Skelvis took the money, and Ledgetak put the bolts that were left into the case and handed them back to Skelvis.
The case had not been made for bolts in the first place, and it also was not large enough to hold all 240 of them, so it was only natural that some bolts would be left over.
It was just fortunate that the size of the case more or less suited the size of the bolts.
“Why are you giving these back to me?”
“Consider it payment for the case as well…”
“Oh no, that is not necessary.
I told you I would not take money for the case…”
“Let me finish.
If you give all of these to me, what will you do in an emergency?
Even if you run into a situation that can be resolved with the one bolt you have loaded in your crossbow, you should still have some spare rounds for reloading.
Shouldn’t you?”
“Even so, this is too many.
Ten bolts are more than enough as spares.
We won’t use even ten before we can buy more in a large village.”
“I don’t want to carry any more than this anyway; they are heavy.
As long as the case is filled to the brim, that is enough.
Even so, together we still have about two hundred shots.
So say no more.”
It was not as if taking off a few bolts would make any real difference in the weight, but Skelvis could hardly argue further with someone of such high status, so he shut his mouth and accepted the bolts Ledgetak handed him.
In the end, his profit had only grown.
A merchant always sells at a higher price than he buys, so if Ledgetak had bought them from a merchant inside the lord’s castle, five thousand coins would have been more than enough even at the high end.
Skelvis had, in fact, quoted a slightly padded figure in case of haggling, but since Ledgetak had paid the asking price without bargaining, there was no way to lower it afterward.
He had been planning at least to give away this case he had no use for anymore, but now he had even ended up getting some of the bolts back.
However, it was a situation in which it was difficult to say anything more, so Skelvis kept silent after that.
Ledgetak slung the bolt case this way and that over his body and eventually left it hanging near his thigh.
It seemed he had no intention of removing and replacing the quiver he had been using until now.
He wore chain mail, and under that he had another layer of leather armor.
From that armor, a strip of thin leather extended downward and hung in tatters almost over the front of his thighs.
It looked as if someone had made a skirt out of thin leather and then cut away all the rest, leaving only the front part in the shape of short pants.
At the end of that strip was attached a fairly large metal stud rolled into a ring-like shape, giving it a very peculiar appearance.
Once Skelvis had taken the money, Ledetak packed the case full of bolts and handed back the ones that still would not fit.
The case had not been made for bolts in the first place, and it was not large enough to hold all 240, so of course some had to be left over.
They were just lucky that the case happened to be roughly the right size for them at all.
“Consider it payment for the case as well…”
“Oh no, that is not necessary.
I told you I would not take money for the quiver…”
“Let me finish.
If you give all of these to me, what will you do in an emergency?
Even if you run into a situation that can be resolved with the one bolt you have loaded in your crossbow, you should still have some spare rounds for reloading.
Shouldn’t you?”
“Even so, this is too many.
Ten bolts are more than enough as spares.
We won’t use even ten before we can buy more in a large village.”
“I don’t want to carry any more than this anyway; they are heavy.
As long as the case is filled to the brim, that is enough.
Even so, together I still have about two hundred shots.
So stop arguing”
It was not as if taking off a few bolts would make any real difference in the weight, but Skelvis could hardly argue further with someone of such high status, so he held his tounge and accepted the bolts Ledgetak handed him.
In the end, his profit had only grown.
A merchant always sells at a higher price than he buys, so if Ledgetak had bought them from a merchant in the lord’s castle, even five thousand coins would have been more than enough.
Skelvis had, in fact, quoted a slightly padded figure in case of haggling, but since Ledgetak had paid the asking price without bargaining, there was no way to lower it afterward.
He had been planning at least to give away this case he had no use for anymore, but now he had even ended up getting some of the bolts back.
However, it was a situation in which it was difficult to say anything more, so Skelvis kept silent after that.
Ledgetak slung the bolt case this way and that over his body and eventually left it hanging near his thigh.
It seemed he had no intention of removing and replacing the quiver he had been using until now.
He wore chain mail, and under that he had another layer of leather armor.
From that armor, a strip of thin leather extended downward and hung in tatters almost over the front of his thighs.
It looked as if someone had made a skirt out of thin leather and then cut away all the rest, leaving only the front part in the shape of short pants.
At the end of that strip was attached a fairly large metal stud rolled into a ring-like shape, giving it a very peculiar appearance.
Ledgetak carried two crossbows.
On his back he had something like a large metal club, with the crossbows strapped across it in an X.
The grip of one rose slightly over his left shoulder so he could draw and fire it at once.
His crossbows were even smaller than the one young Rimas used, and there must have been some kind of fitting on his back to secure them that way.
Over his right shoulder jutted an odd object, too strange to be called a simple metal club.
His second crossbow was fixed horizontally near his waist, also held in place by some kind of fixture.
Its grip stuck out from his right hip, as if he could reach back with his right hand and draw it.
Ledgetak drew one of the crossbows and removed the bolt loaded in it.
Watching this, Skelvis asked without thinking.
“Is that made of ebonyum?”
Depending on the person, that question alone might have been enough to be taken as impudent and to earn him a jab with the bolt in the other’s hand, but Ledgetak was not so ill-tempered.
As he swapped out the bolts, he answered lightly.
“Both the crossbow and the bolts are made of ebonyum.
Of course, they are not pure ebonyum; it is an alloy with other metals.”
“Even so, isn’t that more expensive than the same amount of gold?”
“Obviously…”
Since he was handling weapons, he did not bother to finish the sentence and just cut it off there.
Ledgetak removed the three ebonyum bolts that had been loaded in his crossbow and replaced them with the wooden ones he had just bought.
He had already checked their size and length by eye before buying, so there was no way they would not fit, and they worked without issue.
They were, of course, of a larger gauge than what he normally used.
But Ledgetak’s crossbow was an exceedingly fine piece of craftsmanship; precisely because of that, a true high-grade weapon could not be allowed to fail to use someone else’s bolts in an emergency just because the dimensions did not match exactly.
At least, the equipment used by the MOW had to meet that standard, and indeed, even the reserve magazine that pushed bolts up from inside functioned without any problem.
The only downside was that the tips of the bolts stuck out, so that the three of them overlapped vertically and were visible to the opponent, letting them know how many shots were left.
Rimas and Skelvis were astonished to find that the crossbow actually held three bolts.
The crossbows they were familiar with had to be reloaded after every single shot.
Ledgetak’s crossbow also needed reloading, of course, but judging from its design, when one bolt was fired, the next one below would move up into firing position.
Such a crossbow was completely outside their experience.
Curiosity piqued, the two watched with full attention as Ledgetak returned the crossbow now loaded with wooden bolts to its place at his waist and then drew the one slung over his shoulder.
Ledgetak, as if he did not mind them watching, removed the bolts from the second crossbow as well.
When he took one out, the second bolt that had been pressed down below sprang up.
When he pulled that one, the third one rose in the same way, and when Ledgetak had stowed away even that, he placed one of the newly purchased metal bolts in the channel.
Then he placed the next bolt on top and pushed it down, and it likewise slid down into the body.
It appeared that the grip area of the crossbow was hollow, and the bolts were stored in that space.
The trigger, unlike the nut(아牙) unlike that engaged the string, did not look like something that needed to be made of a hard material like ebonyum, and yet even that part seemed to be made entirely of ebonyum.
Indeed, if it were not made of something as hard as ebonyum, the durability of a hollow-bodied crossbow, designed to hold spare bolts inside for reloading, would be greatly weakened.
Skelvis thought that a crossbow made of ebonyum could have its core hollowed out and fitted with springs, making such a mechanism possible.
After he repeated the process until both crossbows were fully loaded again, Ledgetak returned them to their usual positions and said:
“Now I should test-fire them.”
Ledgetak took a few steps toward the edge of the road and looked at a certain tree roughly a hundred meters away.
The road they were on, which led toward Whitestone, ran through the mountains on both sides.
Strictly speaking, the right side of the road as one goes toward Whitestone rose into higher mountains.
Though there was a difference in elevation and slope like that, in this area the gradient briefly eased on both sides, forming a gently rolling terrain for a short distance before the land turned into deep mountain country again.
By the time one reached Whitestone, one was completely in the mountains, which was only natural for a town that subsisted on quarries and mines.
Although it was a road that ran through the mountains, the trees that would normally have filled the slopes on either side had, over generations, been cut and felled by the past lords who governed the minor fief and by the desmene’s people, who responded to that policy by chopping down the trees near the road for firewood and timber.
As a result of this effort, the forest on the mountains began only at some distance from the road.
Securing timber was one goal, but the policy also served to ensure clear lines of sight for the safety of travelers.
That was why even the nearest trees stood about a hundred meters away from the road.
Ledgetak took a crossbow in each hand and began firing alternately.
To a tall adult like Ledgetak, the two crossbows looked as small as children’s toys, yet it seemed to take less than five seconds in total to fire all six bolts he had loaded.
After firing with one hand, Ledgetak lowered that hand and raised the other, shooting in alternation.
However, he was so fast, and the crossbows made surprisingly little sound when they loosed that it hardly felt like shots were being fired at all.
There was no seeing the bolts in flight, of course.
Even so, the tree bore clear traces where all six bolts had passed through.
Not one had stuck; every bolt had pierced cleanly through a trunk that must have been at least thirty centimeters in diameter, punching six holes through it from a distance of a hundred meters.
For Skelvis and Rimas, it was astonishing that the crossbow bolts flew that far, that they hit a target at that distance, and that they penetrated the tree instead of embedding themselves.
They even wondered if Ledgetak might be capable of putting all six shots through the same hole, and that he had simply adjusted the point of impact slightly for each one so that he could better inspect the condition of each bolt.
What they found even harder to understand was that Ledgetak had managed to fire all six bolts in only about five seconds.
Once a crossbow is fired, its string is driven forward, preventing any bolt below from rising into place.
As a result, even if the crossbow holds spare bolts, they cannot rise on their own, and the weapon will not reload.
No matter how fast one wishes to shoot, the string has to be drawn back; only then can the next bolt move up and be made ready to fire.
In fact, even to dry-fire a crossbow, the string must first be drawn back.
From Rimas and Skelvis’s experience, every time they fired and then drew the string again to reload, several seconds passed.
Even with practice the time could be reduced, but while the time decreased, the effort required did not; drawing the string remained just as hard every time.
When Rimas, unable to bring himself to ask outright, only looked on with a puzzled expression, Ledgetak read his curiosity from his face and gave him a friendly smile.
“Watch closely.
I will do it slowly.”
He had just fired the third and final bolt, so the string was at rest, driven forward.
Ledgetak, unlike Rimas and Skelvis, did not grab the string with his hand to pull it back.
There are, in fact, tools that help with drawing the string, and using them lets one handle larger, more powerful crossbows, but in the real day-to-day life of traveling merchants such tools are of little use.
For that reason, the father and son had always used only crossbows they could reload by pulling the string by hand.
In any case, unlike the merchant father and son, Ledgetak slowly brought the crossbow down to the end of the leather flap hanging in front under his armor.
They knew there was a metal ornament there, but they had not imagined he would use it to draw the string.
Ledgetak slowly lowered the crossbow and bent his wrist so that the string caught on the ring-shaped metal fitting at the end of the leather.
In that position he raised the crossbow again, and the string was drawn back.
Once it was fully drawn and set, he shifted the crossbow slightly, and the leather flap with its rolled metal studs dropped back down under its own weight.
The metal studs at the end of the leather hung far enough apart that the body of the crossbow could pass between them.
The middle of the flap was cut out in a rectangle precisely to match the size and shape of the crossbow’s body.
The ring-shaped metal studs, rolled into circles with a gap for the string to pass through at the end, were sized to catch the string that sat atop the crossbow’s body.
The studs had seemed rather large for mere ornamentation, but now it was clear that he wore such clothing specifically to allow rapid reloading of his crossbows.
Thinking back on it, one realized that while Ledgetak raised one hand to fire, with the other he was repeatedly hooking the string of the crossbow under that side onto the metal ring and drawing it up to reload.
Rimas thought that he might manage it too if he moved slowly, but he could not imagine how much training it would take to become as fast as Ledgetak.
Ledgetak once again loaded three bolts into each crossbow and then said:
“I will go and look for the bolts I fired.
Please wait here for a moment, sir.
Do not go on without me.”
Even before Medipl could reply, he had already left his horse and was heading toward the tree that had been their target, standing at the edge of where the forest began.
As Ledgetak moved away, his bear started to follow him.
Once Ledgetak had gone some distance, Rimas spoke up.
“That was amazing.
How is something like that even possible?
His crossbows are smaller than ours, but they are more powerful.
I do not think I could draw back the string of those ebonyum crossbows no matter what I did.”
“Not just you; an adult man like your father would be the same.
Every warrior of the MOW possesses physical strength beyond that of ordinary people, which is why they can wield weapons we could never handle.
You are astonished by Ledgetak’s crossbow shooting, but among the MOW, those who choose the Sharpshooter class do not even regard crossbows as their main weapons.
When elves grow to a certain age and gain confidence in their archery, the adults among them always say the same thing: that the elven archery of which they are so proud is nothing compared to the skill of a human Sharpshooter.
At first, they do not believe it, but once they see a Sharpshooter class warrior use a bow even once, they understand what that means.”
At Medipl’s words, Rimas asked:
“What is it like?”
“A crossbow, even one used by a MOW warrior like Ledgetak, is ultimately only improved in terms of power and range through stronger materials and magical enchanting, but when a Sharpshooter class warrior uses a bow, he can hit a target two kilometers away, or make a single arrow multiply into dozens that sweep over an area.
To put it in difficult terms, one could say that the techniques of the MOW skill beyond the normal laws of physics.
In any case, among the MOW, crossbows are for those who do not choose the Sharpshooter class.”
“If it is that incredible, why does everyone not learn it?”
“Because there is too much to learn for anyone to master everything.
Even if one devoted one’s entire life to the sword or to the spear alone, that would barely be enough.
But even warriors of the MOW who choose the sword or spear as their main weapon sometimes need ranged weapons, and in such cases they equip themselves with crossbows, like Ledgetak there.”
“Come to think of it, you said the shoulder epaulettes show their grade.
If I remember correctly, the markings went up to seven o’clock, so Sir Ledgetak is a Tier 7 Warmonger, right?”
“That is right.
You remember well.
You are indeed a student worth teaching.”
Medipl, being a teacher with a tendency to praise his students, did not stint in complimenting Rimas even when his answer was a matter of common knowledge.
“Then what about the pine tree symbol in the circle at the center of his mark?”
“As you said, the clock-face marking indicates a person’s tier as a warrior, and the symbol in the center usually shows the subclass he has trained in.
The pine tree represents a Ranger.
And though you do not know this yet, to become a Ranger one must first choose Scout as a subclass and train it to at least Expert rank, so if a warrior bears the Ranger emblem, it automatically means he is at least an Expert Scout as well.
For your reference, the subclass symbols for warrior professions are much more intuitive than those for mages or clerics, so they are easier to learn and recognize.
The symbol for Sharpshooter is an arrow, for Rogue a key, for Lancer a spear, and so on.”
“Then a warrior trained in the sword would, of course, have a sword-shaped emblem.”
“A warrior trained in the sword is called a Swordman.
If the warrior is a woman, she is called a Swordlady.
You should be careful not to get that wrong if you ever speak of such people in their presence.
Strictly speaking, one could distinguish between blades and swords by whether they are single- or double-edged, but those with the Swordman class do not usually differentiate the various types of bladed weapons in their training, so it does not matter what you call it.”
After listening to Medipl, Rimas pondered for a moment and then said:
“If Ledgetak’s crossbows are just for when he needs ranged attacks, that means he has a different main weapon.
But I did not see anything on him…”
“You saw the weapon on his back, did you not?”
“You mean that thing like an iron club?”
“It looked a bit too unusual to call it just an iron club, did it not?”
“Yes, it did.”
“That is the weapon Rangers mainly use, called a Ranger Craft club.
Usually people shorten it to Ranger Club or just Craft Club.
Some Rangers do choose other weapons as their main arm, but most of them do not bother to learn extra weapons and simply use the Ranger Club.
And even Rangers who learn another weapon always carry a Craft Club.
So since they are going to carry it anyway, many Rangers choose not to burden themselves with any other weapon.”
“I vaguely thought Rangers would use bows.”
“Customs do not fade easily, even after centuries.
You are a young boy who has probably never learned this from anyone, yet even you harbor that preconception.”
“Then do Rangers not use bows?”
“They do not never use them, but only a few Rangers do.
In former times, the bow was essential for a Ranger, but after the Sharpshooter class gained exclusive authority over the supernatural power of the bow, most Rangers switched to crossbows as their ranged weapons.
Rangers who still use bows are rare, and the story behind that is complicated enough that it would be hard to explain right now.”
“Wow, you are not a MOW yourself, yet you know all this?”
“All of it is within the scope of the Imperial Teacher qualification exam.
In truth, as long as students have the diligence and talent, even the four-year compulsory primary course could cover quite advanced material.
It is just that very few students delve that deeply into their studies.
Even in mathematics, many students stop at the four basic operations, but anyone with a primary teacher’s qualification could teach higher-order equations to their students.
If one were ever to coach a student preparing for the Imperial University entrance exam, it would not just be something one could teach, but something one would have to teach as a matter of course.
That said, in my past experience as a teacher, I have never had a student preparing for the Imperial University entrance exam who was not from a wealthy family or the nobility.”
“I see.
But Ledgetak smells strange.
It’s neither a foul smell nor a pleasant scent, just… something odd…”
“That is because he is a Ranger.
Rangers spend much of their time in the forest, so they’re careful not to carry any scent that forest animals or monsters might find unfamiliar.
Because of that, they end up smelling strange to humans instead.
Rangers even use special soap when they bathe.
Very few people have a nose keen enough to notice, though, so most never realize it.
You must have an excellent nose, Rimas.”
“Oh, so my nose is good?
But… what is soap?”
“It’s something that helps you wash your body when you bathe.
Using soap lets you get much cleaner.”
“Is it like the mung-bean powder you use for bathing?”
“People from wealthy households use that instead of mung-bean powder.
It’s a kind of luxury good.
It’s expensive enough that traveling merchants like you and your father don’t often deal in it, and in small fiefs like this, people rarely use it at all.”
At that, Skelvis cut in.
“I know what soap is.
I’ve even sold it before.
It’s just that when I’m only traveling around small villages, soap doesn’t sell, so I haven’t bought any from wholesalers in years.
That’s why this boy has never seen me dealing in it.
In walled towns, there are people who buy soap, but they get it from the general stores in town, so it has nothing to do with me.”