Eugene
In the end, they didn't leave until the sun had gone down completely. Which is to say I kept getting beaten right up until then.
A thin ringing — peeeee — refused to die in my ears.
Remi seemed to have barked something at me in that half-assed threatening tone of his. Naturally I didn't catch a word of it. Had that bastard really thought a man getting the stuffing kicked out of him would have the leisure to listen?
It didn't matter.
First I had to get up. Every inch of me throbbed, but I couldn't stay face-down in the street forever. Fortunately my arms and legs still moved. They hadn't broken anything, it seemed.
"Nngh."
I forced my rag of a body upright, spat out the blood pooling in my mouth, and sat back against the wall.
The pain was searing. I was panting hard, trying to ride it out, when I realized something: the corners of my mouth had climbed, all on their own.
"......"
I couldn't hold it. A laugh slipped out.
"Pfft. Heh heh."
When I burst into sudden laughter, I felt the people on the street flinch. Looks that said Has he lost his mind? came flying my way. Fair enough. If I saw someone grinning after a beating like that, I'd think they were mad too.
But my laugh had a perfectly good reason. For one thing, they hadn't found the grimoire I'd hidden against my chest.
And for another.
"Move."
⟨ Move ⟩
I raised an arm and murmured the trigger word, and at the same time I pictured it. Lift. Carry.
Whoosh—
A small sound. Something cutting the air. I snatched the falling thing out of its drop without missing, and a bright clink! rang out. My arm was numb to the bone, but right now the pleasure was enough to drown the pain.
A heavy coin pouch. Remi's.
"Heh. A man greedy enough to beat people and steal the pennies out of a beggar's tin, and he can't even mind his own back pocket."
The sequence of events had gone like this. The coin sack had been sitting in the pocket of his raincoat. Ordinarily you hide a money pouch deep, on account of pickpockets — but even the slickest thieves in the city kept their hands off Remi the outlaw. Which was why it had been sitting right there in plain sight.
While they were beating me, I'd cast Type 1 Magic, Move, scooped the whole thing up, flung it quickly into the air, and parked it roughly on a building's railing. It happened so fast, and Remi was so busy pounding me, that he never even noticed the money was gone. The people on the street would only think something fell off a railing. None of them would imagine I'd cast a spell.
By nature, Eugene — an honest man and a shrewd man of business — does not pick pockets. But given who I was dealing with, far from a pang of conscience, I had worked the magic more nimbly than ever. The pouch in my hand was proof the judgment had been sound.
I undid the drawstring and counted the coins inside. Twenty-one in all.
...Twenty-one shillings.
Hah.
"Tonight's a feast."
How many loaves would this buy?
All told, I'd come out twenty-three shillings ahead. They'd taken what was in the tin, but the two coins in my back pocket plus the twenty-one in the pouch were more than enough to fill a starving belly, with change to spare. And not only that. I could buy the other foods I hadn't been able to touch, for lack of even bread money.
Meat, for instance.
Sadly, actual meat — pork and the like — was out of the question. I'd starve the next day. But grilled fish? That I could hold one in each hand and tear into. Just imagining the savory smell set my mouth watering. The satisfaction of protein, the sweetness of fat — I could taste them already. Months since I'd had any....
Right. This was no time for that.
I hurriedly stowed the coins and looked around. By now Remi might well have noticed the pouch was gone. A few glances this way and that. Fortunately, no sign of the gang.
"Good."
Time to stand. The brief rest had taken the edge off the pain, and I was about to head for the market just like that.
"......"
I looked around again.
A strange feeling. The same bleak view as always: dim streets, faces gone dark, a sky where storm clouds were gathering once more — a postwar landscape so ordinary it hurt. And yet, wedged into the cracks of it, was something slightly out of place.
My gaze was drawn as if on a string, and it landed on an old man near the building across the way, leaning against the wall with a book. Between the strangers and the familiar scenery, what that old man gave off was déjà vu.
That man. I was sure I'd seen him somewhere.
A white-haired old man, cane propped carelessly beside him, absorbed in his reading. The hat suggested he'd come from Frauvia, and yet for all that, the way he lounged against the wall looked a little too loose. The sight nagged at me, and before long the memory surfaced.
Only a few days ago. A rainy day — the man who had seen me use magic. I'd been running along in high spirits with Disc for an umbrella when our eyes met.
But the doubt, far from settling, only sank deeper. That old man. Hadn't he been in that same spot since daytime?
"No way."
An ugly guess rose up. Had he been watching me the whole time? If he really had, things were about to get awkward.
"......"
The Federation's crackdown wasn't limited to magical goods. Anything with the word magic attached to it, they confiscated. People were no exception. Just as a grimoire carried a reward of fifty pounds, a mage carried a bounty too. Unlike a grimoire, which was only a potential threat, a mage was a threat in the flesh — and so the bounty was far larger.
Two hundred pounds.
You couldn't just seize a living person, though. You needed proof. That was why Remi hadn't simply insisted I was a mage out of hand, and had tried only to take the book. But the old man had seen me use magic. Counting just now, twice. No — maybe three times.
A witness was excellent testimony, and in itself physical evidence. Everyone knew the rumor: the garrison kept a magic engine that could reproduce, in a single instant, whatever a person had seen.
My chest went cold. The chill reached deep inside me.
If the old man's aim really was the bounty, I had to choose this instant between running and taking him down. Grimoires were burned without mercy. A mage would hardly be treated any kinder.
"Damn it..."
First, confirm the facts. With my head splitting like this, even I couldn't swear my judgment was sound. So I began to watch the old man closely. About twenty minutes. Then I reached a conclusion.
"Maybe I imagined it."
He never so much as glanced my way, lost in his book. Twenty minutes, and you'd think he'd look over once. No matter how I studied him, he was an ordinary white-haired old man.
So it had been needless worry. Even the sense that he'd been there since noon might have been my memory gone fuzzy from the beating. And even if he had watched me cast, it probably wouldn't matter. A Frauvian soldier would have a hard time taking at face value the wild claim that a beggar was a mage.
"Haaah..."
The tension broke, and a sigh came of its own accord. I'd wasted too much time. I turned toward the shops without a backward glance, already looking forward to a banquet of bread and grilled fish. And then—
"Ah."
Our eyes met.
By the time I reached the market with the coin pouch, more than half the shops had already shut their doors. The good bakery, in particular, had been sold out for ages, they said. Now, back under the bridge only after the sun had fully set, all I had piled to my right was tasteless, rock-hard rye bread.
Grrrgle—
And still my mouth watered. Starve for three days and you'll want to chew on stones; how much more so bread. Right now even stiff rye would be the finest delicacy in the world. Of course that wasn't the only reason.
The smell of oil!
Whenever the dry scent of flour rose on my right, the rich, greasy aroma drifting from my left whipped my appetite into a frenzy. Such was the fearsome power of two grilled fish...!
Grrrrgle—
I couldn't hold the drool back any longer. I snatched up a fish in a bare hand I'd rinsed hastily in the river, and — crunch. I bit down hard.
"......"
I chewed, working the flesh between my teeth. Tough. The juices had long since cooked out of it; there wasn't a trace of tenderness left. And bones — so many bones. The fish itself hadn't been fresh, and someone had grilled it so long that my whole mouth filled with the taste of char.
"......"
And yet it was bliss. I had no words for it. If I had to name the feeling, I might have cried. Warm grilled fish is invincible.
Crunch. Crunch. Crack.
Picking out the bones was a luxury. I demolished the fish as if even the skeleton were too precious to waste. The sweet taste of oil on my tongue, for the first time in weeks, felt like life being pumped at speed into a body dried to the bone. One fish vanished in an instant. Before the oil could wash out of my mouth, I bit into the rye.
At this point even the bread was delicious. Damn carbohydrates. Months of nothing but hard bread had made me sick of the stuff, and yet with fish for the first time in ages, how was it this good?
"Hhk..."
Only after three hunks of tear-soaked bread and the grilled fish had vanished in a blink did my meal come to an end.
My belly was full. I knew from the last few years exactly how great a happiness that was. Right now, I was happy. Which meant the future me ought to be happy too.
After a meal, the accounting always came.
"Let's see. Two grilled fish, ten shillings. Six loaves, five shillings."
Eight coins remained in the pouch. I'd eaten like this, and still had eight whole shillings left.
"Thanks, Remi."
As payment for a beating, it couldn't be better. Thinking so, I gathered all eight coins in my oil-slicked hand, and dropped every last one into the savings tin.