The Guide's Bargain
The man of black hair, black eyes, and an exotic cast of features reached the knights and the mercenary company in no time at all. Distance had hidden it, but he was rather tall.
His steps were in no hurry, and yet the space between them closed with a strangely swift ease. So Ramang thought.
"Strange-looking fellow."
One of the knights offered the assessment.
Perhaps that was something like the feeling of a medieval European laying eyes on an East Asian for the first time. What relieved Ramang, at least, was that the man was not a Green Skin.
Green Skin was the shared hallmark of the creatures fashioned by the evil goddess Ohgana — monsters of a savage temperament.
"If he'd been a Green Skin, I'd have cut him down on the spot. At least his build and features are close to human."
Ramang's reaction was only natural. The man was, after all, human.
"If you think about it, orcs are the same — it's only the skin and the face. They've got arms and legs just like us."
"Haha, true enough!"
But in their world, an East Asian was too unfamiliar a sight for that logic to land.
Messi — Lee Eunho, by his Korean name — knew that well enough. Every time it came up, he was reminded once more that surviving in this distant world, adrift as a man of a different race, and finding a master besides, had been nothing short of a miracle.
"You. Your name is Messi, is it?"
When Knight Ramang stepped forward and asked, Messi hesitated a moment, then nodded. He gave no answer.
"Does he even understand us? Can he speak?"
A crossroads. As expected, the man was trying to take his measure.
From the village entrance all the way here, Messi had been watching people steadily, turning the situation over in his mind.
The village atmosphere is ice-cold, so these people aren't welcome guests. Judging by the gear, medieval knights, something like that? There'll be pressure of rank and station. The old village chief is here, and he doesn't show his face unless something's seriously wrong, so this is an emergency. They haven't drawn weapons, so it isn't a standoff — but the air is razor-thin. And if I walk into the middle of that?
To these strangers, he was an alien variable. Attention would fix on him far more than it should. The question was how to introduce himself in a way that turned that to his advantage.
They aren't startled to see me, which means they already knew I existed. The chief told them? But they're asking whether I can even talk, so they haven't been given any real details. If they find out communication isn't a problem, they'll keep coming at me with questions like an interrogation.
If I pretend I understand nothing at all and don't react, they'll start digging into how I settled in the village and everything around it. The longer a lie runs, the more gaps it shows. I'd have to play it like a foreign exchange student who'd just walked into their first language class.
Messi looked Ramang in the eye, cocked his head once, and answered with an expression of perfect innocence.
"Talk? A little. Me no know. No can talk."
He delivered it in clipped, awkward fragments awkward enough to pass for insolence. A few of the knights' hands drifted toward their swords, and Ramang stopped them.
"Leave him. Do you mean to slaughter every beast that doesn't understand human speech? We simply hoped for too much, that's all. An animal that understands our language..."
Messi's intention seemed to have succeeded. Ramang's interest snuffed out at once, and he stepped away. He had no interest in straining to communicate.
One of the knight company, however, burst out laughing at the sight, and Messi caught it.
"Bwahaha! Sir Ramang, didn't I tell you? We should've just quietly conscripted some of the village humans and gone!"
"Young Master, this is no time for laughter. One of the pieces we meant to use as a guide is only half a piece now."
"What of it? Think of it as picking up a hunting hound."
Three pieces of important information fell out of that careless exchange.
I took the one who spoke first for the leader, but there's a separate power inside the group. 'Young Master'... a noble, then. And a temperament that treats the villagers' lives as a trifle. I cannot afford to catch that one's eye, or to do anything that grates on him.
They've already marked me as a guide? Where do they mean to go? No — the answer's obvious. The destination is the Forest of Resentment. If it were only the Outer Forest, they wouldn't insist on me when we can't even talk. They came into the village looking for a guide, heard I'd come from the forest, and that was that. And the person most likely to have given me up first—
Messi turned his gaze slowly toward the village chief, who was sitting on the cargo wagon. Their eyes met. The chief hesitated a moment, then smiled and waved him over.
That man.
This was the same village chief who had never been glad to see him. They were not on smiling, come-here-go-there terms.
But Uncle Leto was beside him. Messi had been heading that way anyway.
"Well now, you're here? Hunt must've finished early today."
Messi gave the chief's words no reaction and looked at Leto instead. It was an unmistakable snub, and the chief — well aware of what he had done — cleared his throat and ducked his head. Leto eased the awkwardness.
"The situation being what it was. You understand, don't you? I imagine you've more or less figured it out already..."
At his murmured explanation, Messi nodded.
The woman holding Gaston wore an expression that asked what, exactly, they thought they were doing talking to an outlander who couldn't understand a word.
"There's a patient in a bad way. From what I hear, he took an orc spear to the belly. Can you treat him? We've packed the wound with Zanba Herb to stop the bleeding, but there's no visible effect."
Messi nodded along as he listened, his eyes never leaving Gaston.
The hole punched through the lower right abdomen was unmistakable. The spearhead would have driven through the subcutaneous fat and gone in. And it would have torn the viscera.
The more hopeless part was that the idiots had yanked the spear out like brutes. The tearing would only have accelerated the bleeding.
That the patient was in hemorrhagic shock made perfect sense. It was a wonder he had lasted this long in this condition.
"...This is the man called Messi? Nobody said he was an outlander who couldn't even understand speech."
"I understand you."
"Huh?"
"I can understand you, so please keep your voice down. Uncle Leto, if you've got cooled herbal water and clean cloth at the apothecary, bring as much as you can. I need to clear out the blood and the rest of what's leaked out."
"Got it."
Leto ran for his house at once. The moment Messi started moving, the village chief's face eased, as if the whole affair were already over.
What is this? He trusts this outlander that much? And how is he speaking...?
Messi met the confused woman's eyes and murmured, quietly enough that nothing would carry outside the wagon.
"I'll treat him. But I'll need a few promises first."
"What... kind of promises?"
As Messi's voice dropped, hers dropped with it.
"First, keep it secret from your comrades that I can communicate. Especially from those knights."
She nodded. She had read the situation. The being in front of her had no desire to spend any longer talking with those men than he had to.
He was hiding something, or he had something to feel guilty about, or he had an angle — or all three. Speculations chased one another through her mind, but she set them aside for now.
"And later, when I ask for your cooperation, you help me. No questions. That's all I need."
"All right. We'll do it that way. But is it your people's culture to trust strangers so easily? What if I go back on my word?"
"There's no such culture. If you'd like, you can walk over and tell the knights right now. What they want is a guide who does the job faithfully. If they found out I can speak, they'd like that even better. They'd be sour about being fooled, but they absolutely cannot kill me. Why? Because they need a guide."
He was not wrong. She had watched the knights spend the entire journey straining to find a guide who knew the Forest of Resentment well.
When the village chief had told them of the outlander's existence, Knight Ramang's mood had lifted to a conspicuous degree. She saw that Messi was right.
"And I give you my word. The day I survive and walk into that forest as their guide, I swear I will drive you and every last one of your comrades into a death trap. This man I'm about to save included."
It was a quiet murmur meant for her ears alone, and it raised the hair on her arms. Even the village chief, who had overheard from beside them, changed color.
Leto arrived just then with an armful of herbal water and clean cloth. Messi did not wait for the woman's answer. He started treatment. The choice, after all, was obvious.
"Chief. Uncle Leto. I need your help. Spread the wound as wide as you can."
"W-what? This old man too?"
Messi said nothing and simply looked at him. The village chief, who had a sin to answer for, put out his hands with a sour face.
The three of them poured herbal water and washed their hands, and the chief and Leto wrenched the wound open with everything they had. The interior was so drowned in blood that it was impossible to tell where the injury even was.
"We'll rinse it out first."
He poured the herbal water in, flushed the blood and contamination from inside the abdomen, and soaked it up with cloth as he went. The pile of filthy red rags only grew.
If I knew purification magic, I wouldn't have to bother with any of this.
For a man who spent the entire procedure thinking how tedious it was, Messi's hands were fast.
He had finished the irrigation and located the bleeding when the wagon lurched — someone climbing aboard.
"Well now, does this outlander have some mysterious sorcery? Can he actually treat this fellow? Hey, Boyle. I paid good money to hire you, and you wouldn't even attempt treatment. What's going on here?"
It was the young master. In one sturdy hand he was dragging a healer by the scruff of the neck, the man's face drained white.
The healer kept locking eyes with Messi and shaking his head, over and over — a plea, as far as Messi could tell, not to treat the patient at all.
He was probably afraid that if his own incompetence came to light, this vicious young master would make him pay for it.
Hah... just let me treat him already.
Messi found the growing crowd of extra hands climbing onto the wagon a thorough nuisance, but he let none of it show on his face. He gave no reaction, as if he had not understood a word the young master said.
"Th-that's impossible! Unless you're a priest, this isn't a wound you can save!"
"You heard the man. So how is this outlander supposed to save him?"
The young master's question was aimed at Leto. He already knew Messi would not answer, so he asked him instead.
"He uses Heal."
"Heal? An outlander who can use magic? No — more to the point, Boyle, you use Heal too. That's why you're a healer, isn't it?"
"Absolutely not! I stake my word on it. Heal is nothing more than pouring will into mana, Young Master! Of course, if you will the bleeding to stop and the wound to close, the wound will mend according to Heal's principles! But there is no guarantee the inside will match the healthy anatomy it had before! Heal guarantees only the result — it does not vouch for the path that gets you there!"
In short, Heal was an all-roads-lead-to-Rome kind of magic.
To close a wound, flesh might grow out of the injured viscera and regenerate — or it might fuse to the nearest organ and leave a deformity. Either way, the bleeding stopped.
If it went that way, though, the body would be left disabled, and there was no telling what side effects would follow. When the shape and the interior no longer matched, it could not possibly be the same as before.
"There's a reason Heal is only used on light injuries and surface wounds! Even swordsmen with injured arms refuse Heal without extreme caution — they're afraid the arm muscles will knit together wrong! And that's muscle. Internal organs? This outlander is a madman!"
"That's what he says, Captain. Still going to leave your man's treatment to this outlander? He's going to die anyway. Why torment your men any further? Wouldn't it be cleaner to leave the body to me?"
The young master tapped the sword at his hip, smiling with oily amusement.
"You know our family's swordsmanship. With Ahental Swordsmanship, he'll be dead before he even knows his head's been cut off. Here's my proposal. Your men get a clean death, and I get to kill someone for the first time in a while. That's what you call both sides walking away full, isn't it?"
To think of that as a win-win — the man was even more unhinged than Messi had expected.
But not a person present let that thought touch their face. Boyle, of course, was the exception. He was too busy trembling.
"I'll leave it to this outlander. I'm grateful for your kind offer, Young Master, but... I want to do everything I can for my men until the end."
She refused as carefully as she could, so as not to put the young master out.
"Tch. Fine. But I didn't get a taste of blood because of you, so I'll collect it from you tonight."
"Heh heh. If it's you, Young Master, I'd consider it an honor."
So that had been the real object from the start. Messi sighed inwardly.
"What are you doing, you worthless thing? Hurry up and treat him. He's going to die anyway, but he says he wants to kick a little first."
"Haha, quite so! To refuse the Young Master's mercy and take a lowly outlander's madness instead. I pity these mercenaries. In ten years as a healer, I have never seen a sight so unfortunate."
The sparks flew at Messi without warning. He pointed at himself as if he had not understood a word, and Leto gave him a couple of pats, then gestured and mouthed, Treat. Treat.
Only then did Messi put on an exaggerated smile of comprehension and nod.
A serviceable bit of two-man theater.