Chapter 26

Translator: Willia

Four boats made their way along the river the young heroes had traveled only a short while ago.

Each boat carried four or five people, all of them heavily armed.

A few wore helmets, though most had taken theirs off. Shields hung from the sides of the boats, while long weapons such as spears were gathered neatly to one side.

With this many people and this much equipment, it hardly seemed likely that anyone could attack them and beat them to death wherever they went.

There was only one exception. One man was completely unarmed. His body was so excessively fat that it looked as though a pointless amount of expensive cloth had been wasted on his clothes, which did not suit him in the slightest. It was Gutoerm, the Second Young Lord.

Even though the soldiers were the ones rowing, somehow he sat there doing nothing and still panted for breath as though he had been the one exerting himself. On top of that, he was irritable.

“Can’t we go any faster? Can’t you even row properly? I’m dying from the heat.”

The weather was cool. Even the soldiers, rowing in full equipment, were not sweating, yet he alone was drenched in sweat.

At Gutoerm’s urging, the soldiers had to exert themselves more than necessary, and thanks to that, even they began to sweat.

They pushed through the morning mist, and around noon, they too arrived at the wharf where Valery’s party had landed.

The soldiers drew in their oars and brought the boats alongside. Then they climbed onto the wharf, tied the boats down with rope, and hauled Gutoerm up after them.

A knight pushed from behind while two men in front clasped hands and pulled him up. It was quite the commotion.

After finally making it onto the wharf, Gutoerm rested his hands on his knees and waddled unsteadily for a moment before looking around. Beggars lay sprawled here and there.

“Get those things out of here. Use some initiative without making me tell you everything. Do I really have to give orders for every little thing?”

At that, the soldiers who had received the order approached the beggars and told them to get lost. Anyone who looked as though he had lost his mind, already half-dead, was dragged farther away and dumped there.

“Where’s the warehouse keeper?”

Gutoerm spoke. Two knights moved off to inspect the surroundings, but no one fitting that description appeared to be around.

So Gutoerm concluded that no faction had yet properly taken control of the place since the Ball-Ripper’s death. Even after opening the warehouses, they found nothing of note.

Only a few pieces of cargo lay scattered around, either useless or seemingly abandoned long ago.

“Looks like there wasn’t even any need for us to come......”

That was how it appeared. On the surface.

Someone with a keen eye might have found the excessive quiet strange, but Gutoerm had no such experience in the field.

“Five soldiers to each warehouse. You two Sirs, remain behind and oversee matters. I shall stay at the inn.”

He meant to take two knights as escorts and stay at the inn himself. No one else seemed to find that particularly strange.

Taking control of a place meant coming into conflict with whatever force already controlled it. But there was no existing force here to speak of, so there was nothing to do except settle in and stand guard.

Four knights and twenty soldiers. Fully equipped for battle besides. Who would dare attack them?

They only had to endure the boredom, gradually reduce the number of troops stationed here, and return once Duke Sven sent an administrator. That was all there was to it.

In a way, someone else was doing the hard work while he reaped the rewards. Valery endured all the hardship, and Gutoerm got to enjoy the fruits of it.

“No matter how hard he runs around, there’s only so much he can do. What can some bastard possibly accomplish......”

Gutoerm muttered to himself as he fondled his nipple.

And so Gutoerm took lodging at an inn some distance from the warehouses. He had the knights drive everyone inside out, then occupied the entire place alone without even paying a coin for exclusive use.

Then came the early hours before dawn.

Gutoerm slept while snoring loudly enough to sound as though heaven and earth were collapsing. It almost made driving everyone else out seem merciful.

One of the knights who had accompanied him as an escort woke him.

“Young Lord. Young Lord.”

“Khuuaagh! Hack! Hack!? Huh? Wh-what is it?”

“The warehouses are on fire.”

“......Then can’t you just put it out?”

“It seems they cannot get the fire under control. There have already been quite a few casualties.”

“......How many?”

“I was told two knights and ten soldiers died in their sleep. The soldiers came to inform us. The fire can already be seen from here.”

“Two knights are dead?”

Gutoerm was instantly wide awake.

Training a single knight took at least ten years. At the very least.

Warhorses, weapons, and armor were expensive, but in truth, they were far cheaper than the worth of a knight himself.

Where was one supposed to find a man who could ride, wield weapons, and possess both courage and loyalty? One could hire such a man for coin, perhaps, but expecting loyalty as well was another matter.

It was not money that was the problem, but time. Losing a knight from a family that had served the ducal house for generations was especially like losing one of one’s own limbs.

At this point, taking control of the wharf was no longer the issue.

Gutoerm heaved his enormous body upright and climbed out of bed. The bed creaked as though it might collapse.

The moment he stepped outside the inn, the acrid smell of burning struck his nose. Firelight blazed in the distance, while pitch-black smoke billowed into the sky.

A crowd of onlookers had already gathered to watch the fire, and Gutoerm hurried toward the scene with two knights.

Two of the warehouses were completely engulfed in flames, making any attempt to extinguish them seem effectively impossible, and the fire was beginning to spread to a third.

The soldiers were frantically hauling water to put out the flames on that warehouse. Yet they seemed hard-pressed even to stop the fire from spreading.

The heat had roasted the soldiers’ faces red. Gutoerm covered his face with one arm and came around toward the wharf before reaching the scene.

“Young Lord, what should we do?”

One of the knights asked. At a time like this, the person in charge had to give orders. Whether they should keep fighting the fire, or abandon everything for now and withdraw, matters like that.

“......”

But Gutoerm looked utterly stupefied, as though he had stopped thinking altogether.

Then, without warning, a crossbow bolt flew from the direction of the warehouse that was still mostly intact.

Twang! Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud!

“Urgh!”

“Ow!”

“What the hell!?”

They had even taken off their armor because of the heat from the fire, and the soldiers collapsed beneath the sudden volley of bolts. No one died instantly, but everyone was badly shaken by the completely unexpected attack.

One knight seized Gutoerm and shoved him into a boat at the wharf, while the other charged at the enemy without the slightest regard for the several bolts already embedded in his body.

“The Marquis. It’s the Marquis of Denbria’s forces.”

Someone spoke. At those words, Gutoerm snapped back to his senses. 'I knew this would happen. I said we shouldn’t have brought so many people!'

Thud-thud-thud-thud!

Another crossbow volley struck the knight who had nearly reached the enemies hidden in the darkness. Bolts buried themselves in his body once more.

Yet the knight kept going. He swung his sword and cleaved halfway through one enemy’s torso, then seized another man by the head and drove his thumb into the man’s eye.

“Aaaaaaagh!”

A scream erupted.

Truly, if they were only allowed to fight properly, knights were little different from monsters. But the circumstances were far too unfavorable.

The next barrage of spear thrusts brought even such a monster to a dead stop. He held on to one of the spears until the very end, struggling against it before finally collapsing.

“Hey! Get in the boats! Quickly!”

The knight who had remained with Gutoerm to the end shouted to the soldiers. Some boarded the boats to save themselves, while others merely lay on the ground, writhing.

The knight leapt onto the wharf and rescued the fallen soldiers. He hoisted those heavy, full-grown men up one after another and loaded them into another boat, while Gutoerm, intent on saving himself alone, shoved off with an oar and sent his own boat into the water.

The knight was so preoccupied with rescuing the soldiers that he noticed only belatedly that Gutoerm had boarded a boat alone and was already moving away.

“Young Lord!”

Standing on the wharf, he called after Gutoerm.

“Y-you were assigned to protect me in the first place, weren’t you! I’m safe now, so I hope you find some way to survive too!”

At that moment, flames erupted from the boat carrying the soldiers. The Black Hand had loaded it with Peat beforehand, then approached underwater and set it alight.

Worse still, the remaining warehouse had begun to burn as well. The entire area around it was bright as midday, and the knight stood alone, staring after the retreating Gutoerm.

Another volley of bolts flew at him. The knight tore loose something like a plank, used it as a makeshift shield, and charged the enemy.

He resisted fiercely until the very end, but this was not truly a battle. He had simply been caught in a trap.

His struggles were only an attempt to escape that trap, not a fight. Who in his right mind would confront a knight head-on?

As though determined to take at least one of them with him, the knight seized an enemy’s spear shaft, yanked the man closer, caught hold of him, and plunged into the flames. That was the last anyone saw of him.

It was fighting spirit that a man like Gutoerm could never have mustered even if he died and came back to life.

Gutoerm rowed furiously. But because he was unused to physical exertion, he could manage only a few strokes before running out of breath and having to rest.

He regretted not having taken at least a few soldiers aboard with him. 'Why the hell did that fool climb back out just to rescue soldiers who were as good as dead anyway?'

Gutoerm resented the last knight who had remained as his escort. 'All he had to do was protect me. Wouldn’t he have survived too, then?'

Whether fortunately or unfortunately, the fire was so enormous that its glow reached far into the distance. He did not seem likely to take a wrong turn and end up in the Wetlands.

Gutoerm kept rowing. Every so often, exhausted, he would fling the oar aside with a 'Damn it!', then gather his strength and start rowing again, only to become too tired and stop to rest. He repeated the cycle over and over.

Once his surroundings grew quiet, he began worrying about how he would report this to his father. He was afraid as well. 'No. The Marquis of Denbria ambushed us, so this isn’t my fault.' He rationalized it that way.

Then suddenly, he sensed something moving beneath the water. At first he wondered if they were fish, but there was more than one, and looking closely, they seemed rather large.

More than anything, the fact that they were swimming around the boat made him wonder if they were Monsters, and fear seized him.

Gutoerm raised the oar and tried to prod one of the unknown creatures. At that moment, something abruptly surged out of the water and climbed into the boat in an instant.

“Eeeeeek!”

Gutoerm recoiled in terror and nearly fell into the water. He barely managed to grab the side of the boat, then flailed his arms wildly without even knowing what had climbed aboard.

But then a calm voice, strangely out of place in the current situation, reached him.

“Please calm yourself, Young Lord.”

Still startled and disoriented, Gutoerm examined the other party. What had climbed up from beneath the boat was a person, and not merely one.

“Wh-wh-wh-wh-what are you! A ghost? A Monster!”

“Neither a ghost nor a Monster.”

Gutoerm tried his utmost to calm his pounding heart and looked again. They really were people. But they wore things like masks, so he could not see their faces.

“......Wh-who are you?”

“We belong to an organization called the Black Hand. You may think of us as Grinnen’s Thieves’ Guild.”

“A Thieves’ Guild? Is it money you want?”

“Well, perhaps what we want is your life.”

“......Th-that joke goes too far.”

Gutoerm forced a laugh and tried to treat it as a joke. But when the other man said nothing and simply stared at him, his heart sank despite his disbelief.

He fondled his nipple frantically, but it did nothing to soothe his anxiety.

“R-ransom. Yes, that’s it. L-let me go first, and I-I-I’ll pay you a ransom.”

Even at the very end, he proposed an arrangement that barely qualified as negotiation. He would pay a ransom if they released him first.

“In truth, the reason we have appeared before you is to decide, one last time, whether it would profit us more to let you live, Young Lord, or simply kill you.”

“What? A mere Thieves’ Guild dares judge me? N-no, that makes no sense. If you’re thieves, shouldn’t you want money? I don’t understand. Just let me go. I will pay the ransom without fail.”

“That won’t do. I’m afraid you’ll simply have to die.”

“H-hey! That’s absurd! This is absurd! You dare! You dare kill me!? That can’t happen!”

Difficult though it was in a situation like this, the correct thing to do was first calm himself and coolly judge what he could do to survive.

But in a crisis, Gutoerm had nothing to cling to except his status, not ability or judgment.

“I naturally respect your rank, Young Lord, but unfortunately, death treats all men equally. I don’t believe that is something you should complain to us about.”

His manner was exceedingly courteous and his voice pleasantly calm, yet the substance of his words could not have been colder.

Then he whipped something through the air. Gutoerm felt a sharp sting in the nipple he had been unconsciously fondling. Something dropped with a soft plop.

“Aagh! What did you do!?”

“We need proof, you see. We said we would answer with results.”

The Black Hand man spoke as he picked up Gutoerm’s nipple.

Gutoerm’s face twisted as though he were about to cry, and his gaze darted repeatedly between the thing in the man’s hand and his own chest.

“Results...... Don’t tell me my elder brother ordered this?”

“Since these are your last moments, I’ll tell you. The Salt Prince, the Bastard of Winsloe.”

At the word Bastard, Gutoerm’s face contorted grotesquely. A flash of defeat crossed his mind, and rage immediately surged up to smother it. He no longer felt the pain in his chest at all.

“What? Him? He did this to me? A Bastard dares have me killed!? I am the Legitimate Heir of the ducal house! Why are you listening to him instead of me!?”

Apparently deciding there was no further need for conversation, the Black Hand members gave no answer. They tossed Peat into the boat, set it alight, then slipped back into the water.

In an instant, fierce flames swept across the boat. Despite the pain in his chest, Gutoerm hurriedly scooped up water and tried to put out the fire, but it only burned more fiercely.

“Hey! Where are you going!”

Absurdly enough, the only people who could save him now were the very people who had set his boat on fire. So he called desperately after them. But they had apparently already moved far away, because he could no longer see them.

“Nobility! I’ll raise you to the nobility! Come back at once! I’ll grant you lands and titles!”

It was all useless. At some point, the boat gave a violent crack and broke apart, sending Gutoerm into the water.

His body was so obese that even clinging to a fragment of the boat could not keep him afloat, and he continued sinking. At the very end, only his mouth remained above the surface as he shouted something, but the words were impossible to make out.

And in the end, silence remained.

He had been given chance after chance. He never had to involve himself in this affair to begin with. He could have stayed in the warehouses himself and strengthened the watch. He could have waited for his final escorting knight until the end. Perhaps even at the very last moment, he might have survived if only he had answered properly.

The one who had thrown away every last one of those chances was not Valery or anyone else. It was Gutoerm himself.

Chapter 7 – Inferiority Complex. End.