Chapter 52

Gerario moved immediately.

He even knew that Kururu was the mage Dorasutel, and at once gave orders for her to disguise herself, go together with Iiria under beastfolk guard, and head to the church.

Dodol bit back, asking why even they had to go to the church, but Gerario told him that unless they showed that they were not the enemies of humans, they would be killed together with the dragon.

On top of that, when he was told that no one but them could protect Iiria and the others from the mob, and that if they lost this young lady the whole territory would become a complete mess and everyone would lose, Dodol seemed to have no choice but to swallow his anger and accept it.

As for Iiria, she was ordered to cooperate with the church priest and calm the people by declaring that she would confront this crisis. Since a crowd driven into despair might do anything, he told her that she had to become the straw they would cling to.

While Iiria nodded at every single instruction from the battle-seasoned Gerario, Kururu, on the other hand, looked just about as dissatisfied with his instructions as Dodol did.

But it seemed she had no objection to being able to stay with Iiria a little longer.

And while they were making preparations, Gerario ordered me to go to the much-rumored Takahashi Workshop in town and bring back every magic stone they had.

After finishing one round of instructions, Gerario began flipping through the old records of past monsters that Kururu and the others had dragged out of the storehouse, at an incredible speed, together with the heavily built man even more muscular than Kengo.

We did not know who they were, and we did not know their true ability either. They could still have been swindlers who were nothing but bluff.

But Marks, an actual swindler, did not snap at Gerario and the others, and Dodol, if not toward Gerario, at least treated the scar-covered beastman Tsatsaru with respect.

At the very least, it seemed certain that they were no ordinary people.

Together with Kengo, I went back to the workshop, reassured the shaken master craftsmen by telling them that a subjugation party would now be going out, then gathered up every magic stone we could and returned to Iiria’s mansion. The reason I had not brought the composite magic stones was because it was still unknown whether Gerario could be trusted.

Just as I was leaving the mansion, I passed Kururu and Iiria, who were being guarded by Dodol and Marks’s men.

Iiria had hidden her swollen red eyes from crying with face powder, and the disguised Kururu wore her hood pulled low. But as we passed each other, Kururu looked at me and wordlessly seemed to ask, Is this a dream?

When I tilted my head in return, she gave me a smile that somehow looked as though she might burst into tears, then walked toward the frightened crowd.

“He said the color of the scales was red, right?”

When I carried the box packed with magic stones into Iiria’s mansion, that was the first thing Gerario said.

“I believe the color of the belly was probably yellow.”

Kengo answered in a tone unlike his usual one.

“Hmph… the quality of the magic stones isn’t bad. And on top of that, you lot are lucky. Even if the scales are red, if the belly is yellow, then it isn’t a flame dragon. If it were a flame dragon, this whole area would already have turned to trash.”

Gerario lightly kicked with his toe the box packed with magic stones engraved with flame magic circles.

“It’s probably a young dragon. Its scales are still soft, so if you shine a candle on it while it’s sleeping, they look red, but once it wakes up and sunlight hits them, they turn black. Well, if that’s the case, then fire will be enough… hey, don’t you have wind magic?”

The wind magic circle had difficult patterns, and the workshop had not yet managed to mass-produce it. There were distinctive curved sections, and every one of the master craftsmen was bad at them.

What Kururu had used to dig the hole had also been taken from the form of an existing wind magic stone that had already been in the company’s possession.

“If you don’t have any, make them produce some immediately. Strong wind magic is essential for taking down large monsters. I’ve heard your workshop turns out mountains of magic stones in a single day.”

That was certainly true for the kinds of magic stones they were good at, but it was one of the downsides of having gathered only master craftsmen with poor skills.

Would we have no choice but to bring out the composite magic stones? If losing everything was the alternative, would leaking that secret be better?

But even if we did that, unless there was a sample magic stone engraved with wind magic of the strength Gerario and the others needed, we would not be able to make a print.

I thought that, but only for a moment, before realizing there was another way.

“Please wait a moment.”

I headed for the workshop once again, but just as I stepped out from Iiria’s mansion into the square, I heard voices from across the street that could have been either cheers or angry cries. Before long the church bells rang, so Iiria was probably appealing to the people with her hoarse throat, calling on them to hold on to hope.

Everyone was carrying their own role.

I had to fulfill mine as well.

“Master craftsmen!”

When I ran into the workshop, the master craftsmen who were still gathered uneasily in the courtyard stretched out their necks to look at me.

“Please make wind magic stones immediately. As powerful as possible.”

The master craftsmen stared blankly for a moment, then at once broke into agitated murmurs.

One of them spoke.

“Lord Yorinobu, wind magic is still impossible for us.”

“That’s right, with our skills we can’t do the ‘ripples.’ And if you’re talking about a strong one, then…”

Because magic circles were standardized, the distinctive sections each had names.

The “ripples” were the most crucial and also the most difficult part of a wind magic circle.

When I had seen the finished product myself, the wave pattern engraved there had been so delicate that I had thought it was carved by machine.

“No, make everything except that part.”

“What?”

To the puzzled master craftsmen, I said,

“Have you forgotten what kind of workshop this is? It’s division of labor!”

Everyone understood my meaning at once, and the master craftsmen all started giving orders to the apprentices at the same time.

While the apprentices gathered the raw magic stones and the special tools used to carve magic circles, the master craftsmen discussed who would take charge of which part of the magic circle.

The workshop had not even been operating for very long yet, but they already seemed to have become a real team.

Looking back on it, maybe it had actually been a good thing that I knew absolutely nothing about magic stones. Since there was no one there to instruct the work itself, they had grown used to solving problems on their own.

And so the work began, but from here on there was nothing to do but wait.

I thought that if I stared too hard at them while they worked, it might only distract them, and I was just about to head back inside Iiria’s mansion.

That was when I ran into Gerario.

“Ohh, so this is the famous…”

“G-Gerario-san!?”

“No, it’s not that I doubt your business sense, but if there’s no wind magic we can’t win, you know.”

Gerario, flashing a grin that made him impossible to let one’s guard down around, looked over my shoulder at the state of the workshop, then shrugged.

Faced with Gerario like that, I found myself speaking before I could stop myself.

“Why are you—”

Beyond that question, many other questions overlapped.

Why had he lent us his strength?

Why had he been on this island?

Why were magic stones embedded in his armor?

Gerario grinned again, then, spotting a long chest placed by the wall, sat down on it with a thump.

“The reason I lent a hand is because if I didn’t, things were going to get bad for us too.”

That much was true. All the ships leaving the island had sunk, and probably no help was coming.

The ships that had been offshore would not even understand what had happened on the island, so even if they went to seek help, they could only do so in vague terms. By the time all the confusion and back-and-forth was over, if the dragon woke up, this island would instantly become a buffet hall.

“That said, even without a ship, we could get off this island if we had to, and we can at least hide from some slow lizard. So the truth is, we had no intention of lending a hand. We already retired from the adventurer trade.”

Gerario too bore many old scars, and above all there was that beastman, Tsatsaru.

“You saw my companion, didn’t you?”

It seemed he had seen straight through the fact that the word retirement had made me think of Tsatsaru.

“He can’t fight anymore. But the three of us are one. We can’t just throw him away. Well, I’ve started getting aches all over my body too. Balan’s the only one who’s still sturdy as ever, but seriously, what do you have to eat to turn out like that?”

Gerario laughed at his own words, but when he saw my face, he cleared his throat awkwardly.

“You look like you’re wondering how it is we just happened to be here… this island’s been the subject of a little rumor among adventurers.”

“…A rumor?”

“An island ruled by beastfolk.”

“That—”

“Right, I thought it sounded like nonsense too, and in truth it was an exaggerated story. The reality was that a girl with beastfolk blood, born from some noble’s indiscretion, had been dumped here. So naturally she had no real power and was being devoured by the local influential people. But then someone showed up and helped her.”

Gerario peered at me and grinned.

“There aren’t many places in this world where a wounded beastman like Tsatsaru can live in peace. We came here feeling like this was probably the only place left, but at first it was a disappointment. Even so, there was nowhere else for us to go, so while we were simmering there wondering what to do, an overthrow happened. And on top of that, the other half of that beast-eared young lady turned out to be able to use magic.”

Among outsiders, Gerario was probably the only human who knew that secret. It seemed that even if one were human, someone with a discerning eye who investigated carefully enough would still uncover it.

Gerario touched the magic stones embedded in his armor like old scars and continued speaking.

“And then she successfully took back real power, and on top of that, thanks to whoever had put the idea in her head, she was rapidly trying to rebuild the management of the territory.”

Only there did he make a playful wink with one eye.

“The decisive factor was that thing at the harbor the other day.”

“The harbor… ah.”

“Right. You opened up work to the beastfolk, didn’t you? That was when we decided that you people might be worth betting on.”

For the sake of the beastman companion who had been wounded so badly he could barely even walk by himself anymore, he had chosen this place as somewhere that companion could finally settle down.

I also remembered what Kururu had said about having stopped by the harbor of the provincial capital.

The position of beastfolk was terrifyingly unstable, probably far more so than I could even imagine.

“To us, this place is already something like our last hope. We’ve seen mountains of rotten places.”

There was always a smile left at the corners of his mouth, and yet in his eyes there was a darkness so deep it was chilling.

Still, that darkness quickly withdrew, and his expression returned to the familiar easygoing face that looked ready to joke around.

“The reason we’re lending you a hand is because you’re the kind of people worth lending a hand to.”

He stared straight at me.

They were eyes that had clearly lived a life different from mine, and unlike Kengo, who had trained his body because he liked to, they were the eyes of a man who had no choice but to train his body, eyes holding a deep, profound light.

“If we sincerely lend you a hand here, then you people won’t be able to help treating us well afterward. Right?”

The way he immediately broke into a teasing grin somehow reminded me of Kururu.

I thought Gerario was probably a serious man, despite appearances.

If Kururu hid her true feelings behind her foul mouth and sharp glare, then Gerario tried to hide all sorts of things behind that smirking, clownish face of his.

“Besides, when cute girls are getting along like that in front of you, an old man can’t very well not help.”

He probably meant the exchange right before Gerario had come in.

At that, both my arms suddenly began to sting and itch, and when I looked, I saw several linear traces of blood staining the sleeves of my clothes.

“You too stepped in without hesitation and took on the villain’s role at the worst possible moment. That makes you a man.”

He meant when I had pulled Iiria away from Kururu. When he nudged my shoulder, I flushed a little.

Though, just like with Nodon, all the men in this world looked so prematurely aged that Gerario might actually have been younger than me for all I knew.

“A unit that can carry out what needs doing while looking out for one another is a good unit.”

Still smiling, Gerario’s gaze suddenly grew distant.

“…Have you spent your whole life fighting?”

Brought back to himself by that question, Gerario scratched his head with a slightly embarrassed look.

“That’s the only thing I’m good for.”

“But if you wear magic stones, then doesn’t that mean you’re a mage too?”

Even on the back of the hand Gerario used to scratch his head, there was a magic stone set into the gauntlet.

It was a magic circle I had never seen before.

“I could never get used to serving in the court. I learned only the basics at the Ministry of Magic, then ran off as fast as I could. After that, it was nothing but fighting for a living. I hunt monsters too, but it’s probably been more human wars than anything else. Once you go to the front lines, there are as many men like me as you like, and there was always money to be made.”

When I looked more closely, the little finger and ring finger of his left hand did not move; they were prosthetic fingers.

“Um, how do you people even kill something like a dragon?”

Unable to help myself, I asked, and Gerario made a face like a magician being asked to reveal his trick.

“I’d like to say, wait and enjoy the show, but it’s not something worth making mysterious. The frontliner wakes the dragon and lures it outside. Then the support role slams it with wind magic to pin down its movement, and the firepower role roasts it nice and crisp with fire, and that’s the job done. Good thing it’s not some demon type with tricky intelligence. Otherwise you’d need several mages who can coordinate properly.”

It sounded simple enough when he said it, but now I understood why Tsatsaru had suffered such terrible injuries.

Even a mage still had a human body, and because monsters often appeared in mines, until the prey could be brought out to a place where magic could be fired, that role fell to a sturdy beastman.

“The reason adventurers like us have no place to belong is because we share the fate of beastfolk.”

Gerario said it quietly.

“An adventurer who can’t build trust with beastfolk will always make a fatal mistake somewhere and die. Monster hunting is the clearest example, but the one who faces the greatest danger is the beastman serving as bait. If the magic fails to finish it, there’s always the risk of us abandoning them. But if the beastman on the front line doesn’t trust us, then we can’t calmly prepare our magic either. So when the beastman at the front is in trouble, we go save them no matter how reckless it is. If we die, we all die together. A relationship like that… is heresy in this world.”

It was the kind of fierce comradeship one often saw in war films.

But relationships like that never worked very well outside the battlefield.

“So, do you understand now, completely, why we’re lending you our strength?”

Whether or not to lend us their strength was, for Gerario and the others too, a kind of gamble.

If we had been hostile toward beastfolk and a selfish group, there would have been every possibility that we would use Gerario and the others and then cast them aside. And Gerario and the others had probably encountered employers like that more often than not.

But what sort of group we were was obvious just by looking at Iiria and Kururu.

“Well, the fact that this workshop looks like it’s going to make a killing also matters a lot.”

There was that familiar smirking grin of Gerario’s again.

“A hundred imperial gold coins a month, and two hundred if no one dies, right? A chance to grab that kind of good fortune doesn’t come around often.”

“…Tsatsaru-san did cut in to say it was too cheap, though.”

I had no idea at all what the market rate was, and I began to lose a little confidence in whether the deal I had made was actually fair. And I meant that too in the sense of whether I was sending Gerario and the others into mortal danger for an unfairly low price.

“Well, for some backwater frontier lord, it’s common enough not to get paid at all, but in those cases you can just loot to your heart’s content if you win. I’d say the rate’s ordinary enough. I judged that helping you people had a value that can’t be converted into gold coins.”

“…”

I looked straight back at Gerario and nodded.

“I think… that’s probably true.”

Gerario laughed softly in his throat.

As that happened, I noticed one of the master craftsmen looking at us from a distance.

“Ah, the magic stones?”

“Yes… well, we managed to do several of them as instructed…”

“Hey, seriously? That fast?”

Gerario widened his eyes and stood up. Even with division of labor there had to be limits, so there had probably been some wind magic stone somewhere that had already been partly engraved.

I had heard that they had regained their confidence through division of labor and had begun individually tackling tasks they were bad at as well.

“Then let’s go do the finishing work.”

“Hm? They’re not complete?”

The people here were master craftsmen who had lost and fallen low.

And division of labor was the way to achieve something no one person could do alone.