Chapter 338: Secret base under construction 3
Neia magically dries the clothes she washed in the river (I’ve always thought she was dexterous in a weird way) and we return to everyone after freshening up.
“Is the secret story over?”
“Dianne-san”
“Well, I won’t ask too deeply. Just don’t do anything dangerous”
I’m a little nervous, but it may be obvious to the elves and dragons with good ears that we’ve put up an audio barrier. If only they didn’t know that I was talking to the flash sword……
“My apologies. It was a little too much and I couldn’t let anyone but Smithson-san hear it”
Neia puts her hat on her chest and apologizes. Dianne nodded hawkishly and then laughed bitterly.
“And yet, after all, Andy would be the first person I would trust with my heart. It’s a strange thing”
“Eh”
“If you want to talk politics, you have me and Sharon. As a half-elf, Anzeros would be someone you could trust and if it’s about having a connection or not, you could get along with Aurora. If you want to talk about things from a transcendent perspective, there are dragons, but for some reason, Andy is the one to talk to in private”
“It’s……well, that, it’s called coincidence”
“A coincidence. I don’t deny the expression. I’d like to hear a little more about it, but if you can talk about it, you don’t need a secret”
“……I´m sorry”
“Just, well……you better watch out for pregnancy. We are all magically sterilized, but you are not. If you want, just tell my sister”
“It’s not a secret for those reasons!”
……I can’t say I trust it anymore, but that’s the perception that I get along with girls.
“You haven’t made a move yet, have you, Andy?”
“Yes”
“Smithson-san, I don’t think it’s enough to give a powerful and immediate answer……”
Neia gave me a resentful look and coughed.
“……Emm. Then I got my hands on it”
“You’d better use contraception. Pregnancy and childbirth shouldn’t stop the operation”
Dianne says with a grin. I guess she knows what she’s talking about. Like, I’m not having sex, but I’m sexually harassing her.
“That’s why it’s different!”
Neia turns bright red and becomes irritated. Dianne is meaner than ever, but I guess that means she was worried about me.
The construction work is progressing smoothly with the help of two dragons and some innovative magic (it looks like it to us, but it seems to have been in operation for quite a while in the Celesta army’s engineering corps).
“Really, though, I’d like to put a few more people on it, no matter how many ogres it is. It’s refreshing to have the dragons doing most of the work and us providing support”
“Speaking of hard work is an ogre”
That’s the world’s common sense and limitations.
If it cannot be carried by an ogre, it cannot be carried by any other means. The hardest part is left to the ogres. But the existence of dragons turns that upside down. They are stronger than the ogres, can reach higher than the ogres and are rarely fatigued. It is certainly not every day that an ogre takes all the work on a construction site and leaves only the details to the dragon.
“Hoho. Well, I am not a civil engineering specialist myself. It is possible that the construction will be a little bit irregular. If that happens, please fix it up for me”
“I don’t think 100-man commander Dianne would screw that up”
Goto takes his tools and gets down to work.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Oh, please fetch water from the river. There’s a tub right there. Also, if you could check to see if Boyd is dead”
I, a construction amateur with no arms, no height and no skills, could only do chores, more chores, more chores. Yeah, I know. Well, the only reason I’m here is to give orders to Maia, in short.
-
After the day’s work was done, Laila and Dianne took a break and we all set up a furnace in the middle of the lumber yard for dinner.
“Dianne and the others work here at night?”
“I, however, can make progress with Laila’s body as long as I move for a long time. She’s huge and she’s not tired. ……Good grief, a dragon is a stunned creature. If there were ten of them, a city of 100,000 people could be built in a year”
“Ho. You want to try it with the blue lizards next time?”
“The city of dragons. It will go down in history. Well, it means nothing if there is no one to live in it”
I had thought that she might be more likely to complain that 「Civil engineering is not elegant」, but it seems that Laila likes working with Dianne quite a bit.
“But Andy, wouldn’t that kind of work be nice after you retire? I’m sure there will be a lot of interest in building bridges, castles and anything else with dragons”
Dianne fluttered a ceramic cup filled to the brim with alcohol and Goto, who was roasting a deer’s leg beside her, panicked.
“Oh, give me a break. This is bad for our business, isn’t it? If we get the job done in such a short time, we’ll have no trouble getting all the orders for the whole town with just one dragon”
“I’m kidding. ……But Andy. If you don’t want to use your dragons for fighting, you should consider doing that. Even if you feed them, there’s still a limit to what one person can do with a blacksmith job”
“Ho. You are quick-tempered”
Laila, too, sips her drink and waits for the food to be ready. Aurora is the cook.
“It’s almost ready. ……Things were things, so I had to make a stew”
“Thing means……didn’t you bring quite a lot of ingredients?”
“We didn’t have many of the ingredients we used at Sir Guto’s mansion. If we had at least some silver clan fruits, we could have elaborate desserts and garnishes”
“……Wait a minute Aurora”
I looked at the cooking table (which Goto had built in an hour from lumber) and saw that she had thrown in every piece of meat and vegetable that could be put into the pot and left the ones that weren’t unpacked. Even though Apple was the one who did the selection of the ingredients when we left, this was.
“Think a little more from the ingredients……like using dried fish to make broth for the soup and roasting the meat on skewers”
“Oh. ……There were very few dishes made with fish over there, so I was wondering what to do”
“I know you’re excited to learn how to cook, but let’s not waste any ingredients!?”
“Even if you say that, but……there’s no way I can handle ingredients I’ve never worked with before”
……Not possible. It’s really 「Freshly learned」. She had an inkling of it, but other than the dishes she 「Learned」, she’s at a level where she can’t apply or imagine anything else completely. She’s a rich girl, right? A princess. Besides, her judgment on what she can’t use is too drastic. Instead of saying, 「Let’s do something about it」, she says, 「It’s useless, so let’s forget about it」. The rest of us were left with a miserable dinner of stewed vegetables and Laila’s alcohol, not to mention the deer feet that the ogre group had gone to the trouble of loading for their own use. After a hard day’s work, this was a bit much. ……I’m not sure if the other members of the group can cook well enough to follow Aurora’s lead. Sharon and Almeida don’t have that kind of cooking skill and asking Dianne and Laila seems to hurt Aurora’s pride. ……Will I do it? I can’t really think of it. When I decide to prepare.
“……Hou. Do you still have this much material left?”
“Ah, Great Knight Chief Lister”
Great Knight Chief Lister appears out of nowhere and squints as he opens a cloth bag lying on the table or in a wooden box.
“Actually, Aurora, she was just learning to cook and couldn’t get her hands on ingredients she’d never used before……”
“Hmm. ……I’m sorry to be a lackey, but I could add a couple of Lian dishes, if you don’t mind me trying”
“What’s Lian cuisine……”
“The Imperial Lian Kingdom. It is a neighboring country. It is the western edge of the Eastern Mountains and is in close contact with our country. I have stayed there many times during my training”
Taking out a small knife from his pocket, Great Knight Chief Lister sliced and diced several ingredients with brilliant dexterity, grinded them with the handle and prepared salad and dumplings, all with great pleasure.
“She is a very enjoyable person to work with. If I’m in the stuffing house, my men or the cook will do it for me first and at Rennesto there are many invitations to dinner”
“Do you enjoy cooking?”
“When I was back home, my family was quite well-off. And I had no doubts about the food being prepared for me. But when I went to the eastern mountains for training, the food culture was completely different. I had a craving for the food of my hometown, so I started making it”
He wipes the small knife with a cloth, spins it around and then sheathes it with a snap. He handled the small knife so beautifully that he looked like a street performer. I applauded. He looked a little satisfied, but when he put the knife back in his pocket, he looked behind him a little worriedly.
“What’s wrong?”
“……No, I’m a little worried that that ogre young man hasn’t arrived yet”
“Not coming?”
“I’ve given him some kumite practice while he was training, but he seems to be tired……come to think of it, we haven’t decided that there won’t be any monsters here, so I hope there won’t be any”
“Hey……Ma, Maia! Go find Boyd!”
I hurriedly gave instructions to Maia. With a sigh, Maia leaped over the lumber yard in a great leap.
……It seems that Boyd was busted up because the practice was usually too hard for him. When the dragon Maia grabbed him and carried him away, I thought he was a corpse.
-
“Itadakimasu”
We all decide to have dinner with Aurora & Great Knight Chief Lister under the first star. Aurora’s hot pot was delicious enough without any strange applications, but Great Knight Chief Lister’s spicy dumplings were a hit with the majority of the drinking group.
“Hoho. This is a good accompaniment to alcohol”
“Yes. It’s pretty good”
“I’ve heard that Lian food is spicy and unappealing, but this is quite……”
“The flavor of peppers is often difficult to bring out in an unskilled chef. Until I had them at Lian’s, I thought they were just something to mess with the tongue”
“You are a gourmet, Great Knight Chief. I hear that cat beasts have dull tongues
“How many times have I told you I am not a cat!”
“Hii!?”
“……U, Umm. I’m sorry. Annette’s idiots often tease me about cats and kittens on purpose”
Goto is scared to death after being yelled at. Apparently, being an ogre, Great Knight Chief Lister was also a reflexive one.
The non-drinking group, on the other hand.
“I, I feel like I’m losing……”
Aurora is devastated. Aurora and Boyd were reserved because Laila’s drink was too strong, Neia was not good at it and I was told to go home and drink it slowly by Dianne, so I was left with nothing to do.
“You need training”
“We too, Almeida. It’s embarrassing to be behind men in cooking”
And the two gauntlets stopped their hands from reaching for their drinks to keep me company.
“I, I’m a knight and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman. Knight Chief Sharon said something very old-fashioned
“Do you wear that collar as a knight?”
“……I, I……female slave”
“Then you’d better brush up on your feminine side too, or Princess Aurora will just leave you behind. If all you have to be a girl is an attitude on the floor, you might get tired of it sooner or later”
“……Th, That’s……the kind of thing to say”
No, I don’t expect all female slaves to have the women’s skills of cooking, laundry and sewing either. ……And maybe they all can’t beat Selenium or Oregano.
“I’m not sure how much I’d like to do housework with a woman. When I have kids, I’d like to ask them whether they prefer daddy’s cooking or mommy’s cooking……ehehe”
Boyd looks happy as ever, dripping with gooey fantasies. And Neia, on the other hand, is delicately keeping her distance and trying not to get mixed up in the conversation. Well, I guess she doesn’t want to disturb the scene by saying that peaceful skills don’t suit her, or that she will eventually die, as she always does. But,
“Neia. ……Good food, you ate a lot of food over here”
“Eh, ah, yes……that’s right”
“I heard that Great Knight Chief Lister started cooking because he wanted to eat good food himself”
“……Haa”
Neia puts her hand on her hat, looking a bit puzzled.
“Is there anyone back home you’d like to feed a good meal to?”
I didn’t corner her, nor did I let the conversation escape in its usual direction.
“……I want to make sure everyone has something good to eat. Above all, I don’t want them to fight over food”
“I see. ……Then I’d better practice making good food”
“That and this are……”
“What, are you going to go to the trouble of kidnapping the cook over here and taking him away on the orders of the hero?”
“I wouldn’t do that, but……”
“Well then, if you can’t cook it, they won’t get it. How much good food do you have over here and what kind of food do you want to feed everyone back home?”
“……It’s forceful”
Neia pulls down the brim of her hat.
“Neia. ……You can’t leave everything to others. You have to tell them what you want to tell them”
“…………”
“Your hands aren’t just for wielding swords. You can hold someone’s hand or create something. Your voice is not meant to speak of your duties as a hero. You can convey any heart. Your feet can go anywhere and meet anyone. Don’t forget that. You have lived this long to make someone happy. You have been kept alive to make someone happy. Being brave is only a small part of that”
“……Eh, and”
“I mean, that’s mostly what I’m getting at”
I patted Neia’s head on her hat.
“So. ……Do one more thing. Don’t give up. To die for someone means to do everything you can and still die looking for more. If you do something for someone else and then die satisfied with what you’ve done, you’re ultimately dying for yourself”
“……”
“I, I’m sorry I preached that weird sermon”
The stares of the people around me. Feeling strangely embarrassed, I remove my hand from Neia’s. Boyd mutters something.
“……I see that has appeared”
“What the hell!”
When I realized that Neia´s ears turned red and got angry, the surroundings burst out. No one followed the question of what. Even though everyone knows it.
- ToC -