The Alley Boss
The air had turned cool, and autumn was clearly on its way.
The weather was perfect, so why were those kids fighting?
Seated on a rock near the village well, Hilde watched them bicker like children over something absurd. The whole mess had started because Victor had come by the next afternoon, asked her to play, and she’d been with him ever since.
"Victor. Hilde’s going to marry me someday, so stop trying to get handsy with my future bride."
Garrett, a big-bodied boy for sixteen, stormed up with his nostrils flaring.
Before Hilde’s memories from her previous life returned, she’d thought he was rather likable in his own way... But once modern memories began to seep through, he started looking suspiciously like an orc illustration she’d drawn herself.
Still, to be thinking about marriage at sixteen—
It struck her all over again how different this world was from modern life.
"That’s not for you to decide. It’s up to Hilde. And don’t you have any conscience, trying to go after a girl five years younger than you?"
Garrett’s face went red.
Hilde might only be an eleven-year-old child, but nearly every young man in the village liked her. Compared with Garrett’s broad frame, her small figure already came up to his chest, and her proportions looked more mature than they had any right to at her age.
Garrett glanced at Hilde.
The body still in the middle of puberty already promised a very bright future.
Hilde’s prettier than that statue of the goddess all the way out in the city. I’m not giving her to anybody.
Garrett was getting irritated.
He knew Victor wasn’t ignorant of that fact, so he couldn’t understand why he kept acting so self-righteous about it.
With a pitiful look, Garrett stared at Hilde.
In a village like this, her looks were wildly out of place—an almost dangerously charming kind of beauty. Her kind, considerate nature only made it worse.
"Hilde. So who are you going to marry someday? Obviously not some weakling like Victor, right? It’d be me, wouldn’t it?"
Garrett boasted that if she married him, she’d always get to eat freshly hunted boar and would always be protected.
But remembering that now was a terrible idea.
Outwardly, she was a little girl. Inside, she was a man in his early thirties.
Hilde’s stomach suddenly lurched, and she forced the corners of her mouth upward, barely managing a smile.
"Um... I don’t know yet. It’s still a long way off before marriage anyway."
She did her best to act like a kind eleven-year-old Hilde.
In this world, or rather in Creator of Souls, a game very much like this one, there was a system that let you marry an opposite-sex NPC once they were sixteen or older.
If you wanted to push efficiency to the extreme, marrying a temple-side NPC could make Holy Stigma upgrades a little cheaper.
It wasn’t necessary by any means, but if you used that content, progressing through the game became much smoother.
A Holy Stigma was an ability that manifested when an NPC character came of age at fifteen, and it was rare enough to appear in only one out of every hundred people. Naturally, playable characters always received one hundred percent of the time based on the talent chosen at creation, one of the game’s perks that made it easy to build exactly what you wanted.
If you dumped everything into swords when creating a playable character, you could receive the Holy Swordsmanship Stigma; if you focused entirely on divine power, you could receive the Divine Power Enhancement Stigma and become a saint.
To live well in this world, the important thing was to get a Holy Stigma at fifteen. And she did know how to secure one of the better Stigmas, the kind only NPCs could receive. The problem was that the method was a little difficult.
Until my fifteenth birthday, I must intentionally do no harm to any living thing while I’m receiving my Holy Stigma.
It was practically impossible.
Under that condition, even swearing at someone—or throwing a tiny tantrum—would make her fail immediately.
To her surprise, based on the memories she’d lived through so far, she was still on track. The Hilde of this life was exceptionally good-hearted.
"Hilde’s already getting uncomfortable, Garrett. Enough."
"What, are you Hilde’s boyfriend or something? Who the hell are you to run your mouth like that?"
Garrett rolled up his sleeves and stepped toward Victor. After being humiliated by him twice, he looked ready to throw a punch.
Those idiots are at it again.
Hilde stayed quiet, just to see whether they’d actually start trading blows, but the fight never came.
"You brats! I said stop this right now!"
Victor’s father, the adult of the village, came running from a distance.
He was much bigger than Garrett and served as a professional hunter, the sort of seasoned elder Garrett couldn’t possibly hope to challenge.
There was no way either of them could talk back to him.
And just like that, the argument stopped.
Victor’s father had a large backpack and a bow slung over his shoulder, clearly on his way out hunting. He pointed at Hilde, who had been quietly watching everything unfold.
"You boys fight at the slightest excuse, don’t you? When are you going to grow up? Little Hilde over there is more mature than you are!"
Hilde, who still had memories of her previous life, winced inwardly.
If she compared the lives they’d lived, hadn’t she already surpassed them by more than a factor of two? Her conscience pricked at her, and her chest ached.
"No, sir, Victor started it first..."
Garrett tried to weakly explain himself, but it was no use.
"Let me guess—you were squabbling over Hilde again."
Victor’s father snorted. The adults knew, too. The fact that the young men in the village had their hearts set on Hilde was an open secret.
"Well, this works out nicely. Since you two will be heading out into the wider world soon enough, I’ll teach you how to hunt. And Hilde, if you come too, I’ll show you some useful herbs."
"Really? Thank you very much! I’ll do my best to learn!"
Garrett had always regretted not having a father to teach him hunting, so he brightened at once, beaming with relief now that Victor’s father had stepped in.
Commoners often passed down the trade of hunting through generations, but in practice, their know-how was usually shared only with their own children.
Hilde, who had nothing better to do, decided to go along as well.
Once they passed through the village wall and headed toward the rear mountain, there was nothing but dense trees all around except for the path worn by human feet. Victor’s father suddenly seemed to spot something ahead and crouched down.
"See these tracks here? They belong to a beast. The fact that they’re so clear even on a path people use means it’s nearby."
While the two young men learned eagerly with bright eyes, Hilde grew bored and looked around—then noticed something. Even in broad daylight, flower petals were glimmering faintly, as if announcing their existence to the world.
As she moved closer, the glow became even clearer.
This is a jackpot, isn’t it?
Hilde marveled at the unexpected haul. It looked like magic herb, a high-grade material used to make superior potions and upgrade Stigmas in the game.
It was in extremely high demand, but because it couldn’t be cultivated directly, people had to take guild requests or grind endlessly to obtain it. It was a precious material.
But then a question occurred to her.
This village was near the beginner area where playable characters started, and the ambient mana was too thin for magic herb to grow easily.
Hilde yanked it out by the roots and carried it back to where the others were gathered. Garrett laughed when he saw her return with a flower in hand.
"Hilde likes flowers, huh? Want me to give you some from my house?"
Finding it absurd, she only laughed along, but Victor’s father looked at the flower and suddenly seemed to remember something. His face changed in an instant.
"Isn’t this magic herb? Girl, where was this growing?"
"I found it over there because it looked pretty. Is this flower called magic herb?"
Hilde pointed out the spot where she’d picked it, then explained. Victor’s father carefully checked the place where Hilde had uprooted it, down to the roots, and returned with eyes wide open in astonishment.
"This magic herb is worth enough to buy two months’ worth of food for our village. But it’s a flower with concealment, so it’s terribly hard to find. Either way, Hilde, you’ve struck gold."
It had been sparkling, so she didn’t quite understand the part about concealment, but in the game, you had to search for this flower using detection magic, which made a certain amount of sense.
And when detection magic was cast on it, magic herb emitted a glittering effect, and then you had to collect it.
Still, another question bothered her.
Hilde still couldn’t use magic, so there had been no way for her to cast detection magic.
It’s great that I found this here, but these only show up in high-level zones... Please don’t tell me something bad is about to happen.
"Whoa, that expensive? It just looks like a flower to me."
Because Garrett and Victor had only heard that it was worth two months of food, their eyes gleamed with sudden interest.
But today’s goal was to teach them how to hunt, so Victor’s father changed the mood and got started. He taught them how to spot animal tracks, how to set snares, how to drive prey into position, and even the use of styptics and all sorts of medicinal herbs. By the time he was done, the sun had begun to sink.
---
"I’m home, Mother."
"Dinner’s ready, so wash your hands and come eat."
Hilde hadn’t done anything special, but simply being back home made her feel relieved.
Only a day had passed since her memories from her previous life reappeared, yet the warmth of eleven years’ worth of happy memories still remained exactly as they had been.
"Thank you for the food."
After pulling out her chair and sitting down, Hilde bowed her head in prayer and started eating the soup.
Since she usually came home before sunset, she told her mother why she’d been late today, so the woman wouldn’t worry.
"Hilde. Still, you should let me know where you’re going ahead of time."
"Yes. I’ll be sure to tell you from now on before I go. Oh, right, I picked this up today."
Hilde rummaged through her bag and took out the magic herb to show Agatha. Even now, it still shimmered in Hilde’s eyes.
Agatha was startled when she saw it—not simply because it was expensive, but because this was a magic herb whose concealment had been stripped away by detection magic.
By Agatha’s knowledge, the odds of collecting magic herb without using detection magic were lower than finding gold in the street.
"Child. Do you know what this is?"
"Victor’s father said it was a very expensive flower called magic herb."
Hilde answered as though she had just seen it for the first time today.
"Keep it safe. It would be best to use this when Hilde needs it later."
Agatha smiled proudly and stroked Hilde’s hair, but a trace of bitterness lingered in her expression.