Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, Vol. 1 (light novel)

by Hiro Ainana

  Since I had the use of both hands now, getting down was much easier. When I reached the last branch, I had to remember to grab on to it and hang down for a moment before landing on my feet. I didn’t want to worry Zena by jumping straight down, after all.

  “Wow! Satou, you really are very nimble!”

  “Oh, it was nothing special.” Dodging Zena’s compliment, I returned to our idle chatter.

  As we talked, it turned out that Zena had intended to ask me to lift her up so that she could return the bird herself. Oh, Zena. Good thing I misunderstood, because a skirt wasn’t exactly ideal tree-climbing wear.

  Watching the group of kids practicing their martial arts, I asked Zena a question. “What sort of things does the army do for training?”

  “Hmm… Well, the soldiers train the same way here as anywhere else, but magic soldiers have to be mindful that they don’t use up all their magic. The majority of us try to keep ourselves ready to cast at full power.”

  I see. So they break up their training? It made sense—a magic soldier who couldn’t cast spells wouldn’t be of much use to anyone.

  “The assigned roles of magic soldiers and sorcerers vary based on their attributes. This tends to surprise people outside of the army, but for example, Fire users are the only group that really focuses on direct attack spells.”

  Yeah, I guess fire is definitely attack-oriented.

  “As a Wind user, I have useful spells like Wind Protection, which defends against arrows; Air Cushion, which can stop battering rams; and Whisper Wind, which can convey orders. It’d be great to use Fly for scouting from the air and such, but there’s nobody in the county who knows how to use that.”

  That’s right—wasn’t Zena’s goal to be able to fly?

  “If you learn how to fly, it’d be fun to go on a date in the sky or something.”

  I meant it as a joke, but Zena flushed all the way down to her neck and stammered, “P-please look forward to it!”

  She was cute, but I was worried some ill-intentioned person was going to take advantage of her sooner or later.

  When we emerged on the other side of the park, we’d arrived right at the foot of the windmill.

  We weren’t able to go up to the top, but we did get to see the first floor where they grind the flour. There was something exciting about the sights and thunderous sounds of the dense metal machinery at work.

  But all in all, it was a pretty normal windmill. Since this was a fantasy world, I would’ve liked to see some spirits dancing around as they ground the flour or something.

  With that on my mind, I asked Zena about it. “Couldn’t they use magic to grind the flour somehow?”

  “Probably, but…using a mill is much easier,” she replied, shooting me a look saying, What kind of question is that?

  Our next destination, the manor field, was a little far to walk, so we took a horse-drawn carriage along Center Street. Apparently, it cost one large copper for any destination as long as it was within city limits. The vehicle was clearly meant for sightseeing, as it had no roof and the seats were about shoulder height.

  We moved along through the city at an easy trot. A carriage ride through town in an exotic country with a beautiful girl at my side—this I could get used to. It’d be even better if it was a gorgeous, voluptuous woman, but that was probably a bit too much to ask.

  The cart left the main street and headed north through a workers’ district. There, we saw many more vaguely muscular, stubborn-looking people. We passed by buildings that looked like workshops and factories, then through a lumberyard, until we were before the inner wall of the city.

  Proceeding west, we reached a small path between the outer wall at the western city limit and the inner wall, on the other side of which was the lord’s manor.

  “Once we pass through here, we’ll be right at the field.”

  “These walls are pretty impressive, looking up at them on both sides like this.”

  “Yes! It makes you feel safe, doesn’t it?”

  Zena clenched both fists and drew a little closer to me. At that moment, with what seemed like deliberate timing, the cart jerked abruptly. We must have hit a pebble.

  “Ah!” Zena lost her balance and toppled right into me, forcing me to catch her. She certainly felt a lot softer than she had in her armor before. There still wasn’t much worth mentioning about her chest, but she was very soft and feminine, though I’d rather wait at least another five years or so before doing anything like this.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Y-yes! I’m sorry, I’ll get up right now!” Flustered, Zena quickly pulled away from me. You don’t need to feel so bad about it.

  For just a moment, I could swear I saw the coachman snicker. Was that on purpose?! This driver would make a great wingman.

  After traveling this path for a little while longer, we came upon an open gate with a soldier standing guard. The driver nodded at him lightly, then proceeded through the gate into the lord’s manor.

  The land seemed too small to provide enough food for the entire city, yet too large to serve as the feudal lord’s personal field. Our carriage proceeded slowly along the pastoral road. It looked like the farmhands were harvesting something. Using my “Telescopic Sight” skill, I was able to see that they were gathering the “gabo fruits” I’d seen yesterday.

  And like at the market, a lot of the helpers were kids of only around elementary school age.

  “Those children are probably from orphanages. Since it’s harvest season, the kids from town might have come to work, too.”

  “Are those gabo fruits tasty?”

  “No, not at all. They show up in army rations sometimes, but they’re so smelly and bitter, nobody really likes them.”

  Zena was making an extremely unpleasant face. Did she hate them that much?

  “If they’re that bad, why grow so many?” It seemed like an obvious question as I looked over the large field of gabo fruit. Wouldn’t it be better to just grow, say, potatoes? I wonder if they’re particularly rich in nutrients or calories or something?

  “The civil officials say they’re a reliable year-round harvest. A whole field might not yield too much at one time, but they can be picked just about once a month, and the crop almost never fails. On top of that, it can even fertilize fallow land. It’s thanks to the gabo fruit that the rate of starvation in the city is dropping rapidly.”

  What a convenient fantasy crop. That almost seemed like too much value.

  It may have been secondhand information from an official, but that was still an impressively detailed explanation, Zena.

  “However, it can be grown only in walled-in areas, so the food situation in the countryside is apparently still quite rough.”

  The orchard’s outer wall was lower than the one surrounding the city—maybe about sixty feet? I wonder why it has to be walled in? Is it harder to grow outside, or maybe animals would eat it, or the feudal lord’s just monopolizing it? I found this very puzzling.

  “Is there a reason for that?”

  “They’re goblins’ favorite food. They’ll come and devour them all in a matter of moments if the fields aren’t protected like this. The fruit can’t be exported outside the city, either.”

  Ooh, so there are goblins in this world, too? I’d definitely like to see that. From a safe distance, preferably.

  “It seems like there’d be people who’d try to smuggle them out anyway.”

  “Well, if they were caught, they’d be sentenced to slavery.”

  Yeah, but if there’s a famine, there’d be people who’d risk enslavement anyway and try to smuggle them out.

  “Over there is an anti-dragon defense tower.”

  Zena was pointing at one of three large towers inside the manor grounds. Only two of them had windmills attached at the top like the one I’d seen from inside the city.

  “It seems much bigger and sturdier than the kind inside the city.”

  “Yes, it is. There are large Ma
gic Guns installed there from back when they needed to defend against invasions from flying dragons and wyrms, so the tower has to be solid.”

  Unfortunately, because of the cannon at the top, civilians couldn’t enter the anti-dragon defense tower.

  I had been wondering for a while now: Why wouldn’t they just fight the dragons outside the city instead of here, where there were crops that could easily be ruined by such a thing? Perplexed, I posed the question to Zena.

  “These fields were originally prepared specifically to fight against wyverns,” she explained. Apparently, since attacks had become scarce and the fields were falling into disuse, the current count had decided that the area should be used as farmland as well as a manor so it wouldn’t go to waste.

  I see—so I had the order backward.

  The carriage proceeded along a road that connected the towers. One of them was all but destroyed, crumbling and blackened inside and out. There were a few people taking measurements nearby, so it must have been in the process of repairs.

  “Did a wyvern destroy that tower?”

  “Oh… No, a lesser dragon destroyed it in an attack about two years ago. Apparently, it took out half the towers in the area, and there was even damage to the castle. We were still able to drive it off, though.”

  “Only drive it off?”

  “Well, a lesser dragon is still a dragon, after all. Wyverns are one thing, but defeating a dragon is impossible. You’d have to be a great conjurer like the ancestral king Yamato or a hero from the Saga Empire.”

  I was tempted to look through my Storage, but I resisted. Zena’s story was still continuing.

  “That was enough to scare off the lesser dragon, but forty years ago, when a full-grown black dragon attacked, they couldn’t make a scratch on it. It’s hard to believe, but they say it even destroyed the outer wall! The reason the manor wall is so low is because it was built after that event.”

  “Then how did they fend it off? Did a hero step in and defeat it?”

  “No… After it had eaten its fill of goats from the farms, it simply flew away on its own. I guess from a dragon’s point of view, human beings are nothing more than ants.”

  Were dragons really that strong? Then I wonder if having defeated dragons meant that I could aim for world domination. Not that I had the ambition or drive to do anything like that.

  “That’s right—we talked about this a little in the temple, but what exactly makes someone a ‘hero,’ anyway?”

  “A hero? Well, apparently there’s a powerful magic technique in the Saga Kingdom called Hero Summoning. I heard that the cost of the summoning is enormous, though, so they use it only during the sixty-six-year cycle of the demon lords’ invasion.

  “They say King Yamato and the first emperor of the Saga Kingdom were both heroes called on by the Hero Summoning magic to save the world. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  So heroes were summoned here, huh? Maybe they really were Japanese, then. Yamato was definitely a Japanese name, and even this emperor “Saga” could be, too. And the reason the swords had names like “Excalibur” and “Claíomh Solais” might be connected to that, too.

  At any rate, this “Saga Empire” may just hold the key to getting back to my own world. For now, I wrote a note about it in the networking tab.

  “So does this ‘sixty-six-year cycle’ mean you know when a demon lord will attack next?”

  “It’s more like a period during which he could attack at any time. But as of now, we haven’t heard anything about one appearing.”

  Hmm. I definitely feel like it could’ve happened a while ago, and word just hasn’t gotten around yet.

  “Isn’t it possible that a demon lord’s been revived, and the army just hasn’t heard about it?”

  “The Shiga Kingdom and the Saga Empire have magical means of conveying urgent information, so even if one came back and destroyed the city, word would still get to us.”

  Wow, that’s impressive.

  “Besides, before a demon lord appears, the revered priestess at every temple would receive a divine warning called the Oracle, so we would know about it in advance.”

  Even more impressive. These gods know what they’re doing!

  “The Oracle is delivered before any major disaster, not just a demon lord. But apparently, not a single priestess had a premonition about the starfall two days ago… Perhaps the Oracle didn’t appear because it was on the other side of the barrier to the Valley of Dragons.”

  Oh, that wall thing. So maybe it was in a different god’s domain and didn’t qualify for the Oracle or something?

  “So a ‘demon lord’ probably has an army of monsters, right?”

  “It seems to differ depending on the demon lord. Some have fought on their own, but most of them lead big armies of demons or monsters into battle. They say some have even had human or demi-human armies.”

  Huh! So there’s a lot of variety.

  “But the most frightening subordinates a demon lord can have are hell demons. Even the lesser ones are as strong as that wyvern we fought the other day.”

  “Wow. You’d think ‘lesser’ would mean they’d be weak.”

  “Hell demons are troublesome because they can only be harmed by magic or magically imbued weapons.”

  “So if there are lesser hell demons, are there also intermediate and greater ones?”

  “Yes. They say intermediate hell demons can easily destroy a whole city. Generally, it takes a whole group of knights or royal sorcerers to defeat one. The intermediate hell demons have higher resistance to magic, so weak spells won’t work on them.”

  They can destroy an entire city? I feel bad for any hero who has to fight those.

  But if that’s the intermediate level, does that mean there are even more powerful ones?

  “So what about the greater hell demons?”

  “They’re on the same level as a dragon or a demon lord. No human can defeat them. It’s the kind of opponent where you don’t think about how to win against them—just how to minimize your losses or run away.”

  Then it’s on par with the fully grown dragon we talked about earlier, I guess.

  Huh? Something’s nagging me at the back of my mind… Am I forgetting something? Oh well, I’m sure it’ll come back to me.

  “So which is stronger, a demon lord or a dragon?”

  “A dragon.”

  Wow, that was fast.

  “Once, a long time ago, there was a powerful demon lord who even defeated a hero… But he lost the battle against a dragon.”

  “Then instead of summoning heroes, shouldn’t they just get a dragon to take care of demon lords?”

  “That’s impossible. A dragon might fight demons for fun, but it would never take them down for the sake of humans. And the casualties of a battle between the two would be terrible—worse than the damage from a demon lord alone.”

  I see… So it’s like the gods and the heroes have to collaborate to defeat the demon lord before a dragon appears.

  With the power of Meteor Shower, I might be on the level of a dragon right now. If a demon lord attacked and the hero fighting him lost, I’d use Meteor Shower to kill him from a distance. I’m way too clumsy to fight one up close.

  Too much serious conversation can be exhausting, so as we watched the sheep chewing on grass in the untilled fields, we chatted about our favorite and least favorite foods and such.

  After we left the manor, we were planning to go to a well-known restaurant in the plaza in front of the castle, but it was still a bit early for lunch, so we postponed our trip into the inner wall and headed to the west quarter instead.

  Apparently, there were alchemy shops there, so I wanted to check one out.

  “In addition to stores catering to the not-so-wealthy citizens, there are butchery shops, alchemists, and stores of that sort. There are other things there, too, but…” Zena had gotten embarrassed and stopped there.

  From what I saw on the map, there were also pawnshops, moneylend
ers, and brothels, at the very least. There was even a slave market on this very street. She’d probably been reluctant to talk about those things.

  I had better not push the subject, or it might seem like I’m harassing her.

  After we passed through an area selling groceries and other basic necessities, we started to see shops of a more dubious nature. Sexy ladies and unsavory-looking men were wandering around.

  The plaza in the west quarter had plenty of street stalls, many auctioning off livestock and cattle. On closer inspection, young boys and girls were lined up in cages next to the cattle—slaves. I had seen a fair amount of slaves here already, but this kind of treatment was especially sickening.

  I was tempted to buy all of them and set them free, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to look after them in the end.

  At the front of the plaza, a merchant-looking man was making announcements about the slave market. Apparently, it would be occurring for three nights, starting tomorrow evening.

  Once we left the plaza, a line of brothels greeted us. The scene was strangely reminiscent of a historical drama.

  It would definitely be better to do perverted things with a lady in this line of work of her own free will. Why force a slave into it when you could be with a woman who knows her way around the bedroom and actually wants to be there?

  I wanna go to a bar with some pretty ladies tonight! I wonder if they have hostess bars here? I’d enjoy talking dirty with a woman rather than take a bubble bath or whatever—Oh, shit. I probably shouldn’t be thinking about this when I’m with a girl, even if we’re not involved. Sorry, sorry.

  Along the outer wall, there were public park areas every few blocks. One of them looked to be full of people.

  “Please stop a moment,” Zena suddenly commanded the driver, looking into the crowd.

  “What’s the matter, Zena?”

  “Satou, look over there.”

  Hmm? Isn’t that the tubby priest from yesterday?

  “Let us punish these children of demons! Cast these sacred stones at them and pave the way to purity!” Amid the noise of the clamoring crowd, I could hear the shrill voice of the priest shouting in a near-falsetto. I guess since he wasn’t getting anywhere with his expedition to the east quarter, he was now trying his shtick on his home turf in the west quarter.