Back on the Road
We'd heard some unexpected stories, true enough—but anyway, after finishing our meal with the help of the teddy bear Frederica was controlling—
"Haa... so this is Ren's taste...♡"
"That's creepy as hell. Cut it out. Please."
I forced down the bristling feathers of my wings at the sight of that turncoat writhing so disgustingly, and said,
"First things first, Huey. I need to talk to you."
"Huh? Out of nowhere?"
I decided to apologize to him first.
"Looks like our resident pervert snuck into your room while you were sleeping."
"...What?"
"She seems to have collected things like your hair and nail clippings. Sorry."
I gave a slight bow toward the flustered Huey, then quietly fixed Frederica with a glare.
"Ugh... I'm sorry. My curiosity got the better of me."
Only then did Frederica break out in a cold sweat and bow her head politely.
"No, well... it's a bit unsettling, but if you'd just asked, I could have given you that much anytime. Please, just do it the normal way..."
Huey answered while turning his gaze aside, looking thoroughly put off, as if he couldn't bear to meet her eyes.
"...It would appear that bust size and moral character are inversely proportional after all."
And Lucy nodded as if she'd just reached some profound understanding, staring straight at Frederica's chest.
Looking at the two of them reacting as if they'd never imagined the witch in front of them could do something like that, I figured Frederica's subtle image-crafting from the moment she'd first met them had been somewhat effective...
Wait a second.
...Image?
"Hey."
A sudden thought struck me, and I called out to Frederica with a growing sense of dread.
"Yes?"
"You... the fact that you didn't use that thing until the very end—don't tell me..."
"...Hah."
Frederica's face went white as she seemed to realize what was coming next.
"What is it this time?"
"Master. This sounds entertaining, so let's just listen quietly."
I'd been a little bothered by the fact that she hadn't used that technique—the one that had given the Captain and me so much trouble—until the very end.
"Don't tell me you held out in that situation just to protect your image?"
I asked, half in disbelief, half in exasperation.
"For a woman! Image is! More important than life itself?!"
Frederica slammed both hands on the table, shot up from her seat, and shouted with an expression of pure injustice.
"I'm telling you, that image was already ruined a long time ago..."
"Even so! Even sooo!"
She was now lying flat on the floor, throwing a full-blown tantrum. Huey and Lucy watched the spectacle with keen interest.
"I just wanted to look like an elegant older sister for once...!"
At Frederica finally spilling her true feelings in a teary voice—
"...Elegant?"
I decided to recall the Frederica that Huey and Lucy had encountered back in Swinford.
"Weren't you already a long way from elegant the moment you repaired your shattered head and got up like a zombie?"
—Twitch.
And another thing.
"The next time they saw you, you were floating in the water looking like a drowning victim."
—Twitch.
"Ah, she's dead."
"She's dead."
And so, after watching Frederica—who had been putting up a fight—finally go limp and speechless for a moment—
"Oh, right."
"Huh?"
"Yesterday, Violet sent you a... ahem, letter."
"You really are... *sigh*..."
I glared briefly at Huey, who was dredging up yesterday's events that I'd been trying so hard to forget while teasing Frederica. Just thinking about it made my face burn and my stomach twist. I'd put so much effort into scrubbing it from my memory...
"What do you want to do?"
"What is there to do? Nothing to hide, so just open it and give it to me."
Huey's face seemed to be burning just as much as mine. Watching him approach with a carefully composed expression, holding the letter he'd pulled from his coat—
"What's with that old man suddenly writing a letter... He could've just contacted us the usual way."
I grumbled toward the absent Captain.
"Oh, about that."
Frederica, who had somehow revived and was sitting back in her seat, spoke up.
"The Captain seems to have forgotten to pack parchment this time."
"That's unusual. He normally packs that kind of thing carefully."
I was briefly puzzled by the news that the parchment had been left sitting on his office desk.
"Here you go."
"Thanks."
As Huey came up beside me, tore open the envelope, and handed me the contents, I decided to set aside my thoughts about the Captain.
After quietly reading the letter Huey had spread out on the table—
"Haa."
I sighed.
"What's it say?"
Looking at Huey, who was asking with a curious expression, I opened my mouth.
"Nothing major. He got hit with a penalty. Reason: decline in contract fulfillment reliability due to inadequate management."
Inadequate management. Didn't take a genius to figure that out. It was a reprimand for my body ending up like this.
"Contract? With who?"
"Is the mercenary group itself a subordinate organization of something?"
Huey and Lucy looked at me with questions. And Frederica looked at me with a troubled expression.
Can't be helped. She'd find it awkward to explain herself.
"I'll fill you in."
And so, toward Huey and Lucy—who were looking at me after I'd folded the letter and set it on the table—I began explaining about us, about Esras.
"A mercenary group made up of six people total—including me, the Captain, and Frederica here. That's Esras."
There used to be plenty of people who scoffed at calling a group of fewer than ten a mercenary company, but things are different now. And for good reason.
"And every single member is a Transcendent who formally passed the Trial at the Temple of Courage."
Excluding the Adventurer's Guild, almost no country or organization in the world holds more than two Transcendents. Six Transcendents is a force that could, depending on the circumstances, even topple a nation. How could anyone ignore that?
"...What?"
"Is that... even possible?"
"It must be, or we wouldn't be sitting here like this, would we?"
Looking at Huey and Lucy, who were asking again with faces of disbelief, I lifted one wing and pointed at Frederica, who was pretending not to listen over there.
"Anyway, to explain the contract, I need to tell you about Frederica."
In a way, you could even call Frederica one of Esras's founding members.
"Do you remember what Osmon said last time?"
At my question, the two of them thought carefully, seeming to recall a conversation from a few days ago, then looked at Frederica at the same time and spoke.
"If it's something Osmon said..."
"Killing a Hero..."
Frederica made a bitter face at Huey and Lucy's murmuring, but—
"That's right."
I decided to continue the story without paying her any mind. The story of the day I first met Frederica.
"That one was originally a disaster-class subjugation target."
Well, she had her reasons, but nobody knew about that at the time.
"...Hold on."
"Just checking, but—was the previous Hero actually a bad person or something like that?"
As expected, this part was hard to swallow right away. Toward the two who had stopped me mid-sentence to ask, I spoke while recalling those days.
"I don't think there were any rumors like that."
I wasn't particularly interested in Heroes, but from what I remember, his reputation was pretty good. Anyway.
"The Hero's party that went out to subjugate Frederica got wiped out instead, so things got pretty chaotic."
The Hero's spare hadn't even been prepared yet, so I clearly remember how much of an uproar it caused.
"That's when the Captain and I made our move—we'd been looking for a way to get famous so we could attract clients."
Mercenaries who took down a disaster-class that even a Hero had failed against. The risk was huge, but the Captain grinned wickedly saying we'd be sitting on a mountain of money in no time.
"Well, we did win in the end, but..."
We did find a way to kill her, but it wasn't something you could do in your right mind at the time.
"One thing led to another, and we ended up taking Frederica in."
After glancing briefly at Frederica, who had her ears covered against the airing of her dark history—
"You took in someone who killed a Hero. Did other people just sit still for that?"
"Right. If it were me, I'd say round them all up and kill them."
Sure enough, I opened my mouth toward the curious Huey and Lucy.
"Of course it wasn't fine."
A large-scale subjugation force was even organized to kill us along with her—what a pain that was.
"So we went straight into a show of force."
If the Archbishop of Arcadia hadn't shown up to mediate right when I was wondering if we'd have to fight to the death, we might actually have died.
"Their own Hero was dead, and somehow they still proposed a contract with us."
In exchange for wiping Frederica's crimes clean and watching our backs, Arcadia offered two conditions: fill the Hero's vacant seat until the next Hero took their place, and keep a proper rein on Frederica so she wouldn't go on a rampage like that again.
"Thanks to that, everything beyond the bare minimum operating costs gets siphoned off by Arcadia."
If not for that, we'd be living in a grand castle of a house instead of this rundown mansion.
Anyway.
"And with me ending up like this in the middle of all that, it means the Captain went to Arcadia for a regular report and got thoroughly chewed out."
Well, a Hero had already taken the seat long ago. But I didn't need to mention that they'd been forcibly maintaining the contract for years now under the excuse that the Hero was still young.
"If we break the contract on our end, we'd be handing them a justification to make us subjugation targets again. So even if it's annoying, we can't just flip the table."
At least we'd been having some fun siphoning off the materials from the disaster-class monsters we subjugated, but the Captain's been really unhappy lately about the Hero beating us to them more often.
"If you've got more questions, ask away."
With that, I wrapped up the story.
"If there's nothing else, how about we head out right away?"
I proposed to Huey and Lucy, who were drinking tea with drowsy faces. There was nothing more to gain by staying here anyway, so if there were no issues, we should leave immediately.
"Are you sure? Maybe rest one more day..."
"Coming from someone who was stuck lying down until just yesterday, that's quite something."
"Well, Ren's always been like that. She's held out pretty long as it is."
...Why that reaction when the person who was lying down says she's fine?
"Ah, seriously! So are we going or not?"
When I snapped at the three of them, who had started badmouthing me beginning with Frederica, they looked at me with chilly eyes as if they'd coordinated it, then sighed in unison.
"Fine. Let's go, let's go."
"If you hate feeling cooped up, then we should go."
And so, in the end—
"Then give the Captain my regards."
"Yes~. Have a safe trip. I'll be waiting."
We packed our things once more, and with Frederica seeing us off, set out on the road again.