The Rank-Up Request
Mireia glared at me with ice-cold eyes, the tip of her longsword hovering so close it nearly brushed the end of my nose.
"Answer me. You'd do well not to think about running."
"That's..."
My mind went completely blank.
I seemed to have landed myself in a truly outrageous misunderstanding. I'd used traps because I stood no chance on my own — all to protect the village — and now it was coming back around like this.
"What are you, exactly? A demon?"
"No. Of course not..."
"Were you the one who raised the undead from the graves? Was this a self-staged farce so you could infiltrate the Guild as an adventurer?"
"No, that's not it either..."
"Reveal your place of origin. Where are you from?"
Oh, crap.
She had clearly decided I was some kind of demon who commanded monsters. Of all the misunderstandings to fall into, this was a nightmare. But the bigger problem was that I couldn't think of a single way to explain myself right now.
"There's more that's suspicious. Do you really believe a Novice adventurer who hasn't even made Bronze Rank could take on a horde of undead and win? Even if you thinned their numbers with traps, that's still a stretch."
"Uh..."
"Well? Speak. Where are you from?"
I'm from Seoul, actually.
If I said that, I had a sinking feeling everything from the neck up would promptly cease to exist.
Place of origin? Place of origin... Even if she demanded I name one, the only places I knew in this world were Bainar and Kubel.
Ah — I did know one more. Helvetica Island, where Meruru had come from. But I wasn't a beastkin. There was no way that would be convincing.
"You can't answer, I see."
The tip of Mireia's blade slowly descended from my nose until it was aimed at the throat beneath my chin.
Hold on. This is actually dangerous.
Her expression was as cold as ice. And the more I thought about it, the more it started to piss me off.
Sure, I was an otherworlder with no clear origin. A Novice-rank adventurer who'd suddenly fought off a pack of undead by himself and kept the village standing — who'd even predicted they were coming and laid traps in advance.
The more I turned it over, the worse it looked.
Even I had to admit it was suspicious. If you didn't think about it, it just looked like I'd worked hard to protect the village. But pick it apart the way Mireia was doing, and you started to wonder what on earth this person even was.
Wait a second, though.
Just as I had no clear way to explain myself, she didn't have any hard evidence to back up her suspicions either, did she? The biggest reason she suspected me was that I'd known the monsters were coming in advance. So if I could just produce a plausible reason for knowing the undead would rise from the cemetery...
"So you really are—"
"Heh... heh heh... Ahahaha!"
"What is this, all of a sudden. Have you gone mad?"
"Is this how Gold Rank adventurers operate? Just grabbing perfectly innocent people off the street?"
I looked Mireia straight in the eye and, with a hardened expression, launched my counterattack. She had no evidence either. If this was nothing but a gut feeling, there was no need to look flustered.
"It's true I registered as an adventurer with the Guild not long ago. I was born and raised on the pavement of some nameless back alley, so I forgot whatever 'place of origin' I might have had a long time ago. But I wanted to become an adventurer, so I did every dirty job there was — sweeping, hard labor, you name it — until I finally scraped together enough for a single sword. That's how badly I wanted it. When I registered with the Guild, they gave me a Novice rank."
I kept my eyes locked on Mireia's face, doing my best not to look at the blade at my throat, and fleshed out the story of everything I'd been through. When someone accuses you without evidence, that also means they can drop their suspicions without evidence. To make that happen, I needed to build the story up — layering in details from every angle, pretending to tell my own tale while gradually steering the conversation elsewhere.
"What did they say again? No famous family, no track record, never trained in swordsmanship anywhere — so they couldn't even give me Bronze Rank. Start from Novice, build up a record, then apply for promotion. Something along those lines."
"..."
"I was still happy. I got to be an adventurer, after all. I didn't have a place in this subjugation force, but I found whatever I could do and gave it everything I had. Who do you think moved most of the cargo onto the supply wagons? I did. Even after the subjugation force left and I was alone, I kept looking for something — anything — I could do."
I pressed on without pause, not giving her a chance to open her mouth again.
"That's when I noticed a grave in the corner of the cemetery had been dug up. I thought maybe a grave robber had been through, so I looked around — but that wasn't it. An undead had woken up from that grave. Luckily there was only one, so I managed to deal with it, but what do you think went through my mind? Of course I thought they might start waking from the other graves too."
The one fabricated detail that could flip this entire situation on its head: there had, supposedly, already been a single undead that woke up early in a corner of the cemetery. It was a lie, of course — but there was no way to verify that it was a lie. If nobody knows it's a lie, it isn't a lie. It's a fact.
"And then what? The damn subjugation force had already left. The village was empty. I couldn't even call for help. If undead started waking from the other graves, we'd be in serious trouble, wouldn't we? So I set traps and decided to watch the cemetery by myself until the subjugation force came back. If nothing happened, then I'd just been making a fuss over nothing. If the undead really did wake up, I'd use the traps and do whatever I could."
Done. I'd forced it to fit, somehow.
But a story slapped together this fast would fall apart the moment she had time to think it through — some angle I hadn't even considered. To stop that from happening, I had to go on the offensive. There's a reason they say the best defense is a good offense. It works just as well in an argument.
"Then let me ask you something in return. Mireia. I've heard you're a great and very famous adventurer. So why didn't you leave even a skeleton crew to defend the village? What if I hadn't found that undead that woke up early in the cemetery? What if the village had been hit with no defenses at all? What do you think would have happened?"
When I turned the question back on her, Mireia's eyes — which until now had shown no change of expression whatsoever — wavered, just a fraction.
By shifting the focus onto her and starting to pick apart her incompetence, I put her on the back foot. And I had plenty I wanted to pick apart.
"I simply devoted everything I had to subjugating the target."
Mireia answered. No. That wasn't an answer.
"And that's why there were so many dead and wounded?"
"In a battle against monsters, there is always risk—"
"Minimizing that risk is your job, isn't it?"
I knew. The strategy she'd used to subjugate the monsters had been absurdly crude. Splitting the force into a strong group and a weak group and charging in from the front — that wasn't even a strategy. Mireia was Gold Rank, so her personal strength was probably unmatched. But the way she led a subjugation force? I could say with a straight face that it was worse than a Bronze's.
I could feel the atmosphere shifting. She was no longer in a position to worry about whether I'd staged the whole thing. People aren't built to hold two thoughts at once.
"There was an adventurer in the subjugation force named Oren."
I brought it up, thinking of Oren, who had never come back.
"He was only Bronze Rank, but he was a good man who taught me a great deal. And he didn't make it back."
"..."
"That's..."
"You were so blinded by the subjugation target that you didn't even bother with the village's defense. The other adventurers in your force — you didn't care what happened to them, did you?"
After saying that, I glanced at Mireia's condition. A moment later, she withdrew the sword she'd been pointing at me and slid it back into its sheath.
I'd worried I might have gone too far — crossed a line with that attack — but judging by her reaction, I was still in the clear. And even though I'd said it to protect myself from her suspicions, the fact that Oren hadn't come back really had been a shock. If this woman had just run the operation a little more competently, Oren might still be alive. Her strategic incompetence and complacency had as good as killed him.
That part, at least, genuinely made me angry.
"I have nothing more to say. May I go now?"
"..."
When no answer came, I turned my back on her and left her standing there, walking down the hill. Mireia made no move to stop me from behind.
Back in the village, I ducked into an alley, hurrying to get out of people's sight.
"Hah... hah..."
I pressed a hand to my chest and took one deep breath after another. When she'd pointed that sword at me and started interrogating me, I'd genuinely thought I was going to die. All the tension I'd been holding in came undone at once, and my legs started shaking. It had faded with time, but the killing intent I'd felt when she first leveled that blade at me had been the real thing.
I really ran my mouth at a woman that terrifying, huh.
To shake off the suspicion directed at him, Yunoa had humiliated Mireia with a barrage of lies and bluster. A man who would even use a friend's death as material to wriggle out of a crisis — he was a truly outrageous human being.
The other remarks I could swallow. But using a friend's death as material? That one I refused to accept.
Meanwhile, Mireia — who had just been dressed down by a mere Novice adventurer — remained on the cemetery hill, lost in thought. No emotion showed on her ice-locked face. But inside her mind, Yunoa's words kept circling, over and over.