The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick up Trash - Volume 8 - Chapter 406

Chapter 406:

A Moment of Respite

“TE! RYU, RYUUU.”

Oh, Flame must be finished healing the captain! I looked over and saw that Sora had now enveloped him.

“Huh?” Melisa froze stiff as a statue when she tried to approach the bed only to see Sora had swallowed the captain.

“What’s going on?” Garitt asked. I wished he hadn’t asked me, though. I had no idea.

“Ermmm, do you think the captain’s magic energy was wounded by the summoning circle?” Since Sora was healing him, that was the only explanation I could come up with. Unless… Nope, that was the only thing I could think of.

“You think so?”

“I’m probably right.”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. So, um, can I call you Flame? Thanks, Flame,” Fische said, giving Flame’s head a gentle pat.

“Te! Ryu, ryuuu,” Flame sang happily, and Fische’s smile softened. Piarre, Juggy, and Arly each petted Flame’s head in turn after they saw that.

“Gee, this is so soothing…” Juggy said as he gave Flame’s head a pat. Piarre added, “I’m especially grateful for it now.” Zinal and his party nodded.

“It sure is comforting.” Garitt looked down at his lap. He was petting Ciel, who had chosen to curl up there for some reason. Meanwhile, Sol was napping on my father’s head.

“Flame, come sit on my lap,” Nalgath said, tapping his knee. Flame looked at him, then jumped onto Piarre’s lap. “Why? You just looked at me, right? Didn’t you, Flame?”

“Looks like I win.”

Nalgath glared at Piarre. The dark cloud of gloom that was hanging in the room only a couple of minutes ago had disappeared, which relieved me a little. I couldn’t come up with any good ideas if I was stuck in all that gloom. I really owed my creatures my gratitude.

“Ahh, thanks to your slimes, things have calmed down a bit,” Fische said. Everyone smiled and nodded in agreement.

“Oh, I almost forgot! Here.”

Melisa and Eche had returned to the room without my noticing. They set some fresh tea and snacks on the table, then handed my father four sheets of paper. When he saw what they were, he smiled, shook his head, and wrote something on them. Then he handed the papers to me.

“Again?”

They were contracts written on magic paper. Just how many times had I seen those buggers in the past few days? I scanned them quickly, then jotted my name down next to my father’s. Two of the papers went back to Melisa and Eche, and I handed the other two back to my father.

“Looks like we might need a magic box just for contracts,” my father said.

I made a face. He was right, we probably could use a box like that—that’s just how many papers we had amassed.

“Want to go shopping for one after this is all over?” I asked.

“Why not? But this won’t be over unless we talk over a lot of things,” my father said.

The light mood tensed up again, but it wasn’t as gloomy as before.

“Zinal, you said earlier that something had caught your attention. What is it?” My father looked at Zinal, who was staring at the captain on the bed.

“It’s that rumor about the guild master and captain fighting. After I was freed from the spell, I checked up on the captain during my second investigation of this village and confirmed he was bedridden. So, I thought that rumor was strange and asked around. I learned there was a witness to one of their fights two days ago. I asked about the witness, but it was all quite vague. Everybody I asked knew there was a witness, but no one knew who it was. That was one of the things that caught my attention.”

Two days ago? But I heard the rumor about five days ago. So does that mean a rumor different from the one I heard was already being spread? Then there was this witness to a fight that never happened, but we couldn’t get any information on them. Everything rubbed me the wrong way.

“Was there anything else?”

“Have you heard the rumor about somebody carrying dead bodies around at night?” Zinal asked.

Nalgath smiled cynically. “But that rumor started because of a misunderstanding. The witness only saw somebody illegally dumping trash.”

Piarre chimed in, “Yes, that’s right.” I had heard the same rumor and had reached the same conclusion as Nalgath.

“But there’s also rumors about dead bodies surfacing. People are even talking about a missing woman.”

There was a collective gasp.

First the fight, now this rumor? But when I heard the rumor, one of the ladies who was talking about it said nobody was missing. And from the way she was talking, it didn’t sound like she was making anything up. Sometimes rumors mutate well beyond their original form the more they’re spread around, but this change was just too much. Had somebody twisted it on purpose?

“Just how credible is that rumor, sir?”

“I did some digging, and it’s fair to assume both are mere rumors. But as for why somebody would spread such obvious lies—that I do not know. That’s what caught my attention.”

I could see why. The captain and guild master fighting, the person carrying dead bodies—both rumors were easy to unmask as lies. Then again, it would only be easy if the people investigating weren’t under a spell.

“Whoever did this must have put a lot of faith in the summoning circle,” I said. Everyone gave me a curious look. “I mean, both rumors were accepted as fact while we were under the spell, remember? If nobody found them suspicious, they wouldn’t be investigated.”

“I see. Then whoever did this assumed we wouldn’t break free from the summoning circle’s spell.” Fische showed that he understood what I was saying, and my father nodded, too.

“Everything comes back to the summoning circle…” Garitt looked tired.

“You still couldn’t find it, I assume?” Arly asked. Garitt shook his head listlessly.

“We’re so sorry. We marked several potential sites, but our magic items didn’t react at any of them.” Zinal bowed his head to the entire group, and Garitt and Fische followed suit.

“Please, don’t be too hard on yourselves, gentlemen!” Piarre cried out nervously. “You don’t need to do that.”

The men looked up. “Thank you,” Zinal said.

“Er, no problem…” Piarre had a shy grin on his face. Was he Zinal’s secret fan? But it really was unnerving that the more information we gathered, the less we seemed to know about our mastermind.

“Anyway, let’s do what we can first,” my father said.

Everyone nodded and began to lay out all our objectives in order.

“Okay, to clarify, we’re going to look into the summoning circle and the origins of the rumors at the same time, correct? We’re also trying to find anybody who hasn’t been affected by the spell.”

It wasn’t much different from what we were already doing. And did we even have that much time to spare?

“Um, excuse me, but do we have enough time for that?”

“What do you mean?” Nalgath was the one who asked the question, but everyone else stared intently at me like they were thinking the same thing. Could it be that they’d all forgotten?

“Monsters are threatening this village, remember? And everyone who’s been under the spell all this time is barely holding it together, right? We don’t have time for a long investigation.”

“Agh…you’re right.” Zinal and his party actually had forgotten. Fische looked quite confused. I wonder if they usually don’t make mistakes like that? Well, Zinal and his party had been under the spell longer than I was. It might have had that effect on them.

“So what do we do then?” Juggy asked. Everyone turned toward him. His eyes were grim, and I could tell he had a lot of things on his mind.

Sol had woken up during our conversation, so I called out to it. “Sol?”

“Pefu?” It quickly looked up at me from my father’s lap.

“There’s still lots of people we want to free from the spell. Think you can do that for us?”

“Pefu! Pefu!”

Oh, good. The little slime’s got a lot of pep left in it.

“Ivy, what are you suggesting?”

“We’re going to get as many people over to our side as we can.” I’d done a lot of thinking and realized we really just needed more information, but there weren’t enough people free to help us collect it. “We simply don’t have enough people to help gather information, so we need to get as many people on our side as possible.”

Also, we would need to do something quickly about the monsters lurking near the village. After a bit of musing, I came up with the best solution. “Ciel? I have a little job for you.”

Mew?

“Could you go rampage to your heart’s content in the forest?”

Mrrrow.

“Oh, I see. To take away the monster threat?” my father asked.

I nodded. “Yes. I figured we could buy a little time by letting the adandara run loose.”

All we needed was to push the monsters back a bit. If they were nervous because there was an adandara nearby, that would buy us some time. The only thing that concerned me was that we still didn’t know what kind of monster we were dealing with.

“It would buy us more than just a little time. We might even be able to solve this problem by then.”

“One can only hope.”