[V10C1] So Pretty It’s Scary
Translated by Jodas 10: A Job for a Con ManAfter departing from the Lange Hamlet on their way towards the Wedge Tower, Tia and the others discussed the possibility of a Monster hiding inside the Wedge Tower. Continuing to mull it over, they carefully went back on the move.
While their discussion had arisen suspicions of Hütter being a traitor himself, Tia and the others didn’t actually think that Hütter was all that suspicious.
Still, to be safe, Otto and one of the Apprentices stuck with Hütter to prevent him from doing anything away from their sight. None of them noticed anything out of the ordinary. The only thing Tia learned from that exercise was that Hütter was surprisingly good at humming and that he had a vast repertoire. (Thanks to that, Tia had a blast humming along with him.)
Finally, without encountering any Monsters along the road, the party first noticed something was out of place the moment they crested a hill and the Wedge Tower came faintly into view in the distant haze.
“The Tower is… sparkly?”
To Tia’s eyes, the Wedge Tower glittered brightly beneath the clear winter skies like a castle of ice.
The closer they approached, the clearer the anomalies became. People who definitely looked to be fleeing something headed North past them on the road.
Hütter stopped the carriage and called out to one of the refugees.
“Good afternoon sir! We’re merchants on our way to do business at the Wedge Tower. Could it be that something has happened to the Tower?”
“What, you don’t know? If you’ve got business to do, do it somewhere else! It’s Monsters! Monsters have taken over the Wedge Tower!”
The color drained from the faces of Tia, Wren, Sevil, Rukiye, Hütter, Otto — everyone in the carriage — when they heard those words.
Monsters had appeared as far from the Crystal Territory as the Darwock Royal Palace. That being true, it wouldn’t be strange for them to appear in other places as well. In fact, the Lange Hamlet had just weathered such an attack.
Sevil muttered under her breath.
“…I see. So the attack at the Lange Hamlet was just a diversion.”
As it happened, due to the attack on the Lange Hamlet, the mages who had been keeping watch around the Crystal Territory were temporarily concentrated around the Lange Hamlet.
And while the skilled fighters were occupied at the Lange Hamlet, the Monsters attacked the Wedge Tower, the very home of those mages.
Otto frowned at Sevil’s words.
“So Klaus… Headmaster Möbius didn’t make it in time.”
Goosebumps ran down Tia’s arms.
The battle with Monsters’ very existence on the line was beginning. That was what the Arachne had said. Yet Tia still found herself unable to decide whether she would stand on the side of humans or Monsters when the time came.
(Is Sis in the Wedge Tower too…? But what about Ella, Rose… all the Apprentices?)
What if a Harpy had laid hands on her fellow Apprentices?
What if her fellow Apprentices had killed a Harpy?
—Imagining the worst-case scenario, a chill ran down Tia’s spine.
Everyone here was shaken, worried for the other Apprentices’ well-being.
Even Rukiye, who usually kept her composure, looked pale in the face, and Wren would not dare to say his usual quips. Sevil had a stern gaze as she pondered something.
Tia’s throat made a “Pevuvuvu…” noise in her panic. All of a sudden, someone gently placed a hand on top of her head. It was Hütter.
“Change of plans. Otto, let me hear what you think. If it really is as that man said and the Wedge Tower’s been taken over… Where do you think the surviving mages would be hiding?”
“…I can think of a few villages.”
“Then let’s head for the closest of those. Tia, what’s the most important thing at times like this?”
Tia immediately parroted the lesson she’d been taught just recently.
“Think real hard! … And before that, in-for-ma-shun ga-ther-ing!”
“Correct. The size of the Monster assault, whether there are any survivors from the Wedge Tower, where Headmaster Möbius is at the moment, where the safest place is to go… There’s all kinds of things we need to figure out first. Let’s proceed with caution.”
Thanks to Hütter’s words, it felt like they could finally let out the breath that had been stuck in their throats.
With a slight bit of composure regained, Tia thought.
(Assaulting the Wedge Tower sounds kinda… weird. It doesn’t seem like something Monsters would do.)
A swarm of Monsters Assaulted the Wedge Tower. The attack on the Lange Hamlet was a diversion. — Hearing that, Tia felt that was all very out of place.
Typically, Monsters wouldn’t cooperate with other species. They would all form flocks by themselves and lived as they wished.
Yet she felt a sense of strategy in the Monsters’ actions as of late.
If you asked Tia, she would say these things were ‘not Monster-y.’
(There’s no doubt that a Greater Monster is involved… but I don’t think that’s all there is to it.)
Someone was pulling the strings in the background. And what sticky, evil strings they were.
Something told her that, at the other end of those strings, stood an entity she knew.
When it came to information gathering, Tia internally panicked, wondering what she’d do if someone suggested heading past the Western Wall. Tia, a Monster, couldn’t cross the Wall after all.
Yet Hütter didn’t suggest for them to cross the Wall. He said that he thought there was a high probability of Monsters waiting in ambush somewhere around the Wall.
Thus, Tia and the others found themselves heading to the second-closest village to the Wedge Tower. This village, situated atop a small hill overlooking the Wedge Tower, was one of the places that had been designated as an emergency refuge should the need ever arise.
Shortly past noon, around the time the village came into sight, they could clearly see what anomaly had transpired at the Wedge Tower.
The Wedge Tower, along with everything in its campus, had been encrusted in crystals. Just like the Crystal Territory.
Beast-type Monsters wandered around the Tower’s perimeter while a flock of Eyeball Birds circled around in the skies overhead.
The final stronghold to defend the lands of humanity had been occupied by Monsters. No matter who you were, this truth was clear as day.
(The mana density is a lot higher around there.)
She had no idea how it happened, but the crystal-encrusted Wedge Tower had become no different from the Crystal Territory. It was now the territory of Monsters, where no human could hope to live again.
As this had happened so close to human settlements, it must have come as quite the shock to the humans.
“…I know it’s rude to say this, but…”
Gazing at the transformed Wedge Tower, Rukiye mumbled under her breath.
“It’s beautiful. In a scary way.”
Rukiye’s voice carried an intense fear. Her furrowed brows and tense frown looked nothing like the expression of someone gazing upon something beautiful. Yet, from her heart, she truly did think it was beautiful.
Wren also nodded, with a similar expression to Rukiye.
“…They say places where people can’t live are so pretty they’re scary.”
Tia could sort of understand how they felt. To a Harpy’s eyes, the Crystal Territory was a space that was just as beautiful as it was repulsive and terrifying.
(But, it feels so wrong…)
By overlaying the Crystal Territory, the land of Monsters, on top of the Wedge Tower, built by humans; it felt to her like displaying the head of one’s prey as an intimidation tactic.
It was the flaunting of a dark revelry; the display of a long-held resentment, as if to gloat ‘I’ve taken over your last fortress and defiled it! I painted all over it!’
A third-rate con man playing the role of the calm and capable Dream Mage Caspar Hütter, fought the urge to hold his head in his hands.
(What the hell is going on…?)
The mission given to him by the Black Lion Emperor was to investigate the reason why the Wedge Tower cut off ties with the previous Emperor.
To that end, he took on the role of the Dream Mage and infiltrated, yet never in a million years could he have imagined that the very place he was supposed to be infiltrating would be taken over by Monsters in the brief time he was away.
(Shit. Poppo Four hasn’t made it back yet either…)
Just to be safe, he had played his hand around the time the King of Darwock died.
The problem was the pigeon. Poppo Four, who he had sent off to deliver the message to Heidi, had yet to return to him.
Poppo Four was reserved and well-behaved, so she was convenient when he needed to secretly take one along with him, but she had a habit of getting lost easily.
(The Black Lion Emperor’s no idiot. He should have read my message and taken steps by now… But the timing will be hard to pull off. In that sense, everything rests on Poppo Four, but…)
The fate of the Empire rested on that pigeon. ‘Come on, Four. You can do this. Come back to me.’ Hütter prayed as the carriage reached the village.
Even in the middle of day, the village was dead quiet.
Sitting next to the driver’s seat, Hütter asked Otto, who was holding the reins.
“I’ve heard there was a Monster attack thirteen years ago too. Did you evacuate to this village back then as well?”
Thirteen years ago, a Greater Monster with an obsession for war sought to launch a war against the Wedge Tower.
He’d heard many people died in that large-scale attack.
“Yes, back then we had our reserve fighters, members of the Investigation Office, and such stand by in this village… but the wounded and those who couldn’t fight evacuated to a different village on the other side of the Wall.”
This must have uncovered one of Otto’s memories from back then, as he added with a pained expression:
“I messed up and got a pretty nasty injury myself… so I ran to the other side of the Wall too. When I did, Monsters came all the way up to the Wall, so if the Wall wasn’t there, I think we probably would have been wiped out.”
“…I see.”
Hütter kept his reply short, and chose not to ask any further questions. After all, Otto lost his wife and child while that large-scale attack was occurring.
But Otto recalled another memory, and spoke with a somewhat distant gaze.
“Back then Klaus… Headmaster Möbius was there, so we managed to make it through.”
At the time, he’d heard that Headmaster Möbius was only a member of the Extermination Office and a colleague of Otto’s.
While Otto and Möbius were peers, their paths in life had diverged ever since that large-scale attack.
During the attack thirteen years ago, Otto had been wounded and forced to escape to the other side of the Wall.
Meanwhile, Möbius took center stage, garnered accolades, and was now the Headmaster.
Therefore, Otto made distance between himself and Möbius. However, it seemed he did not resent Möbius nor his achievements at all.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Hütter. So long as we have Headmaster Möbius and ‘Ignatius, the Severer’ on our side, we have no reason to fear Monsters. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
Even though he had taken such a stony attitude around Headmaster Möbius, he spoke quite highly and passionately about the man as long as the person in question wasn’t there.
Otto and Möbius used to be brothers in arms. They were once classmates who could open up their hearts to each other.
While Otto now saw Möbius as an entity far beyond his reach, that did not change the absolute trust he had in him.
“You trust him a lot, huh?”
“Unlike me, that guy’s a real genius.”
As Otto spoke words of confidence, Tia poked her face through the curtain separating the front of the carriage from the back.
“Piroro… Mr. Hütter, I hear a familiar voice coming from over that way.”
When she said ‘that way,’ Tia pointed. He could see the form of a human in the distance in that direciton.
Hütter immediately recognized who it was. The man with the X-shaped scar on his face — Dammer, of the Extermination Office.
Hütter had been threatened by Dammer before. At that point, he had made it through using his chantless illusion magic (party tricks), but this was the kind of guy he wanted to avoid if possible.
Hütter kept his mouth shut, deciding to leave this one to Otto.
Otto led the carriage towards Dammer’s position and called out to him.
“Long time no see, Dammer. Are the others taking shelter here as well?”
When Dammer looked up to see Tia behind Otto and Hütter, he crudely clicked his tongue.
“Tch. The Apprentices from the Darwock Mission, huh? No use in a fight.”
“Piyopp! Dammer! What happened to the Wedge Tower?”
In response to Tia’s question, Dammer laughed, not caring to hide his fatalistic attitude.
“Can’t you tell just by looking at it? The Wedge Tower’s been taken over by the Monsters. People died. Both Headmaster Möbius and Assistant Headmaster Miriam are severely wounded. I bet they won’t make it.”
All of the blood drained from Otto’s face.