chap 13+3

When it came to Setora, there was always a wall between them. This place, the Golden Goatfish Inn, was a rather luxurious inn, and each room was five silver a night. That said, they had enough money to afford some luxury, and rather than getting just one room for the guys and one for the girls, they could have gotten individual rooms for everyone. Shihoru hadn’t felt the need, but Setora surely felt constrained, so she should have done that.
“Let me just say this.” Setora opened her mouth. “When it comes to the fact that I haven’t managed to fit in with you people, you might think that I am not particularly concerned... but that is not the case.” Merry let out a slight, “...Eh?” and tilted her head to the side.
It took Shihoru some time to register what Setora had said.
Setora lifted her legs. The hem of her garment slid, leaving her shapely legs completely revealed. What was she doing? She was slowly raising and lowering each of her legs. Was it an exercise?
“I am not good at getting along with others,” Setora said. “Is that a poor way of expressing it? The practice of deepening my relationship with other people is one that I have hardly ever engaged in. Never, perhaps. Unlike golems and nyaas, the creatures known as people are difficult to handle. This may be a poor way of expressing it, too. Yes, I suspect so. I am not good at being considerate in the way I speak...”
Shihoru wondered if, for a start, she should tell her that when you’re trying to word something delicately and be considerate, you don’t tell the other person that’s what you’re doing. Still, it seemed Setora was doing her best to try and be considerate, in her own way, and that didn’t feel bad.
“Um...” Shihoru said hesitantly. “Come to think of it, where is the nyaa?”
“Kiichi? He’s exploring the city, I think. That one’s a bundle of curiosity. It’s unusual for a nyaa. Wild nyaas are not creatures that try to leave their own territory, after all.”
“They’re not suited to traveling?” Merry asked.
Setora stopped raising and lowering her legs. “...No. Not in their natural state. The nyaas kept by the village are used to moving, but they still mark the place they sleep with their own scent. It seems they can’t relax otherwise.”
Merry nodded, satisfied with the answer. She might have tried to think of another question, but she apparently couldn’t come up with one. Shihoru had nothing, either.
Setora went to raise her legs again, but stopped midway. She was left staring up at the ceiling with her knees up.
The silence continued for a fairly long time. Of course, perhaps it only felt long to Shihoru, and it wasn’t in fact that long at all.
“I selfishly brought them with me from the village, and let a large number of nyaas die.” Setora covered her face with both hands, letting out a sigh. “I am a bad master. I broke Enba, too. I’m not sure I can fix him. I’ve no intention of returning to the village for now, so there’s little hope of it.”
Shihoru and Merry looked at one another.
What now? Shihoru wondered. What... do you think we should do?
Yume would have reassured Setora without hesitating. Whether or not the person was one of their comrades, whether or not they were even of the same race, none of that mattered to Yume. She could sympathize with others, and if she felt something, she was quick to admit it.
Shihoru, and also Merry, couldn’t indiscriminately care for others the way Yume did.
“With humans...” Was Setora crying? Her voice wasn’t trembling. It was fixed and emotionless, as usual. “...they have a public face, and a private one. They hide their true feelings behind a facade. They lie. Easily. Even to themselves. I thought it was unsettling as a child, but not so much now. Everyone has things they want to protect, and they’re all desperate. It’s just that I can’t deal with all of that. I’m not interested enough... or so I thought. I had Enba, I was surrounded by nyaas, and that was enough. It should have been enough. Did I make a mistake? Well, I have no regrets.” Setora paused for a moment.
“I hadn’t realized it, but once I left the village, I was glad to be free of it. The village was constraining, but I had never thought of leaving. Now, I find that strange. I wonder why. Why did I never try to leave the village? Was I afraid? Uncertain? ...Regardless, I have now left the village. I have no desire to return. Unless I go back, I cannot rebuild Enba. Still, I do not want to return. I feel bad for Enba, but not bad for me. How should I say this? I feel alive. I’ve never felt so alive.”
“Is it fun?” Merry asked, and Setora removed her hands from her face.
“...Fun. It might be, or it might not. Despite having lost Enba and the nyaas, I’m not all that disheartened. There is not much I am dissatisfied about.”
“But... there are some things?” Shihoru asked hesitantly.
Setora was monologuing at them, and Merry and Shihoru were just asking questions to confirm what she was saying. It felt like an awkward form of communication, but this was likely the best they could do at the moment.
“...Yes,” Setora said. “I might call it a dissatisfaction. To be blunt, there are times when I feel something like a sense of exclusion. I think, most likely, I am indeed feeling excluded. Having been shunned by the house I was born into, I am used to it, so it’s not that much of an issue. From the time I was born, I was defiant, not submitting to the house as I should have. I knew what would happen as a result, but I did not want to be my parents’ slave, and I would not give in to the ways of the village. Now... I am not so stubborn as I was back then. Though, that said, I am not seeking a compromise from you. To give an example, I find Haru pleasing, but I will not ask that he find me pleasing in return. That would be the wrong approach. Even if I were to force him to obey me somehow, his heart would not turn towards me. Just as I never obeyed my own house. That is because, priest... Merry... Haru, he loves you.”
To think she’d actually come out and say that now! Shihoru looked at Merry out of the corner of her eye.
Merry had gone stiff. A statue. She had turned into a statue.
It was hard to imagine she hadn’t known, but, in a way, Merry might be even more dense than Yume about those sorts of things, so Shihoru wanted to feel her out to be sure.
I just want to be like, “Hey, your feeling are reciprocated, you know.” If I did that, how would Merry respond? She might say, “Why?” with a look of surprise on her face.
They were always together, so she forgot sometimes, but Merry was so beautiful that people found her difficult to approach. She was shapely, too, and honestly, Shihoru was jealous of that, but being so different from the norm must have come with its own troubles.
It seemed Merry had little experience with romance, was disinterested, and was also rather dense. Haruhiro-kun, too. Not only was he not super experienced, he was kind of juvenile, maybe?
Did that mean they were both still children emotionally, then?
Shihoru had begun to suspect, if they were left to their own devices, that maybe things would never go anywhere.
Should I do something? How would I even go about trying?
Shihoru wasn’t exactly experienced herself. Actually, all she had to work with was a one-sided crush and her fantasies, so she wasn’t likely to be much help.
Setora sighed, then mumbled to herself, “...Things just don’t work out.”
“I know, right?” Shihoru agreed, looking over at Merry, who was still completely frozen up.
Honestly, all sorts of things aren’t working out. It feels like I’m walking an endless tightrope, and sometimes jumping down from it would be easier. But I probably never will.
Shihoru had too many things she wouldn’t want to let go of that easily. No matter how she treasured them, she could lose them at any moment. Now might be the only time that she could keep holding on to them.
Yume has her own way of living, so I think she had to go away, Shihoru reflected. But I want to see you, Yume. Even though we only just parted, I want to see you so badly.
“So, to sum things up, each of us are burdened with our own personal issues,” Setora said, smiling just a little.
Without a word, Shihoru mentally added:
Yeah—and we’re alive.




“I mean, there’s something weird about him, right?” Kuzaku asked. “That Kejiman guy. I’m sure of it.”
Even once they turned the lights out and the room was completely dark, Kuzaku and Haruhiro kept talking about stuff that didn’t matter. Or rather, Kuzaku was doing basically all the talking, and Haruhiro was just nodding along. He was pretty tired, after all.
“Well, yeah,” Haruhiro said.
“But, well, then again, if he weren’t a little weird, I’d think something was up.”
“You’ve got a point.”
“He doesn’t seem like he’s totally on the ball. More like he’s a bit out of it.”
“Yeah,” Haruhiro said.
“But hey, he could just be faking it. Like, we could be getting a fast one pulled on us here.”
“Gotta be careful, huh?”
“I’ll let you handle that part, Haruhiro. As for me, well, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Zzz...”
“Kuzaku?”
“Zzzzzzzzzzz...”
“Man, you sure do fall asleep quickly...”
Not like I care, really. Haruhiro turned over in bed.
The window was still open. There was a slight breeze. It was still a bit hot, though, so he just had a thin blanket over him up to his belly.
It hadn’t really hit him when he was on the ship, but now that they were staying in an inn like this, he felt rich, and that made him uneasy.
A thousand gold. It was hidden under the bed right now. What should he do about it? If they carried it around with them, he worried it would be stolen, or perhaps strange people would gather around them.
That wasn’t very good from a mental health perspective, so he wanted to just blow it all on something, but that wasn’t something Haruhiro should just decide on his own. Besides, was there even a proper way to spend it?
For example, even if they ordered Kuzaku a full set of custom-made armor, it wouldn’t even cost a hundred gold. With a thousand gold, they could buy a house and have money to spare. They could probably even buy a ship.
That said, houses and ships were of no use to volunteer soldiers. They couldn’t manage such things themselves, and it was stupid to just keep paying the upkeep on them.
“...We could quit. It’s not like it isn’t an option,” he dared to whisper to himself.
Kuzaku was breathing softly in his sleep.
They had a full thousand gold, after all. Even if they set Yume’s share aside and divided it six ways, that was a hundred and sixty-six gold apiece. He didn’t know if that was enough to fool around for the rest of their lives, but if they weren’t stupid with the money, they could live comfortably for ten to twenty years on it.
Ten to twenty years might be too long, but taking it easy for a year or two wouldn’t be bad. Why had no one suggested it?
They had promised to meet Yume half a year from now in Alterna. That said, there wasn’t anything saying they had to stay active as volunteer soldiers during that time.
They’d go to Alterna. Meet Yume in half a year. Other than that, they were free. They could enjoy an extended break.
If they were going to retire from being volunteer soldiers, that was a big deal, so it might be a good idea to move away and do something else for a while. However, none of them, Haruhiro included, seemed to be considering that.
Yes, Haruhiro wasn’t, either. He was just running through all of the possibilities in his head to be sure. They would likely keep working hard at the volunteer soldier trade, just like they had been all this time.
But how long could they keep it up?
If he recalled correctly, Akira-san of the Day Breakers was in his forties. He’d been a volunteer soldier for upwards of twenty years. Two decades.
How many years had it been since the woman called Hiyomu had led Haruhiro and the others to the Volunteer Soldier Corps Office? Five? Six? No, no. It felt like it had been eons ago, but it had actually been fewer than two years. The thought of doing this for twenty years was mind-boggling.
Another eighteen years of this, huh?
Honestly, he couldn’t see them surviving it. What was the survival rate for volunteer soldiers? It couldn’t be that high. Haruhiro had been in enough situations where he could easily have died.
Enough? No. More than enough.
Having stood at the brink of life and death too many times, he’d developed an ability to avoid danger. He hoped that was true, but Haruhiro had just had a brush with death again recently.
Naturally, he wasn’t taking risks for the thrill of it, and he was being as cautious as he could, but it still kept on happening.
Occasionally, he’d think about it. Eventually, in the not too distant future, he was likely going to die.
He might not die. He might notice one day that, like Akira-san, he had been a soldier for twenty years, but it was overwhelmingly more likely that something like that wouldn’t happen.
It wasn’t like he wanted to die young. So if he was going to live a long life, he had to call it quits at the right time.
Akira-san wasn’t a genius. That was what his comrade Gogh had said about him. He was no genius. Akira-san had just survived.
Having been lucky enough to survive, Akira-san had been given time. And so, he’d gotten strong.
He hadn’t survived because he’d gotten strong. He’d gotten strong because he’d survived.
“But they can say whatever they want,” Haruhiro murmured. “I mean, it’s all stuff they’re making up after the fact.”
Even assuming Haruhiro did survive, could he get strong like Akirasan? Haruhiro had taken things seriously, hanging in there at the brink of death all this time, so he knew. People were not equal. There really were such things as inborn potential, talent, and limits to one’s abilities. Looking at the whole picture, Akira-san was clearly extraordinary, while Haruhiro was ordinary.
Perhaps even a mediocre person like him could, with a surplus of luck, survive twenty years as a volunteer soldier. Well, he couldn’t rule the possibility out, at least. But as for becoming a legendary volunteer soldier like Akira-san, it would never happen. No way, no how.
But, to Haruhiro, that wasn’t what was important.
Haruhiro didn’t want to get rich or famous. He wouldn’t disagree if someone said he could stand to be more greedy or have more ambition, but he wasn’t going to overstretch himself for those things. If they never came his way, that was fine.
The issue was, even if Haruhiro did survive, his comrades might die. Tomorrow, Kuzaku, who had just started snoring in the bed next to his, might breathe his last and become a cold, dead body.
Haruhiro got up. The bed creaked a little. Kuzaku stayed sound asleep.
Haruhiro put on his shoes, got out of bed, and quietly left the room.
Lights were out in the hall. It seemed there were still lamps lit off by the stairs, and the light was shining this way.
The place they were staying, the Golden Goatfish Inn, was a fourstory building. The second through fourth floors were all guest rooms. The rooms on the second floor were quad rooms, this third floor was for double rooms, and the fourth floor had large guest rooms with multiple smaller rooms inside.
Unlike in Alterna, there were plenty of four and five-story buildings in Vele.
Haruhiro descended the stairs to the second floor. Without meaning to, he glanced at the door to the room where the girls were staying. Were they all asleep by now? Or were they awake and talking?
Shihoru and Merry were fine together, but how had adding Setora changed the mood in there? Shihoru and Merry were both quiet types, so it was hard to imagine there was a roaring conversation.
“If only Yume were around...” he murmured.
Haruhiro passed by the girls’ room without a sound, opening the door at the T-junction at the end of the hall. There was a wooden deck beyond it. He’d had a premonition somewhere in his head that someone might be there, but there was nobody.
“What am I getting my hopes up for?” He laughed to himself a little as he gripped the railing. Then he let out a sigh.
The Golden Goatfish Inn was in a quiet, stylish area, and he could see the lanterns of the guards on patrol from the deck. The tight security was one of the selling points of the many inns and hotels in this area. It wasn’t just the objects in them; security also had to be bought with money, or else secured by one’s own means.
Haruhiro rested his elbows on the railing and his face in his hands. In such a big city, there had to be a good number of professional thieves. There could be armed robberies and murders, too. Someone could be being murdered right now, and it would be utterly unsurprising if, at this very moment, a person or two was about to die of illness.
And besides that, even if you defended yourself properly, and tried to take care of your health well enough, there was no fighting back against a natural disaster that no one saw coming.
Even if they weren’t volunteer soldiers, they’d die when their time came. That was true, but in this trade, they could make enough money to make up for the amount their lives would be shortened.
No volunteer soldier wanted to die, but they knew that they had to take on risks while stopping short of actually dying.
Eventually, Haruhiro would grow numb to it. No, he already was pretty numb.
Thinking about it, when first starting as a trainee volunteer soldier, he’d been far more timid than he was now. Even an unarmed mud goblin had been unbearably frightening to him.
“Lives are at stake here!” Manato had shouted.
Those words... Haruhiro had completely forgotten them. Lives were at stake on both sides in the volunteer soldiering business. It was full of challenges that couldn’t have more serious stakes.
“There’s no way it’s going to be easy... huh...” he murmured.
No person, no living being, wants to die, Manato had said. Then, although he couldn’t have wanted to, Manato had gone and died ahead of the rest of his comrades. That was where it had all started for Haruhiro and the others.
How far forward had they come from that place that now felt so far away?
“No, that’s not it...” he murmured.
They hadn’t actually progressed at all.
They had just one life, and if they died, it was all over. That principle would not change for anything.
There was no changing it, so even if they improved their skills, or were taking on more challenging opponents, in essence it was all the same. They were creatures that didn’t want to die killing other creatures that didn’t want to die, feeding on them, profiting, and going through the joys and sorrows of life.
If that felt sinful, he’d long since given up and accepted it.
He wasn’t into stepping on those he killed and basking in the afterglow of the deed, but he didn’t think it made him a better person to not do so.
He stole a creatures’ only life from them, without being tortured by any sense of guilt or responsibility, and even if it should have left a bad aftertaste, he didn’t even feel it anymore.
Well, it’s the same for us. We put our lives at stake, and just happen to win. If we lose, we die. The conditions are the same, so we’ll be on the other side eventually.
He might have thought something selfish like, We each only have one life, so no holding any grudges.
“But...” Haruhiro pressed his head to the railing.
But what if that wasn’t true?
 



...Sometimes, I just don’t know. Sometimes? All the time? It may not be a matter of frequency. How often? Is it important?
It’s nothing to think about so deeply. You’ll get used to it. You can get used to anything.
Shut up. Shut up. Stop.
What? Stop what? I’m not doing anything.
Yes, you are. You are.
You’re imagining it. I’m not doing anything. No one is. I won’t get in your way. Because I understand. I’ve been through this, too. Okay. You should try calming down. Take a deep breath. Nice and easy.
I can’t control my pulse. It beats whether or not I do anything. I can’t stop it by my own will.
My breath. I can control my breath. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Stop.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Hold it like that. Stop. Keep holding it. Does it hurt? Well, it’s fine. You’re okay. You won’t die. No, that’s an imprecise way of saying it. That’s not enough for you to die. Your life is like a heart. There’s nothing you can do about it yourself. Soon enough, you’ll come to accept. You’ll gradually begin to understand. What all this is. Right? Right. You can get used to anything. So long as you’re living.
Living.
It’s best not to contemplate whether this counts. That’s something everyone’s thought, after all. It’s stupid to repeat the same thing over and over. A waste of time. Some feel it’s okay to waste a little time. Well, sure. I suppose it might be.

Stop.

I’m not doing anything. Nothing, really.

Stop.

It’s nothing to worry about.

Stop.

It’s like a heart, after all. You have time.

Stop.

Stop.

Plenty of time. Time to adapt. You can accept this. Because you have no choice but to. There are easier ways, too. It might be all right to choose a simpler path. I’ll teach you. If you want to know.

What?
...What is it?

I can’t say I recommend it.
Yeah. I don’t recommend it.
But it will make it easier. Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Breathe in.
Does it hurt? Then you can stop.
Give it up.
You don’t need to control it.
You can throw it away.
—What?

What can I throw away?

You know, don’t you?

It’s your self.

My self?

It’s fine.

Chapter end