The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 8 Read online

  The man was without a doubt their greatest hope. He showed them light they’d never seen in their lives. That was why they controlled the thralls for him. He granted them this power too.

  The man watched the children and smirked.

  ◆◇◆◇◆

  Not only thralls, but most undead were tragic creatures. They gained immortality in a way, but at the same time, they lost their humanity. Once they died and became undead, their corpse was inhabited by a new personality. Nobody knew why this happened, or where the old personality went, despite endless debates on the subject.

  Regardless, it was accepted as fact that they became different people after death. There were many reasons for that, but the biggest reason came from religious authorities. They declared the undead to be impure beings and prioritized the purification of them above all else, so they couldn’t accept the undead as having humanity. They may have looked like they did in life, but they couldn’t be seen as the same person.

  I didn’t particularly criticize that idea. I could see why religious authorities couldn’t accept the undead as the people they were in life, considering the positions they held. But the important thing about their assertions was that they were half proven. That was why I questioned all the thralls I came across. When you questioned the undead for long enough about their past lives, their answers would start to contradict each other. If they were the same people they always were, this presumably wouldn’t happen. Considering their bodies were falling apart, though, you could also explain that away as memory loss. It was hard to say anything for sure.

  But even if that explanation were true, it didn’t change the fact that the undead attacked humans. There were some, such as greater vampires, who could control themselves, but even they tended to attack humans. Nobody wanted to accept such people as their family, friends, or significant others, so the undead were historically understood to have become different people after death. That was why they were exterminated.

  However, humans aren’t so simple. Think about your family or loved ones. What if, after they died one day, they came back to life before you could process it? What if they sounded and acted exactly the same, so you couldn’t deny it was them? I don’t know if many people could reject them right away. Call it kindness, or naivety, or even weakness. I don’t know what it is. But what Lorraine and my other friends showed me was kindness.

  “Why? Why?!” someone screamed.

  But as for what was happening in front of me, I didn’t know what to call it.

  ◆◇◆◇◆

  Adventurers had gathered. Not all of the adventurers in town, but around ten of them. One of them was Guildmaster Wolf, who should have been at the guild delivering orders, so something special was going on. But I suppose the situation wasn’t incredibly unique. I got lucky, but it wouldn’t be strange if similar incidents were taking place all around Maalt.

  The adventurers were surrounding a lone boy. More than just a boy, he was a thrall. His eyes were bloodshot, and his torn clothes revealed dry, rotting flesh underneath. The disguise magic was no longer hiding him, because his face was covered in scars and holes. It was all part of the thrall hunt, but this thrall was posing as an adventurer. His equipment and age made him look like a newbie.

  “What’s your name?” Wolf asked the thrall.

  “Tita Well. I’m an Iron-class adventurer. I’m only just starting out, but I’m trying to get to Bronze-class. I want to make some money to send to my parents back in my hometown. I’d also like to be able to get a nice wedding dress for my sister.”

  “When did you become a thrall?”

  “A thrall? I’m Tita Well, an Iron-class adventurer.”

  I had only just gotten there, but it seemed the others had asked these questions multiple times. Wolf shook his head and looked behind him, toward some adventurers who were holding a girl by her shoulders. “This true?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the girl answered through tears. “Why can’t you let him go? Look, he’s talking to you. He’s saying the same things he said before.”

  “I get how you feel, but you saw what happened. He was going berserk just a minute ago. We can only talk to him like this now because we’re holding him down. If we let go, no question he’ll attack someone again. Can you really say he’s the same person he always was?”

  “But, but...!”

  Wolf was harsh, but he was right. Tita’s eyes wavered between sanity and madness. Turning him back to normal didn’t look impossible, but no such thing had ever been accomplished before.

  “Sorry,” Wolf said. “If I’d done my job better, he probably wouldn’t have been a victim. But what’s done is done, and I’ll do what I have to. If you don’t want to watch, close your eyes. If you hate anyone for this, hate me.”

  Wolf drew the broadsword slung over his back and raised it over his head. The girl, presumably an ally of Tita, tried to reach out her hand, but in the end she shuddered and withdrew it. She must have thought it was hopeless, and she was right.

  Wolf chopped Tita’s head clean off. Then he splashed holy water on both the head and body, turning them to ash. All that remained was Tita’s cheap armor. The girl embraced the armor, scooped up the ashes, and wept.

  ◆◇◆◇◆

  Wolf watched the girl, his expression conflicted. I approached him from behind. “Rentt?” he said without turning around to look at me. He must have noticed me watching these events play out.

  “Sorry you had to do that,” I said, though the words felt kind of trite.

  “He was an adventurer with my guild. I was the best man for the job.” I could sense the dignity and responsibility that he felt as guildmaster. We were lucky to have him in charge of our guild.

  “So that boy was from Maalt’s guild?” I asked. I only started to watch in the middle of it and didn’t have all the details, but I figured he was, and now Wolf confirmed it.

  “Yeah, he was one of the newbie adventurers that went missing. That crying girl went on adventures with him. He up and vanished one day, and that was that, until...”

  “He came back as a thrall?”

  “Right. It’s tragic. If they’d gone after someone like me who’s got less of a future to look forward to, that’d be one thing, but they had to target someone with aspirations. It makes me sick.”

  If I were that vampire, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to pick a fight with Wolf either, but I could see where he was coming from. Targeting the weak was the logical move for any hunter, but when those targets were human, it was unconscionable. Newbie adventurers tended to be children who didn’t know their way around the world yet. Only a coward would attack them.

  “Let me ask you something just to be sure,” Wolf whispered to me so nobody else would hear. “You don’t know a way to turn thralls back into people, do you?” Wolf had talked to the girl like there was no way, but he apparently wondered if it was possible somehow. After all, he had me as an example of sorts.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t know if there’s a way. And when I was a thrall, I never lost my mind like that. My voice was kind of hoarse, but I could talk like an ordinary person, and I was perfectly sane. Maybe there’s something fundamentally unique about me compared to them, judging by what I’ve been seeing here.”

  The boy couldn’t clearly answer Wolf’s question. It was questionable whether he was even aware he was a thrall. But I was different. I was fully conscious of what I was. I couldn’t say I didn’t have any monster-like impulses, but aside from when I attacked Lorraine, I was able to control them. I was also still drinking human blood every day, but I never even thought of attacking another person. That boy, on the other hand, was going berserk before he was captured. There must have been something that made him different from me on a fundamental level.

  Wolf looked both disappointed and relieved at my response—disappointed that he couldn’t save the adventurers that had been his allies and relieved that his decision to purify said adventurers was the right choice. If h
e had killed them when they could have been saved, it’d probably be pretty hard to apologize for. Either way, it was his only choice in this situation. If he revealed that I was undead and claimed to know a way to cure the thralls on top of that, it would put him in a precarious position. But he was willing to cross that bridge if it would help them.

  “I see, got it,” Wolf said. “That’s good to know. Oh, also, we’ve gathered some info. Listen to this.”

  Wolf told me about the current state of the city. I knew some of it thanks to what I saw through Edel’s vision sharing, but I wasn’t as analytical as the guild. Edel and I could try to figure it out on our own, but we would be lacking in some areas. The guild knew how to handle situations like these, and they had plenty of staff members to sort through the information, so listening to them was beneficial.

  First, he told me that they found and defeated thralls all around Maalt and that there seemed to be somewhere from fifty to a hundred of them in total. Some, like the boy from a moment ago, were new adventurers who had disappeared. This all but confirmed that a vampire was behind the disappearances.

  They were trying to locate and capture the vampire at the same time they exterminated the thralls, but they were unable to find him. They also tried to guess the vampire’s location based on how the thralls were distributed throughout Maalt, but the vampire seemed to have taken that into account by stationing them evenly throughout town. He knew better than to set them all up around his hideout, apparently. If he was repeatedly creating thralls and sending them out from his location, presumably they wouldn’t have been so evenly distributed. We could assume from this that he’d thought about positioning before starting the attack.

  “Well, the thrall hunt’s still coming along just fine,” Wolf continued. “I think we’ll take them all out eventually, but there’s been some considerable damage. Wish we could beat the boss already. Speaking of which, I want to ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know how close a vampire has to be to control a thrall? They all showed up and started attacking people and setting things on fire at the same time, so they all probably received the same orders. I’d think the vampire’s at least close enough to give instructions to them.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” I answered.

  “Why? Aren’t you, you know?” Wolf asked and cocked his head. He avoided saying I was a vampire directly. I appreciated his thoughtfulness.

  “Well, think about it. I don’t attack people, and I’ve never created or controlled any thralls. I wouldn’t know exactly how close you’d have to be to control one, or how many could be made.”

  “Right, I get it. Now that you mention it, how would a vampire who doesn’t attack people make thralls? But man, will we just have to search every nook and cranny for this vampire?” Wolf said and crossed his arms.

  “Hold on a second there. I may have never made a thrall before, but I have made a familiar. Here,” I said, pointing to the mouse on my shoulder. Edel stood on his hind legs and crossed his front legs. For a mouse, he was remarkably dexterous.

  “I thought that was just a pet,” Wolf muttered as he looked wide-eyed at Edel. I couldn’t imagine this would be many people’s first choice for a pet, but I guess he thought I was weird. Maybe everyone did, and that’s why nobody commented on the animal sitting on my shoulder this entire time.

  “If he actually were just a pet, it would’ve been kind of insane for me to have him ride on my shoulder through a city under siege, you know.”

  “Well, I figured that’s the kind of thing you’d do. You’ve got a reputation for abruptly doing things that don’t make sense. You’ve always been like that. But now that I think back on it, there was some sense to all those things. Well, enough about the past. So that’s a familiar. What about it?”

  “Thralls are made from humans, so maybe it’s not quite the same, but the way I made my familiar is mostly identical. Maybe the range from which they can be controlled is the same too.”

  “I see, so how close do you have to be for that? Hey, are you actually controlling this thing?” Edel started erratically dancing around atop my shoulder. Wolf gave him a suspicious look. I didn’t know if Edel was just bored or something, but whatever.

  “Well, I usually let him do what he wants. But if I give him orders, he’ll follow them. So, as far as the maximum range of that, I at least know we can contact each other from anywhere in Maalt. And even from outside of Maalt, I can give him some simple instructions.”

  “Dang, that far? How far is it specifically?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’d extend up to about the New Moon Dungeon.”

  I hadn’t actually tried that before, but it felt like it would work. I wouldn’t be able to give detailed instructions, and it would probably take some time for the messages to reach him, but general commands would work up to that distance. Besides that, there was also what I had seen at the New Moon Dungeon. I decided now was a good time to bring that up.

  “By the way, he can share his senses with me to some extent, and he has his own followers of the same species who can share their vision with him. Through those abilities, I learned something a bit curious.”

  “Back up a bit there. Share their vision? All right, the size and color of your familiar is pretty unusual, but isn’t it a puchi suri? So it can see what other puchi suri see? Pretty much any adult with a knife could kill a puchi suri if they felt like it, so nobody really bothers with them and they’re left to roam all over the place. If you could sense what every puchi suri around is sensing, that means...” Wolf murmured under his breath, putting the pieces together. “Sounds like I was right to put you in my guild. You know everything that’s going on in this city, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but they can sneak into all kinds of places to get information.”

  “Better not be doing that at the guild. But whatever, that’s not important right now. Anyway, what’d you find out?”

  “I saw a vampire biting someone at the New Moon Dungeon. It’s been a while since then, but I think that might be the vampire’s base.”

  “I see. The disappearances mostly happened in dungeons. They happened in town too, but not as frequently. Didn’t think it was possible to control thralls from so far away, though. I haven’t started a search all the way out there, but sounds like I should.”

  With the city on fire and thralls attacking people, there wasn’t anyone available to send to the dungeon when the chance of finding something there was incredibly unlikely. Capturing the vampire was important, but not as important as protecting the townspeople. However, from what I said, there was a fair chance the vampire was there.

  “Well, still don’t have too many adventurers with their hands free,” Wolf said after a bit of thought. “We’re slowly getting things under control here, but this is far from over. I’ll have to pick out a few people to send down there. Rentt, will you go?”

  I nodded. The enemy was a vampire, and while I didn’t know its rank, I would know the most about it in some sense.

  “And it’ll probably be good if Lorraine goes too, right?” Wolf suggested. Lorraine would help make sure I didn’t screw things up, and she was also one of Maalt’s few Silver-class adventurers. “Who else?”

  “You’ll take me along too, won’t you?” someone asked, sneaking up from behind Wolf.

  “Whoa!” Wolf yelped.

  The person behind him was, of course, Nive Maris the vampire hunter. I just wished she would go away.

  “How much did you hear?” Wolf asked Nive with a puzzled look. He was probably worried that she’d heard something about me. But I’d seen when Nive waltzed up behind Wolf like a cat, and nothing problematic had been discussed since she appeared.

  “Oh, I just heard you say you were picking people out. Nothing before that,” Nive answered. “It sounds to me like you found the boss’s base or something. How you found it faster than me, though, I have no clue.”

&n
bsp; It sounded like she hadn’t heard anything that would cause issues, but I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t lying. Maybe she was playing dumb, but I had no way to guess. She certainly looked like she was trying to act cute, like a child who saw a toy and couldn’t wait to play with it. A child’s intent might have been written all over their face, but I couldn’t imagine what Nive was thinking.

  “Well, guilds have their ways. Mostly we just throw adventurers at something until it works, though,” Wolf said, relieved he hadn’t given my secret away. And it wasn’t entirely a lie in this case either, if you just replaced adventurers with mice.

  “I see, and you just happened to find it that way, did you?” Nive replied. “Not even I can compete with the power of coincidence. So anyway, can I come with?”

  I was kind of hoping she’d forgotten what we were doing, but my hope was in vain. Nothing could distract Nive from her vampire obsession.

  “Sure,” Wolf said. “You’re Gold-class, not to mention a vampire hunter. It’d be good to have you around. Right, Rentt?”

  He asked me not so much to get my approval but to say there was no choice in the matter and I would have to deal with it. Considering Nive’s strength and abilities, turning her down would be absurd. We had to send the best of the best, and nobody in Maalt fit the bill better than her. My feelings about her being untrustworthy and dangerously spontaneous had to be set aside.

  “Right, it’ll help to have an expert around,” I answered, but only because I had to.

  “Excellent,” Nive said with a giggle. “Let’s not waste any time. Where are we going, by the way? I haven’t heard that part yet.”

  “Oh, the New Moon Dungeon,” Wolf explained. “Can’t guarantee that the vampire’s there, but there’s a good chance.”

  “Really? I see, that certainly may be true. The average vampire would find it difficult to control thralls from so great a range, but a powerful vampire could do it. Even lesser vampires can sometimes do it if several work together. The maximum distance from which someone could control the thralls in Maalt would be somewhere around the New Moon Dungeon.”