The Faraway Paladin Vol 4 Chapter 4

 The Faraway Paladin Volume 4 CHapter 4

He was no ordinary opponent.

“Diiiiiiiiiiie!”

An enraged, husky yell that seemed to thunder from the ground itself accompanied the massive club swinging towards me. Actually, could it even be called a club? It was literally the trunk of a tree, wide enough that I probably couldn’t wrap my arms all the way around it, and being swung with such terrible force that it bent. Although the trunk had at least been hastily stripped of its branches, it was not something that a living creature should have been swinging around. If it hit me, death was all but certain!


I ducked under the sideways swipe and leapt forward, quickly closing the distance to my opponent. My target was his ankles. Yelling out a battle cry, I slashed the newly remade Calldawn at his enormous ankles. The glaive’s golden blade traced a trail through space, and then—

My attack disappeared.

At some point, my blade had stopped. I felt my blood run cold. I had swung the glaive as if driving an axe into a huge tree, with all the explosive energy my body could muster. And yet now the blade was stationary, as if all its momentum had been sucked into a mysterious void. He hadn’t blocked it, deflected it, or avoided it. The motion vector of my attack had suddenly disappeared. That was the only way to describe it. The blade’s motion had been inexplicably arrested. It had happened again. Each time I tried to attack this opponent, this strange phenomenon occurred.

With a lengthy, furious roar, a foot came stomping down from overhead. I leapt backwards to dodge it and regained a safe distance.

The one roaring was a giant. Even Gangr, the forest giant I had met previously who was over three meters tall, looked small by comparison. I couldn’t even tell how big he was by looking up at him, he threw off my sense of scale so badly. If a hill in a place that didn’t get much sunlight suddenly rose up, came over to me, and looked down on me, I imagined it might look something like this. His skin was like rock, and covered in moss so thick it reminded me of fur. A large, plump nose and piercing eyes peeked out from among the moss. His thick arms reminded me of a great and ancient tree. His sturdy legs stood like enormous boulders.

I couldn’t keep on looking. I weaved through the attacks from his wildly swinging club, leapt in close again, and with a forceful yell, I thrust my glaive towards his Achilles’ tendon. Then, flipping the weapon around, I delivered a powerful jab with the end of the shaft. But again, neither attack worked. The giant lifted his foot to stamp on me as I hung about his legs a little too long—

“Menel!”

“Salamander, scorch him!” Menel, who had secured a safe spot behind a rock a little distance away, loudly incanted a fire spell. Flame stretched from a lantern that he had tossed onto the ground, making a beeline for the giant’s face.

It was a direct hit. A burst of flames like a red flower in bloom unfolded inside my imagination. But not even that came to pass. The flame slowed to a gentle stop and fizzled out.

But anyone would be thrown off if fire breath rushed towards their face, and the giant’s foot had been raised in the air as it happened. He made three increasingly desperate noises as he lost his balance, then fell to the ground with a heavy thud that shook the earth and threw a cloud of dust into the air. By the time I heard him groaning—perhaps the fall had hurt at least—I had already retreated to a great distance.

But as the giant held his face, he began to stand.

“Feck it, I knew it wouldn’t work!”

His face didn’t have a single burn mark. It seemed he’d fallen over not because he’d taken any damage, but simply because the flames directly in his face had been so bright he’d lurched back in surprise.

Intending to prevent the giant from getting to his feet, Menel unleashed further attacks. Wind Cutter, Stone Fist, and other techniques of various types aimed at a good spread of areas across the giant’s body—his knees, belly, neck, face, and more—but the outcome was the same every time. The spells were on-target, but they were inexplicably arrested and had no effect.

Blades didn’t work. If even Calldawn was no good, the caliber of the demonblade or enchanted sword definitely wasn’t the problem.

Elementalist spells were no good either. Menel understood the situation as well as I did. It looked like he had been using a wide range of techniques, from the classic fire, air, and earth attacks to lesser-used mental attacks that employed fae of fear and confusion. However, none had any effect.

In that case—I breathed in deeply and pressed my feet firmly into the ground—what about magic?!

“Tonitrus!”

A raucous sound rang out like the boom of a cannon, or perhaps the deafening echo of a cracked bell struck as hard as possible, and a burning smell filled the air as a bolt of purple lightning tore the sky between me and the chest of the giant.

◆

“Are you for real...?”

I could hear Menel’s dumbfounded voice. I felt the same way. Even the lightning of the Tonitrus attack had inexplicably stopped just before striking the giant’s chest.

Blades wouldn’t work, nor elementalist spells, nor magic. None of the methods of attack I had at my disposal did anything against this opponent.

As if by way of counterattack, the club came swinging my way as the giant belted out a long roar. Put under pressure, I hurriedly leapt backwards. The end of the club missed me. However, there was rocky ground everywhere. When the giant flicked up the club he had just smashed down, innumerable chunks and fragments of rock flew in my direction as though a bomb had gone off.

“Flame, protect me!”

Sacred Shield barely made it in time. The shining shield manifested in midair and repelled the rocks flying at me. The attacks were coming thick and fast, and taking a single hit would certainly mean suffering serious damage. This fight was a huge drain on my nerves and physical energy. My breath was heavy, and my body was hot and covered in sweat. I hoped to find a way to break through this situation somehow. Unfortunately...

“O great giant! Surely this is enough?! Please, talk with—”

“Begoooooone!”

From the moment we met, my attempts at conversation had been met with this kind of physical response. Despite telling me to leave, his attacks were outright lethal. I had no choice but to resort to dodging and fighting back, but not a single attack worked against him. We were currently at a total stalemate, neither of us able to deal the other a telling blow. What on earth was I supposed to do? I could think of a few possibilities to get around the fact that my attacks weren’t working, but was it right to carry those out? Considering the circumstances surrounding this giant, retreating would probably be the more correct decision. But finding a smart way to retreat in this situation would be difficult in itself—

I gave some thought to those things in the middle of battle. And the moment I did, the rock I had one foot on tilted severely as I tried to place pressure on it.

Oh—

I broke out in a cold sweat that covered my entire back. My ankle twisted in a strange direction. My momentum was unstoppable. I fell forward.

Oh God.

I’ve botched it.

This is that kind of horrific blunder.

The kind that after it happens, it’s already too late.

My vision went gray. Everything appeared to be moving in slow motion. In front of me, I could see that enormous club, swinging sideways towards me, closing in on me slowly, as though the world was advancing frame by frame. The moment of collision arrived. As a violent impact shook me, the color returned to the world, and time’s flow returned to normal.

I soared through the air. I had been sent flying. I could feel my organs all shifting to one side. Somewhere far away, I heard Menel scream. Below me was rocky ground—a steep decline—I rolled and fell—

Ow. Ow. Ow.

Thud. My head hit something. My eyes filled with tears. My body bounced like a cartoon. I fell. Through my blurry vision, far above, I saw the giant’s face looking down at me...

.........
......
...

And just like that... I was defeated.

◆

“The town doesn’t have enough copper coins.”

A few days earlier, in Torch Port, I had gone shopping for new shoes and various other items to replace the things that had been used up in the endless beast hunts that followed the slaying of the foul-dragon Valacirca. The one talking to me with a frown on his face was Tonio.

“Given how rapidly the town is expanding, it was always an issue that we were going to need to address. But now that the foul-dragon has been successfully slain, people’s minds are at ease, and trade and commerce is flourishing, well...”

“Ahh... I guess that sort of thing would come up.” Now I was frowning, too. “And we’re starting to see symptoms?”

“We are, yes.”

In my last world, where the creation and circulation of currency was sufficiently advanced, the problem of not having enough physical objects to represent money only came up on a national scale in the context of debating macroeconomics. But in this world, it was a more familiar and common issue.

There still wasn’t very much travel or trade between communities. The settlements scattered all around were like little isolated worlds of their own, and there were few enough coins within any single one that with enough effort it would be possible to count them. However, there were enough in circulation that they could be used within the villages for trades between the people living there. Coins left the system when the villagers went to town and bought farming tools and livestock, and entered it when the villagers went to sell crops. Of course, if those two sides fell out of balance, a currency shortage could easily occur.

Torch Port had seen a rise in both internal and external trade recently as its population rapidly increased, and though the scale of things here was a little different from the villages, the same situation applied.

A shortage of currency, which facilitates trade, would cause complicated problems in all kinds of places. What would happen if an entire village had a shortage of copper coins, for example? To express it in my previous world’s terms, this would be a society in which there was a severe reduction in the number of 100-yen and 10-yen coins, there were still plenty of larger-value notes circulating, and one couldn’t easily be exchanged for the other. What would happen if you tried to trade for a product with a fractional price in a society like that?

Starting with the obvious, once everyone started to run out of coins, they would become reluctant to use them. Buyers wouldn’t want to use their coins if they could help it, because those coins were used everywhere for all kinds of low-value payments, and if a buyer ran out of them, it would cause them problems whenever they tried to trade. Similarly, if sellers handed out change to all and sundry, their change would dry up in no time, and they would be put in a tight spot for future transactions. So they too wouldn’t want to hand over their coins.

Stalls wouldn’t want to be paid in large notes and would ask the buyers to pay with coins, while their customers would want to pay with notes and receive coins as change. The result of both parties seeking the optimal solution as seen from their own viewpoints would be a deadlock. This would not be a recipe for smooth and amicable transactions. It would cause arguments all over, and I could imagine it resulting in something like a stop on trading. It could still get worse from there, leading to all kinds of issues: counterfeit money starting to spread, the villages returning to a bartering system...

Just as a human being becomes unwell if they lose too much blood, the loss of money, which facilitates trade between different things, would eat away at the healthy operation of the economy.

That was the core of the “lack of copper coins” problem. And now I had to think about how to resolve it.

“I guess we can’t expect a shortage of coppers to resolve itself naturally.”

“Oh? So you know about this, Will.”

“My grandfather taught me.”

The story might have been different for gold or silver coins, but it would be difficult to hope for a natural resolution to a shortage of coppers. The reason was simple.

Again by comparison to the money of my previous world, let’s say, for example, that there was a terrible shortage of 10,000-yen notes in a certain region, and you could exchange one of them there for eleven 1,000-yen notes. Would there be someone in another region, where there was a sufficient supply of 10,000-yen notes, who would think: “I will collect a good number of 10,000-yen notes—say a thousand of them, ten million yen’s worth—send them over, and make a million yen in profit”? There almost certainly would. And so the imbalance would be naturally resolved.

But what if, similarly, there was a terrible shortage of 10-yen coins in a certain region, and you could exchange a thousand of them there for eleven 1,000-yen notes? Would there be someone in another region, where there was a sufficient supply of 10-yen coins, who would think: “I will collect a million of these coins, count them all up, send this massive amount of coins over, which will probably weigh about half a ton including the containers, and make a million yen in profit”? And let’s add to this that vehicles with internal combustion engines like cars and motorbikes simply don’t exist.

No, they probably wouldn’t even consider it. It would be too much of a hassle. After factoring in the time it would take and the amount it would cost to collect, count, transport, and secure all that money, it wouldn’t be worth the million-yen return. Low-denomination currency is heavy and not worth much, and the copper coins of this world were no different. Nothing was less suited to sending across regions and making a profit from the difference in price.

So shortages of low-denomination currency wouldn’t naturally resolve themselves. Gus had talked about this during his economics lectures, seemingly with great relish. What could be done, then?

“Let’s see...” I thought for a moment. “Alright, I’m just asking, but it wouldn’t be possible for you to issue something like small-change notes from your store...”

“That would be difficult. I am not sufficiently trusted.”

That was one possible solution: handing out promissory notes made of paper or wood with “however-many coppers” written on them and using them as local currency. In other words, making something that was like the first step towards a banknote. However, this required a lot of trust and assets.

“Then, buy coppers in bulk in Whitesails?”

That was another quick fix option: pay money to get money.

“That would be a reliable method, certainly. However, as I am sure you are aware, Whitesails itself suffers from a slight but chronic shortage of copper coins as well. Making a large purchase of them—”

“Could lead to negative effects on Whitesails, too? I don’t think it would be that bad.”

“Not ‘that bad,’ no. Nevertheless, the influential figures of Whitesails may not look upon you too kindly for it.”

I had to give him that. Whitesails was a relatively new city, created for the purpose of developing the south, and prospering under the governance of His Excellency, brother to the king. The fact that it was prospering meant that the scale of its economy was growing, and that brought with it an increase in trade and the amount of currency changing hands. There were probably some people of status struggling to manage the amount of currency in circulation. They couldn’t simply ask the Fertile Kingdom mints on the mainland across the sea to increase the supply of copper coins. It wouldn’t be that easy. In this age, copper coins weren’t something you could just churn out like that.

First of all, making a lot of copper coins would require a large amount of the raw resource—that is, copper—and if you purchased too much at once, it would cause a shortage in the amount of copper available for everyday necessities, and the copper price would rise. Then what would happen is that copper coins would become many times cheaper than copper itself, which would mean that if someone secretly melted the copper coins down and made them into copper ingots, they would make a lot of money. At that point, no matter how many more copper coins you made, they would be melted down in secret, even if you enacted a law prohibiting it. Every time you minted the coins from the raw resources, they would be melted back down again. It would be a catastrophe. The face value of the copper coins and their value as raw metal couldn’t be allowed to change places.

Organizing monetary policy on a macro scale was a pretty mentally challenging job in my previous world, and it was no different here. If I wandered into the midst of the people putting serious thought into all that and started making very inconsiderate large purchases of copper coins, yeah, I could imagine they wouldn’t think much of me. Tonio was very shrewd.

“But then what else is there?”

We couldn’t possibly mint new coppers ourselves. Firstly, the private minting and counterfeiting of currency was prohibited by law, and anyway, making currency was quite expensive. After considering the cost of acquiring the raw resources, the labor cost of the workers who would make the coins, and the cost of the facility itself among other things, by some estimates, it would never be profitable to mint copper coins instead of silver or gold.

“That is the crux of the matter,” Tonio said. “If we go about this cleverly, we might be able to scratch the back of the people in Whitesails a little.”

Now he’d caught my interest. That sounded pretty tempting. I unconsciously leaned in. Tonio grinned at me.

“You must have an inkling, Will.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Of a place where we could acquire a veritable mountain of copper coins.”

“Ohh.”

I did indeed.

◆

Just like many areas in my previous world’s history, in the regions along the coast of Middle-sea between Grassland and Southmark, a pretty diverse array of coins were in circulation, even including privately minted ones. It was a kind of mixed-currency system. Among these various currencies, the well-made coins with high precious-metal content were particularly highly trusted.

So what was the highest-quality and most-trusted currency in this area? Was it the money minted by the Fertile Kingdom? The high-quality coins from the lands of the dwarves? Or was it the money of some more distant power? Actually, it was none of them. The most trusted money along the coast of Middle-sea was the coins used during the much more stable period of the Union Age two hundred years ago. They were intricately made with high precious-metal content and could be found in ruins all over. The government that had created them was now defunct, so there was no danger of them being minted in large quantities or the composition being tampered with. For all these reasons, they were the “key currency” in regions near Middle-sea at present.

“You’re right.” I gave a single nod. “There were copper coins in the foul-dragon’s mountain of treasure.”

I remembered fishing around a bit in that mountain of treasure after the battle with Valacirca to replace my mostly destroyed clothes and armor. In keeping with the nature of treasure-hoarding dragons, Valacirca had amassed a large number of copper coins. It didn’t seem as though he’d treated them with any particular care, however. Countless numbers of them were just scattered randomly about the bottom of the pile with an attitude like, “Well, I do own them, and they’re my treasure, so I guess I won’t bother to throw them away.” Of course, the majority of them were copper coins from the Union Age or slightly before.

“The problem is how to split the treasure up.”

“If it’s to be used as a bargaining chip with His Excellency?”

“Exactly.”

The law of monster-hunting in this world was for all the spoils of battle, including the corpse, to go to the victor. However, since all five of us who took on the foul-dragon had claim to the treasure, I couldn’t use the entire vast hoard however I wanted. What’s more, the treasure hoard also contained a lot of relics from the Iron Country, so I had to consider its former people, too. Honestly, we’d all been putting this issue on hold. We were very busy, and everyone anticipated that it would be annoyingly complicated to distribute.

Tonio went through the steps in a soft tone. “Firstly, we negotiate for special arrangements to be made regarding the revival of the Iron Country and Lothdor, conditional on the sale to His Excellency Ethelbald of a fixed number of copper coins at a low wholesale price. If that is the purpose for which the foul-dragon’s treasure is being organized, it will at least be easy to persuade everyone.”

He continued, his speech measured and fluid. “Then, I will send trustworthy people to the mountain, safely and quickly store away the foul-dragon’s corpse and treasure hoard, and have its value estimated. There’s quite a large amount of it, yes? There will probably be items that can’t be broken up or ones whose value is completely unknown. There is the danger of theft, too. It will take quite a lot of effort to find trustworthy appraisers and guards, to store and, of course, transport it all, but I believe it will be worth the effort.”

“I see.” I nodded. “So how much do I have to pay you?” I said with a wry smile.

There was a short silence from Tonio. Then he laughed nervously.

“Nothing gets by the Paladin, does it?”

“My grandfather taught me well.”

We smiled silently at each other.

Tonio was my friend, but first and foremost he was an independent merchant. Once he learned of the existence of a treasure hoard belonging to a dragon that had lived since the age of the gods, he obviously went about trying to find a way he could profit from it. And it wasn’t difficult for Tonio to profit here.

The mountain of treasure that Valacirca had left behind was truly enormous. It wasn’t as simple as slaying the dragon, getting the treasure, and all being good. There were a large number of magical items that could become a source of trouble and would have to be properly categorized, sorted, valued, and stored. The amount of treasure was ridiculous. It would take a serious amount of effort just to move it all. And neither I nor anyone who traveled with me had the technology or workforce to categorize, sort, value, store, and appropriately handle the mountain of treasure that the foul-dragon had been hoarding.

We couldn’t possibly manage that much treasure. The only one of us who could would be Al, who was in a position to give orders to the dwarves, the former owners of the Iron Country. However, he was still inexperienced, and I couldn’t say that he had enough people for the job.

There was plenty of opportunity for a shrewd merchant to take advantage of here in the name of “helping.” With a smile, he would offer to help me out as a friend, and take profit from the treasure for a range of expenses. It was a very clever way of going about things, I thought, but what impressed me most of all was something else.

“It’s so like you to come up with something where no one loses out.”

Tonio looked astonished. “I am quite clearly trying to take a sizeable portion of the treasure you own...”

“I don’t intend to look down on the way you deal with money or business. Besides, a fortune that I can’t handle and don’t even know how much I have isn’t what I’d call a fortune.”

It would be impossible for me to manage what would be at least a fifth of that mountain all by myself. I would have to give the job of managing it to someone anyway. And it was only natural to pay money when asking someone to do something for you.

“I get someone to manage the treasure. Win for me. In exchange for going to all the effort to manage the treasure, you get continuous profit. Win for you. Because more people and dwarves will be going in and out of the Iron Mountains to organize the dragon’s treasure, work will start on improving the living conditions there and making sure there’s a safe route to and fro, so for Al and the others who aim to see it revived, that’s also a win. Lothdor will likely be one of the routes, so they’ll gain from this, too. You’ll probably hire a lot of people for all kinds of miscellaneous tasks, which creates jobs, so the townspeople and any new settlers also benefit. And I expect you’re thinking about using the foul-dragon’s silver and copper coins to pay their wages as well.”

And then a sufficient number of silver and copper coins would make their way around Torch Port and the surrounding areas from the work being done at the Iron Mountains. The area around here would prosper, and we could help solve the currency shortage.

On a quick lookover, I couldn’t see anyone who lost out with this plan. He’d brought this up casually, but thinking about how well everything fit together and knowing Tonio’s personality, he’d probably put a lot of thought into this.

“You’ve planned this out well,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

Now that he had described it to me, I could form a picture in my head of how it would all fit together, but I wouldn’t have been able to come up with it myself, and I wouldn’t be able to actually carry it out. I didn’t have the necessary contacts or the detailed business knowledge. I was a warrior, priest, and sorcerer. Although I understood money in a broad sense, having learned from Gus, I was by no means a professional merchant. I couldn’t negotiate the world of business alone.

In that case, would it be an easy task for Tonio, a merchant by trade? Probably not. He was still an up-and-coming merchant in an up-and-coming town. He was building people, resources, and trust, but nothing was fully there yet.

“I think it will be a huge undertaking, and I also think the foul-dragon’s treasure has the power to send people mad,” I said. “There might be a lot of temptations, and there might be times when you draw hatred you don’t deserve.”

We had risked our lives to defeat the dragon, and I was sure that managing his treasure was going to come with many burdens as well. Not all battles involved taking on a dragon with a weapon in hand. Running a business dealing with money was a battle, too. If you messed it up, a lot of people would die by the roadside. Instead of suffering death by a sword, they would lose their jobs, pride, and dignity, and either turn to crime out of hunger or die of despair. If taking on an evil dragon about to awaken was a battle that took courage, then spending every day creating jobs for others, making lots of trades, and trying to get money into circulation was a battle that took a lot of courage as well. At the very least, it was no different in the way that he could save a lot of people if he pulled it off.

So I placed my hand on the left side of my chest, looked straight at him, and said, “I can trust you, Tonio. Can I feel safe in the knowledge that you’ve got my back?”

Tonio didn’t say anything for a while. His eyes fixed on mine. We looked at each other quietly.

Finally, he placed his own hand on the left side of his chest, and said solemnly, “I swear by Gracefeel, god of the flame and your protector, and by Whirl, god of wind and business—I do indeed have your back. Please leave this to me.”

He offered me his hand, and I shook it. We had a deal.

◆

After our discussion of the dragon’s treasure hoard wrapped up, I found myself with another item added to my to-do list: finding a path to the Iron Mountains. Of course, there was always the same route as before, the one that passed through Lothdor via my home, the City of the Dead. However, that route ran through regions that really were at the very outskirts of Southmark’s development and was fraught with danger. Not only that, it was quite a long and roundabout way of getting there starting from Whitesails.

It would probably be far better, especially for the future transportation of the copper coins, if I could rediscover the path that must once have connected the Iron Mountains to the northern coast, where Whitesails was. The trade routes through Middle-sea were important during the Union Age as well, so I couldn’t imagine that there was no path at all. I started thinking about searching for it when I had some time. And that was when...

“An invincible... giant?”

...I heard the rumor.

“Uh-huh. It’s just what I heard, but yeah, he’s out there...”

“G-Glen! You can’t speak like that to our liege...”

“What, you want me to start kissing his butt now? That’d just be awkward.”

“Yeah, it’s okay, Glen. You too, Alex, you can relax. It’s not like anyone’s listening.”

On a Torch Port street by the river where several piers jutted out side by side and the winter wind blew through, I happened to meet Glen and Alex, the adventurers to whom I had previously entrusted the dagger that was the shortened Pale Moon.

Both of them seemed to be picking up enough requests to survive okay. Their equipment had gotten a little better recently, too. Glen, the black-haired boy who’d been dressed in hemp and had a crude club and bow as weapons, was now wearing leather armor, and instead of his club he had a tough-looking mace. The ginger kid called Alex, who I assumed to be male but wasn’t going to ask, still had his ash wand and dark-colored robe, but it looked like he was wearing some light chain mail underneath the robe now.

It was good that they weren’t neglecting their armor. They’d also chosen well-made rucksacks and belt pouches. They deserved top marks for that, too. But most important to me was that Glen still had the Pale Moon dagger at his waist. Seeing that warmed my heart a little. Pale Moon was still out there on its journey, being of use to someone.

“Near Beast Woods, in the northeast bit of the Rust Mountains—uh, are they the Iron Mountains now that you freed them from the dragon? Anyway, there’s a village near there, and like, they’re up shit creek. The water from the river’s bad, and there’s a pissed-off giant who’s decided the clean-water spring nearby is his turf now.”

“Umm, and there were several strong adventurers who heard the rumors and tried their hand at it, but they were all beaten.”

“And that’s the Invincible Giant?”

Glen and Alex nodded as one.

“It’s just talk, so beats me if it’s true, but they were saying stuff like, he’s invincible, stinking huge, freaking scary, someone go fight him, whoever beats him’s getting a medal, that kind of stuff.”

“We heard the same story in adventurer taverns all over. At first we thought it was just the drunks making up nonsense, but there were also some sober people...”

“Huh...” I thought for a bit. Rumors were a big source of information in this world, but that meant that misinformation got mixed in from time to time. Just like in my previous world, false rumors spread relatively easily. For example, someone could see a place that looked creepy and crack a joke, saying, “That place looks like it’d have a demon lurking in it.” Then someone would hear that and say, “There might be a demon lurking in there.” And before you knew it, it would be, “I heard there’s a demon lurking in there,” and a nonexistent demon threat would be created. That kind of thing happened a lot.

And even without calling on that kind of coincidence, there were always those troubled people who would tell huge lies with a knowing smirk out of a desire for attention, to put themselves in the limelight and satisfy their need for social approval.

So I wasn’t going to immediately take the claims of a giant at face value—but I’d only just been thinking about how I wanted to investigate the route to the Iron Mountains anyway.

“I think I’ll go and check it out,” I said.

“No kidding. First a dragon, now a giant? You’re a madman...”

“There might be people who need help, and I have business over there anyway. I’ll at least go to see whether he’s there or not.” I thanked them for the information, asked them to tell me if they heard anything more, and gave them a few silver and copper coins.

“W-We can’t take this much...” Alex tried to politely turn me down.

But I insisted. “It’s your info fee. It’s good for an adventurer to be a little profit-greedy. Put it toward something.”

After showing a little hesitation, he nodded and took them from me. “Alright. A little profit-greedy... I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Okay, I’ll be going now. Oh, Glen, how’s the dagger? Does it feel good to use?”

“I had a beast on top of me one time, and it was looking pretty bad. I just managed to bury this guy into him. Saved me. Thanks for the good dagger, bud.” Glen grinned.

I grinned back and gave his shoulder a friendly bump with my fist.

◆

The air there was very cold, perhaps because of the wind blowing down from the Iron Mountains. The ground in the area didn’t look to be very fertile, either. Under a slightly cloudy sky, the crops grew low to the ground, lying flat like a person crawling. Winter wheat and root vegetables like turnips and carrots were planted there. They were extremely ordinary produce, but they looked a little lifeless and shriveled. The climate had to be the cause. That, and...

“Urgh. That is gross.”

Menel gave a huge frown when he saw the river. The water was a reddish-brown color. It wasn’t that the rain had washed earth and sand downstream, temporarily polluting the river, or that there were just a lot of red rocks on the riverbed in the first place. It was something more.

I squatted down next to the river and sniffed the water. It smelled of rust. I licked a drop of it. The taste was a little bitter and astringent. “It looks like the river’s flowing down from the Iron Mountains, so I guess the underground water vein that the spring’s linked up to must be passing through an iron deposit.”

The iron content of the water had combined with the oxygen in the air and turned the water red. If it was just that there was a little more iron in the water than there should be, that wouldn’t be too terrible. But it was possible that it also contained other components of mineral origin. That was a scary thought. Given that there were people living here, it probably wasn’t toxic to the point that drinking a bit of it would immediately do anything to you, but at the very least, it was bitter and a disgusting color, and wasn’t pleasant to drink.

We went quiet for a period as we walked along the path by the river, looking at the nearby fields.

“Heyyyy!” Working in a field a little way off was a farmer wearing a thin towel around his head and tied under his chin. Noticing the two of us, he called out, dragging out his voice so it would carry. “Who are you two?! Adventurers?!”

I took a deep breath. “Yes!” I yelled back, stretching my words in the same way. “Pretty much! How are the fields?!”

“Well, so-so, you know!”

“Is the head of your village here?!”

“Sure! Follow the road, it’s the house at the top of the hill!”

“Thank you for your help!”

“How’s the city?! Any news?!”

“The mountain dragon was slain! The winter solstice festival will be a big party!”

“Oh, so it’s true! That’s a relief! Great news!”

Then we waved goodbye from afar and parted ways.

“You’ve gotten pretty used to this,” Menel said. “You used to be like some sheltered kid who’d never set foot in the real world.”

“It has been three years.”

We chatted like that for a while as we continued along the footpath towards the village houses, giving our greetings to the farmers we met along the way working in the fields. All of a sudden, I heard loud laughter.

“Hey, we have visitors! Welcome!”

I saw someone who looked to be the village chief come out of a house on top of a hill, probably after hearing our voices. It was a lively young woman. The sheath of the dagger she was wearing had a crest on it, so she had to be... nobility?!

◆

“Wahahah! Never expected the noble Faraway Paladin’s party! Well, get it down you! I’ll warn you now, though, it tastes like crap!”

“Urgh, you weren’t kidding!” Menel said.

The woman cackled. “Straight to my face, huh? The beautiful Swift Wings of elven blood, they said. I thought, that guy sounds like a piss-elegant, stuck-up asshole. But hey, you ain’t bad!”

“That’s those stories for you. All of them are like that, big talk, big fat lies. Nothing stays small with those guys! Their stories swell faster than a pervert’s pants.”

“Whoa whoa whoa! Do you really have elf blood? Where’d your elegance go?!”

“Ya, ya, and what about you? Where’s your gracefulness?” Menel screwed up his face. “Gods, this ale tastes like piss! This is what passes for booze around here?! Fig, you’ve got it bad!”

“Right?! Nothing’s worse than shitty booze. Puts a real damper on your mood!”

“Should’ve brought some myself! Tell you what, here’s a gift. Go on, take it!”

“What’s—Oh, salt! Nice!”

The pace of their verbal catchball was frenetic. I sat there speechless, unable to believe this was a conversation that was taking place between a pretty-faced half-elf and a noble-blooded woman. Just as Menel said, I probably was a bit sheltered when it came to things like this. The two of them picked away at their porridge, a mix of wheat and various kinds of wild grass boiled to a pulp (in water from the river, so it was a little red and smelled strange), and knocked back ale while making crude jokes and laughing loudly.

The village chief had introduced herself as Carmela Faraqa, saying, “Technically I’m a baroness, but it’s not like that counts for squat. Don’t go calling me Lady Faraqa!” And then she’d given a boisterous laugh.

Carmela had—I didn’t really like saying this kind of thing about a woman, but you could tell even through her farm clothes that she had a well-shaped body. When I say “well-shaped,” I don’t mean that she had a big butt or an hourglass figure or anything like that, simply that she had a good physique and muscle. In terms of age, I put her in her mid-twenties. Her hair and eyes were quite dark. While she did have a feminine facial structure, she also had thick, prominent eyebrows, and I thought that if she disguised herself as a man, she could probably pass as some famous warrior. The way she spoke, too, was terribly rough. I wouldn’t have recognized it as a woman’s voice except that it was a little bit too high for a man’s.

“A baroness? Then, Carmela, you must be...”

“Yup. Here to ‘take back our land,’ or whatever.”

In the pandemonium caused by the High King of the demons two hundred years ago, Southmark suffered catastrophic damage, civilization disappeared almost completely, and people fled to the northern continent of Grassland. But because Grassland was also in great chaos, reconquering Southmark was impossible. Trees swallowed what was left of the towns and cities, rivers changed their course, and the continent became infested with all kinds of threats. And so Southmark became a place at the farthest reaches of the world where mankind dared not tread.

And then, just a few decades ago, the Fertile Kingdom, having unified the southwestern part of Grassland, embarked on the colonization of Southmark under the direction of the king at the time. The Fertile Kingdom, named as the successor of a kingdom of the same name that originally existed during the Union Age—although whether that was actually true was a little questionable—also had the noble cause of restoring its old territory. And there was a certain group that gave this the final push.

“Back in the Union Age, my ancestors apparently had land around here in the old Fertile Kingdom.”

That group consisted of nobles like Carmela who once owned rights to land in Southmark. Those aristocrats powerful enough two hundred years ago to own territory across both continents of Grassland and Southmark kept that clout when Southmark fell. Even some of the families who only owned land in Southmark—for instance, those who managed to flee to the north or who still had a surviving holder of succession rights in the north—were able to take advantage of their education and bloodline to serve in the royal courts of various countries as nobles of the robe.

Of course, there were lineages that went extinct or fell into decline. But some noble families joined by marriage, and that coordination was a force not to be underestimated. A good number of bloodlines survived in some form or another by helping each other out. Recovering their former territory became a desire that spanned generations, and it was their financial investment that drove the Fertile Kingdom’s reconquest and recolonization of Southmark.

“’Course, you can tell by taking a look at this village that House Faraqa’s poor as all get-out. We just owned a few lousy bits of land in the south, where you couldn’t even grow much. Even in the north, we’re flicking abacuses, keeping accounts, and sucking up to everyone for chicken feed. When the expansion into Southmark got started, they scratched together some cash and sent over a few feisty-looking guys, including one tomboy who liked the martial arts. Yeah, I might be here to ‘take back our land,’ but I’m like the last hair on the dog’s tail as far as that goes.”

Just as Carmela had said, everyone’s situation was different. There were some rich houses who were raring to go, the prime example being royal houses who had absorbed several older families from the south and held rights to a lot of land on the coast of Southmark. Their plan was to join up with powerful companies, pour in tons of cash, expand and develop, and eventually get a return on their investment. And then there were families like Carmela’s, who scraped together what money they could and sent someone in because there was nothing to lose. However, in the latter case—the families without a lot of funds or power—the goal wasn’t to profit from the colonization effort.

“Let me guess. You got sent here to stake your family’s claim to the land?”

“Bingo.”

It was out of fear that the land that on paper they were supposed to own would, in practice, become controlled by some other pioneers—probably backed by the more wealthy aristocrats.

Once that land fell under someone else’s control, no amount of arguing about their two-hundred-year-old rights to it would help them get it back. They were too weak. In fact, if the land was taken by powerful and wealthy aristocrats, even the “on paper” rights might be stolen from them by some complicated trickery. Even the little status they currently had as nobility would be on shaky ground.

The situation reminded me of the conflicts over land or estates that could give a family great political power in the history of my past life. And it was the nature of people in this age, in this world, that if the existence of their family line was threatened, they would go to some lengths to fight back. They would gather together whatever supplies they could or look for some patron, then just get some people together and send them in. There were quite a few unstable settlements that had been built under such circumstances in the northern part of Southmark.

Incidentally, I had asked His Excellency Ethel and Bishop Bagley about this kind of thing a long time ago, and they had told me that in Beast Woods and the places farther south, landowners—like Carmela—were virtually unheard of. That far south, entire families had been wiped out by the effects of the chaos two centuries ago, with very few surviving; on top of that, it was so difficult to develop here that there was almost no advantage to asserting any rights over the land.

Anyway, the general point was clear to me: Carmela Faraqa’s village was a relatively common type of reclamation settlement in Southmark.

“It’s unusual to send over a daughter, though.”

“Nah, it wasn’t like that. I had an older brother who came with me. He’s gone now.” Carmela’s expression clouded over.

Oh. He... passed away...? I swallowed unconsciously.

“The dude couldn’t hack it here and ran off to the north! What a wimp!”

I was speechless. Menel busted a gut laughing.

◆

“He runs off and his little sis stays behind? Show some guts, big bro!”

“You said it! Nobles set an example! You gotta take it on the chin! Laugh it off!”

This Carmela had... an incredibly strong character.

“My bro was definitely missing something between his legs—”

“Nothing but his dingus down there, and a fat lot of use that was!”

They both howled with laughter. By now, Menel was in tears and could hardly breathe. It seemed as though he’d really taken to this Carmela’s brashness.

“You’re from the capital... uh... Ilia’s Tear, aren’t you? What kind of life did you have, woman?! How the feck are you nobility?!”

She put on a mocking tone. “Unruly girl! Acts like a man! Faraqa’s eldest daughter has mental problems!”

“I bet you used that to do whatever the hell you wanted!”

“Why d’you think they sent me packing to the south?!”

The two of them burst into laughter again. What kind of a rowdy conversation was this? Blood would probably have fit right in here. But I couldn’t keep up with this. Maybe it was okay to leave it to Menel. He seemed to be handling it well for me.

“Hmm.” Carmela suddenly looked in my direction and cast a glance over my bowl of porridge. “Not making much headway, are you? Come on, eat up! Or is this food not to your taste, Paladin?”

I’d been so overwhelmed by their conversation that I hadn’t yet touched the porridge. Carmela gave me a slightly searching look. I could tell that she was probably testing me, and I couldn’t let that slide.

“Not at all. I just haven’t said grace yet. My apologies.”

“Oh yeah, gotta say grace first. ’Cause you’re a holy knight.”

I put my hands together and prayed. “Mater, our Earth-Mother, gods of good virtue, bless this food, which by thy merciful love we are about to receive, and let it sustain us in body and mind. For the grace of the gods, we are truly thankful.” Then I took up the spoon and shoveled porridge into my mouth.

The rusty and grassy smell of the bland gruel spread throughout my mouth, but I polished it off in one go. “Thank you very much for the food! Could I trouble you for another bowl?” I banged the bowl back down on the table.

A subtle smile crept onto Menel’s face and he nodded at me. He’d probably picked up on my intent.

Carmela gave a single short laugh. I’d caught her attention. “Go on then,” she said, heaping more into the bowl. “Seconds.”

“Thank you!” I ate it. I placed the bowl down. She filled it again. Again, I ate it and placed the bowl down. I could smell the rust rising from my stomach.

But Carmela grinned at me. “You’re a good eater! You finished off three whole bowls of this crap? Don’t tell me you actually like how it tastes?”

“No. While I’m very grateful for your hospitality, I didn’t find it delicious. Also, I have to say, I’m not the kind of person who’s very good at these blunt, in-your-face conversations. But still...” I was a warrior, and I had pride to uphold: the pride of inheriting the sword of Blood the War Ogre. “If you thought I was a pansy who could only put good food to his mouth, I’ll consider myself insulted!”

“Damn right!” she shouted back in retort, then laughed. “I know a warrior when I see one! I let your gentle manner make me doubt your guts. I apologize unreservedly! Drink and make up?” She held her cup of ale towards me.

“Of course,” I replied, bashed my own cup against hers, and downed the rust-smelling ale all in one go. I exhaled with a refreshing “ahhh” sound. “It was a good and filling meal! Carmela, thank you for the food!”

Menel gobbled down the last of his porridge, washed it down with some ale, and exhaled louder than me. “Me, too. That was a blast.”

Carmela laughed. “I dunno how you can compliment this gross stuff. Guess I gotta thank Whirl for bringing me good guests!”

She shook Menel and me by the hand. Her nails were packed with dirt and her hands covered in calluses. They were the hands of a worker.

◆

“The Invincible Giant? He’s here alright.”

Those were the first words out of Carmela’s mouth after we had finished the meal she had kindly provided for us and told her our true reason for coming here.

“First, the river flowing through here—we call it the Red River—yeah, it’s just as bad as it looks. Iron in the water. And we know for sure that to the southwest, on the rocky plateau between us and the mountains, there’s a bountiful spring that pumps out a lot of clean water, maybe from another water vein. Right now that all ends up in the Red River, but if we could come up with some smart way to draw it, this village’s lot would probably improve. And the stuff about the giant making the area around the spring his turf and getting rid of anyone who goes there, that’s true, too.”

Carmela briskly and efficiently went through what we needed to know. So far, it sounded like the majority of the rumors had been true.

“But I ain’t killing him,” she said, taking me by surprise. “You’re right, a few adventurers did hear the rumors, come here, and take on the giant, driven by ambition or something. But none of the villagers wanted that, and neither do I.”

“May I ask why?”

“Of course. Paladin, I heard you slayed the mountain dragon, so of course you remember that soul-chilling howl, right? And the demons you chased from the mountains.”

“Yes.” I nodded.

Without a moment’s pause, she continued. “This is the closest village to the mountains. Beasts gone berserk and demons you didn’t kill swarmed us. Guess why we’re still here?”

At this point, I could tell what Carmela was getting at.

“I’m not giving you flack here, but seriously, we should be toast, right? Look where we are and what state we’re in. My martial arts ain’t about to save this village, that’s for sure.”

It was strange that there was even a village surviving in this place directly northeast of the Iron Mountains to begin with. After the dragon awakened, the beasts went berserk, and the remaining demons scattered everywhere, it was to be expected that they would be destroyed, just another victim of this world’s commonplace tragedies, everyday calamities. That was the kind of location they were in. And the reason it hadn’t happened that way was probably because...

“The Invincible Giant crushed them all. As intruders on his turf.” Carmela’s manner of speaking wasn’t overly emotional in the slightest. She just continued to share the facts with us in a businesslike fashion. “The giant doesn’t open up to people. He doesn’t even let us get close. We tried having a dialogue with him, but it went nowhere.”

However, I thought I could sense an undertone to her voice now. It felt a little warmer.

“But he isn’t our enemy.” She had a bit of a happy look on her face. It was a subtle smile that I could barely recognize. “As long as we don’t violate his territory, he leaves us alone. If anything comes to break the peace, he’ll wipe out those enemies and get back on with life. He gives nothing to us, but takes nothing away. Can you call that an enemy?”

I shook my head. Menel did the same. She was right. The giant was no enemy.

“Sure, the Faraqa family were the owners of this land two long centuries ago. It’s said the village thrived, also doubling as a rest stop on the way from the Iron Country to the northern coast. But those were just arrangements made between humans. To him, that spring and that plateau ain’t Faraqa land; they’re his home, where he lives.” Carmela gave a slight shrug. “He’s no friend, but he ain’t our enemy either. If anything, he’s a neighbor.”

“And barging into a neighbor’s house to kill them and take their things is what a robber does?” Menel said.

Carmela nodded. “Yeah. Well, he probably doesn’t consider us neighbors. Might even think we’re with the adventurers who came for him. But at least, for our part, we want to think of him that way. We don’t plan on robbing him.”

“That’s the right choice, if you ask me,” Menel said back. “I really think that. So anyway, question: You said this used to be a rest stop?”

“Hm? Yeah.”

I explained. “We came here partially because of the Invincible Giant, but also because we were searching for an old road linking the north to the Iron Country.”

“Right. Well, there’s the remains of an old stone path. I can tell you where it is, but—” She sighed. “The road goes through his turf.”

We had a problem.

◆

I wavered at the edge of consciousness.

We had a problem. We had a problem, and then—

And then what? What happened after that?

Oh, now I remembered.

We followed the path.

We messed up a little.

We ran into the giant.

He really was invincible...

And strong...

And relentless...

And showed no signs of letting me escape...

It hurt. It really hurt.

It really hit home... how small humans were.

We could defeat a god of undeath, defeat a dragon, and still, even the slightest mistake could break us in an instant, leaving nothing but emptiness behind. We could never be invincible like that giant.

And yet for some reason, despite being undefeatable, that giant seemed—

◆

...
......
.........

I felt like I’d been having a long dream. Something was blaring inside my head.

“...l!”

The noise throbbed like a heartbeat. It was obnoxiously loud. I tried to open my eyes. All I could see was red.

“...ill!”

Huh?

Before I could give it any thought, excruciating pain racked my entire body. It hurt so bad that I couldn’t even scream. Tears spilled from the corners of my eyes as I suffered in agony. My arms hurt, my legs hurt, my stomach, my back, my whole body. I felt as though whole handfuls of iron nails had been driven into every part of me.

“Will! Will! You awake?! Will!!”

Amid all this, I heard a voice. It was Menel’s. But I could only hear it from my left. Why was that? Now that I thought about it, my bright-red world was awfully narrow. I could only see the left half of it...

“Pray! Will, pray! Pray!”

Pr...ay? I can’t, Menel. How can I pray when it hurts so much...?

“Hurry up and pray! Live! Live, damn you! Don’t die here, you fig idiot!”

I was being shaken. My whole body was in pain.

“Will! Will! Feck! ‘Thou spirits of life, drink my blood and eat my flesh’...” He groaned. “Come on!”

I felt a little warm. The cold came right back.

“Please... Pray, please, Will! Feck, feck! God! God!”

I ached. I hurt. Tears poured down my face.

“Gracefeel! Gracefeel! I... I’m trash! I’ve lived a no-good life, I probably couldn’t hold my head high in front of you if I died!”

And yet... And yet, I felt strangely tired. Incredibly... tired.

A high-pitched noise rang incessantly in my ear.

“But meeting this guy saved me! He made me a bit of a better person! He’s always given everything! You know it! So please! Please!”

The world had gotten awfully quiet. Oh... If I closed my eyes now, it would be heaven. I could just... slip... into sleep. The idle thoughts of my hazy mind told me it would feel... really... good.

“Save Will! Don’t take my friend away! Gracefeel! God of the flame, please!”

Hearing nothing,

sinking under,

letting go,

I closed

my

“Rise!”

A voice cut through my head fog like a bolt of lightning.

“Rise! Rise! Rise!!”

It wasn’t a very pretty voice. It wasn’t pleasing to the ear.

“Why do you sleep?! Wake yourself—”

It was the voice of a girl who wasn’t used to speaking loudly, yelling at me, her voice shaking...

“Rise, my knight!”

I was awakened. This was the one voice I couldn’t betray.

If she says to rise, you rise!

If she says do not sleep, you summon everything you have to stay awake!

My soul shouted that at me. Power welled inside me. It was as though a cool breeze had blown through me from my head to my toes. Each and every one of the cells throughout my body seethed with energy.

I opened my red-stained eyes. I could see a red sky and Menel’s red face. I twisted slightly. Immediately, the pain that had felt so far-off because of my drowsiness ran straight through my body. It hurt. It really, really hurt. The pain in the right-hand side of my body in particular was agonizing.

I finally realized: my right eye had been half-crushed. My right eardrum had ruptured. I wasn’t sure if I could feel anything beyond my right elbow. A sideways swipe from that enormous club had slammed hard into the right-hand side of my body. My bones and flesh had been smashed and torn, and I had fallen down a sharp, rocky slope. Though my body had become a little more resilient through absorbing Valacirca’s dragon factor, it was amazing that I was even still alive. Every time my heart beat, it felt like I was being gouged with bunches of nails. Every time I twisted my body, it felt like a branding iron was being held against my skin.

But my god was right beside me. I could feel it. And so I was able to put all that aside and pray.

Even if it hurts, even if I suffer, so long as you are beside me, I will devote everything to you.

Please tell me what it is you desire, just as you desire it.

Whatever your wishes, however many they are, as long as I have life left in me, I...

◆

I came to under a starry sky of dancing phosphorescence. But my whole body was in pain. I faced the starry sky unable to move, as if floating in it. Far away in the dark sky, at the edge of my expanded perception, I could sense many worlds—universes—crossing paths. Untold numbers of twinkling souls danced across worlds with simple-minded and single-minded purpose.

“...”

As I lay there, I suddenly became aware of a hooded figure sitting unobtrusively beside my head. It was the god of the flame. She was sitting with her legs folded to one side, looking down upon me like a beautiful mermaid resting on a rock near the shore.

“You asked me my desires.”

It seemed that I had come closer to death than ever before. I couldn’t speak. I nodded yes inside my mind. When I did, she rested her small, pale hand softly on my cheek. Her hand was smooth and cold to the touch, but warmth spread into my body from where she was touching. The silence continued a while longer. It was a comfortable silence.

“My knight.”

Yes? I answered internally.

“I want to hold the hands of those who are lonely or weary.”

I understand. Then please, use my arms.

“Your arms are broken. With them broken, you cannot do that, so I will take your ‘being broken’ and the pain of it upon myself.”

I understand. As you wish. When I gave that answer, the pain vanished from my arms.

“I want to walk alongside those beaten down by injustice.”

I understand. Then please, use my legs.

“Your legs are shattered. With them shattered, you cannot do that, so I will take your ‘being shattered’ and the pain of it upon myself.”

I understand. As you wish. When I gave that answer, the pain vanished from my legs.

“I want to offer words of kindness to those at the end of their rope.”

I understand. Then please, use my mouth.

“Your head is cracked. With it cracked, you cannot do that, so I will take your ‘being cracked’ and the pain of it upon myself.”

I understand. As you wish. When I gave that answer, the pain vanished from my head.

“I... I want to praise those who are simply living in earnest, for the simple reason that they are living in earnest, and I want to love them.”

I understand. Then please, use everything I have within my chest.

“Your chest is torn. With it torn, you cannot do that, so I will take your ‘being torn’ and the pain of it upon myself.

I understand. As you wish. When I gave that answer, the pain vanished from my chest.

“My knight.”

Yes.

“I love people.”

...

“I have been here all along, loving people and watching over them.”

...
“I am a god, so I do not grow weary, nor do I tire.”

...

“However...”

...

“However, I... just a little, I...”

...

“...think that I want to be loved by someone, too.”

The words seemed to fall out of her mouth, her voice heartrendingly quiet and shaking slightly.

The moment I heard them, something hot welled up from deep inside my chest.

◆

The pain had receded, but my body wouldn’t obey me. It was like sleep paralysis. I commanded my body to listen. Converting the heat rising inside me into energy, I forced my shaky hand to move and my trembling throat to speak.

“...go...d.”

I took hold of the pale white hand that had been resting on my cheek. Maybe that was irreverent. The thought crossed my mind, but I didn’t stop. Everything I was belonged to her. If she disapproved of that, she could do what she wanted with me. I didn’t care what happened to me.

“You are already loved.”

In a space halfway between dream and prayer, I softly kissed the tips of her white fingers, and—

“Gracefeel... I love you.”

I confessed to her.

She looked down upon me as I lay there. I could fall very deep into those eyes.

“———”

Her beautiful face, framed by black hair, was as expressionless as ever. But to me, she looked a little surprised. The thought that God—my God—could be taken by surprise tickled me a little.

I thought back, trying to figure out when this had started. It was probably... right at the beginning. Ever since the time we first met.

I had lived an indistinct life and died an indistinct death. She guided me, a sniveling, moaning mess of regret and self-reproach, and silently showed me the path. Each time my knees shook and gave way and I could no longer walk, she turned around and waited patiently for me, the flame of her lantern shining a light on the dark road forward. Back then, I didn’t know her face or anything else about her. And that memory was now a part of my previous life, and all in a haze. I couldn’t even remember unless I came here. But ever since then...

“I have always loved you.”

I had loved her.

“I don’t want anything.”

I wasn’t asking her to return my feelings. I wasn’t even dreaming of receiving anything back. If she were to punish me for committing a sin or blasphemy, I wouldn’t resist or make excuses.

“But—”

But it was by no means a lie. I had told her I loved her because I wanted her to know, because it was true.

“I love you. Please... let me love you.”

“...”

God looked down upon me, saying nothing. I couldn’t read anything from her expression, either. And after a while of silence, the word she said was...

“Fool.”

I sighed internally. It was obvious. Something like that would never be allowed. There was no way she would accept me. What kind of punishment would I receive? No matter what awaited me, I promised myself I would never regret my choice. I fully resolved myself for what was to come.

The words that followed made my mind go blank.

“I will... suffer thee to do so.”

For some reason, God had returned to her previous stiff style of speech, but I wasn’t in a state to think about why.

“Fool. You really are... a fool.”

Yes. I have nothing to say in my defense. My grandfather was hoping for a great-grandchild. He’s going to be disappointed.

“I have no body of flesh.”

I’m aware.

“I do not have the strength to form an Echo.”

I’m aware.

“No matter how deep your feelings, you can only love.”

I don’t care. I’m ready for that.

But—

“On a day long ago,” I said, “you told me that we would go together. Until this life of mine ends. That’s all I want.” I lay there debilitated, looking up at God. Now that I thought about it, this had been a pretty uncool way to confess. “I love you...”

I looked up at her as I thought about how pathetic this was. The young, gentle, black-haired goddess looked back down at me.

“Such a fool...”

And, softly, she smiled.

When I awoke, I was lying flat on my back on soft grass behind some trees. I could hear birds chirping in the distance. The trees formed walls and a ceiling as if they were protecting me, and beams of sunlight were gently shining through. I recognized it as one of Menel’s elementalist techniques.

What... had happened? My memories of the events from before I woke up here were fuzzy.

Anyway, I thought I’d start by getting up, but when I tried, an irritating dryness in my throat sent me into a coughing fit. I was parched.

“Will... Hey, Will! You okay?! You’re awake!”

“Me...nehhl...”

As I looked at his face, I remembered. Of course. The giant’s club had sideswiped me. And then I went rolling down a rocky slope...

“You sound like shit! Here, have some water!” Menel was holding a drinking vessel made from a large, curved leaf. It was full of water. “It’s not that red iron water. Go on, drink!”

He rested one hand on the back of my neck and poured the water from the leaf cup into my mouth. It was colorless, smooth, and smelled faintly of fresh greenery. I gulped it down, drinking so fast that water spilled out from the corners of my mouth, and exhaled loudly when I was finished. I never knew that plain old water could be so delicious.

Laughing, Menel put a hand around my shoulder and mussed up my hair. “I thought you were a goner, damn you!” His eyes looked a little wet.

“Menel... I’m sorry for making you worry.”

He laughed it off. “Like I was actually worried! Your prayer worked—your injuries were healed. So you were obviously gonna wake up sooner or later.”

“Oh, okay.” I thought I’d seen Menel getting fairly distraught, but my memories were a little unclear, so I decided to avoid pointing it out.

“Umm... where are we?”

“The woods in a valley a bit away from that rocky plateau, outside his turf. After he smacked you flying and you fell down, I collected you and ran away.”

As I searched for something to say, he changed topics. “It’s no wonder they call that guy invincible. That’s definitely a giant from the age of the gods. Just like the foul-dragon, he’s not someone people should be carelessly messing with. It was a toss-up whether you’d even survive running into him.”

“Yeah. That was close. I almost died. I guess that counts as a total defeat.”

“Ya. Seriously, you did well to pray in that state.”

“I got the feeling that God was... calling out to me. Saying ‘rise.’”

He chuckled. “Someone loves you.”

It happened the moment he said it. My memories came back.

“......”

My memories—of that starry sky with dancing phosphorescence.

“.........”

“Hm? Will?”

“............”

“What’s up?”

...............

“Ah...”

“Ah?”

“Ahhhhhhhh!!” As the memories flashed back to me, each one triggering the next, I covered my eyes and yelled. I felt as if fire were going to erupt out of my face. What had I done? What had I done?

“What’s wrong? What happened?! Talk to me!”

“I-In my dream, I—I was talking to the god of the flame...”

“Sure. You’re a priest, you do that sometimes. So what, did you get a serious revelation or something?”

I shook my head. How could I put it? “I... confessed to God that... I... loved her...”

A silence fell.

“Eh, I mean... the god of the flame is a goddess.”

“If you don’t know what to say, you can just tell me that, you know?”

“I-It’s not unheard of. It happened in the legends, right? Love with a god...”

“Yeah, a long time ago. In the age of myth.”

“S-So... What was her reply? What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘Fool’...”

Menel went silent. Gently, slowly, he patted me on the shoulder while looking at me with lukewarm eyes. “So first you had a god confess to you and run off before you could reply, and next up, you yourself confess to a god and get shot down. You are... well, let’s just say, you’re something else.”

“I... I wasn’t shot down!”

“C’mon, brother, that’s a rejection!”

“She said she’d allow me to think of her that way!”

“That’s called being shot down!”

“At the end, she kind of... gave me this really pretty, subtle smile and said, ‘Such a fool...’”

“The hell is that, if not being shot down?!”

What?! The more he said it, the more I started to feel like I’d... completely struck out?!

“And brother, if you’re gonna confess, at least think a bit more about the mood and the timing and stuff like that, you know? Well, I dunno if goddesses care about mood and stuff, but you know what I’m saying.”

The truth in his words was painful.

“So, you ran into an enemy, took a nasty blow, almost died, she saved you, you thought, ‘Hey, this feels nice, I like her!’ and were in like a shot with the love confession? What are you, a virgin? Right, you are a virgin.”

I said nothing.

“No fig wonder, then...”

W-Wait, wait. I was pretty sure that wasn’t how it went. It wasn’t a gentle way of turning me down... I thought. No, I was pretty sure! Wasn’t I?

Yeah, if that was a rejection, then that would mean I was just incredibly dense and I could do nothing but feel sorry for myself...

But even if that was the case, even if I had been rejected by her...

“It still doesn’t change how I feel.”

The truth was so simple once I’d realized it. For a very long time—since before I was born, in fact—I had apparently been in love with God. I had faith in her and respected her; and at the same time, I adored her and was hopelessly in love with her.

“I can’t imagine it being anyone except the god of the flame.”

I thought I’d better apologize to Gus for disappointing him. A great-grandchild was definitely going to be impossible for me. I’m so, so sorry, Gus!

“I’ll probably be like this all my life, so I’ll never stop serving her. Even if there’s nothing in it for me.”

And Menel was right about the confession. I decided that one day, I’d do it again properly—not getting carried away in the moment and hurriedly spewing out my words like this time, but something properly thought out that I’d tell her face-to-face. One day, for sure.

“Yeah. You know, realizing that has made me feel better about it.”

“R-Right...”

“Nope, stop it. Don’t you go looking at me with those pitying eyes.”

“But look, think about it. You fall for a hero, and he’s head over heels for your sister... What’s the god of undeath gonna...”

“Oh—” I got the chills. The cold shiver ran down my spine and throughout my entire body. The thought was terrifying. I couldn’t even imagine how Stagnate was going to react.

“Good luck, brother. Also, you keep your love triangle the hell away from me.”

“M-Menel! Don’t be like that, be a friend and save me!”

“That’s not even a thing I can do, you idiot!”

◆

In any case, after that discussion was over and I managed to shake off my temporary confusion and excitement...

“So, that Invincible Giant—what are we gonna do? We had a fight with him ’cause, well, he attacked us, and... ya, that guy’s lethal.”

The conversation turned to this.

“He’s a total unknown,” Menel continued. “And that attack-canceling is disgustingly good. It’s not like I can’t think of other ways to kill him, but...”

“Yeah, me too. If all we had to do was kill him, I could think of a few ways...”

It would depend on the exact nature of his invincibility, but with a little preparation, there were ways to do it. For example, if Menel fully prepared beforehand and used the fae to construct a bottomless bog to lure him into, we could use his weight against him to make him sink and suffocate. Something like that would kill him even if attacks wouldn’t work. And if he had a kind of invincibility that protected him even from that, then we could solidify the bog and bury him to keep him sealed. I could imagine a number of other ideas along the same lines.

“But the local villagers and Carmela don’t want that,” Menel said. “They respect him as a neighbor. So...”

“The most reasonable thing to do would be to leave him alone.”

“Ya. That’d be the best. Sucks that he gets to beat you up and get away with it, but he’s not worth picking a fight to the death with.”

It would mean that the path between the Iron Mountains and Whitesails would be a lost cause, but we could just tell ourselves that we’d checked it and found it to be unusable and a lost cause from the beginning. There was always the other way around, from Whitesails to Torch Port, from the City of the Dead to Lothdor. Transporting the copper coins and so on would be a pain, but you could travel a lot of the way by water. I was reasonably certain it could be done. Ultimately, this path wasn’t usable, so the plan should go ahead using the long-distance route. That was, logically speaking, the best solution, but...

“Sorry, Menel. I’m going to say something unreasonable.”

Menel let out a single sigh. “Yeah, yeah, I can guess where this is going. What?”

“I can’t bear to leave that giant like that.”

There was one thing that stuck out in my hazy memory from those moments after being clubbed and flying through the air. That giant definitely looked lonely. He smacked of loneliness. He smacked of exhaustion. So I wanted to do something for him. I told Menel that.

“That guy nearly killed you. You do know half your body was mushed and you were this close to becoming a corpse?”

“Yeah.”

“Doing something about him without killing him is gonna be even more difficult.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re doing it anyway because...”

“I swore I’d extend a hand to those in sorrow.”

Menel went a little quiet.

“And also, God said she wanted to hold the hand of lonely people.”

He held a hand to his forehead. And finally, he said, “It’s because you love her, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to impress the person you like, don’t you?!”

“Yeah.”

There was also goodwill and faith. But that was also certainly a part of it. I... wanted to show off to God.

“I really want to impress her. Like super bad! I want to tell her I super, super love her!”

“Okay, you are seriously losing your head!” Menel held his forehead again and looked up into the sky. Then he looked down, then up again, and groaned. “Goddamn it. Just—You—Ugh! You really are a huge pain in the ass!”

“Menel!” My expression was probably so bright that anyone could have told what I was feeling.

“If you don’t have a plan, I am out of here. I just know you’ve already got one, so out with it!”

“Of course I do!” I gave a strong nod. And then, drawing a deep breath, I shouted, in the language of the giants.

“‘Gangr of the Jotunn, William is here!’”

◆

“It is know him, Rock of the Pass... uhh... ‘Kittelsen, the Ancient Crag.’”

We struck it lucky on the first attempt. I had figured that being a person of the same race who had lived in the same region since old times, he might know something.

After appearing through a fairy trail, a giant dressed in beast hide who was probably three meters tall stood before me. Gangr, a forest giant I had gained favor with after the Valacirca disturbance, kept the greetings and his introduction to Menel short, and answered my question in the positive. However, he found it hard to talk in Western Common Speech and got stuck for words several times.

Grumbling, he said, “Use my words is okay?”

“‘Okay. I, will, listen. I, will, try, hard.’ Please, tell me about him.”

The three of us sat on the grass in the valley, Menel and I looking up at Gangr as we talked about the Invincible Giant.

“‘Sorry to make you do this. The giant’s name is Kittelsen. He is a crag personified, and he has existed since nearly the time of the gods.’”

I had to agree. That giant had skin like rock, and his whole body was covered in moss.

“‘So he is still alive... The poor man.’”

“Poor?”

“Uhh... Will? I don’t speak giant.”

“Oh! Hmm... ■■■ ■■■■■■?” Perhaps Gangr had realized something from that brief exchange between Menel and me. He looked at Menel and started speaking in a language I didn’t know. It was a flowing language that had a similar sound to Elvish.

“Ah! ■■■■ ■■■... ■■?” Menel replied fluently.

“Muh-huh.”

It sounded like they understood each other. I asked, “The old language of the fae?”

“Right,” Menel replied.

I thought the phonology was similar to the language Menel normally used when calling out to the fairies. I was right. Both Menel and Gangr could communicate with the spirits of nature, so they had a language in common.

The two of them talked for a few more fluently spoken sentences, then shook their heads with a frown. “Yeah, this is no good,” Menel said. “This isn’t meant for conversations between people.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s the language of the fae and fairies in the transient world, so the tenses are vague.”

“The now and the pass... uh, ‘It doesn’t distinguish clearly between present, past, and future, or prospective, perfect, and progressive.’”

“Wh-Whoa...”

That was the kind of language he used to talk to the fairies? It was often said that elementalists had a unique worldview and didn’t value logic as highly as aesthetics, intuition, and other positive qualities beloved by those not of this world. Hearing that about their language made me feel like I was a little closer to understanding.

“So even this language isn’t gonna make this go smoothly,” Menel said. “But it could be useful when we’re not understanding each other.”

“So... We’ll have to...”

“‘Right.’”

And so began a horribly slow and frustrating conversation that was a mix of three languages.

◆

According to what I heard from Gangr, the Invincible Giant’s name was Kittelsen. No one knew when he was born, but it was said that he had been alive since ancient times, close to the age of the gods, and that he was one of the smaller and weaker giants for the time.

“Seriously?” Menel said.

“I, never lie. Granpa, Gramma—‘My grandfather and grandmother said the same, and it was said by the generations before them.’”

That was scary, but not unbelievable. A giant who was truly from the age of the gods would be on the same level as an Elder Dragon. The Ancient Crag and Invincible Giant Kittelsen was a threat, but he definitely wasn’t as much of one as Valacirca. To humans, they were both like unstoppable disasters, but they differed as much as a large-scale meteor strike and a volcanic eruption.

“‘Kittelsen was not strong and was stuck in his ways. To the rough giants of old, he was a nuisance. To the little people, he was a threat, in possession of terrifying power.’”

Neither Menel nor I spoke.

“‘As a giant of ancient rock, he is of the same origin as all the rock in the world. That is where that property of his that makes him so threatening comes from.’”

“What is it?” I said.

Gangr sighed. “‘He is Unchanging. Kittelsen cannot be harmed by anything smaller than himself, nor anything without form.’”

Menel blinked, astonished. I was probably making the same expression. We looked at each other, and then, just to be sure we understood correctly, we asked Gangr to clarify. “So what you’re saying is,” Menel said, “no attack from anyone smaller than him works at all? Even though he’s an ancient giant bigger than most things alive?”

“And he repels everything without a definite form, like fire, water, lightning, and things like that... Do I have that right?”

What a being, I thought.

Gangr shook his head heavily. “It is not so kind. ‘According to the legends, not even time in its merciless equality nor the dreadful beasts of hunger and thirst can harm that giant.’”

“That’s almost perfect immortality, isn’t it?!”

This was crazy!

“But... ‘Is this a blessing for Kittelsen?’”

Those words made me feel like I’d just been drenched with ice-cold water.

“‘Shunned by his brethren, feared by those smaller than him, Kittelsen spent a lot of time alone. Sometimes, gods, fae, and even people appeared to make friends with him, but all disappeared in the flow of time. It is little wonder he became so cranky.’”

This was a lot to think about.

“‘Kittelsen does not change. Kittelsen cannot change. Kittelsen will continue to wander. And just as a large rock eventually becomes a pebble, then sand, Kittelsen, once he has been completely worn down, will return to being the ancient crag that is his origin. That is the fate of a giant, just as the storm giants mingled with the wind and disappeared, the lava giants embraced sleep in the depths of the earth, and the cloud giants transformed to bolts of lightning and expired striking down their foes. Kittelsen is an ancient crag personified, unchanging and invincible. It is rare for any, even the gods, to walk through Time’s great river as long as he.’”

Gangr gave a single sigh. “‘We are guilty of the same thing. When Kittelsen drifted onto these shores when I was a child, our tribe feared him and kept our distance. Our former chief made the decision.’”

Although I had no idea about Kittelsen’s personality, he was a giant with a terrifying ‘unchanging’ nature. If it had come to battle, their defeat would have been inevitable. For a person charged with the safety of his tribe, the decision not to get close to Kittelsen if they could help it made perfect sense.

“‘An ancient, great, and pitiable giant—that is Kittelsen. Not even I know what he thinks about today.’”

We sat there in silence for a while, lost for words. But at the same time, that story had also made me wonder about something. I looked at Menel. He seemed to have caught on to the same thing. “Okay, that’s his past,” he said. “But why is he protecting that place?”

“‘Because of an old promise.’”

“Promise?”

“‘There used to be a village there. I hear that he made friends with the head of that village, and they made some kind of promise.’”

I listened intently.

“‘You two must know history. Two hundred winters past, demons ravaged this land in its entirety. The village fell. All was lost. But Kittelsen keeps his promise. He keeps a promise no one still knows. Even after all has turned to ruins.’” Gangr sighed and said once again that he thought Kittelsen was a poor man.

“‘William. Dragon-slaying hero.’”

“Yes?”

“‘I truly feel pity for Kittelsen. As one of the same race, I hope there will be salvation for him. I did nothing for him, but my thoughts are with him, and that is no lie.’” He paused. “‘If possible... could you please help him?’”

Quietly, I nodded. “I swear it on the flame.”

◆

“My ancestors made a promise with the Invincible Giant?!” Carmela shouted, her eyes opened wide in shock.

After we parted ways with Gangr in that valley, we returned to Carmela’s village where the Red River flowed, in search of clues to the giant’s lost promise. The village people had no idea that I had fought the giant and been defeated. Carmela’s reaction to what I told her about Kittelsen after she asked us how our search for the path went proved that. And of course, it appeared completely genuine.

“I’d been wondering why something like that would stay for long in this backwoods place. Right, so it was my ancestors, huh...?”

“I met up with another giant I’m acquainted with and heard this from him. I don’t suppose you’d happen to know—”

“Suppose, nothing. If I knew anything, I’d already be doing something about it, wouldn’t I? I don’t know anything. That’s why I’ve been sitting on my ass.”

“Good point.” That shut me up.

“Anyway, the Faraqas died out near-completely once already. In the chaos two centuries ago, most of the people, both young and old, died protecting their territory and the people in it. It just so happened that there were about three or four men in the north who’d been kept there like hostages from a young age and still had the family name and the rights. The information’s been lost, so as much as I’d love to give you an answer, I can’t. There are no documents, either, before you suggest that.”

Carmela’s words were always sharp and to the point.

“Wow. Isn’t that the end of the trail already, then?” Menel looked up into the air.

If this were, say, a story or a computer game, we might have followed a chain of information on our search for the truth and eventually come across something we could use to persuade the giant. Things would conveniently go well, and everything would click into place like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

But you couldn’t expect much more than this from reality. It took very little for information to be lost. It wasn’t necessarily the case that oral messages and written notes would be conveniently preserved. It was hard to pass something down a mere two or three generations; for something to have survived two whole centuries would have been a miracle. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been hoping for something, but I just had to accept it.

“Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the trail,” I said. “There’s still a way.”

“Still a way? If Gangr, who’s the same race, doesn’t know, and Carmela, who’s inherited the village, doesn’t know, then what are you saying we’re gonna do?”

“Well, I mean, there’s someone who does know, isn’t there?”

“What?” Puzzled, Menel tilted his head to the side for a moment, and then he went wide-eyed. “Y-You can’t be serious!”

I was.

“We’ll ask Kittelsen.”

If nobody knew, then we would just have to ask the person himself and be prepared for things to get a little bit rough.

“Paladin, I’ve heard the stories about you, but you know who you’re talking about, right? A bunch of adventurers have come to take him on. He beat them all and chased them away.”

“Ah, please add us to that list,” I said. “We ran into him just now and he made us pay for it.”

“Huh?” She looked at us in surprise.

Menel nodded. “This guy got bashed and sent flying and almost died and now he wants to go back. What a bonehead, right?”

Carmela gave a dry laugh, then went a little quiet. Then she said, “Every damn person, and I mean every one, who’s seen that giant’s invincibility ran off home. You’re the first who’s ever considered going twice.” Then she started laughing. “Faraway Paladin, you, buddy, are a true warrior—that or a true bonehead!”

Then she asked me excitedly if I had a strategy if we couldn’t solve it by talking and he started taking swings at me. I nodded. He was a crag of a giant who couldn’t be harmed by anything smaller than him or without form. However...

“I do have a plan if it does turn violent.”

“You do, huh? So I can leave you to handle this?”

“Yes.”

The giant and I needed to have a talk.

◆

Together with Menel, I walked along the old stone path and returned once more to that rocky plateau. We deviated from the old path and walked up a slope with occasional shrubs and patches of undergrowth.

I had already cast plenty of enhancement magic and benediction on us. There was no opportunity to use them last time due to the sudden encounter, but this time, meeting him was the point. There was every chance it could develop into a battle, and so there was no reason not to prepare beforehand.

The slope gradually became steeper. I could hear the faint sound of babbling water. We came to the end of our climb. Clear, pure water gushed out from mossy rocks. Behind them, as though one with the scenery, he sat. His eyes turned towards me. His enormous body rose up. If a hill in a place that didn’t get much sunlight suddenly rose up, came over to me, and looked down on me, I imagined it might look something like this. His skin was like rock, and covered in moss so thick it reminded me of fur. A large, plump nose and piercing eyes peeked out from among the moss. His thick arms reminded me of a great and ancient tree. His sturdy legs stood like enormous boulders.

“So you lived.” The giant ground his teeth. It sounded like a hundred millstones grinding together. “Minion of the cursed, greedy dragon...”

So that was why he tried to kill me. Now I understood why the giant had been so especially relentless towards us when the other adventurers had managed to escape.

The Invincible Giant grasped his club. His posture told me that this time, he didn’t intend to let us leave alive.

“Kittelsen, Ancient Crag!” I spread my arms and yelled out to him.

Surprised by my voice—and more probably by the fact that I’d called him by his name—the giant stopped his imminent charge. His eyes, glinting among the thick moss, were open wide.

I felt a surge of fear. The pain of being clubbed revived in my mind. But I suppressed it. “My name is William G. Maryblood! I am no minion of the foul-dragon, and I do not wish to be your enemy!” Not taking a single step back, I looked up into the giant’s eyes. “I have come here today as the representative of Lady Faraqa, the head of the village downriver!”

“Faraqa...”

“Does this name mean anything to you?!”

The giant fell silent. It seemed to be working.

I rushed into an explanation. I said that I was not a minion of the foul-dragon and had just been cursed by him when I slayed him. I said that the people in the village downriver were definitely successors of the Faraqa line, and that they no longer knew the promise that had once been made with him. And I explained that the adventurers who had challenged him were not sent by the people living in the village.

“So if possible, Lady Faraqa would like to renew and make good on the promise that—”

“I understand.”

Success! We could solve all sorts of problems now without fighting! Or so I thought.

The giant slowly shook his head. “But I cannot believe.”

“Why?!”

“A human... killed... that dreadful dragon? I cannot believe. It is too much to believe. I think... this is a dragon scheme...”

I froze for a few seconds, screaming curses at Valacirca inside my head. Behind me, I sensed Menel—who had just been quietly observing until this point—tilt his neck back and look up into the sky again, as if saying, “Hard to argue with that one.”

I had to agree. The giant’s stance that he couldn’t trust the words of a human with that dragon’s scent made a lot of sense. If someone who stank of Valacirca approached me with a friendly attitude and a convenient story, my guard would also be fully up.

“Maybe you are strong for a human. But a human cannot match the gods... or dragons... or giants.”

“Strength isn’t everything, right?” I hadn’t really wanted to use this argument, but now I had no choice. “If I can break through your invincibility, will you believe that I killed the dragon?”

Kittelsen was quiet for a moment. “I will. If a human can do that.” He nodded. He probably had considerable confidence in his own invincibility. “If you cannot, you will die.”

He fixed me with a forbidding stare. The pressure was terrible. I drew a single breath, and once again, I challenged the Invincible Giant.

◆

He definitely was no ordinary opponent. Roaring in a husky voice that seemed to thunder from the ground itself, he took a storm of swings at me with his massive club. As I ducked and dodged, I called out, “Menel! As planned!”

“Got it!”

I leapt in towards the giant—

“Vastare.”

“Whoa!”

He hammered a vortex of destruction towards me, forcing me to leap away. And—

“Vastare.”

Terrifyingly—

“Vastare.”

Kittelsen—

“Vastare.”

Went for the monstrous method of chaining together Words. He hadn’t been remotely serious when fighting with just a weapon. In this world alive with the mystical, those beings that had existed from ancient times truly were unfair.

A horrifying number of vortices of devastation blasted everywhere, ripping through ground and creating huge clouds of dust. Several of the attacks obviously failed and rebounded on Kittelsen himself, but because of his invincibility, they seemed to have no effect on him. This was an attack he could only perform because he was both an ancient giant close to the Primordial Words and also possessed the nature of invincibility. He was just the same as the Echo of the god of undeath I had fought on the day I became an adult. This giant didn’t fear self-destruction by magic!

I was forced to admit that I’d been taking him lightly, subconsciously thinking that all I had to do was break through his invincibility trick and I could win. Though he wasn’t a giant from the age of the gods in the perfect sense, he was on a similar level to gods and dragons. In terms of ability, it was probably best to assume he was stronger than me. I expected both Menel and myself to die if we allowed this fight to drag on.

Now having a new perspective on the fight, I steeled myself and waited for a chance to attack. As the Invincible Giant continued to shout brutal Words beyond the clouds of dust, I judged my timing and shouted a Word back.

“Tacere, os!”

If there was one thing I could do against an ancient opponent with ridiculous power, it was to stick to fundamentals and use magic cleverly in small amounts. The giant’s mouth clamped shut. At the same moment, I leapt in towards his feet, hiding myself in a dust cloud. Having a huge body like this made him both fast and strong, but that huge body itself unavoidably obstructed his line of sight. Even humans have quite a hard time catching puppies or kittens that run about their legs.

The giant gave a frustrated grumble. I was too close for him to use his club, and he wouldn’t be able to fire off any Words either, as long as the effect of my Word of Silence remained. Wasting no time in switching to stamping instead, he lifted his foot.

“Ligatur laqueus... sequitur!” I cast the magic of Mystic Rope. I didn’t use this one often. I was lucky to see it fly true. The rope stretched upwards, following the giant’s backbone almost exactly, and entangled itself around his neck. He made a loud, throaty noise of surprise. It had worked. It seemed the giant’s motion-arresting ability wouldn’t activate if we just tangled him up instead of piercing, cutting, or striking. I grasped the magic rope with both hands, took a sharp breath, and pulled down with all my might.

A rope tied around his neck had been pulled down hard from the back while he had one foot in the air trying to crush the opponent running about by his feet. It was obvious what would happen. The giant was thrown violently off-balance.

“‘Gnomes, gnomes, slip underfoot!’” Pushing our advantage, Menel cast Slip. The ground rippled. The giant’s leg lurched. And with a yell and a tremendous, earth-shaking thud, Kittelsen fell down.

I had needed to hurriedly adjust my position so he wouldn’t land on me, but even though I was distracted, I didn’t miss the groan of pain that slipped out of his mouth.

“I have broken through your invincibility!”

When Menel had thrown fire in Kittelsen’s face during our previous battle and he had fallen backwards, that was the only time that the giant had groaned. That had given me a hunch, and now it was confirmed.

The Invincible Giant Kittelsen couldn’t be harmed by anything smaller than himself or without form. That was a troublesome characteristic—after all, it would be almost impossible to prepare a weapon bigger than him. But there was one thing that was without doubt bigger than Kittelsen and had a definite form. And that was the ground. Between the ground and a giant, the ground was obviously larger.

“Your invincibility can be broken through by throwing or pushing you down onto the ground.”

As Kittelsen lay there, I asked him if this was good enough for him.

“I see... No wonder... the dragon... was killed.” The Invincible Giant faintly smiled.

◆

“It was not... a hard... promise.” After a while, Kittelsen, the Ancient Crag and Invincible Giant, slowly began to talk. “When I came here, the Faraqa village was starting to be built. Faraqa was a funny man. I guarded the water. He gave me booze. That was the promise.” He had a unique voice that sounded like wind blowing through a deep cave. “I said, humans die fast. Faraqa said, even if he died, his kids, their kids, would give me booze instead.”

Menel and I listened quietly.

“Faraqa said, you are forever, but people are forever, too. Faraqa died, and Faraqa’s kids brought me booze. So I thought, maybe it was true.” The giant of mossy rock slowly closed his eyes. “I knew it was not true. But I wanted to believe.”

I knew how this ended. Two hundred years ago, the village fell, and the Faraqa family almost went extinct. Humans couldn’t live forever. We could attempt to pass things down over generations, but even that was no more than an imitation of eternal existence and fell sorrowfully short of a true eternal being.

“The booze was nasty,” the Invincible Giant muttered. “It was badly made, nasty booze. But slowly, it got better.” He spoke as though carefully bringing out something he’d tucked away deep inside his heart. “What would it be like this year? What about this year? Passing the years became just a little fun. Now, I have not drunk booze for a long time. No one brings it to me.”

A long pause followed. Neither of us felt like breaking it.

“Faraqa, I am always here, waiting for your booze.”

His eyes were focused on someone no longer there.

◆

The next day, I climbed that path again with a barrel of ale on my back. Carmela and Menel walked beside me. We deviated from the old path and walked up the slope with occasional shrubs and patches of undergrowth. The slope gradually became steeper. I could hear the faint sound of babbling water. We came to the end of our climb. Clear, pure water gushed out from mossy rocks. Behind them, as though one with the scenery, he sat. His eyes turned towards us. His enormous body rose up. If a hill in a place that didn’t get much sunlight suddenly rose up, came over to me, and looked down on me, I imagined it might look something like this. His skin was like rock, and covered in moss so thick it reminded me of fur. A large, plump nose and piercing eyes peeked out from among the moss. His thick arms reminded me of a great and ancient tree. His sturdy legs stood like enormous boulders.

He didn’t speak.

“Our neighbor, Kittelsen, the Ancient Crag!” Carmela, unfazed by the sight of the still-silent giant, called out to him. “Faraqa has brought you alcohol. Please, have a drink.”

I opened the lid of the ale barrel. Carmela filled the horn in her hand. The Invincible Giant reached out with his own enormous hand and took the entire barrel. Now that he was holding it, the barrel looked more like a cup or something.

“It sucks,” Carmela said. “I warned you.”

“I know.” Kittelsen raised his barrel and took a sip of ale. Carmela followed suit. It was that iron-water ale that smelled of rust. I heard the sound of a hundred millstones grinding, the sound of Kittelsen grating his teeth.

“Nasty. Nasty booze,” he said. “It makes me cry.”

Carmela nodded. “Yeah.”

“It is the water. The water is bad.”

“I agree, of course.”

“You are stupid. Why not use the water here?”

“Can we?”

“You have been. Since old times. There is no ‘can.’”

The two of them talked while sharing a drink. Menel and I watched over them quietly.

◆

This is another story entirely, but just as a footnote—

After this, the Faraqa village once again prospered as a rest stop connecting the Iron Mountains with Whitesails. It became known for its ale, made with spring water. Two barrels are delivered to Torch Port every time the season comes around.