“Young maste~r! Young master Pellio~t! Please, slow dow~n!”
“Shut up! Stop following me!” Pelliot looked back at the servant pathetically calling his name.
“It’s almost snack time! Where are you going?”
“To Thomas’ house. A knight from the capital has come! Papa left already!”
“Ehh?”
Pelliot saw Armando making a very displeased look for no reason he could understand, and laughed scornfully.
I’m sure he’s afraid of the knight, Pelliot thought. He really is a weak coward.
The events of that day in the forest had completely vanished from his memory. To him, Armando was still the same meddlesome, incompetent fellow as always.
As the north wind blew, Pelliot sped up and ran along the footpaths of the wheat fields.
From their houses scattered around the village, other villagers were walking in the same direction as he was.
“Pelliot!” Some children of roughly the same age as Pelliot raised their hands and came over: the scrawny hunchback Katts, the only girl of the group, Mera, holding her infant brother, and Tanto, slightly younger than them and always twitching.
“Let’s go together!”
“Is the capital knight a Holy Knight?!”
“There’s no way, he’s probably just a regular knight.”
Boisterous, the children walked off shoulder-to-shoulder.
Thomas’ house was located almost in the exact center of the town, and was the only shop there. Half of the first floor was a general store, the other half a tavern. It also served as a meeting place for the villagers.
“Wow, so many people have come already.”
About a dozen villagers had gathered in the plaza in front of Thomas’ house. A thin trickle of other villagers was coming in from behind Pelliot and his friends, too. Though there hadn’t been a particular announcement, it was a rare event for a representative to come from the capital to a remote village like Ordan.
“Hey.”
The tavern door opened, and the crowd stirred.
A young knight covered in lightweight armor emerged from inside. Following him, Pelliot’s father, the village chief, also came outside.
“Hmm, there’s a lot of people gathered here…Perfect,” the knight said pompously. Then he cleared his throat theatrically.
“As I’m sure you already are aware, I am here regarding the Seven Deadly Sins, the order of knights which ten years ago slaughtered the Captain of the Holy Knights, Master Zaratras, and ran away.”
Sighs and ohs escaped from among some of the villagers.
“Those seven Holy Knights that were said to be the strongest and cruelest of all Britannia…”
“But didn’t they all die?”
The villagers were starting to murmur amongst themselves, and the knight recaptured their attention by clearing his throat.
“Unfortunately, their deaths have yet to be confirmed even now. However, we knights of Liones will never forgive them. Their wanted posters are renewed every year, but for several years these posters seem not to have been delivered to this village, so I’ve brought the most recent ones with me here today. I’ve posted them on this tavern’s bulletin board, so be sure to burn their images into your memories too. And if you see someone who looks even slightly suspicious, without exception, remember to send a message to the capital.”
As the villagers bowed their heads and murmured their assent, the young knight nodded his head, satisfied. And then he walked off, rudely pushing his way through the crowd. The village chief hastily followed him.
After seeing him off, the villagers rushed into the tavern, each scrambling to be first. Undaunted by the adults, Pelliot also pushed his way in.
“Welcome, welcome!” Thomas’ parents hollered cheerfully. Thomas stood beside them. His parents seemed to have anticipated the rush and were forcing him to help out.
In the back of the store, the space in front of the bulletin board was crammed with people. Wedging between the adults and slipping through their legs, Pelliot and his friends managed to make it to the front of the crowd.
It was a bulletin board on which announcements from the village chief, or the schedule of merchant coaches, or the shop’s holidays and such were posted sporadically. Now those had all been torn off, and it was completely covered with seven brand-new wanted posters.
“So these are…the Seven Deadly Sins.” Pelliot gasped.
The brutal murder of the Captain of the Holy Knights had happened before he was born. He didn’t know much about it. The incident itself didn’t have much to do with a remote village like Ordan, anyway, and even if the adults spoke of it on rare occasions, the story was like a distant legend that had never really struck home.
However, now, seeing the villainous-looking seven and their descriptions on the wanted posters right in front of his eyes, the fact that they were out there somewhere, even now, became clear to him.
While Pelliot gazed intently at the wanted posters, someone called out to him. It was Ben, who until recently had been working in the capital.
“Those guys, I’ve heard that each of them is monstrously strong. All of them were brutal criminals guilty of crimes so heinous that even if they died multiple times over, they could never make up for them. His Majesty the King personally scouted them from all over Britannia and organized their group.”
“Really—brutal criminals?” Mera, who had been gazing at the posters with Pelliot, opened her eyes wide.
“That’s right. And each of them was assigned a name of a sin from that time. This was their captain, Meliodas.” Ben pointed to the poster, hung in the center of the seven, of a man with a brazen expression. “He’s the Dragon’s Sin of Wrath. And this is Diane, of the giant clan. She’s the Serpent’s Sin of Envy.”
Ben pointed at each of the posters while talking.
Fox’s Sin of Greed, Ban.
Grizzly’s Sin of Sloth, King.
Lion’s Sin of Pride, Escanor.
Boar’s Sin of Gluttony, Merlin.
And—
“This large man in armor is Gowther, the Goat’s Sin of Lust.”
“Gowther…” Pelliot stared at the picture of the armored form, wearing a helmet with one of its horns broken off.
I think I’ve seen that somewhere?
But, no matter how hard he tried to remember, the memory would not take shape.
Pelliot shook his head. Probably just my imagination.
Still—
“So cool!” he couldn’t help but shout out.
Some adults sitting down at the tavern’s tables, who had already distanced themselves from the bulletin board, turned their heads with a wry smile at his exclamation.
“Young master Pelliot, what are you saying?”
Armando, who had come up from behind without his noticing, stooped over and chided Pelliot. However, Pelliot shook off the hand Armando placed on his shoulder.
“They’re cool! The strongest, most brutal, criminal Holy Knights in all of Britannia—amazing!” Pelliot looked up at the bulletin board once more. Meliodas in the center in particular looked incredibly strong. And he was handsome.
“Melio”-das, somehow, is kinda like my name, Pelliot.
“All right! I’ve made up my mind! My name from this day forth will be ‘Pelliodas’!” shouted Pelliot, pumping his fist in the air.
“Young master?!”
With a sidelong glance at the adults bursting with laughter and the shocked Armando, Pelliot declared to his friends, “From this day forth, we are the Seven Deadly Sins.”
Mera’s eyes gleamed.
“Ooohh, that sounds like fun! If Pelliot is Captain Pelliodas, then who am I? Since I’m a girl, maybe Diane or Merlin?!”
“Let’s go plan it out!”
Mera, Katts, and Tanto ran out of the shop with Pelliot. Thomas, who had been helping out in the shop, also ran out with them despite his mother’s yells.
“Good grief…We’re no match for young master Pelliot.” The tipsy adults, who’d been drinking ale since daytime, laughed.
No matter how seriously and gravely the knight from the capital had appealed to them, for the villagers of Ordan, today’s event just seemed like accompaniment for their beer that revived long-forgotten material to populate their conversation.
“Mr. Armando, shouldn’t you go chasing off after them?” Thomas’ mother said with a bitter smile. She hadn’t been able to stop her son from going off after all.
“Hahaha…you’re right.”
Armando bobbed to the exit—then suddenly, halted and looked back at the bulletin board.
They were the portraits of his former friends. Some were just as he remembered them, other portraits were completely different.
He didn’t find it nostalgic. He didn’t have those kind of feelings.
He simply registered the information that even now, not a single one had been found.
Yet for those whose portraits are accurate likenesses, there is the possibility that their whereabouts are known. I need to be careful.
While he calmly thought this to himself, another idea drifted into his mind.
Perhaps the end is approaching.
He didn’t know whether that was a statement of probability he had deduced from objective phenomena, or whether it was something like what people call sentimentality.
If I were a real human…
If I had a soul, would I understand?
“What’s wrong?” one of the guests called, wondering why he was standing stock-still.
He returned his expression to Armando’s, and smiled. “No, nothing’s the matter. Well then, excuse me,” Armando said, bowing his head quickly.
Once again, he ran off after Pelliot and his friends with his silly, flapping gait.
✦ ✦ ✦
“—And a little after that, the captain brought everyone to Ordan village. Everyone knows what happened next.”
With that, Gowther ended his story.
A few people listening, who had a suspicion as to the true identity of the Armor Giant in the story, cast their eyes down as though they were holding their breath. Seeming not to notice, however, the pink boar at their feet laughed hysterically: “That giant fish would have made a great meal!”
Hawk, a talking piglet who was the son of the giant boar that carried the tavern on its head, was always hungry.
“I don’t think it was fit for food, but for our Captain Leftovers, maybe it’d be all right?” Gowther was only giving his honest opinion, but everyone around him laughed, in a slightly strained manner.
Meliodas smiled cheerfully. “Pelliot, huh. That takes me back. I wonder how he’s doing.”
“I wasn’t able to meet him, I guess, since I was sick with a cold back then. I hope you can meet Pelliot again someday too, Gowther,” Elizabeth said.
Gowther tilted his head to the side, perplexed by her words.
“I wonder. When we parted, Pelliot said he would become a Holy Knight and capture me. Since I’m no longer a wanted man, that chance might be gone.”
“In that case, why don’t you go see him normally? Once this fight is over.” Elizabeth smiled.
“That’s right! We should finish this quickly,” Arthur, the young boy with a strange cat atop his head, proposed sunnily.
“I’m compelled to tell you that possibility is rather low.”
As Gowther stated the truth matter-of-factly again, Merlin gave him an exasperated look.
✦ ✦ ✦
It seemed that their rainbow stories would continue for a while yet.