Opening Doors, One by One
Wherever forests or mountains kept human footsteps rare, a certain ecology of its own always took root. Marauding monsters would occasionally rear their heads like uninvited guests, though by now even that had become simply part of the natural order. And since monsters by no means always claimed the predator's seat in the food chain, things had a way of resolving themselves without anyone's help.
The real problem was when monsters fused with native life—by transferring into it, breeding with it, or infecting it. Such creatures doubled their numbers, sometimes multiplying severalfold, and spread their territory in the blink of an eye. They discriminated among nothing: plants, insects, beasts, all alike. And because the disasters and calamities that sprang up differed wildly from region to region, each nation had long since made a habit of combing through their lands and purging the threats—less a task than a seasonal rhythm of statecraft, in a way.
"The musk is strong, but bear meat is fantastic as a restorative! Not a single scrap of the innards needs to go to waste, either!"
Having felled the bear outright, Luirin threw herself into smoking the meat under the banner of letting nothing go to waste.
"This hide would sell well, too, but honestly, even just one for the time being—use it as a bedroll or a cloak, or when we build a shelter or a dugout or a campsite—it makes everything so much cozier."
"……."
Truth be told, the bear frightened me less than Luirin did.
Less even than the savage warrior standing there, perfectly capable of trading blows with it face to face.
…The bear was scarier.
Why?
Not simply because it was huge and ferocious. Beasts like that carried a temperament entirely their own, a wildness with no common ground to ours—which meant there was every chance nothing of our way of doing things would work on it.
Truthfully, a bear that had been penetrated by demonic energy and turned into a monster… would have been far easier to deal with in reverse… and I genuinely couldn't decide whether to laugh that off or swallow dryly at the thought.
The moment the bear appeared, Luirin roared right back at it and charged head-on.
Then she drove her fist straight into its face.
Watching the bear's snout cave in like crushed fruit… how should I put it. My stomach went cold.
It was probably smashed through the skull all the way to the brain. And yet the brown bear somehow held on, and went on grappling with her ferociously for several minutes after.
The magic gear she wore was clearly no ordinary trinket either—claws raked across it and it neither tore nor split.
"Ow! That hurts, you know?!"
Though it didn't tear, the impact and pain came through undiluted, and she flew into an enormous temper over it.
WHAM!
Have you ever seen a bear get punched so hard it went flying, crashed into a tree, and bounced right back out of it?
…It was a first for me, too.
No—the moment a bear went sailing through the air after taking a hit from that pipsqueak, I figured something had gone deeply, deeply wrong with the world.
No sooner had the bear been dealt with than Luirin was flaring her nostrils and sniffing the air.
"Draining the blood and all that would be a bit much out here, and I catch the smell of a stream nearby. Let's go there."
We made camp not far off after that.
Skinning the hide took considerable time on its own, but cutting up and portioning the meat and bone took even longer, and then, because she insisted on smoking it all, the prep work dragged on—despite my help, only as the sun touched the horizon did we finally get to breathe.
"We can eat it all fresh, but that just makes the body heavy for nothing. Who knows how long the journey will stretch, so when the hunt goes well, you have to store up properly."
All of this was possible thanks to the magic gear she carried.
A coat that could hold its contents regardless of volume.
It supposedly had a name, but she didn't know it herself. It had originally been some hopelessly rustic cloak, until an artisan she knew well reworked it for her, mending it on his own into something convenient and practical.
Even as she spoke she sounded like someone faithfully passing along exactly what she'd been told, so I let it go.
Make no mistake—she was competent.
And she was only four years my junior. For someone that young to be this capable… she was a prodigy beyond reason.
A genius of survival, perhaps? Or a genius of adaptation?
…I honestly couldn't say.
Over the fire, generous cuts of bear meat sizzled and browned.
…A bit large, though.
In a small cast-iron pot set near the flames, water was at a rolling boil. Once some grain flour went in, and then a handful of dried vegetables, it became something like a soup—barely.
A desperate effort, pure and simple, to stretch the portions.
With a stream right there, her intention to at least fill our bellies with something proper came through loud and clear.
"Seeing how much you move around and yet how little you eat—Master really is a picky one, isn't he?"
"……."
Master, she says.
At first I'd told her to call me whatever she liked, and when I asked why Master, she said:
"Say I wandered into some remote village. Then a child born in that village would know the roads better than I do, wouldn't he?"
"That's so."
"Then there'd be something for me to learn even from that child, right? As you can see, when you don't know something, asking is the wisest course."
"That's so."
"A skill is the product of someone's time and effort. Sometimes it carries even their misfortune and their fortune, their lifelong devotion and their convictions—you can't afford to be careless about it. Even the people dismissed as serfs, the ones looked down on, have pounded the earth for a dozen years or more, and they dig into the ground better than most knights or warriors ever could. The strong may break things well—break objects, break buildings—but they could never produce what the people who make and build things produce. And that's exactly why the strong know it so well, and use their strength to put those people to work."
"……."
"So when I call you Master, that's the proper respect owed to all of that. I'm wrong, am I?"
"…Do as you like."
After that, she pried and prodded at an enormous range of things.
But even when I explained the way the Demon King had once explained things to me, she simply couldn't grasp it.
Application was all the more hopeless.
And that, despite my even teaching her about intent.
"Why call something so obvious 'intent'? Isn't there anything grander-sounding? And anyway, what is intent? That thing warriors are said to carry—some kind of incantation of the mind? The chivalric principles of the Empire's knights?"
I almost taught her at least the fundamentals they taught at the Academy, then stopped.
…Nothing standardized there would suit this girl, and while I bore no particular patriotism or loyalty to the Empire… something in me balked at leaking secrets and hidden manuals so easily.
'If it had been necessary, I would have taught her.'
Besides, planting needless prejudice or half-formed expectations in her—that, too, didn't sit right with me.
So.
Since words alone wouldn't manage it, I turned the other way: letting her experience it with her own body.
And in the course of teaching, I came to realize—along the way—that it was good for Luirin, and useful for me too.
—Learning is completed in the act of teaching. That's how understanding matures into something fuller.
The Demon King called it a matter of course.
…The reason I'd been drifting off into dazes lately, forgetting even to tune my lute, was partly that my mind had been caught on all of this.
And yet a few hours spent agonizing over what to teach Luirin had brought me more realization and gain than a week or two sunk deep in contemplation.
Privately, I wasn't sure this was right.
—That's what the process is. What do you expect, cooped up alone with nothing but your own skull to grind against? Do you think answers fall from the sky? Even that is only possible once the qualification has been granted.
The Demon King began saying strange things.
—Of course, for some, the moment comes suddenly, water brimming over the vessel and—splash—there it is. But I told you, didn't I? Yours has been overflowing for a long time now. Your problem is the opposite: it's how to put that overflow to use. When the religious types go about bestowing grace and kindness—even if they do it without understanding—by that very act their realm rises, and realization follows. It's all, every bit of it, the virtue of filling and emptying.
"……."
Watching Luirin, I wondered if I was starting to imitate a chatterbox myself.
"So the crux of it is this: that giving holds meaning for realization and the elevation of one's realm—is that it?"
—Yes. If only for the sake of cause and effect.
Cause and effect?
"……."
Listening to this too long was liable to give me a headache.
—It's close to the act of opening a closed door. And those who needn't do such a thing are the ones born with every door already flung wide. And those whose doors never opened? Then open them.
"Is that a kind of talent, too?"
—Strictly speaking, even talent falls within this category. What if you have talent, but the door stays shut? Then it ripens past its time, or rots. Want an example? Light a fire under a pot. Then clamp the lid down tight and keep the fire roaring the whole while? The lid blows off—water, contents, everything comes bursting out. It's the same thing.
And, well, when you got down to it—
—That was your own situation not long ago.
"……?"
In any case.
It was a journey with much to be gained from it.
And yet.
Krrk—
"?!"
More than once I woke in the grip of some fit and spent the rest of the night staring blind at nothing, and that grudge—or whatever it was—kept stirring at me without warning or leave.
"Have you been cursed or something? I can hardly remember the last time I saw you sleep properly."
"……."
For an offhand remark, it landed disturbingly close to the mark, that Luirin of mine.
But I brushed it off as some personal ailment of mine and left it at that.
The travel itself went smoothly after.
We skirted a bandit encampment at one point, and crossed paths with dwarves and other strange folk besides, but none of it came to blows.
Still, there was no shortage of close calls.
Right around where the map marked the border, we very nearly stumbled into the 6th Mountain Scout Corps of Dabas—elite by reputation even there, and known in common parlance as the Monster Logging Corps. My nerves had my throat raw and itching for days.
We'd had to dig in and wait underground for two whole days, after all.
"…Have you had much experience like this?"
"With what?"
"Waiting buried like that. Most people can't even last a few hours, let alone a day, before they start losing their minds. But you bore it remarkably well."
"…I'm used to being shut in some cramped hole, staring at nothing."
At the very least, no one had forced me to my knees to pray in there.
If I wanted to sleep, I could sleep; I didn't need to flinch at when someone might come bursting in. At this point, call it rest—no, call it a holiday.
Being sealed in a tight space without a sliver of light had been mildly unpleasant, but once I grew used to it, sleep came easily enough.
The trouble was when even sleep refused to come. And the matter of answering the call of nature, but….
"Wow, you're made of iron. Quiet as a mouse all day long. Shut away in a monastery, you'd be beloved. So docile—you'd never stir up trouble, I bet. You'd work hard, too. And best of all, you hardly eat a thing!"
"……."
Well, there was a great deal to think about, so.
More importantly—was all of that praise, or insults?
Besides, with the Demon King poking about in there too, the weight of the claustrophobia had felt oddly lighter. Luirin whispered, admittedly, but she also never stopped talking.
In any case.
By following Luirin's lead to the letter, we crossed the border as it was drawn on the map without so much as brushing against the Monster Logging Corps.
And from here on—
"Now we watch for Metran Kingdom's scouts."
Here lay the reason the Monster Logging Corps of Dabas had won its name.
Metran Kingdom's border scouts—above all, the 11th Border Scout Corps, which chiefly patrolled this stretch of forest—were called the Monster Herders.
And here.
This whole region, where the so-called demon-trees grew… was famous as ground no one should set foot on carelessly.
Purple-tinged leaves, branches writhing as if alive… seen for the first time, the sight was enough to make anyone's blood run cold.
"The truly ancient long-trees really do devour living creatures. Some of them, they say, have even developed consciousness enough to communicate—so around here they're regarded as half spirit-beast, half guardian deity."
Unlike Dabas, the Metran Kingdom lay closer to the continent's rim, and so it was all the more invested in exchange and harmony with the nonhuman peoples.
Its policies of bringing other races within its borders to build harmony, even mingling bloodlines to embrace them wholly, had—so the story went—planted the driving force that let all manner of inhuman peoples put down roots there to this day.
…I'd heard plenty of that lecture, but most of it I already roughly knew from the Academy.
"……."
Which meant that back when I was dragged about as a hostage, this was the third place I'd been brought.
Not that I remembered it—I knew it as information, and even that only because I'd heard it separately.
"The rough stretch is short-lived. Once we're across the border, we can travel at our ease."
"……."
Why, though, when we'd prepared documents and identities aplenty, did she insist on slipping past the borders and the checkpoints outright?
To that question, Luirin's answer was:
"Because as long as we don't cross at the border, pinpointing where we are becomes that much harder. Someone's following us, remember? And it's written all over you how little you welcome that—so later on, that too could boil over into needless trouble. We take on a bit of risk as a way of erasing our tracks, that's all. Though I suppose you wouldn't know this, Master—every border, every trading post, every checkpoint that inspects people, even some of the neutral trade zones—all of it runs on information exchange. 'Hey, your people came through here.' 'Hey, such-and-such noble of yours passed this way.' Or: 'Has so-and-so ever shown up here?' 'Let me check—ah, yes, there he is.' Something like that."
"……."
She talks too much.
More than that—for such an adorable little explanation, the content was gruesomely bleak, wasn't it?
"And that information doesn't just flow between nations—it pours into every manner of dark organization besides. Even if the country itself leaves you alone, the moment you look like you're carrying something worthwhile, they might drag their people out to raid you, or send assassins."
"…It goes that far?"
"They might see whether they can collect a bounty off your corpse. Or snatch you first and figure things out after. And if what you're carrying turns out to be extraordinary, well—that's profit all on its own, isn't it? You and I are both carrying magic gear, Master. The moment anyone clocks that, we're targets on the spot. And besides, out in some desolate stretch like this, if we're killed, buried, and finished off as feed for beasts or monsters—who's going to find us? They'd give up on the bodies. Tracking down our effects would be far faster, don't you think?"
"Hm…."
Her explanation made the world feel freshly, newly vicious.
"But turn it around, and you can strip them clean instead. Depending on the moment, that's tidy money, too. Getting caught at it later would be a nuisance, sure—but so long as you resolve never to show your face in that region again for years, it's the sort of thing worth a bold attempt."
"……."
For all her adorable looks, this one was every bit as ruthless as they came.