Volume 4 - CH 6.4

Post-Juna 

My name is Komari Corda. I’m a human girl, seventeen years old. 

I come from a farming family and I was born the second of six children. The family didn’t have a lot of money, and to help put food on the table for my many siblings, from the time I was fourteen, I started heading in to the capital, Parnam, to work at a business owned by an acquaintance of my father. 

The business my father’s acquaintance ran was a restaurant, and I worked as a server there. 

It was open from just before noon until around ten o’clock at night, but... it was especially hectic during the nights. That was because a lot of customers were drinking during that time. 

“Hey, Komari, wanna come here and have a little drink with me?” a customer asked. 

“I-I’m still working...” I turned him down gently, because interacting with the customers was part of my job, and then I walked away from that customer. When I did, another customer slugged that drunkard who had invited me to join him. 

That was because the owner had made it clear that if anyone hit on me, then they, and all their friends, would be blacklisted. There were some people I didn’t know quite how to deal with, but the regulars were all good people, and I felt safe working that job. It could be a lot of trouble, but I had to work hard for my brothers and sisters back home. 

Now, that was all there was to say about my job, but I also had something I secretly enjoyed. 

“Komari, I’ll give you a tip, so sing something for us, would you?” one customer said, waving a coin back and forth. 

“Oh, sounds good! I wanna hear that, too.” 

“Yeah. Let us hear the one that lorelei was singing on the Jewel Voice Broadcast the other day.” 

Like that, the copper coins that would be my tip piled up on the table. 

“...Okay,” I said. “Well then, please listen to this song that Nanna Kamizuki sang on the Jewel Voice Broadcast.” 

It happened some time after that. 

It was a hundred times more than I was usually paid for singing. I couldn’t sing anything nearly good enough to be worth that sort of money. I told her as much, but the woman gently said, “Please. I want to hear you sing the very best that you can.” 

The sincerity she spoke with told me this wasn’t a rich person’s whimsy. There was something about her... The woman had an aura that drew in those who looked at her. If she was going to be so insistent, I had to do it for her. 

“...Okay,” I said at last. “I’ll sing with everything I’ve got.” 

And so, I sang as hard as I could. It was a song that Juna Doma had sung on the Jewel Voice Broadcast before. I had heard that it was a song from His Majesty King Souma’s country, but that Juna had written lyrics for it in this country’s language, or something like that. I thought the song was well-suited to Juna, who was quiet and gentle, yet still powerful. 

When I finished the song, the woman clapped. That was followed by a torrent of applause from the rest of the customers in the restaurant who had been listening, and I felt a bit embarrassed. 

“Um... what did you think...?” I ventured. 

The corners of the woman’s lips turned up a little as she said, “You were lovely. You have a good singing voice. Your technique is a little underdeveloped, though. I think the fact that you’re self-taught and don’t have any specialist knowledge plays a large part in that.”