From that point onward, the two of us silently applied ourselves to our hunt. My posture was terrible, sure, but that terrible posture happened to be the most efficient pose for whacking crocodiles on the ground! Plus, though I had a feeling I looked pretty bored, that couldn’t have been further from the truth!
“Hup, hup, hup! Hup, hup, hup, hup, hup, hup, hup!”
My hammer was a blur, smacking crocs at a breakneck pace. They fell victim to blunt force trauma one after the next.
Now these are the movements of an old lady who’s been working the same job for sixty years plus! I remember seeing old ladies who were astonishingly good at opening up shellfish in no time flat, and now I’m one of them, in a sense! I may look like I’m scowling, but deep down inside, I’m actually enjoying myself!
Eno was hammering away at the crocodiles in silence as well, by the way, and it wasn’t long before the other witches had started talking about us behind our backs.
“That old lady’s incredible!” “It’s like she’s been hitting crocodiles her whole life!” “You go, granny!”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Whoever just called me a granny, you’re gonna regret it!”
✦ ✦ ✦
“Crap! She heard us!” “Run! Run!”
I saw you, and I remember your face! Just you wait until I look like a seventeen-year-old again a couple days from now! You’d better not complain when a young and chipper teenage witch shows up at your doorstep looking for revenge!
Right now, though, I’ve gotta focus on beating these crocodiles! I’ll keep pounding them into the ground until there aren’t any left!
Something about this situation felt weirdly nostalgic to me, though I couldn’t understand why. I’d been through a lot, sure, but I definitely would’ve remembered if I’d ever pounded hordes of crocodiles with a hammer before.
Oh! I get it now.
✦ ✦ ✦
This is a little like my slime-killing lifestyle, in a sense.
✦ ✦ ✦
It wasn’t a perfect equivalent, though. For one thing, the crocodiles appeared way quicker than the slimes did back home.
Just then, a shining, rainbow-colored crocodile materialized just nearby.
“Miss Azusa, that crocodile’s worth as many points as fifty of the normal ones! It’s way faster than the normal ones, too, though! We have to catch—” Eno shouted, but I’d already smacked it into the ground before she could finish.
“No need to worry. By the time I see something vaguely crocodile-shaped, I’m already moving to whack it.”
✦ ✦ ✦
About three minutes after I beat the bonus crocodile, a rather creepy cry that sounded like it came from some sort of bird echoed through the forest, signifying that our time was up.
“I guess that’s it! I can’t wait to hear the results,” Eno said as she brandished her hammer. She seemed pretty satisfied with herself.
I, on the other hand, just muttered, “Phew! Finally over. Hrrmph,” as I sat down on a nearby stump.
“What? No, no, this is no time to rest! We have to go back to hear who won, or we’ll be disqualified! That means we won’t win any prizes!”
“Well, now that I’m sitting down, I’d like to take about ten minutes or so to stay still.”
“I’ll give you candy if you can just get through this one last push!”
“This isn’t a problem you can solve with candy. I’m feeling sleepy, so wake me up in twenty minutes or so.”
“That’s even longer than your last estimate! Okay, fine—I’ll carry you if I have to!”
Eno did just that, picking me up and carrying me piggyback to where the event had started.
✦ ✦ ✦
I’d had a feeling I’d done a pretty good job, and when our scores were announced, I learned I’d been right.
“In first place: Eno and Azu Liliri, with 7,524 points! That’s more than five hundred points above our second-place finishers, making for a decisive victory!”
At the announcer’s urging, Eno and I stepped forward to the front of the group. The other witches applauded us, and I heard one of them say, “Oh, that’s the old lady from before” as well. Thankfully, the one who’d called me a granny was nowhere to be seen.
Eno received a rather valuable assortment of medicinal herbs as her prize for taking first place. It would’ve looked like a pile of weeds to anyone not in the know, but to witches like us, it was a substantial gift. I could really understand why Eno looked so ecstatic when they handed it over to her.
I guess playing to win was the right idea, after all. Just leaving with a participation prize would’ve been a waste.
✦ ✦ ✦
After that, the social gathering began in earnest, and a number of different witches tracked me down for a chat. Winning the contest had earned me quite a lot of attention, though, and since I looked like an old lady at the moment, I couldn’t go around introducing myself as the Witch of the Highlands. As such, whenever someone asked me a probing question…
“Oh, I’m sorry. I just can’t seem to recall! Hmm, hmm, hmm!”
…I would feign forgetfulness until they gave up and dropped the subject. I didn’t want to risk accidentally letting my guard down and answering a question in a way that exposed my identity, so instead, I dodged them altogether.
“What’s your secret to staying healthy in your old age, ma’am?” asked a witch who looked like an actual child.
I mean, considering most of the witches here are pretty long-lived themselves, you could easily be a couple hundred years old, too, for all I know! But anyway, as far as an actual answer goes…
“My secret is not dying,” I replied. I knew it wasn’t a great answer, but it got me through that conversation, at least.
In the end, I got to meet all sorts of witches at the event, and I decided it might be worth attending more of them every once in a while in the future. I wasn’t interested in participating as the Witch of the Highlands, though, so if I did, I’d have to find a way to change my appearance again…
The event wrapped up without a hitch, and I returned to the house in the highlands aboard Eno’s wyvern. She thanked me repeatedly for coming along, possibly on account of the prize she’d won.
“Thank you so much! I owe you for this, ma’am!”
“You’d better not get used to calling me that! Anyway, I’m just glad this curse didn’t end up fading away partway through the event. I was a little worried that might happen.”
This sort of problem always seemed to resolve itself the moment you got used to coping with it. Not that I wanted to stay like this my whole life, of course!
“When you put it that way, magical effects that can’t be removed by magical means do tend to have time limits! I’m sure it’ll go away before much longer,” said Eno.
“Yeah, I thought so. I think it’ll be about three more days, at most,” I replied.
I mulled over the possibilities as we headed home. In the end, I arrived back at the house in the highlands around nine in the evening.