Chapter 213: Chapter 211: Chris’s Life

After finishing the fruit that smelled good but wasn’t very tasty, the two began discussing the lives they had led since parting ways. Chris said she wanted to hear him first and urged Antares to share his experiences.

Antares spoke of his past and summarized the key points. Believing Chris to be dead, he had been enraged and annihilated the Holy Knights. He then recounted being captured by Orvo and turned into a demon. Since then, he had been constantly fighting on the front lines against the Republic. He also mentioned meeting a spiritualist named Aiwass, who was a man beyond the norm, and how, with Aiwass’s help, he had gained his freedom.

“What can I say, your life is as fierce as ever. It seems you’ve been constantly battling, just like back then.”

“That’s true. The only time I haven’t faced a powerful enemy was this winter.”

“A powerful enemy?”

“Yes. By the way, how often have you been attacked by bandits since entering this country?”

Chris was caught off guard by the sudden question, but she thought back and realized that apart from the incident where Leo and Antares had rescued them, they had not been attacked at all. Both Chris and Hilda had not been assaulted, which, while a good thing, also seemed somewhat eerie to her.

Was it just a coincidence that they hadn’t been attacked on the highways, where security should have worsened due to the patrol troops being sent to the front lines? No, that couldn’t be it. Antares wouldn’t have brought up such a topic out of the blue if it were a mere chance.

“Could it be…”

“You guessed it. We have been attacking and wiping them out. The ones who attacked you and your group were also scheduled to be eliminated today. But we took care of them yesterday. Those who escaped from that scene are no longer in this world.”

It seems that the bandits were being slaughtered behind the scenes while Chris and the others were being hospitably treated. For a group like Antares and his team, wiping out a group of bandits seemed like a task they could handle with ease. This realization made Chris acutely aware of their power once again.

She harbored no sympathy for the bandits, though. In fact, she acknowledged that their journey had been safe since entering this country entirely thanks to their efforts. She felt inclined to thank them for this, but at the same time, a question arose in her mind.

“When did you… and why were you hunting bandits anyway?”

“We didn’t want our presence in this forest to be known. And we needed money.”

“Money?”

“Yes. I have a task from a benefactor to cross the Shumie Mountain Range. We’ve been gathering funds for the journey.”

Hearing about crossing the Shumie Mountain Range, Chris was astonished. The range divided the Enzo continent from north to south. It was known for being tall, treacherous, and dangerous. Although there were supposedly safe ways to traverse it, only a few knew them, and it was unlikely Antares and his team would.

However, what Chris felt next was a sense of loneliness. She had thought she would never meet “Antares the Mr. Scorpion” again, yet here they were. But if he crossed to the other side of the Shumie Range, they might never meet again. Her elation quickly turned to dejection.

“Our situation is as such. How have you been these past few years, Chris…. What’s wrong?”

“Eh? Oh, right. It’s about me.”

Antares noticed Chris’s dejected expression and asked her with concern. Chris quickly composed herself and began recounting her life story since they had parted, starting right after the coup d’état.

Chris had sustained a serious injury, losing an arm due to the spiritual arts of a holy knight. Under normal circumstances, she would have died, just as Antares had believed. However, someone had saved her—it was none other than Lieselotte, whom she now served.

“If it weren’t for the young lady saving me, I would be… Oh! Speaking of the young lady, during the coup, I heard that you, Antares, saved her. Is that true?”

“I had suspected as much, but it seems it really was the two of them back then.”

When the coup occurred, the district where the nobles’ mansions were concentrated was among the first to be attacked. After Antares was freed and escaped from underground, he encountered a little girl and a female warrior who was fighting to protect her.

Antares vividly remembered that incident. It was impossible to forget the brave little girl who thanked the giant scorpion. Although he had an idea of what she looked like at the time, he did not fully believe it to be true.

“So you did remember. It was because of you that the young lady and I got along.”

Chris then continued her story. She had been on the brink of death with severe injuries but somehow she survived and woke up. She found herself in a sanctuary owned by the “Goddess of Protection” cult; it was a place meant to provide a safe haven for noblewomen. For Chris, a slave, this was an entirely alien environment.

Although Chris had regained consciousness, she was naturally unable to move immediately. She recounted how Lieselotte and Hilda had taken care of her. The idea of noble ladies nursing a mere slave, who wasn’t even their property, was beyond unconventional, but such was the character of Lieselotte.

“To be precise, Lady Adelheid Lutz, a friend of the young lady, and her guard Miss Leila also took care of me. It seems there are nobles who are unusually kind-hearted.”

Eventually, the coup failed. The kingdom of Harlasia regained peace under King Carl, who rushed back from the front lines. Afterward, Chris had to leave the hideout, but she had nowhere to go. The mansion of the Marquis, her former owner, had burned down, and all its inhabitants were dead.

Without anyone to vouch for her identity, Chris was virtually non-existent in the royal capital. Moreover, as a girl with only one arm, she was deemed useless even as a slave. This left Chris utterly lost.

“But then the young lady said something to me. If I didn’t exist, then it was a chance to rise above my status as a slave.”

Antares was speechless at the audacious statement, which was uncharacteristic of someone born into the highest echelons of the nobility. He couldn’t help but laugh when he heard that Adelheid, another young noblewoman, had suggested that Chris should aim to become a warrior of the “Goddess of Protection”

He also learned that, at that time, even her name had been given to her by Lieselotte. At that moment, a slave girl had transformed into a warrior apprentice.

Despite her handicap of having only one arm, Chris trained under Hilda, honing her skills as a warrior. It seems like she possessed a natural talent for battle, as she swiftly mastered the fundamentals of martial and spiritual arts in a remarkably short period of time.

What was particularly fortunate for her was that her aptitude for spiritual arts involved water manipulation. Chris learned to form a right arm out of water, and she managed to overcome her handicap whenever she used her psychic abilities.

“At first, it was certainly tough, you know? But having both arms was just more convenient, so I put in the effort.”

After intense training, Chris managed to create a water prosthetic arm. She then equipped gauntlets on both arms, making it less apparent to those unaware that she was missing an arm.

However, maintaining this water prosthetic required a significant amount of spiritual power. Therefore, she had to deactivate her spiritual arts and conserve energy when not in the public eye. During long escorts, she was careful to move her arm as little as possible to avoid spiritual power depletion. If she was unable to fight due to a lack of spiritual power when the time came, it would be a real disaster.

“The problem was finally resolved two years ago when I helped an old man who had collapsed on the street.”

While traveling on the roads of the Harlasia Kingdom as an escort to Lieselotte, who was summoned to a noble’s evening party, they found someone who had collapsed along the way. Just as she hadn’t abandoned Chris, Lieselotte naturally instructed the two to offer their help.

Initially, Hilda and Chris approached cautiously, vigilant in their role as escorts. The person who had collapsed was a small old man, but they couldn’t let their guard down. They were aware of tactics where assailants feigned illness to lure in kind-hearted people, only to ambush and rob them.

However, it turned out that the old man had merely collapsed from hunger. Chris shared some emergency rations she carried for snacking during escort missions. Touched by their kindness, the old man revealed he was a skilled blacksmith and offered to craft anything they desired as a token of gratitude.

“Half-jokingly, I said, ‘I wish for a prosthetic hand that I can move freely with just a little spiritual power’. The old man took measurements of my hand and arm and then asked me to return in ten days. I was skeptical, but the young lady insisted that we should check it out, so ten days later…”

“He actually brought the prosthetic hand, didn’t he?”

“Yes, and a matching gauntlet for the left arm too. He explained how to maintain it and how the prosthetic worked. I was amazed by the craftsmanship, and then suddenly, he just disappeared. It was a strange experience.”

“Disappeared…?”

Having heard the story of how Chris obtained her prosthetic hand, Antares furrowed his brows in thought. The more he heard, the more a certain individual’s face came to his mind.

“Did that old man give his name?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“What did he look like? You said he was a small old man, but…”

“Well, he was short and lean, muscular, I think. Oh, and… that’s right! He had long hair and a beard, braided into three parts. Quite unusual, right?”

Chris chuckled cutely as if recalling something, but Antares kept his compound eyes focused on his swords without moving his face. He had become certain upon hearing the description. The maker of the prosthetic hand was the same arms craftsman who had made his swords, Genba Hatakeyama.

The technology used in the mechanical armor of the prosthetic hand, its distinctive appearance, and the way the creator had suddenly disappeared—all these traits pointed unmistakably to one person. In such a vast world, it was unlikely there were two such individuals.

“Is it just coincidence…? No, aren’t there too many coincidences? It all seems too perfect, doesn’t it…?”

Antares, who hadn’t expected to encounter someone he knew in this situation, stroked his chin in deep thought. The overwhelming number of coincidences was eerie and unsettling.

Almost all the bandits, who were supposed to have been eradicated, had coincidentally attacked Lieselotte’s carriage. By chance, Leo intervened, and coincidentally, a broken sword ended up piercing the horse, Weiss.

In these events, he found connections to his own past, and among those involved, Chris had coincidentally received a prosthetic hand from Genba. The multitude of “coincidences” was too significant for Antares not to be suspicious.

“Could someone be involved? No, the prosthetic hand incident was two years ago. Is it truly just a coincidence…hmm?”

As he was deep in thought, a growling sound reached his ears. The source of the sound was Chris’s stomach, and Chris who was embarrassed, turned bright red and covered her face with both hands.

“H-how embarrassing…”

“No, it’s only normal. You’ve only eaten a single piece of fruit since this morning, right? We got so caught up in our conversation that it’s almost dusk. Let’s head back to the camp.”

“…Okay!”

The two, who had thought they were parted by death, walked side by side back to the camp. Their steps were considerably slower than when they had arrived at the rocky area, but their hearts were much lighter than before.