by Mamare Touno
At Nazuna’s words, Riezé and Henrietta sighed.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t deal with Nazuna, but they would have preferred her to go through the proper procedures, yet Nazuna didn’t seem to care one bit. Depending on how you looked at them, her licentious, traditional Japanese clothes also seemed untidy. White skin wrapped in a chain mail undershirt bulged from the open neck of her clothes, and as she sprawled on the sofa, she vividly resembled not a fox but a big cat.
Her current appearance didn’t match her stern, tense atmosphere in battle. However, to Akatsuki, she looked natural. This version of her might be the real one.
But maybe there’s no such thing as a “real version”…
Akatsuki thought that the Shiroe who patted her head was her real liege.
However, he was her liege when he was at his wits’ end over documents as well, and the one who arranged for reinforcements on the battlefield was her real liege, too.
It made a slight pain race through her chest, but the lieges who praised Minori and smiled at Marielle were also real.
Just as the Raynesia next to her didn’t look elegant and fragile as usual—or limp and tired. Instead, she wore an intent expression rife with determination.
Essentially, it was likely that none of it was a lie.
In the midst of a world that had grown just a bit wider and more vivid, Akatsuki realized this for the first time.
There were lots of “reals.”
“In short, is this what it was?”
In front of Akatsuki and Raynesia, Henrietta folded her arms and spoke to them softly.
“You thought you could do it all on your own and tried to look impressive. You knew you really should have discussed it with us, didn’t you? Akatsuki and Raynesia, haven’t you gotten a bit conceited? Aren’t you patronizing the people around you?”
Henrietta’s eyes held none of their usual mischief.
She wore a truly serious expression.
Akatsuki had no way to respond. She was right.
This incident wasn’t the worst it could have been. She could excuse herself by saying the blood had rushed to her head and she’d dashed out.
But she’d hidden in Shiroe’s shadow all this time, and there really was no way to excuse that.
In the end, she hadn’t tried to relate to other people: She’d considered it too much work and had cut them off, thinking she didn’t need them. Sage Nyanta and Naotsugu were one thing, but hadn’t she been stingy with her words with Minori, Touya, and the others, the younger members of her own guild?
Of course she’d supported their efforts. She’d guarded them silently, provided materials. She’d reconnoitered and chosen hunting grounds. However, she’d avoided speaking with them directly and traveling around with them. There hadn’t even been a good reason.
She’d used evasive words, saying that that wasn’t her role.
The realization that she’d dimly understood this tormented Akatsuki.
“How long do you intend to stay on your own? Don’t you think it’s spoiled of you to assume that, provided Master Shiroe is there, that’s enough?”
At Henrietta’s reprimanding voice, Akatsuki drooped.
She had no words. Everything was as she’d said.
Because she’d been entirely dependent on her liege, the moment that liege was gone, she’d stopped being able to do anything. She’d wanted to at least carry out her liege’s request, but she hadn’t even been able to do that. Even though it was a mission Shiroe had given to her alone…
“Did you visit this manor with the intention of acting as a guard?”
Feeling as though her thoughts had received a response, Akatsuki raised her eyes.
“Visiting Water Maple Manor and assisting its security system—that duty wasn’t given to you alone, Akatsuki. It was mine as well, and Riezé’s.”
This time, Akatsuki turned bright red with shame and pain.
Come to think of it, that was only natural. Raynesia was currently one of the most important women in Akiba, and Akatsuki wouldn’t have been assigned as her only guard. Raynesia’s tea parties were being held on Shiroe’s instructions. If she’d given it just a little thought, she would have known.
Even the thought that Shiroe was counting on her had been self-
important.
That was so sad and frustrating that it made tears well up.
Now wasn’t the time to cry, though. Akatsuki had definitely thought that she would protect Raynesia. However, she hadn’t wanted to protect only her life, as a bodyguard. That day, at that time, she’d wanted to protect the wish and the nobility of this girl, who bore a heavy responsibility as the representative of the People of the Earth.
“Akatsuki is, um…m-my—”
Raynesia broke in, speaking with what sounded like great difficulty.
However, Riezé stopped her.
“But I still want your help. I need it.”
Akatsuki desperately strung pleading words together.
“Yes, of course. I will help, and so will Riezé. Just as we promised a moment ago. However, to whom are you directing those words?”
That question was incredibly difficult for Akatsuki.
To whom? To Henrietta and Riezé? To Nazuna? To Mikakage and the others who weren’t here?
But who was that? Who should she rely on? Did she have any right to rely on anybody?
Still, there was definitely something there.
It was only that Akatsuki couldn’t find the right words. The gift was there.
Akatsuki had realized that in the dream she’d lost.
The thing she’d let fall in the faint light of dawn tormented her.
She was sure she’d been holding it tightly, along with Shiroe’s coat, but when she’d opened her eyes, her hand had been empty.
She hadn’t been able to bring it back from the dream.
There was an unbearable impatience in her chest.
The words she was sure she’d had wouldn’t come out.
They had to be there, properly, inside her heart, but she couldn’t communicate them to everyone.
Akatsuki thought, quite seriously, that if it made it possible to convey these feelings and wishes—the ones she thought were really, truly important—to everyone, she wouldn’t mind splitting her own chest open.
However, even if she’d split her chest open, they couldn’t have seen them.
At the thought of the worthlessness of her clumsy self, Akatsuki’s expression twisted, and she found herself on the verge of tears.
“Akatsuki is my friend.”
Having shaken off Riezé’s restraint, Raynesia declared this; her face was angry. Akatsuki gazed at her with an expression of blank amazement.
Inside her, something was born.
It was the words she hadn’t managed to hold on to, and the door she’d been pretending not to notice. The key to that door.
Hearing those words from the silver princess—words she’d never thought she’d say—warmed Akatsuki and gave her strength.
“Raynesia is doing her best, so… I want to help her. Everybody… With everybody. Because, um…we’re friends…”
She couldn’t put it into words well.
Feelings of embarrassment and helplessness and depression flooded her.
Even so, the strong determination that she had to push through was there as well.
As if to break through that irritation, Akatsuki took half a step forward.
It was an advance so small you really couldn’t call it a step.
Inside her mouth, the word friends seemed about to become hoarse with hesitation.
Inside Akatsuki, a slow understanding came together.
The Raynesia who wore a peaceful smile and seemed to be somewhere far away was real, but the Raynesia who was getting angry beside Akatsuki was real as well. The Henrietta who always toyed with Akatsuki was real, but so was the Henrietta who was taking Akatsuki to task. The Riezé who carefully inspected the dresses the
People of the Earth wore and the Riezé whose profile was that of a battle commander were both real.
When she looked at them properly, straight on, there were all sorts of people around Akatsuki who worried about her.
Even if Akatsuki looked uncool, it wouldn’t make her a fake. The Akatsuki she couldn’t forgive was still the real Akatsuki.
There were this many people who were worried about the Akatsuki who’d messed up and been killed.
She thought she understood why Riezé had mentioned middle schoolers. This really was middle school level. To think she’d have to learn something like this so late in the game… I’m lower than Minori, Akatsuki thought. Still, there was no gut-wrenching anxiety in the idea. It was probably true that she was lower than Minori. Besides, right now, there were people right here in front of her who were worried about her.
“Understood. In that case, I have a plan. A plan to put an end to this matter. I’ve contacted the Round Table Council and requested that they set a ban on going out at night. Three days from now, let’s bring down that murderer.”
At Riezé’s words, Akatsuki felt her heart relax. This time, she wouldn’t get it wrong.
6
Henrietta looked out over Akiba from the landing on the stairs.
Most of the town’s trees were deciduous, but there were some evergreens as well. The verdant accents within the gray town were gentle on the eyes. The Crescent Moon League’s home was in this guild center, so she was used to the scenery itself. However, at the moment, the altitude was different.
Her guild home was on the fifth floor of the center. This landing was on the tenth. She was headed for the top level of the same building—in other words, for the Round Table Council.
Henrietta kept walking. Viewed from a real-world perspective, climbing up and down a high-rise building with dead elevators time after time would be torture, but Adventurer bodies were high-performance. She could make the entire round trip without any trouble, even when carrying a wooden crate.
The walls of the stairwell were exposed concrete, but she reached the floor she wanted without the cold posing much of a problem.
Greeting a Person of the Earth girl whom she knew by sight, Henrietta entered the Staff Office. This was the core of the Round Table Council. The true “Round Table Council” indicated the council composed of the leaders of the eleven guilds that represented Akiba, but the plans they settled on were administered by this Staff Office.
Many loud voices had said that technically, in some way, the eleven guilds had a hand in setting Akiba’s policies, and it was probably a bad idea not to give them space in which to do that, so each of the eleven guilds had been given an office inside the Staff Office. That said, most of the eleven guilds were big enough that it wasn’t odd for them to be representing Akiba. Most of the guild masters had offices within their own headquarters and conducted a variety of business there. Although it was a midlevel guild, the Crescent Moon League was the same in that respect, and Marielle had a fancy office that reflected her tastes.
As a result, it was typical for guilds to put someone in their Staff Office offices to hold the fort and use them as places where they could be contacted. However, unfortunately, the Crescent Moon League didn’t have that many people. This meant that Henrietta stopped by regularly to organize the materials and correspondence that had piled up.
Many People of the Earth worked here, too.
This was partly with the goal of commissioning them for simple office work, and partly an operational test to see whether or not they could work together in the same space. It might have been all right to ask them to handle the role of contact, but they were letting the current situation stand. Even without being assigned jobs like that, the People of the Earth staff had all sorts of work, such as handling contacts and negotiations for Akiba’s several hundred guilds.
Having greeted them, Henrietta reached the office, then let out a groan. The work desk was overflowing with documents again. This happened all the time, and just looking at it depressed her. Of the eleven guilds, the Crescent Moon League had things comparatively easy, and even it was like this. She didn’t even want to think about the other guilds.
As she quickly sorted the files, Henrietta poured them into the crate she’d brought along. It looked like a huge amount, but most of it was reports and confirmation documents. When files weren’t important enough to take back to the guild house, she just signed them to show they’d been looked over and tossed them into the furnished “approved” box.
As she performed this simple work, she thought back over the past few days.
After that day, things had moved quickly.
Riezé’s supervision had been brilliant, but the other participants hadn’t fallen behind. Come to think of it, even though they were women, Nazuna, Kyouko, and Azukiko had participated in raids before the Catastrophe. Organized action was probably their forte.
Raynesia’s sitting room had become a temporary strategy headquarters, and a work desk Riezé had brought in from her guild had been installed there. That room was a scene of pandemonium to rival this one. Vast amounts of written memos overflowed in the processes of correction and the creation of clean copies. Henrietta and the other Adventurers had been raised in real-world Earth’s paperless society, and the sight made their heads ache.
The participants in the antimurderer strategy called the initiative “the arrest strategy,” “the recapture strategy,” and similar things.
Because they were using Raynesia’s manor as the strategy’s headquarters, the only participating members were the women who’d been invited to Raynesia’s tea parties. Which meant that, of course, Henrietta and Marielle were participating as well.
There were two central figures: Akatsuki and Raynesia. Unfortunately, not only were both of them unused to this sort of exercise, they didn’t even have any aptitude for it. Their eyes had gone wide at this string of “firsts,” and they were running around in confusion. As the ones who’d proposed the plan, the two of them were key, but as far as group action was concerned, they couldn’t be counted upon. As a result, Riezé and Henrietta were handling the actual administrative duties.
They’d had to.
Growing tired of organizing, Henrietta sat in a leather-covered armchair and looked up at the ceiling. As long as they weren’t summoned, no staff other than Crescent Moon League members would enter the office. It was probably inevitable that her posture looked more deflated than usual.
At the guild, she was surrounded by Marielle and the other cheerful, noisy members, and she couldn’t think properly. Henrietta gently pushed her glasses up, gave a quiet sigh, and took a single card out of her well-used mini commuter pass case.
It was a brusque card, with nothing but a few lines of letters written on it in plain handwriting.
The card was a bank account.
A card that showed an account at the only banking organization in Elder Tales, which was annexed to the guild center. It was an access card, something that hadn’t existed until now.
Before the Catastrophe, Elder Tales had been a game. Its “bank” hadn’t been like a bank on Earth: It was a nonprofit organization that was there to hold players’ cash and items. Actually, it hadn’t even been a nonprofit organization. It had been one of the game functions.
The moment game characters were born—in other words, the instant they began the game—they automatically had a bank account. Procedures to open one weren’t required. Guilds were the same way: The instant they were formed, they had one bank account. It was an automatic process, and in exchange for being no trouble at all to open, you couldn’t refuse to have one. That was the long and short of what it had been. Naturally, there hadn’t been any cards or bankbooks. After all, the game system identified individuals with absolute precision and managed everything without those things.
However, the card in front of her was different.
It was one of the three cards the three committees on the Round Table Cou
ncil would soon have the right to own. The account it showed belonged neither to an individual nor to a guild. It was a possibility no one in Yamato had considered.
“…Because of this, I’d really prefer to stay quiet just now.”
Henrietta spun the card around and around between her fingertips and closed her eyes.
She’d had a vague hunch that Shiroe wasn’t in Akiba. No one had explicitly told her so, but she’d guessed as much when Shiroe had asked her to take care of this card.
The card didn’t have any meaning; not yet. There was no money in the account, and it wasn’t linked to any action. At present, it was just a blank account that had been set up.
However, the future possibilities were dizzying.
Henrietta knew this. Just thinking of how it would be used gave her a faint chill.
The matter of the account hadn’t been made public because the card was currently still meaningless. In other words, at this stage, they were still verifying the possibilities, and it wasn’t yet time to announce them. At the very least, that was how it had been explained to Henrietta. Meanwhile, Henrietta had also guessed the circumstances that hadn’t been explained.
Shiroe had probably avoided announcing it because he’d taken information leakage into account.
Akatsuki’s behavior in hiding the fact that he wasn’t in Akiba also supported this idea.
Krusty, Shiroe, and Michitaka were thinking about problems that might come up in the future. The existence of enemies was probably one of those problems. To make matters worse, they thought they’d have to assume they might exist within the Round Table Council as well.
Henrietta felt that Plant Hwyaden was in the west, watching Akiba. Although a minority, the Odysseia she’d begun hearing about were eerie as well.
The idea that, if we only die enough, we’ll be able to return to Earth…
Their incomprehensible claim made Henrietta sigh. The worry was too heavy for the accountant of a midlevel guild. She couldn’t possibly shoulder it. However, in that case, who would carry it? It would be easy to say Shiroe could do it and leave it to him. However, would that be all right? From Henrietta’s perspective, Shiroe was younger than she was.