After washing up and coming downstairs, he found the first floor noisy with people eating breakfast.
"Leo!"
Sophia was there too, having come to the inn early in the morning because her mother had gone to the temple to see her father, Kane, who was being treated there.
"Sophia!"
Leo broke into a wide smile and started to hurry down the stairs.
"Leo, be careful!"
"Okay!"
Watching Leo grip the railing tightly and go down slowly, Alex was moved.
A Leo who could hear his words. It was joyful enough to bring tears to his eyes.
'I suppose....'
He must have had that dream because he had talked to Two Hundred about the 'future' last night. That frightening, sorrowful dream had steeled Alex's resolve all over again.
"Uncle, where are we going today?"
Leo asked, seated at the table with a fork in his hand.
"Today we're going west. Uncle went to the mercenary guild yesterday, remember? I took a commission there."
"Herb gathering?"
Alex, moving ham onto Leo's plate, smiled and nodded.
"That's right. My Leo is so clever."
"Heheheh."
[But you wiped out a lowest-grade dungeon yesterday, right?]
[Can't that count instead of the examination?]
"Can't yesterday's dungeon count instead?"
Matthew, the server carrying food around, asked exactly the same question as Two Hundred.
"Strictly speaking, that wasn't a commission but a personal matter. I thought it might be a bit questionable as a substitute for the examination."
"I see."
[I see.]
"The commission isn't difficult either, so I thought I'd take Leo along."
"Will you be needing a packed lunch?"
Hallon, the innkeeper and the man whose son Alex had saved, had been listening closely, and now he asked.
Alex smiled and shook his head.
"No, thank you. We're planning to eat lunch out."
"Then try the restaurant over that way. The food there is quite good."
"Yes. We'll do that."
After a hearty breakfast, Alex climbed onto the back of the brown horse Max with Leo and headed for the western gate.
[Oh, you can ride a horse too?]
Unlike the impressed Two Hundred, Leo was simply excited.
Because back when they lived in the village, Alex had often given him rides.
"It's been a whole month!"
"It has."
For Alex, of course, it had been twelve years and a month.
Listening to the CLOP, CLOP of the horse's hooves, Alex recalled old memories.
He had learned to ride at the same time he learned the sword. His sister had taught him, saying it would come in handy.
'Only a little, of course.'
Just as he had practiced swordsmanship in order to go looking for his sister and brother-in-law, he had borrowed horses to practice riding whenever he had the time.
Thanks to that, he could ride like this.
Not brilliantly, like a knight, of course; he only knew how to run a horse well enough.
Sometimes he had let little Leo and his friends ride in front of him when they gazed up at him with shining, pleading eyes.
"Teach me to ride too, Uncle."
"When Leo's a little bigger."
At the answer he always heard, Leo pouted, but being up high on the horse must have been exciting, because he soon broke into a wide smile and started humming.
[Oh! So this is what riding a horse feels like!]
[It looks like it'd be really fun to run!]
Two Hundred was as excited as a child.
But he could not run the horse in a place with this many people about.
As they entered the center of town, people could be seen gathered here and there, talking.
[It's noisy for some reason?]
As Two Hundred said, the crowd was more boisterous than yesterday or the day before, when they had looked around the market.
"Did you hear a dungeon appeared in the south yesterday?"
"Of course I did! They say the mage showed up and swept the whole thing away, just like that!"
"I heard fire the size of a man's head poured down from the sky like rain!"
[It wasn't quite that much.]
[Though for 1st circle, it was impressive.]
Leo must have heard the conversation too, because he giggled and shrugged. His uncle was so wonderful, and he was so proud.
"My uncle really is the greatest!"
"Hahaha!"
Alex burst out laughing at Leo, who said it while gazing up at him with shining eyes.
Walking along and listening to people talk, they passed through the western gate before he knew it.
"I'm going to run now. Hold on tight, Leo."
Alex said it once the crowd had thinned. Leo gripped the front of the saddle with practiced ease and nodded quickly.
"Okay!"
It was not fast enough to send them streaming in the wind, of course, only a little quicker than before, but that alone was enough.
"Whoaaa!!"
[Ooh! Run!]
Leo and Two Hundred cheered as Max ran merrily. A flower of laughter bloomed across Leo's face.
Riding like that, they reached their destination before long.
It was a field a fair distance from the lord's castle, full of weeds, as though no one had ever touched it.
"Hup!"
Alex lifted Leo down from the horse and showed him the commission form.
"We just need to find an herb that looks like this. It's an herb that's good for colds. You've had it before, haven't you, Leo?"
"Yeah! It's super bitter."
Leo said it with a scrunched-up face, as if the taste came back to him just thinking about it, and Alex burst out laughing.
"Still, it's a medicine people need, so let's look for it together, Leo."
"Okay!"
[Is it all right to make a six-year-old work?]
[Is there no such thing as child labor law here?]
Since Leo was crouched down and focused on searching for herbs, Alex could answer quietly.
"I don't know what that is, but this much is play."
Watching Leo compare the grass to the picture on the form with a rather serious expression, Two Hundred was convinced.
[Ah. So it's like a field trip.]
"What's that?"
Alex asked, crouching down in a different patch of grass from Leo to start searching.
[It's when you try all sorts of different things as a kid.]
[It makes for good memories.]
That had been his intention, and Alex was relieved to hear they did such things in another world too.
[It'd be nice to take photographs, too.]
"Photographs?"
[They're like pictures that get drawn in one second.]
[You draw up a whole pile of how someone looked as a child, and then look at them later once they're grown.]
[Saying things like, this is what happened back then.]
"...That sounds good."
Alex looked tempted.
Unfortunately, though, Alex could not draw.
"Can't that be done with magic?"
[You could probably make it as an item.]
[I've never done it, though.]
[Where I'm from, you can buy a camera with a single click. And we've got smartphones on top of that.]
He had no idea what any of that meant, but making this [camera] thing seemed to be difficult even for Two Hundred.
[I know the principle uses light.]
[Ah. There is a similar spell.]
[It's mind magic normally used to extract information from enemies, but don't you think it might work if we handle it right?]
A lich indeed.
Mind magic used to extract information, of all things.
Just hearing the explanation made his head go faint.
"And if it goes wrong?"
[You turn into an idiot.]
"Never mind."
Alex, who had no desire to turn into an idiot, refused flat out.
"Light, huh.... Then should I commission an alchemist?"
[Oh. You've got alchemists here too?]
[They're certainly the better choice for research. Or a mage.]
[Ah! Over there, on the right.]
Alex, who had been thinking of the clever alchemists of the 'future', looked over at Two Hundred's shout when he spotted an herb.
"You're good at finding them."
[Do you know how many ingredients I've handled over the years!]
Though they shared the same field of vision, Two Hundred had a sharper eye than Alex and found them very well.
"Leo, come over here. There's an herb here. Do you want to try digging it up?"
"I want to!"
Leo, who had been pulling up the wrong plants, ran over with a wide smile. Then, listening to Alex's instructions, he very carefully dug out the herb's roots.
"Got it!"
"Well done, Leo!"
[Well done!]
Alex and Two Hundred clapped for him. Clap, clap! Two Hundred's applause could not be heard, of course.
And so the herb gathering continued.
"Leo, tell me if you get thirsty."
"Okay!"
"And stop if it gets to be too much."
"Got it!"
With Two Hundred's help, Alex filled the quota quickly and straightened his crouched knees.
A cool autumn breeze blew, cooling the light sweat he had worked up.
He could see the brown horse Max cropping fresh grass under a tree, and Leo, who had at some point settled down on the ground, plucking at the grass.
The peaceful scene brought a smile to his face on its own.
"Uncle, look at this!"
Leo sprang up and showed him what filled both his hands. It was a bouquet of wildflowers.
[So he was picking flowers, not herbs.]
[A kid through and through.]
Two Hundred snickered at that childishly short attention span. Alex laughed too.
"What a pretty bouquet. You made it well."
"Right? Hehe!"
Leo beamed, bouquet in hand. Around him, flowers large and small could be seen in bloom.
A scene of a flower path spread out before them, in the truest sense.
It looked so peaceful, so happy, so beautiful that Alex suddenly felt as though he might cry.
"Here, this one's for you, Uncle."
"For me?"
Alex took the small bouquet and smiled brightly.
[What about mine?]
"This one's for Sophia. This one's for Grandpa Hallon, this one's for Big Brother Matthew, this one's for Mister Kane, this one's for Missus Jenna, and this one's for the baby!"
[What about mine?!]
Alex burst out laughing at Leo, so full of love that he had made a bouquet even for the baby still in the womb. Perhaps this was why he became the Hero.
[Leo, make one for me too....]
At Two Hundred's dejection, Alex somehow thought of his own days as a ghost, and said,
"Leo. Would you make one for Uncle's friend too? He's the friend who taught Uncle magic."
[Alex! You!]
"Yeah! Okay!"
[Leo...!]
Listening to Two Hundred's moved voice, Alex sorted the herbs they had gathered. Leo was happily putting together a new bouquet.
Then, all at once,
the road leading west came into Alex's view.
[What is it?]
[Ah, is our next destination that way?]
"No. The Holy Kingdom is that way, so we can't go."
Because of Two Hundred, the lich from another world, they had to keep their distance from the Holy Kingdom of Solenium and the Church.
"It's just...."
Alex said in a voice full of longing.
"I think my sister and brother-in-law went that way."
[Yeah?]
"Yeah. Their last commission was in the western region."
The only way to travel from east to west was through the Holy Kingdom of Solenium at the center of the continent.
"So they must have followed this road through the Holy Kingdom and gone west."
Alex tried to call up the faces of his sister and brother-in-law. But perhaps because five years and twelve more had passed, the two of them were blurred.
That was truly sad.
"Uncle! I finished it!"
At Leo's voice, Alex wiped the sadness away.
"You finished already?"
"Yeah! Look."
[My bouquet!]
[You made it so well, Leo!]
Alex ended up laughing at proud Leo and delighted Two Hundred.
With the herb gathering all finished, Alex got ready to head back.
First he brushed the dirt off Leo's clothes, then washed his small, dirt-covered hands with the water he had brought along.
He was glad it was dirt from playing and not from farm work.
[Next time I'll teach you water magic.]
Oh.
That did sound convenient.
"Watch your legs."
"Okay!"
Alex lifted Leo onto the saddle and sat behind him. Then he turned his head back for a moment and looked at the road west, toward the Holy Kingdom.
Somehow he seemed to see, like an illusion, his sister walking along with a bright smile and his brother-in-law watching her with fond eyes.
'I'll come and find you. Sister, brother-in-law.'
Alex turned his head forward again and set off east with Leo, toward the Kaldis lord's castle.