The Hero of Incandescence and the Lamia Queen by Isle Osaki

Author:Isle Osaki [Osaki, Isle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Light Novel
Publisher: J-Novel Club
Published: 2023-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

When we arrived at our rendezvous, a knight from Great Keith greeted us.

“We’ve been waiting,” said one of the men. “You’re the hero’s squad, right?”

“Indeed. And you must be the men General Talisker told us of,” the guardian knight answered.

Neither of them was wearing grand armor, and they both carried the bare minimum of equipment. I was always pretty lightly equipped to begin with. At a glance, our two groups looked like adventurers or mercenaries. This was intentional—we couldn’t afford for the Snake Sect to notice us. That was also why we were in squads roughly ten men strong and why we’d planned to join up at the destination.

The young knight leading Great Keith’s forces guided us. We followed him for a while, and I eventually noticed that the city was getting emptier.

“This is the slums,” our guide explained. “It’s the area with the worst public order in the city.”

I just nodded along. The people milling around here had pretty shabby clothes, and a lot of the kids were barefoot. People had been drinking and gambling before the sun had even risen.

The word “slum” was certainly appropriate.

But...everyone seems oddly bright.

Compared to the same type of area in Highland, there was more life in people’s faces here. There were all kinds of races around—humans, beastmen, dwarves, and even elves. Maybe there are even cambions?

We didn’t have any real issues on the way.

A few kids and beggars came up to us, but our guide showed them some symbol and they all raced off with pale faces.

“What’s going on there?” I asked.

“Hero, this mark is the crest of the Herald Knight,” explained our guide. The crest in his hand depicted a goddess holding both a sword and a book.

“Oh, that is most impressive for your age,” remarked the geezer guardian knight.

“Not at all. Our family has been doing the same since my grandfather’s generation,” he replied with an awkward smile.

A Herald Knight in Japan would be a mixture of a police officer and a judge. Apparently, they made on-the-spot judgments of criminals. Knowing that, I thought the kids were right to run away. It also made this young knight a good choice for a guide since he’d know the whole city.

After a while, we stopped walking. “We have arrived at the entrance,” our guide informed us. We’d ended up in some back alley that looked like an abandoned dumping ground. He pointed toward a stone gate that led underground. “This is the entrance to Great Keith’s underground,” the guardian knight explained.

“Because of the heat on the surface, it’s customary in Great Keith to allow our dead to rest somewhere cooler,” the guide added.

“Huh...”

“Please take care in the dark.”

As we slowly descended, the temperature plummeted. I could almost forget that it was roasting hot aboveground. Periodic vents to the outside kept the place from being completely sealed off, and some light shone through the openings, but even so, this place was pretty much pitch-black.

We used Night Vision to progress through the darkness.

There were graves as far as I could see on either side of the passage.

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