Chapter 49
Chapter 49
Securing Materials (4)
“Th-that….”
“Hm?”
“Is that… a person?”
The party, who had stepped out of the barrier in confusion because their leader had given no signal, turned their gazes toward the place where he was staring blankly.
There was indeed a person there. However, drenched head to toe in blood and mechanically shoveling at Poison Rake Bugs, the figure looked more like a ghost than a human.
No one could easily answer the third-year female student’s question. The blinding light and the bizarre sounds they had felt from inside the barrier—judging by the circumstances, were they caused by that person?
Only then did the group feel, at the same time, relief that they had escaped the Poison Rake Bugs and fear of the blood-soaked figure before them.
“Electricity…?”
“Ah! No way!”
A faint current flowed around the figure who was shoveling into the insects instead of the ground. The reaction came first from the twins, who had noticed it.
The leader asked if they knew him. The older twin brother nodded and said he would go ask.
Only after asking several times if he was certain did the leader allow the twin brother to approach.
“Hello!”
“Hm? Oh. What is it?”
“You’re Senior Davide, right?”
As the twin brother gradually drew closer and reached a reasonable distance, Davide’s head suddenly turned toward him. The eerie movement made the others flinch.
With his naturally sociable demeanor, the twin brother greeted Davide. Davide only stared at him with a puzzled expression.
I had come over because I thought I heard something strange, and it turned out to be swarms of bugs. So I immediately pulled out the Lightning Spike of Anaye and swung it.
And then I saw a familiar face.
“……He’s not wearing a gas mask.”
“What? Oh?”
The twin sister pointed at Davide’s face as she spoke. Only then did the party realize that Davide was not wearing any protective gear.
No gas mask, no special protective suit to block small wounds. He was wearing nothing but the standard combat uniform provided by the academy.
“You’re the twin who teamed up with Winter that time, right?”
“Winter? Ah~ you mean Winter Seraphist. Yes. Thank you for back then.”
“It’s fine. What are you doing here?”
For some reason, the casual tone of their conversation eased the party’s tension, and they finally approached.
“That’s Davide?”
“Hm? Who?”
“……He’s a third-year senior. We even took a class together.”
“I wasn’t interested.”
Up close, Davide looked somewhat frightening. His mysterious sea-colored hair was dyed red, only faint traces of its original color occasionally visible. Dried bloodstains were vivid across his body.
He didn’t appear to be injured anywhere, which only created a disturbing sense of dissonance—meaning that blood all belonged to the monsters.
Was Davide capable of that?
The leader swallowed that trivial doubt and began asking several questions.
Fortunately, Davide answered diligently. They exchanged questions and answers, and the leader was able to roughly grasp the current situation.
“First of all, thank you. You saved us.”
“Huh? Oh, then… that hemisphere.”
“We were suddenly ambushed. We needed a place to catch our breath for a moment.”
Only then did I recall the conspicuous hemisphere. It was the same one I had seen back when dealing with the Acid Gecko.
When I turned my gaze, I saw a female student with reddish-brown hair. The moment our eyes met, she gave me a small bow.
I responded by simply waving my hand.
“It’s shameless of us to ask, but there’s a lighthouse nearby. Do you happen to know about it?”
“Yes. Well. I’m heading that way too. Let’s go together. I know the way.”
Can we trust him?
For a moment, doubt arose. Davide was the kind of person who naturally inspired such uncertainty.
But the leader nodded. No matter how he looked, he was their lifesaver.
If left alone, they might have managed to escape somehow—but the tunnel could have collapsed, or they could have run out of magic power and died from suffocation while resting without air circulation.
Just sparing them from such a terrifying situation was more than enough. The leader felt deep gratitude toward Davide.
“Lightning? You dropped lightning?”
“More precisely, I threw it.”
“……You’re not a mage, though.”
The third-year female student still looked unconvinced. It wasn’t unreasonable, but the leader stepped in to stop her.
“I’m sorry. My teammate’s a bit sensitive right now.”
“It’s fine. I don’t mind.”
And he truly seemed not to. My face remained perfectly calm.
Heh. The leader let out a small, easygoing laugh.
Whether he realized it or not, Davide seemed to have changed. If this had been in the past, he would never have even considered stepping in to save them. Judging by how he pretended not to notice, he seemed embarrassed.
And understandably so. That earthen hemisphere inevitably drew attention, and the Poison Rake Bugs had been roaming around it—there was no way he hadn’t noticed.
“What’s that now?”
Fortunately, the path Davide guided them along was correct. A towering structure that did not fit the forest at all stood ahead. Shaped exactly like a real lighthouse, it emitted light.
It had merely been obscured by the thick poisonous fog.
As the leader approached it, he suddenly gave urgent hand signals. The party swiftly hid themselves.
I stared at the leader with a strange expression, but he didn’t even spare me a glance.
“Bloodstains.”
The leader, who had been at the front, looked startled at the vivid red traces within his field of vision. They were unmistakably bloodstains.
And they were spread all around the lighthouse.
After observing for quite some time and detecting no sign of movement, the leader lowered his hand signals. Only then did the party slowly approach.
Of course, I was the only one staring at them with a dumbfounded expression.
“A curse?”
“No. It’s not systematic. It’s just scattered.”
“Are you saying a massacre took place?”
The leader asked the twins, who had some magical aptitude, about the possibility of a curse. They shook their heads. Without a systematic structure, no trace of magic could be felt.
One of the leader’s friends frowned at their answer. There was an enormous amount of blood. It was enough to make one wonder if a river of blood had flowed here.
If they hadn’t been wearing gas masks, the smell alone would have made them retch. Despite such an incredible quantity, there was not a single corpse to be seen.
“Could a predator have appeared?”
“Don’t say something that horrifying.”
If the predator said to dwell at the center of the swamp had emerged, this would be on the level of a disaster evacuation. Rescue team or not, it would mean they were already dead.
That sluggish creature hadn’t appeared in seventy years, so the chances were low. Making such assumptions would only damage morale. It was better to deliberately ignore the possibility.
“I did it, though?”
“What?”
“No, I was resting at the lighthouse, and those beast bastards kept glaring at me.”
“…….”
Perhaps he couldn’t stand watching them speculate any longer, so I stepped forward. The leader stood there with his mouth hanging open.
He couldn’t tell whether he had heard correctly. It was unbelievable enough that I had created all these bloodstains—but the reason was simply because they had glared at me?
“They were staring at me like I was prey. So I taught them a lesson.”
“……As expected. Duhein.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s nothing.”
The Duhein Family was a family of hunters. Someone born into the position of a hunter getting angry simply because he was looked at like prey.
When he framed it under the name Duhein, it somehow made sense. The word Duhein was truly a remarkable word.
The leader couldn’t get used to how much I had changed. For a moment, he even wondered if someone else was pretending to be Davide.
But looking at me now, I was simply Duhein itself. A year ago, Davide had been like this too.
“How many did you kill? That’s not the blood of just one or two.”
“About forty? I think I killed around that many.”
“Then where are the bodies?”
“They got sucked into the swamp after they died.”
“That’s a strange phenomenon. Is it related to the concentration of the poisonous fog?”
In any case, this wasn’t the worst-case scenario. It had nothing to do with the predator. Reassured by that, the leader was startled once more by my attitude.
A year ago, I had been an ill-mannered bastard who spoke rudely without restraint. But now, the moment I was called a senior, I politely raised my speech level.
That mad dog had climbed to at least the level of a human being.
Whoever was responsible, it was an impressive feat of handling. Or perhaps the expulsion had been that much of a shock.
“The lighthouse is intact, fortunately.”
“It’s functioning. Not very well, though.”
“We’re going to call the rescue team from here. What about you?”
“As for me, I have something to do.”
“Something to do?”
“Yes.”
It didn’t seem like Davide had any intention of explaining further. The leader nodded and let it go. Everyone bore the consequences of their own choices.
There was no need to worry about Davide, who wasn’t even part of his party. More than anything, if he was roaming around alone like this, he must have something to rely on.
“Twins.”
“Yes?”
“Yes?”
“You even answer the same. Anyway, you’re mages. Do you have something like a magic backpack?”
At Davide’s sudden question, the twins nodded without thinking.
“What do you need a magic backpack for?”
“There’s loot I couldn’t bring. It’d be a shame to leave it.”
Davide pointed at his own backpack. It was already bulging as if about to burst, and his appearance was bizarre enough as it was.
It had been hard to tell because of the blood, but those were antennae. Like firewood piled onto a carrier frame, bundles of neatly tied antennae hung from the sides of the backpack.
“Swamp Ants? Don’t tell me all of this is from Swamp Ants?”
The antennae were byproducts of Swamp Ants. They were vicious creatures ranked among the top three monsters to avoid in the Poison Swamp.
And there were too many of their antennae to count.
“You killed all of these?”
“Type advantage?”
Did he really think that explained it?
A monster with a hard exoskeleton, living in swarms, and possessing vicious aggression—he had killed nearly two hundred of them alone.
With the loot right in front of him, denial wasn’t easy. The leader quite literally fell into panic.
“You’re going to replace the purification canister, right?”
Watching the leader nod blankly, Davide also entered the lighthouse. I had just thrown the Lightning Spike of Anaye, so I needed to wait at least thirty minutes for the cooldown.
You never knew what might happen, so it was best to keep a last resort prepared. Though calling it a last resort was questionable, considering I fired it off whenever I had the chance.
“Thank you.”
“It’s fine.”
As I slumped against the lighthouse wall, the twin sister approached. She deliberately bowed at the waist to express her gratitude.
While waiting briefly inside the lighthouse, I heard an irritating fluttering sound—something that provoked a visceral sense of disgust.
Wondering what it was, I went to check and saw a swarm of insects circling around something.
There were so many bugs that I couldn’t see what was at the center. I figured they were probably hunting something and immediately hurled a Lightning Spike of Anaye.
I just wanted to silence that unbearable buzzing as quickly as possible. In other words, there hadn’t been any goodwill behind it.
“Just replace the purification canister. There’s a spare on that shelf.”
“Yes. But more importantly, are you really fine without a gas mask, Senior?”
“Just because you breathe in a little poison doesn’t mean you’ll die that easily.”
“……Normally, you would.”
Perhaps fascinated by the fact that I wandered around without a gas mask, she showed interest. The twin brother, who agreed with her, approached at some point and joined the conversation.
“Detoxification?”
“No. If that were the case, there would inevitably be a period of being poisoned.”
“Then what if the poison is detoxified the moment it enters the body? At a speed so fast that we can’t even notice?”
“That level of detoxification ability? Not impossible, but that would be inhuman.”
Leaving the two who had now started debating among themselves, I leaned back against the wall again and yawned.
I could feel the twins’ gazes on me. Those who had been eavesdropping on their discussion also looked at me.
“What are you staring at?”
Inhuman.
It suited me.