Daon became chief of Bit Village five years ago. He had originally worked as a holy knight exterminating monsters, but at thirty-five he retired and returned to his home village — only to be handed the chieftainship by his parents, who wanted to step down and rest. The villagers raised no objections to a former holy knight taking on the role.
Bit Village sits near a certain mountain range. The place is known as the Dragon’s Deathground — after five hundred years of dissipating miasma, a monster wasteland was about due to form there.
(Even when I tell them it’s dangerous and they should leave, people always resist abandoning their home. …Every last one of them is stubborn and difficult.)
No one knows what kind of monsters might develop in a wasteland. If plant-type monsters — relatively sedentary — were to establish the ecosystem, that would be manageable enough. But if orcs that abduct humans, or carnivorous monsters that prey on any species, were to overrun it and come down from the mountains, Bit Village would be in serious danger.
But if that were to happen, Daon would be here to protect the village and its people. That was why he came back. And that, likely, was why the villagers had welcomed him as their chief.
“Uncle Daon, something feels… wrong…”
“Ellie? Hey, are you alright!?”
Ellie, the girl who lived next door, was fond of Daon. That day too she’d been eating sweets and drinking tea at his house, when her color suddenly went bad and she was sick.
Children falling ill isn’t unusual. But that day, Ellie wasn’t the only one who felt unwell. They couldn’t eat anything. They couldn’t keep even water down, retching almost immediately. Within three days, every person in the village was unable to move properly and reduced to lying still inside their homes.
(What is this sickness… it spread with terrifying speed. Is this a monster’s doing?)
His thinking was that some highly toxic monster might be lurking nearby, harming the villagers. By the time that thought occurred to him, Daon was already down with the same symptoms.
He drank from the water jug, retched it up. But taking in even small amounts of fluid was the only thing standing between him and drying out and dying.
He had been prepared to fight monsters. He’d kept training his body every day even as he aged, so it wouldn’t weaken — all to be ready for a monster attack. And yet, to be laid low like this, of all things —
(… ? … Did the door open…?)
A sound from the entrance. Someone came into the house, footsteps clicking steadily across the floor. At once, the air filled with a sweet fragrance of flowers.
Not a villager. He gripped the short blade under his bedsheet and watched the approaching figure with close attention.
She was a very beautiful woman. Her features were perfectly composed — like a painting or sculpture produced by a celebrated artist. She was draped in flowers of every kind, and the fragrance in the air appeared to be coming from them.
— What are you. How did you get in.
That was what he wanted to say, but his parched, shriveled throat stuck together and the words wouldn’t form.
She had come in through the front door, which he was certain he’d locked. This was no ordinary woman. Her crafted perfection of appearance struck him as eerie as much as beautiful.
He threw his killing intent at her as a warning — and she simply continued to smile, showing no reaction whatsoever. A seasoned holy knight who had put down more monsters than he could count, and his intent did nothing to her. Just who in the world was this woman.
(… Damn, even if she tries something, I won’t be winning this…)
He tried to put strength into the hand gripping the blade, but his body had nothing to give. Every drop of moisture had left him, so no cold sweat formed — but inwardly, he was sweating cold.
The woman, however, turned her back to Daon without doing anything and left. He blinked at the anticlimax, and then the door opened again. This time she reappeared holding the hands of two children. One of them was the girl he knew.
“Ellie…?”
The last he’d seen her, Ellie had been doing nothing but retching in misery. Now she appeared without a trace of illness, perfectly well. While he was still processing this surprise, she held out what looked like a ghostfire-weed berry.
Apparently this was medicine prepared by that woman — the witch. If Ellie had recovered this completely, perhaps it genuinely worked.
(… Either way, I’ll only die if things stay as they are…)
No harm in trying it as a last resort. He bit into the berry and swallowed the liquid inside. The taste — he had tasted it once before, a long time ago. It was the taste of a full-recovery potion.
A medicine this precious, offered freely to a complete stranger without hesitation. Was there really a person like that in the world? And what kind of miracle was it, that such a person appeared in a village on the verge of dying to a plague?
“Uncle, we’re going to go help everyone else now!”
“…Right. Go on then.”
If she was going to save the villagers — whatever her motives might be, it was not worth more than the lives of his people. He looked at the witch and gave a nod that he meant as please.
The witch went out of Daon’s house, still smiling. And that day, every person in the village was saved by the witch’s full-recovery potions. …Was he dreaming? The whole thing was simply too removed from reality.
(… Who is this witch, and what does she want?)
The last surviving Mage-folk is a man. Not a witch but a sorcerer, taken into royal service as a court mage. Daon, as a former holy knight, had seen that court mage — and he knew the woman who saved his village today was an entirely different person.
(They said all but one of the Mage-folk perished — but could another have survived? And lived for five hundred years without appearing before anyone?)
The witch had saved more than fifty villagers with full-recovery potions. The scale of assistance was staggering. Help offered too freely can look suspicious precisely because of its excess.
(Let me test her a little. …There may be some scheme at work.)
It was a reasonable judgment for a chief bearing responsibility for his village’s safety. And yet —
Watching the beautiful woman respond to the gratitude of his villagers with nothing but a calm smile and a nod, being tugged at by two lively children — competing over her, even — while she simply smiled on in gentle warmth — watching that, a feeling rose in him that he didn’t want to doubt the goodness of her heart.
(… If I had any skill with a brush, I’d probably paint this scene…)
She had saved the village with extraordinary medicine and asked for nothing in return, and now she was laughing with the children she’d saved. The villagers watched with expressions of gratitude and reverence, but also something tender. The scene was more brilliant than the high noon sun.
Children are sensitive to ill intent, in their way. Ellie especially — when human traffickers had appeared in the village once, she’d sensed something wrong in their pleasant approach, fled from them, and run to Daon for help.
Despite his own rough, imposing appearance, Ellie had taken well to Daon too. He had always felt she had a sound eye for good and bad. With that same Ellie showing such evident devotion to “ma’am Witch” — could it really be that the witch harbored some dark intention?
(… I’m not eager to do it, but… if this suspicion turns out to be groundless, the least I can do is find some way to make it up to her — something that might actually benefit that woman…)