The Last Chance
"What? Now you say this? Why the sudden change?"
The Fire Mage spun around to face his partner.
They had already sent the thorns smeared with sleeping drug into the wagon. The woman and the child inside were asleep, and so was the magical beast. After going that far, the man wanted to quit and told him to finish it alone. What kind of rotten nonsense was that?
The Wind Mage spoke quietly.
"I've done enough getting you this far. I'm staying in this country. Go on by yourself."
The Fire Mage caught his partner's arm as the man turned to leave.
"Wait! What are you thinking? They're going to find out it was us either way. You know that merchant isn't an ordinary man. He'll figure it out before long. You can't stay here."
"But—"
"Did watching that healing mage fight scare you? Or are you afraid of stealing the beast? You didn't have a problem until the beast came up."
"..."
The Fire Mage seized his partner by the shoulders. The Wind Mage was the nominal Rank 3 leader, but in truth he himself ran the party. Every decision was his. The Wind Mage only followed, and that was the shape of things that worked best.
He gripped both of the Wind Mage's shoulders and dropped his voice.
"Get your head on straight! Even if we take the beast and the kid, there's no telling whether it'll work. And if we don't even have the beast? Ha! Our lives really will be worth less than a fly's."
"But—"
The Wind Mage was plainly terrified of that healing mage. The Fire Mage glared at him.
"We don't have a choice. That healing-mage bastard killed the chief, and everything went to hell. The chief was the one who promised us money and a noble title, and now he's dead."
"..."
"Slip up and they'll catch us here and drive us out. Go over there and we won't see a coin—we'll just take the blame for getting the chief killed. We can't go forward and we can't go back. You know how the guild treats traitors."
The Adventurer's Guild asked nothing when you joined. Take jobs one by one, finish them properly, and build a record, and it did not matter if your character was rotten or you were a murderer. It never asked about the past, and it never condemned it.
Betray the Adventurer's Guild, or do it serious harm, and that changed. It sent your description to nearly every place its influence reached and made it impossible to go on living in this world.
The guild had seeped into almost every part of almost everyone's life. Herb gathering, errands, escorts, hunting, keeping magical beasts in check—it even supplied mercenaries and farmhands. If a noble paid enough, adventurers would help with the harvest.
Even work everyone hated, the guild could place the right person to see it finished somehow. People said it was harder to find a job the Adventurer's Guild could not do than to pick gold up off the street.
Nowhere wanted that guild for an enemy.
"M-maybe we should confess to the Adventurer's Guild even now and beg forgiveness?"
The Wind Mage's voice went thin, and he bowed his head. He was always like this. Once a thing was decided, he regretted it, fretted, and hesitated.
As if that were still possible. The man was a fool. That was why he had swallowed the honeyed talk in the first place.
The Fire Mage clicked his tongue and softened his tone a little.
"You know we can't. Tell the Adventurer's Guild everything and they'll be delighted to hand us over to those noble bastards. Treason, and our heads come clean off."
The Wind Mage's face went bloodless. The Fire Mage sighed and went on.
"Keeping our mouths shut won't save us either. Even if it doesn't come out today, sooner or later they'll learn we were in league with the enemy and passing them the merchants' information."
"..."
"Rotten luck. This was supposed to be the last job, and of all people that bastard had to show up...."
The Fire Mage patted his partner's shoulder.
"It's all right. We only have to take the beast and the child. This is our last chance. What matters is that she's a child, not a grown woman. A child still handles a magical beast clumsily, and that's the opening. Understand? Hold onto that girl and the beast becomes ours. Do you have any idea how enormous that is?"
"...That..."
He doesn't understand. The Fire Mage hid the sigh rising in him and smiled.
"And if we use the child, we can move the healing mage too. What's he going to do if we say we'll kill his kid? You saw how he is with his daughter and his wife. Kissing and fussing, doting until it makes you sick. Take the girl, and we get a beast tamer and a mage of two attributes at the same time."
"Is that so?"
He seemed to accept it at last. There was almost no chance things would actually go that way, but if they got past this moment, both of them would be trapped with no way out. Then even this indecisive fool would be in too deep to wriggle free.
The Wind Mage glanced at the woman inside the wagon and asked, hesitating.
"Then wouldn't it be better to leave the woman? If we take both the child and the woman for no reason, that giant might...."
"Doesn't it make you angry? Everything fell apart because of him."
"Of course I'm angry, but—"
"Think about how he'll feel when he finds that woman dumped somewhere, ruined."
"..."
Whether the fool understood or not didn't matter. He wanted that giant's face and heart torn apart by pain. He wanted the man driven mad with rage and grief.
"..."
Either way, the confusion was their chance. Everyone was busy tending the wounded and patching the broken wagons. If one or two people slipped away, no one would notice.
Even if someone saw them taking the woman, they would think what they always thought: there goes that rogue mage after another woman, and this time the wretch is putting his hands on a child that young. People would dislike it and wrinkle their noses, but they would look the other way. Unless they were close to the victims, most of them did not meddle in other people's business. That was the kind of world it was.
The Fire Mage kept a tight grip on the Wind Mage's arm, in case he tried to bolt, and looked into the wagon.
The woman and child had collapsed, but the horned rabbit was harder to read. It lay still on its belly, and he could not tell whether it was asleep or awake. Its haunches and tail did not move, yet now and then an ear seemed to twitch.
"You did hit the beast properly, didn't you?"
"Yes. The drug should have gone in clean. I don't know much about magical beasts, but a rabbit's hide is thick, so I aimed for the ear on purpose."
"Good. Open the door."
"I'm doing it. Just wait a moment."
The Wind Mage answered in a whisper, staring at the latch inside the wagon. The iron latch trembled and began to shift.
Damn it. Why did he have to fit a thing like that?
Without that latch the job would already be done. That giant was infuriating—a man born with talent piled on talent. He hated him.
A man like that. By rights I should have lived with him under my thumb.
The Fire Mage's mouth twisted hard.
He was not a man who should have been living like this. He had been a noble commoners dared not even look at, the second son of a noble house whose title was modest but whose domain was rich. He was not the sort to haunt filthy guild offices, scrounging for work day after day, or to play escort for some worthless merchant.
Finish this properly and he would be a noble again. They had promised him a small domain that still brought in decent money—not merely for selling information, but because he was a fire mage and his partner used wind.
If he had possessed more talent, there might have been a way to remain in this country. But he did not have what it took to reach Rank 1 or Rank 2.
If climbing from Rank 5 to Rank 4 could be done by effort, then going from Rank 4 to Rank 3 demanded tremendous effort and tremendous time.
Above that, Rank 2 and Rank 1 required true inborn talent. The numbers differed by only one or two, but between them stood a wall no one could cross.
Back home everyone had praised him from childhood as a gifted one, but open the lid and he was only an ordinary talent.
"...It's ready."
The Wind Mage spoke, still hesitant. When the Fire Mage came back to himself, the latch that had held the wagon door shut had already slid aside. It was open.
"Good. We're going in."
If he could never be more than an ordinary mage, then he would abandon that road and return to being a noble. This was probably the last path the light would show him. He could not let it go.
The Fire Mage opened the wagon door, slipped quickly inside, and shut it behind him.
In the dim light he saw the fallen woman, the child, and the horned rabbit.
The horned rabbit, which had been lying perfectly still, lifted its head. Black eyes met the Fire Mage's.
The beast tilted its head and cried softly.
"Pii?"
His heart was in a hurry. Juhwan ran the way the servant pointed. Several guards lay where arrows had taken them down.
With a small knife he slit the flesh in a long line and drew the embedded arrow free. The guard screamed, unable to bear the pain. Strength locked through the man's body, and the muscle went hard.
Juhwan reached out, laid a hand on the wound, and poured mana in. In his haste he may have used too much. The wound knit shut in an instant.
"Good God!"
The master of the trading company, standing nearby, muttered it. All around, servants sucked in their breath.
Centered on the Miller Trading Company, the healing along one end of the column was nearly done.
While Juhwan worked, the merchant train was in disorder.
On one side, company servants pulled a few goods from a damaged wagon and patched the break. In some cases they emptied a cart, broke it apart, and used the pieces to reinforce a wagon.
On the other, guards were sorting the dead from the wounded and loading them onto carts.
Using the carts that way meant some goods had to be abandoned.
Servants ran as far as the other trading houses, searching for empty space to load their own goods or the wounded.
After treating several more, Juhwan stood. It was time for the next company.
Leonard of the Miller Trading Company had said not to treat those who could not be saved, but most of them could. The other houses, once they heard Miller would pay and Juhwan swore he could keep them alive, did not try to stop the healing.
Yes. They would all live. Anyone Juhwan had treated would clearly survive. His heart lightened, just a little.
He kept noticing it whenever he used mana. Healing magic was the easiest, and it cost the least.
Maybe healing magic comes easiest because of what I wished for.
When he first fell into this world, he had seen the dead. A world where a person could lie like a log and no one cared—he had understood that well enough before he met Lizzie and Dorothy.
Perhaps that was what his heart had wanted so fiercely then. The wish never to let his family die had been so strong that it called the healing magic into being. The fear of human death he already carried had burst open the moment he made a family. He did not want to lose them again.
Maybe fire magic and wind magic awakened the same way.
Perhaps they appeared when he truly needed them, when the need was desperate. From everything so far, he was sure of it.
A power Santa gave me.
Or perhaps it was simply because he was from another world. Even then, it was thanks to Santa.
The image of Santa crouched in front of the subway station came back to him. Was that Santa still there, looking for someone whose wish he could grant? Or did he appear only on Christmas Eve?
All at once his thoughts jumped to the Fire Mage.
Santa's handwriting, appearing when he walked with his head down, overlapped with the torch that had sprung up in the dark while he searched for bandits. Probably because he had seen both when he was not expecting them.
The memory of the Fire Mage dragging Marie made his face tighten on its own. If he had not seen it, the man would have hauled her off to some hidden place and....
Then something felt wrong.
But didn't he go too far?
The Fire Mage had probably done the same to the women of Red Sword before. The Red Sword party feared him badly.
Maybe Marie had already suffered it. Maybe Jessie or Karin had. It might have stopped short of the worst, but he had certainly tried before.
And everyone around them had known, hadn't they? The way people reacted when he made the man let Marie go suggested as much. They all knew what kind of bastard he was.
Then there was no need to go so far from the column. He could have done it a little way off. No one would have stopped him, and the Fire Mage had not even tried to hide it. He had gone so far as to tell Juhwan to wait his turn.
And yet the man went much too far.
The place had lain on the path Juhwan took while checking for more bandits. It was not merely nearby. It was the best spot for someone to hide.
He remembered the pile of stones the Fire Mage had gathered to prop up the torch. There had been a great many stones. Had he meant to hide a message for the enemy under that pile?
If dragging Marie away was a disguise to fool other eyes....
When someone lit a torch beside a company wagon so the bandits could see it, no one had seen who lit it.
He had thought it was panic, or that it had simply been too dark. But what if there had truly been no one in front of the real torch?
The Fire Mage could set a fire even from a little distance.
When the enemy attacked, where had those two been?
When the first enemy arrows flew, the mage party had not been where they were supposed to stand. By the time anyone noticed, they were already on the safest side.
Those bastards are the traitors.
Juhwan shot to his feet.
Then a sound like an awl drove into his ears, loud enough to split them.
PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!
"Aaah!"
"What is that!"
"What is that sound!"
People screamed and clamped their hands over their ears.
It was Oz's cry.
Oz was warning him.
Someone meant to harm Lizzie and Dorothy. Oz was telling Juhwan.
His body was already running toward his own wagon before the thought had finished forming.