by Mamare Touno
That’s right. He’s younger. That pitch-black gentleman. Honestly…
Shiroe probably didn’t have any particular interest in Henrietta as an individual. No matter what he was doing, he wasn’t doing it for Henrietta’s sake. Still, she felt as though it wouldn’t do to say, “Shiroe can handle it” and detach herself, as though it were someone else’s problem. She felt as if that would be the same as giving Shiroe up.
Since she thought this way, Henrietta was convinced that she really did need to be involved with the murderer incident.
If Riezé was advising Akatsuki with regard to combat, Henrietta should probably be involved with the matter from a different angle. She’d provide cover fire for that obstinate Shiroe. Henrietta thought it would be rather nice to pitch in and help for that reason.
Ever since the ball at the Court of Ice, where she’d danced with Shiroe, Henrietta had thought that she didn’t mind supporting him. She thought it suited her to support Akatsuki and Shiroe from the shadows.
Riezé, meanwhile, was drilling Akatsuki and training the other members of the task force in teamwork.
Until dusk, they practiced the Mysteries. There were several interested people involved besides Akatsuki, so their information regarding the Mysteries would probably expand a bit.
Then, after dinner, they’d assemble for a meeting, and after that, Akatsuki, Riezé, and the rest of the combat unit would scatter throughout Akiba, in order to keep an eye on a wide area and capture the murderer.
Having heard the detailed circumstances from Akatsuki and Nazuna, Riezé had apparently determined that the murderer wouldn’t show himself for several days. Henrietta had agreed with her, and it was good to have that time. The murderer had taken ferocious attacks from Soujirou and Akatsuki, and had sustained more damage than ever before. It would probably take some time for those wounds to heal. Since he wasn’t an Adventurer, it would certainly take more than a night.
Henrietta had negotiated with the Round Table Council and had a ban on going out at night put in place for Akiba.
This was a trick she’d settled on after discussing the matter with Riezé, both for damage control and to draw out the criminal. These days, Akatsuki and the others who were on guard continued patrolling until dawn, then slept for a short while when the sun came up.
Now was the time for Henrietta to do her job as well.
Putting together a mental list of people who needed to be persuaded, Henrietta stood. She scooped the documents on the work desk into the crate without sorting them, then contacted Hien via telechat.
Michitaka first. Then Calasin, then the members of the eleven guilds. This persuasion work would serve to provide a smoke screen for Shiroe’s operation as well. She didn’t know how far Shiroe had anticipated, but Henrietta smiled, feeling a bit spiteful.
“It may not go the way you’ve predicted, Master Shiroe. Especially…the determination within the girls.”
1
In the sticky darkness, a man stirred.
Slowly, he pulled his creaking body up out of the mud.
The sound of a trickle of muddy water echoed from somewhere. This might be a sewer, but it wasn’t like the sewers of modern Tokyo on Earth. The area where the man had made his den was no more than an underground labyrinth with rivulets of muddy water thinner than fingers running here and there.
Standing up from his bed, which was just a messy pile of old clothes he’d stolen from the Adventurers, the man slowly ran his fingers over his abdomen. The rough, rust-like matter that clung to his fingers was dried blood. Inside his shredded jet-black coat, the hot wounds had already closed.
Apparently his wounds had healed.
The interior of the iron helmet, which looked a bit like a mask, glowed faintly. It was a magic effect that granted the ability to see in the dark.
Mobile armor was an indestructible magic tool that had existed since ancient times. Even the words magic item and artifact didn’t go far enough: It was phantasmal, a memento from a vision.
Its abilities surpassed the current People of the Earth civilization, the Adventurers’ magic civilization, and even that of the Kunie clan. It was a concentration of lost technology.
In his pale green field of vision, the man inspected his body.
His wounds had healed.
The man’s physical abilities were advanced. Mobile armor dramatically improved his entire body’s motor functions, and its effect on strength in particular was outstanding. In terms of HP, his was probably three times what it had been before he’d equipped the armor. However, on the other hand, it didn’t reinforce his recovery abilities all that much. It had never assumed situations in which the wearer would sustain damage. The defensive abilities of mobile armor could negate most attacks, and if you didn’t take damage, there was no need for recovery abilities. These injuries had exposed an unexpected weakness in the mobile armor. As far as the man was concerned, that had been a significant humiliation.
However, the gear wasn’t his only weapon now.
In the tall man’s hand, Hail Blade Byakumaru looked rather small. It was rattling in its sheath.
This mystical blade was said to have been used by Lugurius, the hero of the ice cliffs, and it granted its owner the qualities of a hero. Apparently, the more blood he let Byakumaru, the White Snow Devil, drink, the further his body adapted to its powers. The muscles in his arms, which had grown to easily twice their size, spoke of this eloquently. The mystical blade rattled in its sheath, hungry for more sacrifices.
Giving a low grunt in the darkness, the man left without a single look back at his den.
In any case, he didn’t really think of this sewer as his headquarters or stronghold. Any place that would hide him and wasn’t noisy was fine. This underground cavern was the space behind a collapsed floor. The air did move, so it was probably connected to something aboveground at some point, but as far as he knew, there were no passages left that were large enough to let people enter. He could use teleportation, so this wasn’t a problem, but if ordinary People of the Earth or Adventurers wanted to break in, it would require a large-scale construction operation.
In his mind, the man visualized the town of Akiba. It was a place he’d guarded for a long time, and he had its layout memorized. Lately, the Adventurers had been reconstructing and expanding the buildings one after another, but the streets were basically unchanged.
He jumped to one of the teleportation destinations he remembered.
Immediately, he was surrounded by empty, windblown air.
The wintry night wind buffeted him, trying to freeze him, but it was blocked by the mobile armor’s cold resistance, and it didn’t affect the man in the least. On the contrary, it was the perfect aperitif, and it brought premonitions of the coming feast.
From a ruin that seemed set to crumble any minute, the man looked down over a deserted huddle of street stalls.
A few lights shone deep in the darkness. At the sight of that fragile, unreliable glow, the man couldn’t keep from smiling. Trembling with joy, he leaned his hunchbacked body out as far as he could, licking his lips.
When the light and noise of the day had gone, the town of Akiba grew still, looking like a young girl lying quietly in the depths of the darkness. During the day, she’d been an extremely stubborn, haughty woman, but in the dark of night, she was no more than a girl, as frightened as a rabbit.
The lean man drew his sword from its sheath.
The freezing winter air swirled around him, losing its edge.
As if his soul was crystallizing, in the midst of pain and delight the man gave a twisted laugh.
He was the winter.
The freezing cold air was the man himself. Just as the raging blizzard felt no cold, the man stripped off his black coat in the darkness and flung it away.
Illuminated by the lights from Akiba far below, the man’s silhouette showed dimly, an unbalanced shape. His lean body was taut, but nothing that really looked like muscle showed on the surfa
ce. The man wore leather pants and a black tank top that hugged his torso, and metal armor—gauntlets and body armor—on his lower arms and legs only. The sizes of the components were so different they seemed to belong to someone else. Having cast off his stained coat, which fell toward the street like an ominous black bird, the man was a fiendishly trained weapon.
The enormous metal shells were packed with brownish-gray fibers that stored magic and mitigated shocks. Supplied with magic from the magic circle, the fibers soundlessly began to run. Multiple barriers formed around the man’s arms and legs, and a force field was deployed around his body.
Memories of fighting giants on the frozen plains of the north country rose inside the man.
He was one of Akiba’s People of the Earth, and the memories didn’t belong to him.
They belonged to the hero Lugurius.
Lugurius had fought as an Ancient, and as a Knight of Izumo. For a whole century he’d driven the wicked giants back, to protect the smiles of the people of Susukino. He’d chased the monsters into the Jade Garden, deep in the mountains of Ouu, and had been just a step away from sealing them. That had been the achievement of Lugurius, the hero of Ezzo.
That fierce pride blustered inside the man like a raging blizzard.
If Sutu Inaw, the Maiden of the Japanese Elms, hadn’t betrayed him, if she hadn’t murdered him with a dastardly poison, he would still have been celebrated as the hero of the North and an immortal Ancient. If it hadn’t been for that fragile girl’s treachery…
As if to freeze everything, rampaging wind laced with snowflakes seeped out of the mouth of the sword’s sheath. The mystical blade was responding to the man’s anger; it wanted to work its cursed ice magic.
Lugurius’s grudge screamed that he wanted to gather crowds of people, make them kneel, and make their lives his own.
The man shook his head.
He wasn’t Lugurius.
He was a Person of the Earth, of the Kunie clan. The proud guardians who protected Akiba. However, they weren’t honored. They were scorned as pseudohuman automatons. Although their abilities surpassed even the Adventurers, their status was, at best, security devices, and they were essentially treated as nothing more than accessories for the town. They were a tribe of dogs. Truly a clan of slave-warriors, offered up as sacrifices, just as the characters in the name Kunie implied.
Recalling his own circumstances, the man saw a blazing, pitch-black resentment in them. That resentment twined around rage that was frozen into pure white. That’s how it is. That’s why I was chosen by Lugurius, the man thought.
In order to destroy the human who’d betrayed him, the Maiden of the Japanese Elms.
Showing no hesitation, the man fell from the building, crashing into the ground feetfirst without any particular plan. The barriers around the man’s body didn’t even flicker at a mere six-story drop. On top of that, most of Akiba’s streets weren’t paved. They were soft black dirt, with mossy roots crawling across them. Having landed, shattering twisted branches and tree roots as he did so, the man realized there were barely any signs of life.
There was no prey.
The murderer was suspicious. He also wondered whether they’d all run away.
The man had excellent combat abilities, but he wasn’t omnipotent. There were countless things he wasn’t good at, and one of them was searching for enemies. In the first place, the clan’s guards were ordinarily stationed in the security facilities during their shifts. When the facilities detected a crime in town, guards in mobile armor rushed to the scene and apprehended the criminal.
Detection and searching for enemies were functions of the security facilities, and individual guards didn’t have them. Naturally, as magic equipment from ancient times, the mobile armor didn’t have the ability to strengthen these functions either.
As a result, the man’s senses weren’t good enough to grasp all of Akiba, but even so, the night was far too empty. Going to bed when the sun went down was common sense in this world, but things were different in Akiba. Possibly because of their advanced combat abilities, Adventurers tended to go to bed later than People of the Earth. This was because they were able to defend themselves from nocturnal monsters.
Maybe as a result, even late at night, it was rare for the streets of Akiba to be entirely empty of Adventurers. This was the sort of person the man had sacrificed repeatedly to his mystical sword.
However, right now, he could sense no one.
The man swung Byakumaru in irritation. A spiral blizzard was released, freezing a patch of briars. He kicked them apart, then headed north on the central avenue, searching for sacrifices.
The mobile armor’s teleportation abilities were only compatible with the zone of Akiba.
The armor received its teleportation magic from the ancient magic circle said to have been built under the city. As a result, if Akiba’s Adventurers had evacuated from the city, he couldn’t leave the city to pursue them.
In addition, the teleportation wasn’t able to cross zone boundaries.
Isolated, closed spaces sometimes formed small enclosures known as zones. The rooms at inns were one example. The existence of a door made a small area that could barely hold two beds a separate space, shutting it off from the outside world by magic. It was in the town of Akiba, but it wasn’t considered part of Akiba.
The same was true for the magic facilities known as guild halls that the Adventurers used. Each of the numerous headquarters inside the buildings, seemingly made of obsidian, functioned as separate spaces, or so he’d heard. Most of the buildings the Adventurers had rebuilt were also used as separate zones now.
The man wasn’t able to invade spaces like these with teleportation. Even if he walked to them directly, the zone magic carefully identified the people who were allowed to enter or leave, and would exclude him.
Because of this, hunting prey that had shut themselves up in zones was difficult.
Holding a hand to his throat, the man chuckled.
In other words, this was a siege.
Frightened of the military might of this man, this hero, the Adventurers had finally admitted defeat and shut themselves away. Laughing softly, the man wandered, searching for prey. Peering into alleyways, destroying signs, and swinging the mystic sword was almost unbearably fun. He would probably never have admitted it, but the man was behaving like a murderer drunk on blood.
He didn’t have to wait long.
A small shadow appeared, blocking his path.
The lean man’s mouth twisted into the shape of a crescent moon.
How small. What soft-looking meat.
As the small shadow came toward him, trailing the faint scent of camellia oil, the murderer intercepted it. The blade of ice and snow groaned, demanding a sacrifice. Together, they would smite this town with a hero’s rage and hunger.
2
At the feel of the clash, Akatsuki steeled herself.
Her opponent was a monster. She couldn’t afford the slightest bit of carelessness. Or rather, forget carelessness: What she was most keenly aware of was the probability of her loss.
In any case, she wasn’t a tank, specialized toward drawing enemy attacks. She was an attacker, designed to inflict damage.
During this operation, Akatsuki was third in the priority order for this position. In other words, there were two members who were better suited to direct combat than she was.
Which meant that the fact that Akatsuki was now crossing blades with the murderer was half coincidence. The town of Akiba was two kilometers square. It wasn’t vast, but it certainly wasn’t small. In addition, one unit was too small to build a network to guard against a murderer who could appear anywhere. However, there were circumstances which kept them from deploying a large number of personnel.
For that reason, the strategy Riezé—the raid leader—had chosen took the form of a patrol conducted by squads. Dispersed action by squads of between three and six members created a net that was sparse but still widesprea
d.
One other reason lay in Akatsuki’s subclass and combat experience. Her subclass, Tracker, had several types of special skill that investigated conditions across a wide range, including presence detection and searching for enemies. The range she could monitor alone was equivalent to the area four squads could cover. Her discovery of the murderer had been coincidence, but that hadn’t been all it was.
Wordlessly, Akatsuki unleashed a blade from the left.
Quick Assault released a silver light that seemed to split the night into horizontal halves. Knowing she couldn’t take this guy down with an attack of that level, Akatsuki threw herself forward, using the momentum from her slash. Quick Assault’s special characteristics had increased her leg strength and agility, and she’d spotted a safe area by the murderer’s side.
However, cold air and an impact that was enough to make her shudder burst from the short sword that struck at her back.
Akatsuki had known, but she still gave a bitter groan. She tumbled forward, then picked herself up.
She’d thought she’d leapt into her opponent’s blind spot, but she’d been forcibly chased out of it.
“Akatsu… Eep!”
Struck by a cold, violent gust of wind, Marielle covered her face. Even so, a faintly sparkling recovery effect shimmered on Akatsuki’s back. It was response-activated recovery. Like the Druid Pulse Recovery and the Kannagi Damage Interception, this was a class-specific recovery magic effect, the type that distinguished the three recovery classes from each other.
Feeling the ripples of that recovery like the palm of Marielle’s warm hand, Akatsuki stepped forward. Evading the tip of the blade that bore down on her, dodging right and left with her small body, she pressed forward, forward.
Before her was the demonic murderer, the one she’d been no match for that day.
The core of the incident, the thing she had to defeat.
With a faint smile, the man waited for Akatsuki’s charge. The ominous armor he’d equipped was mobile armor… Or parts of it, anyway. Akatsuki and the others already knew that. Its defensive power was probably equal to that of fantasy-class magic armor. However, she was undaunted.
