Show Me Your Stats!-Chapter 142

“...Scattered silk spiders?”

Silk spiders that had lived settled for decades in a single forest—scattered? Was it {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} just a figure of speech? No matter how she looked at it, the wording seemed suspicious. Ayra tilted her head and squeezed Pebble, but all that came out were dewdrop-like tears and a tiny heart.

She turned her gaze from Janus, who was still wandering the outskirts of Solar, and shifted her attention toward Orsang’s location in Jumeni. At this rate, he would reach the Sobletz lord’s castle within a day.

“He probably won’t send anyone straight into the Silk Spider Forest just yet.”

Bolni was currently in a catastrophic state—its lord, his heir, and many retainers all absent. That said, Bolni’s troops wouldn’t simply vanish, so Orsang was more likely to wait and bide his time. There was no need for him to risk losses now when the fragmented power would collapse on its own before long.

Ayra’s task was clear: retrieve the spiders before Sobletz reached the forest. As the saying went, strike while the iron’s hot—the sooner, the better. She decided to depart at dawn the next morning.

“Regular monsters can go into subspace. I wonder if subspecies can too? If they can, I’ll sweep them all up.”

Every spider—and each strand of their silk—was money. With a full repayment plan forming in her mind, Ayra quickly toured the quarries with Jinas to check the concealment spells. Returning to the manor, she frantically worked to take care of pending tasks before her upcoming absence.

Before she knew it, night had fallen. And even then, Janus had not returned. Wondering where the hell he’d gone, Ayra opened the map window and saw that Janus was running wildly in circles around Solar’s outskirts. She had no idea what he was doing.

“Is it... a full moon tonight or something?”

She’d heard somewhere that beasts got agitated under the full moon. But a glance out the window showed only a dimly glowing crescent, like a trimmed fingernail. She closed the map window. If she wanted to leave early tomorrow, she needed to sleep now. Ayra yawned and climbed into bed. The moment she lay down, exhaustion washed over her like a crashing wave and swept her away.

In the depths of sleep, she thought she heard thunder rumbling.

Janus returned long after Ayra had fallen into a deep sleep. When the bed dipped beside her, she stirred, sensing something off, only for a warm palm to press gently against her eyes.

“It’s me. Go back to sleep.”

Even without hearing the voice, that heat alone—so much hotter than any human’s—was enough to identify him. Why did he have to sound like a husband returning late from work...?

Still, drawn by the comforting warmth, Ayra instinctively nestled into his broad chest. Janus wrapped his arms around her and buried his nose in the nape of her neck. Listening to the slow, even sound of his breathing, she soon drifted back into deep, peaceful sleep.

Ayra only woke up thanks to Pebble’s notification chime. Groaning, she crawled reluctantly out of the warm bed. Stretching, she noticed that, unusually, Janus was still fast asleep with his face buried in the pillow.

“...What the hell were you doing last night?”

Lifting the blanket, she noticed that, unlike when he’d left, his clothes were now tattered and ragged. He hadn’t even washed. A true wild beast, apparently... She eyed the ruined clothes with suspicion, then tugged the bell-rope. She asked Botello to bring breakfast for four and a change of clothes.

Janus didn’t wake up until Botello entered with breakfast. When the lid was lifted on the steaming bowl of hearty meat stew, Janus’s face twitched on the pillow, and his nose twitched at the smell. He cracked open one eye, sat up groggily, smacked his lips, and then slipped casually into a seat at the table.

“What were you doing last night? And what happened to your clothes?”

“...Eh, just wandering around here and there.”

Janus replied vaguely as he piled food onto his plate. Ayra had woken early too and felt nauseated from hunger, so she sat down and began eating as well.

By the time they were nearly finished, Botello returned with travel gear and a change of clothes for Ayra. Janus, now clean and dressed, raised an eyebrow at the sight of the luggage.

“Going somewhere?”

“Going to collect some spiders. Want to come?”

Her tone was casual, but she secretly hoped he’d join her. He didn’t want her to die, after all—and with Sobletz’s assassins lurking who-knew-where, there was no better bodyguard than Janus. She didn’t have enough mana to maintain surveillance for 24 hours.

“Sure. I don’t really have anything better to do.”

Fortunately, the dragon with seemingly no day job responded nonchalantly. Listening in, Botello quietly brought over one more set of supplies. Ayra stored both their gear in her subspace and set off from the manor. It was her second visit to Bolni in quite some time.

❄

“...Huh?”

Ayra let out a dazed sound as she galloped through the blizzard. Janus, clearing the snowy road like a snowplow by swinging his sword, glanced over at her. Ayra rummaged through her subspace, then frowned.

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“I forgot the compass.”

“Don’t worry about that. North’s that way.”

Janus pointed in a direction. Ayra tilted her head and looked up—but with snow flying madly around them and thick clouds blotting out the sky, there was no way to confirm direction. All the surrounding mountains looked the same.

“How do you know that’s north?”

She asked, wondering if there was some distinct landmark, but Janus just shrugged and said he could “feel it.” Well, he wasn’t human—maybe he did have some instinctive sense. Ayra quietly tucked her hand inside her robe and noted it in her observation journal: Dragons... may be able to sense cardinal directions...

“But seriously, what the hell is going on?”

She hunched her shoulders against the cold and pretended to pat her horse as she opened the map. Her brow furrowed.

It wasn’t the forgotten compass that surprised her. She’d only opened the map to estimate their progress—but something was off. The map looked different from last time.

Normally, humans were marked with red dots, monsters with blue. Zoomed-out views would show population density in color: the redder the area, the more people. But Bolni, which had been a deep red before, had suddenly faded to a pale shade. That meant a massive drop in population—overnight.

“An error? A bug?”

It wasn’t just the human density. The dozens of blue dots—representing silk spiders—clustered in the Silk Spider Forest had all but vanished. Filtering specifically for silk spiders showed most had fled to a nearby forest.

“What the hell happened in Bolni last night?”

As if in response, Pebble—shivering in her coat—flashed a system alert:

[News! A massive earthquake struck Bolni last night, causing significant casualties.]

An earthquake...?!

A massive earthquake hit Bolni? Now that she thought about it, she had heard something like thunder while she slept. Could that have been the earthquake?

Then she thought of Janus. Of how he had once shaken the earth during their fight at the lakeside village.

And Janus hadn’t returned until just before dawn. Ayra scowled.

“Did he destroy Bolni after deciding I was his mate?”

And then—there was one more disturbing clue: the quest she’d received.

<Quest!>

[Who Owns the Silk Spiders? 2]

Secure the scattered silk spider colonies to pay off the territory’s debt!

Reward: Commerce Level Increase, Debt Relief

The quest had appeared before the earthquake. That meant the earthquake had been intentional. A natural disaster wouldn’t register emotionally enough for Pebble to detect. Which meant... someone had caused it.

Dragons really did treat human lives as trivial. Ayra’s chest turned cold. She glanced at Janus again.

All the signs pointed to him. And yet... Ayra hoped it wasn’t him. She knew dragons had a history of indiscriminate slaughter. Still, as a human—she wanted Janus to be the exception.

Her lips twisted bitterly. She always realized it at times like this—how much she’d come to like him.

“But it was probably Janus... If not him, then who else could cause an earthquake? Unless there’s another dragon...”

Unless...

Ayra froze.

No way, right? That couldn’t be... right?

Even among dragons, incidents where they destroyed an entire territory were rare—maybe once or twice every few decades. They were a species with few individuals. The idea that there could be two dragons in this region...

Ayra’s lips trembled. As a monster researcher, she’d love nothing more than to observe two dragons at once. But as a lord—the thought chilled her to the bone.