Teir Bamon (2)
The knight's movements froze at my words. He looked back and forth between me and Ashel, his face looking ready to break into a cold sweat, then glanced back at the woman.
"What are you doing?! That bastard called me vulgar! Kill him already!"
She was screaming at the top of her lungs, half out of her mind and past any hope of grasping the situation — no different from a brat throwing a tantrum.
She's really something else.
I clicked my tongue under my breath and spoke.
"If that sounded like empty talk, draw your sword. Otherwise, take that noisy thing and get out."
The knight stared at me for a long moment, then finally took his hand off the hilt. Having crossed blades with Ashel himself, he seemed to have thoroughly grasped the gap in their skill. Instead, he opened his mouth and spoke in a threatening voice.
"......I don't know who you are, young master, but you're making a grave mistake. This lady is the daughter of this city's mayor......"
I didn't bother answering. I just gestured to Ashel. The moment her hand went to her sword hilt, the knight couldn't finish his sentence and shut his mouth.
"You......!"
The woman who'd been raising hell trembled with rage she couldn't contain, then slapped the knight across the face. She struck him again and again, hard, and he simply took it in silence. Having vented her fury, she whipped her gaze back around and glared at me with venom.
"You. I'm going to kill you for real. Do you know who my father is? He's the mayor of this city. This entire city belongs to my family."
"......"
"I'll make sure you pay for running that filthy mouth of yours. I'll make it so you never walk on two legs again unless you crawl between my thighs begging for mercy."
Then she spun around and stormed out of the shop. The escort knight followed after her, and the restaurant fell quiet. Every eye in the place was on us.
Wow......
That was genuinely impressive. I watched the spot where she'd vanished with a kind of admiration. Varos, too, stared at the door she'd gone through with eyes gone cold and still, then spoke to me carefully.
"If you would only give the word, I shall go meet this city's mayor myself. That insolent wench......"
"Don't bother."
This wasn't Enrok. I had no desire to stir up trouble in another Lord's territory if I could help it. My whereabouts could leak to the other Lords, and that might draw the kind of attention I didn't need.
But things had already gone this far. What could I do? I'd known from the moment I stepped in that this was going to get messy. I figured I might as well go see the face of the mayor who'd raised such a spectacular brat tomorrow, then put the whole thing out of my mind.
"Are you all right?"
Ashel helped the fallen waitress to her feet. The manager and the other staff, who'd only been watching until now, approached her belatedly with apologetic faces. Ashel handed the girl over to them and returned to her seat, bowing her head a little awkwardly as she sat down.
Then the man who'd been standing there awkwardly came over as well. He was the one who'd stepped in before Ashel, and nearly had his wrist cut off for it.
"Wow, thank you. I owe you my life, young master — and you as well, my lady. I nearly spent the rest of my days as a one-handed man."
He offered his thanks with an easygoing, good-natured smile. I nodded. From his clothes, he looked like an ordinary traveler. Still, among all the people who'd just stood there watching that lunatic's rampage, he'd been the only one to step forward. He seemed like a decent sort. Not that I blamed anyone who hadn't.
......?
Wait a second......
A faint, familiar feeling washed over me, and I looked at the man's face again, carefully. It was the same sensation I'd had when I first found Ashel. As I stared at him, he looked back at me with a puzzled expression. I asked him,
"What's your name?"
"Pardon?"
He seemed startled for a moment, then put on that same easy smile again.
"It's Rian, young master."
Rian.
And just like that, the image of an NPC character surfaced from my memory. A young man with blond hair and green eyes — the exact same face as the one standing in front of me.
Huh.
I was inwardly astonished, and at the same time found myself marveling at this bizarre coincidence as I turned his name over in my mind. Not the alias he'd just given, but the real name he was hiding.
Teir Bamon.
The abandoned youngest prince of Earthhill, the Neutral State. He wasn't quite a protagonist in the RASA setting, but among supporting characters, he was as close to a lead as you could get. The Earthhill episode involving him was one of the main storylines I'd genuinely liked in the game.
Right — this was five years before that, so he hadn't returned to the kingdom yet. He was still wandering Calderic......
"Um...... the food is ready."
A waitress approached the table hesitantly, carrying the finished dishes herself. A basket piled high with golden, appetizingly fried chicken was set down. I looked at the chicken, then at the table where Rian had been sitting, then back at him. And I asked,
"Call it fate. Would you care to join us for a meal?"
"......Pardon?"
Rian's eyes went round, as if to say, what on earth is this out of nowhere. Ashel and Varos, seated across from me, also stared at me with questioning looks, wondering why I'd suddenly done that.
But the context didn't matter. I wanted to talk with him. Because it occurred to me that this chance encounter might yield something after all.
The Keynes family had held the mayoral office of Vilpeck City for nine consecutive generations — a storied house of the 5th Lord's territory. Mayor Colton Keynes was sharing a somewhat late dinner with a distinguished guest who had come to the mansion after a long absence.
"So I hear the newly ascended 7th Lord crushed an entire merchant company right after taking the throne......"
When Colton posed the question offhandedly, the middle-aged beastfolk nodded.
"The owner of a workshop the company had been meddling with apparently had some connection to His Lordship. I don't know the details myself. Whatever the case, the company is thoroughly marked by the Lord's Castle now."
"......Chilling. And what did he seem like, to your eyes? I heard he's a complete outsider — a human, no less."
"I'm nothing but an administrator. It's not as though I know anything more than you do."
He was Lyca, an administrator of the 7th Lord's Castle, stopping here on official business. He was also, as it happened, a personal friend of Mayor Colton.
"Aside from the merchant company affair, he hasn't really stepped forward to do much of anything. Until I left the castle, I heard he spent all day looking at maps."
"Maps? Why would he......"
"The atmosphere around Seintea and the Neutral States has been uneasy lately, so it could be related to that. I'd rather not say too much, so don't press me on it."
Even with no one else present, talk of a Lord wasn't something you could toss around like idle gossip. The two men soon steered the conversation elsewhere.
Then a commotion rose at the dining room entrance. Colton tilted his head at the sight of his daughter stomping into the room, fuming.
"You're back early, my dear. You said you were going to look around the night market, but the sun hasn't even set yet."
His youngest daughter — born last, after three sons, the child whose birth had cost his wife her life — was a treasure beyond price to him. Denbri greeted Lyca first.
"I'm sorry to interrupt your meal."
Lyca nodded. He was a little annoyed, honestly, but he knew how desperately Colton doted on his youngest, so he let it slide. She turned to her father.
"Father, do you have any idea what kind of insult I just suffered out there?"
"......Hmm?"
"Some lowborn who doesn't know his place dared to call me vulgar! And this idiot here couldn't even draw his sword — he just stood there and watched!"
Colton's expression hardened as he wiped his mouth with a napkin. Lyca, too, leaned in with a look of growing interest. That Lady Denbri was an insufferable brat was a fact no one in this city didn't know. And yet she'd come home humiliated by someone?
"Tell me exactly what happened."
Denbri launched into a rapid-fire account of the restaurant incident. The waitress who'd spilled a drink on her dress, how she'd been "educating" the girl when some escort knight had interfered, and the verbal abuse that knight's master had heaped on her.
The more she talked, the more Lyca stared at her with a look of faint incredulity. She was recounting such extreme violence over something so trivial with complete shamelessness. It was absurd.
Colton's expression, on the other hand, only grew more grim. What mattered to him wasn't her conduct — it was the insult she'd suffered.
"Do you know who that scoundrel was?"
"No idea. Some nobody from some miserable little house, I'm sure."
"Hmm......"
"It's so humiliating I could die, Father. I can't go on living unless I make him grovel on the floor and apologize."
Colton asked the escort knight Jerold standing beside her.
"How was that knight's skill? Speak honestly."
"......Far superior to my own. I apologize."
He bowed his head in shame. Colton let out a small sigh and stroked his chin. Jerold was a sufficiently skilled knight — that was why he'd assigned him as his youngest daughter's escort. Anyone who traveled with a knight far superior to Jerold was clearly no ordinary person. Not a noble from a nearby house, surely. A noble from another Lord's territory, or some distant city?
"Very well. Wait here."
At Colton's words, Denbri's face brightened. Whoever's spawn this man was, inside this city, Colton was as good as a king. And this man had not only insulted his daughter but even ordered her cut down?
"What do you intend to do?"
"What else? I'll have him brought before me."
Colton answered Lyca's question simply. He planned to have the man brought to the mansion, look him in the face, and figure out which house this scoundrel belonged to. If it was someone he could settle things with amicably, he'd do so. If not, he'd make the man pay for what he'd done.
"What did they look like?"
"A black-haired man, and the escort knight was a white-haired woman."
Colton immediately summoned his knights and ordered them to find those two and bring them in.
Meanwhile, Lyca, who'd been listening from the side, tilted his head. A black-haired man and a white-haired female knight? That sounded somehow......
I'm thinking something ridiculous.
He dismissed it as an absurd flight of fancy and let out a short laugh. Quite a curious coincidence, he thought. It would have to make sense first. Why would the 7th Lord, who ought to be at his castle, suddenly be here in the 5th Lord's territory?
In any case, Lyca figured he'd stumbled onto some entertaining spectacle, and waited for the knights to hurry back with those fearless fools.