An old-fashioned horse carriage ran along the b.u.mpy road.
From the outside, there was nothing remarkable about it, but riding inside, there was a bit of a problem.
The feeling of riding in a shaky carriage as it clattered along was the worst. In this box, which didn’t even have a window to look out of, much less seat cushions, we were rolling around like cargo. No, more like we were being rolled around.
But looking at it rationally, it was hardly surprising. To the guys transporting us, that was exactly what we were.
In short —
The guys transporting us were slave traders, and we were the slaves.
Of course, the slave trade was now a crime under international conventions, so it depended on the place, but if they were arrested, they’d get an appropriately severe sentence. That, possibly, being the death penalty.
But unfortunately, because it could be profitable from time to time, there were many willing to commit a crime that could put their heads on the chopping block. It would definitely never die out.
So, having been kicked by the proverbial horse, these victims had no choice but to give up.
But.
“Hh…mm. Nggh…mh.”
Naturally, I hadn’t.
Growing frantic, I rubbed my wrists together, struggling to undo the ropes used to tie my hands behind me.
You’ve gotta be kidding me. 1
The rest of this lot looked like they’d already given up, but there was no way in h.e.l.l I would. I didn’t want to die a slave. I’d never accept such a ridiculous life.
Glaring at nothing in particular, I rubbed my wrists together over and over again.
It was morning on the third day of my captivity.
The name’s Christopher Carson. Nickname, Chris. Incidentally, I’m a woman.
You’re probably thinking, ‘What a way for a woman to talk,’ but there’s a reason for it.
See, I used to be a man.
I’ll say this straight out to avoid any misunderstandings: I am not a transvest.i.te.
I used to be one-hundred percent man, and now I’m one hundred percent woman.
You may not know what I’m talking about, but it’s the truth.
My transformation into a woman was all thanks to some old… well, magic potion is my best guess.
An adventurer with a good bit of experience, even at eighteen, I tackled a certain set of ancient ruins.
In practice, an adventurer is a jack of all trades.
As long as you pay in gold, they’ll be your merc, your investigator, your explorer — you name it.
But an adventurer’s primary occupation has got to be ruin exploration. Well, it sounds better if you call it ‘exploration’, but it’s basically glorified grave-robbing.
Treasures sleep in those ruins, amazing treasures you’d normally never even dream of. Depending on the situation, it might even be so valuable that you wouldn’t have to work another day for the rest of your life.
But ancient ruins are also dangerous places.
Heaps and heaps of bizarre traps. Strong monsters acting as guardians.
But there’s as just much value in deliberately confronting those dangers. That was also why I challenged that nameless ruin.
It wasn’t my first time taking on ancient ruins, but these were completely untouched. They hadn’t been disturbed even once, and that was a first for me.
I found these unexplored ruins by sheer luck.
Well, it wouldn’t be wrong to call it an unexpected windfall. I think any adventurer would want to have the experience at least once. Ruins that pristine aren’t that easy to come by.
It was in a part of the Artor Ruins Cl.u.s.ter, a hunting ground for ancient relics that was relatively famous among the adventuring community. However, after being searched over and over because of its reputation, the well had all but run dry. Since it was basically slim pickings, famous or not, the usual adventurer would pay it no mind.
If someone were to ask me why I discovered untouched ruins in such a place, it really was nothing but good luck, as I said. To be more specific, I happened to pa.s.s near the area, happened to decide on taking the scenic route, and then happened to find the entrance. Even I wanted to call bulls.h.i.t.
But anyway, you would’ve had to pry this golden opportunity from my cold, dead hands. It was unexplored.
It was risky, but I was going to milk first dibs for all it was worth. Alone, I stepped into the ruins.
The ruins extended underground, forming a structure popularly known as a labyrinth.
At five levels, it was relatively shallow. But it didn’t fall short in the traps and monsters department. Even so, I managed to hack my way through it all, and I was able to wrangle myself more treasure than I expected.
Converted into cash, it wouldn’t sustain me for a lifetime, but it would definitely be enough to live the good life for ten years or so.
But…I made a minor, and I mean tiny, miscalculation.
I triggered a trap that poisoned me.
‘s.h.i.t,’ I thought, but it was too late. The poison had begun to circulate in my body with considerable speed. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought an antidote with me.
See, antidotes come in a thousand different kinds, just like poisons do. If the antidote doesn’t match the poison, it’s no better than snake oil.2 Considering I was poisoned in an ancient ruin, it probably wouldn’t be commonly known. So taking an off-the-shelf antidote would’ve been pointless.
There are magical panaceae, but they’re pricey. Still, you’d want to carry one around, but at the time I was horribly broke and couldn’t afford it.
My entire body felt as if it’d caught on fire. It was so hard to breathe, it’s like I’d scaled a tall mountain. My head spun around in circles, and my legs collapsed.
I was dying.
That was my instinctive thought.
But as I teetered on the brink of death, my mind seemed to clear for a moment.
Noticing a certain something, I ransacked my knapsack full of treasure and took out —
Five gla.s.s vials of medicine — probably. One red, one blue, one white, one green, and one purple. Very pretty to look at, but very suspiciously colored for medicine.
There were labels stuck to the vials, more or less, but the words on them had faded to an unreadable yellow. Since it would have been written in an ancient script anyway, I still wouldn’t have been able to understand it.
At any rate, I decided to try drinking them.
See, they were from ancient times. At the time, I thought, ‘One of them might be a panacea.’ As for the other four, I’d just pretend they weren’t there.
But that was a dangerous gamble. Items from so long ago are often hazardous, and people have died using things they couldn’t identify.
But under these circ.u.mstances, I used them without hesitation. If I was going to take poison, might as well take it all.
So basically, in my desperation, I downed all five at once.
Then, I fell over unconscious.
–
–
The introduction was on the long side, but long story short, the poison was gone but I’d become female. Still, it didn’t look like I was unsuited for adventuring. There are girls like this wherever you go.
It seemed that until my consciousness completely recovered from my dead faint, I’d been sleepwalking my way through the labyrinth. While I was trying to make sense of things, I was shocked to discover that I was female.
I spent a good few hours in confusion. Once I came back to my senses, I checked my equipment, but with my clearly smaller body size, it had all slipped off somehow and left me b.u.t.t-naked.
I’d even lost the treasure that would have made this trip worthwhile.
In the midst of my anger, confusion, and regret, I still managed to make it out of the labyrinth. That could only be considered a stroke of good fortune. But then I was suddenly seized by a caravan of slave traders that happened to be on their way to the nearby town.
If I looked at it with a clear mind, it was a complete disaster. In the s.p.a.ce of two or three days, I’d gone from adventurer to young girl, and from young girl to slave.
Still, I wasn’t in that much of a panic, simply because I was an adventurer. Proof? Take these other captive [friends] of mine. They were crying and screaming at the beginning, and now they just rolled around in complete dejection.
Incidentally, all my friends were female. And every one a beauty, to boot.
In short, these slave traders dealt in slaves used for [that] kind of personal use. They’d probably be sold to some millionaire or territorial lord as expensive playthings.
All in all, the only word for them was ‘pitiful’. But it was the same for me. Life was cruel the world over.
–
–
Without warning, the carriage came to a halt.
So it was that time of day. In other words, I was stuck inside day in and day out, unable to even look outside to my heart’s content, but I could tell the time by the state of my stomach.
“Oi. Women! Food!”
Sure enough, the door in the back opened, revealing a man whose face made for poor viewing.
He took his sweet time surveying the inside of the carriage. With a satisfied expression, he began to toss hard bread into the carriage from a box prepared outside.
“Better eat it all up! You’re valuable merchandise, after all!”
At the sound of his sneering voice, everyone but me flinched. Then, they sluggishly reached their hands out toward the bread.
Because it was the third day. They had been too despondent to eat in the beginning, but perhaps they could no longer withstand their bodies’ demands. One by one, they put the bread into their mouths.
They were showing a reality of surrender.3 No one wanted to become a slave, but was death even more undesirable?
“Oi! You!”
The man was about to shut the door once he saw the women begin to eat the tough bread when I called out to him.
“What… you again?”
The man looked me over as he replied in his hateful voice.
“What are you doing! Are you telling me to eat bread like this! It’s just a rope, friggin’ untie it!”4
Actually, I was the only one whose hands had been bound by rope. The reason being that I was moving around a bit too much last night.
“Yeah, just like that. Seems to me if it’s you, it doesn’t matter. Don’t like it? Don’t eat.”
“d.a.m.n it! Are you saying that I’m not valuable merchandise! Oi! Wait! You a.s.shole — !”
While I was in the middle of talking, the man disappeared behind the canopy of the wagon.
d.a.m.n it. I’ll beat the s.h.i.t out of you. You’ll be crying like a baby before I’m through with you. That’s a promise.
“Um…”
As dark urges seethed inside my heart, one of the women spoke to me. A lovely girl, especially with her long, chestnut-brown hair…I think she said her name was Aira.
She was already in the wagon when I was captured.
Rolling my neck around, I looked in her direction. The moment our eyes met, a shiver went through her body. Apparently, I failed to shake off all the ugly feelings inside, so I ended up glaring at her.
Feeling guilty for turning my hostility on an innocent party, the nastiness rapidly withered away.
“…What?”
I said, suppressing my emotions.
At which point Aira, the look in her eyes cowed, slowly held out her own piece of bread to me.
“…Here.”
Her voice dwindled away.
I was taken aback for a moment. Again, I moved my gaze to Aira’s face.
A pleasant smile flickered there for a moment before she tore off a bit of the bread and held it to my mouth. I should’ve been hungry, but for some reason, I suddenly didn’t feel like eating.
“…don’t want it… untie the rope for me instead.”
Hearing me speak, Aira’s expression grew troubled, and she shook her head.
I let out a huge sigh.
This was a repeat of her behavior yesterday.
To be fair, I couldn’t deny that I had zero confidence in how things would go after being untied. They were afraid that once the rope was undone, the slavers would punish them for it.
I understood how they felt. I wouldn’t be able to talk them into it.
“Okay, listen. Before long, there’s going to be a chance to untie me. Do it then.”
“A chance?”
Curious, Aira repeated the word as a question.
I was taken aback, but doing my best to maintain a composed expression, I answered her.
“Yeah. It might not be a good idea right now, but sooner or later…That’s right, sooner or later, we’ll have the chance to escape. Definitely. You should untie me at that time.”
Right. A chance was sure to present itself. Maybe I hadn’t been thinking straight. Right now, it would be useless to struggle.
“…I can’t believe such a thing…”
murmured Aira from beside me, just as I got all excited.
Those words, accompanied by a sigh, weighed heavily on my shoulders. My enthusiasm was abruptly snuffed out.
“…Why’s that?”
“Because… Because, I can’t. I have always, always been waiting for the time to come. But it never has… it never will.”
Suddenly, Aira rattled off a bunch of words, and on top of that, she started to wail. I didn’t even have the time to be surprised before all the chained women around us also started to sob.
For a while, I wondered what I should do, but when I looked at the crying women, a mysterious feeling of irritation boiled up within me. Their wailing voices made it worse.
“Quit crying–!”
And I finally exploded.
When I raised my voice, the women all stopped crying as they were told. They looked at me with cowering eyes. Aira, of course, was no exception.
“Don’t just give up on everything! You got that!? Becoming a slave, you’ll die all the same! Now that it’s come to this, have the guts to put your life on the line! If you can’t, then just die right here, right now — !”
Gimme a break.
Become a slave with this bunch? Sorry, but no way in h.e.l.l. I definitely don’t want to give up. If I became a slave, I really would be better off dead.
A bit of life took root inside them. They looked at me, blinking their eyes. Eyes that said they didn’t know what they should do.
Once they calmed down, they really did seem pitiful.
I hated resigning myself to the thought, but thinking about it, my mind as a man should operate in a fundamentally different way from theirs as women. From that perspective, well, maybe Aira and the others’ reactions were only natural.
I bit into the piece of bread Aira had torn off for me earlier.
“If you don’t want to die, eat. When you’re crawling on your shrunken stomach, you won’t be able to take a chance even if one presents itself.”
When I spoke, I took their feelings into consideration, even if it was just a little. Performing her earlier actions with steady hands, Aira began to pick up the scattered bread. The other women were the same; I could see some small changes in them.
“…Thank you.”
Aira smiled briefly. I was kinda tired, but it wasn’t a bad feeling.
Footnotes
aka help meeeee
1. Skipped: 何が悲しくて奴隷なんぞにならなくてはならないのか ↵
2. Guessed: それは無用の長物以外の何者でもないからだ ↵
3. Guessed: あきらめが現実を見せている ↵
4. Guessed: 縄だけでも解きやがれ！ ↵