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Chapter 1: What You Get out of Louts and Scissors Depends on How You Use Them
15th day, 3rd month, 1,547th year, Continental Calendar
It was a sprawling prairie in the northwestern part of the Kingdom of Friedonia.
A single wide road ran across that prairie with its excellent view, and on either side of that road were demon-destroying trees from the God-Protected Forest planted at regular intervals. This was one of the national highways that had been laid down as part of the transportation network. If one were to follow this road, they might pass merchant caravans protected by adventurers, or rhinosaurus-drawn freight trains.
It was a quiet spring day with clear skies. There was a covered wagon drawn by two horses traveling down said highway. In the covered cart were the wares of a common traveling peddler, but the horses which drew it were quite magnificent beasts.
We were inside that covered wagon. And I was talking to the guy who was running behind the cart.
“What do you think, Hal?” I asked. “How’s it feel running down a road you built yourself?”
“I won’t deny it’s gratifying, but... when you’re the one who says that, it pisses me off a bit...” Halbert said grumpily, still running outside the cart.
Currently, there were four of us riding in the covered wagon: Aisha, Kaede, Tomoe, and me.
This was the group traveling to the Star Dragon Mountain Range at the direct invitation of Mother Dragon.
However, we didn’t know the reason for this invitation, and only a few of my closest retainers had been notified, so we needed to travel incognito. That was why I was wearing my usual Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago traveler’s outfit, consisting of a conical straw hat and a traveler’s raincoat; Tomoe was wearing a white mage’s hooded robe; and Aisha, Hal, and Kaede were each dressed as adventurers.
Of course, once we arrived in the Star Dragon Mountain Range, we intended to change into our formal uniforms that were loaded in the wagon.
Incidentally, the last member of our party, Carla, had gone ahead to scout out things in the direction we were traveling. It was useful having a dragonewt who could fly at times like this.
Aisha and I were relaxing inside the wagon, while Tomoe was in the driver’s seat, having Kaede teach her to control the wagon. Because Tomoe and Kaede were of the similar-looking mystic wolf and mystic fox races, when they sat together in the driver’s seat, they really did look like sisters, which put a smile on my face.
Hal had been in the wagon, too, at least initially, but then he’d said, “My body’s gonna get all numb like this,” and gotten out to start running.
“You were going through hard training as a dratrooper, weren’t you?” I asked. “You should take the chance to relax now, at least.”
“You’re taking it too easy...” Hal gave me a stern and somewhat appalled look.
Uh... Yeah, he might be right.
I was in the covered wagon right now, resting my head in Aisha’s lap. My hat was resting on my chest, and I was taking things maybe just a little too easily. I shifted my head backward to ask Aisha, who was patting my head with a goofy look on her face, a question.
“Aisha, are you okay? I’m not too heavy?”
Aisha came back to her senses, and shook her head with all her might. “Not at all! If anything, I should ask if my lap is too hard for you. I have a lot of muscle, after all...”
“Nah, I think it has just the right level of springiness. Look, my finger sinks right in.”
“Wah! Hold on, that tickles!”
When I poked her thigh, Aisha writhed a little. It was kind of cute.
“Oh, for the love of... I don’t want to be in a wagon with that atmosphere,” Hal said with an “I can’t take any more of this nonsense” attitude.
Yeah, if I were in Hal’s position, I’d probably feel the same. Tomoe was hogging Kaede, too.
“But, if I hadn’t chosen you to accompany me, you two would’ve been aboard the Hiryuu, training as usual, right?” I asked. “Isn’t it nice being able to relax?”
“Well, yeah, but... why are we on this relaxed trip, anyway?” Hal demanded. “They’re meeting us at the border, right? Couldn’t we have just taken a wyvern there?”
As he said, someone from the Star Dragon Mountain Range was going to be coming to get us at a village on the northwestern border of the Kingdom of Friedonia. Once we got there, a dragon would carry us to the Star Dragon Mountain Range.
From the standpoint of pure efficiency, we could have stayed in the capital until just before it was time to go, and then traveled to the village by wyvern on the day of. But that would’ve been bad.
“I’ve finally been given a long vacation,” I said. “It’d be a shame to ruin it by rushing things, don’t you think?”
“Really? I don’t think traveling is something to enjoy...”
This was a difference between the way people in this world looked at things, and the way a modern person would.
In this world, where there were vicious wild creatures, and even monsters that may appear, it wasn’t possible to take it easy traveling, even inside your own country.
In the history of Earth, it was only recently that we’d become able to travel so easily. Even in the Edo Period, when public order had been in a reasonable state, when Matsuo Bashou had traveled, he had to accept he might not come back alive.
Thinking of it that way, it made me realize once again just how incredible Poncho was, having traveled around to so many different countries, and having spent a great deal of money, all to pursue his interest in food.
“I like traveling,” I said. “Seeing unfamiliar vistas makes my heart dance. My grandma and grandpa liked traveling, too, so they often brought me with them.”
“Your grandfather and grandmother did that, sire?” Aisha asked.
“Yeah. Though, with them being an elderly couple, it was a lot of trips to temples, shrines, and castles.”
Going to Nara in autumn.
Red leaves and senbei crackers.
Those had been good times.
Back then, even going to the neighboring prefectures felt like I was going somewhere really far away. I never would’ve imagined then that, years later, I’d find myself traveling to another world entirely.
While I was basking in those memories, Aisha said, “Now that I think of it, there’s something I’ve been wondering about...” She sounded mystified as she continued. “This wagon, it doesn’t shake. Normally, we wouldn’t be able to relax like this, you know?”
“Well, it may look like an ordinary covered wagon, but... Genia designed this thing,” I said.
“Um, why do you suddenly look so exhausted?” Aisha asked.
“The rhinosaurus train primarily carries freight now, but if we want to have it pull passenger cars eventually, the shaking would become an issue,” I began.
“Now that you mention it, when we went to the dark elves’ forest, it was shaking really badly,” Hal interrupted, wincing.
Perhaps he was remembering what it had been like that time. We’d been going there for disaster relief, so every moment counted. That was why we’d gone as fast as we could, without regard to the shaking, and most of the members of the Forbidden Army who had ridden with us had suffered motion sickness as a result.
“That’s why I asked Genia to develop a setup that reduces shaking in the car,” I explained. “It’s just... Genia always manages to exceed my expectations in ways I’d never see coming.”
I’d been envisioning something like a coil spring. My studies had been focused on the humanities, not engineering, so I didn’t understand the exact way to set it up. But I’d given Genia the Overscientist a rough image of what I was thinking of, and hoped she could develop something close to it. What Genia did develop had been beyond my imagination.
“I never thought she’d come up with shock-absorbing materials first...” I murmured.
“Sh-Shock absor... What now?” Aisha asked.
“I haven’t seen one myself, but apparently there’s an armadillo on this continent that’s so huge you could mistake it for a glyptodon, right?” I said.
“I don’t know what a glyptodon is, but you’re talking about the giganto armadillo, right?” Aisha asked. “They mostly live in the forests. They have a hard armor shell, and even I have trouble breaking it.”
“Wait, hold on?! You can break it?!” Hal exclaimed in surprise. “They say it’s practically impossible to break their shells with a physical attack, you know?!”
“They do?” Aisha asked. “I hit it around ten times, changing greatswords in between, and I managed to break it.”
““...”” Hal and I were both speechless. It looked like Genia wasn’t the only one who was off the charts...
“W-Well, setting that aside,” I said. “So, we knew that the giganto armadillo defended itself from physical attacks with its hard armor shell, but Genia questioned where the shock from those attacks was going. No matter how much it looked like there was no exterior damage, she thought the impact might be reaching their soft internal organs. When she dissected one to take a look, she discovered the fat deposits on the inside of its armor shell had powerful shock-absorbing qualities.”
In other words, the inside of the shell had a fleshy texture; but, to put it in terms a modern person would understand, it had a number of qualities that made it like rubber.
I stomped twice on the floor of the wagon car. “The axles and wheels of this wagon are made with a processed form of that fat found inside their armored shells. That’s why this wagon shakes less than other wagons.”
“I see... That’s Madam Genia for you, all right,” Aisha said. “Coming up with something like this so easily.”
Aisha seemed genuinely impressed, but my feelings on the matter were a little more complicated.
It might sound a little demanding, but I wished she’d come up with a material that was easier to put into general use. Giganto armadillo fat was precious, and that made this covered wagon expensive in a way that didn’t match its appearance. If I tried to make a train that didn’t shake using this method, we’d end up overhunting the giganto armadillo.
It needs to be cheaper for the general public to be able to use it... I thought to myself.
However, Genia was a natural-born genius, and once she created something, it wasn’t in her personality to think of ways of creating a more budget-efficient version, or to improve its functionality. There was no helping that, so I turned the materials over to the diligent researchers, and asked them to research a substitute material that could be mass-produced.
As for their results, there was apparently a species of silkworm whose cocoons had similar shock-absorbing properties to this material. Those cocoons could be mass-produced, so I was looking forward to their future research developments. Naturally, I’d told them what I knew about springs, and I had them researching those, too.
The truth was, the ones supporting this country weren’t rulers like me, or geniuses like Genia, but those nameless researchers. It was important not to forget that.
It happened while I was resting my head in Aisha’s lap with my eyes closed, thinking about that.
“Hey,” Hal commented. “Looks like young Miss Carla’s back.”
Hearing that, I sat up. I called out to Tomoe and Kaede in the driver’s seat to have them stop the wagon.
When I got out of the car, Carla was in the middle of landing. It wasn’t a vertical drop; she came in at an angle to land like a passenger plane. She was probably landing that way to make sure no one saw up her apron dress.
“I have returned from scouting, Master,” Carla reported, fixing her skirt which had gotten just a little ruffled in the landing. It looked like she’d gotten used to handling her miniskirt maid outfit.
When I decided to have Carla accompany me, I had thought it was a bit much to make her wear the maid uniform while traveling, and I had planned to let her wear the armor she’d used in the war. But Serina the head maid said, “I thought this might happen, so I prepared a maid outfit for traveling,” and with a cool look on her face, she handed over the thing.
I used some of the materials that were offered to the royal family as gifts, ones where there were no other uses for, to improve my Little Musashibos, and it looked like this maid outfit used them, too. It was a superior product: blade-, arrow-, acid-, and heat-resistant; hard to stain, and easy to wash.
...Where does our head maid’s passion come from, and where is it going? I wondered.
That aside, I praised Carla for her work.
“Well done. How was it?”
“There were no dangerous creatures up ahead... However...” Carla said awkwardly, looking at her winged back.
I looked at her, wondering what was up, when I noticed two tiny feet sticking out from under Carla’s armpits. Carla turned to face the other way, and I saw a little human boy who was about five years old stuck to her back. The boy looked frightened, clinging tightly.
Carla seemed troubled, saying, “I found this boy alone and crying in an open spot on the mountains, and I couldn’t leave him alone, so I brought him back with me. He seems scared of something... and he won’t get down.” Carla shrugged as if to say she didn’t understand the reason at all.
“Isn’t he just scared because you flew through the sky?” I asked. It looked like she’d been flying at a pretty high altitude, so the boy had probably been clinging tightly so that he wouldn’t fall.
When I pointed that out, Carla’s eyes opened wide in realization. “Ah! Y-You’re right. I had forgotten that humans don’t fly.”
“Oh, come on...”
When I gave her a less-than-amused look, Carla blatantly averted her eyes.
Kaede and Tomoe spoke to the boy gently, and managed to coax him down from Carla’s back. But once he was down and the tension was relieved, the boy started to cry.
He was probably from a nearby village, and had gotten lost after wandering into the mountains. We had a boy on our hands who didn’t know his name, didn’t know where he lived, and kept on crying.
If I’d been the dog police officer in the song “Inu no Omawari-san,” this would be where I would start barking because I didn’t know what to do, and then give up.
The boy seemed to have taken to Carla because he was still clinging to her, and she was still panicking when I asked her, “Do we have anything to go on?”
“Uh... AH!” Carla cried. “Now that you mention it. I saw a number of strange men in the mountains.”
“Strange men?” I repeated.
“Yes. They had the appearance of filthy bandits. The fact that there were people like that lurking around in the area was one of the reasons I decided to take this kid with me.”
“Mountain bandits?” I pondered. “I haven’t heard any reports of bandits appearing in our territory...”
When I’d only just taken the throne, there were still occasional reports of thieves and mountain bandits. However, with the transportation network laid out, allowing troops to move around the country quickly, I stopped hearing reports of these sorts of robbers in the country. The only “thieves” I heard about were adventurers who took that name as their job title. Whenever there was a report of an incident, it was put down immediately, and if an armed band was found, the military would be sent to monitor them, or if necessary put them down.
That was how many groups of bandits had been defeated, or left the business of their own accord. Some of those bandits had actually been harmless, and for people like that... Ah!
“Hey, Carla, do you remember what color they were wearing?” I asked.
“Now that you bring it up... they were all wearing matching orange breastplates.”
“Yeah, I figured...” I said, nodding.
“You have some idea who they are, then?”
“Oh, I have more than an idea...”
I was the one who formed their organization.
We traveled for maybe another thirty minutes after that. When we brought the boy to the foot of the mountain where Carla said she had seen the men, the men in orange breastplates came out in force to greet us. I sent Carla ahead to explain the situation to them.
Like Carla had said, the men certainly did look like bandits. Their skin was tanned and swarthy, their faces thick with stubble, and they were a burly band of louts. They looked bad enough that Aisha and Hal tensed for battle when they saw them (Tomoe and Kaede were waiting inside the covered wagon), but the men showed no sign of bloodlust, and displayed no tension whatsoever.
One man who was larger than the rest stepped forward. “You the one, mister? I’m told you took a child into custody.”
The man spread his arms out in an exaggerated gesture, grinning.
“Yeah,” I said. “A member of our group took him in when she found him alone in the mountains.” It would be a pain to deal with it if our identities came out, so I explained the situation to him politely. “Have the boy’s relatives come to collect him?”
“Of course,” said the man. “Hey, you louts! Hurry up and bring the kid’s parents out!”
One of the men shouted, “Yessir!” and rushed off to the rear.
The way they talked, they were totally like a bandit boss and one of his minions.
Not long after that, a woman who looked like an innkeeper from a village threaded her way through the men to appear before us. That woman, who looked confused as she walked through the group of men, looked pleadingly at me with desperation on her face.
“Th-The boy... is my son, all right?! He wandered into the mountains on his own, and I haven’t heard from him since!”
So this was the boy’s mother? She must have been very worried.
“Please, relax,” I said. “There was no sign of him being injured.”
I asked Carla to bring the boy. When Carla brought him out from the cart, the little boy made a beeline for the woman the moment he saw her, jumping into her waiting arms.
“Moooooommy!”
The woman held him tight. “Thank goodness... Honestly, you silly boy! You had me worried sick!”
“I’m sor... sor... ry...”
“I’m really... glad you’re safe...”
The boy and his mother were reunited, and embraced.
While we watched that out of the corner of our eyes, the big man talked to me. “You really did us a favor there, mister. We’d split up to look for the kid, but we just weren’t having any luck. I wasn’t sure what we were gonna do.”
“No, like I said before, we only found him by coincidence.”
“Still, I’ve gotta thank you. I’m the leader of this band. The name’s Gonzales. From the look of you, you’re a merchant, are you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Kazuma Souya of The Silver Deer.”
It would cause trouble if it came out that I was the king, so I was using the alias I had prepared.
Gonzales went, “Hm?” and furrowed his brow. “Mister... Have we met somewhere before?”
“Have we? It’s my first time in these parts...”
“Am I imagining it? I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before...”
“Well, I hope you’ll remember my face, then,” I said. “We’d appreciate your business at The Silver Deer.”
“Gahaha! You aren’t a merchant for nothing, huh?” Gonzales seemed to like that, because he slapped me hard on the back.
...It kind of hurt.
When I played it off like that and returned to my companions, Hal said, “Would you mind explaining the situation already? Who are those men, anyway? They look like a band of brigands.”
“Well, they did used to be mountain bandits, after all.”
“Huh?! What’d you just say?!”
“Calm down, Hal,” I said. “There are all sorts of mountain bandits out there, you know.”
There were mountain bandits who attacked merchants and villagers, stealing their possessions, abducting their women and children, and even killing people. These were what you would call villainous bandits.
However, there were also those that occupied mountain roads, charged a toll for merchants to pass, and protected them in exchange. These were relatively respectable (?) bandits.
Whenever there were reports of the former, I would just send in the military to exterminate them; but for the latter, it was a shame to lose such talented people.
In a way, they were experts on the mountains. They often had roots in the area, maintaining good relations with the nearby villages, and it would be a waste to just throw away their knowledge and experience. So, here was what I did.
“I hired those mountain bandits, and had them form ‘mountain rescue teams.’”
“Mountain rescue teams?” Hal repeated.
“When someone gets lost in the mountains, like what happened here, they search for them. They also patrol the mountain to keep an eye out for any strange happenings, and they protect travelers on the roads, like they had been doing before. The country pays their wages. They charge a fare for protection on the mountain roads, but the money they collect goes into the national coffers. If they’re found to be skimming off the top, obviously, we treat them like normal mountain bandits.”
“Wow, you’ve sure got a lot going on...” Hal said, sounding impressed, but I had to smile wryly.
“Well, I’m the king, after all.”
“Oh, yeah, now that you mention it, I guess you are. I forget sometimes.”
“Yeah, I do, too.”
The two of us laughed together.
After that, we said our farewells to the mother, child, and mountain rescue team, and set off on the road once more.
With every meeting comes another parting, and we had other meetings to get to.
What sort of people would we meet on our trip? I was suddenly looking forward to finding out.