Vanilla. That Enchanting Name (1)
After his reincarnation, Karem had thought he was adapting reasonably well to things that, in his previous life, he had only ever seen or heard about—things that never truly existed.
It was only natural.
Starting with the two archmages closest to him.
Those two spent every other day flinging magic at each other yet somehow left the surroundings completely unscathed; they were the immortal sages every mage in Europa looked up to.
Even setting those two aside, there was also one thoroughly awkward elf necromancer oozing loner vibes.
On top of that, the Mage’s Tower was now packed with mages.
And then there were the goblins, slimes, iceworms, hunter drakes, that talking pseudo-giant crow monster, and all the other stuffed monsters and byproducts he had glimpsed from time to time.
Even a real, living mammoth that made the monsters mentioned above look ordinary.
In a place where mammoths that would have long since gone extinct in his previous life still wandered the earth on four legs, failing to adapt would have been the harder task.
Of course, dwarves, elves, dark elves—species that felt strangely familiar—strolling freely through this world also played a part.
But Karem finally realized the truth.
He still had a long way to go before he truly adapted.
Screeeeeeech—!!
"Watch their front teeth and tails!"
"Damn it! They’ve been quiet for years—I figured it was about time they showed up!"
Massive monsters the size of bears swung crude stone weapons.
The rescue force was locked in combat against an invasion of grizzly beavers.
Karem was at a loss for words.
Grizzly bears… or rather, beavers a little larger than brown bears.
Exactly as the name suggested: grizzly beavers.
Those things were fighting with stone tools, biting with their teeth, slamming with their tails, and body-checking people—methods that clashed completely with their appearance.
Taken by itself, it all seemed utterly ridiculous.
Of course, that only held true if blood, flesh, bone, and entrails weren’t flying everywhere as a result.
And whose those belonged to was painfully obvious.
It felt unreal—trivial and yet somehow reminiscent of the cruel flash animations he had watched as a child.
Especially because of that faintly sweet scent mixed into the blood-stench, a scent familiar to Karem yet completely out of place here.
In that chaos, two people stood out even more than the mages.
Gordon, and Iona.
"Damn it! Lord Iona! You’re advanced in years—fall back!"
Literally flashing east.
Then flashing west as well.
As soon as the rescue force’s main strength joined them, Gordon’s earlier flight became meaningless; he flipped the situation on the spot and counterattacked the monster horde.
Every time the Sword Master’s blade swept through the air, heads, chunks of flesh, and other former proofs of life from the grizzly beavers scattered mercilessly.
Gordon swung his longsword at a speed invisible to ordinary eyes, slaughtering the surrounding grizzly beavers and still finding time to support others in danger.
There was nothing particularly special about it.
Gordon was simply moving fast.
Even Karem, whose only specialty was cooking, could tell that much.
In any case, all of Gordon’s earlier boasting about his skills now felt like nothing more than false modesty, but Karem could understand it.
People were allowed to put on a little act now and then.
What Karem truly could not understand was the scene right beside him.
"Hyaaaaah! Nonsense! This old body—!"
Smash, smash, smash, smash, smash!
Iona, his plump frame clad in ice armor, hammered the grizzly beavers indiscriminately with both fists and both feet.
Pure white cold radiated outward in waves.
In large-scale combat, momentum was everything.
Inspired by that unmatched presence, the rescue force also met the grizzly beavers with blazing morale.
But there were simply too many of them.
Kill one grizzly beaver and two more poured out of the forest.
Even to Karem, who knew nothing of military tactics beyond basic encirclement and annihilation, it was clear that if things continued like this, something big was going to go wrong.
Karem turned to Catherine.
"Uh, this is starting to look a little dangerous—"
"If even the kid is saying that, we must really be getting pushed back."
"Isn’t it about time you stepped in?"
"True, their numbers show no sign of thinning. In that case—"
Catherine gripped her staff and struck the wooden palisade hard.
Air that belonged to midwinter suddenly brushed past Karem’s nose, which had been numbed by the stench of blood and that sweet scent.
"Ugh, cold!"
"Children these days have no patience."
"Then this impatient child will just stand a little farther away."
"Fine. It’ll be over soon."
"No—don’t step in."
Someone casually rested a hand on the palisade in front of Catherine.
It was the giant who had casually vaulted out the window earlier.
"What the—"
"Wouldn’t it be better to conserve our magical forces as much as possible?"
"Hey, isn’t conserving Sword Master strength just as obvious?"
"Remus!"
"Hey!"
"Where are you? Remus!"
"Hey. You ignoring me? Hey! Urgh!"
Catherine, whose words had been ignored, reflexively kicked the giant in the calf.
Clang!
But Catherine was the one who ended up hurting.
On top of that, the angle must have been bad, because the sound rang out with crystal clarity.
"Ghhhkk!"
"Oh dear. Lady Atanita."
"Y-you!"
Hahahahaha! The giant simply laughed.
In the meantime Remus scrambled up onto the palisade and saluted.
"Squire Remus, reporting!"
"Where is the cavalry?"
"Everyone except those out on reconnaissance is preparing to sortie!"
"Hmm. Then we need to buy time. Good! Raise the victory cry!"
"Yes, sir!"
The giant nimbly leaped up onto the palisade like a weasel and balanced himself precariously.
"Sword Master—launch!"
Boom—! Craaack!
The giant launched himself exactly like that.
Part of the palisade shattered from the recoil as he shot toward the grizzly beavers.
At some point a massive double-bladed axe fit for a giant had appeared in his hands.
"Kraaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!"
Naturally every grizzly beaver attacking the rescue force focused its gaze on him.
But it was already too late.
Kwaaaaaang—!
Without losing any of his momentum he split a grizzly beaver cleanly in half.
The impact made the ground itself tremble.
In effect he was a bomb in human form.
Karem finally understood why the rescue force kept functioning even without their giant commander present.
Two Sword Masters, the rescue force’s troops, and the cavalry’s sortie.
Before long the grizzly beaver horde retreated in utter defeat.
The battle ended in less than half a day.
After celebrating their victory, the rescue force was able to confirm what they had already suspected from Iona, his escort, their benefactor Gordon, and the mercenary band.
A large-scale outbreak of grizzly beavers.
Yet contrary to Karem’s expectations, the native Icelanders reacted with a complicated mix of annoyance and half-hearted cheers, as if something that was bound to happen had finally arrived.
Amid the noisy atmosphere, Karem figured out the reason.
True to their beaver nature, grizzly beavers were monsters that built dams on rivers and lakes.
Naturally, building dams required trees.
And naturally, a great many people in Iceland made their living by logging.
In short, their required resources and activity ranges overlapped.
If they had been people, there might have been some room for amicable compromise.
But despite their beaver-like appearance, grizzly beavers were unmistakably monsters.
There was no such thing as compromise with monsters.
Naturally, when damage occurred, adventurers would subjugate them and that would be the end of it.
That would have been a happy ending for everyone—except that in Iceland, every few years the grizzly beaver population exploded and large-scale subjugation commissions were issued.
The rescue force that had reached Blackwood Village completed its original goal of rescuing Iona.
Upon confirming the large-scale grizzly beaver outbreak they contacted Alfred.
The rescue force promptly linked up with the Adventurers’ Guild and converted into a subjugation unit.
As a result, Blackwood Village became even noisier than before.
"Wow, shit. The more I look at these things the less I get used to them."
"Still, their pelts sell extremely well down south where it’s warmer."
"They feel this stiff, though?"
"That’s a problem that goes away once they’re tanned."
While making small talk with the adventurers who were processing the byproducts—skinning and stripping the bones—Karem examined a grizzly beaver more closely.
"I notice you’re all just stripping the bones. Don’t you eat the meat?"
"If it were autumn when they’re fat and oily, maybe. But grizzly beaver meat in spring and summer tastes terrible. Even wild beasts and monsters won’t look at it unless they’re starving."
"Ooooh…"
Grizzly beaver meat outside of autumn tastes bad.
Check. And his personal impression:
Hmm, looking at them like this they’re not really that cute.
From a distance it hadn’t been the case, but up close in this giant size they looked more grotesque than adorable.
What made beavers cute was their fluffy bodies and round eyes, plus those ridiculously short legs and paddle-like tails relative to their bodies.
But at this enormous scale, every cute feature lost its charm. They didn’t give off even a hint of that “cute like a bear” feeling.
Anyway, they said these things periodically appeared in huge numbers.
"Kind of like a locust swarm."
"Locust swarm? Not exactly wrong."
At the familiar voice Karem turned his head.
Gordon—the benefactor of this rescue force and of the Felwinter family, currently the most popular man around and surrounded by people—raised a hand with a weary expression.
"Little genius chef Karem! To think I’d get to see someone so distinguished in a shabby place like this! You’ve gotten taller since the last time I saw you!"
"Come on, you’re embarrassing me."
"I already knew about your incredible cooking skills, but ha! From what I’ve been hearing all over, you raised quite a storm in Coldon too, didn’t you?"
Haa, damn. He thought he had gotten used to such blatant praise.
Karem mumbled awkwardly and changed the subject.
"By the way, is this sweet smell coming from the grizzly beavers?"
"Pretty much. Makes it easy to notice their ambushes, at least."
"Ambushes."
A word that really didn’t suit the word “beaver.”
But thinking about it, it made sense.
They were pack-hunting monsters, so of course they would know how to use tactics.
On top of that they had the brains to crudely manufacture and use weapons.
Considering how few monsters used tools…
Wait. Aren’t these things a lot more dangerous than I thought?
"Why? Curious where the smell’s coming from?"
"You just said it comes from those grizzly beavers."
"Just follow me for a second."
And so Karem followed Gordon to a pile of dead grizzly beavers waiting their turn for processing.
Gordon kicked one over onto its back with his foot.
A dead grizzly beaver flopped over, belly up.
And then—
Dangle.
The thick, intoxicatingly sweet fragrance grew even stronger.
"Ah, please! Gods above! Gordon’s suspicious tastes—"
"Hey! It’s not what you’re thinking!"
"If you’re not talking about balls then what—"
"No, that’s the source. The source! You asked me to show you!"
Karem was still doubtful.
While he hesitated, a disgusting sight peeked through his narrowed eyes.
Whether Karem liked it or not, Gordon kept kicking the grizzly beaver as if telling him to take a good sniff.
Each kick sent another wave of that rich, fragrant smell into the air.
"Why are you acting so disgusted? It’s just—"
"I get that it’s balls already! Stop it!"
"Fine, fine, fine. What did they call it again? The scent males use to attract females, or was it the other way around? Anyway, something like musk."
There was talk of polygamy and how ridiculous their dams were, but—
It was a scent no modern person could ever forget.
Wait a second.
Karem lowered the hand that had been covering his eyes and stared sharply between the monster’s legs.
…This is the smell of vanilla.
Shit, that changes everything.
Come to think of it, back when vanilla was practically worth its weight in gold, there had been some dubious information that beavers were driven to the brink of extinction by people hunting them for cheaper substitutes and high-quality pelts.
They said dried beaver… that part smelled exactly like vanilla.
He wasn’t sure of the exact details, but true to the grizzly beaver’s massive size, those things were enormous as well.
Come to think of it, people ate the testicles just fine when they made seafood stew.
Once he thought of it that way, the revulsion faded considerably.
And more than anything, that overwhelmingly familiar scent.
Karem’s gaze turned so intense that even Sword Master Gordon flinched and took a step back.
"Whoa, what the hell are you thinking? The only things you’ve ever shown interest in are money and cooking, right?"
"I’ve got enough money now."
"That’s a weird thing to say. Anyway, what—are you thinking of eating that?"
"……"
"Uh, I was joking. Don’t tell me you’re serious?"
Karem simply stared at Gordon with a meaningful look.