City of Opportunity, Cambria (3)
A place where light rarely reaches.
A cramped, dark, damp stretch of narrow lanes where visibility is poor and there is no room to move freely. The back alleys—or what people call the slums.
Every city has them, and the larger the city, the more vast they become. The City of Opportunity, Cambria, was no exception. It was where washed-up adventurers and mercenaries crawled to rot, where criminals slipped into the shadows—a sprawling labyrinth of its own.
Anyone in their right mind.
Anyone living a steady, respectable life.
Would feel a chill just setting foot here. Nerves would tighten of their own accord; every motion would grow stiff. The instinct to get out, and get out now, would hit them hard.
That was simply what a slum was.
But the boy who stepped into this one was different.
Najin felt as if he had come home.
For the past ten days his mind had been worn thin by nothing but the unfamiliar. The moment he entered the back alleys, that same mind stretched out and settled with a lazy this is my place. The tension drained away. His body moved easy and loose.
An environment not so different from the underground city of Atman.
Swallowing the thick air, Najin shook himself out lightly. After a few steadying breaths he narrowed his eyes. In the dark, his sunset-colored irises gleamed.
Found you.
—…What?
Najin murmured the thought to himself and took a few light steps forward. He drifted deeper into the alley at an unhurried pace—until, far ahead, he caught the soft tap of a presence. The foot he had been lifting came down hard.
Thud.
A sharp, deliberate step. In the blink that followed, flow settled into Najin’s body. He could now call on mana-reinforced strength at will, whenever he pleased.
BOOM! He drove power into the planted foot and launched himself off the ground. A single burst of acceleration. The man who had been hiding only realized something was wrong too late and tried to run—but by then Najin was already right on top of him.
“Ghk—!”
Najin’s outstretched hand clamped around the man’s nape and hauled him up. The fellow had a solid build, yet the moment Najin raised his arm the man floated helplessly off the ground. When his feet left the dirt he seemed to feel the wrongness of it and looked down.
Their eyes met.
In the gloom where little light filtered through, Najin’s shining pupils looked like those of a wild predator. The man’s legs trembled as if his knees had gone weak.
“Why were you watching me?”
Najin asked.
The man did not answer at once. Najin took one of his fingers in an empty hand. He knew perfectly well how to make a mouth open.
Crunch.
A scream rang out. He repeated the process a few times. Only when fewer than two of the five fingers remained unbroken did the man spill everything he knew. Once Najin had heard enough, he cracked a fist into the man’s jaw and knocked him cold.
He dumped the limp body wherever it fell and muttered to himself.
Hired a few people, posted watchers, and whenever a bounty hunter entered the alleys they just widened the distance and kept slipping away, huh.
The man had given only simple information.
Even so, Najin had already formed a clear picture of how the wanted man had been running. Merlin sounded almost incredulous.
—You got that far from just a handful of scraps?
Once you’ve beaten the truth out of enough people, their methods all start looking the same.
Najin started walking again.
He knew exactly how to catch people who worked like this. There was a safe, slow way and a fast, dangerous way… and he chose the second.
How did they do it again.
He steadied his breathing.
Conscious of the speed of each step and the surface of his sole that touched the ground, he took a stride.
Something like this, I think.
The Church’s shadow agents who had once hunted him through the underground city. He had watched from a distance how they moved, how they killed their presence. Recalling those motions, Najin stepped forward.
One step. Another.
At first a soft sound still carried. By the third step there was none. Once the movement settled into his body, he began to run with his presence erased.
—…What the hell?
Merlin, watching, blinked. The boy’s steps, which had been heavy only moments before, had become as silent and secret as any assassin’s.
In that silence Najin kicked off a wall and ran. He passed directly over the head of a man who looked like a lookout—and the man never noticed him. After slipping past several more watchers like that—
At the center of the web of alleys.
He found a man lounging and laughing. The man was playing cards with what appeared to be hired bodyguards. Cards and coins littered the tabletop.
Wanted man: Lopez.
His face matched the likeness drawn on the bounty notice Dieta had given him. Confirmed, Najin dropped from above with his presence still fully suppressed.
And then—crack.
He seized Lopez’s head on the way down and slammed it straight into the table. The table shattered. Cards and coins sprayed into the air.
“……!”
The men whose employer had just been driven through a table spun and reached for their weapons. Their reactions were fast—disrespectful, even, to compare them to the knife-fighters Najin had known in the underground city.
But speed is always relative.
To Najin, every one of those motions looked painfully slow. He stamped on the hand that was grabbing for an axe left on the floor. Bone crunched. He spun in place.
His heel crushed the back of a hand drawing a sword. He caught the wrist of the man who thrust a dagger at him and bent it the wrong way.
One after another their attempts to draw steel were knocked back. And for Najin, that was enough. He subdued them one by one. He did not need his sword. A clipped jaw, a fist driven into a face—that was plenty.
“Ghhh….”
Lopez, still half-buried in the wreckage of the table, slowly lifted his head. By the time he came to his senses, the three bodyguards who had been at his side were already sprawled on the ground with their eyes rolled back.
“…….”
The moment his gaze met Najin’s—looking down at him from among the fallen men—Lopez’s eyes shook. He twisted, trying to run.
Thuk.
A dagger buried itself in Lopez’s calf.
It was the same throwing knife Najin had taken from the Church’s shadow agents and still favored.
“AAAAAGH!”
Lopez went down hard.
He clenched his teeth and twisted around. Staring up at the unknown boy, he shouted.
“You little bastard—you just fucked with the wrong people.”
Cold sweat ran down his face as he fished something from his coat. The instant his fist closed around it—
WHEEEEEEEEE!
A piercing screech tore through the alleys. A signal calling every partner and hired guard posted throughout the maze.
“This is my territory—mine and big brother Brom’s. You look like a bounty hunter, so congratulations. You’re fucked, kid.”
He grinned, full of confidence.
Najin answered that grin with one of his own. Watching the boy’s faint smile, Lopez felt something off.
“Saves me the trouble.”
Najin murmured it under his breath.
Because wanted man Brom was one of his targets as well.
Listening to the footsteps closing in from every direction, Najin drew his sword. With a soft shing the blade left its scabbard; he let it hang loose and narrowed his eyes.
…It took several more minutes before wanted man Lopez realized just how badly the situation had gone wrong.
Najin had once outrun—and sometimes toyed with and hunted—the Church’s professional pursuers, the shadow agents. Against the gutter trash that rolled through alleys like these, a boy who had grown through that was dealing with nothing more than easy prey.
Five minutes.
That was how long it took Najin to put down every last thug who came running, shatter the knee of wanted man Brom who had been directing them from a distance, and dump him beside Lopez.
“That’s two.”
Wanted man Brom. Wanted man Lopez.
Najin bound them both and tossed them down, muttering.
“If I’d known it would go like this, I should’ve taken all six notices.”
2.
“Guildmaster, an adventurer has come to see you.”
Early morning. At her secretary’s call, Dieta blinked. This early? She had only just arrived at the trading company and was still nursing her morning coffee.
“Who is it?”
“A grey-haired boy. From what he says, he received a commission from you yesterday….”
A grey-haired boy.
The same boy she had bought a meal for yesterday. She had given him the location of the company and her office, but for him to show up this quickly? Maybe he had come to ask for more information on the wanted men.
She had already given him everything she had.
If he was here demanding more, that would be a little disappointing.
Thinking as much, Dieta waved a hand—the signal to let him in. Heavy footsteps soon thudded up the stairs: thud, thud, thud… After a short wait the office door opened.
The one who stepped through was yesterday’s boy.
But the moment she faced him, Dieta understood. He had not come for more information. Because what the boy had dragged in with him were three wanted men.
Dieta’s eyes went wide.
She was not the only one startled. The guardian knight standing beside her, Pasion, also had his eyes opened large.
“These three, right?”
Unconcerned with either of their reactions, Najin jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Behind him stood three wanted men limping on ruined legs. Only their arms were bound, yet they made no attempt to resist—or even to run.
When Najin glanced back, they only ducked their heads lower, as if trying to escape that gaze.
“That’s… correct.”
Dieta murmured it in a daze.
Brom. Lopez. Miles.
Wanted men out of the back alleys, famous for slipping away like eels no matter how hard anyone hunted them. And yet, contrary to every rumor she had heard, the three men stood there as meek as lambs.
As if the boy standing in front of them filled them with pure terror.