“Come to think of it, I heard from my brother that he was finally able to enter your barrier.”
“Is that the kind of thing you two talk about?”
“We don’t actually talk all that often. It seems like it kind of bothers him how much you don’t like him, though.”
“He sure doesn’t act like it does.” Sara was surprised to hear this.
“He asked me once if there was something about him that younger people didn’t like. I told him that his subordinates like him and so do most women, so it probably wasn’t younger people in particular.”
“Pfft.” Allen, who was nearby, burst out laughing. “Yeah. I think it’s just that our ways of thinking don’t gel.”
Sara couldn’t even imagine a dejected Liam, but she had to admit she felt a little bad knowing that he hadn’t been completely unaffected by her cold treatment of him.
“I wouldn’t say that I don’t like him. If I had to say, he’s sort of like the older brother of a friend of mine who lives in another town.”
“Sounds like you don’t care much about him at all. Well, he is my brother.”
After a fun plant-gathering session, Noel seemed to have come to some decision.
“Coming down to the middle floors, I’ve realized that you can gather the basic medicinal plants pretty much anywhere. I’d like to go down to the deeper floors with you, but we can do a survey of the middle floors with just the Apothecary’s Guild if we hire guards.”
“I did the whole thing myself in Hydrangea, though,” Sara said ruefully.
She was planning on going deeper after her lessons with the knights, even if the dungeon’s size meant that it would take a while, but Noel shook his head.
“The distribution can change, and we could find new plants at some point. If we rely on you completely for it, we wouldn’t be able to update it when you go back to Hydrangea or move somewhere else.”
Caren planned to hire guards for the apothecaries in Hydrangea just so that didn’t happen there.
“Though it’d be way cheaper to rely on you for it all, though, to be honest.”
“True.”
If people other than Sara were doing it, they’d need more than just one guard, and if they had to pay attention to their surroundings, the areas they could search would be limited. It would take not only more money but more time to survey the large central dungeon.
“But that’s why you can’t sell yourself short, Sara. Even to the Apothecary’s Guild.”
Sara was happy Noel felt that way.
“Who knows when or why you might be leaving the capital, after all. Show me a bunch of the deeper floors while you can, Sara.”
“Yes, yes.”
With Sara’s barrier, she didn’t mind taking Noel into the dungeon whenever he requested her presence. She learned with the knights, and went into the dungeon with Ann, Noel, and everyone else on her breaks, surveying the dungeon for its medicinal plants. Guildmaster Chester got a bit too excited when they found supreme healing herbs in the lower floors, but unfortunately they had yet to find any silver dragonmint.
They’d come to the capital in spring, but before long, cold winds were blowing and it was the season for migrating dragons. Sara had been eighteen when she’d first come to the capital, but at some point she’d turned nineteen.
“With the end of the year, our classes with the knights are over too!”
It was supposed to be a full year of lessons, starting at the beginning of the year, but since Sara and Ann had joined partway through, they’d been sent home with a lot of homework every day just like Allen and Kuntz had the year before.
“But we’re former Japanese people, so...”
“We’ve already dealt with standardized testing and entrance exams.”
Sara and Ann high-fived. The material might have been new to them, but studying for long periods of time was not. They caught up with the other trainees quickly and were soon able to borrow books from the library to read.
“I used to like books so much, but it’s like I forgot how fun it could be to read.”
She learned that when you were healthy, you were able to concentrate enough to read so much more than when you were exhausted.
“I feel like I can understand why Bradley holed himself up on the Dark Mountain with all his books.”
Of course, she loved working as an apothecary with her healthy body as well. When she finished learning with Ann and the knights at the end of the year, she planned to start working at the Apothecary’s Guild in earnest.
“So we’ll be doing different stuff next year. I’ll miss you,” Ann said.
“Let’s talk at night to make up for it. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to share.”
In the beginning, Allen, Kuntz, and Haruto had worked hard to teach the knights all they could. But the knights had always been strong. As soon as they got the basics of Kuntz’s shield magic down, they improved by the day and soon didn’t need any more instruction.
“I wish people would stop calling it ‘Kuntz’s shield magic,’” Kuntz lamented, but the name had stuck.
As soon as they’d determined that their guidance was no longer necessary, the group of them had started diving into the central dungeon. There had been a long period where they hadn’t been able to hunt as much as they wanted, so as soon as Allen and Kuntz were able to explore the same areas, there was no need for them to hold back anymore. Plus, they had Haruto with them.
With no one to tell them what to do, the three of them ran around the lower floors of the dungeon as much as they wanted. But that wasn’t all that they did; a few times a week, they taught rookie Hunters, and anyone who requested it of them could receive lessons in shield magic or Invited spells. There were a lot of Hunters in the capital, and they didn’t do organized training like the knights, so it was hard to say if their overall strength was improving as a group, but at the very least, the rookies were able to make more money.
Migrating dragon hunts with the knights were going well too. Personal requests to Hunters were mostly just to keep watch, and the Hunters didn’t actually have to intervene much these days.
“Man, when I was here, they were relying on me, Miss Nelly, and Bradley for everything. Now I just have to sit here and watch.”
Haruto, who’d accepted one of those requests, was bored enough to grumble.
Nelly and Chris were supposed to visit at the end of the year. Sara couldn’t wait to see them.
“I can’t believe I didn’t even get wrapped up in anything. I’ve never had such a smooth year before.”
“Hey, cut that out. That’s foreshadowing!”
Haruto was quick to stop her, but what was wrong with everything going smoothly?
There were even days when she could think such naive thoughts...
“We got an emergency message from Rosa.”
It seemed training was over for the rookie knights as well.
“They’ve spotted an enormous herd of cotton sheep in the meadow east of Rosa.”
Sara couldn’t help smiling nostalgically at this news. She thought back to saving those young Hunters with Allen once upon a time.
“It’s rare for the herds to get so big in the winter, but they all seem to be heading south without dispersing, so Rosa wanted to give the capital a heads-up. If those sheep make their way here, you’ll be participating in the mission even if you’re trainees, so be prepared.”
The trainees didn’t seem to know what to make of this news.
“Cotton sheep? Like those sheep candies?”
“Is it a big enough deal that they have to warn us about it?”
Monsters were part of their lessons, but there wasn’t much opportunity to see them in person living in the capital, so the threat must not have seemed real to these people.
She might have been acting like a bit of a busybody here, but Sara explained to them, “I’ve seen them and they’re about as big as...from the desk to here. They’ve got thick wool and attacks don’t really do much to them. I once saw a horned rabbit attack one and get stuck in its wool. Their legs are strong enough to break rocks, and when there’s a herd of them that fills the whole meadow, there’s pretty much nothing you can do about them. They’re a real problem, so you’ll really have to be careful.”
Sara did her best to explain things to the trainees, but they didn’t react much to the information, having not witnessed it themselves.
Now that she thought about it, they’d gotten caught up in some cotton sheep trouble when they were crossing the mountains over from Gardenia last spring, hadn’t they? By the time she remembered that and thought to add it to her explanation, people were already heading to the dining hall for lunch.
“It’s flat around the capital, so I don’t think they’ll destroy any roads or anything...”
“But they could destroy any fields they go across.”
“That wouldn’t be good.”
“Nope.”