Bravado
Bravado
When I got out of the detention center, it was the time of day when the smell of lunch wafted from every direction.
Maybe because the blockade order over those thief bastards had so many adventurers holed up in inns, dutifully eating three meals a day, the place felt busier than the capital's adventurer district. Thanks to that, I had to endure a fierce hunger, but at this hour my companions were likely just getting their meal ready, so I headed straight for the inn without taking any side streets.
"Wow, you actually walked out totally fine."
Sen, who I ran into the moment I arrived, proved my guess right—she was sipping beer with the others and blurted that out with a flabbergasted look. At her reaction, not only my party's eyes but even the other adventurers around us, knowingly or not, started turning toward me.
"I can't believe it even seeing it. For real? After causing that huge ruckus?"
"So that's the capital's mad dog..."
"Truth is, he's got ties to the royal family..."
Hell. Ties my ass—more like bad blood.
I couldn't exactly argue with every rumor floating around the drinking table, so I ignored them and approached our table. Laika, who'd been curled up under Asilie's chair, came scrambling over. Laika had faithfully followed the order I gave before entering the detention center not to wander around too much while I was gone, and even without Magic Power for two days, there wasn't any whining about being hungry. Really obedient, huh.
Finding that newly admirable, I sat in the spot Asilie had saved for me, stroked Laika, and ordered my meal. Gaendal burst out with a hearty laugh and said,
"Congrats on getting out."
"Getting out? That's harsh. I was just released from detention, that's all."
"Haha. Anyway, glad to see things worked out well. A lot of stuff came and went before you got here—did you hear about it?"
"Yes. Thanks to Mr. Kunz coming in person and explaining, I've more or less got a handle on things."
No dramatic reaction followed. That was only natural, since we'd already gone over most of the story before I went into detention. We simply lamented our luck at getting tangled in such annoying business, rejoiced over the compensation, and enjoyed our meal with satisfaction.
The more detailed talk started once the meal was in full swing.
"Eldmia, what exactly did you do to that guild leader?"
"The guild leader? I threw him."
"You threw him? Anyone could see he looked like he'd fallen from a four-story building? Bwyngseu's mansion is only two stories?"
"That's why I threw him high. He landed head-first, nice and clean."
Normal people would've found it a deeply unappetizing tale, but adventurers have zero aversion to bad guys getting killed. In fact, they tend to prefer war stories, and they approach them with the mindset that there might be something to learn from the detailed parts, actively using them as conversation fodder.
"Ugh, Eldmia's fights are never a good reference."
That being the case, I could understand the reactions from Kals and Baije—who'd subtly looked expectant alongside Sen only to end up disappointed. Sure, they'd botched their first impression like total morons, but these guys were veteran adventurers with a genuine drive to improve.
Maybe that's why, having gotten a bit comfortable after living together for a few weeks, they were openly showing they had a lot they wanted to ask. The sight drew a dry chuckle out of me.
"Just work hard at what you can do. Or learn to use aura. You can't even use aura and you're trying to take lessons from an aura user?"
"I mean, the way you say it, you'd think just any old dog or cow can use aura. Even in a regular knight order, they separate those who can and can't use it, and here you are talking like it's easy."
"I'm saying it because I know it's not easy. In the roughly two years I worked as the personal butler to House Ogatorf's Young Head, how many apprentice knights do you think awakened their aura?"
There were twenty kids selected for their talent, and of them, only three ever bloomed their aura. And even that's considered a lot. So among adventurers—who are a dime a dozen and not exactly hand-picked—aura bloomers must pop up as rarely as beans in a drought. Right now, even Gaendal was walking the path of an elite adventurer with a promising future, after all.
Of course, not being able to use aura doesn't mean you're completely in the gutter. Yekaterina, for one, had physical abilities so insane that you couldn't believe she couldn't use aura, and there were plenty of knights who could match most aura users with sheer swordsmanship and physical prowess alone.
But rather than telling people to aim for being those kinds of outliers, it was far more realistic advice to tell them to work hard at awakening their aura.
"Maybe adventurers actually have a better chance of awakening aura than knights because of their environment. For the past few years, a commonly discussed research topic at the academy has been 'the possibility of aura awakening brought on by life-or-death combat.' Seeing how the front lines are holding up this far, it might actually be a credible line of research."
They say humanity's strength is in numbers, but that only works when the difference in individual ability stays within reason. The gap between an ordinary human and a member of the Demonfolk was about the same as the gap between me and a hundred bandits—even a hundred of them would struggle to take me down. The fact that the front had held this long made it reasonable to think some change we'd never seen before was taking place there.
Maybe I was tipsy on the mood, or maybe my mind had loosened up after resolving a troublesome issue—whatever the case, just as I was about to offer some relatively positive talk based on that theory, Sen's eyes went wide and she abruptly blurted out a question.
"What? You worked as a butler for House Ogatorf?"
Here I was trying to give a decent talk, and they latched onto some weird detail. But it wasn't just Sen who bit that bait—everyone else started chiming in too.
"No wonder we could never quite figure out where you were staying."
"Whoa, a butler? Ega, are you really fifteen?"
"No, there's a separate head butler. I was just the young lady's—"
"Wait? Two years? So you've only had two years to pick up all those manners and knowledge we've seen?"
Hell. Apparently I wasn't the only one who'd relaxed.
In the end, far from any serious conversation, I couldn't get up to my room until I'd spilled all sorts of personal details and stories about myself into the evening.
"Eldi, you talked quite a lot today, didn't you?"
"I yakked so much my mouth hurt. Why are they so interested in the life of a fifteen-year-old?"
After washing up thoroughly with warm water for the first time in a while, I sat on the edge of my bed drying my hair and muttering quietly. Asilie, who'd already finished her bedtime prep and was lying in her own bed reading a book, laughed and answered.
"You're not exactly normal. Just the things Eldi's been tangled up in over the last few weeks would be a lifetime's worth of war stories for other people, right? If stuff like that just kept spilling out, even I'd find it so entertaining I'd want to keep listening."
But then again, Laika—who was sprawled out on my bed snoring away—was a Demon Sword to begin with, so fair enough.
I was nodding along at her words, resigned, while watching Laika's ridiculous sleeping form, when Asilie suddenly let out a small laugh.
"What? What's so funny all of a sudden?"
"I remembered the things Laika did while Eldi was in the detention center. A dog through and through."
The way Laika's front paws twitched, as if dreaming, was doglike through and through. Against the fact that Laika was a Demon Sword, it made for a pretty comical sight, but that apparently wasn't what had made Asilie laugh.
"Then I suddenly remembered again that Laika's a Demon Sword, and it brought back some old memories too."
"When we first met?"
"Yeah. That's right."
"Those thieves came to mind when I first saw Laika too. What kind of idiot would have to exist for you to even imagine someone might walk around dropping something like that?"
But recalling that only ever brought me utter disbelief, never laughter. I'd felt this before—Asilie's laughter trigger was a bit... odd.
"More than the thieves, I remembered when you took off my shackles back then and explained the slave contract, and Eldi's face went completely pale. You shouted, 'Help!'"
...Not so odd. She was just thinking of a memory that was genuinely funny. It was a little embarrassing, but not enough to make me kick my blankets.
"I was genuinely desperate at that one moment, I tell you. It was even more shocking than the moment I was pretending to kill those thieves."
"I could tell just from your face. Even in that situation, it was so absurd that I almost burst out laughing."
In the end, we could laugh it off now, but it really was a situation where I could've died. Honestly, just being able to laugh about it makes me want to applaud my own quick thinking for getting through it safely, rather than feel embarrassed.
"Anyway, you got tangled up in some random nonsense again this time. When we get back to the capital, won't you end up becoming the disciple of that mage, Regneva, without even a proper break?"
"...Timing-wise, it's entirely possible."
Since we planned to head straight to Ogwen without stopping in the capital this time, it was a very plausible scenario. By the time we returned to the capital, well over three weeks would have passed.
"Time really flies like crazy. By the time we finish our business in Ogwen and head back to the capital, won't we have been wandering around for nearly four weeks?"
"Probably. Unless we get tangled up in yet another something in between."
"There's a saying that words become seeds, big sis... don't do that..."
It was definitely a good thing that I'd had an opportunity to see my efforts hadn't been in vain, but for a while, I really just wanted to quietly train and study.