Next Move

Author: 天乃聖樹 (Amano Seiju)
Raw link: https://ncode.syosetu.com/n1424ez/18/
Translator: AYA Translation
Editor: Moonreaver

“Nene-sama, Nene-sama! Where we will go next?”

Asked Flan, who walked besides me. She was just like a puppy that had been taken out for a walk. Originally she was a child who worked for a mercenary group, so I understand there was a habit of following the leader of the group. Even so, didn’t she look too much like a puppy?

“Hnn… I want to ride a ship soon. There are limits if we are just walking, and our movement range will increase if there is a ship.”

I didn’t ride a ship yet, even in the first playthrough. But we can’t talk about going one step ahead of the Brave if we don’t have it.

“Ship… huh. Is it possible to buy one with the money we have now?”

“Only a small boat. And a small boat can’t cross the big whirlpool of the Peteuv strait, so it’s useless.”

“If that’s so, then how about capturing a pirate ship…?”

“How would you capture it? First, let’s increase our war fund. I happen to know a place to get some money in the next town.”

“What is that?”

“Fufufu, that’s…”

Standing on the main street of the town  we arrived at, Flan looked around the townscape.

“Somehow… it amazingly has a strange air.”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes. that lives are likely to disappear, or everyone is  scared…”

It’s as Flan said.

The windows of the resident houses were closed, and the shops were also deserted. There was almost nobody on the road, and even if there were, they immediately run off without looking at us. More than that, the easy thing to understand — it’s hard to understand for normal people who didn’t have spiritual power — was the stagnant cloud of spiritual power that covered the town.

“This town, you know, is cursed. Originating from a certain house, the curse spread   and made the residents fall one by one. Humans who come into contact with the curse will turn into grotesque figures.  Depending on the person’s spiritual resistance, and their distance from the epicenter, there are differences in how they are changed but…”

As I was telling Flan the story, “something” was walking with its two feet on the road ahead. It was dragging its swelling body, wriggling, and coming closer. Its body was pitch black and in the middle of its melted face an eyeball was shining brightly

“…! Nene-sama please get down.”

Flan put her hand on  Durandal’s hilt.

“Ah, wait, wait. Don’t kill it. It’s human more or less, not even undead.”

“Is that… the curse…?”

“Yeah, well, they will return to their original selves once we crush the source of the curse, so it’s better if we don’t make trouble by killing the residents. We won’t get the reward if we do that. Especially since they aren’t bad people.”

The cursed resident went to a nearby house and then a scream could be heard from that house. Sounds of rupturing, sounds of crushing, shrieking, and then silence.

“Especially since they aren’t bad people right?”

“I think so, maybe.”

In the first playthrough, the cursed human couldn’t do more than what “that human could do”. That’s why it was decided we’d crush the source of the curse rather than  capturing them one by one.

Accompanied by Flan, we head to the center of the curse — the mansion of the town’s mayor.