True Vorpal Bunny (Danmachi SI) Ch.30 (Patreon)

Chapter 30:

Ali had complaints about doing a pool party in an oasis, mostly that it was drinking water shared by all who traveled the desert and they shouldn’t taint it. There was also the fact that desert nights were cold and the water was freezing.

And Freya saw it coming because among the magic items she bought in the bazaar, she brought both a water purifier and a heater. Both casted a glow as they activated, and Freya had made it so that the light would be refracted into multiple colors to give it a rave feeling.

With her arguments drowned under the oasis’s water, Ali had no choice but to join.

Iru personally found it both funny and idiotic that among all the things the all-knowing gods brought to the lower world, swimsuits and floater rings were among them. They were that close to breaking the fourth wall with all of these anachronistic items they gave to mortals.

Though, he wouldn’t complain about the fact that he could enjoy a mocktail while lounging on his ring, ass half in the water.

Freya was living it up on a clam-shaped floater while wearing sunglasses.

“Isn’t the clam more of an Aphrodite thing?” He asked, curious to know if the blonde deity was actually going to pick a fight over this.

“What is she going to do about it?” Freya shrugged it off unworried.

Well, it wasn’t like the Aphrodite Familia was some kind of powerhouse.

“Fair enough.” The Hume Bunny dropped the topic and took a sip of his drink.

There was silence for a few moments before Freya kicked the water, splashing Iru’s face.

“... Know that you triggered this war.” 

The Level 6 used his supernatural strength to flip Freya’s floating clam, and the goddess with it.

She emerged, sunglasses askew.

“Dick!” She cursed to Iru’s laughter.

Freya dove underwater and reached underneath Iru’s form. She put her feet on the bottom of the oasis’s floor and pushed as hard she could at the same time as she raised her arms to reach Iru’s back.

Iru, while a Level 6 adventurer with inhuman strength who could tank a dragon’s breath, was also a teenager Hume Bunny, therefore a manlet who weighed less than Freya herself.

So, he was lifted from his floatation device and thrown in the air before landing back with a splash.

The rabbit’s retaliation came under the form of a sweep of his arm that created a wave that swept Freya off her feet and carried her to the shore near where Horn and Ali had been drinking their own drinks.

“Horn! Get him!” Freya ordered.

The Level 2 heard and obeyed. And if during the struggle she accidentally groped the chocolate bunny, well no one could prove she did it intentionally.

“Yikes.” Iru whispered upon sensing the hunting intent behind Horn’s focused gaze.

Meanwhile, Freya took hold of Ali’s hand.

“Come play with us.”

Ali thought it must have been the famed sea tale of sirens singing to sailors and making them drown. She would resist the temptation. She had her pride!

Seeing Ali being mulish, Iru ignored Horn for a moment, and sent another wave of water that bowled the goddess and the princess over.

“...” A tick formed on Ali’s temple. Her temper was greater than her pride. “That’s liese-majesty. I’m sentencing him to drowning.”

“That’s the spirit.” Freya agreed.

Ali dove in the water, and if she started to smile while the three women tried to dunk Iru’s head under the water, no one present would bemoan her that simple moment of contentness.

[hr]

The day after, they reached the hidden base. Set at the frontier between Shazald and Israfan, the base was a cave set in the middle of rocky mountains.

When the scouts saw Iru come down from the air, they were scared, but then they saw Ali, wearing men clothes, and their fear evaporated like drops of water on a scorching dune.

“Prince Aram! Quick, warn Lord Douglas!” One of the scouts ordered his comrade who rushed in the hidden fortress to share the good news.

While the scouts babbled and cried upon the return of their prince, it didn’t take long for a black-haired man in armor with sideburns and a thin mustache to appear.

“My Liege! I am so happy to see you alive!” The man sprinted, his muscular warrior frame at odds with the tear running down his face.

“Douglas!” Ali seemed just as happy to see him.

“I knew you were alive! The royal line of Shazald wouldn’t be extinguished that easily!”

“Aww. That’s nice.” Iru cooed at the happy reunion between Iru and one of her advisors.

“Arumph! The man seemed to realize other people were here and coughed in his hand and regained his composure. “And you are?”

Ali was the one to step up and explain.

“Those are my benefactors who brought me here: the famous goddess Freya of Orario and two of her followers. I was lucky that they were traveling for personal reasons and were kind enough to help me.”

Douglas thumped his chest with his fist.

“I can’t thank you enough! This is a debt that I can’t repay! That our country can’t repay!”

“Calm yourself, child.” Freya told the grown-ass man. “There is no debt between me and your prince.” the not anymore was silent and only directed at Ali.

Douglas invited them in the base to show his people that Ali was in fact here safe and sound.

Iru’s ears twitched and he looked behind him. He scanned the hills surrounding the cave.

“What is it?” Freya asked.

“Seems like we got some uninvited guests.” He waved her off with a hand. “Go have fun. I’ll be here in five minutes.”

Freya nodded and followed Ali and Douglas, Horn trailing behind her like a ghost.

Once they were gone, Iru faced a rocky outcropping.

“Ok, assholes! Come out!”

His voice echoed before a group of fifty soldiers bearing Warsa’s crest made their appearance known. The way they moved made it clear that they all bore Falnas.

“Hahaha! This rabbit has good senses! We saw Prince Aram! Begone or be slain by I, warrior Marzner who has ascended to Level 2!” The seeming leader of this troop offered Iru to surrender.

“Fucking country bumpkin.” Iru couldn’t help but be insulted by a Level 2 asking him to surrender. Louder he said, “And what are you going to do to the people inside?”

“We’ll simply kill the men, rape the women before killing them too, and take everything they have. Of course we’ll spare the prince since the king of Warsa wishes to have him publically executed.”

Iru scanned the soldiers to see if anyone of them was disguested by what their leader just said. He only saw bloodlust and regular lust upon smiling faces.

He wasn’t facing people anymore, just beasts that had surrendered to their basest desires.

He unsheathed his axe.

[hr]

Ali’s chest was feeling warm as she saw her subjects cheer upon seeing her. Douglas was making boasts on how they would join up with the remaining generals and save Shazald.

Ali turned toward Freya. It was thanks to her and her Familia that she could see this. She opened her mouth to thank her.

BROOOOOOOOOM!

The earth shook. For a moment, Ali feared the cave would crumble and they would be buried under the mountain.

“What is happening?! Enemy attack?!” Douglas was the first one to jump back to his feet.

Freya whistled.

“Iru is mad.”

Everyone turned toward the goddess.

“What?” Ali asked dumbfounded.

“He detected people approaching and went to confront them. They have said something that soured his mood.”

Douglas cursed and  took some soldiers to help out Iru. Ali ran after them, though she knew that there wasn’t much chance Iru was in danger. She mostly wanted to know what was happening.

When she arrived at the mouth of the cavern, Douglas and his men stood frozen. She couldn’t really blame them. It seemed that everyday, she learned more about how ridiculous the Freya Familia was.

A corner of one of the surrounding mountains had been cleaved in two. Iru stood before the gaping wound already sheathing his axe on his back.

A single Warsian soldier sat to the side, shivering in fright. The Shazaldian warriors quickly took him in custody.

While this was happening, there was a look of concentration on Iru’s face. He was trying to remember how all of this went in the original timeline.

Freya and Ali would have traveled by chamels, arriving only to see everyone in the hidden fortress dead, and then there was something that caused Freya to snap and use her Charm to make the soldiers he just dealt with kill themselves.

“...Leodo.” He remembered. They would also raid Leodo, killing all the slaves Freya freed.

But that was avoided. Still, something grated on Iru. He saw Freya who also came to observe what was happening.

“Oi, make him spill everything he knows.”

Freya raised an eyebrow. While Iru back-talked a lot, he wasn’t generally rude enough to just order her around, mostly because she was just as contrarian as he was and would ignore him. But he seemed far too serious for her liking.

With a sigh, she approached the bound prisoner.

Marzner only had time to raise his head and met her gaze. her eyes flashed pink for a fragment of a second and then he was gone. The bloodthirsty warrior immediately turned into a drooling fool.

“Would you be kind enough to tell me what was your plan?”

Douglad and Ali shared a glance, both terrified at the power of the goddess. Ali finally understood what Iru had been teeling her in the oasis, about the strength of Freya’s Charm and how unresistible it was.

And so he spilled how Resheph, the god of a mercenary Familia had joined Warsa a few years ago and was the mastermind behind most the raiding being done by Warsa. After finishing off the resistance in the north of Shazald, he had joined the hunt for Prince Aram.

Marzner’s troop was sent here to deal with the fortress and if the prince hadn’t been here, they would have left a message for him, telling him that Leodo would be the first city that would pay if he didn’t show himself.

Freya’s stare gained a frosty quality.

“And then you would have killed everyone in Leodo too?”

“Yes, my goddess. No one would have been spared.”

The goddess of love was silent for a moment.

“I see, you would have killed all the children I took in. You would have stolen lives that belong to me.”

The sadness in Freya’s voice struck Marzner like a knife in the gut. His face twisted and tears spilled from his eyes.

“No! My goddess, I am sorry! It wasn’t my intention!”

Iru gazed at the spectacle, not feeling a hint of pity toward the broken husk of a man, but he felt thankful toward Hell Howl, the Skill that made him immune to divine bullshit like that. 

Marzner was grasping at straw, trying to gain back Freya’s favor, as if he ever had it.

“Ah, my goddess! If we don’t report, Warsa will send more soldiers to Leodo!”

And here it was, the thing that was screaming in Iru’s head. He had prevented one attack on Leodo, but more would come.

“That’s all?”

“Yes! That is all I know, my sublime lady!”

“Good. Horn.”

Without hesitation, the silver-haired girl moved and her dagger slit the prisoner’s throat.

Ali gapsed. Iru glanced at her.

“That was a mercy.” He told the crossdressing princess. “Left like that, he would have just kept despairing his whole life that he had hurt Freya’s feelings.”

Before she could reply to him, he raised his hand and chained multiple signs.

To a normal person’s sight, the eight executives of the Freya Familia suddenly materialized like they had always been here.

“What do you want, pipsqueak?” Allen greeted him with his usual gentleman manners.

“I’m going for Leodo. Take care of Freya.”

“Tch!” Hedin clicked his tongue. “You don’t have to ask. Just go.”

No argument, no fight. Someone was trying to steal from the Freya Familia. They wouldn’t succeed.

And so, Iru flew off.