by Mamare Touno
“It looks like this was a training ground.”
“A training ground? That’s why it’s been leveled a bit, then,” Takayama responded, accepting the idea.
Now that she was paying attention, she saw that the larger rocks seemed to have been moved all the way over to the thicket of trees. When she looked closely, there were scattered fragments of wood and pieces of battle gear in the gaps between the rocks. This place had probably been used for quite a long time.
The idea of Goblins training themselves had never occurred to her before, but if they were plotting war, it was only to be expected. That said, she couldn’t imagine that they’d managed to amplify their military power that way—compared to Adventurers, Goblins’ levels were very low.
Having thought that far, Takayama registered Krusty’s gaze, wondered at the seriousness in it… And then, in the next instant, she understood:
Goblins. Conducting combat training.
That was a possibility that hadn’t existed before. Just as Takayama and the others were attempting to conquer the Seventh Fall raid using a method that was completely different from conventional ones, the Goblins would be able to prepare a return strike using methods that were completely different from anything they’d used before now. This world was not Elder Tales. Takayama wondered how often she would have to realize that before it finally sank in. She was filled with the urge to rail at her own incompetence.
“Milord, let’s return immediately, report this to the rest of the army and send word.”
“We’ll have to issue orders to search the training ground and investigate its influence.”
“Yes, sir.”
After this terse exchange, the pair went back the way they’d come, over the dry riverbed, heading for the village. First, they needed to return to the settlement and meet up with Richou and Kugel from the scouting team. Then they would probably have to travel along the ridge and return to the headquarters.
Takayama was flustered, and it took her longer than it should have to notice that her weapon, a great, folding, military scythe, was vibrating slightly. In the blink of an eye, it emitted a strange, metallic sound and cast a hot red light over the area.
This weapon had been acting strange lately.
It wasn’t that its performance had deteriorated. On the contrary: It seemed as though its offensive abilities had increased, so she hadn’t sent it out for repairs, but even on this battlefield, it had sometimes begun to vibrate and radiate enough heat to make her writhe.
As a result, with a dubious expression on her face, Takayama drew her weapon from her back, intending to check its condition carefully. It should have been a casual activity, one that required hardly any thought at all.
However, an impact as if a large dump truck had crashed into it ran through Takayama’s arm. The shock had been so great she knew the bones of her arm had shattered instantly, and her eyes went wide. Krusty snatched the weapon from her, and then she saw a dark red space envelop him, cutting a sphere out of the world.
Her own weapon flashed red, sending a magnetic field out from the center of the warp, drawing everything into it.
It seemed to be enfolding the guild master of D.D.D. into itself.
Krusty had used his other hand to shove Takayama away, but she didn’t recall asking him to do any such thing. Desperately, she reached out for him, thrusting her hand into the warping space.
However, there was a sharp, severing sound, and then the silence of the night left Takayama behind.
Her right arm had disappeared, along with her old friend Krusty and her great scythe, which bore the name “Calamity Hurts.”
1
He seemed to be on a road, late at night.
However, his surroundings weren’t dark. White security lights shone down on the asphalt, throwing black shadows that stretched far away.
Shiroe had determined that it must be late because the shopping district was deserted, its shutters closed, and because everything was deeply, eerily silent.
He passed a McDonald’s and a cell phone shop and crossed in front of a florist’s sign without looking up. He was used to seeing such sights, and traveling through them. What was weird was that there were no people.
The pedestrian-only shopping corridor down which Shiroe was walking was a bit less than an hour from Ikebukuro, a street built around a station so minor that the local residents were careful to use the term “the Tokyo metropolitan area” when referring to their location. Stations with “north” or “south” tacked onto the same place name were scattered nearby. In other words, it was a suburban city that was developing into a bedroom town.
Shiroe had been born and raised here.
However, the town seemed contrived, as if it had been faked, and he felt as though it had always treated him as a stranger.
This town, New Town, had a big population.
It had all the facilities that were required in order to live without inconvenience.
That said, the distance was tricky, and residents who were searching for home appliances or clothes or miscellaneous hobby goods all flowed into the city proper, which meant that the town had no commercial facilities to speak of. This shopping district mirrored the town itself: It wasn’t inconvenient, and it had everything. However, if you began to look for something, you generally wouldn’t find it.
It was a town that couldn’t even be called a small city. It was something like an accessory to Tokyo, and it had no center by which to define itself.
Shiroe’s parents had said they’d moved here when they got married. Their two-story house wasn’t small, but it wasn’t spacious, either, and there were many houses that were exactly the same on its street, like so many identical sisters. That residential district, the station-front area, the few vestigial fields, and the trees that lined the street were commonplace and ordinary, the sort you could find all over Japan, and they flowed past and away.
Because this centerless town had nothing it needed to protect, it changed rapidly. Neither its token station building nor its market street had any stores that could be called long-standing, and their tenants changed regularly. Residents came and went frequently as well.
The same could be said for Shiroe’s friendships. Shiroe’s elementary school had seemed pointlessly big, and one-third of its classrooms had been empty. He didn’t know whether they’d expected that many children when they’d designed it, or if it had had something to do with the city’s budget situation. From elementary school through middle and high school, the boys and girls his age had changed at dizzying speed. Now he understood that that had been something like the metabolism of New Town itself. However, as a boy, Shiroe had felt that the world was rather vague and unreliable, and that people and things could disappear at any moment.
Come to think of it…
Remembering abruptly, he looked up.
There had been a local shop on this street, a place that had used eggplant curry, a minor menu item, as its specialty dish. It had been next to the anmitsu dessert shop, he thought, after the fruit shop and the bag store. He’d hung out with friends there several times in high school. It had been a cheap-looking place, and a nostalgic one.
However, the sign with the drawing of the shady-looking Indian wasn’t there.
For a moment, Shiroe was bewildered, but then he remembered with a twinge of sadness.
It had slipped his mind, but the Indian curry house had gone out of business long ago. A mysterious establishment known as a “beef bowl café” had come in after it, then gone under in a few months, as expected, and had been followed by a ramen chain with a flashy sign that had been expanding its influence in the city center. Shiroe, who came back home from university during the long breaks, remembered it all clearly.
He’d gone to the ramen shop once, but the taste had seemed likely to give him heartburn, so he hadn’t gone back.
Although it had gone out of business, what Shiroe kept wanting again was the curry shop. The proprietor, a Muslim
who spoke in Yokohama dialect for some reason, had obviously not been Indian, and the curries they served had been less like Indian-style curry than Japanese home cooking (actually, no matter how he thought about it, they’d tasted like that instant brand, Vermont Curry). However, its affordable prices and the astonishing amount of eggplant in the curry had made for the occasional feast to spice up his life.
It’s too bad it went under.
When he looked up with a sigh, the store was the ramen chain, with its gaudy sign of dancing black and red letters. Shiroe stopped, observing the shop carefully. The shutter held the words CLOSED WEDNESDAYS. The storefront, which normally had lots of banners hung out, was quiet, and the store name, which should have been written on the projecting awnings, was blurred and illegible.
Shiroe scratched at his cheek with his index finger, then came to a conclusion:
I see. This must be how it goes when you lose your memories.
The name of that ramen chain no longer existed inside Shiroe.
“I suppose that sort of thing happens.”
It wasn’t much of a shock.
He’d predicted that this would happen, and it didn’t strike him as much of a loss. People’s memories faded until they no longer remembered where they’d put them, and, like junk inside a treasure chest with a broken lock, they thinned and vanished.
The sight of the Silver Sword members falling in the midst of their attempt came back to him.
He’d known that if he challenged a raid, he would die. In the first place, raids were something you attempted repeatedly, accumulating experience, confirming your capture method, and then broke through. They weren’t taking on lower-level enemies, the way they had when they’d gone up against the sahuagins and goblins, and so it was only natural that there would be sacrifices, himself included.
Shiroe felt rather troubled and lonely.
That faint emotion was very nostalgic.
It would have been safe to call it the main hue that had colored the young Shiroe, known as Kei Shirogane.
In elementary school, and in middle school, and afterward.
Abruptly, Shiroe got the feeling he’d been harboring that emotion as he walked through the night.
He couldn’t make out even 20 percent of the store names clearly.
…Even though this was the local commercial street of a place where he’d lived from birth through high school. The rapidly changing tenants had touched Shiroe’s life briefly and vanished, but it was likely that from their point of view, he’d been the one to disappear. They’d come into contact very briefly, left traces you couldn’t even call traces, and evaporated. Before long, even the traces known as memories had vanished.
Considered rationally, Shiroe was the one who’d done the forgetting, and the stores on the street had been forgotten.
However, he felt wounded. It was as if he’d been betrayed.
When he searched for the reason, he was ashamed.
He knew his classmates from elementary and middle school probably didn’t remember him.
It was only natural not to remember a classmate who’d tended to miss school, hadn’t adapted to the class, and had always stayed in the library until dusk. Shiroe reproached himself, realizing that he’d been superimposing past classmates—people even he didn’t remember—on the stores before him.
Venting on others for no good reason. That was awfully selfish.
Even though Shiroe had been the one who’d left nothing in the town where he’d been born, this town which seemed to have everything.
Shiroe walked along the silent street, illuminated by mercury lamps.
At some point, he’d left the business quarters, crossed a bridge that looked modern but was oddly dilapidated, and neared the tree-lined street that led to the elementary school.
He was the only moving thing in this town, but the noise of heavy vehicles passing through echoed from the distant highway. The sound was like the faraway moan of the wind, and with that as background, Shiroe went on, watching his feet.
Reaching a large park, on a whim, he turned slightly and headed into it. The park surfaced palely, illuminated by security lamps, and as he’d anticipated, no one was there.
A pond stood there, covered in tiles with drawings of fish, the whole thing built large enough for children to splash around in. But now it only lay there, the surface of the water reflecting the light. Shiroe and his shadow found a bench from which he could look out over the man-made pond and sat down.
In other words, he concluded, this was probably a type of near-death experience.
Shiroe had died in the middle of the raid with Silver Sword.
In accordance with the rules of this other world, he would probably resurrect at the entrance to that raid zone, but this was a time lag, and the abnormal experience of death was showing Shiroe this dream.
He leaned against the back of the bench, looking up at the sky.
There wasn’t a single star to be seen.
…And so here I am again.
He gave a lonely smile.
Shiroe had spent many, many nights on this bench. He’d been raised in a hands-off household where both parents worked, and he’d been a regular guest of this nighttime park since he was young enough to make the staff at the city’s welfare center frown when they heard about him.
It wasn’t that he’d liked this place. He just hadn’t had anywhere else to go. When he stayed at his house alone, even if he crawled into bed, the painful feelings hounded him, and in the business quarter, there were flashily dressed boys and girls who frightened him. As an elementary schooler, the only way Shiroe had been able to forget his unpleasant feelings was to walk around the late-night town until his legs were heavy, then sit down on this park bench.
It wasn’t the sort that had made him hold his chest and squeeze his eyes shut when he was a kid, but a faint pain, which unerringly brought a quiet certainty to Shiroe. The certainty that, apparently, he’d failed again.
Shiroe had come to this exact spot many times in the past.
Ever since he was small, he’d grown up hearing people say he was “mature,” and it was true that he’d had decent comprehension and good self-control for a child. However, because this was true, children his age had seemed savage and irrational to him, and it had created a distance between them. As a result, he’d made a lot of mistakes.
He’d squandered the consideration of his classmates.
He’d coldly shaken off the hands that had been extended to him.
He’d held kindness in contempt.
He’d abandoned places when he should have stood firm and fought for them.
He hadn’t been able to understand his parents’ troubles or feelings.
All had been trivial, but they’d all been irreparable failures.
Every time he’d failed, the young Shiroe had cried on this bench, and he’d sworn in his heart to do something about it. Some things had gone well, and he’d managed to think he’d improved a little. Then he’d fail again, somewhere, and he’d sit on this bench, feeling the same way: troubled, or sad, or as if he was defective.
When you die, you understand stuff. All sorts of stuff. Like how you suck at this, or how you’re stingy or boring. If you die a hundred times, you see it a hundred times. That hurts, and they can’t keep it up.
William’s words came back to him.
He could understand wanting to leave the raid team.
This torment was far more acute than losing memories, and it couldn’t be ignored.
Shiroe knew what William had meant about this feeling very well.
If they were sent here every time they died, over and over, then Shiroe had died before, on Earth, in that town where he’d grown up.
If this was dying, Shiroe had done it many times already.
The night he’d thrown away the notebook he’d treasured. The night he’d shaken off his friend’s hand. The night he’d said “Come back soon” with a faked smile. The night he’d said good-
bye to the library…
In short, dying meant feeling as if you wanted to die.
Even if it had been thinly diluted, Shiroe knew what it was like.
That was what was in his heart now. It was the fact that he’d failed at the same thing again and again, not the failure itself, that had gouged open the wound he’d thought he’d gotten rid of. How many times had he felt this emotion? At the very least, he’d been forced to feel it enough that he’d never wanted to feel it again. Still, the next thing he knew, he’d failed and come here. In the end, no matter how many decades he lived, maybe he’d never be able to move a step from this bench. The doubt clung to his back like a shadow, and he couldn’t shake it.
Shiroe didn’t yet know the future, and to him, it seemed unimaginably long.
“Several decades” was too long for him to understand. Would he live through that time, long beyond comprehension, repeating mistakes over and over?
Shiroe remembered Demiquas, who’d gritted his teeth and shoved him with all his might.
He didn’t understand why he’d done that.
He didn’t remember having done anything that would warrant getting saved by Demiquas.
William, who’d simply said, “Yeah, sure,” and held out his hand.
He didn’t know why that young guy had taken his hand, either.
The only thing he remembered doing had made William lose face…
Shiroe couldn’t understand any of it. He was so dumb it made him sick.
Naotsugu, too. In the end, Shiroe had come all this way keeping a secret, even from his friend.
Even though Minami wasn’t what Shiroe was really concerned about. It wasn’t Minami’s scouts that had Shiroe on the alert. He already knew about them.
What Shiroe was afraid of was an unknown third party.
He gazed at his fists, which he’d clenched at some point, and carefully relaxed them.
It was very likely that there was something in this world besides Shiroe and the other Adventurers and the People of the Earth. He’d suspected it might be the Kunie clan, but he’d finally realized that it wasn’t. However, that meant there must be someone else.
