CH 212

1. < Evade the Hero and Flee! 212 #25. Other’s Stories (1) >

#1 Their circumstances: the circumstance of Wieref Lil Vereiden, a man who used to be a hero

I was always alone since my childhood. By the time I became fully aware of who I was, there was no one beside me. To survive, I did my absolute best every day.

If I got lucky, the local churches provided me with food. On ‘normal’ days, I picked up discarded… things that couldn’t be called food to eat. On those unlucky days, though, I had to do everything in my power to steal food.

Sometimes I got caught. On some days, I didn’t. If I got caught by a nice person, they only gave me a little bit of a lecture before letting me eat the stolen food. On the other hand, not-so-good people catching me meant I’d get beaten up within inches of my life.

Where I lay my head was my bed. Sometimes, I had to sleep in the middle of mountainsides. Living in the wilds wasn’t all that different from where people lived. I could find a little more food in the mountainside, but there were also more dangers here.

Some fruits and mushrooms looked edible but some of them were poisonous. I hadn’t run into any monsters but did encounter many wild animals. And so, when I began to wonder what was the point of struggling so hard to live every day…

“We shall give you a place to sleep and food to eat.” A man kitted out in black showed up in front of me one day to make an offer. “In return, you shall give us your life.”

I looked up at the man and pondered my options.

“Alright.”

However, I didn’t ponder for too long. Rather than keep living like this, I figured that giving up on my life for a slightly comfier time was a fair trade. That’s how I got into the evil organisation.

I found many people in that place. Some of them came from slightly better circumstances than mine, while some were worse. However, our stories didn’t vary that much – we all had roughly a similar-sounding backstory, and most of us had been alone since our births.

We’d sometimes get a member who wasn’t ‘alone’ like the rest of us, but that didn’t mean their circumstances were better than ours. If they had families, that implied that their loved ones had sold them off to the organisation. People like that couldn’t adapt to the organisation’s ways and lagged behind their peers.

In any case, I was now a low-ranking trainee of the evil organisation. Honestly, I was happy. I got to eat hot meals every day and could sleep under a solid roof at the very least. Maybe the best thing about this place was that no one here looked at me like I was a piece of trash.

That’s because we all had instinctively recognised that everyone here came from similar backgrounds. It didn’t matter whether you were old or young. This place was a gathering of those abandoned by this world and those who did their absolute best to survive, after all.

However, no one took pity on each other here. We were brought here to become the organisation’s tool, after all. That’s why we all minded our own businesses and tried our best to survive.

Some time later, I got a neither-bad-nor-good score and was promoted from low-ranking to a high-ranking trainee. And that’s how I got to meet the instructor.

“My name is Naruan, and I shall be your instructor from now on. I took on this job once before, but that was as a substitute, nothing more. As such, this would be my first time as an instructor, and I’m quite nervous about it.” The instructor introduced himself in a flat, not-nervous voice. “I’m still new at this job and don’t know everything about it. That is why I promise to educate you to the best of my abilities.”