A rift had formed between the players and the knights.
The knights' morale was falling.
Big Rat noticed this and mobilized the rats to launch a fierce assault on the emperor's personal knightly order! Knights truly were the elite professional soldiers of the feudal age. Complaints aside, driven by instincts forged through years of training and under the watch of supervising knights, they still followed closely behind the players.
But their combat strength inevitably declined.
When the knights were reduced to only thirty percent of their original number—a full seventy percent casualty rate—they finally broke and scattered.
At that moment, Great Emperor Lancelot finally reached the place indicated by the marker:
A palace halfway up a mountain.
The arrow pointing toward the Fountain of Youth was aimed at a little puppy lying on a stone slab, sunbathing and sleeping soundly.
If it had been a female dog, that would have been one thing. Its milk could at least have been called the Fountain of Youth.
The problem was that it was a male dog...
Lancelot bent down and picked it up. A terrified voice rang out beside his ear:
"Put it down!"
It was a woman's voice.
She looked barely twenty, with skin so excessively pale that people would have believed she was only sixteen or seventeen.
"Your Majesty is wise! This is Big Rat's younger sister!" The intelligence officer recognized her at once.
Two players cast Vine Entanglement together and captured Weil.
They were only going easy on her because she was a woman. Otherwise, she would have faced horrifying torture prisons such as Thorn Jungle, Bone Prison, Pit of Death... and more.
The Great Emperor nodded and led the soldiers into the palace halfway up the mountain.
The foot of the mountain was already surrounded by rats.
But