by Mamare Touno
In the blink of an eye, a blizzard began to rage on Akiba’s wide avenue in the dead of night, freezing the soil.
When Akatsuki looked across the avenue, she saw the ordinary, unchanged walls of the buildings. Even as she fought, Akatsuki’s mind raced. The range of the blizzard was about five meters, ten at most. The katana the murderer brandished was its origin; it was gushing cold air.
As she evaded new attacks she hadn’t been able to take in the previous battle, Akatsuki thought about countermeasures. That had been the first thing Riezé had taught her: Size up your opponent. Watch them and clarify what they can and can’t do. No matter how tough the fight you’re in, you mustn’t give up on that. Akatsuki bit her lip and observed that lesson.
That said, she couldn’t go on the defensive. Right now, Marielle was behind her. Marielle, the leader of the Crescent Moon League, and her bright smile. Her liege’s friend. She couldn’t let her get hurt. Not as a ninja, and not as a gamer.
Marielle was a healer. In order to let healers do their jobs, the vanguard had to draw the enemy. Even if she wasn’t a dedicated tank, right now, Akatsuki was the only one who could fill that role. That meant she had to focus the enemy’s hate on herself.
The feeling of anxiety was strong enough to tear her limbs off.
It made Akatsuki want to cry out, but she bit the urge back and swung her blade.
One. She threw in an Accel Fang. She knew it wouldn’t reach him.
Using the recoil, another Accel Fang. It scraped her opponent’s gauntlet slightly. The grating noise of slashed metal, a scorched smell. Feinting with one more Accel Fang that drew nearly the same trajectory, Akatsuki dropped low, almost as if she was hugging the ground.
The former Akatsuki would probably have leapt up.
She’d been desperate to put power behind her attack, and had wanted to be as far above her opponent as possible. However, this time was different. Her body was already small; if she rolled, ducking, her opponent’s own limbs would act as a blind and he’d lose sight of her. This attack method used her own small size to her advantage, and it wasn’t an advantage she’d had in the past.
Akatsuki had received this strategy from the others.
She unleashed a Death Stinger, as if to pry him open. Unfortunately, the attack she slammed into the back of his knee didn’t add continual damage. However, it had thrown the murderer slightly off-balance, and she struck at his brute-force attack with her Kiln-Turned Tenmoku Sword.
The sound of clashing steel echoed loudly through Akiba’s night.
Unable to hold out against his force, Akatsuki had jumped back about five meters, and she was already sweating. The series of exchanges and its tension had raised her temperature, even in the face of the cold that blasted at her from the murderer. Her arms hurt, too. Although she normally held her short sword with her left hand, she set her right hand on the hilt as well, timing her move to match her opponent’s attack. She’d realized that if she didn’t do it, she wouldn’t make it through.
However, the reality was that, even with both hands in play, she took great damage.
That was only to be expected. According to the Elder Tales specs, if your timing matched exactly, an effect that made the attacks cancel each other out would occur. However, this wasn’t something you could do intentionally as a rule, and even if it did occur, it wasn’t the sort of effect that would reduce the damage to zero. It only meant that you could weaken your opponent’s attack slightly. Powerful attacks surpassed the cancellation and wounded the opponent directly…just as the murderer’s attack, with its extraordinary force, had punched through Akatsuki’s cancellation.
Even so, Akatsuki had a little smile on her lips.
Her arms felt puffy, as though they were inflamed, but a golden, sand-like sparkle had enveloped them and was healing them. Response Activated Recovery was a spell that automatically recovered HP in response to damage inflicted by enemies. This healing power provided support through five or ten attacks. The spell automatically recovered health with each enemy attack, and its effect was enormous. Akatsuki and Marielle were beginners at raids, and the breathing room casting a spell beforehand gave them was a nearly unparalleled merit.
However, it did have weaknesses. Recovery conducted after damage had been taken—recovery after the fact—wouldn’t let you avoid fatal injuries. It couldn’t handle the sort of powerful attacks that severed arms and sent them flying in one blow. Besides, Marielle’s Response Activated Recovery was less experienced than the sort used by, for example, a Cleric affiliated with D.D.D. Even if it actually was recovering, Akatsuki’s HP was far from fully healed.
Even so.
Akatsuki ran.
She charged as if falling: Trick Step. She twisted her right leg by force, turning halfway around. In a mesmerizing movement, she ran past her opponent, inflicting Paralyze Blow as she did so.
Because, after all, Akatsuki wasn’t dead.
“Akatsuki!”
The murderer’s attack grazed her yet again. She could feel her armor being slashed. The attack had been a blast of death that passed over Akatsuki’s heart.
But she was alive.
Her fighting spirit was blazing. A week ago, she hadn’t been able to fight without hiding behind Soujirou. True, the situation was bad. Even with a normal healing spell layered over Response Activated Recovery, her HP was still falling. However, that was only natural. She was up against a murderer, one who was clearly a raid-class enemy. Akatsuki was a hastily trained member of a weak guild, and this monster wasn’t the sort of opponent she could take on. As proof, even Soujirou, leader of the West Wind Brigade, had gone down under his attacks. There was a reason she was able to tackle that opponent, if only for a limited time. The reason gave her courage.
Morning Star Catcher was wrapped around her right arm, the one she’d thrust out. This production-class gauntlet had been made for her by the Lucky Dice sisters. The matte bracer generated a force field, and it had greater defense than its appearance suggested. Even if the blizzard whittled away the defense on her right arm, Ink-Feather Garb gave off a faint glow of magic, forcibly creating a tiny gap in time to allow her to twist her body.
As she used her natural agility to slide through these gaps, Akatsuki was grateful for her new defensive gear. Even though her silhouette had gained attribute defense and increased abilities several times greater than what it previously had, there had been barely any increase in weight. They were all presents from the girls who gathered for those tea parties.
“Could you use something like this?”
“The size is all wrong. Here, I’ll fix it for you.”
“You can eat those strawberries. Those are everyone’s.”
“I’ve got some fan-tas-tic materials. Hee-hee-hee!”
The girls had smiled at her, taking care of Akatsuki almost as if they’d gotten a new little sister. They might have been more than half teasing her, but they’d given her unstinting support.
Most of the equipment that was protecting Akatsuki now had been presents from them.
The durability of her old equipment had deteriorated too far in her fight with the murderer, and it had been clear that it wouldn’t be able to stay with her in her new battle.
She’d known all the women’s faces, but she’d never spoken to any of them for more than half a minute or so. Whether or not they’d heard the explanation about the murderer that Akatsuki had given or the circumstances surrounding Akiba’s crisis, they spoke encouraging words to her and gave her sweets.
It whipped up the old familiar feelings of irritation in Akatsuki’s heart. It was a conditioned reflex: She didn’t want to be treated like a child. Still, on the other hand, there was a comfort in it that she’d never felt before.
Akatsuki had gone down on her knees and begged for their help. That meant that, in a way, she couldn’t get around being treated like a child. Giving up on her repulsion, Akatsuki thought: It’s because I’m not strong enough. Begging everyon
e for help was admitting defeat.
However, even so, not being strong and losing certainly weren’t meaningless.
She thought there were some things you could only understand by admitting weakness.
One of them was probably the peace she felt in her heart.
When she calmed down and thought about it, Akatsuki understood right away that the many people who’d spoken to her hadn’t had any particular ill will. They were only treating her with kindness, plain and simple.
Most of the people she’d rejected and bared her fangs at hadn’t had the slightest intention of making fun of her.
Of course, it had been a very embarrassing experience, but there was nothing about it that she couldn’t accept.
Strangely, Akatsuki was very focused as she fought.
The HP bar, where she could see her HP edging downward, didn’t bother her.
She struck with another attack, hitting the murderer with the biggest movement reduction effect she could manage. This was an expression of trust in a confirmed tactic, more than it was a way to prolong her own life.
“Ten more… Five!”
At Marielle’s voice, which was almost a scream, Akatsuki gave a small smile.
Come to think of it, Marielle had said this was a first for her, too.
Right now, Akatsuki and the others were fighting their first-ever raid.
3
Having been contacted by telechat, Riezé immediately passed on the content to the other team leaders.
“Target acquired. He’s currently traveling on foot down the central avenue in the direction of Old Ogawamachi. Akatsuki’s unit made first contact. A two-man cell, with one healer. Team D move; all others stand by.”
As she relayed the telechat in a yell, Riezé also broke into a run.
The raid had finally begun.
Riezé sent telechat after telechat. There were currently twenty-four Adventurers in Akiba under her command. According to the standard formulas of party organization, they should have formed four parties of six members each. When those were joined together, they’d have a twenty-four member full raid. However, this time, they hadn’t been able to use that formation: Four parties wouldn’t be able to patrol all of Akiba. They’d had to split up, or in other words, organize into smaller teams. Although she hadn’t announced it, the twenty-three people currently under Riezé’s command were split into irregular parties of two or three members. There were more than ten of these.
Riezé was part of the group as well. Kyouko was trailing along behind her. She was a level-90 Guardian, and had been one of the victims during this incident. Riezé herself was a Sorcerer.
Their formation was far too fragile. Even if Team D, which she’d contacted, joined up with Akatsuki’s team, there would only be four members. They really wouldn’t be able to keep a large-scale class enemy in check.
Riezé and Kyouko had been over by the canal, and they ran under the elevated tracks, hurrying toward the central avenue. Unfortunately, the action was a long ways away. They’d have to cut clear across Akiba on a diagonal. The distance was probably a little less than a kilometer. However, with their sturdy Adventurer bodies, they could probably reach their destination in about two minutes.
They detoured around the decayed skeleton of a billboard, dashing down a path covered by underbrush.
“It’s Akatsuki?”
“Yes. Are you all right, Kyouko?”
“Of course. To be honest, I am scared of that guy. Still, I’d fight him again before I’d put him in front of Master Soujirou. I’m not an athletic type for nothing!”
“That’s the spirit!”
“We’re absolutely going to win this!”
Although Riezé didn’t respond to those words aloud, she nodded firmly as she ran. Akiba’s volunteers had leveled the ground in the plaza in front of the station, to make the outdoors more pleasant; the two of them cut across it with strides that were practically long jumps and ran into the guild center, dashing up the concrete stairs as though they’d sprouted wings.
Riezé bit her lip and reviewed the current strategy.
Most of the mysteries had been solved. It was probably safe to say that she understood most of how it was done as well.
The enemy was the dead warrior Lugurius.
Or rather, something that resembled Lugurius.
He was a raid enemy and quest boss in Decayed Exploit, which had been packaged with Sacred Heart, the tenth expansion pack. Since Decayed Exploit had been fully raid content, it was meant to be played with twenty-four people, but the difficulty level wasn’t all that high. Things had been different at the outset, when they hadn’t had enough information, but after that, she didn’t remember the combat content being difficult at all. In any case, the Decayed Exploit quest had been an introduction that acted as a gateway to a bigger quest, the Nine Great Gaols of Halos. Its difficulty really couldn’t be that high.
Even as an enemy raid boss, the fallen warrior Lugurius, who was said to have died in the Ezzo Empire, had haunted Hokkaido. Riezé had no idea why he was attacking the town of Akiba now. She didn’t worry about it, either. Worrying about reasons wasn’t her style. To Riezé, reasons were meaningful only at the stage when you were examining ways to deal with something, and at this point, handling the situation by force was the only way to turn it in their favor.
Riezé had conducted exhaustive interviews of all the victims who had been attacked by the murderer so far. As a result, she had inferred that the culprit was Lugurius, or someone who had tendencies and powers that resembled Lugurius’s. It had taken time because, at first, the murderer hadn’t been able to exercise his abilities completely, or had been trying to hide them.
It was also because the murderer wasn’t simply the raid monster Lugurius: He also had the combat power of mobile armor. He was a monster who could use two different types of strength, and when the incident had first occurred, these two types had camouflaged each other.
The hint that had decisively revealed the truth had been that the murderer’s weapon was Hail Blade Byakumaru.
Akatsuki, who had fought the murderer last, had declared that it was.
As weapons, short swords were on the small side, and it was hard to tell them apart. Riezé wasn’t confident that she could look at an equipped one and guess its name. However, if a girl who also used short swords had declared it, then Riezé concluded that she must have been certain.
After that, things had moved quickly. The name Hail Blade Byakumaru had reminded Riezé of the tale of the hero Lugurius, who had been fond of that sword and had used it to fight for Ezzo, and of the quest to subjugate the now-fallen warrior.
A cursed weapon.
It seemed ridiculous, but that was what Hail Blade Byakumaru was.
From a report Mikakage had delivered, Riezé knew that flavor text was being eroded. The hero who had died filled with bitterness had written his feelings of rage and resentment into the explanatory text of his beloved sword. That cursed text had taken physical shape and attacked its bearer.
That’s absurd!
For the several hundredth time, Riezé bit her lip in a spasm of irritation. Flavor text had taken shape and attacked someone.
That situation awoke a visceral terror, as though a nightmare had slipped out of the realm of dreams and tried to tear its dreamer apart.
However, in a territory separate from that horror, the brain that was entrusted with D.D.D.’s training unit had set to work on tactics. If the murderer had Lugurius’s abilities, there were roughly three of them.
One was a great increase in HP. Lugurius’s maximum HP changed drastically depending on the number of people in the zone. In Decayed Exploit, a quest in which he’d been faced in a subterranean graveyard, he’d kidnapped more than fifty People of the Earth and had had them in the zone with him. That alone had raised Lugurius’s HP to three times its minimum.
If Akiba had stayed as lively as it was ordinarily, his HP capacity would probably have soare
d, swelling to more than several hundred times its normal size. No one would be able to take down a monster like that, not even the West Wind Brigade or D.D.D.
And so Riezé had come up with a plan. She’d worked with Henrietta, who wasn’t here right now, to get a ban put in place on going out at night. Just as they’d evacuated the People of the Earth from the zone in the raid quest, they’d make the town of Akiba a battle zone that was empty of everyone but themselves. That was the minimum requirement for fighting Lugurius.
The second was that all his abilities increased in response to the number of people who were nearby. All of Lugurius’s abilities—his attack power, evasive power, defensive power, and hit rate—increased in response to the number of Adventurers within a fifty-meter radius. This had been part of Lugurius’s secret, the one that had defeated even Soujirou. It was also the reason Riezé had divided her raid into the smallest groups possible.
It had been the same in the Decayed Exploit quest. They’d left only the six strongest, while the remaining eighteen had evacuated the People of the Earth, simultaneously routing the vengeful ghosts that had been attracted by Lugurius’s grudge. By doing so, they’d been able to weaken Lugurius to the point where he was an enemy that could be defeated.
The last was the range attack that used ice. The area in front of Lugurius turned into a blizzard, decreasing visibility. No doubt there would be cold-air damage as well. On its own, the ability was a simple one, but precisely because it was simple, equipment with attribute defense was the only way to deal with it.
The more living people there were in the area, the greater his abilities would become. He could freeze all living things. These abilities existed to express the background for Lugurius, who had died swallowing his resentment.
