Mushoku Tensei (LN) - Volume SS - Chapter 5

Short Story:

Old Enough 

RUDEUS AND HIS COMPANIONS began their adventuring career in the town of Rikarisu in the Demon Continent. Teaming up with Jalil and Vizquel allowed them to climb the adventurer ranks while also saving money. Having cash to spare meant they were well equipped, and once they reached C-rank, they would set off from the town to start the journey home. That was what they were thinking when this episode took place.

Eris was doing upkeep on her gear. She had a newly purchased breastplate, a hood with ears on it, and a sword given to her by the Migurd. Eris was, as a rule, a messy girl. She couldn’t keep her room tidy, and she didn’t even fold her clothes. But she didn’t slack off when it came to maintaining her gear. At some point every day, she always checked it all over—even if she hadn’t done anything to get it dirty. It was partly because Ruijerd had told her she ought to, but mostly it was just that she liked weapons and armor. Just looking at them set her heart racing. The sword, the armor, the cloak—they made you imagine an epic adventure, one where you went into a labyrinth, slayed monsters, and got the treasure. They excited her so much that she even forgot about the displacement incident. Eris would have taken a sword and armor over a pretty dress every day. 

Of course, if this had been the estate back in the Citadel of Roa, she wouldn’t have kept it up for long. Just doing upkeep on weapons wasn’t enough to get her heart racing on its own. Eris would have gotten sick of it in three days and gone looking for something else.

But this was the Demon Continent. They spent every day ­taking quests and fighting monsters to skin and sell their hides, and ­occasionally they got into fights with other adventurers. Eris used her sword and armor daily, and that meant that instead of giving up in three days, she settled into a daily routine of thorough upkeep on her gear.

That day, Eris was going over her gear with a self-satisfied smirk. She polished her breastplate, beat the dust off her cloak, and painstakingly wiped down her sword with an oiled rag.

“Huh?” It was then that she realized that the bottle of oil she kept to use on her gear was empty. There had been so much of it when she bought it, but after cleaning her gear almost every day, she had run out.

“Rudeus, I’m out of oil! We gotta go buy some more!” Eris declared, not bothering to ask what he wanted. But when she looked up, all she saw was the empty room of the inn. Rudeus wasn’t there, and neither was Ruijerd. Where had they gone? The toilet…? Eris racked her brains—then a memory hit her. While she was polishing her breastplate, Rudeus and Ruijerd had gone out to run their own errands.

“That’s right, they said they were going out… But where’d they go?” They’d definitely said where they were going and around when they’d be back. But Eris couldn’t quite remember the particulars. She wasn’t the sort of girl who got hung up on details, and that had put her in a bit of a fix. Eris wanted to clean her weapon right now. It wasn’t a sense of obligation, but she didn’t like to do things halfway. Plus, she wanted to wipe away the tarnish on her blade so she could bask in its gleam. 

But she’d run into a whole lot of obstacles if she went out. First off, Eris didn’t speak the language here. She could sort of understand basic greetings now, but difficult negotiations were out of the question. Then there was the problem of money.

“Wait, I’ve got money.” That was right. Rudeus had given her some money in case of emergencies. She kept it hidden in her under­wear so that pickpockets wouldn’t get at it. Eris rummaged around in her panties, pulled out her purse, then checked its contents. She wasn’t sure how much money here was worth, but she remembered how many coins and notes her cleaning oil had cost last time. The money she had should be enough. Rudeus had said the money was to be used in a crisis, but Eris had cleanly forgotten that. Besides, even if she had remembered, she probably would’ve thought this fit the bill. Finally, there was the way there…but she’d been a few times. She’d be fine.

Eris had money. She was pretty sure she knew the way. She’d been told not to wander around by herself, but right now, that had flown out of her mind as well, so that was okay too. In other words, everything was A-OK.

“I think I’ll be just fine!” Eris put the sword she’d gotten partway through cleaning back in its scabbard, then leapt to her feet.

***

A few minutes later, she was trotting along the streets of Rikarisu in high spirits. She was so cheerful you could practically hear someone humming a happy tune. She was going shopping by herself. What with one thing and another, she’d never been allowed to when she was living in the Citadel of Roa, but now her chance had come in this unexpected form. She was so excited she wanted to run down the street. But even Eris understood their current predicament. They’d been transported to the Demon Continent, and there was a lot they had to do if they were going to get home. She didn’t have time to play around. She’d buy what she needed without getting distracted along the way, then go straight home. 

And so, Eris strode straight down the street toward the armorer’s shop. She walked without hesitation, taking the shortest route from the inn to the armorer. Everything about her said that she knew what she was doing. But her confident gait was a bluff. If Rudeus had been tailing her, he would have realized that this was not the shortest route. Eris was one street off. There was more than one way to get to the armorer, of course, so Eris still had a decent chance of getting to her destination. It wasn’t like she had no sense of direction, and she’d walked along this street multiple times before. If she stopped along the way, cocked her head, and said, “Hold on,” she’d realize her mistake.

It was seriously doubtful that Eris, walking along in high spirits, would actually stop to question the street she was on, but all else going well, she had to catch on eventually.

“Hey, Eris!”

Of course, it’s always at times like those that trouble crops up. Three demons stood in Eris’s path. There was Kurt, a boy with sharp eyes and a single horn protruding from his forehead; Gablin, a nimble-looking boy with a bird’s head; and Bachiro, with a body like a boulder and four arms. It was the Tokurabu Village Toughs. 

“Out on your own? That’s rare. What’s happened? Isn’t Rudeus with you today?”

“You won’t get any answers out of Eris, Kurt. She doesn’t speak our language.”

“Yeah, let’s get out of here before she punches us again.”

“We can’t do that. What if she got separated from Rudeus and she’s lost? We ought to at least tell her where to go. The Tokurabu Village Toughs don’t ignore people in trouble.”

“We don’t even know if she’s in trouble, though…”

While the three of them talked to each other in Demon God tongue, Eris frowned. She didn’t understand Demon God tongue, so she didn’t know what they were saying. But she did recognize one word—Eris. That is, her own name. 

After they’d come up to her, now they were muttering about her among themselves. Eris had experienced this before back at the school she’d briefly attended in Roa. It was what you called “talking behind someone’s back.” They made sure you knew they were talking about you, then said nasty things about you, either making sure you didn’t hear them or making a show of it to ensure you did hear. Eris hated it. There weren’t many people who enjoyed having mean things whispered about them. Eris had learned from her grandfather that when you had something to say, you said it loud and clear. That being said, Eris didn’t know what to do when people insulted her to her face either. She wasn’t good at fighting with words. Her opponents immediately shut her down with logic, leaving her with nothing to say back.

Eris clenched her fist.

“Oh, oh no. Look, she’s angry—she’s angry! Let’s go already, Kurt.”

“R-right…”

The three demons quickly backed up at the sight of Eris’s fist. The memory of how she had beaten them black and blue the other day at the inn was deeply etched in their minds. Healing magic had repaired their physical wounds, but it couldn’t fix the psychological ones. 

“O-okay, we’re going. Y-you’ll get to the inn if you go straight down this street. Inn. You understand ‘inn,’ right?” With that, Gablin and Bachiro dragged Kurt away in the direction of the Adventurers’ Guild and out of sight. 

“Hmph!” Eris huffed through her nose as she watched them go. But she didn’t give chase and beat them up. She was a bit more mellow these days.

“Anyway,” she said to herself. After that unexpected interruption, she just wanted to buy her cleaning oil and get back to the inn. She was thinking she wanted to get a move on when something caught her eye. It was an alleyway. According to the map in her head, the armorer was in exactly the same direction that it led. 

“This way should be shorter!” she said. Without hesitation, she headed into the alley. Needless to say, that alley did not lead to the armorer…

***

Eris walked deeper into the dimly lit backstreets. She’d veered way off course, but she never doubted that she was heading toward her goal. Unlike Rudeus, she didn’t doubt herself. 

She kept walking, progressing further and further into a rougher part of town. A pig-faced demon gambled on the side of the street while a lizard-faced demon asked, eyes glittering, if she had any valuables on her. Eris looked very out of place. The thing was, even if she was just as vicious as any of the folk around her on the inside, she still looked like a little girl. She stood out like an orange life preserver bobbing on the ocean. And so, of course, the sharks that saw anything floating on the surface as a meal started closing in.

“Hey, little girl. This road’s closed.” One of these was a demon with a face like a fox. “If you wanna pass, you’d better get your ­wallet out.” There was a big scar on his face, and you could tell he was tough. An ordinary person would have taken one look at his face, known he was dangerous, and pulled out their wallet. Or at least, anyone who lived on the Demon Continent would have.

But Eris couldn’t even tell demons apart, let alone whether they were tough or not. The way she saw it, a rude fox man had shown up and blocked off the street. And she didn’t understand what he’d said, either. She did understand one thing, though: the fox had a sneering grin on his face, and he was making fun of her. 

Eris only had one way of dealing with louts like him.

“Now, if I like what I find in your wallet, I might let you…guh!”

Eris hit him with a heavy body blow. The fox man, who’d ­assumed she was either scared or intimidated, hadn’t expected her to throw a punch without speaking so much as a word. Eris’s fist came at him faster than he could have imagined and buried itself deep in his gut. He doubled over, clutching his stomach. This naturally meant that he lowered his head. To Eris, this meant it was easier to punch. She took him on the chin with a hook that knocked him out cold. 

Eris looked down at the fox man lying face down on the ground. His ragged clothes and the other end of the street he’d been blocking off sparked a recollection… She realized that she was heading in the direction of the place she had once gone to look for a pet. In other words, she had taken a wrong turn.

“This isn’t right.” Realizing her mistake, she turned around. The direction she set off in wasn’t quite the direction she’d come from, but by happy chance, it was the road that led to the armorer. Rudeus, if he’d been there, would have thanked the fox man for showing her the right way… No, scratch that. He wouldn’t have gone that far. 

In any case, Eris set off without hesitation along the road that led to the armorer.

***

At last, Eris found the armorer. If she’d had a GPS tracker that let her display the route she’d taken, it would have shown she’d gone an extremely roundabout way. But Eris had no notion of having been lost. It didn’t count as being lost if you got to where you were going without ever feeling like you’d lost your way.

When she entered the armorer’s shop, all sorts of things threatened to grab her attention, but she suppressed that urge. She took a bottle of cleaning oil from where it sat beside the weapons, then banged two scrap iron coins down on the counter where the shopkeeper sat.

“I’ll take this!” she declared.

“Thanks,” the shopkeeper said at length. 

She had successfully completed her shopping. Well done, Eris. But she couldn’t relax yet. The shopping wasn’t over until she was back at the inn.

“Ahah! There she is!”

It is said that what goes around comes around. Do a bad thing, and something bad will come back to bite you.

Eris exited the armorer’s shop only to find five men standing in front of her.

“You’ve got some nerve, pulling that stunt back there.” One of them was the fox man with the scar on his face. That’s right, he’d regained consciousness and come here in a rage to get revenge.

Eris, of course, didn’t remember him. The only time she remembered the faces of people she encountered on the side of the road was when they humiliated her. Still, she could tell that the five men around her were extremely hostile. 

“We’re gonna take you down a peg before you start thinking too much of yourself.”

The corners of Eris’s mouth turned down, and she backed up. She didn’t bother to think about why she was surrounded. That was just what ruffians did, and even she had thought that going out alone might lead her to run into kidnapper-types.

On top of that, these were precisely the sorts of opponents her training had prepared her for.

“Out of my way!” Rudeus had told her she should try her best not to stir up any commotions, so she gave them a warning. If it was up to her, she would have attacked before they had a chance to get a word in, but this time, she followed Rudeus’s instructions. Eris had gotten smarter. (Eris didn’t think punching the fox man earlier counted as a commotion. That had been more like saying hello.)

Anyway, she gave the men a warning, but they were demons—they didn’t speak human language. And even if she’d said it in a language they understood, they were too worked up for her warning to stop them. Eris’s shout ended up setting off the fight.

“Take this!” The fox man charged at her like he was determined to get the first punch in on her.

“Hah!” Even with an opponent twice her size barreling toward her, Eris wasn’t scared. She blocked his punch, drove her fist deep into his gut, then, the moment he leaned forward, she clocked him in the jaw with a hook, going through the same motions as the last fight. It was her favorite combo. But there were still four more enemies. She’d taken one down, but she was still surrounded…or so you might have thought. But the other four didn’t attack. Why? Because Eris was standing just inside the entrance to the armorer’s shop. With the door in the way, the other four couldn’t attack her all at once. This was no coincidence. When Eris had been surrounded before, she had deliberately taken a step back to get into this position. That being said, her current location wasn’t purely advantageous. Fighting with the entrance to the shop in front of her put Eris at a disadvantage too. She hadn’t been able to put enough force into her hook to knock the fox man out. As he toppled forward, he reached out to grab Eris’s ankle.

“Ngh…. L-little brat… Gah! G-get her, boys!”

Eris kicked him in the face, but it wasn’t enough to make him let go. And while the entranceway was narrow, in the end, it only limited the number who could attack her at the same time. If they used their numbers, it wouldn’t be hard for them to pile onto her.

“Tsk.” She clicked her tongue, then, feeling a bit desperate, she looked outside. “Huh?” The wind seemed to go out of her sails.

At the same time, she stopped kicking, giving the fox-faced man a moment to glance behind him. “Eh?” Dismay clouded his face. “Y-you’re kiddin’ me…”

There was only one person standing outside the armorer’s shop. The four others that Fox-face had brought with him were lying in the dirt, twitching. They were out cold. Fox-face didn’t know the person standing there, but Eris knew him very well. He had dappled, bluish hair and carried a white spear, and he was glaring down at Fox-face as the demon lay there on his belly.

“Ruijerd,” Eris called out. The man—Ruijerd—let out a sigh of relief.

“I was worried, when you weren’t at the inn.”

“I kind of ran out of oil, so I came to buy some more.”

“At least leave a note.”

“I’ll do that next time!” Eris chirped back. The fox man’s grip had slackened, so she shook him off, then walked out of the armorer’s shop, stomping on his face as she went.

“How’d you know I’d be here?”

“The Tokurabu Village Toughs. They were at the inn when I returned and they told me you were lost. I guessed from their story that this was where you were heading, and I was right.”

“How rude. I wasn’t lost,” Eris protested. “I’m glad you showed up, though. These guys picked a fight with me for some reason.”

“So I saw.”

The two of them strolled serenely away, leaving the four thugs twitching on the ground and Fox-face with his mouth hanging open as he tried to work out what had just happened.

What had gone around had come around. This was the price of blackmail.

***

And so Eris made it safely back to the inn. With Ruijerd at her side, she didn’t make any wrong turns. All there was left to do was take care of her sword.

“Oh no, this is bad… This is bad!” 

Eris was greeted by the sight of Rudeus pacing anxiously around the room in a flap.

“Wh-what’s wrong?” she asked. At this, Rudeus looked anguished and threw his arms around her legs. 

“Eris! Listen, when I came back to the inn, it was deserted. Eris should be here, but I can’t find her anywhere!”

“U-uh-huh… I’ll leave a note next—“

“What should I do?! She might have been kidnapped while I was out. Wait, or it might be a plot by one of my enemies… Damn it! Oh, please don’t let any harm come to her!”

Rudeus went on saying things that Eris couldn’t make heads or tails of. His eyes were unfocused and rolling around with fear. When he’d returned to the inn and found Eris gone, he panicked. He panicked so badly that his hand snaked around Eris’s back to stroke her butt.

“Eris…! Come with me to look for Eris!”

Eris had no words for Rudeus in this state. But she knew what to do when he touched her butt.

“Calm down!”

“Nghaaaagh!” Rudeus’s piteous cry echoed through the inn, and he fell to the ground twitching. But there was a smile on his face. He was satisfied, for he had stroked Eris’s butt and enjoyed every second.

Eris looked down at his dopey grin and promised herself that the next time she went out by herself, she would definitely leave a note.