“Alright, that’s enough, everyone! Our lord and his party are tired! They have, after all, returned from having defeated a dragon!”
He made his way back through the crowd towards me.
“We’ll allow them a little time to recuperate, and have a party tomorrow!” He glanced in my direction and said, “I assume that’s all right with you?”
I nodded. I was no longer any match for Tonio when it came to arranging these kinds of things. Going along with the flow Tonio had created, I shouted, “We will be celebrating the slaying of the dragon! Everyone, I hope you will eat, drink, sing, and celebrate to your hearts’ content tomorrow!”
Especially loud cheers went up among the crowd. All these familiar faces were smiling. They looked like they were having fun, enjoying themselves, and simply being happy. I thought about how I’d protected this happiness. If I hadn’t taken on Valacirca, or if I’d lost to him, I would never have been able to witness this. I’d protected the things I’d gained.
There had been a point to me being reborn from my last world in which I had holed myself up constantly and was unable to go anywhere, a point to forcing myself up and keeping on walking. The full appreciation of that filled my heart and caused a lump to rise in my throat.
◆
The first thing in the morning the following day, the grand celebration started. Tables from all over the town were dragged out into the square, and white tablecloths were draped over them. Garlands were hung everywhere, and right from the early hours of the morning, steaming-hot dishes made by the ladies of the town were pulled out from houses all over. So many people had showed up, each groomed and dressed for the occasion, and every one of them was smiling.
In formal dress, I raised my voice on the platform. “Uh, I won’t talk long. I’m as starving as the rest of you!” I cracked a light joke. Laughs came back. “In celebration of the successful slaying of the dragon and the bountiful blessings we have received, I ask you to raise your cups to the goddess of the flame, and all the good gods!”
“To the goddess of the flame, and all the good gods!” everyone shouted.
“Cheers!” I called out, and they all called back the same, raising their countless cups. There were some made from horns, and others made from wood; some had been decorated in vibrant colors, while others were plain. They all knocked noisily together and were drunk dry one after another as the party progressed.
All over, conversations filled the air unprompted, punctuated with bursts of joyful laughter. Amid all this, I heard the musical sound of strings. Seizing on the chance to profit, Bee had happily started playing her rebec and telling a story.
It was a story of elves, dwarves, and their two countries, finally returning to this land after being lost to the Great Collapse two hundred years ago. It was the story of Lothdor and the Iron Country. The delicate movements of her fingers lent color to her tale, sometimes with bright music and other times sad.
Then there was a transition. The sound stopped. She spoke quietly, without music. The story of the two countries ended with their destruction. But then, ever so quietly, the strings began to sing again. And Bee sang that as long as there were people, as long as there was the will, the countries would revive. Just like reincarnation’s eternal cycle, even when all fell into darkness, the caring goddess of the flame would shine her light upon it.
Even if poison and darkness covered everything, and the land became a place of terror where hideous demons roamed and a wicked dragon howled, still the Faraway Paladin would bravely venture forth, driving out the darkness of this southern continent with the gentle goddess of the flame by his side. Bee’s rebec sang of how the Paladin slayed the dragon, loudly for all to hear.
The Faraway Paladin III: The Lord of the Rust Mountains — Finis.
Glittering rays of sunlight shone through an endless number of enormous trees lined up like a temple’s colonnade. We were deep in Beast Woods, in the domain of the great Lord of the Woods, the Lord of Holly.
“Ohh! This is, great place! ‘You are very thoughtful, Sir William.’”
“‘No, trouble.’ So, about what we discussed...”
“Muh-huh. We accepted.”
The one nodding back was someone so large he was impossible to forget. He was the forest giant I’d fought with once, Gangr of the race of Jotunn. Tribal giants were walking all around the area with curiosity, setting up large canopy tents made of beast hide. The men were over three meters tall and the women more than two and a half, so they were quite the sight. It kind of made me feel like a halfling.
“Fighting people is a pain, whether win or whether lose.”
“You’re not kidding.”
I had slain the dragon, returned home, and held a party. If this were a story, it would have wrapped up at that point with “And they all lived happily ever after” and the fall of a curtain, but unfortunately, this was reality. There had been a lot of things to do in the aftermath. I’d reported to various relevant parties including His Excellency Ethel and Bishop Bagley to tell them that the issue had been safely resolved. To avert riots, I’d allayed the concerns of people who had become anxious. I’d checked the spread of misinformation by widely publicizing the facts. The dragon’s howling had caused trouble that required an urgent response all across Beast Woods. I’d brought all kinds of trouble under control, even trouble that was only brewing.
Even after all that was mostly dealt with, there were still a host of other things I needed to do. Figuring out what to do about the clan of forest giants we’d discovered had been one of them. Just like the dragons, the race generally called giants was said to be neutral, neither affiliated with the good gods nor the evil gods.
“Neutral” here didn’t mean that they wouldn’t support either side because they disliked conflict entirely. They could cope without the protection of either set of gods, and if someone picked a fight with them, no matter which faction the aggressor was part of, they had the strength to hit back and do a spectacular amount of damage. So they had no reason to bother getting involved in a faction war between these guys called gods. They were “neutral” in an extremely powerful sense.
It was said that in comparison to other giants, forest giants had only weakly inherited the blood of the Primordial Giants who existed in the age of the creation myth. Over the generations, their divinity had diminished, their lifespans had shortened, and they had become smaller, too. Despite that, however, their bodies were still three meters tall, and they had a high level of skill as elementalists, although they still fell quite a way short of Menel. There weren’t many of them, but they were a race of extremely high-quality and powerful battlemages. And this was what the comparatively weak-blooded forest giants were like.
The anecdotes about the Primordial Giants who had retained a strong influence from the age of creation were even more crazy. There were the towering Storm Giants, who lived in the eyes of tempests in the southern seas and walked the seas accompanied by raging winds. There were the Lava Giants, who spent eons sleeping within lava in large volcanic belts and woke up from time to time when the volcanoes erupted. There were the Cloud Giants, who made their home atop inexhaustible thunderclouds in the wastes far to the east and ran about the skies at will.
Though many of them had already departed this dimension, just hearing them described gave me a dizzying feeling of scale. I could understand why it was said that dragons and giants were equals. If I’d been something like that, I would have been able to fight Valacirca, one of the Primordial Dragons, in a physical punching match without ever retreating a single step.
Anyway, the problem was that we had discovered we had some very powerful neighbors deep in the forest. They may not have been quite as extreme as the mythical beings I described, but they had certainly inherited their blood. The fact that they were living in the depths of Beast Woods meant that beasts were nothing to them. In fact, judging by the lines of beast-hide canopies, they were the predators here, and the beasts were their pre
y. They were stronger than the beasts, in other words.
If they spread outwards and had an unfortunate collision with the steadily expanding area where people were living, all hell would break loose. Specifically, if a careless encounter turned into a fight and someone ended up dying on one side or the other, there might be no coming back from that. The casualties that would result would be absolutely no joke, and nothing good would come of it for anyone.
Of course, because the two of us did know each other, the negotiation route was open. It was possible that we could work something like that out with compensation. But that was a last resort, not something to rely on from the beginning. Which was why—
“Gangr and clan will protect big Lords.”
I had decided to approach them to ask whether they would move to the areas of the forest with the two gigantic trees known as the Twins of the Woods: the Lord of Oak and the Lord of Holly. I already knew their locations from the time we had that trouble with the horned demon called a Cernunnos.
Those two Lords of the Woods were the most vital part of Beast Woods. We couldn’t allow their domains to be destroyed with a Taboo Word or something, or it would be a disaster. However, the sacred territory of a Lord of the Woods had to remain lush with greenery by its nature, and so we couldn’t afford to let many people into it or develop it on any large scale. Basically, the only way to handle those areas was to treat them as forbidden; yet providing them no protection at all was also not an option.
We were between a rock and hard place, and that was where the giants came in. They would get a virtually permanent place to live, where they would never inadvertently bump into humans, and the Twins would have powerful guardians they could talk with living right nearby. This would most likely be beneficial for both of them.
I shook hands with him to conclude our contract. His hand was big and thick.
“Come to think of it... ‘Gangr, where, Western Common Speech?’”
“Long ago, near the outside the forest, a good man was... uhh... ang... angry... angry culture...? ‘Farming.’ I learned a bit from trade him fur and grain.”
“Huh...”
“That was before three hundred springs came, or more. After, one of the clan fought with humans. We moved into forest deep.”
That really was a long time ago. But if that was the case—
“Is it still... ‘possible, trade-things’?”
“Muh-huh. ‘We would be grateful to trade for metal, but what do you need?’”
“We ‘want, herbs, wood, beast hide, bones.’”
We talked like that about the items we wanted for a while and agreed on the general idea. We could leave the specifics to the people who would actually be involved in the trading.
“Oh,” Gangr said as that topic fizzled out. His eyes were on my back. “What you... uh... ‘What happened to that spear?’”
I did my best to force a smile onto my face as I answered him, but I probably made it a bitter one accidentally. “Unfortunately, it broke during my battle with the dragon.”
Gangr looked sorry for asking.
◆
Pale Moon was destroyed. It had been shattered, broken, and mangled during my battle with Valacirca. It may have been a spear protected by countless Signs, but attacks from a dragon, a being close to the Words, were the one thing it couldn’t handle. I’d been taking care not to let my weapons get destroyed, of course, but there was a limit to what I could do in that situation. So there was nothing I could have done. I just had to accept it...
I gave a long sigh. It was still depressing.
Having returned to Torch Port after that, I was now sitting on a pier and sighing. To tell the truth, I had already checked whether Pale Moon could be fixed. I had His Excellency introduce me to the most skilled blacksmith in Whitesails, and I asked him if there was anything he could do. The reticent blacksmith silently shook his head and said nothing else.
I must have had a unbearably sad look on my face when I received that answer. Perhaps out of pity, the blacksmith did some shortening work on the part of Pale Moon’s broken blade that had the Word of Light engraved on it and made a little dagger for me. The parts with the Signs of Sharpness and Strengthening were shattered and unsalvageable.
“It’s hard to get over it.”
I pulled the dagger shortened from Pale Moon from its sheath that was strapped to my hip and held it up to the sun. The blade gleamed nostalgically. But this dagger now fell far short of the standard of performance that I needed out of a weapon. It was lacking in too many ways for even my normal self to wield, and I dreaded to think what would happen if I tried seriously swinging it around after awakening the power of the foul-dragon sleeping in my soul. It would probably break the first time I hit it against something.
I had many opponents to fight, from beasts to the remnants of the demons and even the minions of unknown evil gods in the south. I couldn’t keep on using a poor-performance weapon just because of sentimentality. It was probably about time I searched for a new main weapon already. After all, at this point, I could pick whatever weapon I wanted.
Even the weapons I’d picked up while hunting around old ruins included several spears that simply outperformed Pale Moon. And if I wasn’t happy with any of those, I could pay some money to the merchants of Whitesails and buy a whole collection of spears from all kinds of places which could be transported here by ship. If I used my connections and made some earnest requests, I could probably even obtain the secret weapons of the dwarves or the elves.
I had access to a spear of old magic, with Signs of fire and lightning incorporated into the blade. There was a spear that tracked the enemy when thrown and could be returned to hand with a single Word. There was a consecrated spear that sharpened the mind of its holder and enhanced their resistance. Another option was a spear of misdirection made of mithril that was imbued with mystifying fairies. There was even a plain but easy-to-use spear that had simply been made to be extremely sharp and durable and which had been fortified with a Sign so that it would never dull.
But none of them felt right.
I’d probably been using Pale Moon for too long. Objectively speaking, Pale Moon wasn’t that strong a spear. It couldn’t match up to Overeater, the life-sucking sword that a demon king had made to kill the High King he opposed; nor was it a match for Calldawn, the small golden sun created by the god of the forge. It was simply an ordinary sturdy spear with an adjustable length and a shining blade. But even so, no matter what anyone said about it, that ordinary sturdy spear with an adjustable length and a shining blade had definitely been the Faraway Paladin’s main weapon. It had been the one weapon I most relied upon.
I couldn’t believe this had become of my favorite weapon. I probably still hadn’t picked myself up from the shock. I got the feeling I could now understand why Reystov insisted so strongly on his favorite sword. None of these weapons had the most important factor I’d taken for granted all this time: absolute confidence in them built up over years. Losing this was a bigger blow than expected.
I gazed silently at the dagger and thought about what to do with it. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t take this shortened Pale Moon out on my adventures. If I did, it would either be simple dead weight, or I would break it. And yet, it didn’t feel right to leave it just decorating the mansion as a memento. What to do, I wondered. What could I do with this...
There were still many things to be done in the aftermath of the dragon-slaying, but I couldn’t get my mind off this. While I was deep in thought—
“I’m gonna do this, dammit! I’m doing this and I mean it!”
I heard a pretty spirited voice.
◆
Walking along the street beside the river, apparently seething with anger, was a boy about thirteen or fourteen years old. He had messy, black hair and strong, hazel eyes. He’d thrown on a coat over rough hemp clothing, and on his back was a crude quiver and bow. Also strapped to his waist was a club that he’d apparently cu
t from wood without much care. I guessed he was a hunter or adventurer in training.
“I’m gonna kill a beast and get its head!”
“L-Let’s not, Glen... It’s too dangerous!”
“Shut up, Alex, I’m going!”
Chasing after the boy was a ginger kid of about the same age, wearing slightly more substantial cotton clothing. My eyes were drawn to the dark, patched-together robe and the pretty old-looking ash wand with a little bit of cloudy silverwork at the tip. This one was clearly a sorcerer—but didn’t seem like a product of the Academy. Perhaps it was some regional hexmage branch of magic?
As I continued to watch idly, the boy disregarded the sorcerer’s attempts to stop him and went marching away from town.
I was getting a bad feeling, so I hurriedly called out to the two of them. “Um, excuse me.”
“Uh? Who’re you?”
The boy named Glen stared up at me with a combative look on his face. The sorcerer kid who had been called Alex looked a little relieved. I bent my knees a little and looked Glen in the eyes.
“I was just wondering where you’re going in such a rage.”
“Beast hunting, okay?! Beast hunting!”
“Beast hunting?”
“Yeah! What? Something wrong with wanting to be an adventurer?!”
Based on where we were and the direction they’d come from, I had a sneaking suspicion I knew what had happened here.
“Ahh... Did you happen to go to the Brown Bear?” I said, giving the name of an inn.
“So what if we did?!”
“U-Um, we... We just... bumped into each other on the road and... he said let’s go together... and then, um...”
“Those assholes!”
“Ahh...”
The Brown Bear was the hangout of some particularly rough adventurers, even for Torch Port. There were some fairly nasty characters among them. If a couple of young, aspiring adventurers went wandering into a place like that, the way they would be treated would probably be decidedly cruel and demeaning.
The Lord of the Rust Mountains (Complete) Page 36
