Goblin Slayer

“Hey, you were in there, too, little lady? How was it?”

“Total loss!”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. But, well, I did get to have an adventure, and I had fun, so maybe it’s okay.”

Under a clear blue sky, the girl with the iron spear across her shoulders laughed out loud. The expression on her face was as bright and refreshing as the wind that made her green outfit flutter—not a cloud in sight.

“I gotcha,” Spearman said when he saw it.
Looks like this event of theirs went pretty well
, he thought. Winter would soon be upon them, but the frontier town was bathed in the festive afterglow of the contest. People looked excited as they walked along, and conversations could be heard here and there about the contest. Young men and women chatted about whether they had participated and whether it had gone well for them or not.

There was even talk of treating promising youngsters from nearby towns as guests, giving them complimentary food and lodging. It seemed to Spearman that they had much to look forward to in the new crop of adventurers who would show up the coming spring. He didn’t regret not being involved in the contest, but it stung a little—a sign that it had been a good event.

Thought I might feel all depressed, failing my mission while everyone else was doing theirs. But…

It helped his mood that the young woman in front of him showed not the slightest sign of regret herself. She would become a good adventurer, he was sure—at the very least, she had one of the most necessary talents for it. Of course an adventurer who failed at their adventure felt bad and maybe got depressed. When life knocked them down, a lot of people gave up. But there was nothing inevitable about that. It was each individual’s choice. The strength of spirit to come bouncing back after a failure wasn’t an easy thing to come by.

He seemed to keep running into the rookie girl, with whom his acquaintance had begun from such a small thing. Seeing her so full of heart couldn’t help but bring a smile to Spearman’s face.

“How about you? How’d you do?”

The girl’s innocent question made him wince. “We hit the ruins where there was supposed to be an immortal body and soul or something.” He scratched his head, offering an unaffected but disappointed grin. It wasn’t untrue. He was just trying to put the best possible spin on it. “But all we found down there was an empty husk.”

“Another dead end, huh?”

“Pretty much.” He nodded, then reached out and mussed the girl’s black hair. She squealed (adorable), but she wasn’t unhappy about it. To be able to innocently touch a girl’s hair like that, you had to have known her for quite a while. “Heck,” Spearman said, “that’s adventuring for you. Can’t let it get you down, right?”

“Sure can’t!” The girl found time to shoot a look in Spearman’s direction as she busied herself with straightening her hair, pouting a little.

The blue-clad swordswoman standing over there, and the wizard in the pink robe with her, must be the girl’s party members. They made quite a sight—but Spearman wasn’t sure. He had the distinct sense that their equipment didn’t reflect their true abilities. Meaning, of course, that the gear wasn’t as good as they were…

Well, nothing he had to worry about. It was just a passing thought, maybe because a young woman who looked a lot like a priestess he knew was standing with them, chatting and laughing.

Priestess came running up to the girl, joining in the laughter and the conversation, the talk blooming like a beautiful flower. It would’ve been easy to take the two for sisters, but Spearman wasn’t about to make that mistake. Just because they were wearing the same religious vestments didn’t mean you couldn’t tell the difference between the two young women—it was palpable.

Whatever a woman wore or whatever she did, it didn’t change the fact that she was beautiful. Spearman thought that was a good thing. Beside him, his partner, Witch, smiled pointedly about something. Well, she was always doing that.

The way a young girl came walking through the door of the Adventurers Guild, clearly nervous—that was perfectly ordinary, too. All of it seemed like another typical day in the town on the western frontier.

§

“Hey, you!”

By this time, he was well accustomed to running errands in town. The first time, his parents had lavished praise on him, and the other kids had been duly impressed, but by now no one really reacted anymore.

What’s more, today he was going with his father, though he’d been told his dad had something important to discuss, so the boy should wait outside, and then he’d been left there. It had been a severe disappointment, since in spite of it all, the boy still saw himself as doing rather amazing work.

All of this meant that at first, even though he was gazing absently down the road to town, he didn’t even notice.

When the girl came down the dirt path, the boy just blinked and watched her go by before finally calling out.

“—?” She turned, puzzled: It was really her, the daughter of the alleged mercenary who lived on the edge of town. Her long black hair and her vacant expression looked the same as always. Her backpack was still too big for her, and the heavy-looking sword she carried still made her lean to one side.

The boy decided, then, that it must have been the cheap leather armor she was wearing that had kept him from recognizing her.

“You…,” he began, staring openly at the girl, who was so much slimmer than he was. “You really became an adventurer.”

“Uh-huh.” The girl nodded, then produced her rank tag from the neck of her shirt. The glimpse of the pale skin around her collarbone as she did so set the boy’s heart racing, though he didn’t know why; he ignored it and looked at the tag. The chain around the girl’s delicate throat carried a small piece of porcelain, and there was a shard of some black rock on a string that quavered as she breathed.

“You sure they’re not pulling your leg?”

“I dunno.”

“And what’s with that rock anyway?”

“It’s my prize, from the contest,” she said happily, quite ignoring his irritated tone as she let her fingers play across the stone. She touched it as tenderly as a cherished treasure, then tucked both it and the tag back into her shirt. “I had it turned into a charm.”

“It looks cheap.” The boy added a snort,
hmph
, but the girl just said, “You think?” not sounding the least bit perturbed.

For some reason, that absolutely aggravated the boy, who puffed out his chest and said, “You probably just swung your sword around a bit, right? Against some, like, goblins or something.”

“Uh-huh. I mean…I guess?”

“Hell, even
I
could deal with some goblins.”

That was it—he’d do a bit of bragging for her. The boy spoke with all the pride he could muster.

He’d chased a goblin away from the village the other day. He’d waved a stick and flung stones. True, there’d been only one goblin, small and emaciated, and the boy had been running behind a pack of adults. But still, that didn’t change the fact that he’d gotten rid of the monster. He was quite proud of himself.

“Huh, really?” The girl showed no special interest in his story, though; she just answered diffidently.

“Better believe it!” Desperate to get a rise out of her, the boy grinned broadly and announced, “This dungeon exploration contest—I guess it was only a game for a bunch of amateurs, huh?”

“Maybe.”

“Hey, did you buy a helmet like I told you?”

“…” The girl was quiet for a second before she held back her bangs to show him: Wrapped around her head was a protective leather band. She softly explained that something like this wouldn’t get pulled off.

What a moron
, the boy thought. How stupid did you have to be to get your helmet pulled off? He snorted. If
he
were an adventurer, he would buy a helmet, and he wouldn’t be dumb enough to lose it. Supremely confident of his wisdom, the boy looked down on the obviously helpless girl and laughed. But there was a certain satisfaction, too. She’d listened to him and bought a helmet.

Well, there you had it. She hadn’t been able to get a prize from the dungeon exploration contest all by herself; she’d needed help.

“I’ll give you all kinds of advice, then!”

“Gosh, I don’t really think so,” the girl said firmly.

The boy gulped and goggled. She’d never actually said
no
to him before. She spoke in the same small, quiet voice she always did, but it cut him to the quick.

For the first time, the boy looked in the face of this girl he’d known since childhood. Her eyes as she gazed back at him were terribly clear and unflinching, like a deep wellspring. She looked at him the way you might look at a stone on the side of the road, seeing that it was there but nothing more.

“Are you done?” she asked, tilting her head as if puzzled. Some sweet, pleasant smell drifted from her hair as she did so. “Okay, I’m gonna go, then.”

Leaving the boy still dumbstruck, the girl turned, faced forward, and walked off. She had much to do and even more to think about, and she wasn’t sure where to start.

“First, the sewers. First, the sewers,” she kept muttering to herself, even as she reached the gate at the edge of town. That was what the nice receptionist lady had recommended. She’d said they could still be dangerous, though, which made the girl a little scared.

Maybe she would try the training center, too, at some point, but first she wanted to earn a little money. She’d asked around at the Adventurers Guild, and everyone had agreed that the sewers were the place to start. Getting up the courage to talk to people had been a real challenge, but they were a lot less scary than that contest facilitator. Besides, when she finally found the nerve to strike up a conversation, everyone turned out to be nice.

One young man’s group that seemed especially knowledgeable about the sewers had told her,
“A club is your best bet.”
But she still didn’t have any money, and she’d never used a club. She’d have to give it a try with her sword.

She’d talked to the old man at the armor shop before setting out, so she knew how much a club cost. Thankfully, he’d been willing to buy the gems she’d gotten from the contest. That had enabled her to get armor, her headband, and some potions. When she’d asked for oil for her lantern, he’d thrown in some perfume oil for free. That made her very happy.

Like that adventurer had said, it was important to stay calm. And she was so excitable.

She hoped there wouldn’t be any snakes. She was very scared of snakes. She was pretty sure there weren’t any snakes in the sewers.

It had been so hard fighting the goblins by herself. She was sure fighting rats would be
really
hard.

So many things I have to keep in mind…

“…But I’ll do my best!”

The girl clenched her fists. Her charm glittered at her neck. The boy she’d just been talking to was already all but gone from her thoughts.

The girl had a name that spread out like a tempest, whirling from the alpha, the very first letter. Rogue-like, she kept walking, sure and steady, the black onyx at her neck.

Ahead of her, the Four-Cornered World spread out, wild and vast.

§

Goblin Slayer sat on the bench, vacantly watching Guild Girl speak to the quest giver. From time to time, adventurers who recognized him would call out to the man in the cheap-looking metal helmet, to which he would inevitably reply, “I see.”

The rookie adventurers—those who had participated in the dungeon exploration contest—hardly even looked at him as he sat there. Maybe it was the grubby equipment, or maybe they just didn’t have the time and energy to pay him any mind; he didn’t know. He certainly didn’t think he’d had any time to go looking around back when he had been a novice.

Of course, none of them thought the man in the grimy armor might be a Silver-ranked adventurer—why would they? That black-haired girl, she was the only exception. The one who had gotten lost during the event—she would give him a polite bow as they passed each other.

I suppose she’ll become an adventurer.
He wasn’t thinking in terms of whether she’d registered with the Guild; she was registered, just as he was.

The girl would surely become an adventurer, though. He didn’t know if it would go well for her, and it was certainly not his place to judge. But the girl had decided to become an adventurer and was doing everything she needed to that end. So she certainly would become one.

What about me?

Yes—what about him?

He let the question drift through his mind. He’d been so busy before the event, but now that it was over—well, here he was. In the grand scheme of things, what had he really done? Just slay some goblins. When it came to creating the labyrinth, setting out traps, and running the contest, he had contributed only the slightest bit.

Everything in this world came down to one thing: Do or do not. His master had taught him that. And if that was the case…

Then I…

His thoughts were interrupted by Guild Girl, who gleefully waved a hand. “Ah, Goblin Slayer, sir! You can come over here now!” Another Guild employee, with a holy symbol hanging from her neck, stood beside Guild Girl; for some reason, she had a little grin on her face that made her look like a cat.
I think she was the one we entrusted to handle things on the surface.
Goblin Slayer grunted softly and nodded slightly.

Inspector looked surprised for a second, then shook her head and said, “Don’t worry about it,” to Guild Girl before returning to her work.

I’ll have to thank her properly sometime
, Goblin Slayer told himself—firmly, so he would remember it, and then he stood across from Guild Girl. She was once again wearing her usual uniform and zipping around behind the counter with all the energy of an excited puppy; she was so busy. Despite how challenging the dungeon exploration contest must have been for her, she showed no sign of fatigue.

“Thank you so much for all your help…,” she began.

“It was no problem,” Goblin Slayer said clearly, seeing Guild Girl go through such pains to apologize. After all, he’d been dealing with goblins. No different from what he always did. No different at all. “It wasn’t that much trouble.”

“Well, I thought it was exciting, helping out with things.” Guild Girl still looked somewhat troubled. She played with her braid; she was smiling but seemed glum. “Although I guess I didn’t help very much…”

“That perfume-oil candy was terrible.”

“
?” She didn’t seem to understand what he meant and merely looked at him blankly.

Goblin Slayer didn’t worry about it, just went on talking. If he stopped, he was sure he would simply fall silent. His childhood friend often pointed out that he went quiet when he was troubled. “The smell came up out of my belly after I swallowed it. It was quite unpleasant, and it threw me off a little.”

“O-oh, really…”

“But other than that, everything was helpful,” he continued immediately. “Thank you.”

“
”

Guild Girl didn’t respond. Her expression stiffened for a second before she said, “Wait there a moment, would you?” as if she had just remembered something, then got out of her chair. She disappeared into the back before emerging at a brisk trot and resuming her place. “
Ahem
, pardon me very much. So, um…after that…” Her words came fluently now, and she had her usual bright smile on her face. “…After that, what happened?”

“I’m afraid most of the contents were lost.”

“Goodness,” she said, blinking. After a second, her smile softened, and she looked down shyly. “That’s all right. It doesn’t matter…”