CH 46

Fikar moved to the right. Su followed him with her nose, letting out a ‘gugyuuu~’.

Fikar moved to the left. Su followed him with her nose, letting out a ‘uggruuu~’.

“A–haha! Su’s got tears in her eyes~”

Crouching low, Su was glued to the perversity mushrooms in front of her, scratching the ground with her short front paws every time she smelled a new one in the area.

“Uhh, ‘scuse me, could you keep it down… thanks.”

“Ah– I’m sorry.”

I put an arm around her nose and stroked it, causing her big yellow eyes to blink a few times. Her pupils, usually vertical and reptilian, were almost perfectly round in their watery state.

Cute. But please, be patient for a little longer.

I kept stroking her until she eventually calmed down and squawked out one last ‘gyuu~’.

Su’s hardships began with a visit from a merchant who’d come a long way from home.

“Dragon’s drool?1 What’s that used for?”

The merchant sitting across from me at the guild’s conference table, rubbing his hands in a very stereotypical manner, was a middle-aged man with a small, fat face and green, mildly matted hair. The man sitting quietly next to him said nothing, but he was probably a magician given his robe and the white staff he held. In the southeastern regions, where there was peace and quiet, magicians like him were hardly ever seen, but it made sense that merchants on dangerous journeys would hire them alongside experienced mercenaries.

The merchant wiped a few beads of sweat from his brow with a small handkerchief and explained to us in a low voice.

“Yes, it can be used in place of some drugs. It’s also very effective, so we would definitely like to handle it, yes.”

“Really?… These five jugs, how big are they?”

“Yes, we’re thinking of this one, medium size. We’re not crooks, so we won’t ask for a large quantity at once, and we would appreciate it if you could give us a little bit of this, yes.”

He took out a water jug that could hold about two liters of liquid. Five of those would be ten liters… Even if Su was pretty big, could that much drool be squeezed out of her? Though, the merchant said it was only a little.

For that, the merchant offered 3 silver coins. It was on the expensive side for a request, but I didn’t know anything about the market price.

I looked to Fikar, who was sitting next to me. He just started back and didn’t seem to have anything in particular to say. He wasn’t very interested in Su to begin with, so he neither agreed nor disagreed with the deal. But, liking Fikar, Su was an unrewarded dragon.

“Well, Su’s gag is warped and the fence on the house is kind of broken… If you don’t mind, Su, can I take it?”

She nodded.

She’ll earn her own food – a respectable (draconic) member of society.

Half an hour had passed since Su had started depositing her saliva into the jugs. In exchange for her hunger, they were slowly but surely filling up.

She knew that she was told not to eat, but she didn’t know why. She couldn’t understand why she was doing this. Su made sorrowful pleas to Fikar and I, but Fikar was unfortunately in charge of restraining her.

The tragedy (for Su) unfolding in the middle of the plaza in front of the guild branch did not appear like it would end any time soon. The overweight merchant, despite how scared he looked, managed to prevent anything from spilling over the edges of the jugs. The magician accompanying him stood a little ways away, holding his staff in a way that made it look like he would be prepared to use his magic if Su made any unexpected moves.

“Is one more jug all we need?”

“Yes, about that, I didn’t expect there to be so much overflow, yes, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have two more jugs on top…, yes.”

“Eh?… But I think Su’s done her best.”

“We’ll do it somehow! Look, the dragon doesn’t mind, so how about this: two more jugs and I’ll double the price!! Please!”

“Double…”

Not only the broken fence, but also the chipped cobblestones could be repaired.

If Su were to really dislike this arrangement, she could always just slip out of our restraints and fly away. She didn’t like when strangers tried to touch her, so she wriggled whenever the merchant tried, but she didn’t make any threats. Her eyes watered, but he was still within her acceptable range.

I told the merchant, “Just two more jugs,” and he bowed deeply.

“Yes, it’s a magnificent dragon, isn’t it? And to obey two of you! We’d love to know how you did that, yes.”

“I get asked that a lot, but I don’t know and neither does Fikar, so I guess Su is just different.”

“Oh? I see, however, yes, I’ve heard rumors that this dragon’s too much for you to handle?…”

Too much, huh.

It’s true that Su made loud noises when she got excited and that we regularly needed to apologize to the neighbors because of that. And since she was so powerful, isn’t wasn’t uncommon for her to break things without doing anything special. Going into the forest, I could tell pretty easily which marks were hers.

“Well, I guess so.”

“With its size, yes, but if you’d like, how about we take care of this dragon for you, yes.”

“Eh? But she’s pretty scary to people she doesn’t like?”

“That’s, yes, if it’s its nature to obey more than one person, we’ll be able to take certain measures, and how about this, I can offer you a gold coin…”

One gold coin. You’re surprisingly cheap, Su.

What’s one gold coin worth if that was all Fikar ever pulled out?… No, it was still very valuable. I couldn’t let my sense of money go crazy just because I had a Hero with me.

Unexpectedly, the middle-aged merchant seemed eager to buy Su outright. I glanced at Fikar, but he was no less expressionless as he held a perversity mushroom at the tip of Su’s nose. No “I refuse” today?

I had no choice but to gently decline.

“Nah~ Su might be difficult, but she’s helpful in a lot of ways, too.”

“Yes, I’m sure, but isn’t it difficult to keep it inside the town? We can manage it and bring it back when you need it.”

“Our Su is free, so I don’t think we can do that.”

This middle-aged man was extra pushy, very much like a merchant.

Dragons were not negotiators, deciding hierarchical relationships by force instead. I wondered if it was possible for him to make Su do as he wished without using force to restrain her, but the merchant didn’t seem to think that was very important. He was supposed to be a member of the Adventurer’s Guild, but I guess he didn’t know.

“So how about this, let’s see if it will like us.”

“Are you going to test Su?”

“Yes. If we all call for it at a distance and it comes our way, we would like you to enter into a price negotiation, yes.”

Su was a dragon who loved Fikar, and I was quite fond of her too.

I asked Fikar what he thought and he nodded. The merchant bowed deeply once again.

“Su, you can’t move yet. Stay still~ Good girl~”

Just when she thought she could eat her long-awaited perversity mushrooms, she was stopped again.

Unreasonable! Su swung her tail on the ground as if to say, “I can’t stand it!”

There was a distance of roughly five meters between the merchant/magician team, standing near the guild branch and the wagon they’d rode on to get here, and the me/Fikar team. Our positions created an equilateral triangle when Su was included.

“Then, let’s get started. Su! C’mere!”

When I called out to her, Su stood up tall and stepped forward.

TL Notes:

1: This reads 竜のヨダレ (ryu no yodare) and the title of the chapter ends with よだれ編１(yodare hen 1). ヨダレ and よだれ represent the same word (yo-da-re) and mean “drool”, just ヨダレ is in katakana and よだれ in hiragana (two Japanese alphabets). The nuance is that katakana is used for foreign words while hiragana is used for familiar/Japanese words (i.e. the merchant might as well be a foreigner while Sumire understands the concept of drooling in the title).

2: Also, yes, the merchant speaks funny. I think of it like he’s overweight to the point of having to heave for breath, bridging the gaps with “yes” or simply trailing off.