Chapter 302: The Tin Knight and The Invitation of Memories (2)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 302: The Tin Knight and The Invitation of Memories (2)
Once upon a time, long, long ago.
A young girl was dying on the street.
The reason was simple.
The girl was still too weak to survive on her own, and the parents who should have protected her until she grew up were already dead.
It was not a terribly tragic or fateful death.
It was an era where poverty, disease, and plunder were commonplace.
Many starved to death, died because they couldn't receive treatment for their illnesses, or were killed when someone stole what was precious to them.
The girl's family had been caught in one of these many misfortunes, and just like that, she was left all alone.
“……”
She hugged her knees, burying her face between them.
Her limbs were covered in countless small wounds—the traces of her desperate struggle to survive after losing her parents.
It was proof that, however futile, she had not given up.
But now, that too was at an end.
The girl no longer had the strength to stand, let alone walk.
All that remained was death.
“—Your aptitude is not bad.”
However, the death that came for the girl was rather unusual.
It was death, to be sure, but it was a being that wore the guise of a human and spoke in a human tongue.
“Child, do you wish to live?”
At the question from above, the girl slowly lifted her head.
A woman stood there.
Skin without a single wrinkle, hair smooth and sleek.
The woman appeared younger than the girl’s own deceased mother, yet for some reason, the girl sensed the deep, rich scent of ages from her.
The girl stared blankly up at the woman and tried to say something, but she only ended up coughing, cough, cough.
Her mouth and throat were so dry that her voice wouldn't come out.
After somehow steadying her breath, the girl asked.
“Are you going to help me?”
At the girl’s question, the woman’s lips twisted.
It was close to a smile, but it was a smile that held a strange, ominous feeling.
“No.”
The woman answered the girl’s question and continued to speak calmly.
“Help is a form of charity. This is a transaction.”
The girl’s and the woman’s eyes met.
“I will give you power. I will teach you how to live. I will pass on the wisdom to navigate the world. However, this is not a gratuitous favor, but a proper contract. Unlike the good witches from fairy tales who cater to people’s tastes, I always receive a price for my work. Therefore, you too—”
“I’ll do it. The contract.”
“—Oh?”
At the girl’s audacity in cutting her off, the woman’s eyes narrowed.
Facing the woman, the girl spoke in a voice that sounded as if she were squeezing it out, yet her gaze was intense.
“If I stay like this, I’ll die anyway. So, whether it’s a price or whatever else, I’ll pay what I can.”
So you’d better give me what you promised. The woman read the rest of the sentence the girl had left unsaid.
“Very well. From this day forward, you are my apprentice.”
And so, the girl became the woman’s apprentice.
And then, about five years later.
“I must have been completely out of my mind back then…”
The girl, Dorothea Aschengard (age 13), lamented as she walked through the forest.
Her entire body was covered in a green, mucus-like substance—a slimy concoction of troll saliva and stomach acid.
It was an honorable wound, earned just before being eaten by a troll, by using the ‘Curse of Nausea’ at maximum output to make the troll motion-sick and escape. Dorothea herself couldn't care less about honor; all she wanted was to wash up as quickly as possible.
After washing herself in the river and drying her clothes with a drying spell, Dorothea headed for the ‘Witch’s Dwelling’ deep in the forest.
A morbidly designed building made entirely of bone—floor, bricks, and roof—greeted her.
Bang! She kicked the door open irritably and saw her master lying in bed, sleeping as peacefully as could be.
It was a tranquility one would never expect from a person who had just shoved her only apprentice into a troll’s nest to fetch some herbs.
Dorothea’s hand, clutching a leather pouch, trembled.
She imagined throwing the pouch in her hand right at that face and screaming, ‘Here are the herbs you were looking for!!’ and felt a secret, dark pleasure.
However, it was a fantasy that could never be realized.
She knew this for a fact, being the one who had tried something similar just a year ago and ended up buried alive in a coffin for a month.
Thus, Dorothea let out a deep sigh and began to open the pouch of herbs, sorting and organizing them one by one.
Just as she finished her work, a voice came from behind her.
“Yawn. You came back in better shape than I expected. You were making such a fuss before you left, as if you were planning your own funeral. I thought you’d come back having lost at least an arm.”
“…I’m so moved by your warm welcome, I don’t know what to do with myself. Why don’t you just go ahead and curse me to drop dead next time.”
“Don’t be foolish. If I intended to kill you, do you think I would have given you such a menial task?”
“It might be a menial task for you, Master, but for me, it was a grand adventure teetering on the edge of life and death!”
Dorothea shrieked, but the Witch of the East remained perfectly composed.
“That’s why you’re still half-baked. Tsk, tsk. When will you ever graduate and pull your own weight?”
“Grrrk.”
Dorothea’s face flushed red and her body trembled, but she couldn't bring herself to retort.
She recalled the sight of the Witch of the East instantly killing the troll—the same troll she had barely managed to incapacitate and flee from—not by doing anything special, but simply by looking at it.
If that was what a ‘real’ necromancer was, then she was indeed half-baked.
It was a misconception that would have made any of the other necromancers scattered across the continent gravely insist, That’s not it, you’re being scammed right now.
But the weak must still voice their opinions, in their own way.
“A-Anyway! The root of the blood herb, the stone honey of the twin-sting bee, and now the petals of the trolliana. I got everything you asked for! So you have to keep your promise!”
“A promise, you say? What was it again?”
“Give me the money! I want to buy some decent clothes for once! You said you’d give it to me after I finished the errands!”
At Dorothea’s desperate shrieking, the Witch of the East clicked her tongue as if looking at something pathetic.
“Now that you mention it, I believe I did say something like that. But… is there really a need to buy clothes? You’re overflowing with mana anyway, you can just make some with necromancy.”
As if to demonstrate, the Witch of the East fluttered the clothes she was wearing.
A simple piece of cloth, so loose that one of her shoulders was half-exposed.
To put it in the Tin Knight’s terms, it was something close to a boxy t-shirt. Dorothea’s eyes narrowed at the sight.
“That’s because it’s you, Master! Do you have any idea how hard it is to maintain necromancy all the time while moving?”
In truth, what the Witch of the East had shown was a magic Dorothea also knew how to use.
Necromancy often used incomplete corpses rather than whole ones, so it was frequently necessary to reconstruct ‘missing body parts’ with mana. With a little application, it was possible to change the shape and material of the reconstructed parts to some extent.
It was theoretically possible to reconstruct only the fur from a handful of animal bone powder and weave it like clothing, or to create long threads from the dried husk of a silkworm.
But that was only possible for the Witch of the East, who had steeped herself in necromancy to its absolute limit, to a degree Dorothea couldn't even imagine.
Lacking her master’s perverted level of control, Dorothea had no choice but to wear rags, which were clothes taken from corpses that she had washed, purified, and patched up as best she could.
Though she wasn't particularly girly for her age, Dorothea at least had the desire to walk around in decent clothes.
The irony was that, since she lived with her master in a deep forest where others rarely set foot, she only had a vague image of what ‘decent clothes’ were, without any specific designs coming to mind.
“Fine, I understand. A deal is a deal.”
As the Witch of the East spoke, a drawer in the living room popped open on its own and spat out a pouch.
Dorothea scurried over to check the contents of the pouch, and her face lit up with joy.
The pouch was filled with silver and copper coins.
“In that case, is it okay if I go to the village?”
“Do as you please. I’ll call you if I need anything.”
After her casual remark, the Witch of the East waved her hand dismissively.
Ordinarily, Dorothea would have been annoyed by the gesture, as if shooing away a fly, but right now she was too excited to care about such trivial things.
*
To get straight to the point, Dorothea’s plan went awry from the very beginning.
“I can’t believe there isn’t a single shop that sells clothes…”
In this era, clothes were something you basically made yourself.
Well, to be precise, the culture of buying clothes sold by others did exist, but that was only in somewhat larger towns or cities.
The Witch of the East’s mansion was located in a backwater so remote even by the standards of the eastern continent that it was closer to a wilderness than a village. There was no way a proper, decent town would be anywhere nearby.
Therefore, to buy clothes, she had to head to a bigger place.
If there was one advantage a child had in this world, it was that people were less wary when you asked them for something.
Dorothea was able to easily get information from people about a ‘big town that would likely sell clothes.’
And if there was one disadvantage a child had in this world, it was that they were easily looked down upon as a pushover.
This was especially true for a child asking where to buy clothes—in other words, a child with money to spend.
“Hey, kid. Hand over that pouch while I’m asking nicely.”
So, it was perhaps only natural that a man like this would appear and threaten Dorothea.
A grown man with a shaggy beard, cornering her in a secluded place and demanding her belongings.
It was a threat sufficient to frighten any ordinary girl, but not Dorothea.
By her standards—having stared down a troll’s throat just a few days ago—a single unarmed man didn't even register as a threat.
“No.”
“What? You little brat—”
The man’s words were cut short.
A bone fragment that Dorothea had casually tossed to the ground.
The fragment swelled in size, and in an instant, it became a large skeleton that lunged at the man.
“Hiek, hieeeek!?”
Faced with such a horrifying and terrifying experience, the man, who had only intended to shake down a kid, fled without even thinking of fighting back. Dorothea nodded at the sight.
“…It seems being a kid alone makes you look like an easy target. I should probably keep a few undead with me as guards.”
In Dorothea’s mind, it was a rather ‘prudent’ judgment.
She was still inexperienced, and the risk of being overpowered by an opponent who attacked her in the brief opening before she could summon an undead was by no means low.
Maintaining one or two undead was nothing compared to creating and maintaining clothing like her master did, so this was an extremely rational course of action.
That’s right.
Having routinely watched her master, who would make Dorothea do chores when she was around but summon undead to handle housework when she was away, Dorothea’s common sense had long since been shattered.
And as a result.
“D-Don’t move, necromancer! You’re not taking another step into this city!”
“…Huh?”