Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Ranting of a Shield Hero(ine) ❯ Ranting: Chapter 4 ( Chapter 4 )

I was angry. Some of it was because I had been about to lose my waitress job in Sapporo after I’d rushed to the radio station and got put behind the microphone when I really just wanted to bite their heads off. My apartment lease was up and thanks to Mitsuo borrowing my savings and running off, I didn’t have the money to renew. And by now my car would have been repossessed and I liked the Mini, and drove it like a maniac. And finally, other than that one scarred knight-sergeant I hadn’t met any tasty men here. Worse, my usual type was basically a helpless womanizer. The kind of helpless I could worry about and cater to, which meant I was a masochist Japanese woman with maternal fantasies.

It was infuriating. I knew what I was doing wrong, but I couldn’t stop doing it. This place, which was like a video game, was distracting at least. So that was something. That was the upside.

Raphtalia was like a friend at this point. Maybe not one you shared your inner turmoil with, but maybe they’d get there when the timing was right. Filo was a child, so my maternal fantasies were getting something of a workout. Raising a child for a few weeks had been interesting, though I was pretty sure a human wouldn’t grow this fast or start slaying your enemies like THAT.

Thanks to my Merchant status and the wagon, I’d been trading around and visited a village that was short on food. So I sold them some of what I’d been using for cooking and explained about how to plant them. The soil was probably rotten for what they’d grown before. So I taught them crop rotation to avoid that problem, and not to plant what they’d been growing before for a couple years, to let the soil heal and the parasites or bugs die off. And maybe situate the outhouse a bit further from the well. Duh!

The next village was the same problem, at first glance. Sick people, lots of them, and a foul stink. I cured them, temporarily, but then I realized there was a dead dragon rotting up the mountainside was responsible for the terrible smell. Apparently one of those high school heroes had killed it, and then left it there after praising himself. The villagers harvested meat and scale from it, and heroes did too, until the rot got too bad and first the villagers got sick near there, then adventurers started dying if they got close.

I offered to burn the corpse if they’d pay me. Lamp oil is neither cheap nor free. Being a responsible person, I got some lantern oil and some other things and then carted up on Filo’s back to a spot with a good view of the death site where the dragon had been slain. We were upwind, because duh! It was nasty and purple and oozing stuff was draining out of the rotting corpse.

Using the power of brains, and an axe, Raphtalia and I constructed a primitive lathe, I mean a trebuchet from local lumber and greenskins, which are uncured leather. Using the counterbalance box and heavy chain, and a huge greased bolt for the hinge the entire contraption was about five meters tall. Some of the iron needed required a few trips down to the village or some of the mining equipment dropped in a clear area. We assembled the system and test fired some boulders the same weight as the oil jars. They flung quite nicely into the dragon corpse. Satisfied I setup one of the oil jars and flung it, hitting the corpse and it broke, spreading around. I repeated this eight more times. Then I flung a lit lantern onto the rotting corpse with a weight attached, to get a good distance on it. It lit the oil on fire quickly after impact and we watched the nasty thing burn. At one point I thought it moved a bit while the fire burned it. A bit later as the smoke turned really black there was a bit of a roaring noise and then it settled down and I got an EXP notification. Weird. I thought the entire process was really gross, and resolved to have some words with the hero-boy about cleaning up his messes. And with the mayor for not thinking that through himself. Idiot people. I took apart the trebuchet and saved the iron bits for later. I don’t think this world is ready for a catapault that will throw a stone two miles. Blame my high school boyfriend for even knowing about this.

Eventually the fire cleaned up the area and left a bit blackened skeleton which eventually fell apart in the flames. Gross. The three of us returned to the village the long way and retrieved the wagon and got paid for the cleanup job, with instructions about outhouses, night soil as fertilizer, and tiny biting bugs called Cholera.

I suppose it could have gone differently, if I’d been a different kind of person. I might have fought a dracoliche and lost control of my anger and poisoned my friend Raphtalia and been forced to visit the corrupt church and gone to war against them to get a cure for Raphtalia’s new creeping crud, but we stayed out of the poison fumes and used FIRE which cleanses many ills. And we got paid. It’s good to get paid.