Chapter 6: Agreeing to a Request

Chapter 6:
Agreeing to a Request

 

IT WAS A SHOCK to be so suddenly met by a fairy who had maintained her sanity. Following a “fairy’s guidance” did have a cool ring to it, but it wasn’t like they had many options. Cool or not, they quickly found themselves swimming after her.

The black shadow of the mad fairy swarm still loomed overhead. It was strange to swim while breathing normally, and nothing felt quite real to Loren as they were led to a cave at the bottom of the lake.

The mouth of the cave was just barely big enough for a human to squeeze through, and it became a vertical shaft just a short way down. This too could only fit one person at a time. While the tight fit was no issue for Lapis and Feuille, Loren was unable to make it through with his sword on his back. He needed Lapis to go up first. She pulled the sword up for him, and he climbed up alone.

He grabbed onto the ledge above to hoist his body out of the water. Loren dripped onto the stone and shook himself like a soaked dog. Looking around, the first thing he noticed was the soft white light that lit the area.

“Ick… I’m soaked.”

He looked toward the voice to see Lapis plopped cross-legged on the ground, wringing out her priestly vestments. Loren and Feuille weren’t dressed so heavily and so were a bit better off on a scale of soggy to drenched; however, even Lapis’s simplified robes, suitable for the adventuring sort of priest, were made of a good bit of fabric. Once soaked, they looked terribly heavy and unpleasant.

“This is all because you instantly threw yourself in the lake, Mr. Loren.”

“What else was I supposed to do?”

“I only had time to cast Water Breathing. I had other spells that would have prevented us all from getting wet—and protected us from the water pressure.”

Lapis glowered at him resentfully, but Loren didn’t think she’d had time to prepare so much magic. He didn’t think that voicing this particular opinion would put her in a good mood or anything, so he maintained his silence.

“I’m just going to strip. I can’t move like this.”

“You serious?”

Lapis, it seemed, quickly came to terms with the fact that she couldn’t blame Loren. Complaining mightily, she whacked and squeezed her robes however she could to make them even just a little more bearable to wear. Eventually, she gave up on this endeavor completely. The weight and rub of damp fabric on her skin was unbearable, and she scowled as she vigorously wriggled out of her clothes.

Loren couldn’t help but wonder why she thought it was perfectly fine and dandy for her to strip without hesitation when a man was around. On the other hand, squelching around in those damp clothes definitely sounded unpleasant, and he couldn’t force her to keep them on—especially not when he was fighting the urge to take his own clothes off and dry them by a fire for a while. Not that even knew whether there was anything burnable in this cave, or whether there was a safe place to start a fire.

These thoughts were cut off by something floating in front of his face.

“Can you talk?”

It was the fairy that had brought them here. Her dress wasn’t wet, nor were her hair or wings. Perhaps she had deployed all that magic Lapis mentioned.

“Hey? Hey? Can you understand me? Human? Human?” the fairy said with slow, drawn out words.

“Yeah, I can hear you, and I can understand you.”

One way or the other, this fairy was their savior. It seemed proper to treat her courteously. Once Loren replied to her, the fairy smiled and perched on his shoulder.

“As for introductions, I am Cornet, of fairy-kind. Nice to meet you.”

“She doesn’t sound very bright.” Lapis offered her frank opinion of the fairy.

Loren tried glaring at Lapis, then immediately looked away. She’d gone right on stripping since he last glanced at her, and now she’d discarded everything apart from her chemise and undergarments. She kneeled there, her clothing in a heap beside her.

In short, her midriff was completely exposed. Loren didn’t intend to look, but the sight was burned into his mind.

“Huh? You’re bright red, Mr. Loren.”

“Shut it. Cover up a bit, will you?”

“I don’t see why I would… You’re the only one looking, Mr. Loren.”

“That’s the problem,” Loren said curtly, hiding his red face.

After staring a while at him, looking as if she didn’t understand in the slightest, Lapis grinned. “What’s this I hear? Is it possible that you’re embarrassed?”

“Lapis, I don’t know how to break it to you, but it’s hard for me to like a girl with no sense of shame.”

Loren needed to hammer this point home before she could get comfortable teasing him.

Lapis frantically collected her garments and attempted to cover her self. However, she wasn’t feeling too inclined to pull the damp swathes of fabric back over her head. She brought the bundle close to her chest, the pulled it away, then tucked it back against her for a bit. Finally, she looked at Loren, troubled.

“Err, Cornet, was it?” Loren sighed. “We’re drenched, as you can see. Do you know any way we can dry our clothes?”

“If that’s what you want, please follow me. Our home is thataway.”

The fairy girl—Cornet—took off from Loren’s shoulder with a gentle flutter, beckoning as she slowly flew deeper into the cave. Loren called out to Lapis (and Feuille, who had been sitting sodden on the floor), and together they gave chase.

“What’s going on with this place?” Lapis asked, clutching her drenched clothes in front of her as a temporary measure. “It’s some manner of cave, as far as I can tell.”

Cornet tilted her head, not seeming to understand what Lapis was asking. “That’s right. We’re underneath that place you guys call the Black Forest.”

“Then how is it so bright down here?”

“Well, that’s because glowmoss grows on the rocks, you see. I don’t know what makes the moss glow, though.”

At this explanation, Loren peered closely at the nearest stone wall. As Cornet said, there a thin coating of moss, and somehow that moss was glowing bright enough to illuminate the entire cave.

“This is the sort of moss you often see in natural dungeons and the like. It’s not as rare as you might think,” Lapis explained in response to his dubious look.

“Is this different from those walls we saw in the ruins of the ancient kingdom?”

“Just because they both glow doesn’t make them the same thing, Mr. Loren.”

In a ruin of the ancient kingdom—which had turned out to be a nefarious goblin breeding facility—the walls had let off light due to their base materials. However, Lapis denied that they were in any way similar.

“From scarcity to luminosity to price point, every part of them entirely differs.”

“Hey, people, you can look at the walls later. Please follow along. You’ll catch a cold like that,” Cornet said, concerned for her dripping guests. For now, they put off inspecting their surroundings and hurried after her.

Some way from the water, the cave-like corridor opened up into a dome-shaped plaza. The ground here was lined with small stone buildings, each rising only to Loren’s waist. He could have taken it for a miniature model if not for the small winged figures passing from building to building. It was clearly much more than some replica.

“The big people are here!”

“They’re here!”

When Cornet called out, fairies, both boys and girls, floated up from all around and flew around them in wide swoops. Loren readied himself, fearing an attack, but Lapis stopped his hand before he could reach for his sword.

“It’s all right. I don’t sense any hostility.”

“Y-yeah… Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.”

“I understand the feeling.”

Lapis clearly hadn’t forgotten how it felt to be hunted by fairy-kind. She had witnessed just as many terrors wrought by the little ones as Loren had and found his defensive stance quite understandable.

“Everyone dry your clothes in here, okay?”

Cornet pointed them to a tunnel in a sidewall. On approaching it, Loren saw that it was too narrow for any human to pass through, but it led somewhere even farther into the cave system. A breeze, comfortably warm, whistled up through the gap.

“I was wondering why it didn’t feel cold down here. So this is what you use to regulate the temperature.”

“You can put your clothes near the entrance. The warm wind should help.”

“Let’s take her up on that, Mr. Loren. Our clothes should dry decently fast if we place them here where it’s warmest.”

“So, so, while your clothes dry, I want you to listen to my story.” Cornet’s expression clouded over ever so slightly as she floated up to Loren again.

“Right, come to think of it, you said you needed help,” Loren said, watching Lapis spread her clothes out near tunnel entrance, positioning them to catch the breeze. “Try us. We’ve got to repay you for saving our skins. We’ll hear you out, even if it’s a bit crazy.”

Once her own clothes had been laid out, Lapis began urging Feuille to strip down. The boy was more than a little flustered.

Cornet, with a serious look on her face, circled around Loren until she was looking him straight in the eye. She clenched her fist, telling him in that same steady, drawn-out voice, “I want you to kill the fairy chieftain.”

“Is this a power struggle or something?” Loren asked. That was, after all, the reason most people wanted to assassinate their superiors. But something about Cornet made him doubt that was the case here.

Loren didn’t know what sort of people fairies tended to be, but they didn’t seem the sort to engage in the ambitious infighting that humanity spent so much time and effort on. It was something about the way the fairies spoke, the air they exuded. In fact, when Loren brought up a coup, Cornet didn’t seem to understand what he was going on about.

Loren apologized, urging her to go on.

“As I said, I want you to hunt down our chieftain.”

“That’s quite a thing to ask someone to do for you. What happened?”

“Well, the chief, you see. He went funny in the head.”

Behind him, Lapis realized Feuille wasn’t going to take his soaked clothes off. The boy put up a desperate resistance as she grabbed at his shirt, but Loren ignored their tussling. Cornet took a seat in a cavity of the bare rock face, crestfallen, her shoulders drooping.

According to her, for some time now, little by little, the fairy chieftain had been acting stranger and stranger. Fairies were whimsical, mischievous, and curious by nature. They often played pranks on the elves who lived in the forest and the humans who visited. It had all started when the king’s pranks went beyond the realm of good clean fun.

“They really were just silly little things until then. Trust me.”

“Give me a few examples, for reference.”

“For instance, switching the salt and sugar the elves used, and splashing muddy water over the humans walking in the forest. That was about it.”

“That’s plenty troublesome… Whatever, go on.”

“We continued arranging our cute little japes, but one day, the chief commanded us to raid the food storage of an elf settlement.”

Without food, the elves would starve. Sure, they could seek help from other settlements, and perhaps they wouldn’t die, per se, but the damage would be considerable. Though the forest was abundant in its blessings, the elves would need to put in back-breaking work to compensate for such a loss. Some fairies had rebelled, standing up to the king to say such an act was no longer in the realm of a joke.

The fairy chieftain had forced them into it anyway. They had stolen every last scrap and crumb of food from the settlement they chose.

“We begged the chief to return the elves’ food—we did. He didn’t listen, and he ate all the stolen food himself.”

“All of it?! That’s incredible. It must have been a lot.”

“But it didn’t end there! Encouraged by his success, the chieftain and the fairies around him began raiding other elf settlements as well.”

“The elves must’ve been furious.”

Loren glanced at Feuille to see Lapis had successfully wrestled him down to his underwear. Lapis hummed as she spread the kid’s clothes out to dry, but for some reason, the boy kept his arms clutched over his chest, face bright red. When he noticed Loren’s attention, Feuille shook his head.

Apparently, Feuille didn’t know anything about these raids. Loren turned back to Cornet.

“Oh, they were! Livid, I tell you!” Though her tone was still the same, sorrow wormed its way into her words. Loren thought she was genuinely sorry for angering the elves, but the truth was far worse. “The elves came to protest. Me and everyone else, we were sure the chief would apologize.”

They “were sure”—which meant that wasn’t how it had gone down. Not that an apology would have been enough to make up for their crimes. But if the elves would have been happy with it, Loren didn’t see any other solution that wouldn’t fan the flames. Without an apology, no one could move forward with peaceful coexistence in the Black Forest.

Cornet pulled her chin in, lowering her eyes. “Funny story. The chieftain murdered every elf who came to him.”

“Real funny,” Loren retorted.

This king had greedily snatched the elves’ food, devoured it, then killed the victims who had already suffered at his hand. Had this happened in the human world, no doubt it would have incited a war.

Unfortunately for the elves, they acted as independent settlements rather than as an entire race, or even an entire kingdom. Worse, if it came down to a magical fight, the fairies outpaced elves in mana capacity and technique. On top of that, they had been up against the chieftain, strongest among the fairy-folk.

“Don’t get me wrong. The fairies faced considerable losses too, you know.”

This had been a tragedy for Cornet’s people, but she had hoped it would finally bring an end to the chief’s rampage. If the dent in his fighting force was large enough, the chief’s personal strength didn’t matter. Without an army at his back, he couldn’t hope to enforce his terrible demands.

Yet the chief had resorted to inconceivable means to replenish his losses and set his sights on still other elf settlements.

“So they started eating elves?” Lapis piped up.

Feuille’s face stiffened at this, and Cornet hung her head.

“What’s that mean?” Loren seemed to be the only one left in the dark. He posed the question to Lapis, as she seemed most knowledgeable.

“Elves are closely related to faeries,” she explained. “But fairies are just a tad higher ranking. They’re made of the same base materials, so it would be possible for a fairy to use their power to interfere with an elf’s body. If done right, they could theoretically produce more fairies from elves. Not that this is common practice or anything.”

She spelled out the terrible details as if this was all very normal, her disclaimer an offhand acknowledgment.

“This does explain the elves eaten from within and the fairies emerging from their corpses,” Lapis continued. “In summary, this chieftain of yours has spread out his power, placing a large portion of the Black Forest under his influence.”

“Exactly right,” Cornet acknowledged.

Which made the fairy chieftain the cause of the forest’s aberration. The situation wouldn’t end unless that cause was removed.

“We can’t leave the chief to his own devices. The fairies of the forest will be persecuted, and the elves will be hunted to extinction.”

“That’s why you want us to kill him?” Loren asked.

“Of course, I don’t want our chieftain to die.”

But Cornet couldn’t see any other way. A chief who didn’t listen to the words of his fellow fairies would hardly hear out the objections of a human. After killing all those elves, it was hard to imagine the chief taking humans into consideration at all. The party would probably have to fight him the moment they met.

“But hold up. What made the chieftain go mad? He wasn’t always like that, was he?”

“True, true… But I don’t know anything about that.”

“Do you have any ideas? Perhaps he ate something he shouldn’t have, or wore something he usually didn’t?” Lapis asked.

Cornet thought for a while, her brow creased. Meanwhile, Lapis stealthily reached out to undo Loren’s own drenched clothes. He smacked her hand away and only took off his coat to give to her.

“Umm, well, there is… But I don’t know if this is the cause.”

“Anything you can offer. It’s always better to have more information.”

Cornet nodded. “The truth is, we fairies happen to love shiny and pretty things.”

The first thing that came to Loren’s mind was glass. For some reason, certain birds would spend their time gathering sparkly objects, and their nests would be filled with glass shards. They would pick up anything that caught their eye; occasionally, they would find silver or gold coins and precious gemstones. It seemed the fairies shared a similar predilection.

“Everything we collect is gathered at the chief’s place and distributed from there. We use that stuff to decorate the village. I just remembered one of the kids brought in something strange a while ago.”

Don’t pick it up if it’s so strange, thought Loren. But his stern logic meant nothing to fairies. Cornet stood atop the rock she’d perched on and spread her arms out.

“It was around this size,” she told Loren. “A shiny, glowing metal box. There were symbols I’d never seen before carved on the surface.”

“Hold on a second.”

Her arm span was about the same as her height. Meaning whatever the fairies had picked up, it was about human-palm-sized. In that case, Loren had seen a box very similar to the one described in a place he’d been recently.

“Hey, Lapis. I remember seeing a box like that just the other day…”

“What a coincidence, Mr. Loren. I was thinking the same thing.”

On their previous quest, in a practical exam conducted at an adventurer training academy, they came across one of the relics of an adventurer named Wolfe. Within that relic an entity had been sealed, one known as the dark god of sloth. It had been a metal box with complex symbols inscribed over the surface, just like the one Cornet described.

“Am I the only one hoping this is a coincidence?” he asked.

“I wish it were,” said Lapis. “But I’m not coming up with any other ideas.”

If it really was what they were imagining… Loren’s mood took a heavy hit. Last time, their opponent had run away on his own. Perhaps he had been feeling lazy because he had only just revived. Or perhaps because he was, after all, the god of sloth, he just hadn’t been particularly motivated. His awakening had not gone without casualty, but the damage had been thankfully relatively contained for someone called an dark god.

While there was no telling what sort of god was in this new box, the changes in the fairy chieftain made its effects abundantly clear. This dark god was probably less prone to running off for a nap.

“It’s not like we can pretend we don’t know anything.”

“Mr. Loren, that kindness will be the end of you, one of these days.”

The least troublesome option would be to find a way back aboveground—to pretend they never saw anything and put the Black Forest behind them. Loren knew that, but having heard the gory details, he couldn’t just wave goodbye and leave the fairies to it.

“Cornet saved us, and we’ve got a debt to repay. Now that we’ve heard the story, we could at least put our heads together and see if there’s anything we can do about the chief.”

“It seems ‘mind our own business’ isn’t an option for you. There really is no saving you, Mr. Loren. Ms.…ah, Cornet, was it? Please answer my questions honestly. I’ll need those answers to think.”

“O-okay, you got it.”

Lapis sighed, then unleashed her deluge of questions. Loren thought she might look quite diligent were she not half-naked. He waited in earnest for his own coat to dry.

 

Lapis’s interrogation carried on until Loren’s coat was dry as bones. By then, Lapis and Feuille’s clothes were ready as well. Feuille slipped his shirt on as soon as he had the chance. As for Lapis, she didn’t claim her clothes until she was satisfied with Cornet’s interrogation. She got dressed with a conflicted look on her face.

“How was it?” Loren asked, having left the questioning up to her.

She shook her head a few times as if to jar her thoughts into order, and finally said, “First of all, this is that hidden fairy village we were looking for.”

Loren had nursed a hunch from the moment Cornet mentioned the chieftain. It seemed his intuition was on point today. Despite their scramble for information, they had reached their destination before they found any leads.

This was good news, in a sense, but terrible news as well. There were no elves in sight, after all. The party had been searching for the hidden village of the fairies in the hopes of finding refugees from Feuille’s settlement. They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of any elf, and it wasn’t as if the elves could be tucked away in the little fairy buildings.

Which meant the elves hadn’t found sanctuary here.

“I checked, just to make sure,” said Lapis. “None of the elves ever sought refuge here.”

“Are there any other places like this?”

“Not as far as Ms. Cornet knew.”

That didn’t mean all hope was lost. Feuille might have expected his fellows to run to the fairy village, but that was hardly proof that they had. Perhaps some elves had fled to other settlements.

The party, unfortunately, didn’t have the means to confirm this. At present, they only knew that there were no elves in the fairy village, save for Feuille.

“Everyone…”

Perhaps Feuille was the lone survivor. This came as a blow to the boy, but Loren and Lapis couldn’t offer any words of comfort. They whispered to one another:

“He might’ve been incredibly lucky, being nabbed by those bandits.”

“Mr. Loren, you shouldn’t say that even if it’s true.”

In one corner was a mercenary—life and death were an everyday occurrence to Loren. A comrade might be right as rain one day and cold in the ground the next; he had experienced just that too many times.

In the other corner was a demon who couldn’t have cared less about anything outside of her own interests.

Neither of them was completely oblivious, so they tried not to say anything careless enough to scar a soft child. To be honest, though, neither grasped the true depth of his shock, and neither could think of anything tactful to say.

“Umm, chin up,” said Lapis. “The chieftain apparently sealed himself off behind a barrier in the back. If we want to kill him, we’ll first have to break the barrier.”

“Cornet and the other fairies can’t break it?”

Fairies were supposed to possess a fair knack for magic. Couldn’t they dispel a barrier or two on their own?

“Well, they would be able to do something about it if they made a serious effort,” Lapis said.

“In that case…”

“But if they pour their magic into breaking the barrier, they wouldn’t have the strength left to defeat the chieftain after.”

Breaking the barrier to fight their chieftain would sap the fairies of all their mana. That had left Cornet at a standstill, even though she accepted the fact that the chieftain needed to go. She knew full well the extent of what the village’s fairies could—or couldn’t—accomplish. That was precisely why she needed the help of an outsider or two.

“Is Cornet actually someone important?” Loren asked.

“Important enough to rally the others.”

Rally the others, hopefully, to follow her proposal. She wanted the village fairies to all work together to clear a path for Loren, so he could sally forth to slay a tiny chieftain.

“Hey, I hope I’ve got this wrong, but if everyone put together can only just barely break this one measly barrier, doesn’t that mean this chieftain is about as strong as every other fairy here put together?”

“That would be the logical conclusion.”

Fairies were already better than elves at magic. If it took an entire village of them to rival one chieftain, it wasn’t hard to imagine how troublesome a foe he would be.

“Can we actually beat him?”

“I think it will work out if no one’s watching,” Lapis answered, all confidence.

Lapis hesitated to use her strength with an audience, and Scena similarly wouldn’t wield her full power in front of others. Once they got rid of prying eyes, though, they could go at it without restraint. Both Lapis and Scena were incredibly powerful, and neither intended to fall short of some fairy chief.

“Well, even if someone decides to rubberneck, I think we can deceive them easily enough.”

<I’ll help out too! Secretly!>

Even holding back their true abilities, Loren thought a demon and a Lifeless King might still rival the chief. Both girls were fully capable of bringing nations to ruin.

Loren, meanwhile, could only swing around a sword. He was starting to see himself as little more than a second-string fighter, but both Lapis and Scena seemed to believe they could push him onto the front lines and summon miracles by cheering him on.

“So you’re fine with taking Cornet’s quest?” Loren asked.

“I am. We decided on a proper reward already.”

He’d thought Lapis’s interrogation session was merely to gather information, but it seemed she’d also bartered the details of a proper adventuring request.

She works fast, Loren thought.

“I tried making it sound like a big deal, but the reward won’t be anything special. The fairies are like the elves; they use hardly any precious metals.”

“They can’t eat much either, not with bodies like that. I can’t see them having enough to share with us.”

“With that in mind, it’s incredible that the chief managed to devour the supplies from the elf settlement,” Lapis mused. “Does he have a stomach of iron, perhaps? Maybe incredibly potent gastric acid?”

“Who knows? So, what did you agree on?”

Fairies traded even less than elves did. Seeing as they didn’t conduct any business with humans, it was hard to imagine the hidden village had anything of significant monetary value.

“Yes, about that. If we do manage to kill the chief, we’ll be permitted to select one thing from the treasures the fairies have collected.”

Lapis had made the deal hoping that some great valuable lay hidden among the shiny things the fairies regularly snatched up. Even if there wasn’t anything really flashy, one gemstone would be enough to cover the costs of their expedition.

“Even if we don’t find anything incredible, I’m hoping we can at least turn a profit with this job.”

“Makes sense to me.”

The fairies were in deep trouble, so Lapis could have leveraged their desperation to get the party more than one prize. Unfortunately, wrangling rewards through the exploitation of the weak left a sour taste in the mouth.

In the end, Lapis’s proposal was a good compromise—Loren would be able to fight with a clear mind, and he wouldn’t go into debt doing it.

“We’re leaving Feuille here. Any objections?”

“None at all. That sounds obvious.”

Feuille lifted his chin at this, but neither Loren nor Lapis had any intention of taking him to see the chief. It was entirely possible that Feuille would find himself thinking of the chieftain as the one who’d stolen his family from him. They couldn’t say for sure, but it was a definite possibility. Perhaps Feuille wanted to get in at least one punch during the battle that would be his vengeance.

Despite this, they couldn’t bring him. At the end of the day, the fairy chief could apparently birth his own brethren from elf corpses, and they had enough trouble to deal with already.

“Bear with me on this,” Loren told the boy. “If we take you along, I’d have to protect you. If the chief made more fairies from you, we’d be attacked from both sides.”

While Feuille looked dissatisfied, he silently hung his head. It seemed like Loren had gotten through to him.

With that decided, Cornet floated into their midst and asked about the request.

“I can’t give any guarantees,” Loren said.

Despite that, Cornet flew in happy circles around him. “We could never ask for that much. We’re just happy to know you accepted.”

He’d make himself dizzy if he followed her with his eyes, but he had to ask. “And we can count on you to do something about the barrier?”

“Of course you can! We’ll help out to the best of our abilities!”

“And your request is to hunt down the chieftain, right? You want us to kill him.”

It took some time before the answer fought free from behind her teeth. “That’s what I’m asking.”

It was impossible for Loren to know what went through Cornet’s mind during that pause, nor how she resolved her own hesitation. Despite everything, she made her plea, and Loren nodded firmly.