Leaving the Lake House inn, Alex walked toward the market with Leo.
"Whoa! Whoaaa!"
To Leo, whose everyday sights were fields, forest, and farmland, and whose only company was his friends, the colorful, tall, bustling town inside the lord's castle was nothing short of another world.
"Leo, shall I buy you a sausage?"
"Yeah!"
[Let's eat some too!]
[It's not factory-made, it's a real handmade sausage made by an actual person!]
He wondered whether sausages were not all made by people, and where the real and fake ones were supposed to be, but Alex did not want to miss out on something delicious either.
Buying two sausages from a stall with many customers, Alex took a bite of his own first and then handed the untouched sausage to Leo.
"It's delicious!"
"Tell me if you want to eat something else. Your uncle will buy it."
"Yeah! But we have to eat dinner, so I won't."
[Smart!]
[Is he really six?]
Alex grew a little sad at how grown-up Leo was.
And so Alex and Leo looked around the market with a sausage each in hand. Most of it was familiar, but there were also a few unfamiliar goods that seemed to have come from other domains.
Holding tight to Alex's hand, Leo looked all around in wonder. The way his cheeks had turned red was pleasingly childlike.
Alex too held Leo's hand so as not to lose him while he checked the prices of goods.
Winter would come in a few months, so he looked at cold-weather items as well. Leo was still young, so he had to prepare thoroughly.
[Let's take a look at the vegetables too!]
[There seem to be a lot of vegetables that are different from our world's!]
Two Hundred, the lich who was good at cooking, showed interest in all sorts of cooking ingredients.
After wandering about that way, Alex went to the smithy Hallon had recommended and bought armor such as a leather set.
"Would I need this too?"
There happened to be cloaks at the smithy of the sort mercenaries often wore, so he bought one in a dark color that would not show dirt easily and tried it on.
"It suits you, Uncle! You look like a real mercenary!"
[I want to see too!]
[Come to think of it, I don't think I've properly seen your face either, Alex.]
He had only seen Alex's face reflected in rippling water while washing.
[Since you're Leo's uncle, I doubt you'd be that ugly.]
[Let's look in a mirror sometime!]
Letting Two Hundred's words slide past with practiced ease, Alex bought a few daggers and asked the blacksmith to look over the sword his sister had given him as a gift.
His pre-regression self had maintained it reasonably well for five years, but to the eyes of the present Alex, there were places that fell short.
"A fine sword. It's been well maintained."
"It's a precious sword."
At the blacksmith's words, Alex smiled and said so.
"It only needs a little work. Come and pick it up tomorrow afternoon."
Having paid, Alex returned to the inn with Leo. Perhaps because the sun had set, everyone was eating dinner.
Alex and Leo took their seats too and ordered the special roast chicken that Matthew the employee had recommended.
It must have been popular, because the special roast chicken came out quickly.
Hot steam and a delicious smell rose from the chicken, roasted to a fine golden brown.
Leo, for whom this was the first meal eaten outside the village, gazed at the special roast chicken without blinking. He was concentrating so hard that his mouth had even fallen slightly open.
Smiling faintly at the sight of Leo, Alex picked up a fork and knife.
"Just a moment, Leo. Your uncle will try it and then serve you some."
"Hm?"
At Alex saying he would eat first, Leo tilted his head but picked up his fork and waited.
[You're eating first?]
[Didn't you do the same when we ate the sausage earlier?]
That was because there had been times when the 'Hero Leo's' food had poison in it.
'Not that I think this place is like that.'
It was only that the 'Hero Leo' suffering after eating poison came to mind, and his hand moved first.
Smiling bitterly inside, Alex tried a small bite of the roast chicken.
[Oh! It's delicious!]
[I thought it was just an inn, but it's a proper restaurant.]
[Hurry up and try the drumstick too!]
Letting Two Hundred's exclamations slide past, Alex divided the chicken by cut and put a little of each on Leo's plate.
"Thank you for the food!"
Leo took a bite of the chicken with a bright face.
The chicken, roasted long and slow, vanished as though melting in his mouth before he had chewed it more than a few times.
"This is really delicious, Uncle!"
Only then did Alex begin to eat the roast chicken with an easy mind.
"So it is. It really is delicious!"
[There's no special seasoning, but the salting is superb. And the texture is cooked to exactly the right point, so it's tender!]
[You can really taste the juices too!]
Listening to Two Hundred marveling nonstop, Alex agreed.
Having a sense of taste really was a magnificent thing. This one bite seemed to make the whole day happy.
Just as they were finishing that happy dinner.
"Grandfather!"
The door opened and a small girl came running in.
"Oh! Sophia!"
Hallon's fierce expression softened completely and he bent his knees. The girl called Sophia ran over and threw herself into Hallon's arms.
"I came with father!"
"Why is that one here?"
At the sight of the man who came in with those words, Alex's eyes went wide.
It was Kane the soldier.
Kane seemed to have spotted Alex and Leo as well, and he relaxed his stiff face and greeted them with his eyes.
[Alex. Don't Hallon's and Kane's faces look alike?]
'Now that you mention it....'
Alex and Leo looked back and forth between Hallon and Kane.
"Could it be...."
"Yes. My father runs this place. There are almost no troublemakers at a shop run by a soldier's family."
[I'd imagine so!]
And the room rate was certainly cheap.
With recommendations like this, he could take any number of them.
"Hello. What's your name?"
"I'm Leo! And you?"
"I'm Sophia! This is my grandfather, and my father! My father is a soldier so he's super strong!"
"My uncle is really amazing too! He's good at roasting meat and good at farming! And he's good at dodging wolves!"
In the meantime.
The little ones, now friends, were exploring the inn here and there.
"They cook here and it comes out like this!"
"Whoa! I see!"
"Look at this, Leo! Doesn't it look just like a puppy?"
"It really does! Uncle! It's a puppy!"
At the children crouching down and giggling as they looked at the wood grain in the floor, a smile came on its own.
"Thank you for recommending such a good place."
At Alex's words, Kane nodded.
"Have you registered as a mercenary?"
"Not yet. I mean to do it tomorrow."
At that Hallon said,
"You can leave the child here during the mercenary examination. My granddaughter is here too, so there's no need to worry."
At that kind consideration, Alex expressed his thanks.
If the granddaughter was there, he certainly felt less worried.
Surely they would not use their own granddaughter as bait to abduct Leo.
'...I'll have to correct this way of thinking too.'
Alex, who had come from a 'future' teeming with every kind of crime, smiled bitterly.
[A mercenary examination?]
[I think I've got a rough idea of what that is.]
Deciding to explain to Two Hundred later.
Leo's new friend Sophia and Kane ended up eating dinner at the same table.
"My mother is at home because she has a baby in her tummy. She goes bleargh! just from smelling things, you know?"
"I'm going with my uncle to look for my mother and father. He's a mercenary!"
"Whoa! He must be super strong! But my father is stronger!"
Because of Leo's words, he could see the eyes of Kane, Hallon, Matthew, and the guests turn sympathetic.
Alex only laughed, haha.
"See you tomorrow, Leo!"
"Bye, Sophia!"
And so dinner ended.
When Leo and Sophia, who had grown close in such a short time, waved their small hands in farewell, everyone burst out laughing.
"The lord's castle is really great, Uncle!"
"Is it?"
Washed clean and lying on the soft bed, Leo chattered away. He seemed set to talk through everything he had seen today from first to last.
"It would have been nice if my friends came too. Nora and Finn and Tom and...."
The way he named his friends one by one, it seemed he missed them. Even though they had only left this morning.
"Do you miss your friends, Leo?"
At Alex's words, Leo nodded honestly.
"Yeah! But I can see my friends later, so it's fine. I'm going to go back to the village with mother and father. With lots of delicious things bought."
At Leo's words, Alex smiled faintly.
"Yes. Later, all together, let's buy lots of delicious things and go back."
"Yeah!"
Leo, who had been chattering, must have been tired, because he soon drifted off to sleep.
Having patted Leo's stomach, Alex left the room and headed for the back yard. It was to train.
Since he had left his sword at the smithy, he decided to do stamina training and flexibility training.
While doing so, he also had the conversation with Two Hundred that they had not been able to have during the day.
[I think I have a rough idea, but what's a mercenary examination?]
"It's something you absolutely have to do to register as a mercenary. You have to pass this examination to become one."
Loosening the joints and muscles of his body this way and that, Alex explained.
"It isn't difficult; you just have to complete a simple commission. It's to check for a minimum of diligence."
[Makes sense. There are people who don't show up to work without a word.]
[Then what about dungeons?]
[I never expected there'd be dungeons here too.]
Alex remembered how startled Two Hundred had been at the word dungeon.
"You said there are dungeons in your world too?"
[Yeah. A completely different dimension where monsters come out, I suppose you'd say.]
[A dungeon in a desert that turns out to hold a sea, or a dungeon in a forest that turns out to hold a glacier, that sort of thing.]
Alex answered while doing push-ups.
"Ours are similar. It's a phenomenon that's existed since long ago; they form anywhere and monsters come out."
Dungeons formed without discrimination, whether in a field or a shop, a city or a forest. And at the moment of formation, they sucked in every living thing nearby.
"They're divided into six grades in total; the most dangerous is the high-grade dungeon and the easiest is the lowest-grade dungeon. And then there are corrupted dungeons."
[Corrupted dungeons?]
Alex looked up toward the second-floor room where Leo was, as though checking on him, and said,
"They're dungeons where the existing monsters are steeped in demonic energy and become abnormally strong. For example, monsters in a lowest-grade dungeon become low-grade or lower-middle-grade demonic beasts."
[Oh, that's different from ours?]
"Is it? What a good world that is. We didn't have dungeons like this in the old days either."
Alex, who had lifted one hand and was doing push-ups on the other, let out a sigh.
In the 'future,' ordinary dungeons had turned into corrupted dungeons, or appeared as corrupted dungeons from the very start, causing enormous damage.
"On top of that, a corrupted dungeon doesn't vanish even if you destroy the boss monster and the dungeon core. The monsters keep appearing again and again, so there's no telling when a break will burst out. That makes it dangerous."
[That's definitely dangerous.]
A dungeon break, in which the monsters inside a dungeon pour out as though exploding.
Because of it the continent grew more chaotic, and that chaos accelerated the pace of ruin.
Among Alex's plans was stopping these corrupted dungeons. Though he would have to find a way to eliminate dungeons.
[Do you know the cause?]
"No. No one could find it."
Neither the Hero's party, nor the mages, nor the Holy Kingdom's priests had been able to discover it.
"Do you have any guesses, by any chance?"
Alex asked just in case.
He was an otherworld lich, after all. He might know something.
[No. No idea at all.]
At Two Hundred's breezy answer, Alex felt let down and did sit-ups.
'Well, if we don't know, all we can do is work at it not knowing.'
There was a great deal to do and the road ahead was daunting.
But for Leo's happiness, Alex could do anything.
[Oh, this is hard.]
[Let's head in soon, Alex.]
'For Leo's sake I'll have to put up with this noise too.'
Letting Two Hundred's groaning go in one ear and out the other, Alex trained diligently.
***
The next morning.
Alex ate a hearty breakfast with Leo and headed for the market.
The portions at breakfast had somehow seemed large, and recalling Hallon's proud look, he could tell it had been done on purpose.
Alex bought, one by one, the things he had looked over and chosen last evening.
"Hehe, Uncle. I love the new clothes!"
Trying on the new clothes bought to mark the journey, Leo smiled with a happy face.
The 'future.'
Recalling Leo, who had been lonely and forlorn at the fact that he had no family, though the village adults had cared for him, he could not have said how grateful and overwhelming this present moment was.
After buying things at the market like that, they had lunch and went to the smithy to collect the finished sword.
"Whoaa!"
[Oooh!]
At the blade gleaming in the sunlight, exclamations burst out of Leo and Two Hundred on their own. Alex was satisfied with the neatly serviced sword as well.
This was the sword that had been the 'Hero Leo's' steady strength until it broke.
'This time I'll be the one using it.'
I'm counting on you.
Smiling softly, Alex fastened the scabbard firmly at his waist.