Helping with Adventurer Party Management - Chapter 370

We’re beginning the Lord Arc now—sorry for the disjointed transition.

This is a story from the boyhood of Swibery, the vice-captain of the Sword Fangs Legion.

It came to me all at once, so I wrote it in one go and decided to post it.

It’s planned to be about three parts long.

“Take care, dear,” Swiberry’s wife called out as he prepared to leave.

Swiberry responded to her send-off. “This expedition might take a bit longer than usual, but it shouldn’t go beyond seven days.”

These days, Swiberry departed from the mansion of a major merchant in the First District.

Previously, as vice-captain of the Sword Fangs Legion, he had lived with other members in a building rented by the corps. But ever since marrying the daughter of a wealthy merchant, his life had completely changed.

Despite the limited space within the city walls, he now resided in a spacious room with high ceilings, polished wooden floors devoid of a speck of dust, and pristine white plaster walls unstained by lamp soot.

His young wife, still a newlywed, wanted to fill the room with decorations, but Swiberry preferred to keep his personal space minimally furnished.

An adventurer’s career ended the moment they could no longer move freely. It was too soon for him to start putting on weight.

For Swiberry, the ideal commander was Jilboa, and it was in pursuit of that ideal that he had joined the Sword Fangs Legion.

He would not allow himself to become a disgrace to his captain.

Before setting out, he tightened the straps of the enchanted sword at his waist and adjusted the laces of his Guardian Shoes.

The enchanted sword was extremely valuable and kept locked in a long chest in his room, away from the hands of the servants. He maintained it himself.

The Guardian Shoes were a mark of a first-rate adventurer. Though they had become more widely produced in recent years, their rarity still meant that most ordinary adventurers couldn’t acquire them.

Swiberry owned three pairs.

One was originally his, another had come through the Sword Fangs Legion’s priority allocations, and the third was a damaged pair he had repaired and kept.

Aside from the soles, most parts of the boots could be repaired by an ordinary cobbler. While he could have given the extra pair to a new recruit, no one in the corps had the same foot size as him.

Swiberry was tall despite his lean frame.

Even among the well-built warriors of the corps, he ranked among the top five in height. Compared to Jilboa, he was nearly half a head taller.

As he tightened his laces, he glanced at his own hands. Like his feet, they were large, with long fingers.

Still not used to them.

A memory from his childhood surfaced in his mind.

“Hey, Shortberry! If you’re mad, come at me!”

“Damn it! Take this! And that!”

“Whoa, ha! You can’t even reach me!”

Boys swung wooden branches like swords, their play crude and unrefined, devoid of any real technique. In such a game, physical size—and by extension, age—made all the difference.

As a child, Swiberry had not been tall. He had always been thin, but among commoner children, thinness was the norm.

“Ow!”

Once again, he was struck. His own swings failed to reach, while his opponent’s landed every time.

It was infuriating.

Even though they were only wooden branches and the strikes were nothing more than the blows of children, repeated hits still hurt.

“Damn it! I need a break! I’m going to train!”

If there was anything different about Swiberry, it was that he sought meaning in his swings.

Watching other boys flail their branches with brute force, he began to think—if he was physically smaller, how could he win?

He made a habit of figuring it out.

“Dad! I need to train a little!”

His father had once been an adventurer, hired to guard trade caravans.

Now, he had left that life behind, making a living selling goods and farming a small plot of land near the town to support Swiberry and the family.

His father opposed the idea of Swiberry becoming an adventurer, given his small frame.

However, in a world where monsters could attack at any time, it was better to at least know how to wield a sword. So, he occasionally taught Swiberry.

Swiberry loved listening to stories about his father’s days guarding caravans.

“Hey, Dad, how do you fight someone bigger than you?”

“Hmm? What, did you lose again?”

“I didn’t lose! I’m strategizing!”

“I see, I see.”

Laughing, his father roughly ruffled the sulking boy’s hair. His hand was missing several fingers.

Swiberry’s father had retired from guarding caravans after losing those fingers in a battle against a monster. He could have continued if he pushed himself, but losing the fingers needed to grip a weapon made him reconsider his future.

“Hmm. A big opponent, huh? Big guys are strong. Most of the time, bigger means stronger. If I ran into one, I’d turn tail and run.”

“What!? You’d run away?” His father’s answer wasn’t what Swiberry wanted to hear.

“That’s right. I’d run. If you die, it’s all over.”

“But you used to guard caravans, didn’t you? You couldn’t just run away, could you?”

“That’s true. Sometimes, running wasn’t an option. In those cases…”

“In those cases?” Eagerly, Swiberry leaned forward, completely drawn into the conversation.

“I’d use a bow.”

“What!? That’s cheating!”

“It’s not cheating. If the enemy is far away, size doesn’t matter. In fact, big guys make great targets.”

“Hmm… I guess that makes sense. But what if you don’t have a bow?”

“Then I’d use a spear.”

“Again!? What about a sword?”

“I didn’t use swords much. First of all, they’re expensive. They use a lot of steel, and every time you use one, the blade gets chipped and needs sharpening. Sharpening costs a lot of money. Plus, if you hit a hard bone or the blade bends when pulling it out, it’s a real hassle. A warped sword won’t fit in its sheath anymore, so you’d have to reforge it. That costs even more money. That’s why I didn’t rely on swords much as a guard.”

“That doesn’t sound very exciting.”

“To be honest, I used daggers more often. When the enemy got too close, there wasn’t even room to swing a sword. You could end up hitting your allies. But daggers were really a last resort. I didn’t want to use them unless I had to.”

“Hmm… Then, what if you only had a sword? And the enemy was bigger than you, and you couldn’t run away? What would you do?”

“In that case, I’d use the sword like a spear or a dagger.”

“What do you mean?”

Just as his father was about to answer, his mother’s sharp voice interrupted them.

“Hey! What are you doing, slacking off instead of working!? Iwanov next door is here to get his sickle sharpened!”

Swiberry’s mother was originally from this village. His father had fallen for her after passing through several times with the caravan. She had agreed to marry him on the condition that he quit being an adventurer.

His father had settled into the village as her husband, receiving a plot of land and using his connections from his guard days to set up shop as a general store owner and handyman.

During his time as a caravan guard, he had to take care of himself, including maintaining his own weapons and armor. Whether it was sharpening a sword or repairing leather armor, he had no choice but to develop those skills.

“Well, that’s how it is. Figure out the rest yourself and work hard.”

Shrugging, his father returned to the shop.

Left behind, Swiberry kept thinking with his small head.

Use a sword like a spear? What did that mean?

Maybe it meant stretching his arm out farther to extend his reach?

He experimented by swinging the wooden branch he had been using, then tried stabbing with it like a spear.

It felt like he could reach a little farther that way.

“But this is a sword, so maybe I should hold it more toward the end…”

He shifted his grip to the very end and stabbed forward.

“It’s a bit unsteady… Maybe if I use both hands…”

He marked a spot on the tree as a target.

Then he stretched out his arm, drew a line on the ground to mark his stance, and carefully thrust forward.

“Okay, I can reach this far. Now I just need to get faster…”

That evening, Swiberry practiced his thrusts over and over until the sun went down.