Risou no Himo Seikatsu - Volume 15 - Chapter 3.4

The cause of the mercenary’s despair was a report from one of his most trusted subordinates: Priest Yan had been burned at the stake.

That report had arrived before the mercenary had even been able to infiltrate the lands of the church where it had taken place. While he had been lying low in a city near the border, his idol’s time had come.

“Commander! Commander Yan!”

The mercenary standing at his side had tears rolling from both eyes as well, and they were by no means only grieving ones. Yan’s most trusted subordinates all knew the priest personally. They knew the kind of person he was and had a degree of respect and affection for the man. His unilateral execution had instilled a mix of sadness, rage, and hatred in all of them. If Yan hadn’t stopped them, some of them would probably have stormed across the borders to try to rescue the priest.

Emotionally, the commander himself felt the same way. The difference was that he understood that hasty action would genuinely not improve the situation, and he had the self-control to keep his head in the middle of the emotional turmoil. He had needed to lay down the law with his subordinates.

“Stay calm.”

“Listen to me.”

“If we throw our lives away for nothing, he will be no happier.”

Those had been his main warnings to his men. He was a veteran mercenary and a superlative commander. He was not, however, beyond human enough that he could overcome his humanity. He had been unable to think of how he could take a mere twenty men against the de facto rulers of the continent to rescue a single man, and while he had agonized over plans and strategies, the man in question had been put to death.

When people finally lost something that they were willing to gamble their lives on, they usually fell into one of two categories. Some fell into despair, effectively becoming zombies, while others had their hearts filled with the fires of hatred and swore vengeance. For those such as the commander, where violence was their occupation, it was rather easy to see which way they would go.

The commander’s voice started off inaudible, but increased in volume until he was speaking clearly. “...it. This will not go unanswered. Who do they think they are, acting holier-than-thou after he died? After they killed him? They won’t get away with it.”

“Right.”

“Commander Yan’s right.”

“This is wrong!”

The small room contained Yan’s most trusted comrades. While there were those who would agree, there were none who would gainsay him. They spurred each other’s anger on to higher levels, stoking their fury until it would consume them.

It was at that moment there was a knock at the door. The quiet noise echoed through the room.

The reactions from the men were exactly what you would expect from such long-serving mercenaries. Yan was instantly on his feet giving wordless hand signals. His men immediately moved to their prearranged stations and placed their hands on their weapons.

The air was thick with tension as Yan looked at one of the men who kept all concern out of his voice as he spoke through the door.

“Aye, who is it?”

Yan and his men were hiding in the district by blending into the slums. They had fake names and histories to avoid rousing suspicion and had interacted with the locals. Whoever was at the door could therefore be a local who had come for no real reason. However, after a short few moments, a voice replied.

“Some guy gave me a letter. Said to give it to the Yan here.” It was a young voice. Someone had asked a child to run an errand for them. There were children even in the slums, so that wasn’t an issue in and of itself. The problem was Yan’s name coming from the child’s mouth.

The commander was incredibly famous for a mercenary. He also had a particularly distinguishing feature in his single eye. Therefore, since he had taken up residence in the hideout, he hadn’t left the building even once, leaving all interactions with the outside to his subordinates. And yet, his location was known. Who in the world had sent this letter?

Yan moved on silent feet out of the shadows he had hidden in, returning to the middle of the room with a stern expression. Then he spoke in a low voice.

“Come in.”

The door slowly opened at his words. It permitted the person to enter. He was, as the voice had led them to believe, a young boy. He wore shoddy clothes that were patched in places, with his face and hair dirtied by grime and grease. He was the very picture of a slum child and couldn’t have been older than his early teens.

He twitched as he saw all the powerful men standing around the room. However, he soon shook his head and mustered his courage, standing as straight as he could as he entered. The commander signaled one of his men with a glance, and the fellow shut the door.

The boy’s shoulders jolted in another flinch, but there was no other choice. They couldn’t allow whatever was discussed here to leave the room.

“I am Yan. What’s this letter?”

“H-Here.” With a shaking hand, the boy held out some parchment.

“Someone light a candle,” Yan ordered as he took it.

“Sure.”

In the light of the candle, Yan cast his eye over the paper. His expression immediately shifted.

“Commander?”

“I’ll explain later. You all wait for now,” he stated, his expression firm. This letter was definitely intended for him.

It started off with words of condolence for the priest’s unjust execution and as a slight comfort, offered assistance in restoring the body. It spoke of a special spell that could completely restore a corpse to pristine condition, no matter its current state.

“Fuck, now of all times. That definitely cooled me down,” he muttered to himself.

Indeed, his thoughts, which had been churning like lava, had suddenly slipped into ice-cold clarity. He had focused on vengeance because there was nothing else more important to him. He didn’t care what he lost anymore, up to and including his own life. Nothing he could gain now would satisfy him. That attitude allowed him to dedicate everything to revenge. This was particularly true when the target was an organization he could almost certainly not defeat.

But the flames of his vengeance had immediately been extinguished by the letter in his hand. If he could retrieve Priest Yan’s corpse, it could be restored. To those of the dragon faith, the corpse being burned was the worst state it could be in. If there was some way it could be restored, then the commander would prioritize that over any fruitless attempt at revenge. The mercenary was logical enough that such an objective could sweep away even the black flames of his vendetta. With logic returned to him, his even sharper intellect and insight could begin to shine.

His eye—a bluish-gray—gleamed as he glared at the parchment. He needed any information he could get. It was high-quality parchment, but not so much that it would stand out. The ink itself also seemed to be good, but the letters written in it were too clean, so nothing about it was useful. It was overall neat and tidy, so there were no clues.

Once he realized that, the mercenary felt something pulling his attention. Instantly, he started to examine his thoughts.

What caught my eye? Did something seem off? It’s clean? Too clean? What’s wrong with it being clean?

With that, Yan realized the problem lay with who exactly had given him the letter.

“Wh-What?” the urchin asked, jolting as Yan fixed him with a single-eyed glare.

The mercenary didn’t give any mind to the scared youth, however, simply continuing to observe him.

“Seriously, what?” the boy demanded, mustering every ounce of courage he had to hold back the tears at the sight of such a scary man glaring at him. But still the commander didn’t let up.

“Commander?” one of his men asked. Even they seemed to find the fixed stare excessive.

Eventually, Yan came to a conclusion. He needed to verify it, though. “You.”

“Wh-What’s with you?!”

While the boy reared back in fear, Yan continued in an even tone.

“Did you look inside? Did anyone but me and the person who sent it read it?”

It was an odd question to ask. A street urchin wouldn’t have had the education to read it, and how would he know whether anyone had seen inside it when some stranger had asked him to take it somewhere?

The boy began waving his hands around. “I-I ain’t looked! I don’t know about no one else; I just got asked to bring it here to some guy called Yan,” he explained.

The explanation made Yan certain that his hunch was right. “I see. You swear it?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Now that he had the promise, Yan’s blue-tinged eye narrowed as he spoke menacingly to the boy. “Right. Then swear it on your father’s honor.”

The reaction was dramatic. The boy’s face froze in surprise for a second, but then he eventually let out a sigh and stood up straight. That was the only change—standing up straight—but it had changed him entirely.

“Very well. I swear upon my father János’s honor, no one has seen the contents of that letter.”

Yan held up a hand to restrain his men as they readied themselves. “Very well. I shall believe you, son of János. László, if I remember correctly.”

“That’s me. It is an honor that a general of your caliber remembered such a novice after leading the battle of Tannenwald to a victory for the commonwealth.” The boy smiled softly at that, putting his right fist over his left breast and bowing. It was a common bow for a mercenary or soldier, but the boy looked like an aristocrat as he did so.

Yan gave a sigh at László behaving the way he was, and scratched his head. “Tch, I’d heard the rumors, but you’re just as bad as your father. So, how involved is János in this?”

János was a name that, at least in the mercenary world, was widely known. He was younger than Yan but had a roughly similar amount of fame. He had led many to victory in battle, and was one of the very few mercenaries whose services influenced any battle where he was employed. He was famed for already being married and taking a young child around with him.

Yan himself had fought on the opposite side from János once, before he was hired by the priest. He of course knew of his son László from rumors, but this was the first time he had laid eyes on the boy.

János was a mercenary who had just as high a reputation for his manners as his military skill. Naturally, that was only in relation to other mercenaries, but he was well-known for fighting for what was right in addition to faithfully fulfilling his contracts.

“It seems we’ve got a troublesome individual with eyes on us. It’s infuriating, but I suppose we were right not to move.”

Yan’s statement was prompted by a significant misunderstanding he was working under. That assumption was that the mercenary János was paying close attention to him and had pinpointed his hideout. It was by no means a shortcoming on Yan’s part that had led to that misunderstanding. There was the saying “it takes one to know one.” Indeed, if you were looking for a mercenary’s hideout, a skilled mercenary in the same circles would certainly be the one to ask.

In fact, Yan felt like it was something he too would do if he had to find a hidden mercenary in a city. It was practically impossible for him to make the leap that Tucale’s divination magic had let the country tip off Aura as to his whereabouts.

“Dad was just hired to get the letter to you, General, I believe he holds you no ill will.” He must have heard Yan’s comment to himself and his response was a pleased smile. He respected his father, so he was probably pleased to hear someone of Yan’s renown evaluate him so highly. You could consider it praising him as a mercenary.

“I see, then tell him this: if you don’t want to make enemies, don’t pry any further into our movements.”

“I shall tell him exactly that. For future reference, though, could you tell me something?”

“What?” Yan returned.

László responded without hesitation. “What exactly marked me out as his child? I don’t believe we’ve ever met, and I am fairly confident in my disguise.”

“Oh. That.” Yan considered it for a few moments, then answered honestly. “The first thing was the letter. That was one of your mistakes. Can you see what it was? It seems not, so I will tell you. It is too clean.”

The fact that László realized his mistake with nothing more was a testament to his intelligence beyond his years.

“Ah, the look on your face tells me that hint was enough. Impressive. That’s right; you’ve disguised yourself as a street brat, and a street brat would have gotten the letter dirty with filth and oils from his hands. Furthermore, they don’t have much of a sense of importance for those things, so it being bent and folded would be more natural. You treated it carefully because of your awareness that it was an important letter.”

There were a few moments of silence before the boy responded. “I’ll learn from that.”

“The deciding factor was your answer when I asked whether anyone other than the sender and I had seen the contents. After you said you hadn’t looked, you also added that you didn’t know about anyone else. Usually, you would answer that you hadn’t, or that no one had.”

“Huh?” The boy didn’t understand that and tilted his head in confusion.

The commander was almost unnaturally kind as he explained. “I suppose your assumption was that with you being a child living in these slums, some person you’d never seen had given you change and told you to bring the letter to me. The sender would never personally come here and directly hand it over, so there would have been at least one other person, or two if there was trust between you and them. That much is correct. If your father was going to use one of the street urchins for such a thing, he would do that, and so would I. However, the brat in question wouldn’t know that.”

“Oh...”

Yan grinned as László realized his mistake, and continued explaining. “That’s right. A street rat would assume that whoever handed them the letter was the sender. Whoever was handing it over would also never explain directly that they were acting on someone else’s behalf, after all. In that case, you would be the only possible person to see the contents between receiving the letter and handing it over. So from that position, the correct answers were either that you hadn’t looked or that no one had looked.”

“I see. If I was the street child I disguised myself as, the correct answer would have actually been the incorrect one. That does help,” he said gratefully. “If you’ll excuse me, then.” Now that his question had been answered, László bowed and moved to leave. His bow, the way he spoke, and the way he walked were all bold and made him seem like the young scion of a military family rather than a mercenary’s son.

“Aye. Take care,” Yan answered, having no more reason to keep the boy.

The squeal of the hinges showed just how bad the door’s condition was as László opened it and shut it behind him.

“That was a pretty precise explanation. Should you have given it?” one of his subordinates asked once they were sure the stranger had left.

The mercenary shrugged before answering. “Probably not. It’s better than a poor explanation to someone like him, though.”

“Not explaining would have been worse?”

László was the son of the mercenary János. You could describe him as a business rival. Purposefully giving him more information didn’t make sense to his subordinates, and their line of thought seemed correct. Commander Yan’s read on the situation was different, though.

“The fact that he bothered to ask means that he already had doubts. If I didn’t tell him the truth, he has enough intelligence to think it through and come to the correct conclusion. His reasoning skills have been trained for it. If it’s going to lead to bad habits in thinking, it’d be better to explain in detail to make him pay more heed to what people say. Well, it’s pretty much pointless, I’d imagine.”

The boy’s father was János, after all, so even if Yan hadn’t told him the truth, if László had explained the situation properly, his father would likely have come to the right conclusion.

“Well, forget about the brat. Getting involved with János is irritating, but if he was hired as a mediator, he probably isn’t against us, and he keeps his word. More importantly, you lot need to see this.”

With that, he passed the letter around to his subordinates. Many mercenaries couldn’t read, but Yan’s most trusted were all educated enough to be able to read on a basic level at least. All of them grew excited as they did so.

“What the?!”

“They can restore the priest’s corpse?”

“Are they telling the truth?”

They were all of the dragon faith, so the hope that the target of so much of their respect could be restored was shared between them.

“Considering the timing, I doubt it is a mere bluff. It will at least be worth hearing them out,” Yan answered.

Even as the words left his mouth, his feelings towards the sender were such that he couldn’t stay calm. The letter had arrived after he had found out about the priest’s death and before he had actively started to attempt his revenge, telling him that they could restore the corpse. It was unlikely that the timing was simple coincidence.

The sender had without a doubt found the mercenary’s location before the priest had been executed, having someone on watch—and Yan’s assumption was that it was the mercenary János.

“I’ve no idea who in the world this is, but it’s in poor taste,” he commented, a murderous tinge to his voice.

They had waited until the priest was already dead and then offered to restore his body. However much the offer matched his desires, he couldn’t manage to feel kindly disposed towards them at all.

“I don’t know what their aim is in contacting us like this, but I’ll see if this letter is true with my own eyes,” he said.

There was an extreme amount of resolve in his words as he spoke.