1

“This ain’t good,” Naotsugu muttered.

He was wiping the grime off Armor of Silver Oath and Guard of Lionheart with a rag he’d taken out of his pack. All the equipment had been rinsed off with a shower from an Undine that a Summoner had brought to life a minute ago. Some monsters’ body fluids damaged equipment; after a battle, it was vital to wash it well.

“What ‘ain’t good,’ Naotsugu?”

Tetora was right next to him, stooping low to wash her fancy baton.

They were both members of the Second party, and lately they often acted as a team. Demiquas was temperamental and always on his own, while Voinen and Federico were members of Silver Sword; they often sent messages to and worked with other teams. Shiroe had settled into the position of adviser or counselor for this full raid, and he was always being called out by William.

That meant that, by necessity, Naotsugu often ended up with Tetora.

“Could it be that the bloodstains won’t come out no matter how much you wash them? Is it a curse?”

“Y’know, for someone who calls herself an idol, you say some pretty graphic stuff.”

“Charismatic individuals like me are very popular just as we are. Because we’re cute.”

“Is-that-right city.”

The day’s exploration wasn’t over yet. It was past noon, so they’d taken a break and were getting ready to eat. They were cleaning their equipment, in part because it needed cleaning, but at least half because they were bored.

“I wasn’t talking about the equipment.”

“I see. Was I on your mind, perhaps?”

“That’d be a no.”

Naotsugu denied it bluntly.

If he had to say whether he liked her or hated her, Naotsugu thought that Tetora would have to go in the “like” category.

Talking to her was just plain easy, and it never made him tired. He thought she was one of the good guys, especially when they were having stupid conversations like this one. Conversations when they just horsed around and didn’t use their brains at all were, in a way, pure refreshment. Naotsugu thought that dumb stuff had great healing properties. It wasn’t because of his interests that he tried to get a laugh by saying “panties” all the time.

“You don’t look very cheerful. Want to see my panties?”

“Nope.”

“I wonder if I should have gone with a miniskirt instead of hot pants.”

“You get away from there, you hear?”

“No, if anything, I’m going to tease you tenaciously.”

Keh-heh-heh-heh. Tetora cuddled up to Naotsugu with her usual triumphant smile, a smile that made it look as if she were plotting something. Naotsugu promptly tore her away with a “Gah, get off, yech.” Despite what he’d just said, having her play with him like this was a problem. Tetora was small, and with her agility and flexibility, she leapt right in close to him before he knew it. He couldn’t strike back with force, so he was constantly losing the initiative.

Tetora was aware of Naotsugu’s hesitation when she came to tease him. In other words, it was harassment. It was spiteful. The fact that she knew she was cute made it vicious.

“That’s generally how it is, you know. Seeing panties would make you happy, wouldn’t it?”

“Uh…huh?”

She’d said the words so naturally that Naotsugu wasn’t able to find a good retort.

“You’d think, ‘Ah man! Today’s my lucky day,’ and things like that, wouldn’t you? When they belong to a girl as cute as I am, I think it would probably put you in the mood to work hard all day, or to high-five the gods.”

Tetora’s tone wasn’t especially teasing. She was speaking genuinely, and surface aside, Naotsugu was forced to agree with her. He thought she’d probably nailed it. Although, of course, he didn’t let it show.

“Yeah, but seriously, kid—”

“I understand those feelings better than anyone! I really must be a natural-born idol! Go ahead and let your heart flutter!”

As Naotsugu watched Tetora say this, snorting and looking proud of herself, he thought, This one’s a big shot. Setting all the other little details aside, this healer with the triumphant face had a really fantastic smile.

That was a big virtue. Naotsugu firmly believed that smiling was one of the best presents a girl could give to the people around her.

But when Tetora messed with him this way, he remembered Marielle.

The smile was what did it.

And it was frequent. However, even when Tetora wasn’t there, he recalled Marielle quite a bit.

It definitely wasn’t because he wanted that soft, squishy, oppressive feeling that showed up when he did so, but he did think that was a problem all on its own.

If this had been the old Earth, things would have been easier. Naotsugu had landed a steady job, and his life had just settled down. He’d even been without a girlfriend for quite a long time, so there wouldn’t have been any obstacles. Life as an Adventurer was fun and seemed worthwhile, but it also felt too unstable to think about “that sort of thing.” Adventuring was a situation that was constantly out of his control. And yet, Marielle’s feelings were important, too.

They say it isn’t good to take too much time, either, Naotsugu thought, and scratched his cheek.

* * *

“Waaaaaaugh! That’s not it!”

“Agh?! Why d’you yell all of a sudden?!”

Tetora, who’d been creeping up on Naotsugu again, was startled, and she banged her small rump on the ruin’s cold stone floor. Naotsugu waved his hands to gloss things over: “That’s not it, it’s not like that. I’m sorry, though.” He lent her a hand and helped her up.

As if to hide what he’d been thinking, Naotsugu muttered, “Some lives are just like that, eh?”

“Naotsugu, you look like a grade-school kid who told his gorgeous teacher he liked her on his test, then got busted when his classmates saw it.”

“What’s with that weirdly specific comment?!”

“Dweh-heh-heh-heh. And? Something got you down?”

Tetora’s expression seemed to say, I’m not letting you get away, but as far as Naotsugu was concerned, having her pursue that topic was a huge help. As a result, he went along with her misunderstanding.

“Yeah, actually, it’s about Shiro.” He pulled a particularly sour expression.

Tetora’s triumphant face shone even brighter. It probably meant, That’s just like me! I asked a critical question! I’m so smart! As Tetora puffed out her chest for absolutely no reason, she looked incredibly dumb.

…Well. Naotsugu couldn’t just let Tetora soothe him like this.

It was true that something was on his mind, but he wasn’t sure how to talk about it.

“Hey. Food.”

Federico had approached just then, and he held boxlike dishes out to them. They were filled with generous helpings of brown stew and asparagus. Since Naotsugu had been thinking, he was a bit late in noticing, but Tetora immediately accepted hers with a beaming smile and a “Thank you, Federico!”

As befitted someone who called herself an idol, Tetora was popular. The raid members had accepted her in no time and made a pet of her. She even seemed to have a few actual fans.

As proof, a smile appeared on Federico’s bearded face as well, and he said, “Nah, it’s fine.” From the way he’d handed them their portions and gone away, he seemed as if he might be a lot easier to get along with than his appearance suggested. He was probably going to deliver Demiquas’s and Voinen’s portions as well. The pair from Silver Sword willingly took on odd jobs like this. You really can’t trust advance reviews, Naotsugu thought.

“Let’s hurry and eat, Naotsugu. Then you’re going to tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Yeah.”

Answering vaguely, Naotsugu looked around for a good place to sit.

They were in one of the countless small rooms in the Abyssal Shaft zone. The room was “small” only in comparison to the scale of the dungeon; it was actually about fifteen meters square, a space roughly the size of a smallish gymnasium, cut into a rectangle. There were carvings on the enormous pillars, although they weren’t ornate, and it had the atmosphere of some kind of palace or religious building. Its high, barrel-shaped ceiling gave off a faint light.

There had been tons of rooms that looked like this space in the surrounding area. In the hours since they’d begun their exploration that day, they’d made an exhaustive search of those compartments, and had continued to exterminate any monsters that appeared.

The pair sat down, using a granite pillar that had crumbled just the right way as a bench.

“Thanks for the food.”

“Thanks for the foooood!”

Astonishingly large chunks of meat peeked out of the stew they’d been given. As he stuffed his face with it, Naotsugu brooded. This was pretty hard to explain. It was a fact that Shiroe was at the heart of the problem, but the bit about things being “bothersome” was just a feeling.

If he extracted the issue simply, it was that Shiroe seemed to be suffering somehow.

However, the guy known as Shiroe was a natural worrier, and he tended to take on a lot of things and be hard-pressed to keep up with his work. Possibly because of that, to people besides Naotsugu, apparently Shiroe always looked slightly troubled and pained.

Naotsugu didn’t think that was true, however.

Even if his expression looked pinched, Shiroe was entertained by all sorts of things, and he often cut corners and slacked off. He even sulked and went to sleep at his desk fairly frequently.

Still, to the multitudes that weren’t close to him, Shiroe always seemed to be dealing with a tough problem, and his weakness was that even when he really was having trouble, no one understood. Shiroe was always hemming and groaning to himself, but even so, in the end, he generally solved the problem, and so it was hard to register his limits, the things he really couldn’t do anything about all by himself. It was even harder to explain this to other people.

After all, even Naotsugu couldn’t explain how to tell what sort of stern expression was only a pose, and what sort of expression meant he was actually in trouble. Naotsugu knew…but only vaguely.

Right now, Shiroe was probably suffering a lot more than he appeared to be.

However, even that was only a hazy feeling.

He couldn’t explain it.

“See, Shiro’s…” Slowly, Naotsugu began to speak. “He sort of looks like he’s maybe in trouble.”

“‘Maybe’?”

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s go save him. Okay?”

Tetora, who’d skewered a piece of asparagus with her fork, made a snap decision.

Don’t say it like it’s easy ’cos it ain’t, Naotsugu huffed.

“People call that four-eyes ‘Machiavelli’ and other stuff, but he’s not crafty so much as he’s a show-off. He’s thinking, ‘Is it all right for me to call for help? Is it okay for me to do a job like this?’ Stuff like that.”

“I see. At heart, he’s a hermit.”

“Yeah, he’s a hermit. There’s no denying that.”

“He needs an idol!”

“I’m pretty sure he’s okay there.”

“Then why did he come all the way out to this hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere?”

Naotsugu almost answered, Because he needs money, duh, but then he realized that that wouldn’t be an answer at all. Shiroe wasn’t the type who found happiness in accumulating money so he could stare at it. Money was a tool to use for some other purpose. It had been that way during the Crescent Moon incident, too. That prompted the question, In that case, what’s he going to use it on this time? but come to think of it, Naotsugu didn’t know the answer to that.

During the Round Table Council affair, it had been used to buy up the zone that housed the bank. However, obtaining the bank hadn’t been Shiroe’s objective, either. He’d only needed a weapon, in order to get the Adventurers of Akiba to the negotiating table.

What would he use the money for when he got it? What did he intend to do by using it that way? Now that he thought about it, Naotsugu hadn’t heard about any of that from Shiroe. Shiroe was a close friend, and he could trust him even without knowing. However, when he had to explain it to a third party—Tetora—it was a problem.

Reason, reason…hm…

Naotsugu racked his brains, and then the words came to him, like a divine revelation.

“I’m just guessing, but I think it’s to protect his house.”

“His house?”

“I’m not talking about an actual, physical building. I mean the place he lives.”

“In other words, his guild?”

“I don’t think it’s just the guild. I don’t really know, but…”

Chewing on a piece of bread he’d soaked in his stew, Naotsugu kept talking, saying things as they came to him.

“If we’re going to live, we need food and a roof over our heads, stuff like that. Then we need people. No matter what, we need a place where we can be with the people we’re close to. In the old world, that was probably family, and in this world, it’s the people in our groups and our guilds.”

Over the past six months, Naotsugu had watched Marielle and the Crescent Moon League.

A place where everyone could feel at ease. A place where they woke up, did their jobs, had dinner, made a racket together, and told each other We made it through another day. Good night!

The importance of it, and its warmth, and the kind smiles that supported it.

“But see, even things like that need a place to belong.”

“Huh?”

Tetora didn’t get it, and Naotsugu kept talking, as if he was trying to persuade her. He was pulling things even he didn’t know from some place deep inside himself.

“It’s like a house for our houses. In other words, it’s Akiba. You can’t just have your own guild, all by itself, in an empty world. Because, see, it’s linked to all sorts of other stuff. Even guilds need a place to belong. Duties, and companion guilds… It’s connected to other places like those, and I don’t really know how to put it, but we’ve got to take care of things like that.”

That was probably the case.

It was also likely the reason that Shiroe had spoken so desperately during the establishment of the Round Table Council.

“Towns are like huge houses. If the town isn’t happy, none of the guilds in it can be happy. All the people that live in those houses will be unhappy, too. Shiroe’s the type who’d go head-to-head with the town or something even bigger to protect his own small house.”

“A home, huh…”

When Naotsugu looked at Tetora, worried about whether his explanation had gotten through to her, he saw an expression he hadn’t expected. It was her usual smile: triumphant, self-important, kind, and strong.

“Protecting the place where you belong is important. For wolves like us, it’s the most important thing there is. If you’re expecting that much from Shiroe, he’s an amazing person. —Even greater than I’d heard. I don’t know what we should do about our guild, either.”

“Light Indigo isn’t doing so great? I haven’t heard much about that guild; did you lose lots of people after the Catastrophe or something?”

“No, it’s not like that. And anyway, in terms of your explanation, Light Indigo isn’t a guild or a house. It’s more like a waiting room, or a workplace.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Is it an idol training school or something?” Naotsugu asked, confused.

However, Tetora said, “Thanks for the food!” and clapped her hands together over the square dish, then grinned and poked Naotsugu’s cheek.

“It’s pretty much an idol training school. We’re all idols who protect the places everyone’s hearts call home. I knew coming with you was the right decision! No wonder my charisma sensor went off. Even without the Light Indigo business, I’ll stick with you until the very end of this raid, absolutely!”

Naotsugu didn’t really understand Tetora’s proud smile, so all he could say was, “Yeah, please do.”

2

“Dwehchoo!”

“My, my. That wasn’t a very ladylike sneeze, was it.”

“My nose itched like crazy.”

At a table in a warm dining room, Henrietta chided Marielle.

Marielle looked around, wondering if cold air had blown in from somewhere, but the Crescent Moon League’s dining room was the very picture of peace.

They’d requested a dining room where everyone in the guild could eat together, and the room was spacious and high ceilinged. The Crescent Moon League was a genuine midsized guild now, with more than forty members, and it was hard to fit numbers like that inside. Even so, they’d managed to get two tables that seated sixteen people each, and if they brought all their chairs in, everyone fit.

At mealtimes, this room was filled with noise and bustle, but now, early in the evening, it held only Marielle, the guild master, and Henrietta, her right-hand woman. The atmosphere was tranquil.

Ever since the Catastrophe, life in Akiba had been eventful.

There had been many painful things, and many things that had made them so happy they’d wanted to dance. Through all sorts of events, around the time of the Libra Festival, it had seemed as though the town had slowly remembered what it was supposed to be. It wasn’t like the dazzling smiles that had been seen right after the establishment of the Round Table Council. However, the people who walked around town had begun to look as though they were savoring the happiness and abundance of being able to relax and live stable lives every day.

Winter here was colder than it had been in their old world, but in the town of Akiba, time was passing peacefully, predominantly.

It was the same for Marielle.

Over these six months, she’d been trying hard to act like a guild master, but lately she’d been able to take it easy. It had begun when Henrietta said, “If you frown like that all the time, you’ll turn into a prickly middle-aged woman, you know.” Marielle couldn’t forget how, in the instant she’d been lectured, her guild family had looked away from her and giggled a little. She hadn’t felt it herself, but she must have been too tense.

She’d have to give it some thought and do better. Marielle gave a soft sigh.

Henrietta, the person who’d delivered the lecture, also seemed to have relaxed a bit recently.

Asuka was helping her manage the accounts, apparently. Since she was involved with duties for the Round Table Council as well, she was gone quite frequently, but she did have enough time to slow down and spend the evenings like this.

The two old friends took sips of cocoa out of thick mugs, which they held closely, to warm their palms.

“……? ……?”

“Oh, Nanami? What is it?”

Henrietta spoke to the little girl who’d looked in through the door, then come trotting over. The girl made a slight detour around Henrietta, then hesitantly peeked up over the edge of the table, looking around.

The girl had joined the guild just recently, and she was still terribly shy.

Henrietta—one of the causes of that shyness—had lowered her eyes and was pretending to coolly drink her cocoa, but Marielle noticed that the corners of her lips were twitching.

The day Nanami had come to the guild, Henrietta had launched into a wild, joyous dance, tumbled the little girl around with the force of a large coin-laundry dryer, and dressed her up in so many outfits that counting had gotten tiresome after thirty. Nanami had finally burst into tears, the Assassin Hien had objected fiercely, and since then, Marielle’s friend had refrained from doting on her too much.

However, even if Henrietta had repented, the experience had probably been rather horrific for Nanami, a Person of the Earth. At times like this, she tended to keep her distance.

“Wanna sit on my lap?”

Marielle put an arm around Nanami’s waist and scooped her up onto her knees.

Now Nanami, who was still very young, was able to see over the entire table.

Since it had been built to seat sixteen, the table was both wide and long. Spread across it was Marielle’s carving knife, the woodworking tools she’d been using, and some fine-grained maple scrap wood; a rough income and expenditures estimate, which Henrietta had been calculating at her leisure; cocoa for two; and cloth sacks. For safety’s sake, Henrietta returned the carving knife to its bag. Marielle was grateful to Henrietta, who always covered for her smoothly, even when she was silent.

Nanami’s eyes were wide with curiosity, and she was fidgeting. Marielle put an arm around her, pulling her rump closer, and felt herself smile involuntarily. She couldn’t have said exactly what it was, or how, but all sorts of things had seemed very precious to her just then.

Illuminated by soft magic light, the dining room was warm and calm. Part of the kitchen was visible through a large aperture, and inside, two Chefs were busily making preparations for dinner. When they listened carefully, they could hear voices conversing, moving down the corridor, greetings from companions who’d returned from outdoors, and the cheerful responses that came back.

Nanami smelled like fresh laundry. Marielle probably did, too. To Mari, this seemed a bit like a family bond.

“Would you like some cocoa? Or were you looking for Hien?”

Henrietta held a mug out to Nanami, tilting her head. Nanami flinched, looked up at her face, looked at the cocoa, then looked at Henrietta again. The little girl turned back, as if asking what she should do. Marielle smiled at her: “Go on, take it.”

Nanami set her hands on the mug, carefully so as not to spill any, and took it. It was big for her, and it was all she could do to use both hands and drink cautiously.

“!”

Apparently the sweetness had been a shock.

Nanami froze, looking startled.

To the Adventurers, this girl was as naïve as could be; everything she saw fascinated her, and she seemed to want to learn so badly she could hardly stand it. This entertained the guild members, and they made a pet of her and had her try all sorts of things. However, Nanami herself seemed to like Hien—the first person she’d met—the best. When he wasn’t there, she turned timid and fidgety, and her eyes were always searching for her reliable “big brother.”

Nanami sniffed at the cocoa, seeing what it smelled like. Then, seeming to have decided she liked it, she held the cup as if it were a treasure and kept drinking.

I hope she relaxes like this, slowly, little by little, Marielle thought, taking care not to let Nanami slip off her lap.

Nanami, who’d been drinking eagerly, abruptly went still.

When she peeked in, sensing trouble, only a mouthful of the cocoa remained.

Nanami was probably thinking, I drank it all by myself! What should I do? It was Henrietta’s!! or something of the sort; she went awkward and began acting suspiciously, and Marielle smiled at her.

“You don’t have to worry. Umeko won’t get mad about somethin’ like that.”

“I will get angry about being called Umeko, however.”

At that bone-chilling comment, Marielle made an exaggerated show of fear. Nanami was adorable as she looked back and forth, timidly comparing their expressions, and the two of them burst out laughing. That exchange made Marielle certain that Henrietta felt the same warmth she did, and the idea made her far too happy.

We’re a good guild, aren’t we?

She was proud of that.

“Man, is it cold out there!”

Although what it had said hadn’t been anything like a homecoming greeting, at the sound of the cheerful voice, Nanami straightened like a clockwork doll and looked around.

“That sounds like Hien. I imagine he’s in the entrance hall.”

Failing to register Henrietta’s casual attempt at earning points, Nanami nodded with a grateful expression, then hopped down from Marielle’s lap. She hugged Marielle, who was smiling at her, then went off in the direction of the entrance hall on slightly unsteady feet.

“Honestly!”

“What’s the matter?”

“That Hien is so popular. I’m a bit jealous.”

“You say that, but it’s all ’cos you spooked her with that horror show of yours, Umeko.”

“Ma-riiii…”

The two of them giggled together.

Being able to tease her old friend like this made Marielle unbearably happy.

“—In that case, that sneeze a short while ago must have been Master Naotsugu.”

“Dwah?!”

“…However, that world was short-lived.”

Her friend, who’d been smiling in harmony with her just a moment ago, now wore a mean smirk and plunged into a cross-examination.

“Was it Master Naotsugu? Was Master Naotsugu talking about you?”

“How on earth would I know?!”

This might be a world of magic, but it wasn’t so magical that you could instantly sense things like that.

“I see. I’ll check with him via telechat, then.”

This clever maneuver, which seemed to blaspheme fantasy, left Marielle with her back against the wall.

Going to this friend of hers for advice on romance might just have been a mistake. Marielle thought she’d regretted it more than a hundred times by now. Henrietta really was a capable worker, and she fielded a vast amount of work every day, but she had interests to match, and the ones at the head of the list were dressing up little girls and tormenting Mari. She was a mother-in-law. It was scary.

“Eeeeep! Spare me!”

“Why?”

Don’t ask me “why,” I can’t do that! Marielle muttered the words to herself. She had no idea what expression to wear; she averted her eyes, but even so, in a spirit of resistance, she kneaded her fingertips together.

“’Cos…”

“Yes?”

“We only telechat once a day, at twenty-one hundred, after dinner.”

“……”

Henrietta accepted the words Marielle had let fall, and there was a silence, as though she was digesting them. Then she responded with a stupefied “Huh?”

“Huh?!”

“I-I’m not sayin’ it twice!” Marielle retorted.

Henrietta wore an unusual expression: Her mouth hung open so far it was nearly square.

“I mean, he’s on a raid, y’know? He’s in the middle of a real tough job! It’s life or death, only we don’t die! Still, listen, I know Naotsugu’s fightin’ with everythin’ he has, and Shiro’s probably thinkin’ like crazy, and I can’t bother them. So I promised I’d only telechat at night, when they’ve got their camp set up—”

Henrietta, who was pressing her fingertips to her temples and seemed to be suffering through a headache, sighed.

What a rude friend. Apparently Marielle’s consideration wasn’t getting through to her.

“That wasn’t what I was asking about. Or rather, I suppose it may have been… So you telechat every day?”

“Right.”

Marielle didn’t really understand, but she nodded.

“I tell him about what Akiba’s like, and what Akatsuki’s been up to. Come to think of it, I told him about Nanami yesterday. Remember I made her a new smock? I talked about that. And about how we went to buy rubber boots together, and how Hien and li’l Nanami danced in the entrance hall. I told him about that new tandoori chicken, too. We both kept sayin’ how we wanted to eat it together. Naotsugu’s a big guy, so I bet he could eat three of ’em, y’know? Maybe even four, since they’re spicy! Then we talked about how lassi was good, too, and how we really did want to go out to eat together, and we just went on for so long… Say, Henrietta, you thought the tandoori was yummy, too, right?”

“Um.”

Henrietta stood. She looked as though she might have heartburn.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to run a delivery over to the Production Guild Liaison Committee before dinner.”

“Oh.”

“If this goes on, I’ll be so full I won’t have room for dinner. Honestly, Mari, you’re so… What’s the word…?”

Henrietta’s shoulders slumped, and she left the dining room with an armful of files. Marielle waved, watching her friend go. Lately, this had been routine at the Crescent Moon League.

Even though Marielle wasn’t aware of it, a white victory star had appeared on the Sumo Wrestling score chart in Henrietta’s mind.

The outcome of this battle for the star had been a contest just as fierce as the raid.

3

Just as the scout team had reported, a dull, dark purple suit of armor knelt, perfectly still, in the center of an enormous, bowl-shaped coliseum. When they’d measured from a distance of more than a hundred meters using a Gunner’s Lock-On Sight, its height seemed to be about sixteen meters. It was probably a golem or a type of giant.

Raid bosses’ detection ranges were wide, but they were also unique. In this case, it was likely that the battle would begin when William and the others entered the coliseum.

The enemy was Ruseato of the Seventh Garden.

To William, this enemy had the same form as Ruseato of the Seventh Prison, whom he’d fought many times in the Nine Great Gaols of Halos. Its characteristics would probably be the same, even if its abilities and tactics were stronger. According to the scout team’s reconnaissance force, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden seemed to have White Knight and Black Knight modes as well. He remembered it being a difficult boss who switched between the two sets of abilities as it attacked.

William raised his hand to the level of his shoulder.

That alone was enough to focus the raid members’ eyes on him.

They’d had a briefing session beforehand. The scout party had charged and died many times over, and even as they did so, they’d brought back valuable information. Even Shiroe of Log Horizon had admitted that, with the tactics they’d built through combining this information, they had a 50 percent chance of victory. For a first battle, that wasn’t a bad figure at all.

He felt heat swelling at his back.

Grabbing that chance, William brought his arm straight down.

Obeying the order, the unit flooded into the room like a river that had burst forth. With the First party in the lead, they plunged down through the grayish-white spectator seats.

They slid down the ruined, crumbled walls, surging forward, forward.

In general terms, the range of a monster’s attacks was proportionate to its size.

Goblins were only about 140 centimeters tall; bare-handed, their attack range was just a couple dozen centimeters, and even if kicks and spears were included in the calculations, it was no more than a meter or so. However, if it was a troll two meters tall, you needed to figure that the range of the club it swung around was about three meters. From the size of the enormous raid boss in front of them, they had to assume that its attack range was fairly large.

At Shiroe’s suggestion, the Silver Sword group had spent the past few days training to gauge ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-meter standard points implicitly. Thanks to that, they wouldn’t misjudge distances with this giant enemy.

However, even that wouldn’t come until after they’d launched the first attack. First they had to get into the enemy’s attack range; then the vanguard would reach the front line, and the fragile spellcasters and long-range attackers would have to be posted in a safe area beyond the outer edge. They’d need to change their attack positions constantly, but their strategy used the difference between the enemy’s range and their own. Unless they made expert use of tactics that involved taking up positions in a blind spot, the rear guard wouldn’t be able to last through the raid boss’s attack. Each attack was simply that powerful.

Running at the head of the muddy torrent, Dinclon charged into the twenty-meter range as if he meant to split it open. As though life had suddenly been breathed into it, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden stood. Its visor looked like mechanical armor, and the crimson light that seeped through its gaps ran down like water as the monster raised its enormous halberd. He saw Dinclon, shield at the ready, grit his teeth and prepare for the impact. His efforts paid off, and the Silver Sword Guardian, reinforced by heavy armor, blocked the raid boss’s first attack.

The damage was slight, about 10 percent of his total HP.

Still, that didn’t mean the enemy’s attack power was low. Purification Barrier, which had been cast on Dinclon before the battle began, was a damage interception spell. Cast by a high-level Kannagi, the spell had negated about 4,500 points of damage that should have been taken by the target. In other words, even after that had been negated, he’d taken damage. If the barrier spell hadn’t been there, he would have lost more than 30 percent of his HP to that single attack.

It was fearsome offensive power.

However, even that had been factored in. The damage obstruction, which had been canceled, was recast immediately.

Dinclon, the Guardian at the head of the First party, was the leading edge of the unit. In terms of arrows, he was the hardest possible arrowhead. The steel Warrior, who’d had a series of recovery spells cast on him, reached the feet of Ruseato of the Seventh Garden and used the special aggro skills Anchor Howl and Taunting Shout in rapid succession.

This marked the beginning of the battle.

“Begin the assault!”

From the Third party, William sent the message to the entire group.

With support songs from Bards, varicolored magic and projectile attacks rained down on the raid boss. In a raid like this one, it was hard to tell, but a terrific number of weakening effects were layered over Ruseato now. This was another reason for incorporating all twelve classes into the full raid. Save for a few exceptions, the same weakening effect couldn’t be layered over itself, but a many-sided net cast by a variety of classes displayed its effect on powerful enemies.

The fusillade of attacks clouded their field of vision for a moment, and heavy explosions seemed to rock the earth.

Ruseato had swung its great steel weapon as if to gouge out ten meters around itself. The attack had killed two members and left several who had been engaged in close combat near death.

The attack was so brutal that even Dinclon lost half his HP.

However, the Silver Sword battle lines didn’t collapse.

The unique Kannagi resurrection spell, Soul-Calling Prayer, teleported the dead to the feet of the caster and revived them. In addition to this convenient spell, which simultaneously evacuated the members to a safe distance and resurrected them, a Summoner who’d summoned a Carbuncle chanted Phantasmal Heal. This HP recovery spell, an oddity among the Magic Attack classes, didn’t measure up to a recovery spell from the usual classes, but it did more than enough to lighten their burden.

Recovery classes besides the Kannagi prioritized recovering wounded members. While this was going on, Dinclon didn’t retreat a single step under Ruseato’s attacks.

The powerful attack that had mowed down the surrounding area a few moments ago had probably been one of the raid boss’s certain-kill attacks.

That attack had been branded on the eyes of the Silver Sword members. A shabby Summoner who stood next to William, holding an adorable, fluffy Carbuncle by the scruff of its neck, began to count in a steely, determined voice. As that voice rang out, everyone listened to it.

Without exception, raid bosses’ enormous attacks had conditions.

One major condition was—to use the vocabulary of the Adventurer-players—Recast Time. Powerful attacks couldn’t be unleashed back-to-back. Each skill had its own cool-down period. There was no telling whether that time would be ten seconds or thirty, but the cool-down time itself had to exist.

As they’d discussed beforehand, the Summoner was counting in order to measure it. Of course he kept up his magic attacks, and he didn’t neglect his response to the combat situation.

In the days when Elder Tales had been a game, they could just leave this sort of count to an external program, or—if handled in a low-tech way—to a stopwatch hung beside the monitor. Raid bosses’ every action had been analyzed by the millisecond from reference videos of recorded play, had been compared against the logs, and everything about it—attack damage, attribute, range, interval, motion, penetration rate, critical rate—had been laid bare.

Raiders had shared that information through cloud services, discussed it in chat rooms, and gone on the attack with the latest, most efficient techniques.

“Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one…”

A hoarse yet firm tenor voice overlapped with the sound of swords, the ring of clashing steel, and the noise of the thunder and flame attacks that raced through the air.

The members each focused their five senses, desperately buckling down in an attempt not to miss anything that voice said, and not to lose sight of the enemy before them.

In this world, where everything had been swallowed up by chaos, Silver Sword had continued to fight, and had rebuilt tactics as primitive and awkward as this one.

It might have been possible to call it the ruined state of a once-powerful guild.

That count was crude and undignified, yet it held a prayer that greedily hungered for victory.

When the count, delivered in an unamplified voice, reached twenty-six, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden raised its great steel halberd. The fearsome attack of a few moments before was on its way.

However, William’s companions showed no fear.

The Assassins and Swashbucklers leapt through space.

The Bards and Druids sprang back, putting distance between them.

The Clerics cast defense-boosting status buffs in rapid succession on the warriors who’d chosen to tough it out.

Handling the second attack like this was splendid.

After the roaring blast had passed through, the attack had not caused any deaths.

Some players had lost most of their HP, true, but the recovery unit’s spells were already healing the damage.

They’d skillfully dodged one of the enemy’s attacks.

The corners of William’s lips rose ferociously.

That wasn’t all: The raid boss, whose very armor looked like a blade, had to be hiding all sorts of twisted attack methods. After all, it hadn’t even changed its shape yet.

Still, this wasn’t bad. Even as he thought that things were going fairly well so far, William fired arrows.

Before he was aware of it, his throat had sent up a savage yell: “More damage! Get the lead out, speed up and chip away at him!”

He fired an astonishing number of arrows.

As if prepared to dash themselves to pieces, the offensive ranks struck with their swords or unleashed flame, pulling Ruseato into ranged spells colored with light and darkness.

William knew. Without exception, boss monsters that appeared in raid zones had vast HP. The amount was overwhelming. Dinclon, a level-94 Guardian in an ultra-top-class raid guild like Silver Sword, had a bit under eighteen thousand HP, and raid boss monsters had HP that ranged from one thousand to ten thousand times that much.

Say Ruseato of the Seventh Garden’s HP had been shown on a meter. If it had been, they could have seen this, but although the offensive ranks were dealing out attacks without a pause, the reduction was truly miniscule. It was such a gradual fall that, on a meter, it probably wouldn’t have been visible to the naked eye. Still, keeping it up was the only way to defeat a boss.

“Careful, watch its feet!”

A sharp voice spoke. It belonged to Federico the Swashbuckler.

Abruptly, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden began to move sluggishly, and a black substance that wasn’t quite a mist or a liquid flooded from under its feet. The substance moved, undulating, spreading rapidly, immersing the floor of the arena.

“Damage detected, attribute: Poison! Action—No, it’s a move obstruction! Attack speed and force both down!”

Dinclon’s report reached his ears. When he looked, something like a black, viscous liquid was wrapping around Dinclon’s plate boots and tugging at them, emitting faint lightning.

For a moment, William hesitated.

There was damage, but it was very slight.

The flickering lightning was an attack that had been repelled by damage interception. The fact that lights as small as that were appearing one after another, and that the barriers hadn’t been breached, was proof that the damage was trivial. He could tell that it wasn’t inflicting serious damage even on the close-range attack members, whose defense was lower than Dinclon’s.

A special attack that only inflicted slight damage, and which hindered movement—the instant William sensed danger, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden began to walk, its footsteps heavy.

Dinclon used multiple Anchor Howls, trying to stop it from moving, but they were negated. With a bursting effect unlike the usual one, they rolled off the surface of Ruseato’s armor.

A low-damage range binding attack.

Realizing the intent behind it, William screamed:

“Range interception! Range recovery!”

As if his yell had thrown a switch, the unit moved.

A barrier that looked like a translucent dome; faintly shining defense spells; the thin orange layer that indicated Reactive Heal… And yet a single attack blew them all away. Ruseato’s metal body, which had begun to lay waste, was more a weapon than a monster. An enormous construction machine was bounding around with the agility of a cat. It brandished its halberd as if licking the ground with it, attempting to cut down Silver Sword like it was no more than reeds, or sheaves of straw.

Still. Even so.

More than half their members were left.

And, even as it quailed from the pain, a voice that refused to retreat was continuing to count.

“First healer, maintain the front line! Second party, fall back, resurrect and restore, Third and Fourth reduce the damage seventy percent; prioritize restoration!”

Deep in his throat, as if he couldn’t quite hold it back, William laughed.

When he licked upward, the stuff that had dripped down the side of his nose tasted like blood.

It was like concentrated iron. It was the taste of the raid William wanted.

The enemy was strong, just as they’d anticipated, beyond what they’d predicted.

And William’s group was still standing.

The fight had only just begun.

4

Demiquas, who’d retreated ten meters in one move with Phantom Step, squeezed a blazing hot sigh from his lungs as he recovered his own HP with Resilience.

The battle had fallen into an infuriating deadlock.

Gritting his molars as if meaning to shatter them, he focused intently on the enemy.

They had to inflict damage on Ruseato of the Seventh Garden as they parried its brutality, all while its armor was deep purple. That was just as their advance intel had said, and it had gone fairly well. Demiquas and the other close-range attackers had landed blow after blow on Ruseato’s obstinate armor, whaling on it and putting cracks in it.

However, when those cracks had sketched a pattern like tree branches all over Ruseato’s body, it had shed the armor as if it was peeling a boiled egg.

What had emerged was a Ruseato as white as a hospital ceiling.

The armor that had been stripped from that bleached figure melted into the shadows at its feet, then stretched up, creating shadow warriors. The deformed warriors had thin, featureless silhouettes and held giant war scythes at the ready. Since they were entirely black, they looked like two-dimensional shadow-pictures.

The white Ruseato unleashed beams of light, and Demiquas evaded them.

Compared to what had come before it, it was a limp, weak attack.

And now, thanks to his self-recovery, he was ready to charge again.

Having spotted a good opportunity, Silver Sword launched repeated wave attacks, but the shadow warriors blocked them. Compared to Ruseato, both their range and their attack power were nothing. However, there were too many of them to ignore. Even now, there were already more than ten.

The unit dodged Ruseato’s careless attacks, gradually taking down the shadow warriors as they did so.

Dinclon, the main tank, really couldn’t handle this many enemies on his own. Five warriors, including that foul Naotsugu, had to draw them off.

The shadow warriors surged in, like insects drawn by the scent of nectar.

Demiquas took aim at the pack with Wyvern Kick.

This flying, gliding kick had a field of fire of about fifteen meters forward, and it could be used both to move and to attack. It was Demiquas’s greatest forte, his absolut Geheimnis. If he unleashed this attack, Demiquas would land right where the enemy was thickest in a single bound. As a general rule, this was a bad move. Ruseato was a high-level raid boss, and it was hard to avoid his attacks, so if he shook off his healer and other reinforcements, Demiquas would be in a dangerous position. However, the black shadows in front of him were raid enemies, not bosses. To Demiquas, a martial artist, enemies that waved around big weapons like that were easy to take on.

With a piercing fighting yell, Demiquas became a deep green meteor.

He crossed the coliseum almost as if he were coasting through the air on a snowboard, crashed into the chest of a shadow warrior, and slammed a Tiger Echo Fist into its body, which left it looking like it had been pierced by a cannonball.

Leaving an echo vibrating in his ears, the raid mob brought its scythe down as a parting gift. Demiquas repelled the attack by a bare minimum with Back Hand, then, squaring off slightly by raising his right knee until it almost touched his chest, he lashed out with Shadowless Kick.

The enemy flew apart pitifully, like a dropped watermelon.

However, since one shadow warrior had been defeated, Ruseato absorbed the darkness that had been generated, and it seemed to have recovered some HP.

In other words, this was why they were taking one step back for each step forward.

White Ruseato recovered its own health.

The shadow warriors were catalysts for the process, and they also bought it time. Apparently, Ruseato’s white reincarnation recovered strength over a set period of time so that it could attack again. Then its armor would be dyed black once more, and it would unleash powerful attacks, moving tirelessly, as though it had just begun to fight.

Outlasting that hurricane certainly wasn’t impossible, but that was assuming Ruseato was their only opponent. If the shadow warriors stayed, the vanguard, who’d lost the greater part of its HP to Black Ruseato, would fall to those great scythes.

Healers supported the health of the raid unit. However, both the Kannagis’ barriers and the Clerics’ Reactive Heals had tolerance limits.

It was nearly all they could do to fight Ruseato of the Seventh Garden by itself.

They couldn’t afford to leave the mobs alive. That said, when they defeated them, they recovered Ruseato. For a short while, there had been twenty shadow warriors, and thanks to that, the unit had been pushed to the brink of collapse.

Infuriatingly, the one to find a way out of that situation had been Shiroe.

Black Ruseato generates a number of shadow warriors equal to the number of people who had inflicted damage on it.

At that discovery, Silver Sword had rallied.

They left the attacking to powerful attackers, while the healers and weaker members refrained. When they did, when Ruseato transformed into its white incarnation, they were able to decrease the number of shadow warriors it generated to ten or so.

Shiroe the coward, who did nothing but give orders from the rear, was someone Demiquas meant to avenge himself on, someone he’d never forgive. He’d shattered Demiquas’s pride, had even destroyed the Briganteers organization he’d worked so hard to build. If only those three hadn’t come to Susukino, Demiquas and the others could have slowly acclimated themselves to this world. If only that Shiroe hadn’t come…

He could forgive the cat-headed swordsman. The swashbuckler had blocked Demiquas’s path and swung his swords. However, from beginning to end, the coward among them hadn’t even looked at Demiquas.

The man didn’t even seem to remember his name.

Demiquas could clearly remember Shiroe’s expression when he’d reappeared in Susukino. When the man had seen Demiquas, he hadn’t looked troubled. That was fine. Shiroe was probably strong; Demiquas had seen that on this raid. In that case, at the very least, he could have sneered or looked contemptuous.

However, the only emotion he’d seen in the damned Enchanter’s expression had been the thought, What a pain.

Demiquas slammed the rage he couldn’t abide into a shadow warrior.

Lightning Straight came back at him, as if to run him through.

He evaded that attack with Phantom Step, kicked it upward with Aerial Rave, then landed a Wyvern Kick in its wide-open side. As it blew away, he slammed another Wyvern Kick into its back.

Shiroe saw Demiquas as no more of an opponent than that.

As if he could go without killing Shiroe! The thought was like flame, and it burned him to the core. Someday, he swore, he’d bring such pain down on Shiroe’s head that he’d regret he’d ever been born into this world.

However, now wasn’t the time.

Frustrating as it was, he didn’t have the ability right now. At this point, even he had to admit it. This Shiroe guy was tough. It was true for his equipment, too, but even his techniques outstripped Demiquas’s.

When Demiquas had joined this raid, at first, he’d been planning on attacking Shiroe from behind. He’d laid monsters out as practice. He’d thought that had raised his spirits: His body had been a lot lighter than usual. Demiquas’s fists had vanquished the monsters, just as they were tearing apart shadow warriors now.

He’d thought he’d gotten used to the atmosphere of the raid, but then he’d noticed a small sword icon spinning around his wrist. The unfamiliar icon was Shiroe’s Keen Edge… That was all it was: Demiquas had only been in high spirits from that guy’s reinforcement spell. When he looked for proof, he found it in spades. Haste, which had linked up attacks more quickly than usual; True Guide, which had let him break through the defense of attacks at higher levels than normal.

Just like now.

A shadow warrior that had approached to cut Demiquas down raised its great scythe.

There was still half a second of bind time left for Wyvern Kick. Demiquas should have taken the attack by a hair, but it didn’t happen.

Shiroe’s support was so subtle that, if this had been the very beginning of the zone capture, he wouldn’t have noticed it. What had he called it, Mind Shock? It was a spell that used the shock wave from an impact to make a monster’s consciousness go dim. The monsters he normally went up against would have been one thing, but it was only able to stun the raid monsters that appeared in this zone for a second at most. However, that one second was enough for Demiquas: He got out of the enemy’s attack range with Monkey Step, turned back, and unleashed a big spin kick, Dragon Tail Swing, as though he were sweeping over the surface of water.

Demiquas’s full-power charges and devastation all fell within the parameters of Shiroe’s estimates.

That escape and the subsequent spin kick had looked like Demiquas’s fierce combat, but Shiroe had merely let him perform them.

Of course, the guy didn’t have Demiquas’s attack power or martial arts.

All he’d done was cause a little distraction and use a measly reinforcement spell. There was no way he’d be able to take down a powerful monster with makeshift trickery like that.

However, what mattered was the fact that Shiroe had guessed what Demiquas was about to do, and had been able to help him without his catching on. Shiroe was predicting Demiquas’s actions perfectly. Demiquas had expanded his skills enough on this raid to know what that meant.

Someday, I’ll slaughter him.

When I do, I’ll do it in front of everybody.

I’ll smash that pasty face and make him drown in tears of remorse.

I’ll get a fantasy-class on this raid—

Boost my level, polish my techniques—

Demiquas bounded around, destroying one enemy after another.

His class, Monk, was a Warrior class that had both attack power and the ability to keep fighting. Although he didn’t have as much offensive power as the Weapon Attack classes, his HP and ability to handle abnormal statuses were incomparably high. That meant he could charge into the midst of the enemy and survive, and it also meant he could stand his ground, even in the raid boss’s attack range, and keep right on attacking. Demiquas kept on shoving, kicking, mowing down, and attacking to the very limits of his techniques, moving as his blazing body dictated.

Yet the battle progressed with painful slowness.

When they were temporarily cornered, William’s feverish commands managed to get them on their feet again. The frontline defenders and healers, keeping the enemy weakened: If this vertical line was functioning properly, they wouldn’t be wiped out easily. Then they simply had to eliminate the shadow warriors and chip away at Ruseato’s HP, suiting their actions to the combat situation.

It took time, of course. During that long time, countless decisions were made, and they all had to be dealt with calmly, deliberately, without error, and promptly. This series of actions was all there was to raids.

Demiquas was heat.

Demiquas was flame.

He evaded the attacks of the enemy in front of him, pierced them, destroyed them.

He leapt at Black Ruseato, brandishing fists of thunder as if to shatter its armor.

His mind gradually emptied until he was simply immersed in the fight, propelled by erupting heat. No more thoughts of when he had been in rotten Susukino; no more thoughts of the day he’d fought Nyanta. Demiquas thought of nothing and became one with the battle.

As a result, he didn’t realized that the situation had changed until he heard a scream go up behind him.

It would have been harsh to blame Demiquas. Even for experienced raid members, it had been far too sudden. The enormous iron grates set in the eastern and western sides of the coliseum had opened completely. From the dark gaping holes, Tartaulga of the Fourth Garden, a frost giant with white eyes and frozen whiskers, and Ibra Habra of the Third Garden, a fiery serpent like a living, writhing corona, appeared.

No sooner had the monsters taken half a step into the coliseum than they unleashed storms of ice and flame from either side. Their target was the Fourth party, which had been concentrating all its attacks on Ruseato. The party was annihilated in an instant, and the side effects alone did massive damage to the rest of the unit.

At the preposterous sight, Demiquas felt an disturbing fluid rush into his mouth from his innards.

This was too much.

Demiquas and the others were fighting Ruseato of the Seventh Garden right now.

Wait your turns, he thought.

They’d fought Ruseato and kept exterminating his kin, the shadow warriors. When the balance had tipped ever so slightly and the enemy’s numbers increased just a little, Demiquas’s group had been in danger of being wiped out.

Just when things had started to go smoothly. Even though that path had been no more than a faint possibility, like stepping onto thin ice.

Now, at this point, here came two bosses whose ranks equaled Ruseato’s.

Even Demiquas could tell, very clearly.

They couldn’t win.

This wasn’t about tactics or strategy.

The difference in fighting power was so overwhelming it destroyed trivial little tricks like those. In order to fight these three at the same time, they would have needed a legion raid with ninety-six people, not a full raid of twenty-four.

Deep in his ears, he heard a flat voice he’d heard somewhere before.

This world isn’t a game anymore. That’s finished. Your time is over.

The realization came to him, then: Just the way Adventurers put together strategies, the monsters left their posts to concentrate their power.

If Demiquas had been a guardian of the dungeon, this would have been an obvious tactic, the first one he came up with.

Combine their strength and exterminate the Adventurers.

That natural thing had happened, and that was all.

The air of the coliseum, which had frozen with that terribly cruel despair, was shredded by screams it was hard to believe had come from human throats.

A face the size of an extralarge advertisement on the wall of a movie theater closed in on them: The frozen giant had bent over and brought its fist down on the members. There was a sticky, splattering noise, and then the Summoner was just a stain in the coliseum.

The counting voice that had put Demiquas at ease was gone.

Demiquas roared, charging like a gale at Shiroe—who was just standing there, stunned, eyes wide—and shoved him hard. Shiroe rolled three times, four, before Naotsugu caught him. It put him outside the range of the Frost Giant’s twisted club.

“Take that, ya damn coward,” Demiquas laughed at him.

In exchange, his left leg had been crushed to a pulp, but he’d gotten to see Shiroe look like an idiot, so he was still ahead.

Kill those cheating raid bosses! Demiquas spat on the ground.

However, neither Demiquas nor Shiroe managed to escape the brutality of Ibra Habra of the Third Garden, the flaming serpent whose writhing body shed a rain of fire. It wasn’t just the two of them. Naotsugu, Tetora, and William. The veterans of Silver Shield, who were stronger than Demiquas, and who’d crushed him like a bug no matter how many times he came at them.

All their moisture was gone in an instant, and in the midst of flames that made their bodies twist in agony, the twenty-four members of the conquest unit were annihilated, just like that.

5

Having just passed through a hut where a foul smell drifted, the line of Krusty’s shapely nose warped slightly. The members of his guild called him thick-skinned, but even for him, the stench of the goblin dwelling had taken its toll.

Takayama had accompanied him, and it had been so bad her eyes had begun to smart partway through.

Compared to the hut’s interior, with its soiled straw and accumulated filth, it was far better outdoors, even under a freezing winter sky. In any case, Adventurer bodies were sturdy when it came to environmental differences like cold and heat.

This seemed to be true for Krusty as well.

He shrugged his shoulders once, then left the goblin dwelling behind him, as if he had no further use for it.

The dwelling was primitive—just a shallow pit dug in the earth, with a post set in the center and lots of tree branches and grasses piled up around it to act as a roof. There were several like it clustered in the surrounding area.

This was one of the goblin villages in the Silverluck Mountains. This part of the wilderness held countless villages like this one, each with about fifty dwellings. Together, each encampment had probably been home to roughly three hundred goblins.

By now, most of them were deserted.

The Akiba Expedition Army Krusty led had subjugated about 30 percent of them.

They assumed the remaining 70 percent had gathered at Seventh Fall, where the Goblin King reigned.

It had already been a month since the expedition began.

During the interval, Misa Takayama and the rest of the expedition army had explored the surrounding area, confirming the locations of goblin villages and sometimes attacking them. The army’s advance had been slow and careful.

From the beginning, the idea that the conquest of Seventh Fall and the defeat of the Goblin King wouldn’t be difficult had been common knowledge for the Round Table Council. During the blank period of the Catastrophe, the goblins of Eastal had bred prolifically, and had reached a scale not often seen in history. To the People of the Earth, this was a disaster straight out of their nightmares.

However, to the Adventurers of Akiba—or at least to the combat guild members who’d reached level 90—they weren’t a big threat. Although this was a raid to storm Seventh Fall, according to Krusty, if they went in with a select group of several dozen members, it should be possible to put down the Goblin King inside of two days. Takayama agreed with this prediction.

In the first place, the defeat of the Goblin King wasn’t the goal of this operation.

The goal was to secure the safety of the People of the Earth who lived in northeastern Yamato. That meant the problem was the several tens of thousands of goblins themselves. Even if they successfully subjugated the Goblin King and the now-leaderless goblins then overran the Silverluck Mountains, they would have to declare the operation a failure.

With that in mind, the headquarters with which Krusty and Takayama were affiliated was moving with intentional slowness and combing the mountains. At present, there were several dozen Adventurer units deployed in the Silverluck Mountains, scouting and sporadically engaging in combat.

As a result of this maneuver, which was a bit like chasing fish into a net, most of the goblin villagers seemed to have gathered at Seventh Fall. They thought they were mustering forces to begin their opposition to the Adventurers, but to Takayama and the others, it was merely a development that matched their strategy.

Takayama followed Krusty, making for the stream.

Members of D.D.D. were investigating the interior of the village and the area around it. That said, under the circumstances, it wasn’t likely that any Goblins had remained behind. They were only confirming the situation, and no one was all that tense.

Krusty and Takayama traveled along a small path, cutting off conspicuous branches as they went.

The well-trodden path was probably an animal track the residents of the village had used when they went to collect water, but Goblins were less than 140 centimeters in height. These two individuals were tall, and as they made their way along the path, the thick branches at face level snagged them and made it hard to walk.

When they emerged on the dry shore at the river’s edge, the wind made them narrow their eyes. It carried a chill that swept away the gloomy air, and it felt pleasant to Takayama, but beside her, her guild leader expression wasn’t good.

She’d noticed this tendency of Krusty’s around the time the Libra Festival had ended, and it seemed as though the anguish was growing more severe. Riezé had been so worried she’d wrung her handkerchief, but up until now, Takayama had left it entirely alone. This was because Krusty was a grown man, and she’d thought it would annoy him to have someone of the opposite sex worrying about him.

Though I suppose being an adult doesn’t have much to do with it. Boys are always delicate, at any age.

Takayama’s workplace experience made her think this.

Besides, she’d known Krusty for a long time. She knew more or less what that worry was about. That was why she’d thought she’d take this chance, when they’d left the headquarters and gone scouting, to talk with him about it, just a little.

“Milord?”

“Hm? What is it, Ms. Takayama?”

After a time lag so slight it was barely noticeable, Krusty turned a pensive face toward Takayama.

“You don’t seem to be feeling well lately. Is something troubling you?”

“Hmm.”

Krusty brooded, covering his mouth with his fingertips. He was wearing thin leather gloves today, instead of his usual Adamantite Steel gauntlets. His midweight armor suited his sturdy frame well. He was a good-looking guild master. The series of people who were fooled by this was never-ending, but it was certainly useful as far as administration was concerned. Harboring this impression, she asked straight-out about what she’d felt:

“Are you bored, sir?”

Looking down at Takayama out of the corner of his eye, Krusty thought for a little while. Then, as though ducking the question, he put on a dignified expression, smiled wryly, and raised both hands as if he’d given up.

“…That’s a problem. Yes, I’m bored.”

“Put up with it, if you would.”

“I’ve put up with a lot of it, and here I am today.”

Takayama sighed heavily.

She’d thought this was probably the case, and she’d been right.

Krusty looked intellectual, and it was true that his actions were logical and precise. He had the brains and the charisma to bring people together. He’d launched and managed D.D.D., the largest guild on the Yamato server—truly an achievement to be proud of. D.D.D., which had absorbed 1,700 members, was larger than a midsized corporation in the real world.

However, that public image wasn’t all there was to Krusty.

This alabaster young man, who had been placed in charge of running even the Round Table Council, was terribly mischievous and had a fickle personality.

One fact that Takayama and a few of the other veteran members knew was that Krusty had created the enormous organization known as D.D.D. because he’d wanted to see what would happen. In the first place, D.D.D. wasn’t a guild. It was part of a personnel exchange system Krusty had thought up, and the guild was just one of its structural elements.

Apparently, one day, Krusty had had a certain thought:

This Elder Tales game is terribly interesting. However, in order to get absolutely everything interesting out of it, you need lots of acquaintances and friends who’ll have fun adventuring with you. The administrators are aware of that, and they actually talk about it. There are all sorts of systems for finding companions built into the game… But if the users created a personnel exchange system that surpassed all that, and if they used that system to conquer end content in the form of raids… Wouldn’t that be rather interesting?

That was why D.D.D. had been formed.

In other words, it hadn’t needed to be structured like a guild. The guild system had just happened to exist in Elder Tales, and it had been convenient, so they’d used it. Back when Elder Tales had been a game, the focus of D.D.D.’s activities had been audio chat and their headquarters’ website, and both these systems had been proposed by Krusty. The periodic directors’ meetings and the personnel distribution system, which focused on raid unit division, had been his ideas as well.

He seemed to have been interested in constructing an autonomous organization in which the divisions produced results by acting independently, rather than being commanded by him personally. For that very reason, even though D.D.D. had grown so powerful, it had managed to remain a well-ventilated organization.

This had continued even after the Catastrophe. Krusty had seen the establishment of the Round Table Council as a rare, potentially beneficial opportunity, and had sought to expand his organization further and make it more autonomous. As a result, Krusty’s curious drive to “see” had been satisfied, but the number of ways were dwindling in which he was required to contribute to the administration.

In short, he’d gotten bored.

Takayama understood her friend’s feelings quite well, and she also thought they were troublesome. Although Krusty was bursting with talent, he was the type of man who had so much of it he was hard to associate with. His talent was excess power, and, for better or for worse, it sowed unforeseen trouble and confusion around the area.

When Krusty was bored, nothing good ever came of it.

He certainly wasn’t an outlaw, and since he was a rational human being, the final results were often beneficial to those around him. However, the commotion and work that occurred in the process were a pain in the neck for Takayama and the others. It had seemed to her that the boredom had been somewhat alleviated after he’d discovered Raynesia, but she might have been overestimating the girl.

It’s unreasonable to push this onto the princess, isn’t it…?

When she thought it over carefully, she was filled with remorse.

She had to say a few words, at least. When, thinking this, she caught up to Krusty—who had gone on ahead, strolling down the stream—he was leaning over, inspecting the rocks that were strewn around.

“What is it?”

“Hmm…”

Krusty readjusted his glasses, which had slipped a bit when he bent down, and held the object he’d picked up in front of her eyes. It seemed to be a spearhead.

The mountain stream drew a great arc in that area, and at the inner edge of a deep pool, there was a dry riverbed littered with rocks that were smaller than a child’s fist. Patches of lingering snow remained here and there, but in summer, it would have been the sort of cool mountain scenery that invited barbecues.

Krusty kicked several rocks, rolling them away with his toes. He seemed to have found traces of something.

“It looks like this was a training ground.”

“A training ground? That’s why it’s been leveled a bit, then,” Takayama responded, accepting the idea.

Now that she was paying attention, she saw that the larger rocks seemed to have been moved all the way over to the thicket of trees. When she looked closely, there were scattered fragments of wood and pieces of battle gear in the gaps between the rocks. This place had probably been used for quite a long time.

The idea of Goblins training themselves had never occurred to her before, but if they were plotting war, it was only to be expected. That said, she couldn’t imagine that they’d managed to amplify their military power that way—compared to Adventurers, Goblins’ levels were very low.

Having thought that far, Takayama registered Krusty’s gaze, wondered at the seriousness in it… And then, in the next instant, she understood:

Goblins. Conducting combat training.

That was a possibility that hadn’t existed before. Just as Takayama and the others were attempting to conquer the Seventh Fall raid using a method that was completely different from conventional ones, the Goblins would be able to prepare a return strike using methods that were completely different from anything they’d used before now. This world was not Elder Tales. Takayama wondered how often she would have to realize that before it finally sank in. She was filled with the urge to rail at her own incompetence.

“Milord, let’s return immediately, report this to the rest of the army and send word.”

“We’ll have to issue orders to search the training ground and investigate its influence.”

“Yes, sir.”

After this terse exchange, the pair went back the way they’d come, over the dry riverbed, heading for the village. First, they needed to return to the settlement and meet up with Richou and Kugel from the scouting team. Then they would probably have to travel along the ridge and return to the headquarters.

Takayama was flustered, and it took her longer than it should have to notice that her weapon, a great, folding, military scythe, was vibrating slightly. In the blink of an eye, it emitted a strange, metallic sound and cast a hot red light over the area.

This weapon had been acting strange lately.

It wasn’t that its performance had deteriorated. On the contrary: It seemed as though its offensive abilities had increased, so she hadn’t sent it out for repairs, but even on this battlefield, it had sometimes begun to vibrate and radiate enough heat to make her writhe.

As a result, with a dubious expression on her face, Takayama drew her weapon from her back, intending to check its condition carefully. It should have been a casual activity, one that required hardly any thought at all.

However, an impact as if a large dump truck had crashed into it ran through Takayama’s arm. The shock had been so great she knew the bones of her arm had shattered instantly, and her eyes went wide. Krusty snatched the weapon from her, and then she saw a dark red space envelop him, cutting a sphere out of the world.

Her own weapon flashed red, sending a magnetic field out from the center of the warp, drawing everything into it.

It seemed to be enfolding the guild master of D.D.D. into itself.

Krusty had used his other hand to shove Takayama away, but she didn’t recall asking him to do any such thing. Desperately, she reached out for him, thrusting her hand into the warping space.

However, there was a sharp, severing sound, and then the silence of the night left Takayama behind.

Her right arm had disappeared, along with her old friend Krusty and her great scythe, which bore the name “Calamity Hurts.”