Receiving a Guest
"Dad!"
"Mari! You're safe!"
At that tearful reunion, Evelyn drew her hood low and quietly slipped away.
Bringing the missing back out of the forest was not an everyday job for a hunter, but neither was this the first time. A parent and child finding each other again, though—that was a sight she had never managed to grow used to. Most likely because it brought things back.
Long ago, when she herself had been even younger than that child. The Elysia manor was often open to the village children. Noble house or not, it was not the sort of place that bolted its gates shut. When the harvest festival came around they handed sweets out to the children, and the yard frequently turned into a playground. The youngest daughter of that house ran among them too.
Ira Elysia. Youngest daughter of House Elysia. She had not been much like a noble at all. She never minded if her shoes got dirty. She played without the slightest hesitation alongside farmers' children, and she had been the first to speak to Evelyn, a perfect stranger.
"Let's play again."
She still remembered those words. In the end, the promise had not been kept.
A plague swept the village. One by one the place went quiet. Friends disappeared. Laughter disappeared. And she herself was no exception. The fever would not break for days. In a plague-struck village, even the doctors would not come near. All that remained was waiting to die. A child could do nothing—nothing but sit beside the bed and watch her father's face as he held her hand and wept.
Then, one day, transport wagons came suddenly to the village at the very height of the plague. They belonged to House Elysia. At first everyone assumed they had come to collect taxes. Because of the plague, the season for paying them had already long since passed. Resentful stares—would they really try to squeeze taxes out of a village while a plague was raging?—turned to shock and wonder the moment the people stepped down from the wagons. What came down were not tax collectors, but apothecaries. Apothecaries who had brought a cure for the plague. And so the village's plague was ended. She, too, had her life saved because of it.
But Ira... that child, in the end, did not survive. The village fell silent, at the fact that the medicine which had saved them all had failed to save that one child.
What followed was not a pleasant story. The manor was no longer opened. The countess went mad with grief. Strange rumors began to circle the house—that they were collecting the corpses of those who had died of the plague, that the countess had made a contract with a demon to raise the dead, that she had sunk herself into forbidden black magic... How much of it was true, there was no way of knowing now. In the end, the Saintess's Knight Order had stormed in and finished the house completely.
"But..."
The face of the girl she had seen then was, without question, the Ira Elysia in her memory. How? Had that child truly come back to life? And though her vision had narrowed at the time and she had not seen clearly, those marks. If the intent had been to harm the child, something about it refused to sit right.
Surely not. If it was that...
"Evelyn? Are you all right? You don't look well."
What drew her up out of her thoughts was Mari, who had come close without her noticing. Seeing how stiff her expression had gone, the girl seemed worried.
"Ah, I'm fine. I was just thinking about something for a moment."
Oh no. She had made Mari worry. Whatever had passed between her and Ira, that was her own affair in the end. The moment she thought it, Evelyn smoothed her face, stroked Mari's hair, and answered in a calm voice.
"Mari, no more going into the forest by yourself, all right?"
The girl must have learned a hard lesson from all this. She would not do anything that reckless again. At those words Mari glanced at her father, whose hand was locked tight around her own, then leaned in and whispered at Evelyn's ear.
"Evelyn, you're going back to the manor, aren't you?"
Evelyn quietly brought a hand to her lips and smiled. Mari smiled too, and set a finger against her own mouth. The gesture was proof of their promise: for the time being, they would not tell the adults what had happened at the manor.
Just then, someone stepped into Evelyn's line of sight. Tucker, the woodcutter. Spotting her, he came over with exaggerated gestures, seized her hand in a great shake, and poured out his thanks.
"Evelyn, I really owe you. Thanks to you, James might actually let me live through this. Hahaha! I'll stand you a drink next time, as thanks for today. Anytime—just say the word."
Evelyn, who had been turning Tucker's trade over in her mind, countered as if the thought had only just struck her.
"Ah, Tucker. Perfect timing. There's a favor I'd like to ask."
"A favor? Name it. Anything I can do, I'll help."
"If you've got any spare timber right now, could you leave it at my hut? Weight doesn't matter, so long as it's sturdy."
"...Right now?"
"What, have you got something else on at the moment?"
At the request, Tucker tipped his head, more puzzled than anything.
"You... you just need the wood brought over? If it needs working, I can help with that."
"No. I just need you to get me the timber."
It nagged at him a little, her wanting wood in such a hurry and yet leaving him—woodcutter and carpenter both—out of it, asking only for the logs. Even so, he did not push his suspicion any further. If she said it that way, she must have had a reason.
Once everyone had gone and the manor was empty again, I stared at the front gate—broken, the wind sighing straight through it—and collapsed onto the floor.
"Did I... live?"
My chest was heaving. I still couldn't quite believe I was alive. No. Was I even alive? I was undead, after all. Well, if you went by that philosopher who said that to think is to live, then calling my current state alive was probably a stretch.
But how in the world had I survived? I'd barely said a word.
"Ha. No idea."
In the end I gave up and lay flat out on the floor. At that, the Unit 2s crowded around me again, whimpering as if to ask what was wrong.
"Eeng..."
"Awoong...?"
Looking at them now, they weren't cute in the slightest. They made my blood boil. These little brats were absolutely useless when it came to hiding! I'd told them to stay put and out of sight, and they couldn't keep still—rustling around, and eeng-eeng-ing at all hours! I should have taught them hide-and-seek before I ever started drilling them in formation.
"You idiots! I told you to be quiet! I said be quiet, so why do you keep making noise!"
When I tore into them, the Unit 2s finally lost their nerve, squirming as they copied a shh, shh. I was going to lose my mind. A moment ago I'd put a hand to my mouth and gone shh—!, and every last one of them had copied the sound and plopped right down. What must that have looked like to that kid? Remembering the village child, scared stiff at the chorus the dust spirits were raising, left a thoroughly unpleasant feeling in me.
Pressing hard at my aching forehead, I crooked a finger and called Unit 2-1 over.
"Unit 2-1. Get over here and stand."
"E-eeng..."
Unit 2-1 looked painfully nervous. ...I couldn't even bring myself to scold them like this. I ordered that one to handle discipline for the rest of the Unit 2s, then turned around.
There, with nothing left but a skull, Unit 1 sat abandoned on the floor.
"You're a problem too."
"...?"
At that, Unit 1's head clacked as if to say, What did I even do? I kindly spelled the mistake out on the spot.
"You played dead and made me worry!"
At the time I'd really thought Unit 1 was gone, and I'd panicked completely. Which was why I'd forgotten my stride was different now, tried to walk, tripped over my own feet, and gone tumbling down the stairs.
"...!"
Nothing but a skull, Unit 1 clacked as if trying to argue, but without a body that could at least manage a little body language, it wasn't an excuse at all. I turned to Unit 2-1, who was diligently chewing out the others on my orders, and told them that was enough—go out and find Unit 1's scattered body.
A wolf had probably made off with it again. They were a summon, so unsummoning and calling them back ought to do the trick, but I still didn't know how. And it irritated me that I had to learn it because of that obnoxious Unit 1. If I could at least feel mana being spent, I might try to shut it off, but I didn't feel anything of the sort. Was it because these guys were all scrubs? Mana just didn't drain?
"Haa. Fine. Honestly, some of this is my fault too..."
The truth was, this had also happened because I couldn't talk to strangers... No. I hadn't meant to show myself at all. How was I supposed to know they'd pinpoint exactly where I was? I couldn't even answer properly when they asked who I was.
Why? Because nothing came to mind that I could say about who I was. If I'd just claimed to be a summoner passing through, or the one who'd saved the child, or at the very least I am not your enemy!—the whole thing could have gone much more smoothly than it did. But I couldn't. Why? Because I had crippling social anxiety. So how was I supposed to get a proper sentence out in that situation? I could barely hold a conversation with people as it was, and the person I had to talk to was a woman who'd nearly killed me. Every excuse I'd just thought up only occurred to me after it was over. Back then I was in full panic and couldn't even think of using my voice.
Well. In the end that woman got shocked all by herself, thought it through all by herself, convinced herself all by herself, and went home all by herself...
"Haa."
Having piled the excuses up in my head, I gave up entirely, flopped onto the floor, and muttered.
"So who on earth is Ira Elysia?"
The reason the hunter about to stab me had stopped her hand. The name that, in the end, had let me live. Ira Elysia. A surname like Elysia—she was probably connected to this manor after all. Had that woman taken me for Ira Elysia? Did I look like her?
Well, it did seem to be why I was still here, at least... All I'd done was pick a short little preset out of the undead customization options.
...Don't tell me that was why. The devs had stuffed dummy data in as customization preset data, and I'd simply chosen it? What an absurd coincidence...
But I didn't believe that misunderstanding would last forever. Because I wasn't the Ira Elysia that woman had in mind. Give it a little more time and she'd probably catch on. I let my eyes wander the silent manor and murmured.
"I'm going to have to leave this place too, in the end."
I couldn't remember the game's story very well, but from the way the manor had been left to rot, I could roughly guess how things had gone. Empty house or not, if the villagers hadn't looked after it at all, relations with people must have been bad... I really ought to clear out before that woman came back.
Shame, though. I'd gotten pretty attached in a single day. I'd take a quick look for anything valuable worth pocketing, and then I'd be off right awa—
That was the moment.
Tok. Tok.
That was... a knock? Startled, I looked toward the front gate, where the sound had come from.
"Hic."
And there she stood—the hunter from earlier, arrived who knew when. With a log bigger than her own body slung over one shoulder...