Katon Village
Kantwi went to extravagant lengths to make amends for his earlier mistake, treating Hwanin with a hospitality so lavish it could only be called excessive.
Perhaps that was why the evening meal transcended a mere banquet and became a small-scale feast.
The guests numbered seven in all—Hwanin, Isilite, Kantwi, and the four retainers. The venue was a pavilion set upon the lawn behind the mansion. Below it a compact outdoor kitchen had been arranged, where appetizing dishes were prepared without pause, and servants shuttled between the pavilion and the kitchen, replenishing the tables the moment a plate emptied.
Fine brewed wines and distilled spirits of every variety kept the cups full, and before long a small ensemble struck up lively tunes beneath the pavilion, lifting the mood still higher.
Cheerful music, excellent food, and more than enough drink. Once the meal itself ended, the gathering naturally turned into a drinking party. The retainers passed cups among themselves and grew thoroughly merry. Even Emergency Food, freshly bathed and groomed by Isilite’s careful hands, sat contentedly to one side of the lawn, savoring the delicacies the maids brought him.
“Lord Hwanin, please accept a cup. This is Baekilhyang, a specialty of Katon Village—a heated clear wine whose aftertaste is clean and free of hangover. Truly first-rate.”
Hwanin joined them quietly, sipping his wine while watching them laugh and chatter, accepting cup after cup from Kantwi’s hand.
It left him faintly puzzled. From the meal onward Kantwi had attended to him with meticulous care, far beyond what a simple exchange of useful information seemed to warrant.
Nor did the landlord’s consideration end there.
The detached cottage prepared for Hwanin was a handsome wooden structure of pale yellow and white that reminded him of a modern Korean hanok. Inside, not a speck of dust remained; flowerpots, orchids, and vases filled the rooms with a subtle fragrance, every detail showing careful thought.
Isilite surveyed the entire cottage, then laid a thick, soft rug across the open wooden floor that linked Hwanin’s bedroom, the central hall, and her own room. She called Emergency Food over.
“Emergency Food, you can sleep right here. From this spot you can see Master’s room, so it’s perfect, isn’t it?”
Perfect indeed. Sitting there, the open sliding doors gave him a clear view of his friend.
“Kue~.”
Watching Emergency Food settle in with obvious satisfaction, Hwanin quietly reviewed the evening for any misstep.
I said nothing and did nothing that could have revealed my true nature.
Then why such generous treatment? Simply because the man was kind?
He approached Emergency Food, who was already preparing to sleep, and stroked the round, soft head.
“If anyone suspicious comes near while you’re sleeping, cry out or thrash them. You can do that, right?”
“Kuet!”
He sensed no ill intent in Kantwi’s hospitality, yet it never hurt to prepare for the unexpected.
After giving the order, Hwanin washed in the bath Isilite had prepared and retired for the night.
The next day.
Having passed the night without incident, Hwanin accepted Kantwi’s invitation to breakfast with the other guests, then set out with Isilite to stroll through the peaceful streets of Katon Village.
“Katon really is a lovely town.”
“It is.”
Trees lined every street; even the quieter alleys were clean and well-kept. In most places such corners would already be gathering the poor and beginning the slide into slums, yet here they remained ordinary residential lanes.
Isilite explained what she had learned at the technical institute: once a settlement expanded into a true city, any area that had begun to slumify was usually pushed outside the walls into the common districts. Hwanin already knew as much, but he had no wish to embarrass her, so he listened with half an ear while surveying their surroundings.
“There are almost no lingering souls here.”
The chief reason a soul wandered was unfinished attachment. Grudges and vengeance existed, but they were far fewer.
“Really? The people of this village must be quite devout. And Kantwi is so kind, too.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to reduce everything to a single cause.”
“Reduce… what does that mean?”
“Thinking that because you’ve seen only a part, every resident of this village must be good—that is reducing it to a single cause.”
Even in a hamlet the size of a village, murders over property occurred. How much more so in a place where dozens of times as many people gathered?
After a rough circuit of the town, Hwanin and Isilite visited a blacksmith. The greatsword that had severed the waists of dozens of magical beasts and animals on the road from Wayford, and that had endured more than twenty sparring matches with Hwanin, needed repair.
“There’s a slight warp in the core, and the edge is badly blunted. A heavy iron greatsword like this is forged thick and strong precisely because wear is expected, so it won’t be scrapped… but realigning it will take a little time. And when we re-edge it, the core will thin a bit—you’ll have to accept that.”
“Please take care of it.”
“The fee is five yeoldonghwa. Come back this evening or tomorrow morning.”
As they left the forge, Isilite muttered as though the money had been stolen from her pocket.
“Charging that much for a repair… it almost feels like a scam.”
“Have you ever had a weapon repaired before?”
“…No.”
“Then it’s better not to jump to conclusions. A greatsword is far harder to grind than a longsword simply because of its size.”
On Earth the work would be done with machine grindstones and industrial furnaces; here every step was by hand. Re-forging a two-meter blade meant labor costs that naturally ran high.
Their next stop was a leather workshop—a comprehensive tannery that sorted hides, bones, meat, and organs, then polished and crafted the leather. Hwanin requested instruction for Isilite.
“You want me to teach this young lady tanning for the next two days?”
The middle-aged woman of the dog-kin race, her ears half-folded like a German shepherd’s, asked in a gravelly voice.
“Yes. I’ll pay for the trouble.”
“Hmm. Looks like a high-born young lady. Learning tanning? It’ll be hard work.”
A high-born young lady—Isilite was too embarrassed to open her mouth, which only made her look more the part.
“From where I stand, the forewoman herself looks every bit a fine lady of means.”
“Oh? Hahaha! Now that’s a man who knows how to leave a woman speechless!”
The forewoman’s hearty laugh suited a face that, taken alone, could have belonged to a former actress turned wealthy matron. The chain-mail apron, chain-mail gloves, corded muscles, and bloodstains liberally spattered across face and body, however, made her more of a hard-boiled matron.
“After a compliment like that I can hardly turn you down. I’ll take her on myself and make sure she masters the basics of tanning!”
“I’m in your care.”
“I’ll work hard!”
Leaving Isilite and twenty silver coins with the hard-boiled forewoman, Hwanin moved on to his next destination.
Next was Yurpa’s Magic Tool Shop of Katon.
He had come to buy a coin pouch enchanted with spatial storage, the only magic-tool shop in the village. He left empty-handed. It was not an outright refusal; a young woman with cat ears—employee or owner, he could not tell—simply stated that she could not sell him any goods, and he had no choice but to turn away.
Even buying magic tools requires qualifications? Or is there another reason?
The village had four blacksmiths and two or three leather workshops and tanneries, yet only this single magic-tool shop. If he could not buy here, he would have to wait until the next town or city.
He decided to ask Kantwi later and began a leisurely circuit of the village.
Trees, shrubs, flowerbeds, and small parks were everywhere, giving the place the themed charm of the German Village on Namhae Island back in Gyeongnam. The streets were clean, and the people matched the atmosphere—friendly and open.
The market square bustled with travelers stopping on the road to Parhist; the townsfolk were busy hawking their wares to them.
Wandering the broad avenues of Katon, which rivaled Wayford’s central district in size, Hwanin counted souls and confirmed that here, too, there were no Honjae.
Meeting two Honjae in succession must simply have been bad luck.
Still, he felt a mild regret. He would have liked to investigate the phenomenon Abet had shown while attached to Isilite.
After spending the entire morning searching for souls, he returned to the river that cut through the village—twenty meters wide—to rest for a while.
The water was remarkably clean. Careful management was evident: designated access points had been built, while stone walls elsewhere kept people from approaching freely. Patrols—higher-ranking than the village self-defense groups—moved along the banks.
Water sources must be treasured. In a world where diverting a river by civil engineering is itself a problem…
Unlike Earth, monsters roamed freely. Make too much noise with construction and there was no telling what might appear.
In Wayford he had heard many rumors of wild monsters. One that had left him incredulous concerned a colossal annelid-type beast a full hundred meters long that lived deep underground in remote lands and swallowed passersby whole. There were also tales of giants dwelling inside whirling hurricanes on the plains, eyes the size of sailing ships swimming in the sea, forests of fairies, flying whales, skeletal warhorses that shook the earth, and walking trees.
People who set out to found a hamlet vanishing after being eaten, or merchants trying to open trade routes into the wilds being wiped out by unknown monsters—such stories were commonplace.
Sitting on a bench and watching villagers draw water, Hwanin suddenly noticed something odd.
A water source is essential for any settlement…
Wayford had no river. He had never heard of a nearby lake or reservoir either. Could a city of that size exist without a water source? It had not even possessed a complete water and sewage system.
He had been told that water-attribute mages among the spellcaster classes could create water with phase force, but using such mages merely to secure a water supply was pure waste.
Of every ten awakened, six became warriors or strikers. Of the remaining four, one became a holy-arts practitioner and three became hunters, secret-arts users, or mages. Even among mages, not every attribute was available; most received only one to three of the eight—red, blue, green, yellow, wood, lightning, white, black.
Awakened themselves appeared at a rate of one in several hundred. The odds of becoming a water-attribute mage among them were vanishingly small. In a city of two hundred thousand like Wayford, the chance of producing any mage at all was a mere 0.002 percent; the further chance of that mage holding the water attribute…
Using such rare mages to manufacture and distribute water was absurd.
Even if they did, only the high clans and great houses would benefit. There must be another factor.
Perhaps it was connected to the labyrinth sitting right beside the city.
As he watched the river glitter under the sunlight, his gaze fell on Emergency Food playing with the village children. Apparently bored of simply sitting beside Hwanin on the bench, the green kue was now racing about in a game of tag, carefully dodging capture so the children could not pluck his feathers, yet clearly enjoying himself.
When noon arrived and the children headed home, Hwanin called Emergency Food and returned to Kantwi’s mansion.
“Hoh! Miss Isilite is learning tanning, you say?”
“Yes. She wanted to learn. On the way here she even skinned the beasts we hunted herself.”
After lunch, noticing Isilite’s absence, Kantwi had asked; the news that the refined young lady was learning tanning drew repeated exclamations of admiration. Tanning was work women did often enough, yet for someone who looked like a high-clan daughter to take on such rough labor…
A mole-kin man with a gray mole-like head, wearing something like a fedora, nodded as though the decision were only proper.
“Having someone in the party who can tan hides brings in a little extra income. That young lady has more practical grit than her looks suggest.”
More than her looks suggest… Hwanin smiled inwardly. Anyone who had seen Isilite three months earlier would never have said such a thing.
“Lord Hwanin. What are your plans for the afternoon?”
At that moment Luararda, who had been silent until now, spoke in a courteous tone. A faint aura—at least 4th Class in density—radiated from him.
“Nothing particular.”
“I see. If you have no objection, I would very much like to cross weapons with you. Will you oblige me?”
“A sparring request?”
“Indeed. Challenging an unawakened is normally discourteous, so I held back… yet I find I can no longer restrain myself. Your skill in training Emergency Food and Miss Isilite, and the fact that you emerged safely from a 6th-Class forest labyrinth—even if only the outer reaches—make me eager to witness your ability firsthand.”
“That puts me in a difficult position. As you can see, I cannot fly.”
Hwanin had not spoken without reason. Luararda had introduced himself as belonging to the lake-gull clan. True to the claim, his head was that of a white-and-yellow gull, and though his body was humanoid, white feathers covered him completely. Enormous wings capable of wrapping his body several times over were folded against his back; his hands, while possessing fingers, more closely resembled the talons of a bird of prey, and his feet were the same.
In short, a physique far better suited to aerial combat than ground fighting.
At Hwanin’s stated reason, Luararda laughed inwardly. The man before him was a true expert. He had not refused by citing his lack of a class; he had refused by pointing out a physical characteristic. That spoke of absolute confidence in his own skill.
“Hahaha. Of course I will seal my flight. I will also suppress my phase force to match your physical capabilities. However, my awakening is a body-reinforcement type focused on defense and recovery—please keep that in mind.”
Hwanin instantly gauged Luararda’s combat potential. The most devastating attack of a flying creature was the diving strike—plummeting from high altitude to seize prey with the force of acceleration. Such an attack was so dangerous that a collision could injure the attacker as well. Yet Luararda had awakened as a close-combat class that enhanced durability and regeneration. That meant he could launch any terrifying assault without hesitation.
“Impressive.”
A glint of interest flashed in Luararda’s eyes; he realized Hwanin had already measured his fighting power.
“Very well. Kantwi, if you have a staff, may I borrow one?”
“Of course. One moment.”
Kantwi loved travelers’ tales and adventurers’ stories, but he loved contests between skilled warriors even more. Naturally his house contained weapons crafted by master smiths, among them a staff specially enchanted for durability.
Hwanin took the staff, swung it a few times, and nodded. It lacked the quality of the black wood of Hallan used in his own Black Spear, yet its elasticity and hardness were more than adequate.
“I truly look forward to Lord Hwanin’s spear arts.”
Luararda muttered as he began to loosen up. Hwanin, for his part, felt a mild anticipation at seeing what fighting style a bird-kin would display. Though neither would fight for his life, Luararda’s aura was of 4th-Class density, and he was a striker as well.
“It is not orthodox spear arts but the spear arts of a heretic. You may be disappointed.”
At the admission that he had never formally studied the spear, Luararda smiled like a cheerful man of the world.
“So it is spear arts tempered by wild instinct. That only makes me more eager. Ah—before we begin, my weapons are these two fists and my legs. I am a striker of the fist-and-foot school.”
Luararda began warming up in earnest, moving his limbs like a professional kickboxer, and asked,
“What rules shall we use?”
“Why not leave the judgment—and the decision to end the match—to the four gentlemen watching?”
“Excellent. Lord Kantwi and the other three, I leave it to you.”
The four, unwilling to miss such a spectacle, nodded and stepped back to give them room.
Hwanin and Luararda focused on each other without further words.
To the onlookers, Luararda’s victory seemed overwhelmingly likely; the penalty of being unawakened was simply too great.
Reality was different.
Only the hands and feet are talons; the musculature and skeletal structure are no different from a human’s.
From Luararda’s warm-up movements alone, Hwanin had already mapped the full range of every joint. Once joint range and attack reach were known, seventy percent of an opponent’s strikes could be predicted.
Moreover, the endless sparring with Isilite and Emergency Food had honed Hwanin’s senses; his reaction speed and reflexes now far surpassed those he had possessed upon arriving in Yulkam.
Luararda, watching Hwanin lower his stance like a leopard and let the staff hang loosely, gave a rueful laugh.
“This is rather disconcerting. There are so many openings, yet somehow I find myself afraid to step into them.”
“Then I shall step in first.”
The moment Hwanin took a step forward, Luararda sprang at him like a diving leopard.