Of Some Use
It was presumptuous of me, I knew — but as long as I was permitted to stay, I meant to keep on staying.
Just as I'd made up my mind, the red-haired woman — the master of this adventurers' guild — spoke to me again.
"Feels good to have let off some steam, doesn't it? Go on and finish your meal. ...It's a bit cramped for you in here, I'd imagine? I'll go bring the others back."
With those words, I began spooning up the soup, a little at a time.
It was warm and soft. I was carefully moving my jaw — wary of loosening the bandages — as I chewed on turnip, when people started trickling back in.
"Lily's hooome~"
A five-year-old's voice, though the owner of it had to be well over fifteen.
"What's with the sudden thunderbolt?"
"Isn't that guy supposed to be someone amazing?"
"You call *that* what an amazing person looks like?"
"Shut up."
All manner of idle chatter began to mix together, and a scene far removed from anything that concerned me started filling the building.
Time to slip out. Once in a while might be forgiven, but I had no right to linger here all day.
I left the emptied dishes where they were, uncleared.
Picking them up to tidy them away was the kind of thing that could sour people's mood just from watching me move.
I was making for the wide-open door when a large, cheerful splash of yellow attached itself to me.
"Hey, where are you going!"
Here I was without so much as a coin to pay for the meal I'd eaten; stirring up more conversation would only be a nuisance.
And yet — it occurred to me that I should at least be prepared to repay this debt whenever the chance arose.
So I turned back. Deeper into the building than where I'd been sitting.
This place wasn't square in shape; like a bent rod, it stretched out long in a single direction. Past the point where it narrowed slightly, there was a board plastered with all kinds of request notices.
And there I took the job adventurers most dreaded — the kind that was troublesome and repulsive precisely because your opponent was fellow human beings.
Bandit extermination.
Properly speaking, I should have stopped and sorted things out with the receptionist, but I simply walked past.
Success was all that mattered.
The only problem was that, having gifted my sword to the ogre, I had nothing decent left to fight with.
So I picked up the most battered hand axe in the vicinity — one with an owner who made no attempt to hide the fact.
"Ah, what the hell."
Naturally, that owner spat out a flustered curse, but he didn't try to stop me.
Perhaps this was one more reason people disliked me.
"If that bastard comes back, I'll kill him."
"Dude, don't get cocky."
Leaving behind the noise of the middle-aged man whose axe I'd stolen and the retort of the man beside him, I finally came to a stop before the entrance. The faces I'd seen since the forest each threw a word my way.
"Mister's leaving?"
"...Be careful out there."
"Come back safe. You've got to collect the reward for the request."
I gave a single quiet nod and set to work on my first request.
Shade where the sound of grass blades rustling in the wind never ceased. Why would bandits manage to survive out here in any steady way? Places this bright with sunlight were often miracles in themselves.
Either they found it convenient, or they had some special reason to be here.
That said — at some point, the friction of grass blades had begun to sound hideous, like blades whispering *die*.
Burning the whole mountain down would settle things quickly, but it would only invite a greater calamity.
The years buried in this soil were vivid enough; if only I could find a single human footprint.
As I pressed on, bent nearly low enough to scrape the ground, a spider the size of a human head came descending along a thread.
A tick-tock spider...
The tick-tock spider, or clock spider as some called it — named for the clock-like sound it made.
I'd heard its bite injected paralytic venom, but I didn't know the details. This was my first time seeing one in the flesh, too.
Skritch. Skritch.
A gray body, tawny fur wrapped around its head like a scarf, planted itself in front of me.
Its eyes gave no hint whether they were looking at me or at the ground.
Rather than feeling it had lost its bearings, it felt as though it *denied* me mine — as if it were better at it than I was.
A flash of mischief made me consider snapping the thread it had ridden down, but I soon gave up on the idea. It might turn into a pointless hassle, and it couldn't leave its own territory anyway.
Still — since when did things like this live somewhere like this? Wasn't it a little too bright for tick-tock spiders?
And why did I get the feeling there was a bandit lair nearby?
This time I began walking with my eyes on the sky instead of the ground.
Once in a while, I'd spot a spider dangling from a thick branch. Meeting those dark red eyes, lifeless even in the half-light of the shadows, was a little unsettling.
Seen this way, their bodies looked black rather than gray — and I understood why so many people remembered them as black.
Following the direction the spiders dangled from, tripping over tree roots now and again, I walked for a long while.
Then I found it: a crude hut built of dark brown logs. It wasn't the cave I'd expected, which surprised me a little.
...There's something underneath, too.
Behind the hut lay a square space made of the same timber.
I circled around cautiously to check the side, but I couldn't find an entrance — which meant it was most likely inside the hut itself.
The lights were on, so someone was keeping watch.
I'd have to be silent on the approach, but noisy going in. Leaping through a window is far harder to respond to than a door.
Silently, silently. When I reached the base of the window—
gripping the short axe even shorter, I vaulted through the open window and the fight began.
"You—!"
Fwish.
I seized the man's head, drove the edge of the axe — using its two ends, its top — into his throat, and killed him.
"You little—!"
As luck would have it, a dagger lay close at hand, so when I turned to the second man, we were both armed.
He'd shrieked and taken his stance, but he didn't stab carelessly.
Not composure. Fear.
I feinted a swing of the axe, and the instant he thrust out his dagger to block it—
I caught the arm holding the blade and drove inside his guard.
Then, just the same, I punched the end of the axe into his throat and finished him.
Clean up.
Ordinarily I'd have taken a head as proof to submit to the guild, but for a thorough purge, leaving the bodies intact was the wiser course.
If the others came running in a rage at the sight of rolling heads, that would be a problem — and if they fled in terror instead, an even bigger one.
First, the opening in the floor — the one I guessed led down to that space I'd glimpsed from outside.
I climbed down the rickety ladder propped beneath it. It was longer than I'd expected.
Barely any light made it down here, but the place was reasonably well kept. It was, after all, somewhere people lived.
A woman cradling an infant, staring down at me with hollow eyes.
A young girl sitting against the wall, arms wrapped around her belly, head resting against the stone.
Women sorting herbs.
Only belatedly did one of them look up at me and speak.
"Who... are you?"
The deeper we went into the cave, the damper the air felt against my skin.
Damn it...
Had I taken a wrong turn? Honestly, just my luck. I was starting to think it might be best to call it a day and head back.
"We're going back."
My party members were every bit as worn out as I was.
"Ha, good call."
"Yes, let's go back."
"...Agreed."
Unanimous. The return was settled.
I had a fair grasp of the way we'd come, so there was no chance of getting lost.
But how had this happened? Why had we lost the trail at all? It wasn't as if the bandaged guy had been our pathfinder.
"Sasha. Did you get mixed up for a moment back there? It felt different from the transfer — the way the route felt, I mean."
"I've taken that path several times before, though less often than some."
"I see. ...Understood."
That was just as we were turning back toward the guild.
"Eek!"
"Ugh...!"
The healer let out a short shriek, and the battle mage grimaced and loosed a fire spell.
"Now what."
The healer, steadying her breath, spoke quietly.
"A sp-spider... it was a spider..."
A spider?
Did she mean the ones a touch smaller than a person's palm?
"What's the big deal about those? They're not even venomous. ...Disgusting, sure."
They posed no real threat, and they only surfaced rarely, so I'd never paid them much mind.
"What — it came down again!"
The battle mage began preparing another spell, irritation sharpening every movement.
"Why would you waste magic catching one of those? Move over."
I cut the thread the spider had ridden down with mana-laced steel and crushed the fallen spider underfoot.
And then, as if to exact revenge, spiders began appearing along our way back.
"Tch, damn it."
Trouble started the moment I severed several threads at once.
"Wh-wh-what is this...!"
"Goddamn it!"
Several spiders crawled across the ground toward the healer all at once, and before long they were climbing up her legs.
"...What a racket."
The blade-woman, Sasha, murmured it under her breath as she peeled the spiders off with her hand and flung them far away.
"I think it was fire. Mary, light a fire. Big one."
Fire?
The moment the battle mage kindled flame above her palm, the spiders fled up their threads as one.
So that was why the bandaged guy always held his torch up high.
Right. If not him, who else would bother with something so pointless?
It had ruined what little good mood I'd managed.
"Let's hurry back."
The women down here had, by all appearances, been abducted and brought to this place.
They didn't fear me. A small hope had taken root, and it had changed the look in their eyes.
Still, they didn't stop working. A kind of fallback, I suppose — a way of retreating if this turned out to be nothing.
For now, I would pass the time here and wait for the rest of the bandits to return.
This was no place to easily fetch fire or water, and there was no chance of a mage among them.
All I had to do was deal with each of them one by one as they came down this narrow stairway, and then leave together with the women.
Today, at least, perhaps even I could be of some use.