The Sword of the Dead
Bagan swung the tree branch with a fierce shout.
“Haaah!”
Whoosh!
Sweat poured down his face. His stance was a complete mess. Barret, who had been watching him, tilted her head.
“Um… why are you swinging a tree branch?”
“Huh? I don’t have a sword.”
Bagan had simply picked up a suitably long branch because he couldn’t think of any better way to get his hands on a real blade.
“Don’t you go to that forest regularly? The… uh…”
“Zairan Forest.”
“Yes, that one.”
“That’s why I grabbed a branch.”
Barret stared at him with an odd look in her eyes.
“What are you looking at me like that for?”
“Was the story about meeting adventurers a lie?”
“No? I did meet them.”
“Then couldn’t you have just asked them for a sword?”
Bagan froze with his mouth hanging open. Paul had definitely been a longsword user.
I should’ve asked him back then.
He regretted it deeply.
“It’s a shame, but what’s done is done.”
In truth, he hadn’t run into any other adventurers since that day. The odds of meeting the same party again were abysmal, and there were no other groups around either. So Bagan simply went back to swinging his branch.
“Where did those adventurers come from?”
She kept interrupting him.
“Ah—hup!—It’s called De Meca—hup!—A city close to the Zairan Forest—hup!”
Bagan answered while continuing to swing the branch, unwilling to waste even a single second.
“Did you never consider going there?”
“Huh?”
Bagan stopped mid-swing. The more he listened to her, the more he realized how stupid he had been.
“Barret.”
“Yes?”
“Are you a genius?”
“……”
Why didn’t I think of that?
He wanted to smack his own shin with the branch in self-reproach. But before the thought could become action—
Crack!
He snapped the branch over his knee instead. It had been too light to provide any real training anyway.
“Barret, I’ll be gone for about a day.”
“It’s that far?”
Bagan nodded and wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve.
“If you’re gone too long, Lord Palamus will come looking for you.”
Bagan, who had been about to head back to the mansion, paused and smiled at her words.
“I suppose he would.”
“Of course. Both you and I are Lord Palamus’s servants, after all.”
“I was a servant too?”
“Everything beneath the exalted Lord Palamus is a servant.”
Bagan swallowed the words You’re the only one who thinks that.
In any case, he had already given up on the idea of running away. Palamus needed him, so he would never allow it. If necessary, the dragon might even order Barret to drag him back. And Bagan had no desire to fight her in earnest. Of course, if she sided with Palamus in the final battle, he would have no choice.
With that thought in mind, Bagan headed toward the mansion and said,
“I’ll be back before breakfast tomorrow morning.”
He was leaving to obtain a sword. He would also take the chance to prepare a few other things while he was at it.
Bagan left the mansion and made his way to the Zairan Forest. He was familiar with the route since he had traveled it that very morning. The real problem was finding De Meca.
There were occasional small villages before reaching the city, but since he was going anyway, Bagan wanted a proper sword. In that sense, he planned to look up the connection he had made last time.
They called themselves Dawn’s Wolf, right?
It was the party consisting of Paul, Natalie, and the nameless mage. Not because Natalie had shot a water bullet at him, but simply because he hadn’t caught the mage’s name properly.
Re… something like that.
Since he couldn’t remember, he decided to move on.
As he passed through the Zairan Forest while thinking of them, Bagan caught a whiff of something acrid in the air.
“What’s that smell?”
With his exceptional senses, he could pinpoint the direction the scent was coming from.
“Over there?”
He focused his gaze in that direction, but saw nothing unusual. That meant the source was farther away than he had first thought.
Bagan fell into thought.
Should I check it out?
He was already heading toward De Meca. Taking a detour would cost him both time and distance from his original goal. Still, the smell of burning in the Zairan Forest was not something one encountered often.
Let’s go.
In the end, he made his decision. He felt a little bad for Barret, but he had never been the type to return at a set time anyway. Once he thought of it that way, his mind felt much lighter. Bagan broke into a run toward the source of the acrid smell.
After running for quite a while, he arrived at a clearing that was rare in the dense Zairan Forest. The closer he got, the stronger the smell became, so he ended up pinching his nose as he moved forward.
Where the hell is this smell coming from?
But the nearer he came, the more the stench seemed to spread in every direction, making it impossible to pinpoint. He would have to rely on sight alone.
The clearing wasn’t very large. The scorched marks on the ground made it clear that something had burned here. And soon, Bagan discovered what it was.
“Ugh!”
It was a corpse.
If it had been an animal’s carcass, there would have been no issue. But what he found in the clearing was unmistakably—
“How did this happen…”
A human corpse.
The body was burned from the waist down, suggesting the fire had started at the lower half. The face was crushed beyond recognition, and the man wore leather armor. From the build and frame, it appeared to be a male.
Bagan didn’t know the circumstances, but he felt only regret for not arriving sooner. There was no particular reason he should have saved the man, yet seeing a human corpse brought nothing but sorrow to mind.
He knelt down, offered a moment of silence, then used magic to dig a grave.
Dig.
He dug until the hole was large enough for the half-burned body, then gently placed the corpse inside and covered it with soil.
“May you rest in a better place.”
After one final moment of mourning, he was about to head toward De Meca when—
Glint.
Perhaps because it was a clearing, something caught the sunlight and flashed in Bagan’s eyes. Almost as if possessed, he walked toward the object.
In a small space where trees had been pushed slightly aside from the clearing, traces of a campsite remained. It seemed they had chosen to camp nearby rather than in an open area. But upon closer inspection, it was clear more than one person had been here. There were multiple footprints and several spots where blankets had been laid out. The campfire was also too large for a single traveler.
And from the spot where the fire had been, a long trail of scorched earth stretched outward.
“So he crawled all the way here while his lower body was burning.”
Now that he looked, in the opposite direction from where Bagan had entered, grass and small trees were flattened, and another scorched trail extended from the clearing. It was the same kind of burn mark he had seen earlier.
How could a person crawl while their body was being consumed by fire? And what had the man been heading toward in that direction?
Bagan was curious.
So he leaped high into the air.
Bang!
He scanned the surroundings and locked onto the direction. The man had been heading south. With Persona Mountain to the north and De Meca to the northeast, that left the sea to the south.
You really wanted to live.
Bagan realized the man he had buried had desperately wanted to survive. Even though the sea was impossibly far, he had crawled in that direction.
With that thought, Bagan searched the campsite and finally found the object that had reflected the sunlight.
It’s a sword.
He had never expected to find one here. And not even at the campsite itself, but in the nearby underbrush.
Did he drop it while resisting?
If so, then the man had been murdered. Or perhaps it had been an accident. But something told Bagan that far more complicated interests were entangled here than a simple mishap.
He decided not to think about it any further.
He simply picked up the sword and gave it a swing.
Whoosh!
The sword of a nameless man.
He swung it again.
Whoosh!
A nameless blade.
This sword he had obtained might become a curse to him. The lingering resentment of its former owner could turn it into a haunted blade.
But Bagan had nothing to regret. If he had been afraid of wielding a dead man’s sword, then the far greater curse was the fact that his body could be stolen by Palamus at any moment, leading to his death.
In other words, he was not afraid of dying.
I’ll become stronger in your place and make sure to get revenge for you.
Still, Bagan felt he should pay the price for borrowing the sword, so he made that promise.
After that, there was no longer any reason to go to De Meca. He returned straight to the mansion.
Barret was surprised to see Bagan return so early.
“Didn’t you say it would take a whole day?”
“Why? Did you miss me?”
Bagan had thrown out the joke to shake off the gloom he felt from how he had acquired the sword, but her reply only made things more depressing.
“Because of your unexpected return, my workload has increased.”
“If I hadn’t left, that would’ve been your original workload anyway, so it’s fine.”
“I suppose that’s one way to look at it. I’ll pull myself together again.”
“You were feeling down?”
Bagan was taken aback by her answer, but his reaction held no meaning for Barret.
“More importantly, you found a sword.”
“Yeah. Easier than I expected.”
“How?”
“I picked it up off the ground.”
Bagan didn’t want to tell her he had brought back a dead man’s sword. However, Barret was quick-witted.
“The…”
“Zairan.”
“It must be something an adventurer who came to the Zairan Forest dropped for some reason.”
“Yeah.”
“They’re probably dead. Or were going to die.”
Why did she repeat herself? In any case, her guess was correct. Bagan gave a silent nod of agreement and headed inside the mansion.
“I’ll prepare your bathwater.”
“Thanks. I’d appreciate it.”
Even after seeing him return with a dead man’s sword, Barret showed no change in attitude. That was probably the normal reaction. After all, it was the death of a complete stranger. Thanks to that, he had even gained a sword.
Still, for Bagan who had lived in the modern world, the experience of seeing a dead person was not something he could easily shake off. The impact was greater than he had expected. Something he hadn’t felt while burying the body now swirled violently in his chest.