Light and Shadow (1)
Every morning, while Yona was packing up her sleeping bag, Rubina would materialize at James's side like a little ghost.
When it was time to prepare a meal, she proved quick-witted, stacking the dishes needed for breakfast in a neat pile; when the meal was done, she'd already drawn water into the bucket for washing them; and while Yona scrubbed, Rubina would stand beside her, taking each dish and drying it with a cloth.
"Right, time to move out."
Kayak patted Rubina's head, and she gave a small nod before trotting back to James.
James scooped Rubina up with practiced ease, spun her around onto his back, then skillfully fashioned a carrier from a long strip of cloth and strapped her in tight.
"Feels like it'll be a warm one today."
James drawled with an easy smile.
And just as he'd said, the sunlight as their journey began toward midday was warm as could be.
Summer on the northern continent was short, but winter arrived early in its place.
A brief summer, an even briefer autumn — and winter closing in fast on their heels.
Nobody welcomes winter, that most unwelcome of seasons, and yet here it came early, as if playing some impish prank.
"How much farther to the Grand Duchy of Carpatia?"
"If we keep this pace and nothing goes wrong, call it four days."
"We're almost there."
What terrified her was how accustomed she'd grown to these distances.
Yona heaved a long sigh inside.
Walking distance measured in four-day increments — was this world insane?
"Come on, Rubina. Want to walk with your big sister for a while?"
"...Huh?"
Without so much as waiting for Yona's answer, James undid the cloth carrier and set Rubina down.
Rubina stared at him for a moment, said nothing, and came to stand beside Yona, quietly starting to walk.
"...James, sir?"
"Well, you'll have to tell her yourself when you leave her at the Carpatia Cathedral orphanage anyway. You'll have plenty of explaining to do, so I figured it wouldn't hurt for you two to get a little closer first."
James flashed a good-natured smile.
It wasn't wrong, exactly — it was just funny that Yona, who had sworn mere hours ago that she would not get attached, was already being foiled.
As she walked, Yona stole a glance down at Rubina.
Standing beside Yona, who was tall for a woman, Rubina didn't even come up to her sternum. She was ten, granted, but this was small even so. No doubt because she'd never eaten properly.
"Rubina."
At Yona's call, the girl lifted her head and looked up at her.
Her black eyes caught the sunlight and gleamed.
"...Do you regret it? At all?"
Yona had no idea what devil had gotten into her.
She'd asked the question herself, and now she was wondering what she'd even meant by it.
"Coming with us. We're only headed to the orphanage to drop you off — don't you regret coming along?"
"...No."
"No? Why not? It might've actually been better for you, growing up with the men of that village. Weren't they good to you?"
"...No. The people who always hurt my big sister — those people."
"Hurt her?"
That was an unexpected thing to hear.
The villagers had said that Rubina's older sister made her living helping with odd jobs around the village for wages. That story, and what Rubina was saying now, didn't square at all.
Yona stared at her, unblinking.
Rubina stared right back up at her, just as long.
Golden eyes met black ones.
Rubina's red lips trembled once more.
"At night, the men would come looking for my sister. Every night. When they did, she'd moan like she was in pain."
"What?"
What did I just hear?
And Yona wasn't the only one who'd heard it. Alec, walking beside her, had caught it too.
"What are you... what are you saying right now?"
Yona stared at Rubina, eyes gone wide.
Rubina, apparently finding the weight of that gaze too much, dropped her eyes and fidgeted with her own hands.
"It's nothing... I'm sorry."
"No — no, it's not that, Rubina. You didn't do anything wrong. I just... I didn't hear you right, that's all."
With Alec, Yona, and Rubina having abruptly stopped in the middle of the road, Kayak and James — who had walked a fair distance ahead before doubling back — caught up. Kayak, about to ask why the three idiots were just standing there, seemed to sense that something was off and wisely shut his mouth, moving quietly to Yona's side.
"It's all right, Rubina. Say it again — the men, what did they do?"
Yona lowered herself to one knee, bringing her eyes level with Rubina's.
The girl still couldn't quite meet her gaze.
"Two or three men would come looking for my sister every night. They'd get angry if I wasn't asleep, so I pretended to sleep... but the men came drunk, so they'd wake up easily, and then..."
"...And then?"
"They'd yell if I went out to see who it was, so I stayed in my room. And the men went into my sister's room... and she'd moan like she was in pain."
"And?"
"The next morning, there were more vegetables in our breakfast than usual."
The four of them said nothing.
Only Rubina, fidgeting and glancing up at them anxiously, wondering if she'd said something wrong.
Yona had wanted to think it was ordinary.
She'd wanted to tell herself that for parentless sisters scraping by in some tiny village, it would have been a choice without alternatives.
But it wasn't working.
"Kay—"
"No. Don't."
Alec's hand closed around Yona's wrist before she could shout for Kayak.
Yona glared at him as he gripped her wrist tight.
"You're all thinking it, Yona. But you can't. We're not apostles of justice — we're not even some righteous hero. We've got no obligation to do that. And— this isn't rare. It's not unusual at all. It's disturbingly common."
"You say that awfully easily."
Alec met the fury flaring in those golden eyes with a steady gaze.
"We're adventurers. Not murderers of ordinary people. We take contracts for pay, and we resolve them. That's what we are."
"But they're criminals."
"They're not criminals. They were selling their own bodies — what's wrong with that?"
"But she was a child. Just a few years older than Rubina."
"Being a child is exactly what made it worse. She was a child, which meant there was no other way for her to survive. Look at that village — what help did anyone expect from it? No hands to help, so she sold her body, and the adults bought it. Filthy, obscene — but it doesn't just happen there, and it didn't just happen to Rubina."
Yona fell silent.
This world had an almost uncanny absence of any concept of human rights.
For all that protecting children was the common wisdom, this was a place where such things happened on the daily.
"I understand, Yona. I do. If it were up to me, I'd want to march back to that village and put every last one of them in the ground. I keep thinking there was a reason the reward for that troll got cut short. But we can't, Yona. If we did, we'd just be ordinary murderers."
"......"
"And if those people hadn't done what they did... Rubina wouldn't be alive right now. She'd have starved to death long ago."
Yona looked quietly down at Rubina.
Rubina, still holding Yona's left hand, looked straight back at her.
That night.
By lucky draw, Yona won a place in the first watch.
With a rounded, swelling rocky hill at her back, and the camp spread out in a circle before her, Yona tossed a few more chunks of wood onto the campfire.
...It might get cold.
She rose and dragged her sleeping bag closer to the fire.
From inside the bag — far too big for her small frame — came the soft, faint rhythm of a child's breathing. Rubina had long since left for the land of dreams.
Only after nudging the sleeping bag as close to the warmth as she could, so the girl could sleep just a little more comfortably, did Yona straighten her back and scan the surroundings.
And her eyes met them.
Several pairs of yellow, slitted eyes, watching her from the darkness beyond.
Yona threw herself flat on pure instinct.
The instant she dropped, a crossbow bolt whistled through exactly where her head had been.
The terrible pain came flooding in — the barely-healed scar on her face had been scraped raw all over again — but Yona, hugging the ground, wrenched herself sideways in a desperate roll.
"Monsters! Everyone up — get up, get up NOW!"
There was a rush of movement and a burst of dust kicked up into the air.
Her companions, deep in sleep in their bedrolls mere moments ago, came tumbling out and were already strapping on their gear, eyes sweeping the darkness.
"Rubina, stay right there. Got it? Don't come out, no matter what."
Before running to Alec, who had already moved to the front, Yona shoved Rubina into a crevice between the rocks.
Rubina, catching the mood in an instant, nodded without a word and hid herself exactly as she was told.
Yona dragged two sleeping bags over and draped them over Rubina's head as a shield against stray bolts, then scrambled breathlessly toward Alec.
"What the hell are those things?"
"Gnolls."
Alec answered as he shifted a shield already bristling with two or three crossbow bolts.
Yona peered between his shoulder blades, one hand braced on his shoulder — and there they were: half a dozen wolf-headed figures standing upright on two legs.
Definitely gnolls.
Not especially strong, but they moved in packs of seven to ten, and some among them wielded crossbows.
Right — in that case—
"James, sir!"
"Already gone."
Crossbows packed power but cycled slowly, and where gnolls had crossbows, this party had an orc archer named James. Yona turned her head and scanned the trees; he was nowhere to be seen, which meant he'd already slipped into the forest.
Roughly six gnolls visible.
How many crossbow-wielders lurked in the rear was anyone's guess, but hunting them down one by one in the dead of night was a losing proposition — they had no choice but to trust James.
— Gotcha!
A crossbow bolt slammed into Kayak's shoulder.
He flinched mid-charge and stumbled to a halt, and in that instant the gnoll he'd been bearing down on seized the opening, whirling its twin axes and lunging at him.
"Hah!"
Kayak caught one axe on his haft.
Then a second axe flew from Kayak's belt into his free hand — and a gnoll's axe came swinging in at his midsection, only for Alec's shield to cut in and take it instead.
"Down!"
Alec's hammer shattered a gnoll's lower jaw.
The moment the creature's strength failed, Kayak's axe split its skull, and Alec swiftly kicked the corpse away.
"Hold still. This is going to hurt."
Yona yanked the bolt from Kayak's shoulder with a hard, clean pull.
His expression said it all — the low hiss told her it stung like hell.
The instant her fingers touched his blood-welling shoulder, a pale glow shimmered softly to life.
"How is it? Better yet?"
"If you're so sore, go find a priest, lizard."
"Better than most priests, you are."
"Big talker. Done — go!"
Yona gave Kayak's shoulder a shove, and he took up his axes and charged back into the fray with long, relentless strides.
Facing him stood a gnoll, jaws stretched wide, raising its great blade—
— Thunk!
—an arrow buried itself in its skull, and the gnoll collapsed face-first, felled mid-lunge.
James's exploits were always carried out where no one could see them — and this night was no different.
Unlike most archers, who spotted and intercepted enemies from the rear, James made full use of his racial gifts as an orc and specialized in a very different breed of archery: one that hunted the enemy down and infiltrated their ranks.
The archer who sniped from the treetops, sniped in turn from the tree opposite.
A Shadow Archer — leveraging the orc's superior physique to punch through every line of resistance and strike before the enemy knew what was happening.
That same breed of archer who only grew deadlier in the dark of night had, while the front-line warriors killed one gnoll, quietly put down three crossbow gnolls on his own and then circled back to support from the rear.
Truth be told, this gnoll skirmish had been all but James's work from start to finish.
"Ow, ow, that hurts."
"There, there. Yes it doooes. Our baldy got one little scratch and he's cryyying."
Yona healed Alec's wound while grinning at him mercilessly.
Every time her right hand — wrapped tight in the Holy Shroud — touched the gash, it vanished as if washed clean, and Rubina stood at Yona's side, watching it all with wide eyes.
"Um, Miss Yona?"
"Hm?"
"That thing... how do you do it?"
"What?"
"Making the wounds... go away..."
"Oh — the healing, you mean? James, sir, come over here a second. Let me look at those scrapes from climbing the trees."
Being an archer granted no superhuman gifts, and the small cuts and scrapes from a night of scaling trees were practically inevitable. Rubina watched, quiet and rapt, as those wounds too melted away, sizzling softly, at Yona's touch.
"This is what healing is. I can do it because my class is Healer."
"Healer...? You're... a Healer, Miss Yona?"
"That's right, I'm a Healer. Bronze-rank Healer of the Evian Adventurer's Guild — a Healer who's survived a whole three years!"
Yona's chest swelled with pride, her nose climbing higher and higher.
"Then... I want to be a Healer too, Miss Yona."
"...Huh?"