A Misunderstanding That Bites Its Own Tail
With Tiana gone from the village, Sian believed he had finally reclaimed his peaceful daily life.
Yes. Believed.
"Dev, it's been a while. Been busy lately?"
"Huh?! Oh, uh…."
His neighbor, who usually bantered with him freely, was somehow avoiding his gaze with an awkward stiffness.
Bemused by the man's fidgeting, Sian asked, "You're acting a little strange, aren't you?"
"Wha? No, it's just…."
"What is it? What's going on?"
Pressed, Dev seemed to weigh something for a moment before letting out a deep sigh. Looking at Sian carefully, he spoke up at last.
"The village chief told us not to ruffle your feathers. I've been wracking my brain over how I'm supposed to treat you."
"……?"
I'm sorry, what was that now?
Don't ruffle my feathers?
The village chief was the kind of man who, friendly as he might be, never gave anything away for free and milked Sian for every odd job he could. And now this.
Even as he thought it, a recent event drifted back to him.
"…Is this because of that?"
"Well, yeah."
Dev nodded with a wry smile, and at his confirmation, Sian exhaled quietly.
It stung, but honestly, the reaction wasn't entirely incomprehensible.
If I were them, I'd be suspicious too.
One Elina might have been dismissed as a fluke, but with Tiana reacting that way as well, people couldn't help but suspect something. Maybe not be certain of it—but definitely suspect it.
"Anyway, that's why. The chief keeps fussing at us not to give you any work. Says we shouldn't poke the bear and set you off for no reason."
"What am I, a wild animal?"
Still, he'd been trading help around the village for goods and favors. If that dried up, his daily life might get a little lean going forward.
"Don't worry about that. We held a meeting among the villagers—we're going to pay extra for the childcare you do, on top of what you'd normally get."
"You held a whole meeting about it?"
So that's why the villagers have been dodging me lately.
It left a bitter taste to learn it hadn't just been the busy harvest season after all.
"Look, I'll talk to the villagers myself later, so don't fret. Nobody knows why you're hiding your strength and living in retirement, but we all know you're not a bad man."
"No, I'm telling you, I didn't retire—"
"Sure, sure. Let's go with that. I don't know what happened, but you don't exactly seem eager to talk about it."
Dev nodded and simply let it slide with a 'whatever you say.'
No, strong or not, none of that is even true—what am I supposed to say at this point?
It seemed the idea that he was a hidden master living in seclusion had already hardened into established fact.
After his talk with Dev ended, Sian returned home and flopped straight onto his bed, starfished across the mattress. Staring blankly at the familiar wood grain of the ceiling, he let out a long, deep sigh.
Well, life will get a bit more comfortable, at least….
But he might as well accept that the old ordinary, quiet life he'd enjoyed in this village had sailed for good.
"What am I going to do about the kids?"
The villagers had said he could keep looking after the little ones, but in the current climate, even that felt like it would be an ordeal. The kids would probably start begging him to train them, just like Elina and Tiana had. Or worse, maybe it wouldn't be the children who came knocking, but their parents, begging him to turn their precious sons and daughters into S-rank adventurers.
The aftershocks of the misunderstanding Tiana left behind looked like they'd be a far worse headache than he'd anticipated.
"Should I move away…?"
But he had nowhere in particular to go. The only reason he'd settled here in the first place was that this region saw fewer monster incursions than anywhere else. Finding a spot this safe in a medieval fantasy world was no small feat.
"Mmmh. I don't know."
No clever solution was coming to him at the moment. Maybe, given time, the misunderstanding would gradually untangle itself.
With that hopeful forecast, Sian decided he might as well take an afternoon nap—the first in ages—and closed his eyes.
A village in the eastern reaches of the kingdom.
Its adventurer guild hall was, as always, packed with adventurers returning from their commissions. Fresh off the day's routine requests, they drank cheap beer and swapped stories to wash away the fatigue.
"Hey, did you hear?"
A burly warrior, face flushed with drink, called out to a wiry-faced rogue sitting across from him.
The rogue, equally deep in his cups, eyed him with a what's this guy's deal? look, but decided to hear the man out first.
"'Did I hear?' How am I supposed to know what that means? Hear what?"
"The monster that's been the plague of the Red Canyon."
"Bloody Claw? That son of a—"
The beast was so infamous around these parts that not knowing it would've been stranger—a wolf-type monster that hunted something, anything, at all times, its claws perpetually stained red with blood, hence the dreaded name. Even with an enormous extermination bounty posted by the guild, it remained an unsolved headache. There were even whispers that left alone, it would one day become a full-blown Calamity—but that had nothing to do with a mere C-rank like him, so he'd simply filed it away. Now that it was suddenly on the table, curiosity won out.
"That's the one."
"So what about it? Don't tell me it showed up nearby?"
"You could say that. Tiana brought its corpse in today! I only caught a glimpse myself, but the thing was so huge I thought I was looking at an ogre!"
"…Tiana. You mean Tiana, the S-rank adventurer?"
Work as an adventurer long enough and the names of the S-ranks came up so often that you learned them whether you wanted to or not.
"Yeah. If an S-rank didn't kill it, who was going to?"
"She only made S-rank recently, though…. Those S-ranks really are monsters. Who was she partying with? Another S-rank?"
"That's the thing—they say she took it down alone."
"……?"
The rogue, mid-swallow with his beer mug tilted, froze solid. The beer in the tilted mug, too slow to reach his foolishly hanging open mouth, dribbled straight down his chin.
"Aw, dammit!"
"Hey, what the hell is wrong with you?"
"You're what's wrong with me, spouting nonsense like that!"
The rogue grumbled as he wiped his mouth. Still, he pressed the warrior—whose face was now glowing a full-bodied red—further.
"What are you even saying? She killed that thing by herself?"
An S-rank killing Bloody Claw?
Yeah. That much, he could believe. Bloody Claw was difficult prey, sure, but it was S-rank—not Disaster-class.
But killing it alone? That was a problem of an entirely different order.
It was like claiming that because a person weighed seventy kilograms, they could eat seventy kilograms. Humans and monsters differed that much in sheer baseline bulk—the claim was simply too absurd to swallow.
"I didn't believe it either, but it's true! The merchant who got attacked swears he saw it with his own two eyes! She suddenly put her hands together, sized the thing up, and—"
"You're out of your mind."
The tale was so preposterous the words wouldn't come.
"I heard she made S-rank, sure, but I never heard anything about feats like that afterward."
If she'd been an adventurer that strong even solo, the stories would have spread long ago, years into her S-rank career. Yet lately she hadn't distinguished herself at all. For her to suddenly be a monster in battle—it defied explanation.
"Exactly! But here's the thing…."
The warrior clapped along with the rogue's skepticism and drained his mug in great gulps.
The rogue waited for what came next.
"……."
"? What, why'd you stop?"
"Throat's a bit dry."
At the warrior's mutter, upending his empty mug, the rogue's face fell in exasperation.
This big oaf plays a sly game. He should've been a bard.
The message was clear: buy me another beer if you want the rest of the story. And having come this far, there was no walking away now. The rogue ordered two more mugs—his own included—and only then did the warrior open his mouth again.
"So the receptionist was shocked that she'd killed it alone, and asked her how—and apparently she suddenly got these sparkling eyes and just started gushing about the teacher who trained her!"
"Teacher?"
"Something or other—grateful sword draws? She said she learned to be grateful? Said a great and venerable teacher had guided her. Wouldn't stop chattering about it, apparently. Totally thrilled."
"What is that even supposed to mean? Did she say he was a holy knight or something?"
S-rank adventurers were beings called the pinnacle of humanity. They occupied a realm only geniuses among geniuses could set foot in—there was no existence that could stand above them and teach them anything.
He was about to dismiss it all asutter nonsense, but the warrior, grinning slovenly through his drunkenness, spoke up.
"You know how it goes. Every once in a while, a hero walks right out of a storybook."
S-ranks, powers of that caliber—rare, yes, but they had always existed.
But beings who could fell even Calamity-class monsters that towered beyond S-rank? Heroes, as legend named them, did not exist in every age.
Which was precisely why they were called heroes, and why their deeds became stories at all.
The rogue snorted in open disbelief.
"Ha. If someone like that actually existed, their name would've been thundering across the land ages ago."
"Heh heh. Who's to say? Maybe there's a hero out there who found the crowds tiresome and retired to the boondocks."
Honestly, it would've been more plausible to hear that she'd met elves or dwarves in some deep, uncharted forest and learned their arts.
"Say something that at least makes sense. What a waste of beer money."
"Oh, come on, it was interesting, wasn't it? Have a drink."
"You really ought to quit the warrior trade and become a bard. It's your true calling, I swear."
The two clinked mugs, chuckling, and were just raising their beer when—
"What an interesting story."
A voice drifted over from somewhere nearby—sharp, yet unmistakably beautiful.
Warrior and rogue turned their heads at the same instant toward the source. There stood a woman with sky-blue hair, draped in a hooded robe.
"The hell? Eavesdropping on other people's conversations is a rotten hobby, missy."
"You two were bellowing loud enough to wake the dead. It'd be stranger if I hadn't heard."
The woman, in answer to the warrior's grumbling, drew something from within her robe and tossed it to him. He caught it on pure reflex—then, recognizing what now sat in his palm—
"Well, well! Does the lovely lady happen to be in the market for some information??"
His posture snapped from belligerent to obsequious in an instant, an oily grin spreading across his face. When money that would take days of risking your neck to earn drops into your hand at once, any man would react the same way.
And then—
"I'd like to hear more about that story you were just telling. In detail."
Her eyes, murmuring those words with naked interest toward the warrior, were glittering a brilliant, luminous blue.