point very clearly. At that time, borrowing Fulan’s identity as a deterrent had been the most crucial thing for him.
Under those circumstances, of course he could not let Fulan leave through the city gates and allow the mercenaries and the followers of the Church of the Goddess of the Currents to see her walk out.
And when Fulan returned to Snow Bear City, she had also come back through the secret passage, so naturally she had not seen the beastmen outside the city, nor the increasing number of mercenaries and followers of the Goddess of the Currents inside it.
After hearing Blake’s explanation, Fulan scratched her head. This was no longer the kind of problem she could solve by herself.
The only reason she had come back here was to collect the payment Blake had promised her back then.
Still, it was not as if she had no way to solve it.
The question was, why should she help Blake? What great benefit would she gain from it?
Fulan thought for a moment, then slowly said:
“How about this, Blake? Later on, you have to agree to one thing for me. I haven’t decided what it is yet, but when the time comes, I’ll come find you.”
“If you agree, then I’ll help you resolve these problems.”
Blake was only stunned for a moment before his head began bobbing up and down frantically, as though he feared Fulan might change her mind.