They had left with only three people but were going to meet up with the others as a group of four. Ophelia had joined Gren on his trip so that she could see the Goddess and help convince Annie that the Returning Heaven guild was not full of enemies like they had expected. "So, who is this Annie person that you're talking about? Your guild master?"
"No, she's our best scout in the guild and my sister." Ophelia made an odd reaction when Gren said the word sister.
"Your sister? Not that I'm suddenly believing your story but if you're really the son of the Goddess then wouldn't that mean that she had two children?" Gren wondered why people were always confused about his family's details but after a little bit of thought he realized that it was all his fault for making everything so complicated.
"No. She's my adopted sister. The two of us have no blood relations. As far as I know, I'm the only child of the Goddess." Gren still wondered about that woman in Doga. It wasn't that far away from Adierton so he could have traveled there but he wanted to hear it from his mother's mouth first. This was especially true now that he had begun to question his own judgement.
"That doesn't seem like something the Goddess would do. She would often teach children magic and help heal them for free but it's said that she would try her best to avoid getting attached to mortals. It's not a mystery why she didn't want to get attached; after the war against the Dark Lord, the heroes that she considered her friends died one by one." Gren knew little of the heroes but he was interested in learning more about them. "The death of the last of the heroes--the elven hero--must have broken her heart. The Goddess swore not to get involved with the war between humans and elves and, in the end, the elven hero took her own life when her people were conquered."
"What even caused the war between the humans and elves?" It was something that Gren had been wondering since the request to clear the elven fort.
"It wasn't originally a war between two species. When Seka took over what's now the Adier Duchy, the elves weren't pleased. It was a land that had already seen enough death so they should have left it alone." Ophelia didn't seem to approve of the Seka Kingdom's actions. "It was the first Adier that took that disagreement and used it to wage a war against the elves." The Adiers again? It made sense since Gren was currently in a territory named after their family but they really showed up a lot. "The official reason given was that the elves were a threat to their new territory but the first Adier was in love with the elven queen. She was a special breed of elf known as a high elf which could be seen from her golden hair; the same golden hair that's often attributed to the Adiers themselves."
"So he waged a war just for a woman? I somehow doubt that she would love him after doing that." What woman would fall for the man that killed her people?
"She didn't ever fall in love with him. When her husband died, she took her own life; just like the elven hero. The elven culture at the time was one that treated marriage as a bond between two lives." After a small moment of her zoning out, Ophelia shook her head and refocused herself with a couple of slaps to her cheeks. "It was the queen's daughter that gave the Adiers their hair color. She was just a toddler when the war was waged but the sick bastard raised her to become his wife."
"That's disturbing. I don't know if I'll ever be able to look at someone with golden hair again without thinking about that." It was going to be tough for Gren to look at Jessica and Jade for a while. "As bad as the guy sounds, I can't help but wonder how he felt when he found out that he caused the woman he loved to die. If I caused the death of someone I loved then I think that I'd end up hating myself for the rest of my life."
"I've never thought about it. Historical documents rarely ever mention the feelings of those involved and I haven't spoken to any of the historians from the Church. Only his private journals, if they exist, would talk about his own feelings." If he had private journals then they'd probably be in the hands of the current Duke. "Why would you care about the guy's feelings, anyways?"
"It's just me being curious. The guy set out to do something and managed to fail in such an extreme way." Gren couldn't sympathize with him completely but he was accustomed to failure in both this life and the last. "There's just a part of me that wonders how someone goes on with their life after that."
"Knowing the Adiers, he probably didn't care too much about her." Rodge interrupted their conversation with his own opinion. "You might not know this but almost every generation of that family has somebody that's twisted. There's the previous Duke that abducted the Goddess but just two generations before him was that one Adier that lusted after his own sister. Even if it's legal, there's nobody out there that would try to marry their siblings."
"Wait, what? How is that legal?" Gren was so shocked by Rodge's statement that he stopped walking. "Don't they know how bad inbreeding is?"
"You really didn't know that? I thought that you knew that there were no marriage laws in this country." Gren had heard that but he didn't expect that they meant absolutely no laws whatsoever. "The founding king was a strange guy. Had a taste for a bit of everything, really. It's not like he was a bad king but his sexual misdeeds make him a controversial subject and he was quickly replaced by one of his sons. Even his succession was controversial but I'm not really comfortable talking about that."
That just made Gren want to know even more but they were getting close to the eastern market. Gren could see the top of the fountain and there was the sound of lots of people shouting out; most likely trying to sell their goods to the shoppers. "I don't like going to these types of markets. I'm always tempted into buying something that I don't need." Gren was surprised to hear Ophelia suddenly reveal something personal. Given the topic that they were just on, perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise. "The last time I was here, I ended up buying an entire set of antique silverware and a bunch of paintings from some late noble's estate."
"That doesn't sound so bad. I once bought a weapon that was almost completely useless. It helped me kill a boar once but that's it, really." Gren wasn't angry that the crossbow-like weapons were useless. He might not have needed them but he also didn't spend too much buying the original. "What about you, Rodge? Did you buy something you regretted afterwards?"
"Alcohol. Rumi got pretty angry at me when she caught me drinking since she can't have any right now." Rodge's gloomy mood could almost be seen in the air as he continued his complaining. "I don't get it. I'm not pregnant so why would I need to stop drinking? I was only having a couple of sips anyways."
"I think that it's best not to fight with her on that one. Pregnant women can become irritable over minor things." Gren tried to give Rodge advice but even he didn't know how to help him. Estella's pregnancy was very different from Rumi's pregnancy and Jessica didn't really get irritable. "It's not good for the child if Rumi's stressed out. That's why I haven't been asking her to watch the kids lately."
"I just don't know what to do. In the Church I could at least listen to the acolytes practicing their singing or I could play cards with the other knights. There's nothing to do in the guild." Gren had heard that complaint a lot but couldn't entertain people all on his own. Rodge did give Gren a good idea though; he could always hire some people to sing for the guild members. "I just train during my free time now."
Gren was now able to see some people wearing the FMC's signature steel armor. "I've been trying to solve that problem but it's harder than I thought it'd be. I plan on creating a gallery of paintings for everybody to look at with new additions being added every time I come back from a request but I didn't think about singers until now." Gren pointed off in the direction of the two short armored people that began to wave at them. "It looks like the others made it before us. After this is over and I've fixed the slums, I'll start putting more of a focus on the guild's happiness. We're already at a point where we're finally earning money instead of burning through everything I've got."
"It'd be good if that were true. Right now my only fun comes from running around doing requests like this. I'm not really looking forward to going back to the guild with the way it is now." Rodge really didn't seem happy. "It's almost like it has become a dungeon. We can't even leave right now."
"You'll just have to wait a bit longer and it'll be safe enough for people to leave the guild. We haven't taken out all of our enemies yet." Gren didn't like keeping the people indoors like they were prisoners but his highest priority was their safety. "Hey! Choco! Noir!" The two short armored people that were waving towards their group came running to Gren. "Did everything go well on your end?" They had helmets on but Gren still patted their heads.
Instead of being greeted with happy barks, the two kobolds pulled at his arms and tried to bring him towards the rest of the group. Gren quickly realized that something was wrong and ran to the people gathered at the fountain. The sight that greeted him was a bunch of people with scorched armor and bandages; some of which seemed to be in agony. "What happened?" There were injured people so Gren quickly got into action and started healing people.
"Things were going fine at first. I didn't think anything bad would happen." Jasmine seemed the most shaken up as she was speaking. "There were flames everywhere. I didn't know that would happen." She wasn't making much sense which only made Gren more worried.
"They had an alchemy lab set up in their guild that nobody knew about." Annie stepped in to give a proper explanation. "The medicines they were producing exploded when hit with Jasmine's flames. Nobody's missing their limbs thanks to the armor but the hot gases from the medicines burned their skin pretty badly." Although Jasmine's armor had scorch marks on it, her skin seemed to be fine and she didn't need to be healed. "Thankfully, Jasmine was up front. Her race has tough skin and scales that can resist high temperatures and her armor is thicker so the debris just crashed into her. Nobody knew that they had an alchemist or else things would have gone differently."
"We had a similar problem. It seems that the information we got was missing a lot of details." Gren was finished healing the people with the worst injuries and had moved on to those with minor burns. "The Returning Heaven guild was never abducting people. I've got all of the paperwork that proves Ophelia's story. Ophelia's the armored woman back behind me that's standing with Rodge."
"We managed to get our mission done without a problem but two of the five guilds we visited today were missing important information and that isn't good. I'll take a small team to spy on the remaining guilds but we got lucky that nobody died so far." Annie was going through the paperwork again to see which groups they still needed to deal with. "Although the other guilds don't seem that difficult, I won't be taking any other risks. After you're done healing everybody, let's head back home. I'll deal with everything else starting tomorrow."
"Alright. If you need my help then just let me know." Gren was glad that everybody could be healed but he wished that he was there to help them sooner. Separating up for the missions was a bad idea even though it allowed them to clean out Old Town in one day. "Tell everybody that went with Jasmine that I'll give them five silvers each for their trouble and that we'll give them time to shop right now if they want to. It's the least I can do to pay them back for what happened." He could afford the hit to his finances but if the independent mercenaries lost trust in their guild then it would be hard to regain it. That would be especially bad right now with their plans to expand their presence into other cities and villages.