Polymath Redux – What it means to be a cog
Chapter XII
“You want us to be the mistress’ maid and butler?”
Yda asks, though she honestly seemed more excited than she was confused or annoyed like she always was when speaking with Mordred. Noticing this Mordred felt a little haughty as his experiments on her was working as intended.
“That’s right, you’re going to be the head maid and butler to the rich merchant, Morgana Daltress.”
Mordred replied.
“Well, that doesn’t seem all that much different from now, but what specifically do we have to do?”
“You’ll be going on a small business trip to the Baliazoural empire’s capital. It’s for ‘official business’.”
As Mordred emphasized the word ‘official business’ it was followed by a distinct and painful silence. One so quiet that it would be extremely easy to hear even the drop of a pin. Cold sweat rushed down Yda’s back as she heard those words come out of his mouth, that she had been told to visit the enemy capital, ‘was he insane?!’ she thought.
However a look of arrogance and smile confirmed that he was indeed serious about this little trip. ‘This was it’, Yda thought to herself, she was going to either die in the hands of the enemy country or die by decapitation from disobedience. ‘Ah, mother in heaven, I’ll be coming to you soon’.
“Don’t worry, as long as you don’t mess up nothing’s going to happen to you. Anyway pack up your stuff since you’ll be leaving in two days.”
As if to offset her worries Mordred tried to promise her safety, and while she knew he was fairly strong she didn’t know just how strong. In any case since he didn’t seem like he would be coming it was all meaningless even if he was strong enough to protect her.
“…”
Yda dropped to the floor and on her knees in a dejected manner, repeating the words ‘it’s over’, to herself under her breath.
“Well, I’ll leave the details up to Morgana. I need to be heading out so good luck.”
“Ah! Wait you crook!”
Yda tried to chase after him but the closing sound made by the wooden doors simply accentuated the fear and panic in her heart. At the midst of such cold treatment it was Morgana who crouched down and started to calm her down with her soothing and motherly voice. ‘There, there~’ she would say as she stroke through her hair gently.
Unbeknownst to either of them, Grimal had a rather dissatisfied face as he saw Mordred leave. Despite only having been born just a few minutes ago he sort of understood the relationship between the man named Mordred and his master, but even so he didn’t really like the way she was being treated.
Still, as a devil he possessed a keen sixth sense and noticed that there wasn’t even an opening in Mordred’s defenses that he could exploit; he was special; powerful, at least far stronger than Grimal himself. Not even in his tone did he falter even once as he spoke in an authoritative and commanding voice. This fact, Grimal could not accept it, as a proud member of the devil race he should be able to exploit any mere human.
However when he could not find any opening he could not help but feel even a tiny bit of admiration towards him, still that did not mean he would tolerate any affront to his master for much longer.
“Thank you mistress, but are you okay with doing whatever that man tells you to? Though I’m not entirely sure on your relationship with him.”
Yda asked while embracing Morgana and planting her face inside her plentiful bosoms.
“I see, Mordred is… special, to me. But don’t worry Yda, when he says that he will make sure you’ll be safe, then he’ll make sure that that is the case.”
Yda wasn’t too satisfied with that answer but if it was the words of her mistress then perhaps there some merit to it. Besides, Morgana herself was going with her so at the very least that man would’ve done everything in his power to keep her safe. If she thought like that then she felt a little reassured.
…
“Rena, I’ll be out for a bit. If problems persist I might not be able to make it back until later tomorrow evening, but if everything goes fine I’ll be back by morning.”
Mordred informed her as he left.
“Oh… I see, okay I’ll be waiting for you here then.”
She gave an uneasy smile but nodded.
…
Upon leaving the inn, Mordred spent the next few hours rushing around the entire Xagontetian territory, though it wasn’t as big as he had initially thought. From the capital, Solaris to the village he had saved a two days ago, it took him only an hour at max speed. His current priority was to make up a map of key locations as maps were extremely expensive and controlled by the church, thus making it hard to trust.
He checked out how the villagers were doing and after confirming that they had continued to live on fairly peacefully he gave a wry smile as he proceeded with his tour, mapping out more locations.
By the time he had finished with the tour of all Xagontetian lands it had already been 2AM in the morning. How did he know the time? Well, as an avid gamer who had to keep track of raid timers he had a keen sense of internal biological time. Thus he could easily determine the time of day simply by the position of the moon and his body’s condition.
Also there was a watch built onto his [inventory].
Mordred took a look at his map, but of course since it was at the dead of night he wasn’t able to see properly… or that would’ve been the case if he didn’t have a certain skill called [night vision], which allowed him to see in dark areas, and in the game it would make him immune to the ‘blind’ status ailment when active.
Most of the lands on this territory wasn’t too harsh and or that notable, except for two places. Of which they were:
The first place was the ‘Dragon’s Passage’, which was actually passage way leading up to a small independent territory at the north of Xagontetia known as the ‘Dragon’s Domain’ which was inhabited by, as you would’ve guessed, dragons. Most dragons there seemed feral, those were the types to roam around the place.
However there were also sentient dragons that were able to take on a humanoid form much like Irina. They also had horns like her but unlike her they had long and thick tails in their humanoid forms. While Mordred was pretty confident in his ‘stealth’ abilities, he didn’t want to take the risk of alerting them of his presence, at the very least he was unable to determine if the being known as the ‘Dragon King’ resided there.
The second place was a dungeon at the edge of the country’s territory, which was southwest from Solaris. Actually there had been a few adventurers there partaking in entering the dungeon, something about a treasure at the bottom floor. While Mordred was interested in a dungeon he didn’t have the time for it.
The dungeon’s name was known as the ‘Forsaken Tomb’ which was filled with undead type monsters. Apparently no one had been to the lowest floor and even veteran adventurers could die by the 10th floor.
Other than that, there weren’t too many places noteworthy enough for Mordred to consider. The reason he had surveyed the entire country was so he could have stage a fake quest for the OMEGA rank adventurer group, ‘Hywel Knights’ to accept.
Actually there was a third place, however this place was a little less popular. Named the ‘Magician’s Chasm’, a little East off the Dragon’s Domain, meaning that it was northeast of Solaris. Coming close to the border between Xagontetia and the Baliazoural empire was a large chasm that was teeming with wild and natural mana. So much so that normal magicians and those sensitive to mana would get intoxicated just by breathing it.
This was the perfect place to stage a false request for the Hywel Knights. Since normal people would have a hard time even entering this place due to the mana, it would make sense that only veteran adventurers would take up the mission. Another fact was that the chasm was contained so there was no chance of anything leaking out, which meant that he didn’t have to take unnecessary risks.
Mordred took out something from his [inventory] and threw it down deep into the deep abyss. After a few moments an ungodly wailing could be heard from deep within. The item he threw down below was a [field boss summoning capsule], which differed from [insignias] as the summoned monsters were just neutral monsters and would attack anyone on sight. The purpose of these were to summon a field boss in an attempt to gather rare items from their drops without having to wait hours for a specific field boss to spawn.
Needless to say it was a cash item.
From the cries below, and that unholy wailing, Mordred had determined that the thing he summoned was a field boss monster known as [Spectral Eaters], which was a ghost type monster that specialized in high health regeneration and powerful magic and mental attacks. That field boss was unable to fly thus making it trapped under that chasm until someone helped it up, but that was highly unlikely as anyone who approached it would die.
For the second part of the false request creation scheme, Mordred summoned a life size puppet of himself with slightly altered looks. This was merely an a lifeless decoy created under the [puppeteer] subsection. With it Mordred threw it down the chasm, after all that puppet was to be his ‘missing brother’.
The request was simple, ‘to get help finding an older brother that went missing near the Magician’s Chasm’. With everything planned Mordred returned to Solaris to start his mission.
“[Master, it’s Irina.]”
Using her ‘communication medal’ that she had received from Mordred, she was contacting him. The range on this item was unlimited thus could be used under any circumstances, but the item itself wasn’t invulnerable and could be broken.
“[Irina, have you confirmed the status on those ‘Hywel Knights’?]”
Before she had left in the morning, Mordred had ordered her to keep track of the Hywel Knights, that was because it would be meaningless if they had another mission and wasn’t available to take his mission. Though to be honest it didn’t really matter too much as long as they were an OMEGA rank adventurer.
“[Yes master, they mentioned that they were currently taking a break from adventuring due to having completed a large mission.]”
“[I see, good job. Then I’ll proceed as planned.]”
“[Thank you my master. I shall continue to work hard for your praise.]”
“[Alright, see you back at the inn.]”
After that brief exchange they had ceased the conversation. Mordred was now returning to Solaris as fast at top speeds and as expected there were no hiccups in his scouting and that he could return back to the inn by early morning.
…
The next morning Irina had woken up early and left the inn at around 6AM. Her master had yet to return from his trip around the country making it a bit lonely, but Morgana was also there as a substitute so it wasn’t too bad. As long as even part of her master was with her then she could endure it as long as she needed to.
Irina had just returned a completed mission set by the adventurer’s guild yesterday. She didn’t have time to return it yesterday since after completing the quest she had received a message from her master to keep an eye on the Hywel Knights.
The job she received was a frustratingly dull and boring job of fighting low level slimes near the entrance of the town. She continued to cut down slimes with her magical sword for half a day and with each cut a ‘pushi~’ sound was made by the squashed slimes, she thought to entertain herself by running simulations in her head about rampaging in the city.
Of course she would never do it unless her master had given her permission to do so, but it was still some food for thought. While continuing on with this inane droll she was met by three young adventurers, they were the same one who had offered her a place in their party but was rejected by her.
“Ah! Hello miss Irina!”
The only girl of the group had called out to her. Apparently she had learnt her name somewhere in passing because Irina did not remember telling her about it, or maybe she did but simply didn’t remember because all of these humans were just like trash to her.
“Hello.”
Remembering rule number 2, Irina replied with a smile which accentuated her charisma.
“Hello.” “Good… morning I guess it is now.”
The other two greeted. Indeed it was only 6AM in the morning but from the way they had bags under their eyes it seemed that they had just returned after completing some sort of quest. She wondered why these weak kids were even living as an adventurer if they couldn’t even handle these kinds of jobs or if it took them this long.
“We just got back from our mission, aha it took much longer than we expected.”
The girl spoke out. She went onto describing what mission it was and how horrible of an experience it was. Their task was to exterminate some low level goblins in the forest but after doing so they got lost and had a horrible time trying to find their way back.
“I see.”
Irina replied with a distant smile.
“Yeah… then we’ll be heading back to our inn, it was nice meeting you miss Irina.”
The other two also nodded and said their goodbyes and left the guild after turning in their quests. After seeing them leave Irina breathed a sigh.
“You shouldn’t sigh like that, they say you lose a bit of your happiness whenever you do.”
From Irina’s side she heard the sound of a little girl’s. She was so surprised because she didn’t even register the child’s movements. To be caught unguarded like this, she felt a chill run down her back and also suffered a bit of damage to her pride, even if she wasn’t in her serious mode right now. For a puny human to take advantage of that gap in preparation was unforgivable.
She looked down and stared with a bit of an angry expression, but she tried to mask it behind an expressionless persona. The person she saw was a small girl, perhaps only around 9 or 10, with short blonde hair and a white one piece dress that matched her pale skin. She wore leather sandals and overall didn’t looked to be that suspicious or dangerous, but she couldn’t be overlooked.
The girl smiled back at Irina with an almost innocent seeming grin.
Rebirth Online World 