The Monster Was Smiling

A roar of the kind that felt like it could crush the heart on sound alone — striking straight at instinct.

Aiz, hearing it from the upper floor of the Sherwood Firm branch, instinctively took two steps back — and even that wasn't enough. She dropped into a crouch, both arms wrapped around herself.

"U-uwah…"

The first roar had been the worst. After that, what came up through the floorboards was a more intermittent thing — staccato cries, and the muffled impacts of something hard hitting something hard. If it carried up from the basement at this volume, what was actually happening down there must have been something else.

Elma drew Aiz's shoulders against her, and once Aiz's heart had settled enough to hear, the next sound she made out was Shaw's sigh.

"…Hh."

A full-body shrug — or rather, a slumping. Shaw continued.

"That, just now, definitely carried. — Yes, it did."

Speaking and giving himself the confirming nod was, in its way, slightly comic.

"Mūzeg's pursuers haven't sniffed us out here yet, and connecting that roar to a party of Demon Lords wouldn't be the first guess anyone made… but. We did want to not draw attention…"

The advantage of skipping the first town was giving them a small breath of room. The fact that they hadn't yet been an hour in the Duchy of Neuce Gauss — same.

Without those buffers, they'd have been hustling toward the east gate at full nervous tilt, scanning every face for trouble.

That said — they hadn't been wasting time. The two-hour reconvene had been tight; they'd done their job and arranged the transport. The few minutes' wait before the others returned was, on that footing, a precious breather.

A mere ten minutes.

— But—

"And here we are using those ten minutes to fix a sick land dragon. That, I have to say, remains a properly outlandish way to operate."

Another sigh from Shaw.

He'd already, at this point, granted Merea a healthy distance from any normal scale. Still, the man kept finding new things to do, and Shaw was running out of room to be surprised in.

"Honestly. Whatever you have to do to make a land dragon that looked half-dead earlier into a thing that could roar like that…"

The floor was shaking; the stone walls of the firm were creaking in protest.

What kind of magic, exactly?

He'd not heard of any medicinal formula that worked on 〈Fatal Draconic Disease〉. Which left — magic, in the reasoning-free sense.

"Just to confirm — there isn't a medicinal-formula for 〈Fatal Draconic Disease〉, is there?"

He turned to Zaido.

"There isn't. To begin with, sample availability is the issue — only dragons contract it, and once a dragon dies of it, the body leaves almost no diagnostic trace. Today's chance — actually seeing a pre-mortem case — was already considerable luck. Patient doesn't quite feel right as a word, mind. Another reason it resists treatment: the underlying pathogen is said to undergo troublesome mutation across generations."

"As of now, I'm keenly glad it isn't a human disease."

— So, magic, then. Or perhaps even sorcery.

Half-jesting; half-serious.

In any case, anything that could trigger thrashing of that magnitude was probably not the carefully-calibrated product of a rigorous medicinal formula. A toxic compound, perhaps. Shock therapy, perhaps. Something on the brute-force side of the field.

"…All right. Five more minutes. If Merea isn't up by then, we go down — much as I'd rather not. — And the horses haven't bolted, presumably?"

"They haven't. Fifteen horses moving through town would draw the eye, so I had them sent ahead to the east gate from the start."

"— Excellent."

Shaw, satisfied.

For some minutes after, the building absorbed the residual tremors from below. The shaking and the roars dropped away, slowly. Everyone waited for Merea and Marisa to come up.

---

They came up roughly four minutes after the first roar.

By the time Shaw's commentary had run out, the noise from the basement had already gone quiet.

Merea, climbing the stairs, had what looked like small cuts all over his body. His clothes, too, were torn here and there.

Marisa, unusually for her, also looked a little disarranged; but by the time she'd turned around at the top of the stairs, it was all back in place.

"Y-you — you're all right?!"

Aiz, noticing how much more worn Merea looked than even Marisa, was first to rush over.

Her face was tight with worry; her clenched fists were trembling.

Merea answered her with a smile, calmly.

"Mm. I'm fine. Just had a bit of a tussle with the dragon."

"For a regular human, a tussle with a land dragon translates immediately and unambiguously to death. That is not the proof of fine you think it is, you know?"

— Shaw, next to weigh in.

Merea turned to face him, the same untroubled smile.

"That dragon — I think it'll recover. I helped it on my own, so I won't say anything about how you handle it from here."

Recover.

At those words, Shaw was, again, properly speechless.

He hadn't thought 〈Fatal Draconic Disease〉 was really curable. A part of him had, in fact, been ready to suspect that Merea's real aim had been to grant the dragon a humane peace before the end.

"Said like that, do you think I can simply ignore it?"

Another sigh.

"Lately you have been butting into my gold-standard principle quite freely. While accumulating unrepayable debts, no less."

"Ha. Wasn't trying to."

"Whether you were or not, I take it seriously, you understand. Because I'm gold-standard, I'm exceptionally sensitive about ledger balances."

These were Shaw's true feelings.

Shaw thought of himself as a small-cunning, slightly sly type — and that exact temperament made him uncomfortable around debts of any real size. I dislike owing was an accurate read on him. Because he was attached to deals — deals being the form gold travelled in — he could not simply walk away from a real debt. Because he could not walk away, he preferred not to incur one.

But this man, Merea, kept stacking them up on him.

A healthy land dragon, as a commodity, was a thing of formidable value. The value of the dragon Zaido had bought — pinned to the floor by the disease — had just leapt back up the scale in the space of ten minutes. The Sherwood Firm was, effectively, going to make an enormous profit from this.

"Another debt," Shaw said, quietly.

He half-resented himself, in retrospect, for having casually said fine, please when Merea had floated the idea.

— I had Merea pegged wrong.

He'd assumed combat-specialised. Merea was, it turned out, a much wider creature than that — a vast monster whose hands could reach into a great many domains. From here on, applying ordinary common sense to the man was probably a mistake.

He'd told himself this since the engagement with Mūzeg, more than once. And yet — still — every time he braced his net of vigilance, Merea would break through it with some new method.

"…What a problem."

The last line was quiet enough that only Shaw himself would have heard it. Even saying it, he could hear that the tone underneath was a touch amused.

Then he turned his attention back to Merea.

The cuts on his face and arms had, somehow, vanished. They hadn't been deep, but the speed was beyond ordinary.

Shaw didn't bother being surprised at it any more.

Instead — reasoning that the torn clothes weren't going to fix themselves — he walked over to a folk costume of some region or other hanging on the firm's wall, picked it off, and lobbed it at Merea.

Change, his eyes said.

Merea caught the garment, caught the meaning, and began swapping outfits where he stood.

"So — we're about due, are we?"

He fumbled at the unfamiliar costume — how does this go on… — and with Marisa's help got himself through it. Head tilted, he turned to Shaw.

"Yes. If we run, we make the east gate two or three minutes before the appointed time."

"Then — let's go."

Merea went over, took Lilium — still asleep — from Elma's arms, and slung her onto his own back. Looking sidelong at Lilium's sleeping face, he said:

"Hah. She didn't even wake for that roar. Lilium has nerve."

A small laugh, on the way to the door.

Behind him: Elma. Aiz. Marisa.

Shaw, last —

"Hh. — This is no good. I find I've been doing a lot of sighing lately."

"My sympathies, Sherwood-sama."

— Zaido, by this point, had also reached an understanding of just how unusual Merea was, and was looking at Shaw with frank pity.

For people of their merchant temperament, unpredictable elements were not friends. In big trades, one read other merchants and routed shipments to outflank them — and the moment the read went wrong, the loss was correspondingly large. So unpredictable elements were not welcome. That was the read behind the pitying glance.

In response, Shaw said —

"Well — because he's unpredictable to anyone, the upside, when one rides it, can be correspondingly enormous."

Half pep-talk to himself. He waved at Zaido and started for the door.

"Manage the merchandise as you have. If pursuers from Mūzeg or elsewhere sniff the firm out — when that happens—"

"I know what to do. I owe Sherwood-sama a debt I cannot repay. They'll get nothing out of me, even at the threat of my life."

"Heart-warming. But — moderation. You can't earn money dead."

That was the last line. Shaw stepped through the door and was gone.

"Those people were like a storm…"

Zaido, fingertip to the monocle, shrugged.

"Well. Now and then, perhaps a storm isn't the worst thing."

There was — at the end of it — a small, pleased look on his face.