Chapter 83 – Aftermath With The Strange Children (1/2)

The battle didn't last much longer.

With these kids' ambush ruined and the two groups separated at the start, we plowed through the larger group with surprising ease. It seemed like pretty much everyone's levels were higher than any of these kids. In addition, in the confusion we were able to reduce their numbers so quickly that by the time the smaller group caught up, we were able to devote two thirds of our group to handling them.

The smaller group were all comprised of taller robed figures. They were obviously higher levels as well, but when outnumbered three to one, the difference wasn't nearly enough and they were cut down.

I stood there in the blood soaked battlefield.

Broken bodies littered the trampled grass.

The members of the investigation group were going around checking the bodies. A few were injured in the fight, but there weren't any deaths on our side.

On the other side...my most optimistic estimate put the survivors at half. None from the second group were left alive.

Crack!

”Hey!”

I yelled in shock.

One of the adventurers just stomped on a dying little boy's neck. I clearly heard his spine break.

”He couldn't fight back! Why did you have to kill him?!”

The guy turned to me, but simply scoffed before he started to search the body.

”Hey miss.”

I turned to the voice. It was the investigation leader. He put a hand on my trembling shoulder as I did my best to hold back the tears that were threatening to spill out.

(This isn't right. This isn't right at all!)

”I know what you're thinking, but they were the ones who tried to kill us first.”

”But, but we've already beat them!”

”And what? You want to take them as prisoners?”

(That's right!)

”Isn't that what we should be doing?”

”That's the works of soldiers and knights. Besides, how do you expect to keep them from causing trouble? We have rope but we can't risk them snapping them.”

That was a legitimate question for sure. Even more importantly, we didn't have a choice but to guard the kids if we kept them prisoners. And the more people we left to guard them, the less we had to continue the investigation.

”How about this?”

Touching the ground, I infused the soil with a bit of magic and reshaped it into heavy stone shackles.

”Hmmm...”

The leader took the shackles and his muscles flexed. After a moment the stone shackles crumbled in his hands.

”Make them a bit thicker and it'll work.”

[Claret?]

Now that I had some busy work to do, I turned my attention to my loyal familiar.

”What is it Master?”

[Could you check the forest? See if any of the spirits know anything about this group or where they came from.]

The shadow spirit looked at the limp bodies scattered around the ground before looking at the forest.

”I'll see if I can find any.”

Leaving those ominous words to me, Claret took off to the skies.

For me, since I had his approval, I quickly went over to the unconscious kids and wrapped their forearms with thick and heavy shackles, tightly fit to reduce the chances of them being able to wiggle their way out of them. Since they were made of a single solid piece of magically fused stone, nothing but brute force or the application of [Earth Magic] could break them.

Then I lined them up in a row and bound their feet as well just in case, connecting these together so that they couldn't move apart as is. The ones that had serious injuries but were still alive I quickly healed up but only so far as to prevent their deaths.

Quite a lot of them had broken bones other debilitating injuries, but none of them seemed to be a threat to their lives. Aside from that, it was better, while a bit cruel, to leave the non-life threatening injuries alone to prevent them from trying to start any trouble.

(The rest though...)

By the time I finished this, the dead had already been piled up and one of the other adventurers was covering them with dirt while chanting some sort of spell. It wasn't even a real burial, but just a half-assed attempt to hide the bodies it looked like.

Not wanting to look at the bodies any further, I turned back to the row of unconscious assailants.

Many of their hoods had come off at some point. The view simply confused me.

While we were fighting, I distinctly saw fangs and red eyes, on many of them. Even if the fangs were strangely short, they were telltale signs of vampires like myself. But looking at the kids more closely revealed things that shouldn't have been possible.

Some were short and wide set. Some were taller and thin. Quite a few had ears that were barely pointy at all. The ones that stood out the most though, had furry ears on the top of their heads, not the sides.

Just to make sure, I checked one of the cat eared kids. He definitely had those strangely short fangs and red eyes.

[Alicia? What are these kids?]

[...]

[Alicia?]

Strangely, I didn't get an immediate response. Thinking about it, it was strange that she didn't give me any information about these kids during the fight either. While she was a person who respected people's privacy properly and didn't use [Scan] on random people, there wasn't much reason to avoid that on people attacking us.

The only reason I could think of was that she didn't think that these guys were worth giving me information on due to how weak they were. But that didn't quite feel characteristic of her in the first place.

[Oh, umm, sorry Scarlet.]

[Ah, no, it's fine. Is something the matter?]

[No. Or rather, maybe?]

The little girl was confusing me. Usually she was only hesitant on things she felt was being selfish, even if it was far from it.

[There's something really strange about these people.]

[You noticed something too?]

It seemed there was a reason why she was being quiet.

[I've been looking through their information over and over, but...here, it's faster if you look.]

With those words, a window showed up. It was the stats page for one of the kids, truncated to only the first few entries. It didn't even take a split second for me to notice the issue.

[There's only garbage for the race name...]

Rather than a proper race name, the race entry was filled with only some random, incomprehensible characters. It was completely unreadable.

[It's not just that one either.]

Alicia pushed out the stats for several others, and they all had the same set of incomprehensible characters.

(No, they're not all the same. There's a little variation between them.)

[I can't figure out what its supposed to mean. I've never seen something like this before.]

I hadn't either. Anything in the stats page was always something easily readable. That was the entire point of the stats page after all. It summed up a person's abilities and qualities in an easy to read manner. Having an entry that was impossible to properly read was betraying that point.

[There's more too. I looked around trying to figure out why the race entry was so weird, but it doesn't make any sense. Look, there's even this!]

The frustrated little girl showed me another kid's status screen. This time it extended to the skills list, but it looked like it stopped part way in. I simply looked at the last visible entry.

”!!!”

It was almost miraculous that I didn't shout out loud at what I had seen.

[Right? It's weird!]

Under racial skills, there were the entries for [Blood Sucking (Vampire)] and [Natural Weapons (Vampire)]. But the strange thing was that they were greyed out. Both of them.

[How is this possible?]

(How indeed.)

Those were the racial skills for vampires. It wouldn't have been strange for these kids to have those skills if they really were vampires, but for some reason the entries were greyed out. The only reason I could think of for that was that they weren't actual vampires. But if they weren't, then how did they even get those skills in the first place? It was the trait of vampires to acquire the skills of those they feed on.

[Do they have some sort of skill that lets them acquire new skills?]

[No. I couldn't find anything like that anywhere. And also...]

A list of hidden skills showed up. For the most part they didn't look too unusual. Until I noticed something odd.

[They don't have [Sunlight Weakness]?]

I double checked and confirmed it. One of the signature traits of vampires was missing in the hidden skill list. On the other hand, [Light Weakness] was still around, so it wasn't like they were completely missing the core vampire skills.

[None of them have it. These people. They look a lot like vampires, but they're not vampires.]

It was the conclusion that I was forced to come to as well. On the surface, they seemed to be just vampire children, but looking deeper, there were so many things that contradicted that.

”To think we'd find something like this here.”

I turned around in surprise. I was concentrating so much on investigating about these children than I didn't notice the investigation leader approaching behind me.

”You know what they are?”

”No. Not what, but I have heard about them.”

”...”

It seemed like this wasn't quite a mystery only for us then.

”I don't know how long ago it started, but sometimes you hear about people who look like vampires, yet aren't. They can walk under the sun and don't seem to drink blood.”