by Mamare Touno
Shiroe thought that was all right.
He didn’t plan to ignore that danger or to take part in terrorism. However, if the two worlds were on a path that would put them in contact with each other, it would probably be arrogant for him to try to stop it from happening on his own. If the worlds were on a course that would prevent them from meeting, then no matter what Shiroe did personally, they’d probably never meet.
At the stage when they were deciding on a destination, both cowardice and arrogance were unnecessary emotions. There was no need to be frightened of possibilities they didn’t clearly understand.
“I-is that possible?!”
“It’ll work, it’ll work.”
His thoughts about the two worlds’ influence on each other were scrambled by Kanami’s incredibly bright words, until they were in danger of becoming shapeless. However, even then, Shiroe had companions.
“That’s just irresponsible!!”
“Yeah, that’s Kanami for ya. Real-tough-to-deal-with city.”
“This person’s amazing. She’s startled even me, and I’m an idol.”
That was why Shiroe was able to shrug his shoulders and laugh. Even firing verbal jabs at Kanami wasn’t his own private penalty game anymore.
“So, Shiro-boy! Get out there and make that happen, please!”
“Are you issuing a quest?”
“Yeah, that! It’s a quest.”
“…I can’t.”
Maybe because he’d laughed for the first time in ages, his heart was bright and cheerful. Inside Shiroe, even as he teased her, the time that had passed was slowly vanishing.
“Whaaaaaat?! Did you get all mean on me, Shiro-boy?!”
Time had passed.
It was as if a scab that had been clinging to the inside of his heart, one Shiroe himself hadn’t noticed, had sloughed off, leaving things clean.
Apparently, he wasn’t Shiroe of the Debauchery Tea Party anymore.
The realization made him feel just a little sadness and far more pride.
“Kanami. I’ve created a guild. It’s called Log Horizon. I’ve made friends and companions.”
“Uh-huh?”
He’d become Shiroe of Log Horizon. He was looking directly at all his companions: Minori, who was gazing at him worriedly; Akatsuki, who’d pinched up the tail of his mantle; Naotsugu, who was smirking; Nyanta, whose eyes had narrowed in a smile; Touya, who didn’t look worried at all; Isuzu and Rundelhaus; and Tetora, who was getting carried away. He had companions now.
That was why time had passed.
“As a result, I can’t accept a request like that one.”
“WhaaaaAAAaaat?”
“Because we’ll complete that quest— We’ll be the first ones in the world to see that view. Right; I guess we’ll be competing with you, Kanami. I suppose there’s no help for that…”
Packing as much retaliation as he could into his jeer, Shiroe spoke across the magic device. Like a shore washed by waves, over and over, he felt the Tea Party slowly coming to an end.
He’d probably made a mistake, somewhere along the way.
Something that should have ended hadn’t done so. Those days had been magnificent. The Debauchery Tea Party had been a good place. In order to establish that as fact, they had allowed things to end. That was only natural. However, it was possible that Shiroe hadn’t been able to do it very well.
Not that there’s much I can do well anyway.
He had the leeway to laugh a little.
How strange: On the day he’d decided to head toward the future, the past had said its good-byes to him.
It wasn’t a painful thing. At the very least, it was far more peaceful than the days when the Tea Party was disbanding, and it brimmed over with a quiet light.
The memories wouldn’t disappear. On the contrary: Now the past would begin to turn into memories. This struck Shiroe as a hushed blessing, and he tucked it away in his heart, feeling something like affection.
“We’re rivals now, after all.”
“I see.”
“Still, we do go way back. If you make it here in time, I don’t mind letting you see it, too. If you’re on the Chinese server, it’s because you’re headed this way, correct?”
If he saw her again, it felt as if he might not be as bad with her as he had been before. Shiroe almost thought that, but then he shook his head.
It wasn’t as if Kanami herself had repented of anything. He considered the idea that having a child might have cured her troublemaking ways, but he decided not to get his hopes up based on wishful thinking.
“I’d expect no less from everybody’s bus guide. No wonder Krus-Krus talks you up so much. I bet the girls can’t leave you alone.”
“Look, would you quit joking around like— What? Krusty?!”
Speak of the devil. Shiroe began to feel a dark dismay. It didn’t help that, behind him, Riezé gave a wordless scream and started repeating “Milord, Milord.”
Shiroe and Naotsugu were fairly used to her, but Riezé was an outsider, and the stimulation had been too much for her. As Shiroe had thought, Kanami was still Kanami. For better or for worse, she was a natural problem child who somehow managed to draw nothing but jokers. There was no other way to describe her. Why had Krusty’s name come up now?
“Right, right, he’s over here. Y’know, Krus-Krus almost died, but he’s such a toughie you wouldn’t believe it—”
“You’re telling me Krusty’s on the Chinese server? Kanami, what have you gotten involved in over there? Do you need help? Let me talk to Krusty—”
Even so, the questions he’d desperately asked ended up being left unfinished.
“Whoa…oh…acting up…rgh… Punch it, kick it… Argh! Tiger Echo…”
The magic device fell silent, and an indescribable atmosphere filled the room.
Shoulders slumping, Shiroe turned around.
Li Gan shook his head, pleading not guilty. Naotsugu held his head, and—unusually—Nyanta averted his eyes. Nazuna was grinning, Soujirou was smiling cheerfully, and Riezé looked unsteady, as though she’d come close to fainting.
Tetora seemed to have put some sort of idea into Minori’s and Akatsuki’s heads. “It’s nothing. It’s not like that,” Shiroe told them, defending himself. Then he informed the capture unit, which was on the brink of an uproar, that they were returning to Akiba.
It was a disorganized ending, but even so, to Shiroe, it was an irreplaceable one as well. As with all endings, it held the hint of a new beginning.
Shiroe nodded and spoke to his companions. A season they couldn’t escape was bearing down, not just on Log Horizon, but on the town of Akiba and on the Adventurers.
It was the eve of the season in which, through an encounter, Shiroe and the others would carve open new horizons—the beginning of the Noosphere.
AFTERWORD
This is Mamare Touno, bringing you this volume as the second season of the Log Horizon anime has finished airing and is starting to be rebroadcast. It’s been a while… I think? It really doesn’t feel that way, but I wrote this in an environment where time gets compressed and stretched out, like bread dough or something out of sci-fi. Anime really keeps you busy. If things are like this when Mr. Masuda’s here, how industrious must other creators be? I think it would constantly be “Game Over” for me.
Thank you very much for picking up Log Horizon, Vol. 10: Homesteading the Noosphere.
In an abrupt change from the previous volume, I wrote about an uproar in Maihama and Akiba. I wanted to put in some kind of pause every five volumes, so I rushed things a little this time (although it did make the book that much thicker), but Shiroe’s unexpected encounter with her, aka Kanami, is in this volume, too.
There are lots of things I want to say about Kanami, but she’s exactly the woman anime viewers and online readers are acquainted with. She was Shiroe’s guiding light when he was at a sensitive age. In
the anime, her most impressive scene is her first appearance, but to Shiroe, Kanami is always “the woman who looks back at him and smiles.” I’d like healthy young men to sympathize with the feeling of surrender—like an odd restlessness, a sense of defeat you can’t quite reconcile yourself to—and with the feeling of wanting to defy it, even so. Ladies, please just think, That’s so dumb… and pretend not to see it, in a tepid sort of way. If you point it out, Shiroe will probably writhe around in agony and die.
That aside, let’s talk about the Season 2 heroine.
In other words, my supervising editor, Ms. Fta.
Because Yamane Yamamoto was releasing the spin-off story Kushiyatama, Do Your Best! I nonchalantly went along for the advance meeting. It wasn’t my book, so it felt like a bit of a holiday to me. Yamane was pretty tense, so we were talking about all sorts of pointless stuff, when along came Ms. Fta.
“Hisssss?”
She was waving her hand wildly. Could that be a greeting?
I quickly glanced at Yamane, and he was flabbergasted. There, see? You see? These afterwords aren’t lies.
She’s little, and she’s bouncing around, right? “Y-yeah,” he said.
Getting right down to it, we started our meeting/meal in a trendy little eatery, and both Mr. Masuda and I ate. This is off-topic, but although these hip dining areas in Shinjuku do help to raise motivation when greeting someone for the first time, I think preliminary meetings are best held in quiet family restaurants late at night. Does that mean I’m in the process of being poisoned?
Well, in any case, just when we’d finished our meal and were gearing up to really start the meeting, Ms. Fta ordered seconds.
“Huh? You’re still eating?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“You can keep eating, too, right, Mr. Mamare?”
“No, I haven’t been able to eat all that much lately.”
“It’s meat, so it’ll be fine.”
>choke<
Yamane, who we’d just met, was shaking next to me.
His shoulders were shaking.
They brought out a huge helping of cubed, stewed meat.
Of course, both Yamane and I partook as well. Yamane had konjac. I had a boiled egg. Ms. Fta ate the meat, with a big smile on her face. “Hisssss!”
Still, when I listened to what was going on beside me, the preliminary book meeting had turned into a pretty heated debate. Which direction should we pare this in, should we add to it, what should we do to make it easier for readers to understand—it was useful stuff. I was pretty impressed, but then I realized feeling that way seemed like proof I don’t normally do a proper job, and I regretted it.
On the way back, Yamane said, “Ms. Fta was Ms. Ftastic!”, and his smile was fantastic. Great! Now I have another ally. We’ll spread the truth about Ms. Fta far and wide, inside and out.
Hisssss.
And with that report on recent events, this has been Log Horizon, Vol. 10.
I think about 80 percent of writing a novel is a puzzle of sorts. You have to put preexisting pieces together in a certain way while observing the limits, and although the process is mediated by taste, it’s not really all that creative. If a high-performance artificial intelligence ever shows up, it might manage it better than humans.
But is it all like that? No. The first 20 percent is the work of building the limits you’ll need to observe with those puzzle pieces. That probably includes the work of creating the problem that needs to be solved.
This time, Shiroe came up against that same wall. “What should I wish for?” “What do I want to be in the future?” Those aren’t questions that can be solved with puzzles. If you try to solve them with all the possibilities from the statistics and analogical reasoning based on all the conditions, you’ll paralyze yourself.
That’s the sort of story Log Horizon, Vol. 10 was. Even though neither Isaac nor Iselus worries, Shiroe keeps running into this sort of wall because he’s a pain—correction: because he’s a clumsy young guy. There’s also a theory that abuse from their creators is what makes protagonists worthwhile.
Now that he’s taken aim, Shiroe is going to head straight for part three. The journey is likely to take him from Akiba to the West… Probably. Whoops, before that, I’ll have to turn the camera on the middle country server for a bit. I’m getting concerned about how Log Horizon’s other bespectacled fiend is doing. That means the online serial is being updated, too.
This time as well, the items listed on the character status screens at the beginning of each chapter were collected on Twitter in July 2015. I used items from @aiirorakko, @dharma0430, @falco_of_choco, @hige_mg, @highgetter, @hpsuke, @irohaniwoedo, @kazamasa504, @Landerblue_, @makiwasabi, @me_pon, @mimitabu_sub, @mine_ml, @nariril, @pons_k, @strangestar_s, @sunshine_rumi, and @tatara26. Thank you very much!! I can’t list all your names here, but I’m grateful to everyone who submitted entries.
We got tons and tons of ideas this time, too! It was really hard to narrow them down to three. The presence of quite a few cuter-than-usual items might be due to His Highness Iselus’s soothing powers.
For details and for the latest news, visit tounomamare.com/. You’ll find information about Mamare Touno that isn’t Log Horizon–related in the blog Mamare Wednesday, which is updated every Wednesday.
…Finally: Shoji Masuda, the producer, and Kazuhiro Hara, the illustrator. Tsubakiya Design, the designer, little Fta, and Sakakibara of the editorial department! Oha, who helped me out again this time! Thank you to Tosho Printing! This time, I also got help from the anime’s Studio DEEN; Director Ishihira; Nemoto, who handled the series composition; the script team; and the people of NHK and NEP. I received support for the creation of many different games, too. Thanks to the people of AZITO for creating all the mini-characters.
And. And. Yamane Yamamoto, with whom I released a book. I wrote about it in the essay, but damn. I confess I’m a bit jealous. It’s exactly as I said. It would be great if lots more spin-off stories were released, though. What sort of story are you going to write next?
In any case, now all that’s left is for everyone to savor this book. Bon appétit!
Mamare “Whoever said we’d have a cool summer this year should reflect on their error” Touno
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
AUTHOR: MAMARE TOUNO
A STRANGE LIFE-FORM THAT INHABITS THE TOKYO BOKUTOU SHITAMACHI AREA. IT’S BEEN TOSSING HALF-BAKED TEXT INTO A CORNER OF THE INTERNET SINCE THE YEAR 2000 OR SO. IT’S A FULLY AUTOMATIC, TEXT-LOVING MACRO THAT EATS AND DISCHARGES TEXT. IT DEBUTED AT THE END OF 2010 WITH MAOYUU: MAOU YUUSHA (MAOYUU: DEMON KING AND HERO). LOG HORIZON IS A RESTRUCTURED VERSION OF A NOVEL THAT RAN ON THE WEBSITE SHOUSETSUKA NI NAROU (SO YOU WANT TO BE A NOVELIST).
WEBSITE: HTTP://WWW.MAMARE.NET
SUPERVISION: SHOJI MASUDA
AS A GAME DESIGNER, HE’S WORKED ON RINDA KYUUBU (RINDA CUBE) AND ORE NO SHIKABANE WO KOETE YUKE (STEP OVER MY DEAD BODY), AMONG OTHERS. ALSO ACTIVE AS A NOVELIST, HE’S RELEASED THE ONIGIRI NUEKO (ONI KILLER NUEKO) SERIES, THE HARUKA SERIES, JOHN & MARY: FUTARI HA SHOUKIN KASEGI (JOHN & MARY: BOUNTY HUNTERS), KIZUDARAKE NO BIINA (BEENA, COVERED IN WOUNDS), AND MORE. HIS LATEST EFFORT IS HIS FIRST CHILDREN’S BOOK, TOUMEI NO NEKO TO TOSHI UE NO IMOUTO (THE TRANSPARENT CAT AND THE OLDER LITTLE SISTER). HE HAS ALSO WRITTEN GEEMU DEZAIN NOU MASUDA SHINJI NO HASSOU TO WAZA (GAME DESIGN BRAIN: SHINJI MASUDA’S IDEAS AND TECHNIQUES).
TWITTER ACCOUNT: SHOJIMASUDA
ILLUSTRATION: KAZUHIRO HARA
AN ILLUSTRATOR WHO LIVES IN ZUSHI. ORIGINALLY A HOME GAME DEVELOPER. IN ADDITION TO ILLUSTRATING BOOKS, HE’S ALSO ACTIVE IN MANGA AND DESIGN. LATELY, HE’S BEEN HAVING FUN FLYING A BIOKITE WHEN HE GOES ON WALKS. HE’S BEEN WORKING ON THE LOG HORIZON COMICALIZATION PROJECT WITH COMIC CLEAR SINCE 2012.
WEBSITE: HTTP://WWW.NINEFIVE95.COM/IG/
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