I'm an alchemist. I've dumped self-restraint into the trash - Chapter 9

In a quiet forest, a boy and a girl were walking, carrying weapons. They were both adventurers, and had come to this place after accepting a request.

Their rank was C. It felt like they had finally started to look like real adventurers. Their journey of becoming adventurers began a year ago, and they had been steadily accumulating experience and improving their skills.

“Oh, hey, you know that rumor about the alchemist that people have been talking about lately?”

“What rumor?” the boy said, shaking his head in response to the girl’s conversation starter.

“Apparently, there’s an alchemist in the Adventurer’s Guild who owns a bunch of elixir-looking potions!”

“Huh… That’s gotta be a misunderstanding. Would a rich guy who owns a bunch of elixirs even gain anything from joining the Adventurer’s Guild?”

Unlike the girl, who spoke teasingly, the boy’s response was blunt.

“Well, I guess normally, that’s what you’d think, but… Man, you never join in on the fun.”

The girl, seemingly disappointed, reflexively kicked the ground. The boy too reflexively sighed at her childish gesture.

“Then bring me a topic that has a bit more credibility. Either that, or stay focused. We came here for a request.”

“So uptight!”

“You’re just too careless,” the boy asserted, feeling a bit uneasy. He gave off the feeling of someone who had surely been through hardships.

“Are there really monsters in a place like this, though? I’ve never heard anything like that until recently.”

“You’ve got a point… But according to the request, there are monsters here. Though, even if we don’t find any, we just need to report that.”

The request they had accepted was a monster subjugation request. They hadn’t heard of monsters frequenting the location until now, which made them suspicious, but there hadn’t been any other requests that seemed promising, so they’d ended up taking it.

Even so, they couldn’t find any trace of an animal’s presence, much less a monster’s. If they could at least find a trail, that would be enough, but even that was hopeless.

“…There’s nothing here.”

“There really isn’t. So what do we do now, go home?”

“It is getting late, too…”

Just as they arrived at an agreement on their plan to return, something entered their line of sight.

“Is that… a cabin?”

“Looks like it.”

The wooden cabin was a bit on the large side and was the only building in this wide open area. A structure so obviously man-made appearing so suddenly before them left the two bewildered.

“Is there someone living in a place like this…?”

“If there is, they must be a pretty weird person…”

The two cautiously approached the cabin, and the boy politely knocked on the door.

“Excuse me, is anyone there?”

They waited a few seconds, but there was no response. They couldn’t hear any particular noises coming from inside the cabin, either.

“…Maybe they’re not here?”

“Probably…”

They wanted to ask for information about the monsters from the person who lived here, but things didn’t seem that easy either.

“What do we do?”

“We can’t just walk in there without permission, so I guess we have to go home after all.”

It was still possible that there might be someone inside, and they were just sleeping. The two gave up on obtaining information and decided to walk away from the cabin.

However–

“…What’s that?”

In the thicket of trees behind the cabin, eyes emerged from the shadows, eyes so bright red they were reminiscent of blood. And not just one or two pairs of them. There were so many that they couldn’t possibly be counted.

The growl of a beast vibrated their eardrums.

“How’d all these things even…?! Shit, we gotta run!”

“Y- yeah!”

At the same time they started running, a wolf-type monster jumped out of the thicket towards them. They only looked for an instant, but there were more than a dozen of them. If the situation demanded combat, it was almost certain that they would die.

“Why now…?!” the boy complained as he was chased through the forest. He was losing his footing, and his gait turned unsteady.

Meanwhile–

“Kya?!”

The girl tripped and fell.

Not overlooking this fatal weakness, the leading wolf rushed at her from behind.

“I won’t let you…!”

However, just then, the boy stepped in and was caught by the wolf’s bite. Teeth sinking into his left arm, the boy was hit with intense pain.

“Th- thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it, just run!”

Her death was narrowly avoided, but that didn’t change the fact that the situation was tense. She quickly stood up and started running once more.

“Haa… haa…”

The boy continued breathing roughly.

Blood continuously dripped from his left arm’s wound, and his stamina was also extremely depleted. His awareness was turning faint – he couldn’t react to the appearance of a new enemy.

“…Huh?”

By the time he noticed, it was right beside him.

Without mercy, the monster bared its teeth at the boy, and–

***

The sky was dyed with orange, and a ray of light poured in from a crack in the clouds. With dinner time approaching, children hurriedly returning home from playing and other such scenes could be seen throughout the town.

In the midst of that, Raith was walking back to the Adventurer’s Guild after completing a request at Daisy’s shop.

“I wonder how long it would take Daisy to be able to learn it…”

Remembering Daisy’s dejected appearance with the dark circles emerging under her eyes, Raith sighed and thought, “Looks like this’ll go on for a while.”

Daisy was too persistent. Raith was concerned that she might wreck her health. It would be a problem if she fainted again, so he was watching out for it just in case.

“Still, it’s hard to believe she’s the same age as me, since she looks like that…”

With a toddler’s physique and very few curves, the parts of her that could be seen as womanly were next to nonexistent. The one time Raith had absentmindedly said this in front of the person in question, she’d put all her weight into stomping on his toes.

There was no telling what would happen if he said something like that again.

“Man, she’s scary…”

Imagining Daisy’s face, Raith’s whole body trembled.

While having these absurd thoughts, he noticed something nearby that seemed odd.

They seemed to be discussing something serious while looking in the direction of the city gate.

“What’s going on?” Raith asked the nearby adventurers.

“Um, well, they’re saying that there are a couple of adventurers covered in blood at the city gate right now…”

“What happened?”

“Attacked by monsters, I bet. Seems like one of them has got a pretty big wound, I hear. Too late to save ‘em, probably… Hey, wait!”

Not waiting for him to finish talking, Raith ran off. He was headed for the place they had discussed, the city gate.

“Please let me make it in time…!”

With this sentiment which could almost be called a prayer, he continued running and arrived within a few minutes. There was a crowd at the gate, and he could hear someone’s mournful shouts.

“Let me through!”

Raith forcibly pushed his way through the crowd and arrived at the center. The scene that suddenly entered his view was that of a boy riddled with wounds carrying a girl covered in blood.

“Someone, please save her…!!!” the boy tearfully begged the people around him, disregarding his own wounds.

The girl’s wound was clearly life-threatening. There was a large laceration on her back, with immense bleeding that did not seem to stop.

Perhaps judging that it was too late to save her, the surrounding people had equally dark expressions on their faces.

In the midst of this, Raith rushed over to the boy’s side.

“Who are…”

“Nevermind that, hurry up and show me the wound!!”

“R- right…”

Looking at the girl’s wound and the area around it, Raith promptly used Analyze.

“Blood loss, decay around the opening of the wound… and poison, huh.”

Understanding the girl’s condition in an instant, he opened the bag that would save her.

He took out an elixir and a green potion.

“Hurry and have her drink the green potion!” Raith instructed the boy carrying the girl while rummaging through his bag again, his face growing more and more strained with panic. “…There’s no potion for the poison…!”

He couldn’t find a potion for the poison invading the girl’s circulatory system. At this rate, even if the wounds were healed, she would be affected by the poison and would eventually die.

“In that case… I’ll just make it right now.”

Without hesitating, Raith took some white liquid, kiukra grass, and a small knife out of his bag, turning the kiukra grass into a potion after which he mixed it with the white liquid.

Then, he cut his fingertip with the knife and added a drop of blood into the white liquid and potion mixture. This was to add data on unpoisoned, healthy blood into the potion.

From his prior use of Analyze, Raith had confirmed that the girl’s blood type was the same as his.

“And lastly, this one!”

Raith handed the final potion to the boy and watched over them until the girl finished drinking all of it.

When the girl finished drinking the green potion, the parts that had decayed and turned purple returned to normal skin color, and after drinking the elixir, the wound on her back closed in an instant.

The clear potion Raith had handed them last didn’t produce any visible changes, but it should have eliminated the poison within the girl’s body.

The boy’s eyes widened in surprise at the changes to the girl’s body, but Raith paid this no attention and used Analyze once more.

“…It’s alright, she’s saved.”

The moment Raith’s words echoed through the quiet space, tremendous applause filled the area.