Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, Vol. 5

by Hiro Ainana

  “Master, I think you ought to come join us in the large bath instead.”

  Arisa’s proposal was met with unanimous agreement from the girls, so I ended up being dragged over there.

  I guess bigger is better for baths after all.

  “Damn, it’s too dark! I guess I ought to learn Light Magic next…”

  Arisa kept muttering to herself in between short dives under the water.

  I had a hunch as to what her goal might be. Unfortunately for her, I was wearing brand-new swim trunks, so she wouldn’t see anyway. I know that runs counter to the idea of natural bathing, but just think of it as an emergency measure.

  “C-collarbone…”

  Lulu, who was submerged up to her shoulders next to Arisa, was mumbling something while staring at me with her cheeks flushed pink. Okay, you’re making me a little uncomfortable.

  I leaned back on the wall again, resuming my previous pose.

  The steam wasn’t doing its job very well, so I couldn’t really keep looking forward.

  I was getting a little hot, so I took my arms out of the water and rested them on the side of the tub, only to immediately have them used as pillows. Tama and Pochi were on my right arm and Mia on my left. Oddly, Lulu was inching closer as if waiting for her turn.

  “Master, I have made a discovery! Confirmation required, I request.”

  Nana’s voice came to me from somewhere behind Lulu. When I glanced over nonchalantly…

  “They float in the water, I report! They are also light and rather cute.”

  Nana, who had opened the front of her bathrobe, was looking at her floating breasts. Though her expression was blank as usual, she seemed terribly entertained.

  If this were a manga, the protagonist’s nose would have started gushing blood. What a sight for sore eyes.

  “Miss Nana, you mustn’t!”

  “Lewd.”

  Lulu quickly moved in front of Nana, blocking my view. Unfortunately, her wet bathrobe was sticking closely to her body, so now I could clearly see the outline of her bottom.

  After a moment, Mia blocked my view of that, too, by standing in the way with her arms spread. She wasn’t wearing a robe, so I could see all kinds of things that I really didn’t need to. If she were an older woman, I’d be so happy I could cry.

  The rest of our bathing time passed in a similar fashion—relaxing, if occasionally boisterous.

  The next morning, I found Liza looking sorrowfully at the cold bath, so I warmed it back up for a morning dip. She always was fond of them.

  Tolma

  Satou here. For some reason, maybe because of a movie I saw long ago, the phrase mountain hunt always makes me picture men with torches hiking into the mountains in the dark. If you ask me, going into the mountains at night is way too dangerous.

  When we reached a fork in the road about half a day’s journey away from Gururian City, we were reunited with a knight who was an old friend of ours.

  Because of my radar, I was already well prepared to meet him.

  “S-Sir Pendragon… Please, could you lend me a horse?”

  I handed the knight a flask of water, and he drained it at an alarming rate.

  It was the temple knight Heath from back in Muno City.

  “Thieves have captured the oracle priestess. I need to tell the viceroy right away!”

  What?! Is Miss Sara in danger?

  The phrase oracle priestess made me search my map in a hurry, but Miss Sara seemed to be safe in Gururian City. He must be talking about a different person.

  “Go ahead and use this horse, then.”

  I gave him the reins to Nana’s usual mount, the fastest steed we had.

  He seemed a bit surprised as he accepted them. He must not have expected it to be so easy.

  His tattered overcoat was covered in dirt, leaves, and sticks from rushing through the mountains.

  “I owe you.”

  Though he looked fatigued, the knight struck his fist to his chest in salute, straddled the horse, and took off at a gallop toward Gururian City.

  “Hey, master. What shall we do with these thieves?”

  I turned back to Arisa, who had finished things up while I was talking to the knight.

  Behind her, a group of around thirty thieves was tied up, disarmed, and even knocked out with Arisa’s Psychic Magic.

  This band of robbers had been chasing the temple knight.

  Three of them were lying dead at the side of the road, but that was the work of the knight, not us.

  When my radar had alerted me to the chase, our group waited at the intersection, armed to the teeth, and rounded up the thieves as soon as they arrived.

  Our enemies were surprisingly well equipped; most had bronze armor and swords, and four of them even had Fire Rods and Thunder Rods, which were magic tools reserved for military use. I was a bit concerned about where they had gotten all this.

  “The knight will probably come back with reinforcements, so let’s just leave the trouble of transportation up to them.”

  I was more than happy to leave the cleanup of the bandits to the proper authorities.

  With that, I opened my map to investigate.

  We had to rescue the oracle priestess from the thieves’ hideout, after all.

  There were ten of them at the base: seven women and three men. The abductees consisted of four men and three women.

  One of the captured women was the same temple knight who had been guarding Miss Sara. She had probably been tasked with guarding the oracle priestess along with Sir Heath.

  I thought about going by myself, but there were more people to be rescued than I’d initially bargained for.

  So I elected to take a few people with me. Arisa’s Psychic Magic made her a vital addition, so I would bring her, Liza, and maybe one other.

  “I’m going to the thieves’ hideout to save the abductees. Arisa, Liza, and Tama, you’ll come with me.”

  The indicated trio nodded, but Nana, Pochi, and Mia seemed disgruntled.

  “Master, permission to accompany?”

  “Pochi is unwanted, sir?”

  “Mrrrr. Going.”

  Nana was expressionless as usual, Pochi was teary-eyed, and Mia’s cheeks were puffed out in anger.

  “I need you three to stay here. Protect Lulu and the carriage.”

  “Master, instructions to defend the base have been registered, I report.” Nana nodded immediately, but Pochi and Mia weren’t so easily swayed.

  I patted each of them on the head and repeated my explanation.

  While I did so, Nana swiftly lined up next to the other two, so I patted her as well.

  “I’ll be terribly scared on my own… Aren’t there aaany strong swordsmen or brave magic users to protect me?”

  Catching my drift, Lulu cleared her throat and loudly tried to draw the pair’s attention.

  “Pochi will protect you, ma’am!” Pochi was drawn in right away.

  At that, the horses flared their nostrils and whinnied.

  “I’ll protect you, too, Rye and Effie, sirs. And you, New and Bie. Zard too, of course, sirs.”

  Pochi hurried to reassure each of the horses by name.

  The horses whinnied again, as if to say, Yeah, you better.

  As that conversation played out, I continued trying to persuade the last holdout.

  “Please, Mia.”

  “…Mm. Fine.”

  When I squatted down to talk to her eye to eye, she reluctantly agreed, giving me a quick hug.

  Arisa yelped, “Ah!” with jealousy, but I pretended not to hear it.

  Once I sectioned off the felled thieves with three layers of barriers using Shelter, it was time to head to the thieves’ mountain hideout.

  We ran along a narrow trail to get there. Since Arisa was utterly lacking in physical strength, of course, I carried her on my shoulders.

  After a while, the entrance to the cave came into view behind the trees. A broken barrier post or something similar stood in fron
t of the entrance, maybe preventing monsters from approaching.

  There were two men standing guard in front of the cave. As we arrived, they were right in the middle of welcoming back more of their number.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Just two stupid little girls and a bunch of crappy loot.”

  A thief carrying a couple of large sacks responded grumpily to the watchman’s question. My bet was that the sacks contained hostages.

  “The coachman abandoned the brats and ran off t’ the mountains, so some o’ ours chased ’im down like a bunch o’ hot-blooded morons.”

  “Hope they don’t ferget the boss told ’em to bring ’im back alive.”

  “Yeah, right. What’s it matter anyway? Even if they did bring ’im back, the boss’d end up torturin’ ’im to death anyway.”

  Hmm, so their boss is some kind of sadistic freak?

  Leaving Liza and the others in the bushes, I crept toward the thieves.

  “No kiddin’. Ever since she got that weird vase, the boss’s been even madder than usual.”

  “Y’mean the one from those purple robes with all the weapons an’ Fire Rods an’ stuff?”

  “Yeah. I bet that thing’s cursed…”

  While the thieves had their guards down, I stepped between them, knocking out four of them before they could react. One tried to sound an alarm horn, but Arisa’s Psychic Magic spell Mind Blow put a stop to that.

  The last two thieves threw down their sacks and reached for their swords, but I quickly kicked the swords away and caught the sacks before they hit the ground.

  Signaling for the others to join me, I had them tie up the unconscious thieves.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Huh? We’re…saved?”

  The first sack turned out to contain a middle school–aged girl, who looked around and mumbled in confusion.

  “Siiiiiis!”

  Sobbing, a little girl about Arisa’s age burst out of the other sack and latched onto the first, who was evidently her sister.

  “Arisa, take care of these two, please. Liza and Tama, keep watch here for other returning thieves. I’m going to scout out the cave.”

  With that, I headed into the hideout. The three thieves on their way back were all less than level 7, so Liza and Tama should be able to handle them without a problem.

  With the help of my cave map, I made a beeline to the abductees.

  They were gathered in a large room all the way in the back of the hideout, along with the boss and her right-hand woman.

  The number of prisoners had decreased since we left, too; it appeared the bandits had killed three of the men. We had to hurry.

  Of the remaining six thieves, four women were gathered at a pool of water, and the other two were coming toward the entrance.

  I knocked out the pair as they rounded the corner, then made my way toward the room in the back.

  “Hmph… Kill her.”

  A woman’s voice echoed from the hall where the boss had the hostages.

  Peering inside from the entryway, I saw Lady Knight chained to the wall.

  Her armor had been removed from the waist up, and her shirt was torn open, exposing one of her breasts.

  If the bottom half of her armor was still intact, she was probably safe for now. I looked around at the rest of the room to assess the situation.

  A middle-aged man with unkempt hair was sitting next to her, trying to show her something with a slimy expression of pleasure.

  Beside him was a female thief with heavy makeup and a skimpy outfit, giving Lady Knight a once-over and snickering cruelly.

  The other abductees were trapped in a cage a short distance away, staring lifelessly at the floor.

  In one corner of the room was a pile of mangled bodies.

  There didn’t seem to be any traps, so I chose to finish this quickly.

  “C’mon, it’s no fun if you give up so quickly. I wanna see you fight.”

  “St-stop… Get that thing away from me!”

  The disgusting man held a puppy-size wasp with its wings torn off.

  According to the AR display, it was called a corpse bee, a horrific monster that laid eggs in animal corpses, where its young would turn the corpse into food with decay-inducing poison. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

  “Let’s see what happens if this thing stings you…”

  I had no desire to watch something like that happen to a woman, so I took a pebble out of Storage and threw it at the corpse bee, destroying it.

  “Who dares…?!”

  Covered in the green fluids of the corpse bee, the thief whirled around in rage.

  Without bothering to answer his question, I quickly dispatched him.

  A few pebbles to the knees sent two more bandits tumbling to the ground. They shouted obscenities at me from the floor, so I kicked them in the stomachs to shut them up. That should keep them unconscious for a good half hour.

  Lady Knight was still blinking in surprise, trying to process what had just happened, when I walked up to her.

  “Y-you’re…from Muno Barony…”

  I covered her chest with a nearby cloth, then destroyed the restraints on her wrists with a knife.

  She’d been splattered with dead corpse bee, too, so I handed her a towel and a flask of water.

  “Thank you, Sir Pendragon. But how did you find this place?”

  “We dragged it out of some robbers who were chasing a young temple knight.”

  As Lady Knight searched around for her stolen equipment, I turned to the people trapped in the large iron cage.

  “I’m here to rescue you. I’ll have you out of there soon, so hang on just a little longer, please.”

  I smiled gently at the abductees as they gave a weak chorus of gratitude, then checked on the map to see where the key was kept.

  Ah, it was on a desk up against the wall.

  “A young temple knight? Is Heath with you, then?”

  “No, I had him go on ahead to Gururian City to send for reinforcements.”

  I answered Lady Knight’s questions as I approached the untidy desk.

  The first thing I noticed was a vase in the center of the desk. It had a suspicious design composed mainly of eyeballs and mouths.

  According to the AR display, this lidded vessel was called a malice urn.

  It must be related to that “chaos jar” thing that the demon I defeated in Muno City said was needed for resurrection. It had probably been gathering resentment and other negative emotions in all sorts of places.

  This had to be the vase the thieves had been grumbling about, the one that had driven their boss insane.

  Opening the lid would probably curse you right away, so I quickly impounded it in Storage.

  Once I got to the old capital, I could probably have the holy woman of Tenion Temple purify it.

  I found the key shortly thereafter, so I freed the captives from their cage.

  “You’re safe now.”

  “Th-thank you.”

  I offered a hand to a woman in her mid-twenties who was carrying a baby.

  The last surviving man’s face was swollen, and one of his arms seemed to be broken.

  “What terrible injuries.”

  “The bandits beat him up when he tried to protect us…”

  “I had to protect my wife and daughter, didn’t I?” The man grimaced through the pain, trying to summon a smile.

  I was surprised that he hadn’t been killed, until I saw his bloodline in the AR display. According to his profile, he was a high-ranking noble of the old capital. They’d probably kept him alive to demand ransom.

  He was severely wounded, so I gave him a lesser magic potion to heal his broken bones. It was a high-quality product that I hadn’t gotten a chance to use in a while.

  “Is this a potion? Thank you…!”

  As if he had just received a glass of water, the man gratefully guzzled down the potion.

  “Well, I’ll be damned! It’s healed alread
y! This is good stuff.”

  The efficacy of the potion took the man by surprise.

  “I’m Tolma. This is my wife, Hayuna, and my daughter, Mayuna. If you go to the old capital, pay Viscount Siemmen a visit. I swear on the Siemmen name that you’ll find a warm welcome!”

  “The viscount…?”

  If I remembered correctly, the viscount Siemmen who Mr. Tolma spoke of ran a scroll workshop in the old capital.

  If Mr. Tolma was his younger brother, this connection might be an unexpected stroke of luck.

  And his daughter, Mayuna, was the “oracle priestess.”

  I smiled at her, and she gave a curious-sounding gurgle. She had to be an exceptionally brave baby not to cry in a place like this.

  Mr. Tolma had introduced himself, so I did the same.

  “A noble of the Muno Barony? Why, I didn’t know my second cousin had taken on a vassal. Is he well, then?”

  So he and Baron Muno were closely related. The baron did say that he came from the old capital, so it made sense.

  As Mr. Tolma and I carried on this bland conversation, Miss Hayuna suddenly gave a bloodcurdling scream.

  The cause turned out to be Lady Knight, who’d taken her revenge.

  Blood dripped from her sword as the heads of the thieves rolled away.

  I generally didn’t think well of killing someone who couldn’t resist, but her retaliation was probably natural, considering how close she’d come to joining the pile of bodies in the hall.

  There was no law against killing bandits in the Shiga Kingdom, but I still didn’t entirely approve.

  “What?” She glared at me. “Are you going to tell me that was unchivalrous?”

  “I won’t tell you not to kill thieves, but please at least refrain from slaughtering people in front of others.”

  “Fine. I’ll be more careful next time.”

  Returning her sword to her scabbard, she went to put her armor back on in a corner of the room.

  Honestly, that’s so gross. I don’t want to see that.

  I sent the rescued captives to meet up with Liza outside, captured the other female thieves, collected some spoils, and secured a means of transportation before rendezvousing with everyone else.

  The transport in question included a covered wagon, a beast of burden called a “dullalkosaur” that seemed to be a cross between a hippopotamus and a dinosaur, a velociraptor-esque riding animal called a “runosaur,” and some horses.