After we broke up, I made my way to a certain tavern. It was the one where I had talked with Al. I just wanted to check that there hadn’t been any particular problems after the incident and that the owner’s illness hadn’t flared up again. It had only been a minor illness, so I didn’t expect a problem, but illnesses that had their roots in lifestyle or nutrition problems sometimes recurred easily, even after I cured them with benediction. Neither prayer nor miracles were all-powerful.
“Okay, so…”
The “feudal lord walking in during business hours incident” wasn’t something I was keen to repeat, so I made sure that the sign hanging on the door did read “Closed.” I could hear talking going on inside, so I went to knock on the door, but before I could—
“I’m sorry to spring this on you. Thank you very much!”
“Not at all. Consider it done.”
The door swung open in front of me.
“Oh!” My eyes opened wide in astonishment.
“Oh my! It’s you, sir!” The tavern girl had her hand over her mouth and was looking at me in surprise from behind the dwarf who had opened the door.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
At the door to the tavern, I had run straight into the dwarf with the scar, Ghelreis.
The tavern owner’s illness seemed to have completely cleared up, and he showed no signs of another flare-up. They invited me to stay awhile, but I said I couldn’t inconvenience them while they were busy preparing to open for the evening, and I took my leave immediately, with Ghelreis walking down the street beside me. We were headed the same way.
Neither of us was saying a word.
Ghelreis, like most dwarves, didn’t speak much, and he had quite a harsh air about him that made it difficult to start up a conversation with him. But the silence was worse; I couldn’t bear it. I brought up a topic.
“What brought you to the tavern today, Ghelreis?”
“They have a reservation for a large party or something in about ten days.
They hired me to procure a decent amount of beast flesh.”
“So you hunt for a living?”
“No. I’m a kind of mercenary, hired muscle. But I happen to have a little skill with crossbows and traps as well, you see—”
“It’s something like a side job, then?”
“That would be a fair description.”
Once I actually tried talking to him, I found he was a surprisingly eloquent speaker. So he was a mercenary, a warrior for hire. That was the same job Blood had. The old scar on his face had clearly been made by a sword, so it made a lot of sense.
We walked down the street in the glittering afternoon sunlight. The faint clanging of hammers reached us from some distant workshop. Different groups of people enjoying their own conversations passed us by. Every so often, one of them would notice me and acknowledge me with a nod or a bow.
“It’s a good town,” Ghelreis said. “It’s almost unimaginable how quickly it’s developed, considering that it was only built a few years ago.”
“Yes. It couldn’t have been done without all the help we received from all kinds of people.”
Ghelreis nodded. Then silence fell again. This time, it wasn’t so suffocating.
“Paladin,” Ghelreis started.
“Yes?”
“I was once a warrior who served the Iron Country.” He spoke quietly, wearing a calm expression as he walked beside me. “At the time, I was still inexperienced as a warrior and was not permitted to die with our lord. I held to his last wishes and protected the people who had been left behind. I earned my daily bread by taking up my weapon and fighting for whoever would hire me.”
I remained quiet and listened.
“It isn’t easy to find a place to live in peace. We wandered across many lands to make it here.” Despite how quietly he was speaking, lots of different emotions showed in his voice. I thought I could sense them churning inside him.
“Please, guide the young master well.”
“I will.” I stopped walking, looked at him with a serious expression, and placed my fist against my heart. “By the flame.”
A line of sweat ran down my neck. Al and I were locked in a grapple on the grass in my yard. Menel was watching us from the sidelines.
After a lot of thought, I’d decided that the next thing to teach Al after the fundamentals was grappling. Al had a naturally good physique, and appeared to have muscle strength, too, despite the fact that he hadn’t had any training.
Maybe that was just the nature of dwarves. My idea had been to begin by teaching him grappling moves, where muscle power had an especially large influence, so that he could gain confidence in his own abilities.
But I hadn’t been expecting this. I was somewhat stronger than him, but even though I was pulling him towards me with all my strength, he was starting to resist me. In a simple push-and-pull exercise, he was holding his ground to a certain extent. He was showing astonishing muscle strength and intuition considering that he hadn’t received any specialist training. There was no other way to say it: he had a natural talent for this.
I understood the reason why he’d been hesitant to hit or grab anyone before.
With this extraordinary level of natural muscle strength, it wasn’t surprising he’d developed an attitude like that. In fact, he might actually have injured someone unintentionally at some point in his past, or at least come close to doing so.
“Al.” I spoke casually, deliberately not letting any strain or effort show in my expression. “Is this your full strength?”
He grunted and pushed harder. My whole body groaned under his tremendous power, but I resisted and pushed back. The body Blood and I had forged together wasn’t so puny that it couldn’t handle this.
“I think you’ve got more,” I said.
He whined.
I needed him to know it was okay for him to go all out, to be more savage.
That was probably what had to come first for him.
“If this is all you’ve got…” I dropped my hips and pushed forward with all my might.
“Wh-Whoa!” Al started sliding backwards, his feet leaving marks in the grass as he tried to press his weight into the ground.
“I can overpower you. I’m stronger.”
So it’s okay for you to go a little more wild. It’s okay for you to use all the strength you’ve got. As I spoke those words to him inside my heart, I maneuvered my body and pulled close to him, then lifted him up and threw him on the ground as hard as I could. I kept my grip on his collar to make sure he at least didn’t hit his head. He made a sound like the wind had been knocked out of him.
“Sorry, Al,” I said. “You lose.”
My general rule was to hold nothing back when it came to this side of things.
Getting used to pain was a part of training, and I had to approach this prepared for him to hate me. I didn’t feel good about it, though.
“Ho—”
“Hm?”
“How do you do the move you just did?!” Al asked me with sparkling eyes, leaping to his feet immediately. Even though I was forcing him to run for ages, throwing him about, and making him go through stuff that was pretty painful and hard to endure, he showed absolutely no sign of giving in. He really was persistent and eager.
“That one?” I hummed in thought. “Menel, come here a sec.”
“What am I, your punching bag?”
“It’s easier to get the idea looking from the side. Please.”
“S-Sorry about this!”
Menel tutted. “Fine. You better give me a clean throw, you got it?! A clean throw!”