CH 24

Chapter 24. The Black Man

It was one day before Karin and Sakimori made a deal.

A 13-year-old child became an employee of Amatsugahara Corporation. Jun, the boy who was the children’s leader, was watching with amazement the results of the seed potatoes he planted in the field. By the way, I have no last name. Or rather, I don’t know. People only called me by my first name among my friends.

It was a sunny day in between the rainy season. Sakimori sent Jun and his friends to a field near the dungeon.

“Can potatoes be made this fast?”

I ask the man who picked them up who is looking at the field next to us. He’s our protector, Sakimori-san. Rubbing his stubble, the man with eyes as sharp as knives squints one eye and lets out a sigh.

“No way, I never heard of a potato that can be harvested in 7 days. I mean, it’s kind of scary the potatoes grow so well in the rain. It’s not “growing fast”. It’s growing like a sizzling potato or something.”

The whole field was green. When I pulled one out to test it, I found a large potato growing in the soil. They weren’t the small, emaciated potatoes you see on the streets outside town. They were bigger than the palm of my hand and worth eating.

The speed of growth is unusual. I hope they grow well when they’re planted, and while I was looking at them with my friends, a sprout peeked out of the soil.

“Well, let’s go with the harvesting process. You guys, do your best~. The boss will be here cheering you on~.”

Sakimori-san waved his hands dazedly in a laid-back tone. He doesn’t seem to want to help. I guess that’s how bosses are. He protects us and gives us food. We have to do our best at least this much.

“You guys, we’re going to do our best!”

“Yeah!”

“Let’s do our best!”

“Let’s do it!”

As the adults entered the field and bend over to harvest the potatoes, we started to run. We can’t lose. We’re the first employees.

Jun was born in an abandoned town. We never found out who my father was, only my mother. I heard she worked as a prostitute in the outer town, but I don’t know much about that. She gave birth to me and raised me for a while until I was 8 years old. Jun understood that raising a child in an abandoned town would be difficult, so the odds were probably miraculous. She’ll work as a prostitute in the outer city and return to the abandoned city. She asked the boss of the outer city to work as a prostitute.

After she gave birth to me, she depended on a slightly skilled man in the ruined town to survive, but it was not an uncommon occurrence in the abandoned town. They were attacked by a swarm of monsters and died, leaving me all alone in the world.

Five years have passed since then. To survive, I gathered friends of similar age, scavenged for leftover food in the outer town, and carried letters to keep in touch with other communities in the abandoned town.

Scavenging for leftover food was difficult because of the territory, and letter-carrying was a risky business in which one had to manage to die while hiding in the streets where monsters roamed.

It was a blessing to receive a ration coupon, and the usual reward was a piece of moldy, crusty bread. Weeping over the occasional deaths of our companions, we lived like a zombie, wandering around the abandoned town without a fixed base of operations.

If we made a fixed base, we would be immediately attacked by adults, and if we always lived in the same place, we would get kidnapped. Or worse. Being killed was a daily occurrence.

I used to live further northwest, but as I moved around, I drifted to this place. Luckily, it was raining that day.

I remember it was raining that day. My littlest age friend, a little girl, kept coughing and shivering all the time, and we all went inside the building, not knowing where we were.

We were soaking wet and needed to warm ourselves, so we hurried to find things to make a fire.

“Hey, let’s dry our clothes. Do you have anything?”

Hana, who was patting the back of a small child who couldn’t stop coughing with concern, nodded, and we all looked for something to burn.

We didn’t have any drums, but we found a large can that was just the right size for a bonfire, so we put paper scraps and pieces of wood into it and burned them using our favorite lighter.

It was hard to find things to burn, but the building we entered was quite large and had many rooms, so it was pretty easy to find things to burn.

The scene is eerily quiet, and a chipped information board is nearly off the wall. Flower pots were lying around in the entrance lobby that would have been used for houseplants, and a couple of couches coated in dust.

“Hey, Jun-kun. Isn’t something strange here?”

Hana asks as she looks around, laying the coughing child beside her.

Only the crackling sound of the bonfire makes me feel a little eerie, even though I was used to living anywhere.

“Yes, it’s kind of spooky, isn’t it? …… Maybe it’s the monster’s home?”

Spiders the size of a person, mimics mimicking boxes, etc. There is a possibility that zombies or skeletons are here.

Gently look around, but if it’s a zombie, we can smell the stench of death. If it’s a skeleton, it has already attacked us, and there doesn’t seem to be a pack of wild dogs.

“Maybe it’s a spider. A big one that’s using an abandoned building as a web.”

I’ve only heard rumors, but I’ve heard that some spiders use an entire building as a web. I heard it covered the building in pure white threads, with eaten human bones clinging to the walls and ceilings like objects.

“Is the next community close by?”

“I heard there is a Shingen community, I think. He said this place is a little further north and looks dangerous.”

We all looked at each other, gulped, and shivered in fear. It’s getting pretty scary.

“Neko-shan …… kehoke.”

My sleeping friend points her little finger to the back of the building. Cat? We all looked in the direction she was pointing and saw a cat with shiny black fur sitting there with golden eyes looking at us.

“It’s a cat. …… Can we eat it?”

Thinking that I might be able to get some meat if I beat it, I grab the iron pipe I had brought with me for self-protection and stand up.

The black cat looks at me like that but is standing still. Something is strange. Is it used by other people?

My friends also braced themselves with iron pipes in their hands, but strangely enough, the cat didn’t seem to run away.

Driven by the eerie feeling, I shouted to get rid of it rather than beat it.

“Hey! We’ll eat you if you just stand there! Shhhh.”

I swung his iron pipe. Jun’s skill is [Metalworking]. He can bend and process iron and other materials just a little. It takes about one centimeter at a time. If I use it until I run out of mana, I can use it 5 times, or 5 centimeters. I can bend it slowly like candy work, and I can sharpen the iron pipe’s tip by the force of the bending.

But it still didn’t seem to be escaping. Eerier, I moved with sliding feet to scrape the dusty floor, trying to get closer to the black cat.

“Don’t do that. Even if you kill it, you won’t have anything left, and more importantly, if you touch it, I’ll assume you have hostile intentions and kill you.”

A man was coming from the end of the hallway, calling out to us in a cold tone of voice. He looked like a reaper in a black coat. Jun thought when he first saw him.

“You entered without knowing whose house this is. Damn, maybe I should make a sign?”

The man approaching unprotected shows a glimpse of confidence. Even though I’m a kid, h doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that we have knives and an iron pipe with a pointed tip.

He must be that strong.

“Um, excuse me. I just came in to get out of the rain. I’ll be out in a minute!”

Hana lowers her head and apologizes. She must have thought he was dangerous. I don’t ask him to stay until the rain stops. This is a man who has such a place as this as his territory. If he gets into a bad mood, he might kill us without question.

The man looked at us with a sidelong glance and sigh.

“Ah ……. It’s a hassle, this ground floor won’t be a problem. Watch out for fire. If you start a blaze, I’ll beat you out. If you came in without knowing, I don’t blame you.”

Waving his hands in the air, the man sniffs in a bored manner and turns to leave.

We try to catch our breath, relieved that he’s leaving, but…

“Neko-shaan. Kehokehokeho.”

The sleeping girl, a rarity for a cat or any other animal, shouted, waved her hand, and coughed again. The man stopped in his tracks at the faint voice and turned around. He squinted at her slightly. He seemed to notice my sleeping friend for the first time.

“…… Are you guys pretty smart or skilled to be alive with such a small child too? Or do you have interesting skills?”

He seemed interested and came back to us again, asking us a question, and I was so surprised that I reflexively tried to brace myself.

“Ugh, can’t you move?”

I notice that my body is stiff and unable to move. I looked and saw that my friends also couldn’t move, their faces scrunched up in fear.

“Oh, um, we each have simple skills! It’s not much, just enough to finally survive!”

Hana exclaimed, looking desperate. We have zero skill levels, but we’ve been living off them. Not enough to be known or considered useful, but enough to barely get by.

“Hou …… what kind of skills is that little girl there who looks sick?”

“Wow, I don’t know. Uh, but I’m [Metalworking]. Hana has [Plant Knowledge], and those guys have [Sewing], [Purification], and [Thread Processing]!”

I thought for a moment about hiding it but decided not to. I figured I might survive better if I was honest. The name of the skill is great, but in reality, he can make a centimeter of thread into cloth or yarn. It’s a skill that can clean up muddy water the size of a candy bar. Hana’s [Plant Knowledge] to know which grasses are not potentially poisonous was our next most useful skill.

“It’s rare that you all have skills. Hey, you want some of this? I thought I’d give it a try.”

He pulls out a small vial from his pocket and tries to get my coughing friend to drink it. The content is blood-red and looks dangerous, but without hesitation, my friend drinks it with a gulp.

We were all pale, wondering if it was poison.

“Sweetss!”

Her eyes lit up with joy. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, stood up as cheerfully as if she had stopped coughing, and then staggered to her feet and grabbed the man’s leg.

“Thankiess~”

“You’re welcome. You’re quite ‘lucky’ to survive when your friends don’t have any good skills and meet me thinking about testing a new item. I’ve met someone with the same skill set before, but he was quickly destroyed, so be careful. Don’t be overconfident. See you.”

He ruffled my friend’s head, and the man left. He vanished, and we were able to move again.

With a clunk of his footsteps, the man disappeared behind a building, and all we could hear was the sound of a black cat falling asleep and the sound of the rain, which was coming down in torrents.