Chapter 4: An Explanation of the Situation

Chapter 4:
An Explanation of the Situation

 

I LEFT FILIA IN THE CARE of a healer and waited for her to regain consciousness in a small room of the order’s headquarters. All I could do was sit on the couch and think back on what had happened.

“Hopeless,” I mumbled. “Completely hopeless.”

No matter how I rationalized it, I had been in a real panic. Never mind what happened at that oily dog’s mansion—ranting and raving at the knight order’s headquarters had been completely meaningless. I’d had absolute tunnel vision and acted like a complete brute, lashing out and even threatening people.

Filia had been kidnapped, and I’d done nothing to stop it. I had to get stronger. I’d lived on my own my whole life, but now I had a partner, and that meant when she was in danger, her safety was my responsibility. She’d survived, but what if something awful had happened? I could barely even sit still.

“Ah.” In the middle of all my self-disgust, I felt a presence coming my way. The door opened, and there stood Filia.

“Thank you for being worried about me,” she said. “For coming to save me.”

“Filia! So…so you’re feeling all right now?”

“Sluggish, and a bit dazed, what with all the magic I used, and the spot of fainting, but, yes. I’m okay. I’m going to head over and explain things to Gauche, but it’s kind of a hassle to tell the same story twice, so I thought I’d have you come along with me, Yuri.”

Here she was, worrying about hassles… Yeah, she talked a big game, pretending everything was okay. I could understand that. I mean, she’d just been abducted by a bunch of strangers, so I’m sure she wanted someone, anyone, close by. A knight escorted me and Filia to Gauche.

“Ah, Lady Filia,” said Gauche with a sigh. “What an awful thing you’ve gone through.”

“But you came to save me. It’s fine.”

“It’s my job, after all.” Gauche gave her a gentle smile. I wished I could put people at ease like he could. “At any rate, I understand it’s a trying thing for a victim to revisit their experiences, and it pains me to ask, but I’m afraid we must. Would you tell me what happened?”

“Y-yes. Yes, I suppose so,” said Filia nervously. “I was out in town shopping. Suddenly, I felt this sharp blow to my neck, and I was knocked out. I bet it was lightning magic, now that I think about it. I couldn’t react in time. Casting a spell like that in the city… I never would’ve thought someone would…”

Gauche shook his head. “It’s speculated that one of the Verkis accomplices has an ability that makes their magic difficult to detect. That’s likely why no one noticed.”

“When I woke up, I was in that cave. They injected me with something and said I wouldn’t be able to use magic anymore. I don’t know what the substance was, but we elves know our forest herbs, medicinal and poisonous… We’ve developed antibodies against many of the latter. I tried to use a small-scale spell as a test. It worked fine. From there, I looked for an opening, and…”—she swallowed—“…well, just as they were about to put some kind of brainwashing magic tool on me, I used wind magic on the man they were all looking to. Their leader, I think. Cut his head clean off.”

Killing the leader first always slowed henchmen way down. Filia had remained calm and calculating, even after getting kidnapped. Totally different from me.

“With all the bandits panicking, I managed to take them all out just in the nick of time. Somehow. And just before the last of my magical energy ran out, you two came to my rescue.” With her explanation finished, Filia took a sip of the drink Gauche had offered her. A long sip.

“Thank you, Filia. We’ve been keeping an eye on the Verkis Bandits, and we were preparing a raid on their hideout. I came to Mussen Morgeth expressly for that purpose. Still, I’m amazed you annihilated an entire group of such fearsome bandits all by yourself.”

“Oh no, it’s not like I really did much. I was lost in a trance, mostly. I honestly don’t remember much of anything, but…” Filia hugged herself tightly with her thin arms. “I shudder to think what would’ve happened if I hadn’t endured that special training with Yuri before the tournament.”

True enough. Anybody would be scared, suffering something like she just had.

“Now, ah,” said Filia, “are we all finished with this interview?”

“Just one more thing, please,” said Gauche. “Did you happen to hear any of them say the words ‘Crazy Face’ or ‘Misery Mosery’?”

I gasped. Couldn’t help it. I’d just read that name in the newspaper hours before! The supposed mastermind behind the Elf Hunting incidents, “Crazy Face” Misery Mosery. “You’re tellin’ me Filia’s kidnapping was part of this whole Elf Hunting thing?”

“Filia is an elf, so we can’t dismiss the possibility. We confirmed that those under Misery Mosery’s command prioritize capturing elves over all other activities,” Gauche replied grimly.

It, well, did make sense.

I turned to Filia, who held up her small hand. “Actually, good Gauche, I do recall coming across that name when I read someone’s mind back there.”

“In that case, we should assume this incident was related. Hm. Thank you very much, Filia. Your cooperation is sincerely appreciated. We’ll take it from here.”

And with that, our interview was over. Gauche stood and went for the door. Paused. “By the way,” he added. “Until this Elf Hunting business is settled, it would be best for you to avoid walking out alone too much. Misery Mosery is one of the ‘Sinmarch,’ after all.”

 

***

 

“I suppose it’d be best if we kept together for a while,” I told Filia back at the inn.

There was what Gauche said to us earlier, which I agreed with, but there were other things he hadn’t said. That was what bothered me. What Gauche told us about just before he left, this thing about Sinmarch… I was sure I’d heard something about them, this group of internationally wanted villains. I didn’t really feel comfortable letting Filia walk around alone with guys like that lurking around.

Filia’s expression darkened, however. “I’m sorry, Yuri. I got you involved in this, all because I’m an elf, and I mean, if I knew I was going to cause you this much trouble, I…” Filia hung her head. “I wish I’d never followed you, Yuri.”

Her eyes were shrouded by her long silver hair. It was heart-wrenching to see her this way—biting her lip, clenching her trembling fists. She seemed so overwhelmed. At a time like this, the only thing I could do for Filia, as her partner, was talk to her.

“Um,” I said, and shuffled my hands. “Filia. Up until now, I’ve lived my whole life just doing whatever I wanted. That’s all. And I was totally free to do it.”

Sure, the training was tough at times, but I’d chosen it. It was my toughness to suffer, all to become stronger. Man, when all was said and done, I must’ve set new records for selfishness living my life as I did.

“And I acted the same way this time around too. I wanted to save you, Filia, so I saved you. Because I’m selfish, and that’s all there is to it.”

I said it all as I thought through it, my words gradually taking shape and coming together. I patted Filia’s head and turned her toward me. “When I worried you might be gone, I couldn’t even think about anything else, so please. Please don’t say that you shouldn’t have followed me. Meeting you was the reason I decided I wanted to leave the woods in the first place, Filia. I need you.”

At that, she looked up at me. “R-really?”

“Yeah. Really.”

“Okay, but… I-I’m going to peek into your mind, you know? If you’re lying, I’m going to find out, you know?” She squinted at me, as if trying to see something hidden.

“Fine by me. I meant what I said, after all. Besides, you usually peek into my mind without my permission anyway, don’t you?” I said with a skeptical look.

“Eh he he, yeah. Guilty.” Filia stuck out her tongue, but her playful expression vanished in a flash and she bowed her head. “But, Yuri…thank you.”

“I dunno why you’re being grateful to me. I was just saying it was the natural thing for me to do. Selfish and all.”

“Even so, thank you.”

“A-all right.”

She had a little bit of her spirit back, it looked like, or I sure hoped so. As I was thought it over, Filia plunked down on the bed and beckoned me to come over. I obeyed and sat beside her.

“You’re an odd one, Yuri. Our personal values are totally different, and we don’t often see eye to eye, but you know what you are? You’re kind, Yuri.”

“Kind…” I repeated. What a weird compliment. “That’s the first time someone’s called me that.”

The unexpectedly stern look on Filia’s face made me more than a little nervous. “This whole thing just showed for sure that I’m weak, Yuri. And if I’m this weak, I can’t even think about accompanying you, especially since…” She took a deep breath. “…I’m an elf. I don’t know who will be coming after me.”

“I…suppose so.”

“So you see, Yuri… I think I’ll go back to the forest where I was born and raised. Will you accompany me?”

Wha—okay, I hadn’t seen that coming. Me? Why? What?

“Can you tell me why?” I asked.

“I think I told you before that my ability is Telepathy, right? Well…that was a lie.”

“A lie?”

But Filia had read my mind tons of times. That didn’t make sense.

“It’s actually an ability called Clairvoyance. It basically means being able to read the thoughts of living things in the surrounding area, regardless of their consent. It allows me to freely read the true essence and abilities of people. Then again, I can’t really use it now though, so it was only sort of a lie.”

Uhh. Uhh? Hmm. There was just so much I couldn’t wrap my head around these days. Did I not train my brain enough? Was it time for more rock-headbutting? I gave my head a tiny, uncertain touch. “Sorry. I don’t get this at all. Can you break it down from the beginning?”

Filia nodded. “I understand. Is it all right if I start at the beginning?”

“Mmhm.”

“All right. A long time ago, I think I told you that I was avoided by my peers in the village, Yuri, because of my Telepathy…that is, my Clairvoyance. But that wasn’t the real problem, I think. It was because of my Wind God. I have two abilities,” said Filia, chuckling to herself. “I’m a dual ability holder—a dual, as we’re sometimes called.”

I caught a tinge of loneliness in her expression. Huh. So the Wind God “magic” she’d used at the tournament and against the bandits was basically her Wind God “ability”? Actually, if she had dual abilities, didn’t that mean she was super cool or something? Or was she just so strong it made people jealous? I supposed that could make a certain kind of dingus ostracize a person.

“It all started when my abilities suddenly manifested one day. You’re probably not aware of this, Yuri, but most elves worship our ‘Almighty Wind God.’ We believe this deity controls all nature, with a specialty in, well, wind. The village chief thought my having the ‘Wind God’ ability was akin to spitting on the image of the Almighty Wind God. Just for that, he named me a heretic. From that point, the village began to discriminate against me in various ways.”

Man, my earlier thoughts had been way off. But it wasn’t like people could choose their own abilities or anything. Anybody with half a brain knew that, right?

“I sure was…surprised, we’ll say. I couldn’t have possibly imagined my mother and father, who had been so kind to me all my life—that everyone else in the village, in fact—would treat me like I didn’t even exist. Do you know, before—and I worry this left me a bit spoiled—they always told me I was such a precious thing? I wonder sometimes if they were only so kind because they found me particularly nice to look at. You can imagine my shock when that no longer seemed to matter to them.”

Filia chuckled darkly. “It all changed so abruptly, and there I was asking, ‘Why? Oh, why would you do this?’ Ah, too bad for Filia. Their faces would scrunch up into a scowl, and they’d tell me they didn’t want to hear a word from my filthy mouth. It became easy at that point to just think that, ah…to think I shouldn’t have even been born.”

Up until that point, Filia told the story like it had all happened to someone else. Then the tears poured down her cheeks so suddenly that she herself seemed surprised. She wiped them away with her sleeve, a quick scrubbing motion. Her eyes were still red.

“And then, what was it, a year or so after? Time grows strange when you’re depressed. Anyway, around then, an unusually large monster appeared in the forest. All the elves in the forest worked together to face it, and still they weren’t enough. Just when the village was about to be smashed to pieces, an S-Rank adventurer happened to be pass through. I watched the adventurer kill the monster with a single blow. I admired them so much. I wanted to be like that. Children really are simple, aren’t they?” Filia added with a choked smile, as if she didn’t want the conversation to get too heavy.

I really needed to thank that adventurer. If it wasn’t for them, I might not have met Filia.

“I tried to leave home in secret, but the village chief found me. I sure got a good scolding, and they’d apparently found some kind of magitool in the corpse of that freakishly large monster. A box. That magitool sucked out my ‘Wind God.’ It degraded my Clairvoyance into what it is now—that parlor trick I call Telepathy. Pretty awful, huh, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.”

“Not that like that could faze me, the transcendentally beautiful elf.”

“Filia. Come on.” Whether or not you were fazed by something had nothing to do with looks.

“Eh he he. Well, anyway, I thought I’d look for another chance to escape.”

Her will hadn’t been crushed after all that, huh? Filia had a real strong heart.

“But, well, after the Wind God was sealed, it was like…” She frowned. “How do I put this? Everyone’s attitudes toward me changed again. They went back to how they were before the Wind God manifested, you see. Or so I thought. I couldn’t hear them, with my mere Telepathy. They didn’t want me to hear what they really thought.”

Filia suddenly began to tremble. “It came to a head when a neighbor, one who hadn’t spoken to me in ages, suddenly said—out of the blue, you see, and I remember the words exactly—she said, ‘Oh my, Filia, you’re as cute as ever, aren’t you?’ Simply because I’d atoned for my sins, they believed, as they’d extracted that Wind God from me. Like it had all been nothing. Like none of it had ever happened. It frightened me.”

Yeah. I bet.

“So, I ran away. Since I couldn’t use the Wind God, my wind magic had weakened, and it was quite difficult. Then again, the village chief didn’t think I’d try to pass through the forest without the Wind God. Wind magic was always my strongest element, and some pretty strong monsters roam our forest, but without the Wind God…” She trailed off.

“And so you went into the forest all excited, but then you got lost, huh?”

“Yep!” Filia snapped her fingers. “Freedom’s a lovely idea, but I wasn’t used to having to make those sorts of decisions by myself. Before I knew it, I wound up lost in a certain part of the forest I hadn’t ever been in before.” Filia giggled and clapped her cheek. Sly.

“You’re gonna talk about getting lost and almost dying with a ‘Yep!’ like that, huh? C’mon, ya idiot.” How could she possibly keep calling me a muscle-brained idiot all the time? She wasn’t any different from me in terms of just going off and doing reckless stuff.

“Wow. Yuri’s calling me an idiot,” said Filia, hanging her head. “That’s one for the history books.”

Maybe it was because she’d gotten all those thoughts off her chest, but the atmosphere seemed more normal again, thank goodness. I’m not good at cheering people up, ya know?

“That’s why you wanna go back to the forest, then? To regain those two abilities?”

“Exactly. If I have my Clairvoyance and the proper version of the Wind God, nothing remotely like today could ever happen again. And if it did, I’d end it a lot sooner and be back for lunch.”

Hmm, yeah. It probably would be better to have those abilities for self-defense. “If that’s what you wanna do, Filia, I’ve got no objections. After we’ve prepared, do you wanna start heading out to your forest village right away?”

“Ah, well, there’s just one concern.”

Concern? “What?”

“I don’t precisely, exactly, quite, really know where it is in any way whatsoever. I’d never gone out of the woods before, and after I finally did make it out, well, I got so happy and so excited that studying at my surroundings was the last thing on my mind.”

“Okay, to be totally clear, you have no idea how to get there?”

“Afraid so.”

“Then what are we going to do?”

“Hmm…” Filia put a finger to her lips. “We’ll go for it. Muddle on through. Gumption! Determination!”

“Ugh, don’t say ridiculous stuff.” Intellectual muscle man though I was, there wasn’t anything I could really do. The elf village was in…a forest! That was our single clue.

“For the time being,” Filia said, “I’d like to take a focused approach to exploring so we can get an idea of where we’re headed.” It certainly seemed like there was no other option but just that: going through the forest with a fine-tooth comb—which depended on finding the right forest in the first place.

“All right, then, let’s do it,” I answered.

With the plan decided, Filia wriggled herself into bed, and I propped myself up on the floor on one elbow for training. This was our typical daily routine, but no matter how much time passed, I still couldn’t hear her breathing in the way she normally did when she was asleep. When I briefly glanced at her, I saw the mattress on the bed was trembling.

Oh, of course she was shaking. What else had I expected? She’d been kidnapped, thrown into a situation where anything could happen, and now, come on, who wouldn’t be scared? I quit my balancing training exercises, got off my elbow, and went over to Filia.

“I’m sorry, Yuri,” she said. “I can’t sleep, I’m scared…”

I took hold of Filia’s trembling hands. She shuddered for a moment, but eventually her body relaxed. Her hands were pillow-soft and pure snow-white, and there, suddenly, I thought to myself: Filia was like any regular girl. She could just use magic was all. Man, I’d been so thoughtless for not noticing.

“Are you sure you’re okay having me at your side,” she said, “even if people like that come after me again?”

“Of course I am. Don’t worry, Filia. You can stay with me. I’ll take care of you. With me around, doesn’t matter if it’s a brokirin or a group of bandits or anybody at all. They’ll be down in one blow.”

“Thank you…so much.” Maybe she was still overwhelmed, because Filia started crying again. She stuck her head under the covers so I wouldn’t see.

“Well, um, if there’s a time you do feel anxious, you can…just take a look at my muscles, ya know? Get a load of these well-developed pectorals and biceps. Looking at ’em will ease your anxiety for sure. Wanna touch ’em?” I asked the lump under the covers.

“No…that’s okay. Really. It’s really okay.”

Hard pass, huh? Oof. Well, I thought it’d help—I mean, just seeing that muscles like this could exist in the world is a balm for the soul, dontcha think?

Or maybe she was just trying to put on a brave face and not bother me? Better to check.

“I’m just gonna ask ya one more time. You really, absolutely, for sure for sure that you don’t wanna touch ’em? You’re not gonna regret it?”

“I can tell you with absolute certainty that I will most definitely not in any way regret it whatsoever. I will accept your sentiment, however.”

Um. I felt like I’d somehow ended up doing the opposite of cheering her up. Ugh, I was so out of my depth. Sorry, Filia.

In the end, Filia finally fell asleep a few minutes later. It was kinda hard for me to confirm if she was down for the count or not. Then Filia, who I thought must be sleeping, squeezed my hand tight.

I ended up staying with her through the night.