1

Leonardo woke early the next morning.

Adventurers had high physical abilities, and Leonardo could tell that they affected sleep time as well. Six hours was enough to let him wake up feeling refreshed.

That said, there did seem to be individual differences, and some Adventurers said they got incredibly sleepy, so it might have been a quirk peculiar to himself.

In any case, having woken up, Leonardo changed into clothes that were sturdy, although not made for combat, and left his assigned shed. Elias was still asleep in the bed, which was made of packed straw and was quite comfortable, so he moved quietly, trying not to make noise.

The sun had just risen, and it was glaringly bright.

He cut through the courtyard of Yagudo’s house, turned onto the main street, and made for the well. There were several People of the Earth ladies there, and lots of children, too.

Leonardo thought he’d woken early, but apparently, as far as the villagers were concerned, it wasn’t that early. The place teemed with women having lively conversations as they did chores, and the little kids were energetic.

Thanking the women who’d considerately moved aside to give him room, Leonardo washed his face. As long as its durability hadn’t worn down, Adventurer equipment recovered from visible dirt and scratches automatically, but people’s moods didn’t bounce back so easily. He quickly wiped off his treasured green hood. The cold-water bath was refreshing.

“Hey, mister.”

“Mr. Green.”

“Why are you green?”

“Why, huh? Why?”

Children had begun to gather around Leonardo like little birds.

Leonardo’s mouth bent into a dissatisfied line. I can’t deal with this, he thought. He wasn’t good with kids. They were all immature and rude and temperamental. Would any sane adult ask somebody else, “Why is your face green, huh?” They most certainly would not.

Asking somebody they’d just met would be even further out of the question.

These guys are genuine idiots who don’t understand how awesome and cool ninjas are.

“Hmph. This is proof that I’m a hero.”

“What’s a hero?”

“Can you eat it?”

“Mister, did you eat breakfast already?”

This blows. Leonardo sighed.

Kids couldn’t stay on topic for a whole conversation. He’d seen that tendency among certain women, too, but it was more striking in kids. Problems and questions should be resolved one at a time. A little bit here, a little bit there: You couldn’t write code or catch software bugs that way. Children were the polar opposite of engineers.

Leonardo hauled up a kid who’d been rolling up his trousers to see if the leg inside was green, too, and flicked him on the forehead.

This was seriously hopeless.

“This head is a tribute to the courage and might of the great frog. As a ninja and a frog, it’s the symbol of the bravest hero in the world.”

“Um… Did you get that?”

“I didn’t get it at all.”

“Green! Green frog! Lu wa!”

“Lu wa. ”

They were probably all under ten years old. Some of them seemed to be around five or six. Leonardo, who’d never babysat in his life or lived with a baby, had no way to discern kids’ ages. He was just guessing on instinct.

In theory, there had been a time when Leonardo himself was a kid, but he just couldn’t believe it.

He didn’t want to think that he’d been anything this irrational.

A boy who was built a little bigger, but who still didn’t come up to Leonardo’s waist, rammed into him from the front. The boy had run up and wrapped his arms around him. Maybe he was trying to wrestle. He pushed at him until his face was bright red, but to an Adventurer, it made less of an impression than an attack from a playful cat. Just the way you’d do to a cat, Leonardo hooked two fingers into the back of the boy’s collar and hoisted him up.

A woman who seemed to be the boy’s mother, wearing several layers of the tribe’s thick, colorful clothes, apologized—I’m sorry he’s disturbed you—but the boy in question didn’t seem to care at all.

“Mr. Green Frog, you’re really strong!”

“Heroes have to be.”

Leonardo had raised the boy to his own eye level, and he glared at him, trying to intimidate him. Even though the boy’s feet were about a meter off the ground, he didn’t seem the least bit afraid. He wriggled and twisted in Leonardo’s fingers, looking thoroughly entertained.

The next thing Leonardo knew, a girl who was even younger than the boy was trying to shinny up his legs from behind. He really couldn’t understand it. Apparently, she’d managed to mistake somebody else’s body for playground equipment.

He hoisted the girl up as well.

That made two. He had no idea what their parents were feeding them, but he hardly felt their weight at all. They were like carry-on luggage, just a little heavier than an old-school laptop.

He couldn’t tell what was so funny, but the dangling boy and girl were shrieking with laughter. Taking advantage that Leonardo had both hands full, a third assassin appeared.

It was a shy-looking kid with eyes that slanted down at the outside corners.

It was probably a boy, but if the kid who’d tackled Leonardo had been a hunting dog, this one seemed like a pet dog. He looked up at Leonardo with big, apologetic eyes.

“Mr. Green Frog.”

“That’s Leonardo to you.”

“Mr. Green Frog…”

“—Fine. Whatever. You can call me that. Dummy.”

The boy’s expression clouded, and Leonardo retracted what he’d just said. Argh, pain in the butt. Irritating. Aggravating. He considered chucking both these dangling kids at him at once. They’d be a new attack technique: Missile Children.

However, when he imagined the way the kids would shriek and laugh as they flew toward their target, the feeling withered on him instantly. It would be too much of a mockery. Battles were about slipping through the gap between life and death, something more sacred. They weren’t the sort of thing you could insult with little kids’ laughter.

“Mr. Green Frog. Food…”

Failing to register Leonardo’s internal scream, the boy with drooping eyes timidly held out a white lump. The lump was more than thirty centimeters long. It was probably made of baked wheat flour or something similar.

After thinking a little bit, Leonardo accepted it.

This was partly because a few of the women were bowing away so vigorously that it looked as if they’d broken, and he felt sorry for them, and also because he thought spending any more time dealing with the happily frolicking kids around him would only tire him out.

In order to take the thing, he had to free up his hands, so he let the captured boy in his right hand and the girl in his left hand go. They bounded around gleefully, singing some sort of local song that Leonardo didn’t know, and ran around the area.

The kids seemed to have decided that getting caught by Leonardo was a new sort of game. They ran at him one after another, or tried to climb up him, or asked him to hoist them up. Leonardo turned them away with dignity.

“Playing with kids isn’t a hero’s job. All right, get out of the way, clear the road.”

Half-heartedly messing with the kids who were still swarming around him, Leonardo made for the outskirts of the village with leisurely footsteps. He was headed for that big boulder. It wasn’t that he’d taken a particular liking to it or anything; he just couldn’t handle getting swarmed by kids. The top of that thing would be a perfect place to take shelter.

As he walked, he ate the misshapen bread. It wasn’t as hard as he’d thought it would be, and the flavor was faint and simple.

In that sense, it reminded him of the unseasoned, half-dried auto meals from just after the Catastrophe. However, as he chewed, a sweetness spread through his mouth, and he decided the flavor wasn’t half bad. Tiny pieces of what was probably dried, minced mutton were mixed in, and the crunchy texture was terrific.

There was already somebody on top of the boulder.

It was KR.

His shape resembled a horse, but as he was now—with his knees folded, lying on his side on the rock—he didn’t look like one. When he’d thought that far, Leonardo corrected himself. Real horses might actually look that messy when they slept, too.

KR glanced over with his third eye, spotted Leonardo, then blissfully closed that eye again.

“You’re going back to sleep?”

“I’m not sleeping. This is a morning nap.”

“That’s sleeping.”

“Not quite. It’s not that I desperately want to sleep or anything. Good morning.”

Even as he sensed the slight blur of the translation function, Leonardo gazed steadily at KR. He’d said he was getting up, but he apparently didn’t plan to change position. He probably wanted to spend the morning idly.

Leonardo didn’t really feel like getting in his way. He ate the bread-like thing in his right hand in silence.

Come to think of it, KR had said that mare was making eyes at him.

Leonardo thought he might have spent the whole night feeling the same thing Leonardo had felt when the kids were mobbing him. In that case, he did sympathize with him a bit. Well, not asking him about it was probably the mannerly thing for an adult male to do.

The brisk morning air caressed the two of them on its way by.

Time passed slowly.

Leonardo gazed at the thin road that ran far away to the southeast, but he didn’t see any travelers or caravans making their way up it. Yagudo had said that a caravan would be here in the next few days, but apparently, things weren’t going to go that smoothly.

“What’s that?”

“They gave it to me. It’s breakfast.”

KR sniffed loudly; the motion looked exactly like that of a real horse. “Want some?” Leonardo held the poorly leavened bread up to his mouth.

“Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”

KR didn’t refuse. He obediently took a bite.

“Ah, damn. That’s good. Grass is bitter and nasty-tasting. Did you know that? That’s Soul Possession’s worst point. You may be a mystical beast, but your sense of taste doesn’t change. This body really isn’t suited to having meals. It’s awful.”

KR’s tone was thoroughly disgusted, and Leonardo was impressed. He hadn’t known about that problem. When he’d heard Soul Possession explained, he’d thought it was an incredibly convenient ability with a wide range of applications, but even so, he didn’t think he’d be able to handle two whole months in that shape.

“You’re in Japan, right, KR?”

“Yes.”

“…And there are level-91 Adventurers there.”

“Some have levels that are even higher.”

“I see…”

In the gaps in their conversation, the two of them ate the lightly salted bread.

In the midst of the dazzling morning light, Leonardo was remembering Big Apple. Inside his mind, the hometown where he’d holed up in a Midtown apartment and worked as an engineer and the comfortable room he’d made for himself in the sewers in Elder Tales blurred together into one New York.

“I bet things are pretty ugly in Japan, too, huh?”

“No, not really.”

“Oh yeah?”

Leonardo hadn’t expected to hear that, and he sent another question back at him.

He was thinking of the cold, paranoid times that had hit Big Apple after the Catastrophe. He’d overheard things about South Angel on a telechat, and although the details had been different, the situation had been similar, so he’d been convinced that Adventurers were hurting one another in all the major cities around the world.

“Well, it depends on where you are in Japan, but yeah. It’s not as bad as the continent. I’ve seen all sorts of things since I came over here. There are some cities that are dominated by brutal violence. Dadu’s so bad it makes Susukino look like a joke. There are things that make the situation in New York you told me about seem like child’s play.”

At KR’s words, Leonardo tried to imagine the atrocities he’d mentioned, then shook his head, stopping himself. There was no point in thinking about them. He wasn’t there. Right now, hearing this story came first.

“Japan’s situation is a bit different. It’s isolated, see. Most of the players are Japanese, and the ocean blocks exchange with the districts under the jurisdiction of other servers.”

2

Come to think of it, that was completely natural.

When he visualized its shape on a map, it was clear that Japan was an island nation. It might be close to the eastern coast of the continent, but there was an ocean in between. That kept it insulated from other regions.

On top of that, Japan was the only area under the jurisdiction of the Japanese server.

In terms of the world map, the North American server managed Canada as well as the United States, and the European server covered more than ten countries. Unlike those, the range Japan’s server managed was incredibly small. In addition, if Leonardo remembered correctly, Japan was a country with very few immigrants. Maybe the eruptions of racism he’d seen in North America had been comparatively less common there.

Or, no, was there a more fundamental reason?

Leonardo asked a question, looking for confirmation:

“Is that because of the new patch? Was there some sort of new element that maintains public order in there?”

“No, as far as I know, it’s nothing to do with the new patch. It’s probably because Japan is full of fanboys, hermits, and nervous types.”

“Wait, really?”

KR lay down on the cool rock, shutting his eyes halfway. He looked completely relaxed.

Gazing at him, Leonardo fell into contemplation.

That must have been the peculiar Japanese “modesty” he’d heard about.

He’d always thought it was cool, and here he’d been given a demonstration of its greatness once again. Not only had they developed cup ramen and the rotary engine, they were managing to maintain order under circumstances like these. He would have expected no less from the country of Zen Buddhism and the samurai code.

“So Japan’s peaceful, huh…? I’m jealous.”

“No, it’s not all that.”

“Hmm?”

“Japan… Well, no, it’s called Yamato here, but…”

Equine muzzle snuffling, KR drew a deep breath.

“Japan was in tatters when the transference happened, too. It was confused, and the depression was worse than the confusion. Talk about being desolated and down in the dumps. From the general mood, the future looked pitch-black. That day, I think there were about thirty thousand Japanese players logged in, and…”

Thirty thousand. That was a larger number than he’d expected.

Considering the area of that island country, it seemed like it would be overcrowded.

“Well, all thirty thousand of them got depressed all at once. Some players just crouched down and couldn’t really move anymore. Some got desperate and tried to kill themselves. Then there were a certain number who started player killing, without a thought for anyone else. However, there were heroes who didn’t think despairing forever was a good plan. In both eastern and western Japan, at that.”

“Does an island that tiny even have an east and west?”

“It’s not a matter of area. It’s about population.”

When he put it that way, it made sense.

The “size of the world” Leonardo and other modern humans felt was technically a network, the connections between people.

The only world a lone person could sense was the scenery in front of them. No matter how wide the world was, there was a limit to the range you could explore—and use—on your own.

In that case, the total size of the world was proportional to the number of observers. You could say that the world you were able to sense was dependent on your number of companions and the people with whom you shared information.

“Not that population alone is enough. Anyway, from what I’ve seen all over the place, the more people there are, the bigger the fights get.”

“Conflicts, huh?”

“That’s right. Although it hasn’t heated up all that far yet. Eastern Yamato has banded together around a town called Akiba. It governs itself; all the guilds in Akiba participate. The top eleven guilds have formed something called the Round Table Council and are working together in a neighborly way. At this point, their representative is a player named Krusty. A good-looking guy, that one. They’ve probably got about fourteen thousand participating members.”

KR broke off for a moment and glanced at Leonardo.

When Leonardo nodded, encouraging him to go on, he continued matter-of-factly, “Meanwhile, the West is centered around a city called Minami. That one’s more radical. All the western Adventurers have been absorbed by a single guild called Plant Hwyaden. Plant Hwyaden claims to have done away with discrimination between Adventurers and established a fair and just society. Officially, they’ve got about twelve thousand participants.”

“Those are some bold strokes.”

“They had to be. They needed to state their ideals boldly to get the confusion under control. You understand that, right?”

“So it was like a presidential election.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“The leader in the West is powerful, and they managed to handle the circumstances skillfully. So the East is a republic? I get the impression there’s a faction struggle going on. Is that right?”

“No, well, I guess you could call it that. It seems to me that ‘republic’ isn’t a word they’re real familiar with in Japan. Either way, those two are both working to get back to the real world, but they’re rivals.”

Something about KR’s words felt strange to Leonardo.

“Are they? They’re not fighting with each other—they’re rivals?”

“They’re both Japanese organizations. They don’t have any particularly hard feelings toward each other. I’m not very confident, but I think that’s true for everybody except Indicus. I couldn’t tell you what it’ll be like in the future, though.”

“Then why are they rivals at all? If they’re working toward the same goal, couldn’t they just integrate? The Plant Hwyaden guild could participate in that eastern council. Or, no, all the eastern guilds could participate in Plant Hwyaden and act as administrative staff.”

At Leonardo’s words, KR smiled faintly.

“An excellent idea, but it ain’t that easy. There are too many people. More than five hundred thousand…”

“Five hundred thousand?! But you just said there were thirty thousand Adventurers in Japan!”

“That five hundred thousand includes the People of the Earth. They’ve got their own circumstances and organizations. In the first place, due to past history, Yamato’s People of the Earth are split between the East and the West. Akiba and Minami’s rivalry is being influenced by the social structure of the People of the Earth.”

“Why would you bother with them? They’re just NPCs. C’mon, KR. You know they’re not human, right?”

“……”

Leonardo realized that KR was gazing at him with eyes as cold as glass beads.

Under that gaze, Leonardo abruptly felt ashamed. He didn’t understand why it had happened, but he felt as if KR was feeling contempt for him, as if he thought he were a slow little kid.

“Leonardo. You’d better hurry up and adjust.”

“Huh? Uh…”

“Without information support, modern humans are just an undisciplined mob. My personal preferences aside, humans are all about numbers. Our true power first appears when we form groups. Groups are societies that have some sort of lifestyle and technological support. If you think back to life on Earth, you’ll understand. Most people wouldn’t even have been able to win a fight with a stray dog, right? Leonardo…I’m not bragging about it, but I’d even lose to a stray cat. We’re fragile, but because we banded together, we managed to conquer the world. It wasn’t our knowledge. After all, early humans weren’t even really able to write… It was society. It’s because we banded together and made a system out of it.”

KR spoke fluently, as if giving a lecture from a podium.

“Knowledge, society, and information are a trinity. In order to create a society, you need to exchange information, and the surplus heat from that exchange generates knowledge. Put another way, if humans didn’t build societies, there would be no need to exchange information, and the civilizations we got would probably have been low-level. That’s clear from a look at history, isn’t it? Information exchange is a weapon. Now that we modern human Adventurers have lost the Web, we’re suddenly back in the Stone Age. We’re being divided, fragmented, here in this other world. Are you aware of that, Leonardo? Can you borrow somebody else’s wisdom at this point?”

A sharp pang ran through Leonardo’s chest.

KR was right.

There were no computers or Internet here. Forget those; they didn’t even have phones or a postal system. They had telechats, of course. Telechats had been part of the game system, and they had survived. However, this wasteland was on the Chinese server. None of Leonardo’s old friends were here. In order to place telechats, you needed a live friend list, but his entire list was dark and silent. Telechats wouldn’t connect unless you were on the same server.

Leonardo remembered the anxiety and hopelessness he’d felt when it seemed as if he’d meet his end in Tekeli—that loneliness.

If he’d had access to a solutions wiki, he probably would have searched for a way to get out of Tekeli. Or, no, even before that, he might have searched for dangerous information and then steered clear of the place to begin with. Even if he’d been unlucky enough to fall into that trap in Tekeli, if he’d had bulletin boards and e-mail, he could have called for help.

But what had actually happened?

He’d been on the verge of starving to death alone.

It was true that Adventurers had rare combat abilities. In terms of their old world, they were in the same position as wolves and panthers. There was no doubting their superiority as living creatures. However, his individual skills hadn’t been enough to let him tear his way out of a single ruins trap. Not only that, in this world, there were all sorts of beings whose strength was higher than Adventurers’. Most of the party monsters encountered in dungeons were sturdier and had greater attack abilities than aboveground monsters. After all, they’d been designed on the assumption that parties of six Adventurers would be fighting them.

If Leonardo was ten levels above them, he might be able to win, but he didn’t have a chance against a party monster on his level. Similarly, raid monsters were designed to be tackled by twenty-four Adventurers of the same level, or by even bigger groups.

Dragons, giants, behemoths, land worms—there were all sorts of enormous, terrifying monsters here, and unless Adventurers banded together, they couldn’t display their abilities. Not in a world without online support.

“What I’m saying is that the People of the Earth aren’t like that. Sure, they may be NPCs… At least to you, Leonardo. But so what? They’re the residents of this world, and they’ve spread their roots much farther than we have. They have their own society. Compared with the electronic network back on Earth, it might be clumsy, but even so, in their own way, they’ve built a society.”

“They…have?”

“Yep. From things that have been used since medieval times, like post horses, messengers and rumors, spies and bureaucrats. They even have a magical information network that uses crystal balls, transmission tubes, and lightning spirits. They aren’t Adventurers, but they’re not idiots and morons, either. And—bonus—they’ve got more than ten times our numbers.”

“Still, that doesn’t mean…”

Even if that was true, People of the Earth were People of the Earth.

Wasn’t it nonsense to compare them to Adventurers? So what if they had ten times the players’ numbers? Leonardo was confident that he could conquer this village all by himself if he felt like it. It didn’t matter if there were two or three hundred villagers. Even Thekkek’s strongest member was only around level 30. Leonardo couldn’t imagine losing to somebody like that.

“Of course, I see what you’re getting at.” KR nodded sagely. “I could dominate this village myself. But what would you do then? Would you become village chief? What would you do if you got hungry? Would you defeat a monster and eat its meat? Would you seriously do something that tiresome? You want to eat wheat, right? You want seasonings, too. For those, in the end, you’d have to associate with the producers, wouldn’t you? Do you think Adventurers could provide all that on their own? For example, even Chefs rely on People of the Earth markets for their ingredients. Even if you took meat from your prey, if you wanted grain, you’d have to buy stuff grown by the locals. If we’re going to have a certain standard of living, we can’t avoid getting involved with the People of the Earth. In the end, that’s where the road forks.”

“Where the road forks?”

“I mean we can’t just think about ourselves, as individuals or as a group. It’s the same with worsening public order, and with the enmity between guilds. If we want to solve our own problems, our only choice is to solve the problems around us. All of them, People of the Earth included. We can say they’ve got nothing to do with us and toss them aside, but in the end, that would royally screw up our own lives, too.”

KR’s words hurt Leonardo.

That was exactly what he’d seen in Big Apple, on the North American server.

In a mildly disgusted voice, KR concluded his lecture:

“In other words, do we and the People of the Earth acknowledge one another, or do we use each other? It doesn’t matter how we do it, but there’s nothing we can do but live with them. As long as we treat them like NPCs, no matter what kinds of guilds we have, even if we’re Adventurers, we’ll have an end-of-the-century conqueror’s legend here, and then society will collapse. The end. That’s all.”

3

Two days had passed.

Over those two days, on the whole, the villagers had welcomed Leonardo’s group.

In response to the villagers’ request, Elias had cleared away several thickets, helping to reclaim land. Coppélia gave blessings and treated injured people when asked, and Kanami’s natural charm made her hugely popular. KR himself absolutely refused to admit it, but half of the horses—and there were more horses than villagers—watched him with fervent eyes.

However, unexpectedly, the one the children took the greatest liking to was Leonardo.

Boy or girl, whenever the kids saw Leonardo, they seemed to get very excited and happy.

What really irritated him was the fact that the kids always tried to climb him. The slightly older ones hung back, but they did so out of what little juvenile pride they had, and he could tell that what they really wanted was to put their sticky mitts all over him.

To Leonardo, most of the younger boys and girls looked like babes in arms or little ones who’d just begun to walk, and they were far less shy about causing him trouble. In other words, they climbed on him, and if they were in a good mood, they’d smack his green mask. If they were in a bad mood, they’d throw tantrums and cry.

Leonardo fled this way and that, trying to stick to places where there were as few children as possible. Even so, in this small village, there was no way to completely avoid them at meals and when he washed his face in the mornings and evenings. He ended up having to spend a lot of time dealing with children whom he couldn’t admonish.

Because the mothers who lived in the village understood that Leonardo was an Adventurer and that his combat abilities were far greater than theirs, they bowed to him apologetically over and over. We’re terribly sorry our children are causing trouble for you, they said again and again.

However, according to what Leonardo’s imagination told him, this was just for show, and the ladies enjoyed seeing the kids attack Leonardo as well. If that wasn’t the case, he couldn’t believe they’d let the little tyrants have this much freedom.

As a result, while they waited for the caravan, Leonardo had to spend his days hiding from children.

That huge boulder on the outskirts of town was a big help. It was two meters tall, and with an area about as big as a large room on top, it made for a perfect shelter.

After meals, Leonardo scuttled away from the little ones, ran through the streets to lose any pursuers, then crept up to the top of the boulder and hid.

Once he’d fled to the boulder, Leonardo spent most of the day up there, swinging his swords. It was the first serious training he’d done since the Catastrophe had brought him to this other world.

Leonardo executed monotonous techniques over and over, checking every single one and progressing with slow steps, like a frog. He was an engineer by trade, and once he’d made up his mind about something, he was extremely tenacious. Most of the time, he achieved his objectives through perseverance and patience, using his instincts like a hunting dog to bring the problem to bay. Right now, he was using those two weapons to deduce the answer to a riddle.

On the morning of their fourth day in the village, travelers arrived.

Leonardo, who was up on the big boulder, saw them first, and he went out to a spot fifty meters from the village to meet them.

They were a much smaller caravan than the caretaker Yagudo had said they would be.

A middle-aged Person of the Earth led a horse loaded with cargo, and a woman wore scarred-up leather armor. Even though she was on foot, the woman, who wore a fur-trimmed mantle, was carrying on her back more cargo than the horse. It looked like they might have been journeying for a long time; there was pronounced fatigue in her expression.

Leonardo confirmed that she was an Adventurer, and he knew she’d recognized him at very nearly the same time.

“Are you an Adventurer, sir?”

“That’s right. I’m Leonardo.”

The woman bit her lip, clearly wary. She looked young, but her voice was calm, and most telling of all, her expression was experienced.

In the world of Elder Tales, due to the influence of the game’s 3-D models, everyone tended to be good-looking. As a result, people who were middle-aged or older often ended up looking as if their youth had been restored. In terms of simple appearance, this woman seemed to be about twenty, but from her self-possession, it wouldn’t have been odd for her to be in her thirties.

“My name is Chun Lu. I am a traveling guard affiliated with the Lelang Wolf Cavalry. My strength was insufficient to protect the other members of the caravan.”

The middle-aged man was a merchant with black whiskers and strong-willed eyes. Introducing himself as Ju Ha, he asked to be taken to village chief Yagudo.

Technically, Leonardo wasn’t in a position to take requests like that, and he didn’t have the authority to grant permission. However, Chun Lu seemed to think that he was an Adventurer who’d been hired to guard the village. Either way, he couldn’t just leave these two on the outskirts of town. Leonardo returned to Yagudo’s house, showing the pair the way.

At the chieftain’s abode, the two travelers were given a warm welcome, and in the large hall, Chun Lu told them what had happened.

The Lelang Wolf Cavalry had accepted a request to guard Ju Ha’s caravan. This sort of guard duty was routine for the Cavalry. There had been four members of the caravan and six guards from the guild. In the beginning, she said, the journey had gone smoothly.

“However, on the eighth night, while we were southeast of this place, we encountered some gnolls. Lately, gnoll sightings in this region have grown more frequent. We had been watching for them, but…there were too many.”

Chun Lu and Ju Ha, who’d been offered plain hot water by the villagers, spoke in leaden voices, but they told things just as they’d happened, with no apparent reluctance.

“We couldn’t tell their exact numbers, but I think there were more than eighty of them. Since we are a guard unit, there is no meaning in simply winning battles. We have to save our clients. We defended, but there was no way for us to block that many gnolls completely.

“Gnolls tend to attack Adventurers. Knowing this, we distanced ourselves from the caravan, but in the end, our efforts were in vain. My Adventurer companions were annihilated. After I’d managed to escape, I went around searching for the members of the caravan, but there was nothing to do but mourn their passing. Ju Ha was the only survivor I found.”

Chun Lu’s face was grave, and the merchant she’d called Ju Ha seemed to be trying to comfort her.

He was a virile man with chiseled features and black whiskers. Although his voice was tired, it was still firm.

“Life on the road is always dangerous. That lot knew something like this could happen. The Wolf Cavalry risked their lives to protect us. They won’t hold a grudge against you.”

“But—!”

With so much force that she seemed in danger of biting through her lip, Chun Lu swallowed her words. Leonardo and the others knew what the rest of the sentence would have been as clearly as if she’d said it.

But we’ll come back to life. We’re Adventurers.

That was only natural. If Adventurers died every time a monster got them, it wouldn’t be much of a game. That was why they revived in the temple. However, this wasn’t true for the People of the Earth.

People of the Earth died.

Because they were NPCs.

That was just as ordinary as it was for Adventurers to revive. However, even though Leonardo knew that death was natural, he was unable to accept it as such.

Ridiculous… You know there’s no helping that. That’s just how it goes…isn’t it?

The things KR had said rose in his mind.

The symbiotic relationship between People of the Earth and Adventurers. He understood that.

There were more People of the Earth in this world than Adventurers, and there was work that only they could do. Therefore, Adventurers couldn’t get by all on their own. In that case, why not just use the People of the Earth as servants and live that way? The way Plant Hwyaden—the guild from Minami that had come up in the conversation—did things was perfectly logical in this world.

Even so, something just didn’t sit right with him, and Kanami, Elias, and even Coppélia were listening to Chun Lu as if that “something” was only natural.

He’d never been good with this sort of dreary emotion.

Leonardo was a genuine New Yorker, and as a city-dweller, he was a believer in dry, hard, urban survival. In New York, everyone had their hands full just trying to save themselves. Working to help yourself was the heart of liberalism.

The weak died. That was simply how the world worked.

However, by that same logic, Leonardo sensed nobility in this middle-aged merchant, Ju Ha.

In the midst of this harsh battle for survival, they risked their most valuable asset—their lives—by trading in this dangerous wasteland. Ju Ha had survived, but his companions had lost their lives. On the whole, it was probably safe to say that the caravan had lost this bet. Ju Ha had been defeated, and he’d lost a lot of property and irreplaceable friends. However, that didn’t decrease his nobility in the slightest. After all, he’d tried.

“So what are you planning to do now, Ju Ha and Chun Lu?”

“Your companions are gone, and I doubt you’ll be able to travel any farther west.”

It looked as if Ju Ha had already been thinking of the things Leonardo and Elias had said. He had only one horse left, and he’d lost most of his guards. Journeying farther would be difficult.

Chun Lu had been about to say something, but she faltered and glanced at Ju Ha. Her employer’s wishes probably took priority.

“You’re right. I’ll have to start all over again. I’m planning to sell off as much of my cargo as possible in this village, then return. If I make it to the City of Mare’s Milk, Dadu may be far, but I think I’ll be able to pull some people together and make a fresh start.”

Chun Lu was a Cleric. That had probably helped them survive. The wounds both Chun Lu and Ju Ha had sustained when fleeing from the gnolls had healed already. If Ju Ha had been on his own, he would have had to stay in this village and recuperate, possibly for as long as six months, but fortunately, he could depart the very next day.

His voice was stern, but it held the energy to move forward again.

“My guild, the Lelang Wolf Cavalry, is planning a raid to wipe out the gnoll group. As a result, they don’t have the leeway to send additional guards for the journey home…” Chun Lu sounded apologetic.

“That’s fine,” Kanami said. “We’re on our way east, too. We’ll be your traveling companions. The five of us… Or—no, I guess one of us is a horse. Anyway, with you, Chun Lu, that’s six. Perfect, right?”

Just as she’d done when she picked up Leonardo and made him a traveling companion, Kanami settled the matter with a lightness that held no hint of sarcasm.

Elias nodded, and Coppélia’s expression looked vaguely happy. This relieved Leonardo. He didn’t know why he felt that way, but Kanami’s decision seemed to have swept away the slight pain he’d felt.

4

Chun Lu belonged to a guild called the Lelang Wolf Cavalry. From what she said, the guild had left Dadu in China and fled west. Dadu was a city in the game that corresponded to real-world Shanghai. It was a player town on par with Yandu, aka Beijing, on the Chinese server.

She recounted her circumstances to Leonardo’s group as they traveled together. Apparently, the Lelang Wolf Cavalry had gotten fed up with the way society was deteriorating in the central area of the Chinese server—the regions along the coast—and had been the first of the guilds to move their main base westward.

On hearing her story, Leonardo thought, That makes sense.

The Lelang Wolf Cavalry was probably a homey outfit. From what he’d heard, they had about five hundred members, which made them huge, but not super-huge. In other words, they’d had enough members to ride the situation out, but they hadn’t been big enough to control the struggle for supremacy on the server. In that case, evacuating seemed like a sound move.

Most of all, Chun Lu knew a lot about this region.

Of course, the wasteland was a vast expanse of unexplored territory. After all, it was the center of the immense Eurasian continent. Even though its size had been halved by the Half-Gaia Project, the Chinese server covered an enormous region that included the Tian Shan Mountains, the Taklamakan Desert, and the Pamir Mountains, among other things. Even on Earth, you really couldn’t say the region was completely developed.

In addition to the gigantic country of China, the area under its jurisdiction included Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the other countries of Central Asia.

There was probably no one, Adventurer or Person of the Earth, who had complete knowledge of each and every zone in its entire map. Even the developers couldn’t possibly have a comprehensive picture of the whole thing.

That said, there were people who did use the narrow paths that linked trade routes, villages, and oases, and Chun Lu and Ju Ha were two of the select few.

“I’m glad we went with you!”

On the night they had left the village, as she sipped hot water they’d boiled in a tin can, Kanami made that declaration to her traveling companions with a smile.

Leonardo had to agree with her.

True, in terms of fighting ability, the People of the Earth merchant Ju Ha would hold them back. The man had a virile, bearded face and a sturdy build, and for a civilian, he was comparatively tough. He might even be as strong as the average soldier. However, his physical abilities were far below Leonardo’s and those of the other level 90s.

Moving forward in accordance with Ju Ha’s orders, the group traveled for ten hours each day.

If he hadn’t been there, they could have spent an additional two hours traveling, plus they would have doubled the distance they covered.

However, nobody was unhappy about this.

If the Adventurers hurried ahead on their own, they’d probably be able to shorten their travel time by a week or two, but the odds of losing their way or running into trouble would be far greater. Leonardo, Kanami, and Coppélia were all Adventurers who’d spent a long time living in cities, and it was highly unlikely that they’d be able to find an oasis.

As a matter of fact, when Elias spotted a watering hole from a sandstone ridge and tried to climb down to it, Ju Ha stopped him.

Although the water in the oasis they saw from up on the ridge was perfectly clear and sparkling, he said that if they climbed down to it they’d get trapped in an enormous hollow.

On hearing that climbing up a cliff of brittle, crumbling sandstone was next to impossible, and that they’d waste a full three days before reaching the next oasis, Leonardo and the others gave up on the idea. Additionally, by evening they reached an abandoned village, and while the place was small, it was comfortable and had an old well.

When traveling across deserts and wastelands, experience was vital.

“True.”

Elias responded to Kanami’s carefree comment with his deep, resonant voice. Of course this Ancient hero, who was as handsome as a picture, even had a beautiful voice.

“You said it.”

Leonardo also responded, shrugging.

Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have been at all strange for him to develop some sort of complex about Elias’s high specs, but weirdly, he didn’t feel anything of the sort. Maybe they’d just boggled him to the point where he had no idea what to do.

This is the Elias Hackblade, after all. Even thinking about it is probably pretty dumb…

The flames of their campfire snapped and crackled.

They’d built it out of solid fuel made from dried livestock dung and a little kindling. The deep red, flickering light shone on the party, who were sitting close together in the shadow of the rock.

“Yaaaay! I call the back today!”

Quickly, Kanami burrowed into the very back of the tent Leonardo had set up. The tent was something Ju Ha had had with him; apparently, it was a travel necessity. It was made of a sturdy felt cloth draped over a lattice framework of plaited bamboo, and even though it was collapsible, it was incredibly good at keeping out the cold.

If you ignored the fact that it made for crowded sleeping conditions, it was perfectly possible for six people to lie down inside.

Earlier, Leonardo had let his Adventurer body’s capabilities handle everything and had traveled without making proper camping preparations, but now he was very impressed, both by this camping equipment and by the skilled campfire-building method Coppélia had used.

In every situation, there were logical actions to take.

“You’re okay there again, KR?”

“I don’t mind. I can handle the cold better than humans. Being a horse has its advantages.”

KR had already moved his equine body to the tent’s entrance.

Even if it was a high-performance felt tent, at night, the plateau wind sometimes crept in. The area near the entrance was cold, and Kanami had fled to the best seat in the house in order to avoid it. Picking up on this, KR had apparently taken the spot by the entrance.

Pulled in by Kanami, Coppélia also went to get ready for bed. From inside the tent, Leonardo heard inappropriate words like hug-pillow and boff, boff, but thinking that was okay because they were both girls, he let it slide.

Elias, Chun Lu, and Ju Ha, who were still near the fire, planned to stay awake a bit longer.

Traveling while fatigued was dangerous. Even so, it couldn’t be much past seven in the evening yet. Since they’d started to make camp a little before sunset, it would be a while longer before they felt sleepy.

“Would you care for another cup?”

At Chun Lu’s suggestion, Leonardo held out his mug. Dexterously using two sticks to take down the brass pot that hung over the fire, she picked it up with the tail of her mantle and poured boiling hot tea into the cup.

“It’s hot, so please be careful.”

“Thanks,” he told the woman, who filled another mug in the same way and handed it to Elias.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

“This area’s always like this.”

Elias’s gaze was turned upward to the sky. Ju Ha was the one to reply.

“Full of stars” was the only way to describe that sky. It was high, infinitely clear, and adorned with a sparkle like scattered diamond dust.

“You said the Lelang Wolf Cavalry is planning to subjugate the gnolls with a raid?” Leonardo asked as he sipped his tea.

In response, Chun Lu nodded. “That’s correct.”

“What’re the odds are their of success?”

“The odds? The Lelang Wolf Cavalry is a guild with slightly under five hundred members. This operation will be conducted by a century unit led by Zhu Huan, our guild leader, in person. I can’t imagine we’ll be defeated.”

He’d never heard the term century unit before, but he understood that she was probably talking about a legion raid. That would mean ninety-six people. You could certainly call that “roughly one hundred.”

Generally speaking, Adventurers’ combat abilities jumped as their numbers grew. The total combat abilities of two Adventurers weren’t double what one Adventurer had—they were two and a half times that, at the very least. Three times, if they fought in close cooperation.

This was a manifestation of the ability generated by the fact that parties weren’t just groups of multiple Adventurers; they were single life-forms that coordinated their fighting. Some Adventurers specialized in defense, some in recovery, some in offense, and some in disturbing the enemy. If Adventurers who knew their own strong points exercised them and compensated for each other’s weak points, Adventurer parties could display terrifying combat abilities.

Of course there were several prerequisites for this sort of coordinated teamwork. The Adventurers in the party had to know one another’s abilities and work together appropriately. They also had to attempt to respond reliably to the other members’ hopes.

These principles applied to raids as well.

Full raids, which were made up of four six-member parties, had twenty-four members. Legion raids, which brought four full raids together, had ninety-six members. With units that large, a cohesive understanding among the groups, vital for cooperation, was difficult to achieve. That said, if they overcame that difficulty, these Adventurer “armies” were probably the strongest military force in the world of Theldesia.

Gnoll levels ranged from about 20 to 50. Although there was no telling what sort of tactics the beasts would use, if the Lelang Wolf Cavalry had gone through even modest team training, against a gnoll force forty times their size—yes, four thousand gnolls—they would be able to fight without giving an inch.

Considered normally, that was enough military strength to power through the game’s content on the grandest scale.

Of course, after the Catastrophe, combat had changed.

The terror of violence, in which steel clashed with steel, emitted a burnt smell. The horror of death, where something gradually transformed into a bloody lump of meat before your eyes.

The influence these things had certainly wasn’t small. Even people who had grown more resistant to pain, thanks to system assists, could break. Leonardo had seen many Adventurers crumple. However, if he believed what Chun Lu said, these fears were groundless. He got the impression that the Lelang Wolf Cavalry was a band of skilled veterans with an excellent leader, so they had nothing to worry about.

…Except for the phenomenon known as “plague demons.”

Leonardo still didn’t have any firm ideas about what the plague demons actually were. He’d told Chun Lu about them, but she hadn’t heard of them. The merchant had said he’d heard rumors among the People of the Earth, but he didn’t know details or the actual truth, and of course he’d never seen one in the flesh.

What had that crazed Person of the Earth boy been?

The boy’s behavior patterns had unmistakably matched those of a gnoll.

It seemed almost self-evident that whatever had made the boy like that had something to do with gnolls. For that reason, he felt a trace of unease about the Lelang Wolf Cavalry’s gnoll subjugation as well.

However, in that case, what was the specific relationship between the plague demons and the gnolls, and what sort of mystery did that hold? Leonardo had absolutely no clue.

He’d given Chun Lu a summary of the incident and had suggested she instruct her headquarters to be on the alert, but with no definite proof at that moment, inspiring caution was the best he could do.

“I hope it’s nothing.”

Elias’s comment seemed somehow undependable. Apparently, even the words of a hero weren’t much help at a time like this.

Leonardo and the others were keeping to the ridge as they traveled, over a hundred kilometers away from the Wolf Cavalry, which was advancing across the plain to the south. Besides, they hadn’t been asked to help, not in so many words. They’d pray for their safety, but it wasn’t as if they could do anything.

This was a natural conclusion, and it was a view Elias and Leonardo shared.

Far to the south, the Lelang Wolf Cavalry advanced under the night sky.

They were headed straight for the Ruined Colonnade of Tonnesgrave.

5

Two days later, the fighting began.

Led by Zhu Huan, the ninety-six legion raid members thickly encircled Tonnesgrave and attacked the gnolls.

From their scout reports, the legion raid knew the gnolls had vast numbers. There were ten thousand of them assembled there, at the very least. In terms of numeric fighting power, there was more than a hundredfold difference between them.

However, a hundredfold difference in fighting power didn’t mean that a hundred monsters could attack a single Adventurer at once. In fact, the gnolls encircled the ruins as if trying to protect them, taking up positions on the opposite side of the structure from Zhu Huan’s legion raid.

That meant the gnolls weren’t making full use of their numbers. All Zhu Huan’s unit had to do was fight the several hundred gnolls that surrounded them, and an encirclement on that level wouldn’t be enough to stop them. The gnolls’ individual fighting power was far below that of each assembled Adventurer.

A song welled up from within the unit.

It was Nocturne of Meditation.

In this land, the song was called “Ying Shi Ye Qu.” Ordinarily, the melody the Bard was playing had the effect of recovering—albeit gradually—MP, which wouldn’t normally recover during battle. It was slow, but in protracted combat, the accumulated recovery amount meant a lot. It was a strategic special skill.

Additionally, the green light of Pulse Recovery, the Druid spell, was visible here and there within the unit.

In terms of the relationship between HP recovery amounts and MP consumption, it was more efficient for each of the Recovery classes to use their unique recovery technique—in other words, Reactive Heal, Damage Interception, and Pulse Recovery—instead of instant recovery spells. In particular, while a Druid’s Pulse Recovery couldn’t recover instantly, it was a convenient spell that continued to recover HP for a set amount of time.

As these two points show, when putting together this legion raid, Zhu Huan had emphasized continuous combat ability over instant offensive ability. If the enemies were gnolls, they’d be able to consign them to oblivion without maintaining vast attack power.

On the contrary, it was more likely that they’d use their numbers to surround the legion raid and wear them out by force.

There was a rear guard unit stationed three kilometers behind the Ruined Colonnade, but Zhu Huan thought they’d be able to settle this with the ninety-six members of this large unit.

“Unit Three is exhausted. Pull them back to the inside! Right wing, switch! Unit One, advance!!”

He issued orders loudly, in a voice that was hoarse and roughened from living in the wilderness, but still full of dignity. The unit advanced in response, slashing through the gnolls.

In battles like this one, Swashbucklers and Taomancers were the leading players. Since their attacks pulled in the beings around them, they were able to suppress monsters on broad planes, instead of merely at points.

Lightning Nebula, a Taomancer wide-range spell, struck the gnolls. Electricity writhed, shining bluish-purple, gleaming like a nebula as it closed a dozen or so foul dog-headed monsters inside itself.

Coolly ignoring the gnoll screams that welled up all around them, four Swashbucklers leapt from the left and right of the unit, walking in a manner that looked like something out of a classical Chinese opera. Every time the twin swords they held flickered left or right, gnolls that’d been bound by the lightning fell comedically.

The swordsmen’s dance of blood went on, and when space opened up in front of the unit, the heavily armored suppression unit made up of Guardians immediately filled the gap. The Swashbuckler class was specially designed for offense. Before they could sustain needless damage, the unit took them back in, in preparation for the next attack.

The unit advanced steadily toward the center of the ruins, using tactics that, while plain, were true to the basics.

“One hour since combat began, hmm?” Zhu Huan muttered.

In his mind, having his unit wipe out the gnolls had never been an option.

After all, there were more than ten thousand of the creatures, possibly even twenty thousand. If he decided to, he didn’t think it would be impossible to destroy them, but it would take far too much work, and it wasn’t realistic.

The gnolls looked like they’d encircled Tonnesgrave with a formation that was several rows deep. They were also camped on the other side of the ruins, opposite the north side, where Zhu Huan and his army had launched their attack. He really didn’t feel like running an operation to annihilate them after they’d mustered all those backup forces as well.

Zhu Huan’s instincts told him it was better to aim for the center of the ruins.

What was this gnoll army, anyway?

In terms of typical gnoll behavior, he knew they formed packs, but these numbers were abnormal.

Something—probably a raid quest or some similar event—had happened among them. That something had assembled them and was keeping them together.

And there was no doubt that the Black Dragon mentioned in the report was somehow connected to that something.

Zhu Huan thought that the key to unlocking those mysteries had to be in the center of the Ruined Colonnade that the gnoll forces had surrounded.

“Rear rank Taomancers! Crush the enemy on top of the hill ahead of you! Open fire!!”

Even if there were several tens of thousands of gnolls, if the Adventurers were simply punching at right angles through a balanced defensive net, they probably wouldn’t encounter even a thousand of them. As a matter of fact, the Lelang Wolf Cavalry was currently tearing through that net.

But something was wrong.

The first ones to notice the initial signs were the Swashbucklers who’d carved their way into their foe’s ranks. The special skill Green Mountain Wind had expanded the Swashbucklers’ swords; their offensive abilities were no different than normal, but the attack range was wider, and when they swung, they pulled in the surrounding monsters as well. The way they slipped into the enemy’s dense ranks maximized the damage being inflicted.

The four Swashbucklers, running to provide support attacks for their Taomancer allies, increased the damage by making their range attacks overlap, and they’d succeeded in turning the area in front of the unit into a killing field.

However—

Their swords’ agile dance was blocked by gnolls they could have sworn had been lying on the ground. Hairy hands they knew they’d already defeated caught the Swashbucklers’ wrists.

A young dwarf Swashbuckler with a boyish face choked back a scream.

Even if this was a subjugation battle in which they were sowing damage across a wide range, that didn’t mean they weren’t checking the creatures’ HP. Gnolls the Swashbuckler was sure he’d finished off had gotten up again. In fact, the monsters’ arms were shredded, and he could see pale viscera through the gaps in their broken scale armor.

Still, what really terrified the boy wasn’t their grotesque figures. It was their status displays.

The displays were blinking, cycling back and forth between GNOLL: WARRIOR and GNOLL: DARKMANCER. Even the monsters’ HP values wavered in time with the blinking. To the boy, they seemed to be supernatural creatures.

They really were ghoulish demons.

“Gsshara!”

With an indescribable cry that had blood-tinged saliva in it, the gnoll bit the boy’s ankle. It was Blood-Starved Bite, an attack method specific to gnolls. Even as he felt the fangs sink into the tendon in his ankle, the boy desperately swung his sword, bringing the blade down on the thing’s neck.

But its HP didn’t fall.

The gnoll didn’t die.

Of course it didn’t. Its HP was at zero already; it couldn’t fall any farther. In spite of that, an instant after the attack, the figure on its status bar rebounded, and the thing glared resentfully up at the boy with dull, yellow eyes.

The pain was akin to being squeezed in a red-hot vice, and the boy panicked.

He swung his sword again and again.

“Hghk! Hghhhk!!”

Stifling screams in his throat, he kept on hitting it as if he were running it over with a car, and as a result, the gnoll finally fell silent. A Druid he knew came running over, looked at him, then cast Pulse Recovery.

The spell healed the wound on his ankle as they watched, but the boy’s expression was still taut, as if he was about to burst into tears.

The actual damage hadn’t been enough to put his life in danger.

Instead of damage to his HP, the boy had been harmed by a colder terror—as if wind had blown into him and chilled his heart.

Similar confusion was occurring all across the battlefield.

Gnolls stood up, even though fighters could have sworn they were dead. Gnolls the army had assumed to be magic users began brandishing axes. Gnolls that had been swinging swords cast magic spells.

But no matter what petty tricks they used, in the end, gnolls were just gnolls.

If dealt with calmly, they were no match for the Lelang Wolf Cavalry, and as a matter of fact, even in the midst of this confusion, damage to the guild hadn’t increased explosively.

However, the irrational phenomenon whipped up a primitive terror in the hearts of the Adventurers.

The Catastrophe had been an unfair disaster. No reason or explanation had been given for it. One day, out of the blue, they’d been plucked from their familiar homes on Earth and flung into this other world. At present, when they had no prospects of finding a way to return, it was safe to say that they’d been exiled.

Under those terrifying circumstances, the Adventurers had managed not to fall into the worst possible panic because, although this might be another world, it bore a very strong resemblance to the world of the Elder Tales game they knew.

What did it mean to “strongly resemble a game”?

It meant that there were certain set rules, ones that were comprehensible.

It was possible to decipher this other world using the game rules and common sense— the principles—that they’d picked up during their days of playing Elder Tales.

Just the existence of those principles meant their knowledge was valid here. It led them to hope that “Someday, this will make sense.” That was precisely what had allowed the Adventurers to get by in this strange, stress-filled other world.

However, the demons in front of them flew in the face of the system they believed in, the Elder Tales game system.

HP was stamina, the power to exist. If that value hit zero, you went down.

That was the rule, or it should have been.

Special abilities, skills, or the circumstances of an event might recover a creature’s HP and revive it. However, statuses must not be chaotic, and multiple classes must never be displayed by turns. Those phenomena violated the rules, and they seemed to predict the breakdown of the Elder Tales system.

The panic that awareness triggered among the Adventurers was quiet, but its roots ran deep.

If they acknowledged what they just observed, they would lose the rules they’d believed in up until now. Specifically, this world would truly become irrational nonsense. Humans couldn’t handle a world that was consistently impossible to understand.

“Withdraw the Swashbucklers! Summoners! Hit the front line with close combat types, and hurry!!”

Zhu Huan, astutely picking up on the mood, rapped out new orders.

The enemy’s attacks weren’t ferocious. For a short amount of time, it would be possible even for summoned creatures with combat abilities inferior to the Adventurers’ to hold the front line.

The panic was bound to subside eventually. However, in order for that to happen, they’d need a little time.

If they were hit with an additional shock now, the front line might collapse. However, conversely, if they got through this situation, they’d be able to compensate for practically any loss.

The Wolf Cavalry still had sufficient combat resources and spare fighting strength; they didn’t have to win right now. The best course was to stick to defense and let the unit recover from its mental disturbance.

Zhu Huan had gotten questionable reports from his scouting units, but he hadn’t expected an occult phenomenon like this one. Wiping a spot of bloody sludge off his Three Kingdoms–style armor, Zhu Huan continued issuing stern orders.

Right now, the most important thing was to raise his voice and inspire his troops.

Zhu Huan’s instincts told him that commanding was more important than personal bravery at this point, and in order to reassure his subordinates, he kept calling out in a voice so full of confidence that it seemed he understood everything.

However, even Zhu Huan’s voice was drowned out by the sound of the Black Dragon’s wings.

6

The local People of the Earth called the pillars “demon’s fingers thrust into the heavens,” and just as the name indicated, their sharply pointed tips were silhouetted against the sky.

They were roughly thirty meters in height.

In terms of real-world buildings, the structure would have been about ten stories tall, but in this area, where it was surrounded by wasteland, the Colonnade looked like enormous fangs sunken into the earth. Three pillars stabbed the sky. Two stood sharply, while the third had broken partway down.

The pillars seemed to be made of metal. That said, they had been melted down, and now there was a strange softness about them, almost like a living creature. On top of that, untold years had left them rusty and mossy. As a result, instead of the cold sharpness of metal, they struck anyone who saw them as a forgotten ruin.

If you ignored their size, what they resembled most were ancient iron spears that had been stuck into a battlefield and abandoned.

Two black shadows stood at their base, on top of the fallen rubble piled against the iron pillars, about ten meters off the ground.

The tall shadow carried pitch-black darkness with it, beneath its feet.

That black swamp changed shape constantly, and sometimes viscous bubbles burst. The tall figure, whose face was hidden by a hood, was standing on top of a swamp that looked like coal tar.

The shorter figure was a girl, no taller than a child.

Like her companion, the blond, small-boned girl had turned her even-featured face toward the battle below her.

The gnolls that had gathered around the ruin were in the process of being driven away by a group of Adventurers.

The girl gazed at the sight. She didn’t seem terribly interested.

She was playing with the ends of her bangs with her fingers—she might not even have been aware she was twirling her hair. She wore frilly, impractical clothes that made her look like the daughter of some aristocratic family. However, her expression was utterly alien, and although her appearance was unmistakably female, the aura she wore made it impossible to state with certainty that “girl” was her actual gender.

The group of Adventurers was closing in on them, slowly but surely, and the tall figure pointed at them. The robe hid its shape from head to toe, and even the protruding bony finger was covered in a black, sticky membrane. A darkness that resembled filthy sludge dripped from it into the swamp under its feet.

“”

There was a sense that some sort of order was being issued. Bubbles rose from the shadow at the tall figure’s feet, adding an accompaniment to that feeling.

They welled up one by one, the sound of bursting methane bubbles forming a sequence. It was a muttered sound, like a faltering imitation of human speech: “Go.”

A gust of wind welled up behind the two.

The corpse of a Black Dragon, which had been dozing as if guarding the ruined base of the iron pillars, rose easily into the air with a single flap of its wings, becoming a black curtain that blocked the bright Aorsoi sunlight.

Turning even its torn, hanging wing membranes into symbols of terror, the Black Dragon made for the group of Adventurers.

“A splendid banquet, don’t you think?”

“That is a reasonable judgment.”

A tall shadow responded to the girl’s mechanical-sounding question. However, its voice was the static that rose from the unclean bubbles of muck at its feet. The sticky bubbles had to have been bursting incidentally, but by the time the popping noises reached the ear, they sounded like words.

Apparently, the speech this tall man used was the result of this bizarre phenomenon.

The girl fell silent for a while. She was completely motionless, and she used that short span of time to think.

“True…or possibly that way would be more certain.”

“How many?”

“For that Black Dragon—”

At this point, for the first time, a thin smile appeared on her face.

“I drew one thousand two hundred souls to it in exchange for your theft of one thousand two hundred souls.”

“Rasfia.”

“Hmm?”

In a doll-like gesture, the girl—Rasfia—looked back, moving only her head. She was looking into the hood, which was packed full of thick sludge. The sludge wavered as bubbles slowly welled up through it.

“How many?”

“Let’s see.”

There was no telling what intent she’d read into the question, which was exactly the same as the one that had come before it, but the girl’s lips warped. In ordinary terms, the expression would probably have been categorized as “a smile,” but her face was masklike, and there was nothing approachable about it.

“If we pull in another two thousand…”

“Two thousand, hmm?”

The tall man abruptly grew thinner.

In the midst of the wind, at first glance, his shape didn’t seem to have changed, but the viscous darkness that streamed from under the man’s feet ran up the rubble like a shadow. It flowed over the slope, then over the ruins, slaughtering gnolls that were outside the pair’s view.

“We mustn’t lose the Black Dragon. Without it, we won’t be able to break these iron towers.”

“Into powerless models— The inconvenience of this bound body.”

The Black Dragon crossed the far edge of their vision, descending over the heads of the Adventurers. From where the pair stood, the motion looked smooth and slow, but when size and distance were taken into account, it was clear just how overwhelming its speed and weight were.

The dragon’s flailing tail and the jet-black electricity it spat out dragged down many Adventurers.

“My, my.”

The girl smiled ironically.

Her oval face had a clear-featured beauty that was as tidy as a bisque doll’s. Of those classic features, only her dull amethyst eyes gleamed, dark and intense, seeming to relish the phenomenon before them.

“Again… Heh-heh. It’s dispatched thirty-two of them already.”

“Rasfia.”

The volume of the robed black shadow had decreased, but even so, just as before, he reproved the girl who seemed to be his partner with noises like bursting bubbles. Listening to the popping sounds, which should have been no more than static, slowly revealed expressions in the voice, and that was even creepier.

“Never fear. They took ten or so of those Adventurers or whatever they’re called along with them. Drunk on the power they’ve been given. This should serve to pay for their ignorance.”

“That is true for us as well.”

Something in the bursting bubble–voice seemed to have irritated her: The girl commented by stamping a shoe that looked as if it was made of enamel, then narrowed her eyes into a smile and beckoned as if embracing the air.

Across a vast distance, as if manipulated by her slim, white fingertips, the Black Dragon rampaged.

If someone with remote viewing abilities had been present, they would have seen the dragon infused with gnoll souls raging as its instincts dictated, greedily devouring Adventurers, its cruelty starkly visible.

Originally, in the vast land of Aorsoi, this dragon wasn’t a particularly enormous or difficult enemy. It was a level-85 full-raid monster—twenty-four Adventurers around level 80 could have defeated it. It was a monster that the Lelang Wolf Cavalry should have been more than able to deal with.

However, some mysterious art had given the Black Dragon a false immortality.

Of course, that didn’t signal a decisive loss for the Adventurers.

In extreme terms, even if the Lelang Wolf Cavalry members were annihilated, they’d only be forcibly returned to their headquarters.

At present, the Adventurers were struggling against the Black Dragon’s immortality, but gradually, they seemed to be finding ways to deal with its attacks.

That said, as you’d expect, the fact that the Adventurers had lost a dozen or so members in that initial surprise attack was significant. The pressure from the countless gnolls that flooded the earth and the repeated lightning attacks from the dragon in the sky seemed to be clashing with their line of defense.

The Black Dragon used its disposable lives to render all attacks meaningless, paying out attacks so powerful they should have been mutually destructive, and it was steadily paring down the Adventurers’ numbers.

The situation had turned into a battle of attrition.

However, the pair didn’t issue any new orders regarding the combat situation. They simply continued to observe coldly.

“Idleness…”

“Understanding of the layers seems to be limited.”

“Give them the fate of inferior beings.”

“If they slept, rest would come to them, and yet…”

Their conversation blended into the sound of the wind and was hard to follow, but eventually, the girl broke into an unbecoming smile.

“Fu-fu-fu! Could this be joy, perhaps?”

Delight surfaced in her dull amethyst eyes.

This was the girl’s first true smile; she’d only warped her expression before. However, the smile was far too twisted and ugly. The fact that her features were passably neat and cute lent it a shudder-inducing malice.

It was an incredibly human smile, yet it was quite clearly inhuman.

“The personality in the avatar’s communication dictionary seems to be eroding.”

“…You’re right. My self-diagnosis suggests something similar.”

“It is not necessary in the collection of Empathiom.”

“Still.”

The girl had been reproached for her smile, but even so, she kept laughing, a light, muffled chuckle deep in her throat. The sound seemed to be connected on a fundamental level. Its source was different, but it had a quality identical to the sound of the tall, lean shadow’s bursting bubbles—meaning, it was a grotesque expression of emotion.

“Our duty is nearly complete. We mustn’t leave the corridor to the heavens here. Toying with unaware actors is quite entertaining.”

“We are no different.”

“And that is precisely why it’s entertaining. Eleven hours remain. Our time will end, and Hora Octava will come. Keh-keh-keh. Fu-fu-fu-fu! Aah, what delight! Hurry, hurry. Quickly, quickly. I can’t wait. I can’t bear it. These lives, in which we’re merely Rank 2… I want to end them. I want to end. I want to die. I want to kill!”

The girl flapped her gothic dress in the plateau wind. A pale vermilion line marked her neck.

The line was no thicker than a thread, but as she danced, the movements of her body widened it. The “line” made anyone who saw it uneasy, and on top of her neck, the girl’s head wobbled like a decorative paper ball that had lost its rhythm.

“I can’t take it. I can’t wait. Hurry, hurry. I beg, I plead. Hora Octava! Trihorium! My siblings, my half sisters from another father. Come, awake, bring the end, the beginning!”

On the altar of the pointed fang at which empty-eyed gnolls worshipped, the girl spun and spun. Her laugh was clear yet ugly, like a piano that had fallen out of tune, and it echoed through the ruins of Tonnesgrave, seeming to lick them, to cling to them.

This land, which on Earth was called Baikonur, seemed to have exchanged its master for a nightmare.

7

“Wiped out?!”

It was evening when Leonardo’s group received the news.

Chun Lu, a Cleric affiliated with the Lelang Wolf Cavalry, had been contacted by one of her companions, and she reported the content of the telechat to her current group.

“Unfortunately, our legion raid was annihilated. The surviving unit seems to have been some distance away from the site.”

“By ‘surviving unit,’ you mean…?”

“A unit that had been kept in reserve as rear support personnel. That said, there are only a few dozen members. They were effectively annihilated… I never dreamed this could happen.”

Chun Lu answered Elias’s question, her voice gloomy but not despairing.

After all, it was a confirmed fact that Adventurers did not die.

From what Chun Lu said, the Cavalry had chosen their headquarters’ current location because it had a temple. This meant, while they might have been wiped out, the members who’d fallen and hadn’t been able to revive at the scene would be back at the temple.

Annihilation didn’t mean that the guild itself was beyond all hope of recovery.

Elder Tales had begun as a game. It had consisted of sword-and-sorcery adventures in the world of Theldesia. Of course, production and interaction were also a big part of the fun, but the majority of the game had been combat.

However, even combat had existed on several different scales.

First, there was solo play, where lone Adventurers fought monsters on their own.

The next step up was party play, in which as many as six companions fought in cooperation.

Most of the combat in the Elder Tales game had consisted of these two types. There were no actual statistics, but to Leonardo, it felt as if about 80 percent of the content had been playable with those two methods.

Raids were what players tackled when they’d been through enough of that sort of game content.

Full raid content was played with twenty-four members, and legion raid content was played with ninety-six members. Combat for large groups like these had been considered high-end game play in Elder Tales.

Naturally, the difficulty levels were high, and it wasn’t unusual for a single dungeon capture to take close to half a year.

Since the opponents this time had been gnolls, considering the level difference between the two sides, everyone had assumed the battle would go quickly. However, if they thought of it as a raid, getting wiped out wasn’t all that rare. Even for top-class guilds made up of elites, it was hard to break through a high-difficulty raid on the first try.

That was probably why, although Chun Lu’s expression was surprised and disappointed, it held no trace of despair.

The concerning thing was…

“It does sound as if they saw that double status display phenomenon.”

“I see.”

When Leonardo checked with her, Chun Lu nodded.

“I knew it…”

“So the phenomenon is spreading.”

No one in Leonardo’s party—not Kanami, who shrugged, or Coppélia, whose expression didn’t change, or Elias, who was frowning—had any acquaintances at the Wolf Cavalry headquarters. Since they hadn’t been registered as friends, they couldn’t contact them by telechat, and so all of their information had to come through Chun Lu.

“Their numbers were great, and in the latter half of the battle, they say it was observed in almost all enemies…”

Leonardo wanted to know exactly what sort of phenomenon this was, and he did want to solve the mystery, but he had no likely sounding hypotheses or methods, so he curbed his curiosity.

It sounded as if the enemy’s total numbers were close to ten thousand.

According to Chun Lu, they’d defeated quite a large number of gnolls, but during the battle, an unidentified black dragon had appeared as well. That dragon had spelled the beginning of the end, and the Lelang Wolf Cavalry had been routed.

There were only six Adventurers in Leonardo’s group, and there was nothing they could do. For now, it was probably best if they kept heading east and, if possible, picked up more information at Cavalry HQ.

At the time, Kanami and Elias had been satisfied with that as well.

That night, Leonardo slipped out of his sleeping bag.

For the duration of this journey, Leonardo’s group was keeping someone on watch at night. They weren’t just a party of Adventurers. Ju Ha, the Person of the Earth merchant, was traveling with them, and they’d decided they should be appropriately cautious as they went.

They took turns keeping watch, but one of the companions kept stealthily sabotaging the turns system. “Sabotage” didn’t mean that they ducked their guard shift. On the contrary: They intentionally forgot to switch with the next guard.

It was Coppélia.

Yawning, Leonardo sat down next to her.

Coppélia had set a cushion she’d bought in the village down on the desiccated, brittle sandstone and was sitting on it. A magnificently embroidered, quilted garment peeked out from under the hem of her maid outfit.

“Good morning. Do you wish to be healed?”

“It’s still the middle of the night. You didn’t wake me up again.”

“Coppélia does not yet require sleep. She is capable of staying on guard.”

That was probably true.

Adventurers’ physical abilities made it possible to shorten the time they spent sleeping. Their tough bodies had excellent powers of recovery, and they seemed to be able to get by on three hours of sleep a night without any ill effects.

That said, keeping watch at night all alone was a different story. They were companions, and they wanted to keep this journey fair.

Leonardo, turning silent and sullen, muttered only, “I’ll keep watch, too.”

Their surroundings were swallowed by darkness.

This was partially because the group hadn’t lit a fire tonight. Fires were handy for keeping animals away, but there was a good possibility that they would attract intelligent monsters. In addition, when you considered the loss of vision that would follow if the light suddenly went out, you couldn’t say there was no downside.

However, it wasn’t that there was no light. The moon that floated in the crystal clear Aorsoi sky cast its pale light over the earth. The glow was more than enough to let him examine Coppélia’s profile as she sat next to him.

“It sure is quiet.”

“Coppélia detects no hostile monsters in the area.”

At Coppélia’s response, Leonardo nodded. According to the contact from Chun Lu, after that incident, the gnolls had stepped up their activity. They were probably far enough away, but there was no such thing as being too careful.

The moonlight shone over Leonardo and Coppélia.

He averted his eyes from the softness of her illuminated cheek’s smooth contours, looking at the ground instead.

The two of them sat quietly, not really talking.

Leonardo was watching the moonlight shift gradually into darkness, as if it were crawling over the earth.

It was an odd feeling. Shadows moving—that was all it was, but Leonardo realized it stirred up a curious emotion inside him.

Considered in terms of real-world Earth, the fluctuating shadows would be caused by the movement of the moon, or more specifically, the rotation of the earth. In terms of the game world, it would happen because the light source set in the sky’s texture was moving.

Either way, the shifting moonlight that fell over the wasteland was the passage of time made visible. Leonardo felt something curious in the perfectly normal fact that time did not stop.

He was deeply, quietly affected, in a way he couldn’t put into words, by the fact that he existed as an individual in the midst of the flow of time.

This feeling soon shifted to the girl beside him. It was curious that he was here with Coppélia under the night sky of Aorsoi. If it hadn’t been for the Catastrophe, this sort of thing would probably never have happened. After all, Leonardo was a geek from New York. The Catastrophe had changed everything. All sorts of things had happened. Apparently, this was true where fate was concerned as well.

“Coppélia will loan you this cape.”

The next thing he knew, Coppélia was offering him a cloth that looked like a quilt. It was covered in embroidered grapes, violets, and flowers whose names he didn’t know; it seemed like a mantle, and it looked warm.

The predawn wasteland was cold. She was probably concerned about him.

“You got this in Thekkek, too?”

“Yes. It was given to Coppélia.”

Coppélia took a similar cloth out of her magic bag and wrapped it around her narrow shoulders.

“Those people gave you a thing like this, huh?”

Still sitting, Leonardo picked up a nearby pebble and tossed it. Coppélia had treated sick and injured people at the village; it was only natural that they’d thank her. That wasn’t a problem.

It wasn’t a problem, but it was a little irritating.

I fielded those annoying little ankle biters, but I… Well, I guess it’s not like I didn’t get anything.

Leonardo hugged his knees and dropped his forehead onto them.

A round, pretty rock. A weird scrap of cloth. A branch carved into the shape of a wooden sword. Half-eaten bread. A dried-out dead bug. An amulet made out of hairs from a horse’s tail. None of the things Leonardo had gotten had been any good.

“You’re lucky, Coppélia.”

“?”

“I meant the cape. It’s nice and warm.”

“Yes. It is a folk craft with excellent heat retentive properties.”

Only half listening to the off-key response, Leonardo sighed. However, he wasn’t actually in a bad mood.

“In that village…”

“Hmm?”

It was unusual for Coppélia to start speaking of her own accord, and for that very reason, Leonardo was able to wait without hurrying her along.

“The boy we encountered in that village recovered.”

“Yeah.”

That double status display. The boy who’d been driven feral by some enigmatic disease. He was still in Thekkek. Now that he was no longer savage, he was just a Person of the Earth boy. He didn’t have the strength to cross the wasteland alone. If he was going to return to his home village, he’d have to make proper preparations. Besides, even if he made those preparations, the odds that his home village was safe were only about fifty-fifty.

If that strange phenomenon had affected everyone in the boy’s village, the villagers had probably already scattered. In addition, if that disease had been brought in from elsewhere, like some sort of plague or curse, it was naïve to think that whoever had brought the disaster in hadn’t done any damage to the village.

If both those possibilities were groundless fears, and if all the members of the boy’s village were still ordinary People of the Earth, then there was a significant possibility the boy had hurt the people of that village—his companions, including his parents and his old friends—through his transformation.

Leonardo thought that continuing to live as a resident of Thekkek might be the happiest possible future for him.

“That boy was…orange and green.”

“Huh?”

Leonardo had been thinking about the kid’s future, and he couldn’t fathom what Coppélia’s odd words meant.

“Monsters have green light, and People of the Earth have orange light. That is how it appears to Coppélia. Adventurers have blue light, and Elias has purple.”

“That’s…”

“Coppélia believes it is the color of their souls.”

At that abrupt remark, Leonardo’s eyes went round.

“Coppélia is not equipped with sight in the ordinary sense of the word.”

Without waiting for Leonardo to ask his question, Coppélia went on, and what she said was something he hadn’t even dreamed of.

“Sight? Huh?”

“Coppélia is unable to see. —To be accurate, Coppélia’s sight is incompatible with yours and the others’. Coppélia is aware of her surroundings through data streams, tags, and the colors of souls.”

The conversation was nuts.

However, at the same time, he couldn’t completely deny it.

If this world was based on a game, then there had to be tags of some sort in the masses of data that were part of objects.

The Adventurers’ status displays were one easy-to-understand example. If he concentrated on Coppélia, even Leonardo was able to make her name, main class, and level display, layered over his visual field.

The name, level, and class were “tags.”

Monsters had monster tags. People of the Earth had People of the Earth tags. He didn’t know the logic behind it, but could Coppélia be seeing those tags as different colors? He didn’t understand the bit about souls, but if that was what she meant, it would technically make sense.

Is her sight maybe…?

A special device for people who’d lost their eyesight had been developed some time before. Research that had managed to make people sense images by connecting sensors to their brains had been reported about a decade earlier. Leonardo didn’t know the details, but he’d heard that, at this point, they’d developed a device that let people recognize several different colors and images.

Had Coppélia been using that sort of device to play Elder Tales? Leonardo wondered about that, but he wasn’t able to say it out loud.

He didn’t think he and Coppélia were close enough for him to bring up personal stuff like that yet. Immediately afterward, he laughed at himself, thinking that that sounded like a coward’s excuse.

“Coppélia has no color. That does not mean that Coppélia is transparent. It means she lacks the vibrating body—in other words, a soul—that generates color. Back then, Parallel One disappeared because Coppélia, who is structurally void, approached, and the more unstable soul was attracted—”

8

“Sorry to be an oaf and disturb your date, but—”

“KR?!”

The white horse had thrust its muzzle in between them. The voice of the Summoner who’d possessed the mystical beast hakutaku broke into Leonardo and Coppélia’s conversation.

“What is the matter?” Coppélia asked calmly.

As Leonardo watched her, he mulled over her earlier words. “In other words, I lack a soul.” What did that mean? It made him feel as though there was something hard lodged deep in his throat.

Even when she’d said that, there had been no pain or sadness in her voice. Leonardo’s heart felt heavy just thinking about it.

“They’re close. It’s the gnolls.”

“Huh?”

However, Leonardo’s thoughts were instantly interrupted.

“They’re marching through the ravine in the northeast,” KR said.

His back was wet. Wiping it down with a cloth, Coppélia said, “Requesting an explanation of the situation.”

“Well, I’ve been out doing recon, and I saw ’em with my own two eyes.”

Did that mean KR had spent all night running across the Aorsoi wilderness? Come to think of it, Leonardo didn’t think he’d seen KR’s big white body at the entrance to the tent when he’d woken up.

“They’re advancing down a riverbed below sheer cliffs. I don’t know what their numbers are. This body doesn’t have good night vision. Moonlight alone wasn’t enough to let me check. We’re not talking a dozen or so, though. There are five hundred of them at least.”

“Five hundred?!”

“At least. They’ve got those broken statuses.”

“Meaning they’re gnolls, but they’re People of the Earth?”

“No, not that.”

KR’s voice was calm, and in the shadow of it, Leonardo felt ashamed. His own words had sounded rather frightened.

“It was more like there were two types of gnolls mixed together, but… Uh… How do I put this? It’s hard to explain. Anyway, the displays seemed to have two monsters layered over each other. It was like that Person of the Earth boy, except a fusion of two monsters.”

He was able to visualize the phenomenon.

However, as before, the cause was beyond him.

“A slew of gnolls, huh?”

“Five hundred, you said?”

When had they woken up? It was probably the faint sounds of their voices talking to KR that had pulled them out of sleep. Kanami, who’d only poked her head out of the tent, and Elias, who was looking down at her as if to reproach her for it, joined the conversation.

Not long afterward, Chun Lu and Ju Ha also emerged from the tent.

“Anything besides gnolls?”

“All I saw were gnolls and gnoll subspecies of different classes. I wish I could do a more detailed recon, but in this body, I can’t summon a servant.”

“Why…?”

Chun Lu’s question was understandable.

Why were they moving as a group at this time of year? It was the first thing Leonardo had thought as well.

One possible explanation was that they were looking for food.

Or rather, it was safe to say that gnolls’ only reasons for moving were to find food or claim territory. Their objective was to provide the main group of gnolls—the ones assembled at the ruins, the group Chun Lu’s guild had attacked—with food: That seemed to be the rational explanation.

The Aorsoi wasteland was barren. The land was dry, and chill winds blew even in summer. Huge, deep green forests spread over the vast wilderness in places, and a wide variety of creatures lived there, but even they probably wouldn’t be enough to sustain ten thousand gnolls over a long period.

In this wasteland, he couldn’t think of a reason for forming an army of that size other than to provide the main group with food. Small groups of a dozen or so members were a lot more efficient at surviving and hunting creatures for food. When you thought about the size of hyena or wolf packs back in the real world, this was self-evident.

On top of that, gnolls were supposed to be monsters that gathered in dungeons and lived in groups of several hundred. They were predators that lurked in caves and ruins, killing and eating creatures that passed by—

That’s game knowledge, though, huh? Leonardo admonished himself. This world was a game. Well, it should have been a game, but for some reason, he’d been summoned into it, body and all, and he did seem to be existing according to its laws.

“The direction they’re heading puts them on a course for Thekkek.”

When Ju Ha pointed this out, he heard Elias catch his breath.

Food…

In that sense, the village’s sheep would probably be pretty appealing.

No, there was a possibility that they would see even the People of the Earth as food. Their habit of avoiding them certainly wasn’t rooted in goodwill. It was because they knew that, if the People of the Earth banded together and defended their village, it would be more difficult to steal sheep and other prey.

If their forces were great enough to surround and wipe out an NPC village or town, they wouldn’t have a single reason to hesitate.

“Are they aiming for the villages?!”

“I don’t know if they’re actively going for them, but if they pass one, they’ll probably attack it. Look at their numbers. I seriously doubt they’d turn back.”

Elias was bristling with anger, but KR responded coolly.

It had already been four days since their departure from Thekkek. Since Ju Ha, a Person of the Earth, was with them, they’d traveled slowly, so they were probably about 140 kilometers away.

If the gnolls kept marching along the ravine, it wouldn’t take them a week to reach Thekkek.

Of course, if they felt like it, the Adventurers could get back to the village before the gnolls reached it. However, even if they got there, what could they do?

Chun Lu and Ju Ha were probably thinking the same thing.

A heavy, wordless silence filled the area.

“Okay. Hup. Hup!”

Kanami completely failed to read the atmosphere. She’d had her face stuck out of the tent, and now she wriggled and crawled the rest of the way out. Why is she crawling? Leonardo wondered, but as it turned out, she was still in her sleeping bag. She inched forward, looking like a caterpillar, then agilely hopped to her feet. Possibly because she was embarrassed (and rightly so), Kanami shucked off the sleeping bag with Elias’s help.

Though really, if she was embarrassed, she should’ve just walked out to begin with.

“Mm. Good. Good? Five hundred dogs. That’s good luck.”

He had no idea what was lucky about it. Maybe it was some sort of Japanese folk tradition. As Leonardo wondered what the hell Kanami was saying, she punched a fist up into the sky.

“Sounds like a worthy opponent to me!!”

“Hey, moron! Don’t you dare!”

“M-moron?! Did you just call me a moron, Croakanardo?!”

“Uh, sorry. Perhaps I went too far.”

Kanami was planning to pick a fight with five hundred monsters—monsters with unknown abilities, at that—and in spite of himself, Leonardo verbally smacked her upside the head. He apologized, but he really did think she was a moron.

“Still, there’s five hundred, you know? It’ll be fun to charge in and kick ’em to pieces,” she added.

“If you manage to kick ’em to pieces, yeah.”

“I can do it if I really try.”

“Like you could ever actually do it, you idiot!”

There was a level difference here. A difference that was probably more than ten.

Warrior classes existed to attract the enemy. They used their abilities to protect the Recovery and Magic Attack classes, and to give Weapon Attack classes like Leonardo the perfect chance to strike.

However, when they attracted the enemy, naturally, they became the target of their attacks. In exchange for not wearing proper armor, Kanami’s class, Monk, had overwhelming evasive abilities. Most attacks from low-level gnolls probably wouldn’t even scratch her.

That was “most,” though.

It wasn’t a guarantee.

On top of that, when the enemy’s numbers were vast, there was the possibility that her MP would be drained during battle. If she ran out of MP, she wouldn’t be able to use special skills. For a Warrior class, Monks had good attack power and well-balanced abilities, but these were only possible because they paid out lots of special skills rapidly, one after another. If her MP ran out, her fighting potential would drop drastically.

With Monk evasive abilities and Kanami’s unique combat abilities, she might actually manage to drive off five hundred gnolls. Leonardo was training with the goal of surpassing her. There was hope. However, the risk was too great.

No, risk wasn’t even the problem here. The problem was her motive.

“And anyway…” As if laughing at Leonardo’s thoughts, Kanami grew enthusiastic, striking up a beat with her fingernails. “Five hundred is apple pie when your stomach’s all grumbly, Croakanardo.”

“Just for the record, I’m not Croakanardo.”

Besides, he hated girls who scarfed down apple pie like that.

“Real Adventurers just blast their way through five hundred! Double up and do twice that.”

“Don’t make up crap about Adventurers.”

And Kanami wasn’t allowed to gamble. What was this “double up” business?

“We punch clear through the enemy and then, um, what was it again? Tone-deaf grads?”

“It is Ruined Colonnade Tonnesgrave.”

“Yeah, that! We charge into the grave-thingy and behead the enemy!!”

“Are you nuts?! There are more than ten thousand of ’em!!”

Leonardo’s shoulders slumped.

He hadn’t held out much hope of their beating even five hundred of them. What was this woman thinking? He’d thought there was just something weird about her, something odd, but no, she was flat-out crazy.

“Weren’t you listening? They wiped out the Lelang Wolf Cavalry’s legion raid. Understand? That’s one hundred level-90 Adventurers. Wiped. Out. All right?!”

“That’s because they fought them head-on, with no intel.”

“Wha…?”

“So we won’t fight. We’ll just attack and behead them. Then we run. A perfect game! We are the champions!”

“Mo—”

This girl had to be a moron.

What was that stuff about “champions”? Your brain is the world champion of stupidity.

That was probably why there were ten thousand gnolls protecting the ruins: so that sort of thing didn’t happen. They’d tried to capture them with a raid because they hadn’t been able to do it the other way. That was what Leonardo thought, but Kanami’s attitude was so cavalier that all he could do was flap his mouth uselessly.

“So, Kanami.”

“Hmm? What, KR?”

“You mentioned intel.”

“We heard quite a bit from Chun Lu, remember?”

“Hmm. So, what sort of intel? And how are you going to use that to defeat the gnoll boss, assuming there is one?”

“You figure that out, KR!”

Kanami spoke decisively, with a smile so bright it almost made you think dawn had broken in the Aorsoi night.

“”

“There’s literally no way he can do that, you idiot!”

KR had gone speechless for a moment, and Leonardo hit her with a few strong words in his place. As things stood, he felt much too bad for KR, who dexterously bent his horse’s neck, snickering as if he couldn’t quite hold back. He was muttering things like, “B-bus guide. There it is, the bus gas explosion…” It was creepy.

“Hmm. I don’t think it’s a question of being able to do it or not.”

“Then what—?”

“We need to go.”

“And I’m asking you why we need to do that!”

As Leonardo pressed her, Kanami took a few light steps on tiptoe and gave a little smile. She didn’t seem to be teasing Leonardo; it was a soft smile.

“It’s a reason I can’t say out loud.”

That kept Leonardo from putting the rest of what he’d been planning to say into words.

Chun Lu and Ju Ha probably thought this was their party’s problem; they were watching, but they didn’t say anything. Leonardo and the others wouldn’t get anywhere like this. He wanted Elias and Coppélia to scold Kanami, too, but they betrayed his expectations.

“I agree with Kanami.”

“!”

“I’m not saying we should depart for the jaws of death because I have an obligation to her. You may have forgotten, but I’m an Ancient. I have a duty to protect the People of the Earth. That has been the mission of the thirteen global chivalric orders ever since they were established. It may be trite, but even so, I sense the weight of truth in it. On the pride of the fallen fairy tribe, I will not abandon the People of the Earth.”

Come to think of it, that’s true, Leonardo remembered.

Ever since Leonardo became their companion on this journey, he’d forgotten that Elias was an Ancient, an NPC. He wasn’t a player. He seemed to be rich in emotions, but he was basically a high-performance robot.

The same went for the People of the Earth.

They were only NPCs.

That was why everything they did was so dumb.

“What the hell are you thinking?! If it’s dangerous, you get away from it. Isn’t that obvious? You people don’t know New York; that’s why you’re spinning castles in the air like this. What happens if you do something like that? This world is weird. It’s a crazy dystopia. Adventurers aren’t invincible. There are things you can save and things you can’t, you know? The People of the Earth aren’t human. We can’t save them. Just leave them!” Leonardo shouted, spitting the words out.

They tasted like blood. Like regret.

“Coppélia will go, too.”

“Why—?”

After Coppélia responded to him, she moved her thin arms, packing her belongings into her weight-reducing bag.

Leonardo couldn’t condone the gesture, and he caught her wrist. There was no help for Kanami and Elias. However, Coppélia served Kanami as a maid, and she had to be different. It gave Leonardo a terribly unpleasant, pathetic feeling.

“Why? You know there’s no way to win that.”

“Are you certain?”

“Just think about it! Why would you do a thing like that for NPCs?!”

“Coppélia feels that there is a chance for victory. Coppélia termed that phenomenon ‘Parallel One.’ That condition is likely to be unstable in the extreme. If Coppélia, who has no soul, approaches, the broken, copied things will rush Coppélia. Coppélia’s defensive gear has anti-spirit capabilities, and she suspects that may prove to be an effective countermeasure for Parallel One.”

“Even if your logic’s sound, it won’t cut down the enemy’s numbers! You don’t have to sacrifice yourself, Coppélia!”

Her deep indigo hair swayed, denying Leonardo’s words. Her large eyes reflected him like polished mirrors.

Fixing that innocent gaze on Leonardo, Coppélia spoke.

“Coppélia is not a player, either. A money-laundering group headquartered in China established several bots to collect capital inside the MMO. Coppélia is one of them.”

Those quiet words pierced right through Leonardo’s cowardice and escapism.