Hans turned his head.
There stood the little punks Hans usually lorded over, staring at him with eyes wide as saucers.
Hans felt his mind go completely blank.
From the gaping mouths of the stunned kids poured a barrage of questions dressed up as attacks.
“….Why are you acting like that? Did you catch her disease?”
In the children’s world, contact with that crazy beggar woman—known among them as “MM”—was the most forbidden of taboos.
Yesterday’s alley boss was no more.
The kids shrieked with the joy of finding fresh prey.
“Whoa! He caught MM’s disease!”
“N-no I didn’t….!”
“He caught her disease! Hans caught her disease!”
“I’m telling you, I didn’t! For real!”
Hans’s cries fell on deaf ears.
Because now Hans was just the little punk who’d caught the disease and confessed to the crazy beggar woman.
Sirin snickered and turned away.
Right.
This is what Charisma 180 looks like.
Sirin no longer had any reason to let infantile urges drag her into hurling insults.
Wasn’t this the civilized way—the way of a person who had preserved her dignity?
She felt genuinely proud of herself.
And so, having crushed one child’s first innocent feelings so mercilessly, Sirin hummed a little tune and strolled into the village.
#
The village was far busier than usual with preparations for the festival.
Makeshift stalls lined the square, and scraps of colorful cloth and dried flower branches lent the place a rough-and-ready festive air.
Children ran about playing tag, while adults exchanged greetings with neighbors or haggled over prices.
Faint music drifted in from somewhere in the distance, and the savory smell of roasting food mingled with the sour tang of cheap fruit wine fermenting in the air.
But beneath the festive cheer, there was an undercurrent of unease.
There was a reason the village’s mood had turned ugly.
A mercenary company hired by the Empire to exterminate nearby magical beasts had stuck around and was making everyone’s lives miserable.
The other world Sirin had fallen into was a place with no real foundation—a chaotic mashup of ancient, medieval, and early modern elements thrown together without rhyme or reason.
There was an Empire with Roman motifs, something like a city-state union, gods running around—
In short, a complete mess.
Sirin thought of it all as filthy medieval fantasy land, but in truth, depending on the city, there were clean and orderly places closer to the early modern era.
It was simply Sirin’s rotten luck that she’d landed in a nameless frontier village on the Empire’s outermost edge.
The Empire’s frontiers swarmed endlessly with magical beasts, and the Empire, perpetually short on soldiers, frequently hired mercenary companies.
The problem was that these mercenaries were, as a rule, a collection of trash who ran wild on nothing but brute force.
The company that had shown up this time was no exception.
Even after the extermination was done, they refused to leave, picking fights with villagers and stealing their goods—the usual garbage behavior.
Sirin’s eyes caught a scuffle breaking out at a fruit stall on one side of the square.
A rough-looking mercenary was shouting at the old woman running the stall.
“Hey, granny! Why does this taste like garbage? You selling rotten stuff?”
“N-no, sir! I picked these fresh just this morning, they’re perfectly—!”
“What? I’m telling you it tastes bad. Does it make sense to charge money for rotten apples that taste like garbage? I already ate it. I think I’m going to get sick—how are you going to compensate me for that?”
“Oh please, sir, I beg you…!”
“Hey, Heres! The fruit here tastes like crap! This old hag gave me fresh garbage!”
At those words, Sirin looked toward a certain man.
The muscular man called Heres cackled and kicked over the stall’s fruit basket.
Ripe apples and nameless fruits tumbled ugly across the dirt.
Things Sirin had starved and starved for and never managed to get her hands on.
“Tsk tsk, granny. You need to read the room if you want to run a business.”
Heres ground the dirt-covered fruit underfoot without a second thought.
The sweet-sour scent rising from the crushed pulp turned Sirin’s stomach—her senses were sharp enough that it made her feel sick.
“You know who we are, don’t you? We’re heroes who risk our lives fighting for the Empire. And we’re broke. We exterminated the beasts and the bounty hasn’t come through. So shouldn’t someone lend us a little money?”
Heres openly eyed the old woman’s coin purse and grinned.
The other mercenaries around him snickered along.
“It’s such a blessed festival day—can’t have the heroes going without apple money, now can we. What do you think, granny? Hm?”
This was roughly how the mercenaries operated.
The Imperial constabulary nominally stationed there watched it all happen and did absolutely nothing.
Sirin stared expressionlessly at the fruit being ground into the dirt, then caught something moving urgently at the edge of her vision.
It was Merye from Wilson’s tavern.
In the brief glimpse she got, Merye’s face seemed to carry the faint shadow of a bruise.
Sirin watched her retreating figure for a moment, then looked away.
Because of the festival, more mercenaries than usual were drifting in and out of the village.
Unlike the rowdy Heres gang, a different group of mercenaries had settled in the shade near the tavern.
They seemed entirely uninterested in the commotion over here—quietly drinking among themselves or talking in low voices.
Birds of a feather, and all that.
Sirin watched them a moment, then moved on.
She headed for the church where Peter was.
He was the first person she needed to tell that she could finally speak.
#
“Old man!”
Sirin called out when she spotted Peter, her voice bright with genuine pleasure.
Peter looked up from whatever he’d been polishing in the corner and said:
“…You’ve learned another word. Though of all the words to figure out first, it had to be ‘old man.'”
Peter gave a solemn nod.
“It’s worth celebrating that your vocabulary is growing, but it’ll take quite a while before you understand what things mean. So why not just keep cursing like usual? I say that because I am not an old man.”
“You crazy old man…”
Peter’s wrinkled eyes went wide at Sirin’s words.
“….What did you just say?”
“Old man, I had my suspicions your hearing was going, but it seems you’ve gone completely deaf now. Can’t even make out words said right to your face—what a shame. Do you have someone to look after you?”
Peter’s mouth fell open at Sirin’s barb.
The old man’s eyes, always so unflappable, went round with shock.
Peter stared at Sirin like that for a moment, then burst into a hearty laugh.
“Well, well! I knew it would come to this!”
“Ugh—!”
Peter slapped Sirin on the back, hard, again and again.
The old man had no business being that strong—Sirin nearly pitched forward onto her face.
—Ding!
[ Powerful Strike! ]
[ Partial conditions for activating the Body Enlightenment (體得) Foundation System have been met! ]
Even the system was spouting nonsense in response to Peter’s smack.
Sirin wheezed and said:
‘Damn it all, this crazy old man is going to kill someone!’
“So good, love tap!”
Oh for the love of—Sirin had misfired her broken language wiring again.
Peter’s forceful physical impact had scrambled the brain-to-tongue connection.
Sirin flared up in irritation.
“You out-of-your-mind old geezer, stop it!”
Only then did Peter stop slapping her on the back.
But his face was still full of delight, a smile spread across every wrinkle.
Seeing that face, Sirin couldn’t stay annoyed—she smiled back at him from behind her mask.
“Is it true? You can really speak now? How is something like this even possible?”
Peter looked Sirin up and down as if he still couldn’t quite believe it.
The past six months flashed through Sirin’s mind like lightning.
A distorted face reflected in a stream, a tongue and lips that refused to obey, the mangled fragments of curses repeated thousands upon thousands of times…
She nearly slipped into sentimentality, but Sirin kept it brief.
“Effort and grit.”
“….That’s nothing short of a miracle. Did you happen to have a god you believed in?”
Sirin smiled coolly and answered.
“Nothing like that, old man. I did it all on my own, through sheer stubbornness.”
“That may well be.”
Peter smiled back at Sirin’s grin.
“In any case, this is truly worth celebrating. We can’t let a day like this pass without marking it. A person learning to speak is like being born again.”
Peter rose from his seat.
“What are you doing?”
“I have a wine set aside for occasions like this.”
“Old man, you had wine? Isn’t this a church? Is a priest allowed to drink?”
“Who doesn’t drink? If you ever meet someone who doesn’t, be careful. They’re either not human or they’re a con artist.”
She’d sensed it before, but Peter was remarkably unorthodox for a priest.
He’d once suggested she try her hand at prostitution, after all.
Peter started to get up, then paused, looked around, and sighed.
“I’d love to bring it out right now, but I still have things to do. Go enjoy the village festival and come back in the evening. We’ll talk properly then.”
“Aren’t you going to the festival, old man?”
“I have my own faith, so I don’t take part in the Pantheon’s festivals. Go enjoy yourself. Actually—wait a moment.”
Peter said that and looked at Sirin.
“If you’re going to the festival, you should at least look the part. Even for a beggar, this is a bit much.”
Peter’s gaze was on Sirin’s rags.
The clothes Sirin was wearing now were actually ones Peter had given her.
They’d just been reduced to tatters from all her rolling around in the dirt.
“I left you alone because I thought you liked bathing in mud puddles every chance you got—figured you had the same taste as a stray dog. But seeing you cleaned up today, I suppose that wasn’t it after all. Wait here a moment.”
Peter came back carrying a set of clothes—old but clean and sturdy-looking—and a small leather pouch.
“Here, put these on. And this… get yourself some treats at the festival.”
Inside the leather pouch were a few coins.
“…..”
The church of the Order of the Savior was poor.
What Peter earned tending to the sick for a full day: five coins.
What he earned helping with a funeral all day: ten coins.
And in this small village, even those opportunities didn’t come often.
Peter was living a life where he could barely afford his own bread.
“…..”
Sirin understood what those few coins were worth.
Peter watched Sirin’s expression shift into something strange and smiled.
“Congratulations on being born again. Go enjoy yourself.”
Sirin genuinely hadn’t wanted to feel this way, but she got a little choked up anyway.
“….Damn it all, I can’t stand being in debt. I’ll pay you back in gold someday.”
“By the time you’re earning gold, I’ll already be dead and gone.”
Sirin said, moved despite herself:
“Then I’ll make sure to gild your gravestone.”
“Talking nonsense like that—you must not be fully recovered yet.”
Peter laughed heartily and smacked Sirin on the back.
—Ding!
[ Powerful Strike! ]
[ Partial conditions for activating the Body Enlightenment (體得) Foundation System have been met! ]
“Ow! You wretched old geezer! Stop hitting me!”
Sirin yelped and bolted out of the church.
“Damn old man.”
Sirin grumbled, but she wasn’t in a bad mood at all.
The liberation of finally being able to speak properly.
She’d change clothes quickly and go say hello to Marta.
Well, she wasn’t planning to go too hard on Marta’s account—but she’d already thought up a few choice things to say to that annoying little brat, Vera or whatever her name was.
Sirin snickered and walked on.
“…..”
As she neared the village, she heard the sounds of someone causing trouble.
It seemed Sirin’s ‘repaying of debts’ was going to come sooner than expected.