Chapter 5 (1/2)

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

A night had pa.s.sed 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 subst.i.tute, 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 gra.s.s that Palmira gathered.

I mean sure, they were edible.

Or rather, it’s more like most kinds of gra.s.s 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 sc.r.a.pped 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 sh.o.r.e, 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.

Pa.s.serby.

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 pa.s.s 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 st.u.r.dy.

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 sh.o.r.e…?”

“I’m hungry.”

With my oar — which was practically just a plank of wood, but otherwise un.o.bjectionable — I began to move the raft across the burbling water to sh.o.r.e.

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 sh.o.r.e took its time.

“Big Sister, do your best–”

Listening to Aira’s unmotivated encouragement, I pulled us to sh.o.r.e.

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 a.s.sistance. Its existence serves to guarantee some standing for adventurers, who’d otherwise be much too low-cla.s.s, 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 ident.i.ty. 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.