Chapter 55

Gather ten people, and about two of them would be brave. Three, at the very most.

If those ten fought another group, the two or three brave ones would generally lead the charge, while the rest merely followed.

Once those two or three died, the rest would naturally scatter. There was no need, then, to kill all ten enemies.

Just two. Or three. Disable their core fighters or take them out of the fight, and victory was all but assured.

The death of a single upper-grade adventurer was a serious blow and a burden to a guild. These were the adventurers who determined its reputation and prestige.

But gather a hundred brave people, and among them would be one hero.

On a night beneath an unusually bright full moon, ten upper-grade adventurers had died at once. Nor had the deaths in the duels before that been few.

They had not all belonged to the same guild, of course, but it was no small number.

And so the attempt to seize the Kaitz heights had come to nothing. Thwarted by a single boy hero.

The guild alliance, whose members had never trusted one another much to begin with, dissolved, and each guild withdrew from the war.

Now they had more than enough troubles of their own. They had reached for what looked like a tasty morsel, only to get badly burned and slink home.

But the war was not over. The Hagen Guild and its allies had, in truth, only come to pick up scraps.

The Beringen Guild's real enemies lay elsewhere: the guilds surrounding Siegfringer, foremost among them Brabant.

That was why Beringen's command had been unable to provide adequate support to the Kaitz heights.

With their true enemies to contend with, they could not commit their strength to a pack of scavengers.

Yet those scavengers were too formidable to ignore. While command was wrestling with that predicament, the boy hero had appeared.

And word of his arrival had spread beyond the guilds to ordinary people.

The tale of how he had put down the notorious Ehrenberg Five, fought twelve duels, and cut down ten vengeance-driven swordsmen passed from mouth to mouth.

As rumors always did, the story grew in the telling, embellished into something harrowing one moment, exhilarating the next.

In taverns and on the streets, children and adults, rich and poor, highborn and low, everyone from whores to noble young ladies whispered the young hero's name. Riki. Riki. Riki...

There was power in that name. Hearing it, speaking it, made hearts race. With longing, with anguish, with exhilaration.

Of course, people believed what they wanted to believe, and much of what they pictured came from their own imaginations. It was far removed from the actual events and the reality of the boy himself.

Then how did the bearer of that much-whispered name feel now? What was in his heart?

Only he could know. And it was something he had to bear entirely alone.

The wind stirred his red cloak. Seen from behind, Ricard looked precarious at the cliff's edge.

One misplaced step, or a shove from someone at his unguarded back, could send him plummeting.

But whether that danger had simply not occurred to him or meant nothing to him, he gazed at the gentle ridgeline in the distance, his hair streaming in the wind.

"Riki."

A familiar voice came from behind. Ricard looked back to find Boribori.

"Did you fight with Marie?"

Ricard could not help smiling. He was probably asking because things had seemed awkward between them lately.

"No."

"No? Hmm, that doesn't sound like a no to me..."

Boribori furrowed his brow and put a hand to his chin, pondering the matter with an earnest expression.

Ricard chuckled at his endearing innocence, but had no desire to discuss every detail of his affairs with a girl. Then again, perhaps he could tell Boribori a little?

"It's because we can't be more than friends. Things should get better with time. It's not something I can fix for her."

Boribori's eyes widened.

"More than friends? Is that even possible?"

"Well, I'm not sure myself."

"So there are things even you don't know, Riki. If anything's bothering you, tell me. I'll listen."

Somewhere along the way, Boribori had grown up. It seemed to have begun when he met the Nameless.

Their relationship was no longer simply one of leading and following. Ricard and Boribori were now friends who supported each other as equals.

"... Yeah. Thanks."

"Anyway, you're still going to be friends with Marie, right?"

"I'd like that too. But I can't force her to..."

"I'd better go tell her."

"What? Hey, hey. Hey!"

Boribori turned and ran off with light steps, never looking back despite Ricard's urgent calls.

Marie sat beside Delphi near the defensive tower, talking. It looked as though she was receiving advice, or perhaps comfort. Delphi's hand gently stroked her back.

Boribori ran straight up to Marie and, sure enough, began telling her something as he pointed at Ricard.

Ricard's face burned at the sight. Confiding in Boribori felt like the greatest mistake of his life. 'Bori, you've betrayed me...'

But Marie's expression barely changed. She merely glanced at Ricard with a blank face, then turned toward the gentle ridgeline in the distance.

Boribori came running back.

"Marie says she understands. Looks like you can stay friends."

"You... Honestly..."

"What?"

"... Never mind..."

What good would it do to get angry at something done out of kindness and concern? Ricard merely decided never to discuss such matters with Boribori again.

He looked down over the cliff. The milling crowds had all vanished, leaving only litter scattered untidily throughout the valley.

That meant there was nothing left to watch, and that the fighting here was over.

The Kaitz heights had always been uninhabited and rarely visited. With the battle over, they were as quiet as they had been before.

Strategically speaking, they had successfully defended the rear. Now he wondered whether there was any need to keep guarding this place.

It was the fourth day since they had sent word of their victory, and Ricard and his friends were waiting for someone from command.

That person arrived after noon, treading softly through the short grass on the way up the Kaitz heights. To his surprise, it was someone Ricard knew.

"Sandy?"

"Well, look how much our young master has grown! Sending your dear senior on errands now, are you?"

How long had it been? Two years? Sandy had not changed a bit, smiling brightly as she teased him with perfect nonchalance. She was a beauty with tightly tied-back brown hair and slightly upturned eyes.

Delighted to see her, Ricard gave her a brief hug.

The moment they parted, however, he sensed something ominous. Turning, he found Marie with her head bowed, huffing to herself as though struggling to contain her anger.

Realizing his mistake, he hurried to explain.

"Uh, this is Sandy. She brought me from Rheinfurt to the academy. That's all. She's just an older friend. My senior. A senior."

Without meaning to, he sounded as though he were making excuses. Still looking down, Marie took deep breaths and barely managed to calm herself.

Sandy looked between them, immediately caught on, and grinned.

"Didn't I tell you? That you'd make a lot of girls cry."

Ricard could only give an awkward smile, at a loss for words. 'Not a lot...'

Of course, counting Daisy, he had made two girls cry, but he had completely forgotten about her.

As an experienced senior adventurer, Sandy offered Marie some advice born of her years.

"Don't make it quite so obvious. That only makes other women want him more."

But this did not seem to be the right moment for advice. Marie fixed Sandy with the fierce gaze she wore in a duel and snapped back.

"What have I done? Don't pretend you know me."

"Hmm... I take it he rejected you recently. You'll need to let some of that venom out. It's just a shame to see someone so pretty acting this way."

"Excuse me? Hah!"

Marie seemed too outraged to speak. She was still too young to match Sandy in a battle of words.

Feeling on the verge of breaking into a cold sweat, Ricard hastily forced introductions on his other friends to salvage the situation. A woman's intuition was more terrifying than the sharpest blade.

"Uh, shouldn't we introduce everyone first? This is Boribori, and this is our Clan Leader, Volka. This is Delphi, and... this is Marie."

Sandy gave Marie a look that seemed to find her both laughable and cute, then turned to the others.

"I'm Sandy of the Fighting Cocks clan. I've heard a great deal about you, Volka."

"Me? Not Riki?"

"How could the man leading Riki's clan not be famous? And Boribori, you're much cuter than I expected. I heard you enjoy chopping people into pieces."

"Uh... I don't enjoy it..."

Perhaps Boribori had suffered the most from the rumors. People thought of him as practically a deranged serial killer.

"Anyway, it's been absolute madness lately. Get any two adventurers together, and your clan is all they talk about. Is there something special about everyone who graduated last year? There's that fellow Ice too. Dealing with the enemy is hard enough, and it looks like the Master doesn't know what to do with you lot."

"What do you mean, doesn't know what to do with us?"

That wording grated on Ricard a little.

"Maybe it's because there's only so much bread to go around, and he's worried about how much to give you? I hear there's even talk in command of not giving you any more assignments. I don't know the details myself."

Every organization had its internal affairs. Factions could form around influence, power, and the like.

Competition between those factions could help them develop, but it could also eat away at the organization from within.

It was a genuine headache, yet inevitable as long as humans lived together in societies. It was a perennial problem, regardless of culture or era.

A thousand years ago or a thousand years hence, factional strife was ever present, a problem that would never disappear. At its core lay the question of how to divide limited resources and power.

The Beringen Adventurers' Guild was no exception. It already had clans and upper-grade adventurers who wielded influence within its ranks, when Ricard and the Viola clan had suddenly risen to prominence.

In the urgency of war, the guild had made use of them. But now that it had room to breathe, how much to reward them had become a problem.

Too little, and they would be dissatisfied. Too much, and the established factions would receive a smaller share.

How wonderful it would be if rewards could simply be allocated reasonably according to merit. But the world did not work so simply.

Two things in this world drove people mad: power and money. Once those were at stake, reason ceased to function.

It was hardly rare for things to descend into madness, with everyone both an aggrieved victim and a vicious aggressor.

Kings killed their children. Princes rebelled. When power and money were at stake, the human animal ceased to recognize even its own parents or children.

"So?"

Ricard asked, sensing something vaguely unsettling.

"Leave this place to the pig. The Master wants to see you lot. That's the message I came to deliver."

By "the pig," Sandy meant Reinhart, Clan Leader of the Widowmakers. Perhaps he, with his simple, thickheaded way of life, was the wisest of them all.

"How are things over there? They wouldn't tell me when I visited before," Volka asked.

"At first, the plan was to split the region three ways, but this Ice fellow did much better than expected. So they considered splitting it in two. Then they heard things here had been settled, and I think they started wondering whether they could take the whole thing if Riki came too. But that's just how it looks to me. I don't know exactly what command is thinking."

"... They shouldn't do that," Ricard muttered after hearing her explanation.

"Hmm?"

"That's not how you wage a war. You set a clear objective, then bring things to a clean end once you've achieved it. If you dither around thinking you could push a little further, or that what you've got isn't quite enough, you won't even come out even."

Ricard had seen many operations ruined that way in his previous life. Whenever something went wrong, that sort of complacent thinking from the commander was always where the trouble began.

"I'm not thrilled either, but what can we do? We're not the ones making the decisions. You can never trust a guild. Expect anything from one, and it'll disappoint you every time. The only people you can trust are your clan. That's how everyone lives. Still, you're such an unprecedented case, Riki. That's why I said I don't really know either."

"..."

There was no point arguing with Sandy now, so Ricard held his tongue.

History offered plenty of examples of people whose achievements had been too great for their own good. From a superior's perspective, an incompetent subordinate was a problem, but so was one who was too capable.

Ricard had never met the Guild Master and had no idea what sort of person he was. Thus he could not guess how things would unfold.

Still, he was not entirely without someone to turn to. He had been told to get in touch if he ran into trouble, so surely he could do that if it came to it?

In any case, Ricard shared a meal with Sandy and told Reinhart they were leaving. Then they all departed the Kaitz heights together.

Their destination was Siegfringer, where he had spent the previous winter working alongside Boribori and the Nameless.