Chapter 3
"Seriously — is this some kind of joke, or what?"
Up until now, my parents' endless warnings had kept me deliberately turning a blind eye to the back alleys. Today I combed every one of them, tracked down the den of those loan shark bastards I'd heard about at the bar, and stormed straight in — and came out with nothing, because those bastards had no idea where my parents were.
"S-spare me..."
Thud. My head was already a wreck and the gang boss's whining was grating on my nerves, so I brought the knife handle down on him and knocked him cold. A deep sigh slipped out of me on its own.
Shit. Looks like I picked the wrong target to start shit with.
My hometown was an awkward sort of territory — too big to call a village, too small to call a city — so I'd assumed the people who grabbed my parents were just some scattered pack of street punks. Bad assumption.
"Separate bastards doing the grabbing, separate ones hauling them off... who do these fucks think they are, some kind of merchant guild?"
The round of magical Twenty Questions I'd played with the loan sharks back at the bar had told me this much: these bastards had dragged my parents away about a week ago — right when I left the village, to the day.
The problem was that they'd only held my parents for a single day before handing them over to someone else, bundled in with the other deadbeat debtors they'd collected—
Slave traders.
And not just anywhere — to the big city of some county a good few days' travel from here.
Had some big-shot criminal organization in a major city sent underlings out to this little town to keep its supply of slaves flowing?
I felt like I was going insane.
"On foot, there's no way I catch up... but a horse... could I even get my hands on one?"
Fortunately, true to their trade, the loan sharks' den was piled with a fair amount of money and valuables. Alongside the pack I carried my knives in, there was now a big leather pouch I'd scavenged from the place, grown suitably heavy with copper coins and jewels.
With the road ahead urgent, there was a considerable sum I couldn't carry — so I gathered up a good chunk of the rest and buried it in secret in the hills behind the den.
The moment I get my parents back, I grab my gear and the money and bolt for another city.
Part of me felt a twinge of hesitation — for all I knew, that money was stained with the blood of innocent people, just like my parents — but in the end, it was money some other bastard would pocket if I didn't. I rationalized it: might as well be me, the one avenging them, who takes it.
"Ha, shit... even if I beat these bastards to a pulp, I won't catch the ones ahead of them."
Looked like this would be a long journey.
As expected, it took me considerable time — more than a month — to turn up my parents' next trail.
In a place called Zamunk County, I tore apart the slave-trading convoy, my first target, and from there interrogation after interrogation carried me across city after city, until today I found myself in a place called the Rung Duchy — far from home by any measure, about as far as you could get and still be on the empire's map.
From what I'd learned, trading slaves without imperial sanction was a serious crime in this empire — get caught, and the minimum sentence was death.
Apparently even criminal bastards fear dying, because these people were far more careful than I'd expected. Like a densely woven spiderweb: seize one point and it simply connected to another, while the center stayed forever out of easy reach.
I ate off the money I'd shaken out of the loan sharks, slept, moved on — and when even that began to run dry, I slept rough, or emptied the pockets of the idiots who decided to pick fights with a kid, or tried to kidnap one. That was how I finally tracked down the subsidiary outfit that had sold my parents off as slaves.
Repeating the truth edition of Twenty Questions for the past month, as I had all along, gave me the final answer: in the end, my parents had been sold at a slave market to a criminal organization, as menial laborers.
Well, fair enough — anyone buying illegal slaves would be a criminal too.
Buying slaves through legal channels apparently came with strict qualifications and standards, so the criminals and lowlifes who needed labor worked cheap had no choice but to procure it illegally.
"So that's what they plan to do with my mom and dad? Those fucking bastards."
Deep, rising fury washed over me as I walked toward their den, mulling over just where to start carving up the absolute dregs of society who'd bought my parents and were working them like dogs—
"Kyaaah!?"
"...?"
Even sunk in thought, my ear caught the ragged breathing, the footsteps, the screams of a girl.
"What the hell..."
It was broad daylight, easy to forget, but this was officially the worst-policed corner of the Rung Duchy — even I had already been hassled by street thugs more times than I cared to count.
Why would a girl be somewhere like this?
One thing was certain: this was no place for a girl to be wandering, and even from that one glimpse of her voice, peace and joy were nowhere in it — it was soaked through with desperation and terror.
Pat, pat. Then came footsteps, far heavier than the girl's.
More than one pair of them.
"There she is!"
"Don't let her get away!"
I could hear the pursuers shouting, and it did not sound like the poor bodyguards of some naive young lady making a lovers' escape straight out of a fairy tale—
The footsteps were close now, so I hid myself and got a look at the men doing the chasing: every one of them built like a wall, faces and bodies crisscrossed with scars — a criminal lineup if anyone ever saw one.
Judging by the thickness of their forearms, and by how barely a sound reached my ears despite them sprinting that hard — unlike the other idiots whose limbs I'd disassembled along the way, these were the real thing. Every last one of them, proper henchman material.
And I'm in a hurry myself...
The bastards who bought my parents were said to be first-rank gangsters even within this duchy — and with the slave shop already torn apart behind me, if I didn't move within the hour, word of me would reach their ears.
"Sorry, but my mom and dad matter more than some brat I don't know."
This was a chance I'd suffered over a month to earn. I could not blow what might be my only shot on meddling that wouldn't help anyone.
Couldn't. And yet—
"Ha... damn it."
You get tangled up in sentiment at the worst possible times. If you can't shake that habit, someday you'll die saving somebody else.
"Damn old man — would it kill you to say one nice thing to your only grandson?"
"That's what talking to people like that gets you — buried in the mountains, unable to get along with a soul, until the day they nail your coffin shut."
My grandfather's infuriating words surfaced — and the most infuriating thing was that I had no comeback.
My head knew there was nothing in it for me, knew perfectly well it was a lunatic thing to do — but unlike my head, my body was already loosening up, a knife in each hand.
Letting out one more of the sighs that had multiplied so much this past month, I stepped out of the alley where I'd been hiding and bellowed, loud enough for the whole pack chasing the girl to hear.
"Hey! You eunuch bastards!"
"A blade!?"
Fwoosh. I hurled a knife at them, and sure enough — my bad instincts had called it right — the instant it left my hand, every one of them twisted out of its path with startling agility.
"It's just a bra— urk!?"
Thanks to the torment my grandfather put me through, I was stronger than most grown men — but not stronger than fellows genuinely trained like these — which meant dragging things out was not an option. I had to end this as fast as I could, while they were still careless enough to write me off as some snot-nosed brat.
Swish. Before they could make sense of what was happening, I dove in among them and swung my remaining knife, laying a clean diagonal gash across the chest of the one nearest me.
"...!"
"You little sh— gahk!?"
It was as if the man had armor layered under his clothes — the cut I'd meant to open him up to the guts stopped dead on his ribs. The one I'd slashed didn't die; he only vomited blood from his mouth, and drove a kick into my stomach.
"What kind of brat—!"
"We're going to lose her! Deal with him, fast!"
Aaah, this really is going to drive me crazy. It's not like I've got a long, peaceful life to be wasting.
...What is this?
The girl whose scream Gul had caught as he passed by — Ferri — could not close her mouth at the desperate, horrific battle before her, where blood and shrieking erupted without end.
"What the hell is with this brat!!"
"You fucking bastards!!!"
The strangers chasing her were kidnappers — and the one fighting them tooth and nail, against sturdy men radiating an aura of strength that even a girl with no grounding in combat could feel, was, astonishingly, a boy who looked all of a few years older than she was.
No — a boy too young to even be called a youth.
Who on earth is he...?
Why she was being chased to begin with — she was brimming with questions from every angle, but the one that filled her mind was the identity of the boy now locked in combat with her kidnappers. No matter how she searched her short past, no one like him ever surfaced.
"Who the hell are you!? Why are you getting in our way!"
"You're the ones in my way, you fucking bastards! Do your dirty work somewhere I can't see — you're being an eyesore!"
Wham. The fist of a man wearing spiked steel knuckles smashed into Gul's face; his cheek tore open and he shrieked.
But in the very next instant he caught the arm of the man who'd struck him, yanked himself in close, and bit down, tearing the man's nose open with his teeth.
He clearly can't be more than a few years older than me... where is that strength coming from, in that small frame?
I need to run...
Partly it was that her legs refused to obey — but more than that, Ferri was watching Gul fight as if spellbound.
He's clearly the weaker one. He should be down any second now.
Watching a nameless boy — tied to her by nothing, appearing out of nowhere — fight her would-be attackers in that precarious, teetering way, her anxiety and fear had somehow drained away, and something strange had filled the space instead: relief.
Come to think of it...
She'd assumed Gul was doing nothing but taking a beating against that overwhelming difference in size — yet already two of the five kidnappers lay sprawled on the ground.
Oh — another one.
The man whose nose had just been torn off took a blade across the ankle and went down. The third.
"Wh-what is with this kid...! Why, why won't he fall!"
The kidnappers too were slowly realizing how strangely things had turned — fear creeping into their faces, for all their numbers, for all their strength.
That's right — the very fear Ferri had been feeling until moments ago, fear handed to her by these men, was now living on their faces, aimed at a boy barely older than she was.
Some ten more minutes crawled past, and at last he drove his head into the face of the final man standing, knocking him out cold.
"Hoo, hoo... those bastards were stubborn as hell... ptui."
The boy Gul — that's rich, coming from him — staggered along, drenched in his own blood and that of the kidnappers he'd felled, and slumped against a wall.
"Ha, shit... hey."
Gul, his eyes half out of focus, was clutching at his forehead when he caught the gaze resting patiently on him, and spoke to Ferri.
"E-excuse me..."
"Can you stand?"
Blunt, informal words from a total stranger — and the thanks Ferri had been about to give caught in her throat.
"Sorry?"
"I said, can you walk?"
"Ah— ah, u-um, yes!"
"This place is dangerous, so run. I don't know the roads here either, so I can't see you back."
"I-I know the way... if you're going somewhere, I can help..."
"Ahem. Forget it. Don't need it..."
Even lost in her confusion, Ferri tried to get something across to him — but Gul never gave her so much as a glance, and with a hand braced against the wall, he was gone.