The Archer of Beast Woods

by Kanata Yanagino

  His ears weren’t the long, pointed ears I might have expected, but were short, about the same size as a human’s, and only a little more pointy. If I remembered my lessons correctly, that was characteristic of a half-elf, a child of mixed race born between elves and humans—

  “Better question,” he said, cutting across my thoughts. “You do that?” He pointed at the hog lying on the ground and then at the blade of my spear, wet with blood.

  “Yes, that was me.”

  He frowned. “That’s an old way of speaking...”

  I was confused for a moment, but after thinking about it, I realized that about two hundred years had passed since Blood and Mary’s time. That was more than enough time for a language to change, even if this world did have races like the elves that lived much longer lives than humans. I must have sounded old-fashioned. Maybe even archaic. In terms of English from my last world, I might have sounded like I was speaking using words like “thou” instead of “you.” I’d have to listen to how current people spoke and fix my speech to match so I wouldn’t make people wary of me.

  “Sorry. It’s kind of a habit.”

  “Weird, but whatever. So this thing,” said the silver-haired half-elf, turning the topic back to the hog. “This was mine.” He pointed to the arrow sticking out of it.

  The arrow’s feathers were white, the same as the other arrows in his quiver. The fact that there hadn’t been much time between me killing the hog and him turning up also indicated that he probably wasn’t lying.

  “You butted in and killed it,” he said bluntly.

  The reason he was practically accusing me of stealing his kill was probably because he was wary of exactly that happening to him. He wanted to stop me before I got the chance.

  The urge to say sorry was almost instinctual, a habit from my past life, but I avoided it. “Yes. It came charging at me, so I was forced to do it to defend myself. But—” This was, in fact, a matter for discussion. It was time for negotiation tactics. “I did finish it off, so I assume I have at least that much right to it.”

  I was hoping that this might lead to me finding a settlement—though whether that would be an elven one or a human one, I had no idea.

  ◆

  The negotiations went on in depth for a little while.

  The silver-haired half-elf was quite the skilled negotiator; I, on the other hand, had no real-world experience in negotiating and was pretty much at his mercy. He appeared to be in the same age bracket as me, but elves and, indeed, half-elves who shared some of the elven blood were said to live longer, so for all I knew he could have been considerably older than I was. Despite this, I somehow managed to hold my ground, and we eventually settled on a deal where I’d get the shoulder on the side I stabbed in exchange for helping to butcher the hog.

  Butchering a wild hog takes a good deal of work.

  To start with, we had to carry it to a river, bleed it out, then clean it down together. Its fur was covered in mud. It had probably been wallowing in it somewhere.

  “Ahhh, the feckin’ thing’s in bits,” Silver-hair said, looking at the head of the arrow he’d pulled out of the wild boar. It had broken to pieces. It must have hit a bone.

  I watched him detach the arrowhead and carefully stash it away in his pocket. It looked as though metal items were pretty valuable in this area at the moment. “We’ve gotta dig out the fragments,” he said. “If someone bites into one of those after this thing is meat, they’re gonna have a bad time.”

  We made use of a flat area of rock by the river to carefully take out the fragments of the arrowhead, then started work on butchering the hog. I’d developed some level of skill at this thanks to Blood, but Silver-hair was even more efficient than I was. The subcutaneous fat was delicious on wild hogs, so the test of your knife skill in this situation was how close to the skin you could cut. And he was terrifyingly precise and fast as well.

  “Now then.” He stuck his knife in under the hog’s jawbone and cut all the way around its neck. He looked to have reached the neck bone, so I held the head and twisted it around to dislocate it.

  “Heh. You know your stuff.” He threw me a grin, so I smiled back. Then, with a few little movements of the knife, he cut through the flesh and sinew and separated the head entirely.

  I laid the hog’s carcass on its back and held it in position, and he started cutting down its belly all the way from its throat to its back end, being careful to only cut the skin. Cutting in deeply would cause damage to the internal organs, which would result in... um, what’s a nice way of putting it... the contents of its intestines, bladder, and reproductive organs spilling over everything and making a huge mess. With this approach, there would be no need to worry.

  When he was done with that, he made cuts in a number of places with a hatchet, and then together we forced the ribs apart. We cut around the anus, cut open the chest cavity, down the diaphragm, peeled off the membrane down to the backbone...

  “Out you come...” He grasped the hog’s trachea and esophagus and pulled them towards the back end. All its guts came out at once in a single mass. He was efficient at this.

  At this point, it looked quite a lot more like “meat,” the kind I’d seen frozen and hung up in movies and on TV in my previous life. I faced the hog’s head we’d removed and put my hands together in prayer.

  I’m sorry. And thank you. We won’t waste what we’ve taken.

  “You’re a real believer, aren’t you?” he said playfully, gently shrugging his shoulders. “Mmkay, as agreed, one shoulder for you.” He skillfully inserted his machete into a joint of the meat which was once a boar and sliced off just its front shoulder. “And that does it for portioning.”

  “Yep.”

  With a blood-soaked hatchet and a short machete in our hands, we exchanged smiles in recognition of each other’s hard work. “Guess we better eat the liver though. It goes bad real fast,” he said.

  “Ah, I’ve got a pan.”

  Fresh liver is delicious.

  We’d been working in the cold, winter river, so my hands were already frozen stiff. While Silver-hair was away collecting driftwood, I gathered together some dry twigs and quickly set fire to them with a whispered Flammo Ignis. I thought I’d better keep it a secret that I could use magic for now. It wasn’t that I thought he couldn’t be trusted... although that was possible. I just didn’t know enough about modern society. Magic may have been accepted in Gus’s time, but I didn’t know how society regarded it today.

  “Brrr... Gods, it’s cold.” I took off my boots and warmed my hands and feet beside the fire.

  After a while, Silver-hair came back. “Freezing,” he said, tossing some driftwood into the fire. Then he took up position beside me. We grinned at each other for some reason.

  “Okay, here’s what we’ve been waiting for,” I said.

  “Ya.”

  I held the pan over the flame and put in some hog’s fat. Once it had amply coated the bottom of the pan, I put in the strips of liver which I’d already cut up, then shaved off some rock salt and sprinkled it over. A sizzling sound accompanied the gorgeous smell of cooking meat.

  I closed my eyes and put my hands together. “Mater our Earth-Mother, gods of good virtue, bless this food, which by thy merciful love we are about to receive, and let it sustain us in body and mind.”

  “Damn, you really are hard-core religious.” The silver-haired half-elf was looking at me incredulously. It seemed he wasn’t the type to have much belief in these things.

  But thinking about it logically, I was the one with memories of a previous life. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for me to be the one impatiently waiting to eat, and him to be religious? Despite being in the middle of prayer, I was amused by how backwards that felt.

  “For the grace of the gods, we are truly thankful.”

  “Awesome. Let’s eat.”

  He may have been impatient, but he was at least polite enough not to ignore my prayer and start eating before me.
/>
  After I finished praying, we each took a knife that we’d washed and cleaned, jabbed it into a piece of cooked liver in the pan, and lifted it out. Steam was rising from it. I stuffed it into my mouth.

  It was hot. And so delicious. The strong flavor of liver with just a pinch of added salt filled my mouth. Gods, it was good. I caught myself wishing for a cold beer.

  Even the wrinkles on Silver-hair’s forehead had loosened now. Meals eaten after hard work really were delicious.

  Before I realized it, the sun had almost set.

  ◆

  “Huh? You want to know... the way? What?”

  When I asked him the way after we’d finished eating, he looked at me strangely, just as I’d expected.

  That was when I knew I’d been right to leave asking this until the end. The question was a little dangerous. It invited queries that would be difficult to answer. Such as—

  “Seriously, where’d you even come from? I’ve never seen you around here.”

  “Well, that’s... hard to explain. I’m not sure what to say.”

  If I were one-hundred-percent honest with him and said, “I was brought up by undead in a ruined city, fought the god of undeath, and set out on a journey,” he would find that story so crazy that I had absolutely no confidence that I could get him to believe it. Not having a way to prove who you were made things very difficult, no matter the society. Humans have no way of proving themselves harmless on their own; they can only ask other people to vouch for them. In my previous world, that came from social systems like the family register and ID cards, and in this world, it seemed to come from your relatives and local community. My not having those was equivalent to declaring to the world that I might be a dangerous person. But a sorcerer who uses Words can hardly afford to lie... so for the time being, I decided to be somewhat vague so I wouldn’t have to lie outright.

  “I came from the south, how’s that?”

  “The south? Brother, there is no ‘south.’ This is as south as it gets.”

  “What do you mean, there’s no south?”

  “This is the southernmost point. Mankind’s frontier. You’re in Beast Woods in Southmark.”

  Beast Woods. That was a pretty intimidating name. Maybe there were a lot of ferocious creatures. That boar certainly was one. I was going to have to be careful.

  How was I meant to explain this, anyway? I seriously had no idea.

  “I did come from the south. It’s complicated...”

  “Ohh... Are you... one of those adventurer types? A ruin-hunter?”

  A ruin-hunter... Now that I thought about it, there had been ruins dating back to Mary and Blood’s time dotted about on the way here. Maybe excavating those kinds of places was an occupation for some people? If so, my own situation wasn’t so different. After all, I myself was trying to subsist off only what I’d gained in that ruined city.

  “Yeah, it’s sort of like that...”

  “And you got lost?”

  “Umm, I guess... that’s kind of it...” I replied, sounding almost dejected.

  “Oh, boy.” The silver-haired half-elf sighed in apparent despair. “You’re the most oblivious adventurer I’ve ever seen. Ehh... whatever. Just follow this river downstream. A couple of days and you’ll be at a little town. It’ll probably work out from there. Good luck.” The tone of his last two words told me clearly that he was done caring. It looked like the good will I’d fostered by working with him was rapidly disappearing thanks to the very suspect conversation I’d started.

  “U-Um, I understand it’s unreasonable to ask this,” I started hesitantly, “but if there’s any chance I could stop by the settlement you’re a part of or anything...”

  His eyes turned incredibly sharp. Breathing a long, exasperated sigh, he looked daggers at me.

  “I don’t want to get involved with you for a fig second. Don’t make me spell it out.”

  “I’m sorry...”

  I couldn’t argue. He was totally right, and I knew it. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me, either. I was an armed soldier of unknown identity and affiliation. Who’d want to invite someone like that into their community?

  “So don’t follow me.”

  I noticed that the sun had almost set, and it was getting a lot darker.

  He stood up and flung the boar onto his back. He had a slim build, but he seemed to be stronger than he looked. He must have trained. Training boosted your physical abilities far more in this world than in my old one.

  “Ah—Are you okay without a light?”

  “I can handle myself, thanks.”

  He muttered something, and what looked like a ball of light came floating out of the depths of the forest toward him.

  “What’s—”

  “It’s a fairy.”

  “I’ve never seen one before...”

  Fairies and elementals were lesser fae: beings with frail existences that were nature’s mediators and helped it with its work. There were techniques for being able to talk with them and, at times, make use of them. Those who could manipulate those mystic arts were referred to as elementalists.

  The elves, who were minions of the god of fae, Rhea Silvia, were said to have a strong affinity with other fae minions. Evidently this half-elf who had inherited elven blood was no exception.

  I remembered once reading in one of Gus’s books that the essence of elementalism was being sensitive to, empathetic with, and accepting of the nebulous and fickle. It was yet another branch of the mystical, separate from “magic”—the power of Words, with its focus on theory, knowledge, memory, and repetition—and from “benediction,” which offered protection and divine grace for acting with religious faith and discipline.

  “Bye,” he said simply, and plodded away with the hog on his back.

  It had been the only conversation I’d had with another person in almost ten days. Maybe that was why I felt a strange urge to not just let him go. Before I knew it, I was calling to him as he left.

  “I’m Will! William G. Maryblood! You?”

  There was a pause before he responded. “Menel. Meneldor. I doubt we’ll be seeing each other again, though,” he answered, walking away. “Try not to die on the road.”

  With the butchered hog on his back, he ambled off, the ground around him illuminated by the shining fairy’s light. I watched him go without attempting to tail him.

  Wary of creatures that might be attracted to the smell of blood, I moved a good distance from where we’d butchered the boar. I kindled another fire and used rope to tie my sheet of canvas between some trees to make a rudimentary tent. I inscribed Signs that would serve as warning alarms in various places, and incanted Words with the power to ward off insects and things of a demonic nature. Finally, I laid down my blanket and went to bed. The pork shoulder I got would be tomorrow’s breakfast.

  I’d held a conversation with a real, living person. It had actually gone surprisingly well. I’d been worrying for nothing.

  Menel. Meneldor. I seemed to remember that it meant “a very fast-flying eagle” in Elvish. He had been a bit rude, but I’d had fun talking to him.

  He’d said we’d probably never meet again. As I drifted off to sleep, I hoped that someday we would.

  In the dead of night, I heard a voice.

  “Prithee, O flame.”

  In the fog between slumber and wakefulness...

  “O flame of mine.”

  ...was a young woman with black hair and a hood that obscured her eyes.

  “As you travel—”

  Ever reticent and expressionless, she spoke her wish:

  “Prithee, bring light to the faraway darkness.”

  And then, like strikes of lightning, numerous visions lit up the inside of my head, burning themselves into my mind.

  Weapons. Screaming. Chaos. Blood. Blood. Bodies. Bodies. Bodies. And—silver hair.

  I inhaled sharply.

  “Lumen!!”

  As I imbued light into
Pale Moon’s blade, I hurriedly readied my equipment and dashed into the night forest.

  ◆

  I kept moving, my path lit by magic. That I had no faster way was maddening. The revelations had blatantly been forecasting a tragedy, and Menel was going to be victim to it.

  I clenched my teeth.

  I’d been suspecting it, but now it was confirmed: the age I was living in was seriously dangerous. Someone you met today could be a corpse tomorrow. Crazy...

  I looked around me. There was nothing but dark forest. The winter meant that the grass wasn’t too overgrown, at least, but I doubted I’d be able to reach Menel’s village in this blackness just by pressing on blindly. I did have the option of tracking Menel’s footprints, but if I did that kind of careful search, I didn’t know if I’d make it in time. Not to mention that Menel might well have covered his tracks. He was wary of me, after all, and he was a professional hunter. If he was remotely serious about hiding his tracks from me, I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

  I incanted a number of Words in quick succession. These were Words of Searching, to use for detecting things.

  “That way...!”

  It was a simple magic that estimated general direction, but it was better than nothing.

  I got ready to be very reckless.

  Holding my shield up, I powered through the forest thickets, leaped down a steep slope, and incanted Feather Fall to soften the landing. I pushed onward, making heavy use of a variety of techniques that anyone used to normal forest walking would definitely frown at if they saw me.

  The fact that there was a settlement meant that there should be a pretty open space somewhere. Stopping from time to time to get a general sense of direction with the Words of Searching, I kept on running.

  All of a sudden—there it was. I could see open land outside the forest. There were fields with rows of furrows, and beyond them, through the darkness of night, I could just about make out the outlines of a dozen or so houses surrounded by a wooden fence. It looked like nothing had happened.

  “I’m... not too late...?”

  No... There was a chance, a reasonably good chance, that the tragedy had already occurred. I didn’t know the cause of what I’d seen in that revelation. It could be a demon, a goblin, an undead creature, a beast... If I approached carelessly, it was possible that I’d take a hit before I was ready.