Goblin Slayer, Vol. 7

by Kumo Kagyu

  “O Earth Mother, abounding in mercy, please, by your revered hand, cleanse us of our corruption.”

  Moved by the devotion of her precious follower, an unseen hand reached down from heaven to touch the girls’ skin. There was a pleasant feeling accompanied by a sensation of touch as soft as that of a feather.

  And behold: before their very eyes, the filth sloughed off the girls and flew away—all the dirt, the streaks of blood, the gore stuck to their clothes. Somehow, their faces seemed to relax, transforming to show expressions of repose.

  “Mm,” High Elf Archer said, squinting like a cat. She opened her arms wide. “That’s really something. It’s almost like they were washed with water. Is that the newest miracle you got?”

  She would have to apologize to the gods for her earlier complaints.

  “Yes,” Priestess replied with a hint of happiness. “When I told the head of the temple that I had been promoted to Steel, they asked me to perform the ceremony.”

  “Kind of a restrained miracle, though, don’cha think? Didn’t they have anything flashier?”

  “…I had to go with what I needed,” Priestess murmured, averting her eyes.

  “Ahh,” High Elf Archer frowned, understanding.

  In general it was said to be the gods who decided what miracle a supplicant would receive, but sometimes a fervent wish could gain one a particular ability.

  This was the Purify miracle. It invoked an act of the gods to remove impurity. That was, as it were, all it did. And to use an all-too-valuable miracle on something like that…

  Yet, at the same time, the idea of being able to clean off her clothes and body once a day while on adventure gladdened her girlish heart. In addition, the miracle could also purify water or air to a certain extent, so it couldn’t hurt to have around.

  There was also the issue that to measure the worth of divine intervention merely in terms of how much it benefited the user was the worst kind of sacrilege.

  “……”

  Priestess put a hand to her small chest and took a deep breath. Her eyelids fluttered and she bit her lip.

  I’ve become used to it, haven’t I?

  After all the talk of weddings, they came here and saw what these goblins had done, what an awful state they had left these young women in. And although her heart ached, she still found herself able to have a little chat. Even if it was partly for show.

  It would have been unimaginable a year before.

  “It’s a good miracle.”

  A heavy hand fell easily on her shoulder. She jumped and looked up to see a grimy metal helmet. Those few words were enough to make her heart pound.

  “There are uses for it.”

  And then Priestess’s brow drooped, an ambivalent expression on her face.

  §

  The crimson of twilight spread to every corner of the plaza.

  It was sunset in summer. The west wind blew in to carry off the heat of the day, spreading ripples through the sea of grass in the pasture.

  “Okay, everyone, time to go home!”

  The cows, which had been munching contentedly on grass, raised their heads with a bevy of lowing. Slowly but surely, they started walking, forming a herd that made for the barn.

  Cows were generally obedient like this. There was little need for Cow Girl to get too involved with them, but that didn’t mean she had no work to do. It was important to count the cattle, making sure all the animals got back to the barn safely. Yes, he checked the fence diligently every morning, but that didn’t mean there might never be a problem. Foxes and wolves were trouble enough, but it was also possible simply to miss an animal out in the fields.

  And once the cows were all in the barn, then she would have to feed them. Livestock like cows and horses were precious assets. It was impossible to pay too much attention to them.

  “…Good, you’re all here.” Cow Girl, crooking her fingers as the cattle walked by, counted off the last one then gave an energetic nod of her head.

  It had been two days now since he, her longtime friend, had set off on an adventure.

  It was only natural that he might be out adventuring some days. He was an adventurer.

  There were days he didn’t come home. Days she was simply waiting.

  Eventually, there might even come a day when the waiting never ended.

  He was an adventurer, and it was only natural.

  Heh. Can’t go down that road, or I’ll never come back.

  “Let’s just focus on work. Work!”

  There was another gust of wind.

  The summer breeze brought with it a bounty of aromas: the smell of fresh grass, the distant odors of the many dinners in town, even the smell of the cows.

  “Hmm…”

  And then there was a smell like rusted metal. It was an odor that, to her chagrin, she had become much acquainted with over the past several years.

  Cow Girl stopped in the process of following the cows to the barn, turning on her heel. Far away, she could see a figure coming from the direction of town, approaching at a bold, nonchalant stride.

  Clad in a grimy metal helmet and cheap-looking leather armor while a sword of a strange length swung at the hip, and a small, round shield rested on an arm.

  Cow Girl squinted. And then, as always, she smiled. “Welcome home. You tired?”

  “Yes,” he replied with a nod. “I’m home.”

  She came up to him at a jog. She took a short breath in, then out. His movements looked normal. She felt her cheeks relax.

  “You’re not hurt. Good, I’m glad.”

  “Yes.” He nodded assiduously then started walking again; he had slowed somewhat from earlier. Cow Girl fell into step beside him.

  “Hrm…” Her face pinched slightly. If she could smell him, could he smell her sweating? She took a little sniff of her sleeve, but she couldn’t tell.

  Eh, I guess it’s a little late for that.

  “Hey, what do adventurers do about dirt and stuff, anyway?”

  “We change when we can. Wipe our bodies. Some even use spells or miracles.”

  “Huh!”

  “Sometimes body odor can alert goblins to your presence. It’s foolish to be upwind of them.”

  I guess that makes sense. Cow Girl nodded then swooped around to stand on his other side.

  “What is it?” he asked, but she simply waved the question away and said, “Don’t worry about it. Do you want dinner tonight? Or did you eat already?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, I’ll cook for you, then. Stew okay?”

  “Yes.” Then the helmet nodded gently up and down. The soft voice, too, sounded more lighthearted than usual. That alone was enough to make Cow Girl glad she had taken the time to prepare this meal.

  Look at me. I’m so easy.

  Well, she didn’t exactly feel bad about it. Things were fine this way.

  “You must be tired though, huh?”

  “…”

  There was no answer. He still had the bad habit of clamming up when he didn’t have a good response.

  Cow Girl giggled a little and leaned forward, as if she might be able to see inside the helmet from underneath. From the other side of the steel visor, she couldn’t see his expression, but she had a pretty good idea what it was.

  “Rough time?”

  “…There are no easy jobs.”

  “True enough.”

  Their shadows stretched out in the summer twilight.

  The cows were back in the barn. All that was left was to go home.

  They had walked the path home together so often since they were little. How many times did this make it now?

  She didn’t feel that much had changed since the old days, although his shadow was now a little longer than hers.

  “By the way…”

  “Hmm?” She kept her eyes on their silhouettes as she answered. She changed her stride a little bit, trying to get their shadows to overlap.

  Not for any special reason. It was just s
omething she suddenly remembered doing as children.

  “It seems there is a wedding.”

  “Wedding…?”

  Well, now. She found she couldn’t help glancing at him. He spoke the word as if it were unfamiliar to him, like it came from a foreign language.

  Wedding. A wedding. To join together with someone. To spend your lives together.

  “A wedding, huh? And were you invited?” she said quietly.

  “Yes,” he replied with his usual brevity. “My…” And then he paused for a moment. “In my party, there is an elf.”

  “Oh,” Cow Girl said, squinting. The cheerful, upbeat ranger girl. “Her.”

  “Her older sister and cousin, it seems.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I was told to invite you as well.”

  “…Are you sure?”

  “That is not for me to decide.”

  Hrm, Cow Girl grunted.

  There was the farm. There was work. Could she really leave it all behind for days on end?

  Summer was a busy time. So was autumn. So were spring and winter. All year long, she had to worry about the weather and the crops and the animals.

  But then… Oh yes, but then.

  An elf wedding!

  The phrase resonated within the deepest reaches of her heart. She had dreamed of such things when she was little, all the while certain she would never see one: The faeries dancing around, clothes more beautiful than anything she had ever seen, and music such as she had never heard. The bride and groom resplendent.

  She had heard of such things in bedtime stories but had always assumed they were nothing more than that.

  What’s more, she had never been away very long from either her hometown (now gone), or the farm where she currently lived. It seemed like a desperately long time since she had imagined going anywhere.

  “I wonder… Is it really okay?” she murmured, as if it might be a genuinely bad thing.

  “I will speak to your uncle.”

  “…Okay.” Perhaps the blunt kindness in his tone was a response to her own vague mumbling.

  That had to be it, she decided. I’m sure it is. I like that better.

  She moved ever so slightly, so that their shadows stopped overlapping. So that only the hands of their silhouettes seemed to be intertwined as the dark figures stretched out over the red field.

  “A marriage, huh…?”

  They were almost back to the house.

  It was a short distance to walk together. Enough to share what they thought. To share a few words…

  “Do you ever think about that sort of thing?”

  “…”

  He was silent for a moment. His usual behavior when he didn’t know the right thing to say.

  “It is difficult.”

  “Maybe so,” she murmured, spinning around on her heel. She started walking backward, hands clasped behind her. “In that case,” she continued, looking toward him, “what about…when we were little? You promised to marry me when we grew up.”

  “…”

  Cow Girl heard a slight sigh from inside the helmet. “I remember no such promise.”

  “Oops… Saw right through me, huh?”

  She laughed out loud, spinning around again as she did so, and kept walking.

  Their shadows separated. Their shadows’ hands separated. Now… Yes, it was too late now.

  But we should have made that promise.

  Somehow the twilight sun found its way into her eyes, and she blinked rapidly.

  “Huff… Puff… Pant… Ahh!”

  Huffing and panting, she tumbled through the hellish greenery.

  Her bare feet were torn by rocks and scratched from the thorns and branches of the forest plants, none of which she recognized, and all four of the limbs visible under her short clothing were slick with blood.

  The trees blocked out the sunlight, yet the dim world under the canopy was brutally humid, and she sweat profusely. Running made her throat burn, but she had no idea where there might be safe water.

  It was the same with food. She saw berries and bugs and grass but couldn’t begin to guess which were edible.

  At this point, in fact, she had no sense of which direction she was even going. The sun was hidden, depriving her of any way to determine where she was running. Her path didn’t seem to be headed north, but she couldn’t be sure.

  In the rain forest, the sounds of animals and birds, the rustling of trees, all came together to envelop her in a cocoon of noise. She had never really been able to detect anything as ambiguous as “presence,” but…

  If I’d known this was going to happen, I would’ve taken some ranger training.

  “Oww, ow…”

  She hated the way her hair clung to her skin; she tried to brush the sweat from her forehead but immediately regretted it. She only succeeded in making her wounds there hurt worse.

  How did this even happen?

  There was no answer. There was no one left to answer. She had lost all her companions.

  It would have been easy to sneer at them for being naive.

  Another possibility was that they had simply been unlucky, but that was cold comfort.

  This was the reality: she and her companions had attempted an adventure, they had failed, and they had been routed. That was all.

  “If only…I at least…had a weapon…!”

  Their raft had capsized, and by the time she’d come to on the riverbank, it had been too late. Her equipment was gone, along with her friends.

  Why did she continue to run rather than give up? Because she was an adventurer.

  And adventurers didn’t give up.

  It was their right to complain about whatever was happening, but they never backed down from it.

  Above all, even when the situation looked hopeless, it wasn’t over.

  She didn’t know where her companions were. That meant there was a possibility she might still find them again.

  My sister… I’m sure she’s all right… She’s gotta be.

  The thought of her older sister, with whom she had been working, brought a smile to her face.

  The last she had seen of her was a hand reaching down from the leaning raft to pull her out of the river where she had fallen in.

  Her sister, the leader of their party and the object of everyone’s respect, had been a druid.

  A person who was one with nature—surely she was all right.

  Or so the girl kept telling herself as she ran desperately through the forest.

  That’s it! I can follow the river.

  It might have been a dangerous gambit in light of her pursuers, but it was better than barreling aimlessly among the trees.

  Yes. She was running away. Desperately, in order to survive. And they would fully understand that.

  “Eeek?!”

  Following the sound of water, she broke through the trees to arrive at the river again—and quickly suppressed a scream.

  She was confronted with a bizarre object.

  It looked like something that had fallen prey to a butcherbird—impaled on a twig, stored to be eaten later. Or like a frog that some children had been tormenting for fun. Or a marionette tangled up in its own strings.

  It was a person.

  A corpse. This person had died in an awful way: a spike pounded from the anus through to the mouth, the body impaled upon it.

  It brought to her mind a series of comical images from shadow-puppet plays she had seen.

  “Wha— Urr… Ackk…”

  It hardly seemed real. But she felt herself twitch reflexively, the contents of her stomach rising up toward her mouth.

  She tasted something bitter. A simple fact flashed through her memory: the last thing she had eaten had been grilled fish. Skewered and burnt.

  “Oh… Ugh…”

  She couldn’t stop herself from dropping to her knees. It was the wrong thing to do, but she realized that too late.

  They could be sensed moving nearby. It was
n’t that they were trying to hide themselves. They weren’t really capable of that.

  It was simply that she wasn’t paying attention.

  “Ee… No—ahh—ahhh!”

  When, in a panic, she tried to react, scads of the tiny shadows were already upon her. Overwhelmed, she fell backward, her bottom sinking into the mud.

  I’m gonna drown…!!

  Her reaction was instinctive; she began to flail her arms and legs, windmilling, kicking.

  Against this many opponents, of course, such resistance was futile. All present knew how this would end.

  “Hrk?!”

  There was a cackle and something caught her feet. She gave a strangled cry as she felt her legs being forced open.

  A crudely sharpened stick was driven in with a dramatic flair, and she felt herself go pale.

  “No… N-no, no, no, no, nooo! How can—I don’t wanna—die…like this…!!”

  Why did things have to end up like this?

  She didn’t know.

  It would be all too easy to sneer and say she was too stupid to know.

  Another possibility was that she had been unlucky; but that was cold comfort.

  Whatever the case, she never registered that it had been her sister on that spike.

  She didn’t even think of it as one of her party members.

  All she knew was how they were going to kill her.

  The moment they disembarked from their carriage, the heat of summer assaulted the party, along with an earsplitting racket. People coming and going on the flagstones. Conversations of every type. The river burbling its way through the town. The wind blowing.

  For a moment, the overwhelming sense of activity left Cow Girl thinking there must have been a festival or something.

  “W-wow…”

  “Are you all right?”

  She felt a gentle hand support her, guarding against a sudden dizzy spell.

  “Er… Yeah… Fine,” she replied, nodding to someone. That someone happened to be a person she’d become fast friends with over the past year: the receptionist from the Adventurers Guild. She was impeccably dressed, as ever. Today, she was wearing a pure white summer dress that reminded Cow Girl that this girl was a public official—in other words, part of the nobility. It wasn’t what she normally wore, but even so—in fact, just for that reason—it left a strong impression.