When we came out of the basement, people of the Order were taking the initiative in cleaning up.

　There seemed to be no more new undead.

　It seems that all the undead in the city have been killed, which is a relief.



　I guess that's all I have to do for now.　

　I tell ...... Shannon and Patra to help the others and go to the Adventurer's Guild to report once more. I went to the reception desk as usual and found Ricca with her gear still on.



"Mr. Ricca, I've come to report on this incident.

"Mr. Rock!　Just in time!　Please come to the guild leader's office as soon as possible!



　Ricca-san pulled me by the arm and took me halfway to the guild leader's room.

　There, the Knight Commander Marcus and the Guild President Titus were sitting quietly across the table from each other.



　Normally, they would start a fight just by meeting each other, but ...... the quietness of the room made me feel something even more peculiar.



　The two are usually fighting when they meet each other.

　I looked at Ricca's face and she winked at me with one eye and pushed me back into the guild leader's office and closed the door.



　She winked at me prettily, but then she pushed me and ran away.



"Welcome Mr. Locke. I'm sorry to bother you at such a busy time.

"I'm sorry about earlier. I didn't want to make you look bad."



　They both talk to me at the same time, and I have a hard time dealing with them.

　I just let it slide and report what happened.



　I thought the Knight Commander would be more angry because I beat him up, but I am relieved to hear that he was not. When I asked him about his memories of the time when he was being manipulated, he said he vaguely remembers it.



　He said he had a vague feeling as if he was watching someone else's life.



　I asked him about the reason why the Knight Commander himself was being manipulated, but he said that he does not know the obvious reason at this moment.

　Even if it was inevitable that he was manipulated, it is problematic that all of the Knights were manipulated.



　If it had been a minister of the country who was being manipulated, ...... this country would have been completely taken over.

　At all costs, the cause must be investigated and action taken.



　For a while after that, Marcus told me about his encounter with Lydia, although he did not know when he was brainwashed.

　He told me that it all started more than a month ago.



　Marcus was training alone after the whole training session was over when the woman appeared. He had never seen her before, but for some reason he felt as if she was a friend he had known for a long time.



　They met several times in the training area, and Marcus did not even feel strange about the presence of a woman he did not know in the training area.



　He said that sometimes he began to feel as if he was losing his memory. For some reason, just looking at Titus was enough to make him feel frustrated to the point where he could not control his emotions.



　He did not like Titus because he had always felt like a rival, but he became even angrier than that.



　Eventually, Lydia told him to collect the corpses of strong demons, explaining that they were necessary for the development of the country.



　In the past, he had been able to obtain materials from strong demons by buying them to make weapons or sell them off, or by defeating them, but after Lydia told him to do so, he became obsessed with stronger demons.



　He used up the budget allotted to the Knights to buy demons, and now he is going out of his way to steal them from adventurers.



　Now he understands how strange this sounds, but at that time he had no idea.

　It was like he was acting in his own mind and not in his own consciousness.



　Marcus bowed to me and Titus and apologized.



　Titus, who was really not expecting it, accepted the apology and promised that the Knights and the adventurers would cooperate with him in the future to investigate the details.



　As for Lydia, the Adventurers' Guild would share the information with the rest of the country and search for her. However, it might be difficult to find her like that.

　Even Domorte would not be able to trace the magic if Lydia had seriously fled.



　Marcus apologized to us one last time and got up to leave.

　He told us that he was still in charge of the debris removal in the country and that he would be back in charge of that.



　He may be held accountable in some way, but right now there is a lot of work to be done.



　Just as Marcus was leaving, Ricca arrived in a hurry.



"Oh my God! A former brave Kid has escaped. He's still wearing his slave collar, so I don't think he'll get very far.



　We then searched for the Kid in parallel, but we could not conduct a large-scale search because we were too busy rebuilding the city, and even Lucky's nose could not track him down, as if he had gone into the river along the way.



　I wonder if Kid's escape was a coincidence. .......

　For a while after that, he was assigned to help rebuild the city.