Mushoku Tensei (LN) - Volume SS - Chapter 3

Short Story:

Old Friends Reunited

IT WAS EIGHT YEARS BEFORE Eris’s tenth birthday. Her father, Philip, was constantly bored and depressed. Around a year had passed since his defeat in the power struggle had led to him losing his position as head of the Boreas family. He spent his days working the modest assistant job to the mayor of Roa and soothing his increasingly neurotic wife, Hilda. Sauros was always yelling at him. He’d been putting up with the yelling since his childhood, so it didn’t bother him, but it frustrated him that he was unable to live up to his full potential in Roa.

On one such day, Paul Greyrat came to Phillip. The man who introduced himself as Paul was both like and unlike what Philip remembered. But that was only natural. It was almost ten years since they had last met.

The moment Paul laid eyes on Philip, he bowed his head. “I want a stable life,” he said. “Give me work.”

Philip asked about his situation and learned how, after running away from the Notos family around ten years earlier, Paul had traveled the Millis Continent and Central Continent as an adventurer. But then he had gotten a woman with child, so he had returned to the Asura Kingdom to do his duty by her. Beside him stood the woman in question. She was beautiful, with the features of a Millis noble, and indeed, her belly was large enough that it was clear she was pregnant.

Philip was silent. In the Asura Kingdom, it was held that settling in one place was best if one was going to raise a child. That was why Paul had come back. But he was unable to return to the Notos house after he’d kicked dirt in their faces on his way out the door, so instead, he was seeking help from the Boreas family—from his old friend, Philip.

“Please,” Paul said. “There’s no one else I can turn to.” When Philip hesitated, he dropped to his knees and bowed his head. This was the manner of address used by townsfolk and artisans. It was not befitting of Asuran nobility, and Philip was filled with contempt as he looked at Paul. Paul Notos Greyrat was the eldest son of the Notos Greyrat family: he ought to have been head of that family. But that was all in the past. He had been disowned the moment he ran away from home, so he wasn’t an Asuran noble anymore. He had no utility to Philip, which meant he was no better than garbage.

“Tomas, take them—” Philip began, about to cold-heartedly order his butler to throw the pair out, but he was interrupted by a bang! The doors to the room swung open, and who should come striding into the reception chamber but Sauros. He looked down at Paul.

“Hmph! If it isn’t you, Paul!”

“Lord Sauros, it’s been too long.”

“Haven’t you grown! It seems you still don’t know how to behave, though! I ask you: is this how a proud Asuran noble presents himself?”

“I’m as much a noble as…erm, I mean, I no longer have any ties to Asuran nobility, my lord.”

“You damn fool! You wouldn’t have been let in the door if that were true!”

Paul’s eyes widened, but he stayed kneeling, his head bowed.

“All the same, I know I’m being unreasonable…”

Sauros snorted. “You get that from your father!” At the mention of his father, Paul’s face twisted. Sauros went on. “I couldn’t stand how unreasonable he was! But he was always too by-the-book! It was like that when we drank together at his mansion fifteen years back! The fellow wanted to split everything equally down to the contents of the bottles! Now, I said his wine tasted like piss, and I didn’t want to drink it, but he said he thought the same, so we’d split it, that once the cork was out, it was good manners to drink it, and actually—”

Sauros got started on what was going to be a long story. Meanwhile, Philip found an old memory coming back to him.

Fifteen years earlier, Philip had been about to start school—he must have been four or five. One day, Sauros went to pay a visit to the Milbotts Region, part of the Notos’s territory. Philip ­accompanied him on the journey. It was his first trip far away—his first time leaving Fittoa. He remembered how excited he had been by Milbotz’s grape vines and windmills. His excitement persisted as they arrived at the Notos mansion, and even while Sauros and the head of the Notos family got started on the wine while the sun was still high. The house, just as spacious as Philip’s own, provided ample fuel for his curiosity. 

Avoiding Sauros’s notice, Philip slipped out of the room and began to explore. Typically, he would never have been so naughty; he would have either stayed at Sauros’s side or sat quietly in the room he was assigned. When he behaved himself like that, a servant or the like would take pity on him and bring him toys or sweets, and that kept boredom at bay. His first trip away had made him bold, but the Notos mansion turned out not to be as interesting as the Boreas mansion was. It all looked the same: identical-looking rows of identical-looking rooms. Perhaps he might have seen something interesting if he had looked out the windows, but he wasn’t tall enough to see through the glass. 

Door after door lined the endless corridor. Nothing at all seemed remotely interesting, and Philip quickly got sick of exploring. Then, Sauros’s face appeared in his mind. Philip would get his ears boxed if his bad-tempered uncle discovered that he had been wandering about without permission. He had to hurry back.

“Huh?”

However, by the time this occurred to him, it was too late. He was already lost. He didn’t know which room he had come from nor the route he had taken. The Notos mansion had in fact been constructed to inspire a sense of deja vu to deter invaders. All the same, Philip tried his best to make it back to the room he had started from, using his memory to guide him. Unfortunately, wandering while lost would only get you more lost. Before long, Philip had lost track even of what floor of the house he was on. A feeling of helplessness came over him, and he wandered around the mansion with a worried look on his face.

“Father? Where are you…? Hello! Is anyone there?!” He was unlucky. This was the time that the servants took their lunch break, and so the mansion was almost deserted. It wasn’t completely deserted, of course, but Philip had made his way into a section of the house that went mostly unused, so no one came. The time he spent lost was probably ten minutes at the most, but to Philip, it felt like hours. 

“Wuh… Waah..” At last, he arrived at a dead end. He felt so entirely helpless that he sat down and started to cry. “Bwaaaaaah…waaaaaah…” He cried and wailed, and yet no one came. He would starve to death in the depths of this labyrinthine mansion.

“Hey.” 

Just then, a shadow fell over his back.

“Hic…hic…” Choking back sobs, Philip turned round to see a boy with light brown hair. He looked about the same age as Philip, or perhaps a little older. He was well-dressed, but there was mud on the hems of his trousers, and his collar was slightly torn.

“What’re you crying for?” The boy asked.

“I-I was…exploring, th-th-then I got lost… I don’t know…wh-where my father is…”

“Is that it? Right, follow me!” The boy jerked his chin toward the end of the corridor, then started walking.

“O-okay.” Philip wiped his tears away and followed the boy. 

That was how Philip and Paul Notos Greyrat met. Thinking this boy would show him where to go, Philip followed him, only to end up roped into playing with him. Later that afternoon, Paul got him covered in mud, for which he was told off by Sauros, but let us set that aside for now.

Strangely enough, Philip kept running into Paul. Sauros visited the Milbotts district many times after that, and each time, Philip and Paul played together. When Philip was seven, he started attending the noble academy in the capital, only to find Paul there too. They got on strangely well, and so they ended up hanging out together. Paul had no brains, and Philip had no brawn. The pair helped each other with their weak points and got up to all sorts of trouble. Looking back now, Philip wondered why he had behaved so badly…but when he had been with Paul, he had done it without thinking twice. They had been so close that you could even say Paul had been his best friend. 

When had he become like this? When had he started thinking of his relationships with people only in terms of the advantages they lent him? Was it when he heard that Paul, rather than returning home after graduation, had fought with his father and run away? Or had it been when he vied with his older brother James to be heir to the Boreas family? Before he knew it, Philip had lost the ability to judge people in any way other than appraising their value to him.

Philip looked at Paul. The other man’s head was lowered. Paul had veered off the path of an Asuran noble. Philip had thought they would never meet again, and yet here he was, bowing his head for the sake of his unborn child. People could change. But to Philip’s eyes, Paul had hardly changed from that day when he had helped Philip—even though his appearance could not have been more different.

“Tomas, the resident knight in Buena village, was killed in a battle with monsters the other day, wasn’t he? This man is a master swordsman. He shall have the job.”

Before he knew it, the words were out of Philip’s mouth. Unable to conceal his surprise, Paul looked up at him.

“Philip…” 

“You will be a low-ranking noble in a backwater village without so much as a market. It will be a provincial life. That’s all right with you?”

“Of course! I’m in your debt!” With a beaming smile on his face, Paul bowed his head.

Eight years had passed. At the time, Philip did not understand why he did what he did. Why had some old memories made him open his arms to a man with so little value? He couldn’t work it out. But now, as he watched Eris’s tenth birthday wrap up, he thought that Paul had changed. Several months earlier, when Philip had discovered that Eris didn’t know even the basic dance steps, he had assumed that her tenth birthday party would end up as a painful memory for her. But the day had come, and Eris had done the dances correctly. Her steps were still clumsy for a ten-year-old, but even Philip had seen that she seemed to genuinely enjoy the dancing, and—biased as he was, as her father—he’d thought she looked lovely. He had half despaired of his daughter, but now he thought she might grow into a fine lady by the time she was fifteen. 

And all of it down to him…

Philip’s gaze turned to the boy standing beside Eris: Rudeus. It was thanks to him that Eris had changed. She had changed a lot. So had Paul. As a boy, he’d been king of the scoundrels; now, he was a father. Philip had thought, when he had offered Paul a job, that he had changed a little too. Even indirectly, Rudeus’s influence had changed him too.

He watched Rudeus lead Eris and Ghislaine off somewhere. During the party, Rudeus had asked for food to be brought to his room, so he would probably be endearing himself to Eris there.

Rudeus is excellent as a teacher, but I see great things for him in the future, too. As well as being determined and patient, the way the boy got up to silly little tricks was just the sort of thing Philip loved, and he often caught himself smiling wickedly at his antics. If he continued growing up like this and kept a tight rein on Eris, he would prove useful in Philip’s political machinations… But something in him opposed the idea. He felt like he shouldn’t use the boy like that, although the Philip of long ago would have made him his political pawn without thinking twice.

“Heh…” Philip laughed to himself. His feelings mystified him a little, but now the thought struck him that if Rudeus were to become head of the Notos Greyrats and Eris the head of the Boreas Greyrats, it could put him and Paul on even footing once again. They could come up with devious schemes together again, and then, regardless of whether they succeeded or failed, raise a glass and laugh about them.

“That sounds like more fun than being head of the family,” he said to himself. Chuckling at his thoughts, he turned his attention to his upcoming schedule.