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It was not Yukinari, but Dasa who had spoken. She was glaring at Arlen from behind her glasses.

Instantly, the two knights behind Arlen jumped forward and restrained him.

“Very sorry,” one of them said.

“We keep telling him,” the other added.

They both bowed their heads and hurried past Yukinari’s party, dragging Arlen—who didn’t actually seem to be finished speaking yet—with them. It was then that Yukinari saw that one of the knights’ suits of armor had a hole in it—specifically, at the waist.

A bullet hole.

He must be one of the missionaries Dasa had shot when they first came to Friedland. In other words, he’d had the ultimate first-hand experience of just how powerful the .44 Magnum rounds fired by Dasa’s Red Chili and Yukinari’s Durandall were—how they could punch through armor.

Apparently, the knight didn’t want to incur Dasa’s wrath again.

“You might be more godlike than me, Dasa,” Yukinari said thoughtfully.

Dasa gave him a questioning look.

“Never mind. Let’s hurry.” Yukinari smiled and gave Dasa a little push on the back, and they were walking again.

●

The young woman delivered her verdict on the state of Friedland:

“Everything’s going well.”

Her rich, golden hair shone in the light that poured in through the window. She was very pretty.

“Crops are growing in the new fields as expected, and there haven’t been any reported sightings of demigods or xenobeasts. If things keep going like this, we can expect a twenty or thirty percent increase in the harvest.”

It wasn’t just her symmetrical features. She spoke without verbal clutter, and her facial expressions were clarity itself. She was obviously an intellectual, and her every movement radiated refinement. That she was not only well-bred but intelligent would have been obvious after only a short conversation. On top of all this, the force of her personality was evident in her emerald eyes.

In some sense, all of this was only natural. She came from such a bloodline and held such an office that in our own world, she might well have been a princess.

This was Fiona Schillings, the daughter of Friedland’s mayor and the town’s current acting leader.

In many cases, the “mayors” of these remote regions were the kings or aristocrats of the small nations that had existed in the past, simply given a new title. The Schillings family had administered Friedland for generations without any particular objection from the villagers, and so they continued as mayors.

With her father’s health failing, leaving him bedridden, it was now Fiona who had practical responsibility for nearly every aspect of town life.

“Well, that’s good to hear,” said Yukinari, seated directly across from her. Dasa sat to his left and Ulrike to his right, and Berta was there, too. The group of them had come into town to discuss a number of issues with Deputy Mayor Fiona.

“Just twenty or thirty percent, though?” Yukinari said. “I wasn’t expecting it to double or anything, but I thought it might be a little more than that.” He grinned ruefully.

Irrigation ditches had been dug. Fertilizer had been put down. Fields had been added. Yukinari and the Friedlanders had put in a good deal of labor to alter the environment, but it wasn’t clear yet whether they would see a corresponding increase in the harvest. The number of villagers—the number of people who could do farm work—was unchanged, so maybe they just didn’t have enough manpower.

“Logic is as logic does,” Fiona said, not seeming very bothered. If anything, her sly smile suggested how important that twenty or thirty percent was. “There are a lot of things we won’t know for sure until we try them. But even a ten percent increase in the harvest would be big.”

“Well, that makes me feel a little better,” Yukinari said with a shrug.

As we’ve said, he may have taken on the duties of guarding the town in place of the erdgod, but he lacked the ability to fulfill the deity’s other role—making the land abundant. He had no way of assuring the villagers a particular result as the prior erdgod had under the system of living sacrifice.

As a result of saving one person—Berta—from the jaws of a man-eating deity, dozens or hundreds of people might die of starvation. If that happened—well, the math just didn’t work out.

“Next is trade,” Fiona said, shooting a glance at Ulrike. “I’m happy to say that the people of Rostruch showed an interest in several of the items we sent them. In exchange, they’re willing to give us food, as well as seeds and sprouts that we can plant in our tilled fields.”

“More good news. Fields weren’t going to do us any good if we didn’t have anything to plant in them.”

A diversity of crops is important from both a nutritional and a disaster-prevention standpoint. The nutrients contained in each kind of crop are subtly different, and while some plants stand up to the cold well, others endure strong sunlight easily. Introducing other crops in addition to the ones the Friedlanders had traditionally raised would help address both of these concerns.

The fields had been expanded not just to better the harvest, but also so there would be some room to experiment with new products.

Most of the townspeople didn’t grasp the details, but Fiona, who had been educated in the capital, was quick to pick up on what Yukinari had in mind. She had good intuition and learned readily. She was also good at applying her knowledge. One reason Yukinari was able to put these ideas to the test was because she was there to help him.

“The trade routes seem to be problem-free, too,” she said. “Lord Yggdra is keeping xenobeasts and demigods at bay, and the missionary knights appear to be taking their work very seriously.”

“Yeah, I got the same impression,” Yukinari said, thinking back to his encounter with Arlen and the other knights.

He had decided to ask the missionary knights to act as bodyguards for trade with Rostruch, as well as to patrol the farming areas. True, they had come to the area as religious invaders and he couldn’t put all his trust in them yet, but this was at least a little better than taking away their weapons and putting them in chains like slaves. They were knights, and battle was their business. They were ideal candidates for patrol and guard work.

“Neither has there been any concern with the familiars.” This came from Ulrike. She herself was a sort of terminal—that is, a familiar—for Yggdra, and the fact that she could speak and act here, so far from Rostruch, was because there was a chain of “intermediary” familiars placed at regular intervals along the trade route.

These familiars not only acted as a relay between Yggdra and Ulrike, but also helped protect trade. They gave off Yggdra’s aura, essentially marking the route as part of the erdgod’s territory and discouraging demigods and xenobeasts from getting too close.

“We intend to create a shrine for the other familiars as soon as possible,” Fiona said.

“Mm,” Ulrike replied.

Most of the intermediary familiars were currently living outdoors. Yggdra was a plant, so the elements didn’t seem to bother her familiars much, but it also wasn’t very polite to keep a god’s messengers living in the rough. Fiona and the townspeople had suggested a series of simple shrines that would give the familiars somewhere to live as well as serving to mark out the trade route.

A thought came unbidden into Yukinari’s mind: It’s a lot like those Jizo statues that live in roadside shrines in Japan.

In Yukinari’s previous world, Japan, there had been a folk religious entity known as Dosojin, “the god of roads and ancestors.” Sometimes known as “the roadside god,” he protected borders, made sure families flourished, and kept travelers safe. “Jizo” was the Japanese name of the bodhisattva Kshitigarbha, from Buddhism, but he had merged with the Dosojin cult, and now he could be found in small shrines that dotted the roadways.

“What is it?” Ulrike looked at him quizzically. Yukinari realized he must have been smiling.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just a little bit like this deity from my homeland.”

“Ah. Now that is most interesting,” Ulrike said, leaning in.

“Eh, let’s save it for another time.” He changed the subject. “You know, we ran into Arlen on the way here.”

“And I suppose he was perfectly polite to you,” Fiona said with a grim smile.

Arlen and Fiona happened to know each other. They had been classmates at the academy in the capital, and she had never known him to hold back from self-important, extreme pronouncements.

“Oh, uh, as polite as ever,” Yukinari said evasively, glancing at Dasa. Stay quiet, the look seemed to say. Arlen had been aggressive, yes, but it wasn’t Yukinari’s style to report the knight’s every minor transgression to Fiona. In fact, things would probably be worse if he didn’t treat it as water under the bridge. If Yukinari told Fiona what had happened, she would feel obligated to punish Arlen, and then the relationship between the townspeople and the knights, which seemed to be getting better ever so slowly, would crumble again. He wanted to avoid that.

“So it looks like we’ve started to lay a foundation,” Yukinari said, his arms crossed. “The next question is what we build on it. And I have an idea.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Just a little something I’d like to try on some of the cultivated fields. I wanted to get your approval.”

“You don’t need that. If you want to do something, Yukinari, none of us have any right to stop you. What is it you want to try?”

“I want to whip up something from my knowledge. Use it to cover the farmland.”

“Cover it...? To retain heat?” Fiona raised an eyebrow. She seemed to be running a number of possible scenarios through her mind. “With all due respect, Yukinari, if you cover the ground, there won’t be enough light for the crops to grow, will there?”

Friedland did have a tradition of periodically using pieces of cloth or rush mats to cover the fields in order to preserve warmth or moisture, but Yukinari was thinking of something fundamentally different.

“You would be right, if we were talking about cloth or a wood board or something.” Yukinari pointed to Dasa’s glasses, the spectacles that sat across her face. “But I’m talking about glass. I’ll make a lot of glass and build a greenhouse with it.”

“A greenhouse...? Oh, you know, I saw one of those in the capital. They were using it to grow flowers from the south. You mean like that?”

“Same idea, sure.”

Trade and commerce brought many things to the capital. Among them were plants and animals from all over, brought in to satisfy the curiosity and amusement of the nobles. But that made them nothing more than a pastime for the rich, and the greenhouse was part of that.

“But greenhouses for flowers, they’re pretty small, right? Maybe just the size of one room?”

“Yes...” Fiona nodded, a fresh look of surprise on her face. “Surely you don’t mean to make one big enough to enclose an entire field?”

“I sure do. And it’s glass, so light can still get in.” He laughed.

Dasa, who had been silent until that moment, suddenly spoke. “A greenhouse made of... glass. It can allow enough light in for the plants to thrive, but because it’s a walled structure, it may... also restrict the flow of air. Opening and... closing a door can keep the temperature... and humidity at the levels necessary for cultivation.”

“You’re saying...”

“Of course, it can also keep... away bugs.”

“It can do that?” Even Fiona didn’t seem to have thought of this. A structure that could keep away harmful insects would require a fair degree of isolation. To the extent Fiona hadn’t imagined a greenhouse large enough for an entire field, she certainly hadn’t imagined one enclosed enough to keep out bugs.

This was where Dasa’s time as the assistant to an alchemist came in handy. She was quite familiar with airtight vessels and glass experimental devices designed to remain bacteria-free. She presumably saw this as the same thing on a larger scale.

As long as Yukinari produced the pieces, there would be no concern about making them to the necessary tolerances. From the parts of a gun to an artificial lens for a human eye, as long as he knew how to build something, he could make it correct down to the micron.

“With a greenhouse, we can keep growing things even when it’s cold out. We still have to be careful not to exhaust the soil, but we should be able to grow crops throughout the year, regardless of the season, and that’s got to mean better harvests.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Fiona said, blinking. “It just never occurred to me to enclose an entire field in glass.”

In this world, glass, especially if it was very translucent, was a valuable material. Obtaining much of it would normally require a good deal of money. No one would have thought to use such a rare resource just to build a house around a field.

“Of course, glass alone isn’t strong enough. We’ll need pillars and a framework to hold everything up.”

Glass is heavy. Of course, a support made from a large tree trunk might well do the job, but in order to maximize the surface area that would receive light, it would be better to make the frame out of something like steel.

“I’ll let you take care of the materials, then,” Fiona said. “But I’ll handle the workforce. If you don’t have enough people, just let me know.”

“Sounds good. Thanks.”

“I know I keep saying this,” Fiona said with a wry grin. “But all you really have to do is give orders, Yukinari. You don’t have to thank us for anything. You’re our god.”

Yukinari found himself lost for words. In his view, all of this farming and trade was a way of atoning for showing up in Friedland, killing their erdgod, and single-handedly dismantling their religion before he really knew anything about it. He didn’t regret saving Berta, but he felt he had to take responsibility for the results of his actions. So he didn’t, in fact, see himself as being in a position to give orders through Fiona to the villagers. He thought of himself as making a request or asking for help.

I guess this is exactly the sort of thing that would piss Arlen off, he thought. If a god didn’t act authoritatively—even arrogantly—it might sow doubt among his followers. As long as he was going to play the part of a god, perhaps he would have to distance himself from his personal feelings about it.

Not that I’m eager to do that...

Yukinari’s thoughts were interrupted by a pounding at the door. “Excuse me—excuse me, please!” A man rushed into the room.

“What is it?” Fiona said, looking reprovingly at the man. “You’re being very rude.”

But the man clearly had little interest in etiquette at that moment. “I—I’m very sorry. But there’s something I must tell you, Miss Fiona, and quickly. If the honored erdgod is here, too, so much the better. Please, come with me to the outskirts of town!”

It didn’t really sound like a request. If he thought it would be best to have Yukinari there, that meant it was likely another attack by a demigod.

In any event, the man’s panic told Yukinari all he needed to know about the situation. He, Dasa, and the others got to their feet.

●

The first thing they heard was the ringing of steel on steel. If that had been all, it could easily have been a blacksmith or a carpenter at work. But it was accompanied by shouts and cries, summoning an entirely different scene to the imagination.

The man led Yukinari and the others to one of the gates built into Friedland’s walls, though not the one Yukinari’s party had come through earlier. There was only one primary gate leading to the main road, but there were a number of smaller ports, with paths leading to the fields and the surrounding area.

They exited through a port and proceeded along a road that led toward the mountains, and they soon came upon the site of the problem.

Arlen and the other two knights who had gone out on patrol had their backs to the approaching party. All three had their swords out and their little shields raised. Ranged against them, weapon at the ready, was... just one person.

“Who are you...?”

The opponent was wearing a heavy coat, and a hood covered their eyes, so it was hard to make out anything about them. But judging by their stance, they weren’t physically large. There was always the possibility they were wearing armor under that outfit, so it was hard to make any precise judgments, but they were probably about as tall as Yukinari, and their limbs were of average length.

In their hand was a spear—no, the hybrid weapon called a halberd. It was good not just for stabbing, but also for sweeping. The distance it established gave its wielder an advantage against swordsmen in many situations, but when fighting in confined spaces, the length could be a liability.

The figure’s overcoat had several crimson stains that appeared to be blood. A bandit, perhaps? But the person seemed to be holding three knights of the Missionary Order at bay without giving an inch, and was clearly trained in the halberd’s use.

There was shock among the combatants as Overcoat thrust.

“Hrah!”

Arlen dodged out of the way just before he was skewered by the polearm. The weapon glanced off his armor in a shower of sparks. Meanwhile, the knights to either side of him saw their opponent extended, in what must have looked to them like a very vulnerable position, and attacked.

The construction of the human body makes people quicker at moving forward than at falling back, even more so if they happen to be carrying a long spear. The two attackers were counting on this.

But Overcoat betrayed their expectations. The figure didn’t come forward or move back. They sank their body down as far as possible, striking out to the left and right. Then they pulled the halberd back, spinning on one heel while extending their body. This allowed the halberd to catch the two knights in a sweeping motion.

Both of the men had had their weight forward, and the blow knocked them to the ground. Even in full armor this gave them a pretty good shock, and they stayed down, groaning quietly.

But Overcoat didn’t finish them off, instead resuming a fighting stance with the halberd and turning back to Arlen. He attacked, but the halberd deflected his sword easily; he couldn’t reach his opponent. He made two or three attempts, during which time the other two knights got up again, but then they were back at square one.

“Who in the world is that...?”

Three knights against one opponent, and they still couldn’t win. Because the knights attacked together, Overcoat had no time to strike a finishing blow; for the moment, they were at a stalemate.

“I—I don’t know, but when I noticed the situation, they were already like this...”

Apparently, this had been going on for some time. But...

They may be evenly matched, but that person has got to tire eventually.

Just as he predicted, Overcoat’s movements were becoming ever so slightly slower. It was three against one. It was obvious that the one would run out of energy first.

“Hiyah!”

Arlen must have noticed the same thing, because he leaped in with a swing of his sword. He wasn’t aiming at the opponent, but at the halberd. No doubt he was thinking about how the enemy deflected all his blows with it.

With a screech of steel, the halberd jumped from Overcoat’s hands. That settled the matter—or would have, but before the weapon hit the ground, Overcoat pulled out a longsword that had been concealed in their outerwear and attacked.

This meant the enemy wasn’t too attached to any one weapon and had a preternaturally quick ability to react to a situation.

“Hrr!” Arlen dodged the attack, a look of shock on his face. A follow-up attack came. Somehow he managed to avoid it, drawing back. If this had been a one-on-one contest, the next blow probably would have finished it.

“Yah!” The other two thrust forward, covering Arlen’s retreat. But Overcoat saw the minute difference in the speed of their attacks and easily parried. Overcoat’s strikes were clearly quicker with a sword.

“This...”

This was no average opponent. It was a warrior with a wealth of battlefield experience, well-versed in a number of different weapons.

Yukinari had given Arlen and the others Durandall weapons like his own in case they encountered any demigods on their patrols, but the knights didn’t look like they were going to use them. Perhaps they hesitated to use an unfamiliar weapon, or perhaps they felt they couldn’t aim a gun at a human opponent.

Yukinari decided it was time to jump in. “Your qualms won’t do you any good if you’re dead! Use the Durandalls!”

His shout seemed to remind Arlen and the others that they were carrying powerful weapons, because two of the knights fell back and drew the guns from the holsters on their backs.

But Overcoat didn’t stop.

It made sense, in its way. Guns had been unknown in this world until Yukinari brought them here. Overcoat probably thought the Durandalls were just crudely made swords. In fact, the firing position for a gun probably looked extremely vulnerable.

Overcoat closed the distance in an instant. The speed of it prevented the two gunners from aiming carefully, and they pulled the triggers in a panic.

Two explosions caused by .44 Magnum bullets traveling faster than the speed of sound rent the air. Even an experienced marksman, though, would find it very difficult to hit a moving target. And when one fires in a hurry, without taking time to aim first, the shot can hardly be expected to hit.

Indeed, both shots missed. The fact that one of them actually grazed Overcoat’s hood was something of a miracle. It tore the fabric and pulled the hood back, leaving Overcoat’s face exposed, but they showed no sign of being intimidated by this. A little surprised by the huge noise, but because Overcoat hadn’t seen the bullet, they didn’t realize how frightening—how dangerous—it really was.

Yukinari made a sound of surprise when he saw Overcoat’s face. “It’s...”

The first thing he noticed was the hair, so red it seemed to be on fire. It fell into tails on either side of the face, but for the most part the hair was short, so as not to interfere with movement. Overcoat’s almond eyes were clear, the features of the face arranged symmetrically around the high bridge of the nose. Even in the midst of battle, the face showed neither panic nor anger; it looked as calm as if its owner were doing some daily chores.

But there was something still more striking about this person.

“...a woman?”

Yes. It was undeniably a woman’s face. She looked to be about twenty years old.

Yukinari wasn’t the only one to be surprised. Two of the knights froze, shocked to discover that the person who had gone toe-to-toe with the three of them was female. As they stood there, petrified, Overcoat—the woman—closed the gap to them, giving two quick slashes. The knights got their Durandalls up in time to block—barely—but they must have been heavy blows, because the guns flew out of their hands and onto the ground.

“Why, you!” Arlen jumped at the woman from behind. But she kicked off one of the knights, using the momentum to spin herself around so she was facing him.

Arlen was agog at the speed of her movement. The woman swept upward with her sword, toward his jaw. From chin to brain case: she meant to kill him with a single blow.

But the instant before she would have turned Arlen into a human shish kebab, she stopped.

That was because Yukinari had appeared with his own Durandall.

The woman immediately interrupted her attack on Arlen, taking up a stance against Yukinari. She made two or three swipes, testing him. He was startled when the next blow came, much heavier than the others, full of the intent to kill. She had aimed at his calf. People rarely think to defend their legs during a fight, and a major artery runs up the inside of the calf, so a wound there can be fatal. This woman really did know how to fight—how to face someone down on the field and kill them.

Instantly, Yukinari dropped Durandall in an effort to deflect the blow, but he was too late.

Instead...

“Yuki!”

There was a roar.