113 – Situation

Once Mark had put out food and water for the dog, he and his new companions—two adventurers and an infected Granny Shroom—set off down the dirt path headed for Crestwood. The old lady hovered in the air, dragged along by the demon mage’s spell, as unnervingly placid as before. He couldn’t tell if she wasn’t trying to move so much as an inch, or really couldn’t. Probably the latter.

“Okay. Explanations,” he said after walking for a minute. “But maybe names first? I’m Mark—thanks again for the help. Things were getting dicey in there, not sure what I would’ve done if you hadn’t shown up. So yeah, appreciate it.”

Mark’s eyes had fallen on the demon as he spoke, since she seemed like the leader of the two girls. But she was visibly distracted, gazing instead at the hovering woman with a scrutiny that was contradictorily intrigued while dispassionate. He didn’t think she’d heard him.

She had said she intended to study Miss Agnes’ condition, but he hadn’t thought that meant during the walk to town.

He looked at the redheaded beastkin as his second option. The girl was more consciously present in the conversation, though when he met her gaze, her lips tightened into something that bordered on a frown.

“No problem,” she said, polite despite her plain suspicion of him. “Just doing what we can. I’m Saffra.”

“Nice to meet you.” He chose to ignore the girl’s expression. His attention turned to the still-distracted demon. “And this is…?”

Both he and Saffra waited for an answer, but the woman once again didn’t acknowledge him. He assumed not through any intentional insult—she really was that focused on her task.

“My master,” Saffra replied.

Master? His eyebrows rose. The woman seemed rather youthful, but he supposed demons were long-lived and thus ambiguously immortal-looking. Determining their age could be close to impossible. Add in some… height challenges… along with thick black robes to hide any hints of a womanly figure—if it existed—and telling the difference between ‘short’ and ‘young’ could be exceedingly difficult.

Or so he surmised. Crestwood didn’t get many demons. They didn’t get many visitors at all.

“And her name?” he prompted, raising his volume in an attempt to draw the woman’s attention. He wasn’t offended, exactly, by her continued disregard of him, but he felt that she was definitely being rude.

Yet despite his effort, the demon remained well and thoroughly occupied with her study of Granny Shroom; once more, she didn’t respond. He guessed he couldn’t be too upset, seeing how she was trying to help Crestwood’s reclusive-but-liked apothecary and sort-of witch. The demon was hardly intentionally snubbing him, or even ignoring him for something unimportant.

Introductions were what didn’t matter, really.

Mark raised an eyebrow at Saffra.

The girl deliberated on how to introduce her master. “Lady Nysari,” she eventually said, but only after a conspicuous hesitation.

The name made the demon—Nysari—finally glance at them. She seemed to run the conversation in her mind backward to catch up. “Ah,” she said. “Yes, my apologies. You can call me Nysari. My attention was… occupied.”

Lady Nysari? He faltered at that. The title didn’t necessarily mean nobility, but it would be the common explanation. Or perhaps she held a high enough adventuring rank that she’d been granted honorary peerage. Meaning mithril at the lowest.

A mithril rank appearing from nowhere wasn’t so outside the realm of possibility that he dismissed the idea outright—especially with the strange perils Crestwood had faced this past month—but he did find it unlikely. He reserved his judgment, but made a note to tread more cautiously.

“Not a problem, Lady Nysari,” he said. “You’re trying to heal her, I take it?”

“Heal?” The demon was quiet for a moment. “Yes. When I can. But for now, only analyzing. As I said, it’s complicated magic, and I don’t want to act before I’m certain it’s safe. Which might take time.”

“That complicated?” the beastkin asked, sounding for some reason shocked. “Even for you?”

Mark glanced curiously at the girl for her reaction. Why did she sound so surprised? Weren’t all mages bad with healing magic? Some could cast those spells, but even a full rank difference might barely let them compete with a [Priestess], for example.

Then again, maybe it was only expected a young teenager would have boundless faith in her master. She was just a girl, even if she had somehow made silver rank. Or maybe I’m missing context, he acknowledged. He didn’t actually know what this woman’s class was. She seemed like a mage, but he had no real proof that she was. Or that she was only that.

The demon hummed. “I’m fairly sure it’s what I suspected from the start. So yes. I need to keep analyzing. Please, continue with your explanations, Mark. I’m listening, just… occupied.”

The cat beastkin’s eyes seemed even more stunned by the demon’s words, and Mark had to stop himself from suspiciously asking why. In particular, he wanted to pry about what she meant by ‘what she had suspected from the start.’ He stayed focused, though.

“You said you’re here to help, so I think you have some idea of what’s going on,” he said as he gathered his thoughts. “I’ll start from the beginning and catch you up, at least with what I’m aware of. The bailiff and the rest of the town’s leadership would know more. You’ll want to get the full story from them.” They were surely keeping certain details under wraps—as was reasonable, even if it was frustrating. “It started with the team of mithril ranks from two months ago.”

He’d expected the momentous opening statement to pull the demon’s attention—an entire team of mithrils wasn’t common anywhere in the Kingdoms—but her focus had returned to Granny Shroom and didn’t waver. Only the cat beastkin gave him an interested look. He internally sighed and faced her. It seemed he would have to speak with the girl and not her master.

“Crestwood was starstruck, of course. I was starstruck.” A measure of heat rose onto his cheeks to admit that, but at the same time, any town would be fascinated by a passing-through squad of mithrils. “They were vague about what they’d come for, but they did say they had a lead on something. Hush-hush, couldn’t get much out of them. Next morning they left for the Middlerose—that’s the woods down south—and, well, that’s the last we heard from them.”

“Ever?”

He shrugged. “Again, last we heard. We thought that they’d done what they’d come for and hurried off.”

“They’d still come back for a sleep and resupplying.”

“Almost definitely. That’s what anyone who’s done real adventuring would assume. But Crestwood isn’t exactly drowning in real adventurers. Believe it or not, I’m one of the best that’s come from here in decades.” He snorted; he knew he wasn’t anything special in the grand scheme of things, though he’d once believed in that delusion. “Even I just kinda shrugged my shoulders, though. Not impossible they left in a hurry, a tight schedule maybe, and no one wants to assume the worst without proof. Anyhow… yeah. The monster showed up two weeks after that.”

Saffra waited, gravely, for him to continue.

“First sightings came as people started going missing… and as people started falling sick. It’s part of life that there’ll be monster problems, even we know that. But it’s not something Crestwood has had to deal with often. Definitely not at this level. I mean, look around.” He gestured at the serene woods surrounding them. The Southern Kingdom didn’t lack dangerous, monster-infested territories, but the patch of forest Crestwood itself was nestled in didn’t have so much as silver-rank territory bordering it. The Middlerose was the most dangerous zone nearby, and that was merely bronze sprinkled with silvers. “It was described as… human,” he said. “But with the wrong proportions, bulging in places, limbs moving in odd ways. Not a proper human at all, even if no one ever got a close look.”

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Saffra’s gaze flicked to Miss Agnes, making the obvious conclusion. “Further gone?” she murmured.

“Yeah,” Mark said grimly. “That’s what we think, now.”

“So one of the mithril ranks themselves? They… turned into something?” Her brow furrowed. “But you said one monster. Not several.”