The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 11, page 18
Ability wielders could do things that magic considered impossible. It wasn’t strange in the least for one of them to be able to tell truth from lies.
“Okay,” Lorraine said. “So let’s assume what Gisel said was true. What is this special material?”
“It is, in fact...” Jean paused, taking his time as though he were unveiling a personal treasure of his. Then, he said it.
A dungeon core.
Needless to say, the facial expressions Lorraine and I made were indescribable.
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Dungeon cores. They were a dungeon’s nucleus and command mechanism. By absorbing and assimilating one, you would gain the ability to control its dungeon. The vampire Laura Latuule had taught us that.
Shumini, another vampire, had once created a dungeon under Maalt, but he hadn’t kept the core himself: he’d forced it onto Rina, who he’d made his servant. We had discovered his plans, and Laura had separated it from Rina and absorbed it into herself, where it currently remained.
At a guess, the “once-in-a-lifetime chance” that Jean had heard about from Gisel was that very dungeon core. In which case...
This was a lost cause already, and Lorraine and I both knew it—hence, our expressions. Still, dungeons existed everywhere. Even Maalt had three if you included the new one. There were hundreds out there in the world. If you wanted a dungeon core, it didn’t have to come from Maalt. You could just as easily go somewhere else.
Lorraine and I exchanged looks that said we’d hear the rest of what Jean had to say first, then turned back to face him.
“Not exactly the reactions I’d expected,” he said. “Oh, do you not know what a dungeon core is? It’s not exactly common knowledge, I suppose. I kind of assumed you two would know though...”
Evidently, he’d mistaken our reactions for surprise and confusion. There was no harm in correcting him, really, but I stayed silent, choosing not to interrupt as he continued.
“A dungeon core is exactly what it sounds like—the core of a dungeon. They exist in every dungeon and are often well protected. If you destroy one, the dungeon collapses too. But in truth, none of this information has been verified.”
That mostly agreed with what Laura had told us. But if he was saying it hadn’t been verified, then why did they believe dungeon cores existed?
Jean must have seen the doubt on my face. “The guild has a long history, and there are a number of stories of people having destroyed one. It’s just, none of those stories can be made public. Usually because the cores were in the possession of royalty or the clergy—you get the idea. Apparently, the cores can be taken out of their dungeons. I’m sure you’ve heard the tales of adventurers who’ve made it into a dungeon’s deepest depths and defeated the fearsome boss monster in the final chamber, right? Well, those guardians—the boss monsters—and the owners of the core are two different things. Think of it like...the relationship between a store’s owner and its manager. And the owner doesn’t necessarily have to be in the dungeon.”
That made sense. It was a pretty mundane analogy, but it got the point across. It got me thinking though. If Laura was currently the dungeon’s owner, who was the manager?
I pictured monster employees who dreaded the owner’s occasional visits. Skeletons lined up in a row out front to greet her enthusiastically. Goblins and orcs cheerfully rubbing their hands together. Slimes producing beverages for the customers...
Hey, that dungeon sounded kind of fun...provided you could handle the owner biting your neck and draining you of blood if you displeased her. Or crushing you with her gravity magic.
Laura had said she was holding on to four dungeon cores, so did that make her a large company in the dungeon master industry? Considering that assimilating even one was extremely difficult, she was probably at the level of a mega-conglomerate.
“I’ve got the general idea,” Lorraine said. “So where is this dungeon core allegedly going to be, and how will it be retrieved?”
“Maalt’s new dungeon,” Jean replied.
Lorraine and I exchange looks again. It was just as we’d suspected. Still, Jean had said himself that the owner wouldn’t necessarily be in the dungeon. That being the case, he had to know it wouldn’t be so easy to obtain the core.
“How do you determine who’s holding the core?” I asked. “If they’re outside of it, they could be anywhere.”
“True, but a newly formed dungeon is different. According to the Tower’s experts, new dungeons are still unstable, so the owner of their core needs to remain inside. They’ve estimated this period to be around a year or more.”
That meant that they were working under the premise that the owner was still inside and that turning the place upside down to find and kill them would get them the dungeon core.
Still, that aside...
“That’s some impressive analysis by the Tower,” Lorraine said. “Dungeon research worldwide hasn’t really progressed much, not even in the Empire.”
“Pretty much,” Jean replied. “Still, discovery is a sudden thing, and you never know where it’ll come from. Would you believe the Tower found a way to create a small-scale, artificial dungeon? I do mean ‘small’ though. Apparently they can only get it as big as an ant’s nest and can’t harvest cores from it. Who knows how many hundreds of years it’ll be before it becomes a practical resource? That said, they showed it to me, and it was definitely a working dungeon. The monsters were only tiny ants...but they could spit acid. That’s dangerous in its own right.”
“They’ve progressed so far?! That’s wonderful. Yaaran’s Tower doesn’t have any particularly notable contributions to their name, so I’d thought they were behind the times, but I stand corrected. You wouldn’t happen to know the name of the Tower’s head dungeon researcher, would you?”
That was a fairly harsh thing to say, but I guessed that didn’t make it any less true. As for the name, Lorraine probably wanted to know so she could pick the person’s brain later down the line.
Evidently, it was no particular secret, because Jean answered easily, “I do. Hamishy Favor. Unhealthy-looking, and the very picture of what you’d imagine a researcher to be...but brilliant all the same. So much so you can practically feel it.”
If the veteran head of two major organizations—one legal and one not—was saying that, then this Hamishy person must really be something else.
Since Yaaran was a backwater kingdom, I’d taken for granted that it’d be mostly behind other countries when it came to advanced research, but finding out that we had someone as talented as that made me kind of happy. It wasn’t my achievement, and I wouldn’t call myself very patriotic, but the mood just kind of took me.
Still, even a genius’s research could be wrong sometimes. In fact, the research had just begun, so mistakes would be the norm. Case in point: it hadn’t been a year and Laura was already outside of the dungeon—which would mean that this plan would be doomed to fail from the outset.
Oh, no, whatever would we do?
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“So the reason the Tower and the Academy are in Maalt right now...” Lorraine said.
Jean nodded. “Yeah. The Tower is looking for the dungeon core. The Academy is too, but they’re being backed by the first prince. It’s a race to see who finds it first.”
“So the prince knows it’s necessary to repair the scepter too?” I asked.
“He does,” Jean replied. “Gisel purposefully leaked the information. At any rate, the Tower’s first priority is to discover a method for finding out who the core’s owner is. It’s a manpower problem, so they want as many people as possible to help search the dungeon. If the Academy finds it first, the Tower plans to steal it from them.”
That was logical, sure, but it would also be bloody. While it was a new dungeon that wasn’t all that large, it would still take a considerable amount of time to search every corner of it. It was understandable that they wanted as many people as possible, since the one-year deadline didn’t give them much space to work with, but the willingness to fight over it once they found it was a bit much...
Still, from our point of view, we knew where the dungeon core was, so we knew that conflict would never happen. They’d never find Laura in the dungeon, and even in the very hypothetical event they realized she was the owner, how would they ever take it from her? I hadn’t gotten an up close look at Laura fighting, but what I did see had been enough to tell me how monstrously powerful she was.
On top of that, she was in the Latuule manor, surrounded by her personnel. A single servant was at the very least a middle vampire, and that was just the lowest rung. Most were actually greater vampires.
The Latuule estate had enough military strength to go to war against an entire country. Could the Tower and Academy of a backwater kingdom like Yaaran win against that? Why even bother asking? There was no two ways about it—anything would be better than trying the extremely bad idea of taking the dungeon core from Laura.
If anything, convincing the king to change his mind would be far easier. I could tell Lorraine and I were thinking the exact same thing, but we couldn’t exactly come clean to Jean about it.
Since I didn’t really have anything else to say on the subject, I decided to change to a topic that was much more important to us.
“Right, I think I’m caught up on the dungeon core. But that doesn’t explain why we needed to be killed.”
“That would be because the second princess was trying to have the high elves create a new scepter,” Jean said. “And we thought you had been chosen to be the couriers.”
I did remember the old man saying something along those lines.
“But what’s so wrong with that?” I asked. “A new scepter would mean the king wouldn’t have to use the old one. I don’t see a problem.”
“That’s true. But the second princess wasn’t going to hand the scepter over to the king. She was going to wait until the old one had drained him to death, then use the new one to seize the throne.”
“No way,” I said immediately. “She isn’t the type to do something like that. At least, she didn’t seem like it to me.”
“And you’re right. That’s the faulty information I mentioned, passed to us by the spy we had among the court. The organization acted accordingly, and I wasn’t here at the time to catch it since I was on business elsewhere. There was nobody around who knew the second princess well enough. The specifics of the scepter hadn’t been passed down to most of them either, so nobody could make an accurate judgment call. One thing led to another, and Gilli got ordered to kill you and foil the second princess’s plot. He’d already left by the time I came back, so I couldn’t put a stop to it.”
The old man in question looked shocked. “The order came from the vice chief, so I didn’t think to question it...”
“It seems the vice chief had been in Gisel’s pocket since a long time back. I’ve already taken care of it though. We’ve got a vice chief no longer, and no court spy either.”
That was a terrifying thing to say so casually. Forget “no longer in the organization.” He’d probably meant “no longer in the world of the living.”
I guessed that was what Jean had been busy with recently. Chief of a shadow organization or not, political power struggles couldn’t be easy to deal with. Still, one thing was bugging me.
“You never noticed your vice chief was working for Gisel?”
That was a pretty big oversight to make...
“I’ve got no excuses. That said, the organization wasn’t always this big. We grew little by little by taking apart and assimilating other outfits. One was the vice chief’s. Imagine keeping a secret like that for thirty years, without even tipping your direct subordinates off. Honestly, it’s more impressive than anything else.”
So the vice chief had kept the secret their entire life, waiting for the critical moment and working diligently without telling their colleagues or subordinates. No wonder nobody had thought to be suspicious.
In the end, the result had been failure. It seemed a sad sort of life to have lived, but if the person themselves had been glad to sacrifice themselves for their loyalty, then perhaps it wasn’t so bad. Even though they’d been the perpetrator who’d caused us such trouble, they were definitely a person of principle, in a way, so I found myself feeling a little melancholy.
Maybe I could only think like that because I’d never met them and we’d come out of their plot no worse for wear. If we’d been truly hurt in some way, I probably would have held a bitter grudge against them.
“So, if that’s the case,” I began, “what are you going to do now? From the look of things, Gisel’s throwing caution to the wind and doing everything she can to put the first princess on the throne. Are you going to keep working with her?”
“No, our contract with her is concluded. I’d be perfectly content with the second princess bringing a new scepter back. I know she’d willingly hand it over to the king. The problem is whether she can manage to get it. How’s that looking, anyway?”
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“I’m afraid we can’t tell you that,” Lorraine said. “I know we’ve been frank with each other so far, but we do have certain matters of confidentiality to keep.”
We didn’t actually, especially considering we hadn’t even accepted the princess’s request, but Lorraine was likely thinking that involving ourselves any further in royal matters would be bothersome.
The stance she was taking was basically: “You handle the rest. We have nothing to do with this.”
I completely agreed with that. I didn’t want to see undead popping up all over Yaaran, but if we poked our noses any deeper into the scepter problem, we’d be risking our lives.
Risking mine was one thing, but it was Lorraine’s and Augurey’s that were the concern here. Besides, even if that wasn’t the case, it was still best to avoid attracting the attention of the kingdom’s heavyweights like Gisel.
If my adventurer class was higher, maybe I’d be able to show off and declare that it was an adventurer’s job to uphold the peace of the kingdom, but as things stood, I had my hands full taking care of my own problems.
Now that there was no longer a threat of Jean’s organization coming after us, I was satisfied. The best step to take next would be to wish him luck and wave goodbye.
Or it would be, if we didn’t need Jean to come to Maalt with us.
This was a problem.
“Makes sense,” Jean replied. “I’ll go ask for an audience with the second princess tomorrow.”
He backed off relatively easily. It did sound like he was an acquaintance of the second princess after all. The king too. The confidence in his words probably came from the fact that it wouldn’t be much trouble for him to meet them whenever he pleased.
“That would be the surest method,” Lorraine said. “As for our other purpose, do you have any plans to visit Maalt?”
If he didn’t want to go, we could just get him to write a letter to that effect and be done with it.
Thinking back, Wolf hadn’t seemed too enthused about the idea of Jean paying a visit either. I wondered if he’d actually celebrate him not coming.
Contrary to my expectations, Jean said, “Yeah, I do. Been thinking it’s due time I stopped by. Tomorrow’s...not open for me since I’ll be seeing the princess like I mentioned, but how about we head for Maalt the day after? That sound good?”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Aren’t you busy?”
Jean had a mountain of issues to handle. He not only had the organization to deal with, but the guild and the scepter business too. I had my own affairs, such as reporting back to Hathara and preparing for the Silver-class exam, but they were all personal matters. They paled in comparison to Jean’s responsibilities.
“The scepter issue isn’t going to be solved in a handful of days,” Jean replied. “And I don’t want to see the dungeon core secured before that happens. I’d like to check on the Tower and the Academy’s progress. I suppose I have a personal interest too. The Tower’s artificial one aside, even I’ve never seen a newly formed dungeon before. I’m curious about what it’s like.”
It was abundantly clear to myself and Lorraine that they couldn’t have made any progress, but we couldn’t tell him that. It’d only lead to him asking us how we knew.
Even if we did want to explain, we would have to be extremely careful. They had an ability wielder who could tell when somebody was lying. The best way to avoid that scrutiny was to direct the conversation so that we wouldn’t be scrutinized in the first place.
Jean’s proposal wasn’t a bad one for us anyway. We had, after all, been tasked with bringing him back to Maalt. Maybe Wolf preferred carrying on without Jean, but there was no reason for us to be so considerate of him. He was the one who’d pushed this job on us, so the least he could do was take responsibility for it.
“All right,” Jean said. “Let’s go with that then. We head for Maalt the day after tomorrow. That okay?”
“Sure,” I replied. “In the meantime, we’ll get our own preparations ready. Regarding the wagon...”
“We’ll take care of it,” Lorraine said. “So you won’t need to make any arrangements. We’ll see you in two days.”
With that, our talks were over.
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After we returned to the inn and told everything to Augurey, he sighed.
“Ha. This has gotten awfully complicated, hasn’t it? It’s not often one gets dragged into a mess like this. I don’t know whether to call it a novel experience or just plain bad luck.”
Siren had gone back with Spriggan to the organization, so Lorraine, Augurey, and I were alone.
The decrease in numbers made things feel calmer, but also a little lonely. Even though they’d come after our lives, we’d also been through danger together, so I’d grown fond of Spriggan’s group. Now that they were gone, I couldn’t help but feel a little down. Then again, while I wanted to think that we wouldn’t try to kill each other again since we weren’t enemies anymore, they worked for a shadow organization. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that they’d come up against us in the future. Given what Jean and Spriggan had said, though, I could probably feel safe that they’d make arrangements to ensure that didn’t happen.
