At the time, I didn’t realize at all that a conversation like this had taken place.
Thirty years later, an earthquake and unprecedentedly large tsunami struck this area.
The land was inundated by turbid waters and many boats were washed out to sea, but surprisingly few lives were lost. Because everyone in the area had grown up hearing the Legend of the Sea God from the storytellers, they were able to begin evacuating as soon as they felt the earthquake.
After the disaster, a statue titled “The King and the Old Man” was built in the seaside park.
It was a statue to commemorate the old man who, at the time of the new city’s construction, had risked his life to make a direct appeal to the king and tell him how to prepare for the tsunami, and the wise king who had listened to his plans. If the two of them could have heard, they’d have laughed wryly, saying, “That’s over-embellishing it.”
Particularly for old man Urup, who had once been the storyteller, but now appeared in stories of his descendants as the Legendary Old Man, what sort of expression did he have on his face while he watched over them from the next world?
Chapter 6: Relief
I’m Halbert Magna, age 19.
I’m the eldest son of the Magna family, well known within the Elfrieden Kingdom land forces. I myself used to belong to them, but after some stuff happened, I was forced to transfer to the Forbidden Army.
To add insult to injury, my commanding officer was my childhood friend, the earth mage Kaede Foxia, who liked to end her sentences with “you know.” To think, now I had to take orders from her… I wished it was all just a joke.
On top of that, what was I doing now? Right now, rather than a sword, I was swinging an entrenching tool (a round-edged shovel which can also be used in close quarters combat) instead.
Marching orders had come for the Forbidden Army, and when I arrived on the site, I was tasked with piling up dirt, hollowing out the middle, pouring in a gooey liquid (?), reinforcing the sides with gravel, then planting saplings on either side. After that, I would set up the street lamps filled with the lightmoss that are common in the capital, the kind which absorb light during the day and are phosphorescent at night, repeating these same tasks over and over.
To sum it up simply, I was doing roadwork.
Summer had ended, but the sun was still hot, and I was digging up dirt and making piles with it over and over.
“Why… does the Forbidden Army… have to do… roadwork?”
“You there. Stop prattling and get to work, on the double.”
Wiping the sweat from my brow, I looked over to see Kaede standing on top of a simple scaffold, smacking the railing with her megaphone as she gave orders. She must have been feeling the heat pretty badly herself. Her trademark perky fox ears had drooped down like dog ears.
“Hey, Kaede, is this really…?” I began.
“You can’t do that!” she protested. “Hal, you’re my subordinate, you know. You must address me properly as the site foreman.”
“…Foreman, is this really a job for the Forbidden Army?”
“This is the sort of work that the Forbidden Army does now, you know,” she answered.
“Surely we could leave this stuff to construction workers.”
“There just aren’t enough of them, you know. This is part of a plan for a kingdom-wide road network, you know. We’ve hired unemployed people from the capital as well, I hear, but we’re still so short of hands, I’d even ask a warcat to help.”
Even so, would you normally have the military do this sort of work? I thought.
“Besides, we can’t have just construction workers come here alone, you know,” she said. “The further you go from a settlement, the more powerful the wild creatures get, after all. And if we hired adventurers to protect them, it would cost a fortune.”
“So, in the end, we’re just cheap labor, is that it…?” I asked.
“If you understand that, then get to work, on the double,” she said.
“You’re an earth mage. Can’t you do this faster with magic?”
“I can’t afford to expend my magic here, you know,” she said. “Hal, are you going to dig tunnels through the mountains in my place?”
I said nothing.
I went back to my work of digging up dirt and piling it up.
It’s better than being forced to dig a tunnel without magic, at least, I thought. What kind of old-fashioned hard labor sentence is this…?
Noon came. We went back to the camp and were given a two-hour break.
Inside the tent we ate, chatted, or used the simple beds (they were no more than stretchers that had grown a little fur) to take an afternoon nap. Apparently that king strongly encouraged naps after eating. It was something about how it improved work efficiency.
So work in the Forbidden Army literally came with “three meals and a nap,” but… once people found out what kind of work was involved, there was no way they would be jealous of us.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to make it through the afternoon if I didn’t eat, so I wolfed down the lunchbox I had been supplied.
Today’s lunchbox was meat and vegetables between bread. Delicious.
The meat was lightly spiced, which felt like it helped relieve my exhaustion. It was apparently a dish called shogayaki which that king had come up with. It was a menu he was experimenting with now that the production of the seasonings the king was having the mystic wolves make for him — “miso,” “soy sauce,” and “mirin” — had gotten on track.
In the Forbidden Army, we were often served the king’s experimental menus like this. The meals were one of the few things that made me happy that I had been forced to transfer to the Forbidden Army. The meals we’d gotten in the land forces had prioritized quantity over quality. The kind of thing you’d picture from the words “A Man’s Meal.” Honestly, eating here even once had been enough to convince me I didn’t want to go back.
“That king… If nothing else, I’ve got to recognize his gift for cooking,” I admitted.
“They really are delicious, you know,” Kaede agreed. “The dishes our king comes up with.”
At some point, Kaede had sat down next to me, and she was eating the same menu.
“Also, it’s incredible that we can eat fresh veggies every day, you know,” she continued. “They come in from the closest village to here that’s hooked up to the castle by road. The reason roads are great is that they make it easy to maintain supply lines, you know.”
“The roads we’re building are being useful right away, huh?” I asked.
“With this transportation capacity, you can almost call the food crisis solved already, you know. We can bring food from the areas with a surplus to the areas where there are shortages. We’ll be able to transport foods that we couldn’t before because they didn’t keep long enough.”
“…Is he doing this because he knows all that stuff?” I asked. “That king, I mean.”
“He’s an incredible man, you know. His foresight is almost frightening.”
Well, I thought Kaede was pretty amazing for being able to understand all of that, too. She could be a bit silly in some ways, but Kaede had some pretty high base specs. She could use magic, and she was sharp, too. That was probably why she had been chosen by the king himself.
…As her childhood friend, it did frustrate me a little, though.
…I need to do my best, too.
“Well, now that you’ve eaten, will you be taking a nap, Hal?” she asked me.
“Well… I am tired. Guess I will.”