My Wife and I Became Sages in Another World
Chapter 361: The Hidden Villagers

Chapter 361: The Hidden Villagers

After Drakzen absorbed the corpse of the Accursed Beast right in front of us, he cast a shadow spell that blinded us for a brief moment, allowing him to escape without leaving a trace for us to follow.

*sigh* "I freaking hate that guy..." I muttered.

Now that he had seen us there, it was evident that he would tell Baelzor, so our cover was blown.

However, we were already on the west side of the northern continent, which was our priority to get there without being noticed.

If we had gotten found out as soon as we arrived, then traveling to this side would have been much more difficult.

A few minutes after Drakzen left the scene, my group and I were looking for a secret entrance that could take us to where all of the survivors were located.

The town looked wholly abandoned and destroyed, but our "search" spell kept telling us that there was a large group of people standing right where we were.

Suddenly, I heard a familiar voice calling me from one of the torn-down homes.

*psst* "Ichiro..."

"Lampart?" I asked, turning my head to see the member of the Dawn’s Defender peeking from behind a wall.

"They are gone. Come on out..." I continued, letting them know that the attack on the town had finished.

Rio and Lampart were using a trap door that was built directly on the ground, and while the entrance was already hard to see, it was also covered in snow and debris that almost hid it completely.

I was glad to see the two of them were still standing, as their last message to me sounded like they were in the middle of a battle.

"We were lucky that this town had this emergency underground room..." Lampart commented.

With the Accursed Beast and the soldiers gone from the small town, the villagers who were hiding with Rio and Lampart started to come out from the trap door on the ground.

There were at least two hundred people inside, which was impressive since the underground room wasn’t that big.

’They must have been packed like sardines in there...’ I thought.

The two members of the Dawn’s Defenders gave me a brief summary of what had happened.

Not far from our location, there was an underground settlement called "The Pit." It was called that way since it resembled a massive hole in a mountain where survivors of Baelzor’s reign had taken refuge.

Rio and Lampart had been leading the other DD members to travel to different towns and settlements on the west side of the northern continent, taking their citizens to The Pit, where they had been safe from Baelzor all this time.

Unfortunately, while both of them were about to take everyone in the small settlement to their safe place, one of the scouts saw the black lightning lion approaching with a small group of soldiers.

The DD members would have fought back if it were just the soldiers, but they knew that Accursed Beasts were not something they could easily take on, so the chief of the village decided to open his secret underground room for everyone to take shelter.

Once the beast realized that there was nobody in town, he went on a rampage and destroyed all of the buildings.

"We were pretty lucky. If this had happened in the last settlement we evacuated, we would have all been killed..." said Rio.

After all of the villagers were out of the secret room, I noticed that a lot of them were revisiting their destroyed homes, looking for personal belongings that survived the Accursed Beast’s attack.

I saw a little girl and her mother rummaging through a house that was wholly razed to the ground.

They looked pretty similar, as they shared the same brunette hair tied into a braid and green eyes, which were widened with frustration.

"Are you guys okay? What are you looking for?" I asked, noticing that they were one of the last people who were not ready to leave the settlement.

The little girl looked at me with a sad face while the mother seemed to struggle to move a boulder out of her way, so I gave her a hand and pushed it off with her.

Under the boulder, there was a small handkerchief that was a little burnt from the attack, and it seemed to have stitched the faces of the little girl and her mother in it.

The stitching work wasn’t the best, but it still looked somewhat cute and charming, giving it a homemade feel to it.

When the little girl spotted the handkerchief, she quickly retrieved it and held it close to her chest, saying that her dad would want it back.

I didn’t want to ask the little girl about what happened to her father since I didn’t want to touch a sensitive subject with a child, so I talked to the mother about it as we reunited with the rest of the villagers.

Rio and Lampart were going to guide us to The Pit, and while I thought that all of the villagers could fit in the back of Fuego if he transformed into his largest form, it would have been pretty dangerous for them to ride.

Now that we were reunited with the DD members, there wasn’t a reason for us to keep rushing, so we had no problem walking along with the villagers.

It was supposed to be about half a day of walking to get to the pit, but considering the fact that we were with a large group that had children and old people in it, we had to prepare to camp out that night.

During the walk, I spoke to the brunette woman who was rummaging through the debris, and she introduced herself as Helena and the little girl as May.

They were mother and daughter, and the handkerchief they were looking for used to belong to her husband.

When she said that, I thought that her husband had been killed by Baelzor’s forces. However, it turned out that he was a soldier who was mind-controlled by the devil a few years ago.

’I need to figure out how this mind-control stuff works...’ I thought.