by Mamare Touno
…But those Nightshade Servants were shattered by a single, enormous attack that plowed into them from the side. Without even taking proper aim, a maul that was over two meters long and looked a bit like an industrial tool had pulverized the group. The Adventurer who held it was swaying on his feet, and tarry-red blood leaked from the gaps in his armor.
The armored Adventurer probably held an important position among the Odysseia Knights. Touya swallowed hard at the sight of the level-90 destruction that had been inflicted right in front of him. He’d known an attack at that level was strong, but its power was insane. The circular dent in the ground seemed more like the result of an impact from construction machinery than a person.
Touya watched the knight with wary awe. However, the other man ignored Touya, or rather, he didn’t even see him. Turning toward the wide avenue on unsteady feet, the man shouted:
“From this point on, we move the battle into the town!!”
Behind him, he knew Serara had gulped at those terrifying words.
“Nightshade Servants have appeared! Kill them all! As long as we keep the wyverns earthbound, they’re just targets. Lure them into the buildings and kill them! Kill them all, don’t let a single one escape! Kill, kill, and die!”
A wordless answer went up from the knights.
At the arrogance of it all, something inside Touya finally snapped.
The roiling emotion he’d kept shut inside ever since they crossed the Boxroot Pass burst forth, overflowing, raging with a force he couldn’t control.
“Touya?!”
He’d struck the knight’s armor with his fist. His fist shuddered and ached.
He didn’t care; he hit him again.
As he’d expected, hitting the heavy metal armor was like punching a dump truck. He wasn’t sure whether the other guy had even noticed.
“Hey!”
However, as Touya struck, he also yelled. Compared to this giant, imposing man, his own arms and legs seemed as skinny as disposable chopsticks, but he didn’t stop.
“Hey!”
He’d gotten worked up, and he couldn’t control his cracked voice. As he struck him over and over, his fists split and bled, but were healed by the dancing light of Pulse Recovery.
“Hey!!”
On the third yell, the Adventurer stirred slightly, as if he’d finally noticed him. Touya felt it, even though, due to the helmet, he couldn’t tell where he was looking.
“Why? Why are you doing stuff like that?! Why…? They’re all gonna—why are you like that?! The Nightshade Servants, and the wyverns, and the Odysseia Knights!”
The feelings were too strong; they burst inside him, and he couldn’t turn them into words.
In response to the pain, Touya squeezed his weaponless left hand into a fist near his chest. It was a gesture he’d repeated over and over again in his wheelchair. However, this wasn’t like before, when he’d stared at the ground. Touya didn’t even spare a glance for the pain. Instead, he lifted his head and glared at the knight.
“Why are you doing crap like this?! People live here!”
“We don’t live here.”
It was a curt response.
The words made him so mad he thought he might go crazy.
“That’s not what I meant! Why are you so… There’s gotta be some other way, right, brother? Another way to fight, a better way—”
“Kids should mind their own business.”
“Why are you doing that? It’s basically suicide! You know you guys could do better…”
In the end, that was what it was:
What Touya had felt had been unfairness.
These people had to be able to fight some other way. There had to be another way to do it.
The Odysseia Knights were level 90, and adults. If they were adults, shouldn’t they be able to do better than this? Even in a hell where Touya, who was just a kid, could only grit his teeth, they ought to be able to do something.
He’d had to be quiet and obedient to avoid causing trouble for his family. He’d learned to clown around so that they wouldn’t worry about him. All the time, at any time. No wonder he’d been caught by Hamelin. He’d been doing as he was told in order not to cause trouble for adults, so it was almost as if he’d intentionally let them trick him. It was all Touya’s fault for being a kid. Because he was a kid, because he was weak, his wishes slipped through his fingers. Or rather, he wasn’t even allowed to wish in the first place.
The rage at this unfairness, the stuff he’d always held in check, roiled up. Touya had cursed himself for being a child for a very long time. Adults were able to determine their own lives, and yet…
He hated being treated like a kid. He couldn’t allow it.
He remembered Dariella’s white fingertips with a twinge.
The soft sensation as they’d combed his bangs off his forehead.
The fist he used to strike this knight was an extension of that past. It was true that Touya was a kid. However, if this Adventurer was going to call him “a kid,” shouldn’t he show him something else? If he was a proper adult, he should have shown Touya the answer Touya wasn’t able to find.
If he didn’t, Touya’s heart would break.
“It’s none of your business.”
“That’s not what I’m saying!”
He lashed out at the man, letting the anger inside him take control, but the man stopped his fist with his iron gauntlet, then squeezed it hard. Touya wouldn’t budge, and the man leaned forward a little, speaking to him in tones that seemed to be cursing him.
“It’s not suicide. Nobody dies in this world. That means there’s no such thing as suicide. We want to go back—we’re going home. If we die, we get to see our families. Did you know that? If you die, you get to see just a little bit of our old world. You get to dream about that world. That place has to be connected to it.”
It was like a voice that blew from a long-term care ward at night.
A voice reminiscent of the dim blue light late at night in a ward that held patients who would be in the hospital for a long time, a ward that almost never got visitors. A voice that had nowhere to go.
Touya had been burning with anger, but at the sound of that voice, he felt terror, as if he’d had icy water dashed over him.
“Listen. I was supposed to get married in summer. Once that happened, I was planning to quit this game. I even went to a condo exhibition. I’m going to have a wife. I can’t keep messing around with this kid stuff. I’m going home.”
The man matched the angle of his helmet to Touya’s face, as if he were peering into it.
However, Touya sensed that the man’s eyes weren’t looking at him; that they weren’t actually seeing anything at all. The knight in front of him wasn’t seeing this world anymore.
“Next time the rent renews, I’m moving. My girl’s kind of a pain; she wants to move out of her parents’ house, and she keeps griping to me about it every day. I have to get hitched soon and bring her over to my place. She’s high-strung, so I’ve gotta take care of her. Over there. See? Even you hate this farce, right?”
If Touya said he didn’t want to go back, he would have been lying.
But it wasn’t that he wasn’t toughing it out.
Still, Touya knew: There were some words that shouldn’t be said. He might be a kid, but he was a guy. There were words guys just had to swallow. Once, those words had been, “I want to play soccer.” Touya had gotten used to swallowing them. Life was much better if everyone was smiling.
Why didn’t this guy understand that?
His raging emotions overflowed. Tears poured over his cheeks.
“The world is always the real thing. There are tons of people who are living like it’s important!” Touya howled.
As he spit out the words, the idea that this was all he could say made him feel hopeless.
“Quit spouting crap. There’s no way in hell this world is the real thing. Like there’s any reality where you don’t die even if you
die? If you die, you have to actually be dead. If you die and stuff doesn’t go quiet, it’s a game. Because people like you don’t die, because you let ’em call you ‘Adventurers’ and butter you up and then live on and on and on—because you people won’t die, we can’t get out of this world.”
“That’s not true. I don’t know what you guys think, but this world is—”
There was something he wanted to say.
The young knight was wrong.
He wanted to scream, Is whether we die or not really that important?!
He wanted to ask the guy if he’d ever died in the old world. Of course he hadn’t; there was no way he had. If he’d died, he wouldn’t have been playing Elder Tales. He wanted to yell, Who decided that if you die it’s real and if you don’t die it’s a game?
Touya remembered getting hit and sent flying like something out of a cartoon, and the way the asphalt had shredded him like grated radish. He’d seen for himself that his bones were white. Not only that, he’d seen his trapped pelvis tilted at a weird angle.
Touya had seen death. It meant “the end.” The driver who’d hit Touya had passed away in the next bed over in the ICU. After a long, painful stretch of rehab, Touya had recovered enough to live in a wheelchair, but the driver hadn’t made it through the night of the crash.
The university hospital where Touya had been was almost like the netherworld.
Late at night, through a painkiller-induced haze, the hospital ward had looked as still as the grave. Someone died practically every day, and speechless patients were carried in. The nurses were all kind in a professional way, but none of them said much. Touya’s attending physician was an individual whose gloomy expression seemed stiff, as if it had been pasted on. From what Touya knew, hospitals were entrances to the next world, and the people who lived there were beings halfway between the dead and the living.
…And so Touya knew death.
After all, for a little while, he hadn’t been alive.
That was why he wanted to tell this guy that this was the wrong way to resolve things.
If he wanted to get back to the old world where death had been, if he was seriously thinking about death, then he really shouldn’t do anything suicidal. He shouldn’t be able to fight a battle in which all the People of the Earth might die. He wanted to scream that at him.
But Touya couldn’t voice a single word of those feelings.
He’d glimpsed the young man’s dull eyes through his helmet, and he recognized them. They looked like Touya’s when he’d been told he’d never walk again. They weren’t the eyes of the living.
“If you’ve got a problem, report it to the admins. At worst, I’ll get banned. And if you don’t, you go die, too.”
Shoved away, Touya looked up at the world from a pile of rubble.
The battle around him was growing fiercer every moment, and the world of death was expanding.
8
That world of death was simultaneously unfolding within the sea of trees as well.
“Kazuhikocchi.”
“It’s been a long time, Captain.”
Kazuhiko, a young man who looked like a ronin, wearing an undershirt, a riding hakama, and a sleeveless campaign jacket known as a jinbaori, looked far more mature than Nyanta remembered. The wrinkle between his furrowed eyebrows clearly showed his distress.
He’d always been a young man with a sense of responsibility.
Kazuhiko had been the Tea Party’s offensive commander.
“Out of my way, Kazuhikocchi! There’s something I must set right.”
“No. I can’t stand down.”
Nyanta had taken a step forward, and Kazuhiko directed a sharp slash at the ground near his feet, opening a crack in it.
Nyanta didn’t stop. Glaring, he closed in on Kazuhiko, his former companion, who had changed beyond recognition. Kazuhiko glared back at him with eyes that were just as intense.
“Are mew involved in this?”
“My social obligations demand it.”
Kazuhiko spit the words out. He was the old comrade Nyanta knew, and at the same time, he was a different man. His eyes held a determined will, but they were also dark and dull. He looked like a man who’d charged ahead even though he hadn’t yet sorted things out in his mind, and who carried many scars while he did so.
Nyanta had heard about Kazuhiko’s current situation from Shiroe, in general terms.
Shiroe had said he’d taken on the task of making Plant Hwyaden healthy from the inside. However, Kazuhiko’s eyes really weren’t the sort of color anyone could have called “healthy.” They were like a bottomless swamp that had swallowed intense anger and sadness without releasing a single bubble, and yet they radiated a rigid, steely will.
“You Adventurers are such slugs!” Mizufa interjected with a sneer. “Always so terribly nice. Operation Crimson Night has already succeeded!! This is why you can’t be the heroes in this world. Go on, go sleep! I mean, it’s not like you’ll die, right?!”
Apparently as far as Mizufa was concerned, Nyanta and Kazuhiko’s chance meeting was just a waste of time. Even as Kazuhiko held her back, she unleashed a slash that used her whole body.
As he struck Mizufa’s saber away, Nyanta was forcibly separated from Kazuhiko.
He wanted to interrogate his onetime companion about his real motives, but this female soldier insisted on following him around.
“You could probably run right through Hades’ Breath and the Nine Great Gaols of Halos, couldn’t you?”
“I did run through them.”
The good old Debauchery Tea Party days—those were memories like a bygone summer afternoon. In his memory, they sparkled and shone with exquisite brightness. However, what had been days of adventuring for Nyanta and the others meant something else to Mizufa. She laughed, her beautiful red lips twisting with humiliation and indignation.
“Ah, yes, I bet. Your sword, your boots, and even your gloves are just dripping with magic. I can feel it! That and the strength of the spirit that fills you from head to toe! People like me don’t have that stuff.”
Nyanta didn’t understand what her smile meant.
Nyanta was a resident of Akiba, and when it came to the vicious malice the People of the Earth held, he was as innocent as a child. In the next instant, that fact would be brought home to him.
It was a scintillating sword dance:
On one side, Mizufa, a warrior far above the People of the Earth; on the other, Nyanta, a Swashbuckler who wielded twin rapiers and was famed for being the fastest of the Adventurers.
The battle went on for three rounds, then four. Both sustained shallow cuts, but neither made a fatal mistake. Depending on how you looked at it, they almost seemed like a perfectly synchronized team.
However, the end came suddenly.
“You Adventurers are strong, aren’t you? Yeah, you’re strong. Strong. It’s no good, though. —Your kindness will kill you. Your desire to save the People of the Earth will kill ’em! All right, what are you going to do about that?!”
Mizufa had exposed her white throat to the tips of Nyanta’s blades.
Nyanta’s swords didn’t stop. The high-speed battle had stolen that leeway from him. Joy had appeared in the woman’s eyes. There was no way he could kill her, and even if she did die, she’d be able to kill Nyanta with her death. She had a strange, malicious confidence that if she died, she’d be able to drag not Nyanta’s body but his spirit along with her.
In the moment he understood this, fear ran up Nyanta’s back.
This world was filled with death.
There were creatures that lived by breathing death. That terror trapped him.
Just before Nyanta skewered Mizufa’s throat, Kazuhiko, the ally who’d charged through so many raids with him, grabbed his sword.
“Mizufa. It’s over.”
The woman had stepped forward in an overly familiar way, and Kazuhiko put out his left hand, stopping her.
His lips were tense, and only
his eyes were turned toward Nyanta. He seemed to be making some sort of appeal.
“What do you think you’re playing at?! You’re just a guard, Kazuhiko! Did you forget the code of the Ten-Seats?!”
“Orders from Nureha. Plant Hwyaden just got orders from the very top. We’re retreating. The maneuver’s been canceled.”
“Kazuhikocchi…”
Nyanta’s former comrade’s voice was like cold mud.
The tone of that voice alone was enough to make Nyanta not want to forgive the organization called Plant Hwyaden.
However, one of the people who led that group was Kazuhiko, and another was Indicus. In other words, Nyanta’s old companions.
What had happened?
Loathing for the darkness he’d just touched in the Person of the Earth soldier warred with worry for the onetime companion he was on the verge of losing.
Nyanta brooded over this, ashamed and irritable. “What is Plant Hwyaden thinking? Kazuhikocchi, what are you—”
“That’s enough hot air out of you.”
Mizufa nearly took a step forward, but in one motion, Kazuhiko drew his sword and slashed at her, and at Nyanta, too. The impact of the bright white blade went deep enough to crack the earth. It was probably the Assassin attack known as Extermination, but even to Nyanta’s eyes, its force was far from normal.
It went beyond the realm of the Adventurers.
“This could have been much worse, you know.”
“……”
Sheathing his sword with a heavy, resonant sound, Kazuhiko turned his broad back on the speechless Nyanta. To Nyanta, it felt like the dark clouds that covered this world had come to his former companions in the Debauchery Tea Party as well.
“You get by without killing a Person of the Earth, Captain. And…”
“And…”
Kazuhiko gave a little smile. It was an ordinary smile, the kind that was heartrending when seen on a battlefield. The wry smile his old friend wore was the same as it had always been.
