[V8C4] Tia’s Return
Translated by Jodas 8: The Witch of the BoundaryThe day after Tia departed from the border town, the Apprentice Mages Wren, Sevil, and Rukiye and their Instructor, Hütter, were to return back to the Wedge Tower.
Personally, Wren wanted to waste no time following Tia down to Merwen, but if they set out at the wrong time, they’d end up having to spend the night camping out along the road. Thus, the adults decided it was best to head out first thing in the morning.
Headmaster Möbius and the other powerful mages were busily running around making contact with people from Darwock to set up meetings between Prince Axel and the Queen’s faction, as well as searching for the Monsters who killed the King.
They planned to stay here near the border for a while and stay on alert for the presence of Monsters.
(…I wonder if Tia flew around this area before heading off. I wonder if she was able to meet her sister.)
Waking up with the sunrise, Wren rolled over in his bed.
Hütter spent the night in the same room as Hütter and the Protection Office’s Otto.
These would be the ones returning to the Wedge Tower with him. Since Hütter wasn’t a combatant, Otto decided to come along to guard them.
First thing in the morning, they were to get ready as quickly as they could and head South for Merwen. Once they rendezvoused with Tia there, then they would continue Southward to return to the Wedge Tower.
“……Hm?”
Mixed in with the tweeting birds that heralded the coming of dawn, could have sworn he heard Tia’s tweeting as well.
(No, it’s gotta just be my imagination. Tia’s all the way down in Merwen right now…)
So he thought, but then reconsidered. ‘No wait, but that’s definitely Tia.’
Maybe she got bored waiting all by herself in that town to the South, so started flying around and eventually ended up back here… Knowing Tia, that’s totally possible.
Or maybe she made it to Merwen just fine, but forgot what she was there to do, so flew back to ask Hütter for clarification. That was also a very Tia thing to do.
Wren slipped out of bed and walked up to the window.
Perhaps noticing the ruckus he made doing so, Hütter asked him “What’s up?” Not just Hütter, Otto also eyed him. It seemed like he’d woken both of them up.
‘Pretty early for you old folks, isn’t it?’ Wren thought as he spoke to them.
“I feel like I could hear Tia’s voice…… Ah, look, there she is!”
Casting his eyes out of the window, Wren caught sight of a silhouette waddling in their direction.
It was still dark outside, but there was no mistaking that starch-white hair and distinctive gait.
Wren was about to throw the window open and call out to her, but then he noticed something off.
For whatever reason, it felt like Tia’s body was unusually staggering from side to side.
“……Eh?”
The Winter morning was cold enough to make your breaths fog up.
And yet, Tia wasn’t wearing a coat. She was in her underwear, with her arms fully exposed.
Upon seeing the state she was in, Wren’s mind immediately brought up Tia’s true form that he’d seen once before.
—The white-winged Harpy.
When Tia returned to her true form, white feathers would burst out from those wings. Her legs would be covered in scales and turn into birds’ feet with huge, sharp talons.
Now, the Tia that approached them, was in the form of a human girl. Nevertheless, her topless form was covered in stains.
Something had happened to Tia’s body.
“Mr. Hütter, Mr. Otto, something’s wrong!”
Wren threw a coat on, grabbed a blanket, and ran outside. Then, once he exited the inn, he surveyed his surroundings.
Tia had sat down on the ground where he had spotted her earlier.
“Tia!”
Wren ran up to her and wrapped Tia’s body in the blanket. Tia might have said that she was strong against the cold, but just looking at her made him shiver.
Tia had no visible large wounds. The most he could find were a couple bruises around her right arm and shoulder. Her feet were bare and covered in mud.
Wren asked in a whisper.
“Did you use those candies again?”
“Pevu… Yeah… I flew high up with the Magical Leaping Device, used a candy to return my form, then glided. I did that over and over…”
Her responding voice rang of exhaustion.
When Tia ate the candies she said she received from the ‘Witch,’ she could return to Harpy form for five minutes.
But whenever the effects ran out and she returned to human form, Tia would suffer from intense pain.
“How many candies did you use?”
“A lot… Um… Ten-ish?”
A chill ran down Wren’s spine.
Leaping up with the Magical Leaping Device, returning to Harpy form with the power of the candies, then gliding as far as she could with those wings. — By repeating that process over and over again, Tia made it all the way back here.
…All the while suffering from intense pain every time she turned back to human form.
She had to have had a reason to go to all that length to come back here.
“What happened in Merwen?”
Tia had been slumped over this whole time, staring at the ground, but now she lifted her face to look at Wren.
Then, with a strange impatience dripping from her expression, she spoke quickly.
“You see, Monsters are lying in wait to the South of here. I think all of the guys from the Investigation Office in Merwen were probably killed.”
When Tia came back, everyone who’d been waiting at the inn set their preparations aside to gather in Hütter’s room.
Sitting on the bed, wrapped in a blanket and receiving first aid, was Tia. To her sides sat Rukiye and Sevil. Rukiye was busy sewing one of her backup shirts. It seemed like she was altering it to fit Tia’s size.
In addition to them; Wren, Hütter, Otto, and four mages of the Extermination and Investigation Office who were on standby in the inn brought whatever chairs they could find and packed into the room.
The room started to get a little claustrophobic, but considering the emergency situation, it couldn’t be helped.
(It felt kinda cozy like this when everyone gathered in the caves in Breakneck Gorge, I think…)
As Tia reminisced about the past, Hütter handed her a mug of hot water.
“Come on, drink up. And, while you drink that, answer our questions. Where was it that you encountered those Monsters?”
Hütter spread out the map in front of her, and Tia took little sips of the hot water as she pointed at the map. “Around here.”
The Northern outskirts of Merwen.
“I was chased around by the Eyeball Birds, then landed in a grove… probably around here. Then there was a Greater Monster there.”
When she said ‘Greater Monster,’ the room buzzed with everyone’s reactions.
The shock on the faces of the Investigation and Extermination Office mages who knew full well the terror of a Greater Monster was particularly palpable.
“I’m surprised you made it back in one piece…”
The Protection Office’s Otto whispered with a tense expression.
Tia tried to choose her next words carefully.
“Um… I went boing with the Magical Leaping Device and headbutted him.”
“…You headbutted a Greater Monster?”
Otto asked that with a twitching face, to which Tia cheerfully responded “Piyopp!”
“Then, I flew a whole lot, I shook off the Eyeball Birds, and somehow ran all the way here.”
She decided to wave off the issue of her shirt and boots by claiming that the Eyeball Birds grabbed onto them as she was fleeing and tore them to shreds until they fell off.
Since several of the panels on the Magical Flying Device’s flight wings had been torn off, and she had forcibly retracted what remained in order to switch to leaping mode, all sorts of issues cropped up with it.
“Tia, what did that Greater Monster say to you?”
Hütter asked Tia for more detailed information.
Tia responded as well as she could remember.
She mentioned that the Monster took the form of a blond young man and spoke of himself as if he were a vampire.
She also mentioned that the mages of the Wedge Tower who were in Merwen had been discovered by ones known as that Greater Monster’s ‘thralls.’
Once Tia had brought up that point, Wren lightly raised his hand to ask the adults a question.
“…A ‘thrall’ is a powerful Monster’s servant, right?”
The one to respond to this question was the Protection Office’s Otto.
Having spent the most time at the Wedge Tower, Otto was the most experienced in the habits of Monsters.
“When you talk about a Greater Monster’s thralls, you can divide them into two basic types. One being weaker Monsters. The other is humans who act as that Monster’s followers.”
For example, the Primordial Beast, born from the Abyss, had beastman-type Monsters as thralls under his command.
However, there were some Monsters that used humans as their thralls.
Tia hadn’t ever seen humans like that, but she’d heard about them.
Among humans, there were some who resented their lives as humans and willingly chose to become a Monster’s thrall.
A vampire with an attractive form would probably have plenty of devout followers among humans.
Humans who worked as thralls of those types of Monsters couldn’t live in the Crystal Territory, so they instead lived quietly in human settlements, awaiting their orders.
With a grim face, Otto continued.
“It’s not limited to thralls. There’ve always been some humans out there who like to side with the Monsters. It’s the Wedge Tower’s job to root out humans like that too… But it looks like they’ve completely got the jump on us this time.”