by Mamare Touno
He’d used Flip Gate several times during the capture with Silver Sword. The spell teleported everyone on the team to the emergency safe area within the active raid zone. In most cases, safe zones were either at the zone entrance or in spaces near it where monsters didn’t appear. Now that Theldesia had turned real, there was no telling how safe they would actually be, but for now, there didn’t seem to be any enemies in sight.
Team members had been sacrificed in the fight. “Lost” meant that resurrection spells hadn’t been cast in time after they’d died, and they’d been sent to the safe area at the zone entrance; in other words, here. After some time had passed, the “dead” members were also switched to “lost;” therefore, a total of eight people had met up with them through teleportation—and not from Shiroe’s spell, but from death.
When he looked around, he saw that they were in a large, box-shaped space about twenty meters square. The room held no furnishings, only rubble piled up against the walls, and it looked like a storeroom.
After a few minutes, the tense atmosphere that had hung over them immediately after teleporting snapped and vanished.
He listened carefully, but the sounds the monsters made were far away. At the very least, they’d gained a minimal sort of safety. Right after resurrection, a penalty was inflicted on their ability values. High-level resurrection spells or resurrection at the Temple reduced this penalty, but coming back from death during a capture meant that almost all values, including physical strength and agility, dropped by several dozen percentage points. If a third of their members had reduced ability values, it would be hard for them to fight right away. That meant this rest was going to be a deal breaker.
In the midst of a very slightly relieved atmosphere, people began to make small talk here and there.
Since there were dead members who hadn’t woken up yet, the conversations were subdued.
Some of the D.D.D. members were joking about how they hadn’t been on a raid like this one in a while. Since Shiroe had been to the Abyssal Shaft, he understood this, too: Raids weren’t the sort of thing you beat on the first try. You were wiped out over and over, and in the process, you figured out how to capture them.
However, he didn’t see their current battlefield as a raid in the purest sense of the word. As proof, this zone was small compared with the Shaft, the corridors were narrow, and the majority of the monsters that appeared were Party rank. The zone clearly hadn’t been designed as a raid area. It was a facility that had been abruptly requisitioned by some unknown factor. Because of Roe2’s letter, Shiroe knew, dimly, what that factor had been, and his companions had also probably guessed that it was the work of the Geniuses.
Shiroe had gone into the capture with a decent shot at success.
In the end, though, they’d retreated following the collapse of their battle lines.
“I’m sorry, Miss Mari. I was right there, and it broke through anyway.”
“It’s fine, hon. You can’t predict that somethin’s gonna come up through the ground and go ‘Graaah!’ like that. I knew what I was gettin’ into when I signed up for this. I got some raid practice in with Akatsuki.”
The sight of Naotsugu and Marielle exchanging whispered apologies made guilt well up inside him.
He didn’t think they hadn’t been capable of lasting through that surprise attack. The enemy’s level and numbers hadn’t been anything they couldn’t have dealt with, if he’d only seen it coming. And he should have seen it coming. This had been Shiroe’s mistake.
“I’m sorry, you guys…”
So this was what it felt like to be disgusted with yourself.
He’d brought a crowd of friends to this battlefield on the strength of an imperfect decision. Shiroe was the raid conductor. Being in that position meant he should take responsibility for this raid. However, he didn’t know what he should be responsible for. Victory, he thought. But what would victory look like? He’d been trying to convince himself that it meant defeating the Geniuses. Doing that wouldn’t solve anything, though. It wouldn’t save the people who were sinking in despair in Akiba, or the young man that Nyanta had met, or the Odysseia Knights.
Even now, Shiroe wasn’t able to reach a clear conclusion. He felt it was spineless of him, and he was irritated.
In the end, what Ains said is bothering me.
He’d understood a sliver of something he hadn’t been able to put into words before.
This world was small.
Its narrowness was the reason Shiroe was feeling suffocated.
He understood the “people who can’t move” that Ains had told them about. Shiroe didn’t think the assistance Ains wanted was wrong.
However, if he accepted that request, the majority of people in Akiba would probably object. The major guilds might break up.
Wondering which choice was right was probably a trap in and of itself.
The world was small. At present, there were a little under thirty thousand Adventurers on the Yamato server. According to their estimates, there were several dozen times that many People of the Earth. Altogether, the population of Arc-Shaped Archipelago Yamato was only about a million, and it was likely that those numbers weren’t much different across the whole of Theldesia.
In addition, the Adventurers were too powerful. In terms of combat abilities alone, they probably had a hundred times what the People of the Earth did. It was likely that their production abilities were even further removed.
A small population and excessive abilities were shrinking this world to the point where, if a person was unhappy, they immediately convinced themself that it was someone else’s responsibility. That was why fissures opened up between the haves and the have-nots, and why enmity grew between people who thought returning home was the most important issue and people who didn’t share that opinion. Each thought the other was to blame. The fact that the distance between them was so small, and that there was no one else in the world, meant they couldn’t help but think it.
The world was sealed, as if trapped in the curse of a zero-sum game, and there was nowhere to run. In this world, everyone was a victim and an interested party.
Of course Shiroe didn’t think that was true. However, he understood what it felt like to believe it implicitly.
He understood that that was probably the reason his heart had been choked on this raid capture.
In this small world, defeating the Geniuses and saving the People of the Earth, and abandoning the People of the Earth and defending the facility so that they could send transmissions, were both imperfect options. Both would probably put someone at a disadvantage. Actions that Shiroe and the others took, convinced that they were for the greater good, would be the acts of usurpers as far as somebody out there was concerned.
I think Captain Nyanta’s suffering is probably the same, at the root…
The hunch that there was no right answer.
The pain of knowing he would fail, no matter what he chose.
These had nailed Shiroe’s feet into stagnation. The path he was walking down probably didn’t lead to anything.
There was a dry sound, and for a moment, Shiroe didn’t understand what had happened.
His cheek felt as if it was on fire. When he raised his head, he saw his friends, looking worried. Henrietta stood at the front of the group. Apparently, she’d slapped him.
Henrietta looks like she might cry.
That was the first thing he thought. Isuzu was the same. Minori’s lips were drawn and tense, and she looked determined. Touya’s resolution, Serara’s worry, Rundelhaus’s expectations.
He saw their faces through eyes that seemed abruptly clear. He thought about those expressions very calmly, and he felt guilty and ashamed about having thought that this was someone else’s problem.
Shiroe looked up at Henrietta. The lovely woman was furious.
Her soft hair fell down around her shoulders, and he thought ineffectual things like, Truly beautiful people look gorgeous even when they’re
mad. Naturally, this was escapism: He’d gotten slapped, and his mind had overloaded, that was all.
He tried to find the words to say next, failed, attempted an apology—driven by his stinging cheek and the atmosphere—then thought that that was something he mustn’t do.
After all, he was the one who’d made Henrietta look like this.
“Master Shiroe.”
“Yes.”
“Gentlemen should live…more selfishly.”
“Yes.”
Shiroe nodded, reflexively.
He couldn’t live that way immediately just because someone had told him to. Shiroe didn’t know what was right. He couldn’t just choose something, in spite of that. Yet, Henrietta was serious, and her seriousness wouldn’t allow him to make excuses. In this situation, “yes” was the only possible answer. Even he knew that much.
I’m always causing Henrietta trouble, aren’t I? With the Crescent Burgers, and the strategy to pull in the commercial guilds, and at the Libra Festival, and for the zone release project, and now…
Now that he thought about it, he’d probably been leaning on her too much. Feeling apologetic and spineless, Shiroe looked at his elder. Leaning on people without being aware that he was doing it could be said to be a bad habit of his.
* * *
“U-um… Shiroe? I… We can stay in this world.”
“Minori?”
“…In Saphir, things didn’t… It didn’t go so well. People thanked us and told us we saved them, so we didn’t completely blow it. But listen, maybe we just plain can’t go home. So… I don’t really get it, but…”
“Touya.”
As the twins spoke to Shiroe, they sounded desperate.
“Going back to our old world would be a good thing, wouldn’t it? We want to go home because we want to be happy. In that case, we’ve all got to be happy, together.”
“Yes, he’s right! It’s wrong to abandon the People of the Earth so that we can be happy.”
As they spoke to Shiroe, the meaning of what they were saying sank in, slowly. He began to understand: They were probably saying he shouldn’t worry, because the Adventurers’ issues could wait.
Children were shouting “You don’t have to worry” at an adult. They might be putting on a bold front, but at the same time, they were demonstrating their willingness to cooperate with everything they had and that they didn’t want to hold anyone back. Shouldn’t he have known that better than anyone?
“Um… We don’t mind waiting, either, Shiroe.”
“Not that I am qualified to comment, mind you, but I’d rather not see my guild master suffer.”
As proof, Isuzu and Rundelhaus spoke up after Minori and Touya. Isuzu’s mouth was set in a cross line, and Rundelhaus was looking proper and stuffy. Behind them, as Nyanta watched her, Serara held her small fists in front of her chest and nodded several times.
“You heard ’em, Shiro.”
“There’s no need to say it, Naotsugu. My liege… Both my liege and I will be fine. Absolutely.”
When he turned around, there was the pair who had stuck with Log Horizon from the very beginning. Naotsugu was wearing an encouraging, macho smile. Akatsuki’s expression was a mixture of shy and morose. As the two of them sent playful kicks and shoves at each other, Shiroe finally understood the significance of what he was seeing.
While he’d lost hope in himself, these people had been putting their hopes in him.
Like a clear stream, that awareness rinsed away Shiroe’s frayed thoughts. When he took another careful look, not a single one of his companions wore an expression that seemed to blame him.
Shiroe was the only one who’d been torturing himself with feelings of self-condemnation.
There was nothing the least bit good about that. In the end, he realized, he’d been full of himself, thinking he had abilities high enough to feel regret over. He was the one who hadn’t been seeing himself as he was.
His friends had understood him better than he had.
“Shiroe. Woodstock is out on aerial patrol, and he’s just contacted us. They’ve pinpointed the enemy leader’s position. It’s a full Raid-rank boss: Taliktan, the Genius of Summoning, level 86. They say it’s at the base of the iron tower on the roof of this zone, summoning monsters with rainbow-colored light. There are thirty-four minutes remaining until moonrise. We have no time. If we are switching to a subjugation with a hundred members, this is a point at which no further changes can be made.”
The D.D.D. tactical officer, with her golden curls, delivered a meticulous summary of the present circumstances. Even the antagonistic way she spoke was no more than hidden worry.
“No… Summonin’? There were a ton of enemies already, and now there’s gonna be more?”
“It’s probably going be a hard fight. What do you think, Chilly Specs?”
“Unless the command style changes, we won’t be able to break through what’s beyond this point.”
“I expect that’s up to Master Shiroe.”
Henrietta crossed her arms and turned away sulkily. Behind her frigid glasses, her eyes were wavering. It looked like anger, but it probably wasn’t. It was more likely to be expectations and trust. Even though she risked making those around them dislike her, Henrietta had tried to wake Shiroe up. He was sure it was her way of being kind, one he’d overlooked until now.
There were lots of things Shiroe couldn’t see.
Even now, there were people who were trying to fulfill the selfish requests he’d been too afraid to make, and while of course the world wouldn’t fulfill that request entirely, Shiroe wasn’t in this alone, either. Once he understood that, it seemed only natural, but that invisible something was—in an entirely natural way—a genuine miracle as well.
“All right. Just choosing one or the other wasn’t going to work, was it? The question itself was wrong. We can’t aim for an answer that there’s no value in aiming for. At any rate, I can’t. We can capture the goal we wanted, though.”
Speaking decisively, Shiroe retrieved his glasses and put them on.
Before him was the full raid that had gathered to make the groups’ request come true, and there was still enough time left before moonrise to make it happen.
After all, there was always time enough to make wishes come true.
Always, just as long as they didn’t give up. Hadn’t Shiroe gone through that again and again with the Debauchery Tea Party?
“Thirty minutes remaining. Let’s go. This is the main run of the capture operation.”
If he wanted it, he always had a shot at victory. In order to clear the dungeon within the time they had left before moonrise, Shiroe began his final briefing.
1
The operation had begun, and Minori’s group was right in the thick of the fighting.
The younger group was acting as attackers. This was due more to their levels not being high enough to let them act as tanks and healers than because they were particularly good at that sort of thing. Since their levels were low, no matter what they did, the damage from their attacks tended to be low as well. However, at least with that, there was a possibility that the issue could be resolved through serial attacks that made use of high-level support and MP supplementation.
Of course, they weren’t able to take on monsters whose levels were in the nineties.
The midlevel group’s role was to pick out the Eternal Moths and Moon Rabbits with levels from 60 to 70 and contribute through range attacks.
“We’re nowhere near done yet, Rudy!”
“Understood! Orb of Lava!!
Following Isuzu’s lead, Rundelhaus cast a fireball spell. Its level had gone up, and the number of small fireballs had increased. Following the blond’s instructions, they punched through Eternal Moths one after another. Even if he couldn’t take them down completely with one attack, if he burned their wings, he could thin out their scales and ground them.
The interior of Fortress of the Call was cramped compared with ordinary dungeo
ns like Forest Ragranda, and it was a maze of intricate corridors—a series of intersections and straight lines in drab, inhospitable colors. This oppressive space was where Minori and the other members of the mixed unit were fighting.
“Touyacchi, let’s go clean up.”
“Roger that!”
Nyanta, Touya, and the wolf Serara had summoned broke into a run. They were going to finish off an enemy group that had lost its HP to a spell bombardment.
“Defense of Doctrine Barrier!!”
“Thanks!”
With Minori’s ample damage interception spell protecting him, Touya swung his katana. Gazing at his back, Minori nodded once. So far, their role-sharing was going well.
There were ten or so semitransparent windows in front of her eyes. In addition to the usual status displays for all her party’s members, she had displays for each leader and the main tank, for a total of about a dozen people. Even though this was only double the amount of information she normally dealt with, Minori felt as if she might drown in its constant fluctuation.
Spells to recover HP naturally consumed MP. The same was true for spells that inflicted damage and for close-combat special skills. If they went out on the front line, there was a possibility they’d get hit with a negative status effect, so they needed special skills that prevented or removed those.
As such, status figures and displays depended on each other. Should someone step out in front or fall back? As the number of people increased, the choices multiplied explosively. Simply doubling the number of display windows had increased the flexibility she had to take into account by a factor of ten. In the midst of what was practically her first raid, Minori continued to struggle desperately with that burden and kaleidoscopic motion.
She held her breath, almost as if she were diving to the bottom of the ocean, and glared at the numbers. The basic rules were the same as they were for a six-member party. HP and MP exchange. The balance between the pace of extermination and defensive abilities. The trade-off between elimination pace and replenishing abilities. However, those basic exchange rates had split into multiple tracks, tangled with each other, and turned into big waves that tossed Minori around.
