Confident? Maybe.
He thought that he really did seem stronger than the first time they had met—or safer, at least, and more sure of himself. For one thing, Fetid Skin had already been tried out in real combat on a fifth-rank apprentice. Then there was the Abyssal bedroom space he could retreat into or step out of at will, stocked with fruit, grub meat, and dragon blood. And finally he still had a Demon's Dice he had never truly used, something to gamble on when his life hung by a thread.
Prompted by what the little dark-skinned elf before him had said, he suddenly realized that he, too, could afford some confidence now; compared with their last meeting, he had mastered more spells and wielded them with greater skill.
But the timidity he had always carried—or caution, if you preferred—was hard to throw off. He considered that a good thing, and saw no need to lose it entirely. It was all precious survival experience, earned in the days when he was a weak, powerless little kobold bullied by his own kind, trembling through every day as if walking on thin ice.
"My friends all call me Luge. You can call me that too. Sorry I didn't get a chance to introduce myself last time," Luge said openly.
"Friends? Including those kobolds?" the elf asked with a teasing smile.
Apparently, in a wizard's eyes, being friends with a pack of kobolds was an astonishing thing.
"No, no, no—don't be so narrow. Friends are precious; don't confine them to a category," he said, and with a flick of his hand produced a spell book. "Even this—spells—are my friends too, things I treasure. Learning and casting spells is another way of communicating with me. As a wizard, you shouldn't let your thoughts be bound. Even the grass and trees here could be our friends."
Clap, clap! The elf actually applauded him.
The little kobold tilted his head up slightly, pleased with himself.
"An interesting view. I think you'd suit the study of mind spells—those people are all rather odd, after all," the elf apprentice wizard said with a smile. "You can call me Gannaya. As for my full name, I only managed to memorize that thing after I turned five."
At Gannaya's words, Luge was reminded at once of all the sayings about long-lived races. Curiosity pushed him to ask; he even wanted to know how old the elf before him was now, but in the end he held the question back.
"I want to invite you—of course, you can refuse. Being a kobold here may matter a great deal to you, so don't be afraid of being rude to me—" the elf Gannaya said.
"I accept your invitation."
As he said it, Luge was looking at the passage behind Gannaya. The Half-Man was standing there, though Luge had not noticed when he arrived; he nodded in greeting, then slowly faded away. At the same time, the Half-Man's voice came to him in secret, telling him to accept the elf's invitation.
"You haven't even heard what I want you to do," the elf said.
"Then what do you want to invite me to do? And what's the payment?" Luge said, turning serious.
The elf was in no hurry to answer. She looked him up and down once more.
Then she turned and started walking toward the passage in the distance.
"I'm inviting you to explore that city with me. There's no reward, though," she said as she walked. "If you want to come, follow me. That city has already begun to show itself faintly, so that little chrysalis worm-person must be somewhere close by. I meant to find some kobolds to use, and to call on you as well since you speak their tongue—I could have given you a suitable reward for that. But since you treat them as friends, I won't send them to their deaths. I'll spend a few magic stones hiring those detestable lizardfolk mercenaries instead."
Luge was taken aback. So the valuable thing had never been him.
He jogged a couple of steps to catch up with the elf.
"What's the price for a hundred kobolds at your command? Could that be traded for books of spell knowledge?" he ventured.
"I could give you some magic stones," the elf said without turning her head.
Luge said nothing more after that.
He sighed inwardly. Kobolds really were cheap.
The two of them wound their way onward, and their pace was not slow.
Luge's mood was good too. He felt he was living out a dream from long ago—walking toward the depths of the caverns he had longed to explore back when he was creeping around everywhere in search of food. He used to think that once he had the strength to face danger, he would follow these passages to their end and see where all these crisscrossing tunnels actually led.
He had to top up his spells twice along the way, and all the running had left his head spinning.
A patch of firelight appeared ahead. Up close, it was a campfire on the verge of dying.
"Keep up. Fall behind and you're on your own."
As she spoke, she whipped something out and threw it at the fire.
The half-dead flames suddenly shot up to more than a person's height.
She charged straight through, dragging Luge with her. When he hit the flames he shut his eyes on instinct; there was a moment of whirling dizziness, along with a trace of that feeling Luge knew well, the one that came each time he stepped through a spatial door.
One leap and he was through. When he opened his eyes again, everything seemed to open up before him.
A vast, empty underground space. To one side there was what looked like a small camp where lizardfolk stood guard, and people were going in and out.
What drew his eyes most, though, was what looked like a bottomless pit in the distance. It was so huge it could rival the hunting grounds a kobold could run for days without reaching the end of—one simply couldn't see the far side. The place they stood on was the rim of that pit, and directly above the great pit floated an illusory city. Around this landing place were countless passage mouths, and the parts too far to make out were surely rows of passage mouths as well. Perhaps one of them even led to the kobold king's Red Horn Tribe.
A familiar figure sat beside the campfire. Luge had thought of this man the moment he crossed the flames—the apprentice wizard who had roasted meat for him last time, with truly superb skill.
"We meet again," the man said, poking at the campfire.
Since their last meeting, Luge had noticed that this man, whether speaking or eating, rarely took his eyes off the flames before him, as if they were his gentle lover.
"So fire is his friend. To use your way of putting it—that also clears up something that's puzzled me for years," the elf said, coming to sit by the campfire. "Thank you for your hospitality last time. It was absolutely delicious."
Luge added his praise and sat down by the fire as well.
In the distance, people were walking into that little lizardfolk-guarded camp, and quite a few others, like the three of them, had chosen to rest in unoccupied spots. All of them looked to be apprentice wizards. So this was what it had come to, right behind his little kobold paradise.
He also saw that several of the apprentice wizards had guard-like men trailing them, each in armor with a sword at his side.
"That detestable fellow really knows how to earn magic stones, taking his business all the way to a place like this..." the elf muttered, looking toward the lizardfolk camp.
"Don't complain, Gannaya. We should all thank him. He truly is disgusting, I'll grant you that—like a freak by nature rather than one who was made that way. Oh, I'm not talking about you," the fire man said.
Luge chuckled and shrugged to show he didn't mind.
"It was he who bred and raised so many lizardfolk in every region, consuming vast numbers of those worms," the fire man went on. "Otherwise we'd have an even harder time finding that little chrysalis worm-person."
Listening on, Luge gradually understood.
The reason he had stopped going hungry was actually the little chrysalis worm-person. It was the little crybaby worm-person's countless aunts—those big worm-people—who, to help it hide, had joined forces and worked some secret art to plant dull-witted fat grubs everywhere in an instant.
The reason he had not starved to death back then was simply that this pack of apprentice wizards was hunting worm-people.
Chapter 67