"Don't you think that once the waiters notice that our lively table has suddenly got quiet, they might try to eavesdrop on us?" Lith's paranoia knocked directly into sixth gear.
"You would be right if that was a Silencer, but it's a Scrambler. It converts our words into boring small talk, like how was the weather or if you're liking your food." Kamila replied, piquing Lith's interest.
Adding words to his Hush spell was a child's play. Making them have a shred of sense was very hard since it depended on the place and context. He tried to examine the device, but Kamila slapped his hand away.
"Move it now and our voices will sound as if we've brain damage." She said.
"Sorry, I had to ask Lady- I mean Jirni's approval because of the confidential nature of the information.
"I didn't mean to hide anything from you, but there are some things in my line of work I can't talk about, just like you do." Kamila took Lith's hand, looking him in the eyes to show him her sincerity.
"Please, brace yourself and remember that nothing I'm about to say has to ever be discussed in the presence of witnesses." She then looked at each one of the Ernas in turn, to let them understand how serious she was.
Once they all had nodded, she took a deep breath before speaking. Kamila herself had a hard time accepting the truth she was about to share.
"As you probably know, the Garlen continent where we live is not the only one on Mogar. The other continents our Kingdom has been historically more involved with are the Jiera on the west and the Verendi on the south."
There were actually more, but that wasn't a geography lesson. Those were the only two continents close enough to Garlen to represent a threat. Or at least they were in the past, before Silverwing's legacy and the development of tier five magic had made dimensional magic reality and naval warfare obsolete.
Dimensional magic made sending reinforcements so fast that any invasion was bound to fail before an army could even land while War Mages could conjure such destruction from a safe distance that any ship would sink without a chance to retaliate.
"Well, let's just say that now all the three great Countries are busy making plans to safely colonize Jiera without messing with each other. Too much, at least. Sabotage, fake information, are to be expected, no matter how well diplomacy works…"
"Hold that thought!" Friya had dropped her fork in surprise, staining her clothes for a second or two before the Skinwalker armor destroyed the traces of sauce with a controlled pulse of darkness magic.
"What do you mean safely?" She had already connected the dots, but the thought of the image that would appear was too horrifying.
Kamila took another deep breath before saying:
"The human race has disappeared from the Jiera continent. It has become a literal no man's land." She took a pause, to let the news sink. The thought that more than half a billion people were no more plunged the table into a shocked silence.
"Seconds, please." Or at least most of it. Lith couldn't care less about people he didn't know. His only worry was to eat to his heart content and put all the money he was wasting in the luxury hotel bill to good use.
"Seriously?" Kamila looked at him disapprovingly while the waiter took away the empty dish replacing it with a new one. Being honest was one thing, being tactless was another.
"Seriously. Believe it or not, murder attempts on my person make me work quite an appetite." Lith said. Kamila was about to rebuke him but a quick peck on her mouth caused her enough embarrassment to defuse her anger.
"That's terrible, but I still don't see how this is relevant to our vacation." Friya said.
"Don't you see?" Quylla had become pale as a ghost. "No humans means no food. The undead of the Jiera continent are mass migrating to our continent to survive. That's why the undead spoke gibberish. It wasn't a dead language but a foreign one!"
"Nailed it in one." Kamila said. "Actually, they are migrating everywhere, even to the Verendi continent. It's not just your vacation that's affected, it's happening in all the three Great countries.
"Only some of them have received asylum from the Undead Courts while most of the others are desperately looking for a place to live and, more importantly, a stable source of food.
"Local undead are far from welcoming since newcomers not only might cause a monster hunt, but there also are too many of them to not upset the balance. Each human settlement in the Kingdom risks doubling its undead population."
Back when Fenagar, the Leviathan Guardian, had informed Leegaain of the effects that the man-made plague had inflicted upon his continent, he had done so to warn Leegaain not only about the living, of which Milea had taken care of, but also about the dead.
The bored Lich had resurfaced and threatened the Gorgon Empire because he couldn't miss the opportunity that having an undead army at his disposal presented. At least not when it came knocking on her door without her having to do nothing more than feeding them and point them to a target.
"This explains everything." Phloria pondered. "They were probably recovering from a battle with other undead and they couldn't feed properly upon the forest without giving away their position. What about the plants?"
Even though it was quite unsettling, that piece of news didn't help to understand the bugbear issue.
"I have no clue about that." Kamila shrugged. "I could ask around, but that would mean getting involved. All the news about Jiera is a state secret, to prevent panic to spread among the population."
"Is that because of the undead or because of what caused the extinction of the humans?" Lith asked, almost certain to already know the answer.
"Both. According to our ambassadors in the Empire, it was some sort of plague. The undead aren't the only concern, there is also the possibility that they carried something infected with them to use it as a deterrent."
"Like the one from Kandria?" Lith didn't like plagues. He was immune to them thanks to Invigoration, but they still threatened life as he knew it.
"Worse. Kandria's plague was developed with the aim to conquer, so it didn't kill fast and the area was quarantined quickly. This one was designed as a weapon of mass destruction and was released on a large scale."
"Wait, ambassadors and not spies?" Quylla had no clue how the Empire could know so much, even less about why they willingly shared such information.
"Yes. The Empress warned us on time and even provided us with the cure. Otherwise our colonization plan wouldn't have even started, nor would we be in such friendly terms for sharing Jiera.
"Don't ask me why she did it. She's either the kindest or the shrewdest person alive."
Both Kamila's hypotheses were wrong. The plague was of magical nature, so no vaccine could be synthesized, only a cure. If the plague spread without her neighbors knowing about its existence, every single traveler would be a ticking bomb.
Moreover, to plan her invasion of Jiera, she needed a cure. Leegaain had accepted to help her, but only at the condition that it would be shared.
