by Sakon Kaidou
“I’m sorry, but we cannot accept your request because it breaches one of the adventurers’ guild’s special rules,” the employee replied, looking thoroughly troubled.
The adventurers around them seemed quite perplexed, as well.
Apparently, the boy was making a request, but for some reason, the guild wasn’t taking it.
“A missing persons quest, huh?” I muttered.
“The adventurer’s guild handles those, but they’re not too popular,” said B3. “They often take a long time, and they require a highly particular set of skills.”
I see, I thought. Depending on your perspective, killing monsters or just gathering stuff is way easier and simpler than searching for someone.
Sure, search quests had an advantage in that they weren’t life-threatening, but that wasn’t that big of a deal for us Masters. Then again, the first quest I’d ever taken on had been a life-threatening search quest... though it probably didn’t count as a search quest, since I’d already known where Milianne was.
“But there are skills that help search for people, right?” I asked.
“Yes.” B3 nodded. “There are some of them among both job skills and unique Embryo skills. However...” she said before pausing and looking at the boy and the employee at the counter. “The worker mentioned a special rule, and if it’s regarding search quests, that might be...”
Suddenly, one of the nearby tian adventurers, unable to bear it, placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder and spoke to him.
“Kid, the man’s been lost for nearly half a year, right? Sorry to break it to you, but your dad’s probably—”
“He can’t be dead!” the boy shouted defiantly as he escaped the man’s hand.
For reasons unknown, I’d felt as though his shout was more than just wishful thinking... as if he was absolutely certain of what he was saying.
“I mean... my dad is...” he said before following it up with words that left me completely astonished. “He’s my stepdad! And he’s a Master!”
“Wh...!” I gasped.
A tian boy had just asserted that his dad was a Master.
“He’s a Master, so he can never die,” he repeated himself. “But he’s been gone for half a year now... so I want someone to find him...”
The boy turned teary and spoke the reasons why he was making the request.
“My little brother or sister... Dad and Mom’s child should be born soon. I want him to be there to meet him or her, and... and...”
He suddenly stopped speaking. He hung his head and started sobbing.
Seeing him like that made my heart ache, but at the same time, I was curious about several things.
“B3, I have some questions,” I said.
“Yes, players and NPCs can get married,” she answered before I could even ask. “As for children between players and NPCs, they’re only possible in theory.”
That was exactly what I wanted to know about.
“If they’re old enough in real life for it — 18 or above in Japan — players can marry NPCs or other players... and partake in intercourse... become intimate, so to speak.”
Well, I guess jobs like “Pimp” and “Harlot” are there for a reason, I thought. I guess it’s only obvious for Dendro to have that kind of intimacy.
On a tangentially-related note, back when Rook had asked if Pimp was “a monster-taming kind of job,” he had only been referring to the job as it was in Dendro. He’d been fully aware of what the word meant in real life.
“I knew about it. It’s common knowledge,” he’d explained to me later.
Are Pimps really common knowledge for people his age? I thought, and then suddenly realized I’d gotten sidetracked pretty badly, so I shifted my attention back to B3.
Probably because I’d appeared really contemplative, she looked like she’d been overthinking some things, too.
“Sorry, I guess you’re too young to talk about this,” she said with her hand over her mouth. Her tone was apologetic.
“Oh. No, no, I’m old enough for this...” I cleared up the misunderstanding, and my own words made me realize that I was already allowed to become intimate with people. I didn’t really see myself ever using that feature, though.
“I see. I’ll continue, then. While players can have intercourse, a certain problem makes it nearly impossible for it to ever result in children.”
“And that problem would be...?”
“Take a look at this,” she said as she reached into her inventory and took out a knife and a handkerchief, neither of which seemed special in any way. Then, not saying a word, B3 thrust the tip of the knife into the palm of her free hand.
“Huh?!” I exclaimed as the shock forced me to stand up.
“Hyah! Hyah!” she shouted, doing it again and again.
The knife didn’t pierce her hand. No matter how many times she tried, it just couldn’t break her skin.
Eventually, the speed of her attacks became such that it had me worried, but even then, B3’s hand remained unharmed.
Normally, the palm would’ve been covered in holes all over at this point, but no, there wasn’t even a hint of a scratch on it.
Soon enough, I began feeling like she was just showing me some trick, and that was about the time when she stopped.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried to release some blood to make my explanation easier, but my END is so high that this knife just couldn’t do it.”
“Ohh...” I expressed my understanding.
That reminded me that B3’s job was “Shield Giant,” and that she was a long-time player who’d once reached the maximum level available to non-Superior Jobs. It was only natural for her to have a high defense stat, and honestly, it wouldn’t have surprised me if that palm of hers was tougher than my armor.
“We’ll have to continue without an example,” she said. “You have seen what happens when players get the death penalty, right?”
“Well... yeah,” I nodded. I’ve seen it plenty of times in the past month.
“Have you noticed how their scattered blood and other bodily fluids vanish along with the body?”
“...I have.”
The first thing that came to mind was Lei-Lei’s battle that Marie had shown me on her crystal. The melted, liquid flesh and the shreds of skin of the Masters she’d killed had all became particles of light and vanished at the same time.
“This exact same phenomenon happens when you log out,” B3 said.
“The exact same?” I raised an eyebrow.
“For example, if I had gotten some of my blood on this handkerchief and logged out, the blood would disappear at the same time as I vanished.”
“I see,” I said, fully understanding what she was getting at. “So you can’t make children because bodily fluids disappear the moment you log out.”
“That’s exactly it.”
It made perfect sense now. After all, we Masters simply had to log out every once in a while.
“However, some theorize that it might be possible if the Master stays online long enough for the zygote to properly develop.”
Well, that was certainly a reasonable theory. I could totally understand why someone would think that a zygote wouldn’t vanish if it was recognized as a separate organism, rather than just an egg with some genes sticking to it.
“But that’s...”
...difficult, to say the least, I finished silently.
Yesterday, when I’d been kidnapped by The Lunar Society for just about a third of one real-life day, I’d become quite hungry and really needed to pee.
Being online long enough for a zygote to develop into its own organism — which could be anywhere from several days to a few weeks — seemed downright impossible.
“Then what about that boy’s sibling?” I asked.
“In my opinion, the most likely case is that his mother cheated on the stepfather Master with another tian,” B3 answered. “The second most likely case is that the stepfather is actually a tian mer
ely pretending to be a Master, and the child is really his. The third and least likely scenario is that the aforementioned theory was proven right. Though, note that the second one would mean severe punishment for the stepfather, since the law in every country strictly forbids tians to pretend to be Masters.”
“Then I hope it’s the third one,” I said. The other two would definitely leave a bad taste in my mouth.
“It doesn’t look like there will be a good ending to this regardless, though,” said B3.
“Why not? If it happens to be the third one, someone would only have to find the stepfather Master and... ah.”
“You see the problem?” she said.
Sure, someone would only have to find him. However, it was likely that the search would go beyond Dendro.
“I didn’t get to tell you about the special rule regarding search quests,” she added. “The guild refuses to accept them when the one being searched for is a Master who hasn’t been online for a long time. You understand why, don’t you?”
Of course I do.
For tians, searching for offline Masters was downright impossible, and even Masters would find it extremely difficult. They might even have to hire a detective, and even then, the chances of success would be low.
After all, Dendro had players all over the world, not to mention that the only info you started out with was regarding them as they’d been here, not back on the other side.
“Finding Masters that haven’t come online for a while is completely impossible,” B3 concluded. “In fact, when they’ve been away from Infinite Dendrogram for so long, it’s highly likely that they’ve quit, so even if you did miraculously find them, convincing them to return would no doubt be difficult.”
She was completely right about that.
The tians and Masters around the boy knew that, too, and I could easily tell they were avoiding any involvement.
They were right to do so.
For tians, going to the world where Masters returned to — reality — was downright impossible, and though it wasn’t so for Masters, they would still have a low chance of succeeding, not to mention that they had no obligation to dedicate their real-life time to a search because of something in Dendro. I could totally understand that, but...
“B3,” I spoke up.
“Yes?”
“Sorry, but can we postpone today’s quest for a later date?”
“Why?”
“I’m gonna accept that boy’s search quest.”
Despite it all, I just couldn’t turn a blind eye to the downcast, crying little kid.
“I just explained that that quest is impossible,” she objected.
“It probably is,” I agreed. “But ignoring it would leave a bad taste in my mouth.”
“...” B3 fell silent as she placed her hand on her mouth and thought about something.
That reaction was only natural. I was fully aware I was being unreasonable, and I didn’t want to involve someone as logical as her into something so unsound.
“You should—”
“Then I’ll join you,” she cut me off with words I really didn’t expect.
“Really...? Are you sure?”
“I said that I would ultimately let you choose the quest we would take, didn’t I?”
That she had. However, I’d assumed that had only applied when we were talking about normal quests.
“Also, if you don’t mind me borrowing your words...” she said in a gentle tone as she looked directly into my eyes. “Going my own way from here would leave a bad taste in my mouth.”
“Thank you,” I said gratefully.
Then I stood up, walked up to the dejected boy at the counter, and placed my hand on his shoulder.
“We’ll accept your request,” I gently said.
“...Eh?” he exclaimed, thoroughly surprised.
There was hope in his eyes. It was as though they were asking “Really?”
I nodded, and asserted, “We will search for your dad.”
Thus, B3 and I began our first adventure together.
We would brave an impossible quest — the search for a Master.
Our goal... was a happy ending.
Let the quest begin.
◇
We’d accepted the request of the boy named Louie who was searching for his dad. However, it didn’t even count as a quest. Not only did the guild not process it because of its special rules, but it also didn’t appear in my log as an event quest. I didn’t know whether that was some sort of accident, or whether the control AI that calculated quest difficulty just didn’t recognize this as a quest.
Still, even without a difficulty rating, I could tell that a quest to find a person in real life would be, in a way, harder than any other quest in Infinite Dendrogram.
We were now at a diner adjoined to the adventurers’ guild, where we had Louie tell us about his dad.
We asked for his name, job, and anything else that could help lead us to his real-life self. None of what we’d learned was much help, but at the very least, we’d gotten his avatar’s name: Ichiro Shijima. If, as the name implied, he was really Japanese, our search would become somewhat easier.
The difficulty would drop again if that was actually a modified version of his real name, since it would limit our search to names such as “Ichiro Ishijima” or “Ichiro Ushijima,” among others.
And, if we were to be greedy...
“It would really help if that’s his real name...” I muttered.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” said B3. “This isn’t the president or the vice president we’re talking about.”
“Yeah, we can’t expect everyone to be like the aberration or the KoA,” I agreed.
“Indeed, the only people who would play with their real names are people such as myself, Lady Tsukuyo, and our Society’s adherents.”
“True...” I said, before realizing who I was talking to and replying with a sarcastic tone. “Ah ha ha... And why might you be here, King of Secretaries... nay, King of Assassins?”
Before we’d realized it, the KoA who was our upperclassman in college, Eishiro Tsukikage, was sitting at one corner of our table with a tea cup in hand, all smiles. He reminded me of Marie.
They’re similar in more than just jobs, I thought. Now that I think about it, the aberration did a similar thing yesterday.
“I’ve been sitting here since halfway through the questioning, but since no one noticed me, I took the liberty of asserting my presence,” he said.
“And why did you sit here?” I demanded.
“Lady Tsukuyo is still prohibited from logging in, so she had me deliver a message to you.”
“Which would be?”
“It’s a proposition. ‘Now, I’ll fix your arm up if you only join CID.’”
“Hm...”
That... was actually worth considering.
You would never see me become a part of The Lunar Society, but I wasn’t too averse to joining the aberration’s college club. I now knew why I was so afraid of her, not to mention that CID had B3, who would keep her in check. The conditions were definitely attractive, but...
“I’ll give my answer after the weekend,” I said at last.
“Very well.”
Yesterday’s memories were just too fresh in my mind to let me accept the offer so nonchalantly.
With his business done, I expected Tsukikage to leave, but he showed no intention to stand up from his chair. I glanced at him and noticed that he was looking at Louie.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Would you like The Lunar Society to help search for this boy’s father?” he proposed.
I didn’t know what kind of whim or plot had caused him to make this offer. Sure, having the cult’s many adherents helping us would greatly increase the scope of our information network and make the search many times easier, but...
“Why?” I asked, not seeing the reason for this proposition.
The aberration wasn’t here, an
d she probably didn’t know that I’d accepted Louie’s request, so it was highly unlikely that she was related to this offer. This would mean that it came from Tsukikage himself, but I couldn’t see any reason why he would suggest it.
The aberration would obviously do this to make me owe her something, but somehow, I didn’t see that being the case with Tsukikage.
Thus, my question.
“That’s a secret,” he replied.
The cloak and dagger in his words made accepting his proposition seem all the more dangerous.
“We’ll ask for your help if we figure there’s nothing we can do by ourselves,” I said.
“Very well.” He nodded. “We will be ready to assist you.”
For now, I decided to keep his offer as an alternative.
Tsukikage stood up from his chair. Then, seemingly struck with an idea, he turned to say something more.
“Oh, by the way... Take this as simple advice, rather than a proposition, but I suggest you take your search for real-life information to young Louie’s mother — Mr. Shijima’s wife. Just as there are things only parents and children talk about, there are also private talks between spouses. Not to mention that you might find clues in their family home. You should only rely on real-life detectives, your brother, or your friends after you’ve exhausted such sources.”
“...Thanks.”
“With that settled, I bid you goodbye. May we meet again.”
Following his long, oddly specific advice, Tsukikage sunk into his own shadow.
The sight greatly surprised Louie, but Fujibayashi — fully used to it, apparently — didn’t even flinch.
Additionally, Tsukikage left behind a pouch with a little paper saying “Payment for my tea.”
...Guy’s a damn weirdo, but he sure is principled, I thought.
Anyway, his advice was completely sound. If we wanted to find a person in real life, we couldn’t miss a single clue we could find here.
“Where do you live, Louie?” I asked the boy.
“In Torne village. It’s in the north, about half a day away from here by carriage.” That was closer than Gideon, but still pretty far.
“Did you come alone?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “I took a stagecoach that was passing through the village. I used the allowance I got from Dad to pay for it. I also thought of using the money to pay for the guild request, but...”
