Episode 59: “For You, Once More”
The state of Epfel Village, visited for the first time in a month, had clearly changed from before.
“Somehow… it feels livelier than it used to?”
Epfel Village shipped its harvest to the royal capital, and its residents did their shopping there in turn — which meant there shouldn’t have been many traveling merchants coming out this way. And yet the square had more peddlers set up than there had been last time.
“Ah, it’s big sister Yuria!”
“Yuria-oneechan!!”
While Fiine had been taking in her surroundings, a crowd of small children had gathered around Yuria.
And Yuria was calling each of them by name, one by one, patting their heads.
(S-seriously, isn’t Yuria a little too settled in here?)
Bit by bit, more villagers besides the children began to gather too.
While Fiine was still trying to process it all, someone called her name — “Fiine-san!” — in a voice she recognized.
She turned, startled.
Standing there was Helena, though she looked nothing like the woman Fiine remembered.
Her long hair was tied up on top of her head, and instead of an elegant one-piece dress, she was dressed in plain, practical work clothes.
Her gentle bearing was unchanged, but now there was a healthy vitality layered over it as well.
“Helena-san…?”
“It’s been a while. I’m sorry — for showing up dressed like this.”
“N-no, not at all…?”
“I’ve started doing farm work myself, recently. My husband always told me I didn’t need to, and I’m embarrassed to say I never even thought to try it while he was alive. But since I’ve decided to keep living here, I felt like I needed to do something myself, too.”
Helena clenched both fists and smiled, looking a little embarrassed.
“Fiine-san. If it’s all right, would you like to come see our field?”
◆
After stopping by the house to call out to Adam and Mary, the five of them headed for the field together.
“…Eh?”
Looking at the scene in front of her, Fiine froze for a moment.
The field in her memory and the field in front of her now were almost unrecognizable as the same place.
The entire field was covered with netting meant to keep out vermin and monsters, woven through with threads containing ingredients effective against monsters.
The traps placed at regular intervals were different from before, too — now they were magical devices rigged to trigger light-attribute magic the moment they detected a monster.
On top of that, plants that hadn’t been there last time had been planted all around the field’s edge.
They were harmless to people and crops both — just plants with a smell that big rats hated.
“Yuria-san gave us some advice, and we did our best with it,” Helena said, puffing her chest out proudly.
“Me too!” Adam piped up beside her, stretching up on his toes.
“I helped plant that grass too! And put up the nets! For the magic tool, I went around asking everyone in the village, trying to figure out if we could all pitch in money together to buy it!”
Magical devices required regular maintenance, and ones that used light-attribute magic in particular didn’t come cheap.
Epfel Village had plenty of wealthy farming households, though — the price probably wasn’t out of reach.
(But hiring people would definitely be the cheaper option…)
As things stood, the only visible danger to the villagers was the damage from big rats.
In that case, it should have been entirely possible to just hire poor laborers to deal with it instead.
(And yet everyone went along with taking all these measures themselves?)
While Fiine stood there, taken aback, a man working in a nearby field called out to her.
“Adam and Helena kept at us so earnestly that the rest of us — me included — figured, well, let’s give it a shot. This is our home to begin with. It’s on us to protect it.”
“…Did none of you consider leaving the fields to someone else, and moving to the capital?”
“‘Course we did. Truth is, we’d been on the fence about it for a while. Then those two started pushing so hard, and it got us thinking, maybe we’ll try it after all.”
The man laughed heartily and threw an arm around Adam’s shoulders.
(Come to think of it, hasn’t this kid gotten taller…?)
Only a month had passed, and yet even his face seemed to have grown up somehow.
“Plus, Yuria-san taught us a whole bunch of things. Honestly, none of this would’ve happened without her.”
“Oh, no, I only gave a little advice, that’s all.”
“That ‘little’ mattered a whole lot to us. Right, Adam?”
“That’s right! Thanks to Yuria-san, we figured out how to actually try!”
Praised from every direction, Yuria scratched the back of her head, looking bashful.
Whatever advice Yuria had given, it was probably grounded in magical knowledge — though nothing especially specialized. The kind of thing any graduate of the magic academy would consider common sense.
(But that knowledge mattered this much, to these people…)
Adam had said they’d figured out how to try.
It had never even occurred to Fiine that there could be people out there who didn’t know how to try.
She’d always thought the world was simply divided — those with strength and those without, those with talent and those without.
That’s all she’d thought it was.
“Honestly, I was just moved by how much heart Adam and Helena and everyone else in the village had. Everyone wanted so badly to try, and it made me want to cheer them on.”
“…Cheer them on…”
“That’s right. Everyone loves this village so much — and that feeling made me want to protect it too.”
While Fiine was slowly turning Yuria’s words over in her mind, Helena reached for her hand to shake it.
“That’s all thanks to you too, Fiine-san. Because you let me see him one more time… because that day happened, I was able to think that I wanted to try, that I wanted to keep going.”
“Honestly, it surprised even me — our sheltered, well-bred Helena, out here in work clothes, going around bowing her head to ask people to teach her farming.”
“Thank you so much,” Helena said, bowing.
“N-no, I just… did my job…”
“Your work saved me, Fiine-san!!”
Dazzling.
That was the only word for what Fiine felt, looking at Helena’s smile.
(People really can change this much…)
As Fiine stood there, frozen without meaning to, Yuria leaned in and whispered softly by her ear.
“See, Fiine? It makes you want to believe, doesn’t it?”
A society where people are respected regardless of their ability or their standing, where everyone joins hands and reaches together for peace.
An ideal. And precisely because it was an ideal, an impossible one.
—The world I dreamed of.
The world we dreamed of.
“I want you to believe in that dream again. Just once more.”