Once we returned home from the worksite that night, I planned to freshen up and then take Tanne d’Arc to the village chief’s manor with us. Usually I’d report on the progress with Nishka or the head carpenter, since they were helping me oversee the site. But today, Alexandricia had made the strange request for me to bring my family instead.
“C-certainly. By family, you mean my two wives?”
“Elpaco lives with you, too, doesn’t he? And that—what do you call it—that little frilled lizard of yours?”
“You want me to bring Basil? But why?”
I squinted suspiciously at the village chief’s command. She always seemed so spontaneous, even if I knew that she was one of the long-game types.
She’d been watching me with amusement that afternoon at the worksite. As I asked her, she coughed slightly and said, “You wound me, my dear elder brother. Now that Gimul is a pledge with the bull-kin, my dinner table feels so empty. Didn’t I tell you to come visit from time to time? So…what do you think?”
“I think you might have another motive,” I replied ambiguously. The village chief really did seem to have something in mind. But whatever little observations I made, I couldn’t exactly refuse her.
When evening came and work was done for the day, we usually trickled back to the village in twos and threes along the well-trodden deer trail. On the way home, I turned to look back at Elpaco, who was at the rear of our group, and asked him something that had been on my mind. “Elpaco?”
“Hm?”
“Do you feel like someone’s watching us again?”
I was referring to the feeling Elpaco had gotten on our way to the worksite at the very beginning of the day, before we’d started work at the lakeshore. Thinking back on it now, I couldn’t help wondering what had been watching us with that nearly tangible malevolence…
But hey, I know karate. You get a sense about these things. Whoever watched us had a reason for doing so. There was no doubt about that.
Slowly but surely, ever since starting my new life in this fantasy world, my intuition was growing sharper.
Humans have a great capacity to adapt to their environment. I remember reading in a book that special forces soldiers honed their minds to the utmost, learning to a kind of “battle-mode sleep.” I guess you could say they were just hypersensitive and only lightly dozing, but a person’s body manages to recover strength even when they only get shallow rest, so it was worth it for these soldiers to learn to sleep pretty much anywhere.
Along those lines, I had learned that Elpaco, being a hunter, was capable of a kind of “hunting-mode sleep.” I suppose caution was only to be expected from a foxling, but he always seemed somehow placid, whether he was conscious or not.
Not that I could do anything like Elpaco or some tactical espionage agent; once I got home to my hunter shack, I flopped down like anyone else and had a pleasant night’s sleep with my family. Or rather, given the fact that every day was brimming with pulled muscles and backbreaking labor, I’d have a pleasant “passing out the moment I hit bed.”
Especially because it wasn’t like I could do any fun, giggly, moany stuff in a one-room shack, whether or not Tanne d’Arc and I were newlyweds.
“There’s nothing right now,” said Elpaco, shaking me out of my reverie. “I only felt it that one time.”
“What if it happened before and we just never noticed it?”
“Could’ve, I guess. This was probably the first time, but if they stayed downwind? I wouldn’t know either way.”
“Ugh.”
“Nishka might know better than me.”
At that, an uneasy look came over Cassandra’s face. “Do you think it’s safe leaving Tanne home by herself?”
“If she stays home, she’s got all the villagers nearby to protect her.”
“But the only neighbors who’ll have anything to do with us are the other hunter families.”
“You’re worried she’s being ostracized?”
Tanne d’Arc had been the one to stay home today, but usually she and Cassandra took turns with that. I could see how that could get depressing.
It was true that since Elpaco, Tanne d’Arc, and I had started living in the hunter shack, the neighbors had never once interacted with us. The only people who acknowledged us were Wak’wakgoro and his brothers while I was gone and Gimul when he was poking his nose in.
But the village shunned all the hunters and, as far as I knew, always had. From the villagers’ perspective, a family of folk that hunted but regularly failed to bring back any catches were no better than freeloaders.
Well, I called it shunning, but then I remembered how almost no villagers had attended the funerals for the first victims of the fight with the wyvern. Back in Japan, that was a no-go. You’d get at least that bare minimum of acknowledgment for a passing, if not the usual respect.
“You’re so accomplished that everyone in the village has to start recognizing you eventually, Shooter,” said Cassandra brightly.
“Yeah, she’s right.”
I felt conflicted letting my wife and puppy-boy bolster my ego like a couple of hype men. I’m not so twisted that praise makes me feel guilty, but once people start expecting things of me, I have to meet their expectations. And I’ve never found that easy.
“I-I guess so. But anyway, let’s focus on giving our report to Alexandricia and coming up with a plan.”
“Um, all right…”
“We don’t want anything to go wrong during construction, and we can’t allow anything to inflame the situation while the settlement is being built.”
“Shooter, you called the village chief by her first name again…”
“Oops…”
I’d let that ambiguous bit of familiarity with the village chief slip out of my inner monologue again. Unable to face Cassandra’s frown, I hurried ahead.