“Is that acceptable to everyone else?” Galeo asked the others.
They all nodded. The complaining voices directed at Lefille were thus silenced.
Confirming that the outburst had ended, he turned to Lefille and spoke coldly.
“…Gurakis-san, I’m the leader of this caravan. That means that I must place the safety of this group first and foremost.”
He hadn’t explicitly stated his conclusion yet, but everyone knew where he was going with this.
Explaining this in full seriousness, he meant to—
“We’ve been targeted by the Mazoku, and you are the reason. As the one responsible for this group, I can’t just leave this situation alone. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do. I understand. You want me to go.”
“—?!”
“That is correct.”
His roundabout manner of speaking notwithstanding, Lefille had understood what he was getting at. Galeo nodded at her response. Responding to the turn of events, the crowd began to murmur once more.
“Of course!”
“Get the hell out of here!”
“You jinx!”
Overly cruel words. Regardless of whether or not Lefille had indeed been the cause for the attacks, she had never intended to bring harm to the caravan. In any event, the one in greatest danger at the moment was her. The one they should be most concerned about was her.
That was how it should have been, anyway. This manner of kicking someone when they were down was going way too far.
Suimei could restrain himself no longer.
“Hey! You’re just going to force her out all alone?!”
“Of course we are! The Mazoku were targeting us because of this girl, you know?! Staying together with this girl means going up against that Mazoku general and his army!”
“Even so! If she’s all alone, what’s she going to do about food and water?!”
Even putting the Mazoku issue aside, this was another important facet of things.
Whether or not you were traveling alone, food and water were a matter of life and death. Ensuring that you had sufficient provisions to last was a necessary part of travel.
Since the caravan was fundamentally for the purpose of transport, carrying along large amounts of food and water was a non-problem. This was not the case for a lone person, however.
If you were to either misjudge either the amount of provisions needed or the distance to be traveled, then it was quite possible to run out of supplies before you’d reached your destination.
Without anywhere to stay along the road, the danger posed to her by exiling Lefille from the group at this point was easy enough to imagine.
The adventurer didn’t seem to care, though.
“I don’t know anything about that! It has nothing to do with us, anyway!”
He actually said something like that.