Chapter 54: A Serpent of Greed in a Human City
[ Status — Aldric Paydragon ]
[ Level: 27 ]
[ Unique Skill: Blessing of the God of Truth ]
[ Normal Skills: Charge of the Brave | Thrust | Intermediate Swordsmanship | Sacrifice | Unbending Will | Mental Endurance | Self-Transcendence | Resilience ]
[ Titles: Young Master | Future of the Paydragons | Apprentice Hero | Scourge of Slimes | Housebroken Hero ]
"Unbending Will, Mental Endurance, Self-Transcendence, and even Resilience. One might think you’d been through hell these past two weeks. Good thing a status doesn’t really describe what a man’s lived through."
Freya, or rather her replica, walked the road beside him, dressed in Naïa’s old clothes, those of a village girl without a coin to her name, a suitcase in hand she’d pulled from the Gacha and deliberately scuffed up on the outside.
"..."
Aldric, for his part, wore the armor and sword he’d arrived at the dungeon with, and said not a word. He didn’t want to hurt Freya, couldn’t lie, and so preferred silence, exactly as she’d drilled into him during their evening lessons.
"Good, you learn fast. But tell me, doesn’t it worry you, your level staying stuck at twenty-seven with the slimes?"
"Why should that worry me? Isn’t it rather a good thing, to have reached a plateau?"
"Depends how you look at it, big guy. I’m just saying that stalling out at twenty-seven is a bad sign. You could end up in the twenty-seven club and never get past it."
"The twenty-seven club?"
"Ah, never mind, it’s a thing from my world."
"I see..." he sighed.
"What? What is it? You think I’m crazy, is that it?!"
"..."
"Ah, you son of a bitch."
And just as she was about to leap on him, the city opened up before them.
It rose at the far end of the plain, ringed by high walls of gray stone lit full-on by the late morning sun, with round towers planted at regular intervals and banners snapping atop the battlements. A wide paved road led up to it, clogged with carts and travelers, and all around stretched fields as far as the eye could see, a great checkerboard of green and brown plots divided by hedges and narrow dirt paths.
"Evangel..." Aldric murmured to himself, gazing at the city he’d walked all day at a brisk pace to reach.
Freya, meanwhile, already had her eyes fixed on the fields spread out around the ramparts, analyzing the farming techniques of this world, or at least of this kingdom.
She saw clearly marked plots, some covered in young shoots, others freshly plowed, and others still left to themselves, overrun with weeds and dotted with livestock grazing peacefully across them.
A portion of the land that produces nothing at all and gets left to rest, with the animals turned loose on it. If what I’m seeing is what I think it is, that’s crop rotation, same as Earth in the Middle Ages.
She obviously couldn’t swear to it from the road, but everything lined up, and if the principle was the same, then they were losing a considerable share of their acreage every year purely to let the soil recover.
When all they’d have to do is replace those fallow fields with fodder and with plants that enrich the soil on their own.
And she drew all that knowledge from one single source, a video she’d stumbled across by chance one night at three in the morning, in one of those Youvube recommendation tunnels you never climb back out of. You farmed every plot each year, you fed more livestock, and the manure from that livestock went right back into enriching the soil, a circle that fed itself, with far better yields to show for it.
She stopped dead on that thought.
Hold on a second, why do I remember that video so clearly, exactly?
Because she was certain of it, back when she was alive on Earth, she’d never have been able to recall a video she’d watched a week earlier, let alone reproduce every explanation and every diagram down to the voice of the guy narrating it.
Has my memory been upgraded along with everything else? Is the mana boosting my brain, or is it just another physical improvement, like my eyes or my legs? Or has my brain become something else entirely, something I can dig through at will, like a database?
The idea was as thrilling as it was dizzying, and she carefully set it aside for later.
Either way, thanks to this, I could bring genuine improvement to this world with nothing but what I know from Earth.
Then a question came back to her, one she still hadn’t asked him.
"Oh, by the way, when does winter come around here?"
"Winter?"
"You know, winter. The coldest season of the year, when it snows, the rivers freeze and nothing grows anymore."
"Aaah, you mean the Dormancy."
So they have different names for the seasons here.
"Go on, I’m interested. Explain how you divide up your year, what your seasons are, where we are right now and what comes after."
"We’re in the Waking, the sowing season, when the earth stirs and the animals give birth. After that comes the Blaze, the season of wars and tournaments, when the roads are dry and armies can finally move. Then the Waning, the harvest and the accounting, when money changes hands and the great deals get made." He paused a moment. "And finally the Dormancy. No one travels, no one fights, everyone waits, and those who prepared poorly during the Waning never see the next Waking." He gave a small smile. "That’s what every child here is taught, as a little rhyme, so they remember the seasons."
So spring, summer, autumn, winter. Overcomplicated for nothing, but the names are clear enough.
"I see. Thank you."
And so they carried on without exchanging another word, all the way to the city gates.
At the sight of Aldric, the nearest guard froze mid-gesture, blinked as though doubting what stood in front of him, then snapped upright and struck his fist against his breastplate before bowing deeply.
"Sir Paydragon!"
The second spun around, dropped his spear outright, which clattered against the cobbles, and bowed in turn while stammering apologies for his weapon. Then he ran to the guardhouse shouting something, and soon three more soldiers came hurrying over, all snapping to attention in perfect disarray, one of them still straightening a crooked helmet.
"It really is him!"
"Sir Paydragon, by all the gods, you’re alive!"
Aldric stepped forward and laid a hand on the shoulder of the first, who was still bowing.
"Rise, please. No need for all these formalities with me, you know that perfectly well."
The man obeyed, a smile rising to his lips despite himself.
"The city’s been worried these past two weeks without a sign of you. We thought you dead. The baron himself confirmed the news of your death."
So our hero really is a star around here, is he? Exactly as we’d hoped.
"I see..." Aldric replied, his voice lower. "So he did it, then."
"We’re glad to see you alive all the same, sir. Your little sisters were so distraught these past days, crying to anyone who’d listen that you weren’t dead, that it couldn’t be."
Aldric’s jaw tightened for a moment.
"But tell me, who is this woman behind you?"
The guard had leaned to one side to get a better look, and Freya immediately shrank back a step, hiding further behind Aldric’s shoulder, both hands clenched around her suitcase handle, eyes on the ground.
"I... I..."
Her voice broke, and she flinched hard when one of the soldiers took a step in her direction.
"No need to fear, ma’am, no one here means you any harm."
He’d lowered his voice, the big fellow, even spreading his arms a little to seem less imposing, which did nothing whatsoever to stop Freya from curling up a little tighter against Aldric’s back.
"I’m... I’m just a village girl... from the village of Veille..."
A silence dropped over the little group all at once.
Aldric broke it.
"A misfortune befell Veille. I met her during my journey, and I’m bringing her back with me to offer her a roof." He laid a protective hand on Freya’s shoulder, and she shivered at the contact. "You’ll understand that I’d like to get her to the manor quickly."
"Of course, sir. Of course."
The guards stepped aside at once, and two of them bowed again as the pair passed through the gates, while Freya trotted along behind Aldric, head pulled down between her shoulders.
Iron, nothing but iron. Their blades are properly maintained, but there isn’t a trace of enchantment on them, not a scrap of magical ore, which means even the guard of a barony’s capital gets nothing but perfectly ordinary equipment.
She filed it all away carefully, and then, as they moved off, the guards’ voices reached her once more, lower now.
"The village of Veille, did you hear?"
"My sister lives near there, she told me that—"
The rest was lost in the noise of the street.
Perfect~ Do pass the word along about my arrival, among yourselves, in your taverns and your barracks, and send it climbing all the way up to your dear baron’s ears.
Evangel spread out before her in a tangle of cobbled streets that rose and fell with the terrain, lined with half-timbered houses pressed tight against one another, their upper floors jutting out over the roadway until they nearly touched. Shops filled the ground floors, each with its painted wooden sign, a blacksmith whose hammer could be heard three streets away, an apothecary, a draper, a baker with a queue outside that wasn’t moving.
But something was off.
It’s all too quiet, far too quiet for a city like this.
There were people about, sure, but nobody was lingering. They went from one place to another and headed home, without stopping at the stalls, without chatting at the crossroads. No criers, no musicians, not one kid chasing a dog.
And not a single marketplace?!
That was the detail that had been nagging at her from the start. A city this size should have had its great square covered in stalls, its daily market, its traveling merchants and all the racket that came with them. And yet they’d crossed half the city without coming across a single one.
But just as she was turning over what that might mean, a man jostled her lightly in passing, and she let out a small cry as she shrank against the wall, hand to her chest, before stammering apologies at a man already walking away without having even noticed her.
She resumed walking, head down and shoulders drawn in, until they finally stopped in front of a wrought-iron gate.
"This is my home."
Behind the bars stretched a vast garden, neglected in places, where the flowerbeds spilled over the gravel paths and a dry fountain stood at the center of an empty basin. At the far end rose a two-story manor of pale stone, with tall mullioned windows, a colonnaded porch, and a slate roof several sections of which could have used repair.
A fine estate, fitting for a noble who has nothing left but the name.
The gate hadn’t even swung shut before an old man came running out of the building, as fast as his legs would carry him.
"Sir! SIR!"
Gauvin stopped three paces short, unable to go any further, tears streaming down his lined face, and Aldric had to catch him by the arm to keep him from falling.
"Sir, we... we had thought..."
"I know, Gauvin. I know."
Then the two little ones came tumbling out in turn, flying down the porch steps screaming, and threw themselves against him with everything they had, the younger sobbing into his stomach, the elder clutching his sleeve without a word, eyes red.
"Big brother! Big brother!" Ophélie kept repeating between hiccups.
He stayed like that a long while, an arm around each of them, saying nothing.
Then Ophélie lifted her head, wiped her tears with the back of her sleeve, nose still running, and pointed a finger at Freya.
"Say... s-say, big brother... who’s she?"
Freya answered before he could, in an unsteady voice, without lifting her eyes from the ground.
"I’m... I’m only a village girl... your brother was kind enough to take me in..."
Aldric nodded.
"She is my guest. Gauvin, see to it that she’s treated as such."
Gauvin, having recovered his full composure, bowed with impeccable precision.
"It shall be done as you wish, sir. Madam, welcome to this house, your room will be ready shortly."
He snapped his fingers, and a maid stepped forward to take the suitcase.
The woman gripped the handle with both hands, pulled once without budging it, braced herself, pulled again, and the suitcase finally slipped from her fingers, before Freya caught it mid-fall and clutched it against herself, trembling.
"I’m sorry... so sorry... it’s all I have left of my family, these are their things, I can’t... I’d rather keep it..."
The maid, red to the ears, bowed far lower than protocol called for.
"My deepest apologies, madam, I shouldn’t have insisted, please forgive me, keep it, of course, keep it."
And it was as she straightened up, suitcase against her chest, that Freya met Amelia’s gaze.
The girl still had tears in her eyes, but she’d stopped wiping them away, too busy watching her in silence, eyes moving from the suitcase to Freya’s face, then to her brother’s face, before returning to the suitcase.
So you’re the little genius Aldric praised so highly these past two weeks? "The true genius of the Paydragons," I believe he said.
Freya lowered her eyes and curled a little tighter around her suitcase, trembling just the right amount.
So tell me, did you notice that I answered before your brother? Have you worked out that something’s wrong, and that your brother, so pure before he left, now dances in my hands out of pure greed? Or will you see nothing at all coming for your dear, beloved city?
The maid escorted her to a room on the first floor, a bright and handsome space with fabric-hung walls, a four-poster bed, a vanity, and a set of glass doors opening onto a balcony.
Freya set her suitcase down on the bed.
The bedframe let out an ominous crack, and the mattress sank several centimeters under the weight.
"..."
"It’s... it’s a little heavy, yes... sorry..." Freya stammered, sliding it down to the floor. "Th-thank you so much for everything..."
The maid bowed, closed the door behind her, and her footsteps faded down the corridor.
Then Freya straightened up.
Shoulders opening, chin lifting, the trembling gone all at once, like a coat being taken off.
She crossed the room, drew back the curtains, and stepped out onto the balcony, from which the whole city could be taken in as it stretched down toward the ramparts, with its packed rooftops, its chimney smoke, and, far off at the end, the massive silhouette of the baronial castle.
And there, alone, she began to laugh softly to herself.
[ Word of Greed skill activated. ]
And so Evangel, a human city, with all its walls, its guards and its laws, welcomed a serpent into its heart.
A patient serpent, cunning and venomous, a serpent of greed that would coil quietly around everything holding that city upright.