Haroun nods.

The two of them walk and ride quietly for a time.

"You kept bringing up my shirt. I don't know if you have, like, a sewing hobby making it more conspicuous to you than to most people, but if you do happen to have a way to deal with it somehow - I don't know, illusion spell, nondescript women's clothing that you have in the carriage for whatever reason, the revelation that actually summoned heroes don't get sunburn and nudity's unremarkable, I don't want to be super picky here -"

Haroun is not made of sufficiently stern material that the thought of Bella walking around naked is entirely undistracting.  He sets aside this point with sheer force of will and thinks on.

"It wouldn't look great on you, and people could probably tell you were wearing secondhand clothes, but Aralin's change of casual clothes might fit you?  I doubt she'd begrudge you the loan, what with Aralin's family's life depending on you and all that.  Pretty sure her armor won't fit you, though, which obviates the issue of whether to try to break Adventurer's Guild rules on that."

"- is having the sword also against some kind of rule, because, uh, it was not on my person when I got hit by the van and it's the only thing like that I've noticed so it seems maybe important. Also where do I find the clothes."

"Sword's fine.  It's not against the rules to wear armor, it just goes to," Haroun has to stop to swallow, "Aralin's family or beneficiaries."

Haroun stops the horses and climbs down to enter the carriage proper.  He is the one who knows where the clothing is stored, and which clothes are Aralin's casual.

Two dead friends and five dead bandits make for a lot of blood leakage, and the bodies are blocking easy access to the travel chest.

Haroun stops and leans against the carriage door, looking as casual about it as he can.  The Summoned Hero probably isn't impressed with boys who get nauseous at the sight of a little blood.

...or would she react differently from that?  Haroun's mental picture of Summoned Heroes hasn't really been all that accurate so far.

"Hey," Haroun says.  He steps back from the carriage door, because trying to inhale directly is a mistake.  He swallows again.  "I don't know - what your level is of being disturbed by blood - but if it doesn't make you sick at all, I might ask you - to pull a couple of the bodies out of the way - or help me out here, if we're both equally sick about it."  Bodies are heavy, aren't they?  He's never had to move a body before.

"I am actually super nauseated by blood, mostly the smell, but I can help you, it's not like it's going to ruin a nice day I was otherwise having." She hauls.

Haroun helps haul.  The Summoned Hero is stronger than him, so she takes more of the load, but he helps.

"This hasn't been a good day for you either, I guess," Haroun says, while they're taking a break in relatively cleaner air, and he can spare breath for words.  "I wasn't thinking about it, but - I lost a friend and an acquaintance, and thought I was going to die.  You - didn't have anyone die on you, that you mentioned, but you're... still having an even worse day than that."  What with the 'fatal injuries' she no longer has, and never seeing any of her family and friends again.  "I don't know if you want to talk about that at all, and obviously I'll shut up if you're not interested, but - I mean - for what it's worth - most people who aren't spies of the Demon Lord will be very much on your side.  All the ordinary good people in the world, more or less.  They'd be ready to do a lot to help Summoned Hero Bella, if they knew who that was.  That includes me, if there's anything at all I can do to help, or - make things better, somehow."

"That's - well, that's good to know, though I'm not sure exactly how many people 'ordinary good people' refers to if half the nobility in your country uses mindreading torture collars on the slaves it seems unremarkable for them to have. I think I'll be less of a mess when I know more about the place and about what I can do in it. I'm pretty badly thrown by the, uh, emphasis on physical combat so far? Physical combat happens on my planet but it's, like... if someone had come up to me and been like 'hand over your money' the unquestionably mainstream advice would have been 'give him my purse and don't make any sudden movements'. I'm not a demographic appropriate to actually fighting anybody. I was never expecting to be in any physical confrontation in my entire life or to need to hire armed guards to avoid being in one. I'm not really okay about the thing where even if I win in the end I may expect to fetch up sitting in a crater trying to calculate the 'violent slaveowner' to, like, 'small child' ratio of who I just killed and would be much happier if I had legible utility magic instead of a sword and was going to have to go on a diplomatic mission to figure out what the demons want or something like that."

There's a lot of that Haroun doesn't know how to address.  "I - I realize that this isn't the major issue here, unless it is, but - it's the part that I understand the best, so - ordinary good people was meant to exclude... about 80% of the nobility.  If you survive your battle, you wouldn't be the first Summoned Hero to go around executing every surviving king who allowed slave collars.  The Hero before the Hero before you did exactly that.  The problem is, after the Summoned Hero dies, people figure there's not much chance of a Demon Lord appearing in the next year.  And a century after that, they figure it's not likely a Summoned Hero will show up that decade.  So here we are.  And you - you might be smarter not to let on how you feel about slave collars.  I mean, you would get stronger support from maybe half the people, including me and my family, and most of the professors I know.  But this is a country where slave collars are legal, so the King and the nobility would - try to arrange for neither you or the Demon Lord to survive the final battle, I'd guess..."  Haroun realizes he's not really supplying emotional comfort here.  "Uh, the final battle does usually come down to magic instead of swords, if that helps.  If what you want is for there to not be a final battle at all, with swords or without them - you'd have to break the entire system, or find some way to force the Demon Lord to back down without a fight.  And Professor Nightstar acts like that's an option and Summoned Heroes are to blame for not doing that, but he's never said one word about how or why that would be possible.  But we could go to my academy and you could talk to him, if you wanted to take the risk on trusting him..."  Haroun sighs.  "I'm sorry.  I wish I had something less awful to say.  Uh, there might be some interesting magic you can cast with a tenth of mana, if you can cast arbitrarily complicated spells just by reading them out of books?  It - it might take some rejiggering to get it down to literally a tenth.  I mean, people aren't designing spells for that.  But high-Skilled people can rejigger things."

"How do you normally tell what someone's Skill level is?"

"You give them challenges that somebody of that Skill level can solve, and see when they stop being able to solve them.  For spells, that usually involves casting standard spells by recitation, which, well, you see the problem in your case.  The Adventurer's Guild uses a small blood ritual to find out what common Skills you have when you sign up, so they can check about Skills for thievery and assassination.  Though if God has trouble reading your soul... it's not impossible that ritual wouldn't work on you either."

"Is that something I can pass off as an unremarkable personal quirk if it comes up or should I make sure it never comes up?"

"You could tell them nobody's ever been able to read you and that it's probably due to some 『Rare Skill』, and you have no idea which 『Rare Skill』 because nobody's ever been able to read you.  They'd probably even believe you about it?  There's rare ways to hide Skills, but nobody would use that to hide all their Skills because it would be pointlessly suspicious.  I mean - it'd probably be better if it never comes up.  But if you plan to sign up with the Adventurer's Guild, I don't see how we'd avoid it.  People aren't allowed in dungeons without guildplates... uh.  Um.  I guess we should probably reconsider that plan too.  I didn't realize at the time that you weren't ready to start making craters.  Though floor one of a minor dungeon is going to be a lot easier than fighting bandits, for whatever that's worth, and delving dungeons is the fastest known way to increase Skills and mana capacity."

"How exactly does it do those things?"

"I think we might understand a lot less about how our world works than your own people understand how your world works.  I wonder if that's because our world is actually harder to understand or if your own people are just smarter?  I mean, there's a bunch of theories like dungeon monsters having something called 'essence' that gets into people and somehow improves them.  But all people actually know is that Skills go up faster when you use them to kill dungeon monsters."

"Are the monsters people?"

"My Dad would congratulate you on asking the right questions, assuming you mean by that what I think you mean.  Uh, just to check, what do you mean?"

"Uh, honestly the thing I mean I wouldn't expect you to have direct access to but do they seem to coordinate as though using language, do they use tools, do they make representational markings of any kind, do they operate towards long term goals. Are they smart. - if you wanna try to reproduce a monster vocalization I could see if I understand it."

"Depends on the monster, but yeah.  Dad would start arguing with you about that on floor 5 of a mid-rank dungeon - what the Guild would call C-level monsters.  At floor 15 of a major dungeon, A-level monsters, he'd stop arguing with you because at that point it's obvious you'll never be convinced no matter what the monsters say, do, or look like.  It's worth noting that boss monsters come back after they die.  I mean they come back as the same person and recognize you if they see you again, not just respawn like other monsters do.  So it's around three floors after the first time you meet a smart boss monster that you've got to start worrying about killing non-immortal smart monsters.  Or if you really want to be sure, you could avoid anything that sets off a『Qualia』-detecting spell.  Some people don't eat cows and stick to chickens because of that."

"You have a 『Qualia』detecting spell? - and it passes cows and fails chickens? Interesting. Uh, I think I'm okay with stabbing chickeny monsters if there's nothing better on although it will not be heaps of fun."

A thought suddenly occurs to Haroun.  "Ah - if it's all right for me to ask - do you happen to know what the expression『Qualia』 means?  What my people know is that it's something that gets detected in most smart monsters, and some small cute monsters that didn't obviously have their own language at the time but later turned out to have one, and cows but not chickens, and so on.  We figure 『Qualia』 means something like 'smart' but we don't actually know, and it occurred to me that maybe you found out as soon as you heard the 『Language』 for it."

"Uh, I'd translate it as 『'qualia'』 in English and it means something like having experiences, being aware? I wouldn't really have expected cows, cows are a surprise and I will have to revisit my eating habits unless you're about to tell me your cows are weird magical cows somehow, but as long as there happens to be an empirical bright line I kinda wanna start using it instead of guessing."

"What does it mean to be 'aware' of something, if not to be smart enough to know it's there?  And our cows don't use rituals-or-incantations-that-operate-Skills but how would I know if they're weird apart from that?"

"You have caught me without access to Wikipedia - that being a major reference on Earth - but something like, uh, the ability to notice that you know something, as opposed to just having it in the background? I dunno, describe cows to me. Our cows are roughly horse sized critters that come in black or white or brown or combinations of those and they're farmed for milk and meat and leather. - not all Skills are operated with incantations and rituals, right, like, for knitting I was imagining you'd just knit."