Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 16 - Chapter 2

2. The Existence of Death

The thieves’ guild in Alterna’s West Town. That day, in the darkness of a hidden room deep inside, Haruhiro had been alone with Barbara.

Or so he’d thought.

Once he explained the situation to her satisfaction, Barbara turned on the lights.

The secret room was divided not by walls, but by a specially treated, fireproof cloth. There were apparently several rooms like this in the thieves’ guild. Only the high-ranking agents of the guild, called mentors, knew where all of them were.

The mentors, as their name suggested, guided and led the thieves. On top of that, they also provided intelligence to the Margrave and the higher-ups in the Frontier Army.

“Not many people realize it, but our thieves’ guild is pretty involved politically.”

That suggestive smile on Barbara’s face was burned into Haruhiro’s memory.

It wouldn’t fade so easily.

“I’m way more interested in sex than politics, though.”

“Erm, that’s enough kidding around...”

“You think I’m joking?”

Barbara touched a sensitive part of his anatomy.

“Whoa, hold on...”

Barbara seemed to enjoy seeing him get flustered.

“It’s okay. You can moan a little. They won’t be able to hear us outside. The room was built to be sure of it. That’s why I’m extra fond of this place.”

“It’s true, they won’t hear us outside.”

When he heard another voice — clearly not Barbara’s — say that, Haruhiro was shocked.

“Huh?! Wh-Wha... Huh? Wh-Who’s there...?”

“I told you, didn’t I?” Barbara cleared her throat mischievously. “The thieves’ guild is a political organization. Thanks to that, we’ve learned to keep our public positions and private positions separate. We’re secretive, you know? You’ll have to learn to be the same.”

“Me? Be secretive? Huh? What do you mean...?”

“When Alterna fell, we took a painful blow. Too painful. But we’d look pretty incompetent if your Barbara-sensei was the only survivor, now wouldn’t we?”

“She’s not really mine...”

“I don’t mind if you want to get possessive with me. I enjoy being loved.”

“Enough of the nonsense, Barbara,” the other voice said. It sounded female.

Barbara shrugged.

“I know.”

Haruhiro looked around the secret room. There was a round table, a lamp on top of it, four sheets of non-combustible cloth, and Barbara, as well as Haruhiro, obviously, and that was it. He was sure that was all that was in the room, and yet this other voice went on to introduce herself.

“I’m Eliza.”

“She’s always been shy,” Barbara explained with a chuckle. “I wonder when was the last time I got a good look at her face.”

“...You’re a mentor in the thieves’ guild?” Haruhiro asked.

“Yes,” Eliza’s disembodied voice responded. “I primarily act as an observer of, and contact with, the Volunteer Soldier Corps.”

“The Volunteer Sol—”

Alterna fell, General Rasentra died in a duel with Jumbo the orc, the Frontier Army was destroyed, and the Volunteer Soldier Corps fled in defeat. Obviously, there had to be some survivors. But how many? And where? That remained unclear.

That was what Haruhiro had thought.

Was he wrong?

“Where is the Volunteer Soldier Corps...?”

“The Wonder Hole,” Eliza answered. “A new race has appeared there, so I’d hardly call their situation safe, but Britney, Orion, the Wild Angels, Iron Knuckle, and the Berserkers have managed to build and defend a base there.”

Merry had given Haruhiro and the others a general rundown of the volunteer soldiers and their hunting grounds. Still, his sense of what they were like was pretty vague. He had an outline of all that knowledge in his head, but it was faint, without detail.

“...I see. So they’re at the Wonder Hole. Well, we did kinda suspect that they might’ve been. But the area was full of enemies, so we couldn’t approach it.”

“There are scouts from the Southern Expedition lurking around the Quickwind Plains,” Eliza said, introducing a term Haruhiro wasn’t familiar with.

“Southern Expedition?” he asked.

“That’s the enemy,” Barbara explained.

“The orc clans and the undead armies moved south, and joined with the goblins and kobolds. We lump all of them together as the ‘Southern Expedition.’”

The Southern Expedition had apparently split into two groups.

One had advanced through the Shadow Forest, where the elves lived, then crossed the Quickwind Plains and conquered Deadhead Watching Keep and Alterna.

The other had turned back, up the Jet River, to Riverside Iron Fortress, which they also attacked and took.

Afterwards, Alterna was given to the goblins, while Riverside Iron Fortress was granted to the kobolds.

The majority of the Southern Expedition then headed north, with one gang of orcs remaining in Deadhead Watching Keep to monitor the situation.

“They headed north? Where? Did they just... go home?”

“The other mentors are looking into that.”

According to Barbara, there were four surviving mentors of the thieves’ guild. Barbara and Eliza, along with the brothers Fudaraku and Mosaic. The brothers were searching for the Southern Expedition, or tailing them, but they hadn’t returned yet.

“I have a hard time imagining they both got caught.”

“No news is bad news,” Eliza said.

“Isn’t the saying, ‘No news is good news’?” Barbara corrected her with a hint of exasperation in her tone. “Still, it’s true that we can’t say what’s happening there. I mean, knowing those brothers, they may have just abandoned the mission and run off.”

“You said I’m going to need to be secretive, too, right, Barbara-sensei?”

Barbara hadn’t told Anthony, who had come with Haruhiro and his group, about the Volunteer Soldier Corps. That had to mean Barbara and the others didn’t want to show their hand to the Expeditionary Force. Not yet, at least.

“You want to provide limited information to the Expeditionary Force. Am I supposed to cooperate with you on that?”

Barbara shook her head.

“Not quite.”

“Huh?”

“We want you to become a mentor in the thieves’ guild.”

“...Come again?”

“Sorry to say this when you’ve lost your memories, but we’re short of hands these days. We’ll take anyone, even an old cat.”

“Am I really cut out for that...?”

“You’ll have to do. Eliza.”

When Barbara called her name, a petite woman emerged from one of the pleats in the cloth. There must have been a seam there.

For an instant, he saw her face in profile.

It was half wrapped in a scarf, though, and her long hair almost completely covered her eyes. She wore an outfit that was a gentle, dark color, and it was hard to make out her figure.

Her gloves left the tips of her fingers exposed. It looked like she was holding something. A silvery bottle and a chalice? Eliza laid it down on the table, then turned her back towards Haruhiro, but didn’t leave. She must not have wanted him to see her face.

“Our guild has always been laid back, so there’s not really a formal procedure for this.”

Barbara opened the bottle, and poured the contents into the chalice. Was it wine, or something similar?

“When we induct a new mentor, they share a ceremonial drink with another mentor.”

Barbara passed the chalice to Eliza, who shifted her scarf, and took a sip of the liquid, still facing the other direction. She returned the chalice, and Barbara brought it to her lips, too.

“Drink the rest,” Barbara said, offering the cup to Haruhiro.

She didn’t ask for his opinion. Pushy, he thought, but Haruhiro had already taken the glass. She was his teacher, after all. She knew his personality.

“What even is this?”

“Blood,” Barbara said with a smirk. “The blood of a thief.”

“Whuh?!”

“You’re kind of stupid, huh? That was a joke. Obviously. It’s just what it looks like. Alcohol.”

“Don’t make fun of me...”

When he sniffed it, he did detect the scent of alcohol. But it didn’t seem like wine.

He sighed, took a drink, and choked on it.

“Whoa! This stuff is a bit strong, isn’t it...?”

“There’s not that much. Just down it all in one go.”

“I won’t get drunk, will I...?”

“If you get drunk and horny, don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen. ...Probably. Not that I remember if I’ve ever gotten drunk before.”

He raised the chalice, and poured it all down his throat. His body got warm fast. Then his vision blurred.

Haruhiro returned the cup to Barbara.

“Is this stuff really just alcohol...?”

“I don’t know. The key thing is that you drink it without worrying it might be poison.”

“That never occurred to me...”

“That’s just how much you trust me, huh? Even if you don’t have your memories, your body hasn’t forgotten me.”

“There you go, saying things like that again...”

After some time, the feeling of strong alcohol flooding his body had receded considerably. Was that because of the small quantity? Or was it just not as hard as he’d thought?

“So, what I’m hearing is that our thieves’ guild doesn’t plan to rely on the Expeditionary Force.”

“You’re already sounding like a mentor, aren’t you?”

“Could you not poke fun at me over every little thing?”

“At the very least, we need to judge them first.”

“What about the Volunteer Soldier Corps?”

“We were volunteer soldiers ourselves once. If it’s a question of whether we side with the Corps or with Arabakia’s Expeditionary Force, that’s a no-brainer. If it looks like we can use the Expeditionary Force, we will.”

“Their general, Jin Mogis, wants to use us instead.”

“And that’s our reason for holding back. We don’t want to show too much of our hand. If they think we have a hundred pieces at our disposal, they’ll try to use all one hundred. But if we hide some of those pieces, make them think we only have ten, that lets us conserve the remaining ninety, saying we can’t give what we don’t have.”

Was this how Barbara-sensei had taught Haruhiro? Despite appearances, she really seemed to like looking after others.

“The Volunteer Soldiers in the Wonder Hole aren’t safe, either.” Eliza’s voice sounded somewhat like rain falling on the other side of a window. “It’s connected to a multitude of other worlds, and is highly unstable. Like I was saying earlier, a powerful new race, the grendels, appeared there recently. On top of having to fight them, there’s also a shortage of supplies. They can’t stay shut up inside that base in the Wonder Hole forever.”

“But if they come out, the area is swarming with enemies, right?” Haruhiro said, then, after thinking a moment, “Was swarming with enemies, when we were around there,” he corrected himself. “...I don’t know if we can call the Expeditionary Force our allies, but they aren’t blatantly our enemies. Even if they’re not our friends, we can use them.”

If the Volunteer Soldier Corps moved on its own, the Southern Expedition, which had taken Riverside Iron Fortress and Deadhead Watching Keep, would no doubt move to crush them.

But if the Expeditionary Force attacked Alterna, then that changed the situation.

“Where will the Volunteer Soldier Corps go?” Haruhiro asked.

“To Riverside Iron Fortress, probably,” Barbara answered. “If the Expeditionary Force are reliable allies, there’s the option of working together on a simultaneous attack.”

“...This is just my guess, but from what I’ve seen, if Jin Mogis learns of the existence of the Volunteer Soldier Corps, he’s not going to overlook them. He might try to bring them under his control.”

“The Volunteer Soldier Corps won’t go along with that quietly,” Eliza said with certainty.

Haruhiro sighed.

“It sounds like coordination isn’t going to be easy...”

Barbara tilted her head to the side.

“What will we do, then?”

This was a question from his teacher. As her student, he needed to rack his brains for an answer.

“...Maybe we don’t coordinate, but still launch a simultaneous attack? If the Volunteer Soldier Corps knows when the Expeditionary Force will attack, there’s still the issue of if they can prepare in time, but it shouldn’t be impossible... I guess.”

Barbara-sensei patted Haruhiro on the head, as if to praise him for his keen insight.

“Depending on the situation, we may change course, but that’s our goal for now. With that settled, how do we make it a reality? If this Jin Mogis guy is easy to handle, or unexpectedly trustworthy, that’d make this quick. I guess I really should meet him myself.”

Haruhiro had regrets.

How could he not?

There were so many things to regret about what happened.

What if he had never let Barbara-sensei meet with the general? If Haruhiro had been able to handle the man in her place, how would things have turned out? Or maybe if Barbara had been able to focus entirely on gathering information inside Alterna. That sort of arrangement should have been possible. But because Haruhiro was so unreliable, Barbara had been forced to do a bit of everything.

He didn’t blame himself completely for what happened. That would be massively overestimating his own importance. But still, if things had been a little different, he might not have lost Barbara-sensei.

People died so easily.

It might be his turn next. Or one of his comrades’.

When he closed his eyes, he saw Barbara-sensei’s smile.

“Listen, Old Cat.”

Even now that she was gone, she taught Haruhiro things like this.

“Right now, in this moment, you’ve got to live so that you have no regrets. That’s all there is to it.”

She was dead.

But it wasn’t as if she had never existed.