The Death Mage that doesn't want a fourth time

106 Regarding the difficulty of communication between races

Leaving Pauvina and Princess Levia behind, Vandalieu rushed towards the person who had produced the scream that had reached his ears. What he found was a beautiful woman with hair of a bright green-blonde color that wouldn't be seen on Earth, seemingly drowning in the river.

"Kyah, kyah, kyaaah~♪"

Still screaming (?), she was flailing at the water's surface with both her arms. There was no dangerous monster or suspicious silhouette that could be a murderer anywhere nearby.

She was just drowning... perhaps?

"Hmm?"

Vandalieu stared at this beautiful woman with his face sticking out of the thicket on the riverbank, even forgetting to put his stretched-out tongue away.

The reason for this was that the sight before him was a very strange one.

Normally, someone with pride in their swimming abilities might leap into the river right away to save the drowning woman.

However, no matter how Vandalieu looked at the situation, the beautiful woman was not drowning.

First of all, the woman was unmistakably a Scylla.

The lower half of the woman's body couldn't be seen as it was hidden by the water. But it was almost winter, and despite that, this woman was in a river near a Scylla village, inside Scylla territory, half-naked with nothing but a cloth wrapped around her chest. Given the circumstantial evidence, this conclusion could be drawn.

They were a race of people with octopus tentacles for the lower halves of their bodies, and though they weren't as well-adapted to being underwater as Merfolk, they were fine with being underwater for about half a day.

Of course, it was possible that there were some Scylla who were not good at swimming. It was likely even possible that they could drown if water levels increased or they were in bad shape.

But this river's water was flowing gently. Even now, there were leaves floating slowly past the woman.

"And most importantly, there's not the slightest reaction from my Danger Sense: Death," Vandalieu murmured.

This meant that the woman was harmless to Vandalieu, and she herself was at absolutely no risk of dying.

"And now that I listen to her screaming carefully, it's not screaming."

For some reason, it had the intonations of a song.

But then this raised the question of why she was pretending to drown in a place like this.

In fantasy works on Earth, Scylla were depicted as monsters who pretended to drown and then attacked the ones who came to help them. Was this the case here?

But if this was the case, there was a conspicuous lack of killing intent.

"So, so, are you going to go to her?" asked Orbia. "Or are you going to ignore her?"

Vandalieu had wanted to ask Orbia about the woman, who was likely acquainted with Orbia, but for some reason, Orbia was looking at Vandalieu with an excited sparkling in her eyes, seemingly intending to watch what he would do next.

"Hmm, I suppose I'll try calling out to her," said Vandalieu.

It didn't seem that the woman needed to be saved, but it was still possible that a dangerous murderer was in these areas. It was probably best to at least speak to her.

Vandalieu thought that it would be a pain if he were to use Flight to approach her just because he didn't want to get wet, only to have her detect the use of magic and mistake him for an enemy. So he decided to manipulate threads extended from his fingers with Thread-reeling to move towards her as a bridge.