Chapter 130 – The North (14)

When Alice opened her eyes, there was a beast sitting there sharpening her claws with her piercing eyes. Alice, startled, jumped up and screamed, clutching at her blanket.

“Quaaaaa

Her screams spread far and wide in the curved caverns, enough to attract the attention of the beastmen lying all around her. Everywhere she looked, her yellow eyes looked right at her.

“What, what? Who are you? What about my dad? What about Lorena?”

“I’m here. Alice. Calm down.”

Lorena, who was sitting in her corner and warming up, smiled awkwardly and moved her hand as if to calm her down. Alice briskly rolled her eyes, recalling the events just before she passed out. She was so cold that as she curled up for a moment, the sled overturned. She remembered that Evan had lifted her Alice and jumped off, and there were beastmen all around her. When Evan said something, she remembered herself shaking her head and saying no.

And now Lorena was in this cave, but Evan wasn’t.

“Oh, what about Dad? Lorena. Where is my dad?”

“Calm down, Alice. Because Evan is safe now. She went after seeing Alice sleeping.”

“That, is it?”

Alice listened to Lorena and sat back down. When she calmed down, her attendants, who had been watching her attentively, went back to their daily routine as if they had never observed her. Lorena started exercising again, and Soo-in sat next to Alice, trimming her toenails.

Alice looked at the beastman next to her and asked Lorena.

“Ooh, how are we now?”

Suin seemed completely uninterested in the conversation between Lorena and Alice. Alice wondered if these prisoners could understand what they were saying. Lorena said as she did her push-ups.

“We are… So, like a hostage.”

“Hostage?”

Alice was taken aback when she said she was a hostage. She looked around, and she found Evan and pulled her body up. Lorena stopped doing her push-ups and she got back up, she said.

“Oh right. Alice. Let me introduce you to the facilities here. It would be more comfortable for me to do it than for the prisoner.”

“Hey, wait a minute, what are you, Lorena? Why are you so calm?”

Alice frowned at Lorena’s appearance, which seemed perfectly adapted. It was because she was easygoing, as if she had betrayed Evan and stuck with Suin. With her disapproving look on her face, she was about to say something, but Lorena winked.

“It would be more comfortable for me to guide you. Prisoners are a bit slurred with our words.”

Alice nodded her head a beat later, calming her temper. Lorena naturally led the way out of the cave, and Alice went out, closely observing the prisoners lying on her floor or doing their jobs.

“Ah… !”

When I left the cave, a cold chill hit me. Without thinking, she stepped outside in her thin clothes and wrapped her arms around her body as she trembled. Lorena cleared her chest and took a deep breath.

“Ah… Lived Alice. Were you surprised?”

So said Lorena, and she gave Alice the coat she had been wearing. Alice quickly took her coat and put it on, then moved to a shaded spot away from the cave. The village, which she thought was simply a cave, was a complex structure like a giant beehive. If you look up, there are beasts running around in the holes scattered in the cliff, and if you turn your body a little, you can observe the beasts opening a shop.

And, as if to surround this village, a wide area of ​​dark forest stretched out. Alice let out a deep sigh as she looked at the vast forest, overlapping with the fog of her eyes and not knowing where her end was. She had to get out of here, because the mere sight of the forest sapped her morale.

“So, where are you now?”

“It is a village of prisoners. Evan came into town on the condition that he not lay a finger on you or me.”

“Under…”

Alice let out a sigh with her confused face. She didn’t know how to deal with this situation. Alice lowered her voice.

“What is your escape plan?”

Lorena shook her head and said.

“I don’t have any plans yet. First of all, Evan said he still needs to monitor the situation. We are…”

Lorena slurred her words and laughed awkwardly. Because neither she nor she knew what to do in this situation. To do nothing. Leaving everything to Evan. For Lorena, who had been in charge of her family instead of Jack, and for Alice, who had lived with the obsession to protect her family, it was a very strange thing.

So Alice asked Lorena a question.

“Really, is there anything I can do?”

Lorena frowned at her Alice’s question and thought about her. Alice, too, put her head against Lorena, and she thought for a moment. Lorena, who had closed her eyes and stamped her feet, said as she grabbed Alice by the shoulder.

“A fugitive who went to Phoebe. Did they really arrive at Phoebe?”

“What?”

Lorena looked around her and said.

“There is a vendor here who sells people stuff, so I asked who he was selling his stuff to. A prisoner told me that originally, this village was doing business with humans and interacting with them to some extent. After becoming the boss now, they suddenly turned hostile, but I heard that they had been interacting until quite recently.”

“If you’ve been interacting with them until recently, there’s a high possibility that villages that don’t normally interact with beastmen don’t know the current situation, right?”

“I guess so.”

Alice nodded, lost in her thoughts. Evan’s friend, who was looking for the fugitive just like them, knew that the fugitive was in a town called Poive.

“If it’s a knight’s subordinate, it must be someone who works in the capital. Since the North provided information on the hideout to the capital, and that person came down from the capital, it must have been quite a while. Did the fugitive stay with Phoebe? He’s smart enough to run away from the thieves’ guild’s assassination attempt, but he couldn’t have known that his hideout had been discovered, and he was living a carefree life?”

Lorena agreed with her reasoning. Not anywhere else, but a fugitive who touched the Hero family. There was no space where such a person could comfortably stretch out and sleep. The person living next door could have been the informer, and the landlord, who had been kind until yesterday, might be stabbing. The fugitive had few options.

Repeatedly fleeing from one village to another and getting caught, or running away to a village where the Thieves Guild couldn’t hide. Lorena said.

“I haven’t heard of a Suin joining the thieves’ guild.”

“I bet you haven’t even heard of the fugitive. Therefore… I think the fugitive would have chosen this prisoner village here as a safe place, free from the thieves’ guild and the Hero family?”

Lorena made a sad face. It was because she could see what kind of sight he would face as he ran blindly on the sleigh, believing only rumors that he was kind to people. Alice turned around and went back into the cave. She was burning with enthusiasm. It was because she found what she could do in this wide cave.

Lorena also followed Alice with a face full of enthusiasm. Alice found her mugshot in her luggage. A male figure with a large mole on her face caught her eye. She rolled around in the snow, but her water badge was unscathed. Alice swept her mugshot once, then she held it out to Suin, who was still sitting in the same seat.

Soo-in, who was trimming his nails, glanced at the wanted badge with an indifferent expression and tapped it with his finger.

“Who? Lover?”

Alice shook her head and said.

“Have you seen this person? I need something this person had.”

Suin was more hospitable than expected. She lowered her head, studied the badge’s face carefully, and then strained her hand to pull the badge out of her. Su-in, who was thinking over and over again while looking at the mugshot in the light, suddenly made a growling sound into the cave.

The beastmen who were lying on the floor began to approach with their eyes twinkling. Alice and Lorena staggered back and sat in the corner. The prisoner tapped the wanted badge in an animal-like language that Alice and Lorena did not understand, and pointed at Alice and Lorena again.

The beastmen nodded and looked at the badge, and the elongated beastman stabbed her badge with her claws as if to pierce it.

“I’ve seen it.”

All eyes were on the prisoner. Alice asked.

“Where are you?”

“Dead. She was alive until she came, but I spit in her face when her boss said he was fond of her. So she was tortured for a week and then she died.”

“Ah, I remember! I remember!”

“There was! It did!”

As the beastman explained the details, exclamations poured out from all directions as if he knew who it was. Alice asked.

“Where are his things?”

“Follow me.”

Following the guide’s guidance, the two moved. The three of them were heading towards a small, round hut covered in pure white snow. Alice felt a strange tension between the receding cave and the approaching hut. Is it some kind of warehouse where the dead people’s things are stored? The forest was dark and I couldn’t see very well.

It was covered in pure white snow and looked like a chocolate cake, or a piece of meat covered with cream cheese. However, the bumpy surface also created an eerie feeling.

Alice thought it was stored in that warehouse. But her confidence turned to anxiety as she got closer, and by the time she was able to identify the hut, she was covered in astonishment.

“What…”

“Here.”

Even at a cursory glance, this hut, which far exceeded Alice’s height, was not a building built by someone else. It was a tomb mixed with frozen clothes and burial goods. A tomb made by discarding grave goods for a long time. Alice turned her head and retched, and Lorena gasped for breath.

“It’s in here.”

Su-in said that while pulling the fur protruding outside. Alice gritted her teeth and looked at her grave. She couldn’t give up here. The prisoner was moving away, but Alice faced a mass of grave goods.

She said, walking on her arm.

“Let’s do it.”

Even for the dead

Had to