“Odd.” Lily fiddled with the Trading Board in her hands. “No one responded to my questions. Are they all out on a mission or something?”
“Maybe. Probably they’re busy doing something right now.” Claud frowned. “Still, they’re carrying out tasks now, of all times? They must be doing something for the Moons, then. Is it wise for us to be here, in that case?”
“Well, it’s worth a shot. We’ll go down and dig out some intelligence first. Your Will of Solitude should let us sneak into Grandia unnoticed, after all.” Lily paused. “Still, this is madness. The Distortions and those things that apparently are worse than Distortions are menacing the world, and the divinities are waging war on each other? One has to wonder why…”
“We’ll find out.” Claud paused. “Probably, anyway. Grandia is probably the best choice for us to find answers right now, but where should we start?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at the city,” Claud replied. “I’m not fully confident that I can find a bar or a tavern there. This place looks really awesome. Would an awesome place have a watering hole?”
“In your estimation, awesome places won’t have a tavern?” Lily asked. “Count Nightfall is going to cry.”
“That’s what I think, anyway. I mean, drunken people really don’t fit into the dominant aesthetics of the Grandis capital, right?”
Claud landed on the ground, guiding Lily with his hand. The weakness that had been plaguing him had weakened ever since he began mediating and contending against the almighty pressure of the Black God. How could the hollowness of one’s life stand against the full power of the Black God at the moment of his apotheosis? Thanks to that, the fatigue that had been biting at him had been numbed thoroughly.
Lily still supported him randomly, though. It was hard to shake the habit, and Claud also found himself cuddling up to her once in a while.
“There’s quite the long queue,” Lily muttered. “And these guys don’t look tourists either. Covered wagons and whole families…refugees?”
“Seems like it. But doesn’t that imply that the war that’s going on is a destructive one?” Claud asked, and then paused. “More destructive than the previous one, anyway. The previous battles didn’t seem to affect the people much, save for the Terra Jewel.”
“Neither side is holding back, then,” Lily concluded. “They’re probably launching insane, indiscriminate attacks. Look! There are soldiers watching over these refugees.”
Claud followed the long train of people, and then frowned. There were actually troops here, troops that wore neither the colours of the Moons nor the Dark. “What are they here for? To protect these refugees, or to enforce order?”
The two of them watched for a few minutes, but none of them could uncover the answer just yet. After a while, Claud got bored and motioned at the cube. “Come on.”
“Okay!”
The two of them walked past the queue without anyone noticing. There was a checkpoint of sorts there, but it was easy enough for Claud and Lily to slip in with a bunch of wagons, and before long, the two of them were inside the weird city.
“Damn.” Claud looked around the place. The “sky” was just fake lightning, held up by tall buildings that looked more like pillars than actual houses. “This definitely is from Celestia. Maybe a bit exaggerated.”
“But this suits your taste, right?” Lily asked.
“Got that right in one,” Claud replied. “But it’s too big. A small fort for the two of us would be more to my liking.”
“Hmm.” Lily smiled. “Right, you told me about this city that was in your Second Tutorial, right? Rimestar and the Frozen Coffin around it. Does this place have to do with Rimestar?”
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Claud shook his head. “Rimestar was a normal city built around a floating palace of ice and snow. Not something as outlandish as this.”
“Oh.” Lily frowned. “So where did the Frozen Coffin come from, then? I mean, it sounded quite awesome too.”
“…Maybe I got my hands on it somehow?” Claud shook his head. “I try not to think about the Second Tutorial. It’s no longer valid, as is the Third. And both of them present horrible futures to me anyway, so I don’t really want to dwell on them longer than is necessary.”
Lily looked at him, and then nodded. “You’re right.”
The two of them looked around for a while. One of the most notable features he could see was the gigantic tent city that had been erected. From the fences around it, it was clear that this tent city was the living space for the refugees that were heading here; did this mean that Grandia was running out of living space?
The soldiers stationed around the sprawling tent city — or those he could see, anyway — weren’t armed, but Claud knew that Emperor Grandis definitely didn’t send a bunch of weaklings to deal with the issue of law and order in his precious city. At any rate, however, the refugee camp directly dealt with the issue of information.
“Let’s head over to the refugees and see what’s going on,” Claud suggested. “We’ll steer clear of the Emperor. He might decide to conscript us or something, and that’ll suck.”
“I wonder where the others are, though.” Lily made a face. “They should have scrambled to safety or hid in somewhere safe, at least. Either that, or they’ve been forced by the Moons to do some missions.”
“I think they ran off,” Claud replied. “Or at least, Nero and Kemata did. Remember what happened when we returned to our house back then?”
“Right.” Lily folded her arms. “That’s rather distressing. Are they fine? They should be, right?”
The two of them slipped into the refugee city in silence. Colourful tents billowed in the artificial wind, but there was a faint, beautiful order to these tents. Clearly, someone had taken the trouble to make sure that this place was kept nice and clean, presumably to prevent Emperor Grandis from getting mad.
In that case, though, why wasn’t the refugee camp established outside the city? Why did Emperor Grandis afford this much attention to the issue of refugees? As an existence that stood at the peak of humanity, there would probably be thousands of people willing to take care of refugees long before it became an issue, but…
“The old emperor’s behaving sneakily again,” Claud muttered.
“Sneakily?”
“Yeah. Seems like he’s paying an awful lot of attention to the refugee issue,” Claud replied. “Why? What for? It’s not like he needs to care about them, right? Maybe he’s a kind person, but I’m not that…gullible.”
“Maybe he wants the refugees to feel grateful or something,” Lily replied.
“Feel grateful?” Claud glanced at her. “Why did you choose to say that, of all things?”
“I was thinking about the divinities and the gods,” Lily replied. “Specifically the Coloured Gods. Why would they need followers? Do the gods need people to believe in them? Or is this a requirement for people who became gods?”
“So, you’re saying…”
“The Emperor might be trying for godhood,” Lily replied. “It’s just a guess on my part, though…”
“I’ll keep that in mind, then. Hmm. But that means he needs to clear the Third Tutorial, then.” Claud bobbed his head. “I wish him the best of luck, if nothing else. Now, then…”
The two of them stopped at an extra-large tent. While there probably weren’t any bars or taverns in the Emperor’s curated capital city, the same couldn’t be said for the refugees. For some reason, there was actually a restaurant-esque tent in front of them; a tent that was selling barbeque and alcohol…
Claud glanced at the shop’s signboard, and then frowned. “Refugee’s Rest Rum. Why is this naming style so freaking familiar? What, Triple-R?”
“Schwarz is here?”
Claud poked his head inside the tent, which was quite neat. He glanced at the clean counter once, and then shook his head. “The counter’s clean. I don’t think it’s him.”
“…What kind of identification method is that supposed to be?” Lily asked, before poking her head into the tent too. “But the bartender’s not him, and there aren’t that many passed-out drunks here. Maybe it’s a coincidence.”
Claud pondered for a moment. “Makes sense. Schwarz and unconscious drunken people are synonymous, after all.”
The two of them entered the tent. Under the cover of Will of Solitude, no one noticed them, allowing Claud and Lily to walk right up to groups of people that were drowning their sorrows and chatting over cups and mugs of alcohol. Ignoring the drunken fellows and the rowdy ones, Claud walked over to a small group of men and women.
“Hic.” The woman closest to Claud slammed her mug down, and the others looked at her.
“What’s wrong?”
“What did you think of?”
“My house, obviously,” the woman snapped. “Damn it. They didn’t conscript people last time, so I bought a bunch of houses from those who fled. And then it turned out that the Moons was conscripting everyone. Do you know how much money we wasted? We’re running out of money for even booze!”
“Then stop drinking…”
Claud exchanged glances with Lily as the woman’s friend offered some sound advice, and then nodded at each other.
Drinking, as it turned out, was quite the problem here…