“Sure, we can do that, but I don’t think I have anything left to tell you guys about mine. I’ve pretty much told you all there is to know.”
“Are you kidding? You haven’t told us anything! All you’ve done is casually mention your upbringing! I mean, come on! Fill us in on the important stuff, l-like...you know...if you’ve got a girlfriend! Or a cute childhood friend or something! You grew up in a nice place, right?”
“A g-girlfriend?! A cute childhood friend?!” Hester spluttered, repeating what Ralph had said. She seemed oddly flustered by this line of inquiry. “Do you...have someone like that, Chris?”
“A girlfriend...? If I had a girlfriend, I probably wouldn’t be this hung up on getting revenge—even though I did almost die.”
“So...you don’t have one, then?”
“Nope. No cute childhood friends either. Actually, I’ve never even had a guy friend before.”
“Wait... Seriously? You’ve never even had guy friends? What the hell kind of childhood did you have that you didn’t have any friends?”
“I already told you, remember? My dad drilled sword fighting into me practically since I was born. Any time I wasn’t doing that, I had lessons for reading and writing. The only thing I did for fun was sneak into the library and read heroic epics,” I said. Then, after a thoughtful pause, I added, “Actually, I don’t know if you’ll count this, but the greengrocer was always nice to me whenever I had to pick something up from him on an errand. Can I call him a friend?”
I asked that question in complete earnestness, but Ralph and Hester just ignored me.
Okay... Guess that’s a “no.”
“Fine. If I can’t count the greengrocer as a friend, then I didn’t have any,” I said.
“Your dad taught sword fighting, didn’t he? He must’ve had plenty of students, right?”
“There were some guys my age, but I trained separately from them. I probably only talked to them a handful of times.”
“Sounds like an awful environment to grow up in.”
“Honestly, I just thought that was the way things were supposed to be, so I never questioned it. Looking back on it now, though... I guess you’re right. I ran more laps and practiced sword fighting more than anyone.” At this point, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Heh... But despite all that, my physical stats are still worse than Hester’s. Crazy, right?”
“Dude, come on. This is serious.”
“It’s all right. I can laugh about it now that it’s all behind me. Just goes to show what a cruel rite of passage the Heaven’s Blessing Ceremony is, though, huh?”
My father had always assumed that the rigorous training he’d put me through as a kid would pay off somehow at the ceremony...but no such luck.
After all that effort, the only thing I had to show for it was my farmer affinity. Meanwhile, Claus, who’d just sat on his butt for his entire life, somehow managed to get a sword god affinity. That’d pretty much burst a hole into my father’s theory.
I had no idea if it came down to fate or just sheer dumb luck, but either way, I was certain now that the ceremony was the cruelest thing you could put someone through.
“And here I thought we were just gonna have some light banter, but you had to go and make everything heavy!”
“Well, what about you guys? Any boyfriends or girlfriends?”
“Please! I grew up on the streets, remember? Like I’d have time for something like romance.”
“I’m in the same boat as Ralph. My hands have been full just trying to survive. I haven’t had time to think about anything like that.”
“Sounds like you guys have had pretty rough lives too,” I said. “By the way, when did you first start working together? I just realized I’ve never heard the story behind that.”
They’d never spoken about how they’d met. Or, to put it more accurately, I guess I’d never asked. I’d always gotten the sense that the more I dug into their lives, the more sensitive the topic got, so I’d been purposefully avoiding it. But I wanted to know.
“I don’t actually remember how we met. Hester and I have known each other since we were really young. It’s gone now, but Hester was living at an orphanage, and I was living in a tent shantytown with my mom and stepdad,” Ralph began.
“That’s right. We’ve known each other since before we can even remember. I think we only started working together once the orphanage was destroyed, though,” Hester added.
“Your orphanage was destroyed? That’s awful...”
“It’s okay. It was a hellhole, actually, so that felt like a pretty just fate. It was basically a front to sell off kids. When it got destroyed, I heard that the other kids moved to another town to be looked after by the soldiers there, but...I was sure that my parents would come back to Realzahd for me one day, so I stayed behind by myself.”
“About a year before that, my mom disappeared,” Ralph said. “That just left me and my stepdad, who came into the picture a few years before. He was a real piece of shit. He’d just drink himself blind every day and go on violent rampages. I couldn’t fight back against him, so that’s when I became a pickpocket to make some money.”
Yep, that’s pretty bleak, all right.
Even the story of how they met was a heavy one.
“So... T-Tell me how you eventually teamed up, then,” I said.
“Don’t rush me, I’m getting there! After about a year of being a pickpocket, I messed up for the first time and had to go home empty-handed. That’s when my stepdad got really mad. I’d never seen him fly off the handle so bad before. The worst part was at the end, when he flung me off a high ledge. I landed on my left leg and hurt my knee really badly.”
“Right around that time, the orphanage had just been destroyed and I had nowhere to go. So, when I found Ralph collapsed on the road, I did my best to nurse him back to health. We’ve been working together ever since.”
Hearing all of that, it felt like they had grown up in a completely different world.
I had some painful memories of my childhood, but they paled in comparison to Ralph’s and Hester’s.
“Yeah. It took about a week before I could walk again,” Ralph continued, picking up where Hester had left off. “I was so determined to escape my living hell and kill my stepdad that I dragged my lame leg all the way back home. But when I found him, he was surrounded by empty bottles. He’d just gone and keeled over without me. I’d been looking after him for the whole past year, and when I left him home alone for even just a week, he couldn’t manage to keep himself alive. What a laugh, right?”
“Hey, that’s pretty serious,” I said, echoing Ralph’s comment from earlier.
“Well, I didn’t get to have my revenge, but at least I managed to sever ties with him. To thank Hester for taking care of me, I told her about this old house that’d been abandoned for ages, and the two of us started living there together.”
“Right... And the two of you just kept picking pockets until I entered the scene?” I asked.