The Wrong Choice (2)
Karem had only seen Gordon fight twice.
The opponents had been a young moss boar and a Grizzly Beaver. The overwhelming force Gordon had shown against both had been too distant and too fast for Karem’s eyes to catch more than a faint silhouette, yet it had been more than enough to wrench an involuntary gasp of awe from his throat.
And now, at last, he was about to witness a Sword Master going all-out against people.
“You dumb bastard. Just a ha—gurgle—”
He saw it. Only the result, though.
Before the bandit leader could finish speaking, his head dropped to the ground. Gordon appeared behind the headless corpse before the spray of blood even reached the earth—then vanished again before a single drop could touch him. He vanished in the direction of the bandits who still stood stunned by the impossible turn of events.
A dozen footprints stamped into the snow almost simultaneously.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
“What the hell is this—”
“There’s only one of him!!?”
“Gurgle—”
A corpse sliced diagonally and kicked like a cannonball slammed into two more men. Before that body even landed, Gordon’s sword had already carved through the arms, legs, and torsos of five others and was splitting the next target clean in half.
A single lion among a flock of sheep. No—even that fell short.
Autumn leaves in a gale. Limbs scattered like withered foliage; human bodies snapped in neat sheaves like wheat at harvest. Lifetimes totaling more than a hundred years were broken in a single heartbeat, so casually that every bandit who had not already bolted the moment their leader died now began to tremble with pure terror.
“You said it was easy! You said it’d be simple!”
“There’s still only one of him! Stick together! Surround the bas—”
“KYAAAAAAAH!!!”
The few who still had functioning brains tried to rally the others, but the instant such voices rose Gordon abandoned whatever he had been doing and changed targets.
Kra-kra-kra-krak!
A bandit in a breastplate toppled backward amid a spray of metal shards. Even while performing these absurd feats, part of Gordon’s mind was elsewhere.
This is going to start rumors.
While he carved through the bandits who had failed—or refused—to flee, his eyes were already tracking the footprints of those who had run and the rest who were using their comrades as bait.
None of them were Sword Masters. None of them even used mana. Slaughtering every last one would have been trivial, yet chasing down every single fugitive was an absurd demand even for a Sword Master.
“Of course, if I had enough time it wouldn’t be impossible.”
It simply wasn’t cost-effective—not as a mercenary, not as a knight. And if he were being graded as a bodyguard right now, the score would be an automatic zero without any debate.
A bodyguard’s job was to protect the charge. Not to butcher the enemy. Even now, some of the bandits had decided to ignore him and attack the carriage line instead, figuring that hostages would solve everything.
“Well… she’ll be fine.”
Gordon kicked away a bandit charging him in a panic and cast a sidelong glance at the carriages encased in a transparent dome of ice.
There are things people simply cannot give up.
Brits who start wars over cars sunk in the sea. Italians who froth at the mouth at the sight of iced americano or pineapple pizza. The French and Turks who worship bread like a religion. Even when you divide people by country alone the differences are that stark—so of course individuals with personalities as varied as the stars in the night sky each have their own unbreakable lines.
For Catherine, that line was food.
Today’s snack was cupcakes filled with jam. Cupcakes Mary had baked ahead of time back at Winterhome, then filled with jam and crowned with vanilla buttercream.
Magic tools really were the best.
The cupcakes looked delicious.
“By the way, can his sword even survive that kind of butchery? Wait—didn’t he just cleave a breastplate in two?”
“He only unfolds aura along the edge for the brief instant the blade makes contact. Anything else is just technique. You can’t see it, little one.”
True enough—Karem couldn’t see any aura or whatever. He hummed through his nose and took a bite of cupcake.
The cake itself was a touch dry, but the sweet-tart raspberry jam and the buttercream that never lost its moisture softened everything into silk.
“Mmm.”
Karem looked away from the vivid crimson jam. A scene of pure carnage was unfolding out there. They said that when something so far exceeded imagination, you went numb instead. That was exactly how Karem felt right now.
“Still… how can you keep eating snacks at a time like this?”
“Hm? What about it?”
“That. All of that.”
The red pools left behind by former bandits. The fragments and debris still spilling from bodies. A landscape that would make ordinary people go weak-kneed, faint, or vomit. And Gordon, every time he reappeared, expanding that landscape a little further.
“You’re asking if I can eat snacks in front of corpses like that?”
“Is that all you’re asking?”
Karem turned from the front to the rear of the carriage.
Clang! Ka-kang! Ka-ga-ga-gak! Screeeech! Kang! Clang!
“—! Front… rear… what…!”
“…!? That bastard… is…!”
“Magic…! Hurry… all of—!!”
The bandits who had surrounded the carriages moments earlier were now hammering on the transparent ice barrier—the dome Catherine had conjured with a flick of her hand. At first the escorts had been thoroughly unsettled by the hostile spectacle. But any stimulus dulls with repetition. Before long the guards, having given up on betting because Gordon moved too fast to follow, simply followed Catherine’s lead and settled into rest. The servants and maids did the same.
Watching that, the bandits’ heads nearly boiled over; they battered the dome even harder.
Kang! Kang! Kang! Kang! Kang! Kang! Kang! Kang! Kang! Kang! Kang! Kang!
“How should I put this… you seem far too relaxed and nonchalant?”
“Why should I be in a hurry right now?”
“Well, we’re currently surrounded by bandits, aren’t we?”
“True.”
“And some of them are actively attacking us.”
“Also true.”
“And yet we’re just calmly having snack time?”
“You helped prepare this yourself—what are you talking about? You’re eating too.”
Well… that was fair.
Karem’s mouth snapped shut. Filling the cupcakes with jam and topping them with cream had been his own suggestion.
“You’re saying odd things during snack time.”
Mary carefully fed Catherine one of the neatly sliced cupcake pieces, then glanced at Karem.
“Is there something more important than snack time right now?”
“People are dying out there.”
“We aren’t the ones taking damage. It doesn’t seem especially important.”
“Well… I mean… haaah.”
“Stop the nonsense and eat your cupcake.”
In the city of the blind, the one-eyed man is the abnormal one. Feeling the righteous indignation of the sole sane person present, Karem had no choice but to sit down as Mary ordered and take his frustration out on the cupcakes.
“You must have been hungrier than you thought?”
“Mmph, gulp. This is just me venting.”
“Venting? So you weren’t actually hungry.”
Mary reached to clear away some of the cupcakes in front of him. An instant before her fingers touched the plate, Karem yanked it toward himself.
“No—on second thought I am hungry!”
A growing boy who got hungry again the moment he turned around after a meal. Karem ate as much as any boy his age—no, far more. Cooking was hard labor, after all.
“Bloodbath in front, that racket behind. So how does the cupcake taste right now?”
“Honestly? Delicious.”
“For someone who claimed to feel uneasy, you’re pretty calm yourself.”
“Well…”
Karem promptly bit into another cupcake. The interior crumbled as softly as a sandcastle after rain; bright, sweet-tart raspberry jam and silky buttercream followed, trailing a gentle vanilla fragrance.
“It’s not like this is the first time I’ve seen corpses.”
Saying death was as close as everyday life would be exaggeration. Still, it was far closer than in his previous life. The very moment he had turned his back on the hometown he found so tiresome in this life, Moston Village—where he had been born and raised—had been overrun by a monster horde. The scenes he had witnessed then. The mercenaries attacked by a griffon after they fled. Plus the countless gore-image terror attacks of his previous life.
“Anyway, this is clearly a life-threatening situation, yet sitting here so comfortably feels way too weird.”
“Then just get used to it quickly.”
“It’s not the kind of thing you can get used to just because someone tells you to—”
“It’s simple. Be quiet, eat your cupcake, and watch the show.”
Catherine waved a hand dismissively and pointed with one finger. The noisy hammering had stopped sometime earlier; the bandits pounding the barrier were now exhausted.
“—Run…!”
“……Magic! ……We can’t…!”
The panting bandits went deathly pale, clutched their weapons, and fled without a backward glance as if they had never been tired at all. Wondering what had happened, Karem turned toward the clear, ringing sounds that had been repeating from the front.
Gordon, who had been rapping on the barrier, met their eyes and shouted.
“Hey… open… up… a bit…!”
Catherine picked up the staff leaning beside her and tapped the ground lightly. The ice dome enclosing them dissolved from the top down like melting snow, scattering into the wind as fine flakes. Before the barrier had fully vanished Gordon vaulted inside, snowflakes swirling around him, and grumbled.
“Some people are working hard while others casually enjoy snacks.”
“Well. It would be rude not to watch such an excellent spectacle. And ‘hard’? Already starting to decline, are you?”
“Correction. Not hard—diligently.”
“Same difference.”
“Honestly, Lady Mage, you’re too much.”
Gordon clutched his chest in exaggerated, completely unconvincing grief, sheathed his longsword—still without a single drop of blood on it—and flopped down. Mary set a plate heaped with cupcakes in front of him.
“Gordon, is it okay to just leave those bodies like that?”
“Of course not.”
Gordon swallowed three or four fist-sized cupcakes one after another and brushed the crumbs from his hands.
“Once I finish these I’ll get the escorts or servants to help clean up.”
“Monsters or beasts will probably show up first…”
“That only happens after we leave.”
He reached for another cupcake, swallowed it whole, and chewed thoughtfully. Watching him, the questioning Karem completely lost his words. Half the plate had vanished in an instant.
“Hm? What? Cupcakes? Yours are still there.”
“No, that’s not it. Doesn’t that choke you?”
“Choke? Whose throat?”
“Yours! You’re just stuffing them in without even chewing!”
Granted, the cupcakes were packed with jam. Soft, airy buttercream sat on top as well. That did not mean the density of the cake itself had gone anywhere. Even with jam and cream, watching the soft-yet-crumbly, wet-sandcastle texture of cupcake after cupcake disappear made Karem’s own throat close in sympathy.
The man committing the atrocity looked utterly baffled.
“I honestly have no idea what the problem is.”
“More importantly, mercenary.”
Catherine regarded Gordon with a flat expression and tapped her fingers.
“No—thinking about it, you have a title now. I should call you Baron.”
“At last a change in form of address?”
“Yes. But tell me you didn’t half-ass the job just because you wanted cupcakes.”
“Would I do that? Even if they aren’t mana users, enemies are still enemies. I finished off everyone who stayed behind for sure… hm?”
Rustle—twitch.
Gordon’s head snapped around mid-conversation. The hand that had been reaching for another cupcake was already on the hilt at his waist.
“It’s autumn right now, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yes? Monster attack?”
“Not that.”
Gordon’s sharp gaze locked onto the place he had been standing moments earlier. The bandits’ corpses—no, the things that had been bandits’ corpses—were slowly, unmistakably, getting back up.
Gordon made no effort to hide his dismay.
“Undead? In autumn? In Iceland?”
Catherine, equally blindsided, blinked and asked suspiciously,
“Mercenary. Did you cut corners because it was a hassle?”
“Excuse me? Me?”
“You half-assed the work just to eat snacks.”
“How can you even say that?!”
Gordon rose again, ready to draw, and shouted in pure indignation.
Soft cupcakes filled with bright raspberry jam and crowned with airy vanilla buttercream.
The shape came out a little banana-like. This is a picture ChatGPT drew for us.