Chapter 57
Though I did end up hearing something I never could have expected.
Anyway, after finishing our meal with the help of the teddy bear Frederica controlled,
“Haa… so this is what Ren tastes like…♡”
“Don't do that. It's creepy. Please.”
I desperately tried to calm the feathers bristling on my wings at the sight of the traitor writhing unpleasantly.
“First of all, Huey. I have something to tell you.”
“Huh? All of a sudden?”
I decided to apologize to Huey first.
“It seems the pervert among us broke into your room while you were sleeping.”
“…What?”
“I think she collected things like your hair and fingernails. Sorry.”
After giving the flustered Huey a slight bow,
I quietly glared at Frederica.
“Ugh… I'm sorry. My curiosity got the better of me.”
Only then did Frederica politely bow her head, sweating profusely.
“No, well… It is a little startling. But if you ask, I can give you things like that anytime, so please use a normal method….”
Huey answered while looking away, as though he couldn't bear to meet my eyes, his expression thoroughly saying he was creeped out.
“…As expected, one's chest and morality are clearly inversely proportional.”
And Lucy nodded as if she had come to some understanding while staring at Frederica's chest.
At the reactions of the two, who seemed unable to believe that the witch before them could be like that,
I thought the image Frederica had been quietly cultivating since she first met them had apparently worked to some extent….
Wait a second.
…An image?
“Hey.”
A sudden thought occurred to me.
With the feeling that surely it couldn't be true, I called out to Frederica.
“Yes?”
“You didn't happen to refrain from using that until the very end….”
“…Gasp.”
At that, Frederica's face went pale, as though she had realized what I was about to say.
“What is it? What are we talking about this time?”
“Master. It sounds interesting, so let's just listen.”
It had been bothering me that she hadn't used that technique—the one that had put the captain and me through so much trouble—until the very end.
“You held out in that situation just to preserve your image?”
When I asked, dumbfounded,
“A woman's! Image! Is more important than her life!?”
Frederica slammed both hands on the table, stood up, and shouted with an aggrieved expression.
“I told you, that image was ruined ages ago….”
“But still! Stillll!”
She now lay down on the floor and began throwing a tantrum.
And Huey and Lucy watched her with great interest.
“I wanted to look like an elegant older sister at least once…!”
When Frederica finally confessed her true feelings in a tearful voice,
“…Elegant?”
I decided to picture for a moment what Frederica must have looked like when she encountered Huey and Lucy in Swinford.
“Didn't she already lose any semblance of elegance when she restored her shattered head and rose like a zombie?”
-Flinch.
And then there was this.
“The next time we saw her, she looked like a drowned corpse floating in the water.”
-Flinch.
“Oh, she's dead.”
“She's really dead.”
That being so.
After watching for a while as Frederica, who had been protesting, finally ran out of things to say and slumped dejectedly,
“Oh, right.”
“Huh?”
“Yesterday, Ms. Violette sent you… Ahem, a letter.”
“You really are… Haa….”
I glared at Huey for a moment as he brought up yesterday's incident again—the one I had been trying so hard to forget while teasing Frederica.
Just thinking about it made my face burn and my stomach twist.
I had worked so hard to erase it from my memory somehow.
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you mean? There's nothing to hide, so just open it and give it to me.”
Maybe his face was burning just as much as mine.
Watching Huey approach me with the letter he had taken from inside his clothes, his face deliberately nonchalant as though trying not to show it,
“Why is that old man suddenly sending a letter…? He could just contact us like he usually does.”
I grumbled toward the captain, who wasn't here.
“Oh, about that.”
Frederica, who had somehow revived and taken her seat, spoke up.
“It seems the captain forgot to bring parchment this time.”
“What got into him? He's usually so careful about bringing it.”
I was briefly puzzled by her saying that the parchment had been left right on the desk in his office.
“Here.”
“Thanks.”
As Huey came over beside me, tore open the envelope, and handed me its contents,
I decided to put my thoughts about the captain aside.
After quietly reading the letter Huey had spread across the table,
“Haa.”
I sighed.
“What does it say?”
I opened my mouth while looking at Huey, who was asking with a curious expression.
“It's nothing much. Apparently, he incurred a penalty. The reason was a decline in confidence in the fulfillment of the contract due to poor management.”
Poor management. I didn't need to see the details to know.
It had to be a reprimand for what had happened to my body.
“A contract? With whom?”
“Is the mercenary corps some kind of subordinate organization of someone?”
Huey and Lucy paused their reading and looked at me questioningly.
And Frederica looked at me uneasily.
It couldn't be helped. She probably didn't want to explain it herself.
“I'll explain.”
And so.
I folded the letter I had been reading, set it on the table, and faced Huey and Lucy.
I began explaining Esras to them.
“Esras is a mercenary corps made up of six people in total, including the captain, me, and Frederica here. That's what Esras is.”
In the past, many people dismissed us for calling ourselves a mercenary corps with fewer than ten members, but things were different now.
And for good reason.
“Every member is also a superhuman who formally passed the trials at the Temple of Courage.”
Other than the Adventurer's Guild,
there were hardly any countries or organizations in the world that possessed even two superhumans.
Six superhumans were a force capable of attempting to overthrow a nation, depending on the circumstances. There was no way anyone could dismiss us.
“…What?”
“Is that… really possible?”
“It must be possible, or we wouldn't all be here like this, would we?”
Watching Huey and Lucy look back at me in disbelief,
I raised one wing and pointed toward Frederica, who was pretending not to hear over there.
“Anyway, to explain the contract, I need to tell you about Frederica.”
In a sense, Frederica could also be called one of Esras's founding members.
“Do you remember what Osmund said the other day?”
At my question, the two of them thought hard, apparently recalling what had happened a few days earlier.
Then they looked at Frederica simultaneously and spoke.
“If you mean what Mr. Osmund said….”
“The hero killer….”
Frederica looked bitter at their muttering, but
“That's right.”
I carried on regardless.
The story of the day I first met Frederica.
“She was originally a disaster-class target for subjugation.”
She did have her reasons, of course.
But no one knew about them at the time.
“…Wait a second.”
“I'm asking just in case, but don't tell me the previous hero turned out to be a bad person or something?”
Apparently, this part was difficult for them to accept right away.
They interrupted me with questions, so
I recalled what had happened back then and opened my mouth.
“I don't remember any such rumors, though?”
I hadn't been particularly interested in the hero,
but from what I remembered, the hero's reputation had seemed fairly good.
Well, anyway.
“The hero party sent to subjugate Frederica was wiped out instead, which caused quite a stir.”
There hadn't even been a spare hero ready,
so I clearly remembered what a huge uproar it had caused.
“The captain and I were looking for a way to become famous so we could attract clients, and that's when we made our move.”
Mercenaries who had subjugated a disaster-class threat that had even defeated a hero.
The captain had grinned wickedly, saying that the risk was high, but we'd be rolling in money in no time.
“Well, we did eventually win, but….”
We did manage to find a way to kill her.
But the problem was that, at the time, it wasn't something we could have done in our right minds.
“And somehow, we ended up taking Frederica in.”
I glanced at Frederica, who was covering her ears at the airing of her dark history, before continuing.
“Did everyone else just stand by when you took in someone who had killed a hero?”
“Indeed. If it were me, I would have thought we should round her up and kill her.”
As expected, Huey and Lucy asked because they were curious, so I answered them.
“As if they could have been okay with it.”
They even formed a massive subjugation force, saying they had to wipe out all of us along with Frederica. It was such a nuisance.
“We staged a show of force.”
If the archbishop of Arcadia hadn't come to mediate while we were wondering whether we'd have to fight until every last one of us was dead, we probably would have actually died.
“Even though their own hero had died, they somehow proposed signing a contract with us.”
In exchange for wiping away Frederica's crimes and having our backs, Arcadia gave us two conditions.
Fill the hero's vacant position until the next hero took it up.
And keep Frederica properly reined in so that she wouldn't run wild like that again.
“Thanks to that, Arcadia took almost everything we earned, except for the bare minimum needed for expenses.”
If not for that, we'd be living in a grand house like a castle instead of this shabby old mansion.
Anyway.
“With me ending up in this state in the middle of all that, the captain went to Arcadia for his regular report and got thoroughly chewed out.”
Of course, the next hero had taken up the position long ago.
There was no need to mention that we'd been forced to maintain the contract for years by using the excuse that the hero was still young.
“If we broke the contract on our end, we'd give them an excuse to make us targets for subjugation again. So we're in a situation where we can't just tear it up because we're annoyed.”
The captain really hated that, after we'd made some nice money by siphoning off materials from the disaster-class threats we'd subjugated, the hero had recently started beating us to them more and more often.
“If you have any other questions, ask.”
And so, after finishing the explanation,
“If there's nothing else, how about we leave right away?”
I suggested it to Huey and Lucy, who were drinking tea with languid expressions.
There was nothing more for us to gain by staying here anyway, so if there were no objections, we should leave immediately.
“Are you sure? Shouldn't you rest for another day….”
“That's rich coming from someone who was helplessly bedridden until yesterday.”
“Well, that's just how Ren is. Ren's held out a long time, considering.”
…Why were they reacting like that when the person in question had said they were fine?
“Oh, come on! Are we going or not?”
When I snapped at the three of them, with Frederica leading the way in badmouthing me,
they gave me chilly looks as though they had planned it together, then sighed in unison.
“Fine. Let's go, then.”
“If you hate being cooped up, then we'd better go, I suppose.”
And so, in the end.
“Then give the captain my regards.”
“Yeees. Have a safe trip. I'll be waiting.”
We packed our things again,
and with Frederica seeing us off, we set out on the road once more.