“You’re the real deal, hero. Tell you what: if you want one of my daughters, you can have her for free! Only problem is that there’s just one of
’em who isn’t married yet, my tenth, and she’s nine years old.”
“If I married a little girl, my reputation would go into the trash! Though, wow, you have ten daughters? How many kids do you have?”
“Well, let’s see. I had my first child at fourteen, and now that I’m forty-five, I’ve had twenty-three. Though if you include the brats I took in after their folks died in battle, it’s a nice, round fifty. Those penniless dumbasses are pretty much my kids, too, so…”
She looked to be in her mid-thirties, but she was actually forty-five? Huh.
Also, wow, that was a lot more children than I expected. It seemed the Dragons of the Scorching Sand were like a big family, with their matriarch running the show.
Salima went on to explain that every child she gave birth to was from a different father. Nearly all of them were the result of one-night stands with men she met in battle. She would occasionally exchange letters with them, and it turned out that all of the men who had impregnated her were now very successful in life. Using those connections, she tried to find foster parents for the kids she took in, in hopes of ultimately turning her subordinates into upstanding members of society.
“You’re a young ’un, right, hero? Could’ve sworn I had a daughter around your age… Oh, yeah. The one I had with that brainy guy, some son of a court magician. I named her Marfisa before he took her in. Wonder how they’re doing now. I sent him a few letters, but he never answered. Guess now that he’s a big-shot noble, he doesn’t have time to read letters from an
old fling, eh?”
She ended up in a lot of relationships over the years, and from time to time she would even fall in love. Sometimes, her partner would assume custody of their child, which left her sadly separated from her baby. As a woman who raised so many children despite that, even taking in orphans of war, she must have had her fair share of admirers.
Almost the entirety of the Dragons of the Scorching Sand were her children, either literally or figuratively, and it seemed the ones most motivated to go out and fight on the front lines of the development plan were her own kids. They were gearing up to take down the titan in hopes of giving their mom the easy life.
Her eldest son and one of the leaders of the mercenary group, Mahendra, was a thirty-year-old man and well suited to lead the Dragons of the Scorching Sand, a group that totalled about three thousand members.
Mahendra excelled both as a commander and as a warrior. He was the de facto leader of the group, Salima claimed, clearly rather proud of her son.
“They’re really willing to go out there and fight for their beloved mother, huh? That’s nice.”
“Hmph. All I did was feed my brats between battles, and now they’re getting high and mighty because they got a few subordinates to boss around.”
To hide her embarrassment, she insulted them and took a swig of tea. I hadn’t expected so many people to scold me over killing the titan yesterday, but at least today I learned that I’d done a good thing for Salima, so that her children and subordinates didn’t have to be sacrificed. She was a good person, and I knew she’d have been deeply wounded if the people who loved her so much died.
“So, did you come here just to thank me?”
“Nah, I’m also here so you can meet my little brats. We were hoping you’d want to work a job with us. I figured, I needed someone competent and reliable, and I couldn’t do better than the hero himself, right?”
I wouldn’t say I seemed especially reliable, if you just met me. If I’d picked up that reputation, it was all the temple’s doing. Though I could see the logic in saying, if I was good enough for the goddess, I was good enough for her.
“’Sides, the client said that it’d be even better if they got to meet the hero. Job’s probably gonna take about two weeks, including the trip there and
back.”
“You want me, a newlywed, to leave my wives for two whole weeks?”
Had this happened before I’d met Olivia, it would’ve been fine. But now that I was addicted to my two wives’ charms, a long separation from them would be tantamount to torture. I liked Salima, but I had to refuse.
“Well, if you really want to, I wouldn’t mind if you bring ’em along. The client is a noble guard, and he wants us to escort the princess of the United Kingdom of the Crater Isles to a secret harbor on the western coast after she finishes her talks with Prince Charles. If you bring your wives, maybe they could keep her company, yeah? They seem like well-bred women to me, so I expect they’d make nice conversation partners. None of my idiots knows how to talk to a princess, that’s for sure! Hahahah!”
Salima was playing this off like a small thing, but suspected there was more to it than she was letting on. The request sounded worrying, in its way, and the secrecy of it meant she could hardly refuse once she’d heard the details.
I later learned that, when her son received the request, Salima had an instant gut feeling that this job was going to go south in a hurry. Her next thought was to try to get me, the hero, in on it. That mercenary intuition, honed by the many battles she’d fought, would in time prove to be spot-on.