by Mamare Touno
Looking excited, Minori got out her Magic Bag, saying, “I bought some smooth ink that’s specifically for documents and some drying sand. Here, Shiroe, you look at them, too.” At that point, all Shiroe could do was watch, his expression strained.
As Shiroe tried to change the subject, Li Gan ended up helping him out.
For the past little while, he’d been crouched down, fiddling with the magic circuits of the transmission device. Abruptly, it began to emit noisy static, and light returned to the room.
There was a popping noise, sparks scattered, and the loudspeaker suddenly began to vibrate.
They’d been resting in this anteroom in the first place, even though it wasn’t very big, because Li Gan had said he wanted to see how damaged the transmitter was right away and to examine whether there was any residual negative influence from the Genius Taliktan.
The members who’d been napping with their eyes closed sat up, watching to see what would happen.
“What, guy, you fixed it?”
“No… It isn’t fixed yet. At this point, I’ve only confirmed that its functions are still live.”
“So can we start talkin’ to the moon now?”
“Here comes my galactic debut!”
Naotsugu and the others crowded around Li Gan. He was down on all fours, doing maintenance around the back of the low device, and he answered from there. Even though it was obviously an uncomfortable position, he sounded as if he was enjoying himself. You could even have said his voice was delighted. Shiroe, who was watching the scene, murmured, “He’s a hobbyist.”
“—From the ancient writings of Miral Lake, I know that this is a long-distance transmitter from the age of the ancient alvs, but the facility wasn’t created to communicate with the moon, you see. I’ve heard that your goal is to get a message to the moon, but before we attempt that, we’ll need to analyze this magic device, research it, and appropriately improve and reinforce it. “
“That’s some unexpectedly practical stuff.”
Akatsuki looked glum as she spoke, and Shiroe soothed her: “We couldn’t really expect anything else.”
On hearing that explanation, Tetora said, “I’m disappointed. And here I was all ready to make my cosmic debut…” The idol clambered up Naotsugu, got pulled at by Marielle, and began screeching shrilly.
In the midst of that uproar, Shiroe finally felt himself begin to relax. The Shibuya raid was over. The series of disturbances that had begun with Roe2’s letter had helped him make up his mind; in that respect, they’d been useful.
Time was moving, and they couldn’t stay in the same place forever.
Starting tomorrow, they’d have to tackle a new challenge.
Riezé poked her head in from the corridor. “You’re in here, Master Shiroe?” she said, stepping into the room crowded with magic devices.
“There was no hidden treasure. I’m impressed the device was safe.”
“It doesn’t seem to have been broken completely.”
“I expect the damage was slight because we tore the enemy away from it. Excellent work, commander.”
“You were a huge help, Riezé.”
Shiroe smiled at her, scratching his head. He didn’t really understand why Akatsuki was nodding next to him, but this girl from D.D.D. really had saved him. He felt that her organization of the rear attack ranks and constantly indicating the order in which the enemy was to be destroyed had made a big contribution to the success of the capture. She was a first-rate commander.
“I’m told the Round Table Council is receiving inquiries from all over, and they’re terribly busy. Shall we go back for now? It’s going to be quite some time before the transmitter is operational, isn’t it?”
As she made the suggestion, Riezé put a finger to her chin, looking thoughtful.
She had a point: They couldn’t stay in this ruin forever. Thinking he’d have to issue orders to move out soon, Shiroe scanned the hall.
Fortunately, more than half the members were in this room. His work as commander wouldn’t be over until they made it back to headquarters.
“…lo…Hello? Can anybody hear— Hello?”
Just as he was about to address the group, however, sounds that were different from earlier, sounds that meant something, issued from the magic device. As if summoning them to a new adventure, the ancient magical equipment from the age of the alvs had brought them news from a distant land.
2
Everyone had been caught off guard, and for a moment, the room was silent.
“…Ni hao. Bonjour, aloha. Moi! Also moikka!”
In the midst of that hush, the magic device kept repeating oblivious greetings. The cheerful voice belonged to a young woman. No one answered. After all, they’d only been testing the device, and no one had expected to get a response from anywhere.
“Kaliméra. Hujambo… Guten Tag… Other than that, um… ‘Me eat you whole’?”
“We can hear you. The noise is really bad, but… Who are you?”
Shiroe was the first to recover.
He’d responded mainly out of a sense of duty—as the person who was currently in charge, he couldn’t just stay silent—but the reply that came back was unexpected.
“Hmm? Your voice… That wouldn’t be Shiro-boy, would it?”
“Huh?”
At the sound of his own name, Shiroe froze up. There weren’t that many people who’d know his voice. Of course lots of Akiba’s Adventurers knew Shiroe, but he didn’t think there were thirty people who’d be able to recognize him from his voice alone. In other words, this was a friend. “Hey, that voice… Wasn’t that…?” “Meow, it couldn’t be.” His companions were talking behind him, but he wasn’t listening to them. Lowering his own voice, Shiroe spoke to Li Gan.
“Where is this connected to? Doesn’t it have some sort of detection function? Did it just connect to something nearby?”
Li Gan shook his head vigorously in response. His expression seemed to say he hadn’t made a mistake, and he hadn’t done anything unnecessary to the equipment. It’s not like he’s a little kid who’s gotten into mischief; I wouldn’t get mad about something like that, Shiroe thought. Either way, apparently Li Gan wasn’t going to be any help here.
Even if this was a friend of Shiroe’s, he couldn’t think of anyone who’d call him Shiro-boy.
I don’t like that name. It sounds sort of doglike. As far as he was concerned, “Shiro” was a name for pet dogs. He didn’t hate it so much that he’d fly off the handle just because someone had called him that, but it was embarrassing, and it felt like he was being made fun of. For that reason, there was only one woman who called him Shiro-boy…and they couldn’t possibly have made contact with her.
“I knew it! Yoo-hoo! Shiro-booooy!”
“Kanami?!”
It was impossible, but they’d reached her anyway.
“It’s been forever! How’ve you been?”
“Don’t give me that ‘it’s been forever’ line!”
Shiroe responded on reflex; he felt dizzy, and his vision seemed to be dimming. It was anemia. He’d never gotten anemia before, but he was sure that was it.
Why now? He wasn’t good with this person. He’d go so far as to call her a natural enemy. If someone had asked him to think of one person he’d absolutely never be able to deal with adequately, he’d have told them “Kanami.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. It wasn’t that he wanted to avoid her.
He just couldn’t keep up with her.
He respected her, he felt obligated to her, and he thought she was a good person. Her cheerfulness and charisma were the biggest elements behind the fact that the Debauchery Tea Party had managed to spend a long time in the raid rankings, even though it wasn’t a guild. Shiroe had been nothing more than a gloomy game expert, and it was thanks to her that he’d been able to experience the best part of MMOs: working together with companions to conquer content.
She’d been outrageous and impudent, but
the Tea Party had been a group of people who loved partying and making noise, and he didn’t think a single one of them had disliked her for it.
That boisterous personality was why Shiroe was simply not good with this woman. She was a human typhoon who treated him like her honorary little brother at every turn.
“Oh, hey, I heard! I heard all about it. You’re doing all sorts of fun stuff in Yamato, too, huh?! Like the Round Table thingummy!”
“It’s the Round Table Council. How do you know about that? And actually, Kanami, didn’t you retire?! When did you come back?! Where are you?!”
And what on earth was a “thingummy”?
Shiroe, who’d knee-jerk answered, felt a little depressed again. With people who never listened to what other people said, he ended up letting his spinal nerves do the talking, too. Or rather, it was less “talking” than “retorting.” Not only that, but since Shiroe’s words just got ignored, it was pretty tiring.
Isn’t she careless? he’d asked Naotsugu once.
Because she’s a careless person, yeah. The answer he’d gotten hadn’t been any kind of resolution, and it had only drained more of his energy.
“Kanami, you wouldn’t be on the moon, would you?”
Through his fatigue, he did his best to ask questions in a businesslike way, and her reply was, “No, on the Chinese server.
“We’re currently on a journey, but we stumbled onto this TV station. It looked like it might work, so we messed with it. And then you picked up.”
“You ‘stumbled onto’…?”
Shiroe pinched the bridge of his nose.
In other words, after Kanami had moved to Europe, she must have gotten back into Elder Tales. The MMORPG had had players all over the world. Europe had had two servers, and it had been one of the most active regions, right up there with North America and Japan. He hadn’t even considered the possibility, but if she’d changed her entire account, he could understand why there hadn’t been any word from her.
Shiroe didn’t know whether this was good news or bad.
There was almost nothing about Kanami that he understood clearly to begin with. He didn’t want to know, he didn’t think he should know, and he didn’t think it would be better if he did know.
“Oh, that’s right! Listen to this, Shiro-boy! My daughter turned three!”
“I know.”
There were plenty of things it was better not to know.
“Huh? Did I tell you already?”
“No. I heard, though.”
“I see…”
He could picture Kanami, eyes round, looking startled. She’d put her hands on her hips and puff out her chest, she’d squish up her soft-looking cheeks, and she’d nod as though she understood everything, even though she wasn’t actually thinking anything at all. That was the kind of woman she was.
She had a big mouth, and she always seemed to be laughing.
Her sense of distance was busted, and she’d often tromped right into Shiroe’s personal space, to the point where he and Naotsugu had formed a victims’ association together.
She had outstanding energy, and she’d been that way even when they’d met offline.
Kanami’s vitality had seemed inexhaustible, and she’d always done everything at full power. That had been the same both in the outside world and in the game. She was a natural leader and naturally cheerful. When you were around her, it always felt as if a summer wind were blowing.
Shiroe’s parents had been very busy, and he hadn’t had many friends even when he was a kid, so he’d never gone to leisure facilities to play. It was because of his friends, Naotsugu and Kanami, that Shiroe had built up experience with “going out and having fun.”
To Shiroe, dealing with the impossible tasks she set up for him was what the Tea Party had been all about, which meant he’d spent the majority of his time in Elder Tales, since middle school, on things like that.
When he tried tallying them up again, the woman was a complete nuisance. You could even have called her destructive. It was only natural that he wasn’t good with her. It was so bad that he didn’t want to understand why she’d been such a hit as a charismatic leader.
Shiroe looked down for just a moment. He saw his own feet, standing firmly on the stone floor. His fists were clenched, but not hard, and they weren’t trembling. He exhaled a little, steeling himself.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to congratulate you… Congratulations,” he told Kanami.
He’d thought the lines were something he’d never actually tell her, but he’d practiced them hundreds of times anyway, and he said them in a voice as close to normal as he could manage.
“I tell you what, my daughter’s unbelievably cute. She zooms all over the place! She does this rocket dash and hits you—boom!—like a suicide attack, then clings to you real tight. She’s a princess.”
She’d left the Tea Party because she’d gone to Europe to study abroad, following the guy she’d married. Shiroe hadn’t known much about him, other than he was German. He’d only found out that he was a doctor affiliated with an international NGO called Doctors of the World after the Tea Party had disbanded, and he’d learned that through KR.
That didn’t mean he’d known nothing. Just before the Tea Party had broken up, Kanami had been exhilarated, so she’d told them all sorts of fragmented information, like how hairy his legs were, and that he liked sashimi, and that he’d teared up on the scream machine at the amusement park, and that he could only say ohayou gozaimasu—“good morning”—as “oyohan gojyamasu.” Kanami had looked happy, and she’d been even more energetic than usual; it had been a serious nuisance.
Boasting about the people she was close to was part of Kanami’s character. Shiroe knew she bragged about the Tea Party members all over the place, too. For that reason, when she told him about her daughter, he managed to feel warm inside.
Come to think of it, there were probably a lot of Adventurers in situations like Kanami’s.
Adventurers who’d been separated from children who were still small. Getting separated from young family members wasn’t the only tragedy, of course. Most Adventurers probably had people who had been hard to leave, parents and siblings, back on Earth. Shiroe thought that, for those people as well, he had to find a hint somehow.
Kanami must be traveling in search of that sort of thing, too. She was a complete terror and an awful leader, but her daughter was blameless. Feeling that it was a miracle that this sort of thing had happened on the very day he’d resolved to work toward a return home, Shiroe spoke to her.
“Is that right—? In that case, we really do have to get back. To our old world, I mean.”
“…Huh? Why?”
“Huh?”
As usual, Kanami casually smashed Shiroe’s idea.
“Shiro! Listen, I want to show this world to my daughter!”
“…Huh?”
Shiroe was taken aback, and the only response he could manage was a dim-sounding one.
He’d thought it many times—no, hundreds of times—before, but what on Earth was this person? He didn’t understand what she meant, and his heart churned with doubts. He had no idea what she was thinking.
“Seriously. Theldesia’s amazing, isn’t it? I mean, it’s this huge, rolling expanse of uncharted world! It’s enormous and gorgeous and fantastic, and it’s full of Mommy’s friends, and it’s a grand adventure where you meet people from all over the world. I absolutely want my daughter to do something like that!”
Kanami’s voice was cheerful.
“She likes high places. I want to let her ride a griffin. I want to show her vast forests and the ocean and deserts. When she’s surprised, her eyes go really round. I want to show her that the world she was born into is a beautiful place!”
But all she was talking about was her daughter.
Kanami’s love was the real thing. She’d never been clever enough to lie or fake it. Her recklessness, her insolence, and everything that made bystanders think sh
e was messing with people—all those things were just Kanami being serious.
And so Shiroe knew.
Apparently, she was actually planning to bring her daughter here.
Unexpectedly, Shiroe felt excited.
Everything he’d been worried about had started to seem ridiculous. He felt as if he’d seen Kanami talking about castles in the air, wearing an unguarded smile.
He realized that, after spending time away from her, he really had forgotten about her a little bit. Now that he was hearing her voice like this again, she was several times more absurd than he’d remembered. She really was the woman he’d been bad with.
He worried and hesitated over problems, and he suffered and drew up meticulous plans so that he wouldn’t have to do those things that bothered him, but she just leapt jauntily over them. She was an exasperating hero.
“My liege.”
“Shiroe?”
Akatsuki and Minori looked up at him, worried, but he was able to smile at them.
“That’s fine, too… I thought it couldn’t be done, and I’d given up on it, but in that case…”
After all, we’re greedy. If we’re trying for something, even if it’s neither going home nor being buried in this world…
…that’s a choice we can make.
In short, that was what Kanami had been talking about.
They wouldn’t choose one or the other. They’d choose both, and they’d wish for a future beyond that. Shiroe had been desperately telling himself that that was greedy, and he felt ridiculous. Apparently, even his biggest ambition had been small as far as Kanami was concerned. Still, if that dream existed, then it would be all right for Shiroe to obtain it.
“We’ll make it possible to go back and forth between Earth and Theldesia.”
When he put it into words, he heard a stir run through the people around him.
He could understand that. When it came to attaining that hope, they didn’t even know where to begin. People had thought, It would be wonderful if we could do that, but everyone had been hesitant to say it.
Even if they made it happen, Earth had a modern civilization, while Theldesia had medieval science. Earth had no magic technology, and Theldesia was a fantasy world. Contact between those two worlds was bound to have a drastic influence on both of them. It might even happen on a destructive scale.
