Monster Company Tycoon Chapter 26

Chapter 26

 

In the end, I wound up heading to the eastern forest in the middle of the night with Brownie.

Since a single torch wasn’t enough to properly illuminate our surroundings in the darkness…

“Make it brighter. What if our Chihuahua trips and gets hurt? Are you going to take responsibility? Do you even know how valuable an employee he is to our dungeon?”

“Hey! You’re only paying me 100 eon! Isn’t that asking a bit much!?”

“Ah, forget it, forget it! Do you think fairies don’t have trouble finding jobs? There are plenty of Fire Fairies willing to light the way for us besides you! If you’re dissatisfied, we can just replace you with someone else!”

“Who said I was dissatisfied!? I was just adjusting the brightness so it wouldn’t hurt his eyes!”

I had hired a low-ranking Fire Fairy for 100 eon per hour.

The fist-sized Fire Fairy circled around us, brightly illuminating our surroundings, so seeing where we were going wasn’t much of a problem… Although it was quite noisy.

“Do we really have to… go meet a monster in the middle of the night?”

“Since we’ve brought it up, we should take care of it as soon as possible! What if those humans end up killing it while we’re dragging our feet?”

I’d only brought it up for no reason, and now Brownie was scolding me even more.

“Especially that one with the eyes of someone who’s already lived through everything! He’s still in his prime, yet his eyes are so dull, and he looks completely unmotivated. I really don’t like him.”

‘You’re talking about Ragner, right?’

He did have a somewhat sleepy-looking expression, but I didn’t think it was that bad…

“But are you sure this is okay? What if it doesn’t recognize me and attacks me…?”

“I told you there’s no need to worry! Attacking you is the same as attacking the Demon King. Any monster with a functioning brain will know to show you the proper respect!”

‘But… to have a functioning brain, wouldn’t it need to have a head in the first place? That guy didn’t have one…’

At last, we arrived at the place where we’d encountered the Dullahan.

I really hadn’t wanted to do anything this dangerous. And yet here I was, in the middle of the night, all alone without anyone to protect me, deep in a forest where dangerous monsters roamed.

‘No, get a grip.’

What’s the point of lamenting over something that’s already happened?

Since I’d come this far, I might as well follow Brownie’s advice and recruit the Dullahan to bring it back with me.

We’d been waiting for quite some time when…

Clank, clank.

The heavy sound of armor I’d heard during the day came from somewhere in the distance.

“It’s coming.”

“Oh!”

Brownie abruptly turned toward the direction of the sound and let out an exclamation filled with excitement.

“Huh?”

Then she tilted her head and said something rather ominous.

“Was that the one?”

“I told you. It was a headless knight.”

“I heard it was an undead monster, so I thought it would be a zombie or a Lich. I didn’t expect a Dullahan…”

Come to think of it, that rascal Brownie had made a huge fuss after hearing only that I’d encountered a powerful undead monster.

She hadn’t even bothered to listen to my explanation that it was a Dullahan.

“What’s with that reaction? Is there some reason it can’t be a Dullahan!?”

“This is a little tricky.”

“W-What? Why are you making it sound so scary…?”

“Let’s move somewhere else for a moment.”

Brownie pointed toward a spot farther away and fluttered off. I hurriedly followed after her.

“Hmm… We’ve got a problem.”

“I came all the way here after walking for an hour in the middle of the night without even getting any sleep. It’ll take another hour to walk back. And I even spent 200 eon! But if all of this turns out to have been completely pointless, I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep out of sheer frustration.”

I had to get up early tomorrow and walk another hour to go to my part-time job!

The dungeon was practically a work-from-home arrangement, which was nice… Ah, the misery of an office worker who has to commute.

Well, I had chosen this hell myself, so I couldn’t really complain.

“Just tell me already. Does this mean we can’t recruit the Dullahan?”

“That’s not it. We just need to do a little preparation first.”

“Preparation?”

Brownie crossed her arms and spoke in a troubled voice.

“Do you know how undead monsters come into existence?”

“Hmm… Skeletons are undead monsters, too, right?”

“That’s right.”

“They die and then come back to life, don’t they?”

“Exactly. When demonic energy enters the corpse of a human or animal, it turns into a monster.”

Sometimes, whenever the skeletons described cemeteries as though they were their family homes, it gave me the creeps. It was even worse now that I remembered all the graves near the place where the temple was being built north of the village.

Could there be skeletons who came from that place?

“Dullahans are the same. When demonic energy enters the corpse of a dead person, particularly a knight or swordsman who wielded a blade, a Dullahan is born. The better someone’s combat skills were in life, the higher their chances of becoming a Dullahan. Oh, and obviously, the corpse must be missing its head.”

“Ah…”

So if it had been skilled before becoming a monster, that meant it would still be skilled after becoming one, right?

If we could somehow bring it to our dungeon, there was no doubt it would become an elite employee.

“Unlike ordinary monsters, Dullahans develop a distinct purpose after becoming monsters. Namely, they wander around searching for their heads.”

I gulped, feeling as though I were listening to a horror story.

To make matters worse, the Fire Fairy was deliberately illuminating only Brownie’s face like a spotlight, as though trying to set the mood. It made everything even more eerie.

“That means…”

“We can’t communicate with it until we find its head. That’s all.”

“Ugh.”

You want me to find its severed head!? How am I supposed to do that?

I rubbed my arms, which had broken out in goosebumps, trying to calm myself down.

“I can’t do that! Absolutely not!”

“Why not? This might actually work out even better! Once we find its head, it’ll listen to everything we say! We can make it work for us with an absurdly low weekly salary!”

“Even so… a corpse… a head… Ugh.”

A severed head was still a severed head, even if I took off my glasses. There was no Gaussian filter that could make it look better!

“Chihuahua, are you really going to act so weak?”

“Fine, let’s say I agree to find it! How exactly are we supposed to look for it?”

Don’t tell me we have to dig through every single grave one by one?

I’d only just managed to become friendly with the villagers through my restaurant job. If I got caught digging up graves, I might end up being banned from the village altogether.

Ragner might even come to execute me, saying that I’d finally revealed my true nature.

“All the clues are already there. First, isn’t it strange that a monster as powerful as a Dullahan is wandering around inside an area so firmly protected by a barrier?”

“Ruadis said the same thing was strange. She also said it would be even more difficult because undead creatures are incompatible with the barrier.”

“There’s no need to overcomplicate things. It’s because the monster was naturally born inside the barrier. In other words, it never needed to break through the barrier in the first place.”

“Ooh…”

“There’s one more thing. Dullahans are extremely obsessed with their lost heads. That’s why they keep wandering around near them.”

“Then… there’s a high chance it’s somewhere in this forest, right?”

“Exactly!”

There was a severed head somewhere in the eastern forest of the village… Just imagining it sent a chill down my spine.

Now that I’d become conscious of it, even rocks about the size of a human head made me flinch whenever I spotted them.

“Let’s hurry up and find it.”

“……”

“We should focus our search on the area where that Dullahan patrols. You could call it a cruel twist of fate, but even though Dullahans wander around near their own heads, they can’t actually find them. They don’t have eyes, so they can’t recognize them!”

Come to think of it, the monster had first been spotted two weeks ago. It had more than enough time to find its head, even if it spent all that time looking at the ground. But it couldn’t find it because… it had no eyes.

“It’s going to take a long time to find it, isn’t it? Oh, it’s been an hour already.”

The Fire Fairy chattered excitedly.

Well… At least I wouldn’t need a watch thanks to it.

After that, despite being frightened, I pursued the Dullahan and searched for its severed head, driven solely by my determination to bring an elite employee back to the dungeon.

“It’s been two hours.”

“Haaah… Is this really possible?”

“You’ve only been searching for an hour. Are you already complaining?”

“I can’t help it. The area illuminated by the Fire Fairy only reaches as far as right over there.”

The surroundings were so dark that searching was proving difficult. On top of that, having to move cautiously to avoid being spotted by the Dullahan was rapidly wearing me down mentally.

Honestly, I wanted to approach the Dullahan directly and ask it to cooperate, but Brownie stopped me.

Apparently, if things went wrong, it might never let us leave until we found its head…

“Still, it’s not a particularly cunning creature.”

“Why?”

“At least it doesn’t go around doing something bizarre like cutting off someone else’s head and putting it on its own shoulders, right?”

“…What?”

As the only human here who actually had a head, I couldn’t help but recoil in horror.

‘You should’ve told me that earlier!’

I reflexively covered my neck and glared at Brownie with a deeply resentful expression.

“That’s why I told you you’re safe. You’ve got that thing firmly attached to your neck, after all. Ah, is there any other clue? The area it wanders around is too large.”

Just then…

Something glimmered from between the thick bushes in the distance.

Something had entered my field of vision, faintly reflecting the light cast by the Fire Fairy.