Chapter 54 – The assassin goes hunting
I enjoyed my home after a long absence.
There really is no place like home after all.
And my dinner was plenty nourishing.
My mom’s dishes weren’t particularly exquisite, but they suited my palate.
Not because I grew up eating them, but because I love my mother.
Then the next day, I went hunting in the mountains.
It wasn’t as thanks for yesterday’s hospitality, but I was going to serve my home cooking today.
Dia also came along to look for ingredients because she wished to eat my rabbit cream stew.
[Tarte, are your mana and stamina okay so far?] (Lugh)
[Yes, somehow!] (Tarte)
My usual hunting grounds were located at the end of a deep animal trail, and within the territories of ferocious beasts, so it was dangerous.
It wasn’t as easy to walk in as the shallow and maintained parts of the forest, and just going forward drained your stamina and put a heavy strain on your legs.
The reason I chose this place to hunt was so I wouldn’t deprive the people of their hunting game.
Among the population, there were those who made a living by hunting. I didn’t want to be a bother to them.
Not only that, but there were some advantages to it.
The fact that even hunters didn’t venture there meant that there was a large number of preys in that zone.
Moreover, taking the rough road itself made for good training.
I trained myself by going hunting there.
[I found traces of an Alvanian rabbit… Judging by these, it shouldn’t have gone too far yet.] (Tarte)
By going through rough roads, you could build up your agility and endurance, as well as your attentiveness and concentration so that you wouldn’t overlook even the faintest animal traces.
How nostalgic.
Tarte was walking on the path I used to follow.
She guessed the position of our prey from the faint traces left by the Alvanian rabbit and ran after it.
For this hunt, I gave Tarte two challenges so she would overcome her weaknesses.
One was to keep Tuatha Dé’s eyes active as soon as she entered the mountains.
Normally, if you used Tuatha Dé’s eyes, which kept exhausting your mana, unless you possessed【Rapid Recovery】, you would immediately collapse.
Which is why, what you had to do was pour just enough to keep them active.
By continuing to activate them with the minimum output for a long time, you could master mana control.
The other one was to make use of a weapon I recently prepared.
Tarte’s spear could be qualified as a first-class weapon.
Aiming for a world-class weapon next would’ve been the natural course of action, but as a shortcut to becoming stronger, we would use new weapons together.
We may have been off the right track to becoming knights and martial artists, but we were assassins.
We greedily sought nothing but strength.
Tarte ran.
She ran while casting the magic spell Dia created per her request.
It was an assassination-oriented spell.
[【Wind Shadow】] (Tarte)
Tarte’s specialty was using magic to move at high speed by wrapping herself in a cowl of wind, eliminating air resistance and saving stamina.
What she had just activated was arranged as such. While she was coating herself with wind and accelerating, the wind erased her scent, noises, and presence, preventing her prey from noticing her.
However, it couldn’t completely remove scents and sounds. Doing that would require a ridiculously delicate processing.
In which case, the magic spell itself would become difficult to cast and control.
Therefore, the spell was sketchy to some extent, the processing was lightened, and although it was imperfect, it allowed her to move while erasing her own presence.
When you put it in words, it sounds easy, but putting it into practice is complicated.
[Nice going.] (Lugh)
Alvanian rabbits possessed unusually sharp hearing and sense of smell.
If she could close in on her prey downwind, and without being noticed, I would give her a passing grade.
I was watching over Tarte from afar.
She rolled up her skirt.
She had her foldable spear on her left thigh, and a handgun and a gun barrel on her right one this time.
The latter was the new weapon I had given her.
[This way, even Tarte can use【Gun Strike】. If it goes well, that is.] (Lugh)
There was a major drawback to the【Gun Strike】Dia and I used.
First,【Gun Strike】required the use of explosions produced by the fire affinity, but only a small fraction of mages could use them.
Then, in the case of the guns that used Fahr Stone explosions to shoot bullets, anyone could use them as long as they poured their mana in the stones, but the drawback was that the force of their explosions was so great that in order to withstand them, the guns had to be made bulky.
And so, what we consequently developed was a fine powder made from Fahr Stones.
This way, the amount of powder could be adjusted to the appropriate firepower.
The bullets in the handgun used by Tarte contained just enough powder for the gun to withstand them.
Tarte took out the handgun from her right thigh and attached the barrel to it.
At close range, the strong point of a handgun was that its frame allowed for easy handling, and at medium range and beyond, it was possible to attach a gun barrel to it for better accuracy.
When Tarte poured her mana into it, the Fahr Stone powder reached its critical point and exploded.
A bullet was ejected from the gun, and the Alvanian rabbit’s head was blown to smithereens.
Tarte shot it with one hand, but she managed to do that because she used magic to enhance her physical abilities.
It was more than twice as powerful as a Magnum bullet, and even if a grown man held it firmly with both hands and fired it, they would lose their grip and get blown away.
Since it was a gun designed to kill mages, I needed such excessive power.
[Lugh-sama, I did it! And I made sure to leave the edible parts untouched.] (Tarte)
I went to the point where the Alvanian rabbit was shot dead just now, but the bullet hit the body in the center, tearing it apart.
To ensure that your prey was good for consumption, you had to fire at the edge of its head like you wanted to graze it, approach it as much as you could, and on top of that, you had to keep calm under those same conditions and shoot with the utmost precision.
Such were the contents of this training, and Tarte had succeeded.
[Well done, you passed the exercise. So how does the gun feel in your hands?] (Lugh)
[It feels really wonderful. And it’s amazing that it can fire up to 6 shots.] (Tarte)
When she cocked the revolver, it spun and loaded the next round.
The pistol I had given to Tarte was of the revolver type, it could hold up to 6 rounds.
If we were talking about efficiency, an automatic pistol would’ve been a better choice than a revolver.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t take the risk of letting her cause an accidental gun discharge.
And the revolver type was better suited to be equipped with a mechanism that blocked mana from the outside apart from the one used for the loaded bullets.
[I see. If you have any complaints about it, tell me all of them. This gun is still a prototype. It needs to be improved.] (Lugh)
[Yes! I will report them to you one by one as soon as they come to mind. Still, this is truly amazing. No chanting is required, and with this, anyone with mana can use incredibly powerful magic.] (Tarte)
As she said, this gun was designed to be usable by anyone.
…In the future, if I could get my hands on high-performance gunpowder without relying on Fahr Stones for that, then I could immediately make a gun that anyone could use in the truest sense of the word.
[Someday, the times when everything was entrusted to a single hero will end. Maybe this gun will take over that role.] (Lugh)
I said jokingly.
Once, in Medieval Europe, guns ousted the knightly community.
The privileged class of knights could get away with anything because they trained their bodies from an early age, learned swordsmanship, reigned as overwhelmingly powerful warriors, and had the strength to protect the peasants.
However, everything changed the moment guns, tools that made it easy for anyone to kill, were created.
All the training the knights had accumulated since their childhood lost all meaning in front of lead bullets. In fact, peasants could become capable of killing even knights after only a few days of practice.
The knights were no longer needed, the peasants found the idea of being exploited to be ridiculous, and the knightly community was gone.
[Lugh-sama, do you plan to spread your guns around the world and put an end to our current society?] (Tarte)
[No, I have no intention of doing that for now.] (Lugh)
This world… No, the aristocracy of this nation was barely holding up.
I wasn’t about to expressly add fuel to the fire.
In the first place, the gun I gave to Tarte could only be used by mages, and even if I could create something like guns that didn’t use Fahr Stones, I think I would only let my relatives use them.
[Tarte, shall we go home?] (Lugh)
[Yes, I look forward to your cream stew, Lugh-sama. Strangely enough, even though you taught me the recipe, I cannot make it like you do, as though something was lacking.] (Tarte)
Cream stew.
It was a dish I made here when I was a child, and before I knew it, it became a culinary specialty of the Tuatha Dé domain.
The local inns served it to travelers to some cream stew, then those travelers popularized it all over the world.
…Lately, the inns even had to deal with food lovers who came all the way to the Tuatha Dé domain to savor authentic cream stew.
[There’s nothing special about the way I cook it, though.] (Lugh)
[Please let me watch you do. Today is the day I discover your secret!] (Tarte)
Tarte was full of spirits.
While we were chatting, I promptly finished skinning the rabbit, draining its blood, and dismantling it, then I wrapped it in tree bark.
Once we were home, I would immediately make a delicious cream stew using the rabbit hunted by Tarte.
She did her best during today’s hunt, so I had to serve her the tastiest rabbit thigh meat.
_______________________________________________________________
Dinner began.
Today’s menu was rabbit cream stew with homemade bread. Plus a little something I added in a hurry.
This cream stew was made by using rabbit bones and dried mushrooms that grew in the mountains of Tuatha Dé for the broth before adding white sauce.
As for the ingredients, I used plenty of seasonal vegetables and rabbit meat.
[Lugh-chan’s cream stew really is a masterpiece after all! I can feel the taste of my son.] (Esri)
[Mom, I’ve often heard about the taste of mothers, but I’ve never heard the expression about the taste of a son.] (Lugh)
[But that’s the only way to describe it. Lugh-chan, you’re so delicious.] (Esri)
[That phrase scares me in more ways than one.] (Lugh)
Mom wore a large smile on her face as she brought a spoonful of stew to her mouth.
[Uuuhh… I wish I could at least beat Lugh-sama at cooking… This is putting the signification of my existence as an exclusive maid into question…] (Tarte)
Tarte said in frustration as she was sinking her teeth into the thigh meat, even though her cooking was delightful.
The most delicious part of a rabbit was its plump and tasteful thigh meat. Eating it was the privilege of the one who hunted it.
By the way, aside from when we were at school, as my exclusive maid, she would usually stay in the background and refrain from eating together with us, but today, mom gave her the strict order to dine with us.
And for some reason, the day before that, mom called for her and discussed with her about various stuff, but I didn’t know whether this and that were related.
Dad was absent because of the matter of my awarding, so this was the right environment for my mother to misbehave.
[This really takes me back. Back when I first arrived as your teacher, you also served me your cream stew. I couldn’t believe someone could produce a dish like that at such an early age. I guess you’ve been a preposterous one since you were a little kid, right Lugh?] (Dia)
[I was just a little precocious. Also, the gratin you asked for is done now.] (Lugh)
[Yay! My favorite dish!] (Dia)
In truth, I prepared that gratin made with the surplus of cream stew I had the following day for Dia, since she told me how much she wanted to eat one.
It wasn’t so laborious to cook since I just had to cover the stew with short, thick pasta, then add tomatoes and cheese before baking it in the oven.
[The cream stew was already tasty as it was, but the richness of the cheese and the sourness of the tomatoes make it even more flavorful.] (Dia)
Dia ate a combination of pasta with lots of cheese and cream sauce with an ecstatic expression.
I also offered some gratin to Tarte since she was struggling to contain her saliva.
…Incidentally, I served some to my seemingly envious mother as well.
I didn’t make my own share.
Although I used tomato sauce to elicit a different impression so they wouldn’t get tired of eating leftover cream stew the following day, the taste remained practically the same.
If you ate it together with cream stew, it’d be no surprise if you got tired of it, and cream stew was a pretty heavy dish.
The fact that the women in the house could eat it up so quickly was a real wonder.
[Phew… I’m full now.] (Esri)
[Lugh-sama, I shall do the clean-up.] (Tarte)
[I’m going back to my room. Lugh, come and meet me there later. I’ve finished analyzing the spell you asked me to work on.] (Dia)
We all went our separate ways.
I was also going to work in my room.
I was curious about the analysis I asked Dia to conduct for me too, and I wanted to improve the prototype of the revolver as well.
Tarte was stealing sideways glances at me.
That was the sort of gesture she did when she had something to hide.
It was the same when she gave me a surprise birthday present.
For now, I’d better pretend I didn’t notice anything.
I wondered what sort of ideas mom might have infused her with, but knowing Tarte, it was probably nothing troublesome for me.