The Beginning Village (2)
"Welcome to Valhalla!"
"Today's meat is fresh as can be!"
"And the beer's excellent!"
A raucous tavern. Before we quite knew what was happening, we were seated at a table. The menu offered exactly three things: whole roasted Sehrimnir, beer, and dark beer.
The food was the same for everyone; we just split the beer and dark beer according to preference. I watched the other gods carousing with flushed faces, then leaned over and whispered to Sophia.
"Sophia. Is this your kind of place?"
"Huh? What? I can't hear you!"
If I shouted, she'd just get embarrassed again. I scooted my chair over beside hers and whispered right into her ear.
"Is this your kind of place?"
"Eep!!"
Sophia jumped and clapped her hands over her ears. She shot me a prim look, then forced the words out one by one.
"Um... a little... maybe it is..."
"I knew it. Sophia, you're all girly-girl most of the time, but every now and then you've got this wild side. Just looking at your internet posts—"
"Stop! Stop talking!"
"Why? It was cool."
"It was not cool at all!"
"Why are you denying it so hard? Sophia, you're cool."
A dwarf at a nearby table, mid-tear through a boar haunch, snickered.
"Couple, are they? Fresh. Real fresh."
"I used to be like that when I was young."
I could tolerate Sophia getting teased. Turning me into the punchline, though—that I could do without. Fortunately the food arrived, so I let it drop.
Sehrimnir. A whole roasted boar said to come back to life the very next day no matter how many times you kill it. Grease gleamed along the crackling skin.
Gulp.
That sound did not come from my mouth.
"The culprit is none other than Sophia!"
"Hik?!"
Sophia had been staring at the Sehrimnir haunch; my shout made her jump, and she immediately started hiccupping.
"Hic. Yohan, hic. You can't just yell like that, hic. You scared me."
"Sorry."
"Honestly. Hic."
Judging by the way she kept licking her lips at the meat, she wanted to be mad but also really wanted to eat. The hiccups, however, made knife work difficult.
"I'll cut it for you."
"Hm? Mm. Hic. Thanks."
She still looked annoyed, but grateful I'd carved the meat. The hiccups still hadn't stopped, though. Time for the nuclear option.
"Sophia. I know a great way to stop hiccups."
"Hic?"
"It's like this... WAH!"
I lunged in until our noses nearly touched and bellowed. Sophia's pupils blew wide like a cat's.
"Wh-whwh... what are you doing..."
"Whwh is Amumu, of course."
"What are you even saying..."
"Oh my god! This is Amumu!"
"Haa..."
Sophia sighed. She looked like someone whose country had just fallen. Had she actually been enjoying the hiccups?
"Hiccups are gone, so let's eat."
"Huh? You're right. So Yohan actually had a plan?"
"Obviously."
"I thought you just ran on spinal reflexes."
"Hahaha."
"Heheheh."
Harsh. One bite of the meat, though, and every sour feeling vanished. The beer had cut the gamey edge; a faint bitterness rode under the pure, honest flavor of the meat itself.
Juice flooded my mouth and made my tongue sing. Rich, yet clean. That wasn't the beer talking. Herbs, maybe?
I chewed a few more bites of the crackling-outside, tender-inside meat, swallowed, and knocked back the dark beer.
"Pwahh!"
This was sex. This was life!
"They said it was the best tavern in the starter village... and it is so good..."
I'd assumed Sophia ate like this all the time, but she tore into the meat just as greedily as I did—first time for her too, apparently.
Watching someone eat well is a beautiful thing. A woman should eat with real appetite. That dainty little-bird pecking people do for show just makes me want to slap them.
We didn't talk. We just demolished the meat.
"Innkeeper! Another beer over here!"
"Innkeeper on first meeting? You some kind of mad human? Khahah!"
A dwarf with a bushy beard thumped me on the back. Thanks to Iron Man, it didn't hurt a bit.
"What a bold friend! I like you! So this one's on the house! Share it with your girlfriend!"
"Hic."
Hiccups again? Thankfully she didn't keep going. Missing food this good because of hiccups would be a crime.
"The freebie is fried skin? This is great too! Perfect drinking snack!"
I called out to the dwarf innkeeper, who was giving me a look of pure secondhand embarrassment. He threw his head back and laughed the way only a dwarf can.
"Khahahah! What's with the formal talk between us? Call me innkeeper like before!"
"Works for me, innkeeper! This stuff is the real deal!"
"Khahahahahah!!"
"Yohan... I'm so embarrassed..."
"You try some too, Sophia!"
"Oomph. Oomph? It's good!"
"Skin fried in lard is the specialty! That's it! Wife! We're closed for the day! Bring more fried skin and beer!"
"Urgh."
I was going to explode. My stomach had been full halfway through, but the meat-and-beer combo was so perfect I'd eaten right up to the edge of throwing up.
A good belch helped. Sophia had a hand over her mouth like someone fighting morning sickness.
"I ate way too much..."
"Still delicious, though. Right?"
"Yeah..."
"And we barely spent anything."
The innkeeper, Serhim, had declared that making new friends was worth celebrating, so he only charged us for the first round of food and drinks. His wife had started yelling about whether they were running a charity dug out of the dirt—until she saw my hands, decided I had a likable face, and cheerfully agreed.
"Is it always this easy to get friendly with dwarves?"
"No. They don't usually like other races much. It's weird. I heard that if you have craft talent, dwarves warm up to you fast—looks like that was true."
"So this is what talent does?"
No wonder I'd felt a weird affinity for that dwarf in the last battle. Craft talent. For dwarves specifically, you could basically call it a social butterfly skill.
"We've eaten. What next?"
"Just walk around together. Rest a bit."
"We're not going out to hunt wild minions?"
"What are you even talking about. There's no such thing as wild minions."
Devastating. No wild minions?
"Then where do you get minions? Don't you beat up a wild one and go, 'You wanna die, or you wanna live with me?' and recruit them?"
"I've heard some evil gods do it that way, but normally no. There are three standard methods for acquiring minions."
"Oh."
A topic I'd actually been curious about.
"The most common is buying minions with divinity on the Galaxy Market. Second is granting the wish of a minion you summoned with a gacha ticket. Last is just picking one from your own planet."
"Isn't that last one basically the same as gacha?"
"You choose them yourself, so you don't have to grant a wish. But you have no idea what their potential is, so it's basically a lottery. In the old days, gods would make provisional contracts through agreements with other gods and send candidates to other worlds to gauge their potential..."
"Open your eyes, Hero?"
Sophia, mid-earnest explanation, stopped with her mouth open and stared at me.
"That's the classic line. How did you know?"
"My insight runs this deep. How does it feel having a smart minion?"
"It was great until just now. Suddenly it's terrible."
"Why would you say that. Sophia. Sophia~"
I followed after Sophia, who ignored my calling and walked ahead—and there, down an alley, was that familiar head of hair again. I'd written it off as a trick of the eye that morning, but coincidence twice is fate. Something smelled like an Incident.
"When I open my eyes in the morning, I wonder about last night—"
"Yohan, you can keep singing here. I'm leaving."
"Sophia. That's not the point right now. Look down that alley."
"Why?"
By then the familiar silhouette had already vanished.
"There's nothing there?"
"Don't you smell it?"
"The Beginning Village was built for the gods' convenience. It doesn't have bad smells."
"Not that kind of smell. Just come look!"
I grabbed Sophia's hand and ran into the alley.
"Ah, Yohan, wait, ah..."
Sophia fretted for a bit, then fell silent and just followed. Deeper in the alley, a dwarf sat sniffling while eating Ambrosia bread.
"Tear-soaked Ambrosia bread... to think I've fallen this low..."
"Who are you, and why are you being so pathetic here."
The dwarf lifted his head like a tragic heroine.
"Guek!"
"Ah, sorry."
He was so pathetic my fist had flown out on pure spinal reflex. But that impact—way too familiar. The dwarf, sniffling after the hit, saw my face and scrambled backward in pure terror.
"Hwaaak! Mad Human!"
"You dwarves really let your mouths run free."
Who are you calling Mad Human.
"Pff. Pffheh. Yohan's Mad Human... heheh. Ah, that's too funny."
"Sophia? You already heard that earlier."
"That was a tavern, and, hahahah. This is, heheh. Ah I can't. My stomach hurts."
Poking someone mid-laugh fit only makes them laugh harder, so better to ignore it. But could I ignore it? Sophia, clutching her stomach, trembling all over—and with those cow-sized breasts bouncing as a result?
Truly a moving performance. That impressive even with clothes on—what would it be like without?
"Mad Human! This is all your fault!"
The mad dwarf interrupted my appreciation. A beggar talking trash to me?
"Be quiet!"
I brought my fist down on his skull, and it sank in with a perfect, sticky give. I knew this hit feel!
"Are you Kim Dwarf by any chance?"
"Y-you... Mad Human! I got abandoned because of you, and you, you!!"
"You are seriously loud."
I hit the dwarf a few more times until he shut up. Around the time Sophia's laughter finally died down, someone new appeared at the mouth of the alley.
"What is all this racket?"
Not a guy—a woman. Cheonsol, formerly the minion of that chunibyo god Absolu.