Chapter 70

At almost the exact same moment the magic potion Remnare was being spilled inside the cave, the knights standing guard outside were suffering from terminal boredom.

“Ugh, it’s freezing! Hey, isn’t the investigation inside finished yet? Let us collect the corpse already!”

“We can’t just barge in without orders. Well, just a little more patience, I guess.”

“Easy for you to say, but I’m losing the sensation in my fingertips… it’s so cold… ACHOO!!”

“I’m telling you, buying that knock-off ‘Mazerun’ brand was a mistake.”

The knight who had begun to shiver as the wind sapped his body heat was the man who, for this snowy mountain expedition, had tried to buy gloves from the famous high-end outdoor brand “Magellan.”

However, thinking he’d found a luxury item at a bargain, he haggled the price down and bought them—only to find the brand was “Mazerun,” which looked exactly like Magellan. In short, he had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a rip-off product the shopkeeper had stocked. Even though they looked warm, the material and the crude stitching meant their cold-weather functionality was abysmal.

“Dammit, this is the Holy Vessel Knights’ fault! Are those guys even doing their cargo inspections seriously?!”

“It really hurts that our country’s domestic production guilds are so weak. Adventurer’s Guild? Don’t know her.”

“Argh, the wind is worse than the snow! Fine, I’ll just bury myself in the snow to wait out the cold! This is the Commander’s secret ‘Reverse Thinking’ method!!”

“Hey, if you cover yourself in snow, you’ll just get even—”

“Hiyah!!”

The knight sprinted and dove—thwump!—right into a nearby mound of snow. However, a snow mound isn’t always something someone made while shoveling; sometimes they occur naturally. Which means, if you think about it calmly, there must be something there for the snow to pile up on in such a shape.

“Buh-oh?! I hit something!! …Dwaa?! The impact knocked the snow down from the top onto me!!”

“You really are an idiot. You’re not a kid anymore, so can’t you calm down a bit?”

“S-shut up!! …Wait, huh…?”

While reflexively snapping back at his colleague’s perfectly valid point, the half-buried knight noticed something felt wrong about the snowdrift he’d charged into.

“H-hey? What’s this?”

“What do you mean ‘what’? I’m telling you, it’s not just a pile of snow. There’s probably a fallen tree or a rock inside—”

“No, but if it were a rock or a tree, I don’t think it would feel this… coarse.”

“Huh? Coarse? What would?”

“The texture of the thing inside the snow!”

The knight who had dove in began to shovel away the snow, relying on the sensation of what he was touching. If he had actually been wearing real Magellan-brand gloves, he might not have been able to feel the texture so clearly. Justifying himself that way, he cleared the snow—and eventually, as the obstructing white powder crumbled away, it appeared.

“What… eh? What is this? It’s not straw, it’s like a pile of white and red things—”

“H-hey… doesn’t this white part hanging down look like a hand and a foot?”

“Huh? Ah—you’re right. And this is a demi-human type, just like an Orc—wait. Then, could this be…?!”

As the other knights realized something was wrong and rushed over, the two of them finished brushing away the snow. They were left speechless.

“A mountain… of white beasts? Wait, are these the targets…?!”

“Is all this red stuff blood…?”

“Oi, we’ve found something insane?! T-the camp!! Contact the camp, and Captain Garmon too!!”

A pillar of stacked corpses. Facing a sight so grotesque it would make any normal person nauseous, the knights fulfilled their duty by shouting at the top of their lungs to drown out their unease.

“And so, the ‘targets’ were found outside in a pile of corpses.”

“Next to the cave… I completely thought it was just snow piled on a rock. A total miscalculation…!!”

Senior Garmon hung his head, looking dejected at having missed something so obvious, but since every knight present had missed it, the blame lay with everyone. As I watched him help carry the corpses found outside into the cave, I thought about what a deeply responsible person he was.

If only the privileged classes of this country had half as much sense of responsibility. Unfortunately, most of them only cherish their bloated pride. Come to think of it, the fact that I entered school at the same time as Astraea and Sedona was practically a miracle. I’ll have to thank them for no particular reason next time I see them. If I remember, that is.

Next to where the corpses were being lined up, Bevion was sprawled on the ground, wheezing with exhaustion, while Nonoka-san—whom Bevion had desperately carried all the way here—was staring at the magic potion spilled across the floor, which was now covered in miscellaneous dead leaves. She pulled a test tube from her pocket and dripped a red liquid onto the floor.

Instantly, the red liquid and the remnants of the magic potion reacted and emitted a glow.

“As expected, there is nothing wrong with the Remnare reagent itself. The reason the spilled area glowed is because that much blood was shed here. And very recently, too.”

“So the potion’s effect is correct. If there were that many bloodstains, why didn’t we notice?”

“If you look closely, there were faint stains on the ground. It appears there were traces of someone trying to wipe it away. Also, since it flowed into the crevices of the bedrock, the obvious stains weren’t found.”

“It was dark, and because the amount of blood was so vast, I thought the floor was just naturally this color. I was careless…”

The seniors looked at each other with bitter expressions.

That’s the second oversight. It didn’t affect the investigation, so it’s fine, but we couldn’t complain if we were scolded for being slack. Specifically, if a madam were to trace a finger along a windowsill and say, “There’s dust here! If you don’t clean seriously, you’re fired!!”, we wouldn’t be able to talk back. If anyone in our Knight Order held that position…

“………”

“What’s wrong, Senior? Your face is turning pale!?”

“I just imagined Yagara in drag with full-on ‘cross-dresser’ makeup… Blergh, so gross!!”

“Why would you subject yourself to such a painful imagination!?”

“Yagara in drag… ugh, now I’m starting to feel sick too…”

“Go puke outside for the sake of preserving the scene!!”

Setting aside the massive psychological self-harm, Nonoka-san, having finished the blood check, was now gripping a scalpel in front of the fallen corpses. That was the one Calme and I had taken down together—is she really going to do her favorite thing, a dissection, right here…?

“Nonoka-san, are you going to do it here?”

“No, I won’t be performing a full-scale dissection. However, there are two things I need to confirm immediately. To do that, I’m going to shave the fur off this creature’s face.”

The face of the creature was a tangled mess of white fur. Indeed, it was buried so deep that its features were impossible to discern. But Nonoka-san’s rush to reach a conclusion suggested she already had a hunch about the true identity of this being.

Scrape, scrape. Nonoka-san’s scalpel carefully began to shear away the white fur. The hair was remarkably tough; even the scalpel, which had a far keener edge than any sword, could only take it off bit by bit. I wondered if the truth Nonoka-san feared lay beneath this coat.

“…Hmm.”

“Senior? What is it now? Another nausea-inducing imagination…?”

“No, it’s not that, but…”

As Nonoka-san continued to shave, a half-baked sense of déjà vu began to swell in my chest—that nagging feeling where you know exactly what something is, but the answer is stuck in your throat and won’t come out. I didn’t have any concrete proof or conviction yet, but the silhouette of the creature’s shaved face felt incredibly familiar.

The more fur that vanished, the stronger that déjà vu became. Calme and Senior Garmon didn’t seem to notice yet, but the members of the Recovery Squad watching the progress gradually began to let out “Huh?“s as they caught on to something.

Finally, by the time Nonoka-san finished shaving the beast’s face completely—I realized the identity of that déjà vu. At this point, the others seemed to have realized it too, and their faces cramped up spectacularly.

No way. It’s impossible.

It should have been impossible, and yet, there it was, a reality right before our eyes.

Something either loathsome, formidable, or terrifying.

And it was a face more familiar to us than any other.

The bared fangs, the pig-like nose and ears, and the sickly green skin that had been hidden beneath the white fur—there was no longer any room for doubt. It was terrifying even to speak the truth, but finally, one of the knights, unable to endure the silence any longer, muttered:

“…Wait, isn’t this that thing?”

“No, there’s no way. After making such a fuss about an ‘Unidentified Mysterious Animal,’ for it to be that now… it’s like a transparent trick from a third-rate writer… but no matter how many times I look at it, it’s that. Sorry, I was wrong.”

“I mean, those don’t have fur like this… but if you pull the hair out, this is totally that, isn’t it!?”

Was this their curse, or a punishment akin to original sin handed down by God?

Had we come all this way, only to end up back in the exact same place?

As if speaking for everyone’s feelings—which had moved past confusion and surprise—I poured the surging emotions boiling up from within my soul into my throat and let them explode.

“…In the end, it’s just another Orc subjugation after all!!—”

With its fur removed and its true face exposed, the creature possessed the all-too-familiar, hateful face of a common Orc.

The mission that was supposed to be the Royal Foreign Hazardous Species Countermeasures Knights’ first major subjugation of a non-Orc monster had turned out to be, in the end, just another day of hunting Orcs.

—For everyone, that is, except Nonoka-san, who stared at the scene with a face turned deathly pale.

Let me briefly explain what happened afterward.

The conclusion was that upon examining both the corpses outside and the one inside, they were all Orcs with fur. Why Orcs—who normally have extremely little body hair—had grown such an elaborate coat is a matter for experts to analyze later, but since the one I shot with the arrow turned out to be female, it was clear that this had been an Orc colony.

With this, the mission was likely over.

While conventional biology usually sees a harem structure with one male and many females, Orcs have an extremely rare ecology where many males gather around a single female to form a colony.

Another trait of Orcs is their tendency to place their living spheres excessively far apart to ensure territories don’t overlap. Calculating backward from this habit, it was unlikely there were any more furry Orc colonies on this mountain.

And as is well known, once the female Orc dies, the colony completely ceases to function, and the surviving males become “Den-less” strays, wandering aimlessly. While Orcs are strong individually, they weaken significantly when they can’t act as a group due to the collapse of their hormone balance; thus, their threat level drops drastically. Giant stray Orcs are a tiny exception among exceptions.

I don’t know where these Orcs came from, but regardless, the colony they formed here likely drew the ire of that massive bear I killed, and they were slaughtered inside the cave. I’m not sure why, but the corpses showed signs of being torn apart by claws, and without exception, they were all young Orcs that hadn’t passed adolescence, so it wouldn’t have even been a contest.

…Even now, I’m reminded of the terrifying strength of that bear I fought. If I hadn’t lured it into a trap—a true tool of civilization—it wouldn’t have ended so easily.

However, since females don’t leave the colony and the corpses didn’t look like they were killed today or yesterday, it’s expected that at least one male Orc still exists. A smart one capable of cleaning the nest, gathering food, and even removing man-made objects… he won’t be easy to deal with.

This introduction has gone on quite a while, but I am currently descending the mountain with everyone to recover the Orc corpses. Their numbers are few, but because of the snow, even with all the sleds borrowed from the village, we can’t carry them easily.

“I wonder where the last one is and what it’s doing.”

My curiosity was shared by everyone around me.

The seniors were also exhaling white breaths into the cold as they voiced their thoughts.

“I’d be grateful if it just died of natural causes. Then we can finally leave this frozen hellhole.”

“Though the mission might not technically end until we find the body.”

“But it’s practically over. There’s no reason for the remaining Orc to destroy traps anymore. Maybe the survivor isn’t even an adult yet.”

If the remaining Orc is weak, there won’t be much chance for me to take its head.

My beloved sword, which I went to the trouble of protecting against the cold, might be lamenting its lack of action.

…Though, according to Old Man Genon the blacksmith, it’s a “sword being pampered by its owner,” so it might actually be relieved there’s no rough business.

Well, once I rest at the camp and report to the Vice Commander, my turn will be over.

—Or so I shouldn’t have said. Because, well…

“Report!! Report! Emergency rep-O-O-ORC!!”

“Huh? Is that a familiar…?”

In this Knight Order, those kinds of flags are almost always collected immediately.