1

Peach blossom petals fluttered in the cool air, dancing by in ones and twos.

As their backdrop, rocky peaks with sheer surfaces jutted up through the clouds. Although faint wisps of greenery clung to their summits and hollows, they gave the impression of knife blades.

It would have been safe to call the view magnificent.

Due to the distance, they didn’t look large, but compared with the palace and the summerhouse where Krusty was reclining, every peak had to be several kilometers wide.

The sky was a subdued pale indigo. This fairyland protruded past the sea of clouds, but he sensed nothing as inconvenient as thin air or freezing temperatures. It was chilly, yes, but not bad enough to bother him if he wore a baggy traveling robe.

Krusty, who’d thrown himself down on a lounge chair that spilled over with cushions, gazed at the distant view from his position of decadence.

All the walls of this summerhouse had been removed; this place was above the clouds, so it never rained here. The roof, too, which was made with beautiful colored tiles, wasn’t strictly necessary; the wind was never strong. It was a very quiet, tranquil place.

A peach blossom petal parted from its twig and drifted down to Krusty, bringing along its fragrance as it settled onto his sleeve. He glanced at the petal out of the corner of his eye, but left it there, not bothering to brush it away.

The big wolf dog that lay by the base of the lounge wagged her tail lazily, so Krusty stroked her fur. She was far hungrier for attention than she looked.

The wolf dog’s tail happily thumped the floor.

“Master Immortal, your meal is ready.”

When he glanced over, Hua Diao had just appeared. The girl, who’d stated her business without bothering with greetings, was an attendant who saw to Krusty’s needs here at Bai Tao Shrine. She had adorable round ears, and she was wearing a pretty—if faded—indigo ruqun robe.

“Is it time for lunch already?”

“Yes, it is. Noon. The sun is shining brightly, you know.”

“Are you sure about that? The weather seems rather hazy.”

“That’s because this is an enchanted land. Even the sun shines brightly in a restrained manner. Wonderful to have such a good climate, isn’t it? All right, come to the dining room.”

“That seems like a lot of work.”

“I thought you’d say that, and so I brought it with me on a cart. I’m quite considerate, you see.”

“Is that right?” Krusty responded, sitting up.

He couldn’t say he was hungry, but he wasn’t so full that he couldn’t eat, either. It was a vast, vague sensation, but apparently, that was a basic attribute of this “fairyland.” In the two months since he’d arrived here, Krusty had grown completely used to the place.

As if she’d taken his attitude as permission, Hua Diao began briskly and efficiently setting out his meal. Although she was a bit of a busybody, she was a good, devoted servant.

The dishes on the table consisted of rice topped with sautéed vegetables and an amber-colored soup.

Hua Diao and the other heavenly martenfolk were civil servants, not cooks. Apparently, there were no Chefs in the shrine in the first place; the martenfolk had absolutely no skills in that area. Naturally, Hua Diao was no exception, and when Krusty had arrived, she’d had no cooking abilities whatsoever.

However, that wasn’t the worst of it. The tribe had been charged with the duties of tian li, or heavenly palace officials, and being strict about formalities, they were under the impression they had to prepare more than a dozen dishes for each meal. The result had been an array of ten or twenty failed recipes—vegetable scraps and charcoal—and it had just made him sad.

At this point, thanks to Krusty’s instruction, there had been substantial improvement. A rice bowl with sautéed vegetables was far from court cuisine, but the taste was worlds better. Most important of all, unlike charcoal, this was actually edible.

Krusty promptly set to work with his chopsticks and steadily ate his way through about half of it.

He was an elegant, alabaster-skinned young man to begin with, so no matter what he did, he looked passably well-mannered while doing it. He was also a warrior with an excellent build, so the speed with which he ate certainly wasn’t slow, but even now, due to the fact that he sat with his spine perfectly straight, he looked graceful. Being able to look like that even when you were eating a sautéed vegetable rice bowl was a plus if ever there was one.

Under the table, the wolf dog was gnawing on some unbattered deep-fried meat she’d gotten from Hua Diao. When the wolf got hungry, she went down the mountain pass and hunted likely looking monsters for her supper, so given that, she enjoyed the meals the girl gave her as if they were dessert. She certainly was a clever one.

Hua Diao bustled around serving Krusty and the enormous beast. While she couldn’t cook at all, she boasted that making tea was her specialty, and she was getting said service ready at this very moment.

Apparently, martenfolk were “weasel spirits.”

They were classified as demispirits, and in Elder Tales, they had been a race that players could talk to but couldn’t select.

Swallowing a mouthful of soup, Krusty said to his servant, “This turned out well.”

“Did it?! Oh, I’m glad. After all, Master Immortal, you’re difficult to please.”

“Am I?” he murmured, cocking his head.

Was that really the case? In the first place, he was in charge of preparing the morning and evening meals. This was because, even though they were master and servant, Krusty felt that chores should be shared.

He was the type who believed that any meal would do, provided it was nutritious and it tasted like something you could at least stand to swallow, and he’d never gotten angry about the meals Hua Diao and the others made, not even once. As you’d expect, charcoal and strange, murky broth had bigger problems than flavor, and so he’d requested improvements. But it seemed unfair to call this “being hard to please.”

At any rate, Krusty had never criticized Hua Diao and the others.

That said, this was all according to Krusty’s awareness. From their perspective, Hua Diao and her people probably saw something different.

Krusty saw it as a division of chores, plain and simple, but the fact that the guest they were supposed to be serving homemade dinner every night; that the dishes were beautiful, plentiful, and varied; that he provided the delicacies of a foreign country unstintingly; and that he even finished the prep work for the next day’s breakfast along with the dinner preparations—it was possible that all these things put heavy pressure on Hua Diao and the other servants.

They’d gotten the wrong impression: “Master Immortal is a great gourmet, and he eats the lunches we make only reluctantly.”

The source of this misunderstanding was the New Wife’s Apron Krusty used, but because no one had realized that, the matter had grown more complicated.

For his part, Krusty gazed absently at the peach blossoms and said things like “I don’t really feel like having lunch,” and Hua Diao just couldn’t take it. What the remark actually meant was “It seems like a lot of trouble, so I’m going to take another nap,” but it made them break out in a cold sweat, wondering whether the fact that he was a gourmand meant he wouldn’t accept their food.

She thinks I’m hard to please.

That’s not true. I’m grateful that you take care of me.

I should tell her that.

Should I make something delicious for dinner?

That’s what I always do.

I should thank her.

She’s never accepted thanks seriously.

Is there any real harm in being considered “hard to please”?

Not particularly.

It may not be necessary to pay the cost of taking steps…

I suppose it isn’t anything I really need to deal with.

As he came to that conclusion, Krusty set down his chopsticks, wearing a sober expression.

At any rate, almost none of the things that happened in this world were particularly noteworthy.

On being told he was hard to please, he’d thought, Well, that’s a problem. What should I do? but now that he’d thought about it, it wasn’t a problem after all. If he looked like that, all it meant was that he looked like that. It was the sort of thing you’d let go with no more than an Is that so? …Well, I guess it is, and being seen that way didn’t seem to have done him any damage. As far as he was concerned, it was just fine with him.

“Master Zhu Huan sent us food.”

“That was very kind of him.”

Hua Diao didn’t seem to have noticed Krusty’s brief internal self-examination. With a cheerful swirl of her skirt, she began counting on her fingers.

“Chicken, boar, deer, mountain pheasant, duck, and eel. Tofu and greens, leeks and bok choy. Rice and sugar and ma and la. There’s pure white grain and brown grain, too.”

“Is that what’s put you in such a good mood?”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that…!”

At Krusty’s question, Hua Diao gave a startled little gasp and put her hands to her cheeks. Apparently, she had been aware of it.

She’s probably just excited, huh? Krusty thought.

This enchanted land was an extraordinarily tranquil place, and they could pick the finest peaches and apricots to their hearts’ content. On the other hand, there were all sorts of things they couldn’t get, such as grains, marine products, and animal flesh. To make delicious, diverse meals, they needed a variety of ingredients, and these had to be sent up from the world below.

That said, this place was technically a fairyland, part of the heavenly palace, which meant that traveling down into the foothills and back was difficult in and of itself. To get there, you had to pass through Sirius Grotto, a long, monster-haunted labyrinth. It was a dangerous place for ordinary citizens.

Zhu Huan was an Adventurer, a master of martial arts, and one of the few people who could safely traverse Sirius Grotto. He was also the one who’d shown Krusty to this place.

He was a good fellow, quite pleasant, a commoners’ champion who ran a large guild known as the Lelang Wolf Cavalry.

“I would have at least said hello to him.”

“He had companions with him. They said they were going to capture Dire Wolves today.”

“Is that right?” Krusty responded. Zhu Huan was the leader of a group, and he was probably busy. Hua Diao’s head seemed to be entirely filled with thoughts of the food they’d brought; she was fidgeting restlessly.

“Did they bring honey and eggs?”

When she heard Krusty’s question, she couldn’t control herself any longer, and her tail stuck straight out. Its tip started tracing figure eights in the air, over and over.

The martenfolk loved sweets, and their traditional meals incorporated lots of fruit. Rich baked goods made with sugar and eggs seemed to have given them a kind of culture shock. After he’d served some to them once, they’d latched on to them with abnormal intensity. She was probably dying to know whether he was going to make them a dessert this time, too.

She’s expecting baked goods from me.

I’m neither a confectioner nor a chef.

If she’s all right with something simple, though, I could make that.

Potential candidates for simple baked goods:

I believe I could make these, if I followed a recipe.

They may be easy, but do I have a reason to make them?

No.

Do I want to eat them?

I have no particular fondness for sweets.

Do I have any reason not to make them?

No.

Consider the cost of the wasted time and trouble.

In fairyland, these can be ignored.

“Sure. I’ll serve a dessert with dinner,” Krusty answered.

Hua Diao bounded in mute delight, breaking into a big grin. It was terribly mercenary of her.

Only Hua Diao and a few other members appeared before Krusty using the magic that gave them human shapes. However, the work those few did kept the Bai Tao Shrine up and running, so making them treats once in a while wasn’t a task onerous enough to refuse.

Either way, time passed too slowly in this enchanted land.

He had plenty to think about, but this place was far too dull. Sneaking out on moonlit nights to cut down Oni and playing at being a cook were about the only ways he had to kill time.

Hua Diao, who had watched Krusty put down his chopsticks, began to thank him, her ears twitching. Her people were conscientious.

However, just as she was about to say what were probably words of gratitude, she turned back, clearly tense, and began to sniff the air vigorously. The wind had grown stronger at some point, and it was shaking the treetops.

The air had begun to grow humid.

As if the sea of clouds had gradually risen, a sudden, fierce gust of damp wind announced the arrival of something abnormal.

Hua Diao’s eyes flicked right and left, quickly; she looked a little frightened. Krusty threw her a rope: “Thank you for the meal. Could you change my sheets?”

Gratefully, Hua Diao responded with a “Yes, sir,” and ran off toward the shrine.

On the lounge in the summerhouse, Krusty tidied himself up a bit.

Compared with Akiba, fairyland certainly was dull. However, every single guest it received was eccentric. Remembering interesting people and people who hadn’t been at all entertaining, Krusty smiled thinly, bracing himself for the visitor.

2

Before five minutes had passed, a beautiful young woman appeared.

She wore a dark veil that obscured her features, but she had black, lustrous hair and red lips, and the soft curves of her body were sheathed in a vivid jade traveling robe. The woman had perfumed her clothes by burning an incense that had a vaguely sweet, old-fashioned scent, and she was in the summerhouse before he was aware of her presence.

“How do you fare, Master Krusty?”

“Fine, thanks. You look well, Enchantress Youren.”

“I’ve asked you to just call me Youren, you know.”

Although Krusty had thanked her for asking about his health, he didn’t feel any particular obligation to the woman, but he kept that to himself and treated her deferentially, with the utmost courtesy. He’d learned that most humans were satisfied if you treated them with respect.

In the first place, being polite was a way of confirming whether you and the other party were the same sort of person.

For example, if you passed a ferocious beast on the road, it might suddenly latch on to your head with its jaws. That was a scary thought. Of course, since you’d be able to tell it was a ferocious beast just by looking at it, all you had to do was run away. However, if the other party was a barbarian, since they were human, it would be hard to identify them as such on sight. Since their common sense was different from yours, though, they might suddenly strike you with a blood-stained two-handed ax. If you’d assumed they were just like you and the attack took you by surprise, you’d die.

That said, it was very difficult and time-consuming to be on your guard against every person you passed on the road.

Politeness was a way to save yourself this trouble.

I’m one of your kind, and I speak your language.

I won’t suddenly display an interest in the taste of your flesh.

It was a ritual to confirm these things.

Humans tended not to take an interest in strangers’ inner selves. Since that was so, as long as they had that minimal guarantee—in other words, that they wouldn’t abruptly suffer harm—they were generous about everything else.

Of course, it was a fact that, when it came right down to it, manners weren’t something you could count on. Sudden disasters, sudden changes, sudden lunatics: Krusty knew that true human nature actually lay on that side of things. Fundamentally, this world was a circus of unfair chaos, a place where anything could happen.

In that respect, the woman in front of him was rather uninteresting. She was an ordinary person who plotted mundane affairs in the regular way.

He couldn’t trust her, but he didn’t actively dislike her, either. She wouldn’t abruptly attack him with bloodshot eyes; she wasn’t unpredictable enough for that. In a way, you could say she was a disappointment.

She was the sort of person you could find anywhere, so he wasn’t very concerned with her. Those were his unvarnished thoughts.

If possible, he’d have preferred that she leave him alone, but unfortunately, this self-styled Enchantress was the type who didn’t listen. That was a common characteristic in women who were otherworldly attractive.

“How do you feel, physically? What about your memories?”

“There aren’t any major problems.” He shrugged.

His physical condition had neither improved nor worsened since he’d regained consciousness after having been flung to the Zhongyuan server. The level-150 bad status known as Soul Darkening Curse hadn’t changed, either.

NATURAL HP RECOVERY IS SUSPENDED.

HP MAY NOT BE RECOVERED THROUGH RECOVERY SPELLS, OR THROUGH FACILITIES OR ITEMS.

THE TELECHAT FUNCTION IS SUSPENDED.

MOVEMENT ACROSS SERVER BOUNDARIES BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE.

MEMORIES ARE LOST.

The effects of the bad status were wide-ranging and serious. When he checked it against his memories, even though they were patchy, he could tell that the curse’s content wouldn’t have been possible in the days of the game.

Krusty had been carried to this fairyland on the back of the enormous wolf dog Gumon, but both Zhu Huan—who’d saved him—and Hua Diao had blanched at his status.

They’d told him it was a terrible, unprecedented curse. Since the HP he lost when wounded didn’t return, that was probably accurate.

He currently had about 5300 HP. That was roughly half his maximum.

The display looked like a warning, and it was an ominous red. Krusty wasn’t particularly disturbed or concerned, though.

This was because, while his HP was down by half, it didn’t seem as if it was worth making a big fuss over. HP was a resource in combat, and when you were up against a strong opponent, it indicated how durable you were. In other words, it was a tool for fighting enemies.

If he actually got into a fight against an enemy and didn’t have enough HP, he would probably think about it. However, under those circumstances, the issues that would come up were “How do I increase my HP?” and “How do I break through this situation with five thousand HP?” and if he accepted that for what it was, it was nothing to agonize over.

Was it inconvenient? Well, maybe. He thought it might be, at least.

However, if asked whether it was a problem, he would have said, Not particularly.

On Earth, it was likely he would have been half paralyzed or in a coma, which would definitely have been inconvenient, but in Theldesia, it didn’t even hurt. It was part of the reason he ended up taking things easy.

“‘No problems’… How courageous you act. It’s heartbreaking.”

If anything, what struck him as dismal was the woman in front of him.

Her eyes were still hidden by her thin silk veil, but her posture as she spoke to Krusty made her seem to be looking up at him. The conversation was probably her way of showing her worry. Even Krusty understood she was hoping for some sort of reaction from him.

And so Krusty played along with her, letting his shoulders slump.

He wasn’t actually discouraged or anything like it. It was a technique for getting along in life: He was matching her mood. He knew from experience that, in most situations, it was safe to respond this way.

He thought scratching Gumon behind the ears would be a more positive and constructive thing to do, but apparently, doing it in the middle of a conversation was considered rude. It made Hua Diao become obviously cross.

“It really doesn’t seem inconvenient to me. This place is peaceful, and anyway, I spend all day watching the peach blossoms.”

“—Doesn’t it frighten you not to have memories?”

At the Enchantress’s words, Krusty broke off and considered.

Was it frightening enough to mention?

If you lost your memories, you simultaneously lost your motive for getting them back, and he didn’t seem to feel any real need to do so. He thought he was probably the sort of person the world referred to as “cold-hearted.”

Krusty gave a little smile. “That doesn’t seem to be the case.”

“What about this amuses you?”

This time, apparently, he really had discouraged the Enchantress.

Inwardly, he thought it was funny.

“Master Krusty.”

The Enchantress tried to take his hand, and he evaded her slim white fingers.

“That curse is unknown, and there is no one who can cure it. If left alone, there’s no knowing what calamity it may invite.”

As Krusty gazed at her, smiling, the woman repeated a treatment suggestion she’d made several times before.

“I may not look it, but I preside over the mystic art of healing. The art was granted to me by the Queen Mother of the West, who lives on the moon. If you’ll only give me permission, Master Krusty, I would like to brew an elixir of life for you.”

“I’m not good with bitter things, you see.”

Still smiling, Krusty declined the offer.

Was the Enchantress saying medicine she brewed could cure this, even though it was “an unknown curse no one could cure”?

Didn’t that mean it wasn’t exactly incurable?

In any case, immortal wizards and mystic arts struck him as fishy.

Well, even Krusty wasn’t flatly denying the woman’s words. That sort of paranormal skill probably did exist. This was a secluded region where mysterious peach trees bore fruit all year round, so something on that level could exist. Since he’d passed level 90, Krusty himself was something like a low-ranking immortal wizard, and that was fine.

However, he didn’t like the way Enchantress Youren had confirmed his weakness, then proceeded to force her good intentions onto him. He didn’t care enough to angrily criticize her for it, but he also didn’t want to get actively involved with her.

The theatrical atmosphere that hung around the woman was boring as well. Was there anything in the depths of that aura? Probably not. It was likely this affected air and way of thinking were the woman herself. In other words, the Enchantress thought her good will—although he didn’t know whether it was actual good will or merely for her own benefit—would get through. She thought that other people would acknowledge it. That her way of doing things would get the job done.

She thought Krusty would agree.

In his hole-ridden memories, many women were like that, so he didn’t intend to single out the Enchantress for criticism, but this was dull. If her goal was to get consent, she could just have been aboveboard about it and handed him a consent form or a contract. Assuming the conditions were appropriate, the matter would move forward easily.

A negotiation over promises in search of profit, before advancing to the stage of consent: That was how society worked, and it was probably necessary, but there was a definite smell of corruption about it.

What should he call it, a sense of not being connected to anything?

Even if Krusty fostered this relationship, it was likely he wouldn’t gain any new knowledge. He had a hunch he wouldn’t even manage to lose anything by it, let alone profit.

She wasn’t fun to tease, either, the way or had been.

Krusty shrugged, letting his eyes go to the distant, drifting peach blossoms.

He’d been told that attempting to descend the mountain would be suicidal, so he hadn’t tried it yet, but if things were like this, there was no telling how true that was. Now that his wounds had largely healed and he’d learned all there was to know about the surrounding situation, this fairyland was much too boring.

Unless something happened soon, he’d end up spending his time doing nothing but stifling yawns. That said, it wasn’t as if he had any leads to follow even if he did descend to the world below.

So, maybe not having memories actually was inconvenient. But after thinking just a little, he knew there was no way he’d have had acquaintances on the Zhongyuan server to begin with, so the presence or lack of memories wouldn’t be an issue toward finding them down there.

So no, it really wasn’t an inconvenience.

The Enchantress was speaking to him in tones that sounded sincere, but in the spare moments between his responses, he was scratching the soft fur behind Gumon’s ears.

He felt sure that, even if he didn’t get impatient, an uproar would break out sooner or later.

The stirring in his chest was alerting him to the approach of that disturbance. To Krusty, it was a far more familiar friend than the suspicious woman in front of him.

3

Meanwhile, in another spot in the expanse of Theldesia, another party was preparing to take a brief rest. The time difference was a mere five minutes or so, and with one of Earth’s airplanes, the distance would have been no more than a short hop. However, the denizens of this world could only advance over the ground like ants, and to them, the national border was far, far away. Even so, in a corner of what was definitely the same highlands of Eured, several other protagonists were continuing their journey.

“Carnivore style!”

Kanami twirled around, holding drumsticks in both hands as if preparing to strike with them.

“Don’t play with your food,” Leonardo replied.

The sky in this country was vast.

It was so wide it could hold blue sky, a sunset, and purple twilight at the same time.

This beautiful gradation appeared practically every day, but the colors were never truly the same. Below it, once again, Kanami’s party was camping under an extremely cold sky.

They’d met up with the merchant Ju Ha, then parted ways, one group heading north and the other south. All sorts of stuff had happened on this trip, Leonardo thought.

Though—no, it wasn’t okay to let his guard down; the trip was still in progress.

“Things are cheerful during every evening meal, aren’t they?”

Chun Lu, her face serious, was sitting on a rug she’d spread over the desiccated ground. As she spoke, she sipped soup out of a bowl. She was an Adventurer, a guard who belonged to the Lelang Wolf Cavalry. The seasons had changed, and she was currently wrapped in a fluffy fur.

“It simply means that telling Kanami to settle down is useless.”

The Ancient hero Elias Hackblade had polished a piece of fruit on his sleeve and was nibbling on it with white teeth. The girl in the maid outfit who was briskly serving him soup was the Cleric Coppélia.

Including Leonardo, who was stuffing his face with some rather flat bread, they were currently traveling as a band of five.

“I did think you were restless, but who’d have thought it was this bad…?”

“If there’s a voice crying for help in the north, I go there and punch out the villains. If I hear there’s a poor village in the south, I head over there and kick their bad harvest.”

What’s the point of kicking a bad harvest? That’s just dumb.

Leonardo pinned Kanami with a dubious look.

Her actual words had gone off the rails and showed no sign of coming back, but what she’d said was true, in a bad way. After their adventure in Aorsoi in central Eurasia, you’d have thought the party would have made straight for Yamato in the Far East, but instead they’d strayed dramatically.

The incident at Ruined Colonnade Tonnesgrave had happened in September, which meant that, at this point, they’d spent three months wandering around the wasteland.

Granted, it apparently hadn’t been strange for a journey along the Silk Road to take six months or a year, so in that sense, they couldn’t declare that their pace was slow.

Rather than keep traveling, it wasn’t at all unusual for them to spend three days or a week at the villages they visited, resting up. If there was a caravan going their way, it was common sense to adjust their time by ten days or so in order to travel with them.

Actions like these were wisdom from the People of the Earth, used as a defense against the natural dangers of the wilderness and monsters, but even Adventurers like Leonardo and the others couldn’t afford to take those lightly.

Leonardo’s group did have several dozen times the combat power of People of the Earth, but there had been that incident in the Tekeli Ruins. Not knowing about the wasteland and the surrounding topography could have fatal consequences. Even if it didn’t endanger their lives, if they got lost in a winding ravine, they could easily end up wasting several weeks. They really did need information from the People of the Earth, who were well versed in local roads and traffic. Apparently, that was what journeys on this continent were like.

Of course, while these ordinary circumstances were prolonging their trip, it was also true they were being delayed by Kanami’s habit of saving people, or her ability for detecting trouble.

At Turkul, they’d defeated a Sand Turtle that had dominated a great river and was rampaging, and at a nameless, impoverished village, Coppélia had blessed watermelon seeds and planted a field.

At Mount Hei Feng, they’d been dragged into a terrible mess when the Kuromami Tribe, a band of malicious tanuki spirits, had stolen Kanami’s hot pants. (They were apparently thought to hold mystical power.) They’d ended up gathering seven ingredients to make a miraculous medicine for the leader, Great King Kuromami, to turn the fur on his belly white… Or rather, Leonardo had.

Ugh, god.

Just remembering it made his head hurt.

Kanami had charged, Coppélia had followed impassively, Elias had raced to the scene in a panic, and Leonardo had cleaned up the aftermath in a glum daze. What was he anyway, the project manager for a raging dumpster fire? Even on the Avenue, he’d never heard of anything like this.

As long as he was with Kanami, it didn’t seem like they’d run out of fuses for trouble. This evening, though, it looked as if they’d run clean out of difficulties, and they were finally camping peacefully… Although even that was more than noisy enough.

“Do you think we’re getting pretty close to Shimanaikui?”

“Yes.”

Chun Lu nodded, licking some fat off her fingers.

“If we keep traveling along this mountain range, we’ll arrive in less than a week.”

This was why they were traveling with this female Adventurer, who was a member of the Lelang Wolf Cavalry. Shimanaikui marked the end of central Eured; from the perspective of what would be China on Earth, it was the town where the Silk Road began in earnest. In other words, in terms of Earth, it would be somewhere around Mongolia.

Kanami’s party (which included Leonardo, although he wished it didn’t) was bound for Yamato. To them, Shimanaikui was a milestone on their journey east, while to Chun Lu, it was the headquarters of the guild she was returning to.

Kanami’s group had wanted a guide, Chun Lu had wanted combat power for the way home, and thus their goals had meshed.

That said, conditions in this land seemed to be growing more and more chaotic, and Leonardo thought the Lelang Wolf Cavalry might have taken an interest in them, since they were outsiders who weren’t affiliated with a major guild… Frankly, he suspected they were keeping an eye on them.

Naturally, even if they were under observation, that in itself wasn’t enough to make them feel alienated. In the situation they found themselves in, if there was an uncertain element, anyone would try to investigate it. Even if they didn’t know whether the code had a bug in it or not, engineers’ instincts told them, Somehow, it feels like the processing is gonna stall somewhere. At the very least, they’d set a breakpoint beforehand. Since they were harboring a landmine like Kanami, he also thought it was only natural that others would be wary of them.

Besides, if Leonardo’s group got pulled into some sort of trouble near here, they intended to use the Lelang Wolf Cavalry. Since they were planning to use them, it probably wasn’t fair to object when the other party did the same thing.

“Shimanaikui, hmm? If we’re going there, I’d like a horse.”

“You want a horse?”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh!”

Kanami nodded vigorously.

“You can ride horseback? So I guess you’re upper-crust, then, huh?” Leonardo muttered, but apparently, Elias had taught her.

She might have developed a taste for it during the business with KR. Riding a friend around seemed like a nasty thing to do, but KR had looked like he was egging her on, so Leonardo kept quiet about it.

“A horse, hmm?”

Chun Lu looked pensive. “Is there some sort of problem?” Elias asked.

She denied this briefly, then began to speak. “It’s possible to buy both horses and Horse Summoning Whistles. However, this land is teeming with monsters. Wolves might be a better bet.”

“Wolves?”

“Yes. In Eured, they’re common mount items. The popular edition is the Wolf Mount Summoning Whistle, I think. They allow you to summon and ride huge wolves. The Lelang Wolf Cavalry is famous for them.”

Kanami’s eyes sparkled. “Huge wolves!” she shouted.

Leonardo and the others had seen the gray-furred wolf she’d summoned several times over the course of their journey. The group was traveling without mounts, and to match their walking pace, she didn’t normally summon it. However, they’d seen it in action multiple times, whenever danger fell upon them.

True, that summoning technique might be ideal for a journey across a wasteland. If all you were thinking about was transportation, you’d probably choose a horse, but if they were attacked by a carnivorous monster while on horseback, their ability to defend themselves and adapt to their environment was bound to prove problematic.

“Uh. Chun Lu? Do they sell those wolf whistle items?”

“Yes, they’re for sale. The guild has artisans who can make them as well. Only…”

“Only?”

“Even if you lump them all together as wolf summoning whistles, there are quite a few different ranks and types.”

Leonardo nodded understandingly.

It was only to be expected. Elder Tales held a wide range of mount-summoning items. With the exception of ultra-high-class items that had flight capabilities, nearly all of them could be acquired by ordinary users. However, for the most part, even these had level-based usage restrictions. Level-20 items for level-20 Adventurers. Level-50 items for level-50 Adventurers. The size, sturdiness, and color of the horses they summoned were different, too. Naturally, capabilities such as speed and the amount of time they could be used for varied as well.

“Since you are all high-end players with levels in the nineties, commercial whistles probably won’t be enough. In that case, you will need to complete a quest.”

That also sounded reasonable.

Summoning items were sometimes obtained as the result of a quest, but it was also just as likely to acquire core materials for the creation of said high-level items through those quests.

“There is a dungeon near here known as Sirius Grotto. It’s intended for high-level parties, and quite a lot of different wolf-type monsters appear there. Core materials can be obtained from several species. If your subclass is Tamer, you can tame the monster and receive a summoning item directly, but…”

“Hey, people. What’s your subclass? Mine’s Delivery Person.”

“Me, me, over here! I’m a Chef!”

“Coppélia is a War Priest.”

“I can use nothing but fairy techniques.”

“Okay, so the quick way’s out, then,” Leonardo summed up.

Still, maybe it really was the correct choice to head down into that Sirius Grotto dungeon and hunt monsters for a while…

But before he could think any further on the matter, Kanami had plunged into fully motivated mode and started muttering: “Hmmm. Wolves, huh? I’ll have to come up with a name! Wolfie…Mr. Wolf…?”

Once she was like this, resistance was futile.

His traveling companions each had abilities he could count on, but he knew that adorable Coppélia was no use whatsoever at restraining Kanami, and that the handsome blond fellow—who had put a hand to his chin and was saying “Not fairy horses, hmm…?”—was a lot more busted than he looked.

Obtaining wolf mounts seemed to be their predetermined route.

That said, even if it was, there were very few problems with it. Shutting themselves in a dungeon would be a lot easier on their nerves than wandering north and south through the wasteland without a plan. Even in terms of time, Leonardo thought, it would probably take a day at the longest.

If that was all they had to do to secure transportation, it was practically the definition of being lucky.

Leonardo had realized, vaguely, that this decision would trigger their second adventure in central Eured.

However, everybody has the right to at least try to comfort themselves. Especially when it lay in the as-yet-unseen future, they were free to fantasize that “this time, it looks like we’ll make safe, peaceful, trouble-free progress.”

Leonardo, a programmer from the Big Apple, had put this into practice on all sorts of projects.

Naturally, it had failed every time.

However, he still hadn’t learned his lesson, and he tried to stay optimistic this time as well.

After all, adventuring New Yorkers couldn’t survive without being tough.

4

The city headquarters was an old-fashioned single-story house on a large lot.

When Zhu Huan, guild master of the Lelang Wolf Cavalry, passed through the gate, he smacked his companion, a Wise Wolf, lightly. His intelligent partner wagged its tail once, then went home to its wolf kennel.

Wolf mounts were practically the Lelang Wolf Cavalry’s trademark. They were large wolves that were summoned with whistles, and there were several different kinds. Creatures were summoned and put to work, so according to this world’s logic, once the summoning period was over, they went off somewhere. However, with high-level summoning whistles, the summoning period was longer than twenty-four hours, which made it possible to keep them active indefinitely.

Of course, if an Adventurer sent them away when they weren’t being ridden, then there was no need to worry about feeding or grooming them. However, because some members of the Lelang Wolf Cavalry wanted to live with their wolves in the guild house instead of sending them away, the guild kept a headquarters with multiple lodges and kennels on a large plot of land.

Unusually for central Eured, the mansion also had a hedge.

There were fig and apricot trees in the garden behind that hedge, but at this time of year, the scenery was rather forlorn. Of course, everything was dry in the center of the continent. Even the rocks had the moisture leeched out of them, and exposed as it was to drastic temperature fluctuations, the land seemed somehow brittle. Compared with those grassy plains and wastelands, the city that was their home was quite fortunate.

“Hey, it’s the captain.” “It’s the captain!”

Two small figures came charging at Zhu Huan, brandishing tree branches; they ran into him, then rolled on the ground like puppies. It looked like something out of a manga, but Zhu Huan and both members of the pair were level-90 Adventurers. They had the leisure to horse around like this.

“Yion, Aruen, what are you doing? Are you stupid?”

“I’d rather you didn’t call us stupid.”

“Well, stupid’s what you are.”

“Shhh. You know that’s a secret.”

“It might have gotten out already.”

“Hey, Captain, has it gotten out?”

“I know, you idiots,” Zhu Huan told them, wearing a sullen, thoroughly disgusted expression.

The pair, who wore fluffy furs, squealed over that comment for a few moments, but then they abruptly looked awkward and made a report.

“A long-face is here.”

“Somebody snooty is here.”

They were troubled, but at the same time, they seemed vaguely out of sorts. Their expressions tipped him off, and Zhu Huan asked his aide Ma Bao—who’d appeared from the depths of the building just as soon as he’d walked through the door—for the particulars.

“It’s exactly what you think. It seems as though they might be forcing things.”

“They’re insisting we sign on as their minions?”

“‘If you don’t join the Blue King faction, you’ll regret it. The White King or Red King would massacre you, plus all the People of the Earth in this city. Hurry up and become our vassals while we’re still discussing it peacefully,’ they said.”

“Vassals, huh? Are their heads full of The Records of the Three Kingdoms? What era are they from anyway? Lousy country bumpkins.”

Thoroughly fed up, Zhu Huan threw his pack aside roughly, then went through the dirt-floored room and out into the courtyard.

Winters in this area were extremely harsh. The landscape turned white and gray, then stayed that way for several months.

In the courtyard, there was an oven made of grimy-looking bricks, with a cranky Salamander lying lazily inside it. Around the oven, guild members were boiling water and roasting meat, trying to get their chores out of the way while there was daylight left.

It was cold, but not freezing. The scene was filled with lively energy.

The visitors to the guild house had been messengers from the Singing Sword Company.

They’d stopped by frequently over the past two months, demanding that they form an alliance or become their subordinates. It had been happening a lot lately; they might have finally gotten serious.

Why were they making these proposals? It had to do with one of the quirks of the Zhongyuan server, the vast region that stretched across Eured from its center to the east, the land that was the equivalent of China.

Elder Tales was an MMORPG that had been developed by the American Atharva Company, and its game world, Theldesia, was enormous. While its size had been cut in half through the Half-Gaia Project, it held a nearly exact replica of Earth’s topography.

This immense in-game world had been recreated through 3-D modeling. You were free to go anywhere, and there were almost no game-type partitions. It was what was referred to as an “open world.”

The attractions of this sort of game were the sense of liberation and freedom, and the fact that it stirred up a spirit of adventure. However, on the other hand, it was extraordinarily hard to provide content for all that space. For example, if you created a village, then set up an attack event there, the number of players who’d manage to stumble onto that village by accident was far too small. Since the world was so large, if you created events at random, they’d end up as events no one could find.

The orthodox solution was to prepare a prodigious number of events, then design things so that, no matter what location you chose in this wide world, you’d find intriguing challenges. However, to do that, you needed a massive, truly astronomical number of events.

In Theldesia, the area of Zhongyuan was approximately 2.5 million square kilometers. In order to have one event for every 5 square kilometers—the area a party of six Adventurers could explore in a day—you’d need one million events. When you considered that several designers, 3-D modelers, and programmers had to work for about a week to create a single event, the required budget would far surpass the scale of the game.

Having anticipated this, Atharva had outsourced each area to operating companies in countries all over Earth, but the company that had been assigned the Zhongyuan server, the Kanan Internet Corporation, hadn’t had astronomical development funds, either. As Elder Tales had grown popular, profits had gone up, and so they’d hired brilliant designers and programmers, but it really hadn’t been possible to fill the vast Chinese server with captivating adventures.

As a result, Kanan Internet had come up with two big policies.

One was to set up a priority ranking for content preparation. They had begun preparing content for Theldesia starting with the coastal areas, in what would have been Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing on Earth. More players logged in from these areas, and so they were already equipped with player towns. It made sense to increase the number of dungeons, folklore, stories, events, and quests starting within their vicinities. All regional operating companies had done it like that. It was just like the way content preparation in Japan, on the Yamato server, had begun in Akiba and its surroundings.

The other distinguishing feature of the Zhongyuan server was the guild wars.

On this server, fighting between guilds was commended.

Of course, it wasn’t a system of unrestricted warfare, but even so, it was true that large-scale player-versus-player combat had been encouraged. When guilds fought in the battle zones that had been set up all over the place, the winner would receive guild points corresponding to the results. With enough points, the victor could become the ruler of the city located near the battlefield. This was true even for player towns like Yandu and Dadu.

In this system where players fought each other, there was no “Content cleared” end point. Even if a guild won and became the ruler of the nearby territory and cities, that guild would be challenged by another one. In other words, it was necessary to defend. Struggles between guilds were essentially limitless events, intended to accelerate their military expansion and their accumulation of items.

As a result, compared with the trouble of creating events, the operating company had believed it would become extremely long-lasting, perennially interesting content. By and large, it had succeeded.

Naturally, that system was from the days of the game: Kanan Internet had felt that creating a vast amount of content would be difficult, and it had hit upon the idea of having the players pick up some of the burden, and the result had been the guild wars. However, Theldesia was now reality, while that system remained in effect.

The result was that there were still Adventurer players on the Zhongyuan server who went along with that system… An overwhelming majority, in fact.

True, if you accumulated enough guild points, you won sovereignty over a city. Once you controlled a city, you could make the surrounding People of the Earth obey you as well, without exception, which meant it was possible to live like ancient royalty.

In the players’ defense, in the interests of fairness, they did none of this out of cruelty or acquisitiveness. They acted to defend the places they called home, out of fear and suspicion of each other, and to secure their own safety.

As game content, the guild wars hadn’t been a bad thing. In the days of Elder Tales, even Zhu Huan had raced across battlefields on wolfback.

However, in Theldesia as it was now, he thought they were the root cause of chaos. Immediately after that transference incident, Zhu Huan and the other Lelang Wolf Cavalry members had seen this coming, and they’d left the player town of Dadu and run here, to Shimanaikui.

But apparently, they hadn’t managed to get away entirely.

“The Blue King is that one, right? The sort of bovine-looking one.”

“I am unable to answer questions regarding whether he eats grass.”

“He seems like an omnivorous ox.”

“Yes, that’s the one. Even though that Singing Sword Company guild has a stylish name.”

“Mr. Blue King makes himself out to be the civilian-rule type, you see,” Ma Bao responded, offering him some warm-looking socks.

“Well, it’s late in the game, but I expect he caught on.”

“Caught on to what?”

“To the fact that if they wage unending war, the People of the Earth will suffer for it. Even if they acquire a territory to rule, if the People of the Earth flee on them, both the fields and commerce will stop dead. As a matter of fact, quite a lot of them have fled over here.”

“Ah. Is that what it’s about? Yeah, you’re right; they are running here.”

Not just People of the Earth, but Adventurers as well.

The twins who’d been all over him a short while ago hadn’t been members of the Lelang Wolf Cavalry to begin with, either. They’d picked them up on the way over. He thought they were still around ten years old.

In Zhongyuan, the People of the Earth seemed to live together in clans. Relatives by blood and marriage lived in groups, and if people shared their last name, even if they lived far away, they’d help them for that reason alone.

Since that was the case, if they were fleeing the area where they lived, the entire clan would work together to do it. They might even run as a group of several hundred people. Shimanaikui was on the outskirts of Zhongyuan. To be accurate, the city lay on the border between verdant Zhongyuan and the wilderness of Aorsoi. Due to the peculiarities of its location, it was no wonder that many People of the Earth who weren’t fond of the turbulence in Zhongyuan came here.

Lately, in addition to merchants with a sharp eye for opportunity, even wealthy farmers who should have been tilling the fields often arrived as entire clans.

“I wonder if something’s up.”

“Do you suppose it’s the Ritual of Coronation?”

“You think that’s connected to this?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Still, Zhu Huan thought, this was a nuisance. The major guilds were too greedy. If they were lucky, just maybe, they might strike it rich: That was all they thought about. Small and midsized guilds like his own tended to wing it, living from hand to mouth, but that was enough. When men of small caliber were idle, they did mischief.

“It would be nice if those great heavenly immortals would do just a little more work.”

“Please don’t say inauspicious things. The situation is already out of control; if the Ancients forced their way in, it would be nothing but trouble.”

“You think so?”

Zhu Huan tilted his head to one side, considering it.

The man he’d delivered to the Bai Tao Shrine a little while ago had seemed pretty skilled. He was a full-fledged general. Zhu Huan thought someone like that would bring some good combat power to the table, but either way, ever since that transference incident, fairyland had fallen silent. As a smaller guild, they had no intention of stirring up trouble. It would be fun if a hero like that led the armies of the outlying regions and dominated Zhongyuan, but he couldn’t get engrossed in that sort of pipe dream.

After all, his daily duties were important.

For that reason, Zhu Huan loudly issued orders to his subordinates, then had the materials for the week’s contract work brought to him. Personal preferences aside, as guild master, he couldn’t exclusively work outdoors. The wasteland winter was deepening, but that didn’t mean an end to monster attacks and trouble.

The term hibernation wasn’t in Theldesia’s vocabulary.

5

They’d said they’d arrive in less than a week, but that didn’t mean that week would end without any trouble.

Kanami, who’d wrapped a mantle around herself (although her midriff was still exposed), took the way that was a magnet for all sorts of headaches.

If Leonardo and the others had been able to use a map app to get a bird’s-eye view of the area they were walking through, it would have shown them the northern foothills of the vast mountain range known as Tian Mai. In Earth terms, they were the Tian Shan Mountains, the backbone of Eurasia.

Since they had seen these same mountains to the north while they were in Aorsoi and were now seeing them to the south, they must have cut across them at some point, but Leonardo didn’t remember doing it.

To be accurate, they’d spent over half a month prowling around the sort of mountainous region where dragon-type monsters appeared every two hours, so it wasn’t clear exactly when they’d crossed over to the north.

Hanging around central Eurasia—and the Tian Shan Mountains at that—from autumn to early winter was practically signing up to commit suicide, but Adventurer physical capabilities made that sort of recklessness possible, as did the sloppiness of the world of Theldesia.

Since they’d parted with the merchant Yagudo, their party now consisted of five Adventurers. Because there were no People of the Earth with them, they didn’t really understand what “normal” was. Even if they dug through the snow to make a spot to camp and spent the night there, they could get by with a simple Whoa, that was cold; my snot’s gonna freeze, and so there was no way for them to pick up common sense.

That said, here in the Tian Mai Mountains, they’d reached a People of the Earth Wolf-Fang hamlet and a Mountain Hare village, so he suspected that this whole world might be pretty good at the “survival” game.

Of course, it was also possible the real Tian Shan Mountains were a peaceful place that was bursting with life as well and that, as a New Yorker, he just didn’t know about it.

The world opened up with undulating mounds and troughs.

For a hilly area, the visibility was unbelievably good. Leonardo had lived in the canyons between buildings, and as far as he was concerned, it was terribly unsettling. A single hill-like rise went on for what was probably several kilometers, and others like it spread all through the plains at the foot of a seven-thousand-kilometer-class mountain range.

The scale was too big, and it made him feel as if his senses were going haywire. It seemed more like he’d shrunk than as if he was in an enormous mountain range. Wavy ground, like a messy picture drawn by a child—but it was impossibly gigantic. The land was preposterous.

According to Chun Lu, in summer, this area was absolutely beautiful. Radiant green sprang up all over the black earth and the rocks, and the wasteland became a grassy plain. The bushes that were here and there produced berries, and the thin trees grew thick foliage.

At the moment, it was a monochrome landscape: a wilderness of black dirt and gray rock with dead grass clinging to it, and the occasional white drift of residual snow. However, Leonardo thought, it was a place he’d like to visit during the summer.

And then Coppélia might start feeling romantic… Or maybe not…

Still, reality was heartless, and the party kept trudging across wide-open plateau country coated with lingering snow. There were about ten hours of daylight, and they spent nearly all of it traveling. Then, about every two hours, a dragon or wyvern or roc or flying spirit came along, and they fought it. Even Dorothy never went through trouble like this, Leonardo thought, as if grumbling to himself. Although the Oz he knew was the version in the musical.

In this region, there were no boulders taller than they were, no large thickets, no stands of trees—nothing they could use for cover.

The rolling wasteland went on for as far as they could see.

In a place like that, they couldn’t escape from flying monsters, so there was no way to avoid combat.

In the mythologies of all ages and places, dragons were depicted as powerful mystical beasts, and the world of Theldesia was no exception. Even within their various level demographics, dragons were monsters who were stronger than the rest, and that was true here in Tian Mai as well. They were Party-rank monsters with levels ranging from 86 to 90. If Leonardo and the others put their strength together, they weren’t unbeatable enemies, but they also weren’t opponents they could afford to get careless with. On the contrary, the way they attacked individually, one at a time, made them extraordinarily convenient training partners. However, it didn’t always go so well…

“You’re too far out, Elias.”

“This is nothing!”

Elias charged, slashing with his fairy longsword, Crystal Stream. The fierce torrent canceled out the Dragon Breath, but Elias himself had taken significant damage.

“Whoa, support Eli-Eli!”

“Yes, Master. Reactive Heal, Sacred Wall.”

Coppélia, who was in her work clothes—her steel maid outfit—swung her enormous traveler’s trunk around, casting a recovery spell. A chartreuse light and a pale-pink barrier blocked the flames, simultaneously healing Elias’s wounds.

“And-a-boooom!”

Kanami, who’d issued the order, jumped straight up, slamming a vertical kick into the lower jaw of the dragon, who was above her head. A flame-like effect that was unique to the warrior classes shone, fanning aggro.

However, this sequence of events really had been Elias’s blunder.

The key to combat lay in the division of labor. Elias was an Ancient with a level of 100, but by nature, he was an attacker and buffer. He wasn’t a tank, built to gather monster aggro and concentrate attacks on himself. Maybe it was all right for him to be on the front line, but he wasn’t supposed to take damage head-on.

This was less because there was a risk to his life than because the monster’s aim would lose its focus, disturbing their teamwork.

Is Elias losing his cool? Leonardo thought.

Nobody could have said Leonardo was especially good at getting along with people, so he couldn’t declare it with any confidence, but Elias had been strange lately. Particularly in combat, he seemed to put himself too far out. In the first place, although he was a swordsman, his water attacks were midrange and meant for suppression. Even considered in combination with powerful support abilities, he was a midfield mobile fighter; there was no need for him to be on the front line, and actually, having him there increased the risk for the whole party.

Of course Elias had a variety of attack methods, some of them single, short-range attacks, so he wasn’t saying he shouldn’t run up to the front line, period. However, even so, it seemed to Leonardo that they were lacking their former balance.

“Rrraaaaaaaaagh! Fairy Sword: Ice Burial Array!”

With a roar that seemed fit to burst his throat, countless ice stakes rose from Elias’s great sword, then flew at the fiery dragon. Kanami’s attack had thrown the dragon completely off-balance.

That one attack tipped the situation. Or, rather, it would have been a finishing blow…if Elias hadn’t been the one to strike it.

Leonardo charged in, hugging the ground, then slashed upward from that unnatural position with his blade.

Deadly Dance: He’d polished this technique so much that it formed the core of his battles, and it had evolved even further over the course of their journey. He’d ingrained the technique’s elaborate structure into himself through repetitive practice, and he’d used it to bury Rasfia, the Genius of Necromancy, but that had been the beginning, not the end. On the contrary, at that stage, Deadly Dance had been a hand-to-hand technique loaded with restrictions, one that required him to perform set motions in a set order.

If he had even a slight handicap—for instance, if he couldn’t move his leg, or one arm was paralyzed—he couldn’t chain Deadly Dance together, because he had to strike the proper form. At the time, his technique for activating it back-to-back had been very rough. It was a technique he could only pull off against an opponent who was standing still on flat ground; he’d managed to end a fight with it back then because both he and his enemy had been in freefall at the time, and there hadn’t been any way to escape.

However, things were different now. Leonardo had sorted predetermined motions into several dozen categories, put them together, and, designing the way they’d circulate with Open Loop Circulation, made Deadly Dance a more sophisticated technique.

It was an idea he’d had ever since the days when Elder Tales had been a game.

Why had it been an idea, instead of a technique? Because there were high hurdles to making it practical. Explained simply, Open Loop Circulation meant fitting the recast times of multiple special skills together to create one constant attack.

Take Venom Strike, for example. It was an Assassin special skill that inflicted extra damage due to Poison, and its recast-time timer had about twenty-four seconds on it. If you used it once, you had to wait twenty-four seconds before you used it again.

Venom Strike was a core attack for Assassins, and naturally, they had to wait twenty-four seconds after attacking. However, just waiting wouldn’t increase the total amount of damage. If they could use some other special skill during those twenty-four seconds, they’d be able to boost the overall damage.

In that case, specifically what sort of special skill should they choose?

Even if they sandwiched in another special skill—Quick Assault, say—Quick Assault had its own unique cast and recast times. The time it took for two Venom Strikes might be enough for three, or possibly five, Quick Assaults; the division almost never came out neatly.

On top of that, recast time fluctuated based on various conditions. Most high-level equipment had special effects that shortened recast time. It was one thing if they shortened it overall, but more of them shortened the recast times of specific special skills. For Leonardo, the recast time for Venom Strike wasn’t its original 24 seconds; it was a finicky time, 22.15 seconds.

In other words, if a player wanted to master Open Loop Circulation, they had to research and practice these varied, unique combinations and structures, and they needed to factor in their equipment as well.

In addition, even if they learned it, a patch or switching equipment could easily send all that training back to square one. That was why, even among die-hard game junkies, only a handful of players even tried to acquire the technique. Naturally, Leonardo hadn’t mastered it, either. Compared with the amount of work you had to sink into it, its performance was just too bad.

That was what he’d thought back when this was a game.

“Ghkguuuuuh!!”

As Leonardo’s Ninja Twin Flames split its scales, the dragon gave a wet scream that seemed to have gone wrong somewhere.

In this world, things were different.

On this adventure, which was now reality, combat abilities were exceedingly important. Whether they were defending themselves or accomplishing an objective, the core of Adventurer abilities was unmistakably combat.

The long time he’d spent traveling had managed to turn a New York programmer into a pretty competent warrior.

“Not yet!”

Elias launched a follow-up attack, bracing his great sword on his shoulder, but the dragon’s HP bar was draining before his very eyes, approaching zero. Kanami’s multilayered attacks and Leonardo’s lethal serial attacks had turned the dragon’s life into rainbows. The falling meter did nothing more than confirm this after the fact.

He must have noticed that. Looking embarrassed, yet still breathing hard, Elias sheathed his weapon.

“Elias—!”

Leonardo was about to call to him, to tell him he’d gone too far ahead, but he hesitated.

It would have been easy to just yell at him, but even if he could imagine what it was that Elias was feeling anxious about or holding in, he didn’t know the truth of it. Leonardo wasn’t a counselor. In Theldesia, where he couldn’t introduce him to a company doctor, there was no guarantee he could give him any useful advice.

To begin with, Elias was an Ancient.

At this late date, he had no intention of being picky about whether somebody was an NPC or a bot, but even so, Leonardo had been made on Earth, and the circumstances of their birth had been different. Even with his project teammate from El Salvador, things had gotten prickly every time they ate lunch (all the nutjob ate was cabbage), so he had absolutely no idea what to talk about with a companion who’d been raised by fairies.

So, how’s the weather over there? We haven’t seen anything but clouds and fine snow for two weeks over here. Oh, I guess it’d be the same for you, huh…?

Leonardo sighed heavily over his own fantasy.

He was tired, too. He would have liked to go talk to a counselor himself.

The more he thought about it, the more that seemed like the right idea. His project team (in other words, this party) needed a counselor who could keep an eye on their mental health. They had a colleague who was from aristocratic stock, a thoughtlessly optimistic, sales-type leader who’d take on any job, and the group’s one bright spot of femininity (Kanami didn’t count), who Leonardo secretly fancied, considered herself an AI.

No wonder Leonardo’s stomach hurt.

“What’s wrong, Leonardo?”

“Nah… It’s nothing. Elias, do you go to a doctor?”

“My fairy blood keeps me from getting ill. Are you feeling unwell?”

“I think I’m going nuts.”

When Elias had asked him a question, he’d tried asking one of his own instead, but as he’d figured, he hadn’t gotten a meaningful answer. There were no corporate benefit service programs in this savage wasteland.

Elias was his teammate. Still, that didn’t mean he and Leonardo had any shared past. After all, he was an Ancient, not somebody from Earth. Leonardo’s expression twisted; he felt rather pathetic. He couldn’t find anything good to say, and that brought on a pang of loneliness.

I wish I could help him out a little more.

Leonardo’s shoulders slumped, and he sighed.

Thinking that, in the end, it seemed as though he ended up worrying about the same things no matter what world he was in, he thought, Oh, I see. I guess this world really is real, and he felt weirdly convinced.

Elias might not eat tortilla-esque things or salt-and-vinegar pickled cabbage, but he was still a foreigner in Leonardo’s workplace.

Leonardo, who hadn’t ever been able to remember where El Salvador was, couldn’t even figure out whether it or Theldesia was farther away.

6

A night in the wilderness, harsh but clear.

Getting up, Elias slipped out of the tent, which had been woven from the wool of Long-Haired Goats.

At night, temperatures were far below freezing. It got so cold that the moisture that had gotten into fissures in the rocks froze, expanded, and broke the rocks down. That was why there weren’t many big boulders in this wasteland.

Elias’s party had pitched their tent in a basin that would have been just big enough to slide two carts into. As a result, the tent wouldn’t blow away, but once he crawled out of the depression, which came up to his chest, the night wind buffeted him.

The thin, shredded clouds drifted away, and the moon illuminated his surroundings.

It was a desolate sight.

As an Ancient, Elias was a warrior with a sturdy body, and his equipment was also pretty tough against cold air, so it only felt like a cool breeze to him. However, the effective temperature might be close to twenty below.

Behind him, the tent swayed wildly. It wasn’t because trouble had broken out; Kanami had probably gotten rough. Both her noisiness and the way she tossed and turned in her sleep were familiar to him by now, and Elias smiled a little.

Ever since she’d rescued him at Ulster, far in the west, Elias had accompanied her on her journey.

At present, an unprecedented peril was attacking Theldesia. The Catastrophe had destroyed all the rules. At this point, it was probably safe to say that the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders had been wiped out.

It had been a secret operation of vital importance.

Ultimate destruction was bearing down on the world of Theldesia. Having gained insight into the situation from a Darshana—a “memory of the future,” related to them by the prophet Sumiltimahra—the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders had stealthily concentrated their forces.

The past century and several decades of history had been all for the sake of this operation.

The Geniuses, demons who wielded grotesque powers, and an army of several tens of thousands of their kin had been sealed in the Great Stronghold of the End, but the time when that seal would be lifted was drawing near.

Elias and the rest of the Knights of the Red Branch had been in a magic circle on the outskirts of Londinium, waiting impatiently for the Great Stronghold of the End to open, so that they could go to war.

The Great Stronghold of the End was an enormous magical device meant to seal the Geniuses, but at the same time, it was also the demons’ base, the Cradle. To obliterate them or seal them again, the Knights had to teleport to the Great Stronghold of the End, but for that to happen, the seal had to be open.

The instant the seal on the Geniuses was released, the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders would use the Spatial Teleportation Devices they’d built in each location and storm the Great Stronghold of the End. The Geniuses—only just awakened, unable to grasp the situation or work as a team—would be vanquished. That was the outline of the decisive battle to protect the world, which had been promoted in secret, unbeknownst to the world itself.

The Knights of the Red Branch, who were led by Elias, would serve as the vanguard in this top-secret operation, and they gave their undivided attention to their final inspection of their equipment and the spells that imbued them. Everyone was convinced that the maneuver would succeed. After all, the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders easily had more than five times the combat power the great attack strategy they’d been given by the prophet Sumiltimahra had called for.

The Wen Keepers.

The Obsidian Swordsmen.

The Knights of Izumo.

The Knights of Habaek.

The Fei Cui Knights.

The Winged Dragon Magic Brigade.

The Knights of Shinha.

The Knights of the Sacred Cow.

The Knights of the Seven Seas.

The Knights of the Red Branch.

The Zilant Knights.

The Blood-Sand Knights.

The Shapeless Knights.

Their forces had gathered and had even included the Shapeless Knights, who hardly ever showed themselves. Elias could state categorically that it had been the greatest number of soldiers the Ancients could muster. Military power like that could easily have ruled the world.

However, out of the blue, tragedy had struck. Just as the countdown to the maneuver had reached eight hours, Elias and the others were hit with a surprise attack.

Geniuses, the grotesque monsters from the prophecy.

These monsters, which should still have been sealed, assailed the Knights of the Red Branch. They were shaped like humans, like fish, like birds, like dice, or like shining mist, and their incoherent yet fearsome army showered Elias’s allies with bladelike tentacles, electrical attacks, and acidic gas.

The fight hadn’t been all that one-sided. Even though it had been a surprise attack, the Knights of the Red Branch had held up well. They’d even re-formed their battle lines. They probably wouldn’t have been able to escape defeat, but they should have been able to let the weaker rear-support personnel get away and vow to rise again.

However, the grotesques had a trump card.

The Words of Death.

The companions who heard that curse fell, one after another. Their expressions were frozen in terror, twisted as if they’d peered into bottomless darkness and touched lunacy they hadn’t even wanted to see. They were definitely alive, but they weren’t breathing; their hearts and lungs had stopped functioning.

Unable to stand the sight of the collapsing front line, Elias had dashed out of the main formation. He’d screamed the order to activate the Spatial Teleportation Device.

But there hadn’t been enough energy. If things went on like this, the unlimited magical energy they’d drawn up from the land’s mana would probably do serious damage to the Transport Gate. However, this wasn’t the time to worry about that.

If the surprise attack destroyed the Spatial Teleportation Device, they’d be left unable to capture the Great Stronghold of the End. Even before that, the military power of this base would probably be wiped out.

Elias had screamed:

I’ll hold them here. Knights from the main formation, use the Spatial Teleportation Device and commence the attack on the Great Stronghold of the End!

That the Geniuses had come here meant that, for some reason, the seal had been released. Since that was the case, teleportation should have been possible, and as a matter of fact, while it had been unstable, the Spatial Teleportation Device had started up.

Elias swung his great sword recklessly, slicing into the throng of demons. At this point, he wasn’t thinking of defeating them.

He had to stall them for a minute longer, or even a second, to save his retreating companions.

Gradually, little by little, in the midst of time that had grown viscous enough to set his stomach burning, the retreat was progressing. In reality, it might not have taken ten minutes, but roughly half of his companions had been absorbed into the radiance of the teleportation device. The only ones who remained were Elias and a small suicide unit.

Stop.

Freeze, tremble, congeal.

An end…

…for the puppets.

Offer up the Empathiom that protects you.

Stop.

Stop this fabricated history.

These fabricated memories.

These fabricated feelings.

The timelines of this character software.

He listened to the curse, which reverberated like a funeral bell. He hoped it would be meaningless static.

However, his wish was in vain, and as it seeped into him, Elias realized, vaguely, what it meant: He mustn’t think about it. The moment he understood it, he’d lose everything. Even though he knew this, he couldn’t stop. As if a world-engulfing nothingness had pulled in the ground under his feet, in a single moment, he’d lost all sense of time, of up and down.

Oh, I see…

That is how it was, isn’t it?

Strangely, the darkness that had fallen was filled with a sense of understanding and acceptance.

In the midst of this resigned stasis, which was abysmally foolish yet unapproachable, where even despair was ridiculous, Elias cut himself off. Or, no, in this darkness, orders and voluntary action were equal. Cutting off and throwing away were the same thing, stopping and withdrawing from the world were the same thing, and sleep and death were the same thing as well.

Back then, Elias had met his end.

Glaring into the darkness, buffeted by the cold wind, Elias gritted his teeth.

He wished that the flames of his rage would scorch him.

He didn’t want to believe that that cold resignation had belonged to him. The life Kanami had breathed into him had become fire and was racing through his veins. That fire was what had awakened him from his dreamless sleep.

I want to be strong.

Elias’s fairy blood had given him fighting skills and a curse. Fairy Arts, a system of sword techniques unparalleled in history, and Fairy Eye, an ability that saw through malice, had both come from the fairies. However, at the same time, he’d been inflicted with a fairy curse that rendered him unable to finish off enemies.

Elias knew that all of these things were worthless.

He understood that they weren’t actually real.

However, if he admitted that the past was counterfeit, he would probably be ushered into that dreamless sleep once again. More than that, it was likely that an Elias who’d denied the fairies wouldn’t be able to be himself anymore. The fairy curse bound him, and it seemed to protect him as well.

Why am I…?

He gazed at his clenched fist, but there was no answer there.

Elias was weak.

He had ultimate power, and yet, his fighting abilities were sealed by an unfair curse. So that he wouldn’t obstruct the Adventurers’ activity— No; that wasn’t it. This seal was a curse from his fairy blood, so that he wouldn’t steal the Adventurers’ prey—

Once again, the Words of Death were beginning to rage inside him.

Despair and jealousy ran wild, like a black ocean, and Elias gripped his chest tightly. This icy pain wasn’t the sort of thing he could shut out by raising his anti-cold attribute defenses.

He knew that, vaguely, but he couldn’t afford to admit it, and because he couldn’t admit it, he couldn’t escape the curse. That was the sort of snare he’d fallen into.

As he gazed at his feet, Elias noticed a shadow.

When he lifted his eyes…

When had she appeared? A graceful woman was watching him, idly.

The wind died, and thin lavender silk drifted lightly in the nighttime chill. Her eyes were hidden behind a veil, but it was clear she was looking at him.

“Did you need something, miss?”

Elias had asked his question on reflex. The woman—Enchantress Youren—spent a little while searching for words, then spoke in a voice that sounded deeply troubled.

“From what I have seen, I gather that you are a highly renowned traveling practitioner of the martial arts. My name is Youren. I live in an enchanted cavern nearby, and while a humble one, I am an Immortal.”

“An Immortal… Then—!”

Elias had raised his voice slightly, and the lady nodded.

“While my skills are far inferior, I, too, am an Ancient… May I assume that you are Lord Elias Hackblade?”

“Indeed I am. I am Elias Hackblade, a Blademancer affiliated with the Knights of the Red Branch, one of the thirteen swords.”

Under the pallid moonlight, the pair gazed at each other.

The word Ancient was no more than shorthand. While it appeared to be the term for a race, in reality, it was neither a tribe nor a clan. Ancients were a type of Person of the Earth, and it meant only that they were strong—no more, no less. At the very least, that was how Elias thought of it. It was probably similar to the word superhuman.

Most of the Ancients belonged to the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders, but that was due to Elias and the others’ hard work, and not all of them did. The term was a general one for People of the Earth who had power, and so, although there weren’t many of them, evil Ancients and Ancients who’d turned their backs on the world did exist.

Since it was a general term, there were many other names for them as well.

Here on the Zhongyuan server, the people called “Immortals” were Ancients. The men were known as “Immortals” while the women were “Enchantresses.” Other names for Ancients on the Zhongyuan server included “Recluses,” “Perfected Ones,” “Immortal Wizards,” and “Holy Mothers.”

Ling Tianfeng, called the White Wing Princess—a Zhongyuan Ancient who was as renowned as Elias—was the leading noble Immortal of the Fei Cui Knights, and she was also an Enchantress.

When he’d awakened from the deep sleep into which the Geniuses had plunged him, he’d tried to contact the chivalric orders, but there had been absolutely no response from any of them, in any country. Now, finally, Elias had managed to connect with another Ancient.

“I have a request to make of you, Lord Elias.”

Speaking in a voice that seemed choked with tears, Enchantress Youren threw herself at Elias’s feet, prostrating herself.

“Our Zhongyuan, with its shining history, has been visited by an unparalleled crisis as well. Fairylands everywhere have fallen or been abandoned… The Bai Tao Shrine is one such place. It is twenty ri to the southeast of here, two or three days’ journey. It has come under the control of a ferocious magus, and the people of the nearby villages and towns spend their days in fear of his violence. The frail heavenly officials live in terror, counting their remaining days on their fingers.”

“A magus—”

Could it be a Genius? Elias imagined the sort of violence incarnate that would make this beautiful Enchantress abandon herself to grief.

“I do feel that it is a shameless request, but, Lord Elias, Hero of the West, I beseech you. Please vanquish the magus.”

As if pushed into action, Elias helped Enchantress Youren up.

She was suffering. She wanted to save her companions but lacked the power to do so… Just like Elias.

Just like that, Elias’s anguish over wanting to save his comrades but lacking the strength to do so led him to a new quest.