Seeds
Forget about all that for now. Getting out of here with my body intact comes first.
It didn't seem like I had any other options, so I had no choice but to nod.
Get hit, heal, get hit again, heal again, and repeat forever. I could already picture that future playing out.
When I nodded, the Master nodded along with me.
"Yay! Going around with Ahjussi is gonna feel so safe. Heehee."
Eira voiced her delight at the top of her lungs.
But why Ahjussi, of all things? I can't talk, so I can't even ask.
Come to think of it, it's not that I *can't* talk. I'm just a sorry excuse for a man who won't.
"My name's Eira! Best archer in the guild!"
There was only one archer in the guild to begin with, though.
"My name is Cerise. I use healing magic."
"Lily. Mage. Nice to meet you, Ahjussi."
By all rights it should have been my turn, but my mouth wouldn't open. Honestly, I hadn't planned on opening it anyway.
Because I'd learned it was okay not to speak.
I simply nodded once more, and that alone was enough to bring smiles to all three of their faces.
The Master placed a hand on my shoulder.
"You don't have to talk if you don't want to. But I do need to see your adventurer registration card."
In response, I opened my small bundle and pulled the registration card out from among the gold coins it had been rolling around with.
The Master took the card, and before long, his expression hardened.
"...Felix. Your name is Felix, then."
Had there been a problem with my name? Or was it the rank?
"Adventurer rank, S."
Ah. So it was the rank.
In an instant, a silence so thick it was hard to breathe swept through the guild.
The first to break the stillness was Lily, whose mouth had twisted into an upside-down triangle.
"...Why do you live like this?"
A sudden attack that dug straight into my heart.
"Ugh, damn it."
"Ahjussi, I nearly died just now."
Little by little, the surrounding bustle began to stir back to life.
"Eira, I think we've met a truly wonderful knight."
"...If they find out, the hero's party might try to poach our Ahjussi."
The hero's party, by definition, would have S-rank personnel or people of equivalent caliber lined up already.
And besides, I'm a half-baked excuse for an adventurer — not worth that much anyway.
I'd learn the truth sooner or later, but since they didn't seem to know it yet, I shook my head in a way that said, that will never happen.
"But Ahjussi says he's not going."
It seemed my message got across a little differently than intended, but did it really matter?
No one was going to drag someone like me along anyway, and even if they asked, I had no intention of following.
The next afternoon. For the first time since setting down new roots, I took on a request together with the others.
My weapon was a single hand axe. The same hand axe I'd borrowed before, in fact.
It hadn't gone bad just because I'd used it — if anything, this was their way of showing recognition.
It was plain to the point of being slightly low-quality, but it felt like being gifted an expensive jewel.
Eira, who had sharp eyes — eyes she was more than happy to brag about herself — was scanning our surroundings when she spoke up.
"Hey, I see something over there? Something green!"
The whole area was green, so wouldn't anything at all look green?
What we were looking for were ogres. Not every ogre is green, but for this particular request, green was the right color.
The posting had said a small wandering pack had been spotted.
"Eira, how many do you think there are?"
"Hmm... five."
The healer Cerise asked, and the archer Eira answered. If what she'd seen really were ogres, five might be a stretch for us.
Should I just go alone and take care of it?
Truthfully, I couldn't get the numbers to add up. Aside from me, our party was D-rank across the board.
Considering that ogres generally sit somewhere between C and D rank, it would be tight — though having seen Lily's magic, I figured we could manage.
But staying unharmed was a separate matter, which meant I needed to think this through carefully.
"Shall we ask the knight?"
"Should we?!"
"Mm-hm."
My heart wanted to shake my head.
With a healer in the party, was it really right to distrust my allies this much?
I nodded and slowly stepped to the front.
"Just trust Lily."
I nodded once more.
As we advanced together like that, the shapes of the green figures began to come into proper focus.
Just as Eira had said — five of them. Ogres, all right.
Twing!
She's shooting already?
Twang!
While I was still caught off guard, two arrows tore through the air like bolts of lightning. Ah — so that's what shooting like a bolt of lightning looks like.
Despite the considerable distance, both struck the ogres' heads dead-on.
The head turned out to be a weak spot that wasn't quite a weak spot — the arrows didn't punch through — but the two ogres that had been hit writhed in pain and went rolling across the ground.
The remaining three began to charge, but they didn't feel all that threatening.
Flames and arrows were already streaming in from both flanks, and I was certain only one ogre had been left for me.
I grabbed the charging ogre by the head and hacked at its neck over and over, the way one fells a tree — but by the time I did, an arrow had already pierced the spot where another ogre's heart sat, and an explosion of flame had sent yet another flying.
Aside from the one whose nape I'd split open, four of them were still clinging to life.
Now what. Do I finish off the ogres that charged first, or go deal with the ones that had been rolling on the ground this whole time?
Any decision would do, in the end — but there is such a thing as the optimal call.
"Ahjussi, don't move!"
As for Eira, who had just shouted that, I could see her strolling back toward us at her leisure, as if the battle ended the moment she loosed a single arrow.
Lily was preparing her magic — apparently intending to finish the job herself.
So I decided to simply hold my ground.
The arrow she'd just fired drove deep into the neck of the ogre that had been knocked flying when it collided with a fireball.
The one that had collapsed clutching its wound near its heart, thrashing in agony, was finished off by a blade of sharp ice Lily had conjured.
I could see the ogres felled at the very start trying to push themselves back up —
but I'd already seen how this would end. Raising my hand high and bringing it down, I walked slowly toward the fallen ones.
Thud. Thud. I lopped off their heads with the axe and put them down for good.
For an S-rank wedged into a D-rank party, it could hardly have been easier.
That aside — Eira's arrows looked remarkably light. Loaded with mana, just as I'd suspected.
Even if not right away, I could see the possibility of these people going far someday.
My companions had closed the distance before I knew it. Cerise was the first to speak.
"You're not hurt anywhere, are you?"
I quietly shook my head. The only ones injured here were the ogres.
Only after Cerise had checked me over did Eira come bounding up.
"Having Ahjussi around really does make everything feel safe, you know?"
Having someone holding the line in front of you can be a considerable psychological comfort, sure —
but honestly, I doubt anything would have changed without me. This party wasn't even at D-rank level to begin with.
If I graded them generously, I'd say they could claw their way up to B.
A single outing is never enough to take the full measure of someone's abilities.
And yet from that small sample alone, I found a seed gazing up at the sky.
With people like these, wouldn't they surpass the likes of me before long?
Back at the guild, I presented the ogres' ears to the receptionist and collected our payment.
They say a healer has value simply by existing — but was it really fair to split the reward in equal shares, me included?
Of course, in my old party too, I'd received exactly the same cut as everyone else when we settled up.
Not weighing individual contribution is the normal way of things.
"Lily's heading out."
The moment the conversation with the receptionist ended came Lily's abrupt departure notice.
Abrupt to me, perhaps, but to Eira and Cerise it seemed perfectly routine.
"Lily promised her parents she'd study hard from evening through night."
Cerise explained in her soft voice, and Eira added her own two coins.
"At this rate, I bet she'll make it all the way to university."
So she hadn't enrolled in an academy's higher course yet. She did look young.
Nineteen at the very oldest. Casting such calm, stable magic at that age — her future looked bright indeed.
I found myself thinking the other two probably weren't far behind Lily, either.
Come to think of it, how did I live just before turning twenty?
I don't remember the details, but young as I was back then, I seems I'd been every bit as promising as these three.
But the past is just the past. Now, I'm an earthworm slowly drifting to sleep in a dark burrow.
Still — tending the soil where flowers might one day bloom. I could manage at least that much, couldn't I?
"What are you thinking about so hard?"
I must have been staring into space, because Eira seemed concerned.
I shook my head, then nodded soon after.
It's nothing. I'm fine. — That's what I meant, anyway.
It really is something, how we understand each other without a single word spoken.
"They're not listening to me, I swear. I told you to stop standing between us!"
"Hey, why are you getting so worked up? It's just an ogre. Let's half-ass it and go."
"No, I'm not angry — ...okay, fine, I'm angry. It's suffocating."
In a meadow where the sunset had already faded, a man and a woman — the ones who had chased off the bandaged man — bickered on.
Nothing serious had happened, but one stroke of bad luck after another had left their nerves frayed.
Mary had planned to loosen up by casually hunting a few ogres, but her magic kept missing its mark, and her mood had soured.
She swayed her long purple hair as she went on.
"Haah... how did we used to deal with ogres, again? Maybe it's just been too long."
Ogres were the kind of thing you cleared away only if they happened to catch your eye on the road — or you just ordered a errand-runner to hack off their ears and bring them back.
"Cutting off ears is such a pain, though. Can't an actual ogre show up or something?"
The man who'd spent the whole day wrangling with Mary kept grumbling under his breath as he carved off ogre ears all the same.
To think someone S-rank is out here doing chores like this.
Not that he was doing it alone — the swordswoman Sasha was cutting alongside him — but what difference did that make?
"Damn it... tomorrow we go far. Let's check the boards at other guilds too."
Still, we should at least bag a bear before we can hold our heads up.
Morning came.
I stopped by the weapons shop and bought a shield that sailed comfortably past the single-gold-coin mark, along with a serviceable spear and a set of throwing daggers.
Having nothing to my name had a way of making me spend more.
When I stepped into the guild, it wasn't yet noon, but the whole party was already gathered.
"Oh, there you are!"
I nodded at Cerise's greeting, then turned my eyes to Eira. She looked like she had something she wanted to say.
And sure enough.
"Ahjussi! We're going to a different guild today!"
Hardly unusual — practically expected, really — but the Master seemed thoroughly sulky about it.