“Rainer! Where are you? I know you’re just playing with Addy!” a voice called from far away. Rainer had been skipping out on his work in the fields, so his mom was coming to get him. The boy stuck out his tongue and ran off in the opposite direction.
It had been quite the rough day for Adlet. Not only had he been dragged into playing defense corps, but then he had to pacify his friend’s livid mother.
“Oh, welcome home. Rainer really beat you good, didn’t he?” When Adlet returned to his stone cottage, he was welcomed by the smell of mushroom stew and a woman in her midtwenties. Her name was Schetra, and she was Adlet’s guardian.
“Schetra, tell Rainer to give me a break from all the practice fights,” said Adlet.
“Tell him that yourself. Besides, he’s not trying to be mean.”
“I’m sick of it. I don’t have to be a fighter. I hate fighting,” complained Adlet, depositing a cloth bundle on the table. A pleasant smell wafted from within it.
“Those are meadowcap mushrooms, aren’t they?” asked Schetra. “Perfect. I was just looking for some ingredients to add flavor.”
After Rainer ran away, Adlet had gone into the forest to look for mushrooms. He’d acquired a number of rare specimens that day. Finding delicious mushrooms was Adlet’s hobby, and it was what he was best at. Schetra cut up the meadow morsels and put them in the stew, producing a fragrant smell reminiscent of chargrilled meat.
Three years earlier, Adlet had lost his parents to the plague, and Schetra had lost her shepherd husband the same way. Schetra had taken Adlet in, and the two of them had been living together ever since. Adlet’s guardian tended to the sheep and cut their wool, while the boy used their milk to make cheese. The pair sold both to the other villagers to support themselves.
That was Adlet Mayer’s memory of being ten years old. He had been content then. After he’d lost his parents, Schetra had kindly embraced him. She’d brought the smiles back to his face. Adlet loved the smell of earth and sheep steeped into Schetra’s body. Rainer was a pain in the butt, but he was a good friend. Adlet was sick of playing defense corps, but he understood quite well that Rainer felt strongly for Adlet and the rest of the village, in his own way. And the other villagers were good people. They bought Adlet’s clumsily made cheese and told him it was good, despite the fact that it would have tasted better if Schetra had made it.
Adlet had been a truly ordinary boy then. He had never considered that he could become one of the Braves of the Six Flowers. He’d never even wanted to, not once. What he’d been good at was finding mushrooms. His goal for the future had been learning to make better cheese.
Young Adlet had believed that those days would go on forever.
It was a dream. A dream of things past.
“……Why have you come here?”
The setting of the dream had changed. There was a house in a forest, a modified cave in the thickly overgrown trees—not very homey. An old man sat cross-legged within.
“Atreau Spiker. I heard you could teach me to become a warrior.” Adlet looked like death. His clothes were tattered, and his body was rail-thin. Both his hands were covered in blood, and his eyes were those of a man who’d died with lingering resentment.
“Leave this mountain. If you wish to be strong, join the knights. If you be a commoner, join a mercenary band.” The old man—Atreau—refused in a quiet but resonant voice.
“That wouldn’t be enough. That would make me strong. But it wouldn’t make me the strongest in the world.”
“The strongest in the world?” Atreau’s eyebrows wavered, their long hair obscuring his expression.
“I can’t become the strongest in the world through normal training,” continued Adlet. “I need to walk a different path. I will become the strongest man in the world. I’ll become the strongest and destroy the fiends.”
“Why do you want to be a warrior?” the old man asked.
“To take back what was stolen from me,” Adlet replied. “I can’t get it back unless I become stronger than anyone. Stronger than everyone.”
“Give up,” said Atreau coldly. “What is gone cannot be retrieved. Give it up and live on.”
“I can’t!” Adlet yelled. “I have to get it back! If I don’t, then what have I survived for?! If I can’t defeat the Evil God, if I can’t fight fiends, my life isn’t worth living at all!”
Atreau looked into Adlet’s eyes for a while, thinking.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” asked Adlet. “You think there’s no way I can become the strongest in the world, don’t you?” There were tears in his eyes. “I don’t care if you think I’m stupid. I don’t care if you laugh at me. I’ll keep on believing I can become the strongest man in the world. I’ll keep on yelling that I’ll be the strongest man in the world. How could I become stronger if I didn’t?!”
Atreau gazed up at the heavens contemplatively. Then he slowly stood and kicked Adlet hard in the gut. It knocked the wind out of him, acid welling up from his empty stomach. Atreau kicked Adlet’s sides and his back over and over. He stepped on the boy’s face and ground it into the cavern floor. And then Atreau said, “Smile.”
“…Huh? Sm…ile?” Though he tried to reply, the words wouldn’t come out. He hurt so much he felt he would die.
“If you want to be a warrior, then smile.” Atreau kicked Adlet’s back. “When sorrow inspires the urge to die. When agony makes it necessary to throw everything away and flee. When you drown in despair and can see no light. One who can smile even then will become strong.”
Adlet’s trembling lips twisted. His cheeks spasmed, and though his expression didn’t look much like he was smiling, he was.
After that, Atreau continued beating him. He kicked Adlet’s face until blood spurted from his nose. He punched Adlet’s stomach until blood mixed with vomit. But even then, Atreau did not stop. To smile, even when spewing red-tinted bile, with his nose dripping blood, and tears streaking down his face. That was the first technique of battle that Atreau taught Adlet.
Adlet opened his eyes. It had been a vague, incoherent dream. “Ugh. ”
He was in the forest, surprised to be still alive. “…?” He thought he’d collapsed facedown, but now he was lying faceup with a tree root as his pillow. When he touched his back, the sword that should have been there was not. His wound had been treated, sewn up, and wrapped in bandages. Who had treated him? Had Nashetania found him?
Then he heard a voice.
“You’re awake.” He could just barely see Fremy’s blurry shape within the dark fog. “They missed your vitals. If you rest, you should be able to move around again soon.”
“You treated my wound?” Adlet asked, sitting up.
“Yes.”
“Why?” Fremy should also have believed that Adlet was the seventh. They had gotten off to a rocky start when they first met, too. He couldn’t understand why she would save him.
“I’m ninety-nine percent certain that you’re the seventh,” said Fremy. “But not completely. This is for the sake of that one percent chance.”
“Well, you’re right. I am a real Brave. I came here to fight the Evil God.”
“Oh? I don’t believe you,” Fremy said, looking away.
Silence fell upon them. The nighttime forest was quiet. Adlet figured the other five would have given up searching now that it was dark. There was no sign that they were still chasing him. So what should he do at this point? He had to prove his innocence, no matter what. But how? “This is gonna sound pathetic,” said Adlet, “but I have no idea how the impostor got into the temple.”
“Of course. Because you’re the impostor.”
“Was it really true, what Hans said? Was there really no way to open that door?”
“I’m not as informed as he is, but I do know a bit about the doors created by the Saint of Seals. I don’t think what Hans said was wrong,” she said.
“…”
“Besides, Mora shot down your ideas, too. There’s no way anyone c
ould have gotten into that temple.”
If that was the case, then Adlet really was stuck. If it was, in fact, possible to get in the temple, that would mean that Hans, Mora, and Fremy were all lying. But only one among the seven of them was the enemy. Six really were Braves. It would be unthinkable for any of the real Braves to be conspiring with the enemy of their own free will. That meant that if multiple Braves were telling the same story, it had to be the truth.
“The impostor might be Mora,” suggested Adlet. She’d said there was no one who could have broken into that locked temple. But if her testimony had been a lie, then what? What if she was an accomplice to the Saint who’d broken in?
“That may be possible,” Fremy conceded. “But you can’t prove it. You would have to capture the person who broke into the temple and demonstrate their powers to all of us.”
“Well, maybe there’s some unknown Saint, one that even she doesn’t know about. She didn’t know about you, so you can’t say for sure that there aren’t any as-yet-unknown Saints.”
“That amounts to the same thing. You can’t prove this Saint did it unless you catch her.”
Anyway, that just meant he had to catch the person who’d activated the barrier. “Let me sort this out,” he said. “First, we have two or more enemies. One of these two is among the seven Braves who have gathered here. The other is the one who broke into the temple and activated the barrier.” That much was certain. It wasn’t possible for any of them other than Adlet to have activated the barrier. When it had been turned on, Fremy, Nashetania, and Goldof had been fighting fiends. Mora and Hans had been on their way to the temple. The only one whose position at the time was unknown was Chamo, but Mora had testified that Chamo could not break into the temple with her powers.
“We’ve been calling the one who infiltrated our group, the one who bears a crest, the seventh,” Adlet continued. “Let’s call the one who activated the barrier the eighth. Of course, they’re working with the fiends. The fiends dropped bombs on the temple in order to lure the Braves of the Six Flowers to the temple and attacked us to separate me from the rest of you. This was most likely a carefully prepared plan.”
“That still leaves us with a question,” said Fremy. “What is the seventh here for? If the plan was to lock us in, it could have been accomplished without the seventh’s presence.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Adlet. “If the seventh wasn’t among us, framing me as the seventh wouldn’t be possible. The plan wasn’t to lock us up. The plan was to set me up and get me killed.”
“I didn’t think of that. Because I thought you were the seventh.” Fremy was going along with the conversation, but she didn’t seem to trust him at all. Adlet had thought he could persuade Fremy to side with him, but it seemed that would be impossible.
“Anyway, we can put off dealing with the seventh,” he said. “Our number one priority is finding the eighth.”
“Can you? On your own, I mean.”
Adlet was forced into silence. He’d be looking for an unknown enemy with unknown powers, all while shaking the other five Braves. Of course, this eighth person wouldn’t just be strolling the woods. They’d be desperately hiding to avoid capture. Could it even be done? It seemed completely impossible to him. But the more convinced he became that it was impossible, the bigger the smile on his face grew. His lips relaxed, and his spirit was invigorated.
“You’re a strange man. What are you smiling about?” asked Fremy.
“I’m smiling because, as usual, I’m the strongest man in the world.” Adlet clenched a fist. “I’m in a lousy situation, but it doesn’t even come close to breaking my spirit.” To smile at despair: That was the first thing Adlet’s master, Atreau, had taught him. “I’m looking forward to tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the day I ruin my enemy’s plot. I’ll prove both my innocence and the fact that I’m the strongest man in the world at the same time. I can’t wait for sunrise.”
Adlet kept smiling. He had no idea who the eighth really was. It didn’t seem likely that he could continue to evade the other Braves, either. But if he stopped smiling, it would all be over.
“You’re deluded.”
“No. I’m determined.” As Adlet smiled, he thought about the eighth: who it might be and what kind of powers they might have. He searched his memories to see if, perhaps, he had overlooked some clue, anything out of the ordinary. After he’d been thinking for a while, Fremy suddenly spoke.
“Why did you want to be one of the Braves of the Six Flowers?”
For some reason, this was new and surprising to him. Fremy had seemed uninterested in the other Braves all this time. This was the first time she’d shown interest in another person. “Why are you asking me that?” asked Adlet.
“Because you’re ordinary.”
“…”
“Hans is a genius. Goldof, too. But you’re not. You’re just an ordinary person with a lot of strange weapons.”
“You’re saying I’m weak? Me, the strongest man in the world?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m asking how an unremarkable person like yourself could become such a powerful fighter. That’s what I want to know.”
Adlet didn’t reply. Hans and Goldof were geniuses, and Adlet was ordinary. He couldn’t deny that. He couldn’t touch either of them when it came to pure swordplay or martial arts. “It’s thanks to my master,” said Adlet. “I hesitate to say this, but he was a little crazy. He was obsessed with killing fiends. He spent all his time by himself, deep in the mountains, devising new weapons and then coming up with ways to use them. He didn’t do anything else. You wouldn’t even think he was human.”
“…”
“He hammered the skills into me. I trained every day until I puked and couldn’t move anymore, and when that was over, I was confined to my desk to study. I learned about making his tools and poisons, refining gunpowder, and even cutting-edge science.”
“Science? Even that?” asked Fremy.
“I’m grateful to him. He made me the warrior I am. Learning a normal style of combat wouldn’t have made me the strongest man in the world.”
“I know that man,” she said, and Adlet looked at her. “Atreau Spiker,” Fremy continued. “He was one of my targets. He was quite old, so he was low on my priority list, though.”
“Yeah, that’s the guy,” said Adlet.
“I heard all his disciples ran away. They couldn’t handle his severe training.”
“Your information was wrong. There was one who didn’t run away: me.”
“How were you able to put up with it?”
Adlet didn’t reply.
“Something happened, didn’t it?” pressed Fremy. “There was a reason you wanted to be one of the Braves of the Six Flowers.”
Adlet suddenly remembered his conversation with Nashetania in the prison. She’d asked him all sorts of things, but Adlet hadn’t told her everything. The subject was heavy for him and not something he could talk about easily. Some things were like that. “When I was a kid, a fiend came to my village.” And yet, why did it feel so natural to talk about his past now? “I couldn’t believe it. I’d thought that fiends were creatures from some faraway land. My best friend tried to hit it with a stick. I was crying when I stopped him.”
“What was this fiend like?” asked Fremy.
“It was shaped like a human. Its body was patterned with green- and skin-colored mottles. At the time, it seemed like it towered to the heavens, but I think it probably wasn’t actually that big. About the same size as Goldof.”
“It had three wings, didn’t it? Three crow-like wings on its back.”
That was exactly right. “You know it?” he asked.
“Continue your story.”
“It didn’t attack us or eat us. It just approached us with a smile and patted my head. It was kind. Unbelievably kind. The fiend called the adults of the village to convene together and told us kids to go to sleep. Of course, there was no way I could fall asleep. I trembled all n
ight in my guardian’s arms.”
“And then?” prompted Fremy.
“The next morning, the fiend was gone. No one had been killed. No one was even injured. I was relieved. And then the village elder told us that the entire village would move to the Howling Vilelands and that from that point on we would be ruled by the Evil God.”
“…”
“Every single adult in the village said the human world was going to end and there was no way the Braves of the Six Flowers could win. But they all believed that if we joined the Evil God right away, our lives would be spared. After speaking with that fiend for just one night, it was like they were all completely different people. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was quiver in my boots. The only ones who opposed this plan were my guardian and my best friend. But the fiend had also said one more thing—to prove our loyalty to the Evil God, the villagers should go carve out the hearts of anyone who objected and bring those hearts to it.”
“That seems like something it’d say,” Fremy remarked.
So Fremy did know the creature, after all. “What was that fiend?” asked Adlet.
“It’s one of the three commanders that govern all fiends. It was also the one that came up with the idea of making a human/fiend child and ordered my mother to bear me.”
“…”
“Continue,” she said.
“Neither my guardian nor my best friend hated the villagers for it, no matter what. The fault lay with that fiend, not the people of the village. My best friend told me not to hate them. My guardian told me that things would surely go back to how they’d been before, that one day we could live together peacefully. Pick us some mushrooms again. Let’s make the defense corps again , they said.”
“What happened to them?” asked Fremy.
“My best friend died defending me. My guardian died so I could escape. I was the only one who survived,” Adlet said, and his story ended there. “What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, the reason I became a warrior.” He closed his eyes, and as he imagined their faces in his mind, he said, “When I told my master about this, he said that it was because of my guardian and my friend that I was able to become strong. That I became so capable because I believed in what they said; that one day, things would be sure to go back to how they were before and we could live together peacefully. He said people can’t become strong for the sake of revenge. They get stronger when they have something to believe in.”
Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers, Vol. 1 Page 12