The Slave Hunters
"How in the world? Is there a limit to what the restraints can suppress? But there wasn't even the faintest sign of magic. She did that on raw physical ability alone? No—don't go chasing pointless questions. What's done is done. If anything, it's a blessing. All right, Ella. Calm down. Just accept it as it is. Then all that's left is the escape plan... The hour's perfect, too, since it's night. First we gather anyone who can actually fight, ambush them, and—"
Artia stared blankly at Elgaia, who was rattling on like a machine gun.
Perhaps she felt that stare. Elgaia, midway through sketching some splendid blueprint inside her own head, stopped dead and cleared her throat.
"Ahem. Pardon me."
Along with the restraints that had crumbled to pieces, the beauty of Elgaia—which had crumbled right along with them—returned.
"You're back, Ella. Thank goodness."
"Whatever do you mean, Lady Artia?"
No, seriously—there was definitely a different elf standing here a second ago. Artia swallowed the words. Elgaia ignored her and closed her eyes.
She wasn't sleeping. She seemed to be putting her thoughts in order.
How long passed like that? Elgaia's eyes flashed open, and she spoke.
"Good. The hour couldn't be better, so we escape right now. First, I've already sorted out the people who can fight immediately."
So saying, she ran down a list of who had to be freed first—this one in that wagon, those two in the wagon over there.
"None of them have managed a proper meal since the hunters took them, so they'll be weakened... even so, they should still be able to use the bare minimum of magic. And the bare minimum is still magic. It will help when we face the hunters."
"You think so?"
"They won't even imagine we could get the restraints off. If we drop a few of them in the opening strike, our chances are more than good."
"Hmm. Is thaaat so~?"
"?"
Her ability to take a situation that had changed without any warning, draft a plan on the spot, and move to carry it out was genuinely worth praising.
An operation to rescue elves enslaved by elf hunters—or to escape with them. It reeked of stealth, infiltration, assassination.
Ah, the assassin's dream. Become a ghost no one ever notices, pick the enemies off one by one, and clear the mission clean.
But that was not Artia's work.
"We—no. I'm walking out proud, once the morning sun is up."
"What?"
At Artia's words, Ella became Elgaia all over again.
Artia did not change her stance.
"What?"
Elgaia kept repeating what? like a broken doll. But this was something Artia could not compromise.
A frontal breakthrough. If there was a trap, she would smash even that trap with a smile and break straight through it. A wound in the back was shame. Wasn't that the very creed for which he had granted Artia the strength to tear mountains from the earth, and a body that could not be wounded?
A nighttime ambush against mere elf slave hunters, scraping together the injured on top of it? Preposterous.
If their strength had actually been lacking, they might have needed even a single magic arrow from a weakened elf—pissing on a frozen foot, anything to buy a moment. Use everything you have. Lean on surprise and chaos, deceive the enemy, gnaw away at their strength, and finish them off one by one. That was the method chosen by someone who knew their own lack, when they had to fight someone stronger. Surprise, chaos, night, variables: the weapons of the weak.
But Artia and Ella were not in that position. One of Earth's gods of war had said it. A great army needs no strategy. Artia's strength alone was enough.
When Ella explained the restraints, she had said that even a mid-rank warrior's power couldn't leave a scratch on them. Artia had shattered those same restraints with nothing but unconscious strength. Logically, that meant the power she held now was high-rank or above.
And what did a high-rank warrior mean in this world? From Artia's first playthrough, back when she had been a human male knight, high-rank was a fully matured superhuman—a stage one step clear of the violence of numbers. Commit to hitting and fading, and even a well-trained army found its feet tied. Without someone of equal skill, there was effectively no answer. Set beside a mid-rank warrior, whom several low-ranks could still hold off together, it was only a single step on paper, and yet the difference in standing was heaven and earth. Even if the thing inside that power was a frail modern-Earth game addict who had never properly fought once in her life, against mere slave hunters it was strength to spare and then some.
"B-but then...!"
At that attitude, Ella chewed her lip. What was this? Was there some problem with the surest, cleanest plan, the one where nobody got hurt? Some notion of settling the grudge of the slave hunt with their own hands?
Artia waited for whatever Ella would say next.
And—
"Then... we'd be dumping the whole of it on you alone, Lady Artia."
"Ah—"
"Even if it isn't much help. Even if it's dangerous... I think there is meaning in doing it together. In the act itself."
It was something Artia had never once considered.
Max. No more and no less than that—two short syllables.
The fellow who bore that name... no, still too boyish to call a man. A boy who had only just joined the hunting band. A rookie. He swaggered that he was already a hunter who pulled his own weight, that he too could catch beautiful elves and get rich, but years would have to pass before any of that became real. And that was only if the boy named Max survived hunt after hunt without losing his life to the elves' fierce magic.
"Hey, Shit-boy! Go check on the goods and get back here."
"Y-yes, sir!"
A slur stuck to him because he never did a real job and only sat around shitting. In this hunting band, the name Max did not exist. Humiliation and shame washed over the boy, but he had to endure it.
The Magical Council Republic of Machaia prided itself on being the freest and most equal republic there was. But in this country, the only ones who were free and equal were mages. Below the mages, the lives of ordinary livestock who could not sense mana were hardly different from the commoners of the empire that Machaia's lofty mage lords so despised.
That was why the boy had chosen this. Where there is danger, there ought to be opportunity as well. Inside a nation of mages, for a commoner with no connections—an ordinary person who couldn't feel a scrap of mana—elf hunting was the road to getting ahead. Even without the talent to climb high as a warrior, if he could just endure somehow, he could pile up money a lifetime of work in the city would barely let him glimpse.
Even so, hard was hard. Every odd job in the band, and on top of that the beatings and the abuse that landed at any hour—he couldn't even sleep easy. Right now was proof enough. The ones who called themselves his seniors were off enjoying themselves to the fullest with the beautiful elves, while Max, who hadn't so much as touched a single joint of an elf's finger, was being sent to check on the slaves.
"Fuck. What's there even to check."
Max grumbled and trudged off.
The restraints worked. An elf who couldn't use magic had no chance of escape. Everyone who set foot in this trade knew that elves in the restraints all sank into lethargy, and that at first even walking was hard for them. They hadn't even held the elves that long. They weren't so frail they'd sicken and die in that short a span, so being told to check their condition was nothing but the senior bastards nitpicking.
Still, if there was one thing he liked, it was that for this little while no one stopped him from admiring the beautiful elves to his heart's content. No shitty interference from the seniors, no spite picked for its own sake—just him, alone, drinking in beauty. He couldn't lay a hand on them, but for Max, who had lived as a city pauper, that much was enough. Above all, there were no fewer than two elves beautiful enough to steal the very soul of the boss himself. One was like looking up at the sun in the sky. The other resembled the vast night. That transcendent beauty, two opposite airs, melted the resentment piling up inside him just by filling his eyes.
"Maybe I should bring them something to eat."
Feeding captured elf slaves was a taboo among elf hunters. Max, true to his age, blithely ignored the wisdom handed down by his seniors. They had the restraints, didn't they? What more did they need, that they had to starve the poor things on top of it? To head off some escape that might never come? To Max it was just ugly nitpicking. The pure crystal of a damp little pleasure: watching things more beautiful than yourself fall, and suffer. He liked to think he hadn't sunk that far.
A fellow recruit in the band would curse him for it—a dumb fuck with a head full of flowers—but from where Max stood, that fellow was the crazy one. The guy looked at elves with the face of a man beholding the most loathsome thing in the world. No matter how Max turned it over, his fellow's eyes were broken somewhere. Anyway. Enough about that blind-eyed bastard.
A small rice ball tucked in his pocket, Max at last reached the wagon where the sun and the night were shut away. Unlike the wagons holding the other elves, this one was screened so no one outside could see in. He opened the little wooden window made for checking the interior.
And he saw it. Starlight risen in the night sky—the same night sky that, for days, had only lain there unconscious.
"Huh? You're awa—!"
CRACK!
"Guhk!"
Max had been about to cry out in welcome before he knew what he was doing. What came back was nothing but a fierce hand snatching him by the collar. The elf's white arm, frail to look at, smashed through the wagon wall without the slightest resistance.
"H-how...?!"
Max was struck dumb. On that slender white arm, there was not a single restraint.
And that could mean only one thing.
W-we're fucked...!