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Chapter 143
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After merrymaking until dawn, I found myself waking up on the floor near the fireplace instead of in my bed like I usually did. Every joint in my body ached.
Come to think of it, I gave my bed to Yurina-san so I was sleeping in a huddle on the floor.
Pushing the quilt away, I looked at my surroundings. Margo and Juno were splendidly sprawled on the floor, with both their arms and legs outstretched to the side while snoring loudly. Sarasa and Elsa had fallen on my bed, sleeping there. While Yurina-san had already woken up and started fixing her appearance.
I said ‘good morning’ to Yurina-san. For some reason, I felt bashful.
Unable to stand how cold the room was, I put firewood on the already extinguished fireplace and lit the fire again with a fire dagger. Suddenly, I felt like taking a bath. While preparing breakfast, I decided to take a bath while watching the snow later. As the menu for our breakfast today, of course I prepared a soup made from mylene herbs. I seasoned it with salt and added herb chicken eggs. Then I cut vegetables in an adequate size to serve as a salad.
Yurina-san also helped me with both the cooking and bath preparations. I guess I should say, ‘as expected from a professional!’ since Yurina-san didn’t have any hangover.
When I went outside, I was greeted with the sight of a complete snowscape. Maybe because they were tempted by the smell of food, the ladies from the entertainment district came out from the blacksmith hut. They looked unkempt and disheveled, making me turn my head away reflexively. Flustered, Yurina-san immediately told the ladies to fix their attire.
I let the ladies from the entertainment district and Yurina-san take the bath first while I prepared food for a large number of people and served them up on a table in the living room. I gave a soup made only by using detoxifying herbs to Margo, Juno, Sarasa and Elsa. They were all still pale and had practically fallen dead asleep from a hangover.
I shrugged my shoulders and thought ‘good grief’ to myself seeing them like this before I started eating breakfast.
The ladies from the entertainment district and Yurina-san came into the living room, having finished with their bath. They also started eating breakfast. Since they had finished with the bath, I then went out to take a bath while watching the snow.
Phew… Taking a bath while watching the snow like this really has a nice charm to it.
I could feel all of the stiffness in my body due to sleeping on the floor being untied apart. Saying that the snow felt warm might sound like a contradiction but I really felt that way. Both my mind and body felt peaceful.
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09:30
I felt bad if the ladies had to wait for Margo and the others who were still down from hangover so I decided to escort the ladies from the entertainment district back to town on a wagon myself. It was cold sitting on a wagon like this so I brought quilts made from fur to wrap our body with.
I left Ash with Yurina-san at home.
On our way to town, we were surrounded by 3 kobold fighters. They were equipped with scimitar and shield. But, we received help from blue wolves who came out from their hiding place.
Taking the opening given by the blue wolves that kept the kobold distracted, I fired my bow with ‘sharpshoot’ skill. I successfully shot the kobold fighters at their head one after another.
After the fight, I stroked the head of the blue wolves that approached me. I also fed them dried meat that I had brought in my wagon and healed their wounds with a potion. Having finished with their business, the blue wolves then left us.
The ladies from the entertainment district who had been watching this scene unfold looked surprised. Their mouths were gaping open.
After safely escorting the ladies from the entertainment district back to town, I parted ways with them at the city’s gate and went to the guild in order to hand over the kobold fighter’s claw as a proof of subjugation.
Since I didn’t have anything particular to do in town except for reporting the kobold fighter subjugation to the guild, I decided to track back the wagon wheel’s trace on the snow field back to home.
On my way home, I loaded the empty wagon with the corpse of the three kobold fighters that I had left behind and continued on with my journey back to home.
14:00
When I arrived at home, I dismantled the kobold fighters together with Margo and Juno who had recovered from their hangover.
I appraised the meat.
【Kobold Fighter Meat: quite delicious.】
That was the result of the appraisal. So I decided to eat the meat as a steak. We had a large amount of kobold meat. It was impossible for us to finish all of the meat so I decided to make dried meat using the portion of the meat that I wouldn’t cook today.
As for the kobold fighter’s emerald green fur, Sarasa, Elsa and Yurina-san helped me in tanning the fur.
16:00
Today, all of us had our stomachs full of foods made from using kobold fighter meat.
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T/N: Trying hard to not think of kobold meat as dog meat.
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Rather than worry if they are dog meat I’m more worried about the fact they use tools, therefore are sentient beings. This is like if they killed an enemy dwarf and roasted it for dinner.
There are already more than enough stories floating around with the content of eating orc meat, aren’t they? They might make you queasy as well, because orcs are also humanoid monsters capable of using weapons and tools and possessing their own language. It makes me wonder who is more deserving of the title of monster, those being eaten or those eating them. Especially in the context of some other stories where humans are kept as livestock by some locally more powerful species.
The way I see it, kobolds are just another type of goblin originally, so just accept whatever traits the story gives them, rather than pre-assume they match what a different story describes them as.
“Trying hard to not think of kobold meat as dog meat.”
So, you see, there’s really no need to try that hard. Some games do depicts them as some kind of dog – like Ragnarok Online – and even some manga/manhwa and novels, however, it’s first mention in any kind of written text comes from some kind of pixie, with a few more humanoid traces, while I *think* they first appeared, in a game, on dungeons and dragons, where, although humanoid, they’re more inclined to being a lizard instead of a dog, since they have draconic origins there.
The Japanese conception of kobolds is absolutely a humanoid dog monster, unfortunately. Just like goblin in folklore is different from “little green man” and elves from “sexy forest rangers,” modern fantasy doesn’t really reference old folklore but ideas about them piled up through various popular works, especially iconic ones like the DnD monster manual and Tolkien’s world settings.
In this case, it was imported to Japan from very early versions of DnD where they were dog-morphs. In later versions, they changed kobolds to lizardlings with a very faint relationship to dragons, and gnolls, a humanoid hyena race, became the low level canid mob, but that was never culturally transmitted, lol. Japanese fantasy makes reference to lizardmen, but they’re more of a swamp race with no real dragon connection.
If the details were just a little more in line with DnD, I’d actually recommend “translating” kobold to gnoll, because what a western audience unfamiliar with Japanese fantasy tropes thinks of as a gnoll is completely different from what a Japanese audience thinks of.
But yeah, it’s dog meat that’s like 20% more like human meat. Yum.
Thanks for the chapter!