The Archer of Beast Woods

by Kanata Yanagino

  Menel shook his head and put his hand to his forehead as if he were trying to cope with a headache. “Of course you’d say that. I forgot who I was dealing with.” He let out a massive sigh. “Being with you throws me off my groove. I thought I was, y’know, more cool and collected than this.”

  “Cool?”

  “Yes, cool! Fig!”

  “Hahaah...” I treated him to a deliberately mocking laugh. He growled in frustration.

  I was surprised at how much fun it was to tease him, or more, to watch his reactions.

  I was having quite a lot of... discoveries, I guess, talking with Menel. I first thought he was a pretty nice guy; then he tried to kill me without any hesitation at all. That had been something. Then I thought he was stubborn and difficult, but he was actually genuine, with a funny side as well.

  This probably wasn’t limited to Menel. Humans in general are pretty multifaceted. They have harsh, inconsiderate sides, and they have charming sides that put a smile on your face. There’s a lot to see, as long as you’re willing to look for it. Maybe confronting these kinds of things was what building a relationship with another person was all about.

  As these thoughts went through my head, Menel and I teased each other. The last time I’d had this kind of fun with someone my age might have been when I was a kid in my previous life.

  After we’d gone at that for a while, I asked him, “So, what kind of person was Marple?”

  ◆

  Menel shrugged his shoulders. “She was a weird old lady. You could probably tell.”

  The sun was beginning to dip down below the horizon. The world turned from red to purple, and on to the color of night.

  “I was born in Grassland to the north, in the Great Forest of Erin where the elves live.

  My mother... She had a very curious personality when she was young, and ran away from the forest. Then, after a few years, she came back pregnant with some guy’s kid. She died an early death, apparently. As for me, I was growing faster than everyone else around me, and I couldn’t get along with them, anyway. The whole deal with my mother was still dragging on... They were calling me a stain on their home... In the end, I thought I’d just run away from the forest, and... yeah. That’s how it goes with mongrel halfs like me.”

  Pretty heavy, and he’d only just gotten started.

  “Of course, the world of people wasn’t a paradise either. It wasn’t until after I left that I found out that for all its problems, I’d had it easy in the Forest of Erin. Fortunately, I knew how to handle a bow and a knife, and most importantly, I could see fairies.” A fairy stopped on the tip of Menel’s extended finger, frolicked there, and then left again. “I was strong enough to kill the hell out of whatever or whoever came to prey on me. If not for that, I’d be in some back alley whoring myself out right about now.”

  “You do have a pretty face...”

  “Don’t agree, goddammit.”

  “I just thought you’d have been pretty popular with guys who are into that.”

  “Feck off.”

  What did he want me to do? Lie? That said, I didn’t have a sexual inclination towards those of my gender, so my thoughts didn’t go any further than “he’s got a pretty face.”

  “Anyway, the point is, for a bunch of reasons, I became an ‘adventurer.’ Southmark still had a lot of ruins, so I made use of the Fertile Kingdom’s open policy and crossed over here.” Menel had a distant look in his eyes. “Then, one of the people I’d banded together with betrayed us and poisoned us. I was this close to getting killed.”

  I had no words. How vicious...

  “It was greed that did it, I bet. The spoils from the ruins were too good. Luckily, I barely touched the poisoned food, so it didn’t get me that bad. I somehow managed to kill the fecker, but still...”

  So this was the standard in this region of the world. It was so savage, and the difference in the way things went here compared with my past life was staggering. I could imagine Blood and those like him having a riot out here, though.

  “All the other guys I knew back then were dead on the ground, foam around their mouths, and the poison and my wounds were making my head all fuzzy. I have no idea how I bumbled my way to the village in that state, but I did, and that was where I went down, just outside there. And Marple took me in. If it wasn’t for that old lady... Of course, back then she wasn’t quite so old.”

  Menel continued to speak, that faraway look still in his eyes. “She really was a strange old woman. She took me in, some sketchy and surly guy lying half-dead on the ground, and she gave me food to eat and a place to sleep; she even lectured me on living a proper life. There were a ton of people like that, different circumstances but similar stories—they’d all ended up settling in that village after being picked up by her.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Beats me.” Menel shook his head. “She said she was an ‘uneducated country bumpkin’ or some crap. Please. Anyway, she’s dead now, and the truth’s gone with her. Happens a lot on this continent.”

  I remembered a saying from my previous world: “Everyone has a story.” And unfortunately, a single human being cannot pore through them all.

  “So, she took me in, and she may have been a preachy old bat, but I owed her one. I couldn’t stomach settling down in the village and playing the part of a farmer, but... I did go around to the nearby villages, doing my best impression of a hunter. ’Cause hunting dangerous animals was something I could do.”

  Menel talked nostalgically, as if he were cherishing a broken treasure. “Beast Woods has a ton of nasty creatures in it. People were finding me pretty useful. I’d found a place where I belonged.”

  And then—

  “Without any warning, it was gone.”

  The village, attacked by demons; the nice old woman, Marple; the children in the barn—all of that was gone.

  “So I decided I wasn’t gonna be someone who gets stuff taken from him. I was gonna be a taker, and protect what I still had left. Which failed spectacularly, thanks to you.” The silver-haired hunter breathed a long sigh. “That’s what this place is like. You’ve gotta be like that if you want to survive out here.”

  He sounded like he’d given up, like a tired old man. “Living longer than other people in a place like this... It’s painful, you know? Just hopelessly painful.” His words held no intensity, just exhaustion and the sense that something inside him had been worn down to nothing.

  “Sometimes I wish I was dead.”

  ◆

  I didn’t know what to say to Menel after his emotional outpour. It reminded me of my previous life and the time when the god of undeath’s words had thrown me into a pit of despair.

  I wondered how I could comfort him. I wondered how I could encourage him. I didn’t know. I couldn’t do as Mary, Blood, and Gus had. I couldn’t think of anything.

  This was something I’d become painfully aware of when I met the ghost of the old woman Marple. There were certainly gods in this world, and if you received their protection, you would become able to heal wounds and cure illnesses. It was almost a little superpower, like the ones you found in comic books. But it wasn’t as if it gave you more life experience. It didn’t give you the ability to say the kinds of words that could resound in someone’s heart, words that could help someone through hard times.

  I could heal the body, but not the heart. That was something that, in the end, a person had to take charge of themselves. And as the silence dragged on, I was unable to say anything. What was I supposed to say? I wished someone would tell me. What was I supposed to do in times like this? I had no experience with this in my previous life, and I didn’t have much in this one, either. If Blood, Mary, or Gus were here, they might have been able to come up with something. But for everything I had learned, I couldn’t produce the right words, not even a single sentence, to save my life.

  “U-Um... I, I guess, you... uh...” I mumbled something, but it didn’t help. Gods... I felt like I really had
regressed to how I used to be. But Menel was in a really bad place right now. I had to say something.

  But while I was racking my brain, Menel exhaled sharply. “Right,” he said, stretching his arms above his head to loosen up his stiff body. “Sucks, but gotta move on!”

  Huh?

  Menel looked at me and tilted his head. “Hm? What’s up? You done making stupid faces?”

  “What? Huh...?” I was confused.

  No, wait, hold up. He had just been so depressed, and now he... wha?

  “Haha, he’s losing it. Y’know, the normal you and the you that does the priest thing are like two totally different people.”

  “Pleeeeeeease shut up.”

  “Too bad, ’cause you’re pretty cool when you’re full-on priest.”

  “I wasn’t—I was just—uhh...”

  After taunting me a little, he bounced lightly to his feet and looked at me with serious eyes. “Will... William. Priest of the god of the flame. I’m grateful to you. For stopping me before it was too late, and for saving the guys in the village. So—” He put his hand on his chest, gracefully descended to one knee, and bowed his head before me. “With you as my mediator, I ask the protection of the god of the flame.”

  This was the standard phrase used when changing your guardian deity and oath. Startled by the sincerity in his voice, I hurriedly stood to face him.

  “Will you do this for me?” he asked.

  “I shall be your mediator and bring you together with my god.” I responded with the standard, age-old reply I’d once been taught by Mary. I placed my hand gently on Menel’s head and prayed to my goddess as he knelt. “I pray for you to the god of the flame. May Gracefeel love you, shine on you, and be with you on your journeys.”

  In the darkness, I felt a faint flame glow warmly in the air behind me.

  “Then to my guardian deity, I make this oath.” Menel raised his eyes and looked up at the flame. “I will atone for my sins and live a positive life, looking forward.” It was a powerful declaration. “Please light the way before me with your flame.”

  That had also been Marple’s wish for him, to the very end.

  “Menel...”

  “Life’s hard a lot of the time. Sometimes it beats me so badly I want to just lie there and die. But I’m not gonna stay down.” He shrugged and put on a brave smile. “I’m gonna get up somehow, and just like Marple said, I’m gonna keep looking forward and do what needs to be done.”

  My previous life ended without me ever being able to recover from my despair, and it had taken a pep talk from Mary for me to manage it in this life, too. But Menel had mustered the strength to stand back up all on his own. He had found a way to resolve his internal struggle, changed his attitude, and sought out how to behave to make up for his past behavior; and he had done all this by himself.

  He’d had Marple’s words to help him, and he was probably putting up a brave front as well, but even so, I couldn’t have done what he had. How arrogant was I, to think that he needed my words? He was strong. Stronger than me. Stronger than I’d ever thought.

  If only I’d had this kind of strength in my past life; maybe something could have been different then. When I thought about this, my chest tightened with a feeling of regret that I couldn’t shake. “Menel, you’re awesome, really,” I said with admiration. “I truly respect you.”

  “What, feck off,” he said, rising to his feet and giving one of my shoulders a playful shove. “You’re the awesome one. How do you get that good at fighting?”

  “It’s not me that’s awesome. It was my teachers.”

  “Can’t imagine what your childhood was like for the life of me. Eh, whatever, I’m not gonna pry,” he said, walking past me. “Let’s get back already. Food’s probably close to being done by now.”

  “Oh yeah. You’re right. We’ll make them worry if we’re much longer.” I followed after him, and we headed back to the village together.

  The feast of homecoming and mourning was just beginning. Though it was small for a ‘feast,’ they wouldn’t stop offering me drinks. Menel tried to keep a low profile in the corner, so I dragged him out and made him get involved. He resisted, and we ended up getting in a weird scuffle.

  It was a night of competition, of fooling around, and of moments spent quietly, listening to the fondly remembered stories of those who had passed away.

  “All our livestock’s been wiped out, and a whole lot of tools that’ll be impossible to replace have been smashed.”

  “Wow...”

  There were still a lot of problems for the villagers even after taking back their village from the hands of the demons. Many of their draft animals and tools had been lost. The villagers had serious expressions on their faces as they discussed the problem from all angles. “We’re gon’ needa stock up at Whitesails...”

  “But what do we do about the money?”

  “We need help also.”

  An unfamiliar word came up in their conversation, so I asked Menel. “What’s Whitesails?”

  Menel looked at me like he was looking at an alien. Was “Whitesails” the name of a place that you couldn’t help learning if you spent any amount of time living here?

  “What is the deal with you, seriously?” he asked. “Were you living under a rock?” Then he gave me a brief summary of the history of this region.

  Apparently, Blood and Mary’s era was now referred to as the Union Age, in which all kinds of races had formed a large confederation. With the exception of regions like this one at the border, it had been a peaceful golden age without much conflict.

  However, the influx of demons that followed caused the Great Collapse, and the Union fell apart. Southmark was lost under the flood of demons. The Hundred Heroes—that referred to Blood and the others who had helped him—killed the demons’ king, but all the same, mankind was forced to abandon this continent for a while.

  Crossing the channel and the inland sea called Middle-Sea, mankind retreated to Grassland in the north. But as a result of the Great Collapse, the central government of Grassland lost its ability to govern, and the continent fractured into smaller regions that vied for power. There was no quick end to the infighting among all those military factions, and while it continued, no division saw good reason to interfere with the darkness in Southmark, farthest of all places and teeming with undead, demons, and goblins.

  After the Fertile Kingdom unified the southwestern part of Grassland, that changed a little. Over the last few decades, they had been expanding and rebuilding with a vision to retake Southmark, and Whitesails was the port city that was currently the heart of the settlement effort coming from the north.

  No wonder he’d given me that look of utter disbelief for not knowing it.

  Anyway, Whitesails, which was the port at the north side of Southmark and the base for their settlement project, was apparently crammed full of immigration ships and trade vessels. And with so many of those going in and out, it was natural that suspicious folk, those with things to hide, and people forced to leave their homelands would also turn up.

  Proper immigration procedures were as good as nonexistent in this era, so of course, there was no way to shut those kinds of people out. Some dived headfirst into the organized criminal underbelly in Whitesails, while others slipped away, made homes, and planted fields on the very edges of the borderlands, where the influence of those in power didn’t reach. Independent settlements such as those were scattered around Beast Woods.

  “Those sorts of people aside, a lot of adventurers come here, as well. Though you could ask just how different the two really are...”

  An “adventurer,” he told me, was a job in which you earned your daily bread by trolling the ruins from the Union Age and taking on mercenary-type jobs. Adventurers weren’t members of a single, unified organization; they were drifters, existing in almost any large town, who took jobs at special-purpose taverns and carried them out for a fee. Most were people down on their luck and unable to make a proper
living, but that was why they saw the Union Age ruins as the key to fulfilling their dreams.

  “In the unlikely event you find a pot of gold coins or something, boom, you’re rich. Your whole life turns around, just like that. People who dream of hitting the big one call themselves adventurers and flock out here. Though, it’s not just them, to be fair. There’s also people hoping to become heroes, people like you who had revelations from their god—all sorts.”

  So you couldn’t generalize them as just people living in poverty. It seemed to be a pretty complicated occupation.

  “You’ve got your own reasons too, right?” he asked. “You’re having revelations and helping people out, so you’re probably also trying to spread your faith or something too, I guess? I mean, the southern continent used to have a deeply rooted faith in Gracefeel.”

  “Hmm... Can you tell me more about that?”

  I asked him a few questions, and learned that the god of the flame had apparently once formed the basis for people’s religious faith here in Southmark.

  However, the flood of demons caused by the Great Collapse two hundred years ago made a mess of Southmark, and as a result, Gracefeel’s followers scattered. Some were just barely able to flee to Grassland in the north and keep her name alive. But unlike the major gods, whose worshippers were numerous and not isolated to particular areas, Gracefeel’s faithful seemed to have waned considerably.

  Demons and beasts were running rampant. There were many villages where the people could barely afford to get by, and sometimes became desperate enough to become thieves. Faith was dwindling to the point of disappearing completely. Things were awful in a lot of ways. And knowing that the mission I’d been given by my god was to do something about it somehow made me feel even worse.

  Blood, Mary, Gus? Outside is a really scary place, I lamented inside my mind. Then I slowly breathed in, and out again.

  To be honest, this was blatantly too much of a burden for me, and I’d really have liked someone else to do it, but I had sworn an oath to my god and decided to live a proper life. In the name of my faith, I decided to do as much as I could. “First things first. This village.”