[V11C14] FRIENDS?
Translated by Jodas 11: Envoy of the AbyssWren pulled an item out from his bag and stuck it to his forehead.
It was a little shard of mana-infused crystal about the size of a coin, designed to look as if it were embedded in his skin.
There wasn’t any particular magical formula carved in to it; it wasn’t designed to activate any magecraft in particular. It was simply a crystal with some mana in it.
“Here goes nothing!”
Rather than hide between the trees, Wren and Sevil confidently and openly strode out towards the hut.
The Monsters that had been wandering around said hut immediately surrounded the two of them.
They were large, bipedal dog Monsters — part of a species known as ‘Kobolds.’ While they were smaller than Werewolves, they were nonetheless each about the size of a grown man. And there were eight of them.
“HUMAN EAT?”
“EAT YUMMY.”
“CHASING FUN.”
‘Can I eat this human? They’re yummy to eat. It’s so much fun to chase them around‘… They were sure saying some concerning stuff.
Swallowing his urge to shriek in fear, Wren pointed at the crystal on his forehead.
“Come on, look closer guys! I’m one of you! Look, don’t you see this crystal rivet I’ve got?”
“CRYSTAL RIVET?”
“HUMAN WITH ONE, THERE WAS BEFORE.”
Indeed, according to the accounts from the other Wedge Tower mages; when the Hundred-Eyes Witch, Anneliese Röhm turned traitor, she had such a crystal rivet implanted in her forehead.
Röhm, a human, should not have been able to survive in the Wedge Tower following its crystal contamination. So Wren and the others surmised that it must have been the Crystal Rivet that enabled her to do so.
(If I recall… Kobolds are supposed to be weaker and less intelligent than Werewolves, right?)
The mana density where they were right now was such that humans couldn’t even get here. The only ones who could were humans that sided with the Monsters and acquired a Crystal Rivet. — That was to say, being here implied that Wren was one of those Monster-aligned humans.
…Or, at least, he wanted to convince the Kobolds that that was the case.
To do that, it would probably be a good idea to avoid any difficult words here.
Wren put on his most disarming pretty boy smile and spoke cheerfully.
“The mana’s real thick around here, you know? If I was a normal human, I’d die! Got it? Humans. Mana. No good!”
“HE’S RIGHT.”
“NOT HUMAN?”
“Humans with the crystal rivets are friends of Monsters! You got it? FRIENDS!”
“FRIENDS?”
“FRIENDS?”
“FRIENDS?”
One Kobold turned to the one on their right, asking “FRIENDS?” Then, that Kobold would ask the one on their right, who would ask the one on their right… Until the question made its way all the way around to the start.
At that point, Sevil spoke up with aplomb.
“Indeed, we are friends!”
“FRIENDS.”
The gentle response came as a huge relief, but he couldn’t let his guard down quite yet.
After all, Kobolds were obsessed with…
“FRIENDS GIVE GUTS?”
Indeed, from the first moment a Kobold learned the taste of a human’s guts, these Monsters have been obsessed with them.
While they could survive on other foods, their obsession with human internal organs went far beyond survival. Wren immediately covered his stomach with his hands and shouted.
“No way! You can’t have my guts! I’ll die!”
“LITTLE BITE?”
“Nope! No biting! Keep your hands off of the pretty boy!”
“PRETTY BOY? HANDS OFF?”
“PRETTY BOY, OFF?”
“HANDS OFF?”
The Kobolds reacted with shock and puppy-dog eyes as they repeated Wren’s words.
Had he not known of their true nature, he might have found them kind of cute… but they were still licking their lips as they huffed and puffed voraciously. Some of them were clearly drooling.
On the spot, Wren came up with an idea to get out of this.
“Hey, you guys know about Vampires, right? The Greater Monsters that look like humans?”
Suddenly, the Kobolds’ fur stood on end.
This was a risky bet. Wren didn’t know all that much about Vampires himself.
It was Tia who had actually encountered the Vampire. Back when she was on her way to the town of Merwen, she had been mistaken for a human and attacked.
It was thanks to that encounter that he learned that the Vampire had human allies called ‘thralls.’
“I’m a Vampire’s thrall, you know? If you attack us, my master will be very angry. You don’t want that, do you?”
The Kobolds scattered away from Wren in a panic.
(Alright, it worked!)
When Wren silently pumped his fist, he was blissfully unaware.
Unaware of the fact that, as they spoke, his teacher Hütter had survived an encounter by taking on the role of just one such Vampire’s servant.
“We came to deliver food and new clothes to the one past here. Stand aside!”
“It takes a human to take care of a human, you know? That’s why we were chosen to do this job.”
With that, Wren and Sevil entered the hut. The Kobolds didn’t dare follow them inside.
Then, once the door was closed, Wren exhaled in relief.
“Sheesh, that was close… But we made it.”
“I owe you my thanks, Wren. That was some good improvization.”
‘Aw, don’t compliment me like that, you’ll make me blush!’ Wren beamed, but Sevil kept speaking with an incredibly straight face.
“When I see a dog, I can’t help the urge to train it. It was close there for a moment; I almost told them to ‘Sit!’”
“……”
Now that Wren and Sevil made it past the Kobolds into the gardener’s hut, they lit a lantern they had brought and descended the staircase that led underground.
As expected, there were bug-type Monsters slithering around in the underground passage, to which Wren cast the lantern on himself to show off the crystal pasted on his forehead.
“I have a crystal! We’re on the same side! We came here to bring food and clothes! Got it?”
When he said the same simple words that had worked against the Kobolds, the bugs stopped what they were doing. It didn’t seem like they were going to attack.
The bug-type Monsters underground included human-sized mantises, millipedes, and then a bunch of unidentifiable slimy things that he wasn’t sure if he should call them larvae or worms. Yet the one thing they all had in common was that their bodies were large enough to fit a crystal rivet somewhere.
(Oh right, if they couldn’t use a crystal rivet, they wouldn’t be able to leave the Crystal Territory in the first place.)
This was a significant advantage to Wren. He had no ways of countering the threat of tiny Monsters that could sneak in and deliver a deadly poison before he knew it.
Most importantly, the larger Monsters tended to have relatively more advanced intelligence. His whole plan of pretending to have crystal rivets relied on his opponents having a certain level of intelligence to work.
(I’m not sure these ones know what I’m saying… but they at least seem to have some idea of what a human with a crystal implanted in them means.)
Now that the bugs were cooperating, Wren and Sevil marched confidently down the corridor.
Any Wedge Tower mage who spotted a Monster would almost always engage it in combat immediately. They would never even think to infiltrate by pretending to be on the Monsters’ side. That was probably the only reason the Monsters didn’t question their paper-thin deception plan.
At the other end of the corridor lied a heavy iron door. It wasn’t locked.
Sevil stepped forward and placed a hand on the door.
“It opens.”
With Wren covering her back, Sevil ever so slightly creaked the door open. A bright light emerged from the gap.
Then, both of them stepped inside and shut the door behind them.
Wren looked around the room, and voiced his first impressions honestly.
“It’s… A really clean room, huh.”
“Indeed, I expected something much more akin to a prison. The Wedge Tower used to be used as a prison back in the day, was it not?”
In fact, while the Wedge Tower of today was widely known as a mages’ tower, at one point it was a prison keep designed to contain criminals.
If anything, it was a safe bet that the Ancient Magical Artifact ‘Chariclea, the Wedge Tower’ was once maintained through the life force of criminals’ children. In time, more and more mages came to help keep the place running, and at a certain point it became known as a mages’ tower instead.
From what the adults and Tia had said, the girl known as Fiene lived in this very room.
Yet nothing about this room felt anything like a child’s room. It wasn’t a stately bedroom with all the luxuries one could ask for either. While it was beautiful, it was pure, not opulent. That is what Wren had meant by a “clean” room.
(No, it’s not just that… It almost feels too clean, like in a creepy way… It all feels so… artificial?)
The lantern was unnecessary inside the room; the light of the lamps was more than enough.
Suddenly, Wren had another realization. This room didn’t have a furnace, and yet it wasn’t cold at all. Even though it was the dead of Winter, and they were underground.
Wren knelt down and analyzed the floor. The room was so clean he could not find even a speck of dust.
“…It’s been a few days since the Monsters took over here, right? I feel like this place is way too clean for that.”
“Could that Fiene girl be cleaning it herself?”
“Look at the lamp. Isn’t it weird that there isn’t even a hint of soot around it?”
Wren pointed at the lamp, and Sevil nodded, convinced. “I see.”
“Well spotted, my brainy pretty boy. Tell me what else you’ve noticed.”
“Sure thing!”
Wren wasn’t athletic, nor did he have much mana. He’d already used the magical serum that Rose had given him as a trump card. Nevertheless, he still had one weapon: his pretty boy brain.
As he surveyed the room, Wren came to another realization.
(I get the feeling… This room is… A lot like the Witch’s house, isn’t it?)