006 – The Spot on the Shoulder #1
Sometimes in life, good things come rushing in all at once.
That’s exactly where I am right now.
I earned a heap of aether.
I got to try cola.
I even touched gold coins for the first time in my life.
On top of that, I learned that even knights who’ve trained their whole bodies can’t train their balls.
Young Master Felix clutched his groin and crawled across the floor.
“Nngh, uuuugh….”
“What was that?”
“My gold coins…. Give them back, you bastard! If you’re not going to run…!”
“Ever seen a lion spit out meat it’s already got in its mouth?”
“L-Lion….”
“That’s me. Money that ends up in my pocket is mine. If you wanted it back, you shouldn’t have thrown it on the floor in the first place.”
“Uuugh….”
In the end, Felix foamed at the mouth and collapsed.
I had hit him with all I had, sure, but it shouldn’t have been enough to knock him out.
‘Is it because I leveled up?’
My level, raised to 4 by spending aether.
Maybe I’d become stronger than I realized.
“It felt good to pay him back, but still.”
You hit me once, I hit you once in return—
It was arithmetic even a child would understand.
Up to that point, fine.
But I hadn’t meant to knock him unconscious.
According to kind Mr. Hammer, this guy was supposed to be my comrade, someone I’d be earning aether with from now on, right?
And my roommate, since we had to share the same room.
What good would come from knocking a guy like that out?
Even without this, he already seemed like he was grinding his teeth, desperate to get me kicked out.
If you let too much resentment pile up, the back of your head starts to prickle.
“Damn it, can’t be helped.”
This wall had a training ground, and even a strategy room.
With plenty of ways for people to get hurt, there had to be something like an infirmary, and a doctor too, right?
I decided to call a doctor and have Felix treated.
“Tch. Being too nice really is one of my flaws.”
Creeeak.
So I left the room and wandered the corridor.
But whether we were the only people in this huge facility or not, the hallway was so empty that finding the infirmary wasn’t exactly easy.
How many minutes had I been walking?
「Great Library」
A place appeared that seemed like it had absolutely nothing to do with me.
Light leaked out from the slightly open door, and the rustle-rustle of pages drifted through, giving off signs of someone inside.
Creeeak.
When I opened the door and went in, a place reeking of ink and paper appeared before my eyes.
“What’s with all these books….”
I picked up a nearby oil lamp and shone the light around, and saw a girl sitting on a mound of piled-up books as if it were a chair.
It was the female Hermit in the pointed hat.
“Hey, where’s the infirmary around here?”
“…Oh my!”
Flinch!
Crashhhhh.
At my simple question, Hermit startled like a rat caught raiding a rice sack.
Thanks to that, the pile of books collapsed, and Hermit landed on her backside.
“Why are you so surprised? Were you doing something you shouldn’t?”
“You’re the one doing something you shouldn’t. How can a person come in without making a single sound….”
Hermit glanced at me, then picked up her staff.
Seeing the hand gripping the staff squeeze so tightly it turned white, her wariness must have been something fierce.
If things went wrong, she was probably planning to hit me with that staff.
No, maybe I’d even get the chance to see this thing called “magic.”
“Newbie, why are you here?”
“What about you? What are you doing here?”
“I was looking at books. You said the idol you made a deal with was called Asibar, right? I thought it might be in this 「Complete Collection of Idols」, but it doesn’t seem to be.”
In Hermit’s hands was an incredibly thick book titled 「Complete Collection of Idols」. At a glance, it wasn’t to my taste.
When it came to books, I could barely read the ones with lewd pictures in them.
The rest made me sleepy after only a little while, and I’d fall asleep right away.
“The idol Asibar that you supposedly contracted with is probably one of two things. Either it’s such a dangerous kind that it wasn’t recorded here and became taboo. Or it was so insignificant that it wasn’t worth recording.”
“Which one is better?”
“The insignificant ones are better. Contracts with them just amount to having wasted aether. But the ends of those who come into contact with idols that have reached the level of taboo are usually horrible.”
Squeeeze.
Hermit wrapped her arms around herself.
She acted as if she knew something.
“Hermit, did you also contract with one of those taboo idols and receive a blessing?”
“That’s… a secret. Normally, you shouldn’t go around carelessly telling people what idol you contracted with. It can become a weakness. Blessings aren’t all-powerful, after all.”
A weakness?
I hadn’t known that.
I’d have to be careful from now on.
Our conversation cut off there.
The mood grew awkward for no reason.
All of a sudden, I wondered what kind of things you were supposed to talk about with girls.
If I had dated a girl normally, what would I have talked about?
As I was thinking hard about that, Hermit spoke first.
“You brought some strange object out of the bonfire earlier, didn’t you?”
“Ah, this.”
I took the empty cola can out of my pocket.
It felt too precious to just throw away.
“It’s an object I’ve never seen before. It seems like a tool made to hold liquid inside and seal it shut. Judging by the delicate craftsmanship, I’m wondering if it might be something from before the ‘Night War.’ Am I right?”
“I don’t understand a single thing you’re saying.”
“The Night War. I’m talking about the war when His Imperial Majesty fought the demons. Back then, the Empire’s territory was much larger, and both technology and magic were far more advanced than they are now.”
From there, Hermit continued into a long explanation.
It was an extremely boring story, but to sum it up, it was this.
There might have been cola in the old Empire.
And in the Lands of Night, there were apparently a lot of old imperial facilities and valuables like that, so they became a modest source of income for Blessed ones who explored them.
Just thinking about converting all of that into money already put me in a good mood.
But—
Hadn’t I forgotten something?
Ah.
“By the way, Hermit, where’s the infirmary around here?”
“Why the infirmary? Is someone hurt?”
“Felix hit me, so I paid him back. The bastard got hit in the balls a little and started foaming at the mouth before passing out. I doubt it’s anything serious, but you never know.”
“B-Ba….”
Hermit went stiff like a mouse that had met a cat.
She fidgeted a few times, fixing her pointed hat and such, then suddenly turned on her heel.
“There’s no infirmary. Instead, we have an arrangement with the neighboring unit and borrow a priest. Ishtar from the neighboring unit can use healing prayers. Most injuries heal quickly.”
“Ooooh.”
“But you have to pay aether. It depends on the injury, but even just the consultation fee is ten thousand aether. That’s what it means to receive treatment from another unit’s priest.”
What?
They took ten thousand aether just for a consultation?
That was downright robbery.
“That healing prayer thing is like magic, right? Hermit, can’t you do something like that?”
“I can’t. Prayer and magic are different.”
“How are they different?”
“That’s a sharp question.”
Hermit narrowed the shining eyes beneath her pointed hat.
Then she picked up a dust-covered book from a nearby fallen pile, patted it clean, and offered it to me.
The title was as follows.
「The Key to Sorcery and Prayer」
It was a book with a mysterious title.
When I flipped it open and skimmed through the pages, there were quite a few pictures of scantily clad women too.
“With that, even a layman in sorcery like you should be able to learn most of the things you’re curious about.”
“Whoa, it even has your age written in here? That’s what I’m most curious about.”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Really? You’re young.”
“I know. That I’m young for a magician. But don’t think you can look down on me. Unlike those run-of-the-mill street magicians, I graduated from the Magic Tower. This hat is proof of that.”
It was a story overflowing with pride.
At the same time, it seemed to carry a warning.
I’m someone that impressive, so don’t mess with me recklessly—
“So where do I have to go to meet that priest?”
“You can’t meet them now. Interaction with other units is forbidden at night. It’s a rule that was made because thieves from each unit kept conspiring together every night.”
Aww, what a shame.
I felt bad for Felix, but I had done my best in my own way!
# # #
When I returned to the room, Felix was doing push-ups.
He was holding himself up on one thumb on each hand, and in the end, he even put one hand on his back and bent his arm.
Then he bent his waist backward like a shrimp and lifted his legs high, doing a handstand on one thumb.
After that, he twisted his hip joints in bizarre ways and abused his body, going beyond gymnastics and into something closer to a circus act.
“Whoa, how do you do that?”
Clap, clap, clap.
I was impressed in the purest sense.
At that, Felix casually wiped the sweat on his forehead with the towel around his neck and said,
“I train the joints throughout my body and the muscles I don’t normally use so I can swing a sword from any position. That way, I can immediately respond even to an unexpected blade coming at me from behind.”
So this was how slaughter-machine knights were perfected, through intense self-torture.
It was an ascetic practice back-alley punks wouldn’t even dare try to imitate.
“For all that, you couldn’t block a fist coming from below.”
“…It won’t happen twice.”
“If that had been a real fight just now, wouldn’t it have ended in one?”
“…That’s true. I’m still lacking.”
Unexpectedly accepting it without complaint, Felix began sweating again in another bizarre, acrobatic pose.
I tried copying a few of the postures too, but it was boring, and it only made me tired for no reason, so I quit.
Still, I was glad Felix seemed fine.
If he could move around that energetically, there was no need to show him to a priest or whatever.
That meant I’d saved ten thousand aether in consultation fees.
How many cans of cola was ten thousand aether?
It would have been better if, instead of a thief, I had been something like a “doctor” or a “priest.”
So this was why mothers made such a fuss about their children becoming doctors.
If I met the right idol or whatever and received a blessing of prayer, could I become a priest instead of a thief?
Thinking that, I opened the book I’d received from Hermit, and Felix spoke.
“That’s a book Hermit picked out for you, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“As you can tell just by looking, she’s soft-hearted and kind. The problem is that she spent so many years in the Magic Tower that she doesn’t know how the world works and trusts people too easily.”
“She did seem that way.”
I turned my gaze back to the book.
The densely packed letters made sleepiness pour over me, but when I thought that there might be an opportunity to obtain even more aether in here, I managed to wake up a little.
As Felix watched me, he casually said one thing.
“This is the first time in my life I’ve seen a thief reading a book.”
“Maybe because you’re the young master of a knightly family, you’ve never seen guys who specialize in handling book collections and expensive ancient texts. People usually called those guys ‘bookworms.’”
“Worms, huh. Did you have a nickname like that too?”
“I was a ball-worm. Mostly because I went after men’s balls.”
“Ugh.”
When I laughed, puhehehe, Felix frowned.
To soothe him a little, I held out a page of the book.
“About this picture of a naked woman here. They all have a star-shaped mark on their left shoulder. Don’t you think they used the same woman as the model for all of them? What do you think?”
“I don’t know about that. Do people usually pay attention to things like that?”
Felix blushed and quickly turned his head away.
Then he pulled his blanket over himself.
“We’re scheduled for our first party exploration tomorrow, so go to sleep early.”
Our first party exploration.
It made me feel pointlessly excited, like the night before a field trip when I was in elementary school.
But Felix added something that made me even more excited.
“The Sun’s Birth Festival is coming soon. So if we produce results this time, Brigadier General Ezakiel may personally visit the wall to give out rewards. So you should work hard too.”
Brigadier General Ezakiel was my benefactor, and a beauty.
To receive a reward directly from someone like that.
What kind of reward could it be?
My anticipation made it even harder to sleep.