The Return of the King

It was official.

“Eat more, you are a growing girl!”

“I—I can’t grow any more! It doesn’t work like that!”

“Don’t care~! Now eat! Eat!”

Martha had a thing for being maternal.

“So… inconsiderate of your people… to hang you out to dry like that,” she said, fussing over Engel like a hawk over its chick.

“Eeeeek!!”

With a sob story like Engel’s, how could someone like Martha resist? The Mother’d given up a world where she was a candidate in line for the Church of Posteria’s future Pope… for kids in a bumbass town like ours. Engel’s plight was like catnip to her.

But inviting her into the canteen for lunch was surely too overwhelming.

I chewed and swallowed my perfectly cooked lamb soup. At least Engel was finally catching a break after living in anonymity and alone for so long, I suppose…

As it turned out, she’d made the orphanage her base because we had a lot of unguarded scrap she could nibble on without anyone batting an eye—unlike a storefront, where one missing dented pot might raise eyebrows.

I would have gone crazy if I had to keep that up for four years of my life.

“It’s hard to reconcile the fact we are seeing the product of a legendary society right before our very eyes,” Piper said, swallowing the gulf of food she had in her mouth. Being part-snake, her mouth can really stretch. “Maybe we can get those golems of theirs to come and help us?”

The legend goes that their golems were once defenders of Schonewelt as a whole continent. That was, before those Mountain Elves were betrayed, whereupon its saviors vanished along with them as punishment.

The Mountain Elves don’t really get out much. It has been four years since she’d been let out of their gates, and apparently, they only open their gates once every six years. Some cultural significance with the number six, maybe?

I smiled. But that smile faded fast.

What were the odds of us doing well in adventuring when I’d nearly let a malnourished girl slip through our fingers? How could we be trusted to fight for East Gate if we couldn’t even fend for ourselves?

And what if—just maybe—the Mountain Elves were using Engel, knowingly or not, as some kind of homing beacon? No, that was being too paranoid.

My train of thought broke when the front door creaked open.

The nun who opened it did a quick bow. “Mother Martha, we have an audience—”

Martha shook her head. “No need, Mistress Laura. Thank you.”

For some reason, I should’ve expected a duke like Calilah to invite himself into the orphanage. In he walked all flamboyant-like, flanked by a small retinue of guards. The kids straightened instinctively; even Daisy stiffened beside me.

“Cotter,” he began.

I knelt down. “Yes, your Excellence?”

“Fight me.”

…

“Who starts a conversation like that?!”

Off to the side, I heard some kids start to sputter.

“KNOW him? The duke’s calling him by name!”

“Cotter knows the new Duke?! WAA!!”

A palace runner shoved through the crowd and made to bow toward me. “Your Grace—ah—Mr. Cotter—sir! Your duke requests you to battle him!”

The kids lost it.

\\

Calilah and I stepped out into the yard. The only reason I didn’t immediately assume I was about to be executed was the faintest twitch at the corner of Calilah’s mouth.

“SMOKE HIS SMOOTH PHOENIX ASS, COTTER!!” I heard from the side.

Piper immediately got a sharp smack on the backside from Martha. “He’s your Duke! Show some respect!”

Piper just grinned. She loved piling on the pressure.

“So… what’s with the creature you were talking to?” Calilah asked, his tone deceptively casual for someone launching a compressed ball of lightning at my head.

I ducked, sending a burst of wind back at him. “Long story. But she’s not one of the conspirators.”

“Gods, life always finds a way to make yours interesting, huh?”

“Ours.”

Calilah sighed. “True that.”

“She’s too precious to have a bad cogwheel in her, anyway…”

“I figured.” He sidestepped and flicked a razor-thin blade of water at my legs. I hopped back right away, trying to get off a minor shield spell; and did. “Also means there was no way she could’ve made all those fake letters in time.”

I clicked my tongue “So that’s why you received so many at once…”

“Half the applications for the city’s contracts were linked to fake businesses,” he replied, deflecting a pebble I’d shot with a mana pulse. “Noise to drown out the real candidates.”

“So someone’s choking the system.” I feinted before darting in with a palm strike. He caught it, grunting.

“My bet’s the palace still isn’t clear of bad actors,” he said. “I go to bed every night knowing someone might be listening to the way I bloody snore.”

“Is that why you dragged me out here to fight in the orphanage courtyard?”

“Among other reasons.”

I rolled my eyes at the prospect of yet another person feeling like they could take out their frustrations on me.

We traded another flurry. Wind against lightning; sparks scattering across the dirt. There was surely too much noise for anyone to hear us speak.

“Well, your training’s done you wonders, Cotter!” he said, smiling for real this time. “Means you are quite ready for what I really came here to tell you.”

Calilah really knew how to dial up the dramatics, huh?

I deliberately closed the distance on him to hear what he had to say. Strike after strike, no one was going to hear what he was saying through all this scuffle.

I heard him sigh.

“You can’t become adventurers by default anymore. You have to do it the official way.”

I felt myself gulp.

“What?!”

At that, I fell off balance. And Calilah raised the pole he was carrying at my neck. “That is exactly why I don’t think you are cut out for this adventurer business yet! You get too easily flustered.”

“Says you.”

“This is s-serious, Cotter! Despite East Gate only having a pseudo-adventurer’s guild, the main office of the Adventurer’s Guild decided to give us the same ‘treatment’ the successful cities get,” Calilah said.

“These spies are going to be on the move, and we just sit here?”

He met my wind with a crack of lightning and a grimace. “You think I don’t know that?!”

We broke apart, dirt scuffing under our boots.

“Withholding an Adventurer’s Guild from East Gate is like denying a knight their baptism. They want us to crawl back for approval now that East Gate has a name again.” He breathed in deep. “My private investigators have had no dice scrawling through our taverns, and I’ve been moving them on into another district—but honestly Cotter, your becoming an adventurer is my only hope right now in solving this problem.”

Investigating outside using palace guards was probably bad optics when so many of East Gate’s problems stemmed inward. Which meant Calilah had to look for external contractors… and none wanted to come to East Gate. I knew the politics, but this seemed like a woeful use of resources. “So what do we do?”

“You take their damn test.” He leaned in. “They’ve agreed to ‘evaluate’ you before they even consider granting East Gate a charter. Pass this, and they can’t refuse you. Fail, and…” His eyes narrowed. “The next two years will become very, very long.”

“Two years?!”

“That’s the wait for the full Adventurer’s Exam in the Capital… when you become adult. But before that, I arranged it so that they would send an exam proctor. It was only fair after setting us back like that. A small-scale trial. You’ll be tested as a unit, and they’ve chosen someone who’d love to see you fail.”

Piper shrieked. “Are you guys done whispering to each other now?! I kind of hate getting left out of the know…”

“Yep!” Calilah called. “Just getting some advice for what East Gate should do next!”

That was when I heard the doors to the courtyard slide open.

“Cotter and Piper should be this way, sire,” I heard Mistress Laura say.

Another visit on the same day? What were the odds? I hope she wasn’t sicc’ing us!

The sight of the man who walked in dashed away all hope.

He’d made such an impression on me it was impossible to forget him. Oh, yes—we’d met before. And I’d only known him for a good five minutes.

To describe him as “the guy who measured my stats that one time” was reductive. He was the man who proved to me that this world operated much like my old one: a place of bigotry, and men with egos to stroke.

Calilah was still talking—something about preparation, something about the Capital—but I wasn’t hearing him anymore.

That guy’s to be our proctor?

And he’s already here?!

We were done for!