WorldEnd: What Do You Do at the End of the World? Are You Busy? Will You Save Us?, Vol. 2

by Akira Kareno

“But! People on the other end can see what we look like when we use the communication crystal!”

  “Well, you know what this is for. Is there a problem?”

  “I’m saying! We’re covered in mud and not dressed very cute, and my hair is a mess!”

  “Oh, you’ll be fine just the way you are. By now, it isn’t a relationship where there’s any point in keeping up appearances, right?”

  “But still, you know…”

  “Because you haven’t seen him in a few days?”

  “Yes. I feel like I need to be ready.”

  “…Huh…?”

  Voices from somewhere.

  They drew closer, accompanied by footsteps.

  He lifted his head and looked in their direction.

  “Sigh… Seeing up close the mind of a girl smitten is more annoying than I thought.”

  In an exaggerated manner, the girl with hair the color of withered grass shook her head in exasperation.

  “That’s not what it is! This is, like, a minimum of courtesy.”

  The girl with cerulean hair argued, her shoulders tensing.

  “Your aloof appeal, which really took its time, by the way, is way too obvious again, y’know what I mean? It’s like, what happened to the defiant Chtholly we had yesterday? I guess it is true that once a normally serious girl becomes conscious of boys, she becomes unruly, since she doesn’t know her limits.”

  “Mm.”

  The girl with dull gray hair nodded shortly in agreement.

  “Are you two siding against me?!”

  The cerulean girl cried in pain.

  The three of them somehow seemed exhausted. Their hair was mussed, their faces covered in mud and dust, and they wore tired linens on their bodies. This was obviously a time where it would be hard to say they looked stylish, even out of empty flattery.

  And another thing. Something, at the very least, apparent from far away.

  They were alive.

  There were no visible wounds, either.

  They moved; they talked.

  “Oh.” Ithea noticed the stare on her.

  “Hmm?” Nephren tilted her head.

  “Huh?” Chtholly turned around and froze.

  “…Yoooouuuuuu threeeee!”

  The darkness before his eyes was now dyed white.

  While the fact that he still could not see anything had not changed, his body knew exactly what it needed to do.

  —There was no need to bend his knees, to gather strength. He didn’t have the time for that. He twisted his entire body and let it fall, as though slipping forward. Pushing himself forward with his legs, as animals were originally made to do, would always delay the initial movement. In the era when the emnetwiht fought with enemies who were far more powerful, they sought a technique that would let them run at a speed beyond their limits. Conceived at the ends of the north and studied in the battlefields to the west, it eventually crystallized. This technique, officially named the Nightingale Sweep, was difficult and would be mastered only by a small handful of adventurers and Quasi Braves. But for those who did, they gained a special move that could deceive even the elves’ eyesight.

  A summary of the result of activating this skill went something like, That man, who’d just been relaxing his knees, without any preparation, dashed at a speed that did not even register to the eye. Then—

  “Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-what?! Wh-wha—?”

  In the next moment, he held Chtholly, who should have been farther away, in a tight embrace.

  “H-hey! Ow! That hurts! I can’t breathe! Stop! I’m covered in mud and I have scratches everywhere and I haven’t cleaned myself and everyone is watching— Are you even listening?!”

  Her words of protest, which she probably wasn’t even aware of herself, of course never reached Willem’s ears.

  “…Where’d this guy come from?” Ithea asked the large lizardfolk man who stood beside her—Limeskin—but he merely shrugged slightly, giving no answer.

  “I said we should have sent word earlier,” Nephren muttered.

  “You did say that, but did you think the officer would’ve been this broken?”

  “Broken?”

  “You know, doesn’t this young man strike you as the type to put up a front, pretend he’s all tough in an unnatural way? Or adopt a cynical attitude like a sourpuss? But then it’s still kind of cute because neither really suits him?” Ithea drew circles in the air with her finger. “That’s why I imagined a more chill reunion, where he just pats her on the head and says, ‘Good job,’ all somber-like, and then Chtholly gets all angry and says, ‘Is that all you’ll say to me?!’ and stuff.”

  “…Willem has always been like this.”

  On the other hand, Nephren spoke smoothly, keeping Chtholly in the corner of her eye.

  “He’s hard-working, straightforward, and doesn’t look at his surroundings very much. He doesn’t stop until he’s broken, and once he does stop, he doesn’t move until he’s fixed. It’s risky and means he can’t be left alone.”

  “Ahhh. I kinda get it, but I kinda don’t.” Ithea tilted her head in thought. “What do you think, Chtholly?”

  “I think you need to stop chatting and help me out here!” she cried in protest.

  “But I believe you should allow him to hug you until he’s finished.”

  “No! Either my spine will snap or I’ll suffocate or I’ll absolutely die of embarrassment before that happens!”

  “I don’t think we need to worry about you suffocating if you’re talking that much.”

  Nephren exhaled slightly, then tugged lightly on Willem’s sleeve.

  She stood on her toes and leaned in to his ear.

  “It’s okay. Everyone’s here. We’re not going anywhere,” she whispered and patted him on the shoulder.

  It seemed her words had an effect. Slowly, reason returned to Willem’s eyes.

  “…Ren.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Nephren nodded slightly when he called her name.

  “Ithea.”

  “Yup.” She raised a hand.

  “And”—he looked down to his arms—“Chtholly.”

  “Just hurry up and let me go. You’re seriously embarrassing me!”

  Once he glanced around and grasped what was going on, he murmured, “Sorry,” and released her from his arms.

  Chtholly stepped away silently and glared daggers at Willem, her face bright red—

  “What a mess.” Ithea grinned mischievously.

  “Yes.” Nephren nodded in defeat.

  —and after a loud crack, Willem’s cheeks burned.

  Everyone, in the Name of Justice

  -from dawn till dusk-

  1. The Proper Use of Love and Justice

  The ceiling in the strategy room was particularly high.

  The desk placed in its center was rather large, and the chair, likely special ordered to match, had an excessively tall back. It was the result of having everything adjusted for those with the largest physiques, since this was a gathering place for soldiers of many races.

  At the moment, the absurdly large lizardfolk—one of the largest—sat down in the sturdy chair made specifically for him, his throat rattling loudly with laughter. His expression was unchanging, which made his laughter feel rather creepy.

  “The omen for Tiat’s maturation as a faerie soldier… Bit early for that, no?”

  Ithea tilted her head as she sat on the chair, swinging her feet freely.

  The three of them had already bathed and cleaned themselves of dust and changed into the informal female guard uniform. It was strange how much more mature they seemed just by wearing clothes different from their casual outfits.

  “I thought the little ones’d have at least two more years until they held a sword.”

  “You don’t look too happy about that,” Willem commented, his cheeks still red and swollen.

  “Well, it ain’t completely a good thing to go to the battlefield while they’re young. There’s a huge risk of accidental de
ath, and they might end up weirdly traumatized even if it does go well. Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this.”

  “But we still have to wish her the best. You know that already, right? She’s always been working her hardest to mature,” Chtholly cut in from beside her.

  “Well, sure, I know that, but…I just don’t know how I feel!” The wrinkles between Ithea’s eyebrows deepened.

  “That’s why I’m here. But anyway, tell me what happened in the end. I heard you lost in the battle at Island No. 15. So why is everyone here?”

  Limeskin’s laughter suddenly stopped, and his polished pebble–like eyes looked straight at Willem.

  “I sssshall ansswer your query, wounded warrior.”

  “O-okay…?”

  Willem found himself flustered, not expecting him to respond to that, of all things.

  “Firsst, allow me to praissse you. The blade you forged ssshone. It cssertainly crusshed the fangss of the beassst. Victory mosst cssertainly sshould have been oursss. However…opening beyond the sssigns of the augury wasss a trap. The fangss had coupled with a different ssset of fangsss. We sspared ourselvesss the recklessnesssss of facing unknown fangsss, sso we made the decssisssion to let the land fall.”

  …Uh?

  “Sorry. I have no idea what you just said.”

  Even if Willem did, lizardfolk had a palate that was shaped differently from the other races, so their pronunciation was hard to understand. And Limeskin was also probably talking in his habitually roundabout way of speaking, so the difficulty of the conversation leaped up tenfold.

  “I sssee.”

  Limeskin’s shoulders dropped, deflated. It was typically an action he would find charming, but it didn’t suit the massive lizard.

  “Well, to sum it up, Timere’d tripped our tactical sensors, but it didn’t seem like we’d be able to win against the Beast,” Ithea piped up. She glanced at Chtholly before continuing. “This girl here seriously had some kind of power-up that I didn’t really understand, so the initial phases of the battle were going super well. Seriously, what was that? I was honestly thinking at one point that we should just leave it all to her and have everyone else retreat.”

  “Seniorious, the most ancient of all holy swords, was even able to cut the Visitors. It won’t lose to any other enemy as long as the right user uses it correctly—right?”

  He touched on the subject, but Chtholly didn’t answer, still turned away in a huff.

  “She’s a sulky one.”

  Ithea grinned. Willem interrupted by clearing his throat.

  “…Anyway. You looked like you were winning, but you couldn’t. What happened?”

  “There was another that didn’t set off the tactical sensors. Beast Six, Timere, is a monster you have to kill a whole handful of times for it to die in the first place. And on top of that, it gets stronger every time it sheds its shell after being killed. This time it was way bigger than usual, a huge monster that was still perfectly fine after we killed it more than two hundred times, and in the middle phases, it was desperate fight after desperate fight, even after Chtholly pushed beyond her limits. There was a lot of bad stuff already going on by that point…

  “But it was after the two hundred and seventeenth kill. Two of them came out of that shell.”

  “Huh?”

  Out came a boneheaded voice.

  “One of them was Timere, as it always had been. But the other was something different.

  “The sensors can pick up all of Six’s invasions, but there’s no way they can detect something hitching a ride. It couldn’t grow rapidly, unlike Timere, so it took time for it to come out. Almost none of the firearms worked against it, so we managed to narrow down which of the Seventeen Beasts it was, but otherwise, we didn’t have a clue. We knew nothing, like what we should do first in order to fight successfully against it, not to mention not knowing if it was even an opponent we could fight and win against anyway.

  “And so, we sent them both along with the island back down to the ground, then pulled out.”

  Well, that made sense. None of the Seventeen Beasts had wings, so they attacked via the very ineffective method of coincidentally drifting ashore. In which case, if there was a way to get them to go back to the surface, then it was possible to concentrate on fighting off the threat before them—

  “—Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  After losing the surface, all surviving life in the world had nowhere to call home but the floating islands.

  In essence, the islands could be seen as all that was left of civilization. Losing one of them meant that this small universe grew even smaller.

  “If we pushed Chtholly, and by that I mean putting her into overdrive, we might have won—lots of the lizard soldiers expressed that opinion. Mr. White Lizard here came to the conclusion that anything we tried in an unexpected battle would be a risk and that we couldn’t discard our greatest strength for poor odds.”

  Limeskin, the white lizard in question, nodded.

  “…”

  For some reason, he glanced once at Chtholly from the corner of his eye.

  “And sso, we have lossst.”

  Then, with an unreadable voice—which was normal, actually—he continued.

  “Ressst easssy—it iss not sssomething for you to fret over. Everything in the ssky will fall one day. Moreover, life asss we know it hass not all come to an end. You being here may alssso be proof of that. We will be bussy from now on. May I leave the tassk of essscorting thossse warriorss home to you?”

  Limeskin glanced toward the three faeries.

  “I guess…I don’t mind.”

  He wanted to know what the soldier meant by, “We will be busy.”

  They probably wouldn’t be able to recover the island that fell. There was grave meaning to this lost fight, and the responsibilities would be huge as well. There was probably much that he had to do as the commander. But now wasn’t quite the time to ask about the things he wasn’t speaking of himself.

  So that was the full account of that long and dangerous battle.

  “You did your best, you three.” He gave his words of appreciation, regretfully thinking how that was all he could do.

  Ithea giggled, Nephren tilted her head, and—

  “Chtholly?”

  —one girl was still looking away in a huff and did not even bother to glance in his direction.

  “You are in quite the mood.” Ithea shrugged, as though giving up on her.

  “Are you okay with that?” Nephren asked, trying to catch a peek at her.

  “…Shaddup.” They were met with the quiet mutter of rejection.

  When they left the strategy room, someone was waiting there.

  There was a semifer girl, her sharp, pointed ears flattened in anxiety.

  “Huh? You’re that…” Before Willem could finish calling out to her, the girl turned her gaze to the one behind him.

  “Uncle!” She raised her voice in delight.

  He turned around slowly. Standing there was a giant lizardfolk.

  “Uncle?” he confirmed.

  “Mm.” He nodded solemnly.

  “You were a semifer? Your fur looks a lot like scales for one.”

  “No.”

  “Then is this kid actually a lizardfolk? Her scales look a lot like fur for one.”

  “No. Thissss girl iss the daughter of an old friend of mine. We have been clossse ssince ssshe wass little.”

  It was a pretty straightforward story, just as he thought might be the case.

  “—What iss the matter, Phyr? Have I not told you to not sssshow your facssse in thesse partsss?” he reprimanded the girl with a rather strong tone.

  “I came knowing I would be scolded. There is no one else I can trust besides you, Uncle,” the girl answered in a flat, quiet voice.

  Limeskin’s eyebrow twitched, or so it looked like. He didn’t have anything like eyebrows, of course.

  “What happened?”

&nbs
p; “A letter came. It said if we don’t call off the ceremony, they will…assassinate Father.”

  Those were not peaceful-sounding words. Willem frowned.

  “—Hmm.”

  “Father told me not to worry about it. He said it is just an empty threat and that the more we pay attention to it, the more confident they’ll become. I do not think that is the case, however. Those thugs are not that soft. But not only has my father said as much, I cannot think of anyone else I can trust but you, Uncle.”

  “And sso hardsship followsss hardsship.” The lizardfolk gazed up at the ceiling. “Phyr. I hate to sssay thiss, but I mussst be going.”

  “Uncle…” The semifer girl’s expression clouded. There was a brief moment of silence.

  “Willem. I have sssomething to asssk of you.”

  “I want to say no,” he responded bluntly.

  “…I have not sssaid anything yet.”

  “I can make a few guesses. Sorry, but I’m pretty busy with babysitting already.”

  He could hear Chtholly’s mood souring behind him. She probably didn’t like being treated like a child, but at the moment, he was going to pretend he didn’t notice.

  “I made up my mind a long time ago that I was gonna stay away from trouble involving women and children.”

  “That’s not very convincing,” Ithea muttered. She probably wanted to say that he was very much involved in the problem of the faerie soldiers despite whatever he said, but he was going to pretend he didn’t hear that.

  “I sssupposse it iss unavoidable… Sso, Chtholly. How iss your condition?”

  “Huh?” Chtholly yelped wildly at hearing her name suddenly called. “Oh, yes. I am recovering. But I don’t think I can use my weapon very well yet.”

  “I do not mind. Very well, I ssshall leave thiss girl’sss problem to you.”

  She blinked.

  “Uh…um…well…I…” After a moment of exaggerated confusion, she closed her eyes and took in a deep breath. She then opened her eyes again. “B-but I’m a faerie. I don’t know anything about this city, and I’ve never guarded anyone before, and I can’t use my venenum right after such a long battle anyway…”

  “However, it ssseemss there iss no one elssse to asssk. You will manage.”