Chapter 88: The Bear is Attacked at the Inn

Chapter 88:
The Bear is Attacked at the Inn

 

AFTER PARTING WAYS with Yuula after her town tour, I headed back to the inn. Machoman served up a good dinner and man, I was stuffed. The food was great, but—I admit it—I was still kinda bummed that I couldn’t have seafood when the ocean was lurking right there. Maybe I could fish a little ways from the town? Not that I knew how, but there was a chance I could reel something up using magic.

I really would’ve rather defeated the kraken myself, though. But how?

From my walk around the seaport, the situation seemed dire. Everyone was exhausted, and they couldn’t go out into the sea at all. Bandits lined their only road and there wasn’t much food. Anything that could be caught along the coast was being managed by the greedy trade guild. Maybe I could go to the adventurers’ guild tomorrow and ask Atola about the bandits?

If I could defeat those bandits, that might help out with the food issue a little, right?

Eh, whatever. I’d go to bed for now and think about it tomorrow. Kumayuru and Kumakyu were snoozing, curled up beside me in cub form. Summoning them in inns as cubs came pretty handy after all—they could sleep right on my bed like that.

“Wake me up if anything happens, all right?”

I gave them pats on their heads and went to sleep while sandwiched between them.

 

Pat pat pat pat.

Something soft hit my face.

Pat pat pat pat.

I brushed it aside.

Felt a soft blanket.

A blanket?

I grabbed it and hugged it close.

Mmm, so warm. So soft!

But…something covered my face?

That I couldn’t brush aside.

Felt like I was suffocating, until I finally woke up.

“What?!”

When I got up, Kumayuru was clinging to my face. Kumakyu was in my arms.

“What? Could you not get to sleep?”

When I complained to them, they cooed softly and looked at the door.

“What? Is someone here?”

They cooed again.

Deigha wouldn’t have woken them. I glanced around uncertainly and, finally, decided to use detection.

There were people moving within the inn. Four of them.

Awful late to be moving around in the middle of the night, right? And wasn’t this place mostly empty? The signal slowly crept up the stairs. Could it be the C-Rank adventurers we talked about the other day?

Weren’t they gone?

The signals stopped at the front of the room. My room. I didn’t think I’d done anything to make people want to kill me. If anybody was gonna cloak-and-dagger anybody, why not that guild master? I felt like I was just a little too young for targeted assassinations.

I got out of bed to deal with them and enlarged my bears.

The door was locked. I wondered what they intended on doing.

Rattle.

And they unlocked it, no problem. Maybe they had a spare key or something? Or was it magic?

The door slowly opened, and guess what? You do not need to go easy on anyone breaking into a fifteen-year-old girl’s room. I bounded to the door and gave the people who came through a bear punch right to the face. The guy I hit crashed into the wall of the hallway and—wham—just out cold, like that. I flew into the hallway from the momentum of my punch and saw three of them there, just standing around, begging to get their faces wrecked.

I emitted light magic. I wanted to see those faces.

“What was that?!”

The three of them were shocked by the light. They were carrying knives. No way this wasn’t a robbery, right?

“Hey! Is this room service? Pretty late for that, isn’t it?”

“Did you hand over those wolves to the adventurers’ guild, lassie?”

They knew about that? “And if I did?”

“Just come along with us.” His teeth were bright yellow. It was almost impressive. “Real nice and obedient-like. We wouldn’t wanna get rough with you.” One of the goons laughed.

“And if I say no?”

“What makes you think you could?” The man pulled his knife. He was definitely thinking about licking it and that was a little too much, even for them.

More importantly, their aim didn’t seem to be me, but the wolves. Looks like the info had gotten out there, somehow. What a pain. It was late, and I was sleepy.

I decided to make quick work of them and go back to bed.

“Okay, let’s just…let’s just make this quick.”

“Bring it on, girly!” The men gripped their knives and attacked.

Bear punch, bear punch, bear punch. Behold, the power of my secret technique: the bear punch (which was a regular punch courtesy of my bear puppets). The men collapsed into the hallway with loud consecutive thumps. Maybe too loud? I didn’t want to wake up Mr. Macho and family.

Before I knocked them the rest of the way out, I asked them who they were working for. “And where were you going to take me?”

“Not like we’d ever tell you.”

See what I’m talking about? Boring. I called for my bears. Kumayuru and Kumakyu, back to their regular size, just barely squeezed through the door and into the hallway.

“B-Bears!” the men shrieked, clawing the floor.

“Yeah, I know,” I said to Kumayuru. “It’s really sad, they just won’t talk. I guess you’ll just have to eat them.”

Kumayuru and Kumakyu slowly approached the collapsed men.

“W-Wait!”

“I don’t think you should wait,” I said. Kumayuru pressed down on top of the man and gave him a big lick.

“I’ll talk! I’ll talk, so don’t eat me!”

“Really? There are four of you, so…” I counted on my fingers, frowning. “I don’t see what the trouble is if they ate one. What do you guys think?”

“Cwooom?” Kumakyu was doing its best, too, leaning onto two of them and keeping them from running.

What a lucky guy, the one I knocked out. Hope he was having sweet dreams.

“Please!”

“Please? What, you’ll answer my questions?”

The man started bawling as Kumayuru held him down. “The one who gave us the order was…it was the trade guild’s master.”

“The trade guild? I didn’t do anything to them.”

“Nah, you didn’t, but ya handed off a ton of wolves to the adventurers’ guild!”

“How do you know it was me?” I made the guild keep quiet about it.

“We’re not a bunch of idiots! We looked into it, and found out that you came around to the adventurers’ guild at the same time they got in a ton of wolf meat.”

Oops. It wasn’t like I went to the guild in secret. It was just a matter of time until it got out.

“When we asked the owner of the inn, we found out that you’ve split ingredients with them too. Also, we know that you gave that couple who climbed the mountain food too!”

I hadn’t even considered that I’d need to cover my tracks like that. Ugh.

“So what,” I said, “you were going to steal the wolves I had?”

“That too, but we were also gonna get our hands on that powerful item bag of yours…”

The wolves and the item bag, then.

“That’s enough, right? We told you stuff! We’re cool, eh?! You can let us go?”

“What’re you talking about? All I said was that they wouldn’t eat you. I’m not letting you get away after you tried to attack me. Kumayuru, Kumakyu, sit on them till tomorrow morning. If they try making a break for it, you can eat them.” Mr. Macho and family didn’t seem to have woken and I didn’t see the point in telling them till morning.

“Cwoooooom.”

“You’re leaving us like this all night?”

“Oh, and guys? Do you think you can keep quiet? If you do, I’ll hand you off to the guards alive. If you don’t…?”

The men shut their mouths and went silent and finally—finally—I could get some dang sleep.

 

“Eeiiiiiiiii, bears?”

I woke up to a commotion in the hallway.

“Is the bear girl okay? Bear girl!” I heard someone calling for me and, groggily, recalled the events of the last evening. Oh, right.

I rubbed my sleepy eyes and left the room.

“Miss, are you all right?! What’re bears doing in my inn?” Macho raised his fists, ready to…do what? He wasn’t planning on fighting my bears, was he?

“Those bears are my summons. They’re friendly.”

“Your summons? You can do that? What’re these guys crushed under ’em?”

The men’s faces were wet from bear drool.

“Oh, they’re bad guys. They assaulted me in the middle of the night, so I caught them.”

“Assaulted you?”

“Apparently, the trade guild master ordered them to.”

“The trade guild master did what?”

“Anyway, I’d like to hand off these men to the guards.”

“I’m not so sure you should.”

“Why’s that?”

“Since the mayor of the town made a break for it, the trade guild has been managing the guards. If you’re going to hand them over to anyone, it should be the adventurers’ guild.”

I ended up asking Mr. Macho’s son to send word to the adventurers’ guild. While that was happening, I sent the bears back and had Mr. Macho tie up the men. After a while, the son came back with guild employees.

 

“What are you doing here, Atola?”

Atola showed up alongside the guild employees. Instead of the revealing outfit from yesterday, she was wearing a light coat. Guess she couldn’t go out and about in those clothes. That had to get a little chilly, right?

“Of course I’d come after hearing you were attacked. Now…who’re these people?” A half smile. “Who’d be stupid enough to attack Yuna?”

I pointed at the miserable lot of prisoners. “Them.”

“Them?”

“Them.”

“You’re kidding me.” She squinted at one of them. “Droi? You’re an adventurer. Really?”

“Guild master…”

“What a miserable disappointment you are.”

“I…”

“I’ll hear the rest from you at the adventurers’ guild.”

Atola instructed the employee that she brought to take him away. “You’re not hurt, are you, Yuna?”

“I’m fine. I’ve got guards.”

“Guards?”

“But the situation there is kinda…hairy. I’ll introduce them to you next time.”

She nodded. “Fine. Do you know why they attacked you?”

“Looks like it was for all my wolf meat. They were saying something about how the trade guild asked them to do it.”

“Ha.” It wasn’t a laugh. “Looks like your charity touched a nerve. I never would’ve thought they’d attack you this soon, though. For now, I’ll look into the men you’ve caught.”

Fine by me. “Atola, I was thinking of apprehending the bandits, so could you tell me more about them?”

“Apprehending the bandits? As in, all of the bandits?”

“Yeah. I can’t defeat the kraken, but I can do bandits. Once they’re gone, you’ll be able to travel on the roads, right?”

“Yuna, it’s dangerous to go alone.”

“You saw my guild card, didn’t you?”

Atola took a deep breath. She thought about it. “The four adventurers who came to town the other day headed over to get the bandits,” she said finally. “I tried to stop them, but they said they would go check it out.”

Maybe these were the adventurers who were supposed to be staying at this inn? I was told they weren’t around right now, after all. This sounded urgent.

I asked Atola as much as I could about the robbers.

There were over twenty of them. Their faces were obscured, so no one knew who they were. They wouldn’t attack anyone with guards, but they’d go after anyone defenseless. Since no one had fought them, she didn’t have info on how powerful they were. They’d watch people from the mountains. For all of that, she didn’t know where their hideout was…but I had resources that she didn’t.

“Do they have any hostages?”

“Women, maybe. They’ve only left behind dead men.”

Ah. Okay, great. I could absolutely annihilate them, then. It would be one thing if they were just robbing people, but murderers and kidnappers got no mercy.

“I’ll head out right away,” I said.

“Yuna, don’t be reckless.” Atola seemed worried for me. Good for her, I guess, but I had work to do. But you know, as she left the inn, she did turn back and say: “You look pretty cute in that white bear outfit too.”

I forgot that I hadn’t gotten changed, since I’d been woken by Deigha yelling. For some reason, I couldn’t help feel embarrassed when people saw me in my white outfit, even if it was mostly the same. I guess it was like being seen in my pajamas.

Before I headed out, I asked Deigha to prep a breakfast that’d keep my energy up for a whole day. I’d need it.