Dark Thorn Strikes! -2
Early dawn.
Before the sun had yet touched the earth, while a black veil still blanketed the world, this hour belonged to assassins alone.
"Kyahaha!"
Deed watched Blanc walk the streets of Lyceum in the pale hour before morning. The way she wandered so peacefully, so utterly unaware of anything, struck Deed as almost comical.
Even in the thick dark, that silver hair looked clean enough to catch and throw light. Imagining it dyed red with blood, Deed let a wicked smile curl across her face.
"Kyahaha! All right! Let the blood banquet begin!"
What, exactly, was a blood banquet supposed to be?
Deed hadn't put any real meaning into the words. She had simply tossed them out because "blood banquet" sounded like something an assassin would say.
It wasn't as if she particularly liked blood—but liking blood as a character trait was so very assassin, wasn't it?
Deed had been building herself a few little settings. First, a dragon slept in her left arm. In her right eye, a magic eye holding ancient power lay hidden.
The whole package had long since left the realm of "assassin" and wandered into the grotesque, but what did that matter?
In Deed's mind, an assassin was the sort of monster who had several tails writhing inside her body, or who could shatter the world with a magic eye.
"Keuk, kyahahahaha…!"
She climbed deliberately onto a building well lit by the moon and began to laugh like a madwoman. High atop a steeple with a great bell, the moon at her back, one hand covering her face as she laughed…
It was extremely assassin-like… or so Deed thought.
"Hm?"
Walking Lyceum's streets with Bokja, I heard a strange laugh and glanced back.
Far off on a steeple, a brown-skinned girl was covering her face with one hand and laughing like a lunatic.
It was that stalker-fan of mine who had been trailing me for some time now.
Hmm?
Don't tell me she's been following me since this hour of the morning?
What a passionately devoted fan she was.
Watching her like this brought back old memories. Back when I lived in Hongdae as a maid named Mariaro, I'd had more than a few stalker-fans just like her…
They had all been Masters who came to the café, so I still remembered every one of their names and faces. After the day my friend asked for those names, they had suddenly vanished from sight…
Still, they were the kind of kind people who would leave bouquets or plush toys in front of my house. My friend had confiscated every last one of those gifts and burned them, though…
Truly a tragic affair.
"Cheap! Going cheap!"
"Just came in this morning!"
There was no sea around Lyceum, but a great river ran through it, and its place at the heart of the continent meant seafood from every corner of the land gathered here. There was a reason Lyceum was called one of the three great holy sites for chefs.
For the record, the other two were the royal capital, Prache, and Mount Eris in the Empire. The former was a holy site because the capital's chefs flocked there and filled it with countless fine restaurants; the latter, because of the endless ingredients that lived on the mountain itself.
Lyceum was a holy site that mixed the best of both—excellent chefs and excellent ingredients all in one place.
And the place I had just arrived at was Lyceum's fish market, which opened its doors before the sun was even up.
Even this far from the ocean, the moment I stepped inside, that distinctive sea-smell tickled my nose. Merchants' cries rang out from every direction, trying to snare customers, and here and there chefs bickered over who would claim the better ingredients.
"Fufu…♥"
Even at this early hour, I could feel people's passion and the vitality of the sea…
Ahh… Just thinking about feeding my Young Miss fish bought here had dopamine welling up through my whole body already.
"Well then! Where shall we start today?"
"Hahahaha! You've got a good eye, customer!"
"Oh?"
As I made the rounds of the fish market with serious intent, a familiar bald head came into view. It was the sort of gleaming dome that made you want to smack the back of it, just for the satisfying sound.
"Man, our shop's the most honest one in this whole market, you know? You've really got an eye for quality."
So he said—while his hands quietly skimmed a portion of the seafood he was packing away for himself. A merchant who looked as if he had tossed his conscience somewhere far, far down the road.
Hmm. Where had I seen him before?
From the voice down to that conscience abandoned with the neighborhood strays, something about him felt familiar…
"Good morning."
Unable to endure my curiosity, I walked straight up to Baldy and offered a greeting.
Even by my own assessment, my beauty was nothing short of perfect. If a perfect maid like me smiled and said hello, even a conscience-free merchant like him would surely smile and greet me back…
"Haha, good morn—hiiik…!"
Oh?
Why that reaction?
"Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh… white hair…!"
"White hair? It is silver, thank you."
Calling the hair of a super-perfect silver-haired maid like me "white"!
How terribly rude!
"Silver hair" had a noble ring that suited a maid perfectly, but "white hair" just made one sound old, and I disliked that. If I were a middle-aged head maid like Miss Asabella, I could have humbly accepted white hair as the dignity of experience—but I was still a soft, fluffy high-school girl!
"I have come to purchase ingredients. Would you kindly show me your goods?"
"Y-you forgot who I am…?"
"Oh, so we have met somewhere after all?"
See? I knew he looked familiar.
A super-perfect☆ maid like me could hardly have a bad memory!
Of course, I did occasionally forget things… but that was a minor detail one could safely overlook.
"N-no! Now that I think about it, I believe this is the first time we've met!"
"Eh?"
First time…?
No, that couldn't be right. I was certain I had seen him somewhere.
"Hmm…"
Ah, forget it!
If he said it was the first time, then the first time it was!
The pot-bellied merchant with the impressively gleaming bald head was named Badro. Once upon a time, he had wandered from place to place fleecing people for a living.
He bought cheap knockoffs or defective goods for next to nothing, found a sucker, and forced the wares on them at a steep price. Once he had milked enough fools, he cut his tail clean and moved on to the next region before anyone could catch him.
Living that way, stuffing only his own belly by deceiving others, Badro one day found himself visiting Preas during the Golden Festival.
Preas's Golden Festival was one of the Empire's greatest celebrations. As a merchant, he could hardly let such a chance slip by. Badro liquidated every last bit of property he had and headed straight for Preas.
And there, he met a pure-white girl.
"Do you truly believe this fabric is worth that price?"
"Ah, for fuck's sake—are you buying or not? And that scratch? That was you, missy. Looks like you'll just have to take it."
A silver-haired girl in commoner's clothes. She was rather pretty for a commoner, so Badro had already begun calculating how to strip her of her money and sell her as a slave. The location was perfect—a back alley out of sight. Kidnapping an innocent, clueless child like her would have been trivial work for the twin bodyguards he employed.
But he had not known.
He had not known that the white girl he had met was, in fact, a white devil.
In an instant the devil disposed of the twins, then blackmailed Badro until she had stripped him of everything he owned. What she took was only about three-tenths of his stock—but she had cherry-picked only the pieces that still held real value out of a pile of fakes and defects, so for all practical purposes she had cleaned him out completely.
The next day, Badro scraped together every coin he had left and hired a capable back-alley gang to bring him the white girl…
"You never said she was that kind of monster! Your damn job got us wrecked! How do you plan on paying us back!?"
"W-what are you talking about?! You're the ones who failed the job—why should I pay!?"
"Ha. This bastard doesn't get it. Boys, bring the tools."
"Hiiik…!"
He had no choice but to hand over every last scrap of money he still had to the gang that was ready to beat him to death with their tools.
In the end, Badro was shaken down down to his soul—exactly the way he had always done to others. He borrowed money on top of money, trying desperately to cover the loss…
"Kyaaaaah!"
"The contestant—the contestant's gone mad!"
"I will regard what you have just done as an act of terror against Preas."
On the very day he meant to make one last killing in Preas, a sudden terrorist attack struck the Golden Festival.
Naturally the festival was cancelled. Badro's final thrashing was for nothing. The Leonhart family promised compensation to merchants who had suffered losses—but Badro could not apply for a single coin of it. Claiming the payment required an identity check, and a man with a past as filthy as Badro's would have ended up in a cell rather than with a payout if the Leonhart knights ever looked into him.
In the end, Badro's entire life was ruined. All that remained was a mountain of debt that had swollen overnight.
But he clung to an unyielding will and refused to abandon being a merchant. He scraped together what money he could and headed straight for Lyceum. Once there, he took every dirty job that came his way, paying off his debts and slowly gathering the seed capital to start over as a merchant.
And three years later, just when his life finally seemed ready to climb back onto its proper rails…
"Good morning."
"Haha, good morn—hiiik…!"
Badro came face to face once more with the terrifying, merciless white devil who had destroyed his life.