Meeting Is Always Sudden
Death was a hollow thing.
Especially on a battlefield where countless lives were being snuffed out.
A comrade you had shared a meal with just hours ago could lie sprawled on the ground without even closing their eyes.
A superior who picked at everything you did, no matter how small, could go still with the gurgling sound of blood frothing in his throat.
Whether he was a husband who had only recently married, or a dutiful son supporting his aging mother alone, no one could escape the merciless blade of war.
To return with all your limbs intact would be a miracle. To come back with only a minor wound would be sheer heavenly luck. Even if a part of your body got blown off, if you came back alive at all, that was fortune.
It must have been bad enough to inspire words like those.
No matter how tragic your circumstances might be, surviving a battlefield and making it back alive—unnoticed, unremembered—was in itself an absurd stroke of luck.
Right. Luck.
In the man’s opinion, the single most important thing for surviving a battlefield was luck.
Half-baked strength meant nothing.
Even on the very battlefield where he had survived, there had been plenty of comrades stronger than him, yet only the man and a handful of others had lived.
They had made it back only because they had been a little luckier than the rest.
If he hadn’t reflexively twisted his body away.
If the Sword Qi that came flying at him had veered just a little more to the side.
...Another miss.
And if the demon that had butchered his allies hadn’t lost interest and turned away.
Then what the man had lost that day would not have been his left arm, but his life.
The demon had inflicted near-total slaughter with nothing more than a few swings of its blade, then wandered off, and the surviving remnants of the unit had barely managed to flee.
There was no need to say what kind of morale those survivors had after escaping like that.
But the man was different.
After losing one arm and being driven from the battlefield as if spat out, he had returned to his hometown. And there, in his mother’s arms as she wept and held him close, the man had thought about it.
Could that really have been the strength of a human body—moreover, of a girl who looked younger than his own daughter?
The man understood then.
Half-baked strength was meaningless, but if strength was overwhelming—
If it was the kind of strength that could still prevail even when misfortune came crashing down—
...then perhaps it mattered.
Survival might depend on luck, but what separated fortune from disaster was strength.
And so the man took up his sword with the one arm he had left.
Waiting for the day his blade would one day reach the demon.
* * *
After the long festival of descent had ended, it had already been several days since we left the Holy Kingdom and set out on the road again.
In the routine of eating, riding, eating again, and riding again, there were two things Daun and I never skipped.
One was sword training, and the other was language study.
“...Do you two always train like this?”
Celine asked in a flustered voice.
I was learning Arkish, but I was still clumsy at it, and Celine didn’t know Granic at all.
So Celine and I could only talk through Daun’s translation, since she was the only one who knew both languages and could speak them.
Or Celine would use only the most basic words possible so I could understand her.
As if that would make communication any easier.
And the person translating our conversation, Daun, was now...
“...”
“Mm...”
No response. She looked dead.
I poked Daun’s side, where she lay face-down on the ground as if she had died there, but there was still no reaction.
Oh, dear... so young, and taken so tragically...
May she rest in paradise.
Rustle.
I gathered a little dirt and sprinkled it over her sprawled body.
“I’m... not asleep yet...”
“Ah, she’s alive.”
With a bizarre groan, Daun slowly pushed herself upright.
...An undead?
She looked exactly like something crawling out from beneath the earth, so much so that I unconsciously let my hand drift to my sword, wondering if I ought to exterminate her.
Then our eyes met, and Celine, too, was wearing an oddly sour expression—so it seemed she had been thinking something similar.
“Celine, would you mind...”
“Oh, of course.”
Golden holy mana flowed from Celine’s hand and seeped into Daun’s body. The scrapes scattered over her skin vanished, and some color returned to her pale face.
Her filthy clothes and utterly exhausted expression were still there, but at least she no longer looked like an undead.
Daun used her sword as a cane and got to her feet, then let out a long sigh.
“Really, I’m always indebted to you, Celine. If it weren’t for you, I’d already be a dead woman.”
“Even so, I’m not sure Canaria-nim would go quite that far...”
“...Honestly, you can’t say for sure either, can you?”
“N-no, that’s not...”
“Come on, don’t be like that. Be honest. Canaria can’t understand us anyway, so it’s fine.”
“How could I speak ill of someone behind her back, as a woman of the cloth?”
“Oh! Not ill of her, no, heaven forbid! I certainly don’t want to speak ill of Canaria either. It’s just... yes, I simply want your honest opinion.”
“My honest... opinion?”
“Yes. You don’t need to think too hard about it. Just tell me how difficult the training is.”
“Hmm... honestly...”
“Honestly...?”
“It does seem very hard.”
“See?!
After exchanging a few words with Celine, Daun instantly regained her energy.
It was a dramatic transformation, hard to believe she had been dying just a moment ago.
“Sometimes it even feels harder than training with the holy knights... Ah, I mean that in terms of the direction of the training.”
“You’re saying it’s hard no matter how you slice it, aren’t you? Oh dear, Canaria is a people-killer, a real people-killer...”
“...”
Judging by the way my name kept being dropped here and there, they were probably talking about me.
How irritating.
It bothered me that I couldn’t understand what they were saying, so I had even considered buying a magic device that could translate speech for me.
...The price, though.
Once I learned the price, I very quickly abandoned the idea.
Or maybe it would be more accurate to say it abandoned me.
No matter how much money I had saved up, spending that much on a gadget was hard to justify.
If I’d known, I should at least have asked Edel whether she had any good ideas.
From the way Earthlings could speak Arkish so fluently, Edel must have pulled some strings.
When I first spoke with Edel, I was too emotionally overwhelmed to think clearly, and during our second conversation there had been so much to talk about that my mind never got that far.
Earth, Dimensional Beasts, the Demon Continent...
With stakes that huge, there was no way I’d think about a translator.
And once the talk about demons was over, Edel had disappeared, so there hadn’t been any time anyway.
For now, I’d study as much as I could, and if it still didn’t work, I’d consider buying a magic device.
Money could always be earned again.
“You look fine. Want to keep going a little longer?”
“...Please, spare me.”
“...I did spare you, didn’t I?”
“No, I mean... I’m not asking you to keep me alive only by a technicality...”
Daun made the most pitiful face she possibly could.
“Da... Hmm...”
As I spoke to Daun, I suddenly stopped at the look in her eyes.
I’d told her my real name, but I had also asked her to call me Journey if possible.
It felt more familiar that way.
And I had added that if I ever felt like being called by my real name, I’d say so, and then she could use it.
...Saying this is a little awkward, but...
Isn’t she making it way too obvious?
Of course, it was because Daun had no idea I knew the truth.
I thought her excuse was flimsy, but I still played along.
“You were the one who asked me to teach you, Journey.”
If teaching her like this had no effect, then I had nothing to say for myself.
“You’ve improved a lot.”
That wasn’t empty praise just to make Daun feel better.
Her basics—such as how she held a sword—had improved, of course, but her combat ability had also become dramatically better than before.
She had mostly overcome the habit of being afraid of the blade she herself was swinging, and she was now able to respond more calmly even when attacks came flying at her.
“I-is that so? Ehehe. R-really?”
Daun’s expression said, Why is Canaria praising me? but once she heard the compliment, she grinned brightly.
Come to think of it, I didn’t think I’d praised her all that often while teaching her.
That was because there usually hadn’t been much to praise, of course, but seeing how happy it made her, maybe a little praise now and then wouldn’t hurt.
For the sake of effective instruction.
...Yes, it’s strictly for efficiency.
Watching Daun smile, the discomfort I’d been feeling eased a little.
“So, want to keep going just a bit longer?”
“You think I’ll fall for that? No way, I’m not doing it!”
I clicked my tongue as I watched Daun dash away before I could try to catch her.
Hah, didn’t work on her.
* * *
Crackle, crackle.
I stared half-dazed at the campfire as it burned.
I’d once heard that fire played one of the greatest roles in human progress.
Maybe that was why. Sitting quietly and watching flames dance like this had a strangely calming effect.
How long has it been since I last let myself relax like this?
If I thought back...
At the very least, I didn’t think I’d truly rested since I’d become the commander.
Or rather, since my father died.
The royals and nobles were a constant pain in the ass, we were at war with the Empire, and you never knew when monsters might come pouring in...
Even after Grasis fell and I was finally free of the burdensome position of commander of the Crimson Flame Knights, things hadn’t really changed.
I still had to stay on guard to some degree, because I never knew where or when danger would strike.
So the fact that I was relaxing like this now was extremely unusual.
Celine’s holy magic meant I didn’t need to worry about physical threats, and as for the things gnawing at my heart...
It would be a lie to say there was nothing, but for some reason I had the feeling things would work out, so I wasn’t too worried.
When had I started thinking so optimistically?
Even I found it laughable, and just as a snort of amusement was about to escape me—
“...Done!”
Suddenly, Daun let out a cheer.
It seemed that whatever she had been crouched in front of the campfire doing every night for days was finally finished.
Whenever I got curious and tried to look, she always said, “It’s a surprise gift, so no peeking,” and that was that—I couldn’t find out what she was doing.
I could have forced it if I really wanted to, but since she’d said that, I didn’t particularly feel like prying.
Still, if you call it a surprise gift, doesn’t that mean it stops being a surprise gift and just becomes a gift?
I tilted my head.
Meanwhile, Daun was busily tidying up the area as she made her way over to me.
“Ta-da! A surprise gift.”
“Y-yeah... I’m surprised. I never would’ve guessed you were preparing something like this.”
“Pfft, what’s that supposed to mean? Were you acting? That didn’t suit you at all!”
“...”
I’d gone to the trouble of playing along, too.
When I puffed out my cheeks, Daun pinched them.
“Aww, so cute~”
“Mmmhph.”
She played with my cheeks like I was a toy, and only let go after my eyes narrowed into sharp little triangles.
Rubbing my cheeks, which had a faint warmth left in them, I asked, “So what is this?”
Daun fluttered through a bundle of papers.
Between the stacked sheets, words glimmered in and out of view.
“Flashcards. I thought they’d make studying easier, and it’d be more convenient for you to talk with Celine, too.”
“?”
At the mention of her name, Celine, who had been standing a little way off, perked up her ears.
She got to her feet and came over, then let out a soft gasp when she saw what was in my hands.
“Oh my, you finished them. You must have worked very hard.”
“Hm. I put in a lot of effort!”
There were Granic and Arkish written on each sheet of paper.
And, apparently to help with understanding, there were simple drawings matched to each word.
While Daun puffed herself up with pride, Celine and I looked over the flashcards she had made.
“F-fish?”
“Yes. That’s the word for fish.”
“...And this?”
“That one means ‘doll.’”
“Ah.”
...It was written in Granic, sure, but I’d obviously thought it was a monster because of the picture. It was a doll?
Daun’s drawing skill was objectively not great.
And yet, even so, her feelings came through.
“...Thank you.”
I smiled faintly and sent my gratitude to her, too.