The Tentacle Awakens Page 9

  The wulfar rushes forward to attack Rolan, but Gram bashes its flank with his shield. That was a nice hit, and it causes the wolf-like beast to jump back. It seems to have learned its lesson and begins to circle the two looking for an opening.

  Another crossbow bolt flies at it, but this time it doesn't manage to hit, whirring past its ear. Still, the wulfar flinches at the sound and using that moment of distraction, Rolan jumps in for a two-handed slash with his sword.

  It grazes the wolf's side, but the cut is shallow, as it's able to dodge just in time. In response, it lunges at the swordsman but Gram somehow jumps between the two, and his shield turns into an insurmountable wall against which the wulfar crashes.

  Clearly, the MVP of this battle is the tank!

  I turn to look at Luna and find that she's still chanting. A magician who takes more than half a minute to invoke a single spell is just useless in actual combat. Even the bard is more useful than her by at least providing a distraction with his crossbow. Even then, he doesn't seem to be a great shot, so he might not really be a trained ranger.

  When Rolan called this party a ragtag bunch, he wasn't kidding.

  A loud yelp draws my attention back to the melee battle. I find that the leader has landed a powerful strike on the wulfar's flank. It has started to bleed profusely, and even if left alone, it would only be a matter of time until it dies.

  Then Luna appears to be finished with her incantation, as orbs of energy manifest in thin air and swirl around her staff. One of the orbs bursts into flames, one generates sparks, one turns into a sharp looking icicle, and one more distorts the air around it.

  "Elemental Overload!" She's calling her attack! That's so embarrassing!

  But the power of her magic is real. The four elements fly out in arcs and assault the wulfar one after another. The sparks hit first, electrocuting the poor creature and rooting it in place with paralysis. It's not enough to kill it, but the effect is enough to prepare the target for the three other elements that follow.

  The fire sets the beast's fur alight, which is then fanned by the wind, causing its whole body to burst out into flames. As it draws back from the pain and stands up on its hind legs, the icicle pierces its chest cleanly, ending its life in an instant.

  From its entire charred carcass, a black mist seeps out and dissipates in the breeze, before the mortal remains begin to crumble away. After a while, nothing remains but a dark stain on the grass, leaving behind a patch of cursed ground.

  Or at least that's what I think it is.

  This is bad. I'm sure if I got hit by Luna's magic, I wouldn't fare better. If I get hit, that is. After all, it took her quite some time to chant, so I wouldn't give her the time to invoke her magic in the first place.

  But I have to admit that they have pretty good teamwork. When Luna called out her spell, Rolan and Gram made way and circled the wulfar to force it to remain in the center. That way, it wasn't able to get out of the way of the sparks, which guaranteed that the entire spell hit.

  Still, this group wouldn't stand a chance against me. I know that I don't have any need to dodge crossbow bolts since I can just take them inside my body. Furthermore, I would eat up the sword along with Rolan, and then Gram and his shield as well. And in regards to Luna, I could use the bladed whip to slash at her and break her concentration - if not outright decapitating her.

  Stop it! Happy thoughts! I don't need to treat them as enemies just yet.

  In fact, I've decided: I'll travel with them for a while and see more of what they're capable of. This way, I'll be able to gauge their abilities compared to those of other adventurers. If I only use them as a reference and they're just rookies, I'd be getting a wrong picture of the potential of the more powerful humans after all.

  Though, if I were to find that they are among the stronger ones, then humanity as a whole would be nothing to fear. I mean, I know for a fact that average humans incapable of magic aren't even worth mentioning. After all, I'm practically impervious to physical attacks.

  Oh, I just realized something: The bard wasn't of much use.

  It's almost completely dark when we return to the village. Rolan and Luna disappear into their rooms on the upper floor of the tavern the moment we arrive. They both give the very obvious excuse that they are tired after the fight and want to hit the sack early.

  Oh, I'm sure they'll be hitting the sack. Quite a bit so, too.

  Gram, the bard and I stay downstairs as agreed on earlier today, to celebrate the completion of the quest with the villagers. It's loud enough in here to drown out whatever sounds may spill from upstairs. Well, the big man's booming laughter is making sure of that in one corner, while the bard's retelling of their exploits against the corrupted creature is distracting from the world in another.

  I'm in the middle, with a huge jug of ale in front of me. This will be my first time drinking alcohol ever. I'm only seventeen years old, but apparently, no law to prohibit underage drinking exists in this world. I see a few youngsters in their mid-teens lifting normal-sized jugs to the big man's jokes at his table.

  So, it's alright for me to drink. And even if it isn't, I don't care!

  I take up the jug with both hands since it doesn't look like a human of my size should be able to lift it with one hand, and begin to chug away.

  I might have gotten ahead of myself with this amount. If I were a human, this would have been enough to make my belly swell. But as I am now, nothing is visible on the outside. I down the whole jug and suddenly a wave of cheers runs through the tavern.

  Huh, what is it now?

  "Wow, the lady is quite the drinker, isn't she?"

  "That's incredible, young lady!"

  Ah, everyone was watching me.

  "You seem to be able to hold your liquor, Miss Marcott." Gram approaches me with a jug of his own. "What say you we have ourselves a little contest?"

  Hey, are you seriously inviting a girl one third your weight - and potentially half your age - to a drinking contest? If I weren't a Crawling Chaos, my belly would explode after the second Gram-sized jug. Scratch that, those aren't jugs, those are buckets!

  But the big man makes his look normal-sized.

  "Alright." I don't know why I accepted, but I did, and it's too late to back out now. Another huge jug is placed in front of us each, and we drink on three, downing it all before putting it down.

  "Whoo, that hits the spot." Wiping his mustache on his sleeve, Gram slams his empty jug. Are you a middle-aged single salaryman or what's with that cliché line? "You're not half bad, either. Starting to feel the effect already?"

  "You wish!" I grin and wave over the second round. Now that he pointed it out to me, I realize that I'm not feeling anything, and wonder about the alcohol content in this brew. Am I just drinking the kiddy version? I look to the tavern keeper, but he's filling our jugs from the same barrel. So that's not it.

  Shrugging, I chalk it up to this convenient body of mine.

  Four jugs later, accompanied by loud cheering, Gram retires. He's holding his belly, and his face is flushed red from the alcohol. I still don't feel anything though? Don't tell me I can't get drunk?

  "Where is she storing all that ale?"

  "This lady is a drinking goddess!"

  Thank you, thank you.

  "Miss Marcott, are you even human?" Gram asks while burping and I freeze up. He doesn't know, does he? I mean, it does look quite suspicious how I seem to have just downed my body's weight worth in liquids, and my stomach didn't even grow. "That's some drinking you only see in an elf!"

  He doesn't suspect a thing, so I'm safe.

  Well, I might be as beautiful as an elf, but my ears aren't pointy. And an elf can defy the laws of physics by storing such a huge amount of alcohol in their bodies without it showing in this world, huh? That's interesting to know.

  "You jest, Mister Gram. I'm just a normal human girl." Ah, that was such a bold-faced lie, I'm surprised at how I can keep a straight face. The villagers look at
me unbelieving, but since there's no other indication for my inhumanity, nobody suspects anything.

  Note to self: Don't do things humans can't.

  But I won't give up on eating a lot whenever I can. For tonight, I'll restrain myself and just consider the ale as food.

  The party slowly trickles out following our contest, but not before everyone had their fair share of alcohol. Gram is lying down on a bench and dozing off, surrounded by empty jugs and plates of snacks. The bard is playing some relaxing tunes on his lute, lulling the people around him to sleep.

  At this point, everyone is either heading home or falling asleep on the spot. This feels like how a party in a fantasy world should be. I wouldn't know about any in the real world since I never went to one before.

  My eyelids begin to feel heavy as I watch the people around me, illuminated by the candlelight. The last thought that crosses my mind while I slip into slumber is that it may actually not be that bad here.

  Chapter 7 - The Capital Of The Plains

  Ugh, it's bad...

  I regret my decision of accepting the drinking contest. My head hurts, and I feel like hurling. Why is it affecting me now? It didn't make me drunk, but I'm stuck with a hangover? Damn it, where's the detox spell when you need it?

  Gram doesn't look much better this morning. The bard didn't drink much, so to the hung-over me, he just seems so much more annoying.

  When the two lovebirds come down from their room in the morning, Rolan looks tired, and Luna appears refreshed. What did those two do, I wonder... not. I don't even want to know how long or how often they did it, I'm just happy we didn't have to hear anything downstairs.

  Ugh, I'm feeling sick.

  "We're departing in an hour. Get ready until then." Rolan announces to the party. I hope in one hour I'll be feeling better, then.

  "Where are we going?" I just shamelessly include myself when I ask this, but it was practically already settled this way yesterday. Something about traveling together until we get to that city, of which the name I already forgot. Taking me to anywhere less backwater would be a step in the right direction anyway. I might be able to find my way from there then.

  "We're going back to the guild in Hovsgaerden to get our reward for this request." Rolan is the one to answer. Right, that's what that city was called.

  "Where is Hovsgaerden?" I ask, hinting at the fact that I'd like to know about it in a geographical sense. Maybe you could show it to me on a map, you know?

  Oh, he's actually taking something out of his bag. It's a piece of leather, similar to the one I found in my backpack. Don't tell me he's going to draw it onto that for me...

  "Kortid!" He chants and lines appear on the leather, which quickly join together to form a map.

  Wait, don't tell me...

  I want to repeatedly hit my mother over the head with a paper fan. She didn't teach me this incantation, and she didn't even tell me that the piece of leather in my backpack was a map in the first place!

  "This is where we are." He points at a small red spot in the center of the map. "And this is Hovsgaerden."

  Drawing his finger about halfway across the map in a line, he stops next to a black spot to the south-west, not too far from it. There are letters on the map, but I can't read them at all. My perfect knowledge of the spoken language right upon reincarnation isn't convenient enough to extend to reading it, huh? Maou-mama never made me read any texts, so I never noticed.

  "How far is it?" I can get an idea about the distances with this.

  "About four days away." Gram joins in on our conversation. He has finished packing his belongings and is drinking a large jug of water to combat his hangover.

  "So we're going to walk?" I'm not too keen on walking long distances on my human feet, now that I know the luxury of moving in the form of a vularen, but I feel that traveling with them is the better option, since I can learn a lot of things from them.

  Or at least just how to operate maps myself. I'll have Rolan teach me along the way, and in the process give Luna more reason to be jealous. She's too fun to play with; I just can't leave that alone.

  "Horses are scarce in these parts, so they're very expensive." Rolan states with a shrug. In other words, this party is poor. "Even this request won't get us enough money to buy a single horse." And apparently, the adventurer job doesn't pay much.

  "We are a long distance from the Demon Continent, so the effect of the demon queen's corruption is not that overbearing. We do not see many incidents here, so the requests are fairly limited." The bard continues to explain when Rolan checks the straps on his backpack.

  "We plan to move to the empire eventually so that we can join the next campaign against the demon queen." The leader finishes his checkup and turns to speak to me with a grin.

  Well, before you do that, I'll kill you though...

  "That's only if the alliance army doesn't succeed." Gram slings his shield onto his back, over his backpack, and rejoins the conversation. "Obviously, we don't hope for that, do we?"

  His voice doesn't hold a sarcastic undertone, so it's safe to say that he actually hopes that they succeed. After all, it would be better to be out of a job than having wished for the death of who knows how many people. And I know that a lot of them must have died, since two monarchs, which should typically be at the very back of the army, had been served up as breakfast afterward.

  "When do you plan to do that?" From their response, I can gauge the confidence they have in their abilities. If it's soon, it means they consider themselves strong. Well, they aren't really when compared to Maou-mama or even myself, but it would mean that they think they are compared to their human peers.

  "At the latest by the time the next expedition comes around if there's one in the first place. The journey alone will take a while, but we need to gather funds first." Rolan replies with a shrug, before looking around at the party members. "Alright, let's go. We'll be camping out for two nights during our journey, so I hope you don't mind, Miss Marcott."

  "You can call me Chloe, Sir Rolan." From the corners of my eyes, I see Luna's head spinning around to stare at me with a dumbfounded expression.

  Hohoho, she's so easy to read.

  "A-ah, yeah. Miss Chloe." He takes me up on that offer, but he doesn't drop the honorific.

  Oh wow, that's a murderous gaze if I've ever seen one. Luna is glaring at Rolan for actually calling me by my first name. Will they start arguing here again? This journey is going to be entertaining.

  We depart the village of Birkas soon after. Rolan, as the party leader, sets the pace but pays attention to whether I can keep up or not. He doesn't know that I don't have a stamina bar that could be depleted and that I don't ever tire.

  I think this will be the longest distance I've ever walked in my life, just to get to another place. Gram explained to me that it's about sixty kilometers. At least that's my estimate, converted from the numbers he gave me. He had to explain the relation between a league and a pace, and it earned me strange looks for not even knowing that.

  I was able to play it off with the fact that I was a sheltered noble daughter who only ever traveled by carriage and didn't ever have to think about distances. It's the truth, since I only ever walked to and from school, but went everywhere else by train.

  The bard already told me that this would be a pretty uneventful journey since the roads are well maintained, and there are usually no monsters around these parts. There aren't many bandits in the kingdom since they don't have much of a reason to exist. So, this is basically a boring, backwater country far from strife, which doesn't know many hardships.

  My little story about being attacked by bandits seems a little unbelievable when I hear that there have been very few incidents in recent years. For me to be attacked near such a small village seems even more unlikely.

  Luckily, nobody is thinking that... I hope.

  Making merry conversation and good progress on the road, the first day comes to an end without anything out of the or
dinary happening. We spend that night in a small village no bigger than Birkas. The inn is even smaller, and there's only a single large communal room where men and women sleep together in bunk beds.

  In my previous life, I would have been too shy to do something like that, but with my new outlook on life, I don't sweat the small stuff anymore. And it seems quite the normal thing to do here, since the party, as well as the other guests, go to sleep soon after nightfall. Their rhythmic breathing tells me that they have fallen asleep just minutes after the lights were put out.

  I had expected Gram to be someone who snores, but he's unexpectedly really quiet. So are the others, which leads me to assume that it's because the air here is incredibly clean and people don't develop breathing problems that way. I find my mind being drawn towards slumber in the silence of the night, and soon slip away as well.

  A new day, the same procedure as the previous.

  As expected, I learn more about the people I'm traveling with. Rolan wanted to be a baker before, but seeing the suffering brought about by the corruption of the demon queen, he decided to change his dreams. It's quite the commendable attitude and reminds me of heroes in fiction; they are always born from the common people who witness injustice and stand up against it.

  Gram grew up as the son of a lumberjack, so it explains his big body. He was meant to take over the family business, but when his father and the employees were killed by a wild beast affected by corruption, the business was practically destroyed. Therefore, he decided to become someone who could protect those dear to him.

  The bard is obnoxious, so I haven't paid much attention to him. I can understand why he would constantly flirt with me since Luna is obviously already taken. It must be a rare occurrence for another girl to join the party, if even only temporarily.

  Speaking of Luna, she doesn't talk to me unless necessary.

  I feel that it might be a waste of time to remember all their personal stories. When we part eventually, we'll either never see each other again, or meet in battle as enemies. Rather than their dreams and aspirations, I'd like to know their weaknesses. But they're weak, so there's not much more to learn. Except for magic, that is.