Ainz woke at dawn, which was strange, because he did not sleep.
What he did instead, in the narrow bed of the Sleepy Goose, was lie very still with his gauntleted hands folded over his chest and listen to the town come alive. First came the rattle of shutters. Then a rooster, then a baker's apprentice shouting at someone for being late, and finally the clatter of a hundred boots on cobblestone as the mercenaries of Wegmark headed for the guild.
He had spent the whole night composing a list of what he did not know about this world. It was a very long list, and the first item was the most urgent: the Vault Holders.
Leah had explained them over tea, of course. But explanations at a table were one thing, and the sight of a hundred immortal strangers marching down a street was another.
"Momon-san," Narberal said through the door. "The sun is up."
"I am aware, Nabe."
"The sun is quite far up."
"I am coming."
He put on the helmet. He took a breath he did not need. And he went to the guild to learn how to be ordinary.
***
The notice board in the guild hall had a new sheet on it.
It was not new, exactly. Ainz had simply not noticed it the day before, because it had been tucked beneath a flyer for a goblin-extermination contract. But this morning, with the hall half empty and the light slanting in through the high windows, it jumped out at him like a face in a crowd.
NEW REGISTRANT ORIENTATION, it read. By Order of Her Highness the Princess. Clause Nine of the Regulation on Escort and Procurement Contracts. All newly registered Vault Holders shall, within the first thirty days, engage a licensed local guide for no fewer than three days of orientation, at the rate set out in Table Four. The guide shall be selected from the guild's approved registry.
Ainz read it twice.
"Table Four," he said, quietly.
"Yes, Momon-san?"
"There is a table for this."
"There is a table for everything in this town," Narberal said.
"It is a very good table," Ainz admitted, in the tone of a man who had spent most of his working life in offices.
There was no queue today, and the clerk from the day before had been replaced by a cheerful young woman with a ponytail. She looked up at Ainz, then at the sheet, then at the brass tag around his neck.
"First time?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Clause Nine, then. It's the cheapest way to make sure you don't get killed in your first week." She flipped open a ledger. "Don't worry, you don't pay up front. The guild holds the fee until the third day, and if you aren't satisfied with your guide, you can file a complaint. We've got four registered this morning. Two are fresh out of the cadet program and a bit eager. One is retired and mostly sleeps. And then there's Bram."
"Bram."
"Nobody wants Bram," the clerk said, lowering her voice. "He's forty-six, he's got a bad knee, and he tells you the truth about everything. But he's the best guide in Wegmark, and the new Vault Holders who hire him tend to still be here a year later."
"Then we will take Bram," Ainz said.
The young woman looked at him with fresh interest.
"That's the first time anyone's said that without being told to," she said.
***
Bram turned out to be a broad man with grey in his beard and a leather jerkin that had been mended so many times it was more patch than jerkin. He waited for them at a table in the corner, a mug of weak ale in front of him, and when Ainz approached he stood up, looked the armor over from helmet to boots, and sighed.
"Two swords," he said. "Right. And that's the mage?"
"I am Nabe," Narberal said.
"Good to meet you, Miss Nabe." He nodded politely, and she blinked, apparently surprised to receive a politeness she had not had to demand. "Name's Bram. I'm told I'm to show you the lie of the land. Is there anything you already know?"
"We know very little," Ainz said truthfully.
"Honest," Bram said. "Good start. Sit, sit. You can start by telling me what brought you to Wegmark."
Ainz had prepared an answer. It was an excellent answer, three sentences long, containing a believable backstory and a plausible reason for his silence. He opened his mouth to deliver it.
"I wanted to see a town," he said instead. "Just an ordinary one."
Bram studied him for a moment. Something in the heavy lines of his face softened.
"Well, Wegmark's about as ordinary as they come," he said. "Though you'll find it's a bit better run than most. Come on. Let's start with the gate, and I'll show you the places that'll kill you."
"You will show us what will kill us," Narberal repeated.
"That's the first lesson," Bram said cheerfully. "It's the one that matters."
***
They spent the morning on foot.
Bram showed them the town in the way a surgeon might show a student an anatomy chart: the guild hall, the three alchemist shops, the smith who would not cheat them, and the one who would. The tavern where mercenaries ate, the tavern where Vault Holders ate, and the tavern where nobody ate, ever, for reasons that Bram refused to discuss. He knew the name of every guard on the wall, and half of them waved as he passed.
"They like you," Ainz observed.
"They like my knee," Bram said. "It's hurt me for six years, and they find it funny."
He also took them to a smith, a cousin of his, a quiet woman named Hanne with forearms like tree trunks. She took one look at the crack in Narberal's staff, clicked her tongue, and said, "That's a dreadful way to treat a good piece of ash. Leave it with me. It'll be ready by sundown."
"What do I owe you?" Narberal asked.
"Nothing yet," Hanne said, and winked. "Bring me a good story and we'll call it even."
Narberal stared at her for a long moment.
"I do not have a story," she said, very seriously.
"Then you'll make one up," Hanne said. "That's what adventurers are for."
By noon they had left the town behind and walked out through the fields to the edge of a long, dark treeline that Bram called the Ashen Woods. It was a good name. The trees stood thin and pale, their bark the color of old ash, and the undergrowth beneath them was brown and dry. A faint haze hung between the trunks.
"This is where most Vault Holders go," Bram said. "It's the closest hunting ground. Wolves and boars on the outer edge, and as you go deeper you'll find ogres, and further in, things that you don't want to meet unless you're prepared. The guild pays well for ogre tusks. You'll see a lot of Vault Holders around here, and you'll see a lot of them die."
"Die," Ainz said.
"Often," Bram said. "Don't worry about it. They don't."
He said it with the casual shrug of a man who had said it a thousand times. Ainz stared at him.
"They do not worry about it?"
"They worry about the pain," Bram said. "They say it's like being stung by a very large wasp. But then they wake up in the square a minute later, and they go right back in. That's what a Vault Holder is. You can't kill them, not for good."
He spoke the words the way another man might have said that the river flowed downhill. Ainz had known this, in the abstract. Leah had told him. But standing at the edge of the forest, with the cold knowledge that this was how things actually worked, felt like swallowing a stone.
"Can I see one?" he asked.
"Die?" Bram said, startled. "You don't need to hurry, they'll be along."
***
They did not have long to wait.
They had stopped at the edge of a small clearing, where Bram was showing Narberal how to identify the tracks of a forest boar, when a shout went up from the trees. A moment later a party of five Vault Holders came crashing out of the undergrowth, running hard, with a very large, very angry ogre behind them.
It was not a particularly tall ogre. Ainz estimated it at around two and a half meters, with a club made of an entire tree limb, and it was gaining on them.
"Left!" someone shouted. "Left, left, go left!"
"Which left?!"
"My left!"
"I don't know your left!"
They were young, perhaps in their early twenties, with new gear and the cheerful panic of people who had been told not to fight an ogre and had done so anyway. A girl with a staff stumbled over a root. The ogre closed. She turned, raised the staff, and cast a spell that fizzled in a puff of sparks.
The club came down.
Ainz had seen a great many deaths. He had caused some of them. But he had never seen one like this. The girl simply vanished: a flash of pale light, a sound like a bell, and then nothing. The staff clattered to the ground.
The ogre stood over it, puzzled.
"Ugh," said one of the party, skidding to a stop. "That's the third time this week."
"She'll be back in a minute," said another.
"Do you think she'll be mad?"
"She's always mad."
The ogre went down a few moments later, with a great deal of shouting and some very inefficient axe work. Then the party gathered up the staff and began arguing cheerfully about how best to divide the loot.
Ainz stood motionless in the shadow of a pale tree, his gauntlets clenched at his sides.
"Momon-san?" Narberal murmured.
"I am quite all right."
"You are gripping your sword very hard."
"I am simply... considering."
Considering what, he could not have said. A girl had died in front of him, and her friends had joked about it. She would return, with a bruise on her ego and nothing else. She had not even screamed.
It was only afterward, as they walked back through the fields in the late afternoon light, that the weight of it came crashing down.
They don't fear death, he thought. Not one of them.
He had spent his entire time in this world assuming fear was the great equalizer. That any being with a body and a mind could be threatened, bargained with, or deterred. But these people could not be threatened. A party of Vault Holders could march into the mouth of a dragon for a tiny reward and never once worry that they would not come out again. And that meant they could not be predicted.
"Bram," he said slowly, "how many Vault Holders are in Wegmark?"
"Right now? A few hundred. But there are thousands across Oral, and more every month."
"And how many of them would you say are dangerous?"
"To you?" Bram looked amused. "Most of them wouldn't hurt a fly unless the fly dropped good loot. They're a friendly lot, on the whole." He paused, and his voice dropped. "But there are some. Groups. Guilds. The big ones, the ones who've been here since the start. They're a different breed. When something doesn't scare you, you start to do strange things with it."
"Strange how?"
"Whatever the fancy takes them," Bram said. "That's the nature of it. You'll see."
Ainz said nothing for a long time.
"Thank you for the lesson," he said finally.
"It's the one I give to everyone," Bram said. "They mostly don't thank me."
***
The common room of the Sleepy Goose was full that night, and loud, and warm.
Hanne had delivered the repaired staff at sundown, and Narberal had paid her in the only currency she had, a very long and very serious account of the time she once defeated a pack of undead using nothing but good posture. Hanne had listened with great gravity and declared it the finest story she had heard in a month. Narberal had walked away with the faintest hint of pink in her cheeks.
Now she sat at a corner table with Ainz and Bram, nursing a cup of tea she had insisted on ordering for herself. Bram's ale was on its fourth refill.
"...and that's why you never trust the east gate guard," Bram finished. "He'll tell you the road's clear and you'll walk straight into a swamp."
"I will remember," Narberal said, filing it away in her head with the same care she gave to any battle plan.
"You're good with details, Miss Nabe."
"I am extremely thorough."
"I'll say. Are you from a big family?"
"I have... several sisters," Narberal said.
"Ah, that explains it. And you're a good-looking lot, I'd wager."
"I am told we are all remarkably similar."
"Do you want to hear about my daughter?" Bram asked, and then, perhaps because she did not immediately answer, "She's nine. She can already read."
"Nine," Narberal said, in a voice of mild wonder. "And she can read?"
"Better than I can. Her mother taught her."
"What does she read?"
"Everything. Cookbooks. Contracts. She found a copy of the princess's last tax regulations and read the whole thing, cover to cover." Bram laughed. "Said it was the best-organized thing she'd ever seen. I told her that's what you get when a clever person writes something. And Her Highness is certainly clever."
Ainz had been very carefully drinking nothing. He lifted the empty cup anyway.
"You speak well of the princess," he said, in Momon's voice.
"Everyone does," Bram said. "She cut the market fees three times. Set up a pension for old mercenaries like me, something nobody's ever bothered with before. And the roads! You've seen the roads. Six years ago a cart would break an axle between here and the next village. Now you can get there in a day."
"A remarkable woman."
"A remarkable girl," Bram corrected. "She's twenty, if she's a day. They say she hasn't made a single mistake since she took over. Some people say she's got a secret adviser, some old witch or a ghost or what have you. A voice in her ear." He chuckled and drank. "I think it's just good sense."
"A voice in her ear," Narberal said.
"That's what they say."
"It is obviously the work of Lyl..."
Ainz moved.
It was not a graceful movement. It involved a large amount of black plate and a gauntleted hand slapping the table with a sound like a cannon shot, which sent three mugs jumping and drew the attention of every person within ten meters.
"Lyrical!" he said, loudly.
Bram blinked at him. "Lyrical?"
"The princess's policies," Ainz said, in a slightly higher voice than usual. "They are... lyrical. In their elegance. The manner in which they flow into one another. A kind of poetry."
"Poetry," Bram repeated.
"Yes."
"In tax regulations."
"Particularly in tax regulations," Ainz said firmly.
There was a very long silence. Narberal looked at Ainz, and at the table, and at Bram, with the expression of a woman who had just realized she had stepped on a landmine and was only now noticing the click.
"...Lyrical," she said carefully.
"Huh," said Bram. "I never thought of it that way." He scratched his beard. "Well, now that you mention it, there is a certain rhythm to Clause Nine."
"I thought so," Ainz said. His heart, had he possessed one, would have been hammering. "You have a fine ear."
"Have I?" Bram said, flattered. "My wife always said so."
Narberal stared into her tea for the remainder of the conversation, and Ainz decided it would be unkind to say anything at all.
Later, as the common room began to empty, he leaned toward her.
"We will discuss this tomorrow," he said, under his breath.
"I understand," Narberal said, hanging her head. "I am deeply sorry, Ainz-sama."
"Momon-san."
"Momon-san."
"It was a near miss," Ainz said. "No harm was done. And you handled the aftermath admirably."
"I said 'lyrical.'"
"You did."
"It was a very poor word."
"It was an acceptable word," Ainz said, "under the circumstances."
Narberal looked at him for a moment, then lowered her eyes again.
"I find that I do not entirely dislike Mr. Bram," she said.
"You asked him about his daughter twice."
"Tolerance requires information."
"Ah," said Ainz.
"I am merely tolerating him," Narberal said, with great dignity.
"Of course."
Bram, who had just returned from the bar with a plate of bread and cheese, set it down in front of them with a clatter.
"Eat," he said. "You're both far too thin. I won't take no for an answer."
Narberal looked at the bread and cheese. She looked at Bram. After a long moment she picked up a piece, with the slow caution of a woman handling a dangerous artifact, and took a very small bite.
"It is acceptable," she said.
"That's the nicest thing anyone's said about my cheese in years," Bram said, and sat down, beaming.
***
"Momon!" someone called from across the room.
Ainz turned. A party of Vault Holders had taken over the large table by the fire, a loud, laughing group of eight or nine in matching silver-grey cloaks. The one who had called out was a tall young man with a sunburned nose and a cheerful face, holding a mug as if he intended to propose a toast.
"You're the new guy, right? In the black armor?"
"I am," Ainz said.
"Nice gear!" The young man raised his mug. "Where'd you get it?"
"I had it made."
"Really? It looks like boss-tier!" He turned to his friends. "Doesn't it look boss-tier? Like one of those rare-spawn knights in the Deepwood?"
"Totally," someone said.
"I'm Kev. Silver Drake guild. We're the big ones, in case you've heard." He grinned. "Anyway, welcome to Wegmark. Come find us if you want to party up!"
"I will keep it in mind," Ainz said.
The group turned back to its noise. But as Kev raised his mug again, his eyes lingered for a moment on the black plate, and on the two swords, and on the faint gleam of the crest at the hilt. There was something in his look that Ainz did not like: a spark of speculation, quickly hidden.
"Silver Drake," Bram said, in a low voice, after the young man had turned away. "Biggest guild in the kingdom. Mostly good people. But they're hungry for rare drops. Be careful."
"Careful in what way?" Ainz asked.
"In every way," Bram said. "You've got a very expensive-looking suit of armor. And you've got a mystery about you."
Ainz said nothing. In the firelight, the faint crest on his sword seemed to gleam rather more brightly than he remembered.
***
It was well past midnight when he cast [Message].
"Lord Ainz." The connection opened at once. "I have been waiting."
"I apologize for the hour," Ainz said, in his own voice, and sat down on the narrow bed. "How is Nazarick?"
"Perfectly in order. How was your day?"
"It was... informative."
"Tell me everything."
So he did. He told her about the notice board and the orientation clause, about Bram and his bad knee and his nine-year-old daughter, and about the smith who had been paid in a story. He told her about the ogre, and about the girl who had vanished and come back, and about the Vault Holders who did not fear death.
He did not tell her about the word "lyrical." He felt it would be better for everyone if that incident remained buried.
Albedo listened without interrupting, which was unusual. When he finished, there was a pause.
"They are not afraid to die," she said at last.
"No."
"Then they are, in a sense, the least frightening and most frightening of all possible opponents."
"Yes," Ainz said, surprised. "That is exactly right."
"You must be very careful, Lord Ainz."
"I will."
"And Narberal?"
"She is... improving."
"I am glad." She paused. "Did she eat?"
"She had bread and cheese."
"Excellent."
"Albedo?"
"Yes?"
"I find that I am enjoying myself," Ainz said.
There was a very long silence. He could almost hear her breathing.
"Then I am very glad," Albedo said, her voice thick. "More than I can say."
The link faded. Ainz sat in the dark, and for a while he did nothing at all. Out in the street the lamplighter had finished his rounds, and the town lay quiet beneath the stars. A warm breeze moved through the open window, and somewhere, very far off, a dog barked.
[Message], came a second voice, light and tired and familiar. Hey, Satoru. Still awake?
"Leah," Ainz said, and felt his shoulders drop slightly. "Yes."
How's it going?
"I have learned a great deal," he said. "And I have encountered something that concerns me."
Oh? She sounded suddenly alert. What?
"A guild," Ainz said slowly. "Silver Drake."
A pause.
...Yeah, Leah said. I know them.
"They looked at my armor," Ainz said, "in a way I did not care for."
Okay, Leah said. Okay. Don't do anything yet. Stay close to Bram, and I'll look into it. And Satoru?
"Yes?"
Be careful. They're nice people, mostly. But they're not nice people about loot.
"So I have been told," Ainz said, and ended the spell.
He sat for a time in the dark. Then he reached up and took off his helmet, and set it on the chair beside the bed.
Tomorrow, he thought, he would find a way to deal with it.
For tonight, he would simply sit here, a skeleton in a small room, in a town where no one was afraid of him, and listen to the dog bark in the dark.