The Zero-Language Alien
I'm screwed...
I finally meet a person, and I can't understand a word he says.
Fortunately, my ability to read intent seems to work on humans too, so I can piece things together a little at a time.
Me! Delner knight! Demon hunt! Benefactor! Thanks! Overwhelming thanks!
Sincerity! Take money!
He was an extremely courteous knight in chainmail and a surcoat, but hearing him in pure Waldo-speak created a massive disconnect.
And demon, huh...
The thing that had butchered those creatures so mercilessly was a monster with a stag's antlers. A grotesque body, dark crimson fur, a black aura... Looking at that truly terrifying form, calling it a demon was no exaggeration.
The moment I saw it charge at blistering speed, I wrapped my blade in Sword Force and swung the wooden sword. Demon or not, I had already killed a god and stood ready to end a world; it simply wasn't a good matchup for the thing.
I took it down easily enough, but I decided I should stay wary of demons as a whole. Even this one had pulled off a physics-defying high-speed charge. That was probably its ability, right? There would be plenty of demons with novel, dangerous powers out there, so a little caution couldn't hurt. Look both ways before you cross the bridge, as they say.
That said, for a knight of this era—basically a thug with a sword—he was surprisingly normal. Honestly, I'd been worried after saving him. Back in the real world, plenty of ungrateful bastards you pull out of trouble turn around and demand your wallet. How much worse would it be in a savage age like this?
I was relieved it didn't come to the utterly absurd situation of my first kill in this world being the man I'd just rescued. He even shoved a ridiculous amount of money at me, enough that I felt a little awkward about it.
His body looked pretty banged up, and isn't there such a thing as give and take? As a free bonus—and as a chance to test Blanc's healing—I treated him. Watching most of the external wounds close left me genuinely impressed. I was going to have to treat Blanc even better from now on.
Meeting that knight made me wonder if I should revise my assessment of the people here a little upward. Maybe Delner was just an unusually polite exception... but this is a savage age. For all I know, the ungrateful bastards and the ones without manners already had their skulls caved in by everyone else.
A long time after I parted ways with the knight Delner, I finally found a village and a church.
Just in case, I slipped into the village under Hide and listened to people talk—but sure enough, I couldn't understand a word of it.
I couldn't just leave it like this!
For several days I kept coming and going between the village and the church. The fruit of that effort was sweet, and I built a hideout in the forest and laid out a plan.
What was the plan going forward?
Simple: learn the language—speech and writing both!
Where I was now was the church, a short distance from the village. Peeking into the priests' intent, I learned they served a goddess of justice and virtue called Maneriat. Other statues appeared here and there as well, so it seemed this was a polytheistic country.
Figuring I might be able to sneak in and learn reading and speech here, I put on Hide and prowled the church. I found about twenty well-dressed boys and girls. Their ages... around fifteen, give or take?
Those youths gathered, filed into a room, and sat down—then a priest came in and started teaching them something. He had them write characters, sound them out again and again, then write them over and over. Reading their intent—things like this is a tree, this is fruit—I realized it was a literacy class.
Yes! Jackpot, right out of the gate!
I headed back to the hideout and immediately drew up a plan. Hide myself, wedge into a corner where I wouldn't brush against the students or the priest, and study. As for concealment, that was a matter of skill.
Perfect Hide
A-rank Stealth Mastery skill. Absolute invisibility until you attack.
It was a skill you unlocked by raising Stealth Mastery to A-rank—highly rated even in the game, and a straight upgrade over Hide. True to the "Perfect" in the name, its effect was absolute stealth for the full duration, right up until you struck. I tried it in front of Hugin and Hati; both of them failed to find me, as if I'd become a real invisible man.
Perfect Hide balanced itself with a short duration of about five seconds and a long one-minute cooldown—and that balance, for some reason, had carried over into reality as well. The second I tried to hold it past those five seconds, mana poured out of me like crazy, and I couldn't last even ten minutes. Honestly... the thing that drained my mana pool dry being a stealth skill was pretty ironic.
Anyway, in the back corner of the classroom stood a large storage cabinet with room enough for me to fit. Inside were cleaning tools, long wooden boards, nails, and other odds and ends—probably materials they pulled out when repairing or building extra desks and chairs. After two or three days of stealth checks, I confirmed that neither the students nor the priest ever so much as touched that cabinet.
I spent a night quietly emptying it, burying the contents deep in the forest floor, and then drilled several peep-holes into the cabinet door at the right height for me to watch the lessons. From then on, all I had to do was slip in under stealth before class and climb into the cabinet ahead of the students.
For notes I planned to use surplus dried rawhide and charcoal. I'd originally meant to sell the hides, but after that knight dumped a mountain of silver on me, they were useless for trade—so I might as well put them to work this way.
Finally, in case someone noticed my gaze and opened the cabinet, I built an emergency escape. I inscribed the mid-tier spell Location Short Jump into a small wooden cube and installed it inside. The spell was a one-use teleport that used mediators like these wooden cubes to jump to another mediator's position. In the game it was a convenience spell for clearing a dungeon and getting out fast—without it, you had to walk the whole way out on foot. What a no-shortcut garbage game.
I set the other mediator's location safely on the church roof. I'd wanted it outside the church entirely, but if the mediators were even a little too far apart, it wouldn't activate. Since the installed magic might be detectable by a priest, I left it for a few days first—they never noticed.
Preparations were complete. Now all that was left was the actual learning.
It wasn't like I was grave-robbing some ultra-dangerous tomb, and yet here I was going through all this just to study letters. Being a zero-language alien in another world really was miserable...
Literacy class at the church began.
Fortunately I could roughly parse the priest's speech through intent, so my writing improved quickly. What would I have done if I hadn't met Blanc? She was looking cuter by the day.
Hugin and Hati I had set free after building them a hideout deep in the uninhabited forest and giving them a few ground rules; they would manage just fine. Blanc had an invisibility mode, so I told her she was welcome to stick with me. In case we ever got separated from Hugin and Hati, I carved a whistle out of animal bone and tested it—it worked well. Even without the whistle, those two had a sixth sense for when I was looking for them and would come tearing over like ghosts, but "what if" still existed, so caution was in order.
After literacy class I went into the village to practice listening.
As for the village itself... it was pure boondocks. Every house was a wooden shack, and people's clothes and bodies were crusted with who-knows-what. Classic old-world types with zero hygiene management.
The one odd feature was a cluster of brick houses deeper in the village. The people living there wore clean clothes and had clean skin. The youths at the church were probably from those households.
The whole village was also ringed with a wooden palisade, with patrols and a checkpoint at the entrance. For a settlement this well fortified, something must have been hitting them on a regular basis. Not that it mattered to me—I just used Hide and hopped the wall, so I was never going to get caught.
Slipping through the village and eavesdropping on conversations, I kept hearing things like:
Ugh, Baira annoying...
Shh! Quiet! Big trouble!
Aigoo... born Indala... misery...
Hmm... listening to them, "Baira"? "Indala"? They sounded like proper nouns. The filthy people living here were probably Indala, and the ones in the brick houses Baira... Most of the village was Indala, and they clearly nursed some resentment—yet the Baira didn't seem to feel any real danger?
Anyway, I wandered here and there soaking up talk. I wanted to visit the village market too, but it was too open, with nowhere to hide, so I gave up. For a village this size, though, there wasn't a single shop aside from a tiny smithy. I did occasionally see peddlers roll in and head for the market square, but that alone couldn't possibly meet demand for this many people... Did giant merchant caravans come through like the golden wagons of remote military outposts?
Either way, the lack of shops was a real shame. I'd wanted to switch into cloth clothes. I even considered stealing some, but even if I took garments from the brick houses, I was too big—nothing would fit. And if I tore them up for fabric and sewed something myself, the quality would be worse than my rawhide outfit, so what was the point?
Days passed as I went back and forth between the village and the church. Two or three months later, listening and writing were solid.
Speaking, on the other hand...
Hello me, traveler bright healthy morning, happiness recommend.
Waldo-speak....
With no one to actually converse with, it was inevitable that speaking lagged behind listening and writing. Class would be starting again soon; time to head for the church.
There they had moved past vocabulary into grammar, and luckily it was similar to English grammar from my original world. I kept shuttling between the village and the church, grinding languages with everything I had.
I was going to master this. No matter what!!