Chapter 50 Breaking Taboos
If she had waited any longer, she would have been found out.
“…”
He was afraid the sound would leak out of his cloak over the frantic pounding of his heart.
After a few fumbles, he pulled his hand away and looked around.
Beyond the translucent cloak, within Ioannes’s reach, Delphine gasped.
“Lord Pride!”
Just then, someone called out to Ioannes from behind.
“They’ve captured every man in the area who’s hit the boundary!”
Soon, the human wagon was full of people.
Cries and sighs of despair came from the people inside.
The men stopped their ‘hunt’ and waited for Ioannes’ command.
There was a moment of stifling silence.
Ioannes looked down at his empty hands and sneered, as if he’d just thought of something ridiculous.
“… Yes. I’m off.”
With that, he swung himself onto his steed and gracefully led the knights at the head of the line.
Behind him came the hammers, loaded with people.
Delphine recognized the child’s mother among them.
She was looking frantically in the direction the child had suddenly disappeared, presumably with only her eyes on him.
The guards and wagon shrank to a dot and moved away.
After Lynn, she blew on the palm of her hand.
A transparent, glowing butterfly fluttered and flew away, landing on the back of a soldier at the very back of the procession.
Lynn whispered in a low voice.
“Follow me.”
***
They followed behind the group, keeping a respectable distance to avoid detection.
The knights moved quickly on horseback, so they had to use a mixture of concealment magic and teleportation.
Halfway through, Belly, who had received Lynn’s transmission, joined the two knights.
He looked surprised to find the child clinging to Delphine’s side, but didn’t say anything, given the circumstances.
“Lynn. You too… No, let’s go after them first.”
They shared the plan, pausing only briefly to distance themselves from the horde.
Delphine asked, her face still pale with the color not returning.
“You think the place they’re taking people to is the ‘factory’ the man spoke of?”
“Yes. It’s still just a guess, of course, but…”
Belly nodded immediately.
“I was expecting a human hunt to take place today, although I didn’t expect it to come from the Marquis of Pride himself…”
“I see. What the hell happened, you almost gave him away!”
Lynn asked Belly in a rather heated tone.
Belly furrowed his eyebrows in confusion.
“The place where we intentionally caused the rebellion is east of District 3. Apparently, until this morning, Marquis Pride, he was there…”
“Damn it, he must be using the black crystal too.”
Lynn insisted, his voice still raging.
“How else would he be able to move around like that?”
At that, Belly glanced over at Delphine.
“Well… We’ll find out today if we follow them.”
But following in silence soon became difficult.
The fog had begun to settle in, and the troop’s form had disappeared.
“… I can’t even feel the tracking magic anymore.”
At Lynn’s words, Belly muttered with a serious expression.
“I see. They wouldn’t let us in so easily, they must have a plan.”
Delphine looked at Belly with a serious face and asked nervously.
“So what do you suggest we do now?”
“What are you worried about? The goddess of luck is on our side.”
Belly’s serious face quickly dropped and smiled brightly, angelically.
“Let’s get through this, shall we, Lynn?”
Lynn peered through the fog for a moment, as if trying to gauge something, then nodded.
Then she spoke with a puzzled expression.
“I’ve seen him before… but I’ve never seen him use magic like this. Is he really all right, Belly?”
She added with a serious face.
“Energy doesn’t just come out of him without a price, does it?”
“That’s…”
“He’s fine.”
Delphine interjected, her face stern.
Of course, the thought of unidentifiable energy draining from her was frightening.
But she had come this far, and she couldn’t give up before facing the truth.
“I’m fine, so please allow me to enter the factory as I am.”
“…”
Lynn reached for her, his face still grim.
Once again, their hands intertwined.
Did this have to be this way?
For a moment, she wondered if she shouldn’t.
“… Yes. I see it. A settlement of this magnitude.”
Lynn glared in all directions through the fog.
“Do you think we can sneak in, Lynn? I don’t think we’ll be able to make a head-on assault on their positions.”
“It’s impossible, all the way up to… set.”
They made a quick judgment call.
First, they teleported the two knights and the child to the headquarters.
“We’re going in.”
She took Lynn’s hand and followed his lead.
An immense pressure crushed her entire body.
Delphine’s grip on Lynn’s hand tightened involuntarily.
And then, to his surprise, the pressure that threatened to burst his veins vanished in an instant.
She could feel the fluffy earth beneath her feet.
“… Here?”
Delphine opened her closed eyes and looked around.
It was a very large flat area with black soil all around.
The desolation of such a large area, without a single blade of grass or a single tree, gave her a chill.
“Ugh…”
At the same time, a terrible stench washed over them.
Even Belly and Lynn furrowed their brows and muttered.
“I thought I’d gotten used to… by now, but this is really bad.”
The stench that permeated District 3 was worse than ever.
Delphine was not used to this, and even standing for a moment made her dizzy.
“Put this on your face. It’ll make it a little better.”
Lynn handed her a dampened handkerchief.
Delphine took it without hesitation, covering her mouth and nose.
If she didn’t, she felt like she was going to vomit at any moment.
“What is this stench…”
“I think that’s it.”
Belly cast a sharp glance straight ahead.
Where his gaze landed, there was a huge factory, black smoke billowing.
It was the height of grotesqueness, towering over the black, weedless ground.
Delphine wrapped one hand around her goosebumped forearm and muttered to herself.
“It’s kind of creepy…”
At that moment, she remembered witnessing the man using the black crystal in the recital hall.
It was the same feeling.
The feeling of coming face to face with something that shouldn’t be in nature…
“Let’s go inside.”
“I’ll cast an invisibility spell.”
Lynn placed his hand on the top of her head.
Then a sensation like being doused in ice cold water ran down from the top of her head to her toes.
Turning to Delphine, who was shivering at the unfamiliar sensation, Lynn spoke.
“The only thing magic can hide is your appearance. No matter what happens, you must never make a sound.”
“So even with phosium, you can’t hide everything?”
“You can only do one of two things: invisibility or mute. Even magic has its limits.”
“Sounds like a myth.”
Lynn looked a little puzzled at the offhand remark.
“… What’s that?”
“Well, old stories are always like this. You should never look back.”
Delphine explained with a smirk.
“The gods always impose taboos on humans, and humans are punished for breaking them.”
Delphine gazed at the factory in the distance with a complicated expression.
She had traveled all the way here, breaking Ioannes’ taboo that she should never leave District 1.
She wondered what punishment she would receive for breaking it.
“… Why are you telling me this now?”
Lynn raised one eyebrow with an impatient expression.
Delphine’s frank face made her forget her tension for a moment and chuckled softly.
Beside her, Belly also exclaimed in a cheerful tone that didn’t fit the situation.
“Now, then. Let’s get back safely and unpunished.”
They soon began walking toward the black factory in the distance.
***
They can’t just walk in through the front door when they are trying to sneak in.
Using Lynn’s magic, they entered a sewer hole in the side of the building.
What emerged was a vast tunnel and a massive network of pipes running through it.
“Is there a place like this in this Empire…”
They looked around in amazement and gasped.
Underground, several pipes as thick as a man’s torso led somewhere.
Delphine lowered her voice to a wary whisper.
“I’m surprised this place is so underground and there are no guards.”
“Perhaps they don’t need to, it’s heavily guarded, and not many people know it exists in the first place.”
Belly replied, peering down the tunnel like a snake’s slithering gills.
“They would have preferred to keep the number of people here to a minimum to maintain secrecy.”
Lynn, his eyes sharp and scanning their surroundings, turned to him.
“Where do you think the people who were taken are, Belly?”
“I don’t know… Let’s follow the pipes.”
The huge pipe curved and stretched on endlessly.
What a dark and damp underground passage they walked through.
After a while, an iron ladder appeared in front of them, leading upward.
