Just outside the city of Gordia, about fifteen minutes up the road from the side of the road into the forest, there is a wooden hut.
The hut that William and the others are heading towards is currently occupied by a female sorceress.

Alice Flamelia.
She graduated from the Academy of Magic three years ago, and is a wizard by trade.

With her long, wavy red hair and beautiful appearance, it was clear that she would have had no shortage of flirtatious stories to tell if she had wanted to.

In fact, during her school years, she had relationships with several men, had s*x with them, and then... lost track of them.

Her parents were very powerful merchants and patrons who supported her dreams and used the power of money to cover up her crimes.

Ever since she learned about the undead at the academy, she had been fascinated by them.
In addition to her general studies at the academy, she immersed herself in the study of the undead as a researcher.

However, there was one thing that was both necessary and lacking in her research.
It was a corpse.
There were almost no corpses under conditions that would allow her to test her hypothesis.

Therefore, she needed to create a corpse with her own hands.

At first, Alice is satisfied with animal corpses, but soon she enters a forbidden realm.
Experiments with human corpses.
Her parents, who had initially been complicit in the cover-up, were finally spurned by her escalating behavior.

Having lost her patron, Alice next turned her attention to the Count of Goldart, to whom she had been assigned as a court magician.

The Count was an unparalleled lover of women, and though he was a small man, he was also ambitious.
Alice sold her body to the snobbish nobleman who pressed her for her body, and by encouraging his ambition, she gained a new patron for her research.

For her, the study of the undead was more important than anything else in her life.

The hut where Alice now resides was also built by her for the Count.
She was writing on a piece of paper in the small, oddly bleak hut, which was furnished with nothing more than a desk, chair, and writing utensils.

But then her hand stops.

'Responding to ...... alerts? There are one, two, three ...... four of them.'

Alice put down her pen, stood up, and picked up a sorcerer's wand that was propped against a nearby wall.

'If it's just one person, it could be that a rat just wandered in, but if it's four people, it can't be a coincidence that they were ...... followed? But it can't be. ...... No, it's more about what to do. ......'

Alice, alone in the hut, bites her fingernails in frustration.

Then, as if on a moment's notice, she walked up to the door of the hut, opened it slightly, and cast the Wizard Eye spell.
The transparent eye she had created appeared through the crack in the door, and she closed it again.

Alice concentrates her mind and moves the invisible 'eye'.
From the hut in the middle of the hillside, she moves her 'eyes' down through the trees in the direction of the alert.

After moving forward for a while, the Eye soon discovers a group of what appear to be adventurers.
They were dressed in a variety of outfits, one male and three female.
All of them appear to be young adventurers, younger than Alice.

It was the male adventurer who caught Alice's attention the most.

'There's a mage. ...... But an adventurer mage is just a flunk at the academy.

With that in mind, Alice tried to keep an eye on the adventurers.
But...

'Now ......?

Alice shouted in surprise inside the hut.
No longer could she see the scenery that her 'eyes' had been transferring to her vision, her field of vision only showed the landscape inside the narrow hut.

A sorcerer among the adventurers had shot down the 'eye' Alice had created with a magic missile spell.

'He was using magic sensing (sense magic) ......! What a clever trick ......!'

Alice bit her thumbnail again.

Both Sense Magic and Magic Missile are spells that can be used even by novice magicians.
So she was more than a little annoyed that Alice's high-level spell, the Wizard's Eye, had been intercepted.

'Now, how am I going to cook this ......'.

Alice pondered her next move.
If it's just a group of beginner adventurers, I should be able to handle it on my own...

'Well, this is a good opportunity to try that.

Suddenly, Alice smiles as she realizes something good.
It was time to test the culmination of her research, she thought to herself.