by CHIROLU
“Or would you prefer to eat all sorts of stuff as we walk around, and keep dinner light?”
“That sounds fun, too...”
This was apparently quite a difficult choice for Latina. She groaned as she thought it over with a serious expression on her face. Dale found it cute, and his expression brightened.
Even when she was troubled, Latina was still enjoying the trip.
Not wanting to rush her decision, Dale held Latina’s hand while slowly heading towards the ocean. As they walked along, they noticed the delicious scents drifting through the air from all over. The option of walking and eating was steadily growing more enticing. In the end, Latina fell to its temptation. With things as they were now, if they ended up restraining themselves so they could have a delicious dinner that night, they’d go crazy.
Dale and Latina took a slightly different approach than they took last time they had walked around the market, which was still full of shops handling marine products. A great many travelers visited Qualle, and quite a few of them were tourists. As a result, there were a lot of shops aimed at them, including stalls serving the town’s famous seafood.
Latina chewed away with all her might at the small shellfish skewer she’d bought from one such stall. As she was such a polite girl, she wasn’t able to walk around and eat at the same time, so she and Dale stood off to the side of the road as she struggled with her food, which was tougher than it had first appeared.
“I’ll eat the rest, Latina.”
“Mmph!”
Her mouth was still full of shellfish, so Latina responded by shaking her head. With her tiny stomach, even a single skewer would fill her up quite a bit. That would take away half the fun of walking around eating.
Latina was shocked when she saw Dale easily gulp down the shellfish she’d been struggling with.
“Should we buy something to drink?”
“Yeah,” Latina said with a nod. Dale took her to a nearby stall stocked with foreign fruits. The unfamiliar fruit juice they purchased was more refreshing than he had expected. While drinking his down, he handed one to Latina as well. With a big gulp, she at last succeeded at swallowing the shellfish in her mouth.
“Haaaah!” she let out, finally able to breathe. She seemed to have surprised herself at how loud she was. She put her hands over her mouth and looked up at Dale in embarrassment. “It was tough.”
“I see. They’re still shellfish, but the ones over there are steamed in wine, so they’re softer. Do you want to give it a try?”
“Yeah! That sounds tasty!”
As they purchased the wine-steamed seafood with the scent of garlic to it, Dale started to want alcohol rather than juice. You never saw such foods around Kreuz, but when you were close to the sea, this sort of dish was often paired with drink.
After seeing Dale use the shell to scoop the meat from the shellfish, Latina gave him a look of surprise and hurriedly tried to copy him.
“It’s yummy!”
As she chewed thoroughly, the umami flavor spread throughout her mouth. The garlic taste wasn’t too strong; instead, it served as a nice accent. Latina was engrossed in eating the still-hot meat, sucking in air to cool it down as she went. Dale was extremely satisfied as he watched. He could never grow tired of any of her little mannerisms.
“How about we look for souvenirs for a while, and then we can stop to eat if anything else catches our eye.”
“Yeah. This is a fun way to have a meal!” Latina said with a smile, thoroughly enjoying herself.
There were souvenir shops aimed towards tourists past the row of stalls, both shops that handled small items and miscellaneous goods from other countries, as well as ones that focused on goods from Laband, meant for serving foreign travelers and tourists.
“There are some fairly high-class inns and the like further down this road. Merchants and the more affluent commoners from other countries stay there.”
“Latina sees.”
“Nobles hardly ever stay there, though. Well, you might see some lower-ranking nobles there. In addition to stocking up, there are also plenty of customers who want souvenirs or other unusual goods.”
“Looking around the marketplace was fun, but it’s also nice to look into shops like this!”
Dale held Latina’s hand tightly so she wouldn’t go wandering all over in her excitement.
“There are a lot of people around here. And you have to watch out for pickpockets, too,” Dale warned, pointing a finger at her, and her expression seemed to be almost saying, “Whoops!” As they walked along, they looked into one shop after another. Sure enough, Latina stopped at shops with cute, girlish items on display. Not only that, but they’d stop in shops with countless suspicious folk crafts from other countries, only to pick up something of unknown purpose and both laugh at it.
After several shops, Latina decided on a ceramic doll for Rita’s souvenir. It was a delicately crafted piece that Dale wouldn’t have considered as a present for her.
When the shopkeeper was carefully wrapping it up, Dale realized it was noisy out front.
Dale and Latina looked at one another, then headed outside and proceeded towards the boisterous crowd. It wasn’t an air of panic, but rather pure curiosity. As a bundle of inquisitiveness herself, Latina was growing restless as well.
The center of all the attention was a gorgeously dressed girl. From the guard and maid with her, it was clear that she was from a rather well-off family. However, because of her impish behavior as she walked along with light steps, peeking into shops as she went, it was hard to say for certain that she was a noble. It was proper to refer to her as a “girl,” as her appearance still had some childishness to it, and her neat and tidy outfit enveloped her slender form. She wore a casual dress that was too short to be called a gown, and further down, she had sturdy leather boots on her feet. In that attire, she clearly gave off a different image than sheltered, rich young ladies.
The expression on her charming face shifted as she looked at one item after another in the store fronts. She was a girl who attracted the gaze of others.
“That’s the ‘Rose Princess’...”
Hearing Dale say that with a sigh, Latina tilted her head.
“Dale, do you know her?”
“Ah, no, I’ve never met her. I’ve just heard rumors. But that’s definitely her... Nobody else has a hair color like that...”
It wasn’t just the girl’s beautiful appearance that drew the gazes of those around her. The light reflected off of her sleek, long, shiny hair. What the light hit was a pale pink, while the portion in the shadows was rose. It was a vivid color of the sort that people didn’t naturally have.
“A mana trait...?” Latina asked.
“You sure are well informed. Did Master Cornelio teach you that?”
“Yeah, he did. Back where Latina was born, someone had a mana trait. Those show up a lot in devils.”
“The same is true of merfolk. Everyone in that race has strong Water mana, after all.”
“People who are born with strong mana have pretty-colored hair and eyes and stuff, right?”
“Is that the case with your hair, Latina...?”
Her hair was a beautiful, unusual color, so Dale had considered that possibility, but this was the first time he’d actually asked her. However, Latina shook her head back and forth in response.
“Latina’s mana isn’t strong. And her hair is the same as Rag’s. It’s hereditary,” she answered readily.
Like how animals with strong mana became far more threatening magical beasts, mana could have an effect on a great many things. Mana traits came in the form of brilliant colors that appeared in people born with strong mana, making them easy to perceive. Those colors generally appeared in hair and eyes, but occasionally affected skin as well.
The colors were entirely different from those that children inherited from their parents. In fact, the brilliant hues were of a sort that people didn’t naturally have in general. That was the phen
omenon known as “mana traits.”
The merfolk that Dale offered as an example were a race that specialized in Water mana. They primarily lived in the water, and thanks to their racial traits, they were able to breathe under it as well. As a race in which mana traits often appeared, many of them had brilliant green or blue hair.
Devils were also a race in which mana traits frequently manifested.
All that said, it wasn’t as if everyone with strong mana had a mana trait. The ratio also varied greatly by race. For devils, they were not particularly uncommon, whereas humans were rarely born with them.
“She’s called the Rose Princess, but she’s just the daughter of a regional lord. Her family isn’t actually all that high up there in terms of social class.”
“It’s a pretty color, isn’t it?”
“Her eye color should be a mana trait, too. An indigo blue, the symbol of the god her divine protection comes from... She’s a high-ranking Niili priestess.”
“You know a lot about her, Dale...”
“She’s an acquaintance of a friend of mine, so I’ve heard a lot about her.”
The image of his overly serious friend came to mind. In the depths of his heart, Dale decided that when they next met, he’d tease him thoroughly on the matter.
“At any rate... you know your own amount of mana, Latina?”
“Latina doesn’t know the exact amount. But you see, Rag was really good at magic. He didn’t have a lot of mana, though. Rag taught Latina that she was the same way.”
Rag was the name of her father. Had she inherited her excellent mana control from him?
That may be the case... I mean, no matter how clever she may have been, even before she met me, she’d already been taught healing magic and the basics of mana control...
Latina had never explicitly said it, but Dale figured her magic teacher had been her father. She’d said that when she was young, she didn’t have much contact with anyone outside of her family, and from what she occasionally told Dale, he sensed that she had been quite close to Rag.
He’d likely been a great man.
“So there was someone with a mana trait even in your home village, Latina? What were they like?” Dale asked casually, remembering what Latina had said earlier.
“Purple hair...” Latina responded with a sigh, a mature, peaceful expression on her face. “She had beautiful, lovely purple hair.”
She seemed like she was looking at something far away.
†
“I’ve heard of the Rose Princess. She’s got strong divine protection from Niili and is supposed to even be able to heal the sort of serious injuries that normal healing magic can’t handle,” said Sylvia enthusiastically after Latina mentioned she’d seen the Rose Princess.
Latina and Chloe nodded along.
“Must be nice... I wish I could go on a journey, too...”
Chloe and Latina exchanged strained smiles at Sylvia’s absentminded muttering. This was how things always were. Feeling like she’d truly returned to where she belonged, Latina let out a little tee-hee.
That was when a loud, hysteric voice rang out through the classroom. “L-Latina?! You’re back?!” The owner of the voice stood stock-still, unable to hide the surprise and delight on his face.
“Long time no see, Rudy.”
“Yeah. Latina, when did you get back...?”
“The teacher’s here, so we’ll talk later.”
Latina smiled when she said that, but there was thick tension and a large distance between them.
Furthermore, when Rudy stiffened up at her response, the other children couldn’t hold back their laughter any further.
He really wasn’t good at dealing with things, in more ways than one.
3: The Young Girl and the Woman Who Was Her Natural Enemy
For a while now, Kenneth had been Latina’s primary conversation partner. It wasn’t Dale, who she always said she loved so much, or Rita, who was the same gender as her, but Kenneth.
She most certainly didn’t think of Dale as unreliable. She was well aware that he was her guardian and that he was responsible for her actions.
Dale was someone special and very precious to Latina, and that was precisely why she was so afraid of him coming to dislike her. She was worried she’d upset him by causing him trouble. And as a result, she saw being selfish or burdening him with her problems as weighing him down, which she didn’t want to do.
Lately, Dale been giving her far more attention and affection than was fitting for someone her age, so she wasn’t as eager to deal with him as she used to be. She no longer took care to make sure she wasn’t seen as a child. As proof that she now let her guard down around others, she held each mistake and bit of mischief as precious and used them to make the adults around her smile. Old habits did die hard, though.
Rita was always dealing with customers and paperwork at the counter in the Dancing Ocelot. Latina was a very serious girl by nature, so she thought it wouldn’t do to bother Rita while she was working.
Ever since Latina first came to the Ocelot, she spent a lot of time with Kenneth in the kitchen. A big reason for that was because she had an interest in cooking and she could learn while helping him out. As Kenneth was a reliable “master” who was tolerant and good at looking after others by nature, it was also only natural that Latina ended up depending on him.
Right now, though, Kenneth was terribly bewildered. Latina was in front of him, looking downhearted and staring at the ground.
He’d known that this tiny girl had a great number of secrets hidden away in the depths of her heart. But even so, he had never imagined that one of those secrets would cause him to feel so uncomfortable.
It started with her talking about her mother.
As Kenneth listened to Latina talk about the woman, whom she’d never mentioned before, he let out a sigh, playing with the half-peeled potato in his hands all the while.
The whole problem had started with Helmine staying here in the Dancing Ocelot.
Dale sent word of his return to Duke Eldstedt soon after making it back to Kreuz, and just as Helmine had said, he received notice of an upcoming operation to subjugate demons. The reply also noted that his visiting the capital to give an official report of his return could wait until when the time came for the job.
The scent of a coming blaze apparently drifted about the small neighboring countries, so as prime minister of Laband, the duke was terribly busy.
Such matters fell outside the jurisdiction of someone like Dale, who specialized in dealing with demons and demon lords.
A private message from his friend Gregor, stating that he was busy on a mission guarding his father and brothers, was included along with the letter from the duke.
Apparently, it was true that Helmine had business in Kreuz, as she headed all over town meeting up with old friends. Because she was a flashy woman, a rarity in the Ocelot, she was an obvious target for gossip.
She had no intention of probing into Helmine’s movements, but Latina naturally ended up hearing about them regardless. And as always, that put her in a bad mood.
This time around, everyone was well aware of what was going on, but Latina wasn’t any good at hiding her feelings. She had always been friendly towards others up until this point and would greet them with a smile, so they never figured she would act like this. But perhaps these frequent mood swings were a characteristic of hers, too.
Latina wore her usual smile, but the displeasure written on her face was, to put it simply, because she wasn’t good at dealing with Helmine. Her overly obvious reaction made this a widely known fact not just to Helmine herself, but to the customers in the shop as well.
If we may digress, the day that Dale and Latina returned, the number of customers was a little low for the Dancing Ocelot, but the day after that, the shop was far more bustling than the norm. The news of the return of the shop’s signature cute little waitress spread from one of the regulars, a gatekeeper from the southern distri
ct, to the rest of them through some sort of information network. Those regulars made a plan. They decided to let the Platinum Fairy Princess, everyone’s idol, rest up on the day she made it back from her trip. For that reason, they suppressed their desire to see her and held themselves back from visiting on that day. After all, if the serious young girl saw that the shop was busy, she’d start helping out rather than worrying about taking care of herself. And in that case, it was better to avoid such a situation to start with.
But as a result of that buildup, the shop was absolutely packed the next day. There weren’t even enough seats for the customers, so wine barrels were brought out into the storefront to serve as temporary tables, around which customers stood and drank. Seeing the old folks’ intimidating faces all turn to smiles as they lovingly watched the young girl happily run about the shop working, Dale and Kenneth let out a sigh, realizing that it may have been no mere rumor that the regulars of the Dancing Ocelot had started a non-profit organization of Kreuz adventurers, a Latina fan club.
Helmine was there as well, and Latina looked displeased, but the woman simply found that amusing. Nobody else was able to get between the two of them, and Dale in particular was left clutching his stomach.
Being treated like a little kid by Helmine upset Latina greatly. She’d never been fond of her small build, so she was especially sensitive to words like “little.” When Dale or Kenneth said she was small, she didn’t look overly displeased because she sensed it came out of affection towards her. But it seemed not just anyone had permission to say such things.
Helmine was a bad opponent for her.
While watching Latina wipe the counter, Helmine rested her chin on her hands and, only smiling with her eyes, said, “You really are an adorable little lady.”
“Latina’s busy working right now,” she firmly responded, self-conscious of how she looked and sensing that Helmine was calling her “young.”
Since Latina was short, she needed to stretch her arms and stand on tip-toes in order to clean the corners of the counter. Seeing her work so hard was enough to make even someone who wasn’t a doting idiot like Dale break out in a goofy smile.