“Mmmm, this is incredible!!”
I stuffed my mouth full of Great Boar meat and couldn’t hold back a groan.
I’d been living frugally for a long time, but I was still the third son of an earl at the end of the day.
I’d grown up eating reasonably well — and even I had no memory of anything tasting like this.
Tender, intensely flavored, and yet never heavy.
Far better than any steak that had ever graced the earldom’s table.
“Pretty amazing, right? Great Boar is top-class even among monster meats!”
“This is one of those moments where living in a demon frontier actually feels worth it!”
“This is truly……something else……!”
Alicia and the others ate with an overwhelmed look on their faces, putting away piece after piece.
Even for adventurers like them, this meat was apparently a serious treat.
The way they were eating, it was like watching people inhale food.
“Makina, keep cutting more!”
At my word, Makina immediately began slicing off more chunks.
——Swoosh swoosh swoosh!!
A massive block of meat became bite-sized pieces in no time.
Then we took turns laying them onto the heated stones to cook.
——Sizzle!!
The fat hit the surface and let out a sound that was just absolutely perfect.
Just hearing that was enough to make your appetite explode.
“Oh man, this is great!”
“That smell is unreal!”
“About ready?”
The moment the surface turned white we pulled the pieces off.
Good meat goes to waste if you cook it too long.
We added a light touch of salt and popped them in without a word.
The meat dissolved in the mouth, and the umami detonated.
“The best!!”
“Yeah! All we’d need now is some booze!”
“I’ve got some! I thought something like this might come up, so I brought some along!”
“Seriously!? Now that’s our lord and master!!”
And so we drank and carried on for several hours.
By the time the sun had completely set and night had fallen, the party finally wound down.
I was fairly well drunk, walking with a slight wobble on my way back to the cabin.
But right then——
“Hmm?”
Something white moved in a nearby thicket — or I thought it did.
A monster, maybe?
My blood ran cold. I immediately put my hand on the knife I carried for self-defense and called out to Makina.
“Hey, Makina! Come over here a second!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Something’s in that thicket!”
I said it and pointed, and Makina immediately dove in.
But nothing in particular happened.
That’s strange — I was sure I saw something……did it run off?
“Hmm……odd……”
“As a precaution, I’ll station Talos units in front of everyone’s cabins. I’ll patrol the village on a circuit myself.”
“Understood, I’ll leave it to you.”
And so that night, I went to sleep carrying a small unease.
――〇●〇――
“Wait——!? The boar meat!”
The next morning.
I went to check the food storage just to be safe, and the leftover boar meat from yesterday was clearly down.
I was sure there had been more than half left — now it was down to about a third.
Who on earth had done this……!
I looked around at everyone immediately, but they all shook their heads at once.
“No way I ate that much!”
“Maybe a monster got in?”
“But it’s been clearly cut with a knife or blade. Look.”
The cut surface of the boar meat was smooth — obviously sliced off with an edged tool.
No way any wild monster was that dexterous.
This was unmistakably the work of someone with hands.
“It could be a demi-human.”
Makina’s words brought an immediate spike of tension.
You’ve got to be kidding — we haven’t even expanded our footprint at all yet!
Getting found by demi-humans at this stage was completely outside what I’d expected.
“This is bad. We’re nowhere near ready in terms of fighting strength. How many golems can we actually deploy right now?”
“Six Talos-type, three Failnote-type. If I redirect all the magic stones we have on hand to production, I think we could add around ten more.”
“That’s fine against Goblins, but……against Orcs or Ogres that’d be rough.”
“Ugh!? I am absolutely refusing to get captured by demi-humans!”
Misha’s face went thoroughly sour.
Understandable. When a woman gets captured by demi-humans, the outcome tends to be grim.
Especially a young woman — the specifics weren’t something I wanted to dwell on.
“Still, I find it curious that they only stole the meat. Aggressive demi-humans would have attacked us without question.”
“Maybe Talos being here kept them from trying anything?”
“That’s possible, but……they didn’t touch any of the other food either.”
Alicia put her hand to her chin and seemed to fall into thought.
The food storage had other things in it too — dried meat, bread we’d brought from town.
A bold demi-human thief taking only the boar meat and leaving everything else was, if anything, surprisingly well-mannered.
“Either way, we need to strengthen our defenses.”
“Yeah. We might be getting close to needing a wall.”
“There’s still timber left over from clearing the forest. Let’s start with a fence using that.”
“Right. For now, big enough to enclose the area where the buildings are should be fine.”
Fencing in the fields too would be way too much work for now — that could wait.
That said, even just the area with buildings — including the workshop — was already roughly a hundred meters square.
Even factoring in the golems’ labor, that was probably three or four days of work.
“Alright then, we’ll survey the surrounding area. Let’s try pushing a bit further out.”
“Stay careful. This is the Great Forest, after all.”
“We’ll be fine — the two weeks have done a lot to get us acclimatized.”
Alicia puffed her chest out as if to say leave it to us.
As expected of former top-tier adventurers — genuinely reassuring.
Still, just letting them head off like this made me a little uneasy.
Looking more carefully, their equipment showed signs of wear from the daily strain.
“Oh! Can you wait a bit before you head out?”
“Is there something?”
“Now that we have clay, I was thinking of building a furnace and making some armor. We’ve got a lot of Red Dragon scales.”
Meat and bones would’ve been too bulky to carry back, but we’d stripped and kept the magic stones and scales.
This seemed like a good opportunity to put them to use.
At that, the look in Alicia’s eyes changed immediately.
“Y-you can work Dragon scales!?”
“Yeah. With a Red Dragon’s magic stone, I can build a basic mana furnace.”
“That is insane! Please, please do that!!”
“Me too, me too, I’m asking too!!”
All three of them bowing their heads at me with tremendous energy.
A Red Dragon was still on the lower end of dragons — was it really that valuable?
I found myself wondering that, but either way I set about making armor for the three of them before they headed out.