The Watchman of the Herb Fields (3)
Unlike the city, the night over the herb fields was utterly dark, without a single point of light.
Perhaps that was why the countless stars studded across the night sky like grains of sand each seemed to flaunt their own presence.
Franc, sitting on a cool wooden platform as he drank in the sight, murmured, "They really do shine bright. Must be nice."
"Must be nice? What's that supposed to mean?"
"Just thinking. What would it feel like, living a life where you shine that brightly and everyone's watching you?"
The boy's gaze turned toward him. "Well, I suppose a genius like you wouldn't get it."
"What? You're plenty impressive yourself, you know."
"Thanks, even if you don't mean it."
Of course, he hadn't been saying it out of politeness. Franc's talent was genuinely excellent.
No need to look far for proof—the boy had succeeded at Dual Casting on his very first attempt.
To put it bluntly, Franc was undeniably a mage with a promising future.
Small Oscar said he was a troublemaker, but for the life of me I can't see why.
If he had to name a flaw, it would be that the boy's hunger for recognition sometimes ran a little too strong. Every now and then, a certain lack of self-esteem showed through as well. That part, he suspected, had something to do with his personal history.
"I'm not flattering you. Flattery was never really my style."
"...Ahem."
Perhaps he'd felt the sincerity in those words, because Franc went awkward and hastily changed the subject. "Anyway, there are so many stars out tonight."
"There are. Shilin used to be like this too."
It was an impossible pleasure in the Shilin of today, bright even at night thanks to its streetlamps, but until a mere twenty years ago, watching the glittering stars from the tower's rooftop had been one of his favorite pastimes.
Franc made a face of mild exasperation. "Honestly, when you say 'back in the day,' how far back do you mean? You're younger than me by birthday, for crying out loud. Anyway..."
Franc glanced around and lowered his voice. "Shilin's herb industry—can it really come back to life?"
"Only one way to find out. But I don't think it's impossible."
His greatest worry had been whether the herbalists even still existed.
If they had sold their land and already migrated to other regions, rebuilding would have been genuinely difficult.
But apparently most of them sold the land and stayed in Shilin. Which means the craftsmanship is still here.
A fresh wave of gratitude toward the Four Great Tower Masters washed over him. It meant the herbalists who had once wandered every corner of the continent truly regarded Shilin as their home.
"Hmm. But can we really trust those people? They were threatened, sure, but they still sold the land in the end."
"...You think they wanted to sell?"
Oscar asked the question back with a bitter smile. "Franc, do you know the single best way to snap a conviction as hard as bedrock?"
"They taught us that at the academy. Softness, right? What they call yielding overcomes hardness."
It would have been the correct answer on an exam, but Oscar shook his head. "Hardness is the inferior strategy, softness the middle one. In all my years of living, what I've found to be the superior strategy is sentiment."
"...Sentiment?"
"The thing people usually call human warmth."
The world has iron-willed men who will not bend their principles even with death staring them in the face.
But he had seen, more than a few times, how even such men wavered when someone dear to them was seized and held as leverage.
"So I don't resent them. If the White Tower hadn't fallen—if there had still been power enough to protect them—the herbalists would never have been put in that position in the first place."
Trace the cause back to its root, and it circled around to no one's fault but his own.
...But at least I know the buttons were sewn on wrong. So I'll just rebutton them, starting now.
Granted, the process would be a tremendous nuisance—tedious, laborious, exhausting. But once it was done, the satisfaction that remained would be worth it, as it always had been.
He knew, because it always had been. When you fall, you get back up. And a mistake made once is simply never made again.
Thump, thump! Oscar rose from the platform and brushed the dust from his trousers. "Already this late. Time to turn in—"
Whip! His head, trailing off mid-sentence, snapped sharply to one side. His narrowed eyes bored into some distant corner of the herb fields. "Franc. It seems we have guests to prepare for."
The cold night wind brushed through his hair.
"What the hell got into him, anyway?"
Poof, pop! Poof, pop!
The green-haired man, blowing up and bursting his bubblegum in an endless rhythm, asked with apparent curiosity. "This whole job. Last time he offered to kill him for us, you clearly turned it down. Threats and locking him up might've been one thing, but killing a Living National Treasure—that's a whole different weight."
The one who answered was an elderly spearman with a long spear slung across his back. "What would you know? The one who pays gives the orders, and we do the job. That's how it's always been, and that's how it'll stay."
"Is that what getting old does to you? Makes you this dead calm about everything? Ugh, I hope I never age."
The three men walking through the herb fields at midnight were the mercenaries contracted to Dvor Powell.
Merely calling themselves mercenaries was generous—they were serious criminals with bounties posted by the Imperial Security Bureau, and lately, in the North, the mere mention of the Gunslinger Jack Gang sent reputations into a tailspin.
Jack, their leader, gave a warning. "Both of you, stay sharp. He said there might be a mage on site."
"Hm. The White Tower, was it? That's a stroke of luck. It would've been worse if it were any of the other Four Great Towers."
The green-haired man snickered at that. "Eh, are the other Four Great Towers really any different? I've never once met a so-called mage who could actually fight instead of just flailing around. They all walk around stiff-necked, and not a single one of them has any real experience."
"Yeah, yeah, we all know how great you are. Just don't get careless."
The spearman, offering halfhearted agreement, looked ahead. "Going by the map, that's the house—and the lights are out. Feels a bit early to be asleep..."
"Max, go take a look."
"Okay."
Phit! Spitting out the gum he'd been chewing, the green-haired man named Max lowered his stance and crept silently toward the hut. Then, with practiced ease, he picked the lock and eased the door open without a sound.
"..."
"..."
He glanced back, and Gunslinger Jack gave a small nod—the signal to finish the job.
Max, muffling his footsteps, approached the bed and quietly drew a dagger.
Hm?
At that moment, an inexplicable wrongness made his eyes narrow. Even in the darkness of the hut's interior, the thing beneath the blanket was far too rough to be a person.
"Oh, for the love of—"
It's a trap.
The instant Max realized it and whipped around to flee—
"Sharp eyes. A waste, really."
TWOOM!
With a sound like compressed air rupturing, a rotating bullet of wind bored into his temple. The result was instantaneous death.
Max, who had hoped to face a seasoned mage, ended his life without even a moment to feel pain.
"...Hm."
Oscar's expression betrayed mild surprise at the result he had produced. So this is Wind Bullet. Its killing power is even better than I expected.
It was one of the spells recorded in The Reinterpretation of Basic Magic, written by Small Oscar—a new style of offensive magic that took the firearm, a weapon, and rebuilt it from the ground up through the White Tower's wind magic.
If Wind Cutter was a spell specialized in cutting, this one was specialized in piercing.
Either way, one's down. Three to go.
Stepping past Max's corpse, he walked slowly toward the door. The spearman, whose eyes met his, asked, "...What happened to Max?"
"He's sleeping inside. Go collect him. Though I'd say he'll be sleeping a long time. Probably... forever?"
"Tch. Pathetic fool. That's exactly why I told him not to get careless."
The spearman clicked his tongue lightly. Watching that reaction, Oscar nodded to himself. Not amateurs, at least.
Even after an obvious provocation like that, none of them had charged in blindly. It meant these men weren't the type to be swallowed by momentary emotion.
"If he's already dead, there's nothing to be done about it."
With that astonishingly level statement, the gunslinger addressed Oscar. "Just hand over the herbalists' location. In exchange, I promise you—I'll carry no grudge over Max's death."
"Ha."
So he meant to avoid an unnecessary fight. Oscar was briefly impressed by the man's cold pragmatism—but there was only one answer to give.
"By all means, hold onto the grudge."
"...If you insist on spilling blood."
Killing intent flooding his gaze, the gunslinger gave the order. "Kill him."
"With pleasure."
The spearman nodded and closed the distance in the blink of an eye. Even then, Oscar observed his opponent with placid, unhurried eyes. The spearman's greatest strength is the long reach of his spear—he hammers you with one-sided attacks from outside your range.
So that strength had to be neutralized first.
Snap! The moment his finger flicked, a Wind Shield bloomed in front of him. "Heh heh. You think a mere barrier can stop me?"
The spearman, thrusting his spear in with a sneer, suddenly flinched. The Wind Shield had tilted at a exquisite angle, letting the spear slide off its surface as smoothly as water.
The instant the man's stance collapsed, Oscar seized the opening without mercy and drove in toward his chest. What—did he plan this from the very start?
It was a chillingly seasoned combination, utterly unbecoming of that boyish face. In a single exchange, the spearman's greatest advantage—his long reach—had been rendered useless.
"...But that's unfortunate for you."
The spearman's mouth split into a wide grin as he twisted the shaft, and the spear divided into two short blades. An unorthodox weapon. What he wielded was a peculiar armament guaranteed to take a first-time opponent by surprise.
"Old means surviving! You think I reached this age without patching the spear's every weakness?"
The two short spears hurtled toward Oscar's vitals. But he didn't so much as change expression. "Oh, so that's it."
Apart from a reasonably respectable speed, everything about this spearman was mediocre. He'd assumed there had to be some reason such an unremarkable man survived to that age—and—
Well, that's a bit of an anticlimax.
『Wind Bullet』
TUNG! TWOOM!
Two rounds fired in an instant struck the tips of the incoming short spears dead-on. Unable to withstand the impact, the weapon split apart, and disbelief flooded the spearman's face. "That's—impossible..."
At this range—and in the worst possible circumstance, a surprise attack with an unorthodox weapon—he landed marksmanship this precise?
Even our leader couldn't pull that off...
The moment that thought flashed through his mind, Oscar's long, thin index and middle fingers leveled at his brow. Two down.
Just as Oscar, mana surging, moved to finish the spearman—
"...!"
Every hair on his body stood on end. His instinct, which had crossed countless battlefields and the very boundary of death as if they were his own backyard, was screaming a warning: your life is in danger.
"Wind Shield!"
Oscar retreated reflexively, throwing up three Wind Shields in quick succession. As it happened, that reflex saved his life.
The bullet that had torn through the spearman's skull punched clean through all three layers of Wind Shields and still had force enough to carve a line across his cheek.
Trickle. Watching the blood run down his opponent's face, Jack gave a shrug. "Shame. If you'd let your guard down just a little longer, you'd be dead for certain."
"...Wasn't he your comrade?"
"A subordinate, strictly speaking. I can always recruit another."
Criminals. Every last one of them.
Oscar cast a brief glance down at the spearman's head-crushed corpse and asked, "So what's that toy supposed to be?"
"Oh, this?"
The man brandished the imposing sawed-off shotgun gripped in one hand. "Hard to say. Too proud a thing to be called a toy. Just know this—it cost a filthy sum."
Confident in his victory, Jack took his time loading a fresh shell into the chamber. Watching him, Oscar's eyes narrowed.
"The enchantments are acceleration, reinforcement, and penetration—three in total. Am I right?"
"...How did you know that?"
"Because I failed to block it."
If even one of those three enchantments had been missing, his Wind Shield would never have been pierced. It was a judgment only someone with absolute confidence in his own magic could make.
Having finished loading, Jack murmured, "Arrogant—but you've got the skill to back it up. So the fallen White Tower still had someone like you hiding in it."
He deliberated over something for a moment, then shrugged and made a proposal. "You'll do nicely. What sells me most is your combat sense and quick eyes. And on top of that, you read enchantments at a masterful level... What do you say? Come work with me."
"No."
"And why not?"
Oscar tilted his chin, indicating the spearman's corpse. "The back of my head would itch the whole time."
"...Tch. Fair point."
Even the gunslinger couldn't argue with a reason that convinced himself. He dismissed the last of his hesitation without ceremony. "Then there's nothing left to discuss."
BANG!
The gunshot announcing the resumption of the hunt rang out into the night.