Wortenia Senki

Some hot day when the sun's rays fall brightly.

White clouds float in the sky, and in the hills where the green pasture grows, the sheep kept to take wool eat grass.

Time to flow slowly and calmly.

Indeed, threats such as bandits and monsters exist in this earth world. But they rarely strike villages surrounded by moats and fences.

Probably something like whether they get attacked every few years at best.

It doesn't mean there's no time for peace at all, even though it's a world of war.

But such tranquillity is easily broken with only a little malice.

Rather, a threat to tiny villages where strategically important bases do not exist nearby were the people of their own countries, such as lords and officials seconded by the kingdom, who are supposed to be more allies than external enemies.

And now, in a small village in one countryside of the Kingdom of Roselia, where we were having such a peaceful time, an incompatible rage echoes in its peaceful landscape.

Square set in the centre of the village. There, a circle of villagers was formed with a mixed expression of anxiety and fright. Their gaze is poured, of course, upon a certain group of people at the center of the wheel.

No, more precisely, it was one man standing in front of that group.

"Forgive me. No more... now we're alive"

The words of plea spoken by a middle-aged man in his desperate shape are interrupted by a dull striking sound.

A large fist wrapped in a small metal hand easily crushed the man's back teeth.

Rusty iron flavour that spreads across your mouth. Bleeding saliva "Who" falls zero from the mouth of the man who squatted "Uzuma" and creates a red and black stain on the earth.

"Father..."

An eye mixed with anxiety and fear. A girl filled with tears shook off her mother's hand and jumped out of the villagers' circle.

The expression "still young" suits the girl. She herself fully understood that there was no way she could do anything where she jumped out. But still, the girl couldn't ignore her father's squatting.

Gently suppress my daughter's shoulders with her bloodstained hands in an attempt to calm her down a little bit like that.

A sight I didn't want to show to my young daughter yet, if it's true.

(why... why is this happening)

When all sorts of thoughts come to mind in a man's head, they disappear.

Indeed, when Lupis Roselianus took the throne, everyone was feeling a new wave of change. Because from the time she was head of the Knights, her personality and impartiality, familiar to the common people, had risen to the mouth of people.

When I cheered with my buddies at the tavern that this would make my life easier, it still burns clearly in the back of a man's brain.

No, change did come. However, it may just be that the change was not a good change for a man.

"Ask again. How soon are we gonna pay the taxes we were ordered to pay?

With a knight who beat up a man on his back, the tax collector threw cold words at the squatting man with a lowly grin.

A human being who takes for granted his overwhelming advantage and feels no itch whatsoever in stepping on others.

If you try being a tax collector, I guess the value of a man is only on one point: paying taxes.

Same as hunters don't get emotional about their prey.

"Of course I would be happy to pay for anything I can. But really no more..."

I can't. The words of the man who tried to say that interrupt again with a dull shock.

The diaphragm is hit hard and the man's breathing stops for a moment. An earlier knight stripped his fangs again.

"It's very difficult to be a civilian at all. I'm not smart enough to make it. I asked when I would pay. I'm not asking for your convenience."

To the merciless words of the tax collector, the man curses in his head as he holds his belly by his hand.

(Damn, damn... Whatever you want. Say it. Whatever)

Dark killing intentions springing up. The man must have beaten this bad chest shit tax collector to death in his heart.

Originally, there is no reason why you can pay taxes ordered by tax collectors. Even if that is the man who was said to be quite wealthy in this village.

A man had no intention of denying himself that he would pay taxes separately.

Because what the Queen called the crisis of the survival of the Kingdom of Roselia was quite imaginable for a man who had seen the world as a traveling merchant.

That's why the man chopped up the savings he saved in a tough life.

Cash receipts from this small village are originally insignificant.

Self-sufficiency is fundamental, and what is missing is compensated by bartering with neighboring villages.

Was the cash spent when adventurers and mercenaries stopped by or when the merchants visited?

If we were just going to live inside this little village in one country, we wouldn't have needed that much money. Yes, until this inferior grin taxpayer shows up in the village.

(They took most of the storage... on top of that, you still want to pay...)

It began with the title of the pains to rebuild the country.

Of course, at first everyone proceeded to the word and tried to cooperate. Expectations of Princess Lupis and love her own country but therefore.

But that doesn't end in one go. An endless, invisible additional levy that is repeated once, twice, and three times. At first it was a small amount that didn't affect my life so much, but gradually the demands are escalating.

Adhesive compression as if you could tighten your neck with cotton.

Anger gushing from the bottom of my heart runs through a man's body.

To be exact, it wasn't like I couldn't pay for one or two more. However, that eliminates anything in the true sense of the word at the man's disposal. Will the road that is left sell off the whole family or someone in the family to slaves? Otherwise, we'll have to abandon the village and embark on a wandering journey. Last storage in the true sense.

(If I had the ability to make more money... would I lose everything again...)

Regret and fear run through a man's body.

As a merchant, a man was never good.

However, a man who was honest and well cared for spent less money on begging to sit in the back alley and consulted with his business partner personally. Friendship was wide and many people admired him.

Good man. Assuming the man was born into a modern society, a country also known as the developed world, he would have received respect and admiration from around him. But his humanity, which was supposed to be a virtue, was only a pure weakness in this earth world.

At one point, he was asked by an acquaintance merchant he had known for a long time to lend him money just for a few days because he suddenly needed cash.

Just around that time, I had quite a bit of cash on hand for a guy who was washing his feet from a pedestrian and trying to set up his own shop in town. There's money to spend on a big deal that a man who's risked his future has never experienced in his life.

But a man rubs his forehead on the earth and gives money to that acquaintance who begs. Believe the promise to return the money by the due date.

But what the man who came to the house of an acquaintance on the due date saw was a horrible crowd of creditors. A trade acquaintance's ship became an expensive shipment of sea algae chips due to the storm.

The acquaintance disappeared with the money the man lent him. Throw everything away.

As a result, the man lost everything.

The big deal that gambled the future naturally flowed, and the sudden suspension of the deal greatly damaged the man's credibility.

And above all, that fact that an acquaintance who trusted him deceived him cast a question mark on his power as a merchant of a man who should have been the victim. He said he was a blind person who saw people.

The fact that it was a promise also leaned against the man.

Though I appealed to my lord, I was driven away without listening to him, and in the first place, as a theory, there is no effective way for a single lord in one country to strike against a person who has already disappeared.

The power of policing mechanisms is also strong in a planet called the information society, but in this terrestrial world it is only best to respond to the obstacles in progress before our eyes.

There was very little room to let people out and investigate other territories.

A man trampled on good intentions and lost everything. No one is strange enough to reach out to him in such a fall. Yes, including the business people he's been taking care of personally...

Falling to the bottom of his disappointment, he had no choice but to abandon and wander the town he was based in. Just blurry like a moving corpse.

But fate changes again depending on the daughter he happens to meet in the village he stopped by. When the love sprouted between her and the dead man dwelt the flame of life again.

And a new beloved life born between her and me.

(No. I definitely need to protect my daughter)

In the eyes of this disgusting tax collector is not a man squatting in the earth. What I see in this man's eyes is his daughter trembling on her back. And after you take my daughter, you'll try to take the man's wife.

The two are dirty for a small village in one country. You don't have to go as far as beauty with your bright temperament, but you look like you can grasp people's hearts enough.

If you're a man who wants an uncomfortable relationship, some people prefer to look like you two to an extinct beauty.

It's not that hard to change the two bodies for gold.

You can beat it to the whorehouse and sell it, and there will be enough demand for it as a slave, including evening fun.

And of the money that sold them, some were paid as taxes, and the rest are dimensions of moisturizing the tax collector's nostalgia in the name of a commission.

No, this inferior tax collector can even think of fully dissipating his taste and his own inferior desire first before selling the two.

The problem is that there is no way to stop it even though I know it.

(Wasn't His Majesty going to change our lives?

A bloody saliva threw up on the earth and the man slowly rose up.

Fist gripped hard. There is a dark flame of anger in his eyes.

"You can't keep your mouth shut. In the first place, this tax was strictly ordered by Her Majesty the Queen. To rebuild this country and keep our people safe..."

The tax collector walks over to the man with a sticky grin.

Two people staring at each other close enough to reach their breath.

The smell of cheap tobacco in the taxpayer's raw warm breath snorted the man's nose.

"The taxes that His Majesty Lupis Roselianus is required to protect and nurture his country. It's not just the lord's house that can pay for it. To Your Majesty. And the same against my country, Roselia. I mean traitors. Traitors."

"Rebel..."

"Yes, then naturally your family won't be free either. It doesn't change how you do. Either way."

The tax collector lifts his lips and gives him a high laugh.

If you can dress up the traitor's stigma, the person in question will be sentenced to death, and his family will be sold off as slaves.

There is no big difference in the end result in trying to sell your family here and now to pay a slave trader a tax, ready to die and rebel.

It was the man who missed his gaze first.

Until then, so much anger that it seems to reach heaven, which ruled his body, scratches out in an instant with a word of a man who turns his humble eyes in front of him.

Not that a man's patriotism made him feel guilty.

What I felt was fear. Fear of power until the overwhelming system of nations.

Beaten by the merciless words of the tax collector, the man stared at the earth powerless.

I have never imagined that a mere civilian living in a small village would turn against a king of a nation.

Even if I've ever spoken of small discontent in my daily routine among villagers, I've never even thought about defying it in a true sense.

(What do I do? How can I protect my family... this village?

The man searches desperately for a solution. That would be the most terrible time in the life of this man born as a civilian.

For the village, for the family, for your own happiness. The man works his head desperately.

A long silence dominated the square.

But there comes a time when the silence, which seems to be eternal, will be broken at some point.

And finally, the time has come. In a way that no one would have expected.