by Mamare Touno
“If you’re able to relax now, straighten your spine. We’re being watched by a crowd, you know. Your steps must be light as a feather. —After all, Master Shiroe, you’re our pitch-black counselor.”
However, Henrietta herself lectured him like a schoolmistress. There was no telling how she’d interpreted his smile.
Shiroe concentrated on keeping his back ramrod straight. Solicitous toward Henrietta in his arms, he raised his left hand, being careful not to hamper her movements, leading her fingertips.
Shiroe and Henrietta danced, turning round and round.
The music sounded much clearer than it had just moments before. He heard the melody, rode it, and his body moved naturally. His toes and Henrietta’s crossed the hall, stepping enchantingly, keeping perfect time.
It must have been true that he’d relaxed a bit. Up until now, the great hall had been no more than a background, but now he could really see it.
Dancers spun around them like fluttering petals. The musicians performed their chamber song in perfect harmony, as if intoxicated.
Countless eyes watched the two of them. At this point, he could hear their quiet conversations clearly, even the spiteful whispers: Apparently we can’t write them off as mere backwater bumpkins.
“Now then, one more dance. Let’s leave every last one of those gossipmongers speechless.”
“Understood. …Milady.”
As the next piece began, Shiroe and Henrietta took their first step into another dance.
1
“Forest Ragranda?” Touya’s voice pitched louder.
From the name, it sounded like a dungeon. When Touya hit him with that inevitable follow-up thought, Naotsugu told him, “It’s not like a dungeon, it is a dungeon. Don’t be dumb.”
The sky had been lavender up until a little while ago, but now it was dyed deep indigo, and the field of the abandoned school where the group had decided to stay glowed red in the light of several bonfires.
Tonight, they were having a barbeque to celebrate their arrival at the base camp.
All the participants—around sixty, from what he’d heard—had gathered in the schoolyard and were noisily enjoying their meal.
It was August. The land had been scorched by the sun during the day, and it held on to that heat. However, the dry night wind felt good on their skin, and although they were sweaty, it wasn’t that unpleasant.
Naturally, the food was superb.
Everything Captain Nyanta cooked was delicious, and when they ate in a big group this way, the atmosphere was indescribable. Touya had always loved this sort of thing. When he thought back, he seemed to remember pestering his sister, Minori, because he wanted to eat things served at the food stalls on festival days.
Minori had been bustling around handing out drinks, but when Touya waved her over, she came running. “What is it?”
“Hey. Minori. It sounds like we’re going to a dungeon. Did you know that?”
“What? A dungeon?!”
Minori cried out in surprise, just as Touya had a moment earlier.
It was a three-week summer camp, after all. They’d naturally assumed there would be combat training, but they hadn’t expected to go to a dungeon right off the bat.
“Me, too?” At her words, Naotsugu nodded.
“I know it’s gonna be a stretch for you, Minori. You’ll feel better being on a team with Touya than you would if you fought on different teams, though, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
Touya nodded vigorously. Touya and Minori were twins.
In terms of exact birth times, Minori was technically older, but as far as Touya was concerned, just being older didn’t make her his guardian. The feeling that he was a guy—and his big sister, a girl—was stronger. Since that was the case, although he wouldn’t call himself her guardian, he did think he was the one who should do the protecting.
They’d be teaming up the whole time they were in this world anyway, so they might as well be together right from the start. More than that, Touya thought, if his sister got pulled into some kind of trouble, he couldn’t even imagine not being able to be right there with her.
“Yes, that’s…true.”
Apparently his sister felt the same way. She nodded, meekly.
“Mew could go with the coast group if mew’d like, Minoricchi, but getting used to dungeons will put you mew in good standing later,” Captain Nyanta said to her. He’d come up carrying a big, square platter piled high with grilled horse mackerel.
“The coast group…? What’s that?”
Nyanta answered Minori’s question with a courteous explanation:
Apparently, even though they were all newbies, there was quite a spread in their abilities. During the summer camp, there were plans to use this abandoned school building as a base camp, then split them into smaller groups by level, and put them through a variety of courses.
Players whose levels were extremely low—less than 20—would be fighting wild animals in the area around the school and giant crabs at the coast. They’d be accompanied by leaders and healers, so they’d be quite safe, and they should be able to accumulate experience nicely.
However, they’d be going up against solitary targets, and they wouldn’t be forming parties. This was because, when working together as a party, if you didn’t know what sort of special skills your main class had, what you could do with them, and which situations they were best used in, players couldn’t combine their strengths. That was another reason for putting them through individual special training at this stage.
As a matter of fact, lots of the campers—Minori included—had gone down to the beach that afternoon, to “observe” it. True, Marielle had dragged them along with her, but they’d ended up playing at the shoreline in swimsuits. Minori felt a bit bad about that.
They had pushed all the work of setting up camp and carrying luggage onto the guys and had frolicked without a care in the world, as if this was vacation.
Marielle and some Crescent Moon League girls she was friends with had even had fun playing with a beach ball. “Wahoo! This is great! This’s so much fun! It’s summer, y’know? Summer means swimsuits! Talk about happy,” she had proclaimed loudly. Her power to pull people in was truly fearsome.
Her bombshell figure was fearsome as well, and Minori had been just a little ashamed of her own childish swimsuit. However, if she’d overreached her style choice, that would have been embarrassing, too.
Adventurers whose levels were between 20 and 35 would undergo combat training in parties. There would be two types of battles: outdoor and indoor. The outdoor training would be held at the nearby Kaminasu Reservoir.
Meanwhile, the indoor training would be held in Forest Ragranda, the dungeon Touya had just heard about. It was located roughly half a day’s journey from where they were, toward the peninsula’s mountains. They’d be camping there during their dungeon expedition, and in a way, it was the hardest of the training courses.
Since there weren’t many players whose levels were 36 and over, they’d be doing individual training. They’d be based out of the school building, and would receive instruction and tips on combat from high-level players. Every player was supposed to aim for level 40.
Touya’s combat level was 29. At Hamelin, he’d been made to work as vanguard for a hunting party, so he had passable skills.
Forest Ragranda, an underground ruin, reportedly held enemies with a wide range of levels. Players between levels 20 and 35 would be tackling this dungeon; Touya’s level of 29 put him right in the middle, and it was likely that he had some difficult battles ahead of him.
When he imagined it, Touya felt the will to fight building inside him.
On the other hand, his sister Minori’s Adventurer level was 21. Her level in her subclass—Tailor—was 32, which put her far ahead of Touya’s subclass, but that wouldn’t help her in combat. In terms of level, Minori would be forced to struggle hard. I’ve got to protect her, Touya thought.
“Wel
l, we’ll explain all that directly beforehand. If your levels are twenty-nine and twenty-one, your balance isn’t that bad. All mew have to do is use your special twins’ teamwork to fill in that gap.”
Captain Nyanta squeezed kabosu citrus juice over the grilled, salted horse mackerel and began happily munching away. Possibly he’d been released from cooking duty for the day: He poured liquor from a jar into a bowl, which he then drained, looking truly satisfied.
“A dungeon, huh… I’m getting psyched!”
Touya couldn’t stop the excitement from bubbling up inside him.
While he’d been Hamelin’s captive, he’d gone hunting outside the town, but because of the round-trip distance and the balance of their skills, he’d never gone into a dungeon.
Dungeons in Elder Tales weren’t necessarily underground prisons, as the name implied. Dungeon was the general term for enclosed structures in which monster battles were fought, such as ruins and castles, fortresses, towers, temples, and caverns.
Many dungeon zones were ruins from the Age of Myth, relics of the magic civilization, or simply natural caverns. Since these ruins had been turned into zones that were bases of activity in the wilderness, it was easy to identify invasion routes. There were many security advantages, they were sturdy, and therefore demand was high.
In this case, demand referred to demand from the monsters.
Many dungeons ended up being inhabited by monsters, regardless of the intent of their creators or those who had abandoned the space. Demihuman races who were intelligent after a fashion—such as orcs, goblins, and ratmen—settled in them and used them as fortified strongholds. Magical beasts such as Owlbears and Chimeras simply used these zones as dens, the way bears used caves.
Monsters with high intelligence, such as dragons and some high-level undead, were known to choose dungeons with high difficulty levels as places to hide their treasure.
Even though Touya had yet to invade a dungeon, he’d been part of Log Horizon for two months already. During his time at the guild house, he’d become great friends with Naotsugu and Nyanta, and they’d told him all sorts of things about battles in Elder Tales. Over the course of listening to them, he had accumulated a fair bit of dungeon knowledge.
Naotsugu said that battles in dungeons are way harder than field battles!
Touya was all fired up.
Naotsugu was Touya’s current master.
Shiroe was Touya’s benefactor and teacher, but when it came to weapon attack techniques and vanguard skills, he couldn’t compare to Naotsugu. Yet even then, Shiroe had considerable knowledge, so he could probably have taught Touya what he was supposed to do.
However, Log Horizon currently had Naotsugu, and Naotsugu was an outstanding warrior. His history in Elder Tales rivaled Shiroe’s, and even on the server, his experience was top-class. He was a Warrior, too, and Shiroe had recommended it, so at present, Naotsugu was teaching him.
Touya liked Naotsugu just as much as he liked Shiroe: He had a friendly personality that masked the age difference between them, and yet he was reliable, one of the good guys. Touya thought that men really needed to be about that, and tough.
Having been taught thus by Naotsugu, Touya was very conscious that battles were something to be challenged.
Someday I’ll tackle my first dungeon and be on my way to becoming a full-fledged Adventurer. Saying the idea hadn’t been on his mind would have been a lie.
“Okay, Minori! Let’s do this! Starting tomorrow, we hit Forest Ragranda!!”
“Oh, Touya. …Honestly. I will catch up to your level, just you wait.”
Minori seemed to have prepared herself; as she watched Touya, her expression was brave.
The two of them bumped their fists together in a greeting they’d shared since they were small.
The flames of the bonfires that crackled and snapped in the Zantleaf schoolyard that night seemed to give their blessing to newbies, and the resolve and determination they held that focused on the training set to begin on the morrow.
2
The following morning. Minori and the others were making for the hills at the center of the Zantleaf peninsula.
There were no steep mountains on the peninsula. Instead, the whole area was covered with rolling hills. There were headsprings all through the countryside, ranging in size from puddles to ponds, and their pure waters flowed into the Great Zantleaf River, or directly into the ocean.
Even though it was only a few dozen kilometers away from Tokyo in the old world, in Elder Tales, it seemed like an untamed paradise.
In fact, even before they reached this place, they’d spotted lots of small, wild birds they’d seen before in the old world, such as bush warblers, Japanese tits, and crested kingfishers. They’d also seen deer. Wild animals like these could now be found all over the area controlled by the Japanese server.
The trees also reproduced vigorously. They didn’t see any sacred, ancient trees like the ones in the town of Akiba, but Minori and Touya were deeply moved at the sight of several thousand magnificent Japanese cedars that stretched up into the sky, trees so thick they couldn’t reach around them even if they linked hands.
Minori and Touya had been born and raised in Tokyo. Up until now, they had never felt the overwhelming power of nature.
The sight left Minori speechless, but Touya kept repeating the word “Awesome!” over and over, with his mouth hanging open.
How can my brother have such a tiny vocabulary? As his sister, it’s a little embarrassing…
That was what she thought, and she meant it, but on the other hand, the fact that he was able to honestly express surprise and delight warmed her heart.
Their destination, which they reached after going up and down many, many hills, was a clearing where the trees had been cut away. When she kicked at the leaf mold that covered the ground with her toe, she exposed stone paving. At the edge of her field of vision she could see a huge, leaning torii gate, bleached nearly colorless by its long exposure to wind and rain.
Apparently this had once been the grounds of a shrine.
The fourteen members of the group who had journeyed here together dismounted from their horses, gathering in the center of the cleared square. They’d left the camp at the abandoned school before dawn and had reached their destination a little before noon.
They’d stopped to rest several times on the way. Minori hadn’t imagined that journeying through mountains would require so much time.
In the center of the group of newbies stood Naotsugu, Nyanta, and Lezarik, a male Cleric who’d been sent by the Knights of the Black Sword.
Nyanta pointed at the opening of a big stone cavern that they could all see.
“That’s Forest Ragranda. The zone inside is quite extensive, but… Generally speaking, if mew turn right at the first T crossing, mew’ll reach a slightly easier area, while if mew go left, mew’ll find yourselves in a slightly more challenging area.”
The newbies looked at the mouth of the cavern and gulped.
To tell the truth, Nyanta hadn’t had to point it out to them. Their eyes had been riveted on the hut-like, underground entrance made of giant stones ever since they entered the small clearing.
Snakelike vines tangled around the opening, and although it was tattered, a ritual straw rope was strung across it. However, there was no hint of anything sacred in the air. All that was there was something rotten and poisonous, something that could only be called miasma.
“Oh, uh… You’ll run into some small magical beasts in there, but most of the monsters are undead,” Naotsugu commented, as if encouraging caution.
Undead.
It was the general term for monsters that, for various reasons, had been unable to die completely, or were driven by astral energy which had been bound to this world due to a curse or some other malicious reason.
Skeletons and Zombies were typical examples, but the term also included some monsters—such as Banshees—that didn’t have physical bodies.
&
nbsp; “This is a camp to hone your skills, and knowing your own limits is a skill. Always keep the way out in mind, and come back to the entrance when mew decide it’s time.”
“That’s right. Take real good care of your lives.”
Nyanta and Naotsugu both cautioned them.
“Naotsugu, Nyanta, and I will set up camp here and wait for you to return. We’ll camp in this clearing, and you’ll go into the dungeon every day. There’s no need to capture it all in one day. I’ll recover your health if you come back to camp, so don’t worry about that.” Lezarik was a stern-faced man, but apparently he was good at looking out for others, even so. He spoke as if to reassure them.
“Huh?! You’re not coming in, master?!” Touya yelled.
In response, Naotsugu grinned at him and nodded.
“Well, duh. This is a drill for newbies, yeah? It wouldn’t be much of a drill if you had a veteran along. You’re a vanguard; you know this stuff. If I was the tank, you wouldn’t get any practice.”
This was true, come to think of it, but Minori still shrank back a bit.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Touya; not at all. On the contrary, she’d heard that Touya was an excellent tank (for a beginner, anyway). If anything, Minori was worried about her own recovery power.
Touya couldn’t fully display his all-important stamina if the number of recovery spells he could get was limited, could he?
Still, since Naotsugu and Nyanta, their instructors, were saying this, she couldn’t object. No doubt they were leaving it to them because they believed they could do it, and in that case, it was their duty to live up to those expectations.
The other newbies looked worried, too, but they were probably thinking the same thing. They all nodded.
Next, they split into teams.
Since the dungeon diverged into right and left sections inside, the eleven newbies were divided into two groups, one with higher skills, one with less advanced skills. Naturally, Minori and Touya were in the lower group. Their faces tense, Minori and the others split into two parties according to the list the Cleric read off.
