Chapter 34
Chapter: 34
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>Translator: penny
>Chapter: 034
>Chapter Title: Aslan of the Western Mountains (1)
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>On the western side of the continent stretched a long, treacherous mountain range running north to south.
Beginning at the border between the Kingdom of Plendor and the Asain Principality, this lengthy chain of peaks passed through Rohan and continued northward, growing ever taller and more rugged until it formed the boundary of the demonic realm where sea monsters dwelled.
In the past, it had borne names like the White Eagle Mountains or the Blade Range, but nowadays, the people of the continent simply called this vast mountain chain the Western Mountains.
At the foothills of those Western Mountains, near the border of the Kingdom of Plendor, lay a small slash-and-burn village that had sprung up only a few years prior. It was a humble settlement carved out by a handful of Plendor refugees who had fled into the hills during the war with the Carthage Principality.
Lately, however, an influx of refugees from Rohan had swelled the village's population to nearly a hundred overnight. Shortages of housing, supplies, and food had naturally followed.
It took no time at all for the little slash-and-burn village to turn into a bandits' den.
Part of the reason was that most of the new refugees were former bandits from Rohan who had turned to robbery, only to be chased off by a punitive force.
Aslan, who had gone out hunting but caught little more than a few rabbits in his traps, came down the mountain to find yet another unfamiliar cart parked in the village clearing today, just as he always did.
"It's smaller than usual..."
Aslan asked the man standing nearby.
"What'd they hit this time?"
"No idea. Merchants heading from Asain to Plendor, I guess."
"Ah, seriously... What are they thinking? How many times has it been just this month? What if the Grand Duke of Asain sends a punitive squad?"
The man shrugged as Aslan scowled.
"So what? Doesn't look like a proper caravan, and you think Asain gives a damn? They said it was an easy mark with no guards."
From what he heard, a scouting party had stumbled upon the merchants by chance while patrolling the mountains.
The cart was loaded with sacks of food and three prisoners, escorted by just two low-rank mercenaries. They had been sneaking along an old trade route that proper caravans no longer used.
The merchants and mercenaries had abandoned the cart and fled the moment they ran into the bandits.
"There were prisoners?"
Aslan asked, puzzled.
Why would merchants be hauling prisoners across the border?
"All three were condemned to death. Carthage sometimes buys them cheap like that. They throw 'em in the salt mines and make 'em dig till they drop dead."
Carthage's salt mines were hellish. Those guys would be better off dying here.
The man shook his head and walked off.
Sure enough, three men were dragged down from the cart after the food sacks.
One was covered head to toe in burns, his face so twisted it was unrecognizable. Another had a sunken eye socket and all his fingers chopped off. Aslan winced involuntarily at their gruesome states.
The last man to step down appeared relatively intact at first glance, but a dark brand was visible on the back of his neck peeking out from his loose robe. Even from a partial view, it was clear this was the vicious mark of a heretic inquisitor's trial.
The sigil of a devil worshiper.
In a way, he had received the cruelest punishment of the three.
The trio was marched straight off to the leader's hut.
Looks like they'll check their backgrounds first before killing them. With that thought, Aslan turned away from the clearing.
Aslan was an orphan boy from Rohan. He had no memory of his parents' faces and had lived with a bandit gang there since early childhood, as far back as he could remember.
He didn't even know his exact age. Piecing together snippets he'd overheard from the bandits, he guessed he was no older than sixteen.
In that rough, uneducated bandit gang, Aslan stood out sharply. Born with a calm temperament, he was sharp-minded and a quick learner.
He picked up various fighting techniques that gang members showed him in jest, helped a hunter-turned-bandit and learned to set traps, and even had a former village guard—who'd fled after a false accusation—teach him basic aura training methods.
The gang occasionally spared the lives of useful captives they'd unluckily crossed paths with. People like the apothecary Seymour or the low-rank priest Gustav.
They harbored resentment toward the bandits in general but treated the young Aslan with relative kindness. Before long, he learned to read from them and how to gather herbs.
It wasn't long before Aslan, despite his youth, had carved out a position of no small importance within the gang.
This was both fortune and misfortune for him. As a powerless orphan, it granted him relative stability instead of abuse or exploitation, but it also made escaping the bandit life and washing his hands of it ever more distant.
"Someday, I hope you can leave this place and live a proper life."
That was always Seymour and Gustav's plea to him, but Aslan had long since given up on that possibility himself.
When a massive punitive force swept through Rohan and ravaged the Western Mountains region, Aslan miraculously survived because he had been out checking his traps. But by then, the entire gang he belonged to had been wiped out.
The punitive force had carried out the extermination with ruthless efficiency, sparing not a single soul—not even the forcibly conscripted Seymour or Gustav. With a modest bounty on his head as a gang member, Aslan had no place left to return to in Rohan.
He had fled southward along the Western Mountains to evade the force, eventually washing up near the Plendor border.
The slash-and-burn village where Aslan settled already had members of other bandit gangs who had fled ahead of him.
The current village leader, Jerome, was a bandit from Rohan as well.
Among the refugees, he was the one who had brought the most followers south early on and successfully built his own faction.
Jerome hadn't been thrilled about the young Aslan at first, but as he learned of the boy's various skills, he grew fond of him. He began calling on Aslan more and more for all sorts of tasks.
From brewing hangover cures or simple medicines to cataloging stolen goods, there were problems everywhere that only Aslan could handle. That included identifying aura users.
Aslan had been bracing himself for the inevitable summons when, sure enough, one of Jerome's lieutenants came to fetch him.
By the time he arrived at Jerome's hut, two corpses were already being hauled out—the burned prisoner and the one without fingers from earlier.
Aslan frowned briefly at their battered, unrecognizable faces before stepping inside.
"Those two had their tongues cut out too. They just kept making these annoying 'err err' noises, and I couldn't see any reason to keep 'em alive."
Jerome, spotting Aslan, explained unprompted with an irritated grimace. Given their conditions, they weren't fit for work anyway, so their deaths were inevitable.
Jerome was a cruel man. His massive frame matched his brute strength, and his fists flew at the slightest annoyance.
His habits were so bad that his wife had ended up with a crippled arm from his beatings, and his son had become lame after being thrown as a child.
He had probably been the one to smash those two prisoners' faces in. Aslan's gaze naturally shifted to the third prisoner standing before Jerome.
He was in better shape than expected. There were fresh bloodstains around his mouth, so he'd taken at least one hit, but that was downright merciful by Jerome's standards.
Jerome nodded toward the prisoner and addressed Aslan.
"This one's an apothecary, apparently. Used to be a priest, but got tried as a heretic for plague research."
In other words, he was useful to the village. The third prisoner's odds of survival had just skyrocketed.
"Check if this bastard's a trained aura user."
Jerome's eyes were icy cold, at odds with his hot temper.
They had been brazenly raiding Asain trade caravans lately, but Jerome was cautious at heart. Even with that brutal brand, he wasn't ruling out the chance this prisoner was a spy from Asain or Plendor.
Aslan approached the prisoner and examined him closely. He was taller than he looked, but his slender frame in the loose robe gave off the vibe of a typical priest. He didn't seem frail, but it was hard to imagine him having undergone rigorous physical training.
Above all, the flow of aura around him felt almost stagnant. That was a trait of the severely weakened or bedridden.
"He's not an aura user. If anything, his aura is unusually weak even for a living person."
Jerome nodded.
"Well, it'd be weirder if a guy who'd been through a heretic trial had a normal body."
Aslan turned to leave, assuming that was it, but Jerome's next words stopped him cold.
"Take him with you and verify if his knowledge is actually worth anything."
Ah. Aslan hesitated without responding right away. He didn't like the idea one bit.
Taking him along meant Aslan had to handle everything from food to bedding. There was no deadline, and if the prisoner escaped, the blame would fall squarely on him.
"Uh..."
As he wavered on a reply, a sharp voice rang out from inside the hut.
"Why bother with all that hassle, Dad? Just kill him."
Thump, thump. A boy with a nasty scowl limped toward them. It was Jerome's son, Kaien, who hadn't walked right since his father had hurled him as a child.
Unlike his burly father, the boy—frequently on the receiving end of violence—had a hunched posture and slight build. But he had inherited Jerome's cruelty in full; Kaien's face was perpetually twisted in rage at the world.
Even now, his piercing glare raked over the prisoner with malicious glee.
"Why do we need two apothecaries? We've got this one."
He jabbed his chin toward Aslan.
"An apothecary is valuable manpower, Kaien."
Hmph. The boy snorted at Jerome's response.
"Come on, Dad. Use your head for once. We've been hitting caravans pretty hard lately, right? The Grand Duke of Asain's already got us on edge, and now a convenient apothecary just drops in our lap?"
"Hmm..."
"Feels fishy. Why risk it keeping him alive?"
"He's been through a heretic trial and branded. You think he's an Asain spy?"
"But why does he look so damn fine to me? That's the suspicious part."
"That's for me to worry about, not you."
"Ah, just kill him already. Simple as that."
"Shut it. Get out before I give you a taste."
Aslan's head throbbed from the father-son bickering.
Kaien wanted to kill everyone on sight. Jerome was no different, but the boy's stubbornness seemed to be goading him into defiance.
As a bystander, it was headache-inducing enough, but the prisoner whose life hung in the balance just watched the two argue impassively.
Hadn't he just seen the other two get beaten to death by Jerome? He had to know they were debating his fate, yet he showed no emotion—calm to the point of eeriness.
If they kept this up, even a survivor might end up dead from Jerome's temper. Aslan made up his mind and spoke to him.
"Alright, I'll take him then."
Jerome waved him off irritably without even looking his way.
Aslan grabbed the hem of the still-dazed prisoner's robe and hurried out of the hut.