Game’s End Part 2

by Mamare Touno

  “Give me a situation report, Minori.”

  Three big strides were enough to take him into the open area; he caught a telechat operator who was nearby and shouted for him to call Calasin.

  “A fierce battle broke out during the defense of Choushi village. We won, but in the process, Rundelhaus was mortally wounded. Resurrection spells failed, but his body is still warm, and he has a pulse… Only he isn’t waking up.”

  —The resurrection spells had failed.

  Enormous wings came sailing across the sky, and Shiroe jumped on, moving more than half unconsciously. Akatsuki had followed him as closely as a shadow, but he barely noticed when she slipped into his arms. The magical beast’s girth had been tightened, and he gave it a small sign.

  On the strength of that slight sign alone, the huge, well-trained mount leapt into the sky, which was beginning to darken into night.

  “His pulse is getting weaker…we think.”

  “Chant another resurrection spell.”

  “We’ve done it twice. He won’t wake up…”

  Resurrection spells were used to revive fallen comrades. They sounded miraculous, but the difficulty of the spells wasn’t that high. In terms of level, all Recovery classes over level 20 knew them. In fact, resurrection spells also had ranks. With low-level spells, although the resurrection would succeed, experience points would be lost.

  This was probably why Minori had contacted Shiroe after trying it twice.

  No, even more than that…

  People of the Earth weren’t Adventurers. If they died, their deaths were absolute, and they would not resurrect in the temple. On the other end of the telechat, he could hear stifled sobs and voices talking in the background.

  “Tell me your location and who’s there.”

  “Me, Touya. Isuzu. Serara. And Rundelhaus, who isn’t reviving. We’re near the center of Choushi, at the big intersection.”

  “Are you safe?”

  “There’s no sign of the enemy in this area. However, the battle along the embankment is probably still going on. Goblins might attack here at any moment, too…”

  —It was over.

  A Person of the Earth had sustained damage in battle and was about to lose his life as a result. As far as the situation was concerned, one could very well say it was over. True, according to what Li Gan had said, during the short time before the yin and yang energy separated, resurrection spells could work on People of the Earth as well. However, if the resurrection spells weren’t working, things had already reached the degradation phase.

  “Shiroe, please save ’im! Save Rudy!”

  Suddenly, he heard a strong voice right in his ear.

  “Listen, Rudy’s—he’s dumb, and a moron, but he’s strong and cool. Rudy was trying to save us!”

  “I’m the one who brought him along. No, I mean, it wasn’t exactly me, but Rudy wanted to come, and I didn’t stop him. Shiro…e. If there’s anything you can do, then—”

  A tear-filled voice sounded on the other end of the telechat.

  “We need you.”

  Minori’s words echoed in his ears.

  Those words were rapidly cooling Shiroe’s mind.

  He visualized a winter’s night, and asphalt that looked ready to develop frost. He lay on that asphalt, his body heat leeching away. It was ominous, but it couldn’t have been more serene. It was the image of Shiroe’s release.

  With all restrictions removed, his thoughts began to run wild. The visualization, which had split up in order to search all courses, examined a matrix of possibilities.

  If Minori’s counting on me, I have to help.

  That wasn’t his will. It was already a given.

  In order to fulfill that prerequisite, Shiroe kept thinking at high speed.

  “Tell Serara to chant a resurrection spell.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Minori’s answer came back instantly.

  She didn’t challenge him with Why? or But that didn’t work. Minori had placed complete trust in Shiroe. She’d contacted him because she believed that Shiroe would do something.

  That was just a wishful assumption, of course.

  There were some things even Shiroe couldn’t do. Rather, there was an overwhelming number of things he couldn’t do. In this incomprehensible, unreasonable other world, it was probably fair to say he couldn’t do anything.

  However, that was neither here nor there. If he couldn’t do something, he couldn’t do it. He could think about that after he’d tried and failed. What was important just now was that Minori had believed “Shiroe can do it,” and in that case, there was only one answer Shiroe could give.

  He had to try to believe he could succeed.

  The feeling of believing rebuilt the matrix inside Shiroe. He shone light on the static—possibilities he’d discarded as impossible—from a new angle.

  “I think his pulse got stronger… But he hasn’t woken up.”

  “Wait 150 seconds. Have Touya guard the area. Tell Isuzu to set an MP recovery song. In 150 seconds, you cast a resurrection spell, Minori.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Shiroe remembered what Li Gan had said.

  Rundelhaus had died.

  Person of the Earth or Adventurer, death was death.

  Death in this other world began when all physical activity ceased. First, the body stopped moving, and body and spirit were separated.

  The spirit would then be trapped in darkness.

  This phenomenon occurred because the communication between yin and yang energy was severed.

  Before long, the yin energy began to disperse.

  Yin energy was the basic energy of the body, its life-force, and this process was known as degradation. The sturdier the body and the higher its level, the greater this energy was. In other words, degradation took longer.

  Rundelhaus was a physically fragile Magic Attack class, and on top of that, he apparently hadn’t reached the middle levels yet. Degradation would probably move quickly for him.

  It was likely… Not definite, but likely, that the resurrection spell had come too late.

  The resurrection magic used by the Recovery classes replenished the yin energy of a body in the process of degradation and rejoined it to the yang energy.

  The spell caster gathered the yin energy that had dispersed into the surrounding atmosphere, supplemented any missing life-force with their own life-force, and returned it to the body.

  The fact that his body was still warm and had a pulse probably meant that the physical reconstruction had worked to a certain extent. His mind wasn’t returning, because the reunification with the yang energy wasn’t going well.

  If that was the situation, then it was likely…

  It was likely that the dispersal of yang energy—soul rot—had begun. Yang energy was mental energy, and the carrier for the spirit. Yang energy that had lost its body began to disperse. A spirit that had lost its yang energy vanished, unable to maintain its identity.

  There was no doubt that while Rundelhaus, a low-level player, was still in the process of degradation, soul rot had set in as well.

  An Adventurer would have been sent to the temple, their body automatically repaired, and their yang energy linked to their body. Because the body was reconstructed, soul rot didn’t occur. In other words, even though physical death occurred, spiritual death did not. They were resurrected in new bodies—aka, immortal.

  “It’s been a hundred and fifty seconds. I’m casting the resurrection spell now.”

  “In another hundred and fifty seconds, have Serara cast another resurrection spell. I’m on my way to you now. Keep chanting by turns that way and hold on for eight minutes.”

  He could hear Minori’s report. The resurrection spells used by Minori and other players around level 20 were primitive. Since chanting them took time and left the caster defenseless, they were practically impossible to use in combat, and the recast times were a full three hundred seconds.

  However, although
they were just starting out, there were two Recovery magic users with Rundelhaus: Serara and Minori.

  By having them cast their resurrection spells by turns, that three-hundred-second recast time was cut to 150 seconds. Resurrection spells devoured MP, and at the moment, Shiroe didn’t know how long they could be used back-to-back, but there was nothing for it but to let them handle it on site.

  The direct trigger of soul rot was the advance of physical degradation. The lack of a body to return to caused the spiritual energy to disperse; howso far it was possible to stop soul rot that had already begun depended on Minori’s party’s resurrection spells.

  After that—

  “Akatsuki, don’t let me slip.”

  At Shiroe’s words, Akatsuki, who’d been settled in his arms, twisted around, turning to face him. His fellow passenger, who hadn’t said a single word for the past few minutes, carefully turned on the griffin’s back—a terror-inducing environment—and, in the midst of a night wind that seemed to flay their skin, hugged Shiroe tightly.

  Shiroe closed his eyes gently, imagined the items in his bag, and put his hand into it. He didn’t know what item he’d need. He didn’t even know if it would work.

  However, even so, he found an item that was suited to the magic he was about to perform:

  An ink Shiroe had painstakingly compounded.

  It was the only bottle of its kind in the world: A fragment of soul.

  2

  In the midst of the sunset, Raynesia arrived on the battlefield, attended by the female knight.

  This area of the steep-walled valley was under the control of Krusty’s strike unit, and they’d been notified that it was secure.

  “Ugh…”

  “Are you all right?”

  The female knight, who was holding a sheaf of documents, didn’t look all that sympathetic, but she asked anyway.

  In this world, very few people had ever experienced the atmosphere of a battlefield. Death came quickly to demihumans and People of the Earth, and if left alone, their bodies disappeared in less than half a day. No matter what sort of a battle it had been, once the corpses vanished, it was just a wilderness littered with weapons.

  However, this particular battlefield had just been created.

  The stench of blood was intense, and it affected Raynesia powerfully. Fortunately, the summer wind blew toward them through the greenery and kept it from being quite as bad as she’d anticipated, but even so, she wasn’t able to look at the ground.

  The female knight walked on.

  They were on their way to meet up with Krusty, who was up ahead, to report in and to confirm the details of the operation, or so Raynesia had heard.

  The female knight, who had introduced herself as Misa Takayama, had told Raynesia that they were the field monitor squad.

  During combat, particularly during raids and battles in places where visibility was bad, it was extremely difficult to grasp the overall situation while fighting in the vanguard.

  For that reason, in addition to the raid force that did the actual fighting, D.D.D. set up a field monitor team that ranged in size from a squad to a company. The field monitor team’s main duty was to use optical instruments and magic to watch the entire battlefield from a distance and sequentially report battle information to the commander on the frontline.

  Raynesia thought Misa Takayama must be a high-ranking officer in D.D.D., because of the way the people around them acted toward her.

  Because they’d scouted a route beforehand that wouldn’t force them to push through groves of trees, it took less time than she’d expected to descend to the valley floor. Attended by guardian knights, Raynesia reached a broad, stony, mostly dry riverbed that had a swift mountain stream running down its center.

  This place seemed to be upstream from the battlefield she’d seen from the heights, and there were no Goblin corpses or traces of battle. The clear, light sound of the stream seemed to chase away the summer heat.

  Around them, the Adventurers were taking a break, each of them relaxing any way they pleased. There were all kinds: Some had stripped to the waist and were bathing, while others were tending to their weapons.

  They were right in the middle of the battlefield, but at the moment, no enemy units had been deployed nearby, so everyone except for the scout unit was resting in shifts.

  Naturally, as a princess, Raynesia had inspected chivalric orders before.

  However, in most cases, this had been performed from a balcony, or she had said a few words of greeting from a stage that had been set up for the purpose. Sometimes she’d gone to the parade grounds and spoken to the knights as she walked, but at those times, the knights of Maihama had been standing in rows with their spears neatly lined up.

  That meant she’d never walked among knights that were this unreserved, and—in terms of the sensibilities of aristocratic society—impolite.

  Of course, Raynesia was a Person of the Earth and a daughter of Maihama. Even if the town of Akiba had joined the League of Free Cities, the Adventurers weren’t in a direct master-servant relationship with Raynesia, and so they weren’t obligated to pay their respects to her. Raynesia had no intention of feeling put out by that, and she was also becoming more and more accustomed to the idea that they were Adventurers, and that their culture was different.

  Raynesia had expected their lack of manners, and she hadn’t planned to let it startle her or to take them to task for it.

  What did surprise Raynesia was the fact that they didn’t ignore her.

  As her group passed by, the Adventurers called to her, loudly.

  “Don’t you worry, Princess. We’ll get this war mopped up for you ASAP.”

  “That’s a bona-fide Scandinavian angel right there.”

  “Our advance unit could take care of that pack of wussy goblins all by its lonesome.”

  “Dude. I just saw, like, the actual princess. I need a photo, anybody got a phone?!”

  “Hey, Princess, you sure you should be out here? …Oh, Miz Takayama’s with you, huh? Scary, scary.”

  “Ha-ha-ha! Princess, the Chief’s up thattaway.”

  “Whoaaa! Whoaaa!”

  “You be real careful you don’t get hit by any stray arrows, a’right?”

  Their words were rough enough to make her think, This is what the mercenaries I’ve heard stories about must be like, but strangely, they didn’t make her feel out of sorts. It was probably because she understood that the Adventurers weren’t making light of her or having fun with her. This was the way they normally talked, and when they spoke to her, they meant to be friendly.

  Raynesia, however, was a recluse.

  As a rule, she wasn’t good at communicating or conversing with others.

  Until now, she’d handled this sort of event by using her “Perfect Young Lady” mask, the one she’d acquired during her strict training. However, she was already learning that it didn’t seem to work well on Adventurers.

  Adventurers weren’t familiar with aristocratic culture, and they wouldn’t jump to the wrong conclusions and do things for her if she only fell silent and looked troubled, or nodded gently, or let her brow cloud over with sorrow.

  For that reason, after giving it unusually serious—for her—thought, in order to strictly avoid bringing shame on the House of Cowen and yet match the Adventurers’ simple etiquette to the greatest extent possible, Raynesia had come up with her own unique way of doing things.

  Specifically, she smiled, raised her right hand to approximately the level of her chest, and gave a little wave.

  When Adventurers spoke to her or gave her advice about something, she’d listen attentively to what they said, and then say, simply, “Thank you very much.” After all, every last Adventurer was part of the same tribe as the mind-reading menace known as Krusty. Even if she tried to keep up appearances and gloss things over, they’d see through it. Besides, even if she showed them a face that was slightly unladylike, they weren’t nobles, and they probably wouldn’t c
are. …This was the conclusion Raynesia had come to.

  By the standards of the fashionable circles in which Raynesia had been rigorously trained, her current attitude and greetings were rude, very nearly those of a common town girl. Still, as she silently excused herself to her grandfather, she was dealing with Adventurers, and this was a battlefield.

  However, although Raynesia completely failed to notice because she was trembling at the way she was overstepping her own common sense, her sweet gestures and open smile were incredibly well received by the Adventurers of the strike unit.

  Because this mixed strike unit was under Krusty’s command, it had been organized around the D.D.D. unit so that his orders would travel all the way through it. However, that alone would have made D.D.D. and Krusty too influential with the Round Table Council. For that reason, and because it was thought that the organization should display the unity of the Round Table Council, it was a mixed army, and about half its troops were veteran players who didn’t belong to D.D.D.

  Because its members included players affiliated with the Knights of the Black Sword and Honesty, their mantles and insignia were all different. As a result, it looked like a very strange chivalric order indeed to Raynesia, who, with aristocratic sensibilities, had assumed that guild meant something like “clan.”

  In noble society, clans and the relations between them were quite complex. Because kinship and profit intermingled, it couldn’t be summed up in a word, but in general terms, the relationships between powerful clans were filled with enmity. This was one of the reasons behind the fact that the League of Free Cities still hadn’t been unified.

  However, on this battlefield, she didn’t see any of that kind of friction.

  Of course, from what she could tell from mantle color and insignia, they seemed to have broken into smaller clan groups to relax, but some were taking a light meal with the mixed unit, and some had handed their weapons to others and were having them check the condition. Was the group that was walking around briskly a transport corps?