Receiving Guests
After I got the ring, I abused summoning magic without a shred of restraint, calling it performance testing, and the Unit 2s multiplied at a frightening pace. There were so many of them now that simply gathering the lot was enough to carpet the entire floor of the mansion's lobby. So I decided the little things were in need of some training.
"Roll left!"
"Eeng—!"
"Roll right!"
"Eeeng—!"
At my command, the black legion moved as one. Every time they tumbled off in a single direction, the ears sticking up like a rabbit's flicked and bobbed, and all those little motions piled together until the whole mass looked like a black wave rolling across the floor.
Ah. This was actually kind of fun.
Faced with a whole swarm that did exactly as I said, I couldn't hold back the line that rose in me like instinct.
"Faster! Unit 2s! Depending on how you conduct yourselves, this drill instructor may become a demon—or an angel!"
"Eeng-eeng—!"
"Wee-eeng—!"
Spirited battle cries(?).
Ah. So this was the view those drill instructors had enjoyed, the ones who'd run me into the ground back in basic. It was far too much fun.
And then, at last, I dredged up the final order—the one jammed so deep in my skull it might as well have been PTSD.
"All right! Execute PT exercise number eight! Now!"
"Weeng...?"
"Aii...?"
PT exercise number eight: the full-body twist. The Unit 2s had no earthly way of knowing what that was, of course, and every one of them panicked, squeaking at the others in confusion. I'd expected exactly that reaction from the start, so I had no intention of turning into a demon instructor over it. Still, seeing how they caught on to nearly any order as if it were second nature, I hadn't been entirely free of expectations...
Most of it seemed to get through. Anything too complicated, though, and the Unit 2s clearly couldn't follow.
But then—
"Eeng! Eeng-eeng—!"
Unit 2-1 suddenly bounced off my shoulder as if furious, shrieking something at the flock of little black soot-balls.
This one... had they just become a demon instructor in my place?
"Wee-eeng—!"
The restless mood snapped straight back into line, and they launched into another bout of crisp, synchronized group movement whose actual purpose I couldn't begin to identify. It was not exercise number eight.
I'd thought it before: even when I only half-explained myself, Unit 2-1 could read a fair amount of what I actually meant. A sharp one. If anyone here had the makings of a drill instructor, it was this little thing. Maybe I ought to sew them a red cap later.
With that, I decided I'd had my fill of playing instructor and turned my attention back to the mansion.
The place had changed quite a lot since the day I first arrived. Once these soot-smudge creatures bunched together, they turned out to be astonishing cleaning machines. They scrubbed dust away by rubbing their bodies over it, dozens swarming in to clear the rubble, wiping out the trash...
Thanks to them, the lobby at least could pass for a brand-new house. There was nothing I could do this instant about the shattered windows or the ragged carpet, but those could be fixed later, if the chance came.
...Well. If it didn't, it didn't.
Nothing about it was urgent. I was undead, so a cold draft wasn't going to give me a cold, and the mansion only needed to function well enough to keep the wolves out. Fixing up a house fell, for me, under the heading of dull, fussy work. In other words, shoving it to the bottom of the list wasn't anything I'd regret. For now, tidying things up enough that they didn't get in the way of walking through would do.
I was thinking that, watching the Unit 2s move, when—
Thud!
A dull sound carried from far off.
Had the Unit 2s knocked something over somewhere? From their point of view, cleaning and demolition weren't very different ideas, so now and then they leaned distinctly toward the latter.
But the sound that followed shot that theory down head-on.
Thud, thud, thud—!
"Hello?! Is anyone in there?!"
More pounding, tangled with a voice gone rough from hard breathing. That earlier series of thuds... maybe it had been desperate knocking?
"...A person?"
I flattened myself against the mansion wall at once, so I couldn't be seen past the windows.
Well. Sure. This was a tutorial area, so of course there'd be a village somewhere nearby. It wasn't as if I hadn't thought of that. At the start I'd even considered going to look for the village myself. I'd just had no choice but to give up.
There were two big reasons. The first: I didn't know the way. This was reality, the kind that didn't hand you a minimap and navigation updating in real time. I had no idea which direction the village lay from the mansion, or how far, and I didn't want to abandon this snug, comfortable house.
And the second: my race was undead, and I was a summoner traveling with a skeleton. The undead racial trait—a flat fifty-point reputation penalty—had been a mild annoyance even when this was only a game. I'd been so irritated that you couldn't trade in a village unless you hid what you were under a robe that I'd rerolled every alt into an ordinary human. If that was no longer a game system, but something written directly into reality, what was going to happen?
On top of that, as I'd seen for myself in a mirror while exploring the mansion, the way I looked now was, to any eye, a black mage, a necromancer, a witch. And I couldn't simply dismiss Unit 1 and the Unit 2s, because I didn't know how. In a fantasy world wary of suspicious outsiders, a first-impression penalty this severe would make something like looking a little young not even worth considering.
No—if anything, looking young would only make me seem more suspicious. A little girl who'd fought her way down a dangerous forest road to get here? Mm. Just thinking about it, yeah. Suspicious.
Turning those thoughts over, I carefully poked my head out past the window. First I needed to see just how many people had come looking for this mansion.
"Hmm..."
Every pane in the mansion had been shattered long ago, which made it easy to slip my head out a little and peer toward the front door.
"...It's a kid."
The one knocking was a single child. Twelve, thirteen, maybe? I didn't know how children grew in this era, so I couldn't be sure, but that was about my guess. A kid from the village around here? Her clothes were torn in places, and her face was caked with dirt. What had she been doing out in the forest in the middle of the night?
And I understood the reason almost at once.
"Awooo—!"
"Ah."
Wolves. Not one of them. A pack of five or six at the least, teeth bared, had chased her all the way here.
"Mm. I think I've got the gist of this..."
I understood the spot she was in perfectly. I'd been through the exact same thing. The one small mercy was that she didn't seem to have been running from them for very long. Otherwise the wolves would have eaten her well before she ever made it here. Those things were fast.
"Should I help...?"
If this were the reality I used to live in, of course I'd open the door and go out to help. A child was in danger right in front of me. Any adult ought to feel they had to step in. But now... honestly, the worry came first.
Not because I was afraid of the wolves. As I was now, I could at least picture throwing Unit 1 out as bait and getting the kid inside, even against a few of them. The problem was that I had no idea what would happen if I got tangled up in this for no good reason.
Save the child, and she'd go back to the village and talk about me, wouldn't she? I couldn't know how she'd tell it, but no matter how kindly she put it, one thing wouldn't change: my existence would be exposed. And then people would start coming to look for my mansion. Was there any guarantee that only the well-intentioned ones would show up?
Absolutely not.
An undead summoner settled into an abandoned mansion near the village? Get unlucky, and I'd be branded a necromancer or a witch and hunted down. This world—I'd thought it a moment ago—was, at its root, unkind to the undead. And I knew all too well that I didn't have the silver tongue or the charm to overturn a perception like that.
To confess: I was close to what people call a shut-in. If dealing with people had been easy, I wouldn't have been macro-farming gold; I'd have gotten a normal job like everyone else. Stand in front of other people, and it felt as if every one of them secretly loathed me and was laughing at me. They'd wear a bright, businesslike smile to your face, then turn their heads and pour out every ugly thing they could say. I didn't imagine those eyes would be so very different here. Change the setting, and human nature doesn't change with it.
Summons, on the other hand—how nice, that I didn't have to think about any of that. Unit 1 and the Unit 2s didn't even have faces that could mock me, and they couldn't speak, so they couldn't badmouth me either.
Haha.
Well. I wandered off for a second, but anyway...
So the best outcome I could imagine was the child opening the door herself, coming into the mansion, and surviving on her own. Even I had no intention of deliberately driving out a kid who walked in like that. That way I wouldn't have to get directly involved, and the kid would live. A win-win, you could call it.
But no matter how the girl threw her whole body against the door and shoved with everything she had, it wouldn't open.
Right. That was the problem. The broken latch.
Truth was, I hadn't broken the latch myself. It had been that way since I first came into the mansion—refusing to lock properly, or locking of its own accord, opening and shutting however it pleased. I'd never expected guests, so I hadn't fixed it, but just now it seemed to have come down on the side of locking itself.
Which meant the best case I'd imagined was gone. The child's life might as well be in my hands. If I didn't step in, that kid would die. Whichever I chose, there was a downside.
So what now? What was I supposed to...
While I was still turning it over, the wolf pack that had chased the girl had already run all the way up to the mansion's front gate. Her death was right in front of us. Her voice reached me, more desperate by the moment.
"Hello, is anyone in there? Please, save me!"
Ugh... to hell with it!
I still couldn't stand by and watch a child get torn apart by wolves. I wasn't some emotionless psycho. See a thing like that, and I'd be thinking about it for days, crushed under the guilt, unable to put my hands to anything. That much was obvious.
With no time left to think, I hurriedly gave my orders to Unit 1 and the Unit 2s.
"Unit 1! You go that way, and Unit 2! All of you, this way! Hurry!"
The aftermath could wait until later.