Chapter 25

Letter

To Her Imperial Highness Xuhitana Furinshao

From Your Loyal Servant Sacred Yorin Holt

On the Matter of the Growth of the Gunslinger Hero

First, Your Highness, the onus of responsibility demands that I remind you that no letter addressed directly to or from the Imperial Throne goes unopened by both spies and patriots, no matter what the state of the seal may claim. As such, while I appreciate and value the openness with which you shared your daily trials with me in your previous missive, I must also encourage you to maintain a more professional air appropriate to your station in any such future communication.

Always assume that all of the Empire reads every word you put to scroll, for the day may come when they very well might.

That being said, yes, Lord Liumori is, as you so regally phrased it, "an insufferable pile of cockatrice excrement." Fortunately, for all of his bluster, the true authority of his house rests in his wife, a well-read woman of stability and reason. Pay her a visit in the afternoon, after the third bell, when she takes her tea and her husband is away, and she will handle him in your stead. Bring a gift of gyokuro, her favorite.

On the matter of the family of Lord Hagasu, while I weep that such corruption was discovered while I was away, any advice I may offer will arrive only after the matter has already been addressed, by manner of one path or another. The men and women of the Capitol Guard are both loyal and competent, and I am certain they will distinguish themselves with the same honor that they always do.

Even if my words may arrive too late, however, I must stress the importance of not allowing zeal to overturn common sense. Not every family from the Western Demesne will have been so turned, but neither are nobles alone particularly more vulnerable or resilient to corruption than any other citizen. If you attempt to cleanse your city of darkness with fire, you will hold naught but its ashes by the end of it. Investigate, but do not hunt. Remember that they remain your dear and precious subjects until it is proven otherwise.

To move finally to the true topic of our exchange, Hero Remmi Lee has yet to leave Dabun on a single quest, though we have been here a month. I am shocked to admit, however, that this has not meant a lack of growth. Rather, she is quick to expand in nearly any avenue presented to her, and is easily distracted by any new idea that takes her fancy.

Perhaps 'distracted' is a poor descriptor. She is not a mote blown about by the whims of the breeze. If anything, she is like a deep-rooted weed, persistent and hard to move. Wherever her tendrils find new gaps in the stone, she drills into it with a relentless focus, yet not because she believes it will render some desired prize. She seems to do it merely to see the result, utterly blind to the predicament of the stone, itself.

She is insightful and clever in terrifyingly equal measure, traits I do not believe can be solely attributed to her upbringing and the nature of her homeland. Or, at least, I find myself praying to the Heavens that she is atypical of her kind in that regard. If she is not, then I fear for the Empire should we two nations ever meet, for we shall surely be overwhelmed. Not from malice, hostility or any other malevolent aspect of the human condition. They could topple us by pure incidence, the exuberance of a child throwing itself at an older grandparent, unaware that their bones cannot endure the impact.

I do not doubt that my words must seem overdramatic, the rantings of an overstressed mother hen. I can only appeal to our shared history and your awareness that I am prone to no such behavior.

The child has no concept of the nature of our world, but rather than hindering her, it seems to grant her sacrilegious leaps of genius that transform her works beyond even those heights we expect of Heroes. Stranger still, the Essence seems to condone her activities, actively enabling her.

This marvelous effect seems to transcend even specialty. The Swordmaster Hero, for example, will no doubt become a legend of sword skill, retiring to train the next generation and perhaps even crafting the next divine blade as his combat skills exceed the capacity of mortal smiths to keep apace.

I have no doubt that Remmi will produce similar advancements in projectile weaponry, even if she does so unintentionally. Indeed, she has already started. The Interior Secretary's slight against her has stuck with her to such a degree that she has been unable to leave be the state of development of our repeating crossbows.

I need not explain how they are derided as true weapons, nor why. Their poor performance in every field but rate of discharge renders anything smaller than emplacement weapons as inferior to any alternative save for in the niche role as home defense tools for inexperienced women and children against unarmored assailants. Even then, they must often be tipped with poison to be effective, and it is the poison that tends the task, rather than the weapon, itself.

Truly, I was as shocked as any other when she was actually able to take out golems with the one she was given. We should have known there that she was Hero-born as certainly as any of the others, for we did not arm the Battlemage Hero with an oiled torch, after all.

Xuhi, she already has a prototype that she constructed in her spare time, late into the evening when there was no longer a sun by which to work outside. She showed it to me, as proud of her work as a young child bringing home their first pottery. Surely she would have demonstrated its use to me but for her lack of steel, leaving vital parts carved of heartwood, which she feared would break under the strain of the weapon's mechanisms.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

I knew even then that I should have praised her for her work, encouraged it. Her prototype alone, even in its current incomplete state, could revolutionize infantry combat. So many lives would be saved by the ability to quickly dispatch enemies from a distance instead of merely as support for melee combatants. It might even remove the latter from military doctrine entirely.

But I couldn't. May the Heavens have mercy upon me for my sins, but as I held that alien machine in my hands, my heart knew only fear at the terrible things she is capable of unleashing on our world in the blissful innocence of a child's good intentions. Instead of praise, I scolded her and swore to keep her under closer supervision, so that she would not be permitted to drift according to her own currents.

Aptly, she called it being "grounded." Certainly, I have chained a bird to a stone for fear of where it might fly. Of course, I am sure she did not use the term intending for such an esoteric meaning. She is too straight-forward in word and mannerism.

As I have said above, however, this ability to innovate from little transcends her specialty of projectile weaponry, where alone we would expect to see it. Perhaps if her prototype had not been the last in a long line of insanity, I would have been better prepared to respond to it appropriately.

The reason it has taken a month before she was prepared to set out is because she did not wish to work out of an inn or the mayor's guest room. This is a sentiment that I can honestly say that I share. Mayor Graf Yomei seems a good and earnest man, but one cannot labor long in the house of another.

Abundant in both energy and drive, Remmi insisted on placing her mark on her new land by bending the wild growth to her will. I thought this a noble pursuit and permitted it, as I shared in my last letter. She took only some basic tools we purchased from the local smithy, and a tent and a few days' worth of provisions left from our wagon's stock, and went up into the forest.

The expectation was that she would come back every few days to rest and restock, and after doing a rough, amateur job of it sufficient to feel she'd laid her claim, we'd get professionals to take over while she began honing her skills in earnest.

I should say that such was my expectation, and the expectation of the mayor. Thinking it a sane and reasonable expectation, we neglected to share it with Hero Remmi, or even to ask her of her own expectations.

I did not see her again for an entire month. During that month, she returned to town only twice. The first was to check with the mayor what legal requirements there were for building a proper road between the town and the estate. The second was finishing actually building the road. Neither time did she stay long, only finishing her task and heading back up into the forest.

Yes, she built an entire road, not a path, not a single lane, a road wide enough for a crew to cart construction supplies, all of the way from the village to the estate. By herself. Presumably within no more than three days. And, yes, it is up to code. I checked it, myself.

Until that point, the knowledge that she was not in danger had stayed my hand and kept me from checking in on her. Even Kyuuga had taken to keeping a close eye on her, so I left her to her self-exploration and focused on laying the groundwork for the temple.

I regret that decision now.

I have said that her energy is boundless, but I must stress that this is not hyperbole. I suspect she has a hidden extra talent or skill that is greatly accelerating the recovery of her already excessive stamina. She had literally spent sunrise to sunset every day for an entire month doing the heavy manual labor of an entire construction crew, all without more than the most cursory of rests.

She cleared two acres of land in that time, Xuhi. Stumps, rocks, everything. She built what she called a shack, but I say to you it was a home of such quality that all but a nobleman or a particularly indulgent merchant would be pleased with it. And she built it all out of hardwood, as notoriously difficult to work with as that is. She dug a well and lined it with bricks and mortar, with a crank pulley she built, herself.

And she built a slime breeding farm. Not for the slimes. For the points. I don't have any idea how many she farmed from them, but with just an inkling of the general skills she must have purchased to do all of this, I tremble at the thought of what the number might have been.

She didn't even realize how ridiculous what she was doing was. She just saw things that needed to happen, and she did them.

I am unspeakably grateful that I did not have both of you to raise at the same time. She is so much like you were, Xuhi, that it is painful. Brilliant, determined, and completely lacking in good sense. Were it that I had to deal with both of you at once, I would be forced to chain you both to my side, and then you would conspire to chew through the iron or some other such nonsense.

Hero Remmi Lee left for the guild hall just before I sat down to pen this letter. It should be a relatively harmless affair. With the throne admission I sent with her, the whole process should be completed without anything too extreme occurring. I didn't tell her it was a throne admission, of course, or she would have refused to take it.

So much like you ...

When you next hear from me, I hope it will be with details on her first successful missions.

~ Your faithful servant and friend

Yorin

*Yorin*

"Yorin! I'm back!"

I look up from the scroll on the table in front of me when I hear Remmi calling my name. I'm kneeling on a pillow before my desk, which sits before a broad window looking out on what will become the temple grounds.

This building is smaller than what the girl built for herself, but is also done in the local style. Her "cabin" had been ... strange to me. This is much more familiar, much more comfortable. I have a generous work area, and just on the other side of a sliding door, I have a place to sleep and take my evening meal. It is enough.

... I control myself admirably when I see the light glinting off of her new badge. I smile back at her and return her call. "Let me just finish this letter, Remmi, and I'll be right out. I want to hear all about how it went."

I really don't. Or rather, I'm dreading what I'm going to hear.

Hurriedly, I jot down a last-minute addition to the letter, my face never losing its outward serenity.

P.S. - Oh gods, she just returned, and she has a bronze badge. Something has gone wrong. And the way she is bouncing around, someone has given her coffee. I apologize in advance for any murder charges you may receive notice of prior to my next missive.

I quickly stamp it with my seal, roll the scroll up and tie it with the appropriate ribbon. With that done, I stand and move over to the actual door leading out. I take in a deep breath, stabilize my emotions, and slide the door open to greet my charge.