The Death Mage that doesn't want a fourth time

85 A king who visits the people

Korf, who managed the caravan of merchants who delivered materials to the slave-run mine, felt a strange uneasiness.

There had been all kinds of things happening in the Hartner Duchy recently.

First, a Dungeon had appeared at the city of Niarki and a monster rampage had occurred, causing a great deal of panic.

The monster rampage and the Dungeon, named 'Heinz's Skeleton Cavern,' had been dealt with by the A-class adventurer party, the Five-colored Blades. After the Dungeon was explored, it was declared to be a C-class dungeon with thirty floors and that monsters shouldn't emerge from within as long as the monster population inside was periodically kept in check.

Apparently, there were many Undead, venomous insectoid monsters and poisonous plant-type monsters; most of the floors were caves, swamps or forests.

During the monster rampage, all of the monsters had been more powerful than their Ranks, but the monsters had now returned to normal strength.

But it seemed that when the Blue-flamed Sword Heinz entered the Dungeon, the monsters would flood towards him.

This was a chance for the city of Niarki, especially the Adventurers' Guild, as only small-to-medium-sized Devil's Nests and D-class Dungeons had existed nearby until now. The monsters that appeared in the new Dungeon were unique, so the Dungeon wouldn't be very popular, however.

The merchants of the caravan anticipated that new, rare drugs could be created from the monsters' venom. They didn't care about the rumors that the remnants of the Demon King had created a Dungeon in order to kill the heroes of the Five-colored Blades, particularly targeting its leader Heinz. It was nothing more than a topic of idle conversation.

After that, the castle in Nineland, the Hartner Duchy's capital, had sunk. Not in the metaphorical, economic sense, but physically. The merchants hadn't seen it for themselves, so they found it difficult to believe, but it was certain that the castle had suffered large damage. An outlaw who had gone on a violent rampage in the north was apparently involved in the incident, but the smaller details hadn't been released yet.

Either way, the merchants had thought that this event had no direct effect on them, as they operated in remote regions. They only hoped that taxes wouldn't increase to fund the castle's repair.

But after leaving the city of Niarki, staying a night in a cultivation village and then heading further south to the slave-run mine, they realized that this wasn't the case.

"Boss... no matter how many times I count, there's a mountain missing."

"I see, so you thought so as well."

After they left the cultivation village, they drew closer to the slave-run mountain that was their destination over the first and second day, giving them a view of the rocky mountains lined up against each other, but... the scenery that they had seen countless times was now different.

There was one less mountain than there should have been.

"What is the meaning of this? Was there a great earthquake or something?"

"If there was an earthquake large enough to collapse a mountain, even the city of Niarki wouldn't be unharmed. The people at the cultivation villages would have known something, too. And if that really were the case, the other mountains would have crumbled as well."

"So, are you saying that the tunnels collapsed, causing the whole mountain to collapse?"

"There's no doubt that some fearsome monster has appeared; I'm sure it was the same demon that sank the castle!"