When Rekka fell from the top floor of Ryugu Palace, Rosalind transformed into bats and followed after him as quickly as she could. To her, it was the obvious thing to do, but it put Rain in the worst position imaginable.
“Ah... uh...”
The mermaid princess was seized with terror, unable to do anything but tremble. She thought she was about to be killed. She thought all of the merfolk were about to be killed. The man in front of her had the motive to do it.
But after he was rid of Rekka, the man just stood there, motionless and silent. It was as if he didn’t even see Rain.
I-I have to get away...
She knew she needed to run, but her feet wouldn’t move. Fear had taken control of her legs.
The secretary, who until now had silently been watching things unfold, walked over to the giant man and whispered something to him. He slowly nodded and turned towards Rain.
“Aah...”
Rain was almost in tears as she felt the oppressive weight of his gaze upon her. She turned to the body of her murdered mother.
Mother...
But alas, the corpse that was no longer her mother offered her no comfort.
The man silently approached.
The sorrow of losing her mother and the fear that she was about to share the same fate washed over Rain at the same time. She could no longer hold it in and began to sob.
“Waah...”
The man’s huge hands reached out towards her.
▽
Ryugu Palace, second floor. Girls’ bathroom.
Tetra and Shirley were hiding in a stall.
“A-Are the scary people gone?”
“I don’t know, but we can’t leave yet.”
“I’m sorry... This is my fault for saying I wanted to go to the bathroom.”
“No, I wanted to go, too... We were just unlucky that the third floor bathroom was being cleaned, you know?”
When Rekka left to hand Raul over to the staff, the two girls also stepped out to visit the bathroom. That was where they were when the pirates had rushed the palace, leaving them unable to get back to the others.
What do I do? What do I do?
Out of all the girls, Tetra was the weakest in combat. After all the time she’d spent living underground, she was weak in general. If even a single pirate found them, there would be nothing she could do. And Shirley was a scientist, so the same was probably true of her.
The two girls huddled in silence after that, but even without saying a word, they could each feel the other shaking as they held each other close.
“I-It’s okay,” Tetra finally said, trying to make them both feel a little better. “Rekka will come to save us. I know it. So until he does, let’s just stay here so the scary people can’t find us.”
“Y-Yeah.”
But as if her prayer had been heard and cruelly denied, the door to the bathroom opened with a click. Tetra’s eyes opened wide at the sound. She tried her best to keep herself under control, even putting her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. She looked and saw that Shirley was doing the same thing. Both girls waited in anxious horror as the footsteps echoed ominously through the cramped room.
Please... Just go away...
But the footsteps suddenly stopped. They stopped right in front of the stall where the two frightened girls were hiding.
SNAP!
The door to the stall was split in two. The top half slid off its hinges and fell to the ground, revealing a towering man looking down at them.
“Rekka...”
Tetra’s tearful plea fell on deaf ears.
Chapter 2: The Pirate Planet
My head feels like it’s full of fuzz. What happened?
“Ugh...”
“Rekka, are you awake?”
“Rosalind? Aagh... I can’t even remember how many times I’ve passed out like this.”
It wasn’t something I tried to keep track of. It would just be a reminder of how many times I’d almost gotten myself killed.
Either way, I came to in a cramped tunnel of some kind. I squinted and saw we were just inside the entrance of a big pipe... maybe to one of the canals? To my left, I could see the water running down the pipe deeper into darkness, and to my right, I could see lights from the moats of Ryugu Palace.
“Where are we?”
“Probably the pipe that circulates water in and out of the moat.”
“What happened to Rain and the big guy?”
“I don’t know.”
“...I see.”
I sat up. I must’ve hit the water when I landed. My whole body hurt, and I was soaking wet. Rosalind said she’d left Rain behind... But she’d done it to save me, so I couldn’t really blame her for that.
“Hey, where’s that pirate girl? She fell down with us, right?”
“She’s right there.”
Rosalind’s pale finger pointed to the girl with the headband, who was currently sitting with her legs crossed.
“Um, are you hurt?” I asked.
“...Hmph.”
She turned away. She didn’t seem to like me much.
“She’s not hurt, I don’t think. You shielded her from the fall. However...” Rosalind frowned and ripped the headband off the girl’s head. “She’s being quite a brat considering you saved her... Hmm?”
“G-Give that back!”
The girl reached out to try and take her headband back from Rosalind, but without it, there was a tiny horn visible on her head.
“Are you an oni or something?”
“An oni? What the heck is that? Just give me that back!”
“Hmph. If you were a fellow outsider like me, I was willing to show you some sympathy... But if you’re not, I suppose there’s no need to give this back.”
Rosalind pushed the girl away and sighed. I felt a little bad, so I spoke up.
“Rosalind, give it back to her.”
“Hmm... I will if she’s willing to answer some questions. Girl, what’s your name?”
“...Fam,” she answered unhappily.
“Fam, is it? And you’re with these Seageists? What are you pirates doing on this planet?”
“The same thing pirates always do,” Fam said bluntly.
“Of course... But some of what you’re doing doesn’t make sense. If you’re after money, why not rob the guests at the inn?”
“Now that you mention it, that’s a good question,” I said.
Ryugu Palace was the priciest inn on Berano. Most of its guests were probably rich, so if the pirates were just after money, they’d be easy targets. But as far as I could tell, the pirates were leaving the patrons alone. So they must have been after...
“You’re after that jewel called the Mermaid Princess’s Tear, aren’t you? It just looked like an ordinary gem when I saw it. Why is it so valuable?”
“It’s supposed to be some kind of ancient merfolk treasure,” a new voice suddenly answered.
I turned around and saw someone I recognized coming from deeper within the pipe.
“Raul!”
“Hey, kid,” Raul answered with a grin.
“You show up in the strangest places, don’t you?” Rosalind said in an exasperated whisper.
“So you know about this Mermaid Princess’s Tear?”
“Hmm... I suppose the answer is both yes and no, depending on how you see it.”
“That tells me nothing. What do you mean?”
Raul shrugged. “Like I said, it’s supposedly some ancient merfolk treasure. When you’re in my line of work, you hear about things like that. The rumors say it’s hidden in Ryugu Palace, but not a single person’s ever seen it. The most common version of the story says that it’s an incredibly valuable jewel.”
“The treasure of the merfolk, huh?”
The Mermaid Princess’s Tear(?) that the big man had been holding definitely looked like a jewel, and I could definitely see pirates going after something like that... probably. The only catch was that if they were after tre
asure—money, really—then why not attack the guests while they were at it?
“That doesn’t make sense,” Rosalind said. “The Mermaid Princess’s Tear must have some other secret.”
It seemed like we were on the same page about that.
“...Oww!”
Huh? Suddenly my head started hurting.
“What’s wrong, Rekka—gah!”
“Oww... What is this?”
Rosalind and Raul both began to clutch their foreheads in pain, too.
“Aah! You! Tiny girl! Give me back my headband!” Fam started to shout when she saw us in pain.
“Hm? Hey, don’t tell me that kid’s a gremlin...”
“A gremlin?”
“What’s that?”
Neither me or Rosalind had any idea what Raul was talking about.
“Just give her back the headband. It’s her horn that’s causing these headaches.”
“Hmph.”
Rosalind scoffed and forced the headband back on Fam’s head. Fam adjusted it so it covered the horn, and my headache stopped instantly.
“The pain’s gone... Raul, what the heck was that? And what’s a gremlin?”
“A rare species that gives off special electromagnetic waves from its horn. They can screw up delicate machinery or interfere with the brain’s electrical signals, which causes headaches. It’s not something gremlins can control, though. That’s just how they are, so cut her some slack.”
Raul put his hand on Fam’s head, but she slapped it away and told him not to touch her.
“Wait, did you call me ‘tiny girl’ a minute ago?” Rosalind asked.
“You are tiny,” Fam said.
“I’m the same size as you are!”
The two tiny girls proceeded to shout at each other.
“Guys, now’s not the time for... Wait. Raul, did you cut your hand?”
“Oh?”
Blood was dripping from a long cut across Raul’s hand where Fam had slapped it.
“It’s fine. It’s not deep... Look.”
Raul rubbed his palms together to wipe the blood away, then spread them out to show that the wound had totally disappeared.
“Huh? You’re right...”
It sure looked like it was a lot of blood, but there was no sign of it now. The cut really was gone. As I tried to figure out what had happened, Fam began to kick her legs and stomp her feet.
“Let me go already!” she yelled.
“Nwah!”
Spit flew from her mouth and landed on Rosalind. I could see Rosalind’s temples begin to twitch.
“You really are a little brat. Everybody knows that when you catch a pirate, they go straight to the noose.”
“...!”
Fam’s expression froze up when she heard the word “noose,” but only for a second. The next moment, she was glaring at us. Maybe she was just bluffing, but she was pretty strong-willed.
“Come on, Rosalind. Don’t scare her.”
“I wasn’t kidding... Oh?”
“Hm?”
Rosalind looked up out of the pipe towards the front gate of Ryugu Palace.
“The pirates are starting to withdraw...” I said.
“They’ve got what they’re after, so they probably want to get out of here before the army arrives.”
“No! Boss!” Fam screamed.
“Looks like you’ve been left behind,” Rosalind said with a grin.
For the first time, the pirate girl went pale.
When I looked out of the pipe again, I saw her “boss” come out of the palace. What was that he was carrying over his shoulders?
“Rain! Tetra! And Shirley? How?! They were supposed to be hiding in the room!”
The three girls were all motionless.
“Damn it! He can’t...”
“Calm down, Rekka. No pirate takes dead bodies back with them. They’re just unconscious.”
“But then why take them?!”
“He either wants hostages in case someone comes after him, or he wants to sell them to slavers. Either way, it’s nothing good.”
“The boss would never do that!” Fam yelled.
She was pretty insistent, but we had no way of knowing if it was the truth or not.
“Hmm... Seems you’ve just been caught up in Rain’s story. Looks like the kidnapped princess type.”
I know that, R! You don’t have to tell me!
No, even if Rain wasn’t a heroine, it was still my job to save her. And of course Tetra and Shirley, too!
“I want to get them back. Rosalind, will you help me once more?”
“Hmph... Well, I should’ve guessed that you would ask that.”
I figured I could take that as a yes.
“So, what’s the plan? Attack head-on and get them back?”
“No. If they use Tetra and the others as hostages, we’ll be in danger, and so will they. We’ll follow them and wait for our chance.”
Raul interrupted us before we could get any further with our plan.
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of sneaking aboard the Seageists’ pirate ship. That’s insane.”
“Are they that dangerous?”
“They sure are. They used to raid Galactic Federation merchant ships all the time. They’re a real nasty bunch.”
Fam frowned. Even if they were pirates, she clearly didn’t like someone talking about her friends that way.
“For the last year or so, they’ve even been raiding military supply ships. They hired some kind of amazing cybernetic engineer to upgrade all their weapons, I heard. The federation sent a task force after them and ended up taking heavy losses, which means they’re no normal pirates. And what’s more...” Raul lowered his voice. “I’ve heard rumors that the captain, Squallow, kidnaps kids and eats them.”
“He eats kids...?”
Images of Tetra, Shirley, and Rain flashed through my mind.
“My boss would never...”
“Shut up,” Rosalind said.
“Grmph!”
Fam tried to talk, but Rosalind put her hand over her mouth.
“See? So chasing after the likes of them is a bad idea.”
“But I don’t buy the whole him eating kids thing. Especially now with Fam right here.”
Fam was a pirate, but she was young enough that you could call her a kid. If that huge man—Squallow, Raul said—really ate kids, then he probably would have eaten her first.
“Well, maybe that part’s not true,” Raul said. “But he’s definitely kidnapping them. You just saw him nab your friends, right? The Seageists are bad news.”
“That’s why we’re going to save them.”
Tetra had been with me for a while now, and Rain and Shirley had both been great to me here on this planet. We were all friends. If the people who’d kidnapped them really were dangerous, then it was all the more reason to save them.
“You really are stubborn, you know that?” Raul said, shaking his head. “I know you care about them, but why not let the Estashionian army handle the baddies?”
“You’re the one who said they weren’t ordinary pirates. They took out almost an entire fleet, right? If we leave now, we can catch up to them. I’m going.”
“Kid, that’s not what I was trying to say...” Raul scratched his head.
“I don’t have any more time to waste here. Rosalind, let’s g—”
“Hold it! If you’re really going, then I’m going with you.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Hmm... Well, I guess I feel like I’ve come so far that I can’t just give up on you now.” Raul gave me a particularly suspect grin and a thumbs-up.
I really didn’t know what to do with this guy...
“Fine. Let’s get going then.”
“Wait, Rekka. We’re heading into enemy territory. We need to do this as safely as possible,” Rosalind said.
“And how are we going to do that?”
Rosalind’s lips curled up into a smile, revealing her vampire fangs.
“Simple. This.”
Her eyes flashed a strange shade of red as she looked down at Fam.
“Now, look into my eyes...”
“Mggh, mggh...”
She was using her vampire charm power, which could put her victim under a powerful kind of hypnosis.
“...There.”
“Are you done?”
“Yeah. I kept it simple: she can’t lie to us, and she can’t disobey us.”
“Ugh... What did you do?” Fam groaned, blinking her eyes repeatedly.
“You left her mind intact, right?” I asked.
“Powerful charm spells sap my strength. We don’t know what’s ahead of us, so it’s best to conserve my power. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to make sure it’s working, though. Bark.”
“Woof! H-Huh?!”
Fam was shocked to find herself obeying Rosalind. In my case, my entire mind had been warped to justify obeying the charm spell, but it seemed to be different with Fam. Rosalind must have used a weaker, more energy-efficient version on her.
“Seems like it worked fine. All right, little girl, lead us to your pirate ship.”
And so Fam began to take us to where her crew was.
“Huh? We’re not heading for the entrance gate?”
I’d thought the only way in and out of the undersea dome was through the gate, but come to think of it, how had the pirates broken in in the first place? If they’d tried to force their way in by breaking through the dome, the pressure collapse would’ve crushed us all. Including them.
“Fam, how did the pirates get into the undersea dome?”
“We used pressurized miniature spaceships to come in through a water duct.”
“A water duct?”
“All the water that’s used here in the city is filtered and sent back into the sea. But those ducts aren’t supposed to open from the outside...” Raul said, confused.
“How did you guys get it open then, Fam?”
“I don’t know,” she said as she looked away.
Since she was under the effect of Rosalind’s charm spell, she must really not have known. The mystery remained, but it seemed like the pirates were headed back for the duct. We followed them into the underground water system. When we got to the ducts near the edge of the dome, we found four small pirate ships that must have been what they used to get inside.
“Fam, do you know which of those Squallow is on?”
I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse: Volume 5 Page 7