Mario charged into a small courtyard near the village center. Just as he was about to enter the house to search, he heard an excited companion's voice from an abandoned barn nearby. "I found a tunnel! It's here!"
"No way!" Mario's face darkened.
Before he could react, Mario heard another voice coming from a dry well not far away. "I found a tunnel too! It's here!"
"I..."
"There's one here too! Someone come quickly..."
Mario's face went completely black.
More than an hour later.
Mario stood in the small square of White Crow Village in an extremely foul mood.
This was awful. A total of five tunnels had been found inside and outside the village—five of them—and not a single one had been found by him.
Of course, someone was in an even worse mood than he was: the more than one hundred White Crow Village villagers who had been forcibly gathered in the square. They were being guarded vigilantly by soldiers of the Red Maple Cavalry Regiment and were under grave suspicion of collaborating with the enemy.
After all, one tunnel outside the village could be explained away as having nothing to do with them. One tunnel inside the village could also be explained as something they had not known about.
But with a full six tunnels inside and outside the village combined, that became rather difficult to explain. What, had the village offended some groundhogs, who had led their entire family to hollow out the ground beneath the village and bury everyone in it? Give me a break!
Stop joking around! Be honest!
At one corner of the square, the commander of the Red Maple Cavalry Regiment stood straight, squinting at the suspicious White Crow Village residents. Strictly speaking, interrogations were not his responsibility, but he truly