The Master Picked Up the Elf His Disciple Was Looking For?
“…Well, this is something…”
It had always been a hermitage no one should ever have been able to reach, but whether it was William’s handiwork during his visits—or Sera’s, for that matter—the place had become an even more perfect sanctuary, one where not even a whisper of presence could be felt. And yet I’d sensed someone. I’d grabbed my bow and arrows and run straight over, only to find…
“…Uuuugh.”
Grrrroooowl!
An elf collapsed on the ground, her stomach making an unholy racket.
An elf, of all things…
Of all the things it could have been, an elf…
Elves are beings you have to be extremely careful around. Even if they looked like children. The very fact that one had left the World Tree’s barrier meant the World Tree herself had acknowledged that elf possessed combat strength sufficient to wander the world alone without issue. That was why the people of this world feared elves.
There were humans blinded by desire, lusting after their beauty and desperate to claim one for themselves, and there were those who would do insane things to sell such elves at a high price to those blinded fools—but what always came back to them was nothing short of poetic justice. (As far as I could tell, the one act in this world for which karmic retribution was absolutely guaranteed was messing with an elf.) More than anything, elves were a long-lived race with excellent memories. Longevity meant countless opportunities to settle scores, and a good memory meant grudges that ran very, very deep. In other words, earn an elf’s enmity once, and you’d spend the rest of your life under that elf’s wrath—and so would your children, your grandchildren, even your grandchildren’s grandchildren. Cross one elf the wrong way, and your entire bloodline was in for a world of suffering.
Therefore, any person with a shred of sense would, upon spotting an elf, put distance between them without a moment’s hesitation. It was an unwritten rule so obvious it barely needed stating.
I, being a person with a proper sense of self-preservation, had wanted to put distance between myself and this elf the moment I found her.
Grrrroowl!
I needed to keep my distance…
“I’m hungry…”
“……”
I needed to keep my distance, and yet…
Haaah…
I really needed to keep my distance…
People often make a mistake. They assume that villains are foolish, hot-tempered, and impulsive. Of course, such villains do exist. Most of them probably are. But the truly wicked ones never move lightly. If anything, they are more cautious. The truly evil know full well that the moment they fail, their heads will roll. That is why they plan carefully, thoroughly, and take their time preparing.
For such wicked people, the oracle that the Demon King’s army would arrive was more than a good opportunity—it was overflowing with potential. And so, while the Emperor selected Hero candidates and entrusted them to masters for training, the truly wicked were making their own preparations.
The villains who currently held notoriety were cute by comparison. The truly evil would make their names during the Great Human-Demon War, proving just how vile humanity could be.
One of them was none other than—
‘Human Merchant’ Macgill.
Exactly as the name suggested. He was a villain who would become the Demon King’s foremost collaborator, selling his own kind to the demonkin who delighted in torturing and slaughtering humans. In the Great Human-Demon War, he would become the most infamous, most monstrous villain of all—but right now, he was nothing special. At present, he was merely a toad-faced, pig-bodied merchant of everyday illegality, armed with nothing but plans.
Which made him easy to deal with.
“Cough! Cough! Damn it! This can’t be! This can’t be happening!! Fortune is on my side! The luck of this world will take my side! There’s no way I end like this…!”
Even with his legs useless and blood pouring out of him in torrents, Macgill refused to give up, insisting he couldn’t die. Sera threw a dagger at his throat without a moment’s hesitation.
Thud!
“It can be. Shut up and die.”
“Grrrk!”
With a sound like a poisonous toad choking on its last breath, the wicked man who would have gone on to earn a terrible reputation died without ever revealing even a fraction of that wickedness to the world.
“A fitting end for someone like you.”
Sera nodded in satisfaction, deciding it was a truly appropriate end for a man who would have cut out his own kin’s tongues and severed their tendons at the demons’ request. Give him a second chance because he wasn’t a villain yet? There were already so many decent people in this world who deserved a second chance—there was no reason to extend that courtesy to scum like him. That was the conclusion the infinitely regressing Hero had reached.
“Still so many bastards left to kill.”
Even if she killed every one of them, new villains would appear to dirty the world all over again. But cleaning up was still better than leaving the mess alone just because it would get dirty again—a slightly better future was still a better future. So Sera decided to exercise her patience.
“But ‘fortune is on my side’…”
Those words inevitably brought a certain elf to mind.
The elf who claimed the World Tree had bestowed Luck upon her as a Special Spirit.
Whenever one of her elven children was born, the World Tree granted them a special power of the soul. The elves called this ‘bestowing a Special Spirit.’ And so each elf named themselves after the Special Spirit they had received—‘Elf of Flame,’ ‘Elf of Frost,’ ‘Elf of Wind’—carrying the pride of a gift from their parent, the World Tree. So yes, there could well be an ‘Elf of Luck’ among them. That possibility was by no means zero.
The problem was…
She was never lucky at all.
An odd elf who constantly got lost, lost her wallet, got scammed by merchants, and suffered every kind of misfortune imaginable—yet insisted to the end that she was the ‘Elf of Luck.’
Still, being an elf, her archery and agility were excellent, so across many of Sera’s lives she had often taken her on as a party member. She planned to recruit her this life as well, but…
Because she gets swept up in every kind of misfortune, there’s no telling where she is.
Whether she was the ‘Elf of Luck’ or the ‘Elf of Misfortune,’ every time Sera regressed, that elf was swept into all manner of disasters, popping up east one moment and west the next. Even Sera, who monopolized so much information, couldn’t find her right now no matter how much she wanted to.
She’s not lost and starving somewhere again, is she?
With that elf, it was entirely possible.
She really was an elf for whom the name ‘Elf of Misfortune’ fit perfectly.
“I really am the ‘Elf of Luck’! I thought everything was over, but here I am eating such delicious food!”
“……”
If she truly had luck, shouldn’t she never have gotten lost and wandered into a place no one ever came near in the first place? The urge to point that out wasn’t absent, but I didn’t want to be cruel to someone who’d only just recovered her strength, so I shook my head and held my tongue.
“Ah! I’m Riel, the ‘Elf of Luck.’ Nice to meet you, my savior.”
“…You don’t have to call me something that grand.”
I’d wondered if I should speak formally, but she looked like a child no matter how you sliced it—and more importantly, she’d stuffed every scrap of food I’d stockpiled into that tiny stomach as if a whole gang of beggars lived in there… There was no way polite speech was coming out of my mouth.
“No, no. You are my savior. Without you, I might have starved to death. I just got lost, but then I kept falling into weirder and weirder traps—I suffered so much… I really thought I was going to die.”
“……”
So that was it after all…
Elves were strong.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say a single one was an army unto themselves. So why had this one been starving near my hermitage? The answer wasn’t hard. That unlucky elf—who insisted she was the ‘Elf of Luck’—had gotten lost, wandered into this territory, and promptly fallen into all the traps William had set to protect me, plus the ones Sera had laid. After suffering every kind of hardship, she’d finally collapsed from hunger—and I’d found her.
I found her, she ate a ton of food and recovered, so is that luck? No—if she truly had the Special Spirit of Luck, she never should have collapsed from hunger in the first place.
Luck… what even is that, really?
A truly difficult question.
Still, one thing is certain: this kid is not the ‘Elf of Luck.’
Why she called herself that, I had no idea…
But she probably had her reasons, right?
Just as it was natural that no person in this world was without a story, it was natural that no elf was without one either.
I had no particular desire to get close enough to form a deep bond, and prying into someone else’s story wouldn’t do me any good, so I decided to just let it be.
Self-proclaimed ‘Elf of Luck,’ Riel.
It was just a self-proclamation.
If she truly were the ‘Elf of Luck,’ she would have received helping hands from people who appeared out of nowhere the moment she got lost; prey would have conveniently shown up right in front of her the moment she got a little hungry; and a sudden shower would have fallen from a clear sky the moment she got thirsty. In other words, she was not the ‘Elf of Luck.’
Elves do not lie. That was why some regions even believed the saying ‘Elves never tell lies.’ It was true that elves did not lie—but that didn’t mean they couldn’t. As children of the World Tree, they considered lying a thoroughly base act and restrained themselves of their own will, treating it as a principle. So the saying ‘Elves do not lie’ wasn’t exactly wrong. But ‘do not’ and ‘cannot’ are not the same thing.
In other words, an elf who lied was by no means an impossibility.
Riel was precisely that—an elf who lied, something that had never existed in this world before.
The reason was simple.
It was because of the Special Spirit the World Tree had bestowed upon her.
She had rejected her Special Spirit—
And so she had no choice but to lie.
To claim she was the ‘Elf of Luck.’
…Honestly… Because of this unwanted ‘Special Spirit,’ I’ve had to live seeing things I never wanted to see… But I never thought the day would come when this ‘Special Spirit’ would let me see ‘something like this.’
Riel’s Special Spirit was Blessing.
She was the Elf of Blessing.
To bestow a blessing.
Looking at that phrase alone, it seemed like a wonderful thing. But what about the one doing the blessing? What did bestowing a blessing even mean? What did you look at, what standards did you use, to decide what blessing to give?
That was it. To bestow a blessing, you had to know what the target needed. And to know that, you inevitably had to know about the target. As a result, countless things became visible to the eyes of Riel, the Elf of Blessing. Because her Special Spirit of Blessing allowed her to bestow a blessing on any target, the flip side was that she couldn’t help but see everything about them.
That was why she had left the World Tree’s barrier, even though most elves never did. To her, everywhere was the same. No—the outside world, where no one knew she was the Elf of Blessing, was far better. People held the fixed idea that elves didn’t lie, so even when she lied, they wouldn’t suspect her.
And so, things about Jade were also visible to Riel’s eyes.
And even for Riel, who had seen so many things, they were truly unusual.