The Hero Beneath the Moon
The Hero Beneath the Moon.
"..."
Every time I heard that name, I found myself picturing my reflection in the mirror.
"...I still can't get used to it."
Unmasked, my face was as blunt and unreadable as ever, so I forced the mask back on — if nothing else, I could at least make my mouth smile.
"Right. Let's make today another lively one."
Twenty years since I came to this world. After one trial after another, I slew the Demon King, and through His Majesty the King, I had at last been granted a way back to my original world.
At the very last step, His Majesty had commanded me to gather a list of materials — several of which, I suspected, were intended to satisfy his own private appetites...
'...He just wants me to go see the world, doesn't he.'
Looking over the list he'd slapped together in a single day, that was exactly what it read like. Granted, a fair number of the items were rare enough that no ordinary method would ever acquire them.
Like a Dragon Heart, say.
Like a Dragon Heart.
...
Your Majesty. Even a rank amateur like me, who slept through every theory lesson, can tell you that dimensional travel has absolutely nothing to do with a Dragon Heart.
And no, if you're looking to fortify your health, hand a quest to one of your knight orders. This kingdom is chock-full of kids who'd volunteer with drool running down their chins at the mere mention of it.
It's called a kingdom, but in practice this place is an empire.
The only reason His Majesty hasn't launched a war of conquest is... well, only that. If the Demon King hadn't existed, and if His Majesty's heart were just a shade filthier, he'd have crowned himself Emperor ages ago — and by now a coup would have broken out and his head would be rolling off a guillotine.
'Best to live a virtuous life, I suppose.'
—Rustle.
By now long accustomed to it, I changed into my blouse and shorts — the latter stuffed to bursting with my own personal vanity — and stood before the full-length mirror.
The Hero Beneath the Moon. Whoever coined that epithet, I genuinely thought they'd done a fine job of it.
"...Though 'Moonlight Beauty' is a little uncomfortable."
—Papapat!!
Finished dressing, I equipped my bastard sword, my rapier, and my special custom-made hwando in the space of a blink. My creed, apparently: changing clothes may take all morning, but gearing up must be lightning-fast. All it earned me was a heap of pointless flourish.
"Good. Shall we?"
His Majesty had said the preparations for the quest weren't yet complete, so I planned to remain in the Royal Capital for the time being.
He'd even offered to let me stay in the palace in the meantime, but there were plenty of faces there less than thrilled to see mine, so I'd settled into an inn in the capital instead.
'There's still a reason for me to stay, after all.'
First things first. There was someone I needed to see.
—Tap. Tap. Tap.
"Ulp. Bwuh—?!!"
Stepping out of my room and down to the first floor, I spotted her in the dining hall at once — a blue-haired girl sitting behind a mountain of meat stacked high on the table.
"Gulp...! You? Awake at the crack of dawn? Whatever has gotten into you, Master?"
Having swallowed a chunk of meat the size of my head in one bite, the girl looked up at me with wide, astonished eyes.
Frankly, the amount of food she'd just put away was more astonishing than her question — but regardless.
"Good morning, Lady Teresa."
"Mmhm. No — more to the point, the question was mine to ask."
Teresa. Full name, Teresa Gracia.
From what I'd heard, she'd been born and raised in a famous house of the North, only to be cast out for being born a bastard and left to drift through the slave markets.
By some twist of chance, she had been the one to catch my eye as I searched for my final slave — and after a fair share of complications, Teresa and I sealed a slave contract.
'Though "slave" hardly covers it, seeing as I use honorifics with her and Lady Teresa talks down to me...'
My gaze drifted to the two ears perked atop Teresa's head.
Teresa was a beastkin.
With a human and an elf apiece — myself excepted — I'd figured adding a beastkin to the party made for a golden composition, and in practice the synergy had been excellent.
Thanks to that, our party — three of us former slaves — was visually well-received, and we were spared a great many headaches on that account.
"Today, you see, I have somewhere to stop by."
"...The investiture is tomorrow, is it not?"
"Yes? Yes, quite right."
Just as Teresa said — the investiture ceremony was tomorrow.
On days without a ceremony, my whole routine amounted to clearing out the tedious errands His Majesty dumped on me or rolling around the inn, but today, as it happened, I had something to do — hence preparing to go out separately.
That was also why I, who on any ordinary day wouldn't crawl out of bed until noon, was up with the morning sun.
"Ah, that reminds me — related to the investiture — I'll be lodging somewhere else tonight. I'll rejoin you separately at the ceremony tomorrow."
"Hmm... is that so..."
"...? Are you feeling unwell?"
"I... 'tis nothing, only... that is..."
"Do you have something you wish to say?"
Her eyes — and her tail — trembled with some unquiet dread. But in the end, that dread never made it past her lips; she simply wrenched her head away.
"'Tis nothing, I said...!!"
"Yes...? Of course... If something is weighing on you, do tell me."
"Did I not say it was nothing!!!"
—BANG!!!
"...?"
The inn door slammed shut with tremendous force, and I found myself summarily ejected.
My relationships with my party members were peculiar enough as it was, but the one with Teresa was peculiar even by those standards.
A famous house, Teresa had claimed — but I knew her surname, and her family, the very things she'd never volunteered herself.
'The Ducal House of Gracia.'
The Grand Duke of the North.
Illegitimate she may be, but Teresa was said to be a Northern Grand Duchess — a name that would rank among the five great houses of the empire.
And as it happened, His Majesty had once let slip a certain rumor...
"It seems the 'only daughter' of Gracia is not, in fact, his true child..."
"..."
"Ahem. Hero? How long have you been standing there?"
As I said before — the relationship between Teresa and me was no ordinary bond of master and servant.
On the very day we sealed the slave contract, Teresa declared that when the time came, she would leave me.
That someday, when the day arrived on which she could seize everything she was ever owed — when she no longer had any need of my help — she would walk away on her own two feet.
'...Why would His Majesty have been curious about something like that?'
I spoke of the 'rumor' loudly enough to carry clearly through the door to Teresa on the other side, straightened my clothes, and turned my focus back to my original purpose.
The investiture was right around the corner now. Time to get ready, I supposed.
"..."
She sat motionless against the door, breath held, until every trace of her master's presence had faded away.
"[Flutter.]"
"...Master, you idiot."
A single butterfly-shaped spirit fluttered down and settled on the back of her hand. With every beat of its wings the spirit shed crystals of ice, and the instant it landed, the cold crystals touched down and chilled her skin.
"..."
People liked to call beastkin 'aberrations of nature'.
Animals, they said, had dared to break the order the world had decreed and dared to take human form — a race that had earned the loathing of the very spirits who were nature incarnate, pointed at and whispered about wherever they went.
And so, in the Kingdom and most every land besides, discrimination against beastkin was never hard to find.
There were even regions with no formal slavery at all where working a beastkin as a slave remained perfectly legal, and being treated as something beneath the monsters roaming the streets was simply an ordinary day.
And yet such a creature had been born in Gracia — the snowfield, beloved of the spirits.
'And what's more... born with a spirit of her own, no less.'
Even traveling the whole world over, the way people saw things hadn't changed a whit from what she already knew.
The treatment of beastkin was as it had always been, and even with the backing of the hero's party, most looked upon her as something beneath a slave.
And so the question had never once left her.
'Am I truly an aberration, contrary to nature itself — just as the world says?'
A being with the shape of an animal while being human.
Human, and yet not human.
And therefore — a being that could belong nowhere at all.
"[Poreu...]"
"..."
For the crime of being born a beastkin, she had been locked away alone in a tower while her mother yet lived, and the moment her mother passed, the family had cast her out to scrounge her way from one slave market to the next.
The spirit was the only soul she had ever confided in. And then, in a black market in some remote frontier where no one would ever come looking, that person appeared before her.
The Hero Beneath the Moon.
An eccentric hero who had crushed wickedness single-handedly before her legend had even begun, cast out every elite party member the King himself had hand-picked, and taken to traveling with nothing but slaves.
Her hair — white as the northern snowfields, long enough to nearly brush the ground — had struck Teresa as beautiful beyond anything else. And with eyes of blue, colder even than her own spirit, the hero had looked straight at her and said:
'Will you come with me?'
"..."
Those eyes had held nothing. Not a trace of emotion.
They were not the eyes of disgust she had seen aimed at beastkin her whole life, nor — as rare as it was — the eyes of pity for her circumstances.
Truly nothing. Not a single feeling in them.
It even made her wonder: was the hero even seeing her as a beastkin at all?
Whatever the case, from that day on, the Hero Beneath the Moon became her master.
Her master never once demanded loyalty from her, and the contract had been sealed not around 'slavery', but around the 'contract' itself.
It was not a master-servant bond without term or promise, but an agreement laced with hope — one that would release her the moment its purpose was fulfilled.
'Slay the Demon King, and I'll grant you your freedom. Hmm... and I'll see you're paid a generous reward on top.'
'...'
'...And it seems there's something else you need, doesn't it?'
That was right. It had never been about money, or honor.
Like it or not, she had been born a beastkin.
She had come into this world only to fall so low, so young, as to be sold — which meant that now she had to prove she possessed worth enough that she would never be made a slave again.
She had to hold that worth with her own two hands.
'...Would a Grand Duke be enough?'
'A Grand... Duke?'
What kind of eyes had her master looked at her with, back then?
She had known the hero had noticed something — but had she really seen through her from that very moment?
'Hmm... how high, you ask? Well — second only to Her Highness the Princess in this whole country, I'd say?'
'Second only to the Princess...'
'Think about it, it's absurd, no? We're not even an empire, and yet there's a Grand Duke, that's just—'
'I'll become one.'
'Uh... yes?'
She had never needed to put it into words — and yet she had told her anyway: that she would become a Grand Duke.
'Then you will. Decided.'
'...Yes. Please take care of me, then.'
After that, she set out traveling with her master and the two other slaves.
They were not bad days.
...Honestly speaking, they were far more joyful and happy times than she had ever expected.
They traveled together, and when hunger gnawed at them they hunted game and roasted it over an open fire; her master personally corrected her swordsmanship, stroke by stroke.
And more than once, at the edge of death, they had saved one another's lives in turn.
"..."
She recalled the conversation her master had shared with the King.
"A place to return to..."
Her master had stressed it to the King again and again: there was a place she had to return to.
The King seemed to know where that place was, and at the very least, one fact appeared already settled — that it lay in another dimension entirely.
But that was the heart of the problem: to reach it, sacrifices of tremendous scale would have to be paid — even by her master, even by the King himself.
And... her master had never, not once, told them anything about that place.
"..."
...Nor about their emancipation, either. That much, she had said.
"..."
...
"...Not yet. Not yet..."
She still needed her master.
She had learned the sword, studied magic, discovered how to speak with spirits, picked up any number of skills that might pass for specialties.
And still, she needed her master.
Because unlike the other two, she and her master had made a contract.
"We slew the Demon King, but..."
Because that had been nothing more than the bare minimum condition.
Because this was not a contract with a fixed party A and a party B.
The other two were different from her. She — her master was...
"[Poreu...]"
"...Ah."
The spirit flew up into her cheek and gave it a small bonk.
The icy chill tickled across her skin, and it felt as though her head had been washed white and clear.
"...Yes. Thank you, Poreu."
"[Poreu...]"
Having given her thanks to Poreu, she rose from her seat and turned back toward the table.
"Phew... first things first. Eat."
She had already worked through roughly half of it, and yet the mountain of meat on the table still stood tall.
"...Master. You'll go home, won't you?"
That was the conclusion, then.
The place her master wished to return to was her master's homeland.
Going by the circumstances, that had to be it. A traveler from another world — the master had let slip, now and then, that others had come before. Or else, a reincarnator.
Come to think of it, her master was her own age, wasn't she? A reincarnator, then, might well be older.
"..."
Her master remained a person she could never quite figure out, no matter how long she looked.
The Hero Beneath the Moon — wearing a face carved from stone, and yet every word out of her mouth was venomous politeness, exquisitely polite on its way to gutting someone.
And that contradiction of hers was, in a strange way, the very thing that made her who she was.
"...Hari."
The Hero Beneath the Moon — 'Hari'.
She murmured the name — the first and last one she had heard, back on the day the contract was sealed — and shook her head.
Gnawing over worries alone wasn't her role, after all.
That was the sort of thing the other two were for.
Besides, the contract wasn't going to break tomorrow.
The ones who ought to be worrying weren't her, but those two.
—Thk.
She skewered a great slab of meat with her fork, stared at it blankly for a long moment...
"Nom."
Opened her mouth wide and swallowed it down in a single bite.
Delicious.
