The fairy hunters froze at the sound of Challe’s voice.
The leader looked up at Challe, his face twitching.
“Allow me to say this again,” said Challe. “The fairies here belong to the Silver Sugar Viscount, Hugh Mercury. If you intend to hunt them anyway, I will run you through.”
“Wh-when a fairy harms a human, he gets put down, no matter the reason,” the leader said in a trembling voice.
Challe answered him with a smile. “Not a problem. There won’t be anyone around to complain, you see. Not after I plunge your corpses to the bottom of this lake. The fellow on the ground over there, and you, and the other four. Do you think I can’t handle this many human opponents?”
The last few moments had shown the men how capable Challe was.
The boss was looking worse and worse by the second, his throat tightening against the tip of Challe’s blade as he swallowed repeatedly.
“Got it. These fairies belong to the Silver Sugar Viscount. We’ll leave them be.”
“Did you hear that? All of you over there, cast your swords, arrows, and chains into the lake.”
With his sword still leveled, Challe called out to the fairy hunters in the distance. They looked at one another like they weren’t sure what to do. Ultimately, however, they took the swords at their waists, the chains in their hands, and the arrows on their backs and tossed them into the lake.
Challe stared intently at the man below him, even as he listened to the splashes coming from the center of the lake. A cold, murderous impulse smoldered in his heart—the desire to go ahead and skewer the cruel hunters who were doing this.
Even with a blade thrust in his face, the fairy hunter stubbornly put on a brave front. “We threw everything away,” he said. “You should be satisfied with that.”
“Are you going to continue to hunt fairies, even after this?” Challe asked in a frigid voice.
Anne must have sensed something behind his question. She stood up and called his name in a pleading tone.
“Challe?!”
The fairy hunter’s leader bared his teeth. “’Course we will. That’s our job.”
“And you’re not inclined to quit?”
“We’ll quit when there’s no one left buyin’.”
At those words, Challe felt his murderous urge begin to fade.
Even these fools are just pieces of a bigger picture.
He pulled his blade away. Then he confiscated the sword at the fairy hunter’s hip and threw it as hard as he could toward the lake.
“Enough,” he said. “Get out of my sight.”
The lead fairy hunter stood up cautiously. Then he signaled to his companions with his eyes and had them support their wounded comrade. Glancing backward now and then, they soon disappeared, following the river.
After watching them go, the fairies breathed a sigh of relief and rose to their feet. Allele, however, squared his shoulders and stalked over to Challe.
“Why did you let them leave?! You should have killed them! They might get more weapons and chase us down again! Even if they don’t come after us, they’re going to hunt different fairies somewhere else!”
As Challe shook his hand and dematerialized his sword, he turned his gaze on Allele and the other fairies behind him.
“As long as there is a system of buying and selling of fairies, humans like those will always be around. Killing them would accomplish little. If we want to eradicate them for good, we need to change the structure of this world.”
“It’ll never change. Dream on,” someone muttered.
Then Anne, who had been standing alone among the fairies, shook her head. “The thing about dreams,” she said, “is that if no one ever acts on them, they remain dreams no matter how much time passes. We want to change things, and that’s why we want you all to come back.” At her forceful words, the fairies began to glance at one another.
Anne seemed to be desperately searching for the right thing to say before she continued.
“If fairies can have jobs and earn money,” she said, “they’ll be able to make a living. Then even if fairy hunters try to take them, the people of the town will protect the fairies, since they need them to do their jobs. And we do need you. You can start out living with humans and then, little by little, build villages and towns for fairies.”
When he heard that, Allele’s lip trembled, and he balled his hands into fists. He began, with difficulty, to shout. “But we want freedom right now! I want to go search for Farrel!!”
“Say you do find her—will the two of you keep running forever in fear of fairy hunters?” Challe asked calmly. “Wandering around the forest and the wastelands, scrounging for food like beasts? Will you and that woman be satisfied with that sort of life?”
Allele hung his head and bit his lip.
“It’s been a little more than a day since you left Hollyleaf Castle. In the time you’ve had your freedom, what have you learned?” Challe demanded.
The fairies’ faces stiffened, as if a sword had been thrust before their eyes.
“Let me tell you. You’ve learned that the fairy world has collapsed,” Challe continued. “That even the songs we ought to be singing have vanished. If fairies were content to live like wild beasts, they never would have cultivated silver sugar, and they wouldn’t have chosen a leader. But we aren’t beasts, and we wanted to live good lives, which is why we created a society, crowned a king, made sugar candy, and sang songs.”
The fairies were alive. However, the world they were supposed to live in no longer existed. They had neither the skills nor the structures to make clothes, neither the land nor the mechanisms to produce their own food. There was no surviving fairy literature for them to read, nor even songs for them to sing.
Though the fairies were well aware of that, Challe wanted them to look directly at the truth they refused to face.
Suddenly, Allele groaned and fell to his knees. He let out muffled sobs as he wept.
Challe stared at him and continued in a dispassionate tone, “In order to resurrect the fairy world, we could do battle against humans again—that would be one way. But I can’t say with certainty we would win, given our overwhelmingly inferior numbers. Both humans and fairies would be worse for it, and the land would fall into ruin.”
In the face of Challe’s relentless wake-up call, the wings on the backs of the fairies wilted, as if they were gradually losing strength.
The facts must have hit home for them over the course of the day. Even if they took their wings back and got their freedom, there was no place where fairies could live happily.