The Villainess
One of the burly mercenaries walking at the front caught sight of the sack and gave a twitch of his brow.
He stared at it hard for a moment. Then he let out a sigh and turned his eyes forward again, as if he had seen nothing at all.
Guess that's a veteran for you. Smart.
Rio had no particular urge to call him on it. He himself was hardly a man burning with righteous fire. To see even a scrap of justice through, you needed power. Failing that, you at least needed money. And if he'd had enough of either, there would have been no reason to be out here getting cut up and killed for a mercenary's wage.
"Move out! Let's get moving!"
The man's hurried voice prodded the mercenaries along. Like the burly one, the others had caught the oddness in the air as well. Not a single one of them let it show.
The wagon wheels lurched into motion with a clunk. For a merchant caravan's wagon, the shape of it was strangely inefficient — poorly suited to hauling cargo at all.
Could be a run to snatch some debtor who hasn't paid up. Could even be a legal slave trade.
Assuming the worst just because there was a person in the wagon wasn't the wisest habit either. Rio fell in behind the wagon, putting a little extra distance between himself and the clients walking ahead. Resting a hand on the sword at his hip, just in case, was a bonus.
They had been moving like that, wound tight, for hours when it happened.
"Let's rest here a moment."
"…Already? This doesn't look like much of a place to stop."
"Ahem. Perhaps we overworked the horses hunting for people. They seem exhausted already…"
"Well. If that's the case."
Leaving the men unhitching the horses from the wagon, Rio looked around. No matter which way he turned, there was nothing but dark forest. A place fit for resting was nowhere to be found, no matter how hard he searched. The trees stood so thick there wasn't even proper room for several people to lie down, so he had no choice but to settle under one of them and lean his back against the trunk.
That uncomfortable rest did not last long.
"I'll just scout the surroundings a moment. This cargo might be something people are after. I have to check."
"If it's scouting, you'd be better off leaving it to the mercenaries."
"…No. This is our own worry, and we don't wish to inconvenience you. Please rest."
The men who had brought the wagon exchanged a few brief words, then vanished into the trees under the pretext of looking around.
"This is strange."
"…"
"They say the cargo is so precious they're worried enough to scout it themselves, and yet they want to stop and rest in the middle of the woods in the dead of night."
The burly mercenary still said nothing. Rio thumped his own chest in frustration.
"Come on, damn it, don't you think so? You were talking just fine to the employers earlier."
"…Ahem. It's not that I disagree."
"If they hired mercenaries and still mean to take the risk themselves, why unofficially hire us at several times the rate of a normal escort job?"
"…"
"And the farther they get from the wagon, the more danger the cargo is actually in."
Rio let the sentence trail, then leaned in and whispered.
"If they're planning something dirty, they don't seem all that bright. It's way too obvious, isn't it? Or maybe they think mercenaries are just dumb bears who only know how to swing. Looking at those pretty faces, the latter might be more likely."
"…There's no good in trying to know too much. The ones who make things uncomfortable can be the more dangerous ones."
"They said the destination was Lupern. From Varken, if you hurry, it usually takes about a week."
"…"
"That's too long a journey to rest after walking a few hours. And thinking about it, the food they were carrying didn't look like all that much either."
Rio's point was simple.
"Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume they never planned to go to Lupern in the first place?"
"…That means."
"You saw it earlier, didn't you?"
The common picture of a mercenary — especially among nobles — was of someone loud and oblivious. The truth was a little different. A mercenary with no sense was already dead, or about to be. The burly mercenary caught Rio's meaning at once.
"So we could look at it this way, couldn't we?"
"…"
"Some kind of dirty fight broke out between nobles or merchant companies, and something went wrong. Say, in a succession struggle, killing someone would be too obvious, so they made them 'disappear' instead… Or a staged kidnapping to pin the blame on a rival company. Something like that?"
Tap. Tap. Rio flicked a fingernail lightly against the sword's hilt.
"It's not an official job with a paper trail anyway. They kill us and leave a little evidence behind. That's all they'd need, right?"
"…That's stretching it too far. If that was the plan, they would have gathered people more quietly."
Rio shrugged.
"Those people are mages, actually."
"…How did you know that?"
"It's not like I went all the way down to the first floor to get a close look at their faces for nothing. You could tell at a glance the faces had been fixed with mana."
"Wait. They hid their faces?"
"Yeah. So maybe… they made a commotion on purpose?"
The man's expression had gone grim. Rio grinned.
"But if those bastards mean to kill everyone and then dress the deaths up as something natural… wouldn't they make it look like we fought over the split and killed each other? Even if not, looking at their clothes they seem to have plenty of money. Hmm."
He had gone silent after seeing the wriggling sack, and that alone said enough. For most mercenaries, a sense of justice was a luxury they couldn't afford.
"There's an absolute law that holds whether it's a brawl or a war. First strike decides the fight."
"…If word gets out that mercenaries turned on their employers first, we're finished. I don't want to take that kind of ri—"
"Man, you're stubborn as hell. The other guys here are mercenaries too, aren't they? No witnesses, and it's an assassination."
"…Even so, I can't do something like that without evidence. And if they really are mages, we have virtually no chance of winning."
"No chance? Why wouldn't we have a chance?"
"…What?"
Rio tilted his head as if he genuinely didn't understand.
The reason mages were rare was obvious. They could sense mana that an ordinary human might never feel once in a lifetime, construct fiendishly complex formulas and incantations, and call down supernatural phenomena. If a single knight could take on several soldiers, a skilled mage could, depending on the circumstances, sweep away several times that many people in a single breath.
Rio wasn't denying that a mage's firepower was strong. That wasn't the point.
"Mages die if you cut them too, you know. What, are their bodies made of orichalcum?"
"…"
The mercenary's face twisted. He had apparently been expecting some brilliant scheme. What came out of Rio's mouth was, in the end, the fact that mages were human and therefore died — something even a three-year-old would know.
"…Anyway. I have no intention of doing something like that without evidence. Keep that in mind."
Rio shook his head at the still-stubborn stance. If there was no evidence, he would just have to show him.
He stopped whispering, rose from his spot, and walked toward the wagon. The moment his hand touched the door—
A bluish streak of light hissed through the air.
"Whoa. Almost died there."
Rio threw his upper body back. The beam grazed the space where his neck had been a heartbeat before and detonated, ripping bark from the side of the wagon. If he had been even a fraction slower, it would have been his skull in that state instead of the wood.
"Who's there!"
Every mercenary's gaze snapped in the same direction at once. On the far side of the wagon stood the man who had gone out to scout, his hand still outstretched.
Rio shrugged, as if he had known this was coming.
"I told you. Those bastards are stupid."
The man grimaced, feeling the weight of all those eyes. A mage in the middle of casting was all but defenseless, so he moved his hand again from a considerable distance.
And then—
"Ha, a mere commoner dares— Gyaaaaah!"
There was a wet chop. Before the man had time to understand what had happened, his severed wrist went spinning through the air.
"Ugh. So noisy."
Rio's kick sent the man's jaw bending in a direction jaws were not meant to go. The mercenaries fell silent for a beat at the suddenly quieted figure. Then the presence of people thickened among the trees.
"Ambush! It's an ambush!"
Any mercenary simple enough to stay loyal to an employer trying to kill him had long since been buried somewhere in the wilderness. They drew their weapons. If the situation had been even a little less urgent, they might have tried questioning the man — but it wasn't that kind of moment, so Rio's sword went through his throat.
Blood ran down the blade in slow drips. Rio pulled it free without much feeling. The sight of a child of about ten turning a person into a slab of meat ought to have been a gruesome one. Given the circumstances, no one was paying attention to that. They were simply, as always, clawing to stay alive.
"Close the distance!"
And if it was a matter of clawing to stay alive, there was one person among them who could fairly be called the foremost authority on the subject.
"What, a phone? Fuck, what's a beggar like you even talking about?"
A boy who had lived on Earth, then, for reasons he still didn't understand, woken up as an orphan in Varken and been beaten like a stray dog in the summer heat. A boy who had swung a sword every single day just to stay alive: Rio.
Every time his form flickered like a shot loosed from a bow, blood sprayed.
Six left.
The other mercenaries were not standing idle either. Their pockets might be empty at the moment, but they were men who had been through the wringer. For them, a brush with death was less a special occasion than something you ran into on a slightly unlucky day. On top of that, the mages waiting in ambush looked as if they had been raised in a greenhouse, and they did not seem particularly used to a real fight.
"P-please spare me! Please, please!"
It did not take long for the employers to become former employers. Of everyone involved, Rio's skill was, without argument, the most impressive. He himself, however, did not rummage through the corpses' pockets the way the others did. He headed for the wagon.
He did not think of himself as a righteous man. Not even a little.
"Tsk. If I'd been a little unlucky, that could've been me…"
Perhaps it was because it reminded him of himself, back when he had first arrived in this body. Rio slipped the blade between the ropes binding the sack and applied a light pressure. When he pulled the mouth of the sack open, the first thing that spilled out was—
"…"
Silver hair. Hair that held a faint luster even on a night when the starlight itself was dim. Hair that would have suited a young lady of a noble house and no one else.
He brushed it aside. A young girl was huddled inside. The clothes she wore were crumpled into a wreck, but the embroidery alone made it easy to tell she was no child of an ordinary household.
"…A noble."
One of the mercenaries who had come up behind him muttered it in a low voice.
"…"
"And not just any ordinary noble, from the looks of it."
Rio thought the same. Wanting at least a rough idea of who she was, he shuffled over toward the burly mercenary, who was still digging through pockets.
"You were putting on such a righteous act earlier, and now look at you. Working real hard."
"Ahem. That's that, and this is this. I made sure to split your share too."
"Well, yeah. Make a mistake with this kind of thing and your head comes off."
"Right. Twenty gold coins came out of them, and nobody had any complaints about giving you a bigger cut."
"Huh. How much?"
"…It's the first time I've seen this much money myself."
At a sum he had never laid eyes on in his life, the matter of the pitiful girl was briefly set aside. Rio remembered his original business soon enough, though, and asked offhandedly.
"Did you kill them all?"
"Of course not. We left one alive for questioning. We'll kill him when that's done."
"Just saying this out of an abundance of caution. The one in the sack looked like a noble after all. If you're not afraid of trouble later, you should finish him for sure."
"We're thorough about this kind of thing."
"So where's the one you left alive?"
Following the burly mercenary's lead, they reached the mage in short order. Then, with a gentlemanly air, Rio asked what he had wanted to know.
"Guh— gyaaaaah!"
"So. Who was the one in that wagon?"
"I'll talk, I'll talk!"
"I said tell me the name."
"Kugh— Elysia! Elysia Beloa!"
At that, Rio's kicking slowed.
"Huh?"
He had been transmigrated into a romance fantasy novel, but the finer settings and lines of the original work had long since evaporated from his memory. He had not, however, forgotten every character who had left a strong impression. Tracing the faded recollections, he found the name.
Apparently the girl in front of him was the villainess of the original romance fantasy novel. And not just any villainess — the young lady of a ducal house.