The Fervent Sand Baths

by Nagaharu Hibihana

  We hadn’t even thought of that.

  Both Clena and Rulitora were behind me after defeating the first sandworm. My broadaxe was still stuck in the ground after I’d used it to channel my MP into the earth. Though even if it wasn’t, I still couldn’t face such an enormous enemy with this tiny weapon. My round shield was pretty big, but not nearly enough to stand a chance.

  I had no choice but to abandon the broadaxe and run. So I decided, and prepared to jump away.

  “...O spear, go forth.”

  Suddenly, a giant silver spear came flying down from the starry sky and pierced through the second sandworm. The spear propelled the sandworm into the ground and stopped its movements for just a second. But it soon pulled itself out and came flying toward me again.

  It all happened in a flash, mere seconds, actually. But it had given me enough time to try a different strategy.

  “Summon... spirit!” I grabbed the handle of the axe I was about to forsake and channeled my MP into the earth again.

  This time, I didn’t summon cones. A giant enemy called for a giant axe.

  Using the edge of the axe that was stuck in the ground as its core, I created a giant black blade by condensing the earth around it.

  The blade was bigger than my entire body. It was an earthen blade, compressed using every last bit of my MP.

  Of course, there was no way I could carry it. Even if the blessings had given me a little more physical power.

  I embedded my arms and legs around the handle sticking out of the ground, then braced the blade against the sandworm.

  The sandworm didn’t react to the giant axe that suddenly appeared before it and flew straight at me. Upon which the giant blade sliced the even larger body right in two.

  “Urgh!”

  I could feel the impact reverberating through the axe’s handle. I poured all my MP into the blade so it wouldn’t break.

  Red blood came raining down from above as I kept enduring the attack, until the momentum eventually dwindled. I remained there in place for a while, keeping an eye on the sandworm, but it didn’t move again. We managed to defeat the second sandworm, too.

  I let out a sigh in relief, and cut off my MP. The blade of the axe which was now bigger than me bulged out, then returned back to the earth it came from. The bulging soil opened up the sandworm’s body, and moonlight shone down on the place I was standing.

  “...Uuugh.” I got out of there as soon as I could after getting a crash course on sandworm anatomy.

  “It’s so damn long!” I had cut it lengthwise, so it took me a while to run all the way past its head.

  We offered our prayers to the two sandworms, and after absorbing their blessings into ourselves, a girl descended from the sky sitting on what looked like a large plate.

  She was a petite girl with cocoa-colored hair—it was Rium, who should have been traveling with Haruno right now.

  “Rium?!”

  “It’s been a while.”

  I raised my voice in disbelief, but she remained calm and responded quietly. She was as aloof as ever.

  As I watched her land from her disc onto the ground, I remembered. She always wore a large cloak, which must have been to shield her from the wind as she flew through the air. In any case, seeing as how she came from the sky, she must have been the one who shot that silver spear.

  “Oh yeah, that spear.” I looked over at the sandworm, but couldn’t spot the spear anywhere on its body.

  “That was a one-use item, so don’t worry about it.” Rium said, then showed me a thin silver spear in her hand. It was about the size of a pencil.

  “I can make these bigger using magic, but I can’t return them to their original size. They just turn into powder after I stop using my magic.”

  “Come to think of it, you did save Haruno back in Jupiteropolis...”

  I’d heard the story, but she must have used this silver spear back then, too. And the plate she was flying on was called the “flying disc.”

  Nevertheless, the mass of the small spear and the big spear were totally different. This was just a theory, but she might have made up for the remaining mass using MP. If that were the case, the original spear would turn into particles that spread out among the larger one, and then when you’d stop using magic they would disperse. I applied the concept of atoms and molecules, assuming the powder worked in a similar fashion, but I didn’t think I was too far off.

  As I thought that, Clena came rushing over.

  “Touya, do you know her?”

  “She’s one of the party members of the other Hero of the Goddess I told you about.”

  “Ohh, Haruno.” Clena stared fixedly at Rium.

  Rium hid behind my back, maybe shy about meeting someone for the first time. Even though I was completely soaked in the blood of the sandworm.

  “Rium!”

  “...Long time no see, Rulitora.”

  Rulitora followed soon after, and Rium seemed a bit relieved at another familiar face.

  “Clena, can you call Roni back?”

  “No problem. Wait just a second.” Clena said, then went to light her sword in the fire again, and launched a fireball off into the night sky. She waited a beat, then fired three more in succession.

  “She should be back shortly.”

  “Alright. Rulitora, should we leave this area after Roni comes back?”

  “There’s a chance that others will appear scavenging for the sandworm corpses. We should leave as soon as possible.”

  “Is there anything you can scavenge from these things?”

  “Just their fangs, at most.”

  I expected as much. Its large, worm-like body wasn’t covered in any hard scales, nor did its flesh seem edible.

  Rulitora and I split up duties to retrieve anything still intact, when Roni came back in the carriage.

  “Lady Clenaaa!”

  Roni stopped the carriage and leaped from the driver’s seat onto Clena. She was protecting the horse and carriage, but having to escape by herself must have made her so worried.

  Unlike Rulitora and I, who had been fighting at close range, Clena was a long-distance spell-caster and thus wasn’t covered in blood and still perfectly huggable.

  And then there was Rium, who was clinging herself around my waist. I couldn’t tell at the moment, but her cloak was probably soaked in blood.

  In any case, Clena and Roni hadn’t met Rium before. Since I was acquainted with both parties, I needed to be their mediator.

  “Let me introduce you, Roni. This is Rium. She’s part of Haruno’s party, who I mentioned to you before, and she really helped me out of a pickle just now.”

  Rium peeked out from behind my back and gave a slight nod.

  “And these two are Clena and Roni. They’re the two party members I met in the Torano’o settlement that I mentioned in my letter to Haruno.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Rium.”

  “Nice to meet you!”

  “...Nice to meet you, too.”

  Clena slouched herself slightly and reached a hand out to Rium, who looked between it and her face for a bit, then timidly reached her own hand out from behind me and shook it.

  “Aww, how cute~!” Roni proclaimed as she watched. She was the youngest of the group and we regarded her as our little sister, so she must have been glad to meet Rium, who was even younger than her.

  Rulitora called out to us, having collected all the fangs. I had accidentally left all the work to him as I busied myself introducing the girls to each other.

  “Sir Touya, we should depart as soon as possible.”

  “You’re right. I want to hear why Rium is here, but that can wait until later.”

  We needed to leave before another sandworm appeared.

  “Before that, the two of you need to wash that blood off. We might leave a scent trail.”

  “Oh, good point.”

  Following Clena’s orders, I started taking water out from the Unlimited Bath to wash off the blood. />
  “...Correction, the three of you.” Her gaze was directed at Rium, whose cheeks were as beet red as her cloak from clinging on to me.

  We set off on the carriage again after rinsing off most of the blood, creating a distance between us and the corpses. They detected their prey through sound, so we made sure to keep alert and move as quietly as possible.

  We moved south.

  We headed in that direction to get as close to the spring as possible.

  Our first destination, the Sage’s Spring, was a little further to the south from here. The remains of the gate, which we hypothesized were connected to the desert kingdom, were located to the southwest of that spring.

  I gazed up at the night sky from the driver’s seat and saw a myriad of stars and a full moon. It was a seldom seen view back in my world. I knew the saying “million-dollar view,” but you couldn’t put a price on this.

  As I held the reins, Clena peeked out from over my shoulder and inspected our surroundings. Her voluptuous breasts were brushing against my cheek, but unfortunately, the only thing I could feel was the smooth fabric of her surcoat and the hard leather armor underneath. The metal reinforcements on the armor felt particularly cold.

  “Can we see the Sage’s Spring from outside the void?”

  “I heard there’s a tall tree near it, but I imagine not in this rain.”

  Considering it was nighttime, we’d likely have some trouble spotting said tree.

  We came across a large boulder and decided to camp there for the night. The boulder was large enough that even if all five of us wrapped ourselves around it holding hands, we still wouldn’t be able to form a full circle. Even a sandworm shouldn’t be able to fit a rock this size in its mouth. And if one reared its ugly head, we’d just take refuge on top of the boulder.

  We immediately parked the carriage next to the boulder and started setting up camp.

  “All right, we’ll take a bath after dinner, then we’ll take turns keeping watch—”

  “No, please rest inside for tonight.”

  All four of us looked at Rulitora.

  “...Why do you say that?”

  “I can handle a surprise attack from a sandworm by myself. That monster is in a class of its own,” he said confidently.

  We had taken turns keeping watching since leaving Ceresopolis, but from Rulitora’s perspective, Clena and Roni were still inexperienced, to say nothing of me. Rium was experienced enough in traveling to journey from Athenapolis to Jupiteropolis on her own, but I wasn’t planning on making her stay up late.

  “...Well, I can’t argue with that.”

  “I guess even my nose can’t detect a monster that attacks from underground.”

  Clena and Roni agreed, so we decided to sleep inside the Unlimited Bath that night.

  Meanwhile, Rium was still clinging on to my waist. Back in Jupiteropolis, she’d stuck to Haruno or Sera, but now that they weren’t around, I had to fill in for them.

  Speaking of which, she was currently wearing my spare cloak. Hers had gotten dirty and was now inside the Unlimited Bath. Roni said she’d wash it later.

  Tonight’s dinner was the usual vegetable soup. We’d have a round flatbread made by kneading flour and water, which we filled with salted and peppered beans and potatoes and cheese on top, making for a simple sandwich. Roni whipped up the soup and sandwiches like a pro, while Clena and I made the bread with Rium’s help.

  We made the bread so it could be baked without fermentation, so it would be done in no time. It was similar to the Indian bread called chapati. You could even compare it to a puffy okonomiyaki.

  I started a fire while kneading the dough. Clena had gone over to assist Roni after she finished kneading her share. Normally we’d have Rulitora help with physical jobs like this, but sand lizardmen weren’t exactly known for their dexterity, so we figured it best not to ask. He stayed away from cooking duties, instead tending to the horse after his bath.

  Right, I’d better make his chapati twice as big.

  I squatted down and cooked the chapati like pancakes on a frying pan, and then mumbled to myself,

  “I should buy a griddle next time we stop in a city.”

  “For a shield?”

  Rium responded, squatting next to me with her eyes locked on the chapati.

  “No, not that. I was thinking that it’d be nice to have a big griddle for cooking. Then we could cook several of these at once, right?”

  A griddle with raised edges and a thin bottom like a frying pan that we could use for barbecues would be great.

  She turned her gaze up slightly, and after giving it some thought, nodded as if her mind had connected the dots. She may have been imagining a huge griddle with stacks of chapati lining up to be baked.

  “But it’d be heavy.”

  “I can just leave it in the Unlimited Bath. Fortunately, things don’t rust in there.”

  “...It can do that?”

  “Yeah, though I only realized that after we started traveling.”

  Come to think of it, this would be something Haruno and her party didn’t know yet.

  I explained other features I had learned about the Unlimited Bath during the journey to Rium while grilling the chapati. She sat there, squatting next to me the entire time, often nodding in sincere interest.

  After we finished cooking dinner, we all sat in a circle and ate. Rulitora and I both ate our sandwiches with our bare hands. I had made his twice as large as ours, but it still looked small in his hands.

  Our meal was modest compared to the ones we had at the temple, but personally, I preferred these. It was like fast food, simple and informal.

  Rulitora, who had gulped down his meal and was licking the cheese off his claws, asked Rium, who was still munching away.

  “Oh yeah, Rium. What are Haruno and her party doing right now?”

  “They’re staying at my master’s residence and working with the pilgrims to eliminate the monsters in the city.”

  Rium paused from eating for a second and looked up to give him a reply.

  “She’s probably trying to gain practical battle experience while also establishing her reputation as a hero,” Clena said. Rium bit down on her sandwich and nodded in response.

  Haruno had chosen a way to gain battle experience that helped people at the same time. Unlike me, who was heading straight for the old base of the demon lord, her methods were logical and steady.

  Rium finished eating her sandwich and inquired me.

  “Why are you here, Touya? Do you still have business in the void?”

  She was sharp. Considering how she had gone out to look for me and appeared right before we entered the void, she was probably already on to something.

  “...Is it the desert kingdom?” Rium tilted her head.

  Which one of them had noticed? My bet was on Haruno, the only one not accustomed to this world’s common sense.

  I glanced at Clena, who sighed and gave me a nod.

  “Though we’re on separate journeys, I’ll trust you since you’re Touya’s friend. If you’ve already found out that much from the little information we gave, then I can count on you.” Clena laughed while saying that, but Roni was fidgeting nervously. She had every right to be worried.

  “Actually, you giving us little information was a big hint in itself,” Rium said nonchalantly.

  “...I see.” Clena drooped her shoulders hearing such an unexpectedly simple reply.

  I knew where she was coming from. The legend of the “desert kingdom” was treated as just a fairy tale here. Hardly anyone actually believed it.

  There were people who chased after get-rich-quick schemes in this world. Those were the battle ravers. Large-scale battles weren’t especially frequent, so this was all they had to make money. Tired of the daily grind and wanting to find riches, they would scavenge their way around ancient ruins, abandoned mansions in the countryside, and subjugated thief hideouts.

  And yet, even they ignored the desert kingdom.
That was how much the legend lacked credibility.

  However, practically all information on the void had been erased. Thus, if one were traveling to the void, that was the only likely destination.

  Come to think of it, I had written in my letter that I had met Clena and Roni in the Torano’o settlement. If she had guessed from that that our next destination would be the void, it wasn’t unreasonable to presume we’d set our sights on the desert kingdom, since it was the only legend worth chasing down in the area.

  “Well then, I’ll begin. The desert kingdom is where the demon lord and demon race were born. We’re making our way there to investigate it.”

  “The demon lord...!” Rium’s eyes opened wide. Even she hadn’t predicted that. “I get why Touya is helping you out now. Haruno was right.”

  “Haruno? What do you mean?”

  “That’s what she said. Touya must be helping them for a very important reason, and they need the assistance.”

  “An important reason...”

  “She said you weren’t the type to abandon those in need.”

  “......”

  It was true that I couldn’t leave Clena and Roni to travel through the desert on their own, but I was both happy and embarrassed that she had seen through me. No, I was mostly just embarrassed.

  “Heh, she believes in you so much, Sir Touya.♪” Roni cheerfully teased me, like she was the one being complimented.

  Rulitora also nodded along, his arms folded.

  Rium was acting proud of herself for some reason.

  Clena, however, had her hand over her mouth, trying to keep herself from bursting into laughter.

  You’re acting like that knowing full well how embarrassed I am, aren’t you? Oh, I’ll make sure to join the fun next time Roni gives you a compliment.

  Oh yeah, I should ask what Rium was doing here now that we’d settled down.

  “So what are you doing here, Rium? Oh, and thanks for saving me earlier, by the way.”

  “I came to deliver that.”

  “That?”

  “The box.”

  “What box?”

  I tilted my head in confusion, but for some reason all I got in response was Rium tilting her head, too. She wasn’t holding anything box-like, though.