Research (5)
I picked at a meager breakfast. There was nothing to be done about it — we barely had any food left to begin with. Mary had used every scrap of remaining ingredients she could, so I couldn't very well complain.
Even after we'd dug into the emergency rations we'd been carrying, it still wasn't nearly enough to fill four stomachs.
"It's a bit of a shame," Sister Mary said. She had done her best. The fault lay with the village that had refused to sell us any provisions.
"We'll have to catch something for lunch."
Hearing the young master talk about hunting brought meat to mind. If we managed to take down a wild boar, we could feast, couldn't we? Just imagining the taste of pork made my mouth water.
"We're leaving today?"
"Yeah. The village chief told us to go."
I'd already told my sister the news, and we'd finished eating, so we set about packing at once. We folded the bedrolls we'd slept in, gathered the tools I'd left out from yesterday's experiments, and — just to be safe — sealed the failed products of my alchemy into a suitable pouch and closed it tight.
"Why are you taking those?"
"Pardon?"
"Aren't those the failures?"
"Well, yes."
"Aren't they trash?"
They were trash. But I had a reason for taking them.
"No matter how much I dislike the villagers, I can't just leave dangerous things behind."
What if someone found them and ate them without knowing what they were?
The young master suddenly smiled.
"You have a kind heart."
What was he saying to embarrass me like that? I whipped my head away and avoided his gaze.
Even after packing, we double-checked that nothing had been left behind before stepping out of the house.
We were already walking, ready to leave the village behind, when the innkeeper appeared.
Or rather — it would be more accurate to say he'd been waiting for us.
"So you're going."
I nearly snapped. After all that hostility, he was going to needle us about leaving now? I bit my tongue hard. Nothing good would come out of my mouth if I opened it.
"Yes."
The young master answered, swallowing his anger.
"I'm sorry about that."
Was he really? His expression made me doubt it. We tried to walk past him and leave the village, but for some reason the innkeeper kept following.
"You're not going to ask why?"
"Why what?"
There was an edge in the young master's voice. We all knew what he meant.
We simply hadn't bothered to ask.
"Why we drove you out."
"I'm curious, I suppose, but there's no real reason to hear it. We'll never see each other again, after all."
At the young master's cutting words, the innkeeper let out a dry laugh. We were being sarcastic — what was so funny?
"True enough. True enough."
After following us for a while, still chuckling, the innkeeper suddenly spoke.
"It was a long time ago. Twenty years, no — thirty? A disaster came to this village."
A pack of monsters had attacked, he said. There hadn't been any of the truly catastrophic large-class monsters, but the villagers had fought with everything they had to protect their families and their home.
A struggle for their lives.
"The damage was heavy, but we managed to hold them off somehow…"
The innkeeper's expression grew distant, as if he were looking back on those days.
But what did any of that have to do with us? I glanced at my companions — none of them seemed interested. They just kept walking, ignoring him.
"Later, we found out what caused the attack. It was almost absurd. Adventurers who had set out to subjugate the monsters had quit halfway through, and the ones that survived simply moved their territory. That was all."
So they'd raided a nest and let some escape? And those surviving monsters, desperate for a place to live, had left their range and happened to come across this village along the way? It was a pitiful story, and an unfair one.
But what did that have to do with us?
"That was when the people of this village started to despise adventurers and mercenaries and their kind."
Was he seriously about to ask us to forgive them because of some old tragedy?
"There were plenty of other incidents like it, too."
Adventurers hired from a big city to clear out monsters who killed a few small ones and then took the full payment and left. Mercenaries who lodged in the village and caused trouble. Adventurers who ran scams. Hunters who killed monsters in the nearby forest and then suddenly demanded a reward.
He laid out the grievances one after another.
"Am I to take this to mean what I think it means?"
That we were the sort who would leave monsters half-dealt-with and then act as if we'd done them a favor?
"Some people might think that. I don't. I'm simply telling you how things stood."
"They're fools, then."
"Simple folk, as well."
Simple folk — he could actually say that with a straight face. Listening to what the village had endured, I did feel some pity. But why take it out on us? It was revolting. The young master's expression said he felt much the same.
"No matter how much you insist you're not like those people, a prejudice rooted that deep is hard to shake."
Why was he saying all this? Because they had their reasons, so we should understand?
I didn't care for the innkeeper's behavior either.
"Doesn't it seem suspicious when someone offers help and asks for nothing in return? What if they suddenly turn around and demand payment? Against adventurers as strong as you, what could we possibly do?"
So they'd twisted our goodwill… and with everything they'd been through, suspicion had come first.
By the time we'd finished listening to the innkeeper's story, we had already reached the edge of the village.
"You said we'd never see each other again, so I know there's little point in saying this. Still — thank you for your help. And try not to hate the villagers too much."
I… no, we gave him no answer. We didn't so much as glance his way. We simply kept walking forward.
We walked in silence for more than thirty minutes.
"Ah! This is so stifling! Why is everyone so quiet?!"
I held out, and held out, and finally snapped first.
"Just because."
My sister was always taciturn, so that was fine! But the young master, who normally chattered away without a second thought, being this quiet was strange.
"Young master?"
When I called him, he gave an awkward smile.
"Well, Miss Julian was quiet, so I closed my mouth as well."
"Why because of me?"
"Because you're the leader of this party, Miss Julian."
W-wait. I was the leader? I'd always thought the young master was. He was the one who always guided us — deciding destinations, setting our course. Always him.
I'd been absolutely certain he was the leader.
But what did that have to do with anything?
"What are you talking about?"
"If the leader is silent, how is anyone supposed to chatter?"
"No, what does being quiet have to do with talking…"
The young master and Sister Mary both looked at me as if I were the strange one for not understanding.
"Weren't you quiet because of the innkeeper earlier?"
H-huh? Where had that come from?
"Weren't you so floored by that nonsense of his that you just went silent?"
"Well… that part's true, but…"
"So we stayed quiet too. Bringing it up now would only leave everyone more frustrated."
Hearing Sister Mary put it that way, I began to understand a little.
"Ahem. I-I'm not really bothered by it, so please just relax…"
"Haha. I was dying of the silence, so that's a relief."
"You were?"
Well — he was the sort who talked constantly under normal circumstances. Of course he'd been stifled.
"Th-that village… it didn't seem like it would last long."
"Is that so? Not that it matters to us."
Whether that village thrived or collapsed was none of my business.
Even if they had their reasons, a prejudice rooted that deep would one day close around the village's throat.
Our own village was just as small. The thought that we might end up the same way worried me.
"Sister, let's make sure our village never becomes like that."
"Mm."
"A village, is it…"
"I told you before, didn't I? My sister is going to be the next village chief."
"Yes, you did."
I'd already shared that with the young master.
"We should take that place as a cautionary tale."
"Yes. That would be wise."
Of course, hearing about the troubles those adventurers had caused, I did feel some pity…
"A lot of it comes down to not building up their own defenses, too…"
Our village ran its own vigilante corps so that sort of thing would never happen.
The young master smiled faintly.
"Truthfully, a vigilante corps is a dangerous institution."
From a noble's perspective, it could look like a private army.
"Well — both adventurers and vigilante corps came about because there was no other choice."
The birth of vigilante corps and adventurers, he explained, dated back several hundred years — to the end of an era when the concept of a territory still mattered more than the concept of a nation.
There had been a king and a kingdom, but the independence of the nobility had been far greater. In those days, a territorial lord was practically a king in his own right, and many nobles raised private armies.
They built their strength so they could fight neighboring territories at any time. When the kingdom went to war, the nobles' private soldiers were gathered up and used as troops.
That system broke down with centralization. Local noble power collapsed, royal authority strengthened, and everything changed.
The greatest change of all was the abolition of the nobles' private armies.
Not every soldier was stripped away, of course. The number of troops a noble could keep was limited by rank and the location of their territory. Anyone who failed to comply would hear a single question:
Plotting rebellion, are you?
There had been fierce resistance at first, but in the struggle between the central and regional nobility, the regions lost.
And as the private armies vanished, all sorts of problems arose.
Private soldiers had filled many roles. They hadn't existed solely for war. They cleared out surging monsters, worked on civil engineering projects, hunted bandits, and maintained public order.
When those private armies disappeared, the number of soldiers shrank.
The result: a great many unemployed men. And some of those unemployed men became bandits. Could a man who had lived as a soldier simply return to ordinary life and adapt?
Gaps opened in public security. Places with small territories and dense populations fared better. But wide territories? Villages scattered everywhere? There was no covering them all.
Monster subjugation fell off as well.
There had once been regular hunts conducted under the pretense of training. Those dwindled. Soldiers were too busy maintaining order to spare the strength for subjugation.
"All those problems arose, and yet under the banner of centralization, private armies continued to be restricted."
And so mercenaries reappeared. Mercenaries who hung out a catchphrase of We'll handle anything — they stepped in to fill the void left by the private armies.
In practice their work was no different from a private army's, but on the surface they drew a line: no connection to the nobility. Of course, a mercenary hired by a noble was a private soldier in all but name. Mercenaries had evolved into private armies to begin with, so how could they be different?
Mercenaries fought in wars and handled the nobles' dirty work… and noble power grew strong again.
"And so the kings began to suppress the mercenaries as well."
The resistance was fierce, but they placed restrictions even on mercenaries who were private armies in everything but name. The alternative that emerged was the adventurer.
Freelance problem-solvers. Mercenaries who refused work related to war or political conflict.
Only after adventurers appeared, he said, did many of those problems find solutions.
"After that, the kingdom learned to coexist with adventurers and mercenaries."
The kingdom itself had drawn mercenaries and adventurers onto its side. That was the facade known as the Adventurers' Guild…
"But the adventurer system itself had holes."
It never thrived outside cities with large populations, and not every person calling themselves an adventurer did honest work.
Which was how villages like that one ended up suffering.
"In the past, the reason nobles and territorial lords were praised was because they did so much to protect their people."
And among the reasons commoners no longer respected the nobility, he said, the abolition of private armies played a part.
The respect that had once grown from a lord's soldiers clearing monsters and protecting villages was simply gone now.
Even a noble who held a territory and wanted to fix that problem would find the limits many.
"That's a fascinating story."
So adventurers hadn't simply appeared out of nowhere… I was walking along, listening, when my stomach let out a loud growl.
"Haha. It seems quite a bit of time has passed already."
Of all the stomachs that could have made a sound, it had to be mine! Mortified, I clutched my belly and looked away.
"Let's start hunting, then."
At the young master's declaration, we came to a stop.