Okano The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 8

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7183-2114-4
Verlag: J-Novel Club
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 8, 1 Seiten

Reihe: The Unwanted Undead Adventurer

After Rentt senses something wrong with his familiar, Edel, he and Lorraine leave Hathara and return to the city of Maalt. There they find the city on fire and crawling with thralls. Rentt finds Edel safe beneath the orphanage and learns through him that a single vampire might be the cause of all the chaos. Just as Rentt goes out to help rid the city of the thralls, he runs into the last person he wants to see in this situation-Gold-class adventurer and vampire hunter Nive Maris!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Okano, Yu

Weitere Mitwirkende

Jaian

Rozenberg, Noah

Leseproben

“Alize, Lillian, you’re safe?” I asked.

Alize ran up to me and clung to my hips. “I was scared,” she said. I stroked her head.

Lillian approached me next. “We heard about the thralls, so we’ve been defending ourselves here. I can use divinity, so perhaps I should be going out to hunt them, but I do have orphans to look after.”

I didn’t know exactly how powerful Lillian was, but I knew she had a fair amount of divinity in addition to the signs of combat experience I could identify. Maybe she would be more than a match for the thralls, but this situation was a little unique.

“Even if the children would be safe without you, I don’t think you should go out there,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but the thralls seem to be disguising themselves as humans. You won’t be able to find them easily.”

If not for that, each of the churches could have sent out their divinity users to make quick work of the monsters. But since their locations were unknown, having adventurers meticulously search the city to root them out was more efficient.

Besides, divinity users could vary. Lillian could use a weapon and defend herself, but most weren’t like that. The majority just went from town to town to provide blessings and had guards do the fighting for them. With the city in such chaos, sending them out didn’t sound like such a good idea. If this city lost some saints, it would probably be a nightmare down the road.

“They’re in disguise?” Lillian asked. “Can they not be detected with divine arts?”

“I don’t know precisely how much divine arts can do, but would you be able to detect a thrall from within a crowd?” If she could, it’d be nice if she would. Either that or she could teach me how to do it. If it was easy enough, I could try it myself.

“It would be hard to do on such a large scale. I could do it, but it would severely exhaust me. If there are a lot of them to find, I don’t think there is much I can do.”

In the end, it sounded like the adventurers’ search would be more efficient. The certainty she could have provided might’ve helped, but this was such an emergency that the searchers could get by with just tearing suspects’ clothes off. There was no need to make her go out there. Besides, Lillian had a responsibility to protect this orphanage.

“So it seems,” I said. “Are all the orphans safe?”

“Yes. Alize volunteered to help defend the orphanage with the magic she learned, but there have been no invaders as of yet.”

“That’s good. Do you know what it’s like under the orphanage?”

I asked because that was where Edel was. Alize and Lillian both knew he lived there too.

“You want to know about Edel?” Alize asked, still clinging to me but looking up at my face. “Oh right, I haven’t seen him. At a time like this, you’d think he’d be crawling out to talk with the other mice.”

I knew that Edel’s mouse communication network was vast and that the mice frequently spoke to each other. This seemed like the perfect time to take advantage of that, so it was strange he hadn’t been seen anywhere.

“I’ll go check the basement. I think you two would be better off hiding further inside. If something happens, shout for me. I’ll run up here right away,” I said and then headed to the basement.

?????

“Hey, Edel!” I yelled as I entered the basement.

Five mice scurried up to me. They were the henchmice who’d attended Edel on our first encounter. Maybe it was because they served Edel, or maybe my power had an influence on them, but they were somewhat smarter than the average puchi suri. They understood human words and emotions to some extent. When they gathered around me, I knew something had happened.

“Where’s Edel?” I asked. One of the mice walked off to the side, wanting me to follow. The basement wasn’t that big, but it was packed with things and a bit hard to navigate. I stepped around the junk in my path as I followed the mouse to a black puchi suri lying near the wall. It was Edel.

“Hey!”

I hurried over and laid a hand on him. He looked dead, but he clearly wasn’t. Still, I didn’t know exactly what kind of state he was in. I could feel him breathing and didn’t see any noteworthy injuries. Although, it was questionable as to how much breathing meant to the undead. I breathed, but mostly just to blend in. I sometimes noticed I would stop breathing in tough situations, so I knew this couldn’t be too rough for Edel. He just seemed to be unconscious.

I thought it might be safe to force him awake, so I sent mana and spirit flowing into him. It looked like he was lacking in both. The great distance I’d traveled might have weakened the supply of energy I sent him. I didn’t know for sure, but I could ask once he was awake.

“Sqreak!” Edel cried as he abruptly opened his eyes and got up. He looked around warily until he saw me and relaxed. Something strange must have happened if he was so on edge, but I didn’t know what.

Edel read my thoughts and communicated his own through images. In my mind I could vividly see what he had seen. The number of things Edel could do kept increasing. I didn’t remember him being able to do this before, but I appreciated having such an exemplary familiar.

“Is this a dungeon? The Water Moon Dungeon? No, the New Moon Dungeon?” I wondered aloud.

This image was probably from the perspective of one of Edel’s henchmice. It was less agile than he was. It didn’t act much smarter than a typical mouse either. It zigzagged around needlessly, but it was certainly heading somewhere.

Then I saw someone. That would have been fine, except that this person was biting an adventurer’s neck, blood dripping from his mouth. When he spotted the mouse, he said it wasn’t nice to watch. Then he unleashed flames and the image went dark. The mouse probably died, sadly. I could feel Edel’s rage at the death of his ally.

I wondered who this person was. I knew he was a vampire, considering he was sucking blood. This wasn’t anyone I knew, though. There were a few people whom I suspected of being vampires, but he wasn’t one of them. Despite that, I felt like I had seen him somewhere before, or heard his voice.

That’s when I recalled a singular, brief memory. It was from one of the times I explored the New Moon Dungeon. I was hunting orcs, and as I left the dungeon, I passed by someone. His voice had been exactly like this vampire’s. I was surprised to remember him in Maalt so long ago, but I also recalled that this was around the time new adventurers began to disappear. Suddenly, it all started to make sense. I met him not far from where the novice adventurers Raiz and Lola were fighting when I first saw them. I thought maybe our encounter was a coincidence, but considering his true nature, maybe he was targeting those two. But my presence there made him fear exposure, so he didn’t do anything...or something like that. If so, Raiz and Lola lucked out. At any rate, now I knew the identity of the vampire and likely the culprit behind the missing adventurers as well.

I had to report this to the guild, but I didn’t know where that vampire was, with my only guess being the New Moon Dungeon. I asked Edel, but he said he didn’t know. From the images he showed, he couldn’t catch the exact location in the end. Considering that the shock of watching through that mouse’s eyes as it died made him pass out, it was to be expected.

I didn’t know exactly how to handle this. If I just went and told people there was a vampire in the New Moon Dungeon, it would sound sketchy. Besides, I had no way of knowing if he was still there. I needed something more convincing.

“What’s that? You have a good idea where the thralls are, you say?” I asked Edel. He responded affirmatively.

According to him, mice were informing him of bizarre acts being committed all around town, everything from loitering to arson. They were probably seeing thralls. Most of Edel’s henchmice weren’t especially strong the way Edel was, so they couldn’t defeat monsters, but they could at least keep an eye on them.

In that case, maybe it would be best to first clear out all the thralls from the city. Vampires had the ability to produce more thralls, but they couldn’t do it easily. It wasn’t like baking a cake. Even that could take a while, but making a monster took even longer. First they needed humans to use as a base, then they had to suck the blood out of them and replace it with some of their own. But even then, they had to wait a while before the person became a thrall. They had to ferment first, to put it in a not-so-funny way.

It took a long time for humans to become monsters, which is why people would say to burn any suspicious corpses on sight. Even if they were in the middle of turning into a thrall, burning them to ash before the process finished would destroy them. There were exceptions to this, though. Vampires could instantly create thralls too, but it cost them a lot of energy. I didn’t know whether it was their mana or blood that was the problem, but it didn’t matter so much.

If Wolf was right and there were close to a hundred thralls around, then they couldn’t have been made just now. They had to have been produced over a long time and hidden away. This wasn’t possible in a matter...