episode_0050

“Oh, princess. Can we just go like this?”

“Hmm.. Well, just like Ayla said, I didn’t receive any proof that the mission was successful.”

“Oh, no, that’s not it..”

“Just kidding. Well… everyone’s been through a lot, but if they’re the ones who survived so far, it doesn’t matter.”

There was no need to worry about the knights since the monsters around them would have already been killed off.

Still, Ayla looked a little uneasy. I don’t know if she was aware of it, but she was walking slowly behind Mathias, holding on to the hem of Mathias’ clothes.

When Ayla first tried to persuade me to join the expedition, she told me that if I was going to fail, I could just abandon everything and run away. And she must have been sincere up until then.

However, when the time came to actually make a choice, it must have been difficult for her to calm down. Even though she had only seen each other occasionally and had never become close with anyone, she probably could not have chosen to abandon and run away, knowing that the people she had been moving with for days would never survive.

If we look at it that way, should we consider it fortunate? If the Reaper Cult had not appeared and Yugram and I had just made our way through and escaped, Ayla’s feelings might have been quite hurt.

“Is Matias okay?”

“..Honestly, it would be a lie to say that I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t experience a real battlefield, I didn’t realize my helplessness.. Even now, I don’t feel like I’m alive.”

Mathias answered in a subdued voice.

Mathias was probably quite confident.

After meeting me, you must have felt your skills improving rapidly, and you have grown to the point where you can keep up with Ayla’s sparring to some extent. Recently, I don’t remember the name, but you fought a group of people who had been harassing you, and came back after defeating them.

However, Mathias’s skills are still only at the bottom of the Academy. They are not comparable to the real swordsmen who have been properly trained and honed their swordsmanship since childhood.

Also, even for those with such skills, such as Ayla or someone with greater skills, if the total amount of magical power is insufficient to produce strong firepower… the reality is that it would be difficult to cut the hide of an ordinary ogre, let alone the ogre just now.

“The cleanup is done, miss.”

“Thank you, Yugram.”

While I was thinking about how to deal with the firepower of Matias and Ayla, Yugram arrived, who was supposed to silence the survivors. Yugram had initially tried to use the most certain method, that is, to show that the dead cannot speak… but no matter what, it didn’t seem right, so I asked for another method.

“Ira and Mathias… I’m sure you’ve guessed, but you must never talk about what happened today. We were just ambushed by three ordinary ogres, and then defeated. ”

“Ha, but princess. Sa─”

I covered Ayla’s mouth with my hand and shook my head.

“This is not something you should worry about. Just quietly enjoy your academy life. That doesn’t mean I’m doing the work for you. Yugram is just reporting it through proper procedures, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

“..Okay, I understand.”

“Matthias, do you understand?”

“Yes, Princess.”

I gently stroked the head of Ayla, who seemed to have a lot to say. She was taller than me, but not tall enough to stand on tiptoe.

“Okay, your pretty face is a mess. Let’s stop thinking about bad things and go back quickly. If we don’t hurry, we’ll have to sleep out in the mountains.”

.

.

.

After that, I spent a day in a nearby village without any special events and then hurried back to the village where the guild was.

I tried my best to cheer up Ayla and Mathias, who were feeling depressed for various reasons, and after a few days of shopping and going to delicious restaurants, I finally saw the shadows disappear from their faces. I guess they just got rid of it on their own.

In the meantime, someone sent by the guild came to visit them and asked them to please visit the guild, so when they took the two with them, the lord sent a medal of appreciation to the guild in consideration of their great contribution to the expedition, and the higher-ups rubbed their hands together as they asked how they could repay this.

When I looked at their expressions, I saw that they didn’t seem to want anything in particular, so I asked them to raise their match evaluation scores significantly. They asked me several times if that was really all that mattered, and if there was any money left, I asked them to introduce me to a skilled blacksmith along with some cash. They offered me a sum that surprised me.

So in the end, Mathias was able to pay back all the money he had borrowed from me at once, and now the three of us were on our way to the blacksmith together.

“Princess. But what’s the difference between a good sword and an ordinary sword?”

“Actually, I don’t know either. I just asked because I thought someone high up in the guild might know someone great.”

Ayla looked a little taken aback by my answer. Despite that expression, I was never a swordsman in the first place. The swords I learned were merely an extension of self-defense, and most of the swords I used during training were false swords that didn’t have a blade, and the ones I occasionally used when hunting captives or monsters were standardized items used by the Knights Templar.

Of course, since it was a sword used by the Knights of the Kingdom, it would be of much higher quality than an ordinary iron sword, but there was nothing particularly great or noticeable about it. Since I had never used an incredibly great sword, I couldn’t tell what was different. Does Yugram know?

“Princess. Isn’t this the place? If it’s the place I heard about…”

“Oh, thank you, Mathias.”

As we were talking, we almost passed by without seeing it, so we took a slight step back and entered the shop. If it was a blacksmith shop, I had a vague idea that it would be a place that was extremely hot and humid with a suffocating smell of sweat, but it was just an ordinary shop. As I imagined, there was a separate place where they worked, with a smelting furnace where they made weapons by smelting metal, and this place seemed to be just a place where they sold things.

“What brings you here?”

A man in neat clothes appeared from inside. This was also different from what I expected. I thought he would be a muscular, short, balding man wearing overalls with his upper body completely naked, but he was just an ordinary clerk. I handed him the letter of introduction I had received from the guild.

“I came here after receiving an introduction from the guild. More details are here.”

“Ugh..!”

The man accepted the letter of introduction and looked over it with a serious expression on his face. He nodded, folded the letter of introduction, and put it in his pocket.

“You are precious people. Would you like to come this way?”

I never expected to receive such a sensible and polite response from the blacksmith shop.

Wasn’t that the place where the old man insisted, saying, “I won’t make weapons for these kids until I see their skills with my own eyes!!”

I walked down the stairs that seemed to lead down to the basement, following the door the man had opened. For some reason, I felt like the temperature was rising. If it wasn’t my imagination, Ayla was fanning herself.

I continued down the spiral staircase, opened the door, and passed through what I had imagined to be the blacksmith shop itself. It was filled with hot air, and the sound of metal striking could be heard everywhere, making my ears numb.

Even a quick glance showed numerous craftsmen smelting some kind of metal. The man continued to head inward, and only stopped when he reached the deepest part.

No matter where you looked, the master of this blacksmith shop… or should I say, the most skilled? I don’t know the terminology well, but in any case, he definitely looked like the most skilled person. With skin that was shiny copper and thick muscles trained through hard blacksmith work. With his brows that were furrowed and his lips that were tightly shut, he looked like a true blacksmith.

Perhaps he was taking a break after finishing his work, when the clerk who introduced us quietly approached him, whispered something in his ear, and then stepped back.

The blacksmith stood up and approached us. He seemed quite large even when he was sitting, but when he stood up, he was truly enormous. He was almost as big as the Bearclaw instructor. If he was even holding a huge club, it would be enough to make you think he was a warrior of great skill. The man opened his mouth.

“I apologize for making you take such a long journey. I am Ravin, the master of this blacksmith shop.”

..it was a very polite greeting.

It was a very obvious and sensible response, but I felt a little disappointed and opened my mouth as the representative.

“Thank you for your polite response, Ravin. The reason we came here is not special.. We heard that you are the greatest blacksmith in this area, so we asked you to use your skills to make our weapons.”

“I am grateful for your high praise. However… If it were an ordinary sword, the ones I have are skilled enough, so the swords they made would be more than enough. If not, do you need a sword that has been magically processed?”

The words were polite, but I could tell that it was meant to imply, ‘Do you think a punk like you would need the sword I made?’ Well, it wasn’t particularly strange to think that way. I slowly took out the sword I had. I could sense that Mathias and Ayla were embarrassed, but I ignored them.

I was able to strengthen the sword with magic power, increasing its cutting power and strength to levels that were hard to believe for a normal metal, and this was the method used by most swordsmen. However, this did not mean that the sword was completely free of damage. The sword that had cut through and shattered the bones of an ogre, which was hard to compare to normal metal, already had teeth in some places.

But I didn’t just take out my sword to see it damaged like this. I focused my magic power on strengthening my right hand, grabbed the tip of the sword, and broke it.

Knock, knock, knock. As I exerted my strength and bent my hand, the blade broke as much as my small hand could hold. Every time I let go of the broken blade, the sound of metal hitting the ground rang out. Ravin’s eyes widened as if he had seen something unbelievable. It would have been difficult for me to do, but since the sword had been used up quite a bit, I was able to do it with relative ease.

“..I think the story will be long, so please come inside.”

“Willingly.”

Ravin led us to a place that was either a break room or a private space inside, and I followed him, throwing away my useless sword.