The Power-Up Gloves

Dong-hui’s eyes were aching and she nearly answered yes, but then she remembered that the thing had taken sixty points off her just for opening it in the first place, and she asked carefully instead. She also stole a couple of glances across the carriage to check that the dozing butler was not waking up. He must have been genuinely tired; he had his head against the carriage wall now and had settled in to doze in earnest.

“Does looking at a sorted list cost points too, by any chance?”

Unable to decide whether she ought to thank it or swear at it, she watched the status window shimmer in rainbow colors for a moment and then, with a riffling sound, lay out its lines of text.

Only three items, but every one of them was tempting. After thinking it over, Dong-hui chose number two, which looked the best suited to protecting herself here and now. She had no idea how much brute force it would actually give her, but ten times her usual strength sounded as though it would come in very handy.

All she had done was settle on number two in her head, and something dropped out of thin air and landed on her lap with a thud. Strength-boosting gloves, she had thought, so she had expected something in leather; what she had bought turned out to be a pair of soft, delicate lace gloves.

The first thought that came to her was, Have I been had?

But the moment she pulled them on, Dong-hui could feel, instinctively, that the strength in her grip had shot up. The frilly lace design was not much to her taste, but the effect seemed impressive enough. Her hands held a power that had not been in them a moment before.

“The Hidden Shop’s not half bad.”

For something bought with a mere sixty points, it was decidedly useful. Dong-hui thought about peeling the gloves off and stowing them in the Inventory, then decided to keep them on, just in case.

“Hey!”

That last remark made her boil over enough to shout out loud. The blue window wiped itself away at speed, and the butler came into view, staring blankly at her.

“Ah—! M— my apologies! I went to bed late last night, that is all—!”

The butler must have been startled out of his doze; he scrabbled the documents he had dropped on the floor back together and apologized in a rush. All that nodding against the carriage wall had left his grizzled hair as messy as a bird’s nest.

Faced with a man far older than herself falling over himself to apologize to her, Dong-hui waved her hands about, at a loss.

“That wasn’t meant for you.”
“I— is that so?”

The butler asked, though he did not look as though he believed her.

“Mm. I dozed off myself, and wouldn’t you know it, I had a nightmare.”

“Ah… Do you still have nightmares from time to time?”

She had thrown the excuse out at random, but the butler asked it with his face gone stiff. While she was opening and closing her mouth with no idea what to say, the carriage gradually slowed and then came to a stop.

They had arrived at the village of Morta.

A ruin.

That was the word that came to Dong-hui the first time she laid eyes on the place.

“My lady, this village absolutely must have a food ration. Two straight years of drought have wiped the crops out to the last seed, and the sick are turning up everywhere. At this rate the people of Morta will starve to death, every last one of them. Just this once, I beg you, show them some mercy…”

The butler had been sitting across from her with an uncomfortable look on his face for some time, and now he spat it all out fast, like a man who had made up his mind. His eyes were squeezed shut and the delivery came like machine-gun fire; he had plainly been steeling himself to say it for a very long while.

“Do it, then.”

At an answer that came so readily, the butler stared blankly for a moment, then asked again, slowly.

“…Pardon?”
“I said take them something to eat.”

Dong-hui answered while looking out of the window, unable to bring herself to step down from the carriage. The person who was supposed to be the lord had clearly turned him down every single time; he had rattled the whole case off before she could so much as raise it herself, which meant he must have asked for a ration any number of times.

People in a state like that, and she looked the other way? A lord, no less?

Dong-hui thought of the warm soup and the soft bread she had eaten that morning. People who had lost count of the days they had gone hungry were right there within arm’s reach, and she alone had eaten well somewhere full of luxury. Guilt she could not put into words came over her. What was more, these people were in the lord’s charge.

— Ding. Ding. Ding.

The favorability was falling fast, and in a matter of moments it had blown past minus two hundred thousand.

Damn it.

When Dong-hui shot up out of her seat, the butler, still wearing that dazed expression, half-rose along with her in an awkward crouch.

“You’re getting out?”
“Mm.”
“It may be dangerous.”

The butler said it with a glance at the bleak world outside the carriage, the unease not gone from his voice. More than anything, the ill-feeling the villagers held toward the lord was nothing to be taken lightly. There was precious little about this lord to like, and still she was the Grace estate’s last hope.

Dong-hui wanted to get down and look the village over a little more closely.

“That’s what we brought the knights along for. Send someone and have them fetch food to hand out right now.”
“How much, exactly…”

None of it felt real to the butler. Any moment now she would change her mind and throw a tantrum, demanding they leave this filthy village at once.

“Enough for these people to eat their fill today.”

“We do not have that much.”

The butler Scrooge answered with no strength at all in his voice. Dong-hui let out a long sigh, then asked in a voice too small for anyone else to hear.

“Then how much food is in the castle storehouse?”

Her heart was in her throat the whole time she was asking. It felt uncomfortably like opening an electricity bill with no money to pay it, and the stress came prickling up in her before she knew it.

Scrooge sat there with nothing but a frown on his face for a long while, as though weighing it up, then answered with the most careful expression in the world.

“If we scrape the storehouse clean down to the last grain, the people of this village could eat for three days.”

“Then the people inside the castle walls will have nothing to eat.”

“Yes.”

Whichever way she turned it, the situation was awkward. But she could hardly do nothing with people about to starve to death right in front of her.

“For now, bring out at least enough to fill their bellies for today. I will see to what comes after.”
“Yes! At once.”

The butler was so overjoyed at Dong-hui’s words that he all but leaped down from the carriage and went scurrying over to the knight who had ridden with them.

When the carriage door opened, the air inside turned cold in an instant. Dong-hui pulled the cloak Delma had draped over her shoulders before they left tighter around herself and, heavy-hearted, looked out. The chill that had come in for that brief moment alone was enough to leave her shivering, and the children of the ruined village had nothing on but thin clothes. Many of them were going about barefoot.

If she ever saw the kkotjebi children of North Korea¹, she thought, they would look exactly like this.

“This is honestly the worst.”

What lay in front of her was so overwhelming that she did not even know where to begin. For now, she had to get down from the carriage.

Dong-hui opened the carriage door, and one of the knights nearby hurried over and set a step beneath it so she could get down easily. She stepped down, careful not to trip. How dreadful it would have been if she had come in a dress dripping with lace; just thinking about it made her shudder.

The air outside the carriage was dry and cold. Other days the carriage had brushed straight past, or stopped just long enough for her to study the place as though stealing a look before it fled at top speed. This time the lord actually stepped down out of it, and the people who had been shut up tight inside their houses began to show themselves, one by one.

“Ah…”

Chilly weather, the equivalent of early November back in Korea.

Not one of those who had come creeping outside was wearing a decent coat.

“Is that really all the clothes these people have? In weather this cold. They’ll catch cold going about like that.”

Dong-hui aimed the question at the butler, who had sent word up to the castle and come back to her side.

“Whatever clothes they had will all have been traded away for food. What they have on now is likely the last of it.”

The butler explained obligingly enough, though there was something reproachful in his tone.

“Have you… explained this situation to me before, by any chance?”

She put it to him on the off chance.

He looked at her with an expression that asked what on earth she was talking about.

“Yes. I told you last month, and again last week, did I not.”
“Tsk!”

There was nothing she could say beyond clicking her tongue. Frightened out of their wits, the people watched from their hiding places like starving field mice, their eyes full of wariness and fear and resentment.

It occurred to her that she ought to at least break out the food she had on her now and share it around. With so many eyes on her, Dong-hui pretended to be pulling something out of the carriage and took out every loaf of bread she had packed into the Inventory. The loaves that had been crammed into every slot came showering down onto the carriage seat at a wave of her hand.

“This isn’t enough. I need to expand the Inventory, and fast.”

Dong-hui muttered, looking down at bread that seemed nowhere near enough.

“Butler.”

The butler had been standing outside talking with the knight commander; at her call he turned his head at once. He still looked tired, but there was somehow more life in him than before.

“Hand this out to the people, for now.”

The butler’s eyes went wide as he took the pile of bread Dong-hui was pulling out of the carriage. They were plainly things that had not been there when the two of them rode in together.