Alchemist Karen No Longer Compromises, Chapter 329

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Volume 7 of “The Forsaken Saintess and her Foodie Roadtrip in Another World” has been out, so I’ve started translating it. That means there will be 3 chapters of “The Alchemist” per week again.

That said, there are only 11 chapters left until the ongoing. The author releases one chapter every three days, so even at such a pace, I’ll eventually catch up.

Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Nine: Ordinary Person, Extraordinarily Treated 2

“I’ll get carried away…! I’ll start thinking maybe it’s fine to ask for just a little something…! I’ll go around bragging to everyone…!”

“See?! Isn’t she pitiful?! Lily is a perfectly ordinary woman with perfectly ordinary self-control!”

“Oh, come on.”

Karen protested.

“I really don’t mind if you get a little carried away.”

“Uugh… I’ve been kind of curious about your cosmetics, Little Karen, the ones everyone’s been talking about…!”

“I’ll give you the full set.”

“WAAAAAAH! The temptation!”

With that, Lily flopped backward onto the bed. In the cradle, Cyril let out a delighted giggle.

“If she could stop at ‘just a little,’ she wouldn’t be suffering this much. Before long, she’d be going around claiming to be your best friend. That’s exactly why Lily’s been avoiding you, Karen.”

“I’ve been avoided?!”

“Uuugh! I’m sorry, Little Karen…! But please, you need to leave before the dark side of me awakens…!”

Lily trembled, clutching her right arm. Whatever darkness lived in her apparently resided in that right arm and was stirring. Karen shrugged at Lily striking a pose straight out of a middle-school power fantasy.

“I suppose it can’t be helped. But I’m genuinely grateful that you decided to move out here for my sake, and what I give in return for that—the compensation and the support—that’s something I’d provide to anyone in your position, not just you. At least accept that much.”

“If it’s the same as what you’d give anyone else… I think I can accept that…!”

“Right, right. But make sure you finish that soup! Potato potage warms you up when you’re tired, and I kept it simple so it can double as baby food for Cyril.”

“There’s no way I’d leave behind something you went to the trouble of making for me…!”

Lily took the bowl from Sepl, who let out a weary sigh. After one spoonful, tears welled up in her eyes.

“It’s so good! Sepl! Give some to Cyril too!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Uncle Sepl’s feeding the baby…!?”

“What on earth are you so surprised about, Little Karen?”

Sepl sat down on the bed beside Lily, picked Cyril up, and began spooning the potage into him as a makeshift baby food. Karen looked on, struck.

“Daa!”

“Heh, looks like Cyril says it’s tasty too.”

“Hehe. That’s wonderful. Little Karen’s cooking is delicious, isn’t it?”

At first, the scene had felt so unfamiliar that Karen instinctively recoiled, but watching the two smile together as they peered down at Cyril, she could clearly see that they were truly husband and wife.

“I’m glad I can leave Cyril in good hands and get to work, but… Little Karen, aren’t you trying to give me special treatment again?”

“I am, and I’m not.”

“That’s still half yes!”

Karen tilted her head, trying to figure out how to explain it.

After a few days of rest, Lily had made a full recovery. It seemed she hadn’t taken much of a toll to begin with. She was a sturdy person. And she wanted to work. She was a hardworking woman—the beloved face of the tavern back in the capital, who had kept working right up until the last possible moment before and after giving birth.

Since Karen understood the feeling of finding meaning in work, she had offered to introduce Lily to a position. Lily accepted happily. Karen, who had been counting on her, was equally pleased.

Having left Cyril with the nursemaid who looked after the servants’ children, Lily and Karen were now walking together through the estate toward the workplace.

“You’re special to me, Mrs. Lily. I owe you, after all.”

“It wasn’t really a debt—I just shared some of the leftover food from our tavern, that’s all.”

“It was more like staff meals than leftovers, wasn’t it? And because you shared them with me, your father gave you a thorough scolding every time… The fact that you didn’t get to take over the tavern is partly my fault too, isn’t it?”

“No, no, it’s not your fault at all. I wasn’t supposed to feed people who couldn’t pay, but I just couldn’t draw a firm line. And it wasn’t only with you, Little Karen.”

Lily gave an awkward smile. Karen had heard the story several times before, so she already knew. Lily was too soft-hearted. She was lenient with herself and equally lenient with others. She was simply a good-natured person.

“My father was right that I’d run the place into the ground in no time… ehehe… I think I’m just not cut out for it. I did love watching adventurers eat and drink and make a racket over his cooking, though.”

Back when Karen’s father, through sheer stupidity rather than malice, had gone off into a dungeon without leaving so much as a coin behind… When young Karen and Thor had reached the limits of how much they could rely on the goodwill of neighbors, one of the places they’d ended up was Drunken Snake Tavern, run by Lily’s father. The owner had no mercy for anyone who couldn’t pay—not even children.

But his daughter Lily had been susceptible to a tearful appeal.

“Besides, before long, you were entertaining customers as a little bard and street performer, earning your meals with the tips they gave you. So it had nothing to do with why I didn’t inherit the tavern.”

Lily’s father had given her such a thunderous scolding that it had frightened Karen half to death, and that was the reason she had stopped taking advantage of Lily’s kindness. In truth, if things had ever gotten truly desperate, she could simply have gone to an orphanage. Being taken in there would have meant getting help. But she hadn’t wanted to lose her freedom—hadn’t wanted to lose the ability to go home, to be separated from Thor—and so Karen had dug in and dragged Thor along with her.

Eventually, Karen had negotiated with the tavern owner and started out singing in the corner of the establishment. At first, the owner and the customers had found the unfamiliar songs more of a nuisance than anything, but gradually they had come to find Karen’s wide and varied repertoire curious, and then entertaining.

“Whatever the case, it doesn’t change the fact that you were kind to us, Mrs. Lily!”

“…So that’s become a debt in your eyes, huh?”

Lily’s gaze drifted somewhere far away.

“There are only so many people I’m actually able to repay.”

“Ah… because people who seem close to you might end up in danger, right? That’s why we moved into the apartment next to your alchemy workshop in the royal capital. Well, Sepl’s an adventurer, so there’s no telling where he might’ve made enemies anyway, so it worked out… But why do you bring that up?”

Lily looked at her curiously, and Karen answered with a smile:

“I want to return all the gratitude I can’t give to everyone else—to you instead!”

The neighbors from her apartment in the capital, close friends, ordinary people living ordinary lives in the city—Karen could no longer give any of them special treatment. But Lily had come to her and would let herself be looked after from now on, which meant Karen could give her all the special treatment she wanted.

“Isn’t that taking things way too far?! How can you still say only half of this is special treatment?!”

“The other half is—”

Just as Karen was about to explain, a high-pitched wail rang out from the direction of the annex, the place they were heading.

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Alchemist Karen No Longer Compromises, Chapter 328

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Eight: Ordinary Person, Extraordinarily Treated

“Karen, I’m home.”

“Oh… welcome back, Julius.”

When Julius spotted Karen coming out to meet him, his face broke into a wide smile, and he crossed the distance in long strides, pulling her into a tight embrace.

“I missed you, Karen.”

“We were only apart for about two weeks. Aren’t you exaggerating a little?”

Karen laughed softly. Julius furrowed his well-shaped brows.

“Didn’t you miss me? …I’m more than willing to do as you ask, but the time without you was almost unbearable for me.”

“I missed you too! Don’t give me that look at this distance!”

Julius deliberately emphasized the overwhelming beauty of his face as he stared down at Karen from point-blank range. Karen had built up more resistance to it than she once had, but he had clearly seen right through the fact that she was still very much susceptible to that face.

“Woooow.”

At the sight of the two of them, Lily—Sepl’s wife, baby in arms—let out an impressed little sound.

Behind Julius stood Sepl—and beside him, the woman holding the infant: Lily. She was a few years older than Karen and was perhaps around Julius’s age. She stood next to Sepl, who had both arms full with what seemed like rather little luggage for a move, staring at Karen and Julius with a slightly dazed expression.

After being squeezed thoroughly, Karen extracted herself from Julius’s arms and spoke:

“Mrs. Lily, it’s been a while!”

“It really has, Little Karen.”

Lily’s color looked healthy despite a journey of over ten days, and Karen let out a quiet sigh of relief.

It had been several months since they’d last spoken properly. Lily had been living in the apartment next to the alchemy workshop for some time, and yet for some reason—different hours, perhaps—Karen had barely seen her at all.

She was a cheerful woman with brown hair in a ponytail, and she looked fuller in the face than Karen remembered, which was surely from having given birth. Apparently, she had delivered the baby around the time Karen had left for Ehlertt for the hunting festival.

Karen peered at the baby in Lily’s arms and smiled. The baby blinked his big, round eyes.

“Those eyes are just like his father’s, but he’s adorable.”

“What do you mean ‘just like his father’s’? Of course, my Cyril’s adorable!”

“Speaking of which, why didn’t you even tell me he’d been born? Actually, you should have told me the due date in the first place!”

Karen shot Sepl a sharp look. In other words, because Sepl had accompanied Karen as her supporter, he had missed the birth of his child.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lily. If I’d known the dates overlapped, I would have left Sepl behind in the capital…”

Karen herself hadn’t thought to ask, but it was also because Sepl had told her almost nothing about Lily. Even in a workplace, there was only so much consideration you could show unless your employees actually informed you.

“I wouldn’t want you leaving him behind, Little Karen. There’s nothing he could have done standing around next to me anyway—I’d much rather he were out earning good money.”

Lily said it with a look of genuine surprise. A difference in values. It was true that women in the adventurers’ district generally preferred a man who charged headlong into dungeons, fired up by his wife’s pregnancy, over one who hovered tenderly at her side.

“I’d hate it if my husband wasn’t there for the birth, though.”

“When the time comes, men are usually useless anyway. Ah… though I suppose your husband might be different.”

Lily glanced toward Julius with something like wariness. Some women lost all composure in Julius’s presence, but thankfully Lily was not among them. She was simply intimidated by him as a nobleman of an entirely different station.

Karen had more or less expected Lily would be fine with him. Lily had always tended toward a preference for rugged, solidly built men who gave off a dependable air—the same type as her father, who ran an adventurers’ tavern. Which was why Karen had never quite understood how she’d ended up with Sepl.

Karen glanced over at Julius. He was writing something down, clearly trying not to forget what he’d just heard.

“I don’t care whether you’re useful or not. I’d absolutely want you by my side.”

Karen said it loud enough to be heard, then took Lily’s hand.

“You must be tired and cold. Come inside.”

“Oh, um… actually, I think I’ll get a room at an inn in town… a noble’s manor is a bit much for me… oh no oh no oh no…!”

Lily protested, but Karen dragged her along regardless, and she stumbled helplessly through the doors of a noble’s manor.

“Mrs. Lily, just say the word if you’re cold, and I’ll put more wood on the fire. I can also warm the room with a magical tool. Little Cyril looks well—let’s tuck him into this nice warm cradle. The servants here at the Ehlertt household will help as well, so feel free to hand the baby off and rest whenever you’re tired. Everyone here is kind, and since this west wing is Julius’s, please make yourself completely at home. Here, have some warm soup, Mrs. Lily—oh.”

Karen had been bustling about without pause—helping Lily out of her coat and hanging it up, fetching a lap blanket, bringing a warm, damp cloth for her to heat her hands with—and was now trying to hand Lily a bowl of soup. Sepl reached over and took it from the side.

He held his personal appraisal mirror to it and gave a wry smile.

“This is a potion. …This is exactly why I kept quiet about Lily—I knew you’d end up like this.”

“End up like what?”

“Going completely overboard with the special treatment.”

Sepl gave her a flat, exasperated stare, and Karen blinked at him.

“Of course, I’d give her special treatment. I’m not giving you any, though.”

“The thing is, Lily is a person with a perfectly normal set of sensibilities…”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Sepl gestured for Karen to look at Lily, who was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“A B-rank alchemist… shows me special treatment…! I’m going to be ruined…!”

Lily was trembling, her face a portrait of anguish.

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Alchemist Karen No Longer Compromises, Chapter 327

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Seven: Adventurer and Alchemist

“We came to have you make some potions for us, Sis.”

With that, Thor and his party dumped a great pile of every manner of material they had brought with them. In the room that Karen already occupied as a matter of course within the Ehlertt family’s manor, Karen received the visit of Thor and his Crimson Thunder party.

“Even though we’re trying to set the fastest record, the fortieth floor is a different beast—we need to prepare differently than we have before. That’s what we’re doing right now.”

“A-Amazing… These are unbelievably expensive! …Wait, I’ve seen this one in a textbook!”

“We brought everything that looked like it might be useful for alchemy. Everything we’ve gathered across all sorts of dungeons up to now. I don’t know much about alchemy, but the materials from when we conquered the capital dungeon’s thirtieth floor are probably rarer, so I separated those.”

Karen stood stunned before the materials Thor’s party had brought.

“…These are all things you couldn’t buy even with money. I don’t have the knowledge or the skill to work with them yet.”

Yuluyana had taught her several potions, but they were all within the range of materials Karen could obtain herself. What Thor had brought were things accumulated over the course of their adventures. Materials obtainable between the twenty-first and thirtieth floors of a dungeon, in particular, were extraordinarily expensive—the kind that were nearly impossible to get no matter how much money one offered.

Because so few people could even descend that far.

“I know. That’s why we’ve already commissioned other alchemists to make the ordinary potions that can be brewed from materials like these—the ones we think we’ll need.”

“Ordinary…? I mean, take this dryad flower nectar, for instance—potions made with something like this are the kind you’d normally commission from an A-rank or S-rank alchemist.”

Karen handled the bottled rare materials with their appraisal results attached, touching them with great care. Thor shrugged.

“They drop sometimes when you kill monsters. It’s not that unusual.”

“So that’s your definition of ordinary…”

“Honestly, no matter how expensive those kinds of potions are, we can get them.”

“That’s exactly what I’d expect from high-ranking adventurers.”

“But your potions, Sis? No amount of money can buy those anywhere else.”

It was true—if asked whether potions like Karen’s would ever drop in a dungeon, she had a feeling the answer was absolutely not. Perhaps somewhere in the world they might, but even S-rank alchemist Yuluyana had regarded Karen’s potions with curiosity. Which meant they were at least that rare.

“So—we’re counting on you, Sis!”

Thor turned to leave without another word, but Karen hurriedly stopped him.

“Wait. I don’t have nearly enough information to go on!”

“You know about the royal capital dungeon, don’t you, Sis?”

“I know what anyone living in the capital would know. But nowhere near as much as you.”

Cutting off Thor’s unquestioning confidence in her, Karen continued:

“I’ve heard stories about the thirty-first through fortieth floors. Hardly anyone has ever reached them, so I know as much as any ordinary adventurer—no more than that.”

“Got it. So that’s the extent of your knowledge, Sis.”

“If I recall correctly, from the thirty-first floor of the capital dungeon, you’re climbing a snowy mountain—I’ve heard that much. And then at some floor you enter a cave, and once you’re through the cave, that’s the fortieth floor, the Fairy Realm?”

Urashima Taro, lost at sea, ended up in the Dragon Palace; adventurers who disappeared in dungeons were said to end up in the Fairy Realm. The idea that they never came back because it was a land of eternal youth, because life there was too joyful to remember the passage of time—both stories had that in common.

Which was to say, to ordinary people, the Fairy Realm on the fortieth floor was very much the stuff of fairy tales. Thor nodded.

“That’s roughly it, yeah.”

“There must be information that only A-rank adventurers like you are allowed to access. And from that information, there are definitely specific potions you need. I’m not sure how much of it I’m allowed to hear—but tell me as much as you can.”

“I keep a record of the characteristics of each floor in a notebook. I’ll pass it along to you later, Ms. Karen.”

“That’s our Chris! Always so meticulous.”

Besides calling himself the errand-runner, Chris apparently also handled the party’s clerical work. Judging by appearances alone, Chris looked more like the leader than Thor, yet somehow the two worked together perfectly.

“Is this information I’m allowed to know?”

“As long as we’ve judged that it’s safe to disclose on our own responsibility, there’s no problem.”

“If there’s a leak, the people who gave us the information will hold us accountable.”

“This is classified material!”

Karen shuddered at Wanda’s words, and Thor said lightly:

“It’s not like it’s that serious—it’s information about things we’re about to witness firsthand anyway. Even if you did happen to leak it, if you said it came from us and we don’t raise an issue over it, you won’t be guilty of anything.”

“Is that really how it works…?”

“It is, Ms. Karen. Who on earth is going to stop us A-rank adventurers from telling the story of our own heroics? If you got charged with a crime every time you tried to talk to a girl, that’d be exhausting, wouldn’t it?”

“Do learn to distinguish between what’s alright to share and what isn’t, Luis.”

Odo gave Luis a flat look as he said it.

“Remember when you fell for a honey trap and leaked information? Another party got there ahead of us. That was the absolute worst, wasn’t it?”

“Come on! Did you have to say that in front of Karen?”

Karen looked around at the lively group and smiled.

“I probably don’t understand what it is you truly need. So… tell me everything. I want to make potions suited to every one of you in the Crimson Thunder.”

Thor’s eyes went wide at Karen’s question. After a moment, he said:

“…Other alchemists have never asked us anything like that before.”

“Oh—sorry! I’m still a rapidly growing alchemist…! I don’t yet have the skill to create precisely the right potions without asking…!”

“That’s not what I meant, Sis.”

Thor stopped Karen calmly as she began to spiral.

“I’m an adventurer, so I might actually know more than you about what potions are useful in the field. That’s why I just order whatever I need. Nobody else offers to come up with new potions tailored to what we actually want the way you do, Sis… But you can.”

Thor finished his expression of admiration, then bowed his head low.

“Thank you, Sis.”

When he raised his face, his eyes were serious.

“Alchemist Karen… I want you to hear everything about our adventures.”

Karen nodded and carefully listened as Thor and his companions recounted their experiences. And as she listened, she realized something. Thor had been leaving a great deal out of his adventure stories up until now.

Most likely to keep her from worrying. He had only ever shared the clean, interesting, fun parts of adventuring. She had vaguely sensed as much, but hearing it all properly brought out one episode after another of the kind that would have made her want to say something as his older sister.

But Karen said nothing and kept listening. Because Adventurer Thor, requesting potions from Alchemist Karen for his challenge of the fortieth floor, had held nothing back—and so Alchemist Karen, quietly turning over in her mind what potions she might make for her client, listened on in silence.

“Hey.”

As they left the Ehlertt family’s manor, Thor spoke to no one in particular.

“I thought getting Sis as our sponsor would at least help give her potions some credibility… but maybe we’re the ones who ended up with an incredible sponsor.”

“You’re only realizing this now, Leader?”

Wanda looked at him with exasperation.

“What? Are you saying you all already knew?!”

“Well… the panacea, come on. Even I’d hesitate to try flirting with someone like that.”

“When someone is family, you stop seeing them objectively. I can understand why it’s hard for you to notice just how extraordinary she really is.”

“The two of you are both so far beyond normal that you’ve lost all sense of what ‘ordinary’ even means. Ha ha ha…”

Watching Chris’s strained smile, Thor’s face went red by degrees, and he buried his head in his hands.

“I went and asked Sis to be our sponsor and called it an engagement present!”

“A-rank adventurers are impressive enough in their own right, so it’s fine. Probably.”

Wanda offered him a rather half-hearted attempt at comfort. Even as his expression cycled through every emotion imaginable, Thor kept moving forward with the next stage of preparations for the adventure.

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Alchemist Karen No Longer Compromises, Chapter 326

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Six: Those Who Aspire 2

“Hey, girls, are you rookie adventurers from out of town?”

“Come with us. We’ll teach you how things are done at the Adventurers’ Guild in Ehlertt’s capital.”

“No way, that very cliché!?”

Blocked by the two male adventurers, Karen let out a delighted cry. Karen the alchemist, twenty years in this world. Having grown up known to the local adventurers from birth in the adventurers’ district, she had never once had the chance to experience this particular isekai fantasy.

“A cli… cliché? What’s that?”

The men were confused. Ottilie was confused too, for that matter.

“My apologies, Lady Karen. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with it either…”

“No, I don’t think anyone here would be…”

It was, in a sense, a cry that only Karen could understand.

“Are you mocking us?”

“Tch! We were gonna cut you some slack, but not anymore!”

The adventurers were starting to get irritated. They had taken Karen’s group for adventurers from out of town, but what sort of kindness had they even been planning to show them? The guild clerk simply muttered "no trouble inside the guild" and showed no sign of actually intervening.

Karen and Ottilie didn’t flinch in the slightest even as the adventurers—each twice their size—began to make their anger plain. Ottilie was the award winner at the hunting festival, so she might well have been stronger than they. And Karen, while she couldn’t gauge their strength exactly, felt no fear of them either.

“You’ve got guts, Karen.”

“Dragons are way scarier, honestly.”

“Well, obviously.”

While Teresa and Karen whispered to each other, one of the muscular adventurers slammed his club against the floor. Even Teresa gave a start and froze up at that. Karen shifted her position to shield Teresa.

Just what were these men planning to do to Karen, Ottilie, and Teresa—

“Hey! Don’t damage the floor!”

“But boss—some outsider’s using a local kid for who-knows-what scheme! How are we supposed to look the other way!?”

They turned out to be perfectly decent people. There was a misunderstanding, and they were being confrontational about it, but Karen felt herself relax. This was what she loved about adventurers, what made her fond of them. A lot of them were simple and straightforward people, but they didn’t blindly worship strength alone.

“What are you smiling about?”

“You think we can’t stop you!?”

“Well, the thing is—”

Just as Karen was about to calmly explain things to the advancing adventurers, a crushing wave of magical pressure—like standing before a dragon—swept through the guild. The next instant, the two adventurers in front of her were lifted off the ground.

“What do you think you’re doing to Sis, huh?”

“Oh, Thor. Wait, wait—there’s been a misunderstanding!”

Thor had both adventurers in iron claws from behind, gripping each by the back of the head, and he furrowed his brow at Karen as she tried to intervene.

“Even if there was some kind of misunderstanding, you wouldn’t do anything that deserves getting yelled at, would you? So they’re the ones at fault for jumping to conclusions, right?”

“It really isn’t that simple, so let them go! They’re good people!”

“They can be good people to everyone else all they want—if they’re rude to Sis, that’s not okay.”

“Thor!”

Thor pursed his lips and flung the still-struggling adventurers away. For all that the adventurers had arms like logs, thick with training, Thor’s arms that had sent them flying were slender by comparison. Yet the two adventurers sailed through the air in an arc that nearly grazed the ceiling, only to be caught by their fellow adventurers nearby.

Gleaming on Thor’s chest was a crimson pendant engraved with a sword and staff—the mark of an A-rank adventurer. The scarletite pendant suited Thor perfectly, especially since he wielded a war hammer forged from a scarletite alloy. Looking over, the members of Thor’s party waiting near the entrance all wore the same red pendants at their chests.

“Why were those guys picking a fight with you, Sis?”

“They were trying to stop me because they thought I was going to do something awful to this girl.”

Karen glanced at Teresa as she said it. Teresa was hunched over, trembling. She must have been overwhelmed by Thor’s pressure. The pressure itself had been milder than it was with the dragon, and it hadn’t been directed at Karen—she’d only been startled—but even Ottilie’s color looked a little off.

“There’s no way you’d do something awful to a kid, Sis.”

“Well… Again, it’s not quite that simple.”

Becoming an adventurer was Teresa’s own choice, and since talking her out of it would be pointless, Karen had agreed to support her. That was the reality of it—but setting that aside, from the outside, Karen was an adult sending a talentless, magicless child to work as an adventurer.

“I’m placing a very small amount of hope in this girl—hoping she might do something remarkable. And to put that hope to the test, I’m about to send her somewhere so dangerous that all hundred people out of a hundred would try to stop it. I intend to support her so she doesn’t die easily—but I can’t guarantee she absolutely won’t die.”

Her past-life self would have tried to talk Teresa out of the adventurer path entirely. But Karen now would not take that road. Besides, she couldn’t force Teresa to do anything. So at least help her, help her avoid death—under that pretext, Karen was, as Teresa had said, no different from using the girl as a test subject.

“I really am planning to do something awful. So it’s only natural for a decent person to try to stop me. Make sure you apologize to those two later.”

“If you say so, I guess.”

Thor sighed, accepted it, and looked down at Teresa, who was still staring at the floor.

“So this is the kid you’re planning to sponsor besides us?”

“Yep. Her name’s Teresa.”

Surprisingly, Teresa kept her eyes down and hid herself behind Karen’s back. She had bitten back at Julius without a second thought when he’d put pressure on her—was she actually afraid of Thor? He had been more intense, it was true… Karen was still analyzing that when Thor crouched down to Teresa’s eye level.

“I’m Thor. I lead the party Crimson Thunder, and as adventurers with Sis as our sponsor, I’m your senior. Good to have a fellow sponsored adventurer on board, Teresa.”

He held out his hand as he said it, and Teresa hesitantly reached out and took it. When the handshake was done, Thor walked off into the back of the guild at an easy pace. He and his party apparently had business at the Ehlertt capital’s Adventurers’ Guild.

“See you later, Ms. Karen.”

Wanda and the rest of the party trailed behind Thor. It was an area restricted to high-ranking adventurers. The guild clerks hurried to receive them.

“So that woman’s the sister of Crimson Thunder, the one who conquered the thirtieth floor—”

“His sister… you mean that one who recently became a lord!?”

At that point, Karen’s identity was obviously no secret anymore.

“You are Karen the alchemist—Master Julius’s wife!”

“Exactly!”

“You haven’t actually gotten married yet.”

Ottilie cut in with a cool correction as Karen played along, and they made their escape from the Adventurers’ Guild.

Once they were in the carriage, Karen called out to Teresa, who was being oddly quiet:

“Teresa, are you alright? Thor looks intimidating, but he’s not a scary person—”

“—I shook hands with an A-rank adventurer.”

“Hm?”

She had been shaking a moment ago, but when Teresa raised her head, her eyes were glistening.

“You’re really his sister? That’s amazing, that’s incredible, that’s unbelievable! I talked to an A-rank adventurer! That’s so cool!”

Teresa’s eyes were watery, her mouth trembling, her face red with excitement. She hadn’t been shaking with fear of Thor—she had been shaking with awe.

Karen blinked at the unexpected reaction.

“Julius is just as strong as any high-ranking adventurer, though. Don’t you think you’re treating them completely differently?”

“An adventurer and a nobleman are totally different! He conquered the thirtieth floor—an A-rank adventurer!”

For Teresa, high-ranking adventurers were something special. Karen had mentioned her connection to Thor before, but it seemed Teresa had only been half-listening to her all along.

“Fellow adventurers with the same sponsor, he said! Ehehe!”

The part about that sponsor being Karen herself seemed to have gone completely over her head, and in her excitement, she kept flailing her legs, repeatedly kicking Karen in the shin. Karen stopped Ottilie from saying something about it.

She watched with a warm smile as Teresa rejoiced with a carefree innocence she had never shown before—like a child, purely and simply happy.

The Translator’s Small Note

I previously translated that Thor’s hammer was made of orichalcum, but “scarletite” is a more accurate translation. Well, the literal translation would be “hihi’irokane,” but that sounds too Japanese.

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Alchemist Karen No Longer Compromises, Chapter 325

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Five: Those Who Aspire

“Blech.”

After touring Karen’s secret alchemist-training orphanage, Teresa had made her way back to the garden and pretended to throw up.

“Isn’t that a bit harsh?”

“I was being con-sid-er-ate? Or trying to be. Didn’t do it in front of the kids, did I?”

She was a child herself, but being among the older ones apparently meant she did have some capacity for consideration toward younger children. What made this girl remarkable was that she reserved her insolence strictly for adults who could take it.

“I think it’s a pretty comfortable environment, honestly.”

“Too comfortable. They’ll go soft.”

Teresa wrinkled her nose and spat the words out.

“If you’re planning to take care of them for the rest of their lives, fine, but if they grow up in a place like that, they won’t be able to go anywhere else.”

“Then they can stay with me for the rest of their lives.”

“Huh? You’re not their parent. What are you on about?”

“I only just got my territory, and I could use all the hands I can get. I can find work for as many people as want it.”

“Right, you’re a… lord now. Hah. No matter how many times I hear it, it sounds like sleeptalking.”

Karen had considered the possibility that seeing the children might change Teresa’s mind and looked into options for taking her in—but Teresa, it seemed, was set on the adventurer’s path after all.

“Well then, shall we head to the Adventurers’ Guild?”

Today was the day Teresa would officially register as an adventurer. And Karen was going along to register as Teresa’s sponsor.

“Lady Karen, the carriage is ready.”

“Thank you very much, Lady Ottilie.”

“Please, just Ottilie.”

When Ottilie smiled, she was beautiful—but above all, dignified. Quite different from the impression she’d made when they first met. The unsettling thing about Ottilie was how plausible it seemed that she was intentionally putting on this poised, gallant persona to make herself more appealing to Karen.

“Is that scary man not coming today?”

Teresa had been peering around like a small animal on alert—apparently looking for Julius.

“You mean Julius? He’s gone to pick someone up.”

“Pick up who?”

“One of my supporters is moving here from the royal capital with his whole family. He sent me a letter saying they’d finished packing, so Julius went to bring them here.”

Sepl had decided to move to the Ehlertt territory together with his wife Lily and their baby. Urte had chosen to stay in the capital with her husband Aaron, taking up a role as a guard at the alchemy workshop.

The alchemy workshop in the capital was set to keep running as Karen’s shop as before, and Yuluyana and Ahim were still in and out of the place regularly, so not having alchemy knowledge herself wasn’t a problem—or rather, as Urte complained in her letter, the pair were so noisy that she could never get a moment’s peace.

“A supporter—that’s one of those has-been adventurers who couldn’t cut it anymore, right? Ow!”

Karen flicked Teresa on her bare forehead for the rude remark. Teresa ended up nursing the spot for longer than Karen had expected.

“Oh—sorry. My magical power has been growing lately, and I haven’t quite gotten control of my strength. Do you want a potion?”

“…Yes.”

Karen handed the half-tearful Teresa a potion bottle, and Teresa didn’t use it—she tucked it straight into her pocket with practiced efficiency. Karen had seen it coming, so she looked the other way.

“Honestly, you’re so cheeky. One of these days, it’s going to come back to bite you.”

“I’m getting it right now.”

“That’s nowhere near enough to teach you a lesson.”

Karen bundled Teresa—who was sticking her tongue out—into the carriage, then climbed in with Ottilie, and they set off for the Adventurers’ Guild.

“Look! I brought my sponsor! So now I can officially become an adventurer, right?”

“Guess there are weirdos willing to become a guardian for someone with no magical power.”

“Sponsor, not guardian!”

“Yeah, yeah, alright…”

The man at the Adventurers’ Guild reception desk shot Karen a sharp look.

“Seriously, what kind of work do you expect a kid like this to do?”

He had the face of a hardened thug, but was a decent enough person. He didn’t think it was acceptable to let Teresa die just because she had no magical power. That was precisely why Teresa was still only a trainee.

“Ideally, I’d like her to start with something like herb-gathering, at first—”

“I’m gonna go around smashing monsters, obviously! I’m not wasting my time picking herbs!”

Teresa declared it boldly. The receptionist’s face twisted with distaste. Karen sighed and pressed the point.

“You know better than anyone that you don’t have that kind of strength, right?”

“…Tch! Shut up!”

“You have a gift for concealing your presence, so you’d be better off developing that and aiming for a style that lets you catch monsters off guard. At least in the beginning.”

“A gift for concealing my presence?”

Teresa blinked at her, and Karen tilted her head slightly.

“Did I not mention it? You have a real talent for concealing your presence, Teresa. It’s because you have no magical power.”

“Because I have no magical power…”

“If you take that talent to its limit—you can make yourself undetectable even to S-rank monsters.”

“What kind of nonsense is that?”

The receptionist grumbled under his breath as he went through the process of registering Teresa as an F-rank adventurer. Technically, there was no age restriction on becoming an adventurer. But the Adventurers’ Guild sometimes turned away children who were too young. A child with no backing who became an adventurer almost always died immediately.

Neither Karen nor Ottilie had intended to draw attention to themselves, so both wore cloaks with their hoods pulled up, their faces largely hidden. Even if the receptionist happened to know Karen’s face, he wouldn’t have recognized her. Which meant he almost certainly had no idea she was one of the members who had taken down the black dragon.

But Teresa knew.

“Seriously…?”

“Seriously.”

“Suuure you are!”

Theresa, who knew the truth and still couldn’t believe it, wore exactly the same expression as the receptionist, and Karen almost burst out laughing.

“Once her adventurer registration is finished, I’d like to register myself as her sponsor as well.”

“You sure you understand how the sponsor system works? It’s a system where you support a well-known adventurer in exchange for them promoting your goods. It’s not the same as donating to an orphan.”

“I understand how it works, thank you.”

“People do sponsor promising high-ranking adventurers or noble brats, but you don’t seriously think this kid’s going to make it big, do you?”

“It’s a huge gamble, but I think she has a chance.”

The receptionist looked as though he’d bitten into something sour. Beside Karen, Teresa’s expression was squirming with something halfway between embarrassed and pleased—but when she noticed Karen looking at her, she snapped her gaze back with a glare.

“What are you looking at? Huh?”

“Such rough manners.”

Karen laughed and completed the sponsor registration. The signature was simply Karen. Until she traveled to the capital in spring, secured an audience with the king, and received the formal conferral of her title, she was still a commoner on paper.

“Karen…?”

The receptionist murmured to himself. She hadn’t used the Himmel name, so she’d assumed she wouldn’t be recognized—but at the sight of Karen’s signature, the receptionist’s face took on the look of someone trying to remember something.

Just how well known was Karen in Ehlertt? Last year, she had apparently been quite the topic of conversation as the protagonist of a real-life Cinderella story, so perhaps her name alone was fairly recognizable.

Not wanting to attract attention, Karen, Ottilie, and Teresa moved to leave quickly—and found a figure stepping into their path.

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Alchemist Karen No Longer Compromises, Chapter 324

Previous chapter Index Next chapter

Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty-Four: Common Ground

“Just as you wished, Lady Karen, they study in the morning, have lunch, and work in the afternoon. They are given three meals a day, finish work at the fifth bell, and go to bed at the sixth bell.”

“And what time do they wake?”

“Half a bell after the first bell, they are woken and given breakfast. After a short rest, their lessons begin at the second bell.”

Karen was doing her rounds, observing the children’s daily routine. Guiding her were Harald, who supervised the children, and Sara, who managed the annex of the Ehlertt family’s estate, which they were borrowing.

It was afternoon, and the children were working. The expensive furniture that had filled the main hall had been moved out and replaced with children’s chairs and long tables. The children—mostly girls—sat side by side at the long tables, sewing sachet bags.

“Children who weren’t good at sewing were assigned different work. Just as you instructed, Lady Karen, I tried to match each child with tasks suited to their individual strengths and weaknesses.”

The children worked in a warm salon bathed in the afternoon sun. At the very least, none of them were hungry or shivering from the cold.

“I wonder if this is really enough…”

“I share your concern, Lady Karen. I do think we may have been a little too lenient with the children.”

Harald immediately agreed with Karen’s hesitant remark. But Sara leaned forward and said:

“Harald, I believe Lady Karen means the opposite, if anything.”

At Sara’s correction, Harald’s face went stiff with shock.

“What…? Surely not… you mean something is still lacking…?”

“Well, they don’t have any days off, do they? Working every single day without a break—wouldn’t that wear them down?”

“It seems I was the lenient one, Ms. Sara…”

Sara gave Harald a sympathetic pat on the shoulder as he looked up to the heavens. Karen, left out of the moment entirely, pursed her lips.

“I will say without hesitation that this is already a dreamlike situation for every single one of those children. It vexes me that there should be any child here who fails to show gratitude to you, Lady Karen.”

With that, Harald cast a sweeping, stern look over the children working on the sachets. Karen could sense them tense at it, and she promptly ushered Harald out of the room.

Harald had reproduced Karen’s broad wishes for the children’s care with impressive faithfulness. …Though Karen couldn’t help worrying about how his deep devotion to her showed through here and there.

Could he really be like a son to me? Karen wondered, her expression somewhere between bemused and troubled—and Sara, as if reading her thoughts, spoke instead:

“Those children are likely wary precisely because of how different this treatment is from what they have known. Understanding their own low standing as they do, they cannot help but search for a hidden meaning behind being treated so well. It is entirely understandable, Lady Karen.”

“You heard her, Harald. What do you think?”

“I do not deny that such a side to the situation exists, as Ms. Sara says. Even so, they should still be grateful to you, Lady Karen. Am I wrong?”

“In the end, I agree as well.”

“So you both came to the same conclusion.”

After the New Year Festival, Helfried, Alise, and Sieg had returned to the royal capital. Karen had gone back once herself, then packed her things and returned to the capital of Ehlertt territory together with Julius. Throughout that time, Sara had remained in the Ehlertt capital as a liaison. For Harald, who had been rather abruptly left behind at the earl’s residence, having Sara—a familiar face—there must have been a great comfort.

Somehow, the two of them seemed to have grown closer than before.

“Naturally, every one of the children ought to be grateful to you for saving them, Lady Karen. In fact, I believe most of them felt a deep sense of gratitude. …However, fears buried deep within one’s heart are not so easily erased. In time, your character—and time itself—will resolve this problem.”

Sara spoke with the solemnity of a prophet. Karen suddenly realized something.

“Come to think of it, Sara—you mentioned before that Sieg saved you, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Master Sieg found me when I had nowhere to go. He took me in, helped me, and said he wished to keep me by his side. At first, the lord and lady of the house quite naturally tried to keep someone of unknown origin like me at a distance…”

Helfried and Alise? Karen found that hard to believe for a moment. Karen herself was often scolded by Natalia for being too soft-hearted, and yet even by her standards, those two were people she’d worry about for being too kind. Still, it was true that most people wouldn’t agree to take in a stray child simply because their own child had brought one home.

Karen found herself returning to a question she had wondered about before—why had Sara been left with nowhere to go? Sara had told her about her past once, but that had been the part of her story that began after meeting Sieg. Everything before that, Karen had never heard.

If Sara didn’t speak of it, it was because she didn’t want to—and so Karen had never asked. But it wasn’t difficult to guess. At the very least, Sara had no parents, no one to protect her. That was why she would understand how the children here felt—and it was part of why Karen had felt she could trust Sara with their care.

“It happened that Master Sieg fell ill with the Bloodline Blessing right around that time, and it seems both of them felt they wished to grant him whatever he asked. At his request, I was taken on as a maid and permitted to serve the household. Naturally, I felt profoundly grateful, but it was only much later that I truly came to trust the people of the Ehlertt Earldom and could express those feelings openly.”

“To rise from such a position all the way to the side of the Ehlertt heir—that could not have been achieved without extraordinary effort.”

Harald said it with heartfelt admiration.

He had no intention of prying into the past Sara chose not to speak of. Or perhaps he simply had no interest in it.

“Indeed. At first, I mostly handled odd jobs. Only much later was I allowed to serve Master Sieg closely.”

“I find that fascinating. I would very much like to hear more… I want to hear the tale of how someone with neither family nor support climbed all the way to becoming her master’s most trusted aide.”

Harald’s peculiar eagerness made Sara let out a small laugh.

“It was quite simple, really. I volunteered to taste Master Sieg’s food. In other words—I took on the most dangerous work available. After collapsing several times from poison administered by those who saw Master Sieg’s illness as an opportunity to dispose of the Ehlertt heir, I earned their trust.”

“I see. The most dangerous work. That’s very instructive.”

Rather than feeling any sorrow for Sara’s painful past, Harald received it with an air of enthusiastic personal application.

At his rather peculiar response, Sara blinked—and then burst into cheerful laughter.

Previous chapter Index Next chapter