Interlude – Freinil’s Recollection ~Meeting Soshi-sama~
“Freinil. As one who has ‘Awakened,’ you are obliged to become an adventurer. That is the law of this country. It cannot be defied.”
“Your father has already given his consent. As what mercy we are able to extend, we will take it upon ourselves to send you to a place fit for the making of an adventurer.”
My life changed entirely in the space of a single week.
Before I understood anything of it, my standing was taken from me and I was cast out into a town I did not know.
The one thing I could just manage to grasp in the confusion was that from now on I would have to live as an ‘Adventurer.’ But an ‘Adventurer’ was a thing that stood at the furthest possible remove from the life I had known.
On the advice of the person who brought me by carriage, I decided that I would begin by studying what an adventurer is, at the Adventurer’s Guild in a town called Maneji. Fortunately, for the sake of people such as myself, it had all been set down in books in considerable detail. But the further I read, the more firmly a single conviction settled in me, and it was the conviction that this was something I could not possibly do.
Nor did that conviction change when I heard the account of a kind-seeming man I happened to meet there.
The next day I was to enter a dungeon with an adventurer party that a kind member of the Guild staff had introduced to me. I had been given equipment of the barest sort, and I thought that at the very least I might be able to do something…
I was made to understand how naive that thought had been.
My legs were shaking before we were through the entrance, and when a monster like a green ogre stepped in front of me, fear put me down on the ground. However the party rebuked me, all I was able to answer was “I cannot”… Remembering it now, I feel nothing but shame.
Afterward, put out of the party, I could do nothing but stand where I was and weep, at the unreasonableness that had come down on me, and at how pathetic I was, able to do nothing in the face of it.
I would sooner disappear altogether… I had begun to think even as far as that, when:
“What you can’t do doesn’t suddenly become what you can, so there’s no sense in agonizing over it.”
The one who comforted me in that gentle voice was the man I had met at the Guild, Soshi-sama.
Soshi-sama taught me what an adventurer needs, truly from the very beginning, and he taught it as though it mattered to him. How to train the body. How to train skills. How to hold one’s heart in front of a monster. How much the preparation beforehand matters; how the body will not move unless it has been made to practice; how one must go about earning money. The craft of an adventurer, certainly. But before that, Soshi-sama gave me the knowledge a person needs simply to live.
Even that green ogre, which had looked so terrible to me, I was able to kill when Soshi-sama was beside me.
My opponent was a monster, of course; and even so, it was the first time in my life that I had taken a life. And still there was nothing in my heart but gratitude to Soshi-sama.
After that I went where Soshi-sama went, and we cleared several dungeons together.
I was given magic skills as well—‘Holy Attribute Magic’ and ‘Divine Attribute Magic’—and only then, at last, was I able to hold any confidence that I might manage as an adventurer after all.
Soshi-sama, who did not abandon me when I had fallen into danger but came for me. Soshi-sama, who told me that he needed me. Soshi-sama, who promised that we would be together always.
Merely to be at Soshi-sama’s side is to feel a strange and powerful strength rising inside me. There is no doubt of it: Soshi-sama is a special person to me, a special presence. If I were told that Soshi-sama was a messenger of god, I am certain I would not be surprised.
When I think of it, I knew nothing of the world outside until now; I lived my life within a closed one. My mother died and I was put out of the house. From the place I was sent to, I was banished as well. And in the small town I came to at the end of all that, I found at last a place where I belong, and I was able to come out into the wide world. If this is not the guidance of god, then what in the world could it be?
From here I will live in this wide world together with Soshi-sama. I have become an adventurer, a person who must fight terrible monsters. And there is no unease in me about it.
To live with Soshi-sama, to fight with Soshi-sama, to go about the world with Soshi-sama. Only to think of it makes everything look bright to me.
There is one thing only that I fear, and it is that I should become a person Soshi-sama has no need of. And so I must train myself, always. For I understand now that this was precisely the thing I had lacked most of all.
