WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Dionysus
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◈ The Wizard's Memoir ◈
Chapter 12: Atmosphere
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Olivia's party retraced their steps and returned to the mining village.
The villagers, men and women, young and old, had gathered in the pub to wait anxiously. Their hopeful looks were a burden, but the party couldn't give them good news.
“You killed the monster, but we still can't enter the mine? Are you talking sense, or just blowing hot air out your backside?”
“Ugh, not while I'm drinking...”
Olivia explained the situation in the dungeon on the party's behalf. Despite going into as much detail as possible, fewer than half the villagers understood. Then again, adventurers probably wouldn't understand a detailed explanation of mining either.
“Did you really kill the monster? Aren't you just making excuses after running away in fear?”
Some were ungrateful enough to voice their suspicions. Irritated, Dahlia threw the evidence they had brought, the spriggans' right arms, onto the table.
A villager approached to see what they were, then recoiled in horror at the nails. Each hand had five long fingers, nothing like anything found on a four-legged beast or a bird.
“We killed three. Nobody knows how many more there are.”
“Y-you mean there wasn't just one?”
Dahlia laid them out neatly for a closer look. Unless the creature had six hands, there had indeed been three. All distrust and complaints vanished. This must have been why the Guild demanded evidence too.
Olivia ordered another beer and spoke firmly.
“We haven't given up. We're saying it'll take some time.”
“C-can we trust you on that?”
“You aren't paying us dena for this. Why would we drag it out on purpose? We want to get it over with too.”
It also meant that they shouldn't give orders unless they were paying. The villagers looked away, apparently still possessing some sense of shame.
“We're the experts here. Trust us and wait.”
@
Someone with a worse temper might have said, “Then deal with it yourselves!” But local support was essential to adventuring, so that wasn't an option.
Olivia's party rested for two days while preparing for the exploration. Food and drinking water were the most important supplies. They initially planned to bring enough for five days, but that wasn't as easy as they had expected.
“No ham? Or sausages? What about cheese? Surely you've got cheese?”
“Ran out last week.”
This was a country village without a market. It was May, with spring just over, and there wasn't much food available. Most of the stores had been used up over winter. Still, the spring fieldwork had just ended, so there was plenty of buckwheat, beans, and turnips.
“I hate beans! I said I hate beans!”
“Oh, come on! You're not a little kid...”
They soothed Dahlia, who was childish in several ways, and bought a mixture of fresh and dried food in equal amounts. They paid for it from the party's shared funds.
People pictured adventurers eating hardtack or jerky, but in reality, nobody ate such tasteless stuff for every meal unless conditions were desperate. They couldn't endure it physically or mentally. Even armies at war paid attention to their menus. Adventurers were no different, provided they could find a variety of ingredients.
“Has food always been this scarce?”
“It's because we're in the north. Things are different from the south.”
Even so, these were good times. Long ago, famine had struck every other year, but once wizards began working throughout society, people stopped starving to death. When Etran pointed that out, Olivia asked a question in return.
“Do wizards conjure up bread or something?”
“If that spell existed, we wouldn't be going through all this trouble.”
Etran left Dahlia to complain and picked up a sack of beans. Steamed until soft, they were quite a treat.
“There's a kind of magic called Precognition. It lets you glimpse the future.”
“That sounds incredibly useful.”
“Not quite. It isn't specific, and cause and effect aren't clear either.”
Etran had meant to give a brief explanation and move on, but had underestimated adventurers plagued by uncertain futures. Not only Olivia and Dahlia, but even Rolf showed a great deal of interest.
“Think of it this way. Olivia, you're going to find a hundred dena on the road. But you don't know when or where.”
“S-so that's how it works? Still, I'm definitely getting a hundred dena, right?”
Olivia looked around for a fallen money pouch. It was only an example, but Etran had chosen an excellent subject.
“After hearing that prediction, you'd walk around watching the ground for those hundred dena. If you found the money that way, were you always destined to find it, or did you find it because of the prediction?”
“Uh... huh?”
The subject had suddenly grown difficult. Not only Olivia and Dahlia, but even the composed Rolf blinked in confusion. At least the whining had stopped, which Etran appreciated.
“It's impossible to predict an individual's fate. The moment you predict it, you interfere with the future.”
“Then is it a useless spell?”
“It helps with things humans can't influence.”
Etran had given them a hint. Olivia and the other weapon wielders thought hard before remembering how the conversation had started.
“...The weather?”
“Yes. That's right.”
By limiting the prediction to rain, wizards could determine whether a year would have heavy or light rainfall.
They couldn't tell exactly when or where it would rain, but they could make useful predictions about rainfall across an entire kingdom or region. That alone was an enormous help to farming.
“Wizards also build roads, run windmills, and treat blight, among other things. As you said, Olivia, magic is varied and useful.”
“That's really impressive...”
In other words, wizards had no trouble making a living without becoming adventurers. The same went for Etran, who was considered a genius. Once Olivia and the others realized this, they quickly took the sack of beans away from Etran.
“Oh, goodness. Someone as important as you shouldn't be doing such menial work!”
“Stay with us for a long, long time. Adventuring's a good job too. People just die now and then.”
“...That doesn't sound good at all.”
They joked around, apparently in better spirits. Yet two days passed, then three, and the party still couldn't leave. It wasn't because they had no meat or not enough alcohol. Those were major complaints too, but a more serious obstacle had appeared.
“Olivia's party? The party that cleared Shadow Castle Ruins and the Well Dungeon one after the other?”
A group of strangers visited the pub in Star Valley. Just as heroes recognized other heroes, people in the same trade recognized their own. Olivia and the others knew at a glance that this was an adventuring party.
“We've come from Northern Ridge.”
Etran considered the place name. They didn't mean they had come down from a mountain to the north. Northern Ridge, named for a northern ridge, was a major city in the northern highlands. If they had come all the way from that bustling place...
“The Guild officially sent us. If we'd known another party was already exploring the dungeon, we wouldn't have hurried so much. Since we're here now, we look forward to working with you.”
@
Like any guild, the Adventurers' Guild had rules. They were intended to prevent excessive competition from leaving everyone worse off.
“We'll carry out the exploration. Let's set a period of three days.”
“But we got here first.”
“You last went down three days ago, didn't you? We fully recognize your achievement in locating the dungeon and identifying the monsters. Even if we defeat the boss, you should still receive fifty percent.”
Olivia's party exchanged looks. The timing was a little awkward, with the newcomers arriving just as they had finished their preparations and worked up their enthusiasm, but this wasn't a bad thing. It reduced the danger and improved their chances of clearing the dungeon.
“What if you discover the condition for the boss?”
“Of course we'll share it.”
After trying it themselves first, naturally.
Olivia let them do as they pleased, making a concession that wasn't much of a concession. It was common for party leaders to agree on dates and whose turn came first. Dahlia stuck out their lower lip and muttered.
“We wouldn't need to do this in a labyrinth...”
“A labyrinth?”
“They call them ‘instances,’ short for ‘instance dungeons,’ whatever that means. Horrible places where you start somewhere different every time.”
Dungeons really were mysterious. The adventurers who kept inventing strange words were fascinating too.
Etran committed the field jargon to memory while studying the party from Northern Ridge.
They had a warrior, an alchemist, an archer, and a seeker. Unusually, the alchemist was the leader. The alchemist wore a large cloak unsuited to the season, with glass bottles going Clink, clink.
“An adventuring alchemist...”
“They're surprisingly popular as support specialists. They can get healing potions cheaply to make injuries less dangerous, and they can give monsters a terrible time with corrosive chemicals.”
Of course, as with any profession, their abilities varied from person to person.
Olivia returned to the table and dropped into a chair. After raising a finger to order a beer, the warrior slumped like an octopus wilting in the summer heat.
“Now we've got three days off. Should I be happy or sad?”
“If they clear it, we'll earn dena without doing the hard work. That should be a good thing, right?”
Etran offered some comfort, suggesting they take the good where they could find it. It was understandable that Olivia felt embarrassed after getting so unnecessarily solemn about the whole thing.
Three days later, however, they learned that a good thing wasn't always good. The Northern Ridge party had gone missing. After some uncertainty, they reached that conclusion on the morning of the fourth day.
“Are we a rescue party again?”
Olivia's party now had another task. While searching for the conditions needed to clear the mine dungeon, they would also have to track down the alchemist's group.
@
Later than planned, they finally set out for the mine dungeon.
Before leaving, they gave the head miner information to pass on in case they met with trouble too. A Guild pub would have handled that for them, but country villages were inconvenient and unreliable in all sorts of ways.
“It won't take as long as last time. I've more or less memorized the route.”
“You memorized those complicated tunnels?”
“I've been through them once. Of course I should remember. Isn't that basic?”
Olivia offered the explanation, “That's a halfling for you,” but Dahlia's excellent memory was a personal strength unrelated to race. It wasn't as though no halfling ever had trouble remembering a route. None had a poor sense of direction, certainly, but remembering a route was a separate ability.
They drew their blades to check them, tapped their armor, inspected their belongings, tightened their shoelaces and pack straps, then exchanged looks to signal that they were ready. With that, they took a step out of the village. Their departure was so natural that the order came a beat late.
“Let's go.”
They didn't need a guide this time. With an excellent seeker in the party, they moved without hesitation along the valley path and through the mine tunnels. After walking for an hour and a half without stopping, they first halted in front of the vertical shaft they had used as a shortcut.
“A spriggan.”
More precisely, it was a spriggan's corpse with its right hand cut off. Judging by its location and condition, it wasn't one Dahlia had cut.
“Must've been our friends from the north, right?”
“They seem capable.”
Etran felt a little relieved. As expected, the three they had killed on their first exploration hadn't been the only ones. If they had recklessly pressed on then, things would have gone badly.
“If a party this capable went missing...”
That hadn't needed saying. Olivia tapped the shield to change the mood, then pointed toward the shaft.
“We'll have to go and see for ourselves. That's what adventurers do, isn't it?”
Etran snapped their fingers and traced a magic circle to create a disc. It was time to descend into the abyss.
Etran wasn't an optimistic halfling with an excellent memory. Having passed through once didn't make the place feel familiar. An unsettling breath of air brushed the back of their neck.
“That's my breath.”
“...Please brush your teeth.”
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