The Strange Adventure of a Broke Mercenary

Chapter 260

Proofreader: Xemul

Loren’s group did not relax for a while, even after Noel had disappeared.

Transporting was a tricky thing; even if no one was there a moment ago, someone could appear a moment later. They were bracing themselves for the possibility that Noel might suddenly appear out of nowhere after pretending to have vanished, but Ivy’s muttering made them realize that they were wrong.

“It seems she has really gone.”

“She’s not coming back, is she?”

In response to Loren’s question, Ivy climbed over the device in the center of the room and began to examine the floor in the area where Noel had disappeared.

“There is a magic circle for transport here. It needs a certain disposable magic instrument to activate, but we’ll know if it’s about to operate, so there’s no chance of a surprise attack.”

“Can’t we destroy it?”

Loren didn’t know if it was possible to destroy that magic circle or not, but he believed that it would be the most reliable approach in this situation. 

Ivy, however, had a hard time with this idea. 

“First of all, it’s a valuable legacy of the Ancient Kingdom…”

Loren was unable to say anything more when he was told that it was valuable due to its academic and historical significance. It was not something he could judge, so he had no counterarguments.

“Is the Adventurers’ Guild going to investigate it?”

Loren thought that it might not be a good idea for technologies about body-swapping to be leaked out into the world today. If Ivy said she would have the Adventurers’ Guild investigate this ruin, he would try to stop her. However, her answer was painfully simple. 

“No?”

“What’s the point of preserving it then?”

“If we don’t preserve it, it will become a lost technology.”

What she essentially said was that she was not sure where to draw the line between good and bad here. Thinking that there was no need to force the destruction of the transport magic circle, Loren patted the device in the center of the room, which looked like a bed wrapped in a transparent shell, and said to Ivy.

“Well, let’s check this out first. I want to know what they were doing here.”

“Understood. Please wait a moment.”

Ivy said and immediately began to examine the equipments and the glowing devices on the wall. 

Gula was not particularly interested in these things, or rather did not want to see them; she didn’t look in Ivy’s direction as she worked. But Lapis watched on with great interest, and occasionally interjected a question or two to satisfy her thirst for knowledge.

“This… is a bit of a mess, isn’t it? It looks like someone who doesn’t know much about the equipment here played around with it.”

Ivy frowned as she worked. Loren had no idea what he was looking for but expected Ivy to explain it to him in her own way, and Ivy began to lay out the information she had found without stopping her work.

“It seems that they were repairing someone’s body and also strengthening the person’s physical abilities. The parameters were… set as high as possible…”

“That’s horrible.”

If Noel was the one who had used the equipments here, it should be almost certain that the one whose body had been repaired and strengthened was Magna. The guy was already quite strong with his own strength and the effects of his equipments; if his abilities were further enhanced by the device here, Loren didn’t want to run into him ever again. 

Ivy, who had been continuing her investigative work without knowing of Loren’s feelings, operated some devices on the wall, and the frown on her face turned even deeper.

“It’s just, the way the equipments was used is a mess. First of all, the culture material has been dripping out.”

Loren’s brow furrowed as he sensed something disturbing in Ivy’s indignant remark. Whatever it may be, the fact that something was dripping out gave Loren a hunch that they were in danger, but Ivy didn’t care and continued to tell Loren what she knew.

“Solutions are also all leaking… Stimulators, stabilizers, all of them… It would have cost a lot of money to replenish all these. The reserved inventory has been consumed with no care at all.”

“I have a quick question. I don’t care who was repairing whose body, but where do all the leaking things go?”

As the waterway was connected to this ruin, Loren could somehow predict the answer to his question even if he did not receive one. Still, he could not help but listen to Ivy’s reply, who was very knowledgeable about this ruin. 

“It will, of course, be disposed of into the waterways.”

Even though he wished it wasn’t, her reply was exactly what Loren had expected. Feeling a slight headache coming on, he pressed with another question.

“What happens to the waterways when those kinds of stuff are poured down?”

“That… is hard to say. The materials and drugs will become all messed up, so it’s unlikely to bring about anything.”

“What if it does?”

“Assuming there is something out there that has eaten the culture material, it will grow to several or dozens of times its normal size as it receives the effects of the stimulating and stabilizing drugs. The giant specimens will lay more eggs than usual under the influence of the drugs… Eh? Could that be…?”

Ivy’s face turned pale as if something came to her mind while she was giving the explanation. Loren, who had already reached the conclusion that Ivy just now reached, clutched his forehead with his left hand as if to endure a headache, and the seemingly-uninterested Gula, though still turned away, had a bead of sweat dripping down her cheek. 

After a while, Lapis, who had been watching their reactions, clapped her hands.

“I see. So it just happens that there are a few places in the wide waterway where the conditions are just right, and the centipedes and other things that live there multiplied and grew healthily, and that’s why we have that swarm?”

“No, I’m sure it was a group of individuals that had been accelerated to grow under somewhat unfavorable conditions. If I remember correctly, if there were areas in the canal with the right conditions, the rate of growth would be even greater.”

What Lapis had deduced was bad enough, but what might have happened according to Ivy was even worse. Loren was speechless after learning all this, but Lapis, perhaps unintentionally, rubbed even more salt to his wound. 

“I see. That reminds me; seeing Mills’ eyes moving on its own, I thought I had seen this phenomenon somewhere before. It was a parasite, wasn’t it?”

“A parasite?”

Loren’s face turned sour as he heard that there was another factor involved, even though the centipedes alone were already too much to handle.

Lapis began to share some of her knowledge.

“I don’t remember its official name, but it is a small parasite whose final host are centipedes. As a larva, it lives in small insects, water, fruits, and vegetables. If the host is a living animal, it enters the host’s central nervous system and brain to control its behavior, and ends its cycle by being eaten by the final host, the centipede.”

The parasites laid eggs inside a centipede’s body, then those eggs were released together with the centipede’s excretion and would be eaten by some other insect, then the parasite would work to have that insect be eaten by a centipede. That was the cycle of this parasite, according to Lapis’ explanation. Also, their larvae did not die from being bitten or chewed, and as long as they retained a certain size, they were resilient enough to return to their original larval state.

“When we first came to town, Nig caught a larva about the size of a thumb and ate it…”

“That’s probably it. I’m sure Nig will be fine though. Spiders release digestive fluid to dissolve their prey and then sip it, and I don’t think the larvae will survive that. They are originally smaller than a grain of wheat, so if you include the larvae before they grow to be huge, they can be of various sizes.”

If the larvae grew inside living creatures, they would have no way to know where these parasites were. If the situation was bad enough, it was possible that almost all of the food in Suest was contaminated by this parasite.

“By the way, if a human’s brain is infected by the parasite, they will…”

“Lose their intelligence and consciousness, and some or most of their memory, I think.” 

“What about the ability to converse?”

“I don’t think it’ll be lost.”

“Isn’t this town finished?”

The symptoms of the parasite victims described by Lapis matched the condition of many of the city’s residents that Loren and his group had seen. Perhaps Lapis understood this, for she looked at Loren with a weak smile and asked in a voice that was more than a little shaky.

“What should we do, Loren?”

“We can’t do anything, can we?”

If the situation had come to light earlier, some action could have been taken to stop the parasites from spreading. However, the residents affected by the parasites had already spread throughout the city, and Loren did not think that there was anything that could be done about it now.

“Can we get rid of the parasites after they infect us?”

“After they enter our head? How do we do that?”

Lapis’ response was that if there was a way, she would like to hear it herself. And as Loren wondered if there was any other way to manage such a thing, Gula said. 

“With the power of Gluttony, it’s impossible to eat only the parasite.” 

[‘Onii-san, it’s also impossible to kill only the parasite with Energy Drain.’]

Shayna said in Loren’s mind as if she had expected him to ask. As he listened to her, he understood that there was nothing they could do. 

“By the way, I’m sure we’re not infected, since we haven’t had any food of this city’s origin since we came here, and the food in the wagon was controlled and sealed by me.”

“I don’t know if this will make you feel any better, but would you like me to make some deworming medicine? I think I can make it with the facilities we have here.”

“There’s a mixing room at the back of this room. There should be some materials left.”

Under Ivy’s guidance, Lapis opened a door that seemed to lead to a mixing room in one corner of the room and disappeared behind it.

As Loren watched Ivy, who was still investigating the device, and Gula, who grimaced because of the terrible situation they were put in, in his heart he continued cursing at Magna, who had probably used this ruin and Noel, who had apparently operated these devices.