The coldest months soon passed, and while patches of snow still lingered across the frontier, the weather was generally mild and comfortable.
Spring had come to the village.
“Is your, um, rear feeling better now?” I asked.
“Y-Yes, thanks for asking,” Leoninus, the chief of the elves, answered with a slightly embarrassed expression. He’d been having trouble walking for a while, so I was glad to see he’d made a full recovery.
“It’s so odd. There have been quite a few people who’ve been complaining about butt pain after moving here. Do you have any idea what might be causing it?”
“N-No, can’t say I do...” Leoninus’s eyes darted away for some reason.
Philia also seemed in pain recently. I hoped there wasn’t some kind of bizarre illness going around the village. But as the mayor, it was my responsibility to get to the bottom of it.
(“I can’t tell him that the bidet felt so good I used it until I got hemorrhoids...and that my daughter did the same thing...”)
“Did you say something, Leoninus?” I asked.
“N-Nope, nothing at all! Anyway, Lord Luke... I must thank you once again for everything you’ve done for us.”
He was clearly trying to change the subject, but I decided not to press him.
“So I hear your village is completely rebuilt now?”
“Yes. Thanks to your help, we can finally return home.”
“I’m very glad to hear that.”
At last, it was time to say goodbye to the elves who’d spent the winter here with us. Since an underground passage connected our settlements, however, we could visit each other whenever we wanted, so it wasn’t goodbye forever.
“Are you okay with us keeping the tunnel open?” I asked.
“Of course! We hope to maintain friendly relations with you moving forward,” Leoninus said. He paused, hesitant. “There is one thing... It seems that some of my people hope to remain in your village.”
“Really?” I wasn’t expecting that. I thought living here would be stressful for elves used to the forest. In fact, I even wondered if the stress was related to all the butt trouble going around. But hearing that some of them genuinely enjoyed living here made me genuinely happy.
“If it’s too much to ask, I can certainly talk to them and bring them back with me,” he said.
“No, not at all! As you can see, the village is full of immigrants. Besides, we’ve got plenty of living spaces and food.”
“D-Do you really mean it? They’re truly welcome to stay?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
The next day, the elves prepared to return to their rebuilt village—except for the few who’d decided to settle here instead. Everyone gathered in the plaza to say goodbye to the elves before they departed through the underground tunnel.
“Lord Luke, my deepest thanks on behalf of all the elves. I pray that this village continues to flourish.”
“Thank you, Leoninus. Please take care of yourself. Come visit anytime. You will always be welcome here.”
As chieftain, Leoninus would naturally return with the others. However, some villagers reported hearing Leoninus shouting in his apartment the previous night. Something like, “I don’t want to go! Don’t make me goooo!”
But it had probably just been their imaginations.
I wondered what Philia was going to do. She was the chief’s daughter after all, so she was probably returning as well.
“All right, my people! Let us return to our home!” Leoninus announced, turning to lead the elves down the tunnel.
Except not a single elf followed him. They stood there, exchanging glances, until Leoninus emerged from the tunnel a few minutes later.
“Hey! Why isn’t anyone following me?!” he asked.
“Well, I mean...” one of the elves said.
“Can you blame us?” another said.
“So no one’s going back, huh?” I wondered.
It didn’t seem like they were trying to prank him or anything. They looked a bit unsure, but it almost seemed like they’d been expecting this to happen.
One elf nervously stepped forward. “Isn’t it kind of obvious, Mayor?”
“What is?” I asked.
“Well, you said anyone who wanted to stay here was welcome to, so of course we’d all choose to stay.”
That opened up the floodgates for the rest of the elves to chime in.
“The food’s way better here than in the forest.”
“Yeah, and it’s safe! We don’t have to worry about monsters invading at night.”
“We can take baths whenever we want, and everything’s clean...”
“Plus, the mayor’s cute...”
“It doesn’t smell bad here.”
“The houses are warm, and the beds are really comfy!”
“Yeah, and the mayor’s adorable...”
“We can use as much hot water as we need.”
“This place is way more comfortable than our village!”
“And the mayor is absolutely precious...”
After every comment, Leoninus groaned and staggered like he’d been punched.
“Y-Yes, that all may be true!” he protested. “But we’ve lived in the forest for generations! Doesn’t that count for something? Don’t you have any attachments to it?”
“Not compared to this place!”
“Yeah, now that we know how comfortable this town is, there’s no way we can go back!”
“Yeah, we’re in too deep now. We’ve been changed forever.”
“Argh...” Leoninus turned toward his daughter with pleading eyes.
“I agree with everyone else,” she said.
“You do, Philia?”
He stared off vacantly into the distance. Now, even his own daughter had turned against him.
“Fine!” he suddenly snapped. “I’ll stay too!”
“But Chieftain, you can’t just leave the forest!”
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be insulting to our ancestors?”
“And we just finished rebuilding the place.”
Poor Leoninus. Everyone’s leaving him out.
“Why?! Are you seriously saying I’m supposed to live in that place alone?!”
Well, that’s not a very nice way to refer to your hometown...
“I want to stay too, damn it! I wanna live in this village too!” Leoninus’s heartfelt cry echoed throughout the plaza.
“Um, I guess I’ll just go ahead and officially welcome you all, then.”
And that was how every last elf, including their chieftain, became a permanent resident of my village.
Leoninus and his group of 238 elves have become villagers.
A while after the elves had officially joined our village, I received a telepathic message from Saten.
“Mayor Luke. A group is approaching from the east.”
“The east? But there’s nothing but mountains that way.”
To the east of our village, a mountain range loomed three thousand meters tall. It was part of the same dangerous, monster-infested no-man’s land as the northern forest, so it was highly unlikely anyone would be coming from that direction.
“Yes, but there’s something else. They don’t seem to be humans.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think they’re dwarves.”
“Dwarves, huh?”
Dwarves were a race closely related to humans, like elves. But they were shorter and had stout, muscular builds. They were known for being incredibly skilled with their hands.
“Dwarves are loud, rough, and incredibly insensitive. They barge into people’s territory without a second thought. Historically, elves and dwarves have not gotten along,” Philia told me.
It sounded like she’d met some before, which made sense considering how long she’d been alive.
Elves were said to be serious, sensitive, and a bit aloof, but I hadn’t gotten that impression from the ones here. Even so, I could see how they might butt heads with dwarves.
At any rate, I decided to go out and meet the dwarves myself.
There were just over a hundred of them, and one nervously stepped forward. He was about the same height as Seren, but his shoulders were twice as broad.
And he wasn’t the only one like that. It turned out that even a full-grown dwarven man was barely taller than a human woman, and dwarven women were around my height.
“S-Sorry to trouble ya. Name’s Dran. I’m a dwarf.”
“Hello there. I’m Luke, the village mayor. It’s nice to meet you.”
Dran had a thick beard and a tough face, but his voice sounded timid and uncertain.
That’s definitely not how Philia described dwarves...
At first, I thought Dran was just an exception, but the rest of the dwarves were just as skittish. They looked jumpy and nervous. I saw no signs of the bold and boisterous personalities Philia had warned me about.
“W-We’ve been livin’ in those mountains over yonder...”
“The Forsaken Mountains? It’s really dangerous over there, right?”
“Aye, lad. We were holed up in a cave there, ya see...” He told me they’d been living in a cave system at the foot of the mountains. There was only one entrance, so it sounded like a pretty secure spot. I asked how they got food, and he explained they grew a special kind of potato deep inside the cave, which made up most of their diet.
“At times, we eat bugs or bats we catch in the caves. Now an’ again, some beastie or monster stumbles in and we use its meat for a stew...”
It didn’t sound like a luxurious life. While dwarves used to interact with humans a long time ago, just like elves, they now had little contact with us. I asked him if humans had persecuted his people, forcing them into the mountain range.
“No. The dwarves brought it upon themselves,” Philia interjected coldly. “They developed powerful weapons and used them to create a massive empire. But they incurred divine wrath for trying to conquer the world, and their empire collapsed. The dwarves scattered across the land, living in small, hidden communities. I wasn’t alive back then, of course. It happened over a thousand years ago, after all. This is just how the story goes.”
A thousand years ago was hard to wrap my head around. I hadn’t even been alive for twenty years.
“What do you mean by ‘divine punishment’? How’d it destroy the whole empire?” I asked.
“The details be lost to time, lad. All we know is our ancestors took to the caves, and we’ve been livin’ there ever since,” Dran said.