By the way, that bag had also held two small-sized Little Musashibo dolls which I now had on patrol in the area. Even in places where the landslide had damaged the roads, those lightweight little guys could jump around easily enough.
“Your ability is more amazing than I’d ever have thought,” he said.
“Yeah. I feel like this is the first time outside of administrative tasks that I’ve gotten some use out of… Urkh!” I crouched over and started vomiting.
“Whoa, what’s this, out of nowhere?!” Hal called out to me, sounding concerned. “H-Hey, Souma.”
“Blech…” I managed, then coughed violently.
“A-Are you all right? Why’d you suddenly start puking?”
“…S-Sorry. While it was searching, one of my wooden mice… it suddenly found a really badly damaged body…”
“Damaged…?”
“The eyeballs were—”
“No, stop! I don’t want to hear it!” Hal looked away and plugged his ears.
I looked at the dirt in front of us.
When the news covers disaster areas, they focus on the tragedies of the affected and the hopes of the survivors. However, now that I was actually experiencing it firsthand, it was a hell greater than I had imagined. This reality was too harsh for a general audience. It would break their hearts.
Still, I didn’t have time to be thinking about that.
“Hal! I’ve found two people in need of rescue, in the shadow of a rock 50 meters ahead of us and to the left.”
“On it!”
— For now, I just had to kill my emotions.
We diligently continued with our relief efforts. We managed to dig a great many dark elves from the earth and rubble.
All of them were injured in one way or another, and many had serious injuries that couldn’t be taken lightly even once they had been rescued. Often, by the time we managed to dig them out, they had already expired.
At first, the ratio of living to dead among the rescued was half and half, but now it was leaning more heavily towards the dead. When I considered that, of the close-to-one-hundred casualties Wodan had mentioned when we had first arrived in the village, only two-tenths had been dead, it was clear that things were getting worse as time passed.
The searchers were showing signs of heavy exhaustion, as well. They had been resting in shifts, but it had now been three days since the disaster had occurred.
It had been hard on the dark elves, of course, but also on the soldiers who had come a long way and then spent a full day searching. They had already dug out a fair number of those in need of rescue (some alive, some not).
I thought it would be wise to check in with Wodan to confirm how many people were still missing. If we could narrow down the number of victims, we could focus our manpower on searching the area where we thought they would be.
As I was thinking that…
“O Godbeast! Why have you let this happen?!”
…I heard a desperate cry.
When I looked, I saw a young (?) dark elf man who resembled Wodan wailing as he struck his fists and head against the ground.
Aisha had returned from evacuating the women and children, so I asked her about him. “Aisha, who is that?”
“That’s… my uncle, Robthor Udgard, He’s my father’s younger brother.”
“From the way he’s crying and wailing, I guess that means…”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “His wife and child, in other words my aunt and her daughter, have yet to be found.”
“That must be… difficult. Are you okay, Aisha?”
“Well, you see… If my father is the head of the liberals, my uncle is head of the conservatives. I didn’t have much contact with them… His daughter was still young and cute, though, so it pains me to see this happen to her…”
“I see…”
We were well past the 72 hour deadline. If she hadn’t been found yet, that meant…
Then, Robthor looked in our direction. When he saw us, he walked over towards us, stumbling as he did.
“King… O, king… Why?”
Robthor grabbed me by the lapels, causing Aisha to yell at him, but I motioned for her to stand down. Rather than gripping them tightly and trying to lift me up, he was just grasping at them, as if clinging to me. If I simply brushed him away, he would probably collapse.
“O, king. I have done all I can to protect this forest. So why has it taken my family from me…?”
I was at a loss for words. I looked over to Aisha.
“My uncle opposed the periodic thinning,” she said. “He said it was unthinkable that dark elves, as protectors of the forest, should cut down trees needlessly. The place that collapsed was one where we couldn’t do periodic thinning because of my uncle’s objections,” she explained.
That’s… I don’t know what to say…
“O, king! Tell me why! Why would the forest I protected destroy my family? If I had cut down trees like Wodan and his lot, would my family have been spared?!”
“There’s… no way to know that,” I said.
“No!” he howled.
“True, if you carry out periodic thinning, take care of the undergrowth, and increase the land’s ability to hold water, it’s possible to create conditions that reduce the likelihood of a landslide. However, it only makes it less likely. In a case like this, where heavy rain over a long period was the cause… It could have happened anywhere.”
“No… You’re saying we just had bad luck, then…” he murmured.
“In terms of where the landslide happened, yes. However, periodic thinning means there’s always work going on in the forest. The workers may hear strange noises, see the forest seeming to shift, and notice other warning signs that a landslide is about to occur. If they notice, there are things that can be done. People could have been evacuated.”
This has also been said to be an advantage of using mountains for terraced rice-fields.
You would think cutting down the trees to make room for rice paddies would make landslides more likely, but it actually reduces the odds of landslides that result in human casualties. Because people have to go into the fields all the time, they quickly notice the warning signs, and that makes it easy to respond. The strongest countermeasure against landslides is to watch the forest at all times. The elves didn’t have debris flow detection systems like in modern day Japan, so that made having people on watch all the more important.
“I’ve protected the forest all this time… was I wrong to do that?” he moaned.
“Your belief that you were protecting the forest was wrong,” I said. “Nature’s not so fragile that it needs people to protect it.”
Aisha had told me before that the trees in the God-Protected Forest were long-lived. That was why they hadn’t noticed it had turned into a beansprout forest and the ground had been weakened. Even though they had simply been lucky that nothing had happened yet, they’d convinced themselves they were protecting the forest.
“If it’s egotistical for man to destroy the forest, so, too, is it egotistical to try to protect it,” I said. “Nature is meant to go through cycles of death and rebirth, yet we’re trying to keep it in a state that’s convenient for us. All people can do is manage things through periodic thinning, keeping the forest in a state where we can co-exist with it. Trying our best not to wake it from its slumber.”
He seemed speechless.
At that moment, one of my wooden mice discovered something.
“There! I found a parent and child!” I cried.
“Wh-Where?!” he stammered.
“Hold on… They’re in a collapsed house ahead and to the left of us, two meters from the mountain ridge!”