Chapter 55: Mine

“Now, do as you’re told and work hard, okay? Hehehe. I’ll leave them in your care, sir!”

With that, he pushed me toward the man in front of us. The man who had said he wanted to take me in as a foster child... There had been several other kids who had been picked up as foster children before me, but that had only happened once a year or so.

That was no surprise. Disease, accidents, war, robbers, etc... People died for many reasons, and there were more and more orphans each and every day. For every couple who wanted a child, they had a sibling, relative, or friend who had passed away, leaving behind their own orphans. There were also kids who had lost both parents, or who had one remaining parent who was in no state to take care of a child.

That was why it was standard practice for people to take in children from a family they knew, and taking in a complete stranger’s child from an orphanage was quite rare. It made sense. You could spend many long years taking care of an orphan, only for someone claiming to be the child’s parent, whether true or not, to barge in and claim they wanted their child back to have someone to take care of them after they retired. Then they could take them away by force or demand money.

But there were some people, albeit rare ones, who wanted to take in the orphans of strangers. In these cases, they were put through a background check, took in the child once they passed, and received occasional check-ins to make sure the child was doing fine.

That is, until about six months ago.

Half a year ago, “Daddy,” who had invested his own money to build the orphanage and spent decades running it, had reluctantly retired, and things changed immediately once his successor had taken over. Orphans were taken away as foster children once every three to four months, and new kids came in right away as if to fill their spots.

For some reason, the kids were taken to other countries rather than staying locally. Each country had their own orphanages, and there were plenty of children who couldn’t even get into them. So why did these people go all the way to another country to foster these children?

This question was on everyone’s mind, but it wasn’t as if anything could be done about it. Even when we asked the adults, they just laughed and said, “You must be jealous of those kids who got adopted.”

I was eight years old when my turn came, and I was taken in as a foster child by a mid-sized merchant house. Yes, I was supposed to be their foster child, but when I arrived at their shop, it wasn’t life as a merchant’s daughter that awaited me. I was forced to work from early morning to late at night for no pay as an employee...no, a slave.

This wasn’t what I had signed up for. I was supposed to be welcomed as a daughter. I was told that the merchant had passed the evaluation conducted by the orphanage. But for some reason, the paperwork claimed I was a live-in servant who had been paid upfront for fifty years of work, making me effectively their slave. It must have been some kind of a trick.

Yes, I believed that “Uncle,” the individual who had taken over after Daddy, wasn’t used to running an orphanage, and he had been deceived by these people because of his lack of experience. There were far fewer orphans to keep track of when Daddy was running things, so the criteria for the evaluations must have gotten more lax.

That was why I had assessed my situation, gathered the necessary information I needed to get back to the orphanage, then spent nearly a year secretly saving up the necessary travel expenses. Since I wasn’t getting paid, I had to save what few tips I got from customers and the coins I picked up off the streets. It was hard work saving up enough to buy even a few days worth of hard bread.

I would camp outside at night. I wouldn’t need too much money as long as I ate the plants and nuts I found as I walked through the forest. And of course, I intended to sneak into the shop before I left so I could fill up my waterskin and take as much food and anything I could pawn off.

That’s theft? No, it’s actually really cheap if you consider it as wages for an entire year. Besides, I was escaping the home of a criminal who had lied to illegally buy me as a slave, so it was unlikely that anyone would try to put me on trial. It was no problem, really.

And so, by the time I had finished my preparations, I was already nine years old and starting to feel like I was in danger. Yes...in “that” sense. Around that time, a six-year-old boy was brought in from a different orphanage from the one I had come from. As a so-called foster child, that is.

Of course, he was forced to work like a slave without compensation, just like me. My “seniors,” who had been purchased before me, just went through each day listlessly as if they had already given up. But this boy was so much like Jessie, a kid who had grown attached to me back at the orphanage, and I could see he hadn’t been tainted with despair yet. Although he acted obedient to the master on the surface, he had also grown attached to me for some reason.

I decided to change my plans and bring him with me. My rate of travel would slow down a bit, and my food consumption would double, but it was no big deal.

So, I waited for that fateful day...

“Wake up, Aral...” I whispered to the young boy as he blinked his sleepy eyes.

“Nn...”

“I’m getting out of here... Wanna come with me?”

Aral was a clever kid. The drowsiness immediately vanished as his eyes widened, then he responded quietly but firmly, “Yeah! I’ll go anywhere with you!”

“Good! All right, then let’s get started.”

I knew where the waterskins, non-perishable food, and petty cash were all kept. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been paying any attention during the year I was working here.

I began stuffing whatever I could into my bag. I had already calculated how much I could carry on my own and decided on how much of each item I needed. After adding Aral’s consumption into the equation, I quickly got to work.

As for money, silver and gold were all kept in the safe, but iron and copper coins were kept in the desk as petty cash, and that was only secured with a simple lock. They weren’t worth much, after all. I could open it with ease if I wanted.

This wasn’t “stealing.” I was just taking a small portion of the wages I was owed from the year I had worked here. The rest of what I was owed would be paid out in another form...

Oh yes, he’ll pay.

All the deeds for big, important transactions were kept in the safe, but the smaller transactions, day-to-day documents, and notes that weren’t regarding financial transactions, like schedules for certain deals...those were all kept in the desk.

I shoved them all into my bag. I wasn’t going to haul them around with me for the whole trip; actually, I planned on dumping them in the nearby river, so I just needed to carry them for a little bit. Yes, I needed to cause confusion and distract as many people as I could from coming after us.

Then...

I quietly undid the inside lock, went outside, and placed a piece of paper I had prepared beforehand onto the door. Daddy and my mommies had taught me how to read and write back at the orphanage.

With my awkward handwriting, I had poured my heart out and written about how we had been taken in as foster children but treated like slaves. I then detailed the shady business practices employed by this shop, how they avoided paying taxes, double-priced their goods, counterfeited and rewrote deeds, and more.

I had learned about commercial transactions, taxes, and accounting at the orphanage. Rather, I learned how to help Daddy when his eyes started going bad and he was having trouble managing his accounts. I was already handling the orphanage’s books about a year before he had retired.

But here, I pretended not to know anything. The owner of the trading company and his clerks spoke openly about their illegal acts around me, assuming I didn’t understand any of it.

“Listen up, Mine. Many people act as if they’re more capable than they really are. When you do that, you’ll only disappoint others when they find out the truth. But if no one expects anything of you, they’ll be in for a pleasant surprise when they see you’re actually skilled. And above all...when someone underestimates you and lets their guard down, it becomes easier for you to do what you need to do.”

Daddy had taught me that. He also told me that if anyone tricked me or took something from me, I need to make them lose more than they had gained from doing so. Otherwise, they would just move on to another target.

That’s why I had to make sure they didn’t just fail to make a profit from messing with the orphans, but that they would suffer extreme losses. If I just took all this hardship without doing anything, it wouldn’t just be a loss for myself, but for all the other people the bad guys would take advantage of after getting away with their crimes.

There were many other things that he had taught me.

“If it comes down to it, take your enemy down with you. That way, you can at least protect all the people who could have also become victims.”

“Hurt the enemy as much as you can, so they have no room to mess with you.”

“Use your anger to fuel your aggression! It will grant you unstoppable power...”

“One who has nothing to lose is invincible!”

What was Daddy doing before he started an orphanage, anyway...? And how did he get the funds to get it running?

Setting that aside, his way of thinking was probably correct. So I would do as he said.

“Okay, time to escape!”

I put up copies of my account on the door of the commerce and industry guild, the public information board at the plaza, and several other locations, then we fled the city. It wasn’t as if this city was surrounded by walls or anything, so we were able to get out without any issues.

All I had to do now was head toward my old home, the orphanage, along with Aral. It was going to take days, or even weeks. We may be forced to drink mud water and eat plants along the way. But I was going home. No matter what.

I was going to go back to the orphanage where all my friends were...

So why was I getting stared down by a dagger-wielding lady with the eyes of a murderer who had killed dozens of people, and getting a weapon that was clearly more deadly than a bow pointed at me...?

“Eek!!!” Aral and I leapt back instinctively and fell on our butts.

“D-Don’t kill us!”

At the time, we still had no idea that this would be the beginning of our glory days...

Ding, ding...

The bell at the hunter’s guild rang every time the door opened. The hunters and guild members all turned to me at once, but I walked right up to the reception desk, unfazed.

“...The mercenary guild is next door.”

Shaddap! I’m not a serial killer, damn it!

“I’m not here to take on any orders! I have a request myself! And I’m not here to ask for anyone to get assassinated!”

“M-My apologies!”

How rude can you get?!

“This is my request.”

This wasn’t the first time I had made a request to the guild...but the last one had been over seventy years ago, in a foreign country. So, the method and standard rates for putting in such a request could be drastically different this time around.

“Yes, you seem to have all the necessities in order, and there are no regulatory violations. Your request can be processed. However, it seems the offered reward is left blank...”

Yes, I couldn’t just make up a number there.

“What would be the standard market price?” I asked.

I discussed it with the reception lady and decided on an adequate fee, after which my order was successfully posted. That mostly consisted of them just writing the details down in a notebook, then putting the form up on the board.

Yes, this too was a part of the process of integrating myself with the local community. Was the local lord’s army the most powerful force in this city? Or maybe the guards? No. It was the hunter’s guild.

There wasn’t really a strict hierarchy, but the hunters did follow orders that came from the guild’s higher-ups. As long as the orders didn’t put their lives in danger or go against their interests, that is. If all of the guild members bared their teeth, their collective power surpassed even that of the local lord’s army and the city guards.

Being a hunter was a common profession, so their numbers were massive if you included their lower-ranking members. On one hand, hunters went through actual combat and put their lives on the line against bandits and the like every day. On the other hand, the lord’s soldiers and guards trained each day, but they had no experience killing anyone in this peaceful time without any wars.

If it came down to a pitched battle on flat, empty plains, the soldiers might be stronger. But who would win in an urban environment, where there were ambushes, sniping with bows and arrows, and terrorist and guerrilla tactics? Well, it wasn’t as if I wanted to make the two forces fight each other. I simply wanted the hunter’s guild on my side, just in case.

Consider a hypothetical conflict: On one hand, we were cute little girls who regularly brought in good work for the hunters. On the other hand, our opponents were some punks from who knows where. The average person might usually ignore a quarrel between random strangers on the streets, but would the hunters decide to step in on our behalf in that situation?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure they would!

I had already planned on putting in a request for the guild anyway, because I wanted to start stocking some meat. Not just for us to eat, but to make products out of it. Like jerky and smoked meat, for example...

Taverns and eateries would make their own simmered and grilled dishes, so it would have only made sense for us to go that route if we were going to sell those items at food stalls or something. It was better for us to make products that took time and effort to make, lasted a while, and were portable.

If I had set Reiko loose in the mountains, she could probably hunt a bunch of stuff with her magic. But I had decided against that idea! No, instead I would kill two birds with one stone by asking the hunter’s guild to bring us some beast meat.

The request was as follows:

Bring back some beast meat for consumption.

Targets: Horn rabbits, deer, boars, bears, orcs, etc. Turn in the carcasses intact without dressing them. However, you are to bleed the carcass before delivery.

Duration/Volume: Indefinite. However, the order quantity is to be adjusted at the reception desk.

Also, I would like to request lessons on skinning and dressing for a separate fee. The lessons would be only for the first few times for each type of prey.

The part about adjusting the quantity at the reception desk was to avoid getting too many of the same type of prey at once. I had already written out a list with the quantities and types of meat we were interested in buying for the receptionist.

I had also made arrangements so that when a hunter went to the reception desk to take on our request, the receptionist would give instructions based on the current order, and when the deliveries exceeded my preset order number, the request would be temporarily removed from the board. They would also need to check if I had already gone through the dressing lessons too.

Also, I had specified a window of time for when the prey would need to be delivered. I wouldn’t be able to take the lessons on dressing carcasses if I was too busy at the time, after all and I didn’t want them to deliver the carcasses when I wasn’t home. It was a lot of extra work for the receptionist, so she ended up charging me extra.

Damn it!

I had set the reward a little higher than the market price. Most people should figure out that I was trying to teach the orphans how to dress animals based on the contents of the request. The perceptive ones should also be able to figure out that this meant we were thinking of adding processed meat products to our lineup.

We would have just bought meat at a butcher if we were just planning on eating it ourselves. Guilds didn’t do retail sales, after all. Not only were we buying the entire carcass, including the parts you’d normally throw away, we were going out of our way to learn how to dress them, so there was only one obvious answer.

I was relatively well-known around here, so hunters began gathering around the board and I quickly made myself scarce. There may have been immediate takers if I stuck around long enough, but I decided to leave for now. I didn’t want to get in the way of the hunters discussing the job I had posted, and it would have been harder for them to talk to the receptionist if I was still around.

And so, I was outta there. It wasn’t as if I was in a hurry anyway. Unlike a posting for a bodyguard, there was no need for the contractor to personally meet up with the client. Whether the contractor was up for the task was for the receptionist to decide, so I was just going to wait for the deliveries and the lessons I had asked for.

It was a bit of a pain not knowing when they would come, but there was no way around that. When would someone accept my request? When would the prey be hunted? When would the contractor decide to return from the hunt? Would they deliver immediately after coming back? Would they have a meal and drink first? Or would they come over the next morning?

There were far too many uncertainties, so it wasn’t as if we could decide on the time of delivery beforehand. The only way for us to do it properly was to determine a delivery window and make sure everyone was home during that time. Fortunately, Reiko or I could handle the purchasing and preservation once we got through several dressing lessons, so we intended to change the delivery window once that had happened.

“Excuse me!”

Huh? Who’s that at the door...?

I wondered why they hadn’t used the door knocker instead of calling out. I figured it must be a hunter who had accepted my request.

“Coming!”

I rushed to the entrance, and a group of four people who seemed to be hunters was waiting there, as expected. They were all male, probably around twenty years old or so, maybe seventeen or eighteen on the low end. That was in accordance with this world’s standards, of course, and I would have assumed they were in their late twenties if this had been Japan. Locally, they were practically old men already.

“We’re here to deliver what you’ve requested. And to explain how to dress it...”

“Very well. Thank you for taking the order. And the prey...?”

I could see that they each had a bag slung over their shoulder. Which meant...

“We brought eight horn rabbits.”

I thought so... If they had caught a big one, they would be carrying the carcass differently. Considering they were each carrying a bag, it had to be several little ones. Finally, since I hadn’t ordered any birds this time around, that naturally meant they had to be horn rabbits.

The objective was to get meat, so goblins and kobolds weren’t an option. There were also deer, boars, bears, orcs, and ogres, but it was hard to find normal, non-monstrous deer or boars, and orcs, bears, and ogres were probably a bit much for four young hunters to handle.

I mean, they might have been able to pull it off, but if there was even a ten percent chance of someone getting hurt, one of them would probably have been seriously injured after taking on ten jobs. Not only would an injury reduce the team’s fighting abilities as a whole, but the injured individual would drag everyone else down...and it’d be game over.

So, naturally, they would only take on jobs that they could complete without serious risk of being hurt. For this party, that meant they wouldn’t be hunting any orcs, but goblins, kobolds, and horn rabbits instead.

Were they cowards? No, they would surely be skilled enough to hunt orcs in a few years, then bears and ogres after that. However, their colleagues of a similar age who were hunting orcs now would probably end up in that orc’s belly.

The world was a cruel place for fools, and fools would never even get a chance to learn and grow from their mistakes. That was just how the world worked...

“Please follow me, then... Get ready, everyone! We’re dressing eight horn rabbits!”

“Okay!” Reiko and the others replied from the back.

They would likely make their way around from the inside, so I led the hunters around the exterior of the building. I wasn’t about to let them walk through the house carrying those blood-soaked bags over their shoulders! We had a no-shoe policy in the traditional Japanese fashion, after all...

We went around the back to the area we had designated for the task, where I had also set up a water supply. Though, that said, all I had done was build a two-meter platform, place a giant barrel with water on it, then connect pipes leading here to the kitchen and the bathroom, and then attached some faucets at the ends.

The water supply? I had built a very delicate water wheel that spun around lightly in a nearby stream and added a drainpipe for the water to flow through. It didn’t pump much water, but it was working constantly, so the small amount that it provided was enough. It was just the four of us using it, and the barrel serving as a reservoir was huge.

Of course, even that was just for looks. Any water that might overflow when the barrel got full would go down the drain, but the water wasn’t actually going into the barrel to be used. The barrel had been built with a double-layered design. When the amount of water in the “actual” storage section fell below a certain level, a warning light in the house would turn on, and the “potion that’s almost exactly the same as water” would be refilled by Reiko’s water magic.

This should come as no surprise. Even though it had gone through a filtration system, I couldn’t bring myself to drink wastewater or water that came from a stream that branched off from a river where animals bathed. Sure, I could use potions to heal us if we got sick, but still... If we had to leave the kids for an extended period, we could switch over to a mechanism that used a lever to refill the water in the barrel from the waterwheel.

Mine and Aral were already ready to go. They had already changed into their work clothes and laid out a set of knives in preparation. They were the only ones learning how to cut the carcasses apart.

Reiko and I didn’t need to learn...right? It wasn’t like we were planning on making a living out of butchery, and we could always remove the skin, blood, and guts in a second using the Item Box. This was solely for training Mine and Aral in a new skill, and not for the sake of myself or Reiko.

“Okay, please begin.”

“What...?” The hunters stared blankly for some reason.

“Oh, it’s just...you want us to teach these little kids, and not you two?”

Well, come to think of it, that was a perfectly natural response...

“That’s right. They’re our employees, you see...”

“O-Oh...”

They didn’t seem to realize that this wasn’t an orphanage, Reiko and I weren’t caretakers, and Mine and Aral weren’t helpless children to be coddled. They were working and earning money for themselves already, and they would do the tasks that we assigned. They were getting this lesson for free, after all, as part of their development for the future. That was all.

“Okay, we’ll show you how it’s done, so watch close...wait, what’s with your tools?! You have a whole array of sharp knives and tools I’ve never even seen before. And what’s that thin tube with water coming out of it...?”

Yup, I had prepared some very high-quality tools.

“Let me see that. Whoa, that’s sharp! You idiot, dull blades are dangerous because you have to put more strength into using them, but they’re just as dangerous when they’re too sharp! Besides, you’ll cut right through the hide while skinning the carcass if it’s this sharp! Haven’t you heard of moderation?”

Huh, his tone was so polite earlier, but he had suddenly become so rude... Or, rather, it seemed he was scolding the kids for their own good.

“All right, I’ll just let you borrow mine for today. Hey, you ladies go to a cutler, explain what you need, and have them pick something out for you. Take these kids with you so they can check their size and grip strength, and the owner there should take care of the rest. Sheesh...”

Actually, I had made that knife. There was some potion inside the hilt and everything. Yup, I had made it with the same method I used when I created Exgram for Francette, though it obviously didn’t sever things at the sub-atomic level or come with any supersonic vibration functions. I still made them extremely sharp, though, not realizing that it wasn’t necessarily best to make them as sharp as possible.

“Here we go. Watch closely. First, we cut off the head. If you don’t, the horn will get in the way for the rest of the rest of the process, and amateurs tend to stab themselves with it by accident. There are some idiots who get too focused on where they’re cutting and stab their own stomach with the horn when they lean into the table.”

That was a good point. It certainly made sense to cut the head off first when you put it that way. Plus, there were supposedly all sorts of uses for the horn itself. We probably couldn’t make much money that way, so we’d leave that for other people and find our profits elsewhere.

“You place the blade here, then you put a little oomph into it all at once...”

The hunter deftly skinned the hide, removed the innards, and dressed the meat.

“We brought back the carcasses intact because that was one of the conditions this time, but we’d usually let out the blood, take out the guts, then chill the meat in a nearby pond or stream right after the kill. It would go bad quicker and taste worse if we didn’t. Oh, but we still let out the blood on the spot. The meat would’ve degraded otherwise...”

“Ah, that’s fine. If you could just simulate how the bloodletting is done...”

Just pointing at the carcass and explaining the method was good enough; moreover, I had written in the request form that I wanted them to let the blood out on the spot, so that was fine.

The hunter dressed another carcass and handed a knife to Mine.

“Here, now you try.”

“What...?”

Mine froze in place for a moment, but her resolve quickly overcame her hesitation. She had decided to make it through life with her own abilities, and she would be the one who protected Aral. She grasped the knife, which was slightly too big for her hand, then faced the three horn rabbits on the table.

Mine’s concentration ran out after she finished dressing her fourth carcass, so I had the hunter handle the two remaining ones, and today’s training came to an end afterward. Aral ended up just watching as Mine practiced, but Mine could always teach him how to do it later.

And then...

“It was only the one person who gave the lesson, but I guess we have to pay all four of you, huh...”

The three who were “just standing around and doing nothing” looked rather alarmed by my comment. I was only kidding, of course. Mine’s head would have exploded if all four of them tried to teach her at once, and it was the party of four that had accepted the request. I doubted just one of them could have hunted eight horn rabbits, either.

“Kidding, kidding!” I assured them, and the hunters laughed awkwardly. I may look like just a little girl, but I did have some common sense.

I had to consider just how much this request was for the hunters. Horn rabbits could be sold at the guild for two silver coins each. Meanwhile, we were paying them three silver coins each. Plus, the guild got a commission from us for any completed requests, so they received achievement points for contributing to the guild in that way. It made sense that they would go through us rather than selling their spoils directly to the guild.

It was a win for us too, since we received materials like animal skin and horns, and we could put in a little research to see if they had any other uses. The butcher in the city sold meat exclusively, but there were specific traders that purchased the other parts like horns and pelts.

One animal could be sold for about three silver coins, so eight of them came to a total of twenty-four silver coins. That was about 24,000 yen... It was a bit low for a day’s work between four men... Of course, maybe they also made some extra income from hunting goblins, kobolds, and other targets that we hadn’t specified in our request, or from gathering herbs and wild plants along the way.

And even though they had only hunted some small fry this time, they might make some better coin on average if they hunted a deer or boar once every few days. They’d save a good amount of money if they cooked their own food too. Vegetables and fish were pretty cheap here, after all.

Besides, they got paid for the dressing lesson today, so maybe they had taken down a decent wage after all.

“Say, what are you going to do with the entrails?”

“Huh?”

“I was just wondering if we could have them, if you’re throwing them away. We’re pretty poor, so a hot pot using those organs is kind of a treat for us. Most people throw them out, though...”

That made sense. But...

“Are you really going to call yourselves poor in front of kids who were orphans not too long ago...?”

“Ah...”

The hunters looked a bit embarrassed. It wasn’t as if I was trying to be mean...

“I was thinking of teaching them how to cook the innards today. Hmm...”

I thought about it, then decided to give them a little treat, considering they were the first ones who had taken up our request.

“We’ll cook them ourselves, but how would you all like to have dinner with us? We’ll be making dishes using ingredients other than just the innards, of course.”

“Really?!”

They were at the most difficult part of their career as hunters, considering they weren’t quite ready to hunt orcs yet. I figured they could probably use a little help.

“Here we are!”

A short time later, a variety of dishes had laid out on the table, all cooked by Reiko and myself, with Mine and Aral observing. I planned on having Mine cook something when it was just the four of us, but I didn’t want to put any unnecessary pressure on her or delay the dinner. We had to be quick for our guests today, so it was just me and Reiko handling the cooking this time around.

We made some horn rabbit innards hot pot, fried rabbit, horn rabbit teriyaki, rabbit stew, roasted rabbit, and more. We had cooked up some vegetables and seafood dishes as well.

Some of the dishes were just things I had taken out of the Item Box. For instance, the stew was just some premade stuff that I added seared horn rabbit to, then let simmer. The stew was already warm out of the box, so it didn’t take long for the meat to cook all the way through.

“You’re done already?! That was fast! And so many dishes...” the hunter said in disbelief. It would have taken a lot longer if I hadn’t had the Item Box, that’s for sure.

“Eat as much as you’d like. I have plenty of meat to practice processing into non-perishable food, and I’m sure we’ll get even more as more hunters make deliveries, so we don’t mind finishing off a few horn rabbits!”

Some of the hunters seemed hesitant about eating some of the goods they had been paid for, especially considering the food had been cooked by their client, but they soon dug right into their meal. The food did smell great, after all.

I used plenty of spices for the dishes that incorporated innards, and most commoners around here would definitely not be accustomed to the taste. In fact, it was unusual to use expensive spices on cooked innards in the first place. It made far more sense to use them generously on higher-quality luxury meals rather than using a tiny bit on a variety of dishes. That was why cooked innards using spices weren’t even a thing around here in the first place.

That was no surprise. Even on Earth, they used to say that pepper was worth its weight in gold in the old days. Of course, that was just a saying to show how valuable it was, not something meant to be taken literally. That was why spices had been exempt from my decision to refrain from using my powers to create stuff.

As an aside, the pepper I had used in my previous life was 168 yen for twenty grams.

Wait, oh no! I need to eat before all the food is gone!

It seemed these people didn’t know any restraint...

Wait, Mine and Aral! Don’t copy them and stuff yourselves like starving animals!

How had all the food disappeared before I ate my fill when there were only eight of us?! And why did Mine, Aral and Reiko have such satisfied looks on their faces?!

Is it just me? Am I the only one who didn’t get to eat a full meal? Damn it!!!

“Thank you!”

Shut it! I’ll sign the form confirming the delivery was completed, so get the hell outta here!

And so, the same process was repeated with orcs, boars, deer, and other carcasses as they were delivered, and Mine’s skill in dressing them gradually increased.

Word went around that anyone who fulfilled our deliveries got treated to delicious food, so the receptionist complained that she had been swamped with candidates. I had no choice but to give her three pieces of dried fish and an experimental jerky product intended for the tavern’s owner to shut her up. I instructed her to spread the word if she thought it tasted good, so I considered it a marketing expense, investment for the business, a bribe, a social expense, or what-have-you.

...Damn it!

Oh, and whenever Mine couldn’t learn how to dress something in one try, I requested additional lessons, and I kept up the purchases so I could use the deliveries for experimentation and making products. The receptionist (the one I had bribed with dried goods and jerky) made adjustments to make sure I didn’t get too many deliveries at once, so I wasn’t worried about that. Plus, I did have the Item Box.

Little Silver had formally succeeded in creating and starting up a meat-processing division. As such, we started getting meat dishes on the table in addition to fish and vegetables. Mhm. Well, that said, we had already made meat dishes with stuff we had bought from the butcher.

There were two growing kids in the household, so I had already thought that part through.

What’s that? There are four kids, you say?

Reiko and I aren’t gonna grow any more than this. In terms of height, and in terms of breast size...

Wait, shaddap!

One day, as our prospects of starting our lines of processed meat products were looking brighter... I heard someone knock on the door and answered it to find two dirty-looking boys who looked about ten years old standing there.

“We’re hungry...”

Where’d these weirdos come from?!

“Orphans?” I heard from behind me. As I stood there blankly, Reiko, Mine, and Aral also walked up to us.

“Please let us stay here...”

“Leave!”

“Huh?”

The pleas of the children, who seemed to be orphans, were immediately shot down...by Mine.

“Whaaaaaat?!” Reiko and I shouted in perfect sync.

I mean, it would have been one thing if it had come from me or Reiko. It was hard to believe Mine, a former orphan, said that to another orphan who had come seeking help at the former orphanage. And she had been in that same position not too long ago! It all seemed a bit harsh.

Aral stayed silent, perhaps because he didn’t fully grasp the situation. Or so I thought...

“Hurry up and leave!”

“Whaaaaaat?!”

It was Aral who spoke up this time, his words full of malice as he practically spit them out.

“Wh-Wh-Why...? You two never acted like this before...”

Indeed, Mine and Aral weren’t the type to drive others away out of fear of having more rivals around, or getting a smaller share of food, or anything like that.

“A-Are they from a rival orphanage or something?” Reiko blurted out, obviously just as shaken as I was.

A rival orphanage? What?

There was clearly something wrong with Mine and Aral’s attitude...

“You two are from wealthy families, aren’t you?! You think you could fool us with those pathetic disguises? What, you think we were born yesterday? Stop taking this industry lightly!”

Wh-Whaaaaaat?! I mean, they completely fooled me! And I didn’t realize being an orphan was an “industry”...

“Wh-Wha... We really are... Why do you think we’re in disguise...? D-Do you have proof, then?!” the child who seemed to be the older of the two shot back at Mine, but...

“Why would we want to point out the flaws in your disguise?! Go back to whoever hired you and tell them that your disguise and acting were so bad that you got caught, and that this method won’t ever work again!”

“Urgh...”

The older child looked frustrated, while the younger looked somewhat scared. They were probably going to be punished when they reported back about their failure, verbally and physically... And judging by the older one’s reaction, it was obvious that Mine and Aral were right. So...

“You have three options right now. First, you tell us who hired you and testify in front of the guards. That, or you run away crying and become our enemies. And your last option...” My mouth curled into a grin. “Is to die right here and now...”

“Gyaaaaaa!!!”

Oops, they ran off. Seems like a bit of an overreaction...

“That was a bit much, Lady Kaoru...”

“That face just isn’t fair...”

Shaddap!

Mine and Aral were just mouthing off freely... Reiko? She was already gone. She was using her magic to tail the two visitors. We had just learned that we had enemies, and they had attempted a preemptive strike. Of course we weren’t just going to ignore them. Search and destroy. We would take a page out of Admiral Halsey’s book.

“...So, what made you realize they were imposters?”

“It was obvious at first glance, my lady!”

Mine’s wording was a bit rough earlier, but she was back to her usual self.

Not bad, Mine...

It seemed she was far more wily and cunning than I thought. Well, if you weren’t hard, you wouldn’t be alive, I guess... And if you couldn’t ever be gentle, you wouldn’t deserve to be alive. Did we have the right to be alive...?

Well, the Goddess Celes had allowed us to, which meant we did have the right to live in this world by definition. We pretty much had an A-grade license to compete in the race. And so, we would use this license to live in this world full-throttle! ...Anyway.

“First, the way their clothes were torn up was completely unnatural. Orphans cherish their clothes, so they would be worn down naturally instead of forcefully ripped and cut like theirs were. Secondly, their clothes should have had a sour smell from getting wet while sifting through garbage and spoil, but they had obviously rubbed dirt into theirs instead. Third, their hair was too neat, as if they hadn’t been scratching at it from all the lice. Not to mention, their skin...”

“Okay, that’s enough! I got it!”

Mine had been in an orphanage, so I didn’t think she’d had to live like a vagabond... What a fool I was. It wasn’t as if she had been born in the orphanage, so of course she had to live out there before that. It goes without saying that some kids went into orphanages immediately after losing their parents, but not all of them. I had forgotten how Emile and the others from the Eyes of the Goddess were living before I met them. And Mine had likely gone through the same thing...

“You’ve done well in seeing through the enemy’s attempt at infiltration. I commend you, Mine and Aral!”

“Thank you!”

The two seemed glad that they had been able to help me. Yes, I had to give credit where it was due. I decided to reward them later somehow. For one, I would make tonight’s dinner instead of having Mine practice. I could even be extra nice and give them some fruit cake for dessert... All I had to do now was wait for Reiko to return...

“So, what’s the report?”

“I found out who the enemy is. It’s one of the mid-sized companies that we didn’t choose to do business with. Those two kids were chosen by one of their apprentices, and I saw them getting hit by the owner when they told him about their failure.”

She used invisibility magic (though I’m not sure if she used light distortion or made light pass through her) to trail the kids with ease and enter their shop. Maybe someone with honed senses could have sensed her presence and shouted “Intruder!!!” like a scene from a movie, but there was no such person there.

“Hmm, I see...”

This was all within expectations, of course.

“The question is...” I began to muse.

“How do we make them pay for this?!” we yelled in unison.

It would have been meaningless to go through their shop’s vault, like some chivalrous robber. We had to make sure the world knew these were idiots who got their just deserts, or it wouldn’t have much of an effect in terms of PR...I mean, prevention. And so...

“What? An employee from the Merdis Trading Company tried to run away to Little Silver?”

“I heard Little Silver treats their workers well, but the employees at Merdis must have it real bad if they ran away from their workplace to go to a former orphanage...”

“And I heard that Little Silver’s owner caught on why Merdis Trading Company’s employees ran away, made them go back, and asked the owner to stop abusing their workers. She even submitted a formal request to the commerce and industry guild to ban excessive violence, abusive outbursts, and exploitation.”

“I heard they were making their workers pay lodging fees, food fees, bathroom fees, and other exploitative charges. They even took off some of their workers’ salaries as unsecured loans and put them in their own account books... Pretty awful stuff...”

“Yeah. That’s no way to treat an apprentice...”

“Word is spreading around the city. People have been asking us many questions, and we confirmed that it’s all true.”

“Well done!”

Mine and Aral reported back after making deliveries to shops around the city. I had told them to gather as much intel as they could, even if their deliveries were somewhat delayed. Yes, all the rumors were true... At least, that’s what everyone thought.

After that whole incident, I had gone out in front of the shop in question and started loudly reading the notice. It would have been pointless to just hand it to someone in the shop, after all, since they’d just have thrown it out. That was why I had read it at the top of my lungs right in front of their place of business. Over and over again.

Someone rushed out of the shop red-faced right away, but I rejected his pleas by pointing out that I, the owner of the business they had caused trouble for, had come over in person, so it was only right for their owner to come out and apologize to me in person. The owner didn’t appear, of course, but the ruckus drew a big audience, so I had fulfilled my objective.

I had submitted a memorandum to the commerce and industry guild afterward and delivered a detailed report of the entire incident to prominent businesses in the region. Merdis Trading Company’s public image had gone into the toilet. Many of the shop owners probably realized the truth already: “Merdis must have dressed their apprentices up as orphans and sent them to Little Silver to find out how they make their dried goods...”

Though, in truth, they probably had no interest in such small-scale profits and were aiming for my spices instead. They may have bribed an employee from one of the three companies I did business with, or else they got that info from some other method.

Shops that purchased from us would obviously need to resell our products elsewhere, so many people already knew that those three businesses were buying up a whole bunch of spices for cheap. That meant that, even if those shops we were dealing with kept the whole deal a secret, there was no way for me to prevent their business partners from spilling the beans.

In fact, my whole plan was for this info to reach the aristocrats, so this was all still considered within expectations. Unfortunately for them, these shops didn’t have the whole picture. Maybe they figured they could take our importation route away from us or they wanted to be business partner number four...

Anyway, the fact that Merdis Trading Company was trying to infiltrate an orphanage by sending their disguised employees quickly spread between merchants, who were quick to pick up on news, and rumors about the company abusing their employees so badly that they fled to another business for help began to spread around.

Well, it was us who spread those very rumors, through various means. You can accomplish a lot with some money, connections, and hunters.

But Merdis Trading Company couldn’t deny those rumors. It was a fact that two of their employees had come to us seeking help, and Reiko had discovered their names by making herself invisible with magic. Besides, there were several witnesses who had seen the kids dressed as orphans and leaving the city in our direction. It wasn’t as if they had visited us in the middle of the night, so they couldn’t have walked from the center of the city to our place without being spotted by anyone.

Now, no one else would want to send fake orphans to our place ever again. Besides, we weren’t even running an orphanage. It was a commercial company, plain and simple. We had no obligation to take in any orphans who visited us.

The local lord made us tax-exempt because he thought we were a non-profit organization? Well, that was completely on him for having that misconception. I hadn’t told a single lie, and I had done everything I explained back then. I took in some orphans and put them to work. I was paying them more than the market rate too. My business was supporting orphans, just as I had claimed.

But that didn’t mean my business was an orphanage, and that was that. We hadn’t taken Mine and Aral in as orphans; we had hired them. Of course, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t considered the fact that Mine had lived here before and desperately struggled to get here while helping Aral.

Whether I wanted to help someone who fought tooth and nail to survive or someone who asked for handouts because they were miserable was completely up to me. I would be the one who decided how to use my own money, and the one who determined how I wanted to live.