Ren looked around with an anxious gaze.
“I don’t know for sure either… but I think he’s a dragon like the ones I once read about in a book.”
“What, a dragon?
Puhahaha!”
At Ren’s words, Eliza burst into uproarious laughter.
Ren quickly covered her mouth.
“Eliza!”
“Alright, alright.
But aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself if you’re talking about a dragon, like in the fairy tales?”
It wasn’t that Ren couldn’t understand Eliza’s reaction.
However, even if she couldn’t exactly put it into words, her intuition kept making her think that Shark was a dragon.
There was a clear reason for it too.
Due to her nature as a practitioner of Spirit Arts, Ren had an outstanding affinity for mana compared to anyone else.
She could feel an aura of mana from Shark so strong that it terrified her.
It was not an amount of mana that a human could possess.
“Let’s get going.
We don’t know what might happen if we’re late.”
“Got it.”
Startled by Eliza’s urgent words, Ren stopped her thoughts and stood up.
As they arrived, meal preparations began in earnest.
On one side, Shark was sitting in a peculiar cross-legged posture with his eyes lightly closed.
“Ren, get us some water.”
Gipel held out an empty bowl to Ren for boiling soup.
“Undine.”
As Ren focused her mind and called out, a small, transparent, angel-shaped spirit appeared in the air.
Ren was a water spirit summoner, but she was still only at the level of calling forth a lower spirit like Undine.
“Ah.”
Undine, who had appeared with a bright smile, let out a shriek as if startled by something and quickly hid behind Ren.
“Didn’t I tell you not to summon me when that inhuman person is around?”
“Ah, sorry.
I forgot.”
This was the third time she had called Undine while Shark was present.
But strangely, Undine was also afraid of Shark.
Ren held the bowl behind her back so Undine could comfortably fill it with water, turning her gaze toward Shark.
Undine’s reaction like this also contributed to her belief that Shark was a dragon.
In a corner, Bash was skinning a levito he had taken out of his bag.
A levito looked like a rabbit, but its size was about twice that of a rabbit.
However, it was woefully insufficient to fill the stomachs of the entire party.
So they planned to boil it into a soup along with bread that had already become as hard as stone.
On the first day of their journey, no one could eat because each person’s stomach churned at the thought of having eaten an orc.
Shark also acted as if it was nothing, but he couldn’t shake off the uncomfortable feeling that it was a pig raised on human flesh.