Prologue: Listening to Tales of Ruin

Prologue:
Listening to Tales of Ruin

 

THE RUMOR WAS SPREADING—a whole city, wiped out.

<Do you think he means Hansa?> asked the small girl with transparent wings who fluttered in the corner of Loren’s peripheral vision.

Loren stole a glance at her from the guild bar as he took a swig from his mug of cheap ale.

It wasn’t at all rare for a settlement or village to be destroyed; in fact, people only really thought such events worth mentioning when the loss was on the level of a city or greater.

Unlike villages, which were forever being built and torn down, cities only came to be because they survived long enough to develop into, well, cities. Most of the smaller settlements these days didn’t even have names. However, if a named city fell to ruin, it meant considerable injury had befallen both property and people.

Loren’s business wasn’t completely unrelated to Hansa’s—in fact, he’d been in the middle of completing a quest in that very city when it had been destroyed due to misdeeds he personally witnessed. That said, he hadn’t offered an official report on the matter, nor had anyone else he knew.

Hansa’s neighboring nations were presently conducting their own investigations, and thus far, they’d established that every single village that had belonged in some way to the city-state of Hansa had been completely and utterly decimated.

Sure, Hansa hadn’t been the largest place, but the fall of a nation was the fall of a nation, and quite a few people were vying to fill the power vacuum it had left behind.

Every neighboring country saw Hansa’s demise as a chance to expand its own territory, and Hansa had shared a border with a number of places; people were eagerly betting on who would be first to stake their claim on its ruins.

Of course, one wrong move and any one of these interested parties might be labeled an uncouth aggressor. Furthermore, not a one of them had yet moved into this territory—a territory whose every last resident had mysteriously disappeared.

In any case, all these investigations, checks, and claims on this empty land would no doubt eventually lead to bloodshed. More importantly, Loren considered this none of his concern.

<Ale tastes awfully strange. I’ve never actually had it before.>

The girl in Loren’s peripheral vision, who was now curiously peeking into his cup, was the daughter of the chancellor of Hansa. Loren had recently been tasked with delivering her to that now-fallen city. Her name was Scena. After being turned into a Lifeless King—the most powerful variety of undead—by the same mysterious individual who had instigated the end of Hansa, Scena had met her defeat at Loren’s hands.

That said, while Loren was a seasoned mercenary, he should have had no way of defeating a Lifeless King on his own. Quite a few things had worked in his favor leading up to his victory.

To the point, Scena had been defeated. However, the moment her body had disintegrated, she had severed her soul from her physical form and escaped death by possessing Loren.

“You can taste it?” Loren spoke unthinking, and Scena put a finger to her lips.

No one could see her, apart from Loren. At first, he’d thought that this floating figure was a ghost. However, Scena claimed that while she registered in his eyes as visual information, her spiritual body was not actually where his mind told her she was.

At that point, he had asked her why she would bother going about it in such a convoluted way.

<Well, if I were to manifest my actual astral body, those with the right skill sets would see me too—and then the cat would be out of the bag.>

Scena’s soul currently existed within Loren’s, and while that made his aura a bit peculiar, his own soul functioned as a cover for hers. She was considerably more difficult to notice.

A part of Loren did resent her for having done this to him without his input, but he had to allow that he had yet to face any inconvenience because of it. He also couldn’t tell Scena to leave—that would mean condemning her to a slow and painful death.

Thus, he had decided that he simply wouldn’t think about it.

Although some things Scena had said were troubling; he suspected they would inevitably lead to problems. For example:

<I share your senses, to a certain degree.>

Part of Loren wanted to consult with his partner—a woman who seemed to know everything. But that partner called herself a priest, for what her claims were worth. Consequently, Loren was convinced that nothing good could come of telling her that an undead being was living in his head rent-free.

“A normal priest would exorcise her… But I get the feeling our priest would use her as a lab rat…”

Lapis saw Loren as a comrade, so he thought she wouldn’t do anything that would put his life at risk. He hoped, at least. However, that still left everything short of death on the table. Loren had therefore decided to keep quiet about it—so long as it didn’t cause any issues.

When all was said and done, however, having a young girl’s soul in his body did feel rather unsettling. Creepy, even. He had a rather hard time putting it into words.

<I’m happy that you want to talk to me… But you should probably keep your responses to yourself. You never know who’s watching.>

Loren surreptitiously scanned the area. While business at the adventurers’ guild bar was as lively as ever, he saw no one paying particular attention to him.

Loren, you see, was rather ignorant to his developing reputation. Not long ago, an adventurer in this very same bar had called him a leech for mooching off of Lapis. Loren had gone a little overboard and beaten the man half to death—while Lapis had beat up his friends. The waitresses had taken to dropping this fact here and there, and unsurprisingly, no one in the know felt especially inclined to pick a fight with him.

Of course, one look at the large sword Loren kept at his back and any adventurer of even very slight mental dexterity would have realized the strength of the man who swung such a thing around. There were, naturally, always exceptions to the rule.

“Oh? What’s this I see? Mr. Loren? Drinking so early again?”

The individual calling out to him was a girl in priest vestments with a swaying black ponytail. She was pretty enough to draw quite a few glances in town, and her eyes sparkled with interest at seemingly everything life had to offer. She approached Loren’s table with an incredibly light step, and she plopped herself into the seat across from him without so much as a by your leave.

“I can’t say I approve of having a drink in place of breakfast. Ah, excuse me, could I have what he’s having?” Lapis had barely taken her seat before she placed an order with the waitress.

This girl had been accompanying Loren for a good while now. She was a priest in service to the god of knowledge, and on top of that, Loren owed her a sizable amount of money. While she looked like an ordinary human girl, she was actually of demon-kind—the black sheep of all other civilizations, to put it lightly. She was at present traveling outside of demon territory to grow more worldly and experienced.

“Should a priest be drinking so early in the morning?”

“The god of knowledge’s scripture says absolutely nothing on the subject of alcohol consumption,” Lapis said with a straight face, thanking the waitress as she accepted her glass.

As Loren took another swig from his own mug, he thought on how Lapis could certainly have afforded to order something of better quality. He watched her as she carefully cradled her cup with two hands, cocked her head curiously, and asked, “Incidentally, Mr. Loren. How are you paying for that?”

“I paid in advance. Got a bit of hazard pay for that last quest.”

In other words, the very same quest that had culminated in the destruction of Hansa and Scena’s transformation into an undead horror. As Scena had been written off as dead and the city had been destroyed, the quest had been designated a complete failure. Even worse, Loren had been hospitalized at the end of it—not due to injuries sustained in combat but from the extreme fatigue that had followed his final fight.

Overall, the quest would have been a total loss had Loren not been paid a pittance for the zombies and revenants he had defeated along the way. The sum wasn’t nearly enough to put a hole in his debt, but he did have a bit of money now, which he had promptly begun to spend on ale.

However, the moment Loren explained this to Lapis, a look of complete and utter disbelief spread over her face. She stared fixedly at him. “Mr. Loren…you actually paid money for something?!”

“Oh, shut it. The hell do you take me for?”

“No, I mean, you’re Mr. Loren.”

“Don’t look so surprised. Aren’t you supposed to say something about using that money to pay you back instead?”

“I said I wouldn’t pressure you.”

To be true, that was one of the conditions under which he had taken a loan from her. However, if Lapis really never tried to collect, Loren expected that he would slowly stop feeling like he had borrowed any money from her at all. Not to mention that she wasn’t charging him interest either.

Interest was a vital part of massive debts in Loren’s experience—it indicated the loan was given in seriousness. Yet Lapis didn’t seem to care about that in the slightest.

“I’m not exactly trying to earn a profit from you,” she said, gingerly sipping from the glass she held between the palms of her hands.

Loren frowned. In that case, he couldn’t comprehend why she had blithely handed him that exorbitant sum.

“I don’t see you returning thirty gold any time soon, anyway.”

This number, which she so casually blurted out, caused a few of the nearby adventurers to spit out their drinks or choke on the food in their mouths.

I can’t even blame them, Loren thought as he spun the cup in his hands.

The total amount Loren had thus far borrowed from Lapis was extraordinary by almost any measure. Just three gold coins would have been enough to comfortably support a family of four for a year, give or take. Meaning Loren had, in short, borrowed enough money to support that family for a decade.

“I’m guessing adventuring ain’t too profitable then,” Loren said, glancing around at their peers. Thirty gold must be a lot to them if they’re that surprised.

For his part, he’d met a good number of generals and infamous mercenaries on the battlefield who had come equipped with enchanted weapons and armor. Each of these pieces of equipment would have cost several hundred gold apiece. In other words, those generals and mercenaries had both the money and connections to obtain such equipment. Given his exposure to these things, Loren hadn’t considered thirty gold an absurd amount.

“It’s not that adventurers aren’t raking in profits. It’s that the ones here don’t know how to be profitable,” Lapis said, completely nonchalant.

This sounded odd to Loren. Lapis had been right there with him when their quest fell to pieces, and she had therefore suffered the same financial loss, but she didn’t seem like someone who’d taken a blow to her coffers.

Intrigued by her confidence, he couldn’t help but ask, “Meaning you turned a profit this time around?”

“Of course I did,” Lapis replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Loren frowned. He had no idea where she could have possibly earned enough to brazenly boast about her winnings. “The zombie killing didn’t pay that much, did it?”

“That was a drop in the bucket.”

“Then what? Did you save enough on preparation fees to turn a profit from that?”

“Yes, well, about that…” Lapis leaned over the table between them and lowered her voice. Loren instinctually leaned in to join her, and she hid her mouth with one hand as she whispered, “I made off with an impressive haul from a certain city, you see…”

“Oi, hold up.”

“If you want me to return anything, first tell me who I’m supposed to give it back to.”

“I mean…”

She did have a point. Seeing as the entire country had gone down in flames, even if Lapis had gone on a looting spree, she had no one to whom she could pay reparations.

“It wasn’t much, mind you. I was pretty occupied with carrying you. I just took a bit here and there from the shops around the hospital. Ah, and I picked up that smithing contraption you were using. No need to worry.”

“That’s not the issue! Oh, whatever.”

Having neither residents nor government, Hansa was effectively a lawless territory. Loren realized that everyone in the region any time soon would stuff their pockets with anything they could find, and in that case, it was probably better that Lapis had gotten there first.

Loren gave up on pursuing the matter any further. Even so, he had to say something. “I’ll ignore it this time, but keep those sticky fingers in check.”

“You make a very good point. I will exercise utmost caution.” Lapis obediently nodded, but Loren couldn’t tell how much those words meant, coming from her.

Loren glanced at Scena, whose smile was wry in the corner of his eye, and he downed the rest of his drink in one gulp.