A Dagger Like A Crescent Moon

Huh?

A Body Level that had never been there before had come up. Traits had gone to 1 on top of that, and the estate residents’ favorability had climbed steeply as well, in a far shorter span of time than it had taken her to raise the village of Morta’s. At this rate, opening up the other villages ought to wipe out the minus figure quickly enough.

Nor was that the end of it. The mp figure had changed a great deal too, and the status window had never so much as told her what it meant.

It definitely robbed me of two thousand points, so why is the mp figure sitting at 1,125p?
Where did the thousand go?

However hard she thought about it, nothing came to mind that could have made a thousand of the mp figure disappear. Dong-hui puzzled over it a long while, then clapped her hands with a smack, as though something had dawned on her.

Hang on! This isn’t my health reading, is it?
Then what’s that 86,400?
Don’t tell me — my life?
So I die when I fill that number all the way up?

The status window watched Dong-hui hurl herself all at once into a terminal-patient cosplay, then quietly scrubbed the writing off its blue screen and thrust out a line of letters written very large.

Huh?
What’s brought this on?

The praise had come out of nowhere, and Dong-hui was quietly pleased by it.

We’ve been through a lot together — I guess it was worried about me after all.

She put on a prim little face, glanced at the status window and smiled faintly, as though to say it should go on.

Ah, so I’m healthy, at least.
That’s a relief.

Hey.

She might well be, Dong-hui thought, the first human being in history to die of high blood pressure¹ on account of a status window.

Dong-hui had come out for a walk inside Grace Castle, mostly to get a breath of air, and she turned her steps toward the drill yard where the knights trained. With the logging off today, she had heard, the knights and the mercenaries would be drilling there instead of going out to lend a hand.

— Ching! Clank!

— Whoosh! Thwack!

As she drew nearer, the sound of iron striking iron and the shouting of men reached her all jumbled together, and Commander Red Bear’s drill-shout carried through it here and there. His voice was so loud that she half wondered whether he alone had a loudspeaker.

Red Bear caught sight of Chloe belatedly and came running headlong over, leaving his men in the middle of their training. Gladness and worry sat on his face at the same time.

“My lady, is it quite all right for you to be out like this already?”
“Yes. I am quite well again.”
“All the same, if you were to rest a little longer…”
“I am all right. I gave you all a great fright. I am sorry.”

Dong-hui said it with a bright smile, and Red Bear’s eyes went wide before he shook his head and smiled a little. His look was full of fondness, as though he were watching a daughter grown to womanhood.

“Ah — I hear the daggers are finished?”

The Kyulen fangs brought out of the Black Forest were not for sale. It had been settled that they would go to reworking the weapons of the Grace estate, and when word got out somehow, guilds of every kind sent in offers for them one after another. Dong-hui refused the lot flat. With material as good as that, she said, it went without saying that weapons should be made for Grace’s own knights. The knights, once the lord’s intention reached them, were fit to leap for joy, and today was the day the finished daggers were to be handed out to them.

“Yes. We had a great deal of help from Smith along the way as well.”

Pulling Smith off the vault room he had been building and putting him onto the making of weapons had been Dong-hui’s decision too.

“I knew he was a man of remarkable skill, but I had no idea he made weapons so well.”
“Nor did I. There are a great many gifted hands on this estate of ours. And of course you know that you are counted among them?”

Red Bear flushed at his lord’s sudden praise, and Dong-hui, who had been watching him steadily all the while, grinned and walked on ahead.

The daggers made from Kyulen fangs came to a hundred and thirty in all. The fangs were so hard and so sharp that no human strength could grind them down, so they were simply fitted with a well-matched hilt and made into the shape of a dagger, or else mounted at the head of a spear. Failing that, they mostly went to the great bows as arrowheads.

Weapons of that make were worth so enormous a sum that a seller could name his own price. Knights of wealthy, well-off noble stock could buy as many as they pleased; for the knights of the Grace order it was another matter. Most of the men out of noble houses with a name to them had left the estate, and of those who remained, even the noble-born came from fallen houses, while more than half were commoners. So it was only natural that men like these should be overcome when Kyulen daggers of such worth were put into their hands.

The knights went down on their knees to receive them as though they were treasures of the highest price, and every one of them swore loyalty to the lord. For a member of the Grace knights to be loyal to the lord of Grace was a thing so obvious it hardly needed saying, but the lord of former days had been someone they could never have thought of as an object of loyalty. So the oath sworn now carried a particular meaning for them, and for Dong-hui as well.

The status window had sprung up without warning, and she was not startled any more; she must have grown used even to this. She read it with a calm eye, and her face was brighter than it had ever been.

She had already decided which area to expand, and all that remained was to go back and fetch what she needed. Between how busy she had been and how little time she had had, she had not managed a visit to the egg counter yet either; the moment she got back to her room, she thought, she would open the front door first thing.

Ninety-five percent trust, though.
That’s a lot to live up to.

So she thought, and still she could not hide the corners of her mouth tugging upward of their own accord.

She was beaming away like that when Red Bear respectfully held out a dagger with a red hilt to Chloe.

“What is this?”
“It is your dagger, my lady.”
“Mine?”

Dong-hui asked it, taking the thing up with a dazed look.

“It is the dagger Smith made first of all, and the one he took longest and most pains over.”
“Good heavens, it is beautiful.”

The dagger carried no particular ornament, but it fit Dong-hui’s hand exactly, and it was very beautiful indeed. Grinding the fang down might have been beyond them, yet it had been polished and polished again over a long while until it shone a milky white, like a pearl. The fang’s own shape had been kept so well that merely holding it seemed threat enough to anyone facing her, and at the same time it was beautiful, as though it had been made from a crescent moon broken off the sky. The maker’s whole care had gone into the thing, and as she took the blade Dong-hui felt her heart lift, and she was very happy.

“I like it better than any present I have ever been given.”
“Smith will be delighted to hear it. It would have been good if he could have been here today, but he said the work on the vault room had fallen behind and went back to the castle in a hurry.”

Dong-hui had never seen Red Bear talk this much. The gift of such precious daggers had plainly heartened him too, and watching him and his knights so pleased, she thought how very glad she was that she had not sold the Kyulen fangs and hide.

“I have given orders for protective gear to be made from the Kyulen hide as well. The work will start as soon as the children’s winter coats are finished. The tailors will be coming before long to take the knights’ measurements, so see that you know of it.”

The hide stripped from the Kyulen corpses they had collected on the way out of the Black Forest was to go to the knights as well.

On the way back to her room Dong-hui saw a line from the status window telling her that trust had broken 99%.

The moment she got back to her room Dong-hui opened the Hidden Shop and expanded the Inventory first of all. It would hold eight hundred things for her now.

“That is most reassuring.”

Dong-hui checked the Inventory, empty as could be, and called up the status window with a light heart.

The moment she saw the options Dong-hui chose without hesitation.

“Number three.”

Whatever floor she drew, there would be more to be had from it than from the convenience store.

“Of course.”

She was so excited that her shoulders seemed likely to start dancing of their own accord.

The status window floated up in the same moment she answered, and in it she saw the altered contents of her Activity Radius.