Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 13 - Chapter 4

4. What He Said That Day

“I mean, there’s something weird about him, right?” Kuzaku asked. “That Kejiman guy. I’m sure of it.”

Even once they turned the lights out and the room was completely dark, Kuzaku and Haruhiro kept talking about stuff that didn’t matter. Or rather, Kuzaku was doing basically all the talking, and Haruhiro was just nodding along. He was pretty tired, after all.

“Well, yeah,” Haruhiro said.

“But, well, then again, if he weren’t a little weird, I’d think something was up.”

“You’ve got a point.”

“He doesn’t seem like he’s totally on the ball. More like he’s a bit out of it.”

“Yeah,” Haruhiro said.

“But hey, he could just be faking it. Like, we could be getting a fast one pulled on us here.”

“Gotta be careful, huh?”

“I’ll let you handle that part, Haruhiro. As for me, well, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Zzz...”

“Kuzaku?”

“Zzzzzzzzzzz...”

“Man, you sure do fall asleep quickly...”

Not like I care, really. Haruhiro turned over in bed.

The window was still open. There was a slight breeze. It was still a bit hot, though, so he just had a thin blanket over him up to his belly.

It hadn’t really hit him when he was on the ship, but now that they were staying in an inn like this, he felt rich, and that made him uneasy.

A thousand gold. It was hidden under the bed right now. What should he do about it? If they carried it around with them, he worried it would be stolen, or perhaps strange people would gather around them.

That wasn’t very good from a mental health perspective, so he wanted to just blow it all on something, but that wasn’t something Haruhiro should just decide on his own. Besides, was there even a proper way to spend it?

For example, even if they ordered Kuzaku a full set of custom-made armor, it wouldn’t even cost a hundred gold. With a thousand gold, they could buy a house and have money to spare. They could probably even buy a ship.

That said, houses and ships were of no use to volunteer soldiers. They couldn’t manage such things themselves, and it was stupid to just keep paying the upkeep on them.

“...We could quit. It’s not like it isn’t an option,” he dared to whisper to himself.

Kuzaku was breathing softly in his sleep.

They had a full thousand gold, after all. Even if they set Yume’s share aside and divided it six ways, that was a hundred and sixty-six gold apiece. He didn’t know if that was enough to fool around for the rest of their lives, but if they weren’t stupid with the money, they could live comfortably for ten to twenty years on it.

Ten to twenty years might be too long, but taking it easy for a year or two wouldn’t be bad. Why had no one suggested it?

They had promised to meet Yume half a year from now in Alterna. That said, there wasn’t anything saying they had to stay active as volunteer soldiers during that time.

They’d go to Alterna. Meet Yume in half a year. Other than that, they were free. They could enjoy an extended break.

If they were going to retire from being volunteer soldiers, that was a big deal, so it might be a good idea to move away and do something else for a while. However, none of them, Haruhiro included, seemed to be considering that.

Yes, Haruhiro wasn’t, either. He was just running through all of the possibilities in his head to be sure. They would likely keep working hard at the volunteer soldier trade, just like they had been all this time.

But how long could they keep it up?

If he recalled correctly, Akira-san of the Day Breakers was in his forties. He’d been a volunteer soldier for upwards of twenty years. Two decades.

How many years had it been since the woman called Hiyomu had led Haruhiro and the others to the Volunteer Soldier Corps Office? Five? Six? No, no. It felt like it had been eons ago, but it had actually been fewer than two years. The thought of doing this for twenty years was mind-boggling.

Another eighteen years of this, huh?

Honestly, he couldn’t see them surviving it. What was the survival rate for volunteer soldiers? It couldn’t be that high. Haruhiro had been in enough situations where he could easily have died.

Enough? No. More than enough.

Having stood at the brink of life and death too many times, he’d developed an ability to avoid danger. He hoped that was true, but Haruhiro had just had a brush with death again recently.

Naturally, he wasn’t taking risks for the thrill of it, and he was being as cautious as he could, but it still kept on happening.

Occasionally, he’d think about it. Eventually, in the not too distant future, he was likely going to die.

He might not die. He might notice one day that, like Akira-san, he had been a soldier for twenty years, but it was overwhelmingly more likely that something like that wouldn’t happen.

It wasn’t like he wanted to die young. So if he was going to live a long life, he had to call it quits at the right time.

Akira-san wasn’t a genius. That was what his comrade Gogh had said about him. He was no genius. Akira-san had just survived.

Having been lucky enough to survive, Akira-san had been given time. And so, he’d gotten strong.

He hadn’t survived because he’d gotten strong. He’d gotten strong because he’d survived.

“But they can say whatever they want,” Haruhiro murmured. “I mean, it’s all stuff they’re making up after the fact.”

Even assuming Haruhiro did survive, could he get strong like Akira-san? Haruhiro had taken things seriously, hanging in there at the brink of death all this time, so he knew. People were not equal. There really were such things as inborn potential, talent, and limits to one’s abilities. Looking at the whole picture, Akira-san was clearly extraordinary, while Haruhiro was ordinary.

Perhaps even a mediocre person like him could, with a surplus of luck, survive twenty years as a volunteer soldier. Well, he couldn’t rule the possibility out, at least. But as for becoming a legendary volunteer soldier like Akira-san, it would never happen. No way, no how.

But, to Haruhiro, that wasn’t what was important.

Haruhiro didn’t want to get rich or famous. He wouldn’t disagree if someone said he could stand to be more greedy or have more ambition, but he wasn’t going to overstretch himself for those things. If they never came his way, that was fine.

The issue was, even if Haruhiro did survive, his comrades might die. Tomorrow, Kuzaku, who had just started snoring in the bed next to his, might breathe his last and become a cold, dead body.

Haruhiro got up. The bed creaked a little. Kuzaku stayed sound asleep.

Haruhiro put on his shoes, got out of bed, and quietly left the room.

Lights were out in the hall. It seemed there were still lamps lit off by the stairs, and the light was shining this way.

The place they were staying, the Golden Goatfish Inn, was a four-story building. The second through fourth floors were all guest rooms. The rooms on the second floor were quad rooms, this third floor was for double rooms, and the fourth floor had large guest rooms with multiple smaller rooms inside.

Unlike in Alterna, there were plenty of four and five-story buildings in Vele.

Haruhiro descended the stairs to the second floor. Without meaning to, he glanced at the door to the room where the girls were staying. Were they all asleep by now? Or were they awake and talking?

Shihoru and Merry were fine together, but how had adding Setora changed the mood in there? Shihoru and Merry were both quiet types, so it was hard to imagine there was a roaring conversation.

“If only Yume were around...” he murmured.

Haruhiro passed by the girls’ room without a sound, opening the door at the T-junction at the end of the hall. There was a wooden deck beyond it. He’d had a premonition somewhere in his head that someone might be there, but there was nobody.

“What am I getting my hopes up for?” He laughed to himself a little as he gripped the railing. Then he let out a sigh.

The Golden Goatfish Inn was in a quiet, stylish area, and he could see the lanterns of the guards on patrol from the deck. The tight security was one of the selling points of the many inns and hotels in this area. It wasn’t just the objects in them; security also had to be bought with money, or else secured by one’s own means.

Haruhiro rested his elbows on the railing and his face in his hands. In such a big city, there had to be a good number of professional thieves. There could be armed robberies and murders, too. Someone could be being murdered right now, and it would be utterly unsurprising if, at this very moment, a person or two was about to die of illness.

And besides that, even if you defended yourself properly, and tried to take care of your health well enough, there was no fighting back against a natural disaster that no one saw coming.

Even if they weren’t volunteer soldiers, they’d die when their time came. That was true, but in this trade, they could make enough money to make up for the amount their lives would be shortened.

No volunteer soldier wanted to die, but they knew that they had to take on risks while stopping short of actually dying.

Eventually, Haruhiro would grow numb to it. No, he already was pretty numb.

Thinking about it, when first starting as a trainee volunteer soldier, he’d been far more timid than he was now. Even an unarmed mud goblin had been unbearably frightening to him.

“Lives are at stake here!” Manato had shouted.

Those words... Haruhiro had completely forgotten them. Lives were at stake on both sides in the volunteer soldiering business. It was full of challenges that couldn’t have more serious stakes.

“There’s no way it’s going to be easy... huh...” he murmured.

No person, no living being, wants to die, Manato had said. Then, although he couldn’t have wanted to, Manato had gone and died ahead of the rest of his comrades. That was where it had all started for Haruhiro and the others.

How far forward had they come from that place that now felt so far away?

“No, that’s not it...” he murmured.

They hadn’t actually progressed at all.

They had just one life, and if they died, it was all over. That principle would not change for anything.

There was no changing it, so even if they improved their skills, or were taking on more challenging opponents, in essence it was all the same. They were creatures that didn’t want to die killing other creatures that didn’t want to die, feeding on them, profiting, and going through the joys and sorrows of life.

If that felt sinful, he’d long since given up and accepted it.

He wasn’t into stepping on those he killed and basking in the afterglow of the deed, but he didn’t think it made him a better person to not do so.

He stole a creatures’ only life from them, without being tortured by any sense of guilt or responsibility, and even if it should have left a bad aftertaste, he didn’t even feel it anymore.

Well, it’s the same for us. We put our lives at stake, and just happen to win. If we lose, we die. The conditions are the same, so we’ll be on the other side eventually.

He might have thought something selfish like, We each only have one life, so no holding any grudges.

“But...” Haruhiro pressed his head to the railing.

But what if that wasn’t true?