We reached the village just before dawn. When we called at the village chief’s manor, all of her servants were asleep, but it was urgent—we banged on the door to the entrance hall over and over again until the usual servant girl appeared, rubbing her eyes sleepily.
I had seen this girl any number of times now, but she always seemed a little freaked out by me. However, when she caught sight of Wak’wakgoro, gorgeous Camulla, and Nishka, something convinced her this was important.
She didn’t say much, but she hurried to the back of the house to wake Gimul, and soon after the village chief herself appeared, looking like an exhausted wreck. We were led to the village chief’s office, where she sat in her own personal armchair.
At first, she dismissed our report entirely.
“What? The bull-kin have built a city at the heart of the cave?”
“I don’t know how they got labeled as barbarians,” I said, “because they have a very advanced culture.”
“Ah, I see that you haven’t given up this ridiculous joke of yours, this secret civilization of amazing bull-kin. And I suppose they can fly, and shoot lasers from their eyes. Fart gold, too?”
“Unfortunately, this isn’t a joke, ma’am.”
“So you’re telling me,” she said, rubbing her eyes, “that there really is a city in that cave?”
“I don’t come from this area, so I don’t know exactly what qualifies as a city or a town, but they’ve built tons of houses that are way nicer than the thatched roofs and mud walls of our village. They’ve also decorated their walls with colorful designs. That sounds like a civilization to me.”
“Designs, hm?”
The village chief eyed me suspiciously, but neither Wak’wakgoro nor Nishka interrupted me even once. They had seen the same things I had.
Fuzzball merely stood by, his expression completely empty and his thoughts as unreadable as ever. He didn’t deny what I said, either. Gah, he was so cute, it was a bit of a shame that he wasn’t a girl. W-wasn’t it? I mean, it wasn’t a shame, or no, I mean…uh, look, it was confusing.
“As you may know, culture doesn’t develop unless people have surplus energy for their minds.” As an almost-archeologist, I knew a decent amount about how civilizations developed. “Meaning that all these minotaurs are leading lives that afford them plenty of surplus. Their world is stable. They have leisure time. As far as we could see, even though night had fallen, their houses were lit. We heard laughing, conversation, bull-kin socializing late into the night.”
“You’re saying they’re well-off enough that they can just…waste oil to stay up late and laugh?”
“Yes, ma’am. I realize it isn’t my place to say so, but oil is so precious for us that once the sun sets, we go to sleep not long after. Even for you, our village chief, candles and lantern oil are luxuries, correct?”
“Hmph!”
I glanced over at Wak’wakgoro and Nishka. Nishka huffed through her nose, suggesting she agreed with me.
“That’s true. And according to these two,” Wak’wakgoro continued, “the minotaurs were speaking the same language as us. Meaning that we could potentially come to an understanding with them.”
“So they even understand our language? But…hmm. If their culture is really so advanced, I suppose that only makes sense…”
“I would say at a rough estimate, there were maybe two, three hundred of them. Enough to take us on if we tried to fight.”
“Are you telling me this is your instinct as a warrior, Shooter?”
The village chief stared at me as if this were some kind of test. Her fingers toyed with the collar of her negligée, like she was…nervous. Everything I’d seen of her was the very definition of a warrior, but everyone in the room was focused on me as if I were the only real fighter on hand.
In reality, I was more of a part-time warrior—not really a warrior at all by the standards of Earth, in my humble opinion. But I used to do karate, so I was okay in one-on-one combat, I guess. And I had performed well enough with katas to win third place at a regional competition.
The village chief kept looking at me with a stony expression, so I summoned up my assessment. “Well, given the population we estimated based on the number of houses we saw, as I said, we can assume they have around three hundred people. Half of those would be men, and I’d estimate another half of those would be men capable of fighting. That’s seventy, at least. Even if we called up every single combat-capable person in this village, those seem like steep odds to me.”
Every now and then, the village chief looked at me with this stern expression. She’d used it when she imprisoned me in the stone tower, too, but I didn’t think the look meant anything bad. It showed a kind of trust, I thought.
You see, I used to be a manager at a convenience store. I worked part-time at one of the corporate-owned ones, to be specific, so when they built a new franchise location, they picked me to be part of the initial staff. The up-and-coming manager was a woman about the same age as me, and she had a similar air to the village chief.
Working on that initial staff was brutal. Thing was, though half the staff were battle-tested veterans with work experience, the other half were people who’d never worked in a convenience store before. When I asked the manager and the support staff of the main company why they’d hired people with no relevant experience for an opening, they all told me the same thing: “We want people who haven’t been influenced by other companies’ policies.”
That is, they wanted people they could mold into whatever they wanted.
When the other manager put the young college or high school students through training, teaching them the basics of having a part-time job and running a convenience store, she would always stare straight into their eyes. She did this partly to make sure they didn’t brush her off because she was a woman, and partly so the kids wouldn’t dare to look away from her.
I don’t think she was a day over twenty-five at the time, but she still taught me a lot of valuable lessons, despite the fact that I was busy goofing off doing low-paying side-jobs. Most importantly, she taught me to look someone in the eyes while talking to them.
I returned the village chief’s gaze as solemnly as I could and, very suddenly, she blushed ever so slightly and glanced away.
I felt Cassandra, who was standing beside me, grab my vest. Hard. What? Hold on, had I done something wrong?
“Gimul! How many warriors can we muster from our territory?” the village chief asked.
“But ma’am!” I thought I’d explained why capturing and enslaving the minotaurs was impossible. Had I failed to convince her?
Her tone hardening slightly, she called to her stepson in annoyance. “Gimul. I asked you a question.”
Gimul nodded. “At the top of the list I’d put Shooter, then the five warriors living in this manor. Putting together all the people with past experience as adventurers or soldiers, and adding in all the hunters in the surrounding settlements, we might get up to about thirty people. If we include the active-duty adventurers we brought to the village, that would increase our numbers, but adventurers work on a contractual basis, so if they refuse…”
“We have less than half the forces they do, then.”
“Ma’am, you can’t seriously be considering…” Gimul was at a loss for words, staring down at his stepmother as she mulled the problem.