Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, Vol. 8

by Hiro Ainana

  Here, the glass doors were set in frames that had a rail, so they could likely slide open and closed just like the sliding doors often found in contemporary Japanese houses.

  Instead of metal walls or fences, the houses were generally separated by hedges or flower beds, mostly the latter, by my estimation.

  But strangely, there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Were they all aboveground partying?

  Our boards flew along at about twelve miles per hour, nearly skimming the ground as they went.

  The road reminded me of asphalt or the surface of a hard court for tennis; it seemed to be made of tiny pebbles that looked like brown beads.

  I asked Mia what it was made out of, but she only said, “Dunno.”

  That Tuya fellow seemed pretty knowledgeable, so I figured I’d ask him next time I saw him.

  Finally, the boards came to a gentle stop in front of one particular house. Then they descended soundlessly, disappearing right into the ground.

  “Satou.”

  Mia touched the front door, and it slid open automatically with a pneumatic hiss.

  Once she led me inside, the door slid closed behind us. Overall, it was very science-fiction-y. It would’ve been better if they were double doors like an air lock, though.

  The moon was visible through the transparent dome-shaped ceiling and beyond the canopy over the city.

  Its light was faint, though, probably because it was behind two layers of glass.

  Mia was still pulling me along, so I followed her down the hallway.

  I guess I shouldn’t have expected that to magically move, too.

  “Here.”

  Mia led me into what appeared to be her room.

  Her parents must have cleaned it often while she was away; there wasn’t a speck of dust in sight.

  There was one bed and one desk. Next to the bed were some built-in shelves, lined with a cutesy stuffed penguin and other plushies.

  The entire room had a subdued pink color scheme. There were no decorative plants or anything like that. Overall, it looked like a middle school girl’s room.

  “What a cute room.”

  “Mm. Comfy.” Mia smiled shyly at my compliment.

  …Did she just want to show me her room?

  “Wait.”

  With that command, Mia flounced into a small room that resembled a walk-in closet.

  Then she paused and stuck her head out. “No peeking,” she added before vanishing inside, closing the door behind her.

  What, did she think I would peek if she didn’t tell me not to?

  Since I’d left without a word to anyone, I used the Telephone spell to contact Arisa.

  “Yesh, thish ish your beloved Arisha!”

  “…Are you drunk?”

  “Huh? I’m cone-shold stober!”

  “Don’t go too crazy, or I won’t give you any hangover medicine tomorrow.”

  “Okey-dokey, artichokey.”

  Arisa was clearly very drunk, so I politely ended the Telephone spell.

  Next, I tried using it to connect with Liza, but there was no response. She must be asleep.

  Finally, I contacted Mia’s mother to let her know that we were at their house.

  “Satou.”

  Mia poked her head out from the walk-in closet, took a moment to work up her courage, and hopped back into the room.

  It was a very cute outfit, with a long-sleeve white blouse and a miniskirt with thin pleats.

  Probably the most noticeable part, though, was…

  “Knee socks.”

  Just as she said, she was wearing knee socks pulled up tight on her slender legs.

  I hadn’t seen them in this world before. Incidentally, they were white with light-blue horizontal stripes.

  “They look very nice on you.”

  Mia smiled bashfully and did a little twirl, making her skirt flutter.

  Judging by the matching low-rise undies I saw beneath, she was apparently fond of stripes.

  “Mia, may I?”

  “Mm.”

  Mia nodded, so I pinched the fabric of the knee socks between my fingers and tugged it experimentally. It was a mysterious fiber, clinging tightly to her legs despite its elasticity not being particularly strong.

  If I could find out more about this by visiting some workshops during our stay, I could really widen the range of potential outfits for my party members.

  “Perv.”

  I glanced up to see Mia blushing, her cheeks puffed indignantly.

  Oops, I guess it’s rude to touch her socks while she’s still wearing them.

  “Sorry, sorry. I was just curious about the fabric.”

  “Mrrr. Indelicate.”

  That was some pretty advanced vocabulary for someone so young… Wait, I guess Mia’s several times older than me, huh?

  After I apologized, the rest of the evening turned into Mia’s fashion show.

  There was a lot more variety in her wardrobe than I had expected: the traditional garb the elves were wearing up in the tree village, a dress, an outfit with a skirt and three-quarter-length leggings, and so on.

  As I later learned, that first one wasn’t actually the traditional clothing of the elves but a design made by the hero Daisaku for the “elf theme park” that was the village in the trees.

  Eventually, Mia got tired and fell asleep, so I put her to bed and ended up dozing off next to her myself.

  Her soft, fluffy bed was too powerful to resist.

  Before long, I was deep in a dreamless sleep.

  “No-more-sneaking-out diiiiive!”

  That shout, coupled with a sudden impact, shocked me awake.

  Mia, who’d been asleep beside me, let out a rather unladylike “Geh!”

  “Arisa, would you mind not diving on people first thing in the morning?”

  As I grumbled, I checked the map.

  Mia’s parents must have brought Arisa and the others to the underground town.

  “This isn’t our usual joking around. This is your punishment,” Arisa intoned.

  I was guessing she was making some kind of reference, but it went right over my head.

  Since she didn’t seem to be hungover at all, the elves must have given her a hangover cure.

  For some reason, she wasn’t wearing her blond wig, so her lilac hair was on full display.

  “Mrrr. Heavy.”

  “It’s your punishment for running away with master. Feel the wrath of the Lolita press!”

  Despite both our protests, Arisa was still fuming.

  “Master, this place is amaziiing!”

  “We rode on a board, and the door opened all by itself, sir!”

  Liza entered the room, holding the excited pair of Tama and Pochi under her arms.

  “Arisa, you mustn’t be so rude to master.”

  “C’mon, Liza, I’m punishing some criminals here…”

  Putting Tama and Pochi down on the floor, Liza lifted Arisa off the bed and freed Mia and me.

  “Master, the underground city is amazing, I report.”

  “To think that the elves had such a remarkable place hidden here!”

  Nana and Lulu sounded more excited than usual, too. None of them could hide their surprise at the semi-underground cityscape.

  “I gotta admit—it is pretty cool. Like a space-age colony or a hyperdimensional fortress.”

  Once again, I wasn’t sure what Arisa was talking about, but she probably meant that it was very sci-fi. Now that she’d calmed down a little about my sharing a bed with Mia, I guess even Arisa was impressed with the elves’ secret home.

  “Good morning, Mr. Satou.”

  “Mia!”

  My group stepped aside for Mia’s parents, who’d guided them here to the underground civilization.

  I greeted them in return, but Mia’s father was glowering at our sleeping arrangements.

  Her mother’s remark and Mia’s response, however…

  “Oh my, aren’t you two close? How lovely.”
r />   “Mm. Lovers.”

  …served only to aggravate her father’s misunderstanding.

  “Interspecies. Can’t reproduce.”

  “Please calm down, dear.”

  “No!”

  “Just a moment, Mr. Laya…”

  Mia’s father swiveled to glare at me.

  I felt a little like a man trying to ask his lover’s disapproving parents for permission to marry.

  “…We fell asleep together and nothing more. The rest of the kids usually sleep in my bed, too.”

  “Harem?”

  I had offered that particular fact in the hopes of conveying that it was no different than children sleeping with their parents, but Mia’s father took it in the worst possible way.

  In the end, I wasn’t able to pacify his anger until Mia’s mother stepped in to help resolve the misunderstanding.

  Actually, I wasn’t sure she cleared things up so much as she simply drowned out his protests with her machine gun–like chatter.

  After a great deal of talking, Mia’s mother finally came to her main point.

  Please cut to the chase a little faster next time.

  “Mr. Satou, at some point, please tell me the story of how Mia became so attached to you, okay? I’m looking forward to it. For now, I’d like you to go see the Council of Elders, if you wouldn’t mind. They asked for you personally, you know.”

  I agreed right away, of course. I might get to meet the high elf I’d been hearing so much about, after all.

  Based on the elves I’d seen so far, I probably shouldn’t get my hopes up for a dynamite bod, but I was looking forward to such a rare opportunity for a meeting with her anyway.

  The World Tree

  Satou here. When I first started working at my company, meetings with the bigwigs made me nervous. But I got used to them after spending a lot of time dealing with unreasonable clients. I guess people really do grow according to their environments.

  “Here.”

  At Mia’s father’s prompting, I stepped onto the moving walkway, which was illuminated by footlights.

  We were now in the center of Bolenan Forest, heading for the Council of Elders’s headquarters at the base of the World Tree.

  We’d arrived at the tree the same way we’d traveled from the tree village to the underground city: teleportation by way of fairy rings.

  Mia’s father, like his daughter, didn’t explain much, but I was guessing this was an area that could be reached only with teleportation.

  When we first entered the area, I used “Search Entire Map,” but it didn’t include the upper or lower layers of the World Tree. So they were all part of different blocks.

  Maybe they even had a system that resisted “Search Entire Map.”

  As far as I could tell, this section of the World Tree went several miles underground.

  I don’t remember how thick a planet’s crust is off the top of my head, but isn’t that pretty deep?

  This was just the size of the structure we were in, too. The World Tree’s roots went even deeper and expanded even farther out than the forest itself.

  Mia’s house was more than six miles away from this part of the World Tree.

  It probably seemed relatively close only because of the absurdly huge size of the World Tree itself.

  “Next. Jump.”

  Following Mia’s father’s brief instructions, I ventured through a mysterious silver ring.

  The materials that made up the cream-colored passages were equally unclear. My AR display labeled it terpeet type-three resin corridor. What in the world was “terpeet”?

  Despite the passage’s modern appearance, the cool air smelled of a walk through the forest, and there was a gentle sound like leaves rustling in the breeze.

  At the other end of the corridor, an automatic door opened with a hiss of air.

  The first set of doors slid open to the left and right, revealing a second set that slid to the top and bottom.

  Beyond this set of double doors was a straight hallway about sixty feet long, at the end of which was a similar set of doors. It was sort of like a submarine bulkhead.

  Past this bulkhead was a narrower passage, which was suspended above a huge hangar.

  “What are…?”

  “Outboard hulls,” Mia’s father informed me.

  Sure enough, the hangar was full of countless silver hulls that looked just like the hero Hayato’s dimensional submarine, the Jules Verne. They were suspended in the air, their bows pointing up toward the ceiling.

  In the back of the hangar were twin-boom aircrafts, wooden hulls, and even some traditional sailing ships.

  “Are these all airships?”

  “No. Just hulls.”

  “They seem to be floating, though…”

  “Dimension Pile.”

  If memory served, Dimension Pile was a Space Magic spell that could suspend physical objects in midair.

  He was probably saying that the countless hulls in the hangar were being held in place with Dimension Pile.

  …I was getting pretty good at filling in the blanks with these elves.

  At any rate, all the ships were sparkling clean. My AR display revealed how they were being kept so free of rust and decay.

  “Fixed?”

  “Mm. Practical. Protects.”

  Again, this was all speculation based on his few words, but maybe they were using Practical Magic to coat the hulls in a pseudo-substance that protected them from oxidation.

  I seemed to remember seeing a spell like that described in the Advanced Practical Magic spell book I’d read at a noble’s house in the old capital.

  It wouldn’t work on weapons, but you could use a certain amount of magic power supply to maintain the “Fixed” state, so lords used them in their Item Boxes and things like that.

  As I gazed around at the ships, I spotted some engineer-looking elves who seemed to be searching for something among the hulls.

  “Are you sure Traya really made a Void Ship?”

  “How strange. I could’ve sworn it was here…”

  I searched the map, but the Void Ship they were looking for didn’t seem to be in this area.

  “Jia, if it’s not here, we’ll have to wake Yua up from the sleep tank…”

  “No, you know we can’t do that.”

  The two people below started quarreling about something.

  What’s a “sleep tank”?

  “Satou. Come.”

  Mia’s father pulled my sleeve, reminding me that this was not our destination.

  Once we crossed the bridge and exited the hangar, we stepped onto a glowing Floating Board that carried us up a slope.

  I saw quite a few similar passages, but there was no one around except us.

  There were tens of thousands of elves here, ten times more than the elf population aboveground, so I was surprised that we hadn’t seen anyone else but the pair of engineers before.

  Checking the map, I learned that most of the elves in this area had the Sleeping condition. Today must be a day off. I wondered if they were sleeping in the “sleep tanks” I’d overheard that pair talking about. Unlike the elves up above, many of these were over ten thousand years old. Their levels were relatively high, but none seemed to be above level 50, not even the oldest among them.

  I wanted to ask Mia’s father about them, but he would probably just ask how I came across that information, so I couldn’t say a word.

  Aside from the elves, there were eight high elves in this area of the World Tree.

  Perhaps they were elf royalty, like you’d find in fantasy stories.

  Like the others, most of them were sleeping, but their levels ranged from the 50s to the 70s.

  Maybe they had some reason for not leveling up higher than that.

  As I was processing all this information, we arrived at our destination, and the Floating Board we’d been riding re-assimilated with the ground.

  In front of our eyes was an octagonal door about ten feet
tall. Though the corridors we’d traversed to get here were all resin, this area used real wood.

  A gap appeared from the top of the octagon, and the door opened like an old-fashioned camera shutter.

  It was just the kind of door you’d see in classic science fiction movies.

  “Satou.” Mia’s father called to me from the other side of the door.

  Oops, I’d been staring at the door for so long, he’d gone in without me. Quickly, I followed behind him.

  On the other side of the door was a parliament-like building so big it could probably hold more than a thousand people.

  Soft light descended from a skylight above, illuminating the passage that led to the platform in the back.

  I couldn’t see her from here, but the only conscious high elf seemed to be in the waiting room ahead.

  Does this mean I get to meet her?

  My heart fluttered with excitement as I followed Mia’s father to the platform. Twenty or so elders were sitting in raised seats around it.

  I sat down next to Mia’s father in a section that reminded me of a defendant’s podium.

  “Satou of the Shiga Kingdom. We are most grateful for your aid.”

  “Satou of the Shiga Kingdom. We will not forget the debt owed you for delivering our youngest child from the clutches of the wicked sorcerer.”

  “Satou of the Shiga Kingdom. We wish to reward you for bringing our little one home from faraway lands.”

  “Satou of the Shiga Kingdom. We are pleased…” And so on.

  Thus, each and every one of the elders thanked me for bringing Mia home. For some reason, they all started their statements with “Satou of the Shiga Kingdom.”

  Was there a rule forcing them to use that phrase or something?

  They must have known somehow that I spoke Elvish, since that was what they were using.

  Despite being elders, they didn’t look much older than Mia’s father.

  However, their eyes were different.

  They were so quiet and calm that they seemed almost distant. It was sort of like looking into the eyes of an ancient tortoise.

  Their gazes were so steady that they felt a little icy if you made eye contact for too long.

  I guess that was what happened when you lived for thousands of years. I’d love to befriend them and hear stories of the olden days.