Chapter 3 - Section 3: Journey

After sleeping the night away, Kurama and Satou emerged from their room and alighted down the stairs of the inn, having slept in a bit since it was the first time in a month that they'd managed to sleep in a real bed rather than on the floor of the dungeon.

Having to sacrifice eating breakfast they hurried off to meet up with the Marked Wolves who they'd be travelling alongside towards the capital.

They met just in time it seems as the caravan they are commissioned to guard was already at the gate in motion.

"Thought you'd run off again!" <Larr >

Having just barely met up on time, Larr's first instinct was to call out on the fact that the last time I made an agreement with them I'd snuck off in the night since I couldn't bring myself to trust anyone when I first came to this world, and then had gotten myself into much more trouble as a result only to come across Raisa.

Raisa who I trusted though I couldn't the others, why was that? wait that doesn't matter now.

"Sorry sorry, been a while since we got to sleep in a bed, and we got stuck in its warm embrace since we could finally relax and lower our guards after so long." <Satou >

"Hehe, well I'll forgive little Kurama 'cause she's so cute, but as for you Satou. You've got a lot of chores to do along this trip to regain my favour" <Quinella >

"Settle down Quin, don't be too harsh on him, after all, you sleep for days after a long excursion yourself" <Anthony >

Having received this rebuttal her head quickly shot down as she puffed her cheeks out while pouting.

The rest of the wolves greeted their late companions as they took up the desired positions while the caravan continued to depart from the village.

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The journey was pretty unremarkable as even a year later the surroundings hadn't truly recovered from the results of the mass extermination caused by the adventurer army and the fallout caused once that army disbanded, those who didn't achieve enough during the battle hunted the surroundings almost to the point of extinction.

Along the way, Satou asked numerous questions trying to catch up on the lack of known current events over the last year.

And while they didn't know much they imparted all they could about the things spreading amongst adventurers.

Starting with the state of the heroes who were summoned alongside him at the beginning.

Picking up from what he knew they revealed that the heroes had splintered and started a civil war after their first venture out to gain real combat experience.

At first, it was just a simple split with one hero who was presumed to be a coward abandoning the front and returning to the castle, but in no time, the kingdom fractured into 3 different factions, and the coward hero was backed by the King and joined by one of the other hero's while the remaining two had the support of the army, and the common people respectively.

As a result, this three-sided war is raging even now, and thousands of lives have already been lost in conflict.

The King's side is the worst of the three from rumour with an almost authoritarian rule coming down with an iron fist and unspeakable horrors being conducted by his majesty's forces.

As for the commoner hero, she's empowered the common folk to rise up and fight for their own lives, her side is by far the best of the three sides, as the commoners were treated as well as one could hope for and any captives were treated well.

As for the militant hero well his forces were pretty much ignoring the plight of the kingdom all together and instead had continued their march further north and joined up with the rest of the royal armies and started a war with the nation to the north.

Aside from this, there are rumours that other kingdoms and nations had also started to summon their own heroes to combat the first set but none of this has as of yet been confirmed as it's thus far just a rumour.

Meanwhile, the disgraced Count has been removed from his position, so Primrose is technically an ex-countess now.

No news could be garnered regarding Raisa as after all she is only a travelling merchant even if she is the daughter of a great merchant of Joquet, and it seems that even with her power boost due to levelling up she hasn't gone out of her way to use it to become a badass adventurer so she probably just returned to her way of life before meeting me, with one change of Primrose most likely tagging along by her side as he partner or in the guise of a little sister.

As for Heracles well it seems true to what was found out in the guild he's in the Captial spreading the Hellenic faith and butting more than a few heads with the local faith.

In the last year, the Hellenic faith had spread far having long since crossed over the borders of Joquet and into the other nations of the continent.

Minor religious skirmishes had already started to break out between the fanatics of the Goddess faith against these rising Heretics of the Hellenic faith.

And while in terms of pure numbers the rising faith is still a vast minority but day by day more conversions are happening and since this is a first for this world the established Theocracy of the pre-existing faith fear what is to come since they've never had to fight off an unprecedentented crisis of faith before.

Beyond this the only other news spread was some sort of miracle potions that were being sold recently that were extremely powerful compared to those used before and their source seems to have been the Meritocracy.