As Zadiris lamented her old age, an arrow flew across just to her side. As the adventurers took aim at her, she reflexively spun her body to the right.

「AH!」

Three seconds later, her feet were standing on empty air. She was at the edge of a cliff. It was a small cliff on the boundary of the forest. It was a cliff of a height such that one wouldn’t die by jumping off it, and one would normally be able to make a safe landing in the forest.

However, this time it was fatal.

Zadiris, losing her balance, hit the cliff’s slope like a ball and began rolling down.

「Ugh…」

She crashed into the ground and landed face-down. She tried to stand up, but she couldn’t put any strength into her legs and arms. Despite the fact that her life was in danger, they demanded rest and refused to obey her commands.

She was already winded, but this was the effect of leaving the Devil’s Nest. She was really feeling her age taking its toll on her.

『Well, this is fine. The clan will not perish just because I am gone.』

Her successor had already been nominated. There were reliable men. She had managed to let the young ones with the future on their shoulders escape.

Considering that she had only ten years or so remaining in her life, hadn’t she done pretty well? It was probably better for her to die already, before she became any more senile than she already was.

Several laughing voices and sets of footsteps came closer. It was the adventurers. From here, they would certainly finish her off and collect the Magic Stone and her body parts that would become raw materials.

She didn’t really care about this; she had done the same thing countless times herself. She hadn’t gone out of her way to do so, but she had even killed adventurers in the past.

She harbored no grudge against them. They should finish her quickly.

Zadiris quietly stayed face-down and closed her eyes, but the adventurers grabbed her legs and turned her face-up.

If they wanted to kill her, they could have stabbed her in the back, so why? As Zadiris thought this, she opened her eyes to see the adventurers looking down at her with vulgar smiles on their faces.

「Heh, I thought this while we were chasing her, but isn’t she quite the pretty woman?」

「You think so? I like mine a little more grown-up.」

「Nobody asked about what you like. What’s important is whether we’ll be able to sell her at a high price.」

Zadiris had thought that they were perhaps inspecting the materials that they would be harvesting before they killed her, but upon hearing the word “sell”, she realized that this was not the case.

「The females of these creatures can be sold to underground slave traders for quite a lot. Thanks to that, we’ll be able to take it easy during this year’s winter.」

The adventurers hadn’t been chasing her around to kill her and harvest raw materials from her, but to capture her alive and sell her to a slave trader.

Zadiris opened her eyes wide. Being defeated and killed was one thing, but she wouldn’t allow herself to become a sex slave and treated as a plaything until she died.

「You bastards!」

「Oh, she understands language. I suppose that’s to be expected of Mages; this one should sell for even more than the market price.」

Zadiris bared her fangs and glared at them, but the smiles of the adventurers looking down on her only widened. She mustered what was left of her strength and tried to take at least one of them down, but one of the adventurers stabbed her with a knife.

「Guh! Ah, AAAAAAAAAGH!」

Violent pain flooded through Zadiris’s body.

Her vision turned pure white, and she couldn’t help but let out a girlish scream.

「It hurts, huh? You guys are pretty tough when it comes to dealing with pain, but this knife is a Magic Item with the Pain Up enchantment; being cut by this knife will hurt three times more than usual.」

「A little while ago, we caught a bandit and all we had to do was give him a light cut with this knife for him to spit out where his base was.」

「Guh… Haah… Haah…」

By the time Zadiris had recovered a little from the violent pain, her willpower fell along with the tears from her eyes.