Father showed the rest of his money to the old guy. I was holding on to most of the money to buy supplies for peddling, so Father only had a little left.
“I’d like to buy some equipment for her,” Father repeated.
“Got it, kid. You have a reason. I’ll help you out. Come here,” he called to Keel. “I’ll pick out some good stuff for you. Can you show me your hand?”
Keel raised her hand.
“I’d recommend a dagger,” he said. “They’re good as beginner weapons for one, and I think it’ll suit her well.”
“That sounds good to me,” Father said. “We also need some armor that she can easily move around in.”
“No problem.”
Once the old guy picked them out, Father gave Keel her dagger and armor. But because of her level, they were of fairly poor quality.
“We can’t really get around the fact that this is weak equipment,” the old guy said. “But you need to be able to use your weapons and armor. Once you get stronger, come back and we’ll exchange them for something better.”
“Sounds good,” Father said.
Keel oinked.
Naturally, having strong weapons alone wasn’t enough. I never had to worry about it because I had my spear. But I remembered that even the legendary weapons got gradually stronger as you leveled up, so they worked pretty much the same as if you were buying new, regular weapons—like the old guy was saying.
So was the old guy done talking to Father yet?
“I’m up next,” I announced.
“Huh? Do you need something, Spear Kid?”
“I’d like to borrow the back room for a moment,” I informed him.
“Again? What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“I’d like you to come with me.”
“Well, fine with me. Let’s go.”
We left Father and Keel in the shop and went to the back room.
“What could it possibly be?” the old guy asked.
“Please allow me to show you something for a moment,” I said. I took out all the equipment I had collected as drop items from the monsters last night and emptied it out on the floor. The old guy gasped as they popped out of my spear.
“What the hell!?”
“This is my weapon’s drop ability, I say,” I announced. “This is what I wanted to talk to you about. The next time Father needs new equipment, I’d like you to show these items to him. But when you do, make sure that you tell him that you made them and act like they’re weak items.”
The old guy nodded. “I don’t mind looking after them for you, but why?”
“If I told you,” I said menacingly, “I’d have to kill you.”
If it became known that Father was in fact strong, then assassins would start coming after us. I had to make sure Father stayed on guard for one, and since the old guy was able to ascertain the weapons’ true strength, he had to be in on it too.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” the old guy said.
“I’ll give you your choice of item as a payment,” I declared.
“Hang on a second . . .” The old guy took a close look at the drop items. “There’s some high-quality stuff in here,” he said. “It’ll sell well. All right, that settles it. I can take it apart for materials for one, and if it’s really helping you kids, I don’t mind doing you the favor.”
“I thank you from the bottom of my soul!”
“Leave it to me, kid.”
With that, I had made arrangements to get Father more powerful equipment. We went out from the back room and I winked at Father.
“Shall we proceed, Father?”
Next up, I had to continue to level up Yuki and Sakura until I could meet Father again.
“See you later. Keel and I are going to go level up. Well, who knows how strong we’ll actually get?” he said.
I chuckled. “Do your best, I say!”
“Good luck, kids!”
The old guy saw us off and Father and I went our separate ways. I headed off from the castle town in a direction that suited my whims—toward a different nearby village. I took care of some monsters along the way and fed them to Yuki and Sakura.
My primary objective was to raise Sakura to be as strong as possible. The only problem would be if the Siltvelt emissary were to try to find Father and take him to Siltvelt. But since I already explained all that to Father, he would probably refuse the emissary’s offer.
I walked through and out of the castle town with a smile on my face.
Two days passed.
“Gweh!”
Yuki had grown remarkably fast and was about to evolve into her filolial queen form.
“Gweh!”
Sakura was a day behind and had grown into her filolial form.
Today I planned to meet Father “by accident” again. I hopped onto Yuki’s back and headed back to the Melromarc castle town.
“Hey, Motoyasu,” Father called. “I haven’t seen you in a few days.”
“Quite so!” I proclaimed. “What an entirely unexpected encounter!”
“Kou really helped me out. Thanks for letting me borrow him.”
We acted as if we had found each other by chance at our planned meet-up spot. Kou, like Yuki, was about to change into his filolial king form.
“Want to chat for a few minutes?” Father asked.
“Why not?” I said. “So how much stronger did everyone get?”
Father glanced at Keel and Kou. I didn’t see much difference from how they looked two days ago, besides the fact that Keel looked like she had cleaned herself up a bit.
“Oink! Oink oink!”
Unfortunately, I still couldn’t understand a word she said. I wished she would hurry up and transform into a dog so I’d be able to at least talk to her!
I suddenly realized that even if a pig could transform into a dog, that didn’t necessarily mean it could suddenly speak human language. That would be problematic.
“I’m about level 7,” Father said. “Keel is level 8. Kou . . . he’s level 10, I think.”
Just in case we were being watched, I could tell Father was lying about Kou’s level.
“Not too different from Yuki and Sakura,” I informed Father.
“So it looks like filolials take on different forms when raised by heroes,” Father said. “I was surprised! They sure can go fast.”
“That’s filolials for you, Father! Kou, you’ve done a wonderful job at protecting Father, haven’t you?”
“Gweh!”
“Oink!”
“That’s right. Keel did a great job too,” Father said and patted Keel on the head. Keel looked like she was much more relaxed compared to a few days ago, I noticed. Of course Father, with all of his experience with slaves, was able to calm her down!
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Father said. “An emissary from Siltvelt came yesterday.”
“An emissary?” I acted surprised. “Why would they come to you?”
“They asked me to come to Siltvelt, but I decided I couldn’t trust them and turned it down.” He spoke loud for anyone nearby to hear, as if they had tried to force him to come to Siltvelt and it had been quite the traumatic experience. We knew that Melromarc was monitoring Siltvelt closely, so there was a high likelihood they were observing any contact Siltvelt made with Father. Which meant that now Melromarc was probably convinced that Father didn’t trust Siltvelt. I’m sure Melromarc’s schemers were breathing a sigh of relief, as the last thing they wanted was for Father to make his way to Siltvelt.
There wasn’t much upside to going to Siltvelt for us either. They would start sending assassins after us, which defeated the purpose of our whole plan to level up and earn money while tricking Melromarc into thinking that Father was still weak.
Father leaned over and whispered in my ear.
“They want to work with us, so I made a plan to talk again with them today. Do you want to come?”
I nodded.
Then I spoke up again. “Now that you mention it, some emissaries came to me too.”
I didn’t remember what country it was, but they had invited me to come to their country in the first go-around as well. At the time, the crimson swine had interfered and I wasn’t even able to give them an answer.
“But I also refused the offer,” I continued. “Shall we take a stroll, Father?”
Back in the first go-around, I had been convinced that Melromarc was the best for me, so I likely would’ve refused the offer anyways. At the time, I was still being influenced by my knowledge of the online game from my original world, and I thought back then that it would be inefficient to bother working with another country. Ren and Itsuki probably felt the same way.
Based on my knowledge now, I knew that Melromarc was doing everything they possibly could to prevent us from getting our hands on accurate information.