Volume 3 Chapter 9.2

Volume 3 Chapter 9.2

Translator: Reflet

Editor: Weasalopes

「We understand. What shall we do with the car?」

「We’d prefer that you get off right here.」

「Understood. We’ll tidy up after we get off, so please give us a moment.」

「Tidy up?」

The officer gave Tatsuya a suspicious look. Ignoring him, everyone else got right to fitting the car in the capsule. Watching all of this unfold, the commanding officer and his team all gaped in astonishment.

「Come on now. If we left something this ginormous in a place like this, it would totally get in everyone’s way, right?」

Tatsuya grinned arrogantly, knowing he had succeeded in taking the wind out of their sails.

「R-Right……」

Although the officer had succeeded in bringing them out of the car to seal their escape, he was by no means in control of the situation.

「Hey, did you see that……?」

「That is one impressive golem carriage……」

「Yeah, those things are real handy.」

「I wonder how much I’d have to save just to buy one of those things?」

The peddlers whispered to each other as they watched the workshop members get escorted along by the guards. They probably didn’t even imagine that the whole carriage was made by the same people riding in it.

「I hope I get to have a cool carriage like that one day.」

「Alright fellows, it’s a race to see who buys it first.」

「Heck yeah.」

The merchants got pumped up with a new objective. The Japanese group continued to influence those around them without knowing it.

「So you’re back!」

「I am so very sorry for worrying you so……」

「Sorry……」

「As long as you girls are safe, I am more than happy……」

The Norton sisters were reunited with the high priest in the reception office. The Japanese party just gazed at them awkwardly. They knew full well that taking the girls around the desert for three days had way too many repercussions.

「Ah～、we’re like、really sorry about all this……」

「A certain idiot went off recklessly……」

「Y’all be actin’ like yer the adults here but y’all ain’t innocent either.」

Hiroshi looked a bit awkward, but maintained his ground.

「You’re not one to talk.」

Tatsuya and Makoto looked at him with spite in their eyes.

With that being said, both of them were only pretending to have been swept up in the whole fiasco, but inwardly they had enjoyed the situation quite a bit. So they knew full well that it was not their place to make Hiroshi out to be the bad guy.

「I have no intention of complaining about anyone. Aren’t adventurers supposed to do things like that?」

The head priest was rather understanding given the situation.

「I’m not sure that we should be considered true adventurers, but yes, that’s normally how it goes……」

Tatsuya couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable. Yes, adventurers did go on long excursions, and yes, as long as the funds from the temple were too scarce to support everyone’s livelihood, there was a need to go on dangerous expeditions like this. There was a need, but…

「Even so, it is still the undeniable truth that as long as we were responsible for them, we should have been more careful.」

「……This seems to only be going around in circles. Both of these girls are safe, so let us quit bringing these things back up again.」

「Right. Let’s stop discussing this.」

The conversation was veering off into a direction unrelated to crafting, so the head priest guided them back to the proper track. The priest had decided that apologizing to someone who has already forgiven you would only make you seem rude, hence why he changed the topic. Realizing this, Tatsuya got on board. Before the report, he also wanted to check something.

「In other news, it feels like the entirety of Darl is on edge. Did something happen?」

「About that. I have something I want to ask all of you. You did go to the desert for the last three days, yes?」

「Yes, that’s correct.」

「Around 3 o’clock yesterday, a nearby town reported that a gigantic sand pillar had suddenly protruded from the ground in the desert. Darl also encountered a light earthquake and a large quantity of sand-like mist. Would you happen to know anything about this?」

The Japanese group froze at the priest’s question. Primula and Judith simply sighed, realizing that their apprehensions had been correct. The Japanese didn’t seem to grasp this, but normally when you activate skills or spells with that much power, people who weren’t on tabs with the situation would simply see the string of events as something unnatural. The sisters had to deal with their set of values and standards for so long they had given up on them changing anytime soon, but surely the Japanese people must have expected some sort of aftermath from being only 200 kilometers away from Darl.

「……An abnormality, huh. Right……」

「……True, with that much sand thrown around, Darl would of course be affected and they would see it as an abnormality……」

「……I never thought about it from their viewpoint, mate……」

「……Well that is why we attempted to reach you in the car……」

Hiroshi and the others finally realized just what they had caused, to which Primula interjected with a tired voice.

「It seems that you do know something about this.」

「Yes. Actually, could you not get angry when you hear this?」

「I will consider it after I hear what you have to say.」

Tatsuya couldn’t help but stiffen at the priest’s honest response. It was more difficult to tell in their case at the scene of the incident, but the outside world had noticed the flashy event quite a bit. They should have known that entrusting everything to Hiroshi was a mistake.

「You see, that was something we, or should I say, Hiroshi accomplished by stuffing a weapon into the car.」

「……A weapon, you say?」

「Yes. They call it Worldshaker. It was what we used against a humanoid-looking thing named Barold.」

「……And it resulted in a disturbance of this caliber……」

「But for those of us near the center of it, it just looked like a slightly flashy explosion with clouds of dust.」

With enough safety precautions, if you were near the center, it was fairly reasonable that you would not notice much else. Still, the same “cloud of dust” was what had turned into a wall of mist that flew straight at Darl in the form of a sand pillar. Surely they must have thought of this incident as more than just a flashy explosion.

Usually this would seem like a lie, but judging by the mannerisms of the upright Norton sisters, this was unmistakably the truth. Still, this was an aggravating situation.

「More specifically, might I ask how much power?」

「The destructive power nearby was slightly more so than Armageddon, and then a hundred meters away and it decreased by about eighty percent. The range of this decreased shock wave was still powerful at a one kilometer radius at most.」

「……That’s more than enough basis to call it a large scale attack……」

「So like I said, we went to the desert to use it……」

If you were trying to be that careful, then might you have simply considered alternatives to defeating them? The priest was about to say it and then swallowed it back down. If Barold was their opponent then Hiroshi most likely had no alternative, as Barold would have done the same, which would have put the Norton sisters in peril.

Plus Hiroshi, the inventor, was one thing. But the other people probably didn’t know anything about this so-called Worldshaker. Maybe they didn’t even know that such a weapon was loaded in the car, which was highly likely. In that case, clearly it would have been tough to stop Hiroshi.

Even Hiroshi was probably only thinking of the best way to minimize casualties, so there really was no point in getting angry at him. He would have thundered against Hiroshi if he had let this happen near town, but this was after Hiroshi had brought the enemy into the desert, a place far less likely to involve innocent bystanders. As long as he was using his head a bit, there was no point getting angry. That was the head priest’s current thinking. His personality wasn’t doing him any favors.

「……I will simply settle this case as one in which everyone took the best measures they could. Still, could you enlighten me as to what you were accomplishing for three, no, two days to be more precise, in the desert?That’s not a whole lot of time.」

Everyone braced themselves to answer the question that had finally arrived. No matter how fast transportation was…or maybe precisely because they had fast transportation, just two days and a half was seriously not enough. And in the scorching-hot desert especially, two or three days was too short to come to-and-fro, whereas in Hiroshi’s case, it took far less time than normal to go from Darl to the desert, hence why it was strange to linger around the entrance for so long.

Harvesting or hunting generally took half a day as long as your findings weren’t scarce. You could still avoid the afternoon heat and make it back the next day. Even the entrance had a good amount of harvesting potential.

「Uhhh, so in this case, I guess we could say we were busy with investigating the ancient ruins?」

「Well that isn’t a lie or anything, right?」

「We had some good results for the most part, and we weren’t playing around or anything, right?」

「Hmm, but I do feel like we played around a bit, y’all.」