From Serf to Swordmaster, Chapter 20
From Serf to Swordmaster, Chapter 20
"Move aside, please."
Berak spoke low and calm. The response came flying back at once.
"Move aside? Where does a brat who still smells of his mother's milk get off giving orders? Want me to cut your tongue out? Huh?"
The big man swaggered up beside him. He tapped the scabbard Berak was carrying and made threats. Snickering broke out around them.
Berak's reaction was instantaneous.
Thud—
A fist drove into the man's side. Lightning-fast. To some, it simply looked as though the big man had suddenly doubled over.
"Guh!"
As his body folded, the man's collar dropped to hand height. Berak didn't even use both hands. He seized the collar with one hand, lifted him straight up, and hurled him forward.
Boom—!
Dust rose in a great cloud with a tremendous sound. The big man shuddered once, then stretched out his arms and legs.
「Unarmed Combat Proficiency + 1」
"What the hell...."
"He threw a man that size with pure strength?"
The mercenaries let out exclamations of admiration. Some reacted even more intensely.
Scrape.
Several chairs near the entrance slid back at once. They looked like the fallen man's companions.
"You insolent little brat!"
"You dare lay hands on a man of the Steel Fangs?"
Their hands went to the sword hilts at their waists in unison. They looked ready to draw and charge at any moment.
Berak took an iron badge from his coat and tossed it among them.
"You're the ones who ought to know who you're picking a fight with."
The iron badge came to rest on the table, the Silver Hawk emblem clearly visible on its face.
"......!"
The air inside the guild froze. The mercenaries who had been acting rough moments before stopped dead.
"Th-that's... the Silver Hawk?"
"The Silver Hawk? That little runt?"
Shock rippled through the other mercenaries watching nearby.
"No wonder his skill was anything but ordinary."
"I thought there was something about him from the moment he walked in. His face and his whole bearing were unusual."
"Anyway, did the Silver Hawk have someone that young? Isn't he the youngest ever?"
Scattered murmuring quickly spread through the entire guild.
The faces of the Steel Fangs mercenaries, now grasping the situation, turned ashen in an instant.
They let go of the sword hilts they had not yet drawn. Then, as if on cue, they rushed over to Berak and bowed at the waist.
"W-we truly failed to recognize you and committed a grave discourtesy!"
"We never dreamed you belonged to the Silver Hawk. Please, let go of your anger!"
The big man who had been floored by Berak's single blow also staggered over belatedly. He seemed to have barely grasped the situation from his companions' explanation. He bowed his head, still clutching his side.
"I apologize...! Mercenaries are so competitive by nature that when a new face appears, testing their skill is something of a custom here...... I made a mistake."
Berak swept his sunken gaze over them and asked,
"Drawing a sword means you're staking your lives on each other, doesn't it?"
At those words, the big man and his companions waved their hands in alarm.
"No! How could anyone draw real weapons and fight inside the guild! We only meant to frighten you a little!"
"Please speak well of us to the Silver Hawk. If a small mercenary band like ours gets so much as a bad rumor with them, we'll have trouble keeping a foothold in this business. Please, I beg you."
He had already known they were the greatest in the city. But experiencing it firsthand, clashing with it in the flesh, was different. The Silver Hawk's standing was far greater than Berak had imagined.
"That's enough. I'm not a child, and I have no intention of tattling."
The mercenaries' expressions shifted oddly for a moment, but they quickly recovered.
"Here, I've brought your badge. Heh heh......."
Berak took the Silver Hawk badge and turned away without a word.
* * *
Berak approached the reception desk. There were three windows. He walked toward the quietest one.
A woman with her hair neatly tied back sat there.
She must have watched the entire commotion, yet she showed no sign of being particularly startled. She simply kept her head down and calmly wrote something.
Only when Berak sat down in front of the window did she raise her head.
"Well handled. Drawing weapons and fighting inside the guild is forbidden. You responded wisely, as befits the Silver Hawk."
"Ah, yes."
In truth, he hadn't known any such rule. Berak inwardly breathed a sigh of relief that his instinctive choice had been the right one.
"I didn't know the Silver Hawk had such a young recruit. What brings you here? Is there a discovery or incident worth reporting to the guild?"
"No, I came to take a request."
"A request?"
Puzzlement settled on the receptionist's face.
"Wouldn't a company of the Silver Hawk's caliber receive mostly designated requests? We always send messengers to your garrison......."
Berak shook his head and answered.
"I'm looking for a request I can carry out personally, not as part of the whole company."
"A personal request?"
The receptionist's expression grew even more bewildered than before. Berak hurriedly handed over the parchment he had prepared.
"This is... a personal activity guarantee. The above-named individual has undergone sufficient training within this organization and is guaranteed capable of independent operations......."
The receptionist's eyes slowly widened as she murmured the contents.
"Liability for all negligence and accidents occurring during activities shall be jointly borne by the affiliated organization, the Silver Hawk......."
By the time the sentence ended, a faint tension had entered the receptionist's fingers holding the parchment. After reading it all, she blinked.
Berak did not miss how her gaze traveled back and forth several times between the Silver Hawk seal stamped at the bottom of the parchment and his own face.
"...The captain signed it personally."
"Yes."
"In principle, personal requests that aren't designated are chosen directly from the board listings."
The woman pulled a thick stack of documents from under the counter and smiled.
"But I can't very well leave someone with a Silver Hawk guarantee standing in front of the board. Let me sort out some suitable cases for you."
Berak examined the documents the receptionist selected one by one. But nothing particularly caught his interest. They were either excessively simple errands, or even when the difficulty was reasonable, they weren't worth carrying out as personal work.
At this level, he would be better off performing the Silver Hawk's regular duties.
'Once I'm famous, designated requests targeting me specifically will come in, but.......'
That wasn't something he could hope for right now. Berak pushed the stack of documents back across the counter and asked,
"Is there anything else besides these?"
"Well, there are some that have remained unresolved long-term because no client could be found......."
The woman trailed off and brought out a few dust-covered documents.
"I'll look at those."
Berak leafed through the papers he was handed. Then, at a certain point, his hand stopped.
[Request: Purification of St. Marian Monastery Cemetery]
- Location: St. Marian Monastery rear cemetery and annex
- Pay: 20 copper coins per day (meals and lodging provided within the monastery)
- Duration: Minimum 1 week of residence (no pay if abandoned midway)
- Details: Each night, reduce the number of undead appearing near the barrier beyond the cemetery's iron gate by physically destroying them.
"This request is......."
When Berak held up the paper, the receptionist frowned as if troubled.
"I'd like to discourage you from that one. Not only is the pay absurdly low for the difficulty, but undead areas cause great mental fatigue, so everyone avoids them."
But Berak did not put the request down.
An undead cemetery with enemies to fight all week long. There was no more perfect place to gain compressed real combat experience.
The low pay wasn't even a consideration for Berak. Far from the reward he'd received from his last mission, even the money he'd originally had was piling up untouched because he had nothing to spend it on.
Living and eating within the mercenary company, he had no expenses at all.
More than money, he desperately needed experience—especially a "special trigger" that could awaken a new ability on the Record Sheet.
Clashing with alien beings would raise that possibility far more than dealing with ordinary monsters.
"I'll take this one."
At his unhesitating choice, the receptionist shrugged.
"...Very well. I won't stop you. But you'll need to steel yourself."
She wrote Berak's name in the ledger, stamped the guild seal on the request confirmation, and held it out.
"The paperwork is done. Go and find the abbess."
Berak took the confirmation and rose from his seat.
From behind him came whispers—perhaps from people who had been watching—about the Silver Hawk rookie's strange behavior.
Berak paid them no mind and opened the door and left.
* * *
Hellvern's Highcastle district, despite its name, was located in the lowest-lying part of the city. The name simply came from a castle that had stood there long ago.
Now it was a slum full of damp sewage smells and peeling brick. It was also where St. Marian Monastery was located.
A sharp shout burst over the monastery wall.
"You! You didn't wash your hands, did you? Touching bread with those filthy hands? Don't you know you'll be cursed if you covet food with unclean hands? Go wash right now!"
A deeply furrowed brow and an overly prominent hooked nose. And eyes slit like a snake's. When Abbess Dora's fierce face descended on them, the children standing in line shrieked with laughter and scattered in all directions.
"Ack! It's the witch granny! Run!"
"Who's a granny, you little brats!"
Ladle in hand, Dora huffed and made a show of chasing the children. But she always kept a fixed distance so they could pretend to be frightened and hide in the corners.
When Dora pretended to give up and returned to the pot, the children crept out and dipped their hands into a wooden tub in a corner of the yard.
Then suddenly, the children's laughter at the entrance cut off. The footsteps were quite light. Dora narrowed her slit eyes even further and turned her head.
A boy stood there.
He looked about the same age as the children waiting for bread and soup. But there was a greatsword on his back and an axe at his waist. A fairly handsome face and deep eyes, too. Something about him was fundamentally different from others his age.
Dora tossed the ladle into the pot and roughly wiped her hands on her apron.
"Hey, kid. You've taken a wrong turn. This isn't a place for sightseeing, so if you want to play mercenary, go ask somewhere else."
"I've come to carry out a request."
"What kind of request?"
Instead of answering, Berak produced the crumpled request confirmation from his coat. The moment she confirmed the guild seal stamped at the bottom, Dora's brow twisted fiercely.
"......Those guild bastards. Have they lost their minds? They ignored me no matter how much I asked, and now they send a child like this!"
The boy tilted his head slightly and took something else from his coat. It was an iron badge bearing a hawk.
"If you doubt my skill......."
But Dora, having taken the badge, still shouted.
"So what if it's the Silver Hawk! Is that place now nothing but crazy old folks who buy their drink with children's lives?!"
Dora's tirade gradually subsided. She had noticed the boy staring intently at her face.
Dora frowned. This ugly face that made anyone recoil at first sight. She was used to gazes that studied it as if observing something. She sneered and glared at Berak.
"What are you staring at? Since they call me a witch, are you checking whether I've actually sprouted horns? Or are you sizing up which part is ugliest?"
At Dora's mockery, Berak replied indifferently.
"No. It doesn't seem that way to me."
"What?"
"The part about you being ugly."
Dora's eyebrows drew together at the unexpected answer.
"Ha! This brat's really set on flattering me. So what, are you saying this face is pretty?"
It was an absurd question, but the boy's answer came immediately.
"Yes. That's the 'feeling' I get."
Dora's breath stopped for a moment.
There was not the slightest hint of empty flattery or mockery in the boy's voice. It was only a mechanical certainty, stating the sense of wrongness before his eyes exactly as it was.
Dora felt a strange chill, as though her true face had been seen through. Unconsciously, her grip tightened on the iron badge.