The Hero and the Guillotine
The Hero and the Guillotine
Operating in the Empire, Siegfried had seen a far wider variety of people than anyone gave him credit for.
It was possible because, from birth, he'd come from a border city farther from the Empire's center—a place with more adventurers than ordinary citizens. Though he'd arrived in this other world in a form akin to possession, the god who'd summoned him here had left behind the original body's memories intact, and Siegfried had managed to avoid being seen as a poor child who'd suddenly turned simple-minded.
Well—he called it possession himself, but perhaps it was simply a delayed awakening of past life memories, and he'd been reincarnated into this body from the start. The boundary of memory was so blurred, though, that he had no certainty. He merely considered it possession because the memories of his past life were far too vivid and overwhelming.
In any case, thanks to that, Siegfried had been able to observe a far broader spectrum of humanity than in his previous life. There had been plenty of bottom-feeders: the mage whose wrist got lopped off while cheating at dice, the warrior who managed to cut that mage's wrist but couldn't block the spell and burned to death, the thief who tried pickpocketing without knowing the score and wound up with a fist-sized wind hole through his solar plexus. But there were even more people suffering at the hands of monsters.
The reason refugees fleeing monster attacks flocked to the border city more than anywhere else was simple. The Empire had attempted territorial expansion into lands beyond the frontier—lands it had half-abandoned developing due to excessive monster distribution.
The situation resembled a kind of Wild West era, with the key difference being that the natives were monsters stronger than ordinary humans. Countless settlements had sprung up and vanished in endless cycles. And the first safe human territory the survivors reached in that process was the border city where Siegfried had lived. That was why Siegfried had abundant opportunities to observe people who'd lost everything overnight, in all their staggering diversity.
Such people overcame their wounds in their own ways, but those who made vengeance their driving force could not maintain normal human relationships, while those who resolved to build new lives chose paths far from the untamed frontier that held only painful memories. Even those who came through it relatively intact merely lived with a detached, almost enlightened mindset far removed from revenge. That was why Siegfried found Eldmia—who could compartmentalize revenge and daily life as cleanly as work and private affairs—so deeply uncanny.
At the same time, he harbored a reasonable suspicion that there might be something beneath the surface that wasn't showing.
"Your house is... remarkably refined?"
"It's a rare proper home, so I put some effort into decorating. It looks the part, doesn't it?"
Even if it had come about by chance, that was part of why he'd insisted on coming all the way into the house.
Eldmia could become a more powerful ally than anyone Siegfried had seen so far, and for Siegfried, who was at least somewhat sincere about saving humanity, he was a talent Siegfried absolutely wanted to recruit. But he didn't want an ending where it turned out the man's mind was broken in ways hidden from others, making him a ticking time bomb. So Siegfried had approached lightly while trying to sound out his intentions as much as possible.
Though it hadn't been easy, since his own abilities were lacking. Siegfried, who'd resolved to finally put a period on his evaluation of Eldmia today, surveyed the house without even a moment's glance at the Welsh Corgi enthusiastically bounding inside.
It was a thoroughly ordinary house—no, considering the average for this other world, it was a house that smelled far more of human life. Adventurers who handled large sums of money on the backs of their lives mostly invested their earnings in equipment or blew it on entertainment, while ordinary citizens tended not to possess enough wealth to accumulate anything stable. Eldmia had decorated his house like a textbook example of what happened when you spent large sums of money stably and wisely. Because of that, Siegfried, who'd momentarily found himself genuinely sightseeing the house without realizing it, couldn't help but ask a question in a slightly flat tone.
"Did you set this all up yourself? Without Asilie's help?"
"Ah, yes. Asilie doesn't have much of a feel for this sort of thing, so I put some serious thought into it myself. Maybe it's a chronic elf problem?"
True enough—Entiere was the same. The dormitory room Entiere used wasn't quite a pigsty, but the layout was baffling enough to make it impossible to understand why she'd arranged things that way. Nodding reflexively at the sudden organic bond of shared experience, Siegfried refocused his mind and headed naturally toward the stove area. Then, looking at the single heap of documents that was utterly chaotic in an otherwise tidily decorated house, he asked.
"What's this pile doing here? Firewood?"
"Noo—ah. That's not entirely wrong, actually. Those are documents I received from the Holy Light Cross Order. If you're bored, take a look. It'll be helpful. Big Sis? Are you asleep?"
Siegfried watched Eldmia answer as if it were no big deal and head upstairs in search of Asilie. After a moment, he decided to accept his host's consideration and skim through the documents.
"...They gave you documents like this?"
And he was shocked. Right from the start, there was more than one or two items that would've been treated as internal secrets even by the Imperial Divine Council. Realizing that the other documents he checked out of curiosity were in a similar state, Siegfried schooled his expression into something serious and put his mind to work.
"There's no way they just handed them over... If he'd had a direct connection to the Holy Light Cross Order, they'd have been involved in this incident, so... did he receive them as payment for catching that demon back then...?"
Inside the stove he'd checked just in case, little fragments of paper that had burned and dripped down remained. Fortunately, it didn't take long to understand what that signified.
Read everything, then burn it. A scene out of a spy movie.
[What are you so suspicious about?]
[Eldmia's mental state.]
The spirit that had briefly left home returned without a sound or word and struck up conversation, but Siegfried didn't startle, merely examining the document pile and the house once more.
It still looked messy even on second glance. In a tidy house, only that pile of the Holy Light Cross Order's confidential documents stood out.
[If only I had a talent for psychology. You wouldn't happen to have something like that?]
[Not that I have any idea what you're talking about.]
Clicking his tongue at the spirit bastard's indifferent response—useless for anything but fighting—Siegfried nevertheless marshaled all his abilities and constructed a hypothesis. Was leaving those documents neglected without organizing them, only to burn them later, because they were simply things to be burned in the end? Or was it a sort of violence born from vengeance?
If the latter, did it mean Eldmia harbored a fury and aggression so absolute he even compartmentalized individual objects accordingly—and that he was controlling it with precision?
Was that... even something normally possible? Or had it become possible precisely because something was mentally off about him?
[I'm certain I couldn't do it, at least.]
There was a reason the phrase 'venting anger' existed. This was a level that far surpassed what could be called selective anger management disorder.
[I've seen other races suppress things through reason, but it's a rare sight among humans, at least.]
His thoughts settled somewhat thanks to the unexpected supporting fire from the spirit—which he'd assumed would be no help at all to his contemplation. Siegfried came to his senses at the sound of footsteps descending the stairs and raised his head. And his eyes met precisely with Asilie's, who was being carried down on Eldmia's back in a half-asleep daze.
"Hey—hey! If a guest came, you should've said a guest came! This is embarrassing—what is this!"
"Ow, ow! What are you talking about, big sis! I did tell you! You answered half-asleep again, didn't you!"
"P-put me down, quickly!"
"You've already been seen anyway, just ride down the rest of the way. Something dangerous might—"
Watching Eldmia descend with indifference while taking Asilie's fists on his back—fists that didn't seem particularly painful—Siegfried chuckled.
Come to think of it, there'd been talk that even modern people back on Earth lived their lives carrying at least one mental illness or another. He'd grown so accustomed to this other world's standards that he'd harbored an anxiety that anyone mentally abnormal would inevitably cause a massive disaster. Looking at scenes like this, he was even starting to feel it had been pointless worrying.
The guy had a different flavor from this world's people to begin with. From his freewheeling nature unbound by religion or status, he was an unusual one—so he might well have some outstanding peculiarity in the mental department that set him apart from others too. Perhaps he was truly the stuff of heroes.
"Little brother. Won't you really join our party?"
In that case, he absolutely had to bring him into the party. Just as his own arrival in this place through death wasn't a joke, the threat to humanity wouldn't be a joke either. Eldmia, who'd been shaking his head while watching Asilie retreat into the kitchen saying she'd prepare the meal with her face bright red, reacted as if dumbfounded by Siegfried's words.
"You're still clinging to that? I thought we'd settled all of this on the way here."
"No matter how much I think about it, talent as exceptional as yours is rare, little brother."
"I'm not doing it. Still, if you've got a problem you can't handle, I'll help you out, so give it a rest."
"Huh? Really?"
Isn't that even more troublesome than joining the party? Without even a moment to voice the question, Eldmia, who'd scooped up the Welsh Corgi into his arms, continued as if it were nothing.
"Isn't it obvious? You're a Hero, even if death's at your door. Of course my own business comes first, but I'm not planning to just not help at all."
"...Huh."
It was beyond absurd, but Siegfried could only laugh.
When faced with a problem so dire even a Hero couldn't handle it, the man said he'd help calmly and without a moment's hesitation—how could he say anything to that?