Chapter 14
#14 Newbie Adventurer Bern (12) - Desperation
After leaving Renya to handle the rough cleanup.
Bern escorted Blanca back to the inn where she was staying.
Even immediately after the battle, Blanca had only looked dumbstruck by Bern's behavior, but as time passed her expression darkened, and now she was openly showing a gloomy mood that anyone could see.
Bern scratched his cheek and said to Blanca.
"You don't seem to be in great shape today, so get some good rest and I'll see you tomorrow. I've also booked my room again in the next room over, so even if something comes up, I'll be able to respond right away. So please don't worry and—"
"Bern. Could you spare me a moment?"
Blanca, who cut off Bern's words, looked at him with eyes that seemed as though she'd made up her mind.
Bern hesitated for a moment, then sat back down in the chair.
Blanca's story began.
***
Blanca's mother was a mage.
This wasn't some metaphorical expression like a child seeing a parent as a magician.
Her mother really could spew fire from nowhere and heal people with nothing more than a touch.
Magic is a precious field of study.
Even the lowest-tier, most basic spells such as 『magic that burns wood』 and 『magic that freezes water』 were so expensive that commoners could scarcely even look at them, and even if they somehow got their hands on one, it was usually a fake.
In that sense, it was certainly strange that a housewife from a rural village with no surname to speak of could handle not one but several kinds of magic with such skill.
But young Blanca did not easily realize that oddness.
Her mother was too clean and beautiful to be called a country woman.
A father she had never once seen since she was born.
A single old sword in the corner of the house, carefully tended by her mother at all times.
Learning to read and write, and the etiquette expected at meals, all of which she was taught as if it were only natural.
After she grew up, went out into society, and gained experience, she belatedly realized that all of it had been "not ordinary," but as a young girl she had no insight to understand what value she was enjoying.
The mother and daughter's life was fairly comfortable.
Blanca's mother, beautiful and dignified, was an out-of-place presence in that rural village, but her power was too valuable to turn away.
In a village that didn't even have a proper temple for the clerics to stay in, much less a decent apothecary, how could they refuse a mage who could heal people just by touching them?
Blanca's mother did not demand any separate compensation when healing villagers, but precisely because of that, people would voluntarily bring appropriate "gifts."
After all, there was nothing to lose by becoming close with the one person who could someday heal their family and loved ones if they were injured or fell ill.
Respect and goodwill toward her mother carried over intact to Blanca, and Blanca vaguely sensed that as well.
Blanca loved her mother, and her mother loved Blanca as well.
It felt as though their peaceful, happy daily life would continue forever.
But that happiness was brazenly taken away.
A purple fog so thick and venomous it was almost obscene.
Terrible screams rang out from within the fog.
The hunter who used to laugh heartily and hand Blanca things like wild nuts walked down the road, dark fluid streaming from his half-crushed head.
The village chief's third son, who had boasted that he would leave this rural village and become an adventurer, was making beast-like noises as he bit into his older brother's throat.
The dead attacked the living, and those who lost their lives that way then became the attackers and slaughtered others.
In the village turned into hell on earth.
Blanca's mother became its center.
The flames her mother usually used to bake pies for Blanca burned the undead to ash, and the villagers clung to her while struggling to survive.
At last, when every corpse had been cleared away and hope appeared on people's faces.
As if it had been waiting for just that moment, it appeared.
「What unexpected luck. I had only intended to replenish my fodder, yet to think I'd find the material for a new heart in a backwater village like this.」
A gray-white skull. A lich with blue will-o'-the-wisps where its eyes should have been spoke in an excited voice, as if it had merely picked up a coin while walking down the road.
Blanca, Blanca's mother, and the villagers were all unable to object to that lich.
Because with a casual wave of its hand, the army of undead they had defeated was revived once more.
Seeing the scene of it so casually undoing the results of their desperate struggle, the villagers all wore expressions of utter despair.
Only one person. The only one trembling all over yet not losing the will to fight was Blanca's mother.
Looking at Blanca's mother, the lich spoke in a friendly voice, as if it had thought of an amusing prank.
「It would be simple to kill all of you here and take your flesh and souls... but I am in an extremely good mood right now. So, I shall grant you one mercy.」
「If you offer your soul of your own volition, I shall not lay a hand on the rest of them.」
The offer made under the name of mercy was, in truth, a poisonous draught steeped in malice.
In magic, intent is extremely important.
A contract forced by outside power and one entered into by one's own consent are nowhere near comparable in terms of coercive force or solidity.
Rather than being killed by the lich and having your soul taken, if you were to offer your soul to the lich yourself, that bondage would be thicker and heavier than any shackle.
You would become the lich's slave for all eternity.
Young Blanca did not know any of that as a mage.
But seeing the wicked gleam in the lich's eyes, she could instinctively tell that it could not be left alone.
Blanca, who had been hiding inside the house with the other children, ran out to her mother.
She clung to her mother's leg, crying and begging her not to go, saying she couldn't do that.
Whenever she recalled her actions from that day later on, Blanca hated her younger self so much she wanted to kill her.
What on earth was she trying to accomplish by throwing a tantrum at her mother? To expose her mother's weakness before the lich herself—what kind of stupid, idiotic thing was that?
If she truly wanted to help her mother, she should not have gone to her side then.
If only she had run the other way instead. If only she had at least lessened her mother's burden a little by doing that, her mother would never have made that choice.
Her mother soothed the crying daughter, then handed the staff she was holding to Blanca.
「I'm sorry, my daughter. If I'd known it would come to this, I would have taught you more, sooner.」
「Eat well, don't speak carelessly, and keep practicing magic diligently.」
「I love you, Blanca.」
That was the last image of her mother that Blanca remembered.
With the warm light seeping from her mother's hand, the girl fell asleep, and when she woke up, everything was over.
When Blanca woke up, she appealed to the surviving villagers.
「We have to save my mother. Please help me.」
The adults who usually thought Blanca was adorable did not respond to her words.
No, they even tried to stop her by saying that if Blanca did something rash, the lich might get angry.
Disappointed, Blanca appealed to the lord who governed the territory that included the village.
「An evil lich has invaded the village. It must still be somewhere in this territory, so please, please defeat it.」
The lord did not even deign to meet her.
The soldiers who were supposed to protect the people instead realized that Blanca's staff and sword were expensive items, and tried to take them from her under the guise of an inspection.
After somehow escaping the soldiers, Blanca returned to the village and liquidated everything except the staff and sword her mother had left her.
And with the money she made that way, she went to the adventurers' guild.
「I want to place a request with the guild. Please, defeat the lich.」
The staff member who would later become the Eastern Branch manager looked at Blanca holding out a pouch full of coins with complicated eyes, but readily accepted the request.
But even if the guild accepts the request, it means nothing if no adventurer takes it.
The skilled ones knew just how dangerous a lich was and refused the request, while greedy amateurs couldn't even reach the lich's face and fled after failing to defeat even one undead it commanded.
After that happened about three times, and the lich subjugation request had become a burden nobody even bothered looking at, Blanca finally admitted it.
That unless she herself stepped forward, there was no one anywhere who would save her mother.
And so, Blanca became an adventurer.
There were many adventurers who wanted a valuable mage as a companion, and Blanca had also inherited her mother's staff.
Even Blanca, whose innate mana wasn't all that strong, could use powerful magic as much as she wanted with the staff's aid.
She rose through the adventurer ranks with astonishing smoothness and got to know capable companions as well.
If things continued like this, if she could just climb a little higher.
Then she would truly be able to defeat that accursed lich and free her mother.
Another misfortune came at precisely the moment she held such thoughts.
Crack.
Just as she was about to use the strongest spell she knew against a huge orc, a sinister cracking sound rang out from the staff in her hand.
The magic went berserk, and the intense flames headed not for the orc she had targeted, but toward some noble's hunting grounds, causing a fire.
The orc itself was taken down somehow by the remaining companions, but after that Blanca's journey was all downhill.
The noble whose hunting grounds had burned demanded enormous compensation, and that became Blanca's debt in full.
If Blanca's skills had remained intact, she would still have had a chance to pay it off before long, but Blanca's magic, having lost her staff, had weakened to a degree that was beyond comparison to before.
Unlike Blanca, who could only use ice magic, Karina—who had been quietly burning with rivalry toward Blanca, who could wield a variety of magic including fire, healing, and enhancement—seized the opportunity and recruited a new healing mage, and Blanca was expelled from the party not long after.
Blanca did not object.
It was the same for her: she was shocked to realize that the strength she'd thought she had grown into was nothing but a bubble that had still been relying on her mother all along.
She tried somehow to find a new party and climb back up, but even that wasn't easy.
Her ability was insufficient to fit in with 3rd-rank adventurers, and 2nd-rank adventurers openly looked down on Blanca, sneering at her fall from above them.
Adventurers practical enough not to be swayed by mere jealousy or petty schadenfreude knew that Blanca's abilities were useful and tried to work with her somehow, but precisely because they were practical, once they learned that Blanca was chasing the absurd goal of subjugating a lich, they cut her off.
As her situation kept worsening, and before long she could no longer even properly pay the interest on her debt, she took a receptionist job.
Blanca found it.
The talent that seemed like they would go along with her absurd goal, possessing both madness and skill.
***
"It was you, Bern."
Having told a story longer than Bern had expected, Blanca let her shoulders slump with a weary look.
"Someone with great potential, and someone so inexperienced with the world that they'd say, 'My dream is to be an adventurer.' If I saddled a rookie like that with debt by acting as their senior... I thought it would help me achieve my goal in many ways. No, I thought it would."
Bern tilted his head, seeming puzzled.
"Not anymore? I didn't think I was showing any particular shortcomings."
Blanca let out a long sigh and then spoke of something else.
"In the goblin extermination quest, I was just your supporting act. Even without any herbs to drive off goblins, even without bothering to use fire magic, you would have completed the mission somehow."
Having revisited the request and realized that fact again, she felt disappointed, but she wasn't crushed.
This was only the first request, after all. Next time, she would do better.
She had adventurer experience and credentials, so if she made good use of that, she'd somehow be helpful. That was what she thought.
But what happened this time told Blanca just how far off even that prediction had been.
"My former companions were a little prickly in character, but they were excellent in terms of skill. It wasn't for nothing that the whole party was on the verge of reaching 4th rank. But you crushed that all by yourself, without even a tiny scratch."
If there were an individual who could single-handedly overwhelm a provisional 4th-rank party, what rank would that individual be?
At the very least, middle to upper 4th rank—and if things went badly, maybe even 5th rank.
And that also meant Bern was already a master nearing the pinnacle of the Adventurers' Guild right now.
Did newbie or veteran even mean anything to someone like that?
To someone like that, would Blanca's accumulated "tricks" hold any value at all?
Bern had asked Blanca for adventurer knowledge and experience, but in Blanca's view, no matter what, that alone could never balance the scales against the power Bern possessed.
If there was one thing Blanca learned as she wandered the world after losing her mother, it was that relationships where only one side keeps giving never end well.
Right now, Bern seems favorably disposed toward Blanca.
But what were the chances that goodwill would continue in the future?
To her, the worst possible outcome was him regarding her as someone he could replace at any time.
So, if she had to prevent that.
With a rustle.
The coat Blanca had been wearing slipped down below her shoulders.
Bringing their bodies close enough to feel each other's scent, Blanca said to Bern.
"Teach me what you know as an adventurer. I won't ask about the secrets you keep. That was all you asked for before... but is it still the same now? Do you still want nothing else from me? Say anything. I'll do anything."