NOVEL NEXT Volume 7, Chapter 6: The brilliant daily life of the Saint, Part 3
The storm of romance abruptly began.
“W-we will escort you on your journey.”
Fannie was going to go investigate one of the smaller nations near the center of the continent, but it was about 1700km away.
For modern earth, it was a distance reachable within a day, a distance equal to about two countries in Europe, but, for horse-drawn carriages, it was about a month’s distance. Even if they were to use a fast warhorse-drawn carriage it was estimated to take over two weeks.
The Sail country, with the excuse that they couldn’t just let a maid travel alone to such a faraway place, attached someone to surveil her.
After all, this girl was one of the attendants of the [Saint], who had been able to take and block the attack of a hero right after being summoned. Because she might have some special magic, they wanted to confirm it, but more than that, danger might befall her, since the [Saint] didn’t make an excuse to leave the country.
That’s why Fannie’s departure was accompanied by five soldiers and three knights, with two large carriages drawn by three large warhorses. However, since Fannie’s mistress Yurushia had 15 people escorting her and four servants originally, she didn’t feel off, since they usually commuted by a four-horse carriage.
Although it was trivial, the knights appointed as escorts were the young sons of the aristocracy who were all between 15 and 17 and were meant to give the expedition gravitas.
In fact, three agents of the country were mixed into the soldiery, and they would move if anything happened, but the problem was the knights were formally supposed to be in charge, and all of them were riled up by Fannie’s adorable appearance.
“Yes, thanks~”
Soft silver hair that flowed smoothly to her shoulders.
Fine, white skin. Slightly moist cherry-pink lips. Beautiful eyes like gems that shone through her eyelashes……
A thing of devilish beauty that didn’t have any of the flaws of humanity.
Yurushia, her master, was slightly frightening because her beauty was too perfect, but Fannie, who always had a lovely smile next to her, was a hot topic amongst the knights that didn’t know them.
Fannie was still 12 years old, but even with their honor, it wasn’t so strange that she was being looked at that way.
In this world, noble children made their social debuts at 13, and would be recognized as marriageable at that time. For the men, the age of marriage was appropriate, but for noble ladies, it was desirable to marry between 15 and 20, so they might be engaged before they turned 13.
Especially in the case of Fannie and the Demons, because they looked like junior high school students due to their good looks, they were well within the ‘strike range’.
With that kind of situation, she was leaving Sail, but then there was another problem.
While it was comfortable, and it seemed that everything was alright, having a carriage with cushioned seats like a noble, and having all her lodging and meals on the way arranged for…
(Bored~~)
Fannie had nothing to do, and so she was very bored.
After all, if Fannie had been alone, she could have easily covered the distance in half a day.
Even when she wanted to beat up the bandits that appeared along the way in the wastelands, she didn’t get a turn at all because the knights were being awfully enthusiastic. At the beginning, she had been told by her mistress that she should hide her abilities as a Demon as much as possible while in Atra.
And……
“Fannie-san, I picked you some flowers. I wanted to present them to you…”
“Thank you~”
The youngest one here was the blonde knight Friedel, the youngest son of a Viscount, who handed her a flower with a smile. Fannie thought that if he was so free, it would have been better if they just sped up instead but received it with a smile.
Because this Friedel stuck to her side for some reason or another, Fannie, whose movements were being restricted, accumulated stress.
“…… can this state of affairs be changed?”
“Ms. Fannie, did you say something?”
“No”
The fifth day after Fannie started to think from the stress. She saw a group of zombies along the mountain road of a small country.
Although it was merely a small crowd, it was rare to see that many along this mountain road, which was neither a labyrinth nor a graveyard. In this world, there were “adventurers” unlike Atra, so it seemed that that would be the end of that party, who were a ramshackle bunch of varying ages and clothes.
“Ms. Fannie, please. stay back!”
“Everyone! Do not be afraid!”
“Draw your swords!”
The knights held their shields, and pulled out their longswords, while the soldiers turned towards the zombies with their spears.
Zombies in the movies had more strength than humans, but because it was a lesser spirit possessing and moving a corpse, the rotten muscles were slow to move, and they weren’t a big threat.
It was a monster that even novice adventurers could kill and couldn’t possibly be a match for knights and soldiers who’d received battle training, but the knights were strangely concerned under Fannie’s gaze and were very enthusiastic.
“I’ll do it too~”
Fannie had reached her limit, and since this was something her mistress had ordered of her, she wasn’t going to abandon it.
The movements of the knights slowed for a moment without a sense of urgency at all, as if they were shopping in a city.
“Eeh?! Ms. Fannie, it’s dangerous!”
Fannie’s Demonic ability was to show people a ‘nightmare’, which normally would have little effect on corpses, but such a thing wasn’t an issue for an [Archdemon].
“eei!”
As Fannie struck the foreheads of the zombies with a tree branch she’d picked up, the zombies collapsed like puppets whose strings had been cut.
What Fannie did was simply pouring pure Demon ‘Miasma’ into them.
The zombies themselves were moving under the power of a tiny bit of miasma, but just like how plants died if you overwatered them, the dense miasma of a Demon decomposed the zombie’s muscles in an instant, rendering them inoperable.
In the blink of an eye, with all four of them defeated, the stunned knights spoke out.
“…… oOH, is this the [Holiness] of those who serve the saint?”
It’s completely off the mark, but they couldn’t tell.
“Well then, please dismantle this.”
“……eh?”
The eyes of the knights were moving up and down from the corpses.
Nobody wanted to do something like disposing of a corpse, but they couldn’t let Fannie, a girl, do it, and so the knights began to disassemble the corpses together with the soldiers.
Fannie actually didn’t mind breaking the corpses with her bare hands, but since she didn’t want to get herself dirty, she hit them with a stick.
“…… Ah, Ms. Fannie, something came out.”
“Show me~”
As Fannie looked at the source of the voice, there was something like a crumbling gem around the heart.
“It seems different from the mana stones……”
“That’s right”
Mana stones were generated in the bodies of [Demonic Beasts] that had been mutated by magic, and the magic power would crystallize the blood, solidifying like a gallstone, and came mostly in shades of coal.
Of course, there were demonic beasts that were bloodless such as golems or skeletons, but between their ores, the bone meal, and the coagulated mana stones, there was surprisingly little difference.
In Atra, since demonic beasts didn’t come out much, mana stones were uncommon, but in this world, they were used like batteries for [Magic Tools], and as proof of subjugation for an adventurer when they slew them.
However, when the gems in the corpses were extracted and rolled on the ground, they crumbled into dust as if weathered by the wind.
“………”
Fannie pinched some of it between her fingers, recovering a little of it in her handkerchief.
“W-, what did you discover?”
“There was magic power~”
Fannie only replied Friedel’s question with the bare facts.
If one thought about it, there was no way that this zombie could have spawned spontaneously. A special magic power was felt from within the jewel that wasn’t buried within the body and felt like the zombie had been created intentionally with the mana stone supplying the magic power.
“That…… what is that then? Is it still a kind of mana stone?”
“I’ll need to show this to Yurushia-sama to examine.”
She didn’t know if the zombie was created by the jewel or if it was a simple byproduct. Crumbling to the wind, even as a by-product. it couldn’t be used as a gem or mana stone.
But Fannie’s curiosity was piqued by this stone.
Even with the sand from the jewel, Noa could still analyses it, and if she could find a gem that would keep its shape she would keep it as a souvenir and might be praised by Yurushia.
“Should I go out and defeat more?”
“…… What?”
Fannie was talking to herself, but Friedel replied to her, and she turned back to him with a smile.
“I will be going ahead.”
“………eh?”
As she said so, Fannie began to skip down the road lightly.
“……O, Oii”
“Follow her!”
“Someone, the wagon…… no, the horses”
In a hurry, they ran over to their beloved horses and gave chase, but no matter how hard they chased they couldn’t match her speed and catch up to Fannie, and before they knew it, that small maid’s figure disappeared from the sights of the knights. The first mission of the team ended in failure.
“Ms. Fannie…… I will not give up”
＊
A maid girl dressed in a white apron over a long black dress ran down the 1000km road in hours, distorting the space as she went.
Fannie was good at teleporting through space, but it was dangerous to travel long distances to places that one didn’t know, so she had to go there with her own legs first.
“Uhmm…… I think it’s around here.”
According to the intelligence report, it seems that that [Mass Zombie Generation] that had occurred in Gamble was slowly subsiding, and that it could be encountered in Krishare, a small country west of Sail but south of Gamble.
According to the sign that she’d seen along the way, Fannie was already in Krishare.
This country used to be larger than the four major powers, but since they did not have a hero, internal divisions occurred and the state split into several pieces.
Krishare’s name was all that remained, and while the past heroes of Sail were nicknamed the [Blue Dragon], Krishare’s were named [Kirin].
“Is that a castle?”
It was already deep at night, but Fannie’s eyes caught the shape of a castle a few kilometers ahead.
If that was it, Fannie thought that she was near the center of Krishare and ignoring the physics of going hundreds of kilometers an hour, changed direction to head north at a right angle.
If she proceeded at her current pace, she would reach Gamble the next afternoon.
If she could find a group of zombies on the way without reaching, she would be able to return to Yurushia the morning after.
“……Huh?”
She’d found a few zombies in mere seconds.
Fannie kept up her speed and plucked the hearts off of the zombies in passing.
“…… failed”
This time around, she managed to retrieve the heart without worrying about getting dirty, and the gems had been buried in them indeed, but when it touched the air, it crumbled away in the wind.
Although it seemed that “Jewel Zombies (temp)” appeared in the area, it seems that they hadn’t reached the stage of an ‘outbreak’ yet.
“Huuu……”
Once she stopped, she had trouble running again. Still Fannie wanted to bring Yurushia a souvenir.
“…… Should I just make one?”
Her thoughts began to stray off course.
She remembered the magical wavelength of the previous zombie. Changing the magic wavelength little by little, a zombie ‘experiment’ was being born by the enormous magic power of the Demon.
And Fannie went out to find a large cemetery in her immediate vicinity.
And as a result……
“……… It’s a success?”
More than one hundred of the zombies were spawned in a cemetery near the Krishare capital. it seems that the range had been increased too much, and she could even feel the presence of monsters in the forest that had been zombified.
Fannie hadn’t expected that she would manage it on her first try.
She thought that she would be trying various different patterns one by one using relatively new corpses in the cemetery, but not only had she succeeded suddenly, but she’d also made a whole load of zombies by making a mistake with the range.
In any case, just reporting this magic power pattern would be a great result for an initial investigation. After that, what would happen after would be up to her Mistress.
And Fannie, who was trying to rid herself of the zombies to fly back, felt the presence of someone fighting zombies in the distance.
She didn’t know if it was some adventurer from the country, but it would be handled completely by them, and she feared that the zombies would be examined.
“This might be bad……”
If there were people with analysis techniques on the level of Fannie or Noa, Fannie might become accused of being the criminal behind the zombie outbreak.
Then Yurushia would get angry. She was scared of Yurushia’s anger.
“………”
Fannie’s face hardened like pottery and turned into the face of a jester.
Her enormous magical power overflowed into miasma, and the nearby zombies turned to dust instantly.
And for the first time in the foreign world [Tess], the threat of an [Archdemon] with a vessel bloomed.
＊
“Fannie! That was fast, that’s great~”
“Ehheh~”
Yurushia stroked Fannie’s head and praised her for investigating the cause of the magic power that was creating zombies.
And after that, Fannie cleared out all of the zombies and collected the remaining gems, returning to Yurushia.”
The gems that Fannie had taken from the zombies she produced kept their original shape even after being exposed to the air, for some reason, so it became a good souvenir.
And after that…… the [Mass Zombie outbreak] that had happened in Krishare was ended in a day, and the fact that Fannie had done it was be hidden, but at the time, the surviving adventurers somehow only knew that the messenger of the [Saint] had come to rescue them from the national crisis, and only the fact that she had destroyed the zombies was spread, causing Yurushia’s fame to rise.
But we haven’t yet gotten to Rinne and the gang……
Author’s Notes:
Next time, Rinne’s tale.