When summer finally gave up on Isekai, all of his businesses there were in order. That meant a steady income. It also meant another three months had passed. During that time, Ioha bought both a riding horse and a packhorse. Yes, he’d be faster running long distances, but he couldn’t carry as much on foot. With that purchase followed a month during which he became the source of a lot of merriment, while his equestrian abilities rose from utterly pathetic to merely not very good.
Nanami and Hiro recruited a few more members each, and Hiro’s finest now had two green but promising parties, plus a combined staff and support unit of four. Nanami also listened to reason, with Misaki firmly joining Ioha’s camp when it came to organising multiple parties into one company. Nanami found two solid leaders, freeing herself and her vice captain up for running the company. A quartermaster and a cook were also added. While Ioha found them a bit short on logistics, he had to accept the realities of economy.
About Misaki. One day, Ioha received a report from Nanami. It included news on the future absence of suicidal missions from the adventurers guild and alternative ways to use fishing boats. Half a dozen people vanished and now Isekai had a permanent unit posted at the caravanserai hunting for Yoshida Akira’s messengers.
After they erected the second barn, the two companies combined kept a rotation of two parties with a trailing unit during daytime. One party ran perimeter patrols, and one manned the defences. That left a lot of time for training, since the trailing parties left two hours after the primaries, with each sweep covering eight hours. Two months after they left Isekai, Nanami’s last party returned from their escort missions, and from that point on wagons left the camp for Halfpoint every week, with what they collected on the way out, and supplies on their way back. They didn’t earn as much as if they had sold their loot in Isekai, but that was another week round trip, which simply wasn’t possible after roaming activity increased early August.
Twice they saw elite parties passing through on deep zone subjugation missions, and twice they saw them return battered but satisfied. Nanami offered hearty meals in both directions and exchanged food for information. Everyone involved agreed it was a good trade. Twice also, Viking girl made overt attempts to get closer to him, and twice Ioha pretended he didn’t understand and kept his distance. In the end, Nanami never asked why he didn’t return to school, and Ioha gratefully accepted the silent understanding that she didn’t need to know.
Currently, he stood facing Hiro, who had just returned from patrol with half a dozen carcasses to show for his effort. It was even more than usual, and a sign something had entered the zone in numbers. They needed to wait for the trailing party, which preferably had drawn blank.
Hiro raised his partisan two-handed. In the end, he picked a weapon almost identical to Ioha’s, but his superior armour meant that a shield wasn’t needed. It gave him more freedom to choose an attack compared to Ioha’s passive shield limiting his left field. Just like the other students at Spellsword Academy, Hiro quickly overtook him when it came to handling his weapon. Most combatants did, even though Ioha did learn, albeit very slowly. Superior shield skills kept Hiro’s attacks at bay, and by now Ioha didn’t really try to improve his physical shield ability. It broke through one hundred points, made a minor increase just to remind him that one hundred wasn’t the limit, and parked. He still got more skilled. Not with how he physically managed his shield, but rather from a better understanding about why, when and where to use it. That knowledge never showed in his numbers, and Ioha simply accepted that there was an aspect to learning that didn’t get measured in a way he could see.
They exchanged blows for a while and switched to swords. Here Hiro stuck to his arming sword. Once again superior armour made the basket hilt moot, and the arming sword’s cross-guard was never in the way sheathed, unlike Ioha’s unwieldy metal basket. Hiro also shocked Ioha by using his earlier admissions of his mistakes to think yet another step further. He grinned, went inside and came back with a heater shield. Just as Ioha was about to tell him to go find his arse, Hiro shook his head and fell into a stance. Ioha advanced, broadsword ready, just to receive a wall of shield into his face.
What the hell? That reach. The sucker boss gripped a heater! I’ll be damned. Fighting with swords turned out to be pointless. With a shield each, Ioha’s superior abilities and Hiro’s greater reach, in combination with plate armour, made it impossible for either of them to get in any kind of decent hit. Even when Ioha used his cat abilities to get above Hiro, that shield he supposedly didn’t need was always in the way.
“Neat idea,” Ioha admitted when they rested later. “How did you come up with it?”
“You did, indirectly at least.”
“Me?”
“Hikari still had her original shield, and my balance felt off when I trained with my sword. When you went back to Isekai one time, I borrowed hers, and it helped a lot.”
Ioha could see that happen. With a one-handed sword, Hiro must have felt naked. “But why the new one?”
“It curves, and I prefer that. Had it made for me in Halfpoint.”
Ioha threw both hand into the air. “I stand corrected.” This was one occasion when excessive formality wasn’t. He bowed deeply. “I admit the shield has a place with your choice of armour.”
Hiro grinned. “Strapped to my arm, it doesn’t. I already skewered one blob to my left once. Wouldn’t have seen it with a shield the way you carry it. Shield’s strapped to my back on patrols.”
It made sense. Ioha needed his shield for physical defence, but it did partially blind side him. Modern riot shields were transparent for a reason, and had they existed in Isekai, Ioha would ask Nanami for leave of absence, strip to minimum armour and run there, burning aura the entire way. He didn’t pick his current equipment because it was the best ever made; he picked it because he believed it was the best he could get this side of the gate.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“How’s maintenance?”
“Pretty bad.” Hiro smiled. “We have a camp, so I’ll stick to the plate. I’ll get a brigandine if we take missions where we have to travel a lot in the future.”
“The crusader?”
“He’s still in love with his mail. It’s good enough for the monsters.”
“How’s Hikari?” She was the weakest of the frontliners.
“Still in love with you.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
A wide grin emerged on Hiro’s face. “I know. Still.”
“One girl is enough.”
“Didn’t you break up?”
“I’m still in love with her.”
“Your funeral. Anyway, she’s doing OK. Since they both use lower grade armour, I have them in the trailing party.”
Ioha knew that. Now he knew Hiro’s rationale as well. The guild-leader promised to become an excellent company captain. In ways, he already was. Even as a clown, he never shirked his responsibility. Back then he was merely incompetent as an adventurer, but the leadership material was already there, or else the wandering circus would never have followed him on a week long hellish march north. The ongoing prank, however...
“The, you know, pieces of cloth,” Ioha started.
“Our guild surcoats?”
“With the strange pictures.”
“Our proud emblems and insignias?” Hiro’s grin widened.
“With the very visible colours.”
“Symbolising the learnings given unto us by our great teacher?”
“You suck!”
“I know.”
Ioha gave up, as he had done so many times before. He was stuck with red and white flags on two legs surrounding him.
They kept on bantering as they ate, and after that Hiro returned to the field for more training. Ioha went to get some water, downed it and sniffed. The stench wasn’t too bad today, which was a solid reason to relax a little. He fetched his partisan, slung his shield over his arm and joined Hiro and his party. After an hour, he was sweaty, tired and satisfied. He gathered the party around him. A minor burst of divine aura later, they all became very clean. Around that time, figures grew larger from the east, and a little later the trailing party entered through the wagon gates. Ioha met them and burned some more aura. Getting clean after hours upon hours of walking helped with morale immensely. They were stronger now, more confident, and with the hot days behind them, stamina was no longer an issue. Come summer again, Ioha guessed they would make it through it without too much difficulty.
“Catch?” Hiro asked.
“One blob,” Viking girl answered and nodded to where one mage lobbed it into the waiting wagon.
“Still not clean, then.” A grimace spread on his face. “Ioha, I don’t like it. It’s the third day in a row when the trailing patrol returns with a catch.”
“Just one, but I get you. Next wagon needs an escort if we have shit roaming on our way out.” Ioha agreed with Hiro’s worry. Part of the idea behind the trailing patrols was to get a fix on how much the primary one had cleared.
“Ioha!”
“Yes, yes. Just testing you.” The next wagon was scheduled for tomorrow, so the returning one made camp just outside the zone about now. “I’ll head out.”
“You know, I really hate it when you do your lone ranger stunt.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Someone…”
“Hiro, we’ve done this before. Two hours down that road, who’s going to run with me?”
They both knew the answer to that question. Even Nanami’s last resort panic messenger fell behind him in a race that covered multiple days. He wasn’t sure anyone in Wergaist could keep up with him on extreme long distance runs.
“You could slow…”
“It gets dark in an hour. I don’t like moving around at night in the zone. I still need three hours to reach their camp.” Hiro had followed him back to the barn. Ioha grabbed his sword and quickly strapped it to his belt. “Tell Nanami I’m guarding the inbound wagon and have half a group escort the outbound one.”
Hiro nodded. He wasn’t happy, but he accepted the inevitable. “I’ll do.”
“I’m counting on you.” With that, he was away. Behind him, he could feel Viking girl giving him worried looks, but he shrugged it off. Hero adulation, infatuation or even real feelings, he knew where his emotional home lay.
He extended more aura into his legs than usual. The wagon camp lay outside the zone, and he wouldn’t need any aura reserves when he arrived. The first hour he covered more than a third of the distance, but an hour and a half he had to run in darkness. When he added aura to his senses, Ioha smiled as he realised he made a small mistake calculating how much aura he spent. Half an hour less spent burning aura on perception counted as well. There was nothing moving among the trees to his north, and to his south lay only abandoned farmland, where even a person lacking his abilities would have noticed moving shadows in the moonlight. As he came closer to the outer border, the stench all but vanished, and he sped up at the cost of his awareness. There was nothing out there, only the background smell of sugar gone bad and roses grown wrong. A few minutes later, he was outside and ran for a campfire in the distance. Just to be on the safe side, he extended a very thin force field around his body and covered it with fireworks. When he came closer, the crew already waited for him with waving hands and a water skin. Glowing in the dark made people less suspicious of you.
He gratefully accepted the water and gulped it down.
“Nothing between us and the camp,” he reported before he sat down by the fire, stretched, made himself very clean and had a bite to replenish energy lost on his way here. His stamina might be absurd, but moving the large body of his still came at a cost. “I’ll sleep and escort you back tomorrow.”
