Strange Grief Wants to Retire ~ The Weakest Hunter Dreams of a Hero ~ - Volume 6 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue: Let This Grieving Soul Retire, Part 6

And so we had safely reached the desert country of Toweyezant. We had no fatalities (but many injuries) and had time to spare before the conference. A perfect job. All’s well that ends well.

“I’m going to hit you once I have the strength to,” Kris said from her bed. Casting defensive spells over everyone just as we crashed had drained every bit of her mana.

After that crash, my stock had begun to plummet, but Kris’s was through the roof. Because she was a Noble Spirit, everyone in the caravan had kept a respectful distance from her, but they were much more comfortable approaching her. Some of them even openly stated that they owed their life to her.

Deep down, Kris was a good person, so she deserved this treatment from the start. I’d have to formally thank Lapis for lending out one of her party members to me, but I still wasn’t going to hand over Lucia.

Now that we were in Toweyezant, our job as guards was over. The civil servants would take over from here. We had experienced our fair share of troubles on this journey. We had some unexpected traitors and an encounter with a treasure vault. But think about it, before I departed I had said to my vice clan master, “No. There might be bandits, there might be monsters, a treasure vault might spring up, there could be a natural disaster. Eva, I could be in serious danger.”

And look at what happened: we didn’t run into any of those. Sure, we had traitors, but we weren’t assailed by any bandits. There were dragons, but I didn’t have to deal with those. There was a treasure vault, but not a new one. There was a storm, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call that a natural disaster. Nothing I had mentioned had actually happened. What could that possibly mean?

“Wait? Was luck on my side this time around?”

“Huh?!”

“No, no. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re at our most vulnerable when we relax. Something could still happen.”

“Would you quit it with the bad jokes? Sir?”

Kris weakly reached for me, her white slender arm entirely bare. For a moment, I wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, but then I figured it out. I leaned forward, and obediently let her hit me on the head.

If Kris was the hero of the day, then the sheetwraiths were the unsung heroes.

I headed to the inn designated by Sitri. I entered a large bedroom and saw the Lucia-wraith collapsed on a bed, glaring at me. She was dressed comfortably, without her usual coat. Her complexion, however, wasn’t so great.

“You idiot...” she mumbled.

“It appears keeping a ship that large airborne for three hundred meters is no easy task,” Sitri, no longer donning her bedsheet, said as she carried in an iced beverage. “You were so far off course, we couldn’t just let you land in the middle of the desert.”

So Lucia had directed the ship for three hundred meters, all while keeping it aloft. I hadn’t noticed at all. I had been desperately trying to endure the turbulence.

“Yeah, uh-huh,” I said. “I can always count on Lucia! I knew you’d come through!”

So that was why we had landed so near our destination. It must have been a tremendous strain, but we had my sister to thank for our zero fatalities. If she hadn’t gone to such lengths, some of our injured members probably wouldn’t have survived.

I sat down on the bed and casually reached for the white ears sprouting from her head, and got hit for it.

“Stop that,” she protested in a faltering voice. By the looks of it, if I touched her tail, she’d do a lot worse than hit me.

“No amount of mana potions can help Lucy recover after she’s absorbed the tail,” Sitri said with a wry grin. “And she can’t remove it until after she’s recovered her mana. There are temporary boosters, but those have severe drawbacks.”

The tail and ears protruding from Lucia were side effects of the Fox God’s Final Tail. After the first encounter at Peregrine Lodge, Sitri had investigated the tail and handed it to Lucia. With some training, she figured out how to successfully draw out a portion of the tail’s power.

She usually kept it affixed to a rod, which she used as a broom, but if she ever ran out of mana then the tail could provide her with a large supply. (I didn’t know how she attached the tail to herself and asking only resulted in flying fists. But it didn’t seem like she needed to disrobe to use it.)

Conscious of her fuzzy ears, Lucia hid them under the covers.

“Well, take care of her,” I said to Sitri. “It seems like things have settled down for the moment.”

Protection during the conference was apparently going to be handled by a different group. And no matter what happened, I would do whatever I could to avoid asking anything more of Lucia. And that was fine. Even without her, there was still the very energetic sword-wraith. He was off playing around somewhere, but I knew he would come if I called. We were a party; my friends would be there when I needed them.

“You can count on me,” the alchemy-wraith said with a grin. I wondered if that also went for the nearby, emaciated Killiam. “This was a very beneficial journey for us as well. Leaving Killiam in your care has made him smarter and stronger.”

I still hadn’t recovered from the shock of seeing a gaunt Killiam emerge from Sir Killigan’s armor.

“Oh, I just remembered,” I said, “I’ve got a present for you, Lucia.”

The magic-wraith squirmed under her blanket, her ears twitching.

Here you go, now you’ll have two tails.

I nodded to myself, then pulled the new tail out from the bag I had brought.

“W-Wait! Hear me out!” I cried.

The Carpet lunged forward and walloped me. As I lay on my back, she punched me over and over again, but being socked by a textile is a painless thing. If anything, it was sort of fun. Being straddled by a Carpet was a far crazier experience than the inverse.

“I said I was sorry! There wasn’t anything else I could’ve done back there! I don’t like it any more than you do!”

It seemed the Delinquent Carpet resented my decision to give her girlfriend (or boyfriend?) to the fox. But I didn’t have any other options. Anyone would’ve done the same thing in my position.

“I had a duty to protect the emperor,” I continued. “And what did you do, besides hide in the back?!”

My protests fell on deaf ears. I didn’t even know where a Carpet’s ears were. She whacked me on the cheek. How tragic that this had to happen just as we had begun to get along. But I was at fault here, so I let the Carpet have her way.

As I lay on my side, being beaten by a Relic, the door opened and Kris came in. She wasn’t in her usual robe but instead in some thin pajamas. I raised my arms, fending off the Carpet. Kris looked briefly shocked, before a stern look formed on her face.

“H-Human weakling! What are you doing?! Sir?!”

“You’re feeling better? Oh, that’s good.”

“I asked you a question. Sir.”

“I think you should be asking the Carpet.”

The frilly edges of the Carpet were whacking against my face. I didn’t know of any creature that attacked with their ears, so I figured her ears must be elsewhere.

I guess there’s nothing more I can do. Playtime’s over.

“All right, all right, I give,” I said. “I’ll buy you a new carpet. One that’s real easy on the eyes.”

The Carpet stopped attacking but remained atop me. I sighed.

“Okay. Fine, you needy textile. To show how sorry I am, I’ll buy you two, no, three carpets. How’s that? Will you forgive me?”

The Carpet patted my head a few times and then got off. It seemed her mood had improved. Honestly, she could be really demanding for someone the size of a welcome mat.

“Please. Quit horsing around. Sir.”

“I know how it looks, but I’m not horsing around.”

Kris knit her brow and let out a sigh, dispensing with her previous dark expression. I noticed her pale limbs protruding from her pajamas. I thought about how being a Forest Noble gave her pale skin, but in the desert, there were Noble Spirits with tan skin (hell, I knew one: Eliza). If Kris spent enough time in the desert, would she get a tan?

“Listen to me, human weakling,” Kris scolded me, cutting off my train of thought. “I’m not your ally, but I’ve got my orders from Lapis. Anything that sullies your name will do collateral damage to our honor as well. Sir.”

“Very diligent of you, Kris.”

If all Noble Spirits were like her, then maybe it was inevitable that they looked down on humans.

“We just had a close call. Sir. I think we need to discuss that. Don’t you agree? Sir?”

“Hmm. I don’t think it was a particularly close call. We made it here just fine.”

“It was close! You brought two traitors into our ranks! Sir!”

“Aah. That was, uh, an oversight.”

“I’m going to hit you. Sir. If you’ve got a good idea to prevent this sort of stuff, I’d love to hear it. Now, do you? Sir?”

“Nope. Y’know, now that you mention it, I forgot all about Telm and Kechachakka.”

They hadn’t been aboard the airship after we left. The most likely possibility was that they were still inside the treasure vault. I blinked and tilted my head. Rubbing her temples, Kris sighed with an expression that reminded me a lot of Lucia.

***

“Where are we?”

“Hee hee hee...”

Telm had a long history as a treasure hunter. Once he had become a Magus, he’d immediately become a hunter and stayed on that path. After that, he became a Fox, which further expanded his wealth of experiences. But something this unnerving was a first for him.

He was certain they had jumped from the airship. They had intended to retreat so they could regroup. But when they stepped out that door, they saw something unexpected. The dense presence of mana material made it immediately apparent to Telm that they were in a treasure vault. Not only that, it surpassed any of the Level 8 vaults he had entered.

He was certain this was no illusion. Even someone as enigmatic as the Thousand Tricks needed time to conjure up an illusion capable of fooling Telm. This also explained why his spells hadn’t been working. Entering the treasure vault had made them subject to new laws. They were in dangerous territory, but staying put wasn’t an option. Fortunately for Telm, his strengthening spells were still an option.

Taking extreme caution, the two of them investigated the building. It was wide, with a high ceiling. They found it unsettling. This was clearly a space designed for humanoids, but they didn’t detect any signs of life.

“Stay sharp,” Telm said. “There should be an exit somewhere.”

Kechachakka chuckled in response.

The hallway seemed to go on forever and was certainly wider than the airship they had just been on. The space around them was most likely being warped, which wasn’t a rare occurrence among high-level treasure vaults.

Something strange caught Telm’s eye—it was a picture. Decorating the wall was an abstract painting. Telm slowly approached it and took a good look. At first, he didn’t understand what all the crisscrossing streaks of yellow were.

He narrowed his eyes. “A fox?” he muttered.

“Heh heh!”

Hearing Kechachakka’s warning, Telm turned and moved away from the painting. Further down the hall, he could see a small human outline. It was a child in a white kimono. It was a phantom. Their face was hidden by a polished white mask modeled after a fox, and the mana material emanating from their body was extraordinary.

When Telm realized what he was looking at, an indescribable chill ran through him. “Impossible. Could this really be...”

“Nine-Tailed Shadow Fox,” the name of the secret organization Telm belonged to, was derived from a treasure vault. Said vault was host to a vulpine god. Misfortune had brought the organization’s founder before something that was once divine. They survived the encounter and went on to name their organization after the being whose might and bearing had enraptured them. They made fox masks their signature item. The mask the founder had brought back from the vault was still used to prove who stood at the organization’s top.

Kechachakka looked nervous, suggesting that he had reached the same conclusion as Telm. It didn’t seem possible that they could be here. The vault’s location wasn’t just uncertain, its very existence was disputed. Telm had heard that the founder had never managed to come across the vulpine god’s domain a second time. Luck alone wasn’t enough to bring someone here; fate had to play a hand. This encounter was the mandate of destiny.

Telm hadn’t looked away for a moment, yet the fox child had still disappeared without him realizing it. Then he heard a voice behind him, “Welcome, visitors.”

“Wha?!”

“There’s no need to be so wary. We’re aware of your circumstances, Telm Apoclys, Kechachakka Munk. You pitiful humans, cast aside by Mr. Caution.”

He had no presence. A young man in a fox mask was standing behind them, almost as if he had always been there. One glance was all it took for the two hunters to understand that they couldn’t win here. This was a being far beyond them. Telm’s instincts urged him to step back, and he only barely managed to resist that urge.

It was too soon to abandon hope. A word of advice left by the founder regarding dealing with this treasure vault was to never give up. If there were people who had survived and brought back a mask as proof, there was no reason Telm the Counter Cascade couldn’t do the same.

“Are you...a god?” he asked in an attempt to distract the phantom.

He could touch it. Many phantoms that looked human also resembled humans on the inside. If that were true here, there should be water inside this phantom. If Telm could directly touch that water, he could manipulate this phantom. This should be well within the realm of possibility for a man who had mastered the control of water. There was nothing else he could do.

“You can relax,” the phantom said. “We’re fair here. I’ll guarantee your safety, but I’d like to be compensated for it.”

“Compensation?”

“I’ll be taking what you value most. Fear not, this is a fair exchange. I’ve already conducted a similar trade with Mr. Caution.”

Telm could see openings, dozens through which he could strike. This phantom wasn’t watching for potential attacks.

The young man saw that his two guests were still on guard. He nodded, then slowly opened his mouth. “I’ll take Hydrogod’s Grace and Dragon’s Reprisal.”

Telm broke out in a cold sweat. The phantom was reading their minds! Those Relics were central to Telm and Kechachakka’s operations and no known replacements existed for either item. If they were taken, then Telm and Kechachakka would lose any chance of beating these phantoms.

“What shall it be?” the phantom asked with a smile.

“Suppose I refused?”

Telm could reach for the phantom’s internal water. If he could just manage that, he could control the phantom, and that would settle this. All it took was one finger.

Telm’s provocative question brought a simple laugh from the phantom.

“Indeed, you certainly have that right. After all, we’re very fair.”