Chapter 20
-CRUNCH!
“Ren!!”
“What are you doing?!”
As they watched red blood and white brain matter burst out with the horrific crunch of a crushed skull,
Huey and Luciela shouted at Ren in protest.
“Ah, seriously… What a pain!!”
Ren ignored the two of them and simply raised their leg once more,
as though they meant to smash the woman’s corpse into pieces.
“Rennn!!”
-CLANG!
“Ghk!? Huey, you…!!”
“Calm down for now, Ren.”
“Let go, I said!!”
And Huey drew his sword to block Ren’s leg,
while Luciela rushed at the flustered Ren and knocked them down.
“Damn it, it’s not over yet!”
“What do you mean, not over?! She’s dead!”
“I’m telling you, she doesn’t die. That thing!!”
“What?”
“…What?”
It was then that Huey and Luciela were puzzled by how unexpectedly calm Ren looked, despite apparently having lost their reason.
“Uh, hehe….”
Along with a sudden laugh,
the corpse staggered to her feet.
“Aww—how cruel. Is this any way to treat someone you haven’t seen in ages?”
“…Run. If you don’t want to die.”
At Ren’s tense-sounding voice, Huey and Luciela slowly turned around, on guard.
“Isn’t that why the commander gets angry with you every time? You always do whatever you feel like and end up ruining someone else’s commission, too.”
What stood there wasn’t a corpse with its head crushed.
It was a woman rising as though the blood and brain matter that had soaked the ground moments before had all been a lie.
“Honestly, what’s the big deal about a few people dying?”
The woman, well over 170 centimeters tall and with pink hair reaching her waist,
had eyes the same color as her hair, filled with irritation and bloodlust.
“You know, didn’t we agree not to lay a hand on civilians?”
“Hmm… I suppose we did. But, more importantly…”
Not content with exposing most of her armpits and shoulders, along with breasts the size of a person’s face, she even left her navel bare,
while flaunting a shamefully revealing dark-purple dress that left nowhere decent to look.
“I wish you’d understand that acting on your whims as you used to while you’re this weakened could get you seriously hurt.”
Now wearing an elegant robe pulled from thin air,
“If you died, I’d be the one in trouble, Ren.”
“Shut up. It’s my call, isn’t it?”
“Aww.”
“What commission, my ass. No doubt you seduced the lord and have been milking him for money under the pretext of extending the commission.”
She met the eyes of Ren, who glared at her as they rose to their feet again.
“Isn’t that right, Frederica?”
“Oh my, how mean. You make me sound like a bad person. Not that you’re exactly wrong.”
Frederica shrugged, as if to say it would be a shame to throw away a rare chance to make money.
“If you’re dissatisfied with my policy… You know the rules, don’t you?”
“…Tch.”
“What’s wrong? I thought you were going to rush at me as enthusiastically as you did a moment ago.”
After watching Ren freeze for a moment at the mention of the rules,
“Hehe. Still, I’m relieved. If you’d really tried to fight me looking like that… I was planning to erase this city from the map.”
Frederica wrapped her robe closed and turned away.
“I’ll send someone to get you later, so come see me at my workshop. I’ll ask the lord not to worry about it.”
Ren could only watch helplessly as Frederica disappeared from sight.
“…Whew, what the hell is that monster?”
“She wasn’t bluffing when she said she’d erase the city.”
Huey muttered, exhaling the breath he had been holding, his face gone pale from the thick bloodlust that had weighed down the air moments before,
while Luciela stared in horror at the spot where Frederica had vanished.
“…I told you to run.”
After hearing them mutter, Ren plopped down on the ground dejectedly,
then spoke while watching people running toward them in the distance.
“Haaah, so. Where should I start explaining?”
At Ren’s question, Huey and Luciela met each other’s eyes for a moment,
“Obviously….”
“From the beginning.”
* *
“Thank you so much… Thank you…!”
“My husband survived thanks to you!”
“It scares me just to think what might have happened if it weren’t for you, miss.”
Huey and Luciela stared blankly at the people who had rushed over from afar, surrounded Ren, and kept thanking them over and over.
“Ah—enough already!! I’m exhausted, so go back to whatever you were doing!!”
The endless stream of thanks finally came to an end when Ren’s patience snapped and they sent everyone away.
“…Huh?”
Huey made a questioning sound, as though he had spotted something among the dispersing crowd.
“Did you find something?”
“No, it’s just… There was a doll over there by itself….”
Huey pointed toward an alley with a face like he had seen a ghost, but
there wasn’t even a footprint, much less a doll, where he looked.
“There’s nothing there.”
“…Did I see it wrong? I could’ve sworn a doll was walking around holding some kind of potion bottle.”
The doll had looked exactly like the rainproof artifact Ren had taken out a little while ago, Huey muttered absently.
It was then.
“Let’s go somewhere quiet for now.”
Ren sighed tiredly and urged Huey and Luciela to move somewhere else.
They returned to the inn where they had been staying.
“Whew, I thought I was going to die.”
As Ren collapsed onto the bed, looking exhausted, Huey and Luciela both spoke at once.
“Now explain. What on earth happened….”
“If it was Frederica, then surely….”
Ren looked at them with exasperation as they both started talking about different things at once, then spoke.
“I’ll explain one thing at a time, so just sit there and listen quietly. Both of you.”
“…Okay.”
“…All right.”
“I’ll start from when I ran out of the inn earlier.”
And so Ren began their story.
“Once I got out, I couldn’t think of anywhere in particular to go.”
They had been wandering around the city to clear their head.
“I heard the lord was passing by, so I thought Frederica might be there and went to take a look.”
“…That person from earlier?”
“Yep. The one who was walking around practically naked is my companion. She said she’d taken a commission to guard the lord, but they were strolling around together like the best of friends, laughing and chatting.”
Anyway, Ren went to see the lord and managed to find Frederica, just as intended,
and was apparently just about to greet her.
“The lord and Frederica were exchanging a few words, then she suddenly started casting a spell at the fruit stand beside them.”
They said they had sensed mana gathering in front of Frederica’s suddenly outstretched hand.
“So I ran over right away and….”
Knowing how skilled Frederica was, Ren planned to catch her off guard.
“I kicked the bastard lord right in the face.”
“What?”
“…Oh.”
“Frederica probably expected me to come at her, but it never occurred to her that I’d go for the lord.”
Taking advantage of Frederica’s confusion, Ren launched a surprise attack, and the fight began.
“She doesn’t die, so she just lets most attacks hit her. That’s what I was counting on.”
“That’s possible?”
“It sounds impossible, but you saw it with your own eyes, Master.”
“I’ll explain that later.”
Ren brusquely cut off Huey and Luciela’s questions.
“Haaah.”
Ren lay back on the bed and let out a deep sigh.
“Since I’d finally gotten a chance, I was planning to throw her as far away as possible and make a run for it….”
“…Ah.”
“Oh dear.”
When Ren lifted their head to look at them, leaving the rest of the sentence unsaid,
the two finally understood what had happened and scratched their heads.
“Ahem. Come to think of it, judging by what the people who fled earlier said, this sort of thing hadn’t happened just once or twice.”
“Is that Frederica person normally that violent?”
Soon, Huey and Luciela asked, trying to change the subject.
“…Do you know the biggest difference between mercenaries and adventurers?”
In response to their questions, Ren threw one back at them.
Mercenaries and adventurers.
People who take on someone else’s commissions in exchange for payment.
What, then, was their biggest difference?
“Scale?”
“Adventurers have a much more organized structure, right?”
“That’s what most people think, but….”
There was a more fundamental difference.
Ren rose to their feet.
“The biggest difference between mercenaries and adventurers is this: whether they take commissions to kill people or not.”
Of course, adventurers also fought people under the pretext of escort work,
and might be forced to fight others during a commission… but they did not accept commissions whose purpose was to harm others.
“Mercenaries take on the kinds of escort work the Adventurers Guild won’t accept, assassination jobs, and pretty much anything else that pays.”
Ren added that the extent varied depending on individual disposition,
“Our mercenary corps is a little different, though… Well, forget that for now. At least, our policy is not to lay a hand on civilians.”
But today’s Frederica had not seemed inclined to honor that rule.
“…She’s not the kind of person who’d do that.”
Ren rested a wing against their head, unable to understand how Frederica, not kind by nature but scrupulous about keeping promises, could have attacked a civilian without hesitation.
“Anyway, that’s the end of my story.”
Immediately after Ren finished their story,
-Knock. Knock.
-I’ve come to escort you on Lady Frederica’s orders. Please come with me.
A man’s voice came with the knock, as though he had been waiting for this very moment.
“Well… Let’s hear about what happened when we meet her.”