Could one single person really be this unlucky?
That was what Dear was thinking, crouched down with her forehead jammed against a tree trunk.
She’d clearly burned through every last scrap of luck in her life just finding Endairon, the high-ranking water spirit.
Back when the contract first succeeded, she hadn’t been anywhere near this bleak about it. Quite the opposite — she’d been thrilled, thinking that all those years of misery had been piled up front so that her whole life could finally come untangled in one go.
Just a few years of training somewhere with good water, somewhere brimming with spirit energy, and I can pay off that wretched debt and put my collapsing house back on its feet!
But fifteen days after the contract, war broke out. Dear graduated from the institute, became an Elma, and was flung straight into the battlefield without a single chance to train.
And a battlefield, as everyone knows, is the worst possible place for a water spirit. Clean water? There wasn’t even enough drinking water for the soldiers. Which was how Dear ended up hauling buckets of filthy water around, despite carrying one of the most renowned high-ranking spirits on the continent.
“...”
I should’ve just contracted an undine.
If she had, she wouldn’t have gotten to land one square punch on all those teachers and classmates with their well, what else would you expect from someone like her faces. But at least she wouldn’t have had to put up with this.
“Boo!”
A shout burst out behind her. Dear jolted and dropped the bucket. The water she’d worked so hard to collect sloshed out and splashed across the ground, but not a drop of the filth soaked into her. Endairon, cradled inside her chest, drank up every bit of water that touched her. Staying dry up to a certain volume of water, proportional to the power one held, was simply what an Elma was.
Seeing Dear bone-dry despite the sheer amount of water that had spilled, the knight put on an exaggerated look of amazement and dropped theatrically onto one knee.
“Ah, of course. An Elma is an Elma after all, isn’t she? Look at her, not a drop on her.”
Dear may have stayed dry, but the spilled water had wrecked the blankets spread on the ground and drowned the campfire.
She took in the scene, then turned back to the knight with disgust written all over her face. At which point the knight beside him shot dramatically to his feet.
“Good heavens, this lady is an Elma? Then why on earth is someone who commands spirits out here lugging water buckets around?”
Dear didn’t answer. She picked up the empty bucket.
“Move, please.”
But the man slid deftly into her path and shoved her, sneering, then rolled up his sleeve. The long gash on his forearm was the first thing she saw.
“Come on, why don’t you fix this up for me, Lady Elma?”
The same routine repeated itself every single time a knight got himself hurt, and the only thing Dear could say was exactly what she’d said last time.
“That isn’t something I’m able to do. Please find someone else.”
But if he were the sort of man to give up at words like that, he’d never have cornered her in the first place. Sure enough, the knight grabbed her again as she tried to leave. His grip was brutal, and her arm hurt.
A whimper nearly slipped out of her, but Dear clamped down on it. This man took pleasure in every moment of her suffering.
The knight tightened his fingers on her arm, slowly, almost casually, as he spoke.
“No, but why? You’re a magnificent spirit summoner, the one who commands Endairon. There isn’t a soul here who’s contracted a finer spirit than that, so why are you telling me to go find someone else? Do you just not want to heal me?”
Irritation flared in Dear, but the truth was there was nothing she could say. Plenty of people already wondered why a spirit summoner like her was out here doing menial work. An ordinary water summoner would be rushing back and forth at this hour, tending to the wounded. Dear, meanwhile, had been assigned to haul buckets, the work of a servant.
She pushed the knight off her and said,
“I’ve told you before. Endairon’s command over pure water itself is excellent, but purification for healing and other varied applications are beyond him. On top of that, my training is insufficient, and I can barely handle Endairon alone as it is. If you want your wound looked at, go find an Elma who commands an undine.”
Ever since that first day, when he’d happened to discover she didn’t get wet, that knight had kept this little play running, over and over, until the words it’s because I’m a worthless spirit summoner came out of her own mouth.
On the first day, frightened by how suddenly it had all happened and by the standoff with the knight, she’d even cried. But after it had repeated so many times, by now it was nothing but tedious.
Do they actually find this fun?
Dear glared at them, spite boiling up inside her. If I just had clean water, I’d ram a column of it straight up that nostril right now. But in the end, there was no way for her to win this fight.
When she finished speaking, the knight furrowed his brows and laughed in her face.
“Then can you even call yourself a spirit summoner? Shouldn’t you be taking that uniform off right now?”
At that, the onlookers who’d been watching the scuffle started snickering. However much she didn’t want to hear it, the filthy talk about her began.
That there’d be nothing worth looking at even if she did strip. That if a man cared that much about having something to look at in the middle of a war, he clearly hadn’t gone hungry enough yet. That one of them would happily tumble with a pockmarked hag so long as she knew how to spread her legs. That she was at least better-looking than the whore who’d come through last time, wasn’t she? On and on it went, until she wanted to gouge her own ears out.
The color was draining from Dear’s face by the second when, all at once, a low voice cut in.
“The f*ck is this.”
The laughter stopped dead at that low voice. She turned her head and saw a man walking toward them.
It was Kyle.
The ash-grey hair he was known for was tousled every which way, and a heavy sword hung carelessly at his waist. His uniform was a disaster too. Three of the buttons that were supposed to be fastened all the way to his throat hung open, and his sleeves were shoved up, baring the thick ridges of his forearms.
Even Dear knew his name. No — in this unit, not knowing his name would practically make you a foreign spy. The bastard whose fists were faster than his mouth, and whose sword was faster than his fists.
On his first day he broke his superior officer’s nose. On the third, he beat two knights who shared his tent half to death. On the seventh, he came back carrying the heads of three enemy soldiers.
Madman.
Punk.
Brawler.
He went by plenty of names, but they all came down to the same thing.
Get tangled up with him and you were f*cked.
And as that Kyle came striding toward them, the hand gripping Dear let go of her and quietly dropped away.
“Kyle.”
“...”
“What’s up? Something wrong?”
The knight who’d been so full of himself a moment ago had gone noticeably meek.
Kyle didn’t answer. He looked down at the ground instead. The soaked blanket. The dead campfire. The overturned bucket. And Dear, standing in front of it all.
His gaze came up slowly.
For a moment, Dear let herself think it. Really, just for a heartbeat. Maybe he’ll help me.
But the instant Kyle opened his mouth, that whole fantasy shattered into pieces.
“Was it you? The one who dumped water all over my spot?”
He snarled it straight into her face and seized her by the collar. He hauled her in close enough to be a threat, and her toes left the ground entirely. Dear screwed up her big amber eyes and let out a low, choked little sound.
The knights snickered and backed away. Dear realized this was the last trap they’d laid for her.
“The one person in this order who can’t do anything but fetch drinking water, and she goes and causes trouble. Things are running beautifully around here.”
Kyle’s eyes dragged slowly over Dear’s frightened face. A face gone strikingly white for such a filthy battlefield — and, through the gap where her shirt had come loose in his fist, the mark of a high-ranking spirit. Kyle clicked his tongue at it like the sight disgusted him and murmured low.
“What’s the word for someone who comes all the way out to a battlefield and does nothing but eat up the rations?”
Dear’s fingertips twitched.
Kyle’s fingers brushed once over her expensive uniform. He pressed down firmly near the embroidered crest and let out a breath of a laugh.
“Dead weight.”
“...”
“Expensive dead weight, at that.”
He’d had a problem with her from the day Dear first arrived. Useless as she was, she wore a gaudy crest, and when things got urgent she even got an escort — all of which did nothing but grate on him.
The knights around them added their own giggles to Kyle’s words. Dear couldn’t hide the shame burning in her face, so she bit down hard on her lip. She chewed it until the blood came and the taste of iron spread through her mouth, and still she couldn’t feel the pain — that was how far her pride had sunk.
Tears welled up in Dear’s amber eyes. Kyle let go of her, nudged the soaked blanket with the toe of his boot, and said,
“Put it back the way it was before sundown. Don’t tell me you can’t even manage that.”
Then he rolled out his stiff shoulders and walked off. Dear just stood there, biting her lip, staring down at the wet bedding.
Literally 밥벌레, a “rice worm” — someone who exists only to eat the food others provide.
