Sheryl Tusin Ogatorf
Sheryl Tusin Ogatorf
The chatterbox Wery had clearly understood his role.
What he told us matched almost exactly what we'd been suspecting. The only real difference was that he filled in more of the details.
"Pa-Pabaera was originally the leader of a small mercenary band. When there was work, they did mercenary work, and when there wasn't, they turned to banditry. While it's the sort of thing low-quality mercenaries commonly do, Pabaera differed from the rest in that he saved money more diligently and had a knack for sly scheming."
He'd originally been hired after Pabaera bought the barony, but Wery was good with numbers and had enough useful connections that he'd eventually become one of Pabaera's close aides.
Anyway, the baron's real name was said to be Baera.
"Why'd he stick 'Pa' on the front?"
"He said... you need at least four letters to sound like nobility..."
"What an unbelievably stupid idea. Doesn't a short, neat name like Sheryl sound far more aristocratic, Wery?"
"A-absolutely correct! That's the level of thinking you get from a bastard who'd even consider buying a title with money!"
Wery was becoming downright likable, answering with enthusiastic agreement and a stream of effortless chatter.
Anyway, contrary to his purely boneheaded notion, Pabaera's financial sense and business acumen actually seemed to have exceeded the average of those around him.
Pabaera, who diligently saved the money earned from steady mercenary work, pillaging, and banditry without ever wasting it, achieved the remarkable feat of buying a baronetcy from a fallen noble, purchasing a mansion, and even acquiring a wine farm.
Damn bastard, honestly, if you looked solely at his diligence, he was so hard-working it was almost mind-boggling.
The problem was he was diligent in bad things; I couldn't shake the thought that if he'd just done mercenary work normally, he might have made quite a name for himself.
"He'd already reached a point where you could call him successful... but I suppose his ambitions were bigger. He started looking for crooked shortcuts to prestige just as he had in banditry."
That was where the adventurers came in. What'd looked absurdly risky to us was, to a man already used to mixing robbery and banditry into his business, simply another version of the same thing.
The scheme had already been under way for months, driven by the appalling criminal logic that, as always, everything was fine so long as no evidence remained and no one caught him.
He'd been meticulous, diligently arranging cover stories and alibis behind the scenes. What really caught both Sheryl and me off guard, though, was learning that unidentified people had been helping him.
"They helped him? Even though that son of a bitch didn't hire them with money?"
"Yes, he always met with them alone, so I don't know their personal details, but..."
"It's a fucking madhouse. Seriously."
Maybe because he sensed my sincerity, our Wery flinched, so I waved a hand once to signal he shouldn't mind it.
Why would investors attach themselves to something this illegal that didn't even make money? Unless their goal was to cultivate Pabaera into a useful villain, wouldn't there still have been far too many uncertainties before he could ever repay whatever favor they were doing him?
I mulled over whether someone had literally raised him for political use, but with my ordinary intellect, I couldn't begin to guess.
I was seriously starting to wonder whether I'd just kicked over some carefully cultivated villain they'd been raising like a precious treasure so the Hero—still right in the middle of training—could later use him as an easy feat of glory.
In the end, I concluded my train of thought with the notion that there must be some lunatic out there trying to dye the world in extreme wickedness. I patted the shoulder of our friend Wery, who'd been scared stiff because I'd kept silent, and opened my mouth.
"Don't be so scared, Wery. You're being very cooperative right now, and Eldmia Ega is generous to cooperative people."
"I-I wasn't worried in the slightest! I was just agonizing over whether I might have more information to offer, and it must have shown on my face! Hahaha!"
"Wow, our Wery! You're so quick-witted and silver-tongued, I can't understand why the hell you were working under a shit-bastard like that! It's truly fortunate you can't wield a sword!"
"Haha... pardon? A sword?"
"Right. The sword. If you'd swung it at me, you'd be dead with those bastards by now. Just thinking that I might've lost our delightful Wery like that makes me fucking sad all over again."
As I mixed a little threat into my smile, Wery's expression visibly stiffened before relaxing again as he faked another smile.
Not bad. As long as he didn't drop everything and retire to a farm, he was useful enough that I could probably find a use for him again someday. And even if he did retire, that was still one more person in the world who'd learned my creed the hard way. I'd already gotten all the information I needed, so there was no downside.
"Is a guy like that worth keeping alive?"
Sheryl watched Wery with obvious displeasure. I'd guaranteed his life on the condition that he later testify to the guild about everything that had happened. Once we'd moved a little distance away, she asked me about it.
"Who knows?"
"What do you mean, 'who knows'..."
"I made a deal: his life in exchange for everything he knew and his testimony. I'm just honoring it. Whether he ever turns out to be useful is something we'll learn later—or maybe never."
He did drive many adventurers to their deaths while knowing the full truth of the incident. But that's none of my business.
In the first place, this whole incident had only entangled me by sheer coincidence; it wasn't aimed at me, or at anyone around me.
In a world where a fifteen-year-old could practice killing techniques in real combat without anyone batting an eye, I didn't have the slightest intention of deciding life and death by some simplistic measure of good and evil.
It was simply a matter of: did they mess with me, or didn't they. That was enough.
"But isn't he clearly someone who participated in a crime? How can you..."
My decision must have bothered her, because Noble Sheryl surfaced for a moment. I couldn't always read that manner of speaking, yet sometimes it made her almost too easy to understand.
"If that rubs you the wrong way, then just kill him later."
"...Huh?"
I didn't think I'd said anything particularly strange, but Sheryl reacted with surprise, looking slightly bewildered.
"If, no matter how much you think about it, killing him is the right thing, then track him down and kill him later. All I did was trade his immediate life for information. I'm not going to keep protecting him or anything."
If he'd approached me first with pure intentions and goodwill, that might be different, but since that wasn't the case, I naturally had no interest in what happened to him later.
In the first place, wasn't the reaction of those unidentified patrons he mentioned still an unknown variable? He might even end up dead on his own if left alone.
"But not now. I made that deal with him, and the guy honestly did his part more reliably than I expected."
"Do you plan to keep using him? Even if he's nothing but a villain?"
"I'm not planning to keep him around as a tool. But if we happen to run into each other again, maybe he'll be useful. More importantly, Sheryl, the world isn't divided neatly into good people and bad people."
That didn't mean I needed to judge him in advance on incomplete information. For all I knew, the bastard had some miserable story of his own and was keeping quiet because he was afraid I'd turn on him.
I could understand why Sheryl thought that way. Wanting to believe in people and pursue what was good wasn't something I could criticize. Hell, in my previous life I'd tried to live like a decent person and gotten a dog's death instead of a reward, and I still believed that kind of heart was worth having.
It was a good enough answer that I ruffled her hair and added just one thing.
"You can tell from all the people I killed here that this doesn't apply to everyone. The basic rule is that they can't have directly harmed me. Cross that line and all bets are off."
"What if a good person harms you?"
"I'll weigh how bad it was, but if they cross the line, they'll die and straighten right out."
The only kind of bastard who could harm me that much and still be good is a dead one.
Once we'd sorted out the story, the adventurers who had been fighting Pabaera's private soldiers disguised as bandits returned one after another. They learned the truth, erupted in fury, and only after that round of chaos did the incident finally begin to settle down.
There weren't that many casualties, but rather than the adventurers' skills being particularly good, the cause seemed to be that the soldiers, sensing something was off, had pulled out. In fact, the number of heads the surviving adventurers had collected didn't even look to be half of forty.
Pabaera simply bled out while none of us were paying him any attention.
Nobody particularly regretted it. We didn't need Pabaera anymore, and we'd already secured a path to documentary evidence through Wery. Well, the adventurers who were still furious might have regretted losing the chance to take their anger out on him.
At least part of Pabaera's assets would clearly come back to us after the guild reported the case and his property was disposed of, both as additional compensation and as restitution for the guild's failure to manage the request properly. So the outcome wasn't all that bad.
Of course, my true desire was to take everything, but that's just the standing of an adventurer for you. If it had just been Sheryl and me, we would've gone right then and stripped the place clean of anything worth money, which was truly a damn shame.
Even a share of the assets distributed through the guild would be a substantial profit. Once the heat of battle and outrage had faded enough for everyone to do the math, the adventurers boarded the carriages genuinely delighted by the unexpected windfall.
But Garun wasn't among them.
That was a bit of a pity. He had been a friendly man, after all.