The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 10 Page 5
When I sent those words with my mind, I got an answer.
“Not a problem. Got into the king’s private chambers.”
It was short and to the point. Maybe this puchi suri was the quiet and concise type? Edel’s answers were usually a lot louder and vaguer. He had an almost piratical air to him. It was hard to describe, since he didn’t put it into words, but somehow his thoughts reflected his personality.
“Seems things were fine,” I told Lorraine.
◆◇◆◇◆
“My name is Rentt.”
When I introduced myself, one of the two soldiers standing watch in front of the well-built stone bridge leading into the castle furrowed his brow in suspicion. I couldn’t blame him; I’m sure this was the first time he’d heard my name.
“Where are you from? What do you want?”
Lorraine, Augurey, and I were all here. Yesterday, after chatting a bit more, we’d cut our meeting short, and today we’d made our way to the palace.
I’d gotten a little nervous when we went from the commoners’ district to the nobles’ district, but just as Edel’s underling had said, none of the detection devices had gone off, and we’d been able to make our way to the palace without incident. While the guards keeping watch in front of the noble estates had looked at me with suspicion, they were retainers who reported to that particular noble house rather than the palace and weren’t the sort to leave their posts to chase after a faintly suspicious passerby.
Well, I’m sure they would’ve sent word to the authorities and come after me if I’d been swinging around a weapon or firing off magic while shouting, “Fear the undead! I’m here to destroy this city in the name of the great vampire lord Laura Latuule!” I would never do something like that, though. It’d turn the entire Kingdom of Yaaran against me. Wait, the scarier thing would be having House Latuule as an enemy. What was even scarier than that, though, was that I wasn’t sure if it would even turn them against me. I felt like Laura might chuckle and say something like, “If you wish to play like that, please, do as you wish. That sounds entertaining.” Isaac would happily go along with her wishes too. It was a creepy thought.
Besides, I just couldn’t imagine winning against them. It was such a tall order that I might even give up my childhood dream of becoming a Mithril-class adventurer if fighting House Latuule was one of the requirements. Just kidding. Maybe.
I mulled over those silly thoughts in my head as I talked to the sentry.
“I’m a Bronze-class adventurer. I have business with Her Highness, Princess Jia Regina Yaaran. I’m not here to cause trouble. Would you mind letting me through?”
All I was doing was stating why I was here, but the sentry looked at me suspiciously and continued to interrogate me. His suspicion was well placed; I was, after all, a monster, and an undead to boot—the most hated and distrusted of all the monsters in this world. The popular conception of the undead was that they were either mages who’d sold their souls to evil or people who’d died with such anger and hatred that they had stuck around just to get their revenge. Basically, they were as bad as could be imagined. There was no way for the guard to know that I was undead, though.
“A mere Bronze-class adventurer is here to see Her Highness? I won’t say it’s impossible, but I’m not aware of any visitors of that sort scheduled for today.”
The fact that he was genuinely considering my story despite my appearance spoke to how seriously he took his job and how sincerely he dealt with people as a representative of his employer. I’m sure that in plenty of other countries, he would have just dismissed me and chased me off. If I were in his place, if some weird-looking man like me came around saying he had business with a princess, I’d never let him into the palace. I had an ace up my sleeve to turn this situation around, however. Or rather, I should have just started the conversation with it.
I began to dig around in my pocket. While I had my magic bag with me, I’d already taken the medal out in anticipation of this very situation, since that’d make it easier to just—presto—produce the medal as needed.
And so—presto—I wasn’t able to instantly produce the medal. I thought it was here somewhere. I continued to search, but I obviously wasn’t doing myself any favors by standing here digging around in my pocket. The sentry slowly started to reach for the sword hanging on his hip.
Crap, this was bad. I needed to find it soon, or...
My hand found what felt like the right object, and I drew it from my pocket with gusto, which prompted the guard to do the very same thing with his sword. He must have thought I was drawing a weapon of some sort, but what I held in my hand wasn’t a weapon.
“A medal?” the sentry said aloud. He then sheathed his sword and continued as though he’d never drawn his weapon at all. “Which must mean you have an introduction from a noble. It’s a common scam. Some ne’er-do-well will manage to talk a gullible rural noble into giving them a medal with the family seal so they can get a look at one of the royals. So you’re one of those, eh? Wait, hold on...”
The guard looked closer at the medal as he spoke and finally recognized the crest depicted on it. His tone suddenly shot up half an octave.
“W-Wait, this is the seal of the Marquess of Ancro! And this version is Lord Nauss’s personal...”
I hadn’t realized this, since I hadn’t taken time to carefully look over the medal, but it appeared the seal on it also identified the individual member of that noble house. This was the first time I’d ever been given— Oh wait, this was only loaned to me. Anyway, this was the first time anyone had ever lent me anything like this. I didn’t know anything about medals since I’d never had an opportunity to learn about them.
The only large noble house around Maalt was its ruler, the Viscount Lottnel, and it wasn’t as though I was close with the viscount himself. The most I’d ever interacted with him was attending the occasional party he threw to interact with the adventuring community in Maalt and glancing at him from a distance. At a party like that, the viscount had no time to talk to a Bronze-class nobody like me, and he was usually too busy talking to other attendees like the guildmaster, Wolf, or the head of some group that had close ties with the guild. Even if I’d wanted to talk to him, his entourage would probably have shooed me away.
Basically, I just wasn’t in the right social circles to have any meaningful relationship with a noble like that. There might be opportunities in the future, perhaps. After all, I’d heard that the Viscount Lottnel had a close relationship with House Latuule, and these days I was pretty close to House Latuule. Still, it wasn’t as though I needed to think much about it at the moment.
“How did you...get this?”
The guard must have really wanted to ask me how I’d managed to steal the medal from Nauss, but he’d somehow swallowed that accusation and calmly finished his question.
“I once spotted Her Highness and Lord Nauss being attacked by monsters,” I explained. “I knew I couldn’t just leave them, so I went to their aid. These two were with me at the time.”
I gestured to Lorraine and Augurey.
“Oh, so you’re... Yes, I’ve heard about you. I’ve also heard that you didn’t show up despite the invitation, so I had forgotten about the whole incident because I thought you were never going to appear.”
The guard was being a touch snide, but it also seemed he was telling the truth. Not everyone who got an invitation to the palace showed up. For example, those who had skeletons in their closet might not appear out of a desire to avoid those skeletons coming to light. I was kind of a shining example of that, even though, technically, I was the skeleton in my closet. I would’ve had no choice but to run like hell if the security devices had detected me.
There were less extreme examples than me, like merchants who’d once been famous bandits or famous adventurers who’d run away from a noble house and were operating under a false name. No matter how much of an honor it was to be invited to the palace, those sorts of
people would never dare to come. That was why the sentry had filed us into a similar category and forgotten about it. Really, he should’ve been praised for retaining some information about us in the back of his mind.
“We had reasons for our delay. We weren’t putting it off on purpose. We’d certainly like to apologize to Her Highness and Lord Nauss directly. Will you let us through?”
The guard nodded. “Very well. But if I let the three of you merely wander in, you’ll just end up repeating this same exchange again inside. I’ll come with you until we can find a servant to show you the way.”
He then politely accompanied us to the entrance of the palace.
◆◇◆◇◆
“Ah. I’d heard you’d finally come, and so you have!”
As we waited in one of the palace’s sitting rooms intended for lower-class guests, the door suddenly burst open, and with a chipper greeting, a man we recognized walked through the door—Nauss Ancro, the captain of the Kingdom of Yaaran’s Royal Guard. He was middle-aged and equipped from head to toe in shining silver armor.
Although the guard had already returned to his post, he had told us on our way here that Nauss was the head of House Ancro and that he had a good reputation among the nobility. That said, he wasn’t particularly powerful in terms of influence, trailing behind the viceroy Duke Lukas Bader; Marquess Marcel Viesel, the head of the first prince’s faction; and the Countess Gisel Georgiou, the first princess’s faction in name recognition. He didn’t have any particularly notable accomplishments, but he was evidently known as a loyal man of good character.
While I’d heard of the other nobles the guard had listed, I didn’t remember hearing Nauss’s name all that often. Even if we adventurers loved freedom and disliked authority, considering that we had to live in this country, we couldn’t avoid interacting with nobles or their relations in some fashion. We did talk about nobles from time to time, but I didn’t recall Nauss ever coming up in those conversations.
Besides, Maalt was so far away from the capital that we rarely had a reason to talk about these kinds of things. At most, we might discuss them once every six months or so. I figured Lorraine might be an exception, though, and when I looked over at her, her expression told me that she’d known the basics about Nauss beforehand. The reason she hadn’t mentioned anything was because, based on what the guard had told me, Nauss wasn’t a particularly objectionable person. Or maybe Lorraine had been letting me judge Nauss for myself.
I wasn’t sure about Augurey, but he’d presumably looked up Nauss while we were busy in Maalt, and they might have even met during that time. The fact that Augurey hadn’t given us any warnings before the meeting told me that Nauss wasn’t excessively touchy about matters of etiquette. And it wasn’t like Lorraine and I were completely uncultured and lacking in manners. If Augurey had been with more rough-hewn adventurers, he might have offered pointers on how to act or speak around nobility.
“Lord Ancro. As I promised, I’ve brought them to the palace,” Augurey said grandly.
Nauss must have been the one who’d been bugging Augurey about visiting. While Augurey was confidently acting like this had all gone according to plan, the fact of the matter was that Augurey had been bluffing and buying time. His mannerisms and tone gave none of that away, though. In fact, they demonstrated that Augurey was an unexpectedly good actor. He’d always been prone to gesticulating grandly and speaking grandiloquently like a performer, though. In that sense, maybe he was acting exactly like what you might expect of him.
“Augurey, you have my apologies for doubting you. You must understand. Everything was so ambiguous—the date the pair would arrive, where they lived, and even their names. Surely you can’t blame me for wondering if there was something more behind it all.”
Depending on the listener, Nauss’s apology might have sounded like a veiled insult, and most commoners would have kowtowed to him and begged his forgiveness at this point, but again, Augurey maintained his debonair attitude.
“Fair enough, m’lord. Still, the two are, in fact, here. If they had anything to hide, they wouldn’t come to a place like this.”
Actually, I had a ton of things I was hiding. Like the fact I was a monster and an undead. And that I knew vampires. And that I had a means of instantly traveling to the capital. I was pretty sure that any one of those things would warrant death, or maybe something worse—never mind them all combined. Even so, Lorraine and I maintained our level expressions and nodded along to their conversation.
Nauss smiled at Augurey and replied, “Indeed, you’re quite right. This palace is equipped with a great many protections. A criminal can’t just easily enter, and we even have magic items that can detect ill intent. I’m afraid I cannot divulge any specifics, but many other layers of protection are in effect as well. But since the three of you are present despite that, it is proof you have nothing to hide or feel ashamed of.”
It was true that I wasn’t a criminal, and I had no intention of harming anyone in the palace. I didn’t know what other detections they might have in place, but since they didn’t react to me, it meant that Nauss was right. As for the monster detection, for whatever reason, it just didn’t react to me.
That was the biggest issue, but it wasn’t like we could say, “Hey, I’m a monster, but your devices didn’t react. You should switch device providers! If you act now, the great alchemist Lorraine Vivie will be happy to provide you with a set of monster-detection magic devices built on new principles for just five platinum pieces! Just five platinum pieces; what a bargain! And if you buy now...”
We weren’t some vendors hawking wares on the street. I mean, I’d fallen for that sort of sales pitch a few times in the past and ended up making an unnecessary purchase. None of them were big scams, though. It was more like realizing that the “sale price” was just the normal price, or something was a little smaller than usual—just petty little things like that.
“Quite so. Now, Lord Ancro, if possible, today we’d like to simply pay our respects to you, m’lord, and then be our way,” Augurey said casually.
He was essentially asking if we could leave. For our part, it’d be easiest if it turned out all they wanted was to see us at the palace, then let us go, but...
“Surely not. We haven’t been able to properly thank you yet. And Her Highness has been anticipating seeing the three of you again. I, Nauss Ancro, certainly couldn’t continue to use the title of marquess if I were to simply let you go.”
Well, there went that hope. Sure, this was always going to be the most likely outcome, and Augurey hadn’t asked to be excused with the expectation that we’d be let go, but Augurey was really good at setting up these sorts of conversational traps. He could basically trick you into giving permission for something before you could really think it through. Clearly it wasn’t going to work with a noble who was used to dealing with that sort of subtle wordplay every day, though. Damn. It worked so well on simple adventurers!
“You honor us, my lord. Then, do we have an audience with Her Highness next?” Augurey asked.
“That’s the plan, yes. There’s no need to be nervous. As I said before, Her Highness is a grounded and gracious woman.”
That was clear from the fact that she was willing to go to the trouble of inviting adventurers to the palace just to thank them. It was just that, from our standpoint, being here was a little bit of a hassle by our standards as adventurers. This was merely a gap in our worldviews, however, and there wasn’t really anything we could do about it.
If possible, I’d hoped that the princess would be gracious enough to just let us go home, but I wasn’t going to get my hopes up for that one now.
◆◇◆◇◆
Nauss lightly knocked on a giant door. “Pardon me, Your Highness. It is I, Nauss. I have brought guests for you.”
On either side of the door were two large, fully equipped knights standing guard. We stood ramrod straight behind Nauss in an effort to appear as inconspicuous as possible.
No, wait... I was the only one doing that. Neither Lorraine nor Augurey appeared particularly ruffled. They were at ease and acting no different from usual.
Were they used to visiting royals? Now that I thought about it, they were both Silver-class adventurers, so they’d probably worked directly for high-ranking nobles in the past. It reminded me of the sheer gap in experience between them and me.
Well, not that it bothered me all that much, but I really needed to become Silver-class soon. I hadn’t been able to take on enough jobs to fulfill the prerequisites for the Ascension Exam because of all that had been going on lately, but I figured I should take on a bunch of jobs when I had some free time so that I could apply for the exam. I swore to myself at that moment that I would.
I wasn’t sure whether I had the skill to pass the exam, but I wouldn’t know until I took it. I mean, I could now handle Silver-class monsters, and depending on the situation, I could even defeat Gold-class ones like the tarasque, which was only for Gold-class adventurers and up. That was partly because it required special preparations to deal with its venom, but I just happened to be immune to poisons. That was why I thought I was maybe around the Silver-class level. Or perhaps I could only take on upper-Bronze-class monsters. I wasn’t super confident about that.
While I was second-guessing myself, someone answered from the other side of the door.
“Nauss, come in.”
“Then, if you’ll pardon us,” Nauss said as he opened the door. He entered, then held the door open and gestured for us to follow suit, so we filed into the room after him.
◆◇◆◇◆
When we entered, a girl of maybe fifteen or sixteen dressed in really elaborate clothing greeted us. Maybe her outfit wasn’t all that elaborate considering she was royalty, but it was certainly fancier than what a commoner might wear.
It went without saying that this girl was Jia Regina Yaaran, the second princess of the Kingdom of Yaaran. It looked like she hadn’t changed much since I last saw her.