Didn't I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life?! Vol. 3 Read online

  True, even if they were to let the Crimson Vow lodge for free, there would still be some profit to them in the situation. But even knowing this, she could not choose that route. She could not betray her pride as an innkeeper’s daughter. No matter how much her father, beside her, tried to convey an aura of, It doesn’t really matter, so just let them stay for free.

  “Um…” The voice came as Lenny crumbled into despair.

  It was Mile, who, up until now had merely been standing quietly beside Mavis.

  “If we can make that agreement, then I think as long as two other requirements can be met, we should be able to keep lodging here…”

  Though Reina and Pauline glared at her, with an air of, Just what are you trying to say? Mile continued to speak.

  “The first requirement is: We need to abolish the expectation that we eat our meals here when we’re in the capital.”

  Tacking on a reassurance to the innkeeper, who looked like he had taken a grave blow at the implication that his cooking was somehow lacking, Mile continued.

  “I mean, it’s not that the food here isn’t great! It’s just that there are so many shops around—I’d love to try eating more things. Plus, sometimes we might get invitations from our friends and that sort of thing…”

  “The second is: I’d like you to lend us part of the courtyard.”

  “Huh???”

  This time, it was not only the innkeeper, his wife, and Lenny who were flabbergasted, but also the three other members of the Crimson Vow.

  “Just what are you planning…?” asked Reina, eyeing Mile with suspicion.

  However, Mile being Mile, there was nothing she could do but shrug.

  Most inns typically had wide-open backyards or courtyards. After all, they often housed hunters and soldiers, as well as many other travelers and merchants with an interest in physical pursuits, who liked to do their daily training early in the morning. Throughout the day, the same space was also used as a space for drying large amounts of laundry. This inn, like others, had a decently spacious courtyard, so it would be no issue for them to relinquish a small corner of it.

  The Crimson Vow had just finished a big job, and so they decided to take several days’ break, with each of them free to do their own thing.

  Mile spent this time flitting to and fro. To the blacksmith, to the lumber mill, and even to the dump…

  And then, one day, the guests of the inn suddenly realized that something odd had appeared in a corner of the courtyard, as if out of nowhere.

  “Oh my! Is it finished?” asked Reina, who had come to see.

  “Yep!” Mile happily replied. “And tonight’s the grand opening!”

  That evening, after dinner…

  Lenny, her mother, the members of the Crimson Vow, and a number of female guests who had come to look on with interest gathered before a nine-meter-square structure that had been erected in the courtyard.

  What stood before them was a modest-sized wooden shack, with a water tower beside it.

  The water tower had four tanks placed upon a platform about two meters high. The tanks were made up of a random selection of items, gathered from whatever happened to be suitable. Two of them were large wooden tubs, and the other two were giant pots of the kind that might be used in the kitchen of a military base. Spouts ran from openings in the bottoms of each of these containers into the small room.

  Mile climbed the stairs that were built into the tower, explaining her creation to everyone from above.

  “This is a water-supplying apparatus. Cold water goes in the wooden buckets, and hot water in the iron pot. If either side becomes empty, it can be replenished while you’re using the other one. The hot water supply assumes you’ll be using magic—it can’t function to boil the water itself.”

  As she spoke, she filled the respective tanks with hot and cold water.

  “You can put the hot water in directly with magic, like this, or fill the pots with cold water and then use a fireball or whatever to heat the pot and prepare the water. Ah—but please be careful not to overdo it and destroy the tanks.”

  She then climbed down from the tank and opened the door to the shack.

  “When you first enter here, there’s the changing room. This is where you undress…”

  She slid the second door to the side.

  “And this is the bath. It has a soaking tub, a washing area, and a shower. You can use this part to regulate the temperature of the water by mixing hot and cold. Please take care not to scald yourself!”

  “Woohoo!” The whole crowd cheered.

  Indeed, the bathhouse was now complete. However, it was for ladies only.

  What about the men? They could just draw water up from the well and douse themselves, couldn’t they?

  At any rate, with this, the Crimson Vow no longer had any reason to move to another inn.

  “Th-thank you so much, Miss Mile!” Little Lenny’s eyes were overflowing with tears of joy. “Now, we’ll get even more guests, and we can charge admission just for the baths!”

  “And you’ll be paying us a usage, provision, and water-heating fee, won’t you?” Pauline asked with a smile.

  “Er…”

  Lenny’s face darkened a bit.

  “Of course, when we aren’t here, you’ll need to recruit someone from among your guests, if there is anyone who can use magic—or figure out if there is someone nearby who you can pay to do it. Or, you could put in a request for magic-users at the hunters’ guild. I think you should be able to attract a few takers just by promising them snacks and ale.”

  As she spoke, Mile provided an example for what to do when there was no one available to produce hot water directly, filling the bath with water and then producing a fireball, which she did not release, but rather, submerged gently into the water. There was a burbling sound, and the temperature of the water in the bath rose slightly. She did this a number of times until steam began to rise from the surface of the pot.

  The hut had no windows except those situated up high to let in light, so it was designed to let steam out through gaps in the ceiling. Also, though it appeared to be wooden from the outside, there were stainless steel plates sandwiched between the boards.

  Additionally, inside the washroom, there was an emergency lever which, if pulled, would bring down another stainless steel plate across the doorway, sealing off entry from the outside, while a chute would open in the wall of the washroom, and the bather’s clothing, weapons, and armor would come out for rapid dressing.

  It was possible that people might plan to attack someone while they were in a place where they were unarmed, so Mile had installed these features as a precaution. Furthermore, there were escape hatches installed in the floor and ceiling, just in case. Naturally, there were traps for snaring any potential pursuers, as well.

  Just what sort of battles was Mile intending to wage here…?

  Had she been so inclined, Mile could have foregone the trouble of buying and gathering all her construction materials, and simply alchemized the whole thing using earth magic. However, that would have made her stand out far too much and attracted suspicion. Therefore, she had taken pains to make the bath appear, as much as possible, like something that had been haphazardly cobbled together from odds and ends. The kind of thing any normal, average C-rank hunter might produce.

  Yet, once again, there was something Mile had neglected.

  It was the fact that there wasn’t a single normal, average, C-rank hunter in the world who could build an entire bathhouse in just two or three days…

  “Now then, Lenny! Why don’t you do us the honor of being our first-ever bather? Show us all how it’s done!” said Mile, already beginning to strip Lenny of her clothes. If she didn’t, she suspected that that “honor” would fall on her, so she thought it best to take the initiative.

  “W-wait Miss Mile, what are you—?! No, d-don’t—!!”

  In a quick move, Mile stripped the embarrassed Lenny of her smock and went to remove he
r… undershirt…

  Mile suddenly found herself frozen, unable to move. Reina looked on in horror.

  Apparently, Lenny was incredibly well developed for a girl of ten.

  Yes, even more so than Mile. And Reina too…

  After that, the other female guests joined the girls, and they all stepped into the bath together. Everyone fussed over Lenny, while Pauline relayed to them all the “Way of the Bath” and the “Bath as a Lady’s Etiquette” talks that Mile had shared with them previously. Mile and Reina, meanwhile, took to the corners of the tub, where they sank into the water up to their ears, staring. Consequently, the rest of the bathers left them very much alone…

  “Time for another folktale…”

  Mile did not seem pleased about it.

  Apparently, she had yet to recover from her grave shock.

  “‘The Wyvern Returns’…”

  And so the story proceeded.

  “And then the wyvern plucked out one of its feathers for each of them…”

  “A wyvern’s wings don’t have any feathers!”

  “Oh…”

  “‘The Ugly Goblin Child’…”

  “But every baby goblin is hideous!”

  “………”

  She was in a funk. Normally, Mile would have told the story “The Dragon Returns,” about a dragon peeling off its own scales to make armor.

  “I’m going to sleep.”

  “Me too.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll sleep too, then…”

  Mile snuggled into bed, followed by Reina and Mavis.

  Only Pauline remained awake, engrossed in her nightly ritual of counting coins.

  “Oh, g-good morning…”

  The next morning, when they went down for breakfast, Lenny greeted the girls with a somewhat sheepish expression.

  In fact, she was wearing the same baggy smock that she always did, but for the first time ever it occurred to Mile and Reina that this might have been out of consideration for them.

  However, Lenny’s pity only stung more.

  “G-good morning, Miss Lenny,” they both replied.

  “Wh-why are you suddenly calling me ‘Miss’?”

  It seemed they had both unintentionally acknowledged Lenny as the victor…

  ***

  Several days later…

  As the girls were calculating their pay after a successful day trip of hunting and harvesting (gathering orc meat and the like), the clerk whispered to them, “The guild master wants to see you in his office.”

  The girls silently nodded, then slipped surreptitiously up to the guildhall’s upper floor.

  “Oh, you’re here.”

  Once they entered, the guild master began to explain.

  “To tell you the truth, girls, there are some folks who have been asking questions about you lately. It seems like they’re strangers to this town. But no one knows what they’re after. I have some guesses, but I really couldn’t say more than that.”

  It was a blunt way to break the news to them, but unfortunately, he told the truth.

  Maybe it was someone who had seen them at the graduation exam, or some noble who had heard the rumors about it. Or perhaps it was someone who was keen on Mile’s storage magic, or an agent of one of those merchants, or a group of imperial soldiers…

  Or perhaps it was even someone interested in their marriage prospects…

  Certainly it’s not that last one, the girls assured themselves. Still, as the guild master had said, there were so many possibilities they couldn’t possibly guess which was most likely. They could only laugh awkwardly.

  “I’ll be keeping an eye out for you, but do be careful. That is all.”

  “Honestly though—who, exactly, would be investigating us?” asked Mile on the way back to the inn.

  Yet just as they turned the final corner, they came upon a young man standing before the entrance. He was around twenty years old, determined-looking, and fairly handsome.

  The moment he saw them, he ran toward them at full speed. Instinctively, the girls took on a defensive stance. However…

  “Huh?”

  He was tall, with golden hair, a taut and resolute face, and shining eyes…

  He was most certainly no one that Reina, Pauline, and Mile had ever met before, and yet somehow he gave them the impression of being an old friend.

  And then, Mavis screamed.

  “Third Brother!”

  Of course.

  They had heard much of this fabled Third Brother. Perhaps more than anyone in the world, outside of Mavis’s own family. The number of times they’d heard the tales in their six months at school was so high they’d lost count…

  This Third Brother came to a halt just in front of Mavis.

  “Wha—? Mavis…? Y-your hair…”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. It was getting in the way, so I cut it.”

  “Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!”

  The girls tried their best to bring Third Brother out of his tizzy as they moved into the inn. Naturally, it would look suspicious for four young ladies to bring a man up to their room, so they picked a corner of the dining room to chat in. After some time, when it seemed that he had finally calmed down somewhat, Mavis began to speak.

  “What are you doing here, Third Brother?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?! I came here to get you. Father has sent you countless letters, but you never returned home—you never even replied! Now, we’re going back home. Pack your things!”

  “Sorry, but I am no longer Mavis von Austien, eldest daughter of the Austien family. The girl you are looking at is plain old Mavis, rookie C-rank hunter and forward guard leader of the Crimson Vow, who aims to become a knight someday.”

  “What are you saying?! You’re our family’s only…”

  Pauline interrupted him. “Please wait, Third Brother.”

  “It’s Ewan. You shouldn’t be calling me that.”

  “Ah, right…” she replied earnestly.

  She had only called him that because, whenever Mavis spoke of her brothers, she referred to them as First Brother, Second Brother, and Third Brother. So naturally, those were the names that Pauline had come to associate with them. And, of course, she hadn’t known Ewan’s actual name. It wasn’t as though she wanted to call him “Third Brother.”

  “Well then, Mister Ewan,” she said. “Are you aware that Mavis ran away from home because your family ignored and even opposed her own dreams of becoming a knight? If she were to return home now, just what would happen to that?”

  “Well, of course, we wouldn’t permit that! Our dear, precious Mavis’s place is with us! Mavis isn’t a knight to do the defending—she’s our fair princess, who we should defend! Why else do you think my brothers and I all became knights in the first place?”

  “Err…”

  The three third wheels shrank back, and Mavis sighed wearily. Lenny was all ears, listening wide-eyed, while the other guests looked flabbergasted.

  It’s just like the Kellogg’s slogan! thought Mile.

  She was only partly right—there weren’t any roosters around, but this sure had been a wake-up call.

  “What are you so shocked for?! Here, take a look at this!”

  “D-don’t! Third Brother, please don’t!”

  As Mavis tried desperately to stop him, Ewan jerked away and pulled from his breast pocket some kind of small parcel, which he then began to unwrap.

  “Now then—feast your eyes!” said Ewan, handing something over.

  It was a palm-sized portrait of a cute young girl, around ten years old. She had golden hair all down her back, big round eyes, and a precious smile. She looked just like a princess from a fairy tale.

  “Who is this?” the girls asked.

  “It’s me…” Mavis replied ruefully, scratching the bridge of her nose.

  “Whaaaaaaaaaaat?!?!” they all screamed.

  Just as they noticed that there was one voice too many among them, they realized that Lenny, who was supposed to be at the
inn’s counter, was gazing at the portrait as well.

  “W-well… I guess if Miss Mavis grew her hair, and put on a dress, and opened her eyes wide, and smiled… She would look something like this…” Lenny mused.

  “Right?! You get it!” Ewan nodded emphatically.

  “Ah, yes, it is just as you say, Mister Ewan…”

  “You can call me Third Brother—I don’t mind.”

  “Uh…”

  Lenny gaped at him.

  “And, I don’t mind if you do, either,” he added, pointing to Mile.

  “What?”

  Mile gaped at him as well.

  Snap!

  A sound rang in everyone’s ears.

  As everyone looked curiously around the room, as if to ask, “Did anyone else hear that?” they saw Reina and Pauline, their veins bursting in their foreheads.

  Oh nooooooo!

  Clang!

  Clatter!

  Everyone in the room moved their tables and chairs as far away from the Crimson Vow as possible.

  He had made an enemy of Pauline and Reina. There was not a single soul among the staff and guests who was not well aware of what that meant…

  Chapter 21:

  The Assault

  “…So, yes, that’s how it happened,” Ewan said, wrapping up his explanation. He slicked back his prized golden—and now slightly singed—hair, pressing a hand over his heart, which was ringing like an alarm.

  Apparently, there had been several nobles watching the graduation exam who had recognized Mavis and brought reports back to her father at home.

  After finally tracking Mavis down, the Austien family had sent her countless letters by way of the guild; however, never receiving a reply, they began to grow worried, and finally decided to dispatch someone to look for her in person. The one who was selected was this third brother, Ewan, who had been taking it easy, having just returned from a distant operation with his company.