chap 14 5

“No...” Haruhiro corrected her in a quiet voice. “It’s not dead yet...”
Is this what it’s like? I don’t know if it’s our enemy or what, but is this what it’s like to kill? This is it.
“We have to finish it,” I raised my staff to swing. “Otherwise... we’ll only prolong its suffering.”
I slammed my short staff into the mud gob’s brainstem. That made it stop moving. It wasn’t breathing anymore.
I did as I’d learned in the priests’ guild, closing my eyes and making the sign of the hexagram.
It weighed on you. Taking a life with your own hands. But not so much that it was crushing.
If this is it, I can do this, I thought. I was more or less fine. Honestly, my uncertainties were gone now. I had thought it would be harder. But it wasn’t, really.
If this had been a human, it would have probably been tough. But it wasn’t human, so even if it left a bad aftertaste, I’d get used to it in no time.
I could keep doing this.
But could we?

3. Keep Walking
After taking down the mud goblin, we had no income for the next three days, and the general mood of the party was only getting worse.
That was just how it went, but we couldn’t leave things like this. Everyone surely knew that, but no one was trying to break the status quo. I’d have to be the one to do it.
At night, in our room at the lodging house, I sat up.
“...Manato?” someone called out to me.
It was Haruhiro. He still wasn’t asleep?
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re up? It’s still night. Or rather, the night has only just started. Running to the washroom or something?”
“Nah.” I got out of bed. “I’m going out for a bit. I probably don’t need to say this, but I’ll be coming back, so don’t worry.”
“Huh. You’re going out... at this time of night?”
“The night’s just getting started,” I said with my usual smile. “See you later. You must be tired. Don’t wait up for me. Go ahead and sleep.”
“Oh, okay.”
If I didn’t invite him, Haruhiro wouldn’t come. That was a bit frustrating, but not unexpected. Still, since he at least had some sense of the danger we were in, Haruhiro was better than the rest.
I left the lodging house, heading for Flower Garden Street. There was a place there, Sherry’s Tavern, which was a hangout for volunteer soldiers.
On my way there, I was hassled by girls acting as touts for other places, but I brushed them off and headed for the tavern I was looking for.
The liveliness of the crowd, for some reason, made me feel nostalgic. Was I used to places like this? It sure was inconvenient not knowing my own past.
Walking with relaxed steps, I looked around the tavern, only for a familiar face to catch my eye.
That silver hair. Sitting at the counter alone. It was Renji.
I sat down next to Renji. “Hey.”
Renji took one glance at me, but didn’t say a thing.
I asked one of the waitresses who came by what drinks were on the menu and what they cost.
When I went to order, Renji shook his own glass.
“More of this.” He pushed a silver coin into the hand of the confused woman. “Two glasses.”
The woman must have been intimidated, because she clutched the silver coin and beat a hasty retreat.
I smiled, the same as ever. “Sorry to trouble you.” “Are you really?” Renji said with a slight smile.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Didn’t think so.”
“You’re doing well for yourself.”
“Unlike you trash.”
“You don’t mince words.”
“Because it’s the truth.”
“Did you buy me a drink as a put-down?”
“I feel sorry for you.” Renji drained his glass. “I don’t know what you’re thinking. Scraping together that bunch of scum. What are you trying to do?”
“Scum, huh?” I was mad. But not mad enough to snap at him. If anything, I was wondering, Why is Renji poking at me like this?
If you looked at our situations, Renji, who could afford to buy my drinks, should have had more composure. I mean, if you compared us, it made everything I did look worthless. I was close to the bottom, in the worst position. Despite that, I wasn’t that pessimistic about it, while Renji was really irritated. Maybe things weren’t going quite how he had planned.
“Must be hard, being a perfectionist,” I said.
“Don’t talk like you would know.”
“I don’t know you, Renji. Not at all.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You don’t know me, either, though.”
“Oh, I know,” Renji said without looking at me. “That smile is just a veneer. You’re a piece of shit who doesn’t even see people as human. You don’t trust anyone. You have no expectations for anyone, or anything. That’s how you can keep that stupid grin on your face, right?”
“When you say that, I’m starting to feel that way, too.”
“I can say it with certainty. That’s the kind of guy you are.”
“If you were to put it in one word, I’m a monster?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Be that as it may, it’s pathetic taking out your frustrations on other people, Renji.”
Renji was about to click his tongue, then stopped. After that, the drinks he’d ordered came, and until he’d finished he didn’t say a word to me.
“Well, good luck out there, Trash Commander,” Renji said and stood up from his seat.
It was so funny, I laughed.
Even though I was laughing, the things Renji had said stayed sunk in like body blows.
I didn’t trust people? I had no expectations? Could I say, definitively, that it wasn’t the case? Did I even need to trust them to begin with? Was there something wrong with having no expectations of other people? My smile was just a veneer, but so what?
Renji was a better guy than appearances would suggest, I thought, and I found that hilarious.
Here I was, alone, chuckling to myself. I might have been a bad guy. And I might not have gotten along with Renji. But if Renji were a little denser, we could have gotten along fine.
To put it bluntly, I could have deceived Renji, manipulated him. But it was no good. Renji had seen through me. If I were to work with him, we’d have to jostle for position.
If Renji and I teamed up, our overall power might go up, but it would make everything a hassle. I don’t think I, or Renji, had the composure for that.
Renji had instinctively understood that. And, well, I was the same. That was how we’d gotten here.
“But I still don’t understand, Renji,” I whispered before downing the rest of the hard liquor.
The truth was, I still didn’t really understand what kind of person I was. Why would that be? I was starting to have fun.
They were scum, huh? I was a Trash Commander? Well, hey, what was wrong with that? I couldn’t think of how, but I’d rise from here. I’d catch up to Team Renji, and overtake them.
If I could do that, it’d feel really good, I was sure. I wanted to see the chagrin on Renji’s face.
I was a monster, huh? Maybe. I didn’t have a good understanding of myself yet, but I was slowly beginning to see.
For now, I needed to make money. I was starting from nothing, or, if you looked at the sad state of the resources available to me, less than nothing. But I hadn’t been wasting my time. At the very least, I had a grasp of what Haruhiro and the rest were like.
Now it was time to get serious.
I gathered information in Sherry’s Tavern. Ingratiating myself with the senior volunteer soldiers was a cinch. It was too inefficient to prowl the forest looking for mud goblins, so was there a good hunting ground somewhere?
I soon found one. If I made the suggestion, no one was likely to object, so that basically decided it. That’s how it actually went, too.
We started going to the Old City of Damuro regularly. Our targets were the goblins living there.
If you were to talk about the enemies of humanity, there were orcs, undead, gray elves, kobolds, goblins, and so on, and so forth.
Goblins were built smaller than humans, and weren’t especially clever. Frankly, they were looked down upon even on the enemy side, and the whole race was treated like cannon fodder.
That was why goblins were pushed off into a corner of the vast frontier, and they had to make Damuro, so close to the human domain, their home.
What was more, the center of goblin power was only the New City of Damuro. The eastern part, the Old City, had been abandoned to rot.
The goblins of the Old City were not what you’d call mainstream goblins. They were outcasts, with no place in the New City.
Honestly, could there have been more suitable prey for us? I don’t mean that ironically; I honestly felt that way.
Making money. That was our main objective, but there was one more thing, something I felt was important.
Experiencing success.
If we didn’t see a continuous sequence of concrete successes, we couldn’t become confident that we would be able to do this. We would need to fight, and win. We needed to develop a habit of winning.
To do that, we’d beat up on weak enemies. That said, if they were too weak, there would be no point. They had to feel challenging, yet be just weak enough.
In what I had heard, asking around, the outcast goblins of the Old City of Damuro were the perfect opponents for us.
I left the scouting to Haruhiro. Haruhiro was cautious, and not prone to mood swings. He could keep going without getting tired of all the little things. He was pretty dependent on me, but that was just because he’d been thrown into an unfamiliar situation, and he was uneasy. Essentially, he was the type that could act independently in the right circumstances.
With those sleepy eyes, he looked like he might be a bit uncooperative, but he was actually surprisingly meek. I felt like he could stand to be more cunning.
I always had Moguzo, making use of the physique he was naturally blessed with, stand on the front line. I had figured out Moguzo’s weakness. When he got flustered, he’d get into an unstable stance. Then, rather than swinging around his bastard sword, the weight of his sword would swing him around.
I knew he had the strength for it, so what he needed to do was keep his center of gravity low and swing with his full body.
When I quietly gave him that advice, there was a clear improvement in the way he moved.
At first glance, Moguzo looked like a bit of a dullard, but that wasn’t true at all. If he just became a bit more stable emotionally, he would be able to do fairly well, even as he was now. He was going to grow more.
Yume, as she would admit herself, was not very good with a bow. It probably wasn’t a dexterity issue so much as a focus one. If I was being kind, I’d say she was very relaxed; if I wasn’t, I’d say she lacked seriousness.
How could I make her get serious? That was the task before me.
Shihoru’s problem was her personality, but fixing her shy, withdrawn nature would be easier said than done. She was always conscious of the eyes of those around her, worrying about how people felt about her and whether she was inconveniencing them.
Well, turning that around, though, it meant she spent all that time looking at other people. As a mage, and therefore furthest from the enemy, she ought to be able to get a wide field of vision. I’d need to have her take advantage of that.
For Ranta, his free spirit was a double-edged blade. But the only option was to let him do as he pleased, while accounting for the fact that it would hurt us some of the time. If I limited him too much, his good points would disappear.
Soon enough, I’d be able to get a handle on how he worked. Then, if I included Ranta’s actions into my calculations, I’d be able to use him well.
On our first day in the Old City of Damuro, we killed four goblins, and made 10 silver and 45 copper.
The second day, it was 1 silver.
The third day, as we proceeded with exploring the Old City and making a simple map, we killed goblins, and made 4 silver and 32 copper.
Having saved up a bit, we went to the market on that day. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, and stayed excited even after we got back to the lodging house.
The lights were already out. Ranta was breathing softly in his sleep. Moguzo was snoring. What about Haruhiro?
I was a little sleepy myself.
We’d finally made it to the starting line. Everything was still to come. I was managing to enjoy it for now. Would it get even more fun? Was Renji having fun? He didn’t look like it.
When I saw Ranta gleefully rifling through a dead goblin’s belongings, I kind of envied him. I couldn’t get that excited. I wasn’t bereft of emotion, but crying, or getting giddy—I couldn’t see myself doing either. I had a hunch that Renji was like that, too.
There was a wall. That was what it felt like. A single wall. Between me and reality.
Reality, huh?
Is this reality...?
“Manato,” someone called out.
It was Haruhiro’s voice. So he wasn’t asleep, after all.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Thank you.”
“What’s that for, all of a sudden?” I laughed despite myself. “I’m the one who ought to be grateful.”
“Huh? You’re grateful...? Why?”
“To everyone, for being my comrades.”
What was I saying? Was this how I really felt? If it was bullshit, I was a natural swindler.
“I’m thankful for that,” I went on. “I’m sure when I say it like this, it probably comes across as a lie, but I really do feel that way.”
“No, I don’t think you’re lying, but...” Haruhiro paused. “How should I put this? We’re always relying on you. If you hadn’t been there for us, we’d have been in serious trouble. Depending how things had gone, we might not still have been alive by this point.”
“That goes both ways. Without you and the others, there’s no telling what might have happened to me. We aren’t in a situation where you can survive on your own, you realize.”
No, I wasn’t lying. I was only telling the truth.
If I weren’t around, Haruhiro and the rest would have been in trouble. Well, yeah, that was probably true.
Nobody can live alone. But maybe I could have found a place where I could live.
Haruhiro and the rest couldn’t necessarily do that. Renji had called them scum, and he’d cut them loose.
To Renji, they lacked the capacity to survive, and weren’t worth using. For someone strong, or at least trying to be strong, like Renji, they were no more than scum.
What about me? In truth, how did I feel about Haruhiro and the rest?
“Now, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but...” The way Haruhiro spoke was tense, and full of hesitation. “I think you could have found any number of people willing to be your comrades. By asking someone to let you join their party, for instance.” “A volunteer soldier party?” I asked.
It was a viable option. It probably would have been possible. Why hadn’t I done that?
A thought occurred to me.
When I’d entered the priest’s guild to become a priest, I had hardly been the best student. That said, I hadn’t been the worst student, either.
For me, if I could work out how to do something the first time I did it, repeating it over and over was agony, so I cut corners. My master in the guild was no idiot, so he’d realized that and reamed me for it.
Any time he got angry at me, I’d find another method, a more efficient way of slacking off.
No matter how my master, Master Honen, got angry, no matter how he tried to persuade me, I’d just put on a thin smile, not doing anything to fix my attitude.
I was so stubborn, even I had to cock my head to the side and wonder what was up with me.
Become humble, Master Honen would lecture me. If you do, you bear in you the buds of exceptional talent.
The candid Master Honen kept trying to teach me with those frank words of his.
But he could threaten me, praise me, be as harsh or encouraging as he liked, and I did not change. I absorbed what I needed quickly, then let the rest go in one ear, out the other.
I can’t have been a terribly likable student for Master Honen. I was blatantly rebellious.
What was more, strange as this may be to say, I didn’t oppose him directly, which only made it worse.
“Honestly, the thought never really crossed my mind,” I said. “You know, I’m probably not the type that can put up with having to bow his head to others. Hierarchical relationships, too. I doubt I’m any good at handling those. I don’t remember what I was doing before I came here, though, so I don’t know for sure.”
“Ah... It might be the same for me,” Haruhiro confessed.
“Somehow...” I murmured.
I felt glad I’d come to Grimgar. What exactly had happened before I came here?
What kind of person am I?
What kind of person was I?
“I feel like I’m not the sort of person that anyone should be treating as a comrade,” I said.
“That’s not...” Haruhiro mumbled a bit, then continued. “As for what the past Manato was like, it doesn’t matter. No one cares. It’s the current Manato that’s our comrade. You’re our leader. We’d be in trouble without you here for us.”
“I need the rest of you, too,” I said.
Was that how I really felt? Or was I just playing along?
I smiled wryly. It was really inconvenient, you know. This notknowing-myself business.
“Still, it’s so weird,” I said. “All of this. What are we even doing? Swords and sorcery. It’s like we’re in a game or something.”
“A game, huh? You’ve got that—” Haruhiro started to say, then stopped. “A game, what is that...?”
“Huh?” I was at a loss for an answer. “...I don’t know. But that’s what I said just now. ‘It’s like a game.’ It came to mind at the time.”
“Well, when you said it, I felt like you were right. But what sort of game? A game...”
Soon after that, Haruhiro drifted off to sleep.
I was wide awake, and I couldn’t get to sleep. Unable to stay put, I slipped out of the lodging house.
When I went to Sherry’s Tavern, Renji was drinking at the counter. It was pretty crowded, but no one was sitting in the seats on either side of him.
I sat down in a seat next to Renji.
“How goes it?” Renji asked me on his own.
“Not bad.”
“Where have you been going?”
“Damuro.”
“Goblins, huh?” Renji said. “It suits you people.”
“You’re in a good mood tonight.”
“I did in an orc.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“When I face small fry like goblins, it makes me feel like a bully. It’s depressing.”
“So if you’re going to fight, you’d prefer a strong opponent?” I asked.
Renji didn’t answer my question.
When I ordered a drink from one of the waitresses, Renji ordered another drink for himself, too.
Renji’s face hadn’t turned red from the alcohol, and his expression was no different from usual, but he was clearly in a good mood.
“Manato,” he said, “I could have let you join.”
“Your party?”
“Yeah. The thing is, though... we don’t need two leaders.”
“Agreed.”
“If you’re willing to do as I say, I can still use you now.”
“Surely you jest.”
“No. I’m not joking. Stop wasting your time with all that scum.” “You’re in quite the rush to get places, aren’t you?” I said.
“If I really rushed, no one would be able to keep up. What about you?”
Ohh, I see.
I’d had it wrong. Renji wasn’t in a good mood at all. It was the opposite. Renji was irritated. Badly irritated, too.
I was pretty sure I knew the reason.
Orcs, along with the undead, were the strongest enemies of humanity. There was this general opinion that a volunteer soldier wasn’t fully fledged until they’d killed an orc. Team Renji had taken on an orc early, and won. But Renji wasn’t satisfied. Worse yet, he’d been made keenly aware of the difference between him and his comrades, and he’d lost hope.
I can do this easily, but are these guys only at this level? If I were to guess at how Renji felt, that would be it.
“Hey, Renji. Here’s what I think.” I put a hand on Renji’s shoulder. “No matter how fast someone is, they can’t run at full speed all the time. There are people who are slow, but they can keep moving forward without resting much. From my perspective, I can see your back far ahead of us, but it’s not going to be like that forever.”
“Lose the baggage.” Renji glared at me. “Then you’ll be able to run fast, too.”
“Instead of hurrying onward, I want to enjoy the scenery.” I smiled, rubbing Renji’s shoulder a bit, then letting go. “Either way, I can’t see myself running alongside you. I mean, come on, Renji. Your legs are too long.”
Renji glanced down at my legs, then scowled a bit. “You’re a real joker.”

4. Until I Close My Eyes
Instead of hurrying onward, I want to enjoy the scenery. Was that how I really felt? I didn’t know.
“...!”
Moguzo and I were pulling in three goblins when one of them slipped between us.
Were we in trouble? No.
Haruhiro, who was watching the goblins, immediately called out, “There’s one headed your way, Ranta!”
Ranta instantly replied, “Yeah!” and chased after the goblin that was going for Yume and Shihoru in the back line. “I already knew that!”
We were hunting goblins in the Old City of Damuro, day in and day out. Everyone had finally gotten used to it, and we were getting the hang of things. Ranta was the same as ever, though.
“Ha! Anger!” Ranta stepped into the attack completely, thrusting out with his longsword.
It was too far. He missed.
“Wha?! You’re no ordinary goblin, are you...?!”
“It’s clearly just a normal goblin, man!” Haruhiro called, with a glance over at me.
I gave him a slight nod as I parried a goblin’s blows with my short staff, and Haruhiro went to support Ranta.
Yume was next to Shihoru. If Ranta, Haruhiro, and Yume worked together, I was sure they could take down a single goblin.
“Fuh! Hah...!” Moguzo didn’t let the goblin’s nimble movements trick him. He was doing a good job of defending.
I could handle a single goblin by myself easily, too. Even if it was two or three, as long as I was just buying time, I could manage. But when it came to keeping an eye on the larger picture as I faced an enemy, that was pretty tough.
I was the priest, though, so I needed to provide treatment with light magic as soon as someone got hurt. On top of that, as the leader of the party, I needed to give the appropriate orders. I couldn’t just be focused on the enemy in front of me.
Should I tell Moguzo to swing wider with his bastard sword? I wondered.
Having learned the lesson from the beginning, in which he had swung relying on brute force, never hitting, and exhausting himself too much, Moguzo now used his sword in a rather compact way. That wasn’t bad, in and of itself, but at this rate, he was bound to make himself too small. He was a big guy, and a warrior too, so I wanted him to swing hard and intimidate the enemy, especially when there were several of them.
I’ll tell him later, I decided. The issue was how to say it, though. Moguzo was so delicate.
“Geez! What’re you two doin’?!” Yume called.
Yume must have gotten frustrated seeing Ranta and Haruhiro struggling to attack a goblin. She pulled her machete and sprang at it.
“Diagonal Cross!”
The goblin shrieked and fell back, trying to avoid it, but received a shallow cut from its shoulder to its chest.
Immediately afterwards, Haruhiro hit it with a Backstab. His timing was so good, you’d think they’d signaled each other to pull it off.
Haruhiro pulled out the dagger as he jumped back, and the goblin coughed blood and collapsed.
What was that? Did he hit a vital point? Was it coincidence? Or was he aiming to do it?
“Huh...?” From Haruhiro’s look of surprise, it had to be coincidence. “Did I hit it in a good spot? Maybe? Or a bad spot...?”
“Whoa?! I’ve gotta finish it!” Ranta leapt on the goblin, decapitating it with his longsword. “Nice! I got my vice!”
“Yume thinks this after every battle, but dread knights sure are savage, huh.”
“Don’t say ‘savage’! Use the more elegant term, ‘atrocious’! We dread knights serve the Dark God, Lord Skullhell. We are atrocious and inhumane, cold and ruthless knights with neither blood nor tears!”
So easygoing. Both Ranta and Yume. I had to warn them about it, of course. But these two, in a different way from Moguzo, also required a careful choice in how I went about it.
If I just told them, it wasn’t that they wouldn’t work to improve themselves, so much as that it was possible their very natures would make it so they didn’t.
Neither meant anything bad by it, but they were hard to handle. If you tried to handle them, it made things hard.
Rather than try to use them, I needed to let them bring out their personalities to their hearts’ content, while I tried to turn them in a positive direction. That was the best way to think of it.
And speaking of hard to handle...
“Ohm, rel, ect...” Shihoru drew elemental sigils with her staff, beginning to chant a spell. “Vel, darsh...!”
It was Shadow Beat. A shadow elemental that looked like a mass of black seaweed flew out with a unique sound that went, Vwong!
Yeah. It was coming this way. But, of course, I wasn’t the target.
It smacked into the goblin I was facing, right in the back of the head. That goblin let out a weird cry of, “Gagah!” and its entire body convulsed.
Shihoru had given me the perfect opening. I struck the goblin in the side of its face, kicking it to the ground. I could have struck the finishing blow, too, but I left that to Ranta.
“Take this! Hatred...! Dammit! You’re just a stupid goblin! Take this! And this! And this...!” I smiled at Shihoru.
She looked down, flustered, pulling down the brim of her hat to cover her face. She shook her head as if to say, No, it was nothing. I didn’t do anything.
Well, darn.
Did Shihoru have potential as a mage? It was outside my area of expertise, so I couldn’t say. But I figured she probably wasn’t completely hopeless. Even in her current state, she was an asset, and she’d only get better.
There was even a way to improve Shihoru’s power by leaps and bounds, if I chose to.
It wasn’t impossible. I could probably pull it off. But I wasn’t all that eager to.
It seemed Shihoru might have a thing for me. More like, well, I was almost certain she did. I mean, look at the way she acted. It was so obvious, you could call it blatant.
If she weren’t a comrade in the party, it’d be no big deal. I could ignore her, or go out with her if I felt like it.
I didn’t know my past, but I had the feeling I wasn’t the type to make a big fuss over crushes and all that. Romance was just a way of playing around. It might help kill time, but getting serious about it just seemed ridiculous.
For instance, I could get Shihoru’s attention, and inspire her. Heck, if I were to pretend to be her boyfriend, I was sure I could make her do anything.
But Shihoru was my comrade. I didn’t want to deceive her, or hurt her. Even more than that, I couldn’t do anything to harm the bonds of trust and human relationships in the party.
That said, if I rejected her, even subtly, Shihoru would get depressed. That would be troublesome in its own way, too.
“Thanks...!” While I was mulling over things, Moguzo ended the fight with a Rage Blow. Because he shouted, “Thanks!” whenever he used it, we also called it the Thanks Slash. Moguzo’s sword entered through the goblin’s shoulder and made it halfway through its chest.
What power!
With a grunt, he swung his sword, and the goblin was sent sailing away, like it was almost a joke.
“Yahoo!” Ranta rushed over to the near-dead goblin, whaling on it with his longsword. “Gwahaha! That’s three vices in a row! That makes eleven vices total! My demon’s powered up! Whenever it feels like it, it’ll whisper in the enemy’s ear to distract it! That’s awesome!”
“Whenever it feels like it...?” Haruhiro said with a sigh. “Your demon sure is useless, huh.”
“Hey! I won’t let that pass, Haruhiro! Don’t you go dissing Zodiackun, or I’ll curse you!”
“I mean, you can only call it out at night—”
Haruhiro gave Ranta too much attention. If you just ignored whatever Ranta said, he’d eventually get lonely and give in, so it was best to leave him alone.
Haruhiro was probably doing it because he was a nice guy, unlike me. I didn’t mind that, though. About Haruhiro.

Chapter end