Chapter 54

Translator: Willia

The smell was awful, as if someone were selling rotten vegetables.

“Who? The Village Head? Ah, I don’t know, I don’t know. I really don’t. If you’re not buying vegetables, then go.”

The vegetable seller spoke with unmistakable reluctance.

Valery’s group stopped asking questions and left the market. They went to a cloth shop instead and asked about the Village Head.

The man there was in the middle of measuring and cutting fabric on a table with a ruler. He gave them an awkward smile and shook his head.

“Well, I’m just a working man. I don’t know much about what goes on in the world. Hahaha......”

With no other choice, they left the cloth shop. That made five.

“What is this, Grinnen or something?”

Knut spoke.

The people of Grinnen lived as though they had sealed their eyes and ears shut, never saying a word no matter what crime took place. Knut meant that Benholm felt much the same.

Unlike the crime-ridden city of Grinnen, however, Benholm maintained a certain degree of order and public safety.

“Isn’t the title ‘Village Head’ strange to begin with? No matter how you look at this place, it doesn’t seem like some rural farming village.”

Yorik had a point. A Village Head was the sort of person one expected to find in a rural community, not a town.

But then again, Benholm itself was difficult to classify as either a town or a village. It did not have that many people, yet neither did they raise livestock or farm for a living.

Valery felt eyes watching him from the market. Even from a distance, he could tell people were pretending to shop while keeping an eye on them.

“Were we too obvious about asking around?”

“They might have realized we were investigating him.”

“Should we just leave?”

“No. Let’s ask at one last place.”

Valery headed toward the source of a steady clang, clang, clang. It was a smithy.

Five or six people worked at Benholm’s smithy, and at a glance, they clearly were not making weapons or combat equipment. Most of their work seemed to be pots, farm tools, and the like.

Heat poured from the furnace. One man worked the bellows tirelessly while another hammered iron into shape.

Valery did not immediately start asking questions. He simply stood there and watched them work.

Even after realizing Valery’s group was watching, they remained focused entirely on their work. Only after some time had passed and they finally had a moment to breathe did the man hammering the iron put down his hammer and ask,

“Looking for something?”

“I’m not looking to buy anything. I have something to ask instead. In return, I’ll show you something rare.”

At Valery’s words, the blacksmith pulled down the cloth wrapped around his head and wiped his face. Then he stared at Valery as if wondering what nonsense he was talking about.

“If you’ve got a question, ask it. As you can see, I’m not exactly idle.”

“Do you know the Village Head here? His name is Oder.”

The blacksmith snorted and sat down nearby. He shook his head before answering.

“What do people like you, walking around with swords at your waists, call yourselves? Knights? Mercenaries? Swordsmen? Adventurers? I don’t see much difference between people like that and thugs. The Village Head’s the same. He calls himself the Village Head, so I suppose that makes him the Village Head. That’s not the important part. What matters is that whenever he comes here and scribbles something on a piece of paper, the next day somebody ends up dead or some village gets torn apart. I don’t give a damn what gutter he crawled out of or what he used to do. We’ve had plenty like him. About a year ago, we had a Mayor. Before that, there were three men running some sort of Committee. I suppose now it’s that fellow’s turn.”

“......”

From what the blacksmith said, Benholm seemed like a body that always remained the same while its head was replaced from time to time.

And whether the person in charge called himself a Village Head or a Mayor, those officials seemed less interested in governing the place than in drawing up job requests and handling affairs outside it.

In other words, this was less a village or town than a garrison. More precisely, it was like a command post.

“I heard thugs had occupied a nearby farm village.”

“So?”

“What do you mean, so? Isn’t it a serious matter if thugs occupy a village?”

“Wasn’t that what the Village Head did?”

“?”

“Sending thugs to occupy villages and demand money from them. That sort of thing. Isn’t that what all those bastards calling themselves Village Heads or Mayors do?”

“......”

“Let’s visit that farm village first.”

Knut spoke. Valery nodded.

“So what was this rare sight you were going to show me?”

The blacksmith asked. Valery nudged Knut.

“What?”

“Show him your dagger. The one you named Frelsi.”

“Why mine?”

“Yours is smaller and simpler.”

“I haven’t even used this thing yet.”

With no other choice, Valery drew the sword hanging at his own waist. As it slid from the sheath, the blacksmith leaned his head back slightly.

But the moment he saw the condition of the blade, his eyes widened. The flat of the blade gleamed like a mirror, while the edge itself was impossibly clean and perfectly sharp.

Valery had cut through weapons, armor, shields, and even people with it, yet there was not so much as a scratch on the blade.

Even someone who knew nothing about swords could tell at a glance that it was no ordinary weapon.

“Dwarven Steel. I thought a blacksmith would want to see it at least once.”

“......What? Dwarven Steel?”

Valery slid the sword back into its sheath with a faint smile.

“Just because we’re Swordsmen doesn’t mean we all carry the same sort of sword.”

With that, he left the smithy with the others.

They retrieved their horses from the stable, mounted up, and rode west out of Benholm toward the place called the farm village.

They had left in the morning, and it was still before noon. Long stakes had been driven into the roadside, corpses impaled upon them. There were not merely one or two. Four or five stood along the road.

The corpses had rotted. Maggots swarmed over them and flies buzzed around. The hideous stench carried far into the distance.

With those things standing on both sides, it was impossible to understand what it felt like to pass between them without experiencing it firsthand.

Most people probably could not even have brought themselves to go through. They were genuinely horrifying, the sort of sight that made fear rise naturally within anyone who saw them.

“Ugh......”

Yorik covered his face with one hand and hunched his shoulders. Whether nobility were simply made of different stuff or born that way, neither Valery nor Knut showed any particular change in expression.

“It’s a warning.”

Knut spoke.

“Yeah.”

Not long after they passed through, a farm village came into view in the distance along the rolling road, nestled beside a river.

A wooden palisade surrounded the village, but the broad farmland nearby looked ravaged rather than properly cultivated and harvested. Some plots had barely been harvested, while others appeared trampled or burned.

From a distance, they could also see several sections of the palisade had collapsed. Broken carts and whatever else was available had been piled into the gaps as makeshift barriers.

There was no real gate to speak of. Instead, sharpened stakes had been lashed together into a barricade. A man stood atop a watchtower, and they could see his head turn toward them.

In other words, both Valery’s party and the people in the village had noticed each other.

Valery examined the surrounding area more carefully in case there was an ambush.

At first glance, such an open plain seemed to offer nowhere to hide, but the land here rose and fell subtly like waves. The terrain created blind spots that could not be seen until one drew closer, which actually made it more dangerous.

Even so, Valery urged his horse forward. He had judged that the other side could have no more than a few dozen men at most. A force that size could not deal with two mounted fighters in an open field like this.

Valery rode almost within bowshot of the farm village. Then he shouted toward it at the top of his lungs.

“Is there someone in charge! I’d like to talk!”

After a short while, several people came out. They did not emerge completely, instead remaining behind the barricade as they shouted back.

“Who are you!?”

“We heard thugs had occupied this village, so we came to look into it!”

“Nonsense!”

The other side shouted back indignantly. Valery approached more slowly and examined them closely. They were armed, but they did not look like professional mercenaries or Swordsmen.

“My companions and I are travelers from Eldeira. We stopped in Benholm looking for a baggage wagon, but they told us there weren’t any there. They said we would have to get one here, but that thugs had occupied the village.”

“Who the hell told you that?”

“The Village Head. Oder.”

“Ha!”

The other man looked utterly dumbfounded. Then he glared at Valery and spoke.

“Listen carefully, handsome knight. I don’t care what that bastard calls himself. He’s the one who hires thugs to occupy villages and terrorize people. Not long ago, they were pillaging another village beyond those hills. We took in the people who fled from there and decided to fight. You call that an occupation?”

“......Let’s say you’re telling the truth. Then just who is that man that he can do something like this? What is the Count doing?”

“Tax Collection Rights. Tax Collection Rights. The Count sold the Tax Collection Rights for this area. Give him a certain amount, and you can do whatever you like with the rest.”

It was a shocking story. The Count of Westlanding, of all people, had sold the Tax Collection Rights to this region.

No, when Valery thought about it, perhaps it was not that shocking after all. He had seen something similar before, back when he had toured Eldeira as a Marshal.

Back then, some incompetent fool had bought the Tax Collection Rights despite being completely unfit for the job and met a miserable death, but this situation seemed different.

“He couldn’t be doing this alone.”

“There’s some mercenary company or Merchant Company backing him. There always is. That Oder fellow is just a front man.”

The real problem was that when the Count sold the Tax Collection Rights to someone, the buyer could then sell them to someone else. And whoever bought them would naturally try to recoup what they had paid.

Put simply, Village Head Oder, or whatever organization he belonged to, had been subcontracted by the Count, and those subcontractors then subcontracted the work again to Swordsmen, mercenaries, or similar people.

Nominally, it was to collect taxes. In practice, it was to squeeze money from people by any means necessary.

What made the whole thing even more fucked up was that the Tax Collection Rights did not even have to change hands through a proper sale. Someone could simply kill the current holder and take them, or drive out the existing faction and seize them.

From the Count’s perspective, he did not care whether the Tax Collection Rights were sold among themselves or stolen from one another, so long as a fixed amount of income continued to reach him.

“Has it always been like this?”

“It was never this bad before. At most, there’d be a bit of wrangling. Sometimes one side would make a show of giving in, sometimes they’d make concessions. That was how things went. But this time, they suddenly started killing people. They made up their minds. So what were we supposed to do? We had to make up ours too.”

Valery had a rough understanding of how the situation worked. Then he reached a conclusion.

“Then let’s do this. You hire us. The payment will be a baggage wagon. Give us enough equipment to put up a few tents, along with the other tools we’ll need for camping. I’d also like to hire a few people to handle odd jobs. In exchange, we’ll drive out the people occupying the village beyond those hills.”

“......”

The villagers looked doubtful at Valery’s proposal, yet they also seemed quietly tempted. They muttered among themselves before answering.

“That’s a perfectly reasonable price for hiring a capable fixer. If you can drive out the men occupying that village, we’ll gladly pay it. We can’t use the baggage wagons anyway while things stay like this.”

“Good. Then we’ll go have a look around.”

Valery turned his horse around. Together with his friends, he headed toward the place the villagers had pointed out.

“That bastard Oder lied to us.”

Knut spoke. Oder had claimed thugs were occupying the village, but they had simply been locals. In truth, Oder himself had hired thugs, and when that had not gone well, he had tried to hire Valery too. No wonder the man had seemed like such trash.

But they had been told the other village was beyond the hill, and there was no village beyond the hill. In truth, the terrain here made it difficult to tell what counted as a hill and what counted as flat land.

Thinking about it from a local’s perspective, perhaps any place that rose a little higher than its surroundings qualified as a hill.

After riding at an easy pace for about thirty minutes, they spotted another village on a rise. There were structures like livestock sheds some distance outside the village, suggesting that the people here made their living raising sheep.

A large tree stood beside the road leading toward the village, with corpses hanging by their necks from its branches. Valery counted six or seven of them, all rotting and giving off the same foul stench.

“What a brutal place this is......”

Yorik spoke from where he sat behind Knut.

In Grinnen, people tended to dispose of the dead by dumping them in the marsh after killing them, so bodies were rarely put openly on display like this.

“What do we do now?”

Knut asked. Valery thought for a moment before answering.

“I’ve got an idea. Let’s say Oder sent us and get inside first. We’re on horseback, so they won’t suspect us.”

Valery immediately rode up the slope. This place also had broken carts and stakes obstructing the entrance.

The man guarding it was sitting not on a chair but on something like an empty crate, joking around with his companions. Even when he saw Valery, he did not bother getting to his feet.

You could tell at a glance whether someone was a local or an outsider. Unlike the people at the farm village earlier, these men had clearly come from elsewhere.

“Who’re you?”

“Oder sent us.”

Valery lied without the slightest hesitation. He disliked lying, but he could do it whenever necessary. War was deception.

Sure enough, the moment Valery said Oder had sent him, the seated man finally stood.

“......Please wait a moment.”

He went inside the village and soon returned with someone who looked like the leader. The man carefully examined Valery, his horse, and the companions who had come with him.

Valery looked a little young, but he was strikingly handsome, neatly dressed, and riding an exceptionally fine horse. He did not look like some run-of-the-mill Swordsman.

Perhaps he was the second son of some noble family who had gone into the mercenary trade, or something along those lines. That was what the man guessed.

“What brings you here?”

“How long do you intend to sit around here? Do you plan to waste your time without even taking a single farm village?”

“Ah, well, sir, the thing is, we have to fill the quota. Some of our men have already been taken out, and if you could send us reinforcements......”

“Shut your mouth! You incompetent fool! If you drag this out, all you’ll do is sit around eating through your provisions! Then it’ll take even longer to fill the quota! Do you think you’ll be paid more just because you take longer!”

At Valery’s fierce rebuke, the man flinched and lowered his head. He did not even dare meet Valery’s eyes.

Seeing that, Valery quietly gave him a way out.

“How much have you collected so far?”

At Valery’s question, something clicked in the other man’s mind. He thought Valery was fishing for a Bribe. At this point, paying one seemed preferable.

“Please, come inside first. They’re shepherd bastards, so there’s hardly any money to speak of. They have to shear the sheep and sell the wool before it turns into coin, you see...... Still, I’ve worked hard and found a few things worth taking. The cheese is excellent, at least, so please allow me to serve you some.”

“Hmm. Let’s have a look first.”

At Valery’s positive response, the man began barking at his subordinates.

“What are you lot doing! Get this cleared away! Clueless idiots! Do I have to tell you every single thing before you’ll move!”

At the order of the Boss, Captain, or whatever the man was, his subordinates cleared away the debris blocking the entrance.

At last, Valery entered, and a bleak vision of Hell spread out before him inside the village.

Corpses that looked as though they had been beaten to death rather than killed with blades lay scattered carelessly about. The vegetable gardens had been devastated, and the livestock sheds held women barely covering themselves with rags instead of animals.

Was there some other Hell? Life itself was Hell. Anyone who went on about the end of the world had clearly never really lived. Wasn’t the end of the world right here?

If people were living peaceful, ordinary lives when strangers came, killed the men, and treated the women like this, then that was Hell. That was the end of the world. Ragnarök and the Great Flood were nothing but bullshit.

“Ah, those bitches over there are the low-grade ones. We’ve got the really good ones kept somewhere else, so you can have a look later.”

As the man spewed his disgusting words, Valery coolly assessed the mercenaries’ numbers, equipment, and positions.

They were certainly above the level of mere thugs and were genuine mercenaries, but they were low-tier ones. Every line of work had its levels.

There were a little over twenty of them. Valery located the Crossbowmen and immediately glanced at Knut.

Knut understood from his eyes alone and nodded. It meant Knut would handle the Crossbowmen, while Valery took care of the rest.

Valery dismounted first. Then he followed the Captain of the mercenary company, and beside one of the buildings, he saw a small child sitting on the ground and clutching something in her arms.

At first glance, it looked like a large yellow ball. But it was actually a human head. Long blond hair covered it, making it resemble a ball.

“Whose head is that?”

Valery stopped walking for a moment and asked. The child holding the head raised her face to look at him. Her blue eyes were dead.

“Mom.”

“Your father?”

“In the tree.”

“Do you want revenge?”

“......I just don’t want to live.”

“No. I’ll take your revenge for you, so you go on living your own life.”

Even if the whole world collapsed and life became Hell, if someone was still breathing, what else could they do but live? They could become a devil in that hellish life, or continue yearning for Heaven despite it all.

Valery followed the leader into a nearby building. The door shut with a sharp thud.

It did not take long before the door opened again. When it did, something round came flying outside, struck the ground, and rolled away, leaving a trail of blood behind it. It was the mercenary captain’s head.

Only then did life begin to return to the girl’s dead eyes.