The Shame of Shatren (4)

Three knights—or rather, three bandits—were subdued without a hitch.

Perhaps because I held the statistical advantage, their movements were utterly sloppy and pointless. Even at the very end, that Tuspel fellow scrambled to his feet, snatched his sword back up, and lunged at me in a last desperate flail, but he hardly struck me as a formidable threat.

When I'd been playing the character, all I ever saw was a pixelated screen, so I'd never known. But now that I'd moved my own body through it, something felt distinctly off about him.

Good. That gets the first button buttoned, at least.

What was there to overthink? All I'd done was clear an episode.

Additional rewards, my foot. Knowing this thing, it'll just display them as three question marks anyway.

That grumble formed in my head without my meaning it to.

The first time a ??? marker vanished and something genuinely useful appeared—when I resolved Camilla's Dead Trigger—it really had been an enormous help. So naturally, the next time I saw the same message, I let myself hope. But whether the game's system simply refused to permit it, everything after that had been worthless. Messages would hover on screen only to vanish the moment I looked away, and when I checked to see if anything had changed from the original, nothing had, not really.

Which was why my expectations had been thoroughly snuffed out.

...Huh?

Unlike the question marks, these were sentences laid bare before my eyes—and they were absolutely not something I could afford to overlook.

Entry into Rusmayer Territory was only possible after the punishment of the three knights who had been masquerading as bandits and pillaging the land ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was complete. That period was roughly two days. Only after the character Diena recovered in her sickbed and returned home with Kiyan would the lock release, allowing Karsein to enter.

But if I cut down those two days.

If I entered Rusmayer a whole two days ahead of schedule.

I'd earn a higher Achievement Rate. And that means I'd have time to spare for a trip to Shatren Territory, too!

Either way, it was a massive gain.

While I was buried in those thoughts, the children—who looked two or three years younger than Karsein—appeared to have finished talking among themselves.

"Thank you so much, my lord. I don't even know how to begin repaying you..."

The girl called Diena, color restored to her cheeks, bowed her thanks before me. The three boys were no different, bowing again and again as they repeated their gratitude.

"We're thankful you helped us and all... but we don't really have anything to give ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you..."

...Good grief.

How on earth were things falling into place like this?

In the original storyline, they would have suspected me—demanded to know my real reason for saving them. Understandably so. The only one whose distrust of nobles had been broken was Kiyan; by now, thanks to raised affinity, Tony and Melik had come around as well, but Diena was a total stranger, and would have been all the more suspicious for it.

And yet here it was, offering to show me around the village so readily? Today, no less?

"Then give me a tour of your village."

There wasn't a single reason to refuse. This alone had already bought me back two days, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠plus several more hours.

Having cleared the episode by simultaneously achieving the two greatest factors influencing Rusmayer, walking into the village should not have been difficult.

But I knew better.

Even if entry were now possible, I could never let my guard down.

Once a main episode was set, an episode begun as a side quest—this being the first episode of Chapter 2—had to be brought to a proper close, no exceptions. The moment anything went wrong, my eligibility to attend the Eastern Noble Conference would be stripped away, and that tied directly into Karsein's bad ending.

And this is an episode I forced forward ahead of schedule. I may have bent the progression, but this part will still come for me as a bad ending without exception.

So it finally begins.

The moment my feet touched Rusmayer soil, Episode II had materialized on its own.

From here on, I couldn't afford to surrender a single mistake.

When the carriage door swung open, a wall of gazes thick with raw emotion turned toward us.

Toward me, no less.

Going by the in-game story, Kiyan couldn't have been the only one. The people of this village have a grudge against nobility ground into them.

What outrages had been inflicted on them.

What injustices they had been made to suffer.

What lawlessness had been visited upon them.

From the villagers' standpoint, every last one of those memories would be surfacing, vivid and undimmed.

And the system never let moments like this slip past.

Options that made my head swim just reading them.

Had I failed to fill the affinity of a key figure, so that option 3 wasn't automatically converted to silence, I had the feeling I'd be banished on the spot.

But I had, at present, fully stocked the affinity of several key figures.

"Barak, sir!"

"Kiyan? Why on earth are you..."

"Hold on—Tony and Melik are there too. And Diena with them?"

"What in the world is going on? Those children, stepping out of a noble's carriage?"

Because I'd raised not one but four people's affinity to the brim, even the adults looked utterly bewildered.

Naturally, per option 3, all I had to do was keep my mouth firmly shut.

"Young Lord Karsein has become the master of our village—no, of all Rusmayer Territory!"

"And that's not all! He lent us his carriage so we could take Diena to a hospital!"

"And, um, I'm all better now! You can see I'm in fine fettle, right?"

"And those knights from Count Modrich's house—Diena was in danger and they deliberately wouldn't clear the road, but our lord took care of every last one of them!"

"What did you say...?"

The boys and girl relayed the day's events in bright, proud voices, practically boasting. Before long, the Status Window flickered up again.

In the original run, the rating only ever dropped from Warning to Restricted, and from that point onward the choices came marching in. Choices tied to nobility. Choices tied to House Vagrand, sitting at the very apex of the peerage. Every manner of choice saturated with distrust and suspicion—they were scheduled to pop up again and again to torment me.

I'd been prepared to weather them using the information Camilla had organized for me and my hard-won mastery of the retry technique.

But the opening choice that was supposed to greet me at village entry simply never appeared. The key question—how would I respond to being asked whether I'd deceived Kiyan—never materialized at all. The danger rating had dropped two full steps to Caution instead of Restricted.

In that state, one man approached me.

This was my chance.

Without a word, I drew out all four of the straw ropes I'd come to possess and held them up for the man to see.

His eyes went wide as saucers.

"I won't claim I had nothing in mind when I helped them, but deceiving those kids was never part of it."

After a moment's silence, he spoke, his expression softened almost beyond recognition.

"...I am Barak, chief of Remten Village. Might I—might it be all right if we continue this conversation elsewhere?"

"By all means."

Just as I'd suspected, the usual battery of questions had been skipped entirely this time as well.

Which suited me fine. Who would refuse a straight pass to the next stage?

This was the home of Barak, chief of Remten Village, the heart of Rusmayer. We had cut through the flood of stares from villagers and territory folk alike to reach it.

One might think that stepping into the chief's house meant the villagers' suspicions had been laid to rest.

One glance at the Status Window made it plain: their doubts had not yet been severed.

Diena had announced her recovery, and Kiyan and his friends had recounted the day's events in full, easing the worst of the distrustful stares—but the villagers' eyes remained firmly hostile. These were people who, dwelling in the shadow of colluding nobles' lands, had been spat upon and reviled, treated as objects of hatred and contempt and pushed to the margins of everything.

Which was why I could say it with certainty.

Something as small as this would never, ever shake their suspicion loose.

That was a feeling I knew better than anyone—having been cast out even by my own family.

A single mug of milk, steam curling gently from its surface.

In this lingering winter chill, few things could have suited the moment better.

Reading that prompt, I checked the status ailment values displayed beside it.

Neither was at a dangerous level, but at these values the effects were more than trivial—they could become a nuisance. Here was an opportunity to mitigate status conditions I would otherwise have to manage by hand.

And yet, this was nothing but a cunning sleight of hand.

Even this trivial little act already constituted a choice.

Worse, the system's cunning stitching was woven into it. At a glance, it looked as though the choice shaped the episode's direction—but nowhere did it say the Achievement Rate could drop. The thing no longer even bothered to warn you that a bad ending lurked here.

I pushed the mug away without hesitation.

"Milk is a rich, nutritious luxury. Save it for the children. It's not meant for me."

"Even so, are we not obligated to extend hospitality to your lordship, the lord of this territory?"

"That milk, if I recall, is made from a hard-to-source ingredient. I understand the land isn't well suited to raising dairy cattle, so it's mostly bought in and given to the children."

Barak's lips twitched.

He knew I was right—precisely because this milk was never meant to be poured down my throat.

"...I understand. However, this milk has already been warmed, so someone must drink it at once. To whom shall I bring it?"

...

...

A cascade of follow-up choices.

Whoever received the warm milk, my affinity with them would shift accordingly.

Option 1 was a trap hiding in plain sight—Barak's affinity wouldn't rise; it would sink even further. The three boys in options 3, 4, and 5 were the same. None of them stood to gain much from drinking it.

Which was why, in my previous run, I had chosen option 2. Diena had been the child in the gravest danger, and feeding the milk to her promised the greatest effect—it had seemed the obvious, rational call. And indeed, not only Diena's affinity but the villagers' as a whole had risen, and even my Recognition within the village had inched upward.

But right now, that no longer felt like the right answer.

The more I look at it, the more it doesn't add up. Diena is fully recovered by now—why would her name still be on this list?

Which meant the milk had to go to the person who needed it most.

This choice mattered far more than it appeared. It wasn't merely a matter of feeding someone milk. This was the single opportunity to open the door to conversation in this territory.

I cannot miss this. The moment I do, it's over!

I racked my brain with the desperation of a man trying to dredge up every scrap of Rusmayer-related information in existence. The documents Camilla had brought me began replaying in my head, page by page.

A statue? Money? The village layout? No—nothing like those. Something unique to this place, something that exists only here...

And in that instant, it clicked.

"In Rusmayer Territory, most of the children show signs of malnutrition. Rusmayer Disease—a sickness unique to this land, I'm told, where children from early childhood through adolescence suffer worsening coughs until they're bedridden for a long stretch."

The guarded light in Barak's eyes flared to life.

"The cause is a diet built almost entirely on crops that grow only here. That said, the adults who eat the same food are perfectly healthy, so the diet itself isn't the problem—later findings revealed, oddly enough, that the true cause was that only the children's bodies failed to absorb the nutrients evenly."

"..."

"Which is why, in cases like this, the standard treatment is milk. Give them milk, and the missing nutrients are absorbed—the coughing stops almost at once, and the fever breaks. Strange as it sounds, they recover so quickly you'd hardly believe it was ever a disease."

So that was the crucial hint. Thank you, Camilla. Because of you, I can recall every piece of it without missing a single one.

"Milk, malnutrition, and Rusmayer Disease. There is exactly one child here who was coughing her lungs out—and you were hardly about to serve me a cup of milk meant for her, were you?"

That's right. That child was the one who needed to drink this milk.

"Delphina. It has to go to that child, doesn't it?"

Right to the very end, I refused to let the thread slip—and I spoke the child's name aloud.