"Hey."
One bandit turned around at the flat, toneless voice.
No one else seemed to have heard, so I opened my mouth once more.
"Oi, hey."
This time I'd spoken loudly enough for every bandit here to catch my voice.
As proof, hadn't the foot of the hulking brute over in the corner, the one who'd been beating a man, just stopped?
"The hell is this bastard?"
A metallic stench, sharp as the reek of blood, suddenly stung my nose.
I couldn't tell whether it came from my rusted helmet, from the blood seeping down the mountain of corpses heaped in this place, or simply from the foul breath of the bandit striding toward me.
"Was there a bastard like this back in Shirn?"
Shirn.
That was the name, yes.
For a moment, I recalled the ruined village I'd passed through before coming here.
I had taken a commission from a man there and tracked the bandits to this place.
"Do you remember Elena?"
"What?"
He'd been a man clutching a heap of burnt ashes to his chest.
'......I will give you everything I own. Please, find these bastards whom heaven and man alike would curse, and kill every last one of them.'
It was a village I'd visited just to throw away my worn-out cape and buy new clothes.
But Shirn had already been plundered by bandits, its people slaughtered, its buildings burned.
When I wandered through the charred ruins for a while, I found a man who hadn't yet died.
He said:
'Only, before you kill them, ask them one thing for me.'
The wind blew.
The ashes he cradled like treasure scattered a little.
'Do they remember Elena.'
Elena.
I turned the name over in my mouth.
Perhaps because the ashes the man held looked like powder scooped from a child's pyre, or perhaps simply because I'd repeated it hundreds of times so as not to forget.
'And after that?'
'If they say they do not know, tear every last one of them apart. If they say they do, spare them.'
'Spare them?'
The man steadied his breathing once.
What he said next was enough to set me in motion.
'I assure you. They will not wonder who Elena was, or why you ask, by so much as a single grain of these ashes.'
The bandit said nothing.
I asked again.
"Do you remember Elena?"
The bandit who'd stepped up to me burst out laughing.
The dried blood crusted in his beard seemed to laugh along with him.
"Elena? Your daughter?"
"No."
"Then why ask?"
I chose my words.
What came out a moment later was, even to my ears, a fairly convincing excuse.
"She's the daughter of an acquaintance."
The bandit laughed again.
I could say with certainty that I had yet to meet anyone who laughed more vulgarly than he did.
"Well, that's a damn shame. We killed every last child in Shirn. An acquaintance, you said? Don't worry, we laid him right next to the brat so he wouldn't feel left out."
The other bandits laughed at that.
It took me a moment to realize it was meant as a joke.
The man could claim first place not only for the most vulgar laugh, but also for the most wretchedly unfunny joke I'd ever heard.
I checked the condition of my scabbard briefly, then drew my longsword.
"I'll keep this short. A survivor from Shirn hired me to kill you all. Said he'd give me everything he owns."
"A survivor?"
The bandit suddenly marched over to the one who'd been beating the man earlier.
Then he started kicking him in the shins.
"Hey, you bastard. I told you to round up every last one of them. And you let one slip?"
"S-sorry! I'm sorry!"
The beating didn't last long.
Perhaps his anger had cooled, for the bandit turned back toward me.
"Who the hell is that bastard of yours, hiring the likes of you for a job like this?"
Instead of answering, I spread my arms slightly.
Rusted and battered as they were, the leather armor reinforced with iron plates and the various pieces of gear beneath my cape came into view.
"Damn. So everyone in armor's a knight now? Looks to me like you stripped a dead knight somewhere."
His mocking tone left me speechless for a moment.
In fairness, my appearance was closer to a beggar who'd been rolling around in the gutter than a knight. Even with the most generous framing, I couldn't escape looking like a filthy vagrant.
"Believe it or not, I don't care. What matters is that I met a survivor in Shirn, and in exchange for everything he owns, I tracked you all the way here to kill you."
The bandit nocked a bolt into his crossbow and asked.
"So, you're going to kill us, is that it?"
The other bandits had already finished loading as well.
"By yourself?"
Staring down the tip of the crossbow aimed at me, I said:
"No."
"What's with this bastard?"
"Pay me more than his entire fortune, and I'll let you go."
The bandit shook his head.
The others laughed as though they couldn't believe what they were hearing.
"This bastard's a real joke."
"Choose. Pay up, or die."
A lie, of course.
Having accepted the commission, killing them and lining my pockets was a foregone conclusion.
Money bears no sin, after all.
The only difference was that it would be easier to collect what they coughed up willingly than to dig through their corpses.
The bandit spoke as if amused.
"How much is his entire fortune?"
"One silver coin."
One silver coin.
Enough to buy a single decent spoon.
The bandit scratched his head, pretending to mull it over.
After a brief silence, the bandit said:
"No deal, you bastard."
The bandit pulled the trigger of his crossbow, and at that signal, the rest fired their bolts in unison.
———FWING!
The sound of projectiles splitting the air lasted only an instant.
Red slowly spread across my ragged armor.
Most had missed, but a few had struck my vitals dead-on.
"No deal, huh. That's a shame."
Silence.
No agonized screams, no thud of a body hitting the ground, as quiet as drops of scarlet blood falling onto green grass.
Into that silence, the only sound that settled was my footsteps.
Unmistakable terror lurked in the eyes of the bandit watching me walk toward him with arrows buried all over my body.
"Wh-what the......."
I pulled the arrows from my neck one by one, then the one lodged in my solar plexus.
Even more blood, an even thicker metallic stench, spread outward.
"Nothing's changed."
I flung away the arrows in my hand.
"You bastards truly haven't changed one bit in decades."
I brought the longsword down.
The one who'd stood frozen split open diagonally from the collarbone down.
A man died.
Blood soaked the earth, and a suffocating reek spread.
As if only now realizing it, one of them let out a scream that split the silence and thrust his spear.
"A-AAAAAARGH!"
The long spear pierced through my abdomen.
It punched through my worn armor, tore through skin, churned through entrails, and came out the other side.
I simply watched it happen.
"U-ugh...... hrk......."
I was the one who'd been stabbed, yet it was the one who'd stabbed me who crumpled to the ground, pissing himself.
"When you thrust a spear, aim for the heart. That way they die instantly, without a chance to fight back."
I took his head.
His wretched skull rolled across the bloodied ground.
I gripped the shaft of the spear still impaling my stomach and pulled.
With a crunch, the spear slid out of my body.
The stench of iron and blood mingled into something foul; the shaft was slick with gore.
These were bandits who should have been more accustomed than anyone to the scene before them, yet they trembled like peasants dragged onto a battlefield.
The spear I'd wrenched free clattered to the ground.
At that signal, the bandits broke into screams and fled.
"When you run, spread out. Running in one direction like that is the perfect way to get wiped out."
I then pulled out the remaining arrows embedded in my body.
The wounds closed almost immediately.
I began chasing the bandits.
Some fired crossbows, some dared to thrust swords.
I killed them all.
One, two, and then which one was this?
Before long, the last of them tripped over a protruding stone.
He'd been looking back at me instead of watching the ground ahead.
"Hrrk...... HIIIK! P-please, spare me!"
Sprawled on his face and crawling, he cried out, close to tears.
I stopped in front of him.
Then crouched down.
"Got a silver coin?"
"Y-yes! Yes! I'll give it to you!"
He rifled through his pockets, trembling violently.
In his outstretched hand was a silver coin.
I took it without a word and slipped it into my coat.
"Thank you, sir knight! Thank you for sparing me!"
"The one silver coin covers the survivor's commission. You'll need to give me more than that."
He kept digging through his pockets.
Two copper coins emerged.
"H-here they are."
I accepted those as well.
Then added:
"Now give me a reason not to kill you."
"......Huh? But, I, you said if I gave you money, you'd spare......."
I stood up.
Because my knees had begun to ache.
Dozens of arrows through my body and I'm perfectly fine, but crouch for too long and my knees hurt.
What a wretched body this was.
"I lied."
A look of hollow despair crossed his face.
Without another glance, I stomped on his skull.
———CRUNCH!
A small sound and a handful of blood.
That was the only trace left on the world by the last of the bandits who had plundered a whole village.
For those who had taken hundreds of lives, it was a pathetically paltry end.
I searched his body myself.
His pockets held six silver coins and twenty-one copper coins.
Retracing my steps, I began looting the corpses one by one.
Picking over stolen goods left a bad taste, of course, but if getting my hands a little dirty earned me the money to live through tomorrow, I could hardly refuse.
The haul came to thirty gold coins and forty-one silver coins.
The jingling in my coin pouch was loud.
I felt no particular remorse for crushing the last man's hope with a lie.
Compared to the slaughter those bastards had carried out, how paltry a sin was a single lie.
I had gathered up my heavy pouch and come back to where the first bandit had died when it happened.
"E-excuse me......."
I turned toward the voice and saw a group of people huddled together, shaking.
They were stripped bare and locked inside a large cage, and with the crowd blocking my view, I couldn't tell who had called out to me.
The ones who'd plundered Shirn were, it seemed, bandits with particularly vile tastes, even by bandit standards.
"......Please help us. Sir knight, please, help us."
I moved closer to the cage.
The owner of the voice still wasn't visible.
"Help you how, exactly?"
"......It's my husband."
From within the crowd, a thin arm rose and pointed beyond the cage.
It pointed toward the man who'd been lying on the ground, beaten by the bandits.
Only then did I meet the eyes of the voice's owner.
"Please bury him."
She was weeping.
Not that anyone here wasn't crying, but she sobbed with true sorrow.
"Hk, hrrk...... please......."
I flicked the blood from the sword I was holding.
The crowd flinched at the sight of bandit blood scattering across the ground.
Then I brought the blade down hard on the cage's lock.
Sparks flew, and the wire-mesh door swung wide open.
"Do it yourself."
Leaving behind the countless stunned gazes fixed on me, I made my way out.
I didn't want to stay any longer in a place that reeked this much of blood.
Feeling the weight of the coin pouch jingling at my hip, I walked on.
My next destination was already decided.
"Time to go collect the advance."
A knight who never wastes a single silver coin.
That was me, Roan Belgard.