by Dojyomaru
Oh, I don’t know how to describe it... It was a very nostalgic experience. It reminded me of the whelk skewers they sold at little stalls at festivals. I’d never thought I wanted to eat them regularly, but when I passed by those stalls and smelled that aroma, I couldn’t help but stop. That was the feeling I was getting now.
I used the fork I was given to eat them. Yeah, these were butter scallops. The taste of both the butter and the scallops were intact, and these were the best butter scallops I had ever had.
I let out an unintended groan of appreciation. “They’re good...”
“I know, right?” Kuu happily agreed. “Frying them up on the beach and then eating them with butter is a proud part of our food culture.”
“I see.”
Food culture, huh? Well, I wasn’t going to let him outdo me.
I called out to Roroa, who was watching with great interest as one of the fishermen stabbed a metal skewer into a spiral shell, twisting it to extract the meat and organs.
“Hey, Roroa!”
“Hm? What’cha need?” Roroa trotted on over.
“Do you have that on you now? You know, the thing you put in a metal container and brought from back home?”
“Ohh, I think that’s in the luggage I brought with me.” Roroa rummaged through the bag of traveling equipment she had brought with her from the carriage. Producing a metal container about the size of a lunchbox, she inquired, “This it?” and offered it to me.
Kuu looked at it with curiosity. “Oookya? What’s that box?”
“It contains a seasoning we brought with us from our country.”
When I opened the metal container, it was filled with a thick, yellowish-brown colored paste.
“Seasoning?”
“Yeah. It’s called miso.”
The container held the miso I’d had the mystic wolves back home make.
Like how Japanese people want to bring instant ramen or miso soup with them when they go abroad, I had brought miso and konbu for producing broth on this trip. With some water and whatever vegetables were on hand, I could make miso soup anywhere this way. If I had meat, I could add that in, too.
That being the case, I scooped up a spoonful of miso and put a small amount of it on my butter scallops. The butter scallops had now evolved into miso and butter scallops.
I stirred them up a bit, then offered them to Kuu. “Give me the benefit of the doubt and try them, okay?”
“...S-Sure.”
Kuu dubiously picked up one of the scallop chunks, throwing it into his mouth. In the next moment, Kuu’s eyes opened in shock. “What is this?! The flavor’s super complex now! No, it’s delicious! It’s delicious, but I can’t help but want booze with it!”
“Heh heh heh,” I grinned. “How’s that? What do you think of my country’s food culture?”
I said it confidently, and after a moment of being taken aback, Kuu let out an amused laugh.
“Oookyakya! I see! You were feeling competitive because I mentioned food culture earlier! You’ve got me this time!”
“I’d say I only evened the score,” I said. “I think frying them on the beach is a good culture to have.”
“Oookyakya! No doubt about that! Ohh, when’s the booze gonna hurry up and get here?”
While we were talking, Leporina and Aisha came back. Leporina was carrying a small barrel, and Aisha was shouldering two large ones.
After that, Hal, Kaede, and Taru rejoined us, and we had a big party on the beach.
The potato vodka Kuu provided was apparently strong stuff, and by the time the sun set, everyone was too excited. Some started to let a little too loose.
The walrus men started dancing and chanting what was either an off-beat song or a cheer, I couldn’t tell which. The way they contorted and wriggled it was almost like they were belly dancers.
“How’s a walrus man dance under the sea?”
“Oh! He dances wobble-wobble-wobblingly!”
Elsewhere, a no-doubt-drunken Hal was performing some sort of fire dance with two pieces of wood wreathed in flames.
“All right! I’m all fired up!” he cried.
An equally drunk Kaede was cackling and rolling around as she watched him.
“That’s great, you know! Hal!”
Meanwhile, a drunk Kuu had a happy Tomoe riding on his shoulders.
“Oookyakya! C’mere.”
“Ahahaha! I’m so high up!”
From the high spirits she was in, Tomoe might have been drunk, too. Naturally, I hadn’t let her have a sip of alcohol, but maybe she’d gotten drunk off the smell, or the alcohol used on the shellfish hadn’t fully evaporated. Whatever the case, I’d failed in my role as her guardian. If Liscia heard about this, I was in for a lecture.
Next to them, possibly incited by Kuu, a drunk Aisha had Juna riding on her shoulders.
“Ha ha ha! What a jolly time we’re having, Madam Juna!”
“H-Hold on, Aisha! Put me down, please!”
Juna didn’t seem all that inebriated, but her face was flushed red from embarrassment at all the attention she was getting.
I helped myself to another drink and just sort of watched as the chaos gradually unfolded on the beach.
“Mweheheh, darlin’.” Roroa draped herself over me from behind. Resting her chin on my shoulder, she rubbed her cheek against me. It was a cute, cat-like gesture, but she smelled a little of alcohol. “You drinkin’ like you should, darlin’?”
“I’m drinking, yes,” I said. “But you, Roroa... you sure you haven’t had one too many?”
“Mweheheh.” She had a glass in one hand and a shell in the other. They were both already empty, so the fact that she wasn’t about to let either of them go was proof that she was already pretty drunk.
“Hey, Roroa...” I began.
“Zzz...”
“Wait, that was fast! We were in the middle of talking!”
Roroa was snoring softly with her chin resting on my shoulder.
There was a little drool coming out of her mouth, but... I decided to pretend I didn’t see it. With no other choice, I got her down off my shoulder, and let her borrow my crossed legs as a pillow.
“Purr...”
“...”
Honestly... She looked so happy, sleeping. While patting Roroa’s head, I looked over to the stupid ruckus Kuu and the others were still kicking up. They were drinking, eating, and partying together.
Having shared that fun time together, a certain thing began to take root in me.
I reflected on that silently.
Then, in order to wipe it away, I downed the glass I was holding. I did not, at this time, realize there were eyes looking at me with concern.
The party in Moran continued until late in the evening, and we ended up staying there overnight. That was because nearly everyone was totally sloshed, and while it was nearby, it was still far enough that we would have to use carriages to return to Noblebeppu.
In the end, we all ended up sleeping on the floor in the great hall of an inn that Kuu used his reputation to get us into.
Those difficulties aside, the next day came.
Kuu, Juna, and I went for a walk and visited the fishing port near the beach where we’d had the cookout. The rest of the group was hung over and out of commission.
Roroa, Hal, and Kaede were hit especially badly, and Tomoe was working with Aisha and Leporina, whose symptoms were less severe, to nurse them. It seemed Kuu’s potato vodka had caused those unused to drinking it to suffer a nasty hangover.
But why was I fine?
I could understand why Kuu, who was used to the stuff, was fine. And I could see why Juna, who’d started holding back at some point, was okay. But for some reason, I wasn’t hungover, either.
I only drank when participating in the nobles’ banquets, or while eating at Poncho’s place on days that work kept me busy until late at night and I missed dinner. I mentioned that to the two of them in puzzlement.
“Maybe you just tak
e your liquor well naturally?” Kuu suggested.
I take my liquor well, huh? Was it a genetic thing?
But, thinking back, I recalled my grandpa could be a pretty bad drunk. I vaguely remembered several times when he’d gotten drunk after drinking heavily at a party with his buddies, hadn’t made it home because of the police taking him into custody, and then received a thorough tongue-lashing from my grandma the next day.
“Is it really something natural about the way my body works?” I murmured.
“Ah...” Juna quickly looked away.
What was that about?
“Juna?”
“...What is it?” Juna showed me her usual calm smile. However, her cheeks looked like they were twitching just a little.
I peered at her face. “Is something the matter?”
Juna blatantly averted her eyes. For Juna, who rarely let her emotions show, she seemed unusually out of sorts.
Suspicious.
“Do you know something?” I prodded.
“Whatever do you mean?”
I stared down Juna, who was trying to dodge the question.
“It must be because of the uwabami,” she said finally, averting her eyes.
An uwabami... That meant a heavy drinker, right? Maybe it did have to do with my genetic makeup... Wait, huh? She’d said it was because of the uwabami, not that I was an uwabami, right? Uwabami was a word that also meant a large serpent, didn’t it?
Hmm, there was something bugging me about this.
For a while we played a game of tag where I would try to look Juna in the eye and she would look away, but then Kuu pointed to the sea and started talking.
“Hey, Kazuma. Can you see that?”
“That?” I looked out to sea to see what he meant, and there was a white object spread out across the horizon.
Was it ice? This country was on the southern tip of the continent. That being the case, that might be the ice of this world’s south pole. Because the maps were vague, there was no way to be sure if there was a continent beneath the ice, though.
Kuu looked directly below the ice as he spoke.
“Those are the ice islands. They gradually approach this country at the end of summer. When winter comes, that ice and this beach are connected, and once it snows, you can’t tell what’s land and what isn’t. This sea gets covered with ice so thick you could ride a carriage over it and it wouldn’t break.”
Kuu sat right down on the beach and crossed his legs.
Then, propping up his elbows on his lap, he rested his cheeks on his hands and looked resentfully out to sea. “Large sea creatures hate this frigid sea. That’s why medium and small fish gather, and it’s why our country has a wealth of places to fish. But that also means large shipping vessels can’t come in.”
“It’s tough, huh,” I nodded.
The large ships of this world had large sea creatures like sea dragons pulling them in the same way that horses would pull a carriage. If those sea dragons hated this sea, that was good in that they wouldn’t be invaded by foreign navies, but it was also bad in that large transport ships couldn’t come here, either. They could carry out trade by methods that didn’t rely on sea creatures or the air, but that was only an option during summer. This world didn’t have ice-breaking ships that could push through the frozen winter seas.
“There are limits to what shipping overland can do,” Kuu said. “Traveling merchants only come in summer, and with the land locked in ice during the winter, it’s hard to even walk around. If we use creatures like the numoth, we can transport things even in winter, but there aren’t that many of them. The vast majority we do have were raised for military use, too.”
“You can’t transfer them to jobs in shipping instead?” I asked.
“They’re our only means of mobility during the winter. If some monsters pour out of a dungeon, or brigands are attacking a village, or a small village has been isolated by an avalanche... we need their legs to carry us there at times like that, right?”
“I see...”
They were already using them for as much as they could, then. They probably couldn’t reassign them for shipping.
Kuu was scratching his head vigorously. “So, well, it’s not like I can’t see why the old men would want to advance northward. If we could receive large transport ships in winter, too, it would do a lot to make this land more prosperous. But even if we invaded and took a warm water port, what would come of it? So long as the difficulties of shipping don’t change, only the area around that port would benefit from trade. Invading land that’s going to be hard to support like that seems like the equivalent of wooing a beautiful woman in your dreams.”
Wooing a beautiful woman in your dreams. That seemed to be a local saying, equivalent to calling something a picture of rice cakes in Japanese. Basically, no matter how hard you worked to seduce a beautiful woman you met in your dreams, it was meaningless, and would only leave you feeling empty.
Hmm... Winter shipping methods, huh...
I wracked my brain.
That issue was a problem for our country, who wanted to trade with this country, too. If the period of trading was limited, that would put limitations on the potential trade goods. Vegetables seemed like they would be a good thing to export to this country, but many fresh foods didn’t keep for long.
We have the Little Susumu Mark V (Maxwell-type Propulsion Device), so we can send out large ships even during the winter, I reflected. However, it won’t let us break through thick ice. I have people studying it, but who knows how long it will take to produce an ice breaker like the Garinko-go...
Could we manage with what we had now, somehow? How about stationing a mage on the ship and having them carve a path?
...No, it was hard to use magic at sea, wasn’t it? The frozen area was too wide, so no matter how many mages we had aboard, they’d eventually run out of steam. Meanwhile, if we tried to attempt transportation by air, the air currents would be too wild, so flying mounts wouldn’t be usable. Also, because the land was covered with snow, if we didn’t use creatures like the numoth, overland transportation would be difficult.
There are no snowplows, either. If there were something like sleds, we could slide over top of the snow... Wait, wouldn’t we need numoths to pull those sled? ...Hm? Slide over top of the snow?
That was when I remembered the existence of a certain thing.
Earlier, when thinking of uses for the Little Susumu Mark V, there was something I’d developed almost entirely as a joke.
Maybe with that... I pondered. Guess I’ll try contacting Genia.
I didn’t know how it would go yet, so rather than give him false hopes, I decided not to tell Kuu and to contact the royal castle in secret.
When the afternoon rolled around, the hungover members of the group started to feel a lot better, so we decided to return to the town of Noblebeppu. It was already evening by the time the rocky carriage ride came to an end.
Kuu was saying we’d have another party tonight, but since most of us hadn’t fully worked last night’s alcohol out of their systems, we politely declined and decided to let our stomachs and livers rest for the night.
The shaking of the carriage had aggravated Roroa, Hal, and Kaede’s hangovers, so they went to their rooms as soon as we got to the inn, and went to sleep without dinner.
Aisha took Tomoe out to walk around the town at night. They were apparently going to look at souvenirs.
Left behind, Juna and I talked about nothing of real consequence and relaxed.
Eventually, while I was thinking that all there was left to do was take a bath in the hot springs and go to sleep, suddenly Juna said, “Oh, I just remembered something I need to do. Excuse me,” and left the room.
She had business to attend to at this hour?
Had she gone to look for Aisha and Tomoe, maybe?
Having been left behind all by myself, I had nothing to do, so I decided to take a bath. This inn just had one large open air bath fed wi
th free-flowing water that was partitioned into men’s and women’s sides.
I rinsed myself with hot water, then immediately went to soak in the tub.
Normally, I’d want to wash myself first, but the nights were cold here, and this being an open air bath, if I didn’t get in quickly, I’d catch a chill and bad things would happen.
As I sank into the steamy water from the cold outside air, my body felt like it was pleasurably melting.
We were the inn’s only guests now, and Hal was about the only other person who might come into the men’s side, so I was able to relax without having to be considerate of anyone else.
Whew, so warm.
The water seeped into my body, washing away the fatigue I’d built up while moving around.
Leaning on the edge of the bath, I was humming the hot springs song from Noboribetsu when I heard someone walking behind me.
That wasn’t the direction of the women’s bath. In that case, had Hal woken up and come to the bath?
I was thinking that as I turned around, but...
Whuh?!
There was Juna, naked.
In her right hand she had a tray, and in her left she held a towel that just barely covered her. Her slightly flushed skin and round, womanly figure burned themselves into my mind.
I was still dumbfounded by this sudden occurrence when Juna laid down the tray and began pouring hot water over herself.
“Excuse me while I get in beside you,” she said as she got into the bath. Then she sat down so close to me that our shoulders were touching. Her soft, white flesh was right next to me.
Once she had soaked up to her shoulders, she let out a breath. “Whew!”
That sexy sigh finally brought me back to my senses. “U-Um... Juna? This is the men’s bath, you realize?”
“I asked the innkeeper to reserve it for us for an hour or so. So it’s fine.”
Now that she mentioned it, Roroa had been saying there was a system like that.
“No, but it’s still embarrassing...”
“Hee hee! Where’s the harm? We’re a couple, after all.” With that said, Juna leaned against me. “So, please, feel free to call me by a pet name now, darling. We’re all alone, so I don’t want you to be so formal.”