SG! 05: A Changing Trio

 “There isn’t much to eat, is there?” Aira sighed.

A night had passed after what was, thinking back on it, a very action-packed yesterday. For lack of any better options, we set out for Telaberan.

On top of the river.

After rising early in the morning, I used Palmira’s axe, which she treated with the utmost devotion, to make a raft.
Without rope, we used ivy as a substitute, but even though I didn’t expect laymen to be able to do it, they made a rope that was better than I thought it would be.
But it did take an excessive amount of time. We started at the crack of dawn, and only finished past noon.
In the meantime, all we had to put in our stomachs was the seemingly edible wild grass that Palmira gathered.
I mean sure, they were edible.
Or rather, it’s more like most kinds of grass are probably edible if you try hard enough…

Anyway, we traveled down the river in some comfort on the raft.
We’d considered walking, of course, but we ultimately scrapped the idea. Without equipment or shoes, it didn’t seem like we’d be able to go for five days of continuous walking.
If we couldn’t walk, we’d be finished.
It would be slow going with our bodies all worn out.

On the one hand, if we were on the river, we’d flow downstream even in silence. Now, unlike the site of the goblin attack, the river had widened to a considerable degree, and the current was slow and easy.
No mistake about it, traveling this way was faster than walking.
If we were going on foot, we’d have to stop for breaks every once in a while, but like this, we had no need for that. At night, of course, we had to pull in close to shore, but even accounting for that, it was a three… four day journey. We’d be able to arrive at a speed not all that different from the carriage’s.

Besides, it was troubling, but there was a risk… should I call it that? There was a certain risk we were able to avoid.

Passerby.
The highway was well-traveled enough to merit the name, so naturally there would be [others] on it aside from us.
From a normal point of view, that might’ve been considered a good thing. For example, maybe we could’ve hitched a ride with a merchant caravan and received their protection.
But, that only applied to good people. In the first place, we’d been captured by slavers doing something similar.
Honestly, it was simply a gamble.
If we really had no option but to walk, taking a risk on our fellow travelers would’ve been acceptable. After all, whether we’d make it on foot was a gamble in itself.
But we could take a third option now. Then we should avoid pointless risk, I thought.
If something were to pass by on the highway, it’d be a good idea to observe first and consider things from there.
Of course, being on the open water of the river, there was still the possibility of being discovered by others.
However, in that case, if we judged the situation to be extremely dangerous, we could simply escape to the opposite bank. It was a rough thing, but we even made an oar.

“Ah–, what are you eating?”

“Tree bark.”

Speaking of making things.
I studied my own two palms.
Slender white fingers. Obviously not the hands I had before. Woman’s hands. Excessively smooth, without a single blemish.

…But that was strange.

Like I said before, I’d been swinging an axe around since morning. It wouldn’t be unusual for someone unused to that kind of work to have blisters all over their hands. Then was I used to it? Of course not.
In other words, there was something odd about this body. It was ridiculously sturdy.
The soles of my feet were dirty — no surprise there — but there wasn’t a single injury on them either. Even though I’d run down a hill barefoot.
Just to be sure, I had the other two show me their feet, but while there was nothing big, they had sustained a number of small injuries. Incidentally, Aira had a lot.

Plus, this body’s physical strength was abnormal.
Naturally, I felled trees for the construction of the raft, but cutting down trees with an axe is, by nature, terribly heavy labor.
Though I did get help from Aira and Palmira, the fact was, both of them were exhausted almost right away.
The work was just that tough, usually. So the second half I did almost entirely by myself. And even then I was barely panting.
By this point, I’d exceeded any sensible definition of ‘strong’.

Tireless.

If I had to pick one word, that would be it.
As you might expect, I found this body unsettling.
It wouldn’t get hurt, wouldn’t get tired.
Though there was little I could do about it, I’d been preoccupied only with my transformation into a woman. But I couldn’t help but feel that this body had other secrets.

“Chris.”

“Hm?”

Palmira tugged lightly on my clothes, bringing me to the present.
It seemed like I’d been sunk in thought for quite some time.

“Hey, the sun’s setting. We should pull up to the bank soon.”

As Palmira spoke, I take stock of our surroundings.
The sky was already dyed madder red. It was only a matter of time before the sun sank below the horizon.
As far as just riding the raft goes, there wasn’t a particular rule saying we couldn’t keep going at night,  but being on the water after nightfall and capsizing, falling overboard, or destroying the raft were all frightening possibilities, so we decided go on the water only during the day and pull up to the bank at night.

“Got it, are we getting closer to shore…?”

“I’m hungry.”

With my oar — which was practically just a plank of wood, but otherwise unobjectionable — I began to move the raft across the burbling water to shore.
The raft wasn’t all that big, but since we built it without thinking about its navigational efficiency at all, even reaching the not-so-distant shore took its time.

“Big Sister, do your best–”

Listening to Aira’s unmotivated encouragement, I pulled us to shore.
Then, the three of us dragged half the raft onto the bank. Without anything to anchor it with, we had to. If we were to wake up one day to find it gone, it would be no laughing matter.

Same as yesterday, we gathered fallen branches and lit a fire. Despite being on the raft, we were all a bit soaked, and having something to light up the night was soothing, after all.
Besides, the goblin threat was gone, but wild dogs and other things might’ve been prowling in the night. Our fire would be effective in terms of looking out for monsters.
In the meantime, Palmira had picked edible-looking mushrooms from somewhere.
Having collected a larger haul than expected, despite being limited in her expressions, Palmira seemed somewhat proud of herself.

…Come to think of it, I felt that Palmira was kind of amazing. At least, her survival know-how was quite a bit better than mine.
Just what kind of past did she have to end up a slave, I wondered, but that was something I would avoid digging into as much as possible.

It was also the case when I was an adventurer, but prying into another’s past was a kind of taboo. Sometimes, out with friends at a bar and terribly drunk, someone might spill, but as a rule, they would develop into miserable, meaningless stories.
Though ‘adventurer’ doesn’t sound half-bad to the ear, in the end, they’re nothing but odd-jobs men, criminals who couldn’t make anything of themselves and finally washed up in this vulgar profession. Take one wrong step, get too close with common thugs and gangs, and everyone around you will only see you as more of the same.

No steady income, almost never a place to stay.
Who would consider it an upright line of work?

Only, even so, the protagonists in the stories are often adventurers. When the terrible Demon King appears, if only in the legends, the one to slay him is considered to be an adventurer.
Basically, it’s a profession that everyone knows about, but it’s of exceedingly low social position and, in practice, full of good-for-nothings. That’s why adventurers are generally half broke debtors and half daydreaming farmers’ sons.
There is the Adventurers’ Guild, which is more or less an organization offering adventurers assistance. Its existence serves to guarantee some standing for adventurers, who’d otherwise be much too low-class, and to act as a liaison between its members and the quest-giving general public.
Every large city is guaranteed to have one. And that includes our current destination, Telaberan.

In my current state, I was thinking of registering at the Adventurers’ Guild and establishing some kind of social standing for myself after arriving in Telaberan.

The truth was, I should have been registered already, but in this form, it didn’t seem like I’d be able to provide proof of my identity. If I registered, I’d be able to get my adventurer’s ID and registration papers, but I had lost the all-important proof of my ranking. Thanks to the miracle of becoming a woman, of course.
Someday, someone might discover the ID I lost and turn it in to the guild. Should that happen, Christopher Carson would be officially dead. It couldn’t be helped; that’s just how the system works. But I wanted to return to normal and retrieve my ID before that could happen.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

I’ve gotten a bit off track, but anyway, even for adventurers, the past is a touchy thing.
What was even more wretched, or should I say the worst of the worst, was the past of a slave. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine how miserable it must be.
That wasn’t a story I wanted to hear.

“Delicious!”

At sundown, we sat around the bonfire, spitting and roasting Palmira’s mushrooms before eating them.
Perhaps out of extreme hunger, Aira devoured them greedily with tears in her eyes. The least useful among us, but that’s normal, I thought, and I let it pass.
Some of the mushrooms looked poisonous, but they sure were tasty.

“You’re amazing.”

When I honestly told Palmira what I thought, with her own cheeks stuffed full of mushrooms, she struck a triumphant pose.
She was a weird one, but good to have around, really.

–

–

“…that’s the plan, anyway.”

After the meal, with our bellies full for the first time in a long while, I told the others about my plans from here on. I didn’t know how things would turn out in the immediate future, but it would be a good idea to talk about what we were going to do once we arrived in Telaberan.
In short, I was going to become an adventurer.
So I asked the other two about their plans.

“If you guys have somewhere to go back to, you should. Well, even in that case, if you don’t have any acquaintances in Telaberan, you’ll still have to do something to earn money for travel expenses.”

For example, prostitution.
Though I didn’t say it.
Palmira was too skinny and too small, but if it were Aira, she’d probably be able to manage it that very day. It was a shame that she wasn’t of much use at present, but she at least had a good face and figure.
But prostitution is a harsh line of work. Just like adventuring, it’s the destination for women who weren’t able to become anything else. Of course, unlike slavery, it’s a legal existence, there’s no high or low in work, but if you didn’t particularly desire to, there was no need to go out of your way to become one.¹

“For now, Aira, look for a position as a barmaid.”

Something like that would work as a compromise, right?
Aira [hmmm]’d, looking troubled. Well, there was still time, so it was fine if she was hesitant.

“Palmira…”

“I’ll become an adventurer too.”

An immediate reply.
To be honest, I was worried about what to do with Palmira.
She was skinny, with an unfriendly glint in her eye, but you could say that she was a beautiful girl in her own way. I thought about finding her a job waiting tables, like Aira, but it might be pretty difficult to find work for two.

“Um, but, being an adventurer is…”

While I struggled with how to break it t her, Palmira turned and extended her hand to me.

“Knife.”

“Ah, yeah.”

I didn’t know why, but under the weight of her gaze, I obediently handed her the knife. She squeezed it several times and hefted it in her palm as if testing its weight. Then, picking up the wooden branch at her feet that she’d just used to roast mushrooms, she stood and moved a few steps away from the bonfire.
A wooden stick in her right hand, the knife in her left. She had the knife in an underhand grip.

“Ha–!”

Then, suddenly, she began to swing the wooden stick and the knife.
At first slowly, then gradually speeding up, the wooden stick, the knife, slashed through the empty air with increasing sharpness.
In front of an astounded Aira and me, at the end she grandly held her weapons aloft, and, drawing both along with her into a turn, she delivered a spinning kick to the air.

“How was that?”

She took a breath, her face devoid of expression.

I was a bit bewildered. That was a spectacle I would never have imagined.
It was unmistakably a combat technique backed by some kind of experience. At the moment, she was probably stronger than me.
It was quite possible that even back there, had there been one or two goblins, she could have pushed them back as long as she had a weapon.
What a weird girl, I thought, but that was as far as I got.
I’d become extremely interested in her background, but at the very brink, I pulled back.

She had her eyes fixed on me.

“…I got it. Then you’ll be an adventurer, Palmira…Well, I look forward to working with you.”

“Likewise. I’ve decided to accompany you, Chris. So we’ll go together.”

Tossing the stick into the bonfire, she sat back down.

“I — I — I want to be an adventurer too…”

Aira hastily piped up. No doubt that display confused her more than me. I sighed and asked, tentatively,

“Aira, do you also have… for example, are you a mage or something like that?”

“Eh? Eh, ehh–……no…”

With that one word, her confusion dissipated, and she hung her head in dejection.
Well, that’s how it is, I thought to myself.

“But, if someone as small as Palmira can be an adventurer… then I…”

Aira persisted, her voice small and subdued.
Big or small didn’t really have anything to do with it, but there was certainly some truth to it. In practice, even among adventurers, there weren’t any children this young. Besides, whether the guild would accept her registration was doubtful.
If I remembered correctly, right now there should be an age restriction.

“I’ll say this once,”

Palmira responded.
And her next words shocked me. Probably Aira too.

“I’m twenty years old.”

We both went rigid.
Once again, we looked at Palmira.
Whatever the angle, she still only looked about thirteen, maybe fourteen. Take away the evil look in her eyes and her lack of expression, and no matter how I looked at her, she had the features of a child.
Her build didn’t look like it belonged to a twenty year old either.
Ask a hundred people and they’d all say the same.
Perhaps noticing our gazes, Palmira looked a bit huffy.

“B–…”

From the side, Aira squeezed out the words in a faint voice.

“…Big Sister?”

“Stop.”

Palmira shut her down right on the spot.