TERNLF Vol. 2 Chapter 3 Part 2

“I do not know.”

“Huh?”

“It is certain the two of them were assassinated, but nothing has been passed down about their daughter.”

If the assassins were a faction that opposed Elf-Dwarf friendship, the odds that they would have left alive the daughter who symbolized that very bond were extremely low.

In any case, it was a story from the distant past. There was no way for us to know the truth now.

“Well, that is enough of a history lesson. We have visitors.”

“Visitors? Down here?”

At Vezzo’s words, Nikka tilted her head with a soft thunk.

“Three… no, four of them are coming this way.”

So the Dwarves were on their way.

And there was no way they were coming to let us out.

I doubted they would jump straight to an execution, but it would not be surprising if they tortured us until we “confessed” to whatever they wanted to hear. Not that we had any intention of meekly going along with them.

“Maybe we talked a little too long.”

“Honestly. You never have any sense of urgency. Let us go.”

Sighing at my comment, Vezzo perked up his ears and slipped out of the room ahead of us.

“Such an impatient guy. You two wait here.”

Leaving those words to the girls, I hurried after Vezzo.

“Seriously. That damn Elf brat still has not coughed up anything, so now I have even more work to do.”

“Even you are having trouble with the Elf brat, Chief?”

“She keeps playing dumb. No matter how long I question her, all she says is ‘I have nothing to do with it,’ so my hand slipped a bit.”

By the time we reached the prison’s entrance, loud voices drifted toward us from beyond it.

Judging from the content, they were obviously talking about the captured Elf.

I did not know what kind of interrogation they had been putting her through, but was the Elf really just a kid?

In this world, age and appearance did not always line up between races.

Dwarves, for example, stopped growing in height once they passed ten, and the men’s faces were eventually swallowed up by their beards. To other races, it was impossible to tell if a Dwarf was a child or an adult.

In other words, you could say Dwarves had almost no truly “cute” childhood phase.

Elves, on the other hand, were the opposite: it was not uncommon for someone who still looked like a kid to be over twenty. Even if the Dwarves were calling him a “brat,” she could easily have been past adulthood in human terms.

Clack, clack.

From the other side of the prison door, I heard the sound of a key turning in a lock.

Vezzo and I quickly slipped into the nearest empty cells on either side of the corridor.

The door opened, and three Dwarves stepped inside.

The two in front wore something like work clothes. Probably the jailers.

Behind them strode another Dwarf dressed a cut above the others. That had to be the “Chief.”

With a cigar stuck arrogantly between his lips, he walked behind his subordinates, puffing out smoke.

“So what did you do when your hand ‘slipped’? Teach me for future reference.”

The Dwarf walking in front addressed the Chief in a fawning tone.

“What do you think? I took that ridiculously long hair of her and chopped it right off.”

“You cut it?”

“What else was I supposed to do? They do not have beards, after all.”

I had heard that for Dwarves, having their beard cut off was the greatest humiliation.

The Chief had probably wanted to inflict an equivalent disgrace and gone for the Elf’s hair instead.

Whether cutting an Elf’s hair was actually that humiliating was… very debatable.

“Thanks to that, those disgusting ears of hers are on full display now. Serves her right.”

“I see…”

“What is that tone? Got a problem with what I did? Do not tell me you are one of those reconciliation types?”

“N-No, of course not. I hate Elves too.”

“That is more like it. Reconciliation with Elves is impossible.”

“Could not agree more.”

They passed right in front of the cells where we hid, the flustered underling stumbling over his words as he tried to placate the Chief.

For some reason, the whole scene reminded me of my previous life and made my stomach hurt.

Just hurry up and get past us already.

“And another thing—”

While I was silently urging them to move on and timing when to jump out, a phrase I had not expected hit my ears.

“That Elf girl—Cheki, was it? We need to make her spit out what she planned to do after sneaking into our country. The sooner, the better.”

What did the Chief just say?

I was still reeling from the unexpected mention when someone besides me burst out of a cell and shouted.

“Hey, beardy! What did you do to Cheki!!”

Grassa’s voice rang down the narrow prison corridor.

“Wh–you! How did you escape your cell?!”

“I asked what you did to Cheki!!”

“The restraints must have been too loose. You lot, grab her, now!”

“S-So you want to fight, huh?”

The moment the two jailers lunged at her, Grassa brought up her guard—

And Vezzo and I exploded out of our hiding places at the same time.

“Y-You too?!”

“Wh-What do we do, Chief?!”

“Do not ask me that!”

“We have to call for backup!”

Seeing us, the Dwarves visibly panicked.

Only one of them—the quiet one who had been walking in front—kept his cool and reached calmly toward his waist…

“Take this!”

Clink, clink!

Nikka shot out from behind Grassa and kicked away whatever he had been about to grab.

“Damn it, the alarm device!”

Caught off guard, the Dwarf scrambled after the object as it rolled along the floor.

But—

“Hi-yah!”

Clang!

Grassa cut him off and sent the thing flying toward the prison entrance, straight past me and Vezzo.

Now the Dwarves could not so much as get close to it unless they got through the two of us.

“So that was an alarm device. Nice work, both of you!”

I activated the spell I had prepared to restrain them.

“【Blessing Ice Bind】!”

As soon as I cast it, water swirled up around the Chief’s body and raced over him, solidifying into a statue of ice.

“Hah!”

“Gwah!”

Right after that, Vezzo leaped at the lead Dwarf, who had been about to attack Nikka and the others to retrieve the alarm, and slammed him to the ground.

“Guh… I-I will not resist. So please stop punching me.”

Seeing that, the last remaining Dwarf immediately gave up, raised his hands, and effectively waved the white flag.

And just like that, we had three Dwarves taken prisoner in the blink of an eye.

“…Huh?”

“You are saying we teamed up with the Elves to steal the Bracelet of Oath?”

After capturing the beardy trio, we began interrogating the man they had called Chief.

He was apparently one of the security chiefs for this prison, and his name was Damogan.

“That is right. The men who brought the Elf in testified to that effect.”

“We did not even know Cheki was an Elf girl.”

“She was wearing a hat the whole time. I just thought she was an ordinary boy.”

While Nikka and Grassa argued, I gestured for Damogan to continue his explanation.

Apparently, Cheki had managed to slip away from her kidnappers when they let their guard down.

But because her hands were bound, she had lost her balance and fallen, and that was when her long ears—an Elf’s defining feature, hidden beneath her hair—had been exposed. A passerby had spotted them, a commotion had started, and she had ended up captured anyway.

“At first, the guards arrested Olchi and his gang for helping an Elf illegally enter the country. They may be small-time crooks, but they already have a record.”

Olchi was apparently the name of one of the three who had kidnapped Cheki.

They had a long history of petty crime and were not trusted in the least.

“Then Councilor Luchimada shows up with a guest in tow. Those three idiots—Olchi and the others—suddenly ‘testify’ that they were only reclaiming a stolen magic tool for him.”

“And who is this Luchimada?”

“He is one of the esteemed councilors who actually run this country. You have never heard of him?”

“Of course I have not.”

From what he said, Luchimada was one of the parliamentary councilors who effectively ran the Dwarven Kingdom, and also one of the candidates to be the next king.

“So that means, at the upcoming Exhibition, this Luchimada guy might become the king if he wins, right?”

“Oh, so you know about the Exhibition.”

“Just that the winner gets to be king. Then what?”

Impatient for him to get on with it, Grassa jabbed Damogan’s knee with the tip of her toe as he knelt in seiza.

“Ow, cut that out.”

“Then hurry up and talk! Come on!!”

Shrinking back from her intensity, Damogan resumed his story.

“According to the councilor, his guest told him that ‘an Oath Ring Luchimada made long ago seems to have leaked out and ended up on the market.’ So he panicked and secretly asked Olchi and his pals to retrieve it.”

“Oath Ring? Not a bracelet?”

“Now that you mention it, he did say ‘bracelet.’ Said he was inexperienced back then and lacking in skill, so it ended up as a bracelet instead of a ring.”

Even after raising his smithing skill enough to become a councilor, Luchimada had kept that old Bracelet of Oath hidden away as a reminder of his humble beginnings.

But then his guest had come and told him that, through some mistake or another, the bracelet had made its way to the market.

He had preserved it to keep his early efforts in mind, not to show it off.

So Luchimada had secretly commissioned the three idiots to recover the bracelet.

The result: although the job was just to retrieve the bracelet, the three idiots had mistakenly kidnapped the person wearing it as well.

When Grassa heard that, she exploded.

“Th-Then you are saying Cheki was kidnapped because of a misunderstanding?!”

“Calm down, Grassa.”

“But that is just getting caught in the crossfire!”

Holding back the furious Grassa, I voiced the question that bothered me.

“If the councilor’s story has been accepted as true, then Cheki—and we, who only chased after him to rescue him—should all be innocent, right? So why have we not been released?”

Those Dwarves had definitely said it themselves when they came to the prison.

That Cheki had kept pretending ignorance the whole time.

In other words, Cheki was suspected of something beyond just having the Bracelet of Oath.

“The Elf is suspected of deliberately letting himself get caught so he could infiltrate the country. Once inside, he was going to scout out an infiltration route, then use the bracelet to contact you and lead you in. That is what they are accusing him of.”

…So, in short, it went like this.

First, Vezzo, being a Beastkin, used his status to enter the country through official channels, then stole the Bracelet of Oath from Luchimada’s house and secretly released it onto the market.

Pretending it had “leaked,” he then handed it to Cheki and Grassa.

At the same time, word spread that a magic tool crafted by a future king candidate had been stolen from the Dwarven Kingdom and was now circulating outside it.

When Dwarven agents came to reclaim the tool, Cheki deliberately allowed himself to be taken.

Finally, by having others pursue Cheki’s trail, they would discover a hidden passage that allowed covert entry into the Dwarven Kingdom, then send that information back to the Elven nation.

Once they knew the route, the Elves could launch some kind of attack.

That was the gist of it, according to Damogan’s rapid-fire explanation.

“That is the kind of thing they are saying—”

“Objection!! There is no way anyone would come up with such a half-baked plan!”

I cut him off before he could even finish, unable to hold back.

The very idea that a Beastkin and a Human would be cooperating with the Elves made no sense in the first place, and more than anything, why would the Dwarves assume the recovery team would kidnap the bracelet’s owner along with it?

Besides, if the bracelet had truly been stolen rather than sold on some back channel, the Dwarves could have just sent people through official channels to search for it.

“Is that so? Everyone else seemed convinced, said it was exactly the kind of scheme Elves would pull.”

“…Are Dwarves just not a very bright race?”

I could not help asking Vezzo.

“They are a people who care about little besides smithing. It cannot be helped.”

“No, it very much can be helped. We cannot just accept being branded criminals because of that.”

We had definitely entered the country illegally, but outside of that, we were completely innocent.

So what were we supposed to do?

Not only were the Dwarves a bit loose in the head to begin with, they were also so blinded by hatred of Elves that they could barely see straight.

Snatching Cheki back by force would be easy enough, but then we risked turning this into a full-blown racial incident between Dwarves, Beastkin, and Humans.

“I want to prove we are innocent and then walk out of this country with our heads held high… Any ideas?”

I turned to the others for their opinions.

“If you are truly innocent, you should prove it in court.”

The only one to respond was not one of my companions, but Damogan himself, sitting bound in front of us.

“Court?”

“That is right, court. That Elf is going to be put on trial. I hear the king himself will be in attendance.”

“That is pretty fast.”

“For our country, this is slow. We are all about quick decisions.”

A trial was not supposed to be something you rushed.

“So our only option is to win a not-guilty verdict at that trial… huh.”

“But Toa, even if it is a courthouse or whatever, if we barge in there we will cause an uproar just by showing up, will we not?”

Nikka was right.

We were not Dwarves, and at this point, there was no way we could pass ourselves off as Beastkin either.

Especially when the Dwarves already believed Beastkin and Humans were cooperating with the Elves.

“You want to attend the trial?”

While I was wrestling with the problem, Damogan spoke up in a suddenly confident tone.

“Is that even possible?”

“It is, if you let me out. I will help you.”

He had to realize that taking us to the courthouse would cause a commotion…

“Planning to betray your country, are you?”

“Not at all. I will be acting in accordance with my orders from above.”

Damogan gave a sharp, crooked grin, then continued.

“Truth is, in the first place, I came here to take you lot to the courthouse as witnesses.”