Lenny Recaps:
Lenny’s Battle Records
My name is Lenny, and I’m the poster child of this inn. I’m a bit like a mascot—as well as everyone’s idol.
What I leave here today is a record of the first half of my life, which documents the history of this inn…
“I was wondering what you were over here writing! Paper and ink aren’t cheap—don’t waste them on these scribbles! Also, you’re only eleven years old. What’s with this, ‘half of my life’ business? Are you planning on dying at twenty-two?”
“Leave me alone! It’s boring being on reception duty in the morning. I need some way to pass the time!”
Now, the history of this inn…
***
I first met her nine days before the entrance ceremony for the Hunters’ Prep School, which is held twice a year. It was on this fateful day that a girl of twelve, with a slightly vapid air and the appearance of having just blown in from the countryside, arrived at our inn to stay the week until the dorms opened.
That girl was Miss Mile, who would become a C-rank hunter soon after.
As a veteran inn employee, I had her number from the moment she walked through the door. “Here comes some airheaded country bumpkin,” I thought to myself. “A sitting d—”
No. No no no no no ! My first impression was of a lovely new customer, one who would surely become a long-time patron.
And I was right! Six month later, Miss Mile had graduated from the prep school, and remembering her earlier stay with gratitude, she decided to make our inn her permanent base, where she would stay with her companions. We were immediately swept up in intense negotiations for discounts with Miss Pauline, who dared claim that our inn failed to offer sufficient incentives for a newly formed party!
Normally, I would strike down such a challenge on the spot, but I had an inkling that these girls would come in handy. I talked it over with my mother and father, and we decided to give them a discount…on one condition.
Miss Mile and Miss Reina were just fine, but I could already tell that Miss Pauline and Miss Mavis would surely be a huge draw for customers!
Just as I anticipated, the customers came flooding in. Naturally, there were men who wanted to meet Miss Pauline and women who wanted to meet Miss Mavis. Then, there was the fact that we were an inn where a party of young girls was happy to stay—proof that we were a safe and comfortable establishment. This proved to be a selling point with both merchants and other guests. Everything was just as I had hoped!
Then, Miss Mile pitched her idea for that odd “Maid Caffay.” While we were all skeptical at first, Miss Mile was so persistent that Miss Pauline and Miss Mavis couldn’t refuse to play along…
And what a success it turned out to be! My heart’s aflutter just thinking about all those new repeat customers!
I must say I was happy to learn that I had underestimated Miss Mile. She doesn’t seem particularly… Well, I mean she’s rather fla… Let’s just say I didn’t think she had very much combat potential.
I was also worried about Miss Reina. She seemed to hate the whole “Maid Caffay” idea and was always cold towards customers, turning red and shouting at anyone who tried to pinch her cheek. Yet, somehow, that turned out to be very popular.
I couldn’t understand it!
Once, I heard Miss Mile say to herself, “I had no idea that tsunderes would be effective even here…” but I had no idea what she was talking about.
Still, whenever the Crimson Vow went out on jobs, we’d be flooded with complaints and questions. Why aren’t those girls here? Where did they go? When will they be back?
What could I say? They aren’t our employees. Their primary employment is as hunters, after all.
I haven’t even gotten to Miss Mile’s storage magic, which is kind of rare. She can hold a crazy huge amount, and because of this, while normal hunters are limited to bringing back only as much meat and materials as they can carry, these girls can bring back the entire thing—no matter how big of a creature they fell.
Roughly half of a 300-kilogram orc consists of butcher-grade meat and edible innards. If you kill a group of three or four of them, that amounts to 450-600 kilograms of market-grade parts. Obviously, there is no way that a party of five or six members, laden with heavy armor and weaponry, camping equipment and other luggage, could carry all of that from the middle of the woods back into town.
Yet these girls can bring all of that. In fact, they can hunt down several groups of orcs in one trip and bring them all back, no matter the number. When you think about it, it seems like it’s gotta be against the rules!
Of course, if they don’t sell the most valuable parts to the guild, the clerks would be cross with them. However, they’re usually able to keep some of the more standard cuts, and the meat that’s too tough to sell at a high price. I’m certain they still sell far more meat to the guild than other parties to begin with…and luckily for us, they always have some to spare as a nice souvenir for their friends at the inn!
All in all, these girls were simple-mi—er, dear —guests, bighearted (with the exception of Miss Pauline), full of hope for the future, and perfect cash c— guests of honor , with plenty of interesting tales to tell.
Thanks to their patronage, our customer base and reputation grew, and we made a name for ourselves as the preferred inn of this exceptional group of hunters.
Our future was looking bright, and I began to think about the future. Soon enough, I would take a husband and assume my rightful place as matron of this inn…or so I thought.
Yes, until that one nightmare of a day…
That day, when the Crimson Vow betrayed me!
It was roughly one month after they began residing at our inn. They had just returned from a guard duty job, which took them away for some days, when they came to me with an outrageous announcement:
“Our financial status is looking up now, so we’re going to move to a different inn.”
Wh-what? What nonsense was thaaaaaaat?!
Those backstabbers! Forgetting all of the debts they owed us! All the help we gave them!
This was akin to a traveling band of performers picking up an orphan and raising him, only for the boy to grow up and declare, “Well, I’m a successful first-class performer now, so I’m transferring to a bigger troupe!” How could a person ignore such an investment of time and money to turn their back on the very ones who had shaped them?
This was unacceptable!
“No way! Have you forgotten all the favors we’ve done for you up until now?!”
“No, this is a perfectly fair transaction. As I recall, the agreement that we made was mutually beneficial.”
Guh…
To think we let them stay at our inn and eat our food for an entire month! I mean, they did pay us, but… We gave them a huge discount on their lodging fees!
Though I suppose we did require them to entertain our other guests in exchange…
E-even so! Even so, there’s still the matter of gratitude. Gratitude. Grat-ti-tude… Gratituuuude!!! What would happen if we lost the Crimson Vow—our inn’s trump card and best source of new customers? I set to scheming at once, concocting new plans. A dinnertime Hunting Beauties Variety Show! A breakfast-time morning cheer service!
I tried desperately to persuade them, but they refused me flat-out. “We aren’t hurting for money anymore,” Miss Pauline said, “so you can’t make us do all that embarrassing entertaining stuff.”
“Besides,” they added, “this place literally stinks. We need to go somewhere with a bath!”
Now, I could concede their point about having to entertain the other guests, but as for the baths…
It would be one thing if we were some high-class inn, with guests who were a bit more flush, but ours was an inn for the common folk. Our low rates and homey atmosphere were our selling points—there was no way we could manage the expense of constructing a bath and hiring staff to draw and boil the water, not to mention the fuel. An inn like ours could not be collecting any pricey bathing fees either. If the baths were expensive, no one would use them in the first place.
Gaaah! This sucke d !!!
Yet, just as I was sinking into an abyss of despair, Miss Mile came to the rescue!
She was going to build us a bath? For free ? And she would draw and heat the water with magic?!
Yahoo!!
Just when our troops were on the brink of annihilation, in came a deus ex machina to turn it all around! Magic was truly incredible. This had to be against the rules!
When the baths were ready, they invited me to join them for a commemorative wash, in spite of my protests. I mean, I told them I shouldn’t…
Miss Reina and Miss Mile looked utterly defeated when I got in there, staring at me with eyes like dead fish. Honestly, the fact that I always wear oversized clothing is out of courtesy to our less well-endowed patrons. Though, of course, it’s also to keep the boys from ogling me…
Anyway, it’s not my fault! The whole bath thing was their idea in the first place!
After further negotiations, we came to an agreement whereby the girls would draw and heat the water with their magic in exchange for free food and drink. With this system in place, we got to offer baths without raising our prices, and as a result, our name was suddenly on the lips of every lady in the city!
Bwahaha…
Bwahahahaha!
We were victorious.
It was all according to my plan…or so I thought.
Until they left on an escort mission?!?!
My hopes nearly perished.
Thanks to the nice big facilities they built us, it took so many trips from the well to fill the tub that my sanity started to crumble… It wasn’t just the tub, either. There were the hot and cold water reservoirs as well, each of which was raised on a stand about two meters high, making them incredibly difficult to fill.
They’d made it all look easy with their magic…
We tried asking some other mage hunters if they could do it, tempting them with booze and snacks, but they told us it was too much work. “When you use magic to produce water repeatedly in the same place,” they explained, “the efficiency quickly drops, so it would be nearly impossible to produce enough water at one time.” Damn these third-rate mages! The girls could always fill the baths with no trouble at all.
At least heating the water wasn’t so complicated. Anyone but the very worst mage could manage that by casting a fire spell and carefully sinking it into the water—something they finally seemed to understand after I carefully explained how Miss Mile had been doing it… Damn these third-rate mages!
It was all enough to make me wonder: were those girls actually some kind of crazy geniuses? No. There was no way. No way! They were just rookies, fresh out of prep school! What the heck am I talking about?
Even my own mother was no help. “I can handle the front desk,” she said, “so you’re in charge of preparing the baths, Lenny.”
I mean, it makes sense that my father couldn’t do it—he is the cook—but couldn’t my mother help with drawing the water? When I pointed this out, she just averted her eyes. Hmph! She was exercising her “parental authority,” and I was at the mercy of her whims!
And so, my days in hell began.
I drew bucket after bucket, dragging the water between the well and the tub and the cistern. Even with trip after trip, the level of the water barely even seemed to rise an inch. Bucket after bucket after bucket after bucket—an endless, unchanging hellscape. The toll it took on my body wasn’t limited to simple muscle soreness. I once lost my grip on the bucket handle, and it fell into the well, scraping up my palms and scratching my hands. Another time, my knees gave way while I was climbing the cistern stand, and I tumbled down, along with the bucket full of water…
I was gonna die! I was really gonna diiiieee!!!
Just when I thought, quite seriously, that I would never survive the ordeal, the girls returned from their job.
Surely they would save me!
They must take responsibility for leaving me on the verge of death!
And, they did.
They helped me to implement two new schemes—partitioning the baths and hiring orphans to draw the water—that allowed me to successfully escape my impending demise! And it turned out that the silver lining of my many days of hell was a newly sculpted physique, particularly noticeable in my arms and stomach!
Yahoo!!!
Alas, my rejoicing was premature.
What?! Leaving on a training journey?!
It’s so soon! It’s far too soon for that, ladies!
Particularly where I’m concerned!
It’s true that such journeys are a mainstay of a C-rank party’s lives. There was no one who would be able to keep them from this. Everyone knew it…even me.
If only there were some way to stop them. However, I could sense that this was one of those cases where, the more I tried to stop them, the more desperately my girls would wish to go… Resistance was futile. Besides, I never had the right to try and stop them in the first place. Who was I to interfere with such a thing?
I knew that parties who set off on these journeys rarely returned with their full membership intact. They overexerted themselves in the name of learning, or got carried away and took jobs beyond their skill level. Though injuries only result from about ten percent of a hunter’s jobs, if you take those kinds of jobs five times, or ten times…
Those who do make it back return with harrowed expressions, some missing arms or legs. Sometimes, the parties never come back at all. They always promise, “When we make it back, we’ll stay at this inn again, and we’ll tell you all about our adventures!” I know they mean it sincerely, and yet…
Meetings and partings are the eternal fate of all those who work at an inn. So, we see them off with a smile. No matter how much they might have contributed to our livelihoods. No matter how much fun we might have had with them. No matter how many wonderful tales they told us.
You mustn’t let someone departing on a journey see your tears. Any good innkeeper knows that you see them off with a smile, and when—if—they return, you welcome them with a smile again.
But the moment everyone is out of sight, all bets are off. I’m still just eleven years old, after all.
Weeeeeeehhh!!!
I wept and wept and wept…and then I went to draw water for the baths. After all, my magical helpers were gone once more—perhaps for good. If I at least got some of the water filled up before the orphans came in for work, it would make their jobs a little bit easier. And since they were paid per shift, it wouldn’t affect their compensation… In truth, there was simply no way I could work at the reception with my face so sloppy with tears.
I went to find the bucket for drawing the bathwater… Which was when, right beside the baths, I saw…
A hole. About sixty centimeters in diameter.
Around it was a stone barrier, roughly twenty centimeters thick and one meter high.
There were no two ways about it. It was a well. A well, which had simply appeared overnight.
Who could have possibly constructed such a thing in so little time? Well, I had an inkling.
Ha.
Ahaha.
Ahahahahaha!
We own an inn.
Most of our guests are passers-through of only an evening, étrangers of a single moon. There are normal guests, ill-mannered guests, and those who are quite friendly. There are those who return to us and those who do not—as well as those who cannot ever again…
Though there are visitors to this inn who have made their way across the whole continent, I will probably spend my entire life in this town. Every day, I’ll take my turn at the desk, and draw water, and make the beds. I’ll repeat this pattern day in and day out.
But I won’t let my life be ordinary.
We’re going to make it big. This inn is going to be the most prosperous in the land. The crown jewel of the nation. Those hunters who stayed here are going to be world-famous someday, and we will rise alongside them. I’d bet everything on that. One day we will surely claim our victory.
No matter what happens, I will never give up!
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