Chapter 98: (Self Edited) Wallis Pursuit
A man named Willis, who was a member of the Peninsula Kingdom Temporary Expeditionary Brigade, was now walking in the forest far north.
Wallis was a 28-year-old man this year and had no surname.
The Peninsula Kingdom was an intense place after the war that ended 175 years ago. In the war which lasted for about fifty years, half of the land was occupied by a pagan country, the Entak Dragon Kingdom, and the southern region was ruled by pagans for forty years. Even after the war ended, the bloodlines of the pagans remained, and of course they were forced to convert, but the traces of cultural mixing were still strong.
The name Wallis (ワリス) was one of them, and if the pronunciation of the Arn language was used in the Cocolulu region, Walis (ワーリス) or Valis (ワァリス). However, Wallis himself didn’t have such knowledge, so he didn’t know the origin of his name. Wallis was born and had never been given the opportunity to learn, and he could only read a minimum number of works related to work.
He didn’t even have a surname. His parents, who were small farmers on a farm, named their third child Wallis in the name of a distant relative. When he grew up to a certain age, the need toward food became higher. Since it put pressure on household food expenses, he was given to a ‘middle man’.
A middle man was a kind of slave trade who introduced a child to a place where there was a demand for labor and received a commission instead. They were the people who changed their title from ‘slave trader’ after the legal slave hunting was banned in the country by the national law. Actually, there was no change in procedure of giving money to parents as the price of the child, and receiving more money from the ‘referrals’. Plus, the child would be forced to work.
Unlike real slaves, this labor was hard at a deadline. In the case of Wallis, he was hired by a lord as a miscellaneous worker in the mountain village and was forced to work for ten years. He was sold by his parents at the age of eleven, and when he finished his work at the age of 21, he had only one tattered-everyday-wear, and a few bronze coins left.
After that, he volunteered for a unit that happened to be recruiting troops and became a member of it. The unit that was recruiting young people at that time had the army fund. Food wasn’t a problem. The sleeping place was secured though it was poor, but overall, it was just perfect.
After spending almost seven years there, Wallis learned how to handle swords, shields, spears, bows and guns. However, since the gun required gunpowder for training, he had only fired a couple of times in reality. Therefore, the training was done exclusively with old-fashioned weapons.