Chapter 81 - Gaining Information from Assessment (1/2)

Ch. 81: Gaining Information from Assessment

The elf boy’s name was Feuille.

Loren had spent around half a day gaining needed information from him.

Finding out his name was already hard, but since Feuille was young, his speech became garbled sometimes and couldn’t remember things here and there, which made the information that Loren got be quite vague.

But since Lapis, who had been listening to their conversation, organized all the information, so by the time Feuille became tired of talking and fell asleep on the back of the donkey, they had most of the information they needed.

According to it, Feuille was from one of the villages of elves living in the Black Forest and was ten years old.

While helping gathering fruit and herbs in the forest with his friends, they had accidentally gone too close to the outskirts of the forest, and unfortunately ran into bad looking men.

The men had tried to capture them and take them, but they lacked finesse, killing half the children and letting the rest escape.

The only one who was caught had been Feuille, who had tripped and fell.

After tying his arms and legs, the men carried him for around a day and into the campsite, and was thrown in the box that Loren and Lapis found him in.

He was scared at what was going to happen to him, but after crying himself to sleep, he didn’t remember seeing anything.

Loren couldn’t tell if his luck was good or bad, but since he hadn’t been found by the undead because he was unconscious inside the box, his life had been spared, so Loren guessed that his luck wasn’t bad.

“There isn’t really any interesting information.”

Lapis said as she looked at Feuille, who was sleeping with his arms around the donkey’s neck, but to the victim himself, it was a matter of life and death, so Loren thought interesting or not wasn’t relevant.

But he couldn’t help but feel that entering the forest with Feuille was dangerous, but when he told Lapis, she gave him a confused look.

“Why would you think we would be in danger?”

“They could think that we’re with the ones who killed and kidnapped their children.”

“People who kidnapped a child wouldn’t come back to return him.”

“That’s true, but…”

Lapis was right if it were thought about calmly, but there was always the chance of a misunderstanding, so if the elves caught wind of humans having custody of one of their missing children, Loren thought that they could believe they were the ones who did it.

“It’s elves, you know?”

“Well, there’s a possibility.”

Lapis understood that even if they weren’t suspected, the elves could imagine that they were they brought back their child for things such as doing something to the village or looking for some rewards or compensation, and for some reason, bringing the child back out of kindness wasn’t an option.

“There are lots of weird ones among elves, after all.”

“I don’t think they’d want a demon saying that about them.”

Lapis was offended at Loren’s poking remark, but she didn’t counter, since it wasn’t like she didn’t have a clue about what he was talking about.

As they continued like that, they had reached the city that was closest to the Black Forest by the end of the day.

“We really didn’t have enough information. I didn’t expect there to be a branch office for the adventurers’ guild in this city.”

Before they went to get rooms for the night, they went to the branch office they found by chance and gave them the extermination parts and materials from the monsters they had encountered.

When Feuille had woken up, Loren and Lapis had been taking apart ten ogres, but they had defeated quite a bit of monsters before that.

They had quite a bit, so they decided to take care of them before they entered the forest.

“You balance it here too?”

As Loren put the bags, which were bloody and looked unsettling, on the front desk, the girl standing behind it took them without breaking her smile and shook her head.

“All we do here is take and assess. We issue certificates, so please go to one of the base guilds and receive your money.”

“I see.”

It was slightly troublesome and was unsure if the guild would give them the money when they returned, but it was helpful that they didn’t have to carry around everything the whole trip.

On top of that, this branch had a bar along with it, like the guild in Kauffa, so Loren pointed at Feuille, who was walking and looking around the place, and told Lapis.

“I’ll take care of things here, so go get him something to eat. He probably hasn’t eaten anything in a while.”

Being kidnapped, tied up, and thrown into a box, it was hard to think that he had been treated decently.

To a young child, missing one or two meals was quite harsh, so as Loren asked Lapis, worrying about Feuille, she nodded and took him towards the bar.

Although it was called a bar, it was closer to a restaurant, so as he saw them off, he hoped there were things that even a child like Feuille could eat, and when he turned around back to the girl at the desk, he saw that she was looking at them as well with interest.

“Did you see anything new?”

As Loren asked her to put up a lighthearted conversation, the girl realized that she was staring at the companions of one of her customers and nodded her head in embarrassment.

Loren wondered if they didn’t see many elves in the area but thought that would be weird since the city was right next to the Black Forest, and there were elves inside that interacted with humans.

“My partner? With her youth and looks, she could probably become anything she wants, instead of being a priestess, in my opinion.”