The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 6, page 1
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Chapter 1: My Hometown of Hathara
In the middle of a wooden fence stood a crude gate. We approached it and met two young men standing guard. They both looked at me as soon as they saw us.
“Halt. What business do you have in Hathara?” one of them asked.
“I’m coming back home. Jal, Dol, don’t you recognize me?” I asked and smiled. But the smile was hidden under my mask, so all they saw were my narrowed eyes.
The two youths, a skinny one named Jal and a short one named Dol, stared at me curiously. A few moments later, they opened their eyes wide.
“Wait, Rentt?! Is that you?!” they shouted.
“Yeah, can’t you tell?”
“No, you looked more like an ordinary adventurer last time you came,” Jal said. “Like a swordsman or something. What’s with the sketchy robe and mask?” His brow furrowed as he asked.
“I’ve been through a lot. Anyway, let me in,” I answered, dodging the question. Explaining would be a hassle, and I had no intention of telling them everything.
“Well, I guess that’s fine. Wait, who’s that?” Dol asked when he noticed Lorraine.
“I’m a fellow adventurer,” Lorraine proclaimed. “My name is Lorraine Vivie. I also work as a scholar in Maalt. Nice to meet you.” She shook their hands.
They both looked bewildered as they shook back, but a second later they dragged me off to the side and spoke into my ear with a shouting whisper.
“Hey! Who’s the hot chick?! Don’t tell me you’re married! Are you married?!” Jal questioned.
Dol quickly added, “Here to report you got married? Is that why you’re back?! This is a big deal. We have to tell the mayor!” he said and ran off into the village.
“Hey, wait! You’ve got it all wrong!” I frantically yelled, but it was too late. Typical of villagers from deep in the mountains, he had strong legs and ran fast. It only took a moment before he was out of sight.
“Who would’ve thought that one of the least sociable people in the village would come back with a wife. Riri and Fahri aren’t gonna be happy about this. At least this gives us a chance with them, though,” Jal muttered.
Riri and Fahri were considered to be among the most beautiful women in the village. They were also childhood friends of mine, but they were around seven years my junior, so I thought of them like younger sisters. Though it was different in the city, by the village’s standards they were getting a bit old for single women. It was a bit worrisome. Still, they were gorgeous enough to get married right away if they ever felt like it, so maybe it wasn’t worth being concerned about.
In any case, I didn’t know why Jal brought them up. “What do you mean, this gives you a chance with them?” I asked.
“I can’t believe you,” Jal said, appalled. “They were always into you. Didn’t they come on to you a few times? And you turned them down.”
“Pretty sure it wasn’t serious. They did that all the time.”
“They gave you honey sweets every year on Saint Alto’s Day, didn’t they? And they always invited you to the lake during the Nameless Festival,” he retorted.
Both of those events were famously meant for couples. The former was celebrated around the world, while the latter was specific to our village. They were embedded enough in our public consciousness that I knew all about them. On Saint Alto’s Day, you gave honey sweets to someone you liked. It was also one of the only times of year where it was considered appropriate for a woman to confess her love to a man. As for the Nameless Festival, it had been held in Hathara for so long that even its original name was forgotten. There was a story that went along with it, and the festival was based around that. The story was about a couple that went to a lake, where their love was finally fully realized.
I did receive sweets and get invited to the lake on those holidays, but I left the village a bit before I turned fifteen. At the time, I didn’t know how I was supposed to take these approaches from seven- or eight-year-old girls. That hardly seemed like a reason to treat me as unreceptive to their love, though.
On the occasions that I did come back to the village, I was surprised to see how beautiful they had become. And they did similar things during those visits. Regardless, I had known them ever since they were young, so they still felt like precious little sisters to me. And if they looked up to me like a big brother, that wouldn’t be especially strange.
“They said they had nobody else and picked me so they could at least experience the holiday,” I explained. That must have been where Jal got the wrong idea. They were clearly too young. I didn’t have anything against an age gap in relationships between adults, but when you’ve known someone since they were an infant, it’s hard to view them as a member of the opposite sex. I assumed they saw me the same way.
“And you just took that at face value?” Jal spat. “Well, whatever. You brought your wife here, so that’s the end of that. Now the village guys can go after Riri and Fahri.”
That must have been what he meant by getting a chance. Well, whether they were kidding or not, I didn’t have romantic feelings for them. Not that I was married to Lorraine either, but it didn’t look like Jal or Dol would listen even if I told them that. Considering Riri and Fahri, maybe this was a convenient misunderstanding, so I didn’t want to go out of my way to correct them.
“What are you chatting about? Anything interesting?” Lorraine asked.
She had popped in from behind us, startling Jal. However, I realized she was there from the moment she approached. It would have been different had she used magic to conceal herself, but I could otherwise detect her without any issues. That wasn’t the case for Jal.
“Not really,” he said. “Well, anyway, no reason to stand around out here. How about we go inside the village? There are some people who’d like to say hi.”
“Oh, right,” Lorraine replied. “Jal, was it?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“I know Rentt is allowed in, but am I?” she asked. It should have been fine as long as she was attending me, but it was typical of her to ask and make sure.
“Yeah, no problem. You’re Rentt’s, well, y’know.”
“I’m not sure I know, but I’m glad to hear it’s fine. Let’s go, Rentt,” Lorraine said and walked on ahead.
“All right, Jal, we’ll be going. See you later,” I told him and then waved and followed after Lorraine. We entered the village together.
“Getting dragged around by the wife already, eh? City girls are rough,” I heard Jal whisper from behind us. Maybe I was imagining it.
Hathara seldom saw visitors, so I didn’t know how they would react to Lorraine, but the villagers we encountered tended to be positive. Just about everyone responded like Jal and Dol. They kept asking if Lorraine was my wife, but at least they did so pleasantly enough. Unlike Jal and Dol, the other villagers had a bit more discretion and listened when I told them she wasn’t. They were all smiling a strange amount, but I wanted to believe there was no special reason for that.
“What does this village produce? Is it all farmers and hunters?” Lorraine asked as she observed her surroundings.
“Yeah, for the most part,” I answered. “But they grow more than just wheat and vegetables. There’s a medicinal herb garden as well, so maybe that’s a bit unique.”
“A medicinal herb garden? Do they sell the herbs to a bigger town or some merchant or what?”
“I think I’ve told you about the medicine woman we have here. She uses the herbs to produce medicine, and then she sells that to traveling merchants. It’s highly effective and goes for a high price, apparently. Thanks to that, it’s not so bad living in this town in the middle of nowhere. They hunt monsters on occasion too, so they also sell magic crystals.”
“I always wondered why you were so accustomed to adventurer work from the start. You were already working like an adventurer in this village, from the sound of it.”
“Well, pretty much. I helped out with dissecting the monsters a lot, and I naturally picked up on how to walk through forests. Oh hey, that’s the mayor’s house.”
I looked ahead and saw a house one size larger than all the ones around it. We headed toward it. When visiting villages like this, it was customary to greet the mayor first.
That wasn’t the only reason I was going there, but it was a good excuse.
◆◇◆◇◆
I knocked on the door, and it slowly opened. A middle-aged woman peeked out from the other side. It had been a while since I’d seen her face; she had visibly aged, but she was still slender and beautiful. When she saw me, she opened her eyes wide. A few tears slipped out.
“Rentt, good to see you’re back. I was worried about you. When the guild told me you’d gone missing, I was sure you’d never return. Thank goodness I was wrong,” she cried.
The guild wasn’t so kind as to go out of its way to report when an adventurer went missing to the adventurer’s hometown, but Guildmaster Wolf probably arranged for that. He knew now I was alive, but he must not have contacted them about that yet. Even though there were methods of contact using flying creatures, they didn’t use those for backwater towns like this. Carriages were the only option. Maybe the carriage we came in on was carrying a letter like that. But I didn’t know if reporting I was alive would technically be accurate, and maybe Wolf wasn’t sure either, so who knows if he thought to send anything yet.
“It’s complicated, but as you can see, I’m in pretty good health. By the way, where’s Dad?”
“Oh, he’s here. Come in and―oh? Who’s this?”
“Lorraine, a friend from Maalt. She’s a scholar,” I said.
Lorraine looked like she had a lot to say about that but decided it was best to hold it back. “I’m Lorraine Vivie. I’m a scholar, like Rentt said, as well as an adventurer, and I also dabble in alchemy. Pleased to meet you. And you are?”
“A scholar? Interesting. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself sooner. I’m Gilda Faina, the wife of the mayor, Ingo Faina. It’s nice to meet you too.”
“Faina?” Lorraine repeated with shock. “Don’t tell me you’re Rentt’s―”
“Yeah, she’s my mom. The mayor’s my dad. And that medicine woman I talked about would be my grandmother’s younger sister, if I’m remembering that right.”
◆◇◆◇◆
“I wasn’t expecting you to bring a woman home to the village. Not that I’m complaining. I’m glad to see it, actually,” Ingo said.
He was sitting at the table, so we all decided to take a seat as well. Once everyone introduced themselves, we started to chat. It was mostly one-sided, with Lorraine and I telling them what I had been up to in Maalt. In return, Ingo and Gilda had a bit to say about the goings-on in the village.
One topic of discussion was all the villagers who were starting to get married. They said that most of the youths I looked after back in the day had significant others now. A fair number of them even had children. When I came to visit over a year ago, there did seem to be a lot of people getting friendly with each other. That must have been the season of love.
Now that I thought about it, there were a fair number of people around my age who got married two or three years after I left the village. Sometimes I saw their children running around like I used to do. It made me feel like I took an unusual course in life. I did feel a bit lonely, but more than that, I was happy to see the village doing well.
Around the time we began to discuss marriage, Ingo and Gilda started to look at Lorraine a bit differently.
“Yes, you always stuck to your training no matter who asked you out. I was afraid you’d never get married. At least it’s nice to see you found such a pretty girl outside the village,” Gilda said.
I wasn’t always the most perceptive person, but even I saw what she was getting at. She assumed Lorraine was my wife. But the women of this village were masters of conversation and knew how to dance around the subject. She just wanted me to confirm or deny it without asking directly. Maybe she was being considerate, in a sense, but it also felt like I had to walk on a bed of nails.
Unlike me, Lorraine wasn’t nervous at all. In fact, she was calm and collected. “Rentt has quite a number of female acquaintances in Maalt,” she said. “There’s Rina, Sheila, me, Lillian, Alize... I could go on...”
The way she listed them off sounded malicious. Simply stating their names made it easy to imagine they were all beautiful women of marriageable age, but Rina was even more like a little sister to me than Riri or Fahri were, and Lillian was far older than me. And then there was Alize, a child by any metric. Sheila was, I suppose, a woman of an appropriate age, but I only knew her through work. We were connected by circumstance, but that was all. That’s how I saw it, at least.
As for Lorraine, though, the fact that I lived with her made it hard to argue with how the villagers saw our relationship. But in Maalt, plenty of adventurers of opposite genders lived together in the same house. It wasn’t that big of a deal. Probably. Maybe it was just me. Either way, Lorraine, Ingo, and Gilda didn’t give me the opportunity to say any of this.
“Oh my, he knows all these women? Then I suppose I was worried for nothing. I wasn’t kidding when I said I thought he might never get married.”
“Really? I know he can be socially inept, but certainly women approach him a fair bit. I don’t see him as the type to stubbornly reject them all, either.”
“Sounds like you know Rentt well. That’s true, but nobody in this village was ever able to go this far with him.”
“What?” Lorraine asked and cocked her head, but her question was brushed aside.
“Oh, right, now that Rentt’s back, I think the village should hold a welcoming banquet. Could you make the preparations, Gilda?”
“Yes, of course, dear. Enjoy yourselves, you two. I’ll go tell the villagers,” Gilda said as she stood and exited the house.
“I’ll be going too,” Ingo informed us just as she left. “It’s a small village, but we have a decent number of citizens. Gilda might find it hard to tell everyone by herself.” He followed Gilda out the door.
Lorraine watched them go. “Hey, Rentt,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Did I say something I shouldn’t have?”
“No, not at all. I’m the problem here. They worry about me so much that it’s kind of unbearable.”
“Why do you feel that way?”
“Well, they’re not my birth parents, but they adopted me.”
“You were adopted? What happened to your birth parents?” Lorraine asked.
Lorraine didn’t beat around the bush, even with a difficult question. I knew she wasn’t trying to be insensitive; Lorraine just had a tendency to be direct. If I said I didn’t want to talk about it, she would likely drop the subject and move on. In other words, while she had asked about it, it was only to give me the option of whether to discuss it or not.
It wasn’t something I was that adamant about avoiding, so I went ahead and told her. “They died a long time ago. I was five when it happened,” I explained.
It was the simple truth, and talking about it didn’t hurt too much anymore. Regardless, it would always be sad. I never forgot their faces, and I would always remember our life together. They were good people. I wished they could still be alive, but it wasn’t to be.
“I see. Were they ill?”
“Attacked by monsters. It happens all the time,” I said, trying not to sound too serious, but I noticed I sounded shaky.
Ever since I turned undead, I started to think my body couldn’t produce tears anymore. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case. When I checked my eyes in the mirror, they were as moist as any human eyes. I supposed there was no reason I wouldn’t be able to cry. Now I felt like I could tear up at any moment.
“Is that why you wanted to be an adventurer?”
“Well, for the most part. That wasn’t the only reason, though. Anyway, when I told my adoptive parents what I wanted to do, they were pretty supportive. Actually, sorry, Lorraine, but I’m going out for a bit too. Do you mind waiting in this house for a little while? I’m sure it won’t be too comfy sitting around in someone else’s house.”
“Hm? Oh, I don’t mind if you don’t. You want me to watch your family’s house?”
“I’d trust you to do it more than anyone. See you later,” I said and left the house.
I knew it wasn’t the best thing to do, but if I stayed any longer, I might have started sobbing. That would only bother Lorraine. In the decade I’d known her, I never once cried in front of her. Actually, maybe I did, now that I thought about it, but it didn’t need to happen again. It was an issue of my meager male pride. I’d take a little walk around the village and give my eyes a chance to dry, then I’d go back. I didn’t want to keep her waiting too long.
◆◇◆◇◆
Sinking into a chair at the mayor’s house, Lorraine felt as if she had stomped on a landmine. She had gone too far with what she said to his parents. However, while some frivolous conversation might have been preferable if this were a simple visit to Rentt’s hometown, she wanted it to be more than that.
Some part of Lorraine was curious to learn about Rentt’s past, and maybe that part of her controlled her actions more than she cared to realize. She wanted to believe it was a desire driven by her researcher’s spirit; she suspected it had more to do with her personal feelings.
They had been friends for a decade, but they always kept a certain amount of distance. It was pleasant in a way that her life in Lelmudan never was. She did have friends in her home country, of course, but Lorraine held a special position there. She was never able to develop a relationship as naturally as she could with Rentt. That was why her feelings for Rentt were so strong...and even dependent in some respects. She had no intention of relying on him to excess, but without him, she would feel hopeless.
