“Indeed,” Loewe agreed. “This place is like our home.”
“But you do know it’s not your home, right?” Zenos said.
“It was originally my home, in fact,” interjected Carmilla, who had returned earlier, as she floated down from the second floor. With her arms crossed, she looked down at Zenos and the others and said, “Hmph. You took your sweet time.”
“Well, stuff happened,” Zenos said as he brought his glass to his lips.
The “stuff” in question was the fact a group from the Black Guild had intruded upon the festivities. Those who lurked in the shadows of the slums, thriving in chaos, had seemed displeased with the peaceful event. Dealing with the aftermath of the scuffle had taken some time, but in the end, there’d been only minimal damage. Some of the demi-humans had been injured, but Zenos had already treated them.
“But throwing an explosive manastone out of the blue like that...” Lily murmured, clutching her teacup with both hands and shrinking back slightly. “Those people are scary.”
“Well, yeah,” Zophia chimed in. “That lot has no limits. But I think they were scoping things out more than anything.”
Lily lifted her head. “Scoping things out?”
“I think so, yeah. If they’d really wanted to destroy the festival, they’d have been sneaky about it, sabotaged it here and there instead of brazenly barging in like that.”
“Yeah,” Lynga agreed. “And if they’d done that, we’d have retaliated for real.”
“So this was just meant as a warning,” Loewe concluded.
“A warning,” Lily echoed with a shudder.
Carmilla, floating in midair, spoke ominously. “Hee hee hee... I see. Sounds like our next opponent is the Black Guild.”
The demi-humans, still holding their glasses, gave small shrugs. “Who knows,” Zophia said. “They’re a shady bunch. Nothing like an ordinary guild.”
“Yep,” Lynga added. “They’re not exactly united. I think it was probably the doing of a small fraction of the whole guild.”
“So what you’re saying is that this attack wasn’t representative of the whole guild,” Zenos pondered.
Loewe nodded. “The Black Guild does officially have bosses and leaders and whatnot, but they rarely show their faces. Most members don’t even know who they are.”
“Huh...”
As the healer looked vacantly out the window, the demi-humans patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry, doc. If our enemies are anything like that big green dimwit, they’re no big deal,” Zophia assured him.
“She’s right,” Lynga said. “He was kinda unhinged, but we’re used to dealing with his sort.”
“After all, Zophia and Lynga are experts on being unhinged,” Loewe quipped.
“You’re one to talk,” Zophia retorted.
“I don’t want to hear that from you, Loewe,” Lynga snapped.
Loewe laughed. “Right, right.”
“What are you so happy about?” Zenos asked. Was the orc leader that self-aware?
“But you know,” Zophia said solemnly, “in our world, messing with someone else’s turf is basically a declaration of war. The audacity of those people...”
“Yeah. I held back because we were holding a peaceful event,” Lynga added, just as solemnly. “Normally, though? I’d have been out for blood.”
“Same here,” Loewe agreed with a serious expression of her own. “We don’t mess with the Black Guild, and they don’t mess with us. That’s how things have stayed in balance until now.”
“Ah, I see,” Carmilla remarked. “So they have deliberately broken an unwritten rule of nonaggression.”
Zophia nodded slightly. “Maybe something’s going on in the Black Guild that we don’t know about.”
Chapter 2: The Woman from the Black Guild
The Kingdom of Herzeth, also known as the Kingdom of the Sun, was one of the greatest powers in the continent. At the center of its capital was the royal palace, surrounded by a special district where nobility resided, and further encircled by the town district where ordinary citizens lived peacefully.
The slums were even further out, particularly on the opposite side of the royal capital’s main gate—referred to as the “otherside.” Beyond there loomed eerie mountains, home to ferocious magical beasts that would occasionally wander down into the slums. Rumor had it that the kingdom deliberately neglected the slums, using the area as a defensive wall against such threats.
Naturally, this meant that the central government’s watchful eye didn’t reach that far, so the further away from the heart of the capital, the worse the security and the greater the danger in the slums.
In the sprawling, spiderweb-like old underground sewage system, in an area lined with shacks that rattled at the slightest breeze, groans echoed through the air.
“Stupid bastards,” barked a large man with greenish skin at the multiple others who lay collapsed and bruised, moaning in pain at his feet. “Getting your asses kicked by a bunch of domesticated demi-humans.”
“Oh, dear,” came a strangely syrupy woman’s voice from behind them. “What happened here?” The scent of aged honey wafted through the air as her voluptuous figure, oozing allure, emerged from the darkness.
The large man instinctively straightened his back. “Oh, nothing much. Just educating these worthless newbies.”
“So your attack on the festival was a failure, then? You do know it’s bad form to blame your subordinates for your failures, yes?”
“No, that’s not—”
