Dark Elf Mercenary Redhood #8
The faint gentleness was gone without a trace. A cold aura filled the space it had left behind.
The way she flinched at the mere mention of land made it plain she had been badly burned before.
Had the offer been ordinary coin, things might never have soured this far—but the words were already out of my mouth.
I was only an ordinary human. I could not turn back the steadily darkening mood those words had caused.
Charge straight in? Or try to coax her gently?
I weighed the two paths that rose in my mind. Whichever I chose, I would have to give it everything—that much was obvious—but I could not yet tell which would prove more efficient.
"Setting the talk of filth aside for a moment—have you had some bad experience involving land?"
After a deliberation that felt both brief and endless, I decided to cut straight to the heart of it and opened my mouth.
This sort of thing could fester into a real disaster later. If we were going to collide eventually, better to settle it now.
"Why would a human like you care about that?"
I had been the one to poke first. The thorns in Ellen's tone were only natural.
"I came here to take you with me. So if you have grievances, I mean to hear them and resolve them as best I can. More than anything else, I want to know about you."
"Want to know, is it. You think you have the capacity for that?"
"I may lack the ability, but I'm ready to listen. And that readiness is what I believe you need most of all… isn't it?"
Dark elves were treated as filth as a matter of course, and the people themselves had grown sick of it and learned to live with the treatment. Simply not picking pointless fights with them would already be counted a blessing.
As I turned that over, something occurred to me.
If you refused to treat them like filth, they would first grow suspicious. The behavior defied common sense, so they would assume some scheme was afoot.
But even those who hid schemes seemed to have a line they could never cross. No matter how well they acted, no matter how friendly they pretended to be, there would always be a boundary they could not step over—a distance they could never close.
So if I crossed that line and showed genuine goodwill, the result might not be so bad.
Of course, even if it wasn't, there was nothing I could do about it. The only thing left to me was to persuade them with all the sincerity I had.
"Are you saying that sincerely?"
"Yes. If I were a mage, I would have sworn a mana oath to prove it."
A mana oath was a powerful binding that sealed every ability the moment it was broken. Only mages could use it, and it took effect solely through one's own vow—but nothing demonstrated sincerity quite like it.
I felt a fresh stab of regret that I had never become a mage, and put strength into my eyes. I did not dodge Ellen's sharp gaze. I tried to press back against it instead.
"…Fine. If you're that certain, I'll tell you."
Fortunately my sincerity seemed to have gotten through. Ellen let the force drain from her eyes and slowly parted her lips.
What followed was a record of regret—the first time she had been betrayed, and the price she had paid for it. The promise of land, offered under a mask of friendship, had been nothing but a lure: a way to freely exploit her strength before disposing of her. A single nightmare.
I listened with my face twisted into a deep frown.
Ironically, they really had given her land. It was only as small as a grain of millet, just as Ellen said—but the fact that they later begrudged even that and tried to poison her left a foul taste in my mouth.
"They said not even a scrap of land was worth wasting on filth like me. When I heard those words with a body already weakened by poison, the rage that surged up…"
Ellen clenched both hands tight, as if even recalling the incident was loathsome. She squeezed so hard her bones seemed ready to shatter, and blood began to seep from her palms.
The expression of someone hurt more by memory than by physical pain, and the drops of blood falling one by one—all of it looked so pitiful that I lifted my gaze toward Olivia. I needed her to release the binding magic.
"I won't try anything foolish. No—keep your bow trained on me if you like. Just please release it. I'm asking you."
You should never take a strange outsider's words at face value. Especially not in the middle of a war. Opening your heart to someone who was not an ally could mean getting stabbed in the back in spectacular fashion.
Personally I thought even allies stabbed you in the back in this world, but you could not live suspecting everyone. Humans found it hard to survive alone, and trusting those you should trust made the heart a great deal lighter.
I sparkled my eyes, hoping Olivia would think the same—and the result was success. I felt the pressure that had been wrapping my body vanish.
"Tch."
Right after that I clicked my tongue and tore the sleeve of my clothes. The fabric was filthy in every way imaginable, so shaking off as much dust as possible was the best I could manage, and even if a heal would take care of the wound, I could not simply leave it alone. At the very least I wanted to wrap the injury with this cloth.
"Give me your hand."
"Eh…?!"
When I half-forcibly took her injured hand, a half-startled sound slipped from Ellen's lips. A human casually taking her hand, and then wrapping the wound—it must have seemed novel.
"For someone who's been rolling around battlefields for over half a century, your hands are soft. Is it because you're an elf that you don't form many calluses?"
Around the time I was tying the knot and nearly finished, I muttered those words without thinking. For a woman who also used a bow, she had remarkably few calluses. Helena, who lived with a sword in her hand, was far rougher. So of course I was surprised.
"You don't think dark elves are filthy?"
"I don't know about other people… but I don't think so. Looking at you only makes me think of the night sky—it's beautiful."
Even to my own ears the line reeked of stale cheese. A faint wave of nausea even rose, but I finished as if nothing were wrong. I had tied it fairly tight, so the hemostatic effect should be solid.
Still, I had not entirely made it up. Seeing the moonlight flow over ash-gray skin and the beads of sweat sparkling as they caught that light, the thought had crossed my mind unbidden. Saying it out loud was the problem—but spilled water could not be unspilled.
The one silver lining was that the women hearing these words were all of a certain age. The standards for dividing life stages might differ from humans, but the years and experience accumulated in their bodies did not change. In other words, even this worn-out line landed surprisingly well. It had come to me by chance, but the effect was unexpectedly good.
"You really think that?"
See? Just from how her speech had softened, I could feel the effect. The sharpness had left her eyes as well, so she was almost won over. At least that was how I saw it.
I opened my mouth, intending to ride this momentum and finish the conversation about the land.
"Of course. And while I'm at it—I should tell you that the land I can promise you won't be fertile even by the most generous measure. The plot is large and the condition isn't bad, but it's closer to an empty vacant lot. Still, I'll do my best so you can cultivate plants there, plant trees, and raise a small forest of your own. If that doesn't suit you, there's a broad forest outside the main castle—I can arrange for you to live there instead."
The land I planned to purchase was fairly large, but barren, without a single building. The Krauser duchy had a reasonably large forest, but it lay outside the walls, so one could not help feeling somewhat isolated. Either option was bound to leave someone dissatisfied. But these two were the best I had been able to prepare. So I could only pray that at least one of them would appeal.
"We don't necessarily need to live in a forest. So there's no need to tie it to forests, is there?"
"That doesn't mean you dislike forests—just that it doesn't have to be a forest, right? You're elves, so I thought you'd naturally like forests… isn't that so? It's also the environment that would make you most comfortable."
I asked as if treating them like ordinary elves rather than dark elves. Elves lived in forests and loved them. I figured the same would hold for dark elves. They were not ordinary elves who had fallen and transformed—they were simply born that way, like a mutation.
"Give me a moment to think."
After a brief silence, Ellen barely squeezed out that short sentence. Regardless of the atmosphere, this was a matter that demanded caution; they clearly needed to gather opinions and decide together.
"Of course."
So nodding cleanly and giving them that time was only natural.
She needed time to think.
She had said so, but Ellen's heart was already half-tilted. The way he had casually taken her hand and wrapped it in cloth, the sincerity she felt in every word—those things had shaken her.
Moreover, she was not the only one shaken. Every dark elf watching the scene was thinking along similar lines as Ellen.
"I think we could accept. What do you think?"
"It might be too early to jump to conclusions. Still, it's hard to deny that his sincerity comes through. Just the fact that he came all the way here says something."
Olivia opened the floodgates, and countless opinions began to flow. They liked that he had dropped the pretense when talking about the land, and they rated highly the fact that he had casually touched a dark elf's skin—something no one wanted to touch. Even the bastards who had approached Ellen pretending to be friendly had refused contact to the end.
"Aww, what a waste. He's handsome and his personality seems decent, but he already has someone…"
"Oh, please. If I were a duchess and had a guy like that by my side, I'd have snagged him ages ago."
"True. He doesn't have any flaws you can pick at on the outside, and with a personality like that… it'd be weird to just leave him alone."
They were thoroughly smitten and busy defending Zion. Ellen alone watched the situation with a bitter smile, but deep down she harbored similar thoughts. She was the one whose hand he had actually held, after all—she could not help it.
"Anyway, what are you going to do? Ellen's the head, so you need to set the policy."
Opinions might diverge, but the final decision rested in Ellen's hands. Olivia knew that, so she hastily stopped the conversation and looked at Ellen, pressing for a decision. Separate from her fondness for Zion Altram, she intended to follow whatever decision was made. The other dark elves felt the same.
What to do.
In a silence thick with a peculiar tension, Ellen kept her mouth tightly shut and sank into thought. Goodwill was only goodwill, and there was no guarantee they would not get stabbed in the back the same way as before. That was a different matter from her heart wavering.
But she also thought the timing was convenient. She was sick of seeing blood on the battlefield, and this place was no different—the moment the tide turned, who knew what fate awaited them. From that perspective, leaving for somewhere else was not a bad choice either.
The only catch was that if they did, Ellen and her mercenary band would be walking straight into a place where a monster had nested.
"Mmm──."
Even so, escape was feasible. Catching one person's ankle with magic and fleeing was far more promising than shaking off countless soldiers here. The Swordmaster was enough to chill the blood, but with preparation they could stay safe.
Ellen hummed as she fretted and fretted, then at last opened her heavily sealed lips.
"Let's go. I'm sick of this battlefield too, aren't you? So leaving around now would be a good choice."