Book 2: Chapter 51 (1/2)

Alice stirred her tea and dropped in a cube of sugar before taking a sip out of the steaming cup. She sighed as she stood up and walked out of her office, holding her cup and a stack of papers. The party had finally ended, but she still had to take care of some paperwork that Henry had saved up for her. Tafel didn’t mind waiting and had been hanging out with the skeletons.

A strange ripping sound drew Alice’s attention, and she followed the noise to one of the storage rooms in the adventurers’ guild. Mr. Skelly was tearing large swaths of cloth into smaller pieces while other skeletons were stitching them onto large, rectangular cloth pieces.

“Sewing skeletons,” Alice said and shook her head before taking a sip of her tea. Mr. Skelly raised his head and smiled at the guild master before handing off the cloth in his hand to an old lady, whom Alice recognized as the town’s oldest seamstress. “What are you making?”

“Flags,” Mr. Skelly said. “Did you need anything, guild master? Your hair is awfully lustrous today. You’ll have to tell me the secret to keeping it so healthy.”

Alice snorted. “Don’t try to flatter me, you hairless being.” She frowned at the grinning skull with a golden halo depicted on the flags by the skeletons. “What are you making flags for? Are you planning on sailing?”

“Sailing? No,” Mr. Skelly said. “We’re here to plant them. See?” He pointed outside the window, causing the guild master to follow his finger with her gaze. A large flag was waving in the wind above the tallest building in Anfang.

Alice tilted her head before taking another sip of tea. “Why?”

“You don’t know what planting a flag means?” Mr. Skelly asked while blinking.

“We don’t have any flag-planting customs here,” Alice said.

“Oh,” Mr. Skelly said and rubbed his chin. “Well, it means—”

“Tell me the truth,” Alice said and kicked his shin, causing a crack to appear on the skeleton’s bones. “I always feel like you’re lying when you rub your chin like that.”

Mr. Skelly cackled. “Alright, the truth then,” he said. “In our continent, you identify someone’s territory by their flag.”

Alice waited for more, but Mr. Skelly kept his mouth shut. She knit her brow as the skeleton’s words sunk in. “So what you’re saying is … Anfang is your territory?” Her eyes narrowed at the grinning skeleton.

“Precisely,” Mr. Skelly said with a nod. “You’re an awfully smart individual; won’t you reconsider joining us?”

Alice smacked Mr. Skelly’s head with her shield. His skull detached from his neck and rolled across the room just as Tafel appeared beside Alice. The demon blinked at the rolling skull and glanced at Alice. “Violent much?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “I thought you said you’d try to get along with them.”

Mr. Skelly’s headless body nodded by bending at the chest. “Right?” Mr. Skelly asked. “I was even extending an olive branch to her.”

Tafel blinked at Mr. Skelly. “You can speak without your head?”

“Of course,” Mr. Skelly said. “Skulls are a formality when you’re dead. We don’t have vocal cords. Regardless of whether or not our heads are attached, we shouldn’t be able to speak anyways, right?”

Tafel scratched her head. “I never thought about it that way,” she said. Her gaze shifted onto the flags on the ground. “Flags of Damnedism? Really?”

“It’d be wrong not to spread the glory of our mistress since we’re already here,” Mr. Skelly said as he retrieved his skull from the child by his side. The seamstress’ grandchild had chased after the skull when it started rolling.