Time Healer Ceres

That makes four already.

One child had gone to the academy, another had gone out on an errand, and another had gone to play with a friend...

One day passed, then another, and they still hadn’t returned.

The disappearances were already reported to the guards, but there was still no word that any of the children had been found.

With that happening, it was hard not to worry whenever a child was late coming home. What if they had gone missing, too?

“You should go inside and get some rest. I’ll wait a little longer before I go in.”

“Yes.”

Seeing the worried look on the director’s face, Jailo’s spirits sank as well. He slowly headed inside the orphanage.

“Haa.”

He could hear the director sighed heavily behind him.

***

“Who?”

“Jailo. He’s my friend.”

“Your friend’s older sister went missing?”

“Yeah! She’s not his real sister. She’s just an older girl who lives at the orphanage with him... Anyway, she hasn’t come home for three days.”

“Hmm.”

Ceres was in the kitchen, stirring a pot of stew, when Julia came to visit the shop for the first time in a while. The girl hadn’t been coming around lately, so Ceres wondered what had brought her here today. Apparently, she had something urgent to tell her.

“She went to the academy and didn’t come back?”

“Yeah!”

“Did they report it?”

“They did. But it doesn’t seem to have helped. It was the same when Dave disappeared too...”

Julia’s expression fell as she remembered what had happened to her friend, Dave. The case had eventually been ruled as a murder committed by his own father. The incident still weighed heavily on her.

“Jailo’s really worried. Other kids have gone missing and never come back. Now Anisha isn’t coming home either.”

“...Other kids have gone missing, too?”

“Yeah. Including Anisha, there are five who haven’t come back.”

“......”

...Five, huh? It wasn’t normal for five children to disappear from the same orphanage.

Could these children have been taken to an illegal auction house?

Her first thought was that there might still be places like the one where she had found Zien, where children were being bought and sold illegally.

But the Crown Prince said he was launching a large-scale investigation.

After what happened last time, he had said investigators would be sent to every orphanage in the empire, not just those in the capital. He would make sure nothing illegal was going on.

The news already spread throughout the empire. Even with that, were there still people brazen enough to keep trafficking children?

“Are all the missing children like Dave...”

Julia bit her lip, unable to finish her words. She was afraid that saying them aloud might make them come true.

“I’ll look into it.”

“Really?”

“It shouldn’t be hard.”

Finding out how the investigation was going shouldn’t be difficult.

I should check with Sky as well.

It wouldn’t hurt to ask the information guild Sky to look into it.

“Hehe.”

Julia’s face brightened at once when Ceres offered to help.

“But, Julia.”

“Hmm?”

Ceres quietly called Julia’s name as she stroked the girl’s head, her eyes falling on the object in Julia’s hand.

“What are you holding?”

“...Huh?”

“Why do you have a teleportation scroll? I never gave you one.”

Ceres had noticed the familiar object in Julia’s hand the moment she entered the shop and had been wondering about it ever since. Why was Julia carrying it?

“......”

Julia slowly looked down at her hand. Only then did she realize her mistake.

She had been planning to visit Uncle Kainel as usual that day. But after Jailo told her that his sister from the orphanage was missing, she rushed straight to Ceres.

She had completely forgotten that she was still holding a teleportation scroll...

“Julia.”

“Hehe...”

“Julia.”

“......”

Julia tried to laugh it off, but as Ceres’s eyes narrowed, she lowered her head.

Uncle...

We’re busted.

***

[Screeech!]

Thud!

[Guh... i... iik...]

One-meter-long centipedes crawled through the darkness of the Black Forest.

“It’s only a B-rank Black Forest. This is easier than I expected.”

Slash!

“Don’t get careless.”

“Of course.”

The mercenaries advanced through the Black Forest, cutting down monsters as they went. Fortunately, the forest wasn’t particularly high-ranked, so the monsters were easier to deal with than expected.

“The captain went after the boss, right?”

“He should be done soon.”

The Halo Mercenary Corps had made quite a name for itself in the southern region. Most of its members, including the captain, were A-rank mercenaries. Although they were small in number, their skill was widely recognized.

Having entered the B-rank Black Forest without hesitation, they were confident they would finish the mission without any trouble.

[Squeak!]

Slash!

While waiting for the captain and the others to deal with the boss, the mercenaries continued cutting down the monsters one by one.

“They’re taking a while.”

“Yeah.”

Some time had passed. The boss of a B-rank Black Forest should’ve been dealt with by now, but there was still no word. The mercenaries started to exchange uneasy looks.

These things wouldn’t disappear until the boss was dead.

Rumble...

“......?”

The mercenaries were starting to get tired when the ground suddenly trembled beneath them. They stopped.

“What was that?”

“Not sure.”

Rumble... Rumble...

The rumbling grew louder, and the mercenaries’ faces grew tense. Something was coming their way.

Rumble!

“—!”

“...What is that?”

A moment later, they spotted a strange creature in the distance. The mercenaries immediately froze.

“That... is the boss?”

“...This can’t be.”

This is only a B-rank Black Forest...

It was unlike any creature they had ever seen. If you gathered every kind of monster and threw them together into one body, would they look like this? They couldn’t bring themselves to attack it.

Corpses were impaled on its long, spider-like legs...

“—!”

The mercenaries’ faces grew even more stricken when they realized who the corpses belonged to:

Their captain and their comrades.

.

.

.

Chapter 56: The Missing Children

“Where’s Uncle Gino?”

“He went back to the south.”

“The south?”

Duke Schweiss and Duchess Elkein had come to visit after some time away. But one person who usually came with them was missing—Duke Nora.

“He asked me to apologize for leaving in such a hurry without saying goodbye.”

“Did something happen?”

Duchess Elkein sighed quietly at Ceres’s question.

“A Black Forest appeared recently...”

Black Forests appeared all the time, so that alone was nothing unusual. The problem was...

“Every person inside was wiped out.”

“What?”

Wiped out? Did that mean everyone inside the Black Forest had died?

“Was it... S-rank?”

“No. B-rank, apparently.”

...B-rank?

And everyone died?

Ceres couldn’t make sense of what the two dukes were saying. Sure, attempts to clear a Black Forest could fail. But for everyone to die in a forest that wasn’t S-rank or A-rank was hard to believe.

How could that happen?

“That’s certainly unusual.”

“It is.”

“That’s why he went straight back to the south.”

As the head of the family responsible for protecting the south, Duke Nora couldn’t afford to ignore the incident.

“Will Uncle be all right?”

Something was clearly off. Whenever Black Forest appeared, its rank was determined first. Then mercenaries were recruited and soldiers deployed according to its rank.

And yet, everyone was wiped out.

Ceres couldn’t help wondering if something unexpected had happened inside the Black Forest. Naturally, she was worried about Duke Nora, who had gone back to the south alone.

Of the three dukes, Duke Nora was the only one who had never shown any real fighting ability in front of her. She only ever saw him laugh amiably and step in to stop the others from fighting.

He said farming was his specialty.

When they first met, he had told her he was good at farming. She was worried about what would happen if a dangerous monster appeared.

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