by Mamare Touno
Shiroe knew the answer to that, so he gave it.
“Absolutely not.”
They didn’t have to continue this fall.
It wasn’t as if they were rotten fruit on their way to the ground, and this was simply nature taking its course. The world had gone sly and cheap and ugly, and it was fast losing any trace of gallantry and virtue. That couldn’t possibly be okay. Even if that was “the natural way of things,” Shiroe would fight it.
“That would just be lame.”
Naotsugu briefly voiced his feelings.
“……”
Akatsuki kept gazing at the horizon.
When Shiroe had said they’d go on the rescue mission instead of Marielle and the Crescent Moon League members, it had been because he’d calculated that they had a better chance of success than the guild members, both because of their levels and because they’d been through more battles.
That had been one of the reasons, at any rate.
Still, while it might have been a reason for them to accept the mission if offered, it hadn’t been a reason they needed to take it.
Although they were on friendly terms with the Crescent Moon League, it was an independent guild. There had been no call for Shiroe, Naotsugu, and Akatsuki, unaffiliated players, to intentionally take on a long, dangerous mission in the guild’s place. Ordinarily, the idea would have been unthinkable. Marielle had been fully aware of this, which was why, at first, she’d asked them to check in on the younger members who were staying behind once in a while. She’d probably felt it was the very most she was entitled to ask of them. It was only common sense, and under the circumstances, she’d been entirely correct.
Naotsugu and Akatsuki had known that, too. They had no obligation to go rescue one of the guild’s members.
Even so, Shiroe had wanted to take this mission. Logic and calculations were important, of course. He’d compiled and recompiled everything mentally, holding his breath, thinking hard. At the heart of everything, though, there’d been a fierce irritation. Even Shiroe had been startled to discover this vein of rich emotions in himself. He wanted to bless the friends who’d felt the same way, without his having said a word about those feelings, at the top of his lungs.
—That would just be lame.
—It’s ugly.
Although I did say something humiliating, for sure…
At the memory, his cheeks began to burn, but the brisk wind rushed past them. Among the peaks and troughs of his surging feelings, he felt a ticklish sort of happiness and anxiety and a soft, light sense of……euphoria. It was a feeling of rebellion against this degenerating world.
If this was how it was going to be, he had things he wanted to try.
Even if it was only in the area he himself could reach.
Even if it was only while he was here.
As Shiroe thought about this and that in a daze, Naotsugu thumped him on the back.
“If family starts crying, you go help. Everybody knows that. Just because the other guys are pathetic losers doesn’t mean we have to join ’em.”
He didn’t want to think they’d been exiled to a world that ugly and pathetic and boring and hopeless. Shiroe couldn’t hate himself that much. He knew there had to be amazingly cool things like the Debauchery Tea Party in this world, too.
It would have been embarrassing to say aloud, so Shiroe was doing his best not to think about it, but that was what he felt, and it was the answer he’d come up with.
It was his “something better to do.”
“Yeesh. Brute force attacks like that are all wrong. No class. It should really be more like, you know. This. A little peek or something.”
Naotsugu’s words withered the atmosphere at a stroke.
“Then, uh… What sort of thing do you like, Naotsugu?”
Akatsuki was watching Naotsugu coldly, but Shiroe decided, a bit defiantly, to humor him. His naively idealistic thoughts had embarrassed him badly, and he had to take his mind off them somehow.
“Oh, all sorts of stuff. Maids, nurses, you know… Well, no. I guess the standard is a cute little junior. Once you’re out in the working world, those innocent, purehearted kids shine like stars. Like new hires, when they call you ‘Mr. Naotsugu, sir!’ and stuff. Basic things like that are super important.”
“Yeah, the basics really are important. Even team plays in combat are an accumulation of basics!”
Shiroe hadn’t understood half of what Naotsugu had said, but he answered loudly and almost desperately, feeling he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. Akatsuki’s gaze was physically painful.
“Yep, you got it. Team plays are important. That and tactics. Using the land. Like sneaking peeks up skirts on a stairway… And then you get mad at them right after. You yell, ‘You put it out there where I could see it!’ You can’t beat that.”
Forget beating it. Wouldn’t that be a pretty vicious false accusation…?
Such were Shiroe’s thoughts, but of course, Akatsuki couldn’t read his mind, and all he got was a “Stupid Naotsugu is one thing, but I wish you’d act like yourself, my liege. Stupid my liege.”
3
After they finished eating, Akatsuki—who’d gone icy after that particular discussion—began to call the horses back, but Shiroe stopped her. Before her perplexed eyes, he produced a bamboo pipe whose surface was carved into a flowing openwork pattern. It looked a bit like the whistles used to summon horses, but it was beautiful, practically a work of art. At the same time, Naotsugu took out one of the same pipes.
“What is that, my liege?”
Akatsuki cocked her head to one side. Shiroe smiled at her, then blew on the pipe, sending the sound echoing high into the sky. The sound blended with the tone from Naotsugu’s pipe, until the notes were like the calls of two songbirds, twining around one another and riding the wind over the wilderness to dissolve into the clear blue.
“Wait… Are those…?”
Akatsuki’s question was cut short by an eagle’s piercing scream. Two enormous shadows soared toward them on heavy, powerful wings. The two beasts, which were nearly as big as carriages, circled Shiroe’s group twice, then landed with rough force and lowered their sturdy heads at Shiroe and Naotsugu’s feet.
“They’re griffins!”
Shiroe and Naotsugu had summoned imaginary beasts known as griffins. They were flying creatures with the bodies of huge lions and the heads, wings, and forelimbs of eagles. Although their combat abilities varied by subspecies and age, they were on the same level as Chimeras.
“…Well. Yes.”
Shiroe patted his griffin’s neck two or three times, then gave it some raw meat he’d taken out of his pack. They’d bought quite a lot of raw meat at the market before they left. Since it was a harvested item used as a basic ingredient for food items, it was cheap.
“You didn’t really think we were going to ride those horses all the way north, did you? We’d be old before we got there.”
Naotsugu teased Akatsuki a bit spitefully.
“Yes, but why would you summon beasts like… Are we riding them?”
“Yes, we are… Miss Akatsuki?”
“Just Akatsuki.”
Akatsuki barked her correction. No matter how many times Shiroe said it, she insisted that he refer to her casually, by her first name only.
“Akatsuki, then— You’ll ride behind me… Unless you’d mind, of course.”
“I don’t mind… But…”
Akatsuki backed away from the griffin, eyeing it fearfully. Naotsugu was expertly strapping a saddle and girth onto his griffin. Shiroe had given his more meat and was scratching its ears.
“I’d heard that summoning pipes like yours existed. They were given to players who made it through the Hades’s Breath raid.”
“Right. We, um… It was a while ago,” Shiroe told Akatsuki. It was one of the legends the Debauchery Tea Party had left behind, and not many people remembered it anymore.
Shiroe and Naotsugu had won the
pipes deep in an underground tomb where Hades—the king of the dead, a high-ranking undead monster—slept. The pipes were souvenirs of a long, fierce battle against Hades’s four knights, on an altar that was a magical device meant to warp the secret of life into something malicious. Hades had plotted to steal the underground energy from the sacred mountain and use the power to gain eternal life. The players had fought alongside the Simurghs, the rulers of all winged creatures, and after they’d foiled Hades’s plot, the Simurghs had given them the pipes as a symbol of friendship.
“Why do you have those?”
“They make for a great party trick, no?”
Naotsugu answered Akatsuki that time.
These really are sort of embarrassing.
They hadn’t exactly been hiding the pipes, and it wasn’t that they wanted to. It was just that, for Shiroe and Naotsugu, having to explain the details of how they’d gotten them felt pretty awkward. Griffins’ pipes were rare items, the envy of other players. Still, no matter how powerful the actual item was, it was just a reminder of a priceless memory.
“Fasten your sheath and short sword to your belt even more securely than usual. The same goes for your pack. If you have anything the wind could take, put it away.”
Shiroe held out a hand to Akatsuki, who was still hanging back. After starting and then hesitating several times, just as she finally reached for Shiroe’s outstretched hand, she seemed to realize something. Her face went a little red. As Shiroe watched her, puzzled, she grabbed his hand quickly, as though she’d dared herself into it. Shiroe pulled her up to sit behind him; he barely had to pull at all. He didn’t know whether it was because she was small and slender or because she’d jumped just as he pulled, but she was as light as a feather, and it startled him.
“All set?”
“Yes, my liege. No problems here.”
Akatsuki was shifting around restlessly behind Shiroe, and it made him a bit uneasy; he looked back at her.
“Let your weight settle and sit a bit deeper. Hold on to me, too. If you’re scared, you can hang on as tight as you want to… But please don’t grab my stomach like that!”
Naotsugu, who’d been watching Shiroe and Akatsuki and biting back laughter, finally cracked up. They both glared at him, but he didn’t seem fazed by it. He smacked his griffin’s neck.
“Catch you two later!”
The words weren’t so much left behind as ripped to shreds and tossed back by a gale, and the next instant, Naotsugu and his griffin were just a backlit shadow in the clear sky.
“Geez… Akatsuki, are you ready? Then here we go.”
It felt like being thrown into the farthest reaches of the sky and also like falling headlong to the land that spread out far, far below. Akatsuki managed to tolerate the sensation by clinging to Shiroe’s slim back. Shiroe was an academic type, and his back had no extra meat on it. At first, Akatsuki pressed her face into it so that she couldn’t see her surroundings, but after a while, she’d settled down enough to look around.
“It’s a great view.”
Shiroe spoke gently. Having Akatsuki clinging to him for dear life was making him all kinds of uncomfortable, but she was little. At most, she only came up to his shoulder—maybe only to his chest—and she was fine boned. She was so light he was worried the wind might take her. He thought it might have been better to let her ride in front so that he could hold on to her, rather than having her ride behind and hang on to him… Then again, it might have been just as scary for her.
Besides, I’d have had to figure out where to hang on to her…
He ran a detailed mental analysis and came to the conclusion that, since he was holding the griffin’s reins, he’d have had to put his left arm around either her stomach or her upper chest. Either way, the thought of what would have happened if he’d accidentally gotten the wrong place made him turn bright red and break out in a cold sweat. Naotsugu roaring with laughter would have been the least of his worries. Just imagining the possibility of being shoved away—and off—in midair sent Shiroe’s mind into a tailspin.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes— My liege, this is amazing. It’s like we’re floating in the heart of the sky.”
The air rushed past them, roaring, shredded by their flight. By now, the griffin was hardly beating its wings at all. It held them out rigidly, dexterously riding the air currents.
The currents in the atmosphere seemed to bend gently to the left and right, like a river, sometimes rising, sometimes falling. Still, possibly because the griffin had a bird’s unique vision, it chose the rising currents that would work to their advantage, and they were rapidly climbing the slope of the sky.
At some point, there in the blue sky and sapphire sunlight, Naotsugu’s griffin had come up beside them.
“Whaddaya think?! Isn’t it awesome?!”
More than pride, Naotsugu’s words shone with the simple exhilaration of flying. On seeing his smile, Akatsuki—who usually had nothing but scorn for the immature, vulgar Naotsugu—broke into a very rare smile of her own. It was like watching a flower bloom.
“It’s fantastic. Really fantastic. The blue is crystal clear.”
Still facing forward, Shiroe gave a tiny smile that curved just the corners of his lips.
They were right. Skimming through the blue sky was rare ecstasy.
4
“—No enemies ahead.”
In response to Akatsuki’s hushed voice, Naotsugu flashed a hand sign.
“Let’s go.”
They were in the Depths of Palm, an ancient underground road that ran beneath the Tearstone Mountains. They’d entered the dungeon fifteen long hours before. According to the rough map Shiroe was drawing, they’d already traveled about twenty kilometers as the crow flies. Shiroe had been here before, when Elder Tales was a game, but he’d never realized just how big the place actually was.
It had been three days since their departure from Akiba, and they were traveling fast. In terms of simple speed, the griffins they rode traveled about three times as fast as horses. However, the fact that they were able to completely ignore all obstacles on the ground meant they were covering close to ten times the distance in the same amount of time. The griffins’ ability restrictions meant they were only able to ride them for four hours per day, but even then, they’d only taken three days to cover a distance that might have taken two weeks on horseback.
Yesterday, though, their journey had hit a snag.
They’d guessed as much, and when Shiroe and the others reached the Tearstone Mountains, their predictions had been confirmed: The mountains were home to wyverns. Wyverns were a fairly low-level dragon subspecies. Although they looked a lot like dragons, they had no front legs, and they weren’t able to use magic or Dragon’s Breath.
That didn’t mean they were easy to deal with.
Dragons had the highest Health and Defense of all monsters. They were fast and powerful, and some were even highly intelligent and able to use magic. In Elder Tales, as in many fantasy stories, dragons were an Adventurer’s greatest nemesis. Wyverns might be a low-level subspecies, but they were still dragons. Although they couldn’t use magic, their tails were sharp and as hard as iron, and their razor-like wings made them as fast as rocs.
Of course, Shiroe, Naotsugu, and Akatsuki’s abilities were as high as player abilities could get. If the three of them fought one wyvern on the ground, they would have been able to defeat it with ease. Still, if attacked by a flight of wyverns in midair over the mountains while riding the griffins, they’d have a very hard time winning.
The Tearstone Mountains had been a haunt for wyverns ever since the old Elder Tales era, and Shiroe had been prepared for this situation. That was why they’d avoided blindly rushing into the airspace over the mountains. If they’d happened to get themselves entangled in an aerial battle without a plan, they might have been able to defeat a few wyverns, but they would have been attacked by several dozens of the dragons in waves that just kept coming and
would eventually have been dashed to the ground.
There was no way to retire gracefully from aerial combat. The loser was fated to be forcibly sent to their place of execution, several hundred meters below.
Shiroe and his group, who’d avoided that trap and were lurking as quietly as they could on the ground, had four options: (1) They could take a big detour to the ocean; (2) they could trek through the dense forest that covered the Tearstone Mountains, crossing the range that way; (3) they could cut through the Depths of Palm, a complex of ancient tunnels and mineshafts that ran deep under the Tearstone Mountains.; or (4) they could go up the roads that ran through the mountains. After some discussion, Shiroe and the others decided to go through the tunnels. All things considered, that route would take the least amount of time, and it seemed to be the safest course.
Fifteen hours ago, they’d entered the tunnels through the ruins of an enormous ancient construction site cut into the rock face in the forested foothills of the mountain. Instead of the rough dirt-walled cavern they’d expected, the tunnel proved to be a vast underground passage with pale gray concrete walls that ran on and on in the glow of their Magic Light. Like the main drainage tunnel of an underground water treatment plant, the passage was interrupted at regular intervals by narrow branch tunnels to the right and left, and sometimes they passed dull, boxy rooms whose original purpose was a complete mystery.
The intent of the space’s designer and any traces of its users had been eroded over the aeons, until now they lay buried under the dust and the rubble. The current owners of this enormous cavern and its underground streams were the ratmen.
Among the many species of demihumans that populated this world, ratmen were a fairly low-ranking variety. As far as appearance went, they looked like something halfway between a human with a rat’s head and a rat standing on its hind legs. They were about as tall as a middle schooler, but the smooth, damp-looking fur that covered them from head to toe made it difficult to see what their bodies were shaped like. They could use simple tools, but to high-level players like Shiroe and the others, their combat abilities were no threat whatsoever. Although it depended on the individual, ratmen tended to be even weaker than goblins or orcs.
