The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick up Trash - Volume 9 - Chapter 437.2

SIDE:

The Captain and the Guild Master, Part 1

VILLAGE WATCH CAPTAIN APPAS’S PERSPECTIVE

“I’M COMING IN… A-Appas, what are you doing?”

A glance at the door revealed Uliga, flustered by the sight of me. Well, I don’t blame him. I’m even more embarrassed than he is. Imagine having your friend walk in on you while you’re smoothing your wrinkles in the mirror… I’d been thinking about how I was getting too old for this, then my eyes naturally wandered to the mirror and my rather wrinkled face stared back at me. Since I had been asleep for a couple of years and lost a lot of weight, the wrinkles were very deep. So I was just innocently tugging at them a little, to smooth them out…never even dreaming that somebody’d walk in on me. I discreetly lowered my hands and meandered over to a nearby chair, trying not to look at Uliga.

“Agh… Go ahead and sit.”

“Right. Hey, have you lost your mar… Er, never mind.”

“No, I have not lost my marbles!”

“…Okay.”

Hey, what’s with the pause? Well, then again, if I walked in on Uliga doing the same thing… Yeah, I’d be concerned for his sanity, all right, even if he insisted he was sane. I shouldn’t have snapped at him.

“I just came back from the church.” He was changing the subject on my behalf, and I appreciated it.

“How’d it go?”

“I remembered a lot. I think the whole plot started right around the time Bishop Gupinus came to this village.”

Bishop Gupinus? Who was that again?

“Don’t you remember him? I recall him stopping by the guild and the village watch station to introduce himself.”

“Bishop Gupinus… Ohh, yeah, he was a sketchy guy, wasn’t he?”

That’s right. The moment I saw him, a bad feeling ran through my veins.

“You think so? He didn’t seem sketchy to me.”

Uliga’s words gave me pause. Were we each thinking about a different person?

“I’ll have a look at Bishop Gupinus when I get a moment,” I said.

“We slapped slave bands on his wrists and threw him in a cell at the watch station. We locked up his accomplice, Father Salify, at the guild.”

Slave bands?

“But they haven’t been officially convicted of their crimes yet. Why did you put slave bands on them?”

It was fine and all to put slave bands on someone who’d been properly convicted, but they were merely arrested suspects. If we put slave bands on them prematurely, there would be a mess for us to clean up later. Uliga was well aware of that…so why had he done it?

“Did you forget? A trigger word might activate a curse on them.”

“Ohh, yes, now I remember. Well, I’ll look into that right away, so you should be able to take off their slave bands.”

The culprit who used the summoning circle in my earlier encounter died because I said the wrong word and activated the circle. But now, I could quickly figure out if somebody was under a similar curse. Even if they were under it, they would be fine as long as they didn’t hear the word—the curse would not activate if you simply saw the trigger word. Because of this, it wasn’t as dangerous as it had been in the past. Still, the method for breaking the curse had many opportunities for things to go wrong, so you couldn’t say it was a hundred percent safe.

“Their bellies and backs,” Uliga said.

“Hm?”

“Gupinus and Salify’s bellies and backs had summoning circles carved on them.”

“What?!”

Summoning circles carved on their bellies and backs… Wait—carved? How?

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, we noticed them when we put them in their cells and changed their clothes. There was no telling what might happen, so we used the slave bands. That way, they can’t try any funny business themselves.”

True, those men would not be able to do anything. We could simply restrict all their movements with the slave bands. But couldn’t somebody else still activate the summoning circles?

“Oh! Is that why you put them in separate cells?”

“Yeah, there was no telling what they might try if we kept them together. We put slave bands on Father Salify as well.”

From what he was telling me, the slave bands did sound like a reasonable precaution. Even if we got in trouble for it later, we had a valid explanation. Then again, from the sound of things, I had a feeling it would get swept under the rug anyway.

“I also remembered who pushed me into the summoning circle to begin with: the former guild master, Chemanta.”

“What?!”

I felt like I’d just heard a very strange name.

“Chemanta, our former guild master, was involved in the conspiracy.” Uliga looked at me and smiled sadly.

“And you’re sure of it?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

Chemanta was Hataka’s former guild master. Could it be possible that a man who loved this village so much had put its citizens under a curse? But I could tell from the look on Uliga’s face that he wasn’t lying. In fact, the grim truth had probably hit him the hardest of all. Chemanta had been like a father to Uliga.

“Wow. Chemanta, eh…?”

What the hell happened? Chemanta had become the guild master a little while before I took over as captain of the watch. We drank and made merry together, and we solved Hataka’s problems together. I saw how passionate he had been about helping Hataka. So why…?

“One more thing…”

Ugh, there’s more?

“They were using Hataka as a testing site for experiments.” Uliga took a stack of papers out of his magic bag. I grabbed one of the sheets and looked it over. It had a sketch of a summoning circle with a list of its aftereffects on the side. The more sheets of paper I read, the more I saw the word “deceased” pop up. Were those the corpses we’d found in the cave? I suddenly noticed one of the papers was different from the others in the pile. I pulled it out and read it, and discovered it was a letter addressed to Gupinus with a list of commands.

First the papers documenting the experiments, and now this letter…

“Yes, it does look like we were a big experiment. And somebody was orchestrating the whole thing.”

“We haven’t done a full investigation yet, but the letters look like they’re all in the same handwriting, so we assume it was just one person behind everything.”

Uliga pulled a letter out of the stack of papers. Then his face twitched. I kept an eye on him while I looked over the several remaining sheets. Each one documented in detail all the negative effects of the summoning circle activations.

“Say, Appas…why do ya think people got hurt every time a summoning circle was activated? Don’t they only hurt people if you keep activating them over and over?”

Come to think of it, I still haven’t explained all the details about summoning circles to Uliga yet. I didn’t want him in too deep.

“That’s partly true—if you keep activating a summoning circle, you’ll eventually lose your mind. People kept getting hurt or killed whenever a circle was activated because the glyphs were written incorrectly. If even one of the glyphs in a summoning circle is off, its power becomes wildly unstable. That’s why you must always write each glyph in a summoning circle with absolute perfection.”

Summoning circles might seem easy to draw because they’re made of a specific combination of words, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. To make a proper summoning circle, you had to choose the right words. This selection process was a particularly brutal task—if you got the balance of words even slightly off, the circle’s power would go wild and people would get hurt. What’s more, sometimes it would yield results not intended in your combination of words. In short, you had to spend a lot of time and hurt a lot of people to finish a summoning circle.

“Oh…! Looks like Chemanta was tempted by the summoning circle’s power.”

In the upper margins of the papers documenting the summoning circle’s issues, I spotted some very familiar handwriting. It was a stylized script I had seen for years and years while working together with its writer. It was Chemanta’s handwriting.

“Appas…do many people fall victim to a summoning circle’s temptation?” Uliga asked, tracing the lines of the circle on the paper with his finger.

“Not many fall…but quite a few do. Many scientists have fallen into temptation, gone mad, and had to be put down.”

“Oh, wow…”

Those who fell into temptation always experimented with small summoning circles that were difficult to trace. But with each success, their efforts would get more and more extreme until they eventually tried their hands at the most dangerous circles.

“Do you know where Chemanta might be right now?” I asked.

“We’re going to conduct a full search of the village starting tomorrow. He might have already skipped town.”

That was probably true. Considering Hataka’s fate, it would make sense for him to retreat and pick up the experiments in a new place—if he still had his mind intact, that is.

“Any ideas on who delivered those letters?” Uliga asked.

I looked at one of them. They were clean and beautiful, with nothing unique about them—they were textbook-perfect letters. Unfortunately, they didn’t look familiar to me.

“I don’t know… Could be somebody connected with the church.”

Uliga nodded. Since a priest and a bishop were involved, it threw the entire church under suspicion. They had an abnormally strong sense of camaraderie. The church’s influence waned the closer you got to the capital, but it still held power in the more remote villages. It manipulated the villagers with useless teachings, and it consolidated its power with each sacrificed life.

 “So what do we do about it?”

“Now that the church has reared its ugly head, we must report to the royal family. Know anything, Uliga?”

“About how the church and the royal family get along? I don’t know much, but I’ve heard they have a bad relationship.”

“Ah.”

“So what’s their relationship really like?” Uliga asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s not so much the royal family and the church—it’s the king and the church. They’ll keep on fighting until one of them disappears.”

Uliga nodded grimly. “So watch, I’ll bet they’re using summoning circles to attack each other,” he joked.

I nodded. “Exactly.”

“Huh?! Seriously?”

Uliga probably hadn’t been expecting that answer. He gave me a rather bewildered look, and I smiled grimly.

“Yeah. Seriously.”