WFB Chapter 139

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Chapter 139: People who stick to their beliefs despite going against majority bias always look like weirdos

“… What a nightmare.”

Dark elf Perielle rolls her eyes and scratches at her hair, messing up her neatly pulled back ponytail in frustration.

Sorry. It doesn’t seem like my memory alteration abilities are reliable.

Although the Extus party’s memories are pretty damn messed up so they can’t directly accuse anyone of anything, I wasn’t able to completely alter them so that they don’t have suspicions.

Still, with Suzako-san’s collar around a pretty damn mutilated corpse, torched for good measure, at least the Extus noble is convinced that she’s dead.

It probably helps that he’s so terrified of the punishment of allowing a valuable slave to die that he probably wasn’t going to be thinking clearly even if I hadn’t messed with his memory.

Btw, I’m probably not going to do the memory stuff again.

I’m not into dying from MP loss, and just muddling and abridging those peoples’ memories wiped out over 2million.

So, you know… something like the MP of the lives of over 20,000 people or something like that.

And I couldn’t make new memories or alter their memories too far.

With Derrick helping me to simulate how much MP tweaking this or that would take …

Haa…

Let’s just say I’m glad that there was so much chaos going on that they weren’t sure what was going on in the first place.

I did my best with the MP I had, but it was a total waste of MP.

For a fraction of that MP, we could have cut their chain of communication back to Extus.

Or snuck in and used magic liberally to erase our tracks as we rescued Suzako-san.

In other words… altering memories is a totally inefficient way of using magic.

At least I got to try it out?

And it was necessary in order to hide Yuuri-chan and Takumi-san’s involvement in the fiasco, since they weren’t subtle at all.

But after having practical experience with it, I can confidently say that it’s terrifying to think that the entire world might be under something similar.

Even Derrick didn’t know how much MP and focus something like that would need, although he did understand the theory.

Right now, Derrick’s mumbling under his … breath? about how this is all very disturbing, what has happened to this world in the years he’s been asleep? – stuff like that.

It’s a bit sad that Derrick doesn’t even know how long he’s been asleep, since no one’s been able to tell us about anything, landmarks, occasions, or people, that Derrick would be able to use to gauge the approximate passage of time.

With the world’s ‘history’ changed through magic, he could have been inactive for thousands of years or ten years.

Anyway, it’s a relief we didn’t have to kill the Extus party.

I mean, we could have if we had to, and it wasn’t like we weren’t considering it as an option, but frankly, when dealing with Extus, it’s better to let the rabid dogs bite at each other.

And by that it means it’s easier, politically, to leave the noble alive to take the blame for making a mess of their own activities.

If the noble was killed, Extus would make a fuss and try to take it out on the Guild or other Unaffiliateds, but if the noble’s alive, then he’s the screw up to take their anger out on.

What a fickle country.

It’s to the degree that you have to wonder how the rest of the world let it get this bad.

At any rate, we’ve successfully sent off the confused Extus noble.

Which leaves us with seven new add-ons to our group.

There’s Troy-san and Suzako-san, and then there’s also the group of five cloaked people. You know, the five people of which there are two other Japanese people who have been unluckily transmigrated here.

Although the Adashino ‘dark elf’ siblings got into an argument with their three other companions, apparently things are fine now?

I was kind of recovering from MP depletion at the time, but although the Adashino siblings were upset that their companions had left a lot of things unmentioned, it seems that they haven’t actually split apart even after their argument.

They’d been living in the mountainous desert for almost half a year with their companions’ tribe, and have become attached.

It’s not like their companions kept things from them on purpose… or at least, it wasn’t malicious.

Common sense things like MP running out and possibly killing them was just something they assumed the Adashino siblings knew, while other things, like the political climate, they may have kept quiet about, but it seems that as a secluded desert tribe, they’re not too sure on the details either.

Either way, the attack on the Extus nobles this time wasn’t their main objective.

“… Is it okay to bring these guys with us when they’re also searching for the Forge?” I whispered to Perielle, probably not subtly.

“It’s not like there’s any guarantee for us to find it,” Perielle responded, “And it would be better to have them accompany us than leave them to their own devices.”

She had a look of distinct disapproval, but at least she doesn’t seem to want to murder them anymore.

“Anyway, we’ll head to the third level, and hear about just why they’re looking for the Forge,” she said.

The third level of Ploids is more of a forest than a jungle or a swamp, so that’s where we’re planning on spending the night.

“… Did Desmond and Aislin and Aidan go somewhere?” Hibiki-chan asked, “I lost track of them when we were running through the swamp.”

I don’t blame her, it was pretty hectic.

“I think they had other things to do in the Labyrinth to begin with,” Ragnall responded. “If they were actually planning on coming with us to search for the Forge, Desmond wouldn’t have refused when Guild Master Helmina asked them about it.”

“I wonder what they have to do,” I muttered.

“Who knows. There are a lot of old Deep Elf ruins in Ploids, although many of them have been broken and moved around every time the Labyrinth purges,” Perielle said. “Or he could be hunting some sort of monster, or maybe looking for rare plants and materials.”

“At any rate, it only makes sense for them to hold back and go off on their own, when there was that much chaos and some people from Extus being thrown in,” Oberon said, slinging his giant axe over his shoulder casually.

“A Deep Elf…” one of the desert men said, “If it’s a Deep Elf, wouldn’t he know about the Forge?”

The Scarlet Torch and Ragnall glanced at each other.

“That’s misinformation,” I said. “Even Desmond said that it’s just rumored that the Forge is related to ancient elves, and it’s not like the Deep Elves are the ancient elves themselves, so they’re more like distant ancestors.”

“Is that so…” Takumi-san said. “It looks like it’s not actually going to be very useful to look for Deep Elves, then.”

“Why were you looking for Deep Elves in the first place-ssu?” Jira asked. “They aren’t known for their … ah… helpfulness. They’re also not really … easy to find.”

“Our tribe is looking for information about the Lost Decade,” the desert man said.

Lost Decade?

Hibiki-chan, Derrick, and I exchanged glances. Or at least, as best we could with one of us being a dagger.

—

That night, after making camp (we’re not using my OP barriers as much, to hide it from our new additions), we started quizzing the desert dwellers about their intentions.

“The Lost Decade is just what our Tribe Patron calls it, but there is a period of time in the past that has been lost in history,” the leader of the three people from the desert tribe, Harzil, said. “We are searching for the reason behind it.”

Perielle narrowed her eyes, and Oberon and Jira exchanged glances.

From what I tried with Ragnall and the innkeeper girl, there’s probably no recognition that they’re missing any history.

In fact, Ragnall doesn’t seem to even remember when I asked him about the gods and the fake sky.

“So your tribe thinks you’re missing ten years or so? How can you tell?” Perielle asked, clearly skeptical, but Harzil didn’t seem annoyed. If anything, it felt like he had expected it.

“Our tribe follows an oral tradition of reciting our history regularly,” he said. “However, five years ago, all of us who have been reciting the histories for more than five years noticed an odd discrepancy in the recitation. If it were only one or two of us, perhaps we wouldn’t have thought much about it, but with the entire tribe noticing that something was wrong at the same point in the recitation, we became concerned.”

The Scarlet Torch and Ragnall seeming skeptical of their claim, but that’s more to be expected.

After all, Ragnall doesn’t even remember me talking to him about the gods and stuff, so whatever is keeping people from remembering things is being pretty thorough about it.

And for me, that makes me more more curious about how this tribe of desert dwellers was able to figure out anything at all.

As I ponder about it, Derrick suddenly spoke up.

“Ah. Although the spell may have obstructed the written and spoken word, it seems it was unable to erase the muscle memory from this sort of recitation.”

So that’s how it is.

… Is that how it is?

So whatever has somehow rearranged all of history in the minds and (I’d assume) the written texts of the people in this world, it doesn’t have an effect on anything that’s not words?

As someone who comes from another world, it doesn’t quite make sense to me. Words and actions are all stimuli to the mind, so I don’t understand really understand how magic could discern the difference.

This world really is a different world with different rules about how things work. I think I should pay a little more attention to how Light Magic … is.

There’s something about words that’s irrevocably linked to existence, but not in a purely physical way, and it makes me a little uneasy.

“Before all of the ones who can recognize the disturbance all go the way of our ancestors, we hoped to unravel the mystery of the Lost Decade,” Harzil said, then sighed. “But it was unexpected that the rest of the world could not remember it either.”

He seemed to have said it with some extra meaning to it, given how he’s looking at Perielle and the others who had extreme looks of doubt on their face, but it’s impossible to convince someone who doesn’t believe anything is wrong that something is wrong, after all.

“Leaving the matter about whether there really is a ‘lost decade’ or not aside, that doesn’t explain why you’re looking for the Forge,” Perielle pointed out.

“The Forge and the Deep Elves, the Demons and the Quarry … Six by six for a False God, seven by seven for a Sanctuary. These are phrases that seem to have no meaning, and yet they are things that feel like they hold far more importance than what they should.”

“That’s…” opening her mouth as if to say something snide, Perielle suddenly froze, furrowing her brows.

“Hey, Derrick. What is going on?” I asked.

“Those are phrases that hold great importance,” Derrick replied, but he sounded a little concerned. “Ancient texts about the foundations of the world. But why would those be censored? Why do I feel like there’s something I’m missing?”

“… You aren’t also being effected by whatever this spell is, are you?” I couldn’t help asking.

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s just amnesia. However I ended up like this, and the events more directly before I ended up like this, are all a little fuzzy. I would imagine that whatever happened, it was traumatic enough to screw up some memories here or there.”

I suppose that would have been my second guess.

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<a/n: Sorry for dropping off the face of the earth. I think I had, like, a writing existential crisis.

If you notice my style changing in wfb, it was a conscious decision, especially because I’m juggling more than a few speaking characters at once now.
In order to be a little more transparent about what I’ve been doing and what’s going on, I also have an instagram now, check the sidebar. I really can’t imagine I’ll be posting a ton, but, uh… it’s there. I’m like, 7 years late to the party, and floundering in the interface. So this is how it feels to be a parent that’s fallen out of the social media acumen loop… >