by Mamare Touno
Of course she was preparing to chant another barrier into existence, but it wasn’t a spell she could use back-to-back. Kannagi like Nazuna fought by combining barriers and subtle recovery to fully protect their companions from danger.
If she blindly stuck with barriers, she’d lose more MP than she had to, and before long, the battle would begin turning against them. Even without that, it felt as though she was walking a tightrope. If the murderer in front of her sensed that she was casting defensive spells like this, his blade might turn on her.
However, if she turned her back on the fight, she wouldn’t be able to protect or heal Soujirou.
All she could do was watch him, gauge her own powers, and continue to entrust everything to barriers, even if they were like tissue paper.
What is this guy? As if a gamble like this could exist!
There were some things she understood precisely because she was a Kannagi.
She was the main healer of the West Wind Brigade, a guild which yielded to other top-class groups in terms of size yet kept challenging raid after raid anyway and was one of the top guilds on the server.
Yet defeat in this fight seemed almost certain.
Because the tank who was drawing the enemy’s attacks was Soujirou, they were managing to preserve a balance by the skin of their teeth, but if it hadn’t been him, Nazuna was certain they would have been trampled, and that would have been that.
Even Soujirou wasn’t able to parry all the attacks.
Of course, even if this had been a raid, it wouldn’t have been possible to negate all the attacks from a giant dragon or murderous golem. In most raids, combat moved forward with at least three, and sometimes as many as ten, healers supporting just one vanguard player. Then, while the vanguard kept the powerful enemy pinned, the attackers shaved its HP down to nothing.
However, right now, they didn’t have enough healers or attackers. In any case, in this narrow alley that was like a gap between furniture, they couldn’t use a raid formation.
Nazuna and the others had thought that if the enemy was an Adventurer, or possibly an average monster, they had nothing to be afraid of. They hadn’t thought the murderer would be such a demon.
And again—
“Ghk!!”
The enemy slipped through Soujirou’s attack.
The murderer had gotten around to Soujirou’s right side before they were aware of it. His weird silhouette moved like an insect as he took a swipe at Soujirou’s shins. Soujirou leapt, evading the attack, but his usual dance-like grace was gone. He didn’t have that sort of breathing room.
Soujirou would link several attacks together and break down his opponent’s stance, working diligently to create an opening for an attack, but this monster would use his strange martial arts to negate the blow. It had happened again, just now.
He slipped through Soujirou’s attack and caught him in the back.
If they could only hit him with an attack, she doubted he’d respond like an actual raid monster, but they just couldn’t hit him. Even if Soujirou was able to stay this active, if things kept on this way, Nazuna’s MP would run out and the front line would crumble.
And it was likely that…
As long as we’re here, I bet Soujirou won’t run.
She was sure of it.
“…Master Sou.”
“Boss.”
“It’s no good, I can’t see!”
She heard murmurs that held hints of pain. It was Nazuna’s companions. They were covered in wounds, and it was technically Nazuna’s job to heal them, but right now, she couldn’t even do that properly. She wanted to hang on to even the slight amount of MP it would take to heal them.
On a separate circuit from her increasingly anxious heart, Nazuna put together a plan for retreat.
Soujirou couldn’t run. This was partly because he would never abandon his female companions, and also because he was already being pushed hard by the murderer: Running would leave him open to attack from behind.
In the same sense that Soujirou couldn’t run, Nazuna couldn’t run either. If Nazuna ran, the barrier would fall in a few seconds at the earliest, and thirty seconds at the most. If the barrier fell, the damage would be dealt straight to Soujirou’s HP. In order to keep Soujirou alive—in other words, to delay the pursuit for even a little while—Nazuna couldn’t run.
But what about the other girls?
She could let Kawara and Olive and the others go first. That was probably the only right answer.
However, she needed an opportunity to do it. If they began running away pell-mell now, the murderer might shift his target from Soujirou and lay waste to the girls. It was Soujirou’s role to keep that from happening, of course, but there was no guarantee he’d be able to prevent it entirely. The demon was simply that skilled.
If they had some sort of chance… Even as she thought this, time was slipping past her, and it was growing darker. The murderer’s blade danced, shining with a phosphorescent glow. The twilight stretched out, longer and longer.
Glimpses of uncertainty were visible in the way Soujirou swung his sword. The battle was a contest. Even if this was Soujirou, she couldn’t presume that mental agitation wouldn’t trigger his collapse.
Just then, a swallow swooped down.
5
She ran along the branch of an ancient tree that surrounded the guild office building, then launched herself from its tip.
The thinner the branch, the better. Branches that seemed thick enough to sit astride felt secure, but when using flexibility to “fly,” they were a bit inconvenient.
In movements she’d repeated over and over, Akatsuki ran through the town of Akiba.
There were corridors in the air, just as there were roads on the ground. Branches and roofs that were easy to jump to. Balconies and crumbling signs. In the Adventurers’ town, which held the ruins of old buildings and ancient trees, there were routes specifically for those who raced through the sky.
When had she become able to travel through the air along those routes without thinking about it?
When this was a game, it hadn’t been an option.
She didn’t think she’d been able to do it yet when the Round Table Council was established. By the time they returned from Zantleaf, she’d already been doing it unconsciously. She wasn’t clear on when she’d become able to do it, but by now, she couldn’t imagine traveling through Akiba without this method. Even in zones she’d never visited before, she felt herself unconsciously observing the flow of the wind, the placement of the buildings, and the positions of trees and the walls of structures.
Her long hair fluttered through the layers of the air.
If her hair was heavy, that meant the air was damp and rain was on its way.
If it tugged at her, the wind was strong, and some of the routes would be unusable.
Having acquired even this sense, Akatsuki had begun to gain physical skills that were far and away the best among the Adventurers who used these corridors in the air.
She was only doing what she always did, but her body felt hot deep inside, and her limbs were light.
Akatsuki watched for the instant her weight came down on the tip of a branch, then flung herself into the air. When she caught the wind, her awareness of her body’s movements was sharper than usual. She’d repeated these motions dozens of times, but why was it that she was able to land on the next branch using half the strength she normally used, then let her mind skip ahead to the next leap, which would use the shift in her weight?
Her short conversation with Raynesia spun around and around in her mind.
Akatsuki wasn’t good at thinking about herself in relation to other people, and she couldn’t organize her thoughts well. How Raynesia had looked. Raynesia’s words. Her own feelings. Her responses. They floated up inside Akatsuki like rising bubbles, brushing against her, then burst and vanished.
Because they disappeared before becoming words, Akatsuki didn’t really know what it was that h
ad pushed her into motion.
Raynesia was working hard.
Those words alone smoldered in her heart.
…To the point where she thought she should be rewarded.
The evening sun was retreating into the west. As she watched it out of the corner of her eye, she strained her ears, spreading her senses wide and thin. The presence-sensing skill she’d used over and over again picked up miscellaneous murmurs from the town of Akiba.
Let’s go back to the guild and make onion soup.
Where should we hunt tomorrow?
Want to go get dinner with me somewhere? I, um… My treat!
Y’know, I’ve been thinking about a new business.
I swear, our sub GM is so strict!
I wonder if I could get a date somehow.
The Adventurers eat twice as much as we do, don’t they…
Nah, three times as much.
The conversations were truly trivial, nothing important. Ordinarily, she probably wouldn’t even have registered the exchanges. However, for some reason, Akatsuki’s ears picked them up with unusual clarity today.
These were their secrets.
Everyone lived through the activities of their day, and in the evening, these were the modest plans to spend the night with the people closest to them. Either that, or the little private wishes each had for themselves, about what sort of day they wanted the next to be. Of course these weren’t the kind of secrets that would cause them trouble if anyone overheard, but in the sense that they were the individuals’ feelings about themselves, the whispers counted as secrets.
Akatsuki didn’t really know, but it was likely that the murmurs were very important to each of those people. Today, she understood that importance.
Without knowing what it was she’d touched, Akatsuki brushed against something big and extraordinary.
Possibly because she’d been thinking these things, by the time she spotted the fight, she’d already leapt into it.
It was about two minutes from the time her ears caught the rasp of sword guards in close combat and she changed her course, to the point where she spotted the battle from a deserted fifteen-story building. The instant she detected it, she flung herself lightly into the canyon between the two buildings.
She didn’t simply relax into the free fall: She kicked the walls of the buildings on either side, trying to accelerate.
Putting a hand to the hilt of the short sword bound to the small of her back, Akatsuki held her breath and plunged into a tailspin.
As she felt the kickback from cutting through the membranes of air that were automatically deployed by magic equipment, Akatsuki finally recognized the situation.
A single party was fighting the black murderer. There was a Samurai vanguard, and a rear guard composed of just one healer. They rest had been partially wiped out.
The vanguard was Soujirou, guild master of the West Wind Brigade, one of the eleven guilds that made up the Round Table Council.
In MMO games, what Akatsuki had done was called “kill stealing.” It meant a situation where one party was fighting an opponent, and an Adventurer who wasn’t a member of the party attacked that opponent without permission. Since the action was very closely related to stealing experience points or treasure, it was considered poor etiquette and frowned upon.
On top of that, the other party was from one of Akiba’s leading combat guilds. Since Akatsuki was bad at dealing with other people, ordinarily, she would have been at her wits’ end and probably wouldn’t have approached in the first place.
However, this time was different.
Her consciousness was saturated with everything that had happened since that morning.
Her mind felt as though she was delirious with fever, but even so, the world Akatsuki leapt through looked dozens of times clearer than usual.
An Accel Fang, sweeping sideways from the right.
It didn’t reach. She’d known it wouldn’t. She kicked the wall, danced through space: Stealth Blade.
She flipped, dodged: Quick Assault.
As she’d felt on that first charge, the murderer was strong. Akatsuki probably couldn’t win.
Even so, she didn’t stop.
In an attempt to gain even a small hint: Venom Strike.
She stepped back as the enemy’s sword bore down on her. Not enough. She forced herself backward with Gust Step. Still not enough. Even as the pale blade slipped through Akatsuki’s zone of defense, freezing her spine, she stepped forward with blazing composure. Not caring that her right bangs had been cut away: Accel Fang.
Too shallow. One more! Carefully changing the trajectory, as if scooping it up: Accel Fang.
Faster, faster, faster still.
At some point, Akatsuki noticed that pale blue ripples were shimmering around her.
It was a Kannagi’s barrier spell. She could tell it was a high-level spell, several times stronger than the one Minori used. No doubt it was support from the healer she’d seen a moment ago.
However, Akatsuki knew that even that was no more than slight insurance. The murderer’s blade was still turned on the Samurai in front of her. That was why he hadn’t made many counterattacks on Akatsuki, which was why Akatsuki was still alive. If it had been one-on-one, Akatsuki’s life would have been long gone.
Although she hated to admit it, the round-faced boy—who wore his hair in a ponytail even though he was a guy—was one of the top-class vanguards on the server, West Wind Brigade leader Soujirou Seta. He was a tough guy with a war record and fame that made Akatsuki’s pale in comparison, and even he wasn’t able to restrain the black murderer.
“Run!”
Akatsuki saw the corners of Soujirou’s lips rise in response to the words she’d screamed.
An intense, penetrating gaze struck Akatsuki. Even though he looked younger than she was, it was a man’s expression, and a threatening one, and Akatsuki anticipated that it would frighten her. However, in fact, she’d ignored that premonition and was still fighting like a small-scale storm.
“Why?”
Soujirou’s question was quite natural, and it left Akatsuki at a loss for words.
She’d only yelled on reflex, and even she didn’t know why she’d said it. This Person of the Earth, who was far stronger than Akatsuki, was a monster.
Come to think of it, that was probably only natural. His level was higher than any Adventurer’s, and his abilities were being augmented with mobile armor. Another look showed her that the swollen silhouette of the murderer’s limbs was due to the fact that he’d forcibly fixed parts of the guard armor to his body. The bits that looked like light-emitting diodes—proof that magic was still being supplied?—formed a defensive membrane, blocking the Adventurer’s attacks.
Akatsuki probably couldn’t win. It was likely Soujirou couldn’t either. No one could defeat the murderer in this narrow alley. The only way to do it would be to surround him with far more Adventurers and put pressure on him…but was that why she’d yelled? Did she want to use herself as a decoy to save Soujirou?
Amid Akatsuki’s saturated thoughts, she saw Shiroe, looking up at the sky, his face troubled.
“Why?”
“Because defeating him and resolving this are two different things.”
A grotesque strike bore down on Soujirou, ready to rip through him, and Akatsuki intercepted it with all her might:
Assassinate. It was an Assassin’s fastest, strongest special skill, dealing over ten thousand in instantaneous damage, and even that could only knock the murderer’s thick, black, enormous gauntlet off course.
“So run!”
“I can’t agree to that.”
At her repeated warning, Soujirou’s smile deepened. He’d had his sword raised over his head, and he brought it down.
The murderer dodged, then released a superhuman kick that Soujirou evaded, letting it brush against the right side of his bangs. As he lost hair in the exact same place as Akatsuki, Soujirou stepped in to cross swords, slashing up
at the blade that had been on its way down.
Soujirou was strong. Probably several times stronger than Akatsuki.
Even from an exchange that had taken no more than a fraction of a breath, she could tell.
However, precisely because of that, Soujirou must have known he couldn’t finish off the monster here and now… And yet he wouldn’t run. Why? What a stubborn boy, Akatsuki thought. Come to think of it, all the men in this world were stubborn. Touya and Rundelhaus—the younger boys in the group—were exceptionally stubborn. Naotsugu was more stupid than stubborn, and he couldn’t mend his ways. Sage Nyanta was also more stubborn than he appeared. The fact that he put cucumbers in salads was proof. Akatsuki felt as though the only one who’d listen to her suggestions was her liege, Shiroe.
“On your left!”
Akatsuki stopped abruptly, and a violent mass of metal flashed right past the end of her nose.
She’d just barely avoided that side blow, and Soujirou, still watching Akatsuki, evaded it lightly.
Akatsuki stared, admiring the motion, and began to feel strange.
Even now, Soujirou was directing a bone-chilling smile at the murderer and Akatsuki alike. Ordinarily, Akatsuki would have felt enough pressure to make her run straight home.
But she didn’t.
There was something here, too, something big that Akatsuki didn’t really understand. Soujirou hadn’t threatened Akatsuki. He was trying to give her something, and she had grazed it.
Akatsuki felt guilty for not knowing what its true shape was, but, even without knowing, she understood that it was something terribly important.
“Nazuna. Go home ahead of me, please.”
“—Understood. We’ll await you at the guild hall.”
At those words, Akatsuki finally understood that Soujirou had continued to fight a battle he couldn’t win against the murderer to protect the girls who’d been rendered helpless. Sensing the barriers that flew at her and Soujirou as a final act of support, Akatsuki felt the others leave. Even as she did so, she and Soujirou began a ferocious attack.
