Then...
“The Sage passed away, but she still believes that one day, a delegate who knows his true name will come.”
Their names...
“And she will return the dagger, the money she was lent, and the interest, as well as the amount that was entrusted to her husband.”
Their names were still echoing.
“And she will say her thanks for what was done for her.”
Over two hundred years later, and they were still echoing, right up to the present.
“And that’s the end of my story. A story of great heroes that echoes down the ages, even today... Huh? Will? Will, are you crying?”
As she tilted her head and peered into my face, I panicked. My face was bright red, and my eyes were blurry with tears. I was only moments from a complete breakdown. “C-Crying?! No, I’m not crying!”
“Ohh yes you are! Your eyes are red!” Bee gave a satisfied laugh. “My awesome storytelling touched you, didn’t it?”
“N-No, no it didn’t!”
“Hehehe, fess up fess up!”
We teased and ribbed each other a lot that evening. As we joked together, I felt that something warm had flared to life inside my chest.
Blood, Mary, Gus.
There are so many people in this world besides me who still remember you.
There were so many.
And I could cry for joy.
The following day, I was outside the shrine before the first light of dawn, practicing thrusting my spear and pulling it back. The fact that I had been on night watch duty since late last night had something to do with it, and I was just a little excited as well.
I’d now heard about the “Fertile Kingdom.” It was a country that had expanded from Grassland down here to Southmark. Count Dagger was nobility, and the expansion of the Fertile Kingdom to Southmark was a new development of the past few decades, so the half-elf woman in the story was probably back on the other continent. Which meant that if I crossed the sea, I could find someone I could talk to about Blood, Mary, and Gus.
I had a lot of things to deal with right now, so I couldn’t just drop everything, but one day I wanted to cross the sea and pay her a visit. Thrusting the spear forward again with a grunt, I thought about how I wanted to feel like I’d earned the right to say with pride, I was a member of their family.
Mixing in some footwork, I jabbed out with my spear again, sharply. And sharper again.
In the language of battle techniques, “sharpness” didn’t refer to simple speed. It referred to the swiftness of the switch between stillness and action.
Stillness...
Explosive motion.
Stillness...
Explosive motion.
Sharper. Sharper. Sharper still—
“Lo. I see you’re hard at work already.”
The voice broke me out of my concentration. How many of those practice thrusts had I done? I was pretty short of breath, so it had probably been at least a hundred.
“Tonio.”
The one who had come out of the aged shrine was the man with the beard and mild smile. I went to put away my spear.
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to interrupt. Please continue.”
“Ah, thanks...”
That said, I’d allowed myself to get way too absorbed in practice. I still had walking to do today, so it would do me no good to exhaust myself by pushing my body to its limits. I had to do some cooling down exercises anyway, so I decided to just practice my form. Tonio sat down on a nearby stump and watched me.
“I must say, you are strong, Will.”
“Am I? You think so?”
“Well, I’m not sure how much this is worth, coming from someone who was cheated by a group of fraudulent adventurers...” Tonio laughed as if to conceal his embarrassment.
I listened while practicing my form with slow, gentle movements. Knock away the opponent’s weapon, lower myself, upwards thrust...
“But I can at least tell that your movements are very polished. And more than that, if I may give my opinion as a merchant...”
“What is it?”
“I believe that spear to be a dwarven masterpiece, and you look perfectly natural with it. Someone who’s a perfect match for a gem like that must be a gem themselves.” He shrugged. “However, there is something I don’t understand.”
“Something you don’t understand?”
“Yes,” he said. I suddenly noticed that behind his gentle gaze were the keen eyes of a merchant carefully evaluating a product. “What is it that you truly seek?”
I paused and tilted my head to the side. “Truly seek? Hmm, well, what I want is for the god of the flame—”
“Those are your desires as a priest. Well, perhaps once one is a saintly priest, it becomes a way of life, but all the same... Do you not have any individual desires?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Because I am a merchant.” Tonio laughed. “That which abounds far away, I sell close by, and that which abounds close by, I sell far away. That is what it means to be a merchant. Our business is in moving products, granting people’s wishes, and ensuring their satisfaction in exchange for an appropriate price.”
He spoke openly and honestly, but his tone was serious. It dawned on me that this was the creed which he lived his life by.
“And yet... I cannot picture how you could be satisfied,” Tonio continued. “You are a bit of a mystery. You have muscular arms and plenty of pluck. Based on the way you heal difficult wounds and illnesses, you have earned the gods’ blessings. I sense etiquette and erudition in the way you act, and you seem to have built up a financial cushion as well. And yet, you are sensitive enough to shed tears at a famous story as if you have barely experienced life at all. I have never seen a person quite like you before. It seems to me that ‘nobility’ is not quite accurate. You are like the holy knights that one hears about in stories.”
Tonio smiled with his whole face. “So for my own edification, I thought I would ask you directly while I have the opportunity. What is it that you, as an individual, are looking for? Or are you indeed a representative of God through and through?”
I had to think about the answer. What did I want from the outside world—from this world? In fact, to begin with...
“Tonio, I, um... prior to now, I was living in a small and happy place, with people who... well, they were the ones who raised me, they were my teachers, and I also thought of them as my family. But just before I was due to set off on my own and become independent, I suddenly lost those people and was forced to leave. In their place, I gained the protection of the god of the flame.”
Those events with the god of undeath—it seemed unreal, but they had only happened a few weeks ago.
“I still know so little about the world—about anything, really—so I’m basically just mindlessly following the mission my god sets for me, I think.”
I didn’t know anything about this place, so how was I meant to know what I wanted here? I thought that I probably needed first to learn about this world, this world that Blood and Mary and Gus had fought to protect, and I told him that. “So, the first thing I want to do is learn about the world. I think I’ll discover what I want as I encounter things and learn about them.”
As I said it, an image came into my head of Blood, Mary, and Gus laughing, and I pictured their exploits together.