Chapter 6: The Castle in the Woods, by the Quiet Shore

Chapter 6:
The Castle in the Woods,
by the Quiet Shore

 

YO, THE NAME’S SHOOTER. I’m thirty-two years old and I’m a slave. Usually I’m put to work as a hunter for my village, but I was recently knighted, so that’s weird. I live in a hunter’s shack with three other people. Picture, if you will, four adults sharing a studio apartment. The hut is incredibly cramped.

“Good morning, Shooter.”

“G’morning. Did you sleep okay?”

“The bed was a little snug, unfortunately,” my principal wife Cassandra answered curtly.

“Um, g-good morning, Tanne d’Arc.”

“Good morning, husband. Your bed is so small, I almost fell out three times last night. Can’t you do something about it? Please?”

“We don’t have much choice. If it weren’t for your dowry, the bed would be an even tighter squeeze for us.”

“Why can’t you ask your barbarian chief to build a new house for you already? Didn’t she say she was giving you a house as a reward?”

In celebration of my marriage to his little sister, the chieftain of the bull-kin clan had given me a double bed that was disproportionately large for our tiny shack. But I only call it large in terms of the standards of this fantasy world. Back in Japan, it might not even classify as twin-size.

My two wives and I had slept pressed up against each other like sardines, and since Tanne d’Arc was the one on the outside, she almost got pushed out of the bed whenever someone shifted during the night. We were going to have to do something about that.

“Kweeee!”

“You can’t fuss like that in the bed, Basil. And if you have to go to the bathroom, you need to wake up your mother or Tanne d’Arc. Understand?”

“Kwee kwee ppthhbbb!”

The baby basilisk had entered a rebellious phase recently, and since Tanne d’Arc had only moved in the previous night, he didn’t yet recognize her as a co-mom. He treated her worse than if she were his older sister. Another fun problem.

“Good morning, Shooter.”

“Hey there. I hope you slept all right, Elpaco.”

“Yeah. But I was a little lonely sleeping by myself.”

“Really? You seemed so cozy, though.”

Animal-eared Elpaco had agreed to sleep in the long, narrow bed I used originally. Back then, Cassandra and I were newlyweds. And now my new wife Tanne d’Arc was part of the equation. It was hard enough that circumstance had forced Elpaco to come live with Cassandra and I right after we got married, but now the kid was stuck spending the night in the same room as a newly polygamous marriage.

Ironic—I rescued him from Wak’wakgoro’s huge goblin family only for him to end up sleeping alone in a house with three newlyweds…which was another fine problem to solve. The hunter shacks were already uniformly cramped, and then we’d crammed a double bed into ours, making the living space even tinier and aaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAHHHH I really, really needed to do something about this situation.

We didn’t have a third mattress to rotate anyone onto, either. Before any of this even happened, the village had run out of spare beds for all the new settlers so the village chief had taken away the pallet Cassandra slept on before she married me. Not there was room in our hut for anything superfluous.

“W-well, Elpaco and I will go tend to the fields. The two of you can take care of the laundry.”

“You can’t do that, Shooter. The village chief told you to go meet with her first thing in the morning to discuss our housing situation, remember?” said Cassandra.

“She’s right. I want to move to a bigger house! Stuffing four of us into a tiny shack like this…” Tanne d’Arc folded her arms. “It’s like living in a slave hovel.”

“Now hold on, Tanne! I think it’s a little rude to call my husband’s house a slave hovel.”

“Our husband is a slave. Objectively. We’re married to a slave.”

“That may be true, but it’s rude to say it.”

I was holding my wives away from each other with both arms, but I decided this was a good opportunity to get away. I grabbed Elpaco and hurried out toward the fields. “Let’s go, Elpaco! No need for us men in their conversation. We belong out in the fields!”

“Ow! Sh-Shooter, don’t pull so hard. Shoooooterrrrrrrr!”

 

Right as we finished up the fieldwork, I received a summons from the village chief. Both my wives had repeatedly reminded me to, “Go talk to the village chief about getting a new house ready as soon as possible!” Defeated, I went to her manor. When I got there, she ordered me to accompany her and I soon found myself on the way to the lakeshore with her, followed by a herd of goblin laborers and enslaved criminals.

Since being appointed a knight in service to Knight Commander Alexandricia, I had expected major changes to my day-to-day life, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case. I went out to the forest to hunt just like always, and the chore of going out to the fields in the morning to weed and water them was no different than before, either. The only real difference was that Alexandricia’s stepson Gimul, who had been in line to inherit leadership of the village, was gone. Without him, Alexandricia summoned me to her house all the time instead.

“I’ve decided to build a new settlement here,” she said at the lake. “And this hill overlooking the shore will be the center of it. It’s a little far from the current village, but it’s an ideal location to defend, and it will be close to the village as well as the bull-kin colony. My hope is that someday this location will be an administrative center for the territory. I want you to take charge of some people and build a castle here—as well as an attendant settlement.”

“You want to build a castle? On this hill?”

“That’s right. Look how much of the land you can see from up here. We’ve managed to carve a village out of Apegut Forest, but it’s nothing more than a remote outpost on the outermost frontier as far as the kingdom is concerned. That’s how they see it. As for how I see it, we’re on the edge of vast, unclaimed tracts of land.”

Alexandricia was wearing her usual outfit that sort of reminded me of a dress, but today she was also clad in her knight’s attire. She stood atop the low rise of the hill and gazed out over the lake and the broad expanse of Apegut Forest.

She was right—the forest was vast. The lay of the forest known to the villagers only extended about half a day’s walk from the village or one of the smaller settlements. Only the hunters knew anything of the geography beyond. And nearly half of the hunters had died in the fight against the wyvern, so veterans like Wak’wakgoro and Nishka were the only ones with any detailed knowledge of the area.

The village chief wanted to change that. That was why the adventurers we had brought back from town were currently employed in making those maps.

“Since our village is just an outpost, up ’til now we’ve grown by letting people build houses more or less wherever they wanted.” The village chief turned her eyes down to the people gathered below us. “That changes now. I intend to build a settlement here beside the lake so that we can develop into a town in permanent control of this area.”

“I see. So that’s the objective?”

“That’s right. You saw what Bulka was like. And you must have noticed something when you compared it to my village. Didn’t you?”

“Our buildings look piss-poor compared to them.”

“It hurts to hear it put so bluntly, but yes, that’s exactly what I’m referring to.” Alexandricia planted a hand on her hip and laughed musically.

The town of Bulka featured neat avenues of cobblestone streets and stone houses. Meanwhile, the houses in our outpost village consisted of mud walls piled around a central wooden column and capped with a thatched roof. From the outside, they looked like triangular huts.

They were like the crude houses widely used during the settlement of Hokkaido in the late 1800s, the ones called “prayer huts”—not because they were churches or anything, but because when viewed from the side, they looked like hands steepled in prayer.

But in some ways, the huts in the village were completely different from the “prayer huts” of Hokkaido’s settlement period. Back on Earth, the prayer huts were a temporary solution thrown together in desperation until the settlement stabilized and they could begin harvesting crops. In this world, the bedraggled huts were constructed when the settlement was first established, and they continued to be built to this day. They were certainly larger than the huts I’d visited on field trips or whatever, and the ones in my world didn’t have mud walls, but those weren’t huge differences.

“We never knew if our work to reclaim the land and establish our settlement would fail, so we never cultivated the ambition to build sturdier houses until now,” Alexandricia explained.

I nodded. “And when the number of residents increases, you’ll need to provide permanent housing anyway. And a castle to keep it all defensible.”

She nodded in turn. “I am the governor of this region, and I must protect my people. It’s not enough to simply protect my own village. I need a fortification that can accommodate everyone from the surrounding settlements in case of emergency.”

“I understand. In which case, the houses should all be surrounded by the castle walls…” I touched a hand to my chin and thought the problem over. I watched as some goblins hauled timber freshly cut from the forest to the planned construction site. There were fewer than fifty people working below, but that was all we could spare right now.

“There’s a strict difference between a town and a village, Shooter. Do you know what it is?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“The laws of the kingdom define a town as having city walls. There are about one thousand people in our village, which is relatively large for such a settlement, but we’re still considered a village, even though there are several towns around Bulka with fewer people. Once they have city walls, they have the privilege of becoming a proper town.”

“So we need walls. Does that mean we’re going to build those later on?”

“No. Towns and villages pay different amounts of tax to the king. In order to prosper from this expansion, we need to remain a ‘village’ as long as possible. Of course, we won’t be able to bend the rules forever,” the village chief said. So, she intended to bring the village up to the level of a town but keep it categorized as a village as long as possible for the sweet tax break. “However, the powers on our borders consider this unclaimed land. Just as the bull-kin had their eyes on it, so do many others.”

“Which means we do need ramparts, or something similar.”

“Precisely.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, ma’am. What’s the difference between a castle wall and a city wall? I mean, couldn’t a stone wall qualify as either a castle or a city wall?”

The strangest look came over the village chief’s face. It was as if she didn’t know what I was asking. “Yes, I suppose it could.”

“So then, for instance, suppose we built up an earthwork mound and put wooden fencing around the houses. Would that qualify as a city wall?” I asked.

“The word ‘town’ signifies a central location that permanently governs the area around it. So a place surrounded by earthworks or fencing would be nothing more than an encampment.”

“So that option is available to us, as well. For our…‘village.’”

“But wooden fences on top of dirt mounds are far too unreliable to protect a permanent territory. Not to mention the amount of labor it would take to repair them. And they would be completely unreliable for protecting the houses.”

I’m pretty sure she knew what I was getting at, though.

“Hm,” Alexandricia murmured, tilting her head to one side as she fell into thought.

Even in the world I came from, there were plenty of legal loopholes that anyone—rich or poor—could learn to exploit. In any world, you’ve got to try your best to take advantage of those.

“And one other thing,” I said, “is it possible to bend the definition by building part of the wall as a true rampart and then making another part out of the fenced mounds? That way we would be able to build stone walls at the most important places and close the rest off with more easily constructed fencing.”

“Well now…”

I’d read about fortifications like the Taga Stronghold and Dewa Stockade in history textbooks and articles. Long ago, during the northern expansion of the Japanese imperial government, the imperial forces built governmental and military strongholds that allowed them to advance into the northern territory and settle there, despite violent clashes with the powers native to the area. I remembered an artist’s reconstruction in one book showing fortifications of clay mounds and wooden fences built all the way around the strongholds.

There weren’t many historical examples of villages completely surrounded by walls, but at that time, the fighting with the native tribes was especially heated, so the fortifications were built to allow settlers to flee their homes and take refuge inside the stronghold if they needed to.

“That’s an interesting suggestion, Shooter.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Do you think it would work?”

“As long as the colony isn’t completely enclosed by earthworks or ramparts, I think I should be able to talk my way out of trouble. If you leave just a few places open, then the fortifications would be too deficient to qualify as city walls and we could argue that we’re not a town.”

“Would that work?”

“Even if we do become a town someday, we don’t have enough resources or people to do it yet. So we can just say we’re not at that stage.” Alexandricia chuckled conspiratorially. Her expression was more devious than I’d ever seen it before. It was the face of ambition itself. Not an innocent ambition, either; she seemed to be reaching toward something far in the distance, beyond anything I could picture.

“If I may ask, what do you envision once the settlement has advanced and we’ve extended your territory?”

“I’m not sure what to call it. Redemption, perhaps?” the village chief said.

I frowned. “Redemption?”

“When I was younger, I was in the military for quite some time, serving as a knight in the royal palace and in Bulka. The royal palace is an endless performance, a bloody theater where power struggles play on and on. The nobility band together and pull strings with the king, the royal family, and powerful nobles to decide whether a group should be allowed to live or not.”

“Wow…”

“You know that I’m half-goblin, yes? That’s why I still look so young. The nobility of backwater territories along the borders always laughed at me and treated me like a child. It went on for years, Shooter. It filled me with resentment for the blood-drenched stage of the kingdom’s political theater. When I was married off to a family near where I grew up, it was a relief.”

I nodded sympathetically.

“The man I married had a distasteful predilection for goblin women. He was the successor to a noble military family of no fortune.” The village chief might have been talking about another person’s life, for how casual she sounded about it all. “When I first met him, he was a monumental fool who had caught a venereal disease from flinging money at women from barbarian tribes while he was serving on the front lines. He started to feel strange, so he went to a religious order for treatment, but they told him he was too far gone. I realized I had to build a place in the world for myself on my own. My husband ignored his disease and went out to subjugate a tribe of barbarians, and that’s how he died. We had only been married for a year.”

“What terrible misfortune.”

“Hm. It seems to me that most men are like that. You stare at my chest every chance you get.”

“Ha ha ha! What a wonderful joke, madam.”

I had at that moment been examining the way her dress fell across her bosom. I quickly averted my eyes. Alexandricia’s breasts were on the small side compared to Nishka or my new wife Tanne d’Arc—I wouldn’t quite call them bazongas, and certainly not bodahogazongas, though they might’ve qualified for zongas—but the allure of a widow with breasts that size was immeasurable.

I found it difficult to resist. I just couldn’t do it. I’m not a bad person!

“Just be sure it’s never anything more than a joke. I played matchmaker for Cassandra and Tanne d’Arc, so if anything were to happen, it would reflect poorly on me.”

“Y-y-y-yes, of course, madam.”

“All right, then. On with our little tale. When the chief of this village, my late husband, approached me to become his second wife, I was hesitant. I thought I might catch his venereal disease, and if word got out that his wife was half-goblin, I didn’t think it would go over well.”

“But then you inherited the village chiefhood.”

“Correct. I found it difficult to go back home to live with my parents after my husband died, and the fact that I had goblin blood in my veins didn’t sit well with people. Nothing had changed at the royal palace or in town. So I came to my husband’s village.”

Alexandricia had been through so much more than I’d known. I wished there was something I could do, even in some small way, to make up for all the suffering she’d endured.

“What were you looking for?” I asked. “A way out? A place to belong?”

The village chief let out a quick breath. “Who can say? But now I know what I must do.”

“Oh?”

“It’s been ten years since my husband died so suddenly, but he left me with my stepson, who was kind enough to love his father’s widow like a mother. The settlement I built with my husband has grown so much.”

“It has.”

“Nothing has come easily in my life, but this land on the outskirts of the kingdom is brimming with possibility. People get fifty or sixty years at most to live their lives, and I have almost half of mine left ahead.”

Alexandricia tightened her grip on the parchment survey she held. “I intend to use what remains of my life to build my own town in this place. And if at all possible, I will usurp the kingdom and drive the fools screaming from their castle.”

“Are you serious?” She was still so blasé!

A sinister smile came over her face. “Of course. If at all possible. The king ordered my husband to colonize the borderlands, and it has been nothing but trouble and suffering ever since. It’s always trouble and suffering, bleeding down from the ones at the top to drown the ones at the bottom. I think it’s high time the people of this village were repaid for their work. You don’t agree?”

The village chief turned her gaze on me, her eyes sparkling with hunger.

I had no place commenting on the difficulties of settling out here, but she wasn’t wrong, exactly. These frontier lands were rife with ogres, kobolds, and minotaurs, not to mention wyverns and basilisks. I could easily imagine how impossibly difficult things must have been for the settlers even before my arrival.

But the audacity of declaring that a village chief would usurp the kingdom if at all possible was something else entirely. It was a dangerous idea.

I wasn’t too familiar with feudalism in Europe, but I don’t think such ambitions were very common back then. Even looking at Japanese history, you could count on one hand the number of people who had thought about overthrowing the imperial family. The only people I could even think of were Taira no Masakado, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, and Oda Nobunaga.

“Well, I am your slave, ma’am. If you order me to do something, I have no choice but to do it.”

“That doesn’t sound very enthusiastic. What do you want? Hm?” Alexandricia fixed me with a bewitching gaze, as if testing me.

I swallowed. The inscrutable charm of this widow set my heart racing.

“I suppose my rewards for you haven’t been well suited for each other. It’s difficult to build a family and also serve as my knight.”

“What do you think would balance them out, Alexandricia?” Could this be something good? A positive development? Could Alexandricia end up my wife…? But as soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake. I was always calling her “Alexandricia” in my head, and now I’d accidentally said it out loud.

“Alexandricia, eh?” she chuckled. “I didn’t know we were on a first-name basis.”

“W-well, you are younger than me, after all. And you’re practically family, with everything you’ve done for me,” I replied boldly, grinning at her. I didn’t try to weasel my way out of my mistake.

“Oh? Then if we’re family, I hope you’ll listen when your little sister asks you for a favor. Older brother.”

“B-brother?!”

“I have a little sister already, but I’ve never had a brother. And now I have a big, strong elder brother to start relying on. As for your reward…”

“Yes?” I gulped.

The widow gave another alluring chuckle. Then, in a teasing tone more suited to a much younger girl, she declared, “When the two of us are alone, how about I call you that? I’ll talk to you like…hm. Family. Not blood family, but…” She smirked. “Get cracking on expanding my territory, O brother mine!”

And unfortunately for me, her big brother assented immediately.

Man, she was good at this. I don’t think I’d ever felt so pathetic and so happy at the same time.

 

***

 

In the next few days, crowds of people started tromping back and forth along a deer trail connecting the village to the lakeside. To Alexandricia, this was the image of her plan beginning to take shape.

One day, about ten after we began construction on the lakeside settlement, I was heading out to the worksite by the lake early in the morning with Elpaco and my wife Cassandra.

Since my family had grown, I was able to finish up my morning chores in the field a lot quicker, and for that I was grateful. Plus, with two wives, the washing was done and lunches got packed quick. When the housework was finished, I would take Elpaco and one of my wives with me out to the worksite.

“I thought maybe we should build a real road along this deer trail, but the village chief said it would get easier to walk on before long, and she was right.”

“Just by people moving back and forth every day, packing down the earth.”

“It’s still not quite wide enough for two people to walk side by side. If we’re going to move the base of operations for the territory here, I’ll request that Alexandricia assign some folks to widening it once the construction load has lightened a little,” I mused, moving to the head of our group.

Knight Commander Alexandricia’s lakeside castle, the defensive stronghold of Apegut Forest, was our top priority. But there were nowhere near enough people at the construction site. For now, a group of dwarven carpenters were hard at work handling the initial stages of the castle.

“Shooter?”

“What is it, Cassandra?”

Cassandra’s hands were full carrying our lunches to the site. She looked up at me timidly and cautioned, “If Gimul hears you referring to the village chief by her first name, I don’t think he’ll like it.”

“Oof. You’re right. I’ll try to be more careful.” I guess I had stopped paying attention and was blabbing the village chief’s first name all the time now.

The daily routine was that when we finished our work for the day and returned to the village, I would send my family on ahead to our shack while I turned toward the village chief’s manor. It was there that the two of us, both full-grown adults over thirty, could engage in scandalous banter, stepping over every line of intimacy to call each other “elder brother” and “Alexandricia” as we’d promised that day by the lake. I suppose I was so used to it now that it was starting to slip into my regular conversations, too.

“Shooter?”

“Hm?”

I was fighting my embarrassment, trying to change the mood hanging over us, when I felt Elpaco tug on my leather vest. His animal ears twitched. As soon as I looked at him, I understood. I grabbed the handle of the shortsword hanging at my waist with one hand and with the other motioned for Cassandra to stay still.

“Was it an animal?” I asked.

“No, it was a person,” he said. “Someone’s watching us.”

“Do you think they intend us harm?”

“I’m not sure. But I don’t think they can do anything from where they are.”

“What about bow attacks?”

I scanned the deer trail that ran through the forest all the way to the lakeshore. My eyes jumped to follow Elpaco’s gaze. The trees grew so thickly that an ambush with bows and arrows seemed plausible, and I wanted to be sure.

“Not at this distance. I think they’re at least a hundred paces away. Nothing but the strongest bows would be able to fire through cover this thick.”

“Don’t forget, you actually know someone who could pull it off,” I said. “Don’t take anything for granted.”

“Do you mean Nishka?” Cassandra cut in, her expression fearful.

“I mean, she could, but she wouldn’t. I just meant that people like that exist.”

“Mm. I don’t get the sense that this person is about to do anything,” said Elpaco.

“Not until we start moving again, I’m sure. Elpaco, you take up the rear. You walk between us, Cassandra. I’m counting on you if anything happens, Elpaco.”

“Okay…”

The three of us crept slowly toward the worksite, sensing something hidden out of sight in the woods.

Why would anyone go to such trouble to stalk us? Was it a bandit? A villager? Or maybe one of the minotaurs from the newly absorbed settlement? All seemed equally likely to me.

“It’s got to be a bandit, a villager, or one of the bull-kin, right?” I said.

“I don’t know, Shooter,” said Cassandra.

“I don’t think it’s one of the bulls. They make more noise when they walk,” Elpaco’s voice answered from behind me.

“Ugh, I’m the daughter of a hunter. I should know these things!”

“I really am a hunter and I don’t know, either. There’s no reason to be upset.”

“Y-you’re right, Shooter.”

“Elpaco’s animal ears must be superior to ours. Wak’wakgoro and Nishka can hear things far off like that, too. Maybe I’ll develop that ability with some more hunting experience.”

I turned back to Elpaco. His face glowing pink, the boy lowered his eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “We’re pretty far from them now. I think we’ll be okay.”

“You sure are helpful, Elpaco!”

“It’s nothing special.”

“We’re almost to the worksite, so let’s ease off. But if you notice anything strange on the way back home, let me know right away. If something happens, I want you to protect my wife and take her back to the house. And let the village chief know what happened.”

Elpaco’s face glowed with girlish pride, despite the whole not-a-girl thing. While he looked pleased at my praise, his face suddenly turned cloudy again at the second half of my instructions.

“What are you upset about?”

“You want me to leave you behind, but that means you’ll be in danger. I can’t do that to you.”

“He’s right, husband. You’re the bedrock of our family. You mustn’t think so selfishly. Isn’t that right, Elpaco?”

“Yeah.”

The two were really worrying about me together. It was actually kind of nice to be worried about. Heh. I could almost feel the tears welling in my eyes.

At which point I slammed my big, dumb toes into a big, dumb rock and nearly twisted my ankle.

“Waugh!”

That’s what I got for not wearing boots.

When you’re a husband, you gotta put your wife first, but you’re not the only one trying to put the other first. I’d have to give that some thought.

 

As soon as I got to the worksite, I always held a morning meeting. But on that day, there was something I wanted to do first.

I’ve always tried to leave home as early as I could to get to work, and I stuck to that even here in fantasyland. Although I wasn’t the first person at the site that day, I had still arrived pretty early. When you manage that, you have a moment to catch up with your coworkers and managers and the like.

We dropped our lunches and carpentry tools off at the construction shed that stood atop the hill where we were planning to build the castle. I spotted a group of laborers—their numbers just kept growing as people trickled in—and saw my chance. I’d never be able to build up a relationship with these people if I didn’t make a little effort to talk to them.

“Hey there,” I said. “I heard bringing in the stones has been slow going.”

“Oh, it has, Sir Slave,” one replied. “The road isn’t paved, and the stones are coming in by the river next to the village—I guess you know that already, ha. It feels like a big detour to bring them down the river, but I’m not gonna say it isn’t efficient!”

“Yeah, the quarry is pretty far from here, after all.”

The workers building the castle were some dwarves from the village, carpenters, and builders. The carpenters, well, were carpenters—as their job title implied, they specialized in fabricating buildings. And think of the builders like construction workers.

Under normal circumstances, we’d have to spare some of the builders to work on our flimsy huts, but at present all our resources were concentrated on building the castle and there weren’t enough people for both projects. We still didn’t have too many stones on site, though, so about half the builders were just doing basic construction work for the surrounding castle settlement.

“The plan was to get three houses built in the next couple days. How’s that going?” I asked. “The ones I saw only had scaffolding up, but none of the framework was done yet.”

“Well, you know how it is. With the number of builders we have right now, we figured we would get all that scaffolding finished first. You know, just get it out of the way.”

“Smart.”

“It’s the obvious thing to do. We’ve been constructing houses in the village and outer settlements for years now. And when we start building your house, you don’t worry about a thing. We’ll pick out the very best materials for you, Sir Slave. You just wait.”

“Hey now, don’t say that too loudly!” I protested. No one was supposed to display any kind of favoritism…not overtly. Some might call that an abuse of power, but it’s just one of the perks of leadership! “Well, I look forward to seeing your work, boss.”

As the dwarven carpenter and I chatted, I made sure to check on the progress of the houses. This carpenter was a supervisor for a portion of the workers and had given them orders to construct the new homes. I figured one of those might be my own future abode, so I couldn’t help but feel a little anxious.

We were looking to have people move into these houses starting next spring, which was just about how much time it would take to actually finish constructing them. So, we were planning to build new housing in the village first.

I know it sounds like duplicating work, but the plan was for me and my family to move out of the hunter shack and into a new house in the village, and then to move again once the settlement by the lake was finished. Our house in the village, then, could be given to new arrivals.

“What’s the progress like on clearing the field for the city square?” I asked. “The way the construction is going so far, even if we clear out the weeds and work the land now, we’re just going to have to do it over and over again, no?”

“Don’t you worry,” he said, “I’m working on that. It’ll be done before you know it.”

“Be careful you don’t work the crews too hard. That could be bad news.”

“If that ever happens, you and me’ll just kill the lot of ’em. Isn’t that right, Sir Slave?” chuckled Nishka, who was passing by.

“Uh, I certainly hope it never comes to that. We don’t have any manpower to spare!”

The enslaved criminals were the ones cutting down the vegetation and digging up stones to create a vacant plot of land for the village square. Nishka the Scalesplitter was directing that group, but her interpersonal skills were as harsh as ever. Sure, she would address me politely enough as “Sir Slave,” but there still wasn’t a shred of respect in her attitude.

Though really, I was grateful to have such a relaxed relationship with someone.

Once I’d chatted with the dwarven supervisor, I noticed that the group of slaves working under Nishka were staring hard in my direction. The look in their eyes even freaked out Cassandra, and she hid behind me.

It was a look of resentment. I could tell. In their minds, I had the same belly piercing as they did, and yet they were still treated as slaves while I was elevated to knighthood. There wasn’t much I could do about how much they hated me. Here they were, the lowest caste in the village, and they thought that I—another slave—was looking down my nose at them. Couldn’t blame ’em, honestly.

I took a rolled-up parchment scroll from the basket that hung from my shoulder and sighed. I just wanted this project to be done. “All right, everyone. I hope we’re all ready to work hard today! Remember, safety first. And when you’re carrying lumber, be sure to check your surroundings carefully. And always communicate with each other!”

Maybe they’d listen, or maybe they wouldn’t care about anything I had to say. Only so much I could do—I pulled off my leather vest and joined the ranks of the workers to start carrying stones.

 

***

 

The castle that Knight Commander Alexandricia had ordered wasn’t on the same scale as the fairy tale castles people usually imagine when they hear the word.

Coming from Japan, I picture castles with Japanese-style towers where a gruff dude with a topknot hangs out, or a more modern German-style castle with rows of Cinderella-like pointed towers that could have come straight from a Grimms’ fairy tale. But nope—the finished plan sketched on my parchment was more like a fortress of stacked stone blocks, with a few attached buildings spidering out that looked like churches or towers.

“We can haul stone here all day long and never finish building this castle,” I moaned.

“Don’t give up, Shooter,” said Elpaco. The two of us were heaving stone after stone to the site on shoulder yokes.

The stones had been carved down to the shape of bricks, more or less neatly—there were different sizes, see, and they were to form the foundation and castle walls. Any gaps between them would be filled in with clay. We were going to lift the stones using a wooden crane built on the struts and catwalks of the castle’s wooden frame, but the interior walls would be the same clay walls that the village had always used, built using earth magic and then fired at the end to harden them.

This last part would be done by the village chief. She knew the site well, now—she came every afternoon.

“I used to work at a construction site and I’ve built stage sets for a theater,” I said to Elpaco. “I think what we’re doing today is more like the job building stage sets. Nowadays, a lot of building construction is done with machines. But this…this reminds me of hauling stage platforms around.”

“I thought you were a warrior, Shooter?”

“I was. But before I came here, I was more of a, uh, part-time warrior. A wanderer from one gig to the next, going wherever the wind took me.”

“You’re amazing…”

“Oh, no, no. I just never managed to become a good grown-up and get a regular job. You shouldn’t praise me for that!”

“But being able to do all kinds of things is amazing. Right?”

Elpaco and I finished heaving the stones to the top of the hill and took a short break. Sweat dripped down my upper body. I wiped it away with the cloth that hung around my neck. Elpaco was soaked with sweat, too, to the point that his white lace-up shirt had become see-through. It hung open in the front.

I couldn’t help giving him a sidelong glance, not quite able to resist the “see-through” part. His shirt was made of thick material, so I couldn’t make out all the details, but the cloth was just transparent enough to let me make out the curve of a pair of tiny rosebuds.

If Elpaco hadn’t been a man in a girl’s body, for sure my heart would have started racing. Which it wasn’t, obviously. Pert little peaks pressed into the cloth of his shirt, and it absolutely was not driving me crazy. Nope.

“What is it, Shooter? Don’t look at me like that…” Elpaco blushed. “It’s embarrassing…”

“I-If you let the sweat sit on your skin, you’ll catch a cold and we don’t want that. Is Cassandra around?” Worried, I called out to ask if anyone had seen my wife, who was, like me, a straight person.

Since Cassandra was now the wife of a knight in the ruling class of the village, her rank allowed her to get out of working alongside everyone else if she wished. Obviously, my retainer Elpaco and I were both in the same position, but we at least wanted to help make up for the delays and joined in with the other workers. Meanwhile, Cassandra usually stayed at the work shed and oversaw general progress at the site.

“You called for me, Shooter?” Cassandra walked up to us with a smile.

“Elpaco sweated through his clothes. They’re soaking wet. Will you take him to get changed and rest a while?”

“Certainly. You must have worked very hard, Elpaco!” Cassandra looked down at Fuzzball, who was just a tiny bit shorter than her.

“Oh, um.”

“I’ll take over while you sit right here and relax,” I told him. “This job isn’t going to be done any time soon, so how about we take turns?”

“Okay…”

I glanced at Elpaco’s head and realized I was stroking his hair out of habit. Until then, he’d looked like he was ready to keep working alongside me, but that look shifted to a more placid expression and his tail started swaying. What a good pup. Not that Elpaco was a dogman—his tail didn’t typically wag like crazy whenever he was happy.

“I’m gonna start hauling stone again. This shortsword is just getting in my way, though. Would you hold onto it for me?”

“Certainly, husband. Try not to push yourself too hard.”

“I won’t. And shouldn’t you two find some shade? It’s pretty hot out.”

“All right. Let’s go find some shade and take a rest, shall we, Elpaco?”

“Okay…”

I handed Cassandra the shortsword that usually hung at my waist. I had tried wearing it at my hip in order to act the part of a valorous knight, but it did nothing but get in the way while I worked, so I had to get rid of it. Not to mention, shedding more equipment when I already had my shirt off made me feel that little bit lighter on my feet.

“Sir Slave?” one of the dwarven carpenters called to me. “The village chief said that some more laborers would be joining us this afternoon to help out. Did you hear?”

“I did, but I can’t remember… Did she say they were new enslaved criminals from town, or something else?”

“Oh no, sir! She’s simply recruited people from the settlements in the area. It’s almost summertime, after all. That means there isn’t much left to do in the fields, so they’re sending people over to us.”

It was July, or something like it. Soon enough the temperature would skyrocket. In the Middle Ages in Japan, this time of year was when all the work in the fields was done, and they called it “war season.” Farmers would be conscripted, armed with pikes, and used as foot soldiers. Wars weren’t so common in this world, so instead the farmers were roped into construction work for their territorial leader once summer rolled around. Last year they’d been set to work on irrigation channel maintenance, I heard, and this year the only change was that we were putting them on castle construction.

The castle was going to be kind of like the trademark image of the territory, so the village chief was treating the project with due seriousness.

“They probably won’t buy new enslaved criminals for a bit. If you put a bunch of them together all at once, you’re just asking for trouble if they ever stir things up. And if your neighbors find out you had to put down a slave rebellion, well. That doesn’t look too good, does it?”

“I guess you have a point. Although, you know, now this village is the kind of place that lets a slave serve as a knight, whatever that means.”

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot you used to be a slave, Sir Slave!”

The dwarf laughed boisterously, but I couldn’t help frowning. The more I thought about it, there was no denying that I was exquisitely dressed for my ongoing adventures as literal, actual slave labor.

The early summer sun shone down on us, catching a glimmer on my belly-button piercing.

“It looks like some of the carpenters didn’t come today,” I noted. “Do you think they weren’t feeling well?”

“Certainly not! They’ve gone to build your new home, Sir Slave!”

“Really?”

“Of course. Didn’t you hear the village chief boasting about how they’d get the whole thing built in one day as soon as the materials were ready?”

I hadn’t heard about that, although she had told me that she would give me a new house as a reward if I beat the bull-kin chieftain—that is to say, if talks with the minotaurs went well. Alexandricia had also told me she was a talented earth mage, so I guess the implication might have been that she would take care of it herself. Huh.

“I bet they’ve made you a marvelous hunter shack.”

“I hope not! With two wives and a boarder, I’m going to need way more space to stay sane.”

“Oh, don’t you worry. We can’t have a knight living in some shabby old hut!” The dwarf laughed again.

It made me uncomfortable—I didn’t see what was so funny about what he’d said. But I put the feeling aside and just replied, “I guess not.”

 

At noon, Cassandra and Elpaco came over to let me know it was time for lunch.

I leaned back against a large boulder—I was lucky that they hadn’t moved it from the lakeshore—ready to dig in. Nishka joined us and we began our lunch break.

“What did you pack today?” Nishka asked.

Cassandra smiled. “You don’t get enough nutrition only eating steamed potatoes day after day, so today I made a green bean and rabbit stew. And some rye bread.”

“I’ve got jerky. There’s more wyvern meat than I know what to do with back at my place, so here. Take some! C’mon, take it!”

We had all been beaming expectantly over the food Cassandra laid out when Nishka unfolded her own filthy lunch cloth to trumpet her jerky. The rest of us wrinkled our noses.

For one, Cassandra had eaten smoked wyvern meat almost every day while I was gone and she looked like she was tired of it. For another, tough, stringy wyvern was beyond unappetizing. It was like a hole in the platonic concept of appetizing. Antipetizing. Elpaco’s usual vacant expression was gone and he had his eyes locked on the ground in front of him. Fuzzball was a hunter from the city, so you might think he’d be eager to try some wild country cuisine, but even he looked disgusted.

“C’mon, what’s with those faces? If meat makes you stronger, just imagine how it feels to get some Lizard King meat down that gullet! Eat up!”

“No, thank you,” said Cassandra delicately. “I’ve had my fill of wyvern lately.”

Elpaco nervously added, “I’m good, too, thanks.”

Nishka looked like she was about to have a major pout, so I reached out to take some of the jerky to make her feel better. It flapped unpleasantly in my hand. I don’t know how it did that, but it absolutely waggled.

“Shooter, wyvern meat is tough. It’s not good for your stomach,” Elpaco warned me quietly.

Once lunch was over, the promised workforce of builders arrived and gathered around. As always, since I wanted to convey that the work would be bearable, I joined in. Once we were all together, you couldn’t tell at a glance who was the leader and who were the workers. In fact, Cassandra was the one who looked like she was in charge of the whole worksite. She wore the clothes she’d made from the fine cloth I’d bought in town, and my shortsword was slung from her waist. I felt kind of pathetic in comparison.

I guess it didn’t matter that much, as long as the castle got built. A person’s appearance has nothing to do with how well they get their work done.

“All right, everyone,” I said. “Starting today, we’d like you to help out with building a castle on top of this hill here.”

Dead silence.

“The carpenters will handle the more complicated work,” I continued. “But we need your help to carry in the supplies.”

One man stepped forward, looked suspiciously at me, and said, “Awful rich, innit. A slave like you, daring to give us orders.”

In that instant, the dialogue between the workers and I turned ass-puckeringly sour.

 

***

 

The man fixing me with a harsh glare was a farmer around thirty years old dressed in a dirty peasant’s shift. His body hardened by daily farm work, his whole air was of a top-notch, energetic worker. He wasn’t as built as Gimul, but he had the hard-edged features and physique characteristic of a man who spent his life doing punishing fieldwork.

Whereas I stood before him shirtless with a pierced belly-button that advertised my status as a slave.

Now, a half-naked man wasn’t exactly an uncommon sight at the worksite. When you have to carry heavy scaffolding lumber or dressed stone, you get drenched in sweat and caked in dirt and grime. Most of the laborers and carpenters were half naked and no one gave it a second thought. But I was supposed to be the site supervisor, so seeing me half naked with my slave piercing exposed was, I now realized, perhaps kind of an issue.

“What’s a slave doing running a construction operation? Who do you think you are?”

I’d taken a grave misstep. In most circumstances, you wouldn’t expect to see a site supervisor with his shirt off, working and sweating alongside his guys. Worse yet, these people weren’t villagers at all. They came from the settlements scattered around the village chief’s territory.

They had no idea who I was. I had to head this guy off.

“I apologize. There’s been a misunderstanding.” My first impulse told me it would be wise to be humble. This was going to be all kinds of trouble, so I yielded immediately and hung my head.

“Harrumph! Answer my question then, slave. Who are you?”

“My name is Shooter. I’m a hunter.”

“They let you be a hunter, even though you’re a slave?”

“Yes—I was a hunter before I became a slave.” I ducked my head in a polite semi-bow, wondering just how much of an introduction I was going to need to give this guy. The village chief had mustered these laborers to help with the construction work. I couldn’t afford to say anything that would upset them or lead to an argument.

After all, the village chief was the one who had appointed me as the site supervisor. If a dispute broke out, it might lead some people to question her authority, and that would cast doubt on Alexandricia’s leadership. On top of that, the enslaved criminals seemed particularly irked that I was in charge of the project, and that could make things even worse. I couldn’t let this get out of hand.

I desperately thought back over all my past part-time jobs, trying to remember something, anything that came close to this situation.

Cassandra and Elpaco had been watching from a distance, but I could see the color draining from their faces. They rushed over to me. I tried to keep my eyes on the group—didn’t want to risk looking away—but I threw just one sideways glance at my wife and Fuzzball. “J-just a moment please, folks.”

Cassandra jumped between me and the villagers, her hands spread. Today she wore a checker-print shirt and bib dress, and still had my shortsword at her hip. “What exactly is going on here?!”

Elpaco held back beside her, ready to draw his knife at any moment.

“There’s no reason to fight! The village chief ordered Shooter to take charge of the site!”

“And who are you? We came here ’cause the village chief said we’d be workin’ for a knight to build a castle. Where’s Gimul? I thought the knight was gonna be Gimul.”

“I am Cassandra, the wife of that very knight. Gimul is no longer with us—he has gone to the bull-kin colony in search of a wife.”

“Gimul’s with the bull-kin? I never heard about that.” That news seemed to throw the square-jawed spokesman for the farmers off-balance. He turned back to the rest of the group and the lot of them fell into a nervous, confused conversation.

I couldn’t let my wife handle the situation forever, so I stood straight and gestured for her and Elpaco to step back.

“Are you all aware,” I said, “that the village chief held talks with the bull-kin a few days ago?”

“No, we never heard a thing. The hell happened with the minotaurs to set off all this?”

“Do you see that big cave beside the lake? The minotaurs have carved an entire city out of a huge cavern in the deepest reaches of the cave.”

“They did?”

Seeing the shock on the farmers’ faces, Cassandra and Elpaco nodded in confirmation.

“How did they manage that in such a place?” The farmer’s eyes flashed. “Is that why we’re building a fort here? To fight them?”

“No.”

“Well, could you explain, then?”

“Yes, fine, I will.”

Wracking my brain for a useful memory, I kiiind of found one. I once worked at a classy bar, and at that sort of place, you inevitably mess up dealing with customers. I tried desperately to remember how I handled that precise situation. What had I said?

Well, I’d gone low profile. Let ’em shout, let ’em complain, all while I bowed my head and kept quiet. When I did that, the other person started demanding an explanation. And if I was going to give them excuses, that was my chance.

I wasn’t about to lose this opportunity. I explained it all: That in exchange for allowing the minotaurs to live in her territory, the village chief had demanded they pay taxes. That we had held a feast to strengthen our bonds, and that we had cemented our commitment with an exchange of pledges.

“It was during the feast that I fought the bull-kin chieftain in their traditional pantsless wrestling style called bullfighting. It was only meant to be entertainment for the feast, but—” I tried not to look too self-absorbed, and I think I did as great a job as usual, “—I just so happened to take the victory.”

“You? A slave? That’s preposterous. I don’t believe you.”

“That’s why I’m here, actually. The village chief rewarded me by conferring a knighthood on me.”

As one, the farmers turned to look at Cassandra. She nodded to them. The disbelief on their faces didn’t change, but since there was a witness corroborating my story, they weren’t quite as secure in their assumptions.

“So what does that mean, if a knight is a slave?” one of the farmers muttered.

Another: “I refuse to be conscripted labor for some slave, getting ordered around while he flaunts his belly piercing!”

A third: “Yeah!”

Not to say that they weren’t still pissy.

I suppose they thought I was being uppity and overreaching my station. But given my position at the worksite, I wasn’t going to let them treat me like a slave, either. As long as everyone was on the same page, I wouldn’t be arrogant or servile.

And there’s where I made them my offer.

“Think of it like this: Slaves have the lowest status in society, and knights are part of the ruling class that serves the governor. Put the two together, divide by two, and that puts me on the same level as you, right?”

When I laid it out like that, the farmers and even Cassandra stared at me, wide-eyed.

“I gather that you aren’t very familiar with who I am, but there you have it. I came to the village several months ago as an outsider. A newcomer. Meaning that I can learn from you, from the experience you all possess. And as your student, I ask only this…”

They waited, uncertain.

“Think of me as the village chief’s messenger, passing along her orders. I plan to work alongside you to build this castle. I hope you see where I’m coming from.”

I dipped into a crisp bow and the discontented group of farmers were now looking at each other. They had fallen silent. Better than loud and angry, I suppose. This would do until the village chief arrived.

Once I started carrying stone again, this time alongside the new farmers, I saw Nishka look over at me from where she stood driving the slaves. I guess she’d heard what I said, proud long-ear that she was. After I unloaded the stone from my yoke and headed back down the hill, I saw Nishka marching straight at me. What, did she want to talk?

 

“Sorry,” she said, “I’m goin’ for a walk.”

“Hey, hold on! You’re not skipping out on me, are you?”

“Ha ha ha! Of course not!”

I hastily excused myself from my newly won allies, though I still don’t think they exactly liked me, and ran after Nishka.

“How come you didn’t slap those idiots down?” she hissed. “Huh?”

“If I start beating people to get them to listen to me, I’m pretty sure the village would ostracize me and my family. And what would I do then?”

“Ostrich size you? I don’t get what those birds gotta do with this.”

“No, that’s not—I mean that they’d snub us. The villagers would all band together to ignore us and we’d be outcasts.”

“You talkin’ about gettin’ bullied?” Nishka snorted. It was weird how infuriated she seemed.

“Where I came from, it was kind of like a rule that, if you crossed all the wrong lines, everyone would ignore you except at a funeral or a fire. I just got a new wife, so I can’t afford to start picking fights with anyone.”

“I guess you’ve got a point. But those bastards were bein’ so damn rude to you, makes my blood boil!”

“Don’t worry about it. Do you think I’ll ever be able to get rid of this thing, though?” I tugged on my belly-button piercing and sighed. It drew looks from the villagers, and it was getting to the point that even the stares from the enslaved criminals were starting to bother me.

“Sure ya can. If you don’t like it, want me to yank it out for ya?”

“N-no thanks! I like having a belly.”

“Ha ha ha! Just jokin’,” Nishka laughed. “But y’know, it doesn’t have to be a joke. The yanking part, sure, but…”

Her face turned serious. I understood why. Even while the two of us were talking, the enslaved criminals were toiling and—every now and again—glancing in our direction with dagger-eyed looks.

“You can handle the farmers however ya want, but that stuff won’t work on slaves. If one of ’em turns rebellious and you don’t set him straight, they’re gonna start gettin’ violent. And if it happens in the village, stuff’d go south real fast.”

“Ugh. That’s true. I should talk to the village chief.”

“And tell her how the farmers were stirrin’ up trouble.”

“You’re right. Speaking of touchy subjects, someone was watching us on our way here this morning.”

“Watchin’ you? Maybe it was the bull-kin.” Nishka propped her chin on her fingers and thought it over.

I didn’t have any guesses of my own, and I didn’t know if it was wise to speculate.

“Ya might not wanna talk about that here, though. Maybe wait until you get back to the village chief’s place.”

“Good point.”

And back to work we went. There were some pockets of unrest in the air, but no one was going to cause problems, at least not yet…but that still left the question of whoever had been stalking us. Who was that?

 

When the village chief arrived that afternoon, she climbed up the hill and then sent her bodyguard, the adventurer Electra, back down before she let slip a whisper of admiration. “Looks like work is progressing pretty well here. I thought it would take more time to get the scaffolding set up.”

“We’ve managed to get a lot done thanks to all the serfs you sent to help.”

“You’ll need to finish as much as possible before autumn. Once harvest time comes around, the farmers won’t be available anymore and the hunters will need to focus their energy on hunting,” Alexandricia told me as we walked the outer boundary of the castle. We had managed to finish the foundation and had begun building scaffolding and setting stones.

I followed along behind Alexandricia, bowing at constant intervals. Cassandra and Elpaco walked even farther back. It was kinda dopey-looking.

“As it happens, I have some good news for you, Shooter.”

“Is it about my new house?”

The village chief turned to me, her eyebrows raised. “Who told you that? I was trying to keep it secret.”

“The carpenters were talking about it. They said that’s why we didn’t have as many carpenters here today.”

“Well, I figured you wouldn’t need so many just to lay foundations and erect scaffolding. Those damn chatty dwarves.”

“Please don’t blame them, ma’am. I was the one who asked if they were overworked, given the shortage of manpower.”

“You notice the strangest things. Or perhaps I know better now—perhaps I should say you seem educated? Regardless, it makes you troublesome. Yes, Shooter, the frame of the house is up and everything is done except the mud walls.”

Right now, houses were being built all over the place for the newly arrived settlers and goblin laborers, and it looked like mine was among them. Then I remembered that basic construction had been done for several buildings on what I’d thought was just the empty lot next to my house. Was I wrong? Was one of them mine?

“Did they really get the entire frame up in one day?”

“Ha. I’m sure your new wives are eager to move in. Once the basics are taken care of, it only takes a day or two to get a one-story house up.”

“Man. Earth magic is something else…”

“It will probably take a few days for the walls to fully set, and we can’t put the thatched roof up until after that.”

“Thank you so much, ma’am. Truly, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”

I groveled, and Cassandra and Elpaco followed my lead.

“You’d prefer to have a separate room for you and your brides, I assume?”

“Ha ha! Yes, yes yes yes, thank you!”

“It’s much nicer than a hunter’s shack, but it’s still just a wood-frame house with mud walls. I hope you can make do until the proper stone houses are built around the castle,” Alexandricia said cheerfully. Then she drew close beside me and whispered, so that only I’d hear, “I’m working hard for you, big brother.” She smiled. “Well, I’d better get started putting those walls up.”

Hot damn, the walls were coming up, my mood was coming up, everything was coming up!

 

***

 

Once we returned home from the worksite that night, I planned to freshen up and then take Tanne d’Arc to the village chief’s manor with us. Usually I’d report on the progress with Nishka or the head carpenter, since they were helping me oversee the site. But today, Alexandricia had made the strange request for me to bring my family instead.

“C-certainly. By family, you mean my two wives?”

“Elpaco lives with you, too, doesn’t he? And that—what do you call it—that little frilled lizard of yours?”

“You want me to bring Basil? But why?”

I squinted suspiciously at the village chief’s command. She always seemed so spontaneous, even if I knew that she was one of the long-game types.

She’d been watching me with amusement that afternoon at the worksite. As I asked her, she coughed slightly and said, “You wound me, my dear elder brother. Now that Gimul is a pledge with the bull-kin, my dinner table feels so empty. Didn’t I tell you to come visit from time to time? So…what do you think?”

“I think you might have another motive,” I replied ambiguously. The village chief really did seem to have something in mind. But whatever little observations I made, I couldn’t exactly refuse her.

When evening came and work was done for the day, we usually trickled back to the village in twos and threes along the well-trodden deer trail. On the way home, I turned to look back at Elpaco, who was at the rear of our group, and asked him something that had been on my mind. “Elpaco?”

“Hm?”

“Do you feel like someone’s watching us again?”

I was referring to the feeling Elpaco had gotten on our way to the worksite at the very beginning of the day, before we’d started work at the lakeshore. Thinking back on it now, I couldn’t help wondering what had been watching us with that nearly tangible malevolence…

But hey, I know karate. You get a sense about these things. Whoever watched us had a reason for doing so. There was no doubt about that.

Slowly but surely, ever since starting my new life in this fantasy world, my intuition was growing sharper.

Humans have a great capacity to adapt to their environment. I remember reading in a book that special forces soldiers honed their minds to the utmost, learning to a kind of “battle-mode sleep.” I guess you could say they were just hypersensitive and only lightly dozing, but a person’s body manages to recover strength even when they only get shallow rest, so it was worth it for these soldiers to learn to sleep pretty much anywhere.

Along those lines, I had learned that Elpaco, being a hunter, was capable of a kind of “hunting-mode sleep.” I suppose caution was only to be expected from a foxling, but he always seemed somehow placid, whether he was conscious or not.

Not that I could do anything like Elpaco or some tactical espionage agent; once I got home to my hunter shack, I flopped down like anyone else and had a pleasant night’s sleep with my family. Or rather, given the fact that every day was brimming with pulled muscles and backbreaking labor, I’d have a pleasant “passing out the moment I hit bed.”

Especially because it wasn’t like I could do any fun, giggly, moany stuff in a one-room shack, whether or not Tanne d’Arc and I were newlyweds.

“There’s nothing right now,” said Elpaco, shaking me out of my reverie. “I only felt it that one time.”

“What if it happened before and we just never noticed it?”

“Could’ve, I guess. This was probably the first time, but if they stayed downwind? I wouldn’t know either way.”

“Ugh.”

“Nishka might know better than me.”

At that, an uneasy look came over Cassandra’s face. “Do you think it’s safe leaving Tanne home by herself?”

“If she stays home, she’s got all the villagers nearby to protect her.”

“But the only neighbors who’ll have anything to do with us are the other hunter families.”

“You’re worried she’s being ostracized?”

Tanne d’Arc had been the one to stay home today, but usually she and Cassandra took turns with that. I could see how that could get depressing.

It was true that since Elpaco, Tanne d’Arc, and I had started living in the hunter shack, the neighbors had never once interacted with us. The only people who acknowledged us were Wak’wakgoro and his brothers while I was gone and Gimul when he was poking his nose in.

But the village shunned all the hunters and, as far as I knew, always had. From the villagers’ perspective, a family of folk that hunted but regularly failed to bring back any catches were no better than freeloaders.

Well, I called it shunning, but then I remembered how almost no villagers had attended the funerals for the first victims of the fight with the wyvern. Back in Japan, that was a no-go. You’d get at least that bare minimum of acknowledgment for a passing, if not the usual respect.

“You’re so accomplished that everyone in the village has to start recognizing you eventually, Shooter,” said Cassandra brightly.

“Yeah, she’s right.”

I felt conflicted letting my wife and puppy-boy bolster my ego like a couple of hype men. I’m not so twisted that praise makes me feel guilty, but once people start expecting things of me, I have to meet their expectations. And I’ve never found that easy.

“I-I guess so. But anyway, let’s focus on giving our report to Alexandricia and coming up with a plan.”

“Um, all right…”

“We don’t want anything to go wrong during construction, and we can’t allow anything to inflame the situation while the settlement is being built.”

“Shooter, you called the village chief by her first name again…”

“Oops…”

I’d let that ambiguous bit of familiarity with the village chief slip out of my inner monologue again. Unable to face Cassandra’s frown, I hurried ahead.

 

And so we found ourselves at the village chief’s manor.

It was the only abode in town whose construction could compare to those in Bulka. The house that was currently being built for me was nice enough, but it ultimately wasn’t much more than a stretched-out hut.

The village chief’s manor, on the other hand, had a sitting room, a dining hall, and other luxurious rooms in case she needed to welcome any esteemed outsiders.

It had the elegance of a governor’s mansion, buuuuut…well, as the residence of an ambitious woman who was kinda sorta plotting to commit high treason and supplant the kingdom no matter the bloody cost, it was downright puny. Kinda like a flashy celebrity living low-profile, except with the promise of guillotines. (Or, more guillotines.)

Tanne d’Arc sighed. “Aren’t you going to knock on the door, husband? The bugs are eating me alive.”

“I’m sure you’re tired, but the village chief is probably waiting for us…” Cassandra added.

“Kweee!”

“R-right. Here goes.”

I had been so caught up in my thoughts gazing at the village chief’s manor that my wives had to prod me back to reality.

Their personalities were so different, it was easy to tell them apart.

Tanne d’Arc, as befitted the sister of a chieftain, never seemed to get enough pampering. Whereas Cassandra, who cradled Basil in her arms, seemed to be happy just to have a family, and she just couldn’t stop complimenting me recently. Probably had something to do with all that time she was alone after her father died.

“You shouldn’t disrespect your husband in public, Tanne.”

“B-but the bugs are making me itchy, sister…”

I rapped my knuckles soundly on the door while Cassandra scolded my bull-kin wife. Cassandra had decided to take on the role of a big sister. I guess it almost made sense. I’d married Cassandra first, so she was like a veteran while Tanne d’Arc was more of a newbie. So, sure, why not.

“No excuses, now. Shooter comes from a tribe of great warriors who revere nudity. If you insult your husband, the ancestors of his fallen tribe will come after you.”

“Fiiine.” Tanne d’Arc drooped, but she still took a moment to glance over at me and stick out her tongue.

Cassandra was unexpectedly good at being the primary wife and keeping everything together.

Tanne d’Arc was one thing with her utterly defeated annoyance, but now Elpaco was looking at me with a slightly frightened face, as if asking me to protect him.

“Now, now, Elpaco,” Cassandra cooed, “You’ll only get in Shooter’s way if you’re clinging at his sleeve like that. That wouldn’t be appropriate for one of Shooter’s wives!”

“Wh-wha…wife?”

Elpaco looked confused and as usual it was just so friggin’ adorable!

At last, the young serving girl invited us into the village chief’s home.

Basil was the first one through the door, launching himself from Cassandra’s chest.

I ran after him shouting, “Get back here!” The little dork must’ve been hungry. He led me straight to the dining room.

“So, Shooter, you finally decided to show up. And with your whole family, too.”

“I apologize, ma’am. Basil made a mess of things…”

“It’s fine. Now that I don’t have Gimul around anymore, I was thinking of getting a dog. Things like that happen with pets.”

“C’mon, you sound like a mother whose child finally moved out! You’re not that old. Come here, Basil.”

“Kwee kwee ptthhbb!”

When I entered the dining room, bowing as I did so, Basil was rubbing against the village chief’s legs. He often did the same to me back in the shack. That chubby little monster! Of course he knew who the scariest person in the whole village was, didn’t he? But he also knew he’d get away with it because he was a baby.

“Wow, Shooter. We’ve been waitin’ so long for ya I already got started with the drinks.”

“Huh? Why did you ask Nishka to come?”

“Aww, don’t be rude, now! My little sister went and got married, so now I’ve got no one to go home to!”

“Oh, really? Why have I never heard about this?”

“You think I’m gonna go around tellin’ everyone my little sister got hitched before me? Way too embarrassin’!”

“I apologize. But is this really the place to talk about it…?”

“Why not? I told the village chief the whole story, and she saw how broken up I was, so she’s probably gonna introduce me to a great guy!” Nishka proclaimed, swinging a bottle of wine, her nose turning red. She was already Tipsy Nish, and threatening to get way tipsier.

The servant girl guided the rest of my family in and we took our seats at the long table. The village chief sat at the head, naturally. I sat to her left with Cassandra and Tanne d’Arc, and Nishka and Elpaco sat on the other side.

I bet Tipsy Nish was sitting in Gimul’s old seat; the fact that the chair was a little larger than all the others was a good tip-off.

“Now then, shall we eat? Wak’wakgoro brought in a boar today, so he’s prepared some for us. Nice and fresh.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I was just thinking how we ought to go back out hunting every now and then. We’ve dumped all the responsibility on Wak’wakgoro.”

“I’ve already considered that. Once you’ve made a certain amount of progress, I’m thinking you two can take turns as site supervisor.”

“Actually, about that…” I started.

Alexandricia shook her head. “The Scalesplitter told me what happened. Unruly slaves, insubordinate serfs…that’s the situation, is it not?”

“Yes, there’s that. But also one other thing.”

“Yes, yes—someone is watching the village or the nearby area, hmm?” the village chief interrupted. “Let’s discuss why I brought you all here today, seeing as we must inform the bull-kin.”

My entire family gulped. Elpaco alone kept his eyes fixed vacantly on the steaming boar meat.

 

***

 

“Eat while it’s hot,” said the village chief, smirking at the staring Elpaco.

To be completely honest, I’m not a big fan of being teased like that. I didn’t really like having dinner dangled in front of me making me salivate, either, but I was more interested in hearing what the village chief wanted to say. I’m not opposed to surprises in and of themselves, but I hate the anxiety of waiting for news you just know isn’t going to be good. It’s bad for your mental health, you know?

Cassandra and Tanne d’Arc were about as nervous as me, not touching their forks even after the village chief’s goblin servant cut off steaming pieces of herbed boar meat and loaded it onto their plates.

Nishka, blunt and easygoing as she was, and hungry Elpaco were the only ones to pick up the strange two-pronged forks of this world. Almost immediately, Cassandra cut in to chide the latter. “No, Elpaco. Neither our husband nor the village chief has started eating yet. You have to wait.”

“Oh, okay.”

Cassandra was being strict, trying to teach Elpaco manners, but I just smiled and lifted a hand to brush her concern aside. “Oh, it’s fine. It’s hard to think straight when you’re hungry, and we’ve been toiling the whole day at work.”

The village chief watched this exchange, then picked up her fork. “Hm. It’s important to take cues from our superiors. Let me begin, then. You too, Shooter.”

“Ah, yes. Of course.”

Ordinarily, I would’ve been starving at this point. But I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting back to the looming discussion. Still, my family wanted me to take the next bite, so I followed the village chief’s example and reached for a steamed potato on one of the dishes at the center of the table.

Steamed potatoes were never missing from any meal in this village, but these were identical to ones that might have been taken from our very own fields. The taste was akin to taro root; it was probably related to the plant that fed regions all around the Pacific.

These were cooked by wrapping the potato in fresh leaves from the plant and setting them in a steam pot. Steaming in the soft, green leaves added a hint of bitterness and a touch of color to them. When dipped in good boar meat sauce, they were damn good. The faint bitterness and bite of spice paired perfectly with the wine.

“There’s no reason we can’t talk while we eat. I’m told that you’ve sensed someone watching the area around the village.” The village chief brought a cup of wine to her lips and watched my reaction before continuing. “I’ve heard similar reports from the adventurers mapping the area. So I had the matter investigated.”

“Did guild administrator Camulla tell you?”

“No. Electra told me herself.”

Electra was one of the adventurers Nishka and I had interviewed face-to-face at the adventurer’s guild in Bulka, along with Gimul. Very muscular, very hardcore, very gorilla-shaped. She used a rapier, which was pretty odd in this world, so she made quite an impression. I remembered her combat skills being pretty jaw-dropping, too, though I still didn’t know how her preferred weapon performed against monsters.

“Why would she do that?” I asked dubiously.

The village chief’s lips pulled into a smile. “Because she’s someone I can trust, of course.”

Not to mention, Electra was a woman, and I’d seen them together a lot more often recently around the village and at the worksite. Maybe Alexandricia felt more at ease with a woman for a bodyguard, and this one was a particularly skilled warrior at that.

“To all appearances, the adventurer’s guild outpost has started operations. Everything is going smoothly so far.”

“So then why didn’t Camulla mention anything?”

“If you recall, Electra and Dyson were here before him. They took advantage of their familiarity with the area to join the mapping expeditions with the village’s hunters. And, they said they notified the adventurer’s guild of their suspicions that someone might be watching us.”

“Hold on, are you saying that Camulla hid that information?” I nearly dropped my wine cup, and not just because the wine would taste about as good on the floor. This was quite an unexpected development.

“What do you think, Shooter?”

“Well, I can picture a few scenarios. Maybe he didn’t feel like he should escalate unconfirmed information higher up the chain of command. Or maybe Camulla believed the report wasn’t true for his own reasons. Or maybe…” I said finally, “he had reason to ignore it.”

“I see.”

I once worked part-time at a web development company. The company was so greedy, they would take orders from any company for jobs even remotely related to web development. They would do work ranging from a storefront website for a mail order company to subcontracted social network games. The implementation team and development team members always called these companies suckers because the poor saps would bite at anything.

One day I got assigned to manage a project creating background images for a mobile game. My job was to get in touch with the illustrator who was handling the backgrounds and make sure we stuck to the client’s schedule, but the work got delayed for all kinds of reasons.

Maybe the illustrator just wasn’t up to the task, or maybe he had a backlog. There was also the fact that no matter how many pictures we sent the client, they would tell us to make corrections and resend them. In the end, the illustrator started telling me, “I’m almost done!” and then would try anything he could to squeeze out extra time or thwart me.

As they say in business, we had a failure to “report, inform, and consult.” The illustrator was clearly lying and pulling whatever he could to get away with it, sure, but ultimately we reached a stalemate over how to actually fix the problem. First, the picture would get to me late. Then I’d let the general contractor know and add in all kinds of excuses for the delay. Finally, the contractor would make excuses to the publisher. The chain of excuses eventually got so complicated no one could untangle it anymore.

“But no matter his reasons,” I said, “it’s problematic that Camulla didn’t tell us anything.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

I told the village chief exactly what I thought. Ever since I’d arrived in the village, I had decided to stop simply telling everyone what they wanted to hear. And if I owed anyone my true feelings, it was Alexandricia.

I mean, after Cassandra and Tanne d’Arc, of course. They were my wives, and family has to come first. After all, back in Japan, a person like me who went from one part-time job to another could never dream of being able to have a family. I prized them.

“And what do you think, Scalesplitter?”

“Can’t go wrong leavin’ stuff like that up to Shooter. I dunno much about Camulla, but this guy I know I can trust.”

Aw! I love it when Nishka gets nice. At which point Nishka looked over at me, made eye contact, then shut her one eye. Then again, since Nishka wore an eyepatch as a fashion statement, maybe she’d tried for some kinda ironic wink that nobody could see.

“Which means that Camulla is now a person of interest,” I concluded.

“I suppose so.”

“But then we have to ask, why would this barbarian Camulla do something like that?” Elegantly cutting away the last bits of meat still clinging to the bone on her plate, Tanne d’Arc slid into our conversation.

“Easy! He hushed it up ’cause it would make him look bad,” Nishka answered blithely. “He’s probably workin’ with someone. Man, this boar is tasty!”

“And who would that ‘someone’ be? Who would be troubled by things going well for our barbarian chief? I don’t like the sound of this Camulla fellow, husband,” said Tanne d’Arc, scooping the last bits of meat up with her knife and fork. She had some pretty incisive observations, this little sister of the bull-kin chieftain.

“Your second wife is a sharp one, Shooter,” the village chief said, her eyes wide but intrigued. “As far as my rivals go, there are the governors of the surrounding territories and the earl of Bulka, I suppose. And the earl of Bulka has the most to lose from my success so nearby.”

Tanne d’Arc nodded. “Those parties would be best served by someone infiltrating the settlers. It’s possible that there may be someone among the migrants, the goblin laborers, the enslaved criminals, or the adventurers acting suspiciously.”

“So it’s possible that Camulla is a plant for Bulka’s commander or one of the nearby lords,” I said.

The village chief sniffed. “Obviously we can’t say for certain whether Camulla is directly attached to one of my rivals. He might be linked to a third party acting as a proxy.”

At that, I looked over at Elpaco.

Elpaco paused with a spoonful of vegetable soup to his mouth. He looked so broken up. “D-do you think I’m part of it?”

Of course he got the wrong idea. I wasn’t suspicious of him in the least. It was just that since he was a hunter from Bulka, he had spent a lot of time with the migrants and slaves on the journey to the village. I wondered if he might know something.

I hurried to explain myself. “No, no! That’s not what I meant. I was just wondering if you’d seen any suspicious activity in the newcomers.”

“What do you mean, ‘suspicious activity’?”

“Well, you’re a foxling, right? Those ears of yours can pick up sounds a long way away. And whether it’s because you’re a hunter or because you’re a beastman, you’re good at detecting other people’s movements, right?” I said, trying to patch things up. Elpaco looked a little embarrassed, but was otherwise as unreadable as always.

As soon as I opened my mouth to add something more, Elpaco started to say something, too, and as soon as I shut my mouth to hear what he had to say, someone jumped in with their own contribution.

It was Alexandricia.

“You’re a foxling? Shooter—did Elpaco tell you that?”

“Oh, uh, yes. What’s wrong?”

“That girl’s no foxling. Why would you think that?”

“Huh?”

“Um, boy?”

“Not important. Who told you that you’re a foxling? I doubt very much that your parents were.”

The village chief was practically interrogating Fuzzball, her tone a little harsher than before. She was leaning forward slightly over the table, staring hard at Elpaco, to all appearances indifferent about whether he was a boy or a girl.

Fuzzball drooped and curled in on himself. He glanced furtively up at me as if begging for help. “I-I was an orphan. A goblin family took me in and raised me as their own. They thought I was a foxling,” Elpaco confessed, almost apologetically.

He was an orphan? And raised by goblins? We really did have no idea what he was, then.

I’d no sooner thought that than a loud knocking resounded through the hall, followed by the sound of ragged breathing. Heavy footsteps pounded over the floor and two adventurers burst into the dining room.

Alexandricia glared. “What’s wrong with you two? We’re in the middle of dinner.”

It was Electra and Dyson.

“We’ve got a problem, ma’am. The sky over the lake has turned red!”

“There’s a fire at the worksite. Someone set the whole place on fire!”

At that, the room burst into a confused uproar.

 

It felt as if a stack of carefully placed toy blocks had been knocked over.

When I was a kid, I liked to play with blocks when my parents were out. My little sisters would always try to get me to pay attention to them, and sometimes they blew up my block castle to get me to.

I stared at the charred skeleton of the lakeside settlement, reduced to cinders in a single night. Atop the hill, the early stages of the castle were now black with soot. The stones we had stacked were knocked to the ground.

Someone had toppled Alexandricia’s toy castle.