Mistaken for a Mage
After a brief, awkward silence, the first to move were five or six young men.
I had never tangled with them directly, but I had seen them quarreling with others in the group several times before. Their faces and mannerisms were so savage that anyone could tell at a glance they were rough customers. The man I had pegged as a thug the moment we joined the caravan was among them.
The young men dashed toward the pile of supplies. When the captain left us here, he had abandoned a considerable number of iron tools—spears, knives, hoes, and the like. Some of the people who had come to this place had brought their families. There weren’t enough weapons for one per person, but there were enough for at least one per household.
Thinking back on my conversation with the captain, I doubted the royal family had provided them. It seemed the captain himself had prepared the weapons to deal with outsiders or wild beasts. I had been grateful at the time, but in this moment they had become a curse.
If those men laid hands on the weapons before anyone else, it would spell danger. The people who finally sensed the crisis rushed toward the supplies. I did the same.
But the young men moved in perfect coordination, as if they had planned it, blocking anyone who tried to approach.
“Back off! These supplies belong to us from now on. No one touches them without our permission!”
“Get lost!”
“Out of the way, you worthless trash!”
It was clear they had intended to do this even before we arrived. The men punched anyone who tried to reach the supplies, driving them back. They were clearly used to fighting. I had thought they were thugs, and it turned out they really were.
The idea of facing several at once made my nerves tighten, but if I yielded here it would all be over. One of the thugs already held a weapon; the rest were still empty-handed. The chance was now. If I missed this moment, I would spend the rest of my time in the frontier under their thumb.
I slipped around behind the men and approached the supplies from the rear. One of the thugs spotted me late, but a mountain of luggage stood between us. The captain had unloaded enough cargo from the wagons to resemble an entire household’s worth of moving boxes. The thug tried to leap over the pile, failed, and scrambled around the side in a panic.
In that brief window I seized the handle of a spear poking out between the bundles and yanked it free. It was fortunate I had noted the weapons’ locations in advance. The captain had deliberately scattered them rather than stacking them all in one place. Perhaps he had anticipated trouble like this.
Before the thug could reach me, I managed to pull out several spears. Just then the child’s father—who had spotted me and come running—arrived. I thrust one into his hands. He caught it, let the extras clatter behind him, and gripped one firmly with both hands.
He leveled it at the charging thug without hesitation. The steady gleam in his eyes made me flinch. Unlike me, who still hesitated to kill, this man was clearly prepared to take a life if it meant protecting the supplies—his family’s property.
People with something to protect are strong.
The spears that had fallen to the ground were snatched up by other men rushing forward. Several thugs from the front had already armed themselves and were charging toward us.
“You rat bastard!”
The first thug who had noticed me bellowed with a twisted face and lunged. He held a knife. He wasn’t ready to commit murder yet, but my body moved on instinct.
I deflected the flying blade with the spear and shoved it aside. In my case, technique mattered more than raw strength. In the thirty years I lived on Earth, I had survived countless misfortunes—bumping into the wrong stranger on the street only to discover he was a gangster, or accidentally witnessing an axe murder and becoming the killer’s next target. I had lived through all of them.
In short, I was immune to situations like this. My senses had been honed whether I liked it or not. Otherwise I would have died long ago.
The thug’s knife changed direction mid-swing and came slashing down with the same momentum. Good. It worked. I had experience with sickles, axes, and hammers, but knives had only been kitchen blades, so I had been a little worried. Looking back now, my thirty years on Earth had truly been a brutal life.
The clash of metal rang out from elsewhere. When I glanced over, the child’s father was swinging his spear in a desperate fight against another thug. A little too close for comfort.
He had spirit, but his skill was terrible. At this rate he would be killed. The bright, innocent smile of his child flashed through my mind.
Fine. I would steel myself.
There was such a thing as murder law in this world, though it differed from Earth’s. Cities and villages had their own rules, a messy patchwork of laws and circumstances that were applied however convenient at the time. From what the captain had hinted, in a place like this a dead body was likely to be quietly buried and forgotten.
And right now, that exact situation was about to unfold.
I let out a long breath.
Between the child’s father and the thug, there was no need to weigh who should live and who should die. If I didn’t stop these thugs now, the future would become hell. I had to help. I needed to finish the one in front of me first.
As I thrust my spear forward, Popcorn shot out ahead of the weapon.
“Pipipipipipipipipipipipi!”
Popcorn streaked forward like an angry bee, shrieking at the top of his lungs. So he could fly like that. It was the complete opposite of his usual staggering. I was genuinely surprised.
He seemed furious that the thug had pointed a weapon at me. But what could such a tiny creature actually do? He spent every day stumbling around and bouncing off people. Worried he would get hurt, I hurriedly thrust my spear forward as well.
The moment Popcorn’s small body slammed into the thug, a brilliant light burst from him in every direction. It wasn’t the usual gentle, drifting sparkle. With a loud whoosh, the light spread all at once like a transparent umbrella snapping open. It looked like the flashy defensive barrier from an anime.
The thug was launched into the air and sent flying backward.
“Aaaagh!”
He screamed as he crashed into the ground several meters away and lay still, apparently unconscious. Yet even after seeing that, Popcorn’s anger hadn’t faded. He let out another string of pipipi cries and charged at the next man.
At this rate he really would kill someone.
“Popcorn!”
I shouted without thinking. Popcorn, who had been about to ram the thug, froze in midair.
Pipi?
Popcorn spun around to look at me. Probably. He was so small it was impossible to tell which side was front unless you were close.
By then the fighting had stopped. The entire area had fallen deathly silent.
“He’s a mage!”
Ji-geu shouted as he watched the man sail through the air.
“I knew it! He really is a mage!”
The man in the strange clothes was exactly what Ji-geu had claimed—a mage. Father hadn’t believed him, but Ji-geu had been right all along.
The night they decided to head for the frontier had been windy enough to finally tear the old shutter off its hinges. After Mother disappeared and older brother died, Father had barely spoken. That night, for the first time in a long while, he sat Ji-geu down and told him they were going to the frontier.
Rumors about the frontier had circulated even among the children. The goats and sheep that used to live at their house had all vanished, so there was nothing left to tend, but Ji-geu had often gone far afield with the neighborhood kids to graze the village livestock. While the animals ate, the children—who had nothing else to do—would talk about what happened in their own homes.
They said you could make a lot of money in the frontier. When Ji-geu asked how, the other children told him the ground was full of buried gold coins. If that were true, Ji-geu wondered, why hadn’t everyone already gone to dig them up? By the time they arrived late, surely someone else would have taken everything.
After the livestock finished grazing, they would go to the owner’s house and receive a little stew with vegetables in it. There was never any for Father—only Ji-geu’s portion. He wanted to save some to share, but Father always said it wasn’t necessary, so Ji-geu ate alone at the owner’s house. While sipping the stew with the owner’s children, he listened to the adults talk.
Whether gold coins were really buried or not, it did seem possible to earn money. The adults spoke with spit flying, saying the frontier was a place where you could get rich. Ji-geu thought it would be nice if he and Father could pick up some gold coins there. Then maybe Mother would come home.
He didn’t remember exactly when Mother had left, but a few words remained burned into his memory.
I can’t bear this poverty anymore.
Mother had sobbed as she said it. She couldn’t stand being hungry or watching her children starve. After she left, only Father, older brother, and Ji-geu remained. Soon after, older brother died too.
There had only been two children in the house, so Ji-geu believed Mother left because of him and his brother. If they hadn’t been hungry, if they had been able to eat properly, maybe she wouldn’t have gone. Because of that thought, Ji-geu always tried to eat everything he could, as hard as he could—so Father wouldn’t leave him too.
But that was difficult. When there was nothing to eat, you couldn’t eat hard. Sometimes Ji-geu would secretly nibble the same grass the livestock ate. If sheep and goats could eat it, he figured people could too. Those days always gave him stomachaches and diarrhea, but he kept doing it anyway.
Then one day Father announced they were leaving for the frontier. It was only after they set out that Father began speaking again, even a little. That made Ji-geu so happy he started talking to other people whenever he could. He just wanted to say anything at all. Most of the time his words were ignored. Everyone reacted as if what he said didn’t matter.
There was a boy in another family who was bigger and older than Ji-geu. He would glare at him silently, and when Father wasn’t looking he would hit him. Ji-geu eventually gave up trying to befriend him.
It was around that time that the man in strange clothes joined the caravan. After Ji-geu learned the man had received a Spirit’s Blessing, he deliberately stayed close and tried to talk to him. Everyone who received a Spirit’s Blessing became happy, so maybe if he and Father stayed near him, they would become happy too.
At first that was his reason, but later he went close simply because it felt good to be near the man. It reminded him of lying on the ground with the other children, watching the livestock graze, staring at the sky and laughing. The man smelled like sunlight.
Unlike other adults, when Ji-geu spoke the man would smile, answer, and sometimes grab him by the waist, lift him high, and spin him around in the air. Even Father had never done that. Every time, the man would say, “Airplane takeoff!” When Ji-geu asked what an airplane was, the man said it was something from his homeland, but Ji-geu couldn’t picture it. When he asked again, the man made a troubled sound and told him it was like a bird.
Ji-geu still didn’t understand, but he began to suspect the man might be the mage he had only heard about in stories. When he told Father, Father gently stroked his head and said that if the man didn’t speak of it first, Ji-geu shouldn’t ask. Most people here had their own painful circumstances, so prying would be rude.
“He’s probably not a mage. Mages live in noble mansions or the royal palace. They aren’t the sort of people you meet in a place like this.”
That was what Father said. But Ji-geu still believed the man was a mage. When the man was nearby, Father would sometimes smile. That was truly astonishing. Father had seemed to have forgotten how to smile; he hadn’t laughed once in all that time. He never smiled when he was with other people. Only when he was beside the man in strange clothes would a faint, unconscious smile sometimes appear on his face.
Ji-geu said nothing. He was afraid that if Father realized he was smiling, he would stop. A person who knew strange things, spoke strange words, wore strange clothes, and could make a man who never smiled… smile. If a mage existed in this world, surely it would be someone like him. That was what Ji-geu thought.
One day while receiving food, he secretly told the captain. The captain winked and put a finger to his lips.
“It might be true, but that’s a secret, kid. Don’t tell anyone. If the mage is hiding it, there must be a good reason.”
After that Ji-geu kept his mouth tightly shut. But now it should be all right to speak. If the man had used magic in front of everyone, Ji-geu no longer needed to keep the secret.
While the others stared at the mage in stunned silence, Ji-geu shouted again.
“I knew it! I knew from the very beginning! That uncle is a mage!”
Father was blinking rapidly, staring at the mage with his mouth slightly open.
Hehe.
It looked like Father finally believed Ji-geu’s words. Ji-geu puffed out his chest proudly.
“I was the only one who knew that uncle was a mage.”
The mage looked at Ji-geu with the same troubled expression he had worn when Ji-geu asked about airplanes.