Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, Vol. 1 (light novel)

by Hiro Ainana

  “Hmm? Are you planning to spend the night? You don’t have any bags…”

  “My packhorse got startled by the starfall the other day and ran off… Luckily, I still had my coin purse, so I managed to make it to town.”

  “Oh, that must have been rough! Well, we charge one large copper per night or a small copper for the large communal room. If you eat your meals at the bar, we’ll throw in a dish for free as a special deal for overnight customers.”

  Hmm. I don’t know the standard cost for inns here, but if I want to figure out the exchange rate between large coppers and silvers, I should try paying for ten days in advance. The landlady seemed like she’d be pretty good at math, so I doubted she’d mess up the calculation.

  “Well then, I’ll pay for ten days’ stay, please.”

  “Certainly! That’ll be two silvers, then.”

  I pulled two silver coins out of my pocket and handed them to the landlady. So five large coppers made one silver. If that wasn’t right, she probably would’ve mentioned knocking off an extra copper as a favor or something.

  Now that I’d secured a place at the inn, I definitely wanted something to eat. All I’d had the day before was a protein bar, so I was getting pretty hungry.

  “Ma’am, would I be able to take my meal now? I’d like to eat something simple if I can…”

  “Well, if you want hot food, you’re either a few hours too early or too late. The kitchen fire’s died out for the moment, but I do have a premade quiche I can fix up for you, if you’d like.”

  A quiche, huh? I hadn’t had that since I ate at a diner last month. Considering the town’s European-fantasy setting, I’d been expecting something more like rye bread or salty soup, but I guess I’d assumed too much.

  “I’ll take that, then, please.”

  “Certainly. Please have a seat; it’ll be right out. Martha, could you take our guest’s information for the register?”

  The landlady returned to the kitchen, and Martha appeared in her place, pitter-pattering up to me with a string-bound logbook like a clerk in a period piece.

  Martha’s outfit, which I hadn’t been able to get a look at before, consisted of a white blouse, a light-orange skirt, and a brown corset-style vest. Her shoes were made of leather and looked like soft hallway slippers.

  “Yes, ma’am! Sir, if you could give me your name, please!”

  “Satou.”

  “Mr. Satou… Got it. Now your age and occupation, please!”

  I had to stop myself from saying I was a twenty-nine-year-old programmer. My status screen said I was fifteen, and so should the ID papers I got earlier, so… “I’m a peddler, fifteen years old.”

  “Whoa, you’re older than me?! I figured we were around the same age!” Despite her surprise, Martha swiftly took down my info on the straw paper of the logbook.

  Apparently, I didn’t need to show my ID for inn registry. Right as Martha finished writing everything down, ready to start some kind of idle conversation, the landlady reappeared from the kitchen with a plate of food.

  “Thanks for waiting! The side dish is on the house.”

  Maybe it was just my imagination, but the landlady seemed to make a point of obstructing my view of Martha as she put down my food on the table.

  Two slices of quiche sat on the plate, along with a small bowl of what looked like pickled bok choy. The slices were generous, and there was a wooden fork to eat them with.

  The lone copper piece I paid for the meal felt like a cheap ten-yen coin.

  Now then, it was time to dig in to my first full meal in over a day. I took a bite slowly, savoring the taste. The quiche was dense and heavy, made with plenty of potatoes. The other ingredients consisted of spinachlike leafy greens, mushrooms, and…red onions maybe?

  Even though it was cold, it was tastier than I’d expected. I did think it could’ve used a bit more jerky, but it would be wrong to complain about a meal prepared especially for me outside of the usual kitchen hours.

  “Mom’s quiches are even better when they’re fresh from the oven!”

  “Martha! You haven’t cleaned up after those cowardly merchants who left this morning, have you?”

  “Oh, sorry, not yet!”

  “Then what are you lollygagging around for?”

  “All right, all right, I’m going. See you later, Mr. Satou!” Martha headed upstairs to do her cleaning.

  “What did you mean by ‘cowardly merchants’?”

  “Ahh, well… After these guests witnessed yesterday’s starfall, they were in a tizzy all night, going on about ‘a demon lord picking a fight with the dragons of the valley!’ They left first thing this morning.”

  She lost business because of me… That was a pretty bad thing I did.

  Wait. More important, there was a word in there I don’t like the sound of…

  “There’s a ‘demon lord’ around here?”

  “Well, there was. Though the destined hero defeated the last one sixty or seventy years ago. And I haven’t heard anything about one being resurrected anywhere.”

  So there was a “demon lord”…and a “hero.” Good thing that was taken care of. If this was a game, progressing through events as the protagonist would definitely end up with the demon lord getting resurrected. It was probably best not to stick my nose into it, poking around for more information.

  “Besides, in the six hundred years since the Shiga Kingdom was founded, no one has ever seen a demon lord in Seiryuu City or the neighboring counties. Even if it did attack, it’d start with Labyrinth City, I’m sure. And that’s on the opposite side of the kingdom, so we have no cause for worry.”

  If this was a game, I feel like this conversation would definitely raise an event flag for an attack.

  “Around here, we’re far more worried about wyverns. They can swoop down and carry away young farmhands, packhorses, even children. Our army is strong, so Seiryuu City is safe… But outside the city walls, people working in the fields are in constant fear of an attack.”

  Those things are scarier than I thought.

  “But the dragons don’t attack people?”

  “Haven’t you heard the legends? Dragons are lethargic and lazy. They sleep in the Valley of Dragons and seldom come out. The last time one appeared was two years ago, and the time before that was before I was born!

  “It was terrible, apparently. They say a black dragon attacked and ate all the goats and sheep…”

  She mentioned only livestock, so did that mean there weren’t that many human casualties? I wanted to talk about it a little more, but the landlady returned to the kitchen.

  Before finishing off the quiche, I decided to try the side dish. The pickled stuff in the bowl turned out to be cabbage, not bok choy. I had mistaken it because of the whitish color, but the taste reminded me of the sauerkraut I had tried in a shop specializing in German beer.

  The topping sprinkled over it was a finely chopped herb, maybe something like parsley. Returning from her cleaning, Martha informed me that if I mixed it into the cabbage before eating it, it would cut the sourness.

  Wait, was she done cleaning already? It hadn’t even been ten minutes!

  But since she was just sitting around while I ate, I asked her if she knew any shops where I could buy some everyday supplies. I could have just checked my map, but I thought it was important to communicate with the locals.

  “Huh? Supplies? There are street stalls in the east quarter, so you could probably buy them there. But as long as it’s nothing too complicated, we can have our maid buy them for you!”

  “Thank you, but I’d like to get a change of clothes and underwear and things like that, so I think I’d better go myself.” It was tempting to let them treat me like a celebrity, but I was a bit reluctant to have a stranger buying me underwear.

  “Hmm… I know there are stalls on East Street that sell secondhand clothes…”

  “Secondhand? I don’t know…”

  “If you want new stuff, your best be
t is to get it tailor-made on Center Street, but that’ll be pricey!”

  “Is there anywhere that sells new clothes that’re manufactured instead of tailor-made?”

  “What’s ‘manufactured’…? Oh, you mean like premade clothes? You use some big words for someone so young. They sell those on Teputa Avenue, but they’re still pretty expensive.”

  Teputa Avenue, huh? I opened the map to search for it. It looked a little far from the inn. For now, I marked it on the map with a pin.

  “Thank you. I’ll take a stroll around the street stalls and Teputa Avenue, then.”

  “Oh, I know! How about I show you around? I can, can’t I, Mom? Especially since there aren’t a lot of customers today!”

  Oh, that would be nice. Shopping with a local as my guide sounded exciting. Martha got permission from her mother, on the condition that she’d be back in time to help prepare for dinner.

  Still, guest or not, I found it odd that she’d so easily let her daughter go out on the town with a man she didn’t know. Where was her sense of danger? Wait… Maybe she had assessed (correctly) that I wouldn’t hurt a fly. Yeah, that was probably it.

  Even back in high school, a girl I was close to was always telling me what a good person I am… Okay, no—let’s not go dredging up traumatic memories.

  Martha brought me to a section of East Street that was lined with all kinds of street stalls for about a third of a mile. Each stall had a space of only about twenty square feet. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could swear there was a faint scent of soy sauce in the air.

  “A lot of these stalls are closed…”

  “Oh, that’s because food vendors and farmers from the villages nearby usually do business here. They generally close around noon. Come evening, a lot of the food carts set up in the plaza instead.”

  Most of the clothing vendors were about midway down the street, so we headed in that direction, idly browsing the other stalls as we went.

  Some of the ones selling foodstuffs were still open, it turned out. Standing beside Martha as she admired some carved wooden accessories, I listened with great interest to a conversation between the proprietor of the stall next door and an older woman shopping there.

  “How much for three of these gabo fruits?”

  “Three of ’em would be two penny coins.”

  “What? Two pennies? Surely one’s enough.”

  “At that price you’d be bleedin’ me dry, ma’am! How about four for two?”

  “Five for two!”

  “Oh, all right. That’ll do. Only because you’re so pretty, y’hear?”

  So haggling is standard here, huh? Man, I’m used to buying things for whatever the price tag says… That’s kind of a pain.

  Incidentally, a “gabo fruit” appeared to be a root crop not unlike a red, fist-size pumpkin.

  I was drawn to the unusual term penny coin, so I took one out of Storage to have a look. It was a square brass coin that weighed only a fraction of an ounce, though mine was rusted over.

  Martha held a small hair ornament shaped like a water bird up to her hair and turned to me. “What do you think? Does it suit me?”

  “Yeah, it looks great.”

  “Which one do you think looks better?”

  Heh-heh-heh… I knew she’d ask that!

  I’d learned all too well in college how to deal with this. You can’t just blurt your honest opinion. You have to figure out which one she’s already leaning toward, based on her initial reactions, and go with that one. Otherwise, the process will just get dragged out even more.

  “The light-blue one, I think. It goes great with your hair color.”

  “You think so, too?”

  “I’ll sell that one to ya for three copper coins,” the shopkeeper announced quickly, sensing that he might have a customer.

  “I’m sorry; I don’t have enough pocket money today… I’ll try to come and buy it at the next harvest festival.”

  Huh? I’d expected her to try to hint that I should buy it for her, but I guess she’s too modest for that. Thanks to extensive experience with my college girlfriend, I was already prepared to pay for it. I also wanted to give haggling a try, so I decided to get it for her as thanks for guiding me through the city.

  “Any chance you’d take one copper?”

  “If I did, I’d barely break even! Make it two coppers, at least.”

  As I started to negotiate, Martha tugged on my sleeve, seeming worried that I was spending money on her. “Wait, you don’t have to—” But I waved her off.

  From what I’d seen so far, I was fairly certain that five pennies made one copper, and four coppers made one large copper.

  “How about one copper and two pennies?”

  “Make it a copper and four.”

  “A copper and three?”

  “All right. Sold.”

  I pulled the right amount from my pocket and paid the man. He handed me the hair ornament, and I affixed it to Martha’s hair for her. It felt like going around to stalls at a festival with a younger cousin or something.

  > Skill Acquired: “Haggling”

  > Skill Acquired: “Estimation”

  > Skill Acquired: “Negotiation”

  For my success in bargaining, I was rewarded with several new skills. They seemed useful, so I enhanced all three with some skill points.

  “Hee-hee… Thank you, Mr. Satou!”

  “Not at all! It’s my way of thanking you for showing me around.” I replied to Martha’s shy thanks as noncommittally as possible. If I wanted to flirt with her, I’d go on to add a few compliments or something, but again, she’s a little girl and I’m not a creep, so I left it at that.

  Since I had activated the “Estimation” skill, looking at a product would now allow me to see the cost displayed in an AR box beside it, in the form of white text showing a range like 2~4 copper coins. That was probably the estimated price range.

  Anyway, there were an awful lot of children working around here.

  “What’s wrong, Mr. Satou?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking about how many kids there are…”

  “They’re mostly servants and maids who get paid in tips.”

  “Really? Wow, that’s quite the work ethic for being so young.”

  “Huh? It’s normal.” Martha seemed genuinely confused by how impressed I was. I guess the standard age of employment was really low here.

  Ooh! That must be—!

  Peeking out through a gap in all the hustle and bustle of the marketplace was a pair of lightly twitching cat ears.

  Beastfolk! It had to be! It seemed like they mostly lived in the west quarter, so I hadn’t seen one in person yet.

  Unfortunately, a sudden shout put a damper on my excitement.

  “Dirty little animals! Whaddaya think yer doin’ in the east quarter?!”

  A blond young man in a tunic aimed a kick at a little dog-girl struggling under a heavy burden, and her bundle of firewood clattered to the ground as she fell. Her ears flattened in fear as she looked up at the man who’d kicked her. The cat-girl with her came running over immediately, bowing and apologizing fervently to him.

  I couldn’t stand by and watch this.

  “Do you have a problem with these girls?” In an uncharacteristic move, I butted in before processing what I was doing.

  “Huh?! Are these your slaves? Get some leashes on ’em and put ’em back in the west quarter!”

  To be honest, I didn’t have much of a plan, but luckily, the other guy quickly retreated. I gathered up the dog-girl’s scattered sticks.

  “Th-the firewood…”

  “P-please…g-give…”

  The two little girls looked up at me from the ground. Did they think I was going to take away their firewood? The dog-girl was stammering so badly from fear, she couldn’t finish her request for me to give it back. I took a piece of string out of my bag and tied up the sticks as they’d been before, then handed them back.

  “Are you all right?�
��

  “Yes.”

  “We’re…fine.”

  “Oh, good. There are a lot of people on the main street, so be careful.”

  The two thanked me profusely as they left. When I turned back, Martha was giving me a strange look.

  “What is it?”

  “You were so kind to those beastfolk…”

  Hmm? Why not? They’re cute, aren’t they? Sure, they need a wash and a haircut, but I’m sure they’ll grow up to be lovely young women.

  “Do people in the city hate them that much?”

  “Well, yeah. Apparently, beastfolk used to attack or even kill hunters and villagers coming to sell produce.”

  So they’re thought of as thieves and savages, I guess?

  “Oh, hey—look over there!” Maybe she was just trying to change the subject, but Martha quickly dragged me over to what had caught her interest. I pushed the beastfolk to the back of my mind and looked where she was pointing. Small animals in cages were up for sale.

  The vendor was a man in a fur coat who appeared to be a hunter. Some kind of hatchet hung from his waist.

  Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen many people walking around with swords—only guards and young delinquents. All I’d noticed other than that were a few dagger-length blades hanging from some belts. Swords are heavier than they look, so I bet carrying them at your waist would drag down your clothes and give you sore shoulders.

  Martha and I both commented on the animals in the cages, but our opinions were at odds.

  “They’re pretty cute.”

  “They look delicious!”

  Embarrassed that she’d prioritized her stomach, Martha cleared her throat, then grabbed my arm and led me to the next stall. So I guess we’re pretending that didn’t happen.

  By the time we reached the clothing area, I’d already bought mugs, a comb, soap, and some “tooth-polishing sticks.” These were some sort of dried plant stem that you were supposed to gnaw on while rinsing with water in order to clean your teeth; there were no toothbrushes or floss here.

  I didn’t see anything made of glass, either. The closest I could find were wares made of gems or crystal.

  By now I’d gotten the hang of shopping here. Vendors didn’t like it if I tried buying something right away at its estimated price, I realized after three stores or so. Instead, I had to start the negotiations at about half the going rate, then arrive at the price I wanted after three or four rounds of haggling. Man, I didn’t mind doing that every once in a while, but every single time was a pain.