No Such Thing as a Male Adventurer
"Beor… would you mind going back to the church for another checkup? Something about your symptoms just doesn't feel like ordinary amnesia…."
Senior Elin's expression grew a touch more serious as she met my eyes. Genuine concern shone in her gaze — and yet the mere fact that our eyes had locked was enough to set my heart thudding for no good reason.
"…Go back to the church?"
"If it were just a matter of not knowing common knowledge, I'd chalk it up to the amnesia. But for some reason, it feels like you've been operating on a completely different set of common knowledge from the start…."
"…I'm sorry. Could you explain a little more?"
"Hmm…. Where do I even begin…."
Unlike the patient, one-by-one answers she'd been giving me so far, she crossed her arms this time, her face turning decidedly grave. I held my gaze on her, wondering what on earth was coming — and then something almost unbelievable slipped from her lips.
"For starters, there's no such thing as a male adventurer."
"What?"
"Well, men don't have Unique Abilities. How is someone without a Unique Ability supposed to be an adventurer? It's absurd just to say it out loud."
…Come to think of it, that phrase had shown up on the appraisal orb earlier, too.
I recalled the text that had appeared — Unique Ability: Vitality Massage. A-rank — and decided to start by asking her about Unique Abilities themselves.
"Senior Elin, I think I forgot this because of the amnesia too…."
"Hm?"
"What exactly is a Unique Ability…?"
"…You really don't know anything, do you?"
"…I'm sorry. I genuinely can't remember a thing."
"Sounds like a pretty severe case. Forgetting even basic common sense like this…."
"At least my speech and comprehension still work fine, so that's something. Memories will come back eventually — and if they don't, I'll just build new ones."
"You're an optimist, Beor. You seem like a completely different person from yesterday."
…Well, I am a different person, so of course I would.
I'd been deliberately vague to keep her from growing suspicious or the mood from turning heavy, and for now it seemed to be working.
"First off, a Unique Ability is like a personal specialty that only women have."
"A specialty?"
"Mm-hm."
"Don't men have specialties too, though? Everyone does. I wouldn't say I'm completely without one myself."
"Hmm. It is a specialty, but more like a specialty no one else can copy. Does that make more sense?"
"What?"
"For example — want to throw a multiplication problem at me? Something around five digits."
"Multiplication?"
"Yeah. Showing you will be faster than explaining."
Her confident expression made me a little skeptical, but I nodded anyway and pulled a pair of numbers more or less at random from my head.
"All right… what's 53,255 times 98,741?"
"5,258,451,955. Dropped the place-value units."
"……What?"
"If you don't believe me, calculate it yourself. I doubt I got it wrong."
"…Do you have a calculator?"
"Hm? A calculator? Oh — you mean an abacus? Here."
…Right. Of course a world that looked like medieval fantasy wouldn't have digital calculators.
An abacus would do in a pinch, so I took it. All I needed was to check whether the answer was right or wrong.
I only calculated the last three digits — 255 times 741 — and checked the final three places of the product….
"…Looks about right."
"Huh, already done? I figured it'd take you a good ten minutes."
"I just multiplied the last three digits. If those match, the whole answer is almost certainly correct. Even by pure luck, nailing that would be nearly impossible."
"True enough — if you're only checking right or wrong, that works. You're pretty sharp, Beor."
"I think you're the impressive one here, Senior Elin."
Multiplying five-digit numbers on an abacus would have taken forever. A three-digit product never went past six digits, so for a simple verification, that much was plenty.
"Is doing arithmetic in a few seconds your Unique Ability?"
"Hm? No, no. More precisely, my Unique Ability is called Thought Acceleration. It's B-rank."
"There are ranks, too?"
"Of course there are. Without ranks, how would you even judge whether a Unique Ability is useful or not?"
Fair point — the appraisal orb earlier had displayed an A-rank grade as well. In this world, apparently, ranking these things was so ordinary that questioning it would have been the strange part.
For now, I decided to take everything Senior Elin said as the truth. Nothing about her so far suggested she was the type to lie.
That said — the ability that had popped up when I'd accidentally used the appraisal orb, Vitality Massage, had been listed as A-rank. Did that mean my Unique Ability was stronger than hers?
"Mine's the kind of ability with zero combat aptitude, which is why I work as a receptionist at the Adventurer's Guild. But for most women, their Unique Ability is their weapon. See that dark elf warrior over there with the giant warhammer?"
"Yes, I see her."
"I can't go into detail because of privacy, but she's almost certainly got a Unique Ability suited to swinging that massive warhammer — something that spikes her strength in an instant, or lets her land a heavier blow with a hammer."
"I see."
"And that cloaked mage over there? Obviously a Unique Ability for casting magic. What kind of magic, you'd have to ask her yourself or watch her fight to find out."
"I think I get the idea. So a Unique Ability is something so powerful or specialized that no amount of ordinary effort could ever imitate it?"
"Mm-hm, exactly. You're a quick study."
So Unique Abilities were something close to an innate aptitude that every individual in this world possessed — except that aptitude was already fixed from the start.
A world where you couldn't freely choose your own dreams or profession didn't sit well with me, but that was only because I was an outsider. The people born here would have grown up taking it for granted that you lived according to your Unique Ability, and wouldn't find anything odd about it at all.
They might even find the original world's system — where effort alone could change your career — strange or exhausting by comparison.
"But what do you mean men don't have Unique Abilities?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. Women's Unique Abilities are all different, so even among adventurers, one might be a gifted swordswoman while another excels at magic. Men, on the other hand, have no Unique Abilities, so their physical capabilities tend to be more or less the same across the board."
"Hmm…."
"Without a Unique Ability, you obviously can't take on monster subjugations or caravan escort jobs, so male adventurers simply don't exist. Sure, men are generally stronger than women in raw muscle — but once a Unique Ability enters the picture, that barely matters."
"…I see."
Then what was that Vitality Massage, A-rank that had shown up on the appraisal orb? From where I stood, it had clearly looked like my Unique Ability.
Even without fully understanding what Unique Abilities were, Senior Elin's explanation made one thing clear: as a man, I wasn't supposed to have one. What would happen if I let that slip?
Apparently she took my silence for disappointment, because she hurriedly added something to console me.
"Ah — you don't need to look so down about it! Men are precious just by existing!"
"What? What do you mean by that?"
"Men are always scarce, so they're treated as rare no matter where they go. Roughly one boy is born for every twenty girls? And even then, most of them marry into noble or royal families the moment they come of age, so for commoners like us, just catching a glimpse of an adult man is hard enough. They're genuinely that rare."
"…That rare? But I'm working right here at the Adventurer's Guild."
"That's because you're unusual, Beor…. Even I don't know why you chose to work at the Adventurer's Guild. The Beor from before the memory loss never told me. No matter what I asked, he'd just shake his head or ignore me…."
"Ah — I'm sorry…."
"No, no! I'm not talking about the you of right now, of course! …Wait, or am I? The original Beor is still Beor, so maybe I am talking about the current you? Ugh, I'm getting confused…."
What kind of personality had the previous owner of this body even had? One thing was certain: it was almost certainly nothing like mine.
At least I'd learned that men were treated as precious in this world — which might well have affected the sexual dynamics between men and women, too.
In my original world, women generally had an easier time satisfying their desires. In a world where men were this scarce, though, I had a strong feeling it would be the opposite.
To the Senior Elin currently fretting over my identity, I asked her to draw a clean line between the old me and the current me.
"You can just think of the me from before and the me right now as two different people. Consider this a chance to start a whole new life."
"Wow…. Your mental fortitude is something else, Beor…."
"By the way — you said ordinary commoners can barely even catch a glimpse of an adult man. Does that include you, Senior Elin?"
"Pretty much? Though since I work at the Adventurer's Guild, I've seen a few when escort jobs come in…. Honestly, though, they were a bit much for me."
"What?"
"Well, grown men are always arrogant, or always angry, or somehow creepy…. Ah — I'm not talking about you, Beor, obviously!"
"I figured as much."
"…A-anyway, men all grow up spoiled rotten, so most of them have terrible personalities. Of course, no matter how bad the personality, every woman still secretly wishes she could be held by a man at least once — so nobody ever shows that they dislike it."
"Hmm…."
Just as I'd expected — in this world, women seemed to have stronger sexual desire than men.
More precisely, the scarcity of men had forced that desire to grow, but it was fair enough to say that women here carried a bit more hunger for sex than men did.
And that meant Senior Elin herself almost certainly harbored the wish of being held by a man at least once….
Asking her outright would probably be rude.
I had no desire to make things awkward with the first person I'd actually gotten close to in this world, so I locked the thought away. There was still plenty more I wanted to ask her about this place, after all.
"Nngh, huuuuuuh…!"
Whether from the exhaustion of delivering a lecture so meticulous even someone summoned to another world less than a day ago could follow it, Senior Elin stretched her arms out long and rolled her shoulders again.
…Frankly, I suspected those enormous breasts of hers accounted for a solid eighty percent of why her shoulders were so sore.
Come to think of it, my Unique Ability was called Vitality Massage, wasn't it?
Would that ability have some kind of effect if I worked on Senior Elin's shoulders?
"Senior Elin."
"Nngh~! Hm?"
"If your shoulders are stiff, would you like me to rub them a little?"
"Wh— huh?!"
Figuring I might as well test it firsthand, I carefully offered her a massage. I'd already put her through a lot over the course of a single day, after all.
And I was more than a little curious to find out just what my Unique Ability actually did.