The End and the Beginning (2)
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"It was yesterday. I was snaring rabbits in the woods near the village when a man came up to me. Said he was lost, and started asking all sorts of questions."
"What did he ask?"
"Quite a few things. Where my village was. And how far the nearest castle or fortress stood from it."
"So you told him everything?"
"Yeah."
"...Hrm."
The man who had questioned Theo was surely one of the raiders. Short on coin and food, they would have needed a plan to strike another village.
They would have scattered scouts first — the man who spoke to Theo among them — to learn which of the nearby villages was worth the attack.
"Even so, how could you just hand that sort of information to a stranger?"
"I'm sorry."
"If you're sorry, why don't you go and let those raiders catch you."
"......"
Theo's face fell, and he started toward the place where the raiders were.
"Hey, you idiot..."
I set both hands on his shoulders and forced him back down onto the ground.
"It was a joke, a joke! You were really going to take me at my word?"
I had meant it. But the sight of him drooping like that pricked at me, so I covered it over.
"Don't put it all on yourself. If they aren't common bandits, they're mercenaries. And if they're mercenaries, they would have come for this place eventually, whether you'd told them anything or not."
"Thank you for saying that..."
Going by everything I had seen, the mismatched weapons and clothing said as much, and so did the looting — loud, brazen. They looked like mercenaries. Ordinary bandits don't plunder with that kind of confidence.
Most bandits are people who turned to it because life left them no other choice. A conscripted soldier becomes a deserter and, with nothing to live on, a bandit. A survivor of a village raiders have already swept clean, like this one, drifts as a wanderer until banditry is all that remains.
Not that every bandit of this age is a drifter living by theft. Some grow tired of wandering, or of running from a bounty, and settle in a village. Skilled thieves, on the other hand, seize a village outright by violence, play the part of villagers where anyone can see, and bleed the people dry behind their backs.
Put all of that together, and I was convinced the ones tearing through this village were mercenaries. Someone had probably hired them cheap and ordered them to attack a village. That would explain the fires, and the noisy plundering.
For their employer, success alone was enough to deal the other side a grievous blow. The mercenaries, meanwhile, collected their pay and skimmed still more off the village — two birds with one stone. A raid is not a siege. Hit hard and get clear, and the odds of surviving are high. Most mercenaries, who prize coin and their own necks, prefer raiding to a siege for exactly that reason.
In the world I had built, mercenaries appeared often — often enough that the sight of them sacking a village was a familiar one. So I believed these raiders were mercenaries, though I still wasn't certain. That was why I decided to gamble my life.
"Theo. Even if we can't save everyone, if we could save a few... how would you live after that?"
"What do you mean?"
"There's a way to pull at least a few of the kids out, even if we can't save them all. I don't know if it'll work."
"What kind of way?"
"If they're mercenaries, there'll be a captain leading them. I show myself, and I ask them to take me to him. Tell them I have something to say."
"...Isn't there a better way?"
A better way? Hardly. There was no such thing.
If the one I possessed in the dream, time after time, had been the protagonist, I never would have considered a plan this mad. I already knew how the protagonist began, and how it ended.
But this dream I kept having was not the protagonist's starting point. I was nothing more than Girl A, a girl who began in this village.
So even I, its creator, could not tell how far the story had run from inside this body, or which pieces of information I was meant to use. That was why it was a gamble.
"It'll sound insane, but right now there isn't a better way than this."
"Say you do meet their captain. Then what?"
"Simple. I make them an offer. I'll sell a few pieces of information — how about a deal?"
"...Will people like that really just believe something coming out of kids like us?"
I shook my head, as if to agree with him.
"They won't simply believe it. Not unless they're fools."
"Then..."
"But from where they stand, a brat who comes making an offer like this can at least be interesting. For a talk, or a deal, trust matters — but what matters more is whether the thing is interesting, and whether there's profit in it."
"What if... what if it doesn't end well?"
"I haven't thought that far. Worst that happens, we're sold for slaves, or we become something for them to spend their lust on. Still better than being left in a ruin like this to starve, isn't it? They'd feed us, at least."
"...I suppose that's true."
I had said it to Theo as if it were nothing, but I had no wish to see that ending.
I was the one who had emptied whatever remained in the bottle of sleeping pills and drunk soju in place of water. The me in the real world was surely already dead of acute poisoning.
And yet the me of now was alive and moving, in a dream that had become another reality.
As if the impossible were not enough, I had been given a new life. I could not throw this chance away. Whatever it took, I had to survive here.
"So you choose, too. How you're going to live. Will you stay here, or come with me?"
"I..."
The mercenaries set to watch the prisoners were bored enough to itch in their bones.
"Haaah~ I'm bored."
"You're telling me. The others are off having their fun, so why are we stuck here?"
"Nothing for it. The prisoners are our charge this time."
"You think I'm saying it because I don't know that? I'm saying it because I do, and it's driving me mad!"
"Haaah~ Don't fight. Fight, and you turn stupid."
"...And you're not the stupid one?"
Mid-talk, one of them noticed the children standing before them.
"Hey, wait. Look over there!"
"What... huh? Those are kids. Oy, Johnson. How'd you tie them, if they slipped out like that?"
"That's strange. Th-that can't be."
"Go and check."
"All right. Let's see... one, two, three... hmm... eight, exactly. Nobody snuck out of here?"
"No? Then what are those?"
"Others we haven't caught yet, I'd say."
"So they walked in on their own..."
A silver-haired girl, a sight seldom seen, came toward them looking filthy, and behind her a boy with a messy thatch of brown hair.
The boy's face was locked tight, his legs shaking, but the girl never once broke her blank expression, and one of the men watched her as if she interested him.
"Kid. You come looking for us knowing who we are?"
The girl answered.
"Well. Bandits, or else mercenaries, I should think."
"Most lump us all together and call us bandits. You're a little interesting. Just as you said — we're a mercenary company. Men who don't hesitate at a job, so long as it pays."
"Yes. And?"
"Hmm. 'And,' is it... Now that is interesting!"
The mercenaries curled their mouths, like men seeing something amusing for the first time in a long while.
"If you know that much about us, you know full well what we're doing here... Not scared, brat?"
One of them pointed at the boy, wound tight with fear, as he asked. The girl answered.
"Well, it isn't that I'm not afraid. But... I do wonder why I ought to be. Once you've taken the measure of the other side's strength, do you get afraid — or do you not, even then?"
"Hmm."
Her brazen question left them looking as if they had taken a blow. Then they roared with laughter.
"Puhahaha! What a funny little bitch. Well, she isn't wrong."
The mercenary who had spoken opened his mouth again.
"Talk like that, and now we're curious too. Why show up in front of us of your own accord? Something you want to say?"
At his question, the girl answered without hesitation.
"Please let me meet your captain. I have something to say to him."
"Something to say to the company captain? Information rich as milk and honey, is that it?"
"I can't give you the details here. But you may take it that way."
"Hmm..."
"Hey. Don't tell me you're going to believe this bitch."
A comrade asked him that. The man with the knife scar by his eye twisted his face and turned cold.
"I'm only humoring her because it's amusing. Believe talk like this, and I should have quit the mercenary life long ago. But you — you do trust me, don't you? Why ask me a thing like that?"
"Haha... Slip of the tongue. Sorry. I trust you. I only wondered..."
The air went frigid, and it was the girl who broke the quiet.
"So. What will you do? Will you let me meet this captain?"
"I'll let you meet him. But if what you say isn't true, the price will be terrible."
He warned her. She paid it no mind.
"All right. Then lead the way."
"Hey. Smith. Johnson. Show these brats through."
"Will do."
"Got it."
"...And one more thing. Don't lay a hand on them. Not yet."
"I heard you."
While they led the children off, another man spoke to him.
"This is exactly why you're trouble."
"What is."
"That soft spot of yours for kids."
"Hah. It is nothing of the sort."
"Like hell it isn't."
"I'll say it again. It absolutely isn't. I am curious about one thing, though."
"Yeah? What's that?"
"If what that kid says is true — what we stand to gain."