Then, I turned and faced the Young Swordsman. I walked right up to him and looked him in the eyes. His eyes were tired, but he had a fire in his spirit, something that I really liked. To kill this man who shows no fear to me would be a waste. To eat his flesh and blood when I had not been able to fight him yet would be a waste. To kill him would be a waste.
I decided that I would capture them and bring them with me. I stated that I was not going to kill them, but on the condition that they came with me. Hearing this, the Young Swordsman looked in to my eyes for several minutes, then agreed.
I was able to obtain several Fomorian bodies, as well as the Flesh of the Giant King today. Furthermore, I managed to gather several strong humans as well. A bonus was that there were several beauties mixed in with the group.
After the Young Swordsman agreed to my request, he showed no signs of hostility, though the others were cautious. I proceeded to treat them one by one. First, I set out to work on the Shield warrior, as he could die at any moment. I gave him one of Alchemist-san's life potions to stabilize his condition while I also treated the two Beast people.
The Cleric and Magician would be able to recover naturally, but even so, I forced them to drink mana recovery potions, courtesy of Alchemist-san's work.
During the battle they drained their power greatly. In cases where it is drained too quickly, it can have negative effects on the body, something that I wanted to avoid.
I could have used my [Blood Elixir] to treat them to full health, but I thought better of it. The risks of having that information come into circulation was too great of a risk. All of their wounds were stabilized and would heal naturally if left alone.
They slowly began to lessen their caution around me as I continued healing them. They probably assumed that I was a Ogre Mage, entities known for their great power but almost never attacked humans.
The fact that my killing intent was so powerful also further served to deter thoughts of attacking me.
I was asked what happened to the corpses, and I simply fed them a lie that I had used a magic item to store them.
In the circumstances, there was still a risk towards my own survival, even though the party is still weak, the fact remains that the Youthful Swordsman could still fight me evenly. I wasn't willing to become greedy for several items at the cost of my life, so the next best option was to win them over to my side. Some of them were still not fully convinced, but for the moment, they didn't make any moves on me. The tension slowly fell.
I was also tempted to take the women for myself, but I quickly dismissed that thought due to the risks involved with capturing the beauties. It would certainly put me at odds with the Young Swordsman. After I finished healing them, I was asked why I went out of my way to help them. My response being that I was in the area and was interested in gathering the materials. Since they were about to be wiped out, I made my decision to stop waiting and took my chances.
The group was pretty suspicious of my story, there were quite a few points that I'd have suspicions with if I had been on the receiving end. Though everything I had said was more or less true, I did want the materials, and only acted once they were about to be destroyed. The only one of the party that could accept this was the Youthful Swordsman who bowed his head and gave me his thanks.
The great build up of tension was broken with that sign of good will from the Youthful Swordsman. I hadn't gathered up all of the materials from the Fomorians, so I set out to take care of that as well.
While I was doing that, I decided that since we were on a mission, it wouldn't be best to bring more hands with us, putting the risk on our group. So in the end, we went our separate ways, I passed up on several parts of the Fomorians and that was the end of it.
I quickly made my way from the area since the time was running short on my ability to eat my prizes. My anxiety was still present because when I begin to eat, I would become open to attack and would risk losing my prize in a bad situation.
I spent roughly ten minutes at full speed to find a safe place to begin eating my spoils.
Although the head was gone, the body of the beast was quite large. It would take me far too long to ingest the entire thing, so I decided It would be time to test out one of my theories. With that I turned my body into that of a massive slime using [Metamorphosis]. I wrapped the entire body of the Giant King in a layer of my body to absorb the materials. The body was unreasonably large to begin with, and it would have taken hours to eat normally, but this way proved perfect for experimentation.
In the end, there was no problem and I absorbed the corpses with ease: