The Weight of Regret
Regret.
It had taken root the day my parents were murdered, and it had never left. A knot in my chest that refused to loosen, no matter how many years passed. This time was no different.
Oble had been the closest friend I had among the monster hunters. His death, too, had become another regret.
If I hadn't taken my eyes off him. If I had killed Trenba that day. If I had just kept my mouth shut and never provoked him.
The what-ifs bloomed and died in my head without end.
I attended Oble's funeral. A decent crowd had gathered. His wife, still carrying their child, had become a widow in a single instant. Standing before her, the only thing I could do was bow my head.
"Haren. This is the gear he used to carry."
She held Oble's equipment out to me.
"He always said it was too worn to sell, so he just kept it around. I'd be grateful if you'd take it."
Oble had been melancholy even as he retired from monster hunting. That was probably why he couldn't bring himself to part with the tools he'd carried all those years.
"……I'll put them to good use."
I couldn't refuse. I took Oble's equipment and trudged home.
Trenba didn't get a funeral. Under the laws of Raoren County, murderers weren't entitled to one. All that was left for him was a shallow grave on the outskirts of town.
The monster hunters spat on it as they passed. They weren't especially close-knit, but he'd killed one of their own. There was no chance they'd treat him kindly.
Two monster hunters gone in a single day. And yet the Monster Hunter Guild was as busy as ever.
"A bunch of large-class monsters showed up in the Jefran barony, I hear."
"The hunters there all bailed for other cities after the place went to hell. How are they supposed to stop that?"
"They'll probably hire a mage."
"That nest of corrupt officials? Yeah, right. Tsk. They're finished."
Jefran, the city to the west. The same city those bandits had come from. It seemed a large-scale dimensional shift had torn open there.
I let their voices wash over me as I quietly stepped outside. I wasn't in the mood to listen. I simply walked, alone, toward somewhere I needed to be.
Trenba had meant to kill me from the start. But that wasn't the only reason he'd ended up killing Oble too.
There was the special drug he was believed to have taken — a substance that boosted physical ability and bloodlust until all reason vanished. That same drug was circulating through Laoren's back alleys right now.
It was the cause of Oble's death. It would be the cause of many more, if left alone. I was walking because I intended to crush that cause into dust.
The streets were already tipping into summer. It was the middle of the day, and still the back alleys lay in shadow. A muggy wind rolled down the narrow passages toward me.
I knew these alleys well. Today, though, they stank worse than a monster's maw.
I stepped inside.
Laoren's back alleys were closer to a labyrinth than a neighborhood. Buildings thrown up in a frenzy, slapped together by people trying to survive the brutal north — those structures had tangled and knotted until the gaps between them became streets. This was that place.
In the places no one watched, vermin thrived. The ones you couldn't see spread plague, and every so often that evil crawled up into the light. This was no different. The pestilence festering here had shown its face above ground once again — and it hadn't even the decency to be ashamed.
Figures flickered in the gaps between the buildings as I passed. Most of them were in wretched shape, staring blankly without coming any closer. No one with half a brain would approach a man in full combat gear.
One of them did.
A boy stepped forward and held out his hand. His hair was a wild tangle, and he looked like he hadn't eaten in days. He was begging.
The back alleys were a cruel place for children. They weren't pitied here. They were used. I dug through my pocket and pressed a single copper coin into his palm. Give a kid real money in a place like this and someone would only take it from him.
"Live without reading the room around here and you'll be dead soon."
The boy clutched the coin tight at that scrap of advice.
"……I'm not clueless. You gave me money, after all."
He ducked his head in a quick bow and left. I watched him go — and then I felt it. Presence, approaching from the far end of the alley.
A sight like that drew a certain kind of man.
Down the narrow passage, filling it from wall to wall, came a cluster of heavy bodies. Five of them. Tattooed men radiating as much menace as they could manufacture, like beasts puffing themselves up to hide how weak they really were.
A faint smell drifted from the gaps between them. The same kind of smell I had caught on Trenba.
"Hey. You don't look like you're from around here. The hell are you doing crawling in?"
"You got any idea whose turf this is?"
They barked it at me with their ugliest faces on. I had lived in these alleys once myself. I knew the rules they'd laid down, and I knew some of the faces. One of the men in front of me was someone I recognized.
He didn't remember me. Fair enough. I didn't look much like I used to.
"Hey, you prissy little shit — you deaf? Get the hell out if you don't wanna die."
I had no intention of listening to a long speech. I kicked off the ground and closed the distance in an instant.
The moment I moved, the one in the crude iron helmet snatched up his axe. The alley was narrow. No matter how fast I was, the line I had to run was the same — and he knew it. That was why he could stay calm and wait.
But the instant he lifted that axe, my foot was already reaching for the wall.
A thud.
I jammed my toes into a crack between the stones and launched myself upward. Trusting the speed and strength my body had been given, I sprinted diagonally up the wall.
"Wh— what?"
The thug at the front froze with his axe still raised, staring. A man running on a wall was not a sight you saw every day. It certainly wasn't a trick some alley rat could pull off.
I scaled the wall in a heartbeat, vaulted over the axe-man, and landed in front of the one I had marked from the start.
Coul.
The man who had beaten a child half to death for failing to bring in money, then stomped him until his organs ruptured. I had watched that atrocity happen, and all I had been able to do was look away. Stepping in would have only gotten me the same treatment.
I was not that powerless weakling anymore. I was not some fool who crushed his own sense of justice underfoot.
"You little—!"
Coul swung his sword. The cheap blade was already stained — he had carved through more than a few people with it. It never reached me.
I was a man Dreygan had trained, and trained again. A back-alley thug was no longer someone who could touch me. So I swung my gauntleted fist straight into the incoming blade.
A shriek of metal.
"Gaaah?!"
The sword crumpled against the gauntlet and bounced away. The force pouring up the blade tore it from Coul's grip, and the ruined weapon went spinning toward the man with the axe.
"Whoa—?!"
Iron Helm sat down hard, an ugly sprawl of limbs, barely twisting aside in time to keep the flying sword from finding him. He clutched his backside and started to rise.
Then he noticed something was wrong. The alley had gone far too quiet.
His gaze drifted toward me. His pupils began to shake.
I was reflected in them. More precisely: I was standing on Coul, grinding him into the dirt.
Coul wasn't breathing. It had happened in the time it took a man to fall on his ass.
These were men who had carved through people before. They knew exactly what a body looked like when it stopped drawing air. Coul was dead — dead in a way none of them had imagined possible.
They held their breath. In the back alleys, every day was a question of survival, and their instincts told them the truth at once: they were no longer the predators here. They were the prey.
The three in the back spun and bolted. They had realized they couldn't win. A reasonable choice.
It didn't matter. I still had one left.
I turned toward Iron Helm, the one who had been standing at the front.
"Hhk— hiiik!"
He thrashed, clutching at his axe, trying to get his feet under him. By then I was already in his face. My fist caved in his shoulder.
He screamed loud enough to peel the plaster off the walls, dropped the axe, and crumpled. I pinned the ruined shoulder with one hand and looked him in the eye.
On his breath, faint but unmistakable, was the same chemical tang I had smelled on Trenba. That settled it.
"You know the one selling the drugs."
"Y-yes?"
"Tell me who he is. Tell me where he lives."
I put more weight on his shoulder. He screamed again.
"Ghk— aagh— wait, wait! Milord! I can tell you! I can tell you everything! Ghhh—!"
He spilled it in a rush, promising me anything I wanted.
"B-but— but there's a problem!"
"The problem where you die?"
"N-no, not that — it's the people behind the ones selling the stuff! That's the problem!"
Backing. A drug that strengthened the body and stoked the urge to kill was not something you picked up on a street corner. Of course the dealers had someone behind them. I had assumed that from the start.
"If it's just the usual alley bosses, I don't care. Spit it out."
"N-no, milord — if it were scum like that I'd have told you already. The problem is it's someone worse!"
He glanced around as if even saying the next words left a bad taste in his mouth. A commotion in the back alleys was not a spectator sport. Watch too long and you got pulled in. Everyone around us had already fled.
"Talk. There's no one here."
I could see that for myself. Through the Third Eye, the streets around us were empty. Not a single living soul.
"A noble. It's a noble."
A noble. A bigger fish than I had expected.
"Why would a noble get involved in alley business?"
"H-how would I know? It's only a rumor as it is. I don't know the details. The one thing I can say for sure is the Mud Hands are mixed up in it!"
I had told him to say what he knew, so he had thrown in the rumors too. His face made it clear he didn't actually know much of anything.
If a noble was involved, the scale of this changed. Lay a hand on the nobility and you were executed on the spot. Commoners and nobles were completely separate castes. People didn't flinch away from noble business for no reason. Mages stood even higher than that — but to a commoner, a noble might as well have been the heavens themselves.
"I-I don't know the particulars, but the rumor has weight. If you go charging in, you'll be in real danger."
He wasn't worried about me. He was performing concern so I'd look on him kindly and let him live. That made it even more disgusting. Men who showed the weak no mercy at all turned this obedient the moment they faced someone stronger. The world's ugliness settled over me all over again.
"That's none of your concern."
I lifted my hand, tore the iron helmet off his head, and drove my fist into his face.
"Ghhk—!"
Stripped of the helmet, he hit the ground in a wretched heap, his lights already out. I left him where he lay, picked up the iron helmet, and settled it onto my own head.
The Mud Hands. One of the organizations that had sunk its roots into Laoren's back alleys. I would tear the truth of this out of them.