Chapter 34

Every occurrence has a reason for its existence.

However, most of those reasons are so trivial to people living their daily lives that no one bothers to investigate them individually. Thus, there are many truths in the world that remain buried and unrevealed simply because no one spares them a glance.

And occasionally, those buried truths drag out an unexpected past, one thing leading to another.

At Nagi’s direction, several members of the Kliffia Militia had been urgently summoned. Following his instructions, they completed their tasks and were now reporting to the Vice Captain.

“Finished the questioning. A few people said they’ve heard splashing in the waterways at night recently. But since fish occasionally swim up these channels, it sounds like they didn’t think much of it.”

Even if requested by their leader, the report consisted of minor details that could occur in any ordinary day. The man giving the report looked puzzled, wondering what the point of this investigation actually was.

The others seemed to feel the same; they had done the legwork but couldn’t grasp the significance of their actions.

“About the waterway lids—I actually saw one open on the day the fish were stolen. I put it back thinking it was some prank, but when I asked around later, it seems it happened several times after that. Including the one the leader put back, the lids have been opened at least five times.”

“I got a complaint, too. The lady next door says the water in the cistern has been smelling a bit off lately.”

“Over here, it’s missing goods. The old man at the greengrocer’s was hollering that a bag of beans he’d left in front of his shop to set out on the main street was swiped. The stuff vanished sometime between yesterday and this morning.”

“…Isn’t that just the old man being too careless?”

“In a small town like this, the only people who’d steal are outsiders. The old man’s in the kitchen sharpening his knife, vowing to catch the thief and fillet them into three pieces.”

Now that it was mentioned, a rhythmic shing-shing sound could be heard coming from somewhere.

The old greengrocer was a local celebrity, a veteran merchant who sourced and sold vegetables that couldn’t normally be found in town. He was a stereotypical stubborn old man; once he decided on something, he wouldn’t listen to anyone.

“…It’d be a pity if the thief got killed by the old man, so maybe we should be the ones to catch them.”

“…Yeah.”

It went without saying that Kliffia’s whetstones were among the finest in the kingdom, so that knife was likely terrifyingly sharp.

“But Vice Captain, what’s the point of all this questioning?”

“Beats me. Ask those two.”

With a shrug that suggested he was being worked just as hard as they were, he jerked his chin toward the second floor of the Mayor’s house, where Varna and Nagi were conducting their research.

In the study of the Mayor’s residence—or rather, the storehouse where the town’s public documents were kept—I was looking through records with Nagi.

“I didn’t expect the town’s construction plans to still be at the Mayor’s place. Outside of the big cities, they usually aren’t preserved, or the towns were built without blueprints in the first place.”

“Apparently, there was a plan to build a memorial hall when the town got bigger. The Mayor keeps everything that constitutes the town’s history.”

That was rare for a town governed by commoners, so personally, I was very grateful. It was a frustrating truth, but the privileged classes understood the meaning and value of preserving such materials. Since nobles were originally beings tasked by the Royal Family to rule the land, keeping records was a duty, and merchants cherished their ledgers and contracts. In lands ruled by commoners who didn’t know that logic, or in ancient settlements, one usually ended up having to grope for the truth through the foggy memories of people.

“I owe Mayor Ricky my thanks. Let’s see, the waterway plans… is this it?”

“That’s the repair plan from twenty years ago. Isn’t the original design next to it?”

“This one…? Are you serious? They built this almost simultaneously with the town’s construction?! That was over a hundred years ago… It’ll be impossible to find the people who actually made it.”

The preservation state was good, but having been left alone for over a century, the plan was understandably discolored. I grabbed it and spread it out on a table near the bookshelf. Construction materials, the reason for building, required personnel, schedules—I flipped past the irrelevant sections one after another until I finally found the page I was looking for.

“This is it. The source of the waterway’s water. This is what I was curious about.”

“I always assumed it was just drawn directly from the river… but they utilized a natural water vein. No wonder the water doesn’t get very muddy even when it rains heavily.”

Nagi peered over my shoulder out of curiosity. The page showed a plan to create a waterway utilizing a stream formed by a natural spring.

First, they built one large channel to stabilize the foundation, and from there, they split the water into two channels each for drinking and domestic wastewater. Two of those four channels ran along the left and right sides of the main street. The drinking water passed under small alleys in the residential area, connecting to deep areas called cisterns, and any excess water overflowing from there merged with the wastewater channels and emptied into the river.

The cisterns seemingly served as reservoirs when the water volume decreased. The drainage channels were apparently built quite large to account for potential flooding.

That was the basic design of the waterways.

“I see. So they decided to design the town here specifically because of this spring. Man, I’ve lived in this town all my life and I never knew. People in the old days were smart.”

Nagi stared at the blueprints, impressed. If I might add, the sheer amount of stone used for these waterways and the processing technology were also staggering. This level of technical skill—completing such a large-scale waterway without any kind of mortar or cement—might actually cause a stir in the construction industry if it got out.

But the important part wasn’t that. The source was the real issue.

If my hunch was correct, this would be the breakthrough.

“The source flows from the nearby cliffs, and it shall be utilized. An investigation of the water source was attempted, but abandoned due to the extreme depth and increasing water levels. However, calculating backward from the depth, distance, and direction…”

I placed the regional map made by the Knights next to the map in the documents, tracing a line from the town toward the water source with my finger on both maps simultaneously. My fingers stopped perfectly in unison at a specific spot.

“It is believed the water flows from the direction of the cliffs to the north of the town, huh.”

“…Hey, Varna, this spot is!!”

“Yeah, looks that way. Now, if the results of the questioning are good, it’ll be perfect!”

The location indicated on the document’s map overlapped with the cliffs where the Orc group was currently thought to be located, without a hair’s breadth of deviation.

However, Nagi likely hadn’t imagined that danger was lurking in the very town waterways he passed every day. It was reminiscent of the six-legged insect known as the “Black Flash G,” which the cooking squad feared like a demon. The way they made you think there were thirty for every one you saw was a disgusting point of similarity.

“Directly from the cliffs into our living space… there’s no way we could have prevented that with sentries! Are those pigs messing with us!?”

“I told you, don’t underestimate Orcs. They care about human eyes, too… unlike strays, Orcs in a group are surprisingly sneaky.”

If I recalled correctly, there was talk that the cliffs occupied by the Orcs had a vertical shaft leading down from the summit. Connecting that with this new information, that shaft likely led to the underground spring and the waterway it fed.

Whether by design or accident, the Orcs had learned of this and were infiltrating the town night after night through the waterways—a safe route free of human oversight. Since there was no physical evidence yet, I couldn’t state it as an absolute fact, but I couldn’t think of any other possibility.

“But hey, it looks like these waterways get deeper the further back you go. Wouldn’t the Orcs just drown?”

“It’s not widely known, but Orcs are actually quite good swimmers despite being land creatures. There’s even a story about an Orc that crossed from the continent to an island, lured by the pheromones of a female Orc being kept as an exhibit on a ship.”

“They crossed the ocean!? Those guys are way too high-spec…”

They were no match for aquatic monsters, of course, but a diving capacity said to last twenty minutes without surfacing and a swimming style that belied their bulk were traits that Kobolds and Trolls lacked. In the first place, if they were poor swimmers, Orcs wouldn’t have landed in the Kingdom by now.

…Though it was a personally complicated feeling to think that if Orcs didn’t exist, the Commoner Knights wouldn’t have been formed, and I wouldn’t have become a knight. If that had happened, the “Former Strongest” Cushu would likely still be throwing his weight around.

“But wait, if that’s the case, why hasn’t there been any human casualties until now? A sleeping human is the perfect prey, isn’t it?”

“I wondered about that, too. An unresisting animal is easy pickings.”

Orcs aren’t a race that hesitates to kill enemies to get food, and in some cases, they’ll even make humans their meal. Also, though the reason wasn’t clear, they apparently kidnapped young women from time to time. As Nagi said, a sleeping human was a sitting duck.

I wouldn’t know for sure without a detailed investigation, but even I could make a guess.

As the knight who had listened to Nonoka-san’s “Orc Talks” more than anyone else, I took pride in being something of an Orc expert within the Order. According to my brilliant deduction, the reason was this:

“Maybe even for an Orc, swimming in midwinter was physically taxing? They aren’t monsters that originally lived in cold places, plus they had the return trip to consider. If they got spotted by humans, they’d be beaten to a pulp, and their precious infiltration route would be exposed.”

“Orcs actually care about things like that!?”

“For better or worse, they do. They really are a pain in the neck.”

I added that the ones coming to town were immature Orcs, and since the path was narrow both ways, there might have been a constraint where they couldn’t carry large items back. Well, that was irrelevant for now, so I put that thought aside.

I made notes of the report the militia Vice Captain had given us earlier and added markings to my own map based on that information.

“The place where the lid was open was here, and the date was… okay. And if I line up the days the fields were raided and the days the fish went missing… yeah, just as I thought.”

“The lid being open near the dates of the damage… are you serious? I put those lids back without a single doubt! I was basically cleaning up after the Orcs!?”

“Well, you usually put things back like that without thinking, so it can’t be helped.”

I’ve had times where I saw white smoke leaking from a pipe inside the Motive Carriage and just patched it with repair tape without giving it much thought. It was a bitter memory how Rai got incredibly angry at me later, yelling, “It’s fine that you fixed it, but why didn’t you tell me sooner!?” I just figured since the Motive Carriage itself was a prototype, things like that were bound to happen.

“Wait, but the place where the lid was open today hasn’t suffered any damage…?”

“This spot… is right in front of the old greengrocer’s house. He mentioned a bag of beans being swiped… could it be that?”

“Ooh, as expected of a local! I see, everything fits together then!”

“Hehe, I’m of some use after all, aren’t I?”

These were points I wouldn’t have known as a non-local, so it was very helpful. I wasn’t entirely sure if the smell in the cistern was truly the Orcs’ fault, but the lead that they were using the waterways had become quite strong. With this many conditions met, there was enough credibility to put it in a report.

“Alright, time to finish the paperwork. Nagi, don’t tell the militia or the Mayor about this yet, okay?”

“Yeah, of course I know. We’re doing it like we discussed, right? I’ve made up my mind…”

At that moment—I failed to notice that Nagi was standing behind me, secretly clutching a length of rough rope.

‘…I feel bad for deceiving you, but I’m going to use you for my own personal reasons. You’ll just have to curse your own bad luck.’

I would come to regret this oversight later.

Well, since things didn’t actually turn out to be a major problem in the end, it was merely a modest regret—the kind born from a slight misunderstanding and a minor breakdown in communication.