Sheryl Tusin Ogatorf
Sheryl Tusin Ogatorf
"You two! If you don't do this properly, the request fee can't be paid!"
Before we'd even taken ten steps, the shout came from behind us from the guide, and I answered by raising my middle finger.
"I read the damn contract inside out, so don't start with me! Shut your mouth unless you want to get hit with penalties for breaching it!"
"Wha, what?!"
Was literacy high in this world? I'd never seen any statistics, so I couldn't be certain, but judging by how society worked overall, the rate probably wasn't anything to celebrate.
Adventurers weren't much different. Among those treated as mid-level adventurers, none were illiterate, but Asilie had told me long ago that cases where they couldn't properly grasp the meaning even when presented with technical terms or even slightly complex sentences were more common than expected. Worried I'd neglect my studies, she'd brought it up especially often, stressing it by citing concrete examples.
It happened all the time that people suffered ridiculous losses because they didn't understand the contract properly, or took on completely unnecessary work. Just like those pathetic idiots running ahead.
"You always get a foul mouth when you do adventurer work, don't you?"
"The living intellectual Eldmia simply believes in tailoring his behavior to the level of whoever he's dealing with."
"Sounds like bullshit."
"People tend to turn their heads away from sudden truth."
Sheryl answered by kicking a pebble in my direction as we walked. And while we were fooling around, the adventurers had already run ahead and reduced the distance by more than half. The initial distance was roughly three hundred meters, wasn't it? It was a rough guess by eye, so it wouldn't be exact, but it seemed about right.
When about twenty of them had halved the distance like that, arrows suddenly shot out from the forest.
"Fuck, archers!!"
"Run! If we don't make it into the forest and fall here, we'll become pincushions!"
Some made cold judgments, while others got hit and collapsed, unable to come to their senses. But the arrows didn't fly at the downed ones for a confirmation kill. They only shot at those trying to run the remaining distance into the forest.
"Are these motherfuckers playing with us?!"
The expression 'playing with' was a bit off. Because a few had died in the first volley.
I didn't know why, but they were conducting training where they ambushed and lured people outside the forest, incapacitating and killing them. It was clear they weren't just doing simple drills or practice, but were verifying their skills in actual combat.
Countless thoughts crowded my mind, but first I asked Sheryl.
"You don't know who owns the wine farm here, do you?"
"No. It's probably not a very powerful noble."
"Then we can just kill everyone in the forest first and think about the rest later, right?"
There was only one way to make sense of what we were seeing: they were using Green-rank and Blue-rank adventurers for live killing practice. The repeated failed subjugations hadn't really been failures at all—the conditions had been designed to make failure inevitable. If you came expecting ordinary bandits and found trained soldiers waiting in ambush, death was usually your only option.
No Mana, no aura—just ordinary fighting built on experience and organization. That was roughly the level Green-rank and Blue-rank adventurers occupied.
Only at Red-rank, the next step up, did mages and aura users start appearing from time to time. Anyone like that would be too strong for this scheme to work, which was obviously why they hadn't recruited Red-rank adventurers.
"Don't leave a single one alive."
Having guessed that far, Sheryl, with a noble's face, gave me the order.
"There is absolutely no reason to spare animals worse than dogs who dare commit slaughter in front of the kingdom's capital and make a mockery of the royal house."
Apparently even a genius like her could only reach the same conclusion I had. Sheryl didn't wait for my answer. She drew her sword, erupted with aura, and charged. She crossed the distance so fast I found myself wondering whether a fifteen-year-old—or any human—should be able to run like that. Another arrow came her way, but the shooter had completely misjudged her speed and fired far behind her.
By the time the arrow that missed its target hit the ground, Sheryl had already vanished into the forest.
"Aaaaaagh!"
At the same time, a scream came from the forest for the first time. I drew my sword as well, silently praying that we'd misjudged this.
"Now that's decisiveness worthy of the Young Head."
If the goal was training, there had to be someone who'd ordered it.
And the situation that the one who ordered the training would least want was the training becoming meaningless, and the surest way to create that situation was, no matter what anyone said, the deaths of those being trained.
So I made that my objective and wrapped my body in Magic Power.
My control of Magic Power had improved dramatically thanks to what I'd learned about aura techniques at the Ogatorf estate. What used to feel like forcing myself into thick armor now wrapped around my entire body like a perfectly fitted swimsuit. My five senses sharpened under the enhancement, registering the changes in my body and adapting to them.
When those senses, familiar from long training, reached the optimal point, I kicked off the ground and dashed out.
It didn't take even ten seconds to erase the remaining two hundred meters. The scenery became forest in an instant, and people who'd been invisible from outside snapped into view. A man raising a bow and starting to draw the string stared at me in shock.
"A-aura...!"
Breastplate. Greaves. Gauntlets and helmet. A short sword at his waist, no bag. Three men. Confirming that the two besides the bowman hadn't even managed to react, I accelerated once more.
"...user...!"
It was certain. These weren't bandits; they were soldiers.
As I finished my judgment, my sword moved as if sucked in and cleanly severed the man's neck. It wasn't difficult to spin around and behead the remaining two in one stroke. My seven years of training hadn't been for nothing.
Keeping low and alert for another attack, I watched the situation for a moment. The soldier's death cry seemed to have blended into the adventurers' shouts outside the forest without reaching anyone else. I checked the trench-like position around me, confirmed Sheryl wasn't there, sheathed my sword, took the dead soldiers' short swords, and ran deeper into the forest.
Since I still couldn't run through the forest like it was open ground, my speed dropped significantly from before. As I went, I sorted my thoughts and pondered their purpose again. If Asilie had seen me, she might have scolded me for letting my mind wander in combat, but the enemies were sufficiently weak that it didn't matter.
No matter how I looked at it, the situation was hard to accept. Adventurers as a profession did, on average, have barely any civic protections. Unless they held a recognized rank or a steady occupation that paid regular taxes, the kingdom wasn't charitable enough to treat wandering people with irregular income as full citizens it had to protect. Adventuring was probably the clearest profession for learning that rights came with obligations.
But if no rights were given, a force could emerge that unilaterally exploited adventurers, who cheaply solved non-human problems. Naturally, in that case, adventurers would dwindle or disappear, and all the requests they had been handling would become the kingdom's problems, overflowing.
Hence, the kingdom afforded adventurers the bare minimum of treatment. So if someone deceived the request details or unfairly harmed an adventurer, they were punished under kingdom law.
"There's one more...!"
The moment I saw another alert three-man team, I threw the two short swords separately. The pair who'd been working in tight formation suddenly had blades sprouting from a head and chest. The last man panicked and tried to reset his grip, but one punch to the face made him drop his sword and collapse.
"Gahk!"
I kicked his stomach, flipped him over, and stomped on his cervical spine with my heel; the bastard's body, which had seemed ready to thrash, began to stiffen rigidly. Honestly, I'd expected him to try to pry my foot off somehow, but he'd made a surprisingly quick judgment. It felt like I'd drawn a winning ticket.
"All right. Live or die—pick one. You get one chance. What the hell were you thinking, using adventurers as live-combat training dummies?"
"B-because of orders, sir!"
"I like the quick answer, so I'll give you one more chance. From now on, use your head and answer each question properly the first time. Drag it out and I'll kill you and grab someone else. Whose orders?"
"Our employer! Baron Pabaera! The owner of the wine farm!"
I liked this guy. He was impressively quick on the uptake.