The Maid Is Not Dead

I hiked up the foothills and the rocky slope streaked by sun-burned grass. The watch at the dungeon entrance was already gone. The cabin the guardsmen had built by the trampled path was left deserted, staring down the dale with vacant, glassy eyes, as though the disease within had spilled without.

All those good-intending fortune-seekers, all those would-be corpses, who had been turned away from these stone steps now had the full freedom to pursue their unmaking. Maybe new heroes would emerge from their ranks, who could achieve what nobody else had before and change history. It was not outside the realm of possibility. There was a time in the past when the Guild operated without the rank system, or rules, or restrictions, and they were only coming back to that in Argento.

But the rules didn't exist solely to make life pointlessly difficult.

The underlying intent was to save lives.

In the elden times, every small success in the war against monsters was built on innumerable casualties. Returning to past ways meant those who could have lived would die, and rise the way of the cursed dead, and bring down many more with them. But what was it to me? What were these people to me? Why did I spend so much time thinking about their good instead of my own mission?

A diligent servant did a little more than was asked of her, but those who did the work of others too was only a fool.

I went in and passed through the quiet halls of Qiln and came to the clearing at the foot of Arden's gate. It was empty. The undead horde that had held post there had vanished since the day I rescued Lady Mariel. The pieces of the shattered waterwheel still lay on the pavement with the charred remains of a handful of walkers. A curious observation on its own. It seemed there was a limit to the puppet master's power, after all. If too many ghouls were destroyed thoroughly enough at once, it was left unable to repair all of them. Wary of receiving another such a blow, the invisible foe had changed tactics and dispersed its slaves throughout the domain. This way they were undeniably a bigger threat to detached, smaller groups of explorers.

I saw a few on the way down.

Not ghouls but explorers.

I'd never noticed how many colleagues there were before scouring these dead streets, but now they seemed to jump to my eye. One group in particular caught my attention. Two young men and a woman of about the same age. Maybe they were friends. Maybe they were something else. They looked decently prepared and armed, but wore clearly fresh faces. Gazes as of yet stained by terror and tragedy, which took in what was still unknown and strange and even a little fascinating. I passed the trio quietly along the rooftops, avoiding contact, and they never knew I was there.

I utilized the shortcuts I'd discovered through my previous visits and ignored any enemies on the way, pressing deeper. I could no longer take it slow and steady, minding my own safety and finances. I had to find the market bridge and the way through to the north side, even if it meant getting a little reckless. Even if it meant being a little stupid.

In a couple of hours, I touched down on the fourth floor of Arden, past the farthest point I'd been before.

The neighborhood I faced looked older, more like a standard dwarf dwelling. Less board and masonry, more traditional stonework. Every house here was stout as a mansion, smooth-walled and high and stately, the window-holes deep and elegantly beveled. The roofs were open and furnished, more like uncovered living rooms than a casing meant to protect the interior. Who lived here in the days of yore, I couldn't say. It being fashioned out of stone was not necessarily any indication of the building's cost, or the builder's proficiency, or the owner's class; it was the baseline for a respectable dwarf residence.

Through the township ran a long, wide street paved with large square tiles of red granite. Or perhaps it was a boulevard, or maybe even a park of sorts.

The only remaining evidence of gardening were stone-framed flowerbeds laid in the dead center of the avenue. Long, long lines of boxed earth, in which the flora had worn away and pulverized lifetimes ago, deprived of light and treatment. What remained of the presumed past splendor of blossoms were these knee-high displays of bone-dry, ashen soil. Had there ever been flowers,or was it only an outward senseless exhibit of dead land, a tribute to an earthen god, or a public reminder of mortality? Given the circumstances, the decorations created to delight had turned into a scathing taunt. Here is where you come from, o' traveler, and here is where you shall soon go back to.

Dust to dust. Excrement to excrement. A sample of how dungeons twisted all that was good and pretty. And then a troll came up.

Due to the scarcity of light, I failed to see the giant until it was less than thirty yards away and its bulky figure suddenly lumbered out of the shadows. Standing ten feet tall, broad-shouldered, and strong. Another blue mountain troll, the same as the one we had come across on the way to Faulsen with the hero's party.

No, this one was perhaps a few years younger, less scarred. The cerulean blue of its backside was more vivid. It was leaner. It hadn't had a trade route to feast on, but that made it only more agile and angrier. It was an exemplary representative of its species in all respects. Almost a thing of beauty, as unfit as that was to say of beings world-famous for their loathsomeness. But I felt beauty was not merely a matter of aesthetics, but also that of function, and a troll that could at once, at a glance, be recognized as a troll, was nothing if not functional, in my opinion.

I didn't expect to meet anything but ghouls in this necropolis but was shown my mistake. Whereas goblins and other smaller creatures were not friends with the undead, trolls had nothing to fear from them. They went wherever they pleased—and could fit. Ghouls had no means to overcome such a mountain of muscle and its hard hide, and their feeble curses didn't stick on it. The monster had smelled me long before I saw it and sought me out, its heavy footsteps startlingly subtle on the granite-padded floor.

Before I knew it, I stared at a lively reenactment of that day in early April. The main difference was that I had no heroes or helpful imperial guards with me.

Not necessarily a setback. There was no need to fight and waste time and energy here. I could probably lose the beast in the narrow streets setting out of the avenue in every direction. It had better circle around and force my way forward while daylight lasted.

Yet, I was reluctant to go. My thoughts returned to the last group of adventurers behind me. I thought about all the other adventurers and non-adventurers who would drift into the dungeon over the day and the days to come. There was a non-zero chance that some of them could reach all the way here and this gluttonous titan, or it could catch their smell and climb up looking for easier prey, if I lost it now. That was going to be the end of the newcomers. But what could I do about it?

I wasn't going to defeat a mountain troll alone.

There was no way I could.

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But who decided that?

Didn't Ray kill the other one practically by himself and with ease? That greenhorn hero, who was afraid of goblins. But I wasn't a hero. But he said it wasn't a matter of being the hero. He killed it only because he believed he could, despite having never even tried it before. Didn't I believe in myself? But wasn't that what all the talented, blessed people said, unable to see how special they were?

Then was I talentless as well as faithless?

When and where had I drawn the line? When did I assign myself into that box of ordinarity and raise it up as an excuse to give up trying? For all my days, I'd done what I had to do, without sparing a thought for whether I even could. And look, when all was said and done, there was never anything I had to give up on, no matter the effort it took. How did the situation at hand differ from all those times?

There was no difference. I would accept no notion of difference.

Maybe Raymond Reed was indeed the hero of humanity chosen by the Heavens, and maybe I was only a lost, foolish maid, living in an entirely different world, where things were measured with spoons instead of spades, but under no circumstance could I confess to being inferior to that boy. Even if the Gods were to tell me that was how it was, I wouldn't own it. Somehow, nothing enraged me more than that thought. It was wholly reprehensible to me.

How far I could go—I would be the judge of that and no other.

I abandoned the thought of retreat and ran forth to meet the coming troll. It picked up the pace, not balking at the challenge. Unlike its cousin from the past, it bore no arms. Trolls needed no weapons, save when they wished to look fashionable. Their enormous, hard hands were more formidable than any tool and it had two of them to spare. It needed only to catch me in its bulky fingers and chomp off my head to end my worldly journey short. But I wasn't about to stand there and let it have a piece of me.

Having come close enough, I stopped to draw in the air.

Elemental Gate: Aqua.

"Water Sphere!"

I splurged the Power without reservation to conjure water up to the highest limit of the magic and my vessel. I'd taken a rough measure of the troll's speed, placed the expanding orb above its path, and held it until the time was right. And then let go.

Eighty gallons of pure water weighed about six hundred and sixty pounds plus change. Not even a troll could shrug off such a load when it landed all at once on its bent neck and back. The beast staggered under the abrupt monsoon, momentarily forgetting about me. As it stumbled, I dashed forth once again and withdrew my dagger from its holder.

The troll stretched out its leg in a reaching step to restore its ailing balance and I hopped up onto the outstretched knee, and from there leapt higher, and cut. I threw all of my modest weight into the weapon hand, aerially pivoting, and sliced down at the side of the broad neck, where the skin hung thinner and flabby. The folded hide was like a tight-knit carpet in the texture, leathery and obscenely tough, but the blade of weisteel was sharp and honed. I leaned far into the cut, my arm tight twisted under the load, and drew a long line from below the jaw down to the collarbone that protruded like a castle bulwark. The dagger ate through the skin and soft flesh and dug deep into the carotid artery, arranged not so differently from humankind.

The blade drawn out, I fell faster. My feet touching down onto the pavement, whence I dove into a roll, out of the stumbling monster's way and to the side, and from there retreated behind it. The troll turned to follow, yowling out of the stinging of its neck, wrathful, wiping the wound with its coarse hands, unable to comprehend the extent of the damage but unwilling to give up the hunt. All it cared about was its hunger, even as blood gushed out of the gap in the creases of hide in thick bursts, pumped out at the beat of its massive heart, black as tar and gooey and smelling like whale oil. Not knowing it was already dead.

I gave way in front of the troll and led it on, letting it almost catch me but dodging at the last moment, encouraging it to spend the remainder of its strength faster. One careless mistake and it could still have taken me with it to wherever it was that monsters went after they died. But an Imperial Maid makes no mistakes when she's serious about her job, or else death is where she belongs. I didn't know if the otherworld had its own gods or its own Hades, but if they did, I had a feeling it was a dry place without rivers, or boats, or ferriers.

Even reduced to its knees now, the beast dragged itself on with its strong arms, then to lay down sprawled on its belly, feebly kicking the slick floor and grasping, the pavement covered wide in a lake of beast blood diluted by magic water. And then at long last, with a big, flat slap, it let its grotesque head sink to rest and only breathed, having no might left for more, drank air in frantic, shallow gasps, the great chest rising and recededing, and settled.

I crouched behind its head, where it could neither see nor reach me, waited for a minute, and then went to open the other side of the throat, and stood back to watch it run empty. While at it, I thought about living and fighting and dying, and figured I'd reached something of an epiphany on the subject. Although, as I thought about it still more, it began to seem less like an enlightenment, and more a thing so clear and self-evident from the start, it was not even worth discussing on the side of tea and scones. But maybe those we thought were strong weren't ever strong and beyond death. It was all fables. And I wasn't someone who started out weak and grew out of it by effort, but maybe we people were always weak, and stayed weak throughout, and there wasn't ever going to be any fight that couldn't kill you. The whole business boiled down to a coin flip, and you could only either flip the coin yourself, or have someone else flip it for you, but there was no escaping the spin of the crown, the spontaneous, erratic alteration of heads and tails. What else could a mortal but pray the odds were with you until the day came that they were not, but you could never walk away from that table.

And then I thought better of it and agreed with myself it was a load rubbish, and got started with dissecting the troll.

The disasters both domestic and foreign were often distant to children, and beneath active thought. A rare exception had emerged as of late. Ever since spring, all of the southern realm from Burne to Bataria and Werge to Gaulea had restlessly followed the developments with the fabled dungeon trade route that had become clogged up. Could another way be found through the labyrinthine halls? Why was it taking so long? What would the Northern Kingdoms do, what would the Empire? What about the Guild? Was anyone even trying?

The federation army maintained ironclad secrecy over the state of affairs in the mountains under the pretense of national security, but private messenger birds sometimes made it over the range, bearing short news in minimalist writing from one side to the other. And the discussions of parents at home were faithfully carried by their children to school, rich and poor, and busily traded from dawn to dusk. The prestigious St Gemain's private school was not an exception to this. All crumbs of informatio from the northern border and beyond became a hot topic of discussion whenever any were received. That day, too, the classroom of the senior students of the middle school section was abuzz with unusual glee, fresh tales delivered on wings from the north.

—Hey, did you already hear? About the Phantom of Baloria?

—No. What is that?

—They say sometimes a young woman appears in the dungeon, dressed like a maid. No one knows her real name or where she comes from. She appears out of nothing and disappears the same way. They say she goes around and defeats the most dangerous monsters, so that the other adventurers can stay safe. Because of that, they call her 'Shield Maid'.

—They say she's the ghost of a long-dead adventurer, come back to life to help her living colleagues. Others say that she's the hero in disguise, doing noble deeds.

—I thought the hero was a man? What was his name again?

—Yeah. What happened to that guy, anyway?

This endless gossiping even reached the ears of her imperial highness, Princess Anastasia, seated in the window row of the classroom, whose high rank and public image prevented her direct participation. Only her close friend, the Duchess of Marth could tell her highness was paying close attention to every word. Since spring, the word "maid" had often come up in their conversations.

"Well, aren't you glad, Anna?" the Duchess asked.

The Princess made no audible answer, facing away towards the classroom window, but a small smile could be seen brighten her highness's normally stoic reflection.