It took Bella less than ten minutes to slaughter the hundreds of Voidnir.
When she swung her claws, monsters were torn into three pieces, and when she kicked, they burst like water balloons.
She grabbed them as if swinging a flyswatter and slammed them into the wall, and some were flattened and stuck there like jerky.
It was truly an astonishing massacre.
“Ugh, the smell.”
Eugene and Echo wore disgusted expressions.
It was a complete mess.
Bella was covered in pieces of flesh and bodily fluid sprayed by the dying Voidnir.
If someone who knew nothing saw her, they would believe she had crawled up from a hell full of corpses.
“We really ought to show the others what you look like fighting.”
“Is there some problem?”
“Don’t you think the fact that you don’t know is already a problem?”
“Stop talking in circles and say it properly. If you say it like that, I won’t understand.”
Most men were not even this dull.
Eugene sighed.
After the Voidnir cleanup ended, Echo remained at the scene, saying he would collect samples.
Meanwhile, Eugene began wiping Bella’s ruined body clean. She had said it would take too long alone, so he was helping her.
Bella had taken off her upper garment.
As if she felt no shame, she had her bare back exposed while wiping her arms and legs.
And Eugene was wiping Bella’s hair.
Her hair was incredibly long. If she did not tie it up in a knot and fasten it like a horse’s tail as she usually did, it would reach her heels.
“Isn’t it hard to manage this?”
“What management does it need? If I wash it roughly with water, it becomes clean.”
“Dragons are so damn broken.”
Eugene muttered that and glanced at Bella. It was because the volume he could feel even from beyond her back was tremendous.
Bella said,
“Stop stealing glances. Those eyes might be plucked out.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Eugene diligently wiped her hair. Then he suddenly said,
“This probably isn’t the only one.”
Bella sighed.
“……You mean a hidden colony.”
“Yeah. For now, it seems certain the Voidnir bastards hid troops underground.”
“But the colony was dormant. There was a creature that looked like a sentry, but it didn’t seem particularly active.”
“They did that on purpose. So they could wake them up when necessary and use them as troops.”
“…….”
“The problem is, as you said, the colony was dormant. It wasn’t moving around on its own, looking for nutrients and expanding its sphere of influence.”
“Ah!”
Realizing what he meant, Bella briefly exclaimed.
“In other words, someone is personally building colonies underground. By directly planting Gongha Trees…… or some method like that.”
Eugene nodded.
“Yeah. Human-mimicking Voidnir. We need to find those bastards quickly.”
As they talked, even that long hair had been wiped clean before they knew it.
Eugene moved Bella’s hair to one side and was about to bring the towel to her still-dirty back.
Tak. Bella turned and grabbed Eugene’s hand.
Her vertically split crimson pupils glared at him.
“Where do you think you’re touching?”
Eugene said indifferently,
“Your back.”
“I asked you to wipe my hair. I never asked you to wipe my body.”
No, after all the way she had casually stripped off her clothes without hesitation.
Eugene looked at Bella as if dumbfounded.
When Bella had first asked for help, Eugene had actually been the one flustered.
He had thought, Even if I don’t look like a romantic interest to you, isn’t this too much?
Back then, she had said it did not matter, but now she was telling him not to touch her body.
‘What exactly is your standard for embarrassment?! ……Wait.’
Eugene grinned as an amusing thought came to him.
“Why are you getting embarrassed about something like that now? Think about the time we returned from. We aren’t old, but we’re at an age where we’ve experienced everything there is to experience. Yet you’re acting like some virgin maiden over me wiping your back…….”
Eugene’s casually prattling words stopped.
Because the reaction that came back was the exact opposite of what he had expected. He had thought she would snort and tell him not to get cocky.
Bella’s face had turned bright red.
‘Huh?’
Soon, the red of embarrassment changed into the red of anger.
It also seemed, just slightly, as if tears had appeared at the corners of her eyes.
An expression he had never seen before.
Eugene realized that he had touched her reverse scale.
“Get lost!”
Bella rushed at him, grabbed him by the collar, and,
without giving him time to say anything, threw him off the open crater cliff.
As Eugene was flung away, he thought,
Sometimes she seems like a man, and sometimes she seems like a woman.
Sometimes she seems mature, and sometimes she seems clumsy.
“Really. I can’t get a grasp on her at all.”
Muttering that, he began thinking about what magic could save him as he fell endlessly.
***
Count Echo Helstein’s escort during the exploration of the subterranean monster habitat.
That had been the original mission.
There had been incidents such as discovering a Voidnir colony on the first day of the mission, but after that, things were fine.
They floated a boat over lava.
They restrained Count Helstein when he screamed at them not to kill the creatures.
They were chased by hundreds of subterranean monsters, and various other happenings occurred.
But Eugene and Bella were able to complete their first mercenary mission without issue.
When the contract period ended.
As soon as they came back to the surface, the two began investigating the surface, using the location of the first Voidnir colony they had discovered as a reference point.
And they found it.
A strange tree with stems that writhed like a living creature and purple leaves.
Just as Eugene had said, a Gongha Tree was growing on the surface.
And not only one.
A full three Gongha Trees were discovered in the Ascalon Mountains.
Spreading the request fee they had received from Count Helstein among the villagers living halfway up the mountain had produced results.
Eugene said,
“We found three in just one week. If we investigate properly, who knows how many more there might be?”
Bella nodded gravely. Before the two stood a strange tree rising from the center of a barren winter forest.
Its purple stem writhed as if alive.
Despite the subzero weather, its lush leaves were diamond-shaped and glittered like jewels.
At a glance, the leaves looked beautiful. But they were monstrous things that sucked the lives and blood of nearby creatures.
As proof, the corpses and bones of dead animals were scattered around the tree. Because it had viciously sucked away nutrients, the surrounding ground had already been devastated and turned ash gray.
And seeing it, Gilbert Maynard said,
“It is a Ghost Tree.”
A bushy beard and a body packed with muscle.
Gilbert was the biologist Echo Helstein had introduced to them.
When he recognized the Gongha Tree, Eugene no longer even looked surprised.
“A Ghost Tree, you say? Do you know it well?”
“Not in detail. I have only seen it in old ancient texts.”
“Do you still have that book?”
“No. It was not particularly useful, so I sold them all when I moved.”
From a collecting cage made by weaving bark at his waist, Gilbert took out a mouse.
Then he lightly tossed it beneath the Gongha Tree.
“Squeak!”
The mouse sprang up and sniffed the surrounding smells.
Despite the bones of squirrels, deer, and the like lying right beside it, it did not seem to sense anything unusual and approached the Gongha Tree while twitching its nose.
Then, at one moment.
Hsssssst!
A thick branch began squirming like a tentacle.
Then it moved the diamond-shaped leaf that had been angled up toward the sky and pierced through the mouse’s body in an instant.
The mouse screamed with a squeak.
But only for a moment.
Squirm, squirm.
The Gongha Tree’s branch moved as if sucking something in, and the mouse instantly became a shriveled corpse and fell to the ground.
Gilbert observed it carefully.
“It has strong aggression. And yet the prey does not sense danger.”
He sniffed the air like the mouse from just now, then shook his head.
“Hmm…… It does not seem to be something that can be sensed by a human’s sense of smell, but there appears to be something that lowers vigilance.”
Muttering, he personally moved his feet and approached the Gongha Tree.
Even though he had just seen how the mouse had died, he strode forward.
Should I stop him? Just as Eugene wondered that and wove magic in preparation for an emergency.
As if it had been waiting for Gilbert to approach, the Gongha Tree lunged at him.
Tak!
Gilbert casually stretched out a hand and snatched the tree branch that had been aiming for his neck like a snake.
Then he observed it as it wriggled like a freshly caught live fish, took scissors from his work bag, and snipped off its tip.
He held up the still-living, still-moving branch and the leaf hanging from its end, then turned back to the two.
“I will take this as a sample. I will try planting it myself and see if it sprouts.”
Even before a monster tree that killed people, he did not waver. Eugene whistled at his composure.
Bella spoke quietly beside him.
“He is a scholar, but he is also quite skilled as a warrior. Even if he enters a Voidnir colony, he should be fine as long as he does not encounter something like a queen.”
If Bella vouched for him, it could be trusted. Eugene set aside his needless worries and handed Gilbert a purse filled generously with money, telling him to use it for research expenses.
Clink-
After weighing the purse of money in his hand, Gilbert grinned.
“By the way, what are you two trying to do? As for me, any interesting organism is good, so I do not mind.”
Eugene smiled.
“I am not much different. I am merely interested in this organism.”
It was different from before. Eugene and Bella were now in a position where they had to judge and move on their own, rather than follow someone else’s orders.
In that case, the more they knew about the enemy, the better.
That alone was the reason Eugene had hired Gilbert.
Gilbert did not pry further into the reason beyond that.
He merely left behind the words, “See you next time,” and ambled away.
Watching Gilbert’s back as he left, Bella said,
“……Will that man not be assassinated at this rate? Researching the Voidnir so openly is dangerous.”
Eugene shook his head.
“No, it’s fine. He said it too. There were records about the Gongha Tree. Those bastards didn’t arrive just a day or two ago.”
“…….”
“They’ve been preparing for at least a hundred years, maybe even centuries. So they won’t try to move personally over just anything.”
“I see.”
Bella nodded in understanding. Eugene exhaled with a sigh.
“What I’m wondering about is something else.”
“What is it?”
“How exactly did Count Echo Helstein predict the bastards’ large-scale invasion?”
“Hmm, is that not because the count went around underground often? Like this time, he must have discovered one of their colonies somewhere.”
“No. Discovering a few small-scale colonies like that would make it hard to immediately connect them to a large-scale invasion.”
That was true.
Perhaps Bella had realized, like Eugene, the bottomless nature of the Voidnir’s plans, because she clenched her teeth.
“There is something more. Definitely.”
As Eugene said that, he examined the corpse of the mouse that had just died and the bone fragments scattered nearby.
The sight from his memories flashed by.
A forest of Gongha Trees planted too densely to count, and the corpses of people piled beneath them.
That sight could not be allowed to repeat.
They had to stop it. No matter what.
Eugene looked at Bella.
“Let’s dig into it step by step from now on.”
“Right.”
Bella nodded and tapped Eugene’s shoulder.
‘Is it because there are two of us?’
Even though a heavy responsibility rested on them, his shoulders did not feel that heavy.
Eugene and Bella handled several more mercenary missions after that as well.
Naturally, their clients’ satisfaction was high.
And slowly, rumors of the appearance of the Twinstella Dragon Knights began to spread.
A month passed like that.
The vacation they had received by leaving training camp early had come to an end.
The day when the two would return to the Order was drawing near.