Kingdom Building: Civilization Starts with Divinity-Chapter 98: Missing Deer

"I’m back!" Alchemy cheered, sliding into her bedroom.

She had expected Sapphire to jump from surprise and shout EEP! As per usual.

"Eh? Where’s Sapphire?"

But Sapphire was nowhere to be seen.

She rushed out of the hut past Gravana to the nearby Granitects who were still working hard on the Chitin Forge.

"Yo, have you girls seen Sapphire?"

{Mother! She left shortly after you did. We believe it was 2 hours ago now.} 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

"She... Left?"

Alchemy suddenly felt her heart drop.

’No. I must be understanding. I can’t freak out yet. Everything has worked out so far. This won’t be any different.’

She hid her hands in her hoodie pockets before clenching her fist.

"Did anyone go with her?"

{Some Wingrazers and Thornskirmishers followed her at first, but she told them to leave after some time.}

It made sense. Sapphire still didn’t like the greater Verminae crowd. She had barely warmed up to Nera, so it wasn’t surprising that she didn’t want the units following her around. They couldn’t go against her orders as one of Alchemy’s heroes either.

"Map."

She looked at the map, swiping around forcefully as she checked every corner of her territory. Not a single gold dot appeared. Naturally, Nera wouldn’t appear since she was still in the pocket dimension, but Sapphire was also missing.

"Which way did Sapphire go?"

{North.}

"Thanks, kiddos. I’ll be right back."

As she turned to the north, she launched herself forward. The force of her leap caused the ground beneath her to shake.

As her speed increased, Gravana watched her run. He considered chasing after her but decided against it. He was not concerned about why she was running; his concern was how she had become so much faster.

When they were fighting the boss, Gravana was sure she was using all her strength, but her speed then paled compared to now.

’She’s fine, Alchemy. If something happened to her, the System would have notified me.’ She said to herself.

’Right, System? She’s fine, right?!’ She immediately faltered.

|<Notice: All Heroes Vitals are OK!>|

’Then where did she go? Come on. Find her."

She looked around but saw nothing. Quickly, she hopped to the top of a tree before looking around. Her eyes stretched to the absolute limit, like when fighting Gravana. Her field of vision grew larger, but still, she found nothing.

’Insect Communication!’ She thought, activating the two skills she got the other day.

|<Notice: Skills Insect Communication & Arachnid Communication have activated together, creating a synergy!>|

|<Synergy: Skill effectiveness up 100%!>|

’Come on. One of you had to see something, right?’

Her skills activating caused all the nearby insects around to close in on her location. As far as she could see, none matched the creatures she knew from Earth, but that didn’t matter to her right now.

"Have any of you seen a young deer? Fur like snow and horns of Sapphire?" She asked.

The numerous small creepy crawlers looked around. They didn’t make a sound aside from their flapping wings, but Alchemy could understand their thoughts to an extent.

None of them had seen a white deer.

Then, one insect came forward. It was a ground insect crawling up the bark of the tree she was on. It was clear it wasn’t built to as it struggled.

She gave her arm for it to latch onto before pulling it up.

"White Deer... None... Deer... Different... Yes." It said in unclear, broken words.

Alchemy’s eyes widened nonetheless.

"A different deer? What was different about it?"

"Color... Different..."

’Is it someone from her herd? Since she’s a mutant, it wouldn’t be surprising if they had different colored Fur.’

"Where did that deer go? Do you remember?"

"Way..." The tiny creature said, crawling along Alchemy’s arm to the North East.

"Thank you so much. You all can go back to what you were doing."

Her skills were deactivated, and the insects dispersed quickly. When she returned to the ground, she let off the small one who had helped her before heading off.

As she ran, she looked through her skills and storage to see if she had anything that could help her locate Sapphire—not that she had any such skills.

Utility skills that dealt with information gathering were exceedingly rare. Despite that, Alchemy could have had one of the best in A.O.A, yet she didn’t take it.

If only she could foresee Sapphire going missing, she would have never skipped out on taking the Piety sub-skill.

"Why did you leave, Sapphire? What did I do wrong?" Alchemy questioned.

Did she put too much pressure on the little deer? Was it that her being forward about noticing Sapphire’s insecurities had the opposite effect? She didn’t know.

She thought about every possible reason, but it didn’t matter. If Sapphire wasn’t here, nobody could confirm or deny her suspicions.

All she knew was that, over the past week, she had grown to care about that young, shy deer.

’It’s fine if she left! At least tell me first!’

Alchemy’s thoughts made her stop.

Was it fine?

She had no intention of forcing Sapphire to stay. She never wanted to force Sapphire into doing anything. Sure, she grabbed the young deer partly to sate her curiosity about what would happen if she brought a Rare monster under her wing, but that was little more than an excuse.

She just wanted to help a child who had lost their family. Despite that, Sapphire had fought for Alchemy and gotten hurt for Alchemy.

Alchemy knew that she had already long since overstepped the bounds of just wanting to help a child, but she realized that too late.

"I made another mistake... Haven’t I?" Alchemy fell onto her butt.

"It was the same with Gravana and Rio. I made a mistake back then, too, and only survived because I was lucky."

"The stakes aren’t even high. At this point, losing Sapphire wouldn’t be too big of a hit to me... So why... Why does this feel so awful?"

A vision of the past played in her eyes. A tall old man in his 50s or 60s, he had a pristine mustache, beard, and smooth black hair, even in his old age.

"Dad... Have I failed?" Tears streamed down Alchemy’s face.

The old man, amongst a seemingly infinite number of books, looked at Alchemy and smiled.

His lips moved as if he had said something, but Alchemy heard nothing. She couldn’t remember his words from all those years ago.

"Master Alchemy?"