Mercenaries (1)
Mercenaries (1)
The Red Bear Mercenary Corps was using a building deep in the shopping district, a little way from Mercenary Street.
The place consisted of a two-story wooden building that looked like an inn, a warehouse, and a fairly large vacant lot.
Perhaps most of them had gone out, since only a few places were lit.
I couldn't tell whether that was good luck or bad.
Either way, it was a great opportunity to spy on someone else's property.
I quieted my footsteps and pressed myself against the building's wall.
It wasn't the smooth stone wall you'd see at a lord's castle or a duke's mansion, but a rough, bumpy plaster wall.
Sneaking in and out of a heavily guarded duke's mansion or a marquis's castle would be out of the question, but scaling the wall of an ordinary house like this was no trouble at all.
There was nothing unusual going on in the rooms on the first and second floors where the lights were on.
Some mercenaries were maintaining their gear, someone was writing a letter, and one room even radiated a strange, pink, suggestive atmosphere.
Finally, I climbed toward a third-floor window where light spilled out.
It was the last room.
"How much longer do we have to stay here? I'm so restless I can't stand it."
I was in luck.
A familiar voice drifted out through the lit window.
That was the female mercenary's voice. Noah, wasn't it?
I pressed myself flat beneath the window.
Hooking my fingers into the gaps in the window frame and the plaster wall, I held myself tight against the building.
'This is a bit tight.'
Both the window frame and the plaster wall were incredibly worn out. They barely supported my weight.
It was a relief that I was just a kid. If I had been even a little heavier, the wall or the window frame would surely have given way.
Another voice echoed from inside the room. This one was familiar, too.
"Just endure it a little longer. We've gotten close enough to Martin, and Martin will bring us a way to annihilate the Marquis's family soon enough."
"Can we really trust that? He's been completely off lately. Even this time, he suddenly moved the schedule up by several months..."
The schedule had been moved up by several months? What were they talking about?
"He's never been wrong in other regions. There might be something in this area interfering with his ability."
"Doesn't that make him even less trustworthy, then?"
"Still, the big picture hasn't been wrong, so wait just a bit longer."
"Yes, yes."
Were they talking about an inherited ability this time? Whose ability was it, and what kind?
"Is everything ready?"
"Since things were suddenly moved up, our training is a bit lacking... but anyway, our people are more or less ready. We've also wrapped up talks with the other mercenary groups. Once the mercenary groups we've coordinated with clean up the inside, and Count La Palma brings the knights on time, we'll be set."
The conversation I was overhearing was growing stranger and stranger.
Could they be talking about the events that had happened in my past life?
But that wasn't supposed to happen for months! Why were they already preparing for it? Could my actions in this life have caused a butterfly effect?
But all I'd done was join Brother Simon's journey.
Meeting Martin and coming along, then escaping through the secret passage with Adria...
Hmm, looking at it that way, I actually had done quite a lot.
Still, it was hard to imagine those actions influencing their behavior. The timeline didn't add up.
I strained my ears further.
Their conversation continued, covering the mercenaries they'd worked with and various trivial complaints.
Unfortunately, nothing like what I wanted to hear came up.
Their voices, meanwhile, grew quieter, as if they'd moved farther away.
"So... like this... that issue..."
Had they moved away? Was that why their voices were getting quieter?
At that moment, a chill ran down my spine.
Thump!
I kicked off the wall with all my might.
At that exact moment—
"You rat!"
Bang!
The window frame shattered, and a man burst through the window with a roar.
Through the scattering splinters of wood, a sword lunged straight at me.
Clang!
As I kicked off the wall, I drew my sword and blocked the incoming blade.
The blade was infused with mana. My own sword shrieked as it blocked the attack, and for a moment, my hand went numb.
I barely managed to deflect it.
But I ended up being blown backward. Suspended in midair, I was bound to be overpowered by the difference in weight.
Normally, I'd have been annoyed, but right now, I was only grateful.
Using the momentum of being flung backward, I threw myself as far as I could.
Swish!
I sailed across the wide street, and the moment my feet touched the ground, I bolted.
Now, time to run!
"Was it really a rat!"
"They're really small. A woman?"
"I don't care if it's a dwarf or a woman. Pursue them, quickly!"
"Yes, yes."
It seemed the woman had come down in the meantime, too.
Tweeeet!
After some chatter from behind me, a whistle blew, followed by the female mercenary's voice.
"Wow! It's been a while since we had some fun! Rat or dwarf, wait right there!"
The female mercenary's voice was drawing closer and closer.
Damn it, I'd thought she just had a good nose, but she was fast, too.
"Is it an enemy?"
"Block them! But why are they so small?"
To make matters worse, mercenaries were bursting out from both sides of the street.
I hadn't seen any of them when I arrived, so where on earth had they all come from?
"Wait, is it a kid? I can easily catch them with my bare han—Ugh!"
I struck the mercenary blocking my path, who hadn't even drawn his sword, with the flat of my blade.
Thud!
"Aaargh!"
Then I kicked the flank of the mercenary behind him, who was trying to draw his sword.
The mercenaries blocking my way went flying in all directions. I hadn't killed them, just in case, but it felt like a few of their bones must have shattered.
But even more mercenaries poured into the street than the ones I'd sent flying.
"You idiots! It's not a kid! It's an expert! Just surround them!"
On top of that, in that brief moment, the female mercenary's voice sounded even closer.
It was impossible to escape by simply running down the street like this.
I hadn't scouted the back alleys beforehand, but I had no choice now.
I quickly dove between the buildings.
It was an alley where barely one or two people could squeeze through.
For a bulky adult, it would be difficult to escape through easily.
But a narrow, pitch-black alley with no lights on a dark night was the ultimate playground for a child under ten to hide in.
"Where are they!"
"Not in this alley!"
"Not here either!"
The voices of mercenaries echoed from all over the alleys.
"Then where! Check every house with an open door or window!"
"They're all closed, though."
"They might have slipped into an open place and shut the door behind them."
"Then open them up and check!"
It seemed everything I'd heard earlier was true.
The mercenary group searching for me wasn't the only one involved. All the other mercenary groups around the lodging were in on it, too.
It had been a mistake to rush over here the moment I heard about the mercenary lodging.
I thought I'd been careful in my own way, but my mistakes kept showing in actual combat.
'I have to be careful. At this rate, I won't even have the right to complain if I die again.'
I renewed my resolve as I watched the mercenaries running around in the alleys below.
As expected, climbing onto the roof had been the right call.
The mercenaries searching for me hadn't even considered that I might have climbed onto a roof.
Since they couldn't do it themselves, they didn't think anyone else could, either.
Well, even from my perspective, it would have been impossible for an ordinary person to scale the roof in that short amount of time.
As I looked down, the female mercenary appeared in the alley below.
"Hmm, where did they run off to?"
She took a deep breath and scanned her surroundings.
Then she raised her head and looked straight toward me.
Oops, I'm going to get caught.
I pulled my head back like a turtle.
I hadn't been spotted, had I?
I carefully shifted my position.
She was a woman with an incredibly sharp sense of smell. It seemed she hadn't spotted me, but I needed to make a quick escape.
I crawled away as quietly as I could, then leaped over to the roof of another house.
Mercenaries were running through the alley I'd just jumped over, but none of them looked up.
I kept leaping from building to building like that.
The night air brushing against my face was incredibly refreshing, and my racing heart finally began to calm down.
A few buildings away, Mercenary Street came into view. A few buildings beyond that, I could see the roof of the inn where Martin was staying.
The noisy clamor from the inn reached all the way over here.
I'd just gone through a whole action sequence, yet everywhere else remained completely unchanged.
"Well, shall I head back now?"
Mercenary Street, where the inn was located, was noisy, but this area was extremely quiet.
I'd slipped out of the mercenaries' dragnet.
They might come searching all the way here as time passed, but before that, I'd return to being the little kid by Adria's side.
I leaped down lightly. It was a second-story roof, so it was quite high, but I was long past the age of being afraid of a height like this.
"Found you!"
At that moment, a woman's voice echoed from the dark alley beneath my feet.
It was Noah's voice.
At the same time, she leaped upward.
In the darkness of the night, her flushed face rapidly approached.
Her face was red with excitement, and she wore a broad smile.
I didn't know what made her so happy, but alongside her bright smile, a sword flashing green lunged toward me at high speed.
'Are the mercenaries in this town all using poison!'
I swung my sword with all my might to block the incoming poisoned blade.
Clang!
But the moment the blades clashed, an unexpected sound came from my sword.
At the same time, I was flung backward and crashed into the wall.
Ugh!
I felt the disadvantage of my body weight once again, but that wasn't the most important thing right now.
"Your skills are good, but why is your sword in that state? Were you broke? Were you a petty thief instead of a rat?"
Even more than her bewildered expression, I let out a sigh of my own.
I couldn't believe the sword had snapped clean in half from a single clash.
Was this the limit of a mass-produced iron sword?
It had looked precarious when I clashed swords with the mercenary captain earlier, but I hadn't expected it to break this easily.
I forced myself to stand up. My back ached from slamming into the wall, and blood trickled down my thigh, likely because my leg had been cut when the sword shattered.
Damn it, this is bad.
The alley she was blocking was the very one that led back to Mercenary Street.
My physical condition was poor, I had lost my sword, and my escape route was blocked.
My bleeding leg was in no condition to let me climb back up to the roof, either.
Tweeeet!
At that moment, she blew a whistle.
"Everyone will be here soon. We'll find out in no time whether you're a rat or a petty thief."
It would be troublesome if the mercenaries swarmed in. Both the woman in front of me and the mercenary captain had seen my face.
If they just pulled back my cloak, they would recognize me immediately.
'Damn it, is this the end?'
The thought of having to live through another regression was dreadful, but ending it here seemed far better than being captured and tortured without even being allowed to die.
Thinking about it that way, I felt a deep sense of regret for this life. Just when I thought I'd figured things out to some extent, my complacency had ruined everything.
Still, I had no intention of giving up. If I was very, very lucky, an opportunity to escape might present itself.
Just as I was about to put weight on my injured leg and charge forward, a voice rang out.
"What do you think you're doing!"
The voice came from behind the woman.
"Threatening an injured child! Have you no sense of honor!"
It wasn't the female mercenary's voice. The voice came from behind her.
The female mercenary, Noah, turned around with a bewildered look.
"Honor? Are you talking about honor to a mercenary?"
Well, it was certainly an unfitting word.
Then a figure stepped out of the darkness behind the female mercenary.
A petite mercenary wrapped in a cloak. It was the mercenary who had tried to help Adria not too long ago.
"Whether you are a mercenary or a knight, anyone who holds a sword bears a responsibility equal to the blade they carry! You, who do not know this, have no right to hold a sword!"
Both the female mercenary and I stared at the newly arrived mercenary with our mouths wide open.
I never thought I'd hear such a cringeworthy line in person—the kind that only ever appeared in movies back in my past life.
Although this person had clearly come to save me, right now I just wanted to pretend I didn't know them.