Chapter 4 – To a New Town
I left the town of Tolson the next morning, well before it got light.
There were people there I’d grown friendly enough with, but nobody came out to see me off, which was no more than I expected. Part of why I went at that hour, if I’m honest, was that being seen off would have embarrassed the life out of me.
Euron, my next stop, is three days from Tolson on foot. That’s for an ordinary person, mind you; an adventurer, whose legs and stamina have nothing to do with a normal human’s, can apparently make it in one at a push.
I did want to hurry. But it was my first long haul, so I’d budgeted two days.
This is a world with monsters and bandits in it, after all. And given the luck I’d been having since I got here—bad luck, good luck, I still can’t tell which—some sort of trouble event was guaranteed to fire.
The highway was dirt, but carts had packed it down hard enough that walking it was no work at all. At that hour, with the night barely off it, I had the road entirely to myself. Tolson is the countryside to begin with, and there had never been much traffic on it.
For the record, I was doing this in full kit—weapons, armor, food, water, Dark Metal rods across my back, something close to four hundred kilos all told—and barefoot, because shoes don’t survive that kind of load. Anyone who came along the road would have got quite a sight, and I’d have had to live with it. What I couldn’t argue with was the training value. Walking briskly under that much weight is a workout by itself.
The sun came up, and I stopped for a rest when it was getting on toward the top of the sky. What I’d walked through so far was fields and the occasional farming village, and otherwise woods, grassland, hills and small streams. After the gray of a Japanese city in my last life, the whole of it felt like it was rinsing something out of me.
I ate every last skewer I’d bought for lunch and started walking again.
A while further on I came up on a cart standing at the side of the highway, two people beside it. There was something like a donkey in the traces, which made it a wagon rather than a handcart, and the bed was canted right over.
Closer up I could see why. Half of one wheel had shattered away and was lying in the road. They’d been stranded there long enough to run out of ideas.
Both of the people frowning over the problem had dog-like ears standing up out of their hair. Beastfolk, the race is called: a shade better than humans physically, and otherwise no different at all. A young man and a young woman. A married couple, at a guess.
“Is something wrong?”
I couldn’t very well walk on past. The man looked around at me and hunched a shoulder.
“Just what it looks like. Wheel went on us and here we are, stuck. Still a fair way to Euron, too.”
The cart was loaded to the top rail. Peddlers, probably. Or a family moving house.
“Ah, that’s rotten luck. Is there anything I can do?”
That surprised him. Then he took another look at my kit and something clicked.
“Say, you wouldn’t happen to be an adventurer?”
“I am, yes.”
“Then sorry to ask, but would you let us hire you? Go on to Euron and tell the Merchant Guild what’s happened to us. They’ll send a wagon out for us then.”
He’d said hire, just like that. And sure enough, there does seem to be a custom of it: adventurers take requests, and adventurers get hired.
“I see. Wouldn’t that leave you sitting out here a good while, though?”
“Not much choice about it. We can’t walk off and leave the load, either.”
“No. No, I suppose you can’t.”
Fair enough, except that while I was saying it I was looking at the cart bed, and another answer occurred to me.
“I’m happy to be hired. But how would it be if I lifted this side of the bed and we simply kept going?”
“Huh? No, look, adventurer or not, that’s beyond you. It’s heavy, I’m telling you.”
“Let me try it a moment.”
I got a hand under the bed near the broken wheel’s axle housing and lifted.
Heavy, right enough. But one side of it was a one-handed job, and standing in for a wheel wasn’t going to be a problem.
“This will be fine, I think. Shall we try a little way?”
“Ah… right. All right, then. Adventurers really are something else.”
He led the donkey off with his eyes still round. The woman walked the far side, keeping watch on the load.
As long as I matched their pace there was nothing to it. It would put my arrival back a little, but I could live with that.
We went on down the highway like that until the sun went.
“Can’t thank you enough. But Soshi-san, you’re too strong by half. Tolson adventurer, is it? What are you, D-rank?”
The beastfolk man, whose name turned out to be Gashi, tipped a small measure of liquor into my cup from the flask he carried.
We were in an empty hut in a farming village. Villages along the highway get used as staging posts by travelers, so most of them apparently keep something like this standing. It had the feel of a mountain hut back in Japan, and since it beat sleeping in a field by several thousand percent, I wasn’t about to complain.
“No, I’m still E-rank, in fact. I’ve just got a bit of arm strength on me, so weight like that isn’t a problem.”
“Come off it. Three Dark Metal rods on your back while you do it? Never heard the like. And my load’s no featherweight either. That’s some serious strength.”
Gashi kept on marveling at it. Beside him the beastfolk woman—Nari, I gathered—nodded along with an “Isn’t it, though.” The two of them were a married couple after all, and merchants; carriers subcontracting to the Merchant Guild, to be exact.
“How long have the pair of you been at this work, Gashi-san?”
“Ahh… ten years and more? I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.”
“A veteran, then. Do you work mainly out of Euron?”
“That’s it. Euron’s the biggest town in the Viscount’s lands, so we base out of there and go around the dungeon towns. Tolson and the like.”
So Euron, where I was headed, is the first city of the Barius domain, which covers this whole stretch of country. Its seat, in other words.
Which made Tolson a reasonably central town, when you thought about it. It hadn’t felt like one: there hadn’t been all that many people in it.
“What is a dungeon town, exactly?”
“Huh, you don’t know that one? A town built next to a dungeon, that’s all it means. Hauling what gets taken out of them is the bulk of our work.”
“Materials? Magic stones and so on?”
“Nah, magic stones are Adventurer’s Guild only. We handle everything that isn’t.”
“Ah. I see.”
I’d never once wondered where dungeon materials went after they crossed the counter. So the trade splits in two. Worth knowing.
I was draining my cup when somebody knocked at the hut door. ‘Presence Sense’ had told me they were coming, but nothing about the way they moved was odd, so I’d put them down as a villager.
“Come in.”
The door opened on a middle-aged man, the village chief, if I had him right.
“Sorry to bother you. You’ll all want to stay in tonight. There was howling out there a while back.”
“Howling?”
The chief nodded.
“A monster’s. One’s settled in close by, this last while. A ‘Night Wolf,’ that’s the thing.”
“That’s… have you filed a subjugation request?”
“We’ve settled that we’re going to. It’s just that the fields have us tied up at the minute.”
Surely those priorities are backwards, I thought, and then thought better of it. There’ll be things about living here that only the people living here understand.
A Night Wolf, though. E-rank monster, I was fairly sure. It’s nocturnal, which is why the line is that you’re relatively safe so long as you stay indoors after dark, though looking at the timber houses around here, I wasn’t sure how much comfort that was.
“Just the one?”
“That’s right. One set of tracks, going by what we found.”
“…Understood. In that case I’ll deal with it. I am an E-rank adventurer, for what that’s worth.”
I hefted the mace as I said it, and the chief’s eyes opened a little wider.
“So you really are an adventurer. That’s a weight off. I’ll pay you what the request would have paid. Will you do it?”
“Consider it taken. Leave it with me.”
So the event had fired after all. The only question was whether it really stopped at one Night Wolf, and I made up my mind to go out there braced for worse.
Outside, the night had come all the way down. With ‘Vision’ raised as far as mine had come, though, the moonlight was plenty to work by.
“Sorry to land you with it,” the chief said, and went, and the quiet closed over the place behind him. You don’t get quiet like that in Japan.
I walked out the way the tracks had been found. Village is a generous word for five or six houses; I was past the last of them inside a minute.
A little further on, a howl came up out of the dark, and not from far off.
‘Presence Sense’ lit. Something was closing at speed, and there was only one of it.
Then I could hear it, something big tearing through the grass.
I turned that way and there it came, a four-legged monster running like a squall, built along the lines of a big dog, and white.
White…? A Night Wolf is supposed to be dark gray.
The instant it came inside my reach I swung the mace flat across as a counter. It changed direction as though the laws of physics had no say in the matter, slid out from under the blow, and backed off.
So there I was, squared off under the moon with a Night Wolf (?).
A closer look confirmed the wolf part, at least. Its eyes burned red, and there was something foul in them.
“Don’t tell me it’s another rare monster.”
White coat, red eyes: that could simply be an albino. Either way, I wasn’t going to be careless about it.
The wolf dropped low and watched for its opening.
I put the buckler out in front and drew the mace in tight against my side. It was faster than I was, and there was no arguing with that. A counter was the only thing worth aiming for.
Then it moved, weaving in at speed. Physics was getting ignored again. It had a skill, then.
It broke to my front left, using the buckler’s shadow for cover, and made as if to spring.
I started the mace that way, and it went the other, to my right. A feint. The thing had feinted me.
My balance drifted, half a beat of it, and the wolf took the opening and came in open-mouthed for my throat.
I kept it off the carotid, at least. What it got was my right shoulder, and it got it properly. ‘Steel Body’ kept the meat on the bone, but the fangs went through skin and the damage was real.
I went to swing and it sprang clear, well out of reach. So that was the plan: wear the prey down a piece at a time, then take it.
I put the buckler up again. The pain in the shoulder was already easing—‘Regeneration’ doing its work—and there was a thought in that. The wolf had no reason to expect I could heal.
So I let the right arm hang dead and gave ground, slowly. A feint deserves a fake in return.
It read its moment and came. Straight in, this time.
I held the buckler low and waited. A stride out, the wolf accelerated—really accelerated. So it had been holding something back after all.
I took the fangs on the buckler, and the buckler lost. The top half of it came apart in the wolf’s teeth in a single bite—which should not have been possible—and the wolf came on through the wreckage for my throat.
Which put its belly where I wanted it. My mace went up into it from underneath.
Gyabu!
Blood came out of its mouth and the wolf went up and away at an angle.
It came down, and its legs wouldn’t hold it. I was on it before it could do anything about that, and flattened its head with the mace.
“Whew. Up close it really is strength that settles things.”
I got the headless carcass over my shoulder and carried it back toward the village.
“Well now, that’s a Moon Wolf. This is what was making all that noise?”
I’d shown Gashi the carcass first thing the next morning, and it stopped him where he stood.
“Yes, this is what came out. A Moon Wolf, is it.”
“Rare form of the Night Wolf, way I hear it. Pelt ought to fetch a good price, only carrying it like that’ll be a nuisance. Soshi-san, can you dress a carcass?”
“No. About all I can manage is getting the magic stone out.”
“I’ll do it, if you like. No charge, obviously.”
“Then would you? I’d be grateful.”
He set to it with the efficiency of long practice, and I gathered he makes part of his living that way. A trade in your hands must count for a great deal in a world like this one.
While he worked I fetched the chief, reported the kill, was thanked, and took my payment.
Wolf turns out to be edible, near enough, and for a village, that’s protein worth having, so I handed the meat over as it was.
“Here you go. Your lucky day, Soshi-san. Looks like this one was carrying an orb.”
“An orb?”
What he put in my hand wasn’t a magic stone but something like a ball of crystal, shining in rainbow colors, with an odd sort of power coming off it. A rare individual dropping a special kind of magic stone, perhaps.
“You don’t know orbs either? That there’s a Skill Orb. Valuable thing: an adventurer uses one, he comes away with a skill. Sells high at the Guild.”
“Huh…”
Not a word about them in the guide, either. But if the thing hands out skills, I’d sooner use it than sell it.
“I’m allowed to use it myself, I take it?”
“What comes off a monster you subjugated is that adventurer’s, near enough. Long as you’re not buying and selling around the Guild, nobody’s going to say a word.”
“That’s what I thought. Only, how do you use it…”
I closed my hand hard on it to see, and something came in through my palm.
The knowledge of it surfaced slowly, the way warmth does. ‘Body Twist,’ a skill that lets you move in defiance of the law of inertia. So that was what the Moon Wolf had been doing to me. An interesting one, that. Used properly, I suspect it will be very strong indeed.
“Oh, you used it?”
“It seems I did, yes. And a good one at that.”
“Glad to hear it. Still, putting this thing down on your own. You’re the real article, Soshi-san.”
“Mm. There was only one of it, mind. Once you’re in close, arm strength does the talking.”
“Hah. Fair enough. Right, the hide’s off, so take it with you. We’ll be moving shortly. That suit you?”
“Yes. Let’s push and make Euron today.”
So by way of some mysterious process I still can’t file under either good luck or bad, I came out of that night one skill richer. I’d handled a monster I’d never seen before without losing my head, too. I seem to be getting stronger in the right direction.
We left the village, and the rest of it passed without incident. By evening Euron had come into view.
What stood at the end of the highway was a walled city in the proper fortress sense. Over the top of the wall you could see nothing but the roofs of the taller buildings, packed at a density that said the place was full. The handsome hall on the high ground near the middle would be the residence of the lord, Viscount Barius.
Houses and shacks stood outside the wall as well, in no order whatsoever, giving off the unmistakable air of a slum. According to Gashi that’s where the poor who can’t get through the gate live, along with anyone carrying a conviction. The word for it in this country is ‘the Outwall.’
Viscount Barius polices it hard enough that the people out there rarely try anything in the open. Behind your back is another matter, and I was warned as much, though I was also told, “Not that there’s many fools stupid enough to touch an adventurer.”
“Ah, we’re here at last. Soshi-san, you saved us, and that’s the truth of it.”
“Not at all. I was only doing a job.”
“Even so, we’re in on the day because of you. You’ll be thanked properly, I’ll see to that.”
Talking like that we came up through the Outwall and out in front of the gate, where an inspection was running and some forty people stood in line for it. A few of them were plainly adventurers, but adventurers have a checkpoint of their own, and they went in through that.
I got Gashi’s advice on decent inns while the line moved, and at the front I showed my adventurer card and he and Nari showed their Merchant Guild ones, and that was the whole of the examination. Belonging to a guild is evidently credit in itself.
Euron was prosperous in a way that put Tolson out of the comparison. We’d come out onto what I took for the central street, and both sides of it were crowded to the last inch with houses and shops.
The buildings were well made, and the signs with them, and glass windows—which you hardly saw in Tolson—were common here. There was no taking the town in at a glance from anywhere; without somebody to point the way I’d have been lost inside ten minutes.
The cart still had to reach the Merchant Guild warehouse, though, so I stayed on the job that far. One street off the central road and a short way along stood a big unornamented building three stories or so tall, warehouse written all over it. The wide entrance had been left open, and merchants and carriers moved through it in a steady traffic.
We got the cart a little way inside, and that was my work done.
“Come along with me a minute.”
I followed him to a room off the warehouse floor that served as the office. He spoke to the man at the desk furthest back, and that man—middle-aged, and the office chief by the look of him—got up and came over.
“Ah, good evening. Paolo, of the Merchant Guild. It seems our people have been in your care, and I thank you for it. I’m told you’re an adventurer. Is that so?”
“It is. Soshi, Rank E. I came upon Gashi-san on the road, and as he appeared to be in difficulty, I lent a hand.”
Something in the way I said it surprised him. The politeness, I suppose.
“I see. By rights we would render our thanks through the Adventurer’s Guild, but we would rather not go the long way around. Might we treat this as help given privately? We’ll pay the same either way.”
“I don’t mind at all. Put it down as a kindness.”
“Much obliged. Then if you would take this…”
Eighty thousand roms changed hands. I have no real sense yet of what’s generous and what isn’t, but the E-rank day rate at the goblin mass subjugation had been fifty thousand, so for two days on the road it wasn’t a strange figure.
“Received, thank you. Do you need a signature of any kind?”
“Not at all. This is a private matter, so there’s no need.”
The smile that went with it was entirely professional.
“Understood. Then I’ll take my leave.”
I was on my way out when Gashi came hurrying after me. “You really did save us this time. Once you’re settled in this town, we’ll have a drink again.”
Even if that was no more than the polite thing to say, walking into a strange town with somebody in it who knows your name is not nothing.
I turned back toward the central street to find myself a bed.
With a room secured at the inn Gashi had named, I went on to the Adventurer’s Guild in Euron.
It was a big four-story building on the gate end of the central street, an address that tells you plainly how well the Guild is thought of here. I went in through the wide open entrance. The lobby was Tolson’s, scaled straight up.
Counters on the right as you come in, the board on the left, and ten or so parties loitering in between. They came in every shape, and one or two of them were obviously the real thing.
There’s a C-class dungeon within reach of this town, so there would be C-rank parties among them. ‘Fortuner,’ who turned out for the mass subjugation, are based here too, apparently.
Not one of them paid me any attention; they talked among themselves and laughed. Far preferable to being picked at.
I chose an open counter and went to it.
“Excuse me. I’d like to sell some materials, and I’d like permission to read the guide.”
The young woman behind it went on looking somewhere else the entire time I was walking up.
When I spoke she moved her eyes to me without moving her head, and said, more or less to herself, “New face.”
“Yes, it’s my first time here. Soshi, Rank E.”
“Soshi-san, E-rank. And the materials?”
“These.”
I put the Moon Wolf pelt on the counter, and the sleepy face above it changed by a small but definite amount.
“This is… a Moon Wolf pelt. Where did you get it?”
“Between Tolson and Euron. It crossed my path and I subjugated it.”
“Do you have the magic stone?”
“An orb came out in place of the stone, in fact, and I’ve used it.”
“The husk?”
“Here.”
A used Skill Orb only loses the rainbow out of it. The ball of crystal stays behind.
She picked it up, said “Confirmed,” and set it down on the counter.
“We’ll purchase the pelt and this husk. Is that acceptable?”
“Please.”
The two of them came to eight hundred thousand roms. I don’t know the market well enough to argue it either way, but that was not a low price by anyone’s reckoning, the rare monster’s pelt doing the work, probably. Either way, found money.
“The guide is on the second floor, use it as you please. And a Skill Orb from the same monster has no effect if a second one is used, so if another comes your way, bring it straight in for purchase. The Moon Wolf’s ‘Body Twist’ is a rare skill. Ten million roms at the very least.”
She said it with her eyes on me, pricing me the way she’d priced the pelt. Seen head-on, she was a considerable beauty, blue hair cut in a short bob.
“Ah. Understood. Thank you very much.”
I said that and started up to the second floor for the guide. Halfway up the stairs, needless to say, it caught up with me. Ten million roms?
