“Pip’s party’s not come back,” he said. “They were the ones searching the west.”
Pip... If I remembered correctly, he was a young lad who’d come from some farm. He’d been in a party with two other men, Harvey and Brennan. “How long have they been gone?”
“They said they’d take ten days at the longest. They’re over by two already. And those guys have skills.” He was obviously implying that something must have happened for them to be this late.
“All right. We’ll go out and search for them.” I thought for a moment about who should go. It was possible that there had been some kind of accident, or they’d been attacked by wild beasts. But there was also the remote possibility that Pip’s party had been spotted by the demons’ lookouts. In which case, we’d need party members with combat skills. Also, to be absolutely sure we could follow their trail, we’d need a hunter or ranger skilled in tracking.
“Me, Menel, and you are definites. Also, whichever two parties you think are most skilled at forest exploration, I’d like to merge those into our search party as well. Are you okay with that?”
Reystov nodded to say he was happy with my suggestion. “I’ll get everyone together right away.”
Our party members gathered quickly in the village square. I explained the situation to them simply. I could talk about the details once we were on the move.
“Pip and the others are two days past their return date. We’re going to go searching for them, but there’s a possibility that there’s been more than just an accident. They may have been spotted by the demons’ lookouts. If that turns out to be the case, we may also end up in a battle against demons.” When I said that, I noticed everyone’s faces visibly tense up.
“It’ll get a bit more peaceful around here if we take them out.” Menel nodded in response.
It wasn’t a certainty that there’d be demons—it might just have been a simple accident that had befallen them—but the tension in the air was palpable as we all got ready and headed out.
“Hey, uh.” Menel called to me as we were walking. We had followed the trail of Pip’s party and were just about to enter where they had been planning to search. “I gotta... thank you.”
We were hanging back from the group. Ahead of us, Reystov and the other adventurers were deep in discussion about the trampled leaves dotted about the forest floor.
“Umm... For what?”
“A bunch of stuff.” Menel’s jade eyes weren’t looking at me. In fact, he was practically facing the other way as he talked. “Without you, I would’ve hit rock bottom. And now I’m living for something good, and that’s ’cause of you. So... Uh... Yeah.” He paused awkwardly for a moment, trying to get the words out. “Thanks, brother," he said, still looking in the other direction.
I felt something warm filling my chest. “I’m the one who should thank you. Thanks for helping me out when I was so ignorant about the world.” I smiled and nodded at him. “But...”
“What?”
“Say it again while looking at me.”
“Feck off!” He stormed away, still refusing to look me in the eye or even turn his face towards me. The other adventurers collectively ooh’ed in our direction.
The search for Pip’s party continued.
It took several days before we found their bodies.
Several days after we left the village in search of Pip’s party, the dense greenery of the forest which had been around us for so long disappeared, and a blue sky came into view. What lay ahead of us after we exited the forest of green was a valley of craggy rocks. Beyond the valley was more forest, and beyond that, I could see a reddish-brown mountain range: the Rust Mountains. It was probably safe to assume this valley had been created by a flow of water pouring down the mountainside. The flow had either changed or dried up, and only the valley and rocks had been left behind. The valley wasn’t that deep, but it ran for a good distance, and where the riverbed must once have been, there were a lot of round stones lying around.
Pip and the others had been scattered around that area. It looked like the kind of mess left behind after a young child’s playtime—as if a child had gotten their hands on something insubstantial, like a paper doll, and clumsily pulled it apart, ripped it into many randomly sized pieces, thrown them everywhere, and then moved on to something else.
Menel and the others chased away the birds and other animals that had gathered around. Crows took off, their black wings flapping noisily, and other carrion feeders large and small darted away in all directions.
“Look at this.” Menel’s eyes stopped on some tracks. They were the footprints of a beast, stained with blood, each about as large as the shield I had over my back... “Extremely large. What kind of beast is this?” Menel asked, and the other adventurers also gathered around and stared hard at the tracks.
“Hm... Not sure.”
“It’s big. Bigger than a manticore.”
“A wild creature living in the valley? Or...”
Was the demons’ stronghold somewhere deep in this valley? I got that far in my thinking when one of the adventurers said in a chipper voice, “Well, they got to fight a monster. Good way to go. I’ll bet Pip, Harvey, and Brennan are pretty damn satisfied with that, and kicking themselves, too.”
“Yeah. Bet they’re saying, ‘How awesome would it have been if we could have killed that?!’”
“They died good deaths. Adventurers’ deaths!”
“O gods of good virtue, please grant their souls repose!”
“Have a last drink on me, lads,” one of the adventurers said, and took a bottle out of his inside pocket and poured its contents over the scattered body parts. I did my part too, using the blessing Divine Torch to make extra sure that their corpses wouldn’t turn undead. Menel and a number of the others talked and kept an eye over the area while Reystov went around the bodies collecting clippings of hair, which were often kept as mementos.
“Hmm?” Reystov sounded confused. “There’s only two heads. They’ve been damaged so badly it’s hard to tell, but...”
I looked around. Now that he’d mentioned it, I was kind of getting the feeling there should have been more here. “Probably just got eaten, right?”
“Plausible.”
“No... wait,” Menel said, raising his voice. He’d noticed something. I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw that there was a sword, a shield, and gauntlets scattered on the ground along a line that seemed to be heading into the valley.
“Did he... run away shedding his equipment?”
“Why into the valley?”
“If it blocked him from going into the forest, he probably wouldn’t have had another choice.”
“Good point.” We all nodded to each other and went down into the valley to check.
We walked down into the valley.
Helmet, breastplate...
After following the trail of dropped items that far, something suddenly occurred to me, and it seemed to have occurred to Menel and Reystov at the same time. “That’s weird...” I muttered. Menel and Reystov both nodded in agreement.
“Yeah. This is strange.”
“What’s strange?” one of the others asked.
“The ground in this valley is pretty bad...”
There were loose rocks scattered everywhere. It certainly wasn’t suited to sprinting. And as for useful obstacles to hide behind, there was only the occasional large boulder; the view we had down the valley was actually pretty clear.
Let’s assume that the large, unknown beast had been preoccupied with slaughtering the other two people. Even if that was the case—in a place like this, over this distance, there was no way a human could get away from a beast of that size.