After the battle, the expedition tended to its casualties, gathered the monster materials, and returned straight to Shedil.

Bloodied and battered, the army looked for all the world like the remnants of a defeated force. Yet the pride on their faces, and the enormous head resting on a wagon in the middle of their column, proclaimed them victors rather than vanquished.

On the way back, as Shan wiped his blood-covered face with a damp cloth, Roden reported that two of the thirty Altoan mercenaries they had mustered had died.

“They were unlucky. A harpy’s talons caught one of them squarely across the throat. The other took a rock thrown by a troll to the head.”

With an ordinary injury, they could have retreated inside the defensive formation and received treatment from a priest. But unless a person wore exceptionally good equipment, a monster’s attack was likely to kill them outright.

Shan committed the names of the two Altoan mercenaries buried in the gorge where they had fought to memory. They were the first to die fighting under his command.

“Roden.”

“Yes?”

“If they have families, I’d like you to make sure they’re provided for. At least enough that they won’t go hungry for now.”

Roden did not tell Shan that no knight took responsibility for mercenaries’ families. He merely nodded with a pleased smile.

“They’ll be glad.”

“I hope it at least makes them a little less sad.”

Naturally, the Altoan mercenaries following them heard every word of this exchange.

Uncomfortable with the gazes boring into the back of his head, Shan slipped away toward the wagons hastily built from trees felled nearby. On one lay a tall knight, well over two meters in height, whose wagon was consequently half again as large as the others.

“How is he doing?”

“They say he’s improved a great deal. He hasn’t regained consciousness yet, but with continued rest and care, he should recover soon...”

The squire tending Lug answered Shan with tears in his eyes.

“Thank you so much, Sir Shan! I’ll be sure to tell Sir Lug when he wakes! How can we ever repay you?”

Word that Shan had used a special elixir to save Lug had already spread throughout the expedition. A man who might well have died within minutes had suddenly been saved. Naturally, people talked.

A few sneered that he had done something foolish, but most admired his generosity in using a treasure of his own to save a comrade’s life. Knights, after all, could hardly resist such notions as loyalty, honor, and friendship.

With so many wounded, however, it had been an ordeal explaining that he had none left to those begging him to sell them some medicine too.

After several hours marching southwest, they finally sighted Shedil’s walls, by which time darkness had fallen. A few men at the head of the column shouted up to the people on the walls.

“We killed the ogre!”

“The hunt was a success!”

Once word spread, cheers soon rang out from inside the city as well. The expedition passed through the open gates to universal acclaim as victorious heroes.

“Haha! I knew you could do it. I knew it! You actually pulled it off!”

Count Shedil had come out to greet them in person. Laughing heartily, he clapped Shan, the other knights, and the few surviving nobles on the shoulders. With the burden of worry lifted from him, he seemed to have grown ten years younger in an instant.

After washing themselves clean, the expedition’s lords and knights gathered in the council chamber of the count’s castle. They all looked exhausted enough to collapse on the spot, but there was work to be done: assessing their achievements in battle and deciding their rewards.

In truth, this could well be called the greatest challenge of a monster hunt. No one could devise a fixed measure of how much each person had contributed to the fighting.

Fortunately, there was a system of sorts, based on longstanding rules, that assigned points according to the number and strength of the monsters slain and, for large monsters, the extent of the wounds inflicted.

Once their discussion began to yield results, a baron who had survived the vanguard’s destruction shouted indignantly.

“I cannot accept this! My house fought at the forefront and lost more than half its troops. We must at least be compensated for the blood we shed!”

A viscount who had fought hard on the right wing answered indifferently.

“All the vanguard did was charge into a field of traps and become ogre feed. If Sir Shan and the left wing hadn’t come to your aid, you would certainly have been wiped out. Your lives were saved, and still you have no shame.”

“Y-you dare—!”

The baron huffed in outrage, but unfortunately for him, few took his side. Most of the western Old Faith lords and knights who would have supported him had been flattened beneath the ogre’s fists.

They had used their superior numbers to claim the vanguard. Now that their numbers had dwindled, their voices inevitably carried less weight.

Having thus silenced what remained of the vanguard, they moved on to deciding how to distribute the battle’s greatest prizes: the ogre’s head and the other materials harvested from its body.

“Now that I look at it, there’s remarkably little of an ogre that goes to waste.”

“Indeed...”

The lords and knights chatted as they studied the list of materials harvested from the creature. Starting with its head, many parts of an ogre—its brain matter, fangs, bones, and organs—served as powerful magical ingredients.

Moreover, since such a rare creature appeared only once every few decades, supply fell short of demand, driving prices to astronomical heights even relative to their actual potency.

Naturally, the most valuable items, the head and magic stone, went to Shan, who had fought the ogre most fiercely and delivered the killing blow.

Many coveted the head in particular as proof of the honor of the hunt, but the difference in their achievements was too great to dispute.

“Hmm...”

“Well, that stands to reason.”

Disappointed though they were, the lords and knights nodded. They knew that trying to interject with claims about their own contributions now would only make them look petty.

The trouble came with the next item.

Everyone eyed the two large, round lumps longingly while watching one another’s reactions.

“Ahem. Next are the ogre’s... testicles...”

Ogre testicles were renowned as an exceptionally potent virility tonic. People openly claimed that they could let a seventy-year-old man father three children. Some of those present were more interested in these than in the head or magic stone.

Roden quietly addressed Shan, who stood beside him.

“What shall we do?”

“Hm? Those? I’ll pass.”

Shan, who did not yet even understand why anyone needed enhanced virility, dismissed the matter. Roden confidently announced,

“Very well. House Barendil withdraws from the bidding for the testicles!”

There was no need to state, in poor taste, that they expected an advantage in bidding for other items in return. Such things were understood without being spoken.

“Oh!”

With a formidable rival out of the running, the older men eagerly competed for the prize. After much noisy debate, an elderly lord with a faded white beard and a middle-aged knight claimed one testicle apiece.

By then, Shan could feel his eyes drifting shut. After repeatedly wringing out his spirit, his battered body was demanding the sleep it needed to recover.

Watching him nod off, Roden whispered,

“Shall I take care of the rest?”

“Is that all right?”

“As Sir Shan’s squire, I ought to be able to handle this much myself.”

“Then I’ll go get some rest...”

Shan rose, yawned, said his goodbyes to a few nearby knights, and left. Fortunately, the count had offered him a room in the castle, sparing him the trip down to the inn below.

* * *

Without even changing his clothes, Shan stretched out on the bed and fell into a deep, utterly dreamless sleep. It was a sleep so heavy that his whole body seemed to sink into mud.

After sleeping for what felt at once like an instant and an eternity, he awoke and stretched, savoring how refreshed he felt. Sunlight streamed through the window; apparently, morning had come.

“Mmm...”

He had been in rather poor shape before going to sleep. The troll’s rock had left a black bruise on his side. He had sprained his ankle and scraped open his knee in a fall, and the ogre’s crushing grip had cracked his ribs.

Yet for some reason, he now felt none of the lingering effects of those injuries. Even if a priest had performed healing miracles on him as he slept, this seemed an unusually rapid recovery.

“Oh, you’re awake?”

Roden looked up delightedly from the desk opposite him, where he had been writing something.

“Finally. If you hadn’t woken up today, I was going to grab the priests by their collars and tell them to do something.”

“Why?”

“You’ve been asleep for nearly four days. Aren’t you thirsty?”

“That long?”

Startled by this unexpected revelation, Shan realized that his throat was indeed parched. He really must have slept a long time: hunger and thirst assailed him with frightening intensity.

“How are you feeling?”

“Hungry and thirsty.”

“I’ll have them bring food and drink. Apart from that, how are your injuries?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt better in my life.”

“That’s a relief. I was worried there might be something wrong with you.”

“Though the priests said you were fine,” Roden added.

He called out into the corridor, and before long, simple fare arrived: porridge, cheese, and water. For some reason, however, the maid who brought it kept peering at Shan with wide eyes.

When their eyes met, she cried out in alarm.

“P-please excuse me!”

Great as the difference in status between a knight and a servant might be, a count’s servant would not normally be quite so deferential.

His puzzlement lasted only a moment before he began shoveling down the food, appeasing his ravenous hunger and thirst.

As he ate, Shan was surprised to discover that the porridge and cheese tasted quite good. Everything he had eaten the day before the hunt and on the morning they set out had been dreadful from long storage, but this seemed to have been made with fairly fresh ingredients.

“This is good.”

“Count Pales’s food wagons arrived just yesterday. Thanks to that, we don’t have to worry about starving to death after going to all the trouble of killing the ogre.”

Roden grumbled that it was fortunate they had slain the ogre, at least; with food running short, the mood had grown genuinely ugly.

“Count Pales... The princess’s uncle on her mother’s side?”

“Yes. Though he didn’t bring them himself.”

Come to think of it, the princess never spoke about her uncle either. Shan wondered what sort of man he was as he stuffed the remaining food into his mouth.

After a small burp, he brought up something he had been wondering about.

“How is Sir Lug?”

“He’s awake. They say he’ll probably need a few weeks to recover, though. Well, he’d be dead without the princess’s elixir, so that much can’t be helped.”

“I see...”

“Aren’t you going to ask how the rewards were divided?”

“I’m sure you handled it well.”

At a remark so irresponsible it bordered on shameless, Roden stared in disbelief, then gave a snort of laughter.

“I’m tempted to tell you otherwise, but yes. It turned out quite well.”

“I knew I could count on you.”

“You certainly know what to say. Here, take a look.”

Roden handed him the sheet he was holding. Reading down it, Shan exclaimed in wonder.

Beginning with the ogre’s head and magic stone, the list of rewards went on through tendons, some of its bones, troll bones, banshee essence, and so much more that it was difficult to read it all.

“This much?”

“You essentially led the left wing to victory, and you made the greatest contribution to killing the ogre. Still, we weren’t the only ones fighting, so I had to concede a few things.”

He went on to explain that he had accepted fewer of the relatively cheap materials, taking into account the price drop an oversupply would cause, and so forth.

“Oh, and it isn’t written there, but the ogre’s heart is ours too. Sir Lug received it as the second most distinguished fighter, but he decided to give it to us. Apparently, it’s still usable despite the great big hole in it.”

“Huh? Why?”

“For saving his life, of course. He survived because of the medicine you gave him.”

“Well, I gave it to him because we fought together.”

Shan smiled awkwardly, and Roden shook his head.

“Well, we can take our time deciding whether to turn the ogre’s heart into medicine or whatever else... Shall we pay him a visit, then? He’s in the building right next door.”

At Roden’s suggestion, Shan got up, changed his clothes, and left the room. Before long, he discovered that everyone in the count’s castle looked up to him.

“Oh, is that him?”

“First the Cockatrice Slayer, and now the Ogre Slayer... They say he isn’t even fifteen yet.”

“It really feels like seeing someone out of legend or myth with my own eyes.”

“I heard he tore out the ogre’s heart with his bare hands.”

Four days after the ogre’s defeat, accounts of Shan’s extraordinary martial prowess had spread all over Shedil, exaggerated several times over. They claimed he had flown through the sky on horseback, skewering dozens of monsters with a single thrust of his lance, or severed the ogre’s head with one stroke of his sword.

There had been a reason for the maid’s exaggerated reaction earlier.

Feeling his shoulders rise with pride at the attention, Shan knocked on the door and entered the room where Lug was resting with a satisfied smile.

“Oh, Sir Shan! You’ve come!”

Lug was wrapped in bandages from his characteristically guileless, horse-like face down to the rest of his body. He was recovering under regular healing miracles, but apparently, with so many broken bones, a speedy recovery was out of the question.

“I heard what happened. You used a precious elixir to save me.”

“We’re comrades. Besides, you risked your life to save mine, didn’t you?”

Shan still remembered the moment Lug had limped over on his broken leg and cut through the ogre’s fingers. Without that, the creature’s final struggle would have suffocated him.

At Shan’s words, tears welled in Lug’s honest eyes. Wiping them with a long, bandaged arm, he spoke solemnly.

“I will never forget this kindness. I swear by the Goddess, if I ever raise a lance or sword against you, Sir Shan, then I am no man but the offspring of a beast.”

“You needn’t go that far. Even giving me the ogre’s heart is rather excessive...”

Knowing that Princess Sherin, with whom he was on friendly terms, did not get along particularly well with Lug’s liege, Prince Elvin, Shan found the pledge rather burdensome. But Lug shook his head vehemently, only to give a strangled groan when the movement apparently aggravated his injuries.

“It is not excessive in the least!”

“Please, calm down.”

Seeing him grow excited and move about despite his injuries, Shan and Roden decided that staying any longer would do more harm than good. They told Lug to get more rest and left the room.

Shan looked back at the door and let out a quiet groan.

“Hmm.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s just a little tiring.”

He was not a bad person, Shan admitted frankly, but being around someone who constantly gazed at him with boundless admiration or praised him to excess was decidedly uncomfortable.

Roden chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Then just become someone worthy of that treatment. No, honestly, you’re already more than worthy. You’re Sir Shan, the man who killed an ogre by tearing out its heart with his bare hands.”

“What do you mean, with my bare hands?”

“The rumor’s everywhere already. You’d be better off giving up on correcting it.”

Apparently, from a distance, pulling the sword out of its heart had looked that way. Then again, what did the precise method of killing it matter?

Later, after inspecting the valuable monster materials stored in the vault—the ogre’s head, magic stone, heart, and the like—Shan was looking around the stable where Arwin was staying when Count Shedil sent him an invitation. The count had apparently heard that he was awake.

Escorted to the study, Shan began unfastening Guardian of the East from his waist to entrust it to a nearby servant, but the count waved him off.

“No need. I gave it to you; keep it with you. It’s hardly as though you’ll suddenly draw it and cut me down, is it?”

Permission to remain armed in a noble’s presence was a sign of absolute trust.

Slightly surprised by this unexpected gesture, Shan took the seat opposite him. Count Shedil smiled warmly.

“I hear you slept very soundly. Are you feeling better?”

“Thanks to your consideration, I’m fully recovered.”

Shan had heard that a priest assigned by the count had continued performing healing miracles on him for four days. He bowed his head slightly in thanks.

In truth, his body was more than recovered. He was so full of energy that he wanted to run about to burn it off immediately.

Come to think of it, although he had not intended it, he had been drenched in the ogre’s blood while killing it. Perhaps this had something to do with the phenomenon Sherin had mentioned before. He would have to make time for another examination when he returned to the capital.

While Shan was considering this, Count Shedil sipped his tea and began to talk. It was nothing of great importance: whether Shan might consider selling the ogre’s magic stone—the count seemed deeply impressed by how the cockatrice’s stone had helped them hold out—and whether there had been any reasonably skilled knights-errant in the expedition.

Of course, Shan had no intention of selling the magic stone to him. Having acquired one of the highest quality, he wanted to ask Sherin to make him an incredible magical device.

Since he already had a sword and lance, perhaps armor or a shield would be best.

After this small talk to put them at ease, the count’s expression abruptly grew serious.

“Have you heard that the others who came with the expedition have all gone home?”

“Yes. I heard everyone has dispersed apart from those too badly injured to travel.”

Unless they had a long-term contract, every additional day of keeping mercenaries cost money. With their business concluded, the lords and knights needed to return home and terminate their contracts as soon as possible.

Consequently, Shan’s party was now among the very few members of the expedition still staying in Shedil.

“And you’ll be returning to the capital too.”

“I expect we’ll leave today or tomorrow.”

Shan, too, was paying his mercenaries’ wages. Staying here for the several weeks Lug needed to recover would be a considerable loss. He also wanted to turn the ogre materials into something useful as soon as possible. Above all, Sherin’s warning about the ominous situation in the capital weighed on him.

At his reply, the count hesitated, then gave a low hum.

“I’ve been trying to think of a tactful way to put this, but nothing comes to mind. I’ll be direct. Why not stay here in Shedil for a while and consider it a period of convalescence?”

“Pardon?”

“Just to be clear, this isn’t some foolish attempt to ask you to enter my service as a vassal. You’ve become too great a figure for me to take under my wing now.”

Waving a hand to forestall any misunderstanding, the count revealed something startling.

“News came in just yesterday. Something serious seems to be happening in Hasra. I don’t know the exact circumstances, but I’m told passage through the city gates has been restricted for days.”

The count quietly added that it might be wiser to keep some distance, at least until they understood the situation.