Absolutely Do Not Touch Eldmia Egga

Chapter 8: Really Had to Do It to Feel Right

No one raised their hands.

Instead, chaos erupted with screams and fear.

“Uaaah chief died!”

“Kyaaaaaah!”

“Mommee!”

“Which fucking brat is looking for a mom in front of a parentless orphan?! Is this the extravagance of the ‘have’?! You dare feign humility in front of me?!”

When I furiously shouted aloud, silence flowed in the warehouse that’d been a firework of chaos.

“From this moment on, sons and daughters of bitches that look for a parent will taste the fury of a parentless child. Who’s the brat that shouted mom just now?”

Instantly everyone’s fingers pointed at one guy. The brat that had looked for his mom while trembling in fear immediately turned pale and began to tremble wildly.

“You little brat, you dare fuck around here when you got a head to look for mom? Get over here!”

When I resolutely walked down, the hooligans split to the sides and noisily ran towards the warehouse door. Few even pushed the brat toward me as if offering a sacrifice, and the brat failed to even think of running in that while and walked up to me while  trembling fearfully.

The second the brat with a suffocating hairstyle with an eye-covering dirty blond clump of hair came into range, I immediately rapped him on the head with a knuckle and then clenched his hair. 

“Uagh!”  

“What ‘uagh’, you little brat? Are you a war orphan?”

“N, no! I’m not!”

“Then what?”

“…uh, that’s…”

A body that wasn’t thin as others despite not having much to eat. A height that looked about 5cm taller than me. Hair comparably in better shape unlike flaky skin and face. Shirts and pants that were all worn-out but definitely must’ve been pretty good clothes at first, and so on. Having caught all the evidence, it felt as if a kind Elmdia with a ring on its head was whispering in my ear.

– this brat’s a runaway youth! Kill him!

Eh? It looked like it wasn’t a kind Eldmia but a bad Eldmia unlike how it looked. Then, an Eldmia with horns on its head began whispering in my other ear. As I thought, it wasn’t a good habit to judge based on appearances.

– Yeah yeah! Make him regret not cherishing having living parents and an intact home in this shitty world!

What the. Where’s the kind Eldmia?

“I, I left home to b, become an adventur…”

“What, you brat? An adventurer? Is back-alley sewer searching as a hooligan your adventure? You adventuring between life and death right now is kind of an adventure, but did you want this? You wanna be like that guy too?”  

“Hick, hick, p, please don’t kill me. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

“I asked if you wanna be like him, so why aren’t you answering you brat!!!”

Was dissociated replies a trait of hooligans? Why’s he raising my blood pressure again?

“No!! I don’t wanna be like that guy!! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry I said nonsense!!”

“You’re looking down at me right now thinking I’m an orphan that failed to even properly protect my parents, right? I look silly to you ’cause my parents are gone and yours are alive, right? That’s why you’re ignoring my words and replying with nonsense, right?”

“No! I’m absolutely not! I didn’t know! I’m sor…! Hph! Huaang! Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”

When I grabbed his hair and shook it around, he finally burst into tears and began begging with both his hands together. 

Wow. Did people here also rub their hands together when begging? This surprisingly was an inter-dimensional gesture, huh.

“How long has it been since you left home?”

“T, two months.”

“You changed jobs to Ogwen hooligan brat in just two months? How old are you?”

“F, fifteen…”

If one was a fifteen years-old boy, one could beg for work at any place and get at least a chore work with a day-worth wage. Especially because Ogwen was overflowing with jobs due to work recently increasing, even kids in normal homes helped out neighboring merchants as a way to earn pocket money.

But this brat didn’t even do that, and was lying around like a hobo and mugging others.

“Fucking fifteen? Fifteeen? You got that old and did this fuckery, let alone work an honest job and dream of an adventurer like your goal while gathering money you hooligan brat?!”

“Hiick. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m a hooligan brat!”

“Go over there and plank yourself!”

Since I had to check the other brats too, I pointed at (what had been) the chief’s chair and was going to turn my head, but the brat’s eyes turned round.

“Eh?”

“Eh? Did you just throw a question?”

I squinted my eyes wondering if he was rebelling from disliking the punishment when he should just be thankful I’m leaving him alive, but thankfully he wasn’t a brat with that much of a sense missing from his head. 

“I, I’m sorry! I’m not sure what planking myself means.”

“Ah. Yeah. That’s right. I can understand that. Go and lie down over there.”

One couldn’t do something one didn’t know. My nearly-erupting rage having peacefully calmed down, I kindly helped fix his pose.

“Uh yeah. In that pose, push up your upper body with your arms…right. That’s the planking pose. And straighten your back. Now I’m going to bury you in the ground if your body touches the ground, so hold on strong.” 

When I turned my head away from the runaway youth tensing up completely stiff at my last warning, I could see the runaway kids and hooligans all completely frozen as if playing red-light blue-light.

“So… you brats orphans or runaways?”

Eldmia Egga Cubs and Chicks Screening Station opened.

Asileye’s guess was almost exact. Among the 17 kids, only one girl was an orphan.

Among them, even kids who ran away with something that could be called a reason for running away were just one girl and two boys, and the rest 13 were merely teenage brats hit by an adventure-disease.

Puberty in the fantasy world was literally an anarchy.

Calmly staring at the scene where 13 were planking themselves, 3 were kneeling with their hands raised up, and one was just kneeling down like that, a sigh instinctively came out.

“Even I, a victim of the first Demon King Army’s attack and one who became a war orphan from being the sole survivor, am trying hard to live honestly, but you guys are crossing the line a little a lot.”

Thinking back on it, it’s a really grandly pitiful title. If it wasn’t for Asileye, I’d have had to go searching for at least a religious institution to survive. Even worse, I didn’t even know the location of Ogwen back then, so it wasn’t even clear if I could have properly found my way to the village.

Just why’d you run out of a perfectly fine home when you didn’t even have any skill?

“‘My home is really far but I have to live here because I don’t have the money for the carriage ride’. Raise a hand while lying down if you’re a brat in that sort of situation.”

No one relaxed their pose.

“Those of you who think ‘I won’t ever go home even if I were to die here. That place isn’t a home but hell. Please kill me instead’, raise a hand while lying down.”

As expected, no one relaxed their pose. Meaning they hadn’t even resolved for death. In the end, them failing to go home was merely due to pride, having liked this lifestyle, or whatever other trivial factors.

The average age of the kids lying down was 14 years-old, and even for the brat that left home for the longest, it was 3 months at most. And even that was uniquely long, and the rest were merely less than 2 months.

“Who am I?”

“Eldmia Egga!!”

“Eldmia Egga what?”

“Absolutely!! Do not!! Touch!!”

Creed installation was finished.

They said that no one knew the hooligan chief’s name.

That they referred to him as chief since they hadn’t had a particular need to call him by name, nor a reason to.

In fact, the chief bastard was also the reason for them trying to steal my practice longsword. On the day he sent out the kids to steal a sword as if his ‘soul of a swordsman’ had abruptly erupted into flame, they met me of all people, and they, who never once in their life had properly seen a sword before, saw an easy-looking brat walking around with it and decided to mug him without even knowing if it was real or fake. As expected from hooligan brats.

On top of that, Zigmel only stayed and participated in searching for me because he was an ultimate brownnoser, and the rest of the guys that I beat up apparently had all run away. When I ultimately heard that there wasn’t something like other members doing the search, and that those that were here were all that there were, it even felt a little anticlimactic.

But it wasn’t as anticlimactic as the fantasy world’s pathetic puberty that transcended my expectations. With a sigh, I stood up from my seat and then straightened the practice longsword blocking the warehouse door and opened the door.

“All of you lying down, go and scram back home. My memories are good. So if I see your faces in Ogwen, I’ll snap your legs like that Zigmel brat. If you think you can survive even after that, you can stay. If not, go home even if you’ll get beat up like a dog by your parents.”

There was no need to particularly look over the brats running full sprint out of the warehouse without a word. Rather, there was a brat not running and still lying down, so my attention naturally turned towards him.

It was the guy with the longest runaway history of 3 months. Even while visibly trembling when I approached, he didn’t stand up.

“What the? Why aren’t you going?”

“I, I can’t go home!”

“But you didn’t raise your hand back then.”

“I, I didn’t raise it ‘cause I didn’t want to die! I’m sorry!”

I was simply asking if they were that desperate, but with a corpse lying on the ground, it looked like he got far too scared. But seeing how he was being honest and staying, well, he probably had his own circumstances.

“Go and kneel down with them.”

While watching the guy immediately stand up and then kneeled down and even raise his hands without a word, I stood in front of the remaining brats.

“Do you want to get a chance to live honestly, or would you like to crawl out as a half-crippled?”

It was a moment of choice.

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