Right after the Person Appraisal, Yukitaka was pushed straight into a carriage that had already been prepared, and without wasting a single minute, they sent him off toward the Frontier.
Yukitaka told himself that all he had to do was steel himself and accept it. Even out here in the Frontier, if they were moving him to some village, there would still be people living there.
So, the way a character in a light novel would, he began running through the Appraisal glasses in his head, checking every scrap of knowledge he had brought with him from his old world to see if any of it could help.
He wanted to buy supplies in every town they passed, but the money for living expenses was only going to be handed over once they reached the Frontier, and until then he had nothing at all in his pockets, so Yukitaka had no choice but to stay quiet and keep going.
The trip took a full month, and Yukitaka spent most of it watching people come and go from the swaying carriage or staring out from the inn windows of each town they passed, but as they drew closer to the Frontier, they camped outside more often and the roads grew emptier, until there was almost no traffic left at all.
It was a literal Frontier. The driver and the guards traveling with him never once spoke to him, so he had no idea what sort of men they were, but he did know one thing about all of them: every last one of them was skilled, and he knew that because he had listened to them talk.
The driver had once served as a knight in the Kingdom's army. After he retired, he worked as an armed escort and coachman for people who mattered.
The guards were adventurers, and they carried themselves like men who had survived far worse than a long coach ride. One of them was a first-rate archer with a Skill called Sure-Hit Shot, which always drove an arrow straight into the heart of whoever he aimed it at, so at least Yukitaka could take comfort in the thought that he would reach the Frontier alive.
Then, one night, something changed.
The driver and the guards were talking in low voices in the middle of the night, while Yukitaka was supposed to be asleep, sounding relieved that they would reach the Frontier village by morning.
Yukitaka could not sleep either. He lay in his bedroll inside the tent and went over, again and again, everything he intended to do the moment they reached the village, starting with how he would keep himself alive from that day forward, and then he heard the guard adventurers' voices carry across the camp.
"Job says the Frontier village is close, so the night before we arrive, the loser tries to run, and I put an arrow through his heart. That the plan?" he heard one of them say.
"Correct," The second voice was flat and businesslike. "That is precisely why your guild was engaged at such a premium."
"Still," the first man muttered, "killing one nobody with no Skill at all, and you call in specialists like us. The Dragonslayers."
"There are precedents in the records of Rare Visitors being left alone and whole countries falling afterward," the second man said. "His Majesty the King is being unusually careful this time."
"Leave that part to me," A dry, pleased note entered the first man's voice. "I have never seen a man walk away from my Sure-Hit Shot, and I am not about to break that record tonight. Do not worry, there is enough power behind that arrow to punch through most armor and come out the other side."
To the King and to the driver, those had been reassuring words, because the adventurers were calmly discussing the plan to assassinate Yukitaka.
Yukitaka's whole body locked up at once.
[The glasses cannot block something like Sure-Hit Shot... So I run. Now. While I still can.]
He planned to slip out of the far side of the tent, keeping the campfire and the three men watching it out of his line of sight, and to get away into the dark. Slowly he flattened himself down and crept toward the grass, careful not to make a single sound that the three men around the fire would be able to hear, and then he moved.
"You took the bait just like that," A voice called out toward him. "I have a detection Skill, so I know the exact moment anything out there moves."
Yukitaka understood right away that the words were meant for him, so he was on his feet and running before the sentence finished, using the tall grass and the trees as cover as he ran desperately, dodging and weaving, trying to stay out of the archer's line of fire.
"Ha ha ha!" The archer mocked the struggling run. "Everybody tries that. No Skill, and that is all you got? Come on, man, you are not even making this interesting."
Then the archer set an arrow to the string and drew the bowstring back. "At this range, my Sure-Hit Shot has never missed!" he declared, and let the arrow fly.
True to his word, the arrow caught Yukitaka square in the chest as he ran in a zigzag, punching straight through his Business Backpack and on into his heart.
A grunt came out of him, weak and more surprised than painful, and the force of the impact threw him backward, where he tumbled and rolled down the slope beyond.
"Ah! I felt that one land clean, but he went off the cliff!" The archer had seen it happen from far away, using his skill that let him see farther than any normal eye, and he was furious about it. "That is a problem. We were supposed to bring back his glasses as proof, once the job was finished."
The driver, who had been paid to return proof that the deed was done, crouched and started searching the ground. "If it is the glasses, they fell around here?"
One of the other adventurers picked the glasses up off the dirt and held them out for everyone to see. "Then there is no problem."
"I am glad I finally got to see the famous Sure-Hit Shot in person," the driver said with a smile. "That wraps up the job. Once dawn breaks, shall we head back to the Royal Capital?" He then lay down with the guards, and they slept until morning as if nothing in the world had happened.
As for Yukitaka, who had been shot through the heart and sent off the edge of a cliff, somehow, he had survived. The archer's Sure-Hit Shot had definitely struck his heart, and it had not pierced it.
Had the Business Backpack protected him? No. There was no way a normal business backpack sold anywhere on Earth could have stopped an arrow from an archer who specialized in hunting dragons, and yet for some reason Yukitaka had gone over the edge of that cliff without so much as a scratch, and he was now lying unconscious at the bottom, an umbrella clutched in his right hand and a bag in his left.
Yukitaka finally opened his eyes some time later and found himself unhurt. "Where... where is this?" he said, then looked up and made out a thin strip of dawn along the rim far above him.
What made his stomach drop was how deep the cliff he had fallen down actually was. Looking straight up from where he lay, he could tell that this was the bottom of an abyss far deeper than the village above, since almost no light at all reached the ground around him. Because of that darkness, he pulled his smartphone out of his pocket and turned on the screen light.
The ground around him was rocky and uneven, but there was no sign of any monsters. If this had been a monster den, he would have been in real trouble, though as far as he could tell, nothing was moving out there at all, and the relief of it hit him so hard that he had to stop and breathe for a few seconds before he could start noticing all the things that did not add up.
"How am I alive after taking an arrow from a Skill that powerful, and why is there not one scratch on me after a fall from that height?" Yukitaka frowned down at the light in his hand. "And... the smartphone light is way too bright!"
Even as Yukitaka felt relief at having survived, he also noticed that there were a great many things about this situation that made no sense at all.
Trivia:
- The archer's detection ability let him know Yukitaka moved the moment he started crawling, meaning escape was never actually possible once the night watch began.
- The driver was assigned to bring back the glasses as physical proof of the kill, which is why the job was considered complete even without the body.
- Yukitaka survived because the arrow hit his heart but did not pierce it, leaving no wound despite the fall from a cliff so deep almost no light reaches the bottom.
Notes:
• Yukitaka - First given name of Yukitaka Goto. He is a twenty-five-year-old salaryman summoned to another world without receiving a skill, who maxed out his level at 99 in half a day without gaining meaningful power, spent about three months at the royal palace before being pushed toward the frontier, and discovered that his black-rimmed glasses let him appraise objects.