Bonus Short Stories

The War Ogre vs. The Wandering Sage

There was the story about traveling across wastes where myrmecoleo were rampant; the story of the night battle at the fortress in the valley, intercepting a tribe of trolls; Blood’s confrontation with the Hecatoncheir, guardian of the ruins; the time when Gus had a battle of riddles against a cat sith… Even the most casual list of examples showed the incredible richness of the pair’s heroic tales.

As I listened to them talk about their exploits in my usual room in the temple—

“I wonder who’d win in a fight between you two.”

Those words that fell casually from my lips were the trigger.

“Well, obviously, me,” they both said.

By the time I realized I’d set something bad in motion, it was too late.

“Oh? Oh? What’s that, old man, you think you can win against these muscles?”

“Your so-called muscles are long gone. Do you think I’d lose to a skeleton with an empty head?”

“Oh-ho, Nice words for a formless old man who’s even lost his bones. How’s it feel not being able to touch money?”

“Why, you...”

The exchange, started as a joke, gradually began to heat up.

After a little back-and-forth, Blood finally said, “We’re not getting anywhere throwing insults at each other. Why don’t we do this?”

“Mm. A proof is required.”

And so it was settled. There was nothing I could do about it.

The three of us were on the grassy plain at the foot of the temple hill. Blood, the bulky skeleton, had changed into full armor in a very short span of time. He was equipped with magical leather armor, a two-handed broadsword, a dagger, and a sling as well. Gus, the hook-nosed ghost, looked no different from normal, but... yeah, I was certain he had something up his sleeves.

“Right, Will! You start us off!”

“And we’ll need you to referee! It shouldn’t be difficult. We won’t go down that easily, so don’t worry about it too much. Just stop us once Blood starts whining.”

“Alright Will, once this old fogey starts making excuses and running away, be nice to him and take the hint. Twisting the facts is the only thing he’s good at.”

“Oooohh...”

“Oooohh...”

“R-Right! Okay, both of you, play fair and above board! Everything good and clean! This is a match, remember. A match, not a fight!”

I emphasized that part as strongly as I could and stepped between the two, who were glaring at each other with their faces close to touching. My Gus-facing hand slipped through him, though.

“Yeah. A match. Right...”

“Mm. A match. Yes...”

They both looked like they were plotting something, even though Blood didn’t have any facial expressions. But there was no way for me to stop whatever it was they were planning to do; I slightly understood the feeling of wanting to battle it out man against man; and finally, I did want to see them fight just once.

“O-Okay then, here goes.”

I raised my arm into the air.

“Begin!”

I swung my arm down and signaled the start of the match.

◆

Blood was the one who made the first move. As Gus immediately tried to escape into the air, Blood whipped his sling around terrifyingly fast and hurled the projectile at Gus. It was a lead ball about the size of a skipping stone, and it had a Word inscribed on it, so it could hit Gus. Blood was pretty serious about this. And it wasn’t just him; the fact that Gus used the advantage of being a ghost to immediately launch an attack from the air showed that he was pretty serious, too.

Gus tutted and dodged the attack interfering with his movement through the sky.

“Expergisci!”

He suddenly set golems in motion. When had he set those up? Lumps of earth all over began to rise up—

“You sneak!”

They were swept aside with an explosive sound. A single impact from Blood’s broadsword sent one of the human-sized golems flying off into another, smashing them both to pieces.

Drawing in his broadsword with a flowing motion, Blood sprinted towards Gus.

“Acceleratio!”

Gus tried to open up distance between them, but Blood caught up with his own natural acceleration.

“Currere Oleum!”

Blood took an enormous leap to avoid the Grease spell and slashed out at Gus. That instant, Gus cast the Word of Defense with impeccable timing and sent the blade off course.

It was a fierce battle over distance. Blood closed in, Gus dodged and got away; Blood stuck fast to him, and Gus drew back. Gus fired off countless Words and Signs at high speed and attempted to create more space between them, while Blood hindered him with endless special moves and, above all, his overwhelming physical ability.

The battle grew more serious, and both attack and defense rapidly grew faster and more complicated.

And at the moment that I finally became unable to understand the infinite flurry of attacks and feints and started to worry that things were escalating too far—

“What, pray tell, might you two be doing?”

A smiling Mary appeared, everyone froze, and the match was called. I’m sure I don’t need to mention that they received one heck of a talking-to after that.

In other words, the conclusion was this:

In a fight between Blood and Gus, Mary wins.

A Dream of Bygone Days

“Hmm... This can go with these...”

“...”

“Oh, but maybe this goes better?”

“U-Umm, Mary?”

We were in a room in the temple. Several sets of clothing were tidily folded up into piles.

Mary had been using me as her personal fashion doll for over half an hour now. This was because Blood had managed to pull out some clothes that were still in good condition from the ruined city.

Clothing would normally be in a heck of a state after a few hundred years, but if they were stored in a clothes chest with magical Signs engraved upon it, that was a whole different story.

Kids grow quickly. I too had shot up in height and was now twelve solstice years old. The clothes I was wearing last year were already far too small. Mary had, of course, been working her own kind of magic to adjust the length of the clothes I was wearing, but it looked quite a difficult task to manage. And so Blood had been considerate and gone on a search for clothing, and he had come back with a mountain of piled up clothes that, as I mentioned, had gotten Mary completely fired up.

I never had much interest in fashion, in my last world or this one, so to be honest, I was just confused and unable to keep up. “It’s not like anyone’s coming. As long as I can wear them—”

At least that was how I saw it.

“Oh no, that won’t do.” Mary smiled. “You need to build up your knowledge of clothes, or you’ll embarrass yourself when you go out into the world someday.”

Mary took items of clothing in hand one after another and started explaining them to me. This is silk, this is cotton, this is linen. This is a plain weave, twill weave, satin weave, cross weave...

She showed me the different ways of sewing each part, the meanings of the patterns and designs stitched onto the clothes, and how to wear various fashion accessories. And while warning me that things had probably changed in the outside world, she taught me the customs relating to what people wore at each level of society.

For instance, she taught me that not all fur coats were created equal, and only the upper class could use martens and squirrels. That got a “Huh,” from me, and I started to gain an appreciation for clothing despite myself as I listened to her. I’d hardly had any interest at all up until now, and I was surprised at how many different kinds of clothing there were in the world.

“It’s incredible,” I said.

“Buildings, cooking, and clothing are things that people can’t live without. Of course there are a lot of them,” she replied primly. She seemed to be in a good mood and enjoying herself.

“You know a lot about this.”

“I liked clothes and decorations. If I hadn’t heard the voice of our Earth-Mother, I might have aspired to be a clothes-seller or a dressmaker.” Mary seemed to be looking far off somewhere. “If I’d never heard God’s voice, or if I’d been born as the daughter of some dressmaker...”

Everyone imagines that kind of thing at least once. My memories of my previous life were still vague, but I had the feeling that there was a time when that was all I thought about.

How did things end up this way? If only I’d been born into a different family, if only I’d been born in a different country, an entirely different path might have stretched before me—

“But no.” Contrary to my own thoughts, Mary smiled.

“As a dressmaker’s daughter, I would never have met Gus or Blood—” She tilted her head to the side and looked at me. “And of course I wouldn’t have met you, Will.” Her smile made her look very pretty.

“Yeah. I’m glad you weren’t a dressmaker’s daughter, too.” I smiled back.

Where had I fallen down in my previous life? Was it a failure that I had brought on myself through my own carelessness and complacency? Or had I become disheartened by crippling circumstances I was powerless to change? Maybe it was half and half.

I could no longer pull that memory from beyond the haze. All I knew was that at the end of it all, I stood here, in a fantastic world of swords and sorcery, raised by a gentle family of undead. I thought myself very lucky.

“Alright.”

I’d lost myself in those thoughts. Mary’s voice pulled me back to reality.

“That’s enough talking. Let’s try this one next, shall we?”

“What? There’s still more?!”

Mary was a good mother on the whole, but she got like this sometimes. I wailed in protest and tried to escape, but Mary was surprisingly nimble. She caught me with no effort at all, and for a full hour after that, I was made into her personal mannequin...

Lethal Traps in Ancient Ruins

“Ooh! Hey, Will, Menel! Are you fixing up your adventuring stuff?! Show me, show me!”

We had some time free one day, so we’d spread a sheet out on the grass and were doing some maintenance work on our tools when Bee, the red-haired halfling, came bounding up to us with sparkling eyes.

“No! Hands off.” Meneldor, the half-elf with silver hair, flicked his hand at her as if swatting away an insect.

“Aww, whyyy?!”

“You look like you’d manhandle them. They’re my precious tools of the trade.”

“I would not, Menel the meanie! No one likes a fussy man, you know?”

“I’m sorted there, thanks.”

“Yep, you’re lovey-dovey with Will, after all!”

“Why’d you bring up Will?! I’m talking about women!”

There was a fun rhythm to the rally of quick quips going on between them.

“Ah, thief tools!” Bee’s eyes went straight to the item Menel was holding. It was a leather case, about the size of a closed book, containing several smaller tools. All kinds of tools were there, including tongs, hook-shaped objects, and metal files.

“Oh? A hand mirror?” Finding a slightly unusual item among them, Bee tilted her head. “What do you use that for?”

“Guess.”

“Hm.” Bee frowned and started thinking. “Signals? Reflecting light or something?”

“You could, but I wouldn’t carry it around just for that.”

“Grooming.”

“You ever seen an adventurer look neat and tidy?”

“Oh, I know! Disguises for city adventuring!”

She sounded convinced that she’d got it, but sadly that wasn’t the answer.

“Well, yeah, I use it for that too”—he shook his head—“but that’s not the main thing it’s for.” He polished the mirror, grinning. Bee thought even harder.

“Mggg... Will, hint please!”

“Okay. An old adventurers’ saying: You can buy a mirror and look handsome, or lose an eye and look ugly.”

“Ah! Disarming traps!” Bee yelled out.

“Right answer.” Menel nodded.

I nodded too. A mirror was virtually essential for scouting ruins. Even Blood had told me about it in the past.

“You’ve heard of this one, right?” Menel continued. “It’s a standard trap. A careless thief goes peering straight into the keyhole of a treasure chest, sticks one of his tools in there and rattles it around, and then—”

“Poison gas or needles come shooting out and make you go blind! That kind of stuff.”

“That’s where the mirror comes in.”

“I get it. So if it looks dangerous, you don’t look straight at it.”

Working via a mirror made blinding traps easier to avoid.

“And we also use it for checking if a passage is safe to go through.”

You could check what things were like in the corridor around the corner without poking your head out. Plenty of ruins were dens of the evil gods’ minions, so this came in surprisingly useful.

“Huh! Scouting just gets brushed over a lot of the time in the stories. So it’s like that! Oh, what’s this one?”

“Wedge.”

“Just what it looks like? How d’you use it?” Bee cocked her head to the side.

This time, I was the one to answer her. “You can use them as points to tie ropes around when dealing with steep outdoor slopes or places where it’s easy to slip and stuff.” And besides standard usages like that— “It also has another important role in holding ruin doors in place, I guess.”

“Holding them in place?”

“Because of lock-in traps.”

“Oh, right, those. I heard about them in some story. Someone went to the atelier of a great old sorcerer and got chased around by golems, then he escaped into a room and the door closed all by itself and locked him in.”

“Those are actually pretty scary.”

“They are?”

“Ya. He’s right, ‘lock-in rooms’ like that are fig scary.” Menel looked vaguely into the air, as though remembering something. “Back when they were made, the idea was apparently for whoever was in charge of the house to call the authorities or something and unlock the room from the outside once they arrived.”

But now that those houses were ruins, whoever had once been in charge of them was obviously long gone.

“Set off one of those now, and you could end up starving to death inside a room sealed tight by magic. I’ve seen one of those rooms before where some poor fecker had set the trap off. It wasn’t pretty.”

Bee and I winced audibly. I didn’t really want to imagine the despair of the person who fell into that trap or the gruesomeness of the scene. I could only sympathize with Menel for having inadvertently laid eyes on it.

“Ya, so if you don’t want to get caught in something like that, fixing the door in place with a wedge before going into any suspicious rooms is a standard countermeasure.”

If you stuck a wedge in first, the door wouldn’t shut completely. There would also be a gap for you to escape. It was a tool with a surprising number of uses.

“Interesting.”

“Death traps are always where you least expect them, so you can’t let your guard down,” Menel muttered bitterly.

The phrase “ancient ruins” conjures up a strong image of death traps, but the ruins of the Union Age rarely contained traps set up with the intention of killing someone. It wasn’t as if we set up those sorts of traps in our own houses and workplaces either, military bases and other very special facilities like that aside. However, the passage of time was frightening, and things could change without anyone noticing. Floors became brittle and turned into pitfall traps or descending ceilings. The cables of lifts became old and transformed them into boxes that would fall when you entered them. And absent the person whose presence was assumed, lock-in rooms became rooms of death by starvation.

“Whoever made them didn’t want to kill at all, but time comes along and converts these things into fig murderous traps.”

“Yeah. We have to factor all that in and stay alert.”

We carefully inspected our tools as we talked, polishing them and making sure they were in good repair. They were our lifelines when we went exploring dangerous ruins.

“You can never be too prepared, I guess.”

“Exactly.” Menel and I both nodded.

Evening of Rest

The cured meat was tossed deftly into the boiling pot.

A knife held in one hand worked around vegetables held in the other, and then, after being beautifully peeled and chopped into bite-sized pieces, the vegetables were plunged into the pot.

I could hear the sounds of water and crackling firewood. These were the sounds of cooking.

“I acquired some good salt-cured meat, so we have soup today.”

We were on our way to Whitesails. While we set up camp in the forest, Tonio smiled at us in good spirits as he prepared our evening meal. After determining where to camp, he had gathered dead branches, put together an oven out of stones he had found, and begun preparing to cook.

“Woohoo!” Bee started dancing. Menel wore his usual expression, but I caught a hint of a smile. I was beaming, too.

Having delicious food was a wonderful thing. I remembered reading a book on the military a long time ago in my previous life which said that whether food was warm or cold and whether it tasted good or bad had an effect on morale. At that time, I hadn’t really thought much about it, but after being born into this kind of world, I understood how true that really was.

These Beast Woods had a lot of villages in unfortunate circumstances, and due to that and other factors, we had remarkably few resources to spare on meals. But even so, it really made you miserable to eat bad food. Like gloopy wheat porridge with a weird bitter flavor and half-cooked vegetables mixed in it, or dried fish that you weren’t quite sure had been fermented or just gone bad...

“Having tasty food is good!” Bee declared with clenched fists.

“Yeah.” Agreeing, I handed her the rope to put up the tent with.

“The breakfast we had in that village this morning, no offense to them, but it was kinda terrible. So you bet I’m ready to eat tonight! Tonio, lots, okay? Make lots!”

“Yes, yes. Most certainly, Madam.”

She was quite a glutton and ate a lot for her size. It was completely believable that she was sticking with Tonio for his cooking skills.

“No but for real, this is what’s such a pain about traveling. Only two or three meals a day! In my home village, I’d have twice that!”

“Here we go, the halfling food obsession,” Menel said wearily. “Do you guys actually eat six meals a day? You serious?”

“Yep, serious. Super serious.” She laughed. “Breakfast, elevenses, dinner, low tea, high tea, and supper! Any decent halfling village will be something like that. Awesome, right?”

“Where the hell do you put that much grub? You’re gonna get fat.”

“Wow, that’s not a very nice thing to say to a lady. I move around a lot and use up what I’ve eaten, obviously, and that makes the next meal taste good. Isn’t that common sense?”

“Halflings. Brother...”

Bee was genuinely as brisk as she claimed, and even as she spoke, she was busily working on putting up the tent. Menel shrugged.

“Right, I guess I’ll go do a bit of work as well. I’ll go look for some more firewood. Hopefully there’ll be something to eat, too.”

“Go find some fruit or something for me, mister talented hunter.”

“Sure, okay, I’ll just find some fruit. Gods. Don’t get your hopes up.” And with a wave of his hand, Menel disappeared into the forest.

◆

Before long, the tent was also finished. I used several Words and Signs to place bug repelling and early warning magic around the tent we’d erected. It was very simple magic, kind of like a charm, but there was a big difference between having it and not.

“Thanks again. Having a sorcerer around is sooo useful! Goodbye, nights of annoying buzzing noises!”

“I’ve seen a few sorcerers before, but Will, the way you use magic is particularly fluid.”

“My teacher was all about small magic.”

Gus could use any kind of magic, no matter how difficult, but he put a lot of importance on small magic like this instead. Back when I was in the city of the dead, he’d made sure to drill that message into me.

“What did he say to you?”

“Even the most indomitable hero, who can conquer any monster when it comes to battle, can eventually succumb to the poisonous bugs that plague him during his travels.”

“Hmm. Was he a bit of a bore?”

“The opposite. He was actually pretty wild. From time to time, he’d blow his own horn with these really crazy stories. But when it came to this, yeah, he had his head screwed on tight.”

Even though not much time had passed, those days in the city of the dead were already feeling pretty nostalgic to me.

“Hey! Hey!”

As I lost myself in my memories, Menel came back. He was running towards us. My hand instinctively reached for my spear as I wondered what was going on, but then I noticed he looked awfully proud of himself, and he was carrying several bundles of dead branches and a lot of red fruit.

“Forestberries?! Oh my god, they’re so rare!” Bee shouted out, her eyes sparkling.

“Found a bunch of them growing behind some rocks over there.”

Tonio thought for a moment and started talking profit. “If we can take them to a nearby town, we should be able to make some change out of these.”

“Are they that good?”

“Oh, Will, you’re so clueless!”

“Just try one already, dammit. Here!” He shoved a vivid red berry into my mouth.

I tried biting into it. An invigorating tangy sweetness filled my mouth. “This is delicious!”

“See?!”

“You three, take care not to eat too much before dinner, please.”

“Ya, I know, I know.”

As the sun slowly set, we made a lot of noise together while passing the time before our evening meal. It was an uneventful, everyday scene—but I was sure I’d look back on it someday with a smile.