A Midnight Escape
"Whew."
Once I'd cleared out the clutter inside, the space was barely livable. It was still thick with dust, but it was our first night—we'd just have to grit our teeth and sleep through it.
The place I'd brought the three of them to was an old mill deep in the woods. Whether its owner had died or simply moved on, it had sat abandoned for a long time.
I remembered it because I'd handled a request here once—the bandits had been using it as a hideout. I'd swept them out, of course. They'd been kidnapping and murdering rookie adventurers.
It wasn't a bad setup: three rooms, two privies, a common room, a kitchen, and a hearth. Everything was a wreck, though, and it had taken ages to straighten out.
"We'll stay here for now. The city's a two-hour walk, so we can restock on supplies, and there's a river nearby. Monsters do show up around here, but nothing strong comes through this area."
I pulled the sleeping bags out of my pack.
"I'll buy bedding and the rest of what we need tomorrow, so sleep here tonight. I've got work to do, so go ahead without me."
I was turning to leave when, sure enough, Blackie raised her voice.
"What's your goal here, anyway?"
"Just don't die."
All I wanted was to skip the part of the story where they nearly die as my slaves and awaken because of it.
"That doesn't make any sense. Why would a slave merchant go out of his way for nameless slave brats?"
I turned and planted myself in front of her. She seemed a little intimidated by my size and drew in on herself.
Frankly, the one who should be feeling threatened here is me. These kids had no idea what they were, apparently.
I tilted my head back and glanced up above it.
⟨ Slave Merchant Wicker ⟩
What exactly is so impressive about this damn nametag that it has to show off even in the dead of night?
Really, how long am I supposed to stand around explaining myself to a bunch of little kids?
I was getting tired of it, honestly.
"Blackie."
I crouched down to meet her eyes. She looked somewhat tense.
"Wh-what?"
"I'm getting sleepy, so stop talking back and go to bed already."
"…Don't want to."
"Come on, sleep. It's the only way I can go out and get my work done. If you're slaves, listen to your slave merchant."
"…Didn't you say you weren't a slave merchant?"
"That's right, I did. So sleep. All of you."
I stuffed Blackie into a sleeping bag first. When I reached for Whitey, she flinched away from my hand, so I spread a sleeping bag open and scooped her up like I was filling an envelope.
And just like that, two enormous caterpillars lay on the floor.
I stood and looked back at Yellowie. He was the cooperative one—probably safe to give him a job.
They're slaves, so they can't just disobey orders, right? Can they? Honestly, no idea.
"Yellowie, you're the boy, so look after the girls. You're the knight who guards the princesses. Got it?"
"Knight."
Yellowie gave a big, solemn nod, his face utterly blank.
Blackie and Whitey, faces poking out of their sleeping bags, were making very strange expressions. I had no idea why.
Come to think of it, I'd carelessly used the word knight in front of the Black Knight. For all I know, I just dug my own grave.
Though if things could really change over something that trivial, I'd never have crossed paths with these kids in the first place.
Stepping outside the mill, I decided to sprinkle monster-repelling mana stone powder around the perimeter first.
Yellowie, Blackie, Whitey.
Just don't run away.
The slave merchant really did walk out of the house.
Blackie slipped free of her sleeping bag and tracked his figure through the window. He wasn't watching them at all—he was absorbed in his task.
Born with an innate sensitivity to mana, Blackie could tell even from a distance that what he was handling was mana stone powder—the kind monsters hated.
…That's his big "work"? Sprinkling powder to drive off monsters?
"Tia."
"Wah!"
The hand on her shoulder made her jump clean off the floor.
Luca stood there holding a wooden club he'd dug up from somewhere.
"Luca, you scared me…."
Luca raised a thumb, expressionless.
"Go sleep. I'll keep watch."
"Keep watch? Don't tell me you actually took that slave merchant seriously."
"Knight."
Luca's eyes gleamed in the dark. Blackie sighed.
"There's no stopping Luca once he's latched onto something like that…."
From deeper inside, Whitey, the puppy beastkin, came shuffling out on the verge of tears. She was still trembling with fear.
"Forget me—protect Yuri instead. Look how scared she still is."
"Got it."
Luca went straight to Whitey, and she buried herself in his arms without hesitation.
"…We're not actually going to trust the slave merchant, are we?"
The moment Whitey asked in a quavering voice, Blackie bristled.
"O-of course not. How many slave merchants have we been through by now? Every single one of them was trash. …Still, he did give us bread."
"Maybe he's just being nice so he can hurt us worse later."
"Says the one who ate hers first."
"That's… but we didn't even know whether Luca was a girl or a boy."
"M-manly. Cool."
Luca snorted through his nose like he was fired up.
"They say humans are harder to tell apart than elves or beastkin when they're little."
"Either way… I hate being a slave now. We don't even have names on our nametags."
She was right.
Their true names had already been erased—wiped from their own memories and from the world itself, along with their first slave contracts.
All they had were the names they'd given each other.
"I want my name back. I can't even remember what my parents called me anymore…. Slave merchants scare me…."
"I know…."
Blackie looked at Whitey.
Whitey was shaking like a leaf in the wind. Luca pulled her in and held her tighter.
They'd been taken at slightly different times, but all three had already spent more than a year passing through the hands of dozens of slave merchants, hauled back and forth across the continent without ever understanding why.
How they'd been captured was horrific in itself. Each of them carried a cruelty burned deep into memory.
And not one slave merchant had ever treated them as people.
They were fed rotting slop worse than livestock feed; there were days they went without water for two at a time. They'd been crammed into tiny cages and handled like cargo. They'd crossed rugged mountain country straight through howling storms.
The merchants, every last one, had crowed over them as they were traded—prime goods, this, perverted nobles will love her, that.
What waited at the end of the sale was obviously worse than anything they'd known.
Someday they might even look back with longing on now—on the days they could at least see the sky.
Blackie, the dark elf, had been wary of everything since she was small.
She and the other two had become friends because they looked around the same age and shared the same plight, but Luca and Whitey were younger than her.
So she carried a quiet sense of responsibility, like the eldest sister.
"Let's run away."
At last Blackie made her decision and took Luca's and Whitey's hands.
"Run? Now?"
"Now, while the slave merchant's guard is down—that's our chance. We can get new names at a church. I don't know if there's a way to break a slave contract, but we'll look for one."
Blackie had no intention of trusting the slave merchant either. For her, hope—something that had never once come looking for her in her whole life—mattered far less than the two children in front of her.
Luca and Whitey felt the steel in her voice and nodded.
"Let's go."
The three of them slipped quietly out of the mill.
The slave merchant was off in the distance, too busy spreading the mana stone powder evenly to notice anything.
With Blackie in the lead, they tore through the forest.
Sturdy stalks of grass toppled over wherever the small figures passed.
"Haah, haah."
Luca, blessed with stamina, led the way, but Blackie and Whitey quickly ran out of breath and slowed. Before they knew it, their arms were crisscrossed with scratches from the branches.
Still, Blackie didn't stop. Even when her muscles screamed, she dragged them forward by force.
A little farther.
Just a little farther, and pure white freedom would be waiting.
Hope flooded her mind with adrenaline, drowning out the fact that the ominous sounds of pursuit behind them were multiplying.
—A low growl rumbled out of the black undergrowth.
CRASH!
Before she could even register what it was, a massive boar burst from the dark brush, almost on top of her.
"Kyaah!!"
In an instant the boar was on top of her. This was no ordinary beast—it was a monster, one of the things that prowled the forest.
It was only a piglet, roughly the size of the girls themselves, but a monster was a monster. Its strength, its savagery—there was no comparing them.
"Hyah!"
Luca sensed the danger and swung his club at the boar at once.
CLANG!
CRACK!
All he accomplished, in the end, was wrenching his own wrist.
"Ow, ow, ow!"
Blackie flailed her arms beneath the boar, but the monster showed no sign whatsoever of letting her go.
Blood ran in streaks down the arm its great tusks had raked when it charged. She didn't even register the wound—only the sickening stench and the terror swallowing her whole.
Because the boar's gaping maw was right there, closing in.
…So this is how it ends, then. Dragged around as a slave, and killed by dumb luck.
I never told anyone, but I wanted to see the Academy someday.
In the moment when she wasn't even granted the time to hold that regret—
—SKREEEE!
The boar pinning her down shrieked and went flying.
As Blackie gasped for air, a man's voice reached her, tight with alarm.
"Kids! Are you okay?!"
She looked up, shaking all over, and saw his nametag floating there.
⟨ Slave Merchant Wicker ⟩
"WAAAAAAH―! Tia!!"
Whitey flung herself at Blackie and clung to her, soaking the front of her shirt with tears.
Still gasping, not yet calm, Blackie stroked Whitey's hair with her uninjured hand.
"It dug in deep. Bear with it for me."
A stinging throb spread through her right arm. The slave merchant was pouring disinfectant over the wound and applying salve, his hands moving with the easy familiarity of someone who had done this many, many times.
"Thank god you didn't die. Seriously…."
Blackie stole a glance up at the slave merchant's face.
She was the one who had almost died just now.
And it had been entirely her own fault.
She was the one who'd said let's run. She was the one who'd chosen the forest.
Judging by the boar being a piglet, its parents had to be somewhere nearby—Luca and Whitey would have been in danger soon too.
And yet the slave merchant had saved her on the spot, and instead of blaming her for running, he was exhaling in relief and relaxing his shoulders as if he were the one who'd come back from the dead.
…What on earth is wrong with this man?
It was the moment the first hairline crack opened in Blackie's heart.
When the treatment was done, the slave merchant stood up.
"…Sorry for running away."
Luca was the first to apologize. The slave merchant let out a long sigh.
"It's fine. I was the one who got careless. Don't ever do this again. The forest is dangerous at night."
"I couldn't protect them."
A large hand settled on the crestfallen boy's head.
"You swung it like a champ, though. Good job."
"Mm."
"Wrist hurt, right? Let me see."
The slave merchant packed the boy's wrist with herbs, fitted a splint, and wound it with bandages.
Luca stared down at his own hand for a long moment, then—apparently satisfied—glommed onto the man's leg like a limpet.
"Hey, it's hard to walk like this."
Luca ignored his flustered protests and rubbed his cheek against the man's broad leg like some small animal.
"How did you find us…?"
At Whitey's question, he scratched his jaw.
"Finished up outside, came back in, and you were gone—so I looked. But sla… er, with the contract and all, once I focused, I could tell which direction you'd gone."
Let's go home. With that, the slave merchant carefully scooped Blackie up into his arms.
The warmth spreading through her back from him made her no longer want to resist at all.
…I still can't trust him. But.
Hadn't he, just now, been careful not to say the word slave? That had to count for something.
…He's warm.
Without quite meaning to, Blackie buried her face against his chest and decided that, just for tonight, she would be a good girl and sleep.