The Fervent Sand Baths

by Nagaharu Hibihana

  “And yet he was yapping about the demon lord day in and day out.”

  Come to think of it, his behavior was pretty inconsistent. He reacted oddly when we were in front of the demon lord’s statue, too. Sure it was just a statue, but he should have reacted more strongly after seeing the demon lord for the first time in several hundred years.

  In any case, it was too late for those thoughts now—Goldfish had disappeared from under our eyes. To be honest, I didn’t believe he was in the pond. We had no options but to keep searching for him while staying on guard, assuming he was still hiding somewhere.

  “Roni, let’s make breakfast a quick one today. We’ll search through the temple after that, and then head to the demon lord’s castle.”

  “Understood. I’ll make crepes, then.”

  I would describe the crepes as thin, unsweetened pancakes. In this world, pancakes were a desert while crepes were a breakfast food. The ingredients were pretty similar, though. A good substitute for bread, it was a popular meal among travelers, since all you needed was a frying pan and a few basic ingredients. You’d usually eat it wrapped around a sausage, or a thick slice of ham. Pickled vegetables worked as a filling as well. This morning we had it with ham and cheese, like a pizza. I folded it in half and started digging in.

  After we finished our quick breakfast, we went searching through the temple, when Clena noticed something.

  “This temple... It’s been constructed to reject anything that isn’t the Goddess of Darkness’ magic.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Magic from other goddesses is weaker here. Take a look over there.” Clena was pointing at one of the pillars in the temple. On it hung an elegant relief.

  “Wait, so you mean this....?”

  “Yeah, that relief is creating the effect.”

  I faced Clena, and she gave me a solemn nod in response. I had completely overlooked it yesterday, assuming it was just decoration, but this was canceling out powers from any goddess other than the Goddess of Darkness.

  “We can use cleric magic here, so I think it’s only weakening the effectiveness.”

  “But that’s still a pretty big deal.”

  “The MP in the water was probably affected, too...” Clena mumbled.

  So my MP had drained more quickly than usual, including the MP in my water. Goldfish took the opportunity when the magic ran out to cast his own magic to escape. Maybe he had been planning this ever since he started leading us toward the temple.

  “Let me reinforce that grave a little more.”

  “...Good idea.”

  Just in case, I made the pond’s cover thicker and stronger. The burial mound, which didn’t reach higher than my knees, sprung up in size to about my height, enveloping the walls and dirt around it.

  We then gathered our luggage and rode our carriage directly to the demon lord’s castle. It was such a quiet city. Not only was it dim, everything felt gray and desolate. The only thing that gave the landscape color was the sand.

  The color of sand could be described as “golden,” which sounded fancier than it was in reality. Needless to say it was lifeless, and the only sounds we could hear were from the sand falling from the dome above. The term “ghost town” came to mind. We’d start feeling depressed if we kept silent for too long, so... everyone deliberately made small talk as we advanced. Of course, we made sure to stay on guard as well.

  A few groups of skeletons tried to attack us along the way, but they were individually pretty weak, and Rulitora was able to make quick work of them. We didn’t have Goldfish around to guide us anymore, but that wouldn’t be an issue if we were heading to the demon lord’s castle. The castle was one part of the overhead dome that maintained this underground city, after all. We could spot the castle in the distance as long as we had an open view.

  On the way, we found a mansion and used their yard to have lunch. There was the remains of a flower bed that must have once been filled with colorful blossoms, but now was just a barren plot of soil. The mansion had a fence, but it wasn’t completely sealed from the outside, so we couldn’t let our guards down. We had a light lunch and headed out again immediately.

  About an hour later, we reached the demon lord’s castle.

  “It looks so normal.” Rium was the first to speak up. She didn’t mince words.

  She was right, though. The castle before our eyes was an exceedingly normal-looking one, far from the grand image that the term “demon lord’s castle” might imply.

  The outside showed some signs of fragmentation. Maybe it suffered some damage when the other tower came falling down, or maybe it was collateral damage from the battle between the first sacred king and the demon lord. In either case, it looked like a mere shadow of its former self.

  “So the castle was surrounded by a moat,” Roni mumbled, kneeling next to the moat.

  She was using past tense because you couldn’t quite call it a moat anymore. The moat was overflowing with sand. The city’s circulation magic couldn’t take care of everything, it seemed.

  “This serves no purpose as a moat anymore.”

  “I guess it’s useless against sand lizardmen.”

  “Even if it was a normal moat, it’d still be useless against swamp lizardmen.”

  I didn’t know if swamp lizardmen actually existed, but I guess a moat in Japan would be useless against kappa, too.

  In any case, the drawbridge was still down, so we’d be able to cross over in our carriage without trouble. We carefully crossed the bridge and made our way into the castle.

  After we passed the gate, we were greeted by the sight of yet another barren garden. A deteriorated stone pathway, barely visible under all the sand, led the way to the castle doors.

  The only things decorating the garden were the streams of sand falling from the sky. The circulation magic could only handle so much. At least more light was filtering down from above, making the sand glisten and giving it a true golden hue.

  “Now then, where should we go first?”

  “We should find their library.”

  “I guess that’s the obvious choice, if we want to learn more about the demon lord.”

  Rium and Roni offered their ideas.

  We should definitely start from there if we wanted to collect documents. Hopefully they were in better condition than the ones in the temple. There was one other thing I felt was important, though.

  “We have a real world problem, though—if we don’t find anything here, then we’ll be in the red, money-wise.”

  It had cost us a pretty penny to fund this whole trip. If we didn’t find something of value here, then we’d have a hard time planning our future travels. It went without saying that we needed to gather information on the demon lord, but we had to fulfill our roles as treasure hunters, too.

  “Do you think there’s anything like an armory or a treasure safe left?”

  “The demon lord isn’t here anymore, so let’s search every last corner while we still have time.”

  “Good plan. But we need someone to watch the horse, and I don’t want to split into two groups.”

  The carriage couldn’t pass through the front doors, so we had no choice but to park it here. After some discussion, we decided that Rulitora would be on horse-watching duty. If we had to split ourselves up based on pure fighting power, then it would be Rulitora and everyone else. Even though it was a big castle, it shouldn’t take us a whole week to explore. The question was how much was left in here, and how much we could find.

  We took only the bare essentials and armed ourselves to the teeth. I started making my way to the door, but then Rium tugged at my sleeve.

  “Touya.”

  “What is it?”

  “I bet there’s a golem here. Those can easily survive 500 years.”

  “I see, so they’d be like security guards for the treasure?”

  Rium nodded in response.

  Manmade monsters, golems, often showed up in my video games.
Since crystal magic involved creating magic items, she must have had some knowledge on the subject.

  “Would you be able to identify them?”

  “As long as I can detect the magic that’s making them move, yes.”

  “What if they don’t move?”

  “If I could detect those, then they’d be worthless as golems,” Rium said, quite matter-of-factly.

  So they might be disguising themselves as pieces of furniture, even though they were actually monsters. If the castle really employed those things, then we just needed to proceed with caution.

  We kept walking along the garden until we reached a wall. I saw a giant set of doors door before me. They looked like incredibly heavy doors made of metal. Since some people had given up their humanity after being blessed by the Goddess of Darkness, they must have had to accommodate sizes surpassing a normal human’s.

  Could we open this thing by ourselves? I approached it, a little doubtful.

  “Sir Touya, watch out!”

  As I reached for the door, Roni pulled me back and onto the ground. When I looked back in surprise, I saw a shadow blocking my view. I couldn’t tell what it was in that instant, since the shadow retreated as fast as it had appeared. I looked over, still on the ground, and saw where it had come from.

  “Th-the door...?”

  Yes, it was the door. It was currently opened horizontally, not vertically like a set of doors should be. The opening was contorting itself like clay, and soon formed the shape of a smile.

  That shadow just now must have been the door extending its mouth to bite down on me. If Roni hadn’t saved me, I’d probably be stuck inside that giant mouth right now.

  “Sir Touya!”

  Rulitora rushed over to Roni and I, pulling us up and out of the reach of the door. I saw Clena holding Rium, also making their way away from the door. They seemed unharmed.

  “Thanks for the help, Rulitora.”

  “Do not mention it, I’m just glad you’re safe.”

  “Are you alright, Roni?”

  “No sweat!”

  Roni was holding her arm, so I was worried that the door had bitten her, but it was just a scratch from when she’d pulled me down.

  Fortunately, the door monster couldn’t move from its position.

  “What in the world is that thing?”

  “It’s a door golem. Instead of locks, it needs a special amulet to open.”

  “So if you don’t have that amulet, it attacks you?”

  Rium nodded in response.

  I see. Since you had to go through the door to enter the castle, it was an effective trap against intruders. Though it made me wonder what would happen to a person who just happened to forget their amulet.

  “Let me handle this!”

  Rulitora said, and in the same moment waved his glaive above his head and struck the door golem. The clash of metal against metal rang in the air. Despite the way it was contorting earlier, the door was still as hard as metal.

  Rium also got out one of her pencil-sized spears and transformed into a giant one. This must have been standard practice for crystal magic.

  The metallic clangs continued resounding through the air. Rulitora kept striking the door golem as he dodged its attacks, but it was so dense that he wasn’t able to deliver any significant blows. That said, he was doing an exceptional job of handling it. If it were me, I’d have my hands full just trying to keep myself together.

  “Do you think earth spirits could interfere with that?”

  “It depends.”

  I tried asking Rium, and she gave me a curt reply. It probably depended on the skills of the spell caster. It was a little too risky to approach the door without knowing if I could handle it. So I tried another method.

  “Rulitora, don’t get caught!”

  “Right! ...Wait, what?!”

  I ran past the confused Rulitora toward the door—or rather, the place immediately to the right of it.

  “Summon spirit!”

  I pressed my hand against it to summon spirits of the earth. I wasn’t doing it on the door golem itself, though. Instead I used the door’s frame, or in other words: the castle walls.

  The walls warped so that the frame surrounding the door expanded. The door golem, however, wasn’t expanding to fit the shape of its new frame.

  “I see!” Rulitora exclaimed as he parried an attack with his glaive.

  The door golem tried going after him, but having lost its means of support, fell flat on the ground with a deafening roar. There was no way something capable of warping itself so much to attack would be able to balance on its own. Unsurprisingly, without a building for support, it couldn’t make any attacks from its back, which left it flailing around on the ground like a caught fish.

  It was honestly pretty off-putting seeing a solid metal set of doors thrashing about on the ground like that. This wasn’t exactly the type of fantastical experience I was hoping to have when I came to this fantasy world.

  Rium hopped on top of one door with a hammer and chisel.

  “Leave the rest to me.”

  She crawled to the center of the door and tried to kneel down, but since it was still stubbornly writhing around, she fell on her behind.

  “Rulitora, let’s help push it down as well.”

  “Understood.”

  I used my Healing Light to heal Roni’s scratch, then rushed over to Rium. Fully clad in metal armor, and aided by the towering Rulitora... who was now sitting on top of the door golem, it wasn’t going to budge anytime soon. Total domination.

  What was Rium trying to do, though? As I stared at her in curiosity, she used the chisel to try and detach a gem-like object that was inlaid on the back of the door.

  “What’s that?”

  “The golem’s power source.” Rium said as she swung her hammer down. With a light clang, the gem-like object dislodged itself from the door, and at the same time the door golem stopped moving completely. We repeated the process on the other door, dislodging the gem and stopping the door from moving.

  I see, so this must have been a type of crystal that crystal mages used. When I asked her about it later, she told me that crystals that could be infused with magic were simply called “magic crystals.” They could be reused if dislodged properly, and fetched a high price.

  Rium had managed to retrieve the two crystals from the golems without a scratch, looking rather proud of herself. She was so cute I patted her head.

  “Looks like it’s full steam ahead from the get-go, huh?”

  “I’m not too surprised, this is a castle after all.”

  “It makes sense that they’d heighten their security, assuming there are valuables inside.”

  “At least I hope there are...”

  “Should I accompany you inside?”

  We were conversing in a half-eager, half-apprehensive tone, but Rulitora, who would be guarding the carriage outside, was at least 90 percent apprehensive.

  “No, if something happens to the horse, then we won’t be able to get ourselves back, much less anything we find inside.”

  “Mmm...”

  That’s right. No matter how convenient my Unlimited Bath was, we’d never be able to leave the void without our carriage. It was absolutely vital that we protect our horse and carriage.

  “Will you be alright though, Rulitora? Something might attack while you’re waiting outside. Shall I stay as well?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine by myself.”

  Roni worried for Rulitora in turn, but he softly declined. From his perspective, he’d be even more worried if we lessened our battle strength inside the castle.

  Normally the carriage was convenient, but now it definitely felt like a burden. We needed to think of a way to deal with this in the future. But now wasn’t the time to be mulling over that. We had to concentrate on exploring the castle.

  “Let’s make sure to let each other know if anything happens. It’ll be pretty quiet in there, so... just shout and we�
�ll hear you.”

  “Not like we have any other options.”

  “Don’t try to handle it on your own. Call for help, okay?”

  “That goes for you too, Sir Touya.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I won’t be the only one in danger, the girls will be too. I won’t push myself.”

  “That’s fine, then...”

  Rulitora was still uneasy, though. Maybe he was worried that I’d push myself too hard and expose the girls to danger. This wasn’t something we would ever settle by talking about it, though. I’d have to prove it to him by making sure we explored vigilantly and returned unharmed.

  “It’s okay, I won’t do something dumb in this situation. While we’re gone, try bringing the carriage around the area and see if there’s any place you can stay. There might be a barn or something.”

  “Understood.”

  He still wasn’t agreeing with me, but he could also tell that we had nothing to gain by debating more about the issue.

  I made sure all my armor was in order and equipped my broadaxe again.

  “Are you ready, everyone?”

  “Yep, ready to go.”

  “Ready.”

  “It’ll be a piece of cake, since we won’t even need to carry anything!” Roni exclaimed, smiling. Indeed, we could just shove everything we found inside my Unlimited Bath, which would be a huge advantage for us.

  “Alright, we’ll be off now.”

  “Please be careful, Sir Touya.”

  We entered the castle as Rulitora saw us off.

  Ogre or lore, who knew what was in store? Come to think of it, there was a “White-Faced Ogre” among the Five Great Demon Generals. I’d prefer it if we didn’t come across an ogre, though. I thought to myself as we entered the demon lord’s castle and began our hunt.

  We first went to the throne room. It was something we were all curious about. Nothing but a pile of rubble remained, signifying a fierce battle, but we didn’t see any golems and continued on our way.

  I wondered how the door golem survived all of that. Maybe there was another way of getting inside without having to deal with it.