Rombamel, Border City (2)
There was no time to rejoice over finding a trace.
The black trail flickering through the passersby sent a stabbing pain through his head.
Instinct told him at once that he couldn’t keep this up for long.
He had to move before whoever was watching lost the trace of Lemegeton.
Lawrence rose from his seat and followed the dark trail onward.
“What, is this bastard blind?”
“Watch where you’re going!”
“Sorry.”
Too focused on the trace, he kept bumping into people.
But he couldn’t spare even a glance at them.
It was a faint, wavering haze, as though it might gutter out at any moment. He had to chase it before the trail vanished completely.
He hurried faster and faster.
At some point, he stopped offering automatic apologies altogether.
How long had he been following the trace?
Suddenly, he realized he was no longer colliding with anyone.
When he looked up, the scenery had changed entirely.
An alley so dark not even sunlight reached it.
A filthy place, enough to make the back alleys he had once lived in at Hilton Village seem almost quaint.
The stench of the gutter clung to memory like a scar.
The fallen down here longed for a light they could never see again.
A place where the lost gathered with nowhere left to go.
A pit where endless passion and hunger raged without mercy.
Those cast into the underworld gnawed at one another like rats, tearing flesh from flesh.
Red lanterns hung in every corner of the dark alleyways.
Their glow was nothing like the sunset painting the sky above.
This was not a street made to be seen by anyone.
It was merely a nest for rats that had fallen and kept falling.
Bloodstains spread along the roadside and hardly seemed out of place.
Buildings around him looked ready to collapse at any moment.
Rows of shanties stacked at mismatched heights obeyed no rule at all.
The narrow lanes reeked of stale liquor.
Filling the streets were the usual vagrants.
Empty bottles rolled about at their feet like refuse.
For people who had already reached the bottom, drink was not a choice but a necessity.
Thinking about tomorrow meant nothing.
Even surviving today was more than most of them could manage.
It felt almost like coming home.
He didn’t want to think of it that way, and yet some corner of his heart relaxed.
The tangled maze of alleys felt familiar.
The maze wasn’t a maze at all. Following the trace, Lawrence made his way without hesitation and reached the pickpocket’s den.
“……”
Found it.
The trace of Lemegeton ended at a tilted shack.
A window hastily nailed shut.
A door that looked as though it would collapse if pushed too hard.
There was no way to check inside from outside.
After a moment’s hesitation, Lawrence pushed the door open and stepped in.
Creak.
“Leonie? You went to the playground again, didn’t you?”
A childish girl’s voice answered him.
The shack, thick with a sour, stale smell, was only a single room.
What had reacted to the sound of the door was a young girl.
She wore clothes that looked as though a sack had been turned inside out and put on her.
Her sky-blue hair had been cut roughly, with no care for style.
On her face, at least the part that seemed clean, a long scar stood out.
The mark stretched from her mouth to her eye, a wound that seemed to carry pain in every line.
“Wh-who are you?”
Suspicion flashed in those eyes at once.
But Lawrence was just as startled.
This girl wasn’t the pickpocket.
Had he followed the trace wrong?
No. That was impossible.
The trace didn’t lie.
The pickpocket might not be here, but Lemegeton was in this single room.
“Were you perhaps the one who came looking for the scripture?”
The girl asked the unexpected question.
Before Lawrence could even open his mouth, she turned around.
She cleared off the table and opened the box that had been serving as a leg.
Inside, Lemegeton wrapped in its seal casing was revealed.
“I’m truly sorry. My younger brother did this without understanding what he was doing.”
Keeping her head bowed deeply, the girl held Lemegeton out to Lawrence.
“So, um… m-may Goddess’ blessings be with you?”
She even tried to speak the sign of the Holy Cross Order, though she clearly did not really know it.
Her voice, lacking confidence, rose at the end like a question.
Lawrence took Lemegeton.
Fortunately, there were no signs that the seal casing had been broken.
The grimoire remained unharmed, exactly as it had been before it was lost.
“Did you know it was stolen?”
Clerics of the Order treasured scripture more than their own lives.
Most likely, this girl’s younger brother had known that from the start and stolen Lemegeton, mistaking it for a holy text.
“I think… he probably did.”
The girl dropped to her knees and pressed her forehead to the floor.
“To be honest, I heard that Goddess forgives with love and mercy. Could you please forgive what happened today?”
“……”
Lawrence looked around the single room.
There wasn’t a proper possession in sight; it looked as though everything here had been scavenged from other people’s trash.
The table, missing one leg, stayed upright thanks to a box propping it up.
A thin blanket had been spread across what was clearly meant to be a bed.
There was a box used as a desk.
A chair with no back.
Broken dishes and a few small pieces of fruit.
The water bottle wasn’t even half full.
The scene of poverty was not unfamiliar.
That was why he understood.
Lawrence himself could do anything for his friends.
And blood, after all, was thicker than water.
Lemegeton had been recovered safely.
What had actually been lost was only the money pouch with fifty copper coins in it.
That amount, he could spare for the sake of this girl’s earnest courage in begging forgiveness.
“You don’t need to ask my forgiveness. You simply found the scripture I had lost today. In gratitude, I’m giving you this reward.”
It was at the very lowest places that people yearned for light more than anyone else.
Just as Lawrence had once searched for hope by chasing the stars in his own youth.
He hoped a light like a lantern would remain with this child as well.
“Ah! Thank you, priest! Thank you, Goddess!”
He left the girl thanking him in a daze behind him and walked out of the alley.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
The Mercenary Guild branch in Rombamel was in an uproar.
Shouts and curses flew beneath the ceiling.
Billowing smoke from tobacco pipes had already swallowed half the hall.
The bulletin board was packed with requests, and every seat was filled with mercenaries and guild staff alike.
As one would expect from a border city, there were even mercenaries with different skin tones here and there.
The language they used as they spoke to one another was one he had never heard before.
In many ways, it reminded him of Horos Village.
It wasn’t exactly an atmosphere he liked, but if he was going to work in Rombamel from now on, it wasn’t entirely bad either.
More mercenaries meant more work, and more work usually meant a higher overall quality of requests.
He went through the posted notices one by one.
Unlike Horos Village or Remington, where monster extermination had been the bulk of the work, most of the Rombamel branch’s requests involved settling disputes between people.
Find a missing person.
Catch a client who ran off without paying.
Kill a vicious criminal and bring back proof.
Recover money from a debtor who refused to pay his gambling debts.
Most of the requests were practically about nothing but grudges and debts.
To put it mildly, they were not the sort of jobs that appealed to him.
This wasn’t simply about killing monsters and earning money from the remains.
Once he became entangled in affairs between people, emotional baggage always followed in one form or another.
No matter how little he cared about the Church’s gaze, he still didn’t want to take on work like that as a pilgrim in holy robes.
He might not be able to stay here for long.
After a while of staring down the bulletin board, he finally headed to the reception desk.
“Welcome to the Rombamel branch of the Mercenary Guild.”
The receptionist was a burly man.
It was an appearance he had never seen before in a mercenary guild receptionist.
Had dealing with rough mercenaries turned even the receptionist rough?
Or had they hired someone like him from the start to prevent complaints from ever blooming?
Given that there had been no female receptionist in Horos Village, the latter might have been true.
“I’m looking for work. Are the requests posted on the board all there is?”
“Of course not. We’ve got more requests than we know what to do with, so don’t worry about that. First, show me your guild plate. Then tell me what kind of job you want, and I’ll introduce you to the closest match I can find.”
Despite his rugged appearance, the man was easy to talk to.
Lawrence took out the mercenary plate he had prepared in advance and set it on the desk.
“If possible, I’d like to look into monster extermination work.”
“Monster extermination? Rombamel isn’t exactly the best place for that to pay off. The Franks have even boars, but out here you’ve got nothing but Under Wolf and goblins. Honestly, clearing out criminals or bandits might be more profitable.”
The sort of request the receptionist mentioned was one he had already seen posted on the board.
“I’d rather avoid killing people.”
“No need to kill them if you don’t want to. Cutting off a leg or an arm would do just fine. But if you don’t like that either, I won’t force you. Let’s see. For current monster extermination jobs….”
The request slips he pulled from the drawer flipped over one after another.
He was checking them so fast that Lawrence’s eyes felt like they were spinning.
“Here we are. Exterminate the orcs roaming the Rival Plains. How about that? If bandit clearing doesn’t appeal to you, exterminating orcs might do the trick.”
“Orcs? There are orcs on the Rival Plains?”
“Not many. The orcs who drift this far are ones who’ve been left behind by their tribe. If you’re Bronze Plate, a party of three or four should be enough to handle them.”
The receptionist checked Lawrence’s guild plate.
When his eyes found Lawrence’s full name engraved behind the Bronze Plate, they widened.
“Lawrence of the Holy Cross Order?”
“Yes. Is there a problem?”
The receptionist sprang to his feet.
“The Shadow Mage!”
Shadow… what?
“The Shadow Mage?”
“There’s a Shadow Mage?”
The reaction came from behind him.
The mercenaries who heard the receptionist repeated the name out loud.
“Damn it… nothing’s wrong. Sorry about that.”
The receptionist quickly calmed the commotion.
For a moment, the stares clung to him, but the mercenaries soon returned to their own business.
“Are you really Lawrence the Shadow Mage?”
As though determined not to make the same mistake twice, the receptionist lowered his voice as much as he could.
“I don’t know about the Shadow Mage part, but I am Lawrence.”
“I’m terribly sorry, but could you show me your magic so I can confirm it’s really you? Ah, not here. I’ll prepare a separate place in the back for you.”
From that reaction, Lawrence finally understood what was going on.
He hadn’t known it, but at some point he seemed to have become known by the title of Shadow Mage.
After glancing around for a moment, Lawrence pointed at the receptionist’s chest.
“Shadow.”
The shadow rippled.
Shadow slipped lightly around the desk once and vanished.
“Ohhh… so you really do control shadows.”
“I’m not fond of drawing attention.”
“I understand. Thank you for indulging my rude request.”
The receptionist nodded.
“Why am I being called the Shadow Mage?”
“You didn’t know? The rumor’s been everywhere that you killed a Bugbear in a single blow in the Ulbazar Swamp. There’s the report that came into the guild, of course, but a minstrel who just arrived in the city is singing a song about the Shadow Mage.”
“A minstrel is singing about me…? That’s hard to believe.”
“It’s true. He’s probably singing it even today. It’s at the Drunk Duck Inn. The one near the central square. If you don’t mind, you should stop by sometime. The food’s good, and the lodging’s decent too.”
Drunk Duck.
After committing the inn’s name to memory, Lawrence continued.
“There’s something I’d like to confirm. Has my real name become known as well, or only the Shadow Mage title?”
That was the most important question.
Depending on the receptionist’s answer, he might need to change his plans going forward.
“Not really. Guild staff would know if they looked into it, but ordinary mercenaries wouldn’t. The guild doesn’t disclose personal information without permission unless there’s a very good reason. Right now, you’re famous because of the minstrel’s song. Though mercenaries who are personally interested in you probably know the feats mentioned in the report.”
“I see. Thank you.”
In truth, he wanted to ask more about the minstrel, but Lawrence changed the subject instead.
“Could I see the report that was sent to the guild?”
“No trouble at all. Please wait a moment.”
The receptionist went into the office and came back out carrying a thick document.
“Remington branch. Remington branch. Ah, here it is.”
Lawrence checked the document the receptionist had unfolded for him.
Starting from the top, there were familiar names written in order.
Balik and Garick.
And even Isolde.
He never would have imagined those three names could make him feel this glad to see them.
“May I read it and give it back after?”
“Yes. But you’ll have to read it while I’m here.”
Nodding, Lawrence began to read the report submitted by the three of them.
The first report was Balik’s.
The account filed by the Bronze Plate mercenary was packed with his deeds.
How he had brought down the jaguar.
What magic he had used, and even how he had killed the Bugbear in a single strike.
At the end, there was even a note about how he had come all the way into the depths of the swamp, refusing to let danger stop him, in order to rescue the others.
There was an addendum saying they believed him to be safe.
That was Balik’s own message of thanks to Lawrence.
He said he remembered their promise, so Lawrence had better come eat with them.
Lawrence’s chest tightened.
He had never dreamed that the reports submitted to the guild would serve as a means of communication between mercenaries like this.
Balik had once said that if it came to it, Lawrence should abandon him and flee.
But seeing this report he had left behind alive, Lawrence felt that saving him had been the right choice after all.
Garick’s report leaned even more heavily into gratitude.
Thanks to him, his life had been saved, so they had to meet again alive.
He couldn’t afford anything expensive, but he would at least treat him to a good meal.
His injuries were severe enough that he wouldn’t be able to work as a mercenary for the time being.
Still, once treatment was over, he planned to go back out as a mercenary again—a hopeful report through and through.
The last was Isolde’s report.
Since she had said she couldn’t read, it was probably dictated by the receptionist.
The mercenaries had returned safely.
Doris had recovered fully.
Neil hadn’t taken Tyrae’s payment, but instead had donated money to Saint Dominic Monastery.
Reading that everyone was safe brightened Lawrence’s expression.
---