The man leading the caravan was a merchant from Gauche named Augusto.
Known for his honest trading, he was a merchant with a solid reputation even in Gauche.
Because of this, the large merchant guilds saw him as a thorn in their side and frequently interfered with his business.
The reason he had organized this caravan so hastily was that goods he was supposed to procure from other merchants had become unavailable due to interference from a large guild. With no other choice, he had urgently set out to source supplies from another city.
Even so, the adventurers Augusto always hired as guards gladly accepted the sudden request.
The procurement had gone smoothly, and they were hurrying back to Gauche when...
"Augusto, a monster approaching from the front! Only one! But... it's huge! A Sandworm?!"
Zedan, a thief among the hired adventurer guards, shouted with a grim expression.
Hearing this, Augusto turned to Zarust, who commanded the adventurers.
"What should I do?"
"You're right. Ideally, we'd outrun it... Zedan, can we get away?!"
"No chance! It's faster than us! If we try to run, it'll catch up before we get far!"
"...Can a Sandworm move that fast? No—if we can't outrun it regardless, we're better off intercepting it here. We'll face the enemy with our full combat power. ...May I?"
Augusto nodded at Zarust's words.
Like a true desert dweller, Augusto had brown skin that rivaled even a Dark Elf's. But he was of medium build and by no means a fighter.
Even so, having survived many similar deadly situations before, he didn't panic at the news of an impending monster attack. He simply nodded.
"Understood. I'll leave everything to you. I'll stay out of the way, so please handle this."
"Leave it to me. If it's a Sandworm, we can manage. We've got plenty of C-rank adventurers with us. ...Everyone, battle positions! We're intercepting the monster!"
Zarust barked the order, and the carriages ground to a halt.
The camels, seemingly sensing the approaching monster, grew restless, but the caravan drivers managed to keep them calm.
"Seriously, first a monster flying overhead, and now this mess. ...You don't think that monster drew this one in?"
One of the adventurers muttered bitterly.
They had spotted a flying monster a short while ago, but it was a creature unlike anything they had ever seen.
They hadn't been able to get a clear look because of the sunlight, but while a few species of flying monsters did inhabit this desert, that one had a completely different silhouette.
The man had worked in the desert for years, but he had never seen anything like it.
"That can wait! Focus on the monster in front of us!"
Zarust shouted, and the man readied his weapon with a grunt of agreement.
What he held was a type of curved blade called a scimitar.
Unlike the longswords commonly used by adventurers, its blade curved in a gentle crescent shape.
It was known for its razor-sharp edge, but the thinner blade also made it more fragile than a standard longsword.
The man raised his scimitar, lightly touched the turban wrapped around his head, and licked his lips as he braced for the Sandworm. But...
"It's here... No, wait! It's not a Sandworm! It's a Sand Serpent!"
At Zedan's shout, Zarust clicked his tongue and gripped his spear shaft tightly.
"Damn it, a Sand Serpent!? What's it doing here? They always stick to soft sand!"
While it burrowed underground like a Sandworm, the Sand Serpent was a far weaker digger.
That was exactly why its appearance in this terrain—a mix of rocky desert and sandy stretches—was so unexpected.
Even so, as hired guards, fleeing wasn't an option.
Besides, while the Sand Serpent had caught them off guard, it wasn't an opponent they couldn't beat if they kept their heads.
(Still... this is going to be rough on the rookies.)
Zarust watched the Sand Serpent's scales barely visible above the sand surface and cursed inwardly.
Because the request had come so suddenly, the assembled guards—including his own party—weren't all veterans.
A handful of E-rank and F-rank rookies were mixed in among them.
Whether those rookies could survive against a C-rank monster—one that required a full party just to fight on even terms—was doubtful at best.
They had a decent number of skilled adventurers, but even so, the rookies' survival would come down to luck.
(But I want to bring them home alive if I can. They're the ones who'll carry Gauche's future.)
Touching the turban on his head absentmindedly, Zarust reaffirmed his priorities: kill the Sand Serpent, protect the caravan and Augusto, and keep the rookies alive as best he could.
As he steeled his resolve and arranged a defensive formation around the carriages, the Sand Serpent finally surfaced.
It hadn't even fully emerged yet, but it was already big enough to swallow a person whole.
"...That's enormous."
Zarust had fought Sand Serpents before—several times, in fact.
But he was certain that the one now looming before him was the largest and strongest he had ever encountered.
Cursing inwardly at how much harder it would be to protect the rookies, he called out to his comrades.
"Listen up, don't let your guard—huh?"
He couldn't finish his sentence. In that same instant, something whistled past with a sharp shriek—and the Sand Serpent's head simply ceased to exist.
Not metaphorically. Literally obliterated.
Nearly the entire head was gone, leaving only faint traces of bone and brain matter scattered on the ground—remnants barely worthy of the word "remains."
Before Zarust or anyone else could fully grasp what had happened, the Sand Serpent's body slumped onto the sand.
The impact and sound jolted Zarust back to his senses. He turned toward a crimson spear more than half-buried in the ground...
"What? It vanished?"
Before his eyes, the red spear disappeared as if to say it had all been an illusion.
But it hadn't been his imagination. The hole in the sand and the headless corpse of the Sand Serpent were proof enough.
Many of the others had seen the spear vanish as well, and they could only stand there, dumbfounded.
Among them, Zarust deduced the direction it had flown from based on how it had been embedded, and looked up—skyward.
What he saw was a flying monster. Not just any flying monster—an A-rank Gryphon. And on its back sat what appeared to be a human figure.
"Could that be..."
What flashed through Zarust's mind was the monster that had passed overhead earlier.
It had been too high to identify at the time, but now that it was close, there was no mistaking it.
Wings on its back. The upper body of an eagle, the lower body of a lion. An overwhelming presence that was unmistakable even from a distance.
Compared to a Sandworm or a Sand Serpent, the creature now in Zarust's line of sight was in an entirely different league—like comparing a child to an adult. No, the gap was even wider than that.
"A G-Gryphon..." someone murmured, the words ringing out through the silence.
Even in the desert, there was normally no shortage of ambient sound.
The whisper of wind, the scraping of sand. In the rocky desert, the clatter of stones or the rustle of sparse trees in the breeze.
But right now, none of those sounds reached their ears. Only silence hung over everything.
Zarust wanted to commend whoever had just spoken for having the nerve to open their mouth in this situation.
Then, the Gryphon beat its wings and descended toward the ground.
The instant they saw it, every guard—Zarust included—was certain they were going to die. And honestly, that feeling was justified.
To ordinary adventurers, an A-rank Gryphon was the very embodiment of helplessness—an irresistible force that simply couldn't be dealt with.
"Gurururu?"
But for Set, who was accustomed to being petted, fed, and played with on a daily basis, the fact that Zarust and everyone else had frozen in place was puzzling.
He purred as usual and tilted his head to one side.
It was a gesture that most residents of Gilm would have found adorable—but a change of scenery meant a change of interpretation. Or rather, in this case, a change of people.
Either way, to Zarust and the others, Set's head-tilt looked like nothing so much as a predator sizing up its prey.
From Set's back, Rei understood this instinctively.
(Well, I suppose it's my fault for killing the Sand Serpent in one shot with the Twilight Spear. Still, I went out of my way to help them—I'd rather not have the tension boil over into hostility.)
If things continued like this, it might well end in a fight.
Hoping to avoid that outcome, Rei decided to speak up.
"Is everyone unharmed? I killed the monster before it could do any damage to your side, at any rate."
He hopped down from Set's back and gave the headless Sand Serpent's corpse a light tap.
Blood still oozed from where the head had been, staining the ground red and filling the air with the copper scent of gore.
The first to recover at Rei's words was, unsurprisingly, Zarust.
"Yeah, thanks to you. We had a lot of rookies with us, too. ...I know it's strange to say this after being rescued, but who exactly are you? I'd never believe someone had a Gryphon as a tamed monster unless I saw it with my own eyes."
At Zarust's question, the surrounding guards and even the merchants turned their stares toward Rei.
The camels pulling the carriages, as was only natural for animals seeing Set for the first time, were paralyzed with fear and couldn't even move. The drivers, too, fixed their gazes on Rei and Set.
Receiving the full weight of the caravan's collective stare, Rei couldn't help but look slightly taken aback.
Until now, he had operated in the Kingdom of Mireana, where—thanks to the matter with the Bestia Empire war—there was hardly an adventurer or mercenary who didn't know his name.
At the very least, among adventurers and mercenaries, there was no one unfamiliar with the alias Crimson.
While his alias had spread far more widely than knowledge of what he actually looked like, it was still common knowledge that he traveled with a Gryphon. Most people, upon seeing Set, immediately identified him as Rei.
The only other country Rei had ever visited was the Bestia Empire, and there too his name was known—though for entirely different reasons than in the Kingdom of Mireana.
...Well, given the damage Rei had inflicted on the Bestia Empire, that was hardly surprising. And his exploits during their civil war had been worthy of his alias, so it was only natural.
That was why he never expected to be asked who he was, even after they'd seen Set.
Of course, there were people in Gauche who knew the alias Crimson, and the Guild certainly had information on Rei.
But it was only natural for people to be more interested in adventurers from their own country than those from a neighboring nation—especially one their own country was subordinated to.
"Rei. I'm an adventurer based in Gilm, in the Kingdom of Mireana."
The instant the words "Kingdom of Mireana" left his mouth, Rei could see Zarust and everyone around him stiffen slightly.
(I'd heard this was a vassal state, but... it seems they're not exactly fond of their suzerain, as expected.)
Rei could read how the Kingdom of Mireana was perceived from their reaction. But even so, he couldn't simply part ways here.
He had slain a Sand Serpent—an unfamiliar monster—and he definitely wanted its Magic Stone.
Judging, however, that they would rather not prolong their association with someone from the Kingdom of Mireana, he got straight to the point.
"This Sand Serpent, though—is it all right if I claim it?"