The Slave Hunters
Who was that?
Artia studied the man. Mean-looking, in every way a face could be mean.
"Ghh—let go of me!"
"Hold still, you bitch."
A nameless elf was thrashing, and the man had her pinned, bearing down with both hands. Beside him stood another, dull-eyed and blank, a blade hanging loose in his grip. The elf didn't have so much as a scrap of underclothes on her. She was naked, crushed under the brute force of his hands.
Taking a hostage was one thing. But if you were even halfway a person, the least you owed her was a rag to throw over her shoulders. Wasn't that the bare minimum of decency? The man was a textbook specimen of a bastard.
"Boss Ander...!"
The cry came from one of the hunters sprawled in the dirt, an arm or a leg—or both—snapped clean through. Only then did Artia place him.
Of course. From the look of him alone, he had exactly the bearing of a man fit to lead elf hunters. In the bad sense.
A hostage? Of all the vile tricks—!
And what had he been doing while his men were getting wrecked? The moment he deigned to show up, he'd put that little brain of his to work.
Hostage-taking was a swindle with history and tradition behind it, handed down since ancient times, and one of the very few ways the weak could land a meaningful blow on the strong. The more precious the hostage, the harder the trick hit—power enough to put a legendary divine sword to shame. Even if the hostage's value ran a little thin, the return could still be decent. All that dropped was the ceiling on what you could demand. So long as the other party had ordinary sense and an ordinary conscience, they would take a reasonable deal.
"Hm."
"Don't move. And don't call me jumpy. After the ability you've shown, this is only natural."
The boss flinched at the mere hint of a hand rising toward a chin. Artia ignored him cleanly, propped her chin in her palm anyway, and gave it a little tilt, as if daring him to do something about it.
Something in that attitude must have reached him. Tension crawled over Ander's face as he realized the hostage in his grip was not nearly so valuable as he had hoped. He could find no urgency in Artia's expression, and precious little worry for the elf he had seized. All he could read off her was the ordinary reaction any person—any thinking being—might be expected to have.
So that part's real.
Ander trusted his instincts. They went so far as to call him a coward, and perhaps because of it he had a knack for seeing through other people's lies. Not something drilled into him by training. More of an animal sense. The feeling had paid him handsomely over the years, and he trusted it.
Still. Not entirely worthless, either.
The judgment was reasonable enough. One look at the hostage had been enough to halt the slaughter of his men and make her listen. He had hoped this elf bitch might be a friend of that one. That, it seemed, had been nothing but Ander's own wish.
He did not despair all the way. Demand too much and she would decide he was spouting bullshit and beat him into the dirt. Offer a sensible trade within reasonable bounds, though, and she would not refuse outright. Ask only to withdraw quietly and politely, and to be allowed to keep his life, and she would accept. Then, the very moment the deal was struck and the elf's guard went dull—
If he struck into that gap...
Ander was just opening his mouth to name his terms—
—when Artia hit him first.
"Pardon?"
"Release the hostage this instant, or I kill every one of you!"
"What?"
Ander was thrown. In all his life, he could count on one hand the times he had been this badly thrown.
Why are you the one saying that?
He was the one holding the hostage. He was the one who was supposed to put an offer on the table. Who in the world, faced with a hostage-taker who already had his prize in hand, skipped what do you want and opened with a proposal like that? This was not the marketplace in the capital of Pyeongui, where they cut your nose off in broad daylight. And to begin with—telling the man holding the hostage that if he didn't let the hostage go, everyone would die? What kind of threat was that supposed to be?
"..."
A silence settled between them, different in kind from the quiet that had fallen when the elf was running wild. The subordinates who had drifted to Ander's side to read the mood, Ander himself, even the elf taken hostage—none of them had a word left. Into that emptied space, only the black-haired elf's voice went on ringing.
Artia moved.
She made a show of it. Moments ago she had been moving at a speed the hunters' eyes could barely follow, and now she was leisure itself.
Step.
The men jerked.
Step.
A flinch.
"What kind of unreasonable—"
The words I'll kill you themselves looked like a lie. What did that matter? The world held far too many ways to ruin a person completely without ever killing them. Rage boiled up in Ander's gut. He was so dumbfounded he could only work his mouth, soundless.
"If you do not release the hostage, I will kill all of you!"
Staring into that calm, beautiful elven face, Ander broke into a cold sweat.
She said that if he didn't free the hostage, everyone died. And if he simply let go with no conditions at all, limp and empty-handed? Then he was obviously fucked. Nor could he throw up his hands and actually kill the hostage he was holding. That would be a true mutual death pact, you die and I die, and the game would be over before he ever got to play the hidden card he had prepared.
What kind of crazy bitch was this?
And the restraints on a crazy bitch like this just had to be defective?
Ander found the world a bitter place. He had been thinking of retirement, and on an expedition that might have been his last he had caught an enormous stroke of luck, snatched the elves with ease, and even landed merchandise of a completely different class from anything before. He had been singing the goddess's praises, and this was how it had to continue.
Wasn't this the sort of thing they called a lucky day up in the Northern Empire? A goddamn lucky fucking day. No—a goddamn lucky fucking expedition.
Still, it wasn't over. From the very beginning, his real aim had been...
In the end, Ander opened his mouth.
"M-my lady elf? Just a moment, just one moment, would you stop for me?"
Very, very politely. Careful, lest he inconvenience her in the slightest.
"What would we have to do, if it please you, to drag these wretched little lives of ours out of here? Hehe."
The voice and the posture were astonishingly servile. Ander did his best to ignore the stunned stares of the men looking at him. If anything, he lamented that those idiot bastards still had no sense of the moment. Even if they all wrung their hands together until their palms wore through, it wouldn't be enough.
The elf facing them was a fighter of high grade at the very least. Ander himself was barely the tail end of low grade. Even if those moron subordinates of his had been in one piece, resistance would have been impossible, and running would have been a gamble. Head-on, they wouldn't even qualify as opponents. If he meant to try some separate play, he would first have to lure her into letting her guard down completely. In the end, only one method remained.
For now...
Wasn't there a saying out of Macaia? Talk well enough, and you can pay off a debt owed to a mage.
"Aigoo, if the blood of filthy wretches like us stained the hand of our beautiful lady elf, wouldn't that be a tragedy for the whole world? Eh? Human blood and fat, scrubbing that out is a job of work, a real job! And another thing! Killing someone you can actually talk to—even if the bastard's garbage through and through—doesn't exactly leave you feeling good, you know? Me and the trash standing here, we're used to it, sure, but a beautiful, noble, kind soul like you, my lady, if a moment's anger carries you through the deed, you might have a hard time of it afterward. Even garbage like me couldn't sleep right at night the first time I killed a man."
"..."
"Our lady elf's name, by any chance? Ah! You'd rather not say! That's fine. Perfectly fine. Even having your name known to worthless bastards like us would be unpleasant, wouldn't it? Learn a name and all we do is curse her this and curse her that. This Ander understands completely."
"..."
This time it was Artia's turn to lose her words.
What the hell is wrong with this guy?
"So I am truly, truly, truly sorry, but the brats back home have families waiting day and night for Papa to come back with the coin, and isn't there some way, if it please you?"
Artia was dumbfounded, but if the man was going to bow and walk himself in, she saw no reason to waste the effort. Unlike the other elves, she had only just woken in this world. Elf hunters or not, she had no vast old grudge against them. Even accounting for that, she had still been planning to break an arm or a leg at the very least.
"Hand that elf over first."
"Now, my lady elf, you have to give us some minimum guarantee..."
"Release the hostage this instant, or I kill every one of you!"
"Ah, shi—"
"Shi?"
"Six— just sixty seconds to think it over, if it please you, hehe—"
Ander swallowed the curse and rubbed his palms together.
This is an act.
An act, for one clean reversal.
I only went to my knees so I could launch.