It was around the time the sun was at the top of the sky.

“Good, hey kids! you can see the village already—!”

The peddler ojisan calls us from outside the cargo box.

“I said it in the morning already, but we’ll stay in this village for two nights. But since there’s no inn in this village, we’re going to have to camp today and tomorrow, got it?”

““Oka～y.””

“I’ll go give my greetings to the village chief and go around the village to let them know I arrived already. Since tomorrow I’ll set up a street stand, I might ask for your help… well, maybe with one of you helping will be enough.”

“A question, peddler ojisan, is it ok if I spend my free time wandering around until the day we depart?”

He might not be able to see it from the outside, but I still raised my hand to ask a question to the peddler ojisan.

“It’s ok, but remember I will leave early in the morning of the day after tomorrow, so you better be there on time… Oh, I guess I haven’t properly introduced myself to Yunu yet.”

“Oh, now that you say it, I haven’t heard peddler ojisan’s name.”

“Yeah, I had the feeling it was like that, well, it doesn’t matter. My name is Paul Bruno Hozier, you can call me Hoser-san¹.”

“Then I should properly introduce myself too. I’m Yunu Vertu, thank you for taking care of me until the imperial capital, Hosea-san.”

“No problem! Ok then, we’re almost at the village! We’ll be getting down, so get ready.”

Even when he came to our village all the time, I just kept calling him peddler ojisan. Since everyone called him peddler, I ended up also calling him that too, I never noticed I didn’t know his name.

Anyway, it seems that the cart already arrived at the village. This will be my first time in a different village.

Since I will have a lot of free time, let’s use it to explore the whole village.

In that way, I took Luca and we went around the village.

“It doesn’t look that much different from our village…”

“Well～, they both are mountain villages after all.”

It really was not that different from the village we both have lived our whole lives.

I wonder if there’s something different… what could be different? I guess the size of the church? I’ll confirm it later. The arrangement of the houses is different too, if children who are not familiar with the village walked down the road, I wonder if they could come back without getting lost.

“Now then, what will you do now, Yunu? Will you continue to explore the village?”

“N～, even if I want to explore it… what will you do? Go back to the cart?”

“I guess so. Then, do you want me to tag along and keep walking to kill time?”

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

Although I should be traveling in order to see various sceneries, the sight in front of my eyes is not that different from the one I’m used to see.

It’s a bit, no, it is quite disappointing.

Well, since we’ve arrived I’ve been seeing kids play here and there. There seems to be no school in this village, so the children having no homework to do, go out and play with their friends. This would be an unusual sight at our village unless there was a day off at school.

 Therefore, I keep telling myself that this is a completely different village.

About six children are playing tag, while another two are playing with a ball in a corner. I used to play like them before.

I have good memories about this game, I used to like it a lot. One side throws a ball made of rolled up cloth rags to the other side and they go like that back and forth. My father was still with us at that time, so I could afford going outside to play back then.

When I was feeling nostalgic watching them play, I noticed Luca silently staring at me. Then he turned his sight to the boy and girl playing the cloth ball.

 

“Do you want to play too?”

“No, it’s not that. I was just remembering the old days.”

“Ohh, old days… it’s been six years already, huh?”

“Back then it was you and me playing ball. Since Luca never really played tag and I was not very good at playing tag.”

“Are you still going about me not playing tag? Forgive me already, everyone wants to have fun, but that was not for me.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“Ohh.”

“Ugh, they really ended up doing it.”

As we were watching the kids play with the cloth ball, it flew into the wrong direction and ended up getting caught up in a tree. The girl, to whom it was thrown to, gave a harsh stare at the boy who threw it and was frozen stiff as he said “Crap”.

At least the place it was caught was on the hanging branches, which was a good thing.

But it’s still quite high, I doubt those children could reach it.

“Let’s go help them.”

“Right, let’s go.”

Me and Luca walked towards those two troubled faces.

 

^{1  I assume Hozier is harder to pronounce in japanese, thats why he gave a simplified name in the raws.}

<<  ToC  >>

 

P.S. Im sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been very busy, like seriously busy, these past couple months. Lets hope the busy times dont come back when i have a bigger reader base. Currently only about 60 read Yunu and 300 read Evan.