A Sunday in Akiba

by Mamare Touno

  Copyright

  Log Horizon, Volume 5

  Mamare Touno

  Illustration by Kazuhiro Hara

  Translation by Taylor Engel

  Cover art by Kazuhiro Hara

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  LOG HORIZON, VOLUME 5

  Sunday in Akiba

  ©Touno Mamare 2011

  First published in Japan in 2011 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2016 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On eBook Edition: February 2020

  Originally published in paperback in July 2016 by Yen On.

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  ISBN: 978-1-9753-0988-6

  E3-20200204-JV-NF-ORI

  1

  It is said that God created the world in a six-day miracle, and on the seventh day, he rested. In other words, even God takes days off. And since God does it, Shiroe thought, humans would do well to imitate Him.

  After labor, there should be a holiday.

  Without them, people break down.

  That was simple common sense.

  This might be another world, with Adventurers and the Catastrophe, but there was no need to destroy common sense. …And yet.

  Lately, Shiroe had been too busy to even raise such complaints.

  He wasn’t being picked on by his guild mates, of course. Nyanta, Naotsugu, Akatsuki, and even the new members—Minori, Touya, Isuzu, and Rundelhaus—were trying to help him. However, the Round Table Council sent down an even greater amount of work than that.

  Well, it might be cowardly to put it that way.

  Those jobs weren’t being forced on him as the result of malicious power harassment.

  …Probably.

  If anything, Shiroe himself might have been the cause.

  Shiroe was considered, both by the Round Table Council and by his own guild, to be a quick-witted strategic counselor type, and even he thought it probably wasn’t an inappropriate label. However—and this was something Shiroe was deeply conscious of—it wasn’t that he’d been blessed with extraordinary talent or the brain of a genius. On the contrary: According to Shiroe’s analysis, his abilities were perfectly mediocre.

  In Shiroe’s own estimation, he was a typical advance prep type. He felt that his ability was to gather sufficient information ahead of time, examine and study it, include in his calculations how well it could be used off the cuff at the actual site, and then draw up scenarios.

  This type wasn’t unusual. Put roughly, everyone who read the strategy guide before playing a game could be classed as this type of person. Really, it was a kind of cowardice. What set Shiroe apart was that reading the existing strategy guides wasn’t enough for him, and he would then begin to write his own strategy guide. It was probably curiosity—strong enough to force the cowardice aside—that made him do it.

  He had no confidence in his skills, so he prepared very carefully. As a result, the people around him came to rely on this, and before long, he would inevitably be immersed even further in his preparations. He was the type who, although not particularly obliging, found himself handed the role of organizer before he knew what was happening.

  Being cowardly was generally considered a weak point, but in terms of Shiroe’s role, it certainly couldn’t be called a total weakness. When acting as a strategy counselor, caution bordering on paranoia was an advantage, not a flaw.

  However, that was the sort of thing you could say only if you were in a position to direct plenty of manpower. Shiroe was on his own, and the reality was that he was being nearly crushed by work.

  This other world held far too many things for Shiroe to research.

  Where the future was concerned, the more information they had the better, and the information he wanted to collect covered a very wide range. Elder Tales had existed as a game for twenty years, and there was a vast amount of strategy information even among others of its genre. Now that it had transformed into another world, that amount had only ballooned to several dozen times the original size. Not only that, but the world wasn’t static; it interacted with itself, and its aspect changed from moment to moment.

  Of course, Shiroe had set a certain order of priority and was trying to make estimates as he investigated necessary information. He didn’t personally have enough acquaintances or economic support to achieve his goals, but he was able to connect with the public flow of information from the Round Table Council and he had a budget, if a set one. Compared to how it had been just after the Catastrophe, he’d grown far more efficient at gathering information.

  That said, even so, there were a vast number of things he wanted to know and things he should know, and his feeling of unease never lifted.

  Shiroe wasn’t collecting all the information about this world that he could get his hands on out of sheer personal curiosity. Whether the Adventurers worked to return home or gave up on it, the fact that they’d have to survive in this world was already common knowledge.

  In order for that to happen, there were probably many situations where information would prove to be a lifeline.

  In addition, just as a ship on an ocean voyage needed a sea chart, the Round Table Council needed information about this new world. No matter the situation, if they didn’t understand the surrounding information, they couldn’t hope to make an accurate decision.

  For that reason, gathering and analyzing information was a public duty for Shiroe.

  However, for the eleven guild masters on the Round Table Council—Akiba’s organization of self-government—routine contacts and miscellaneous duties took up a lot of time all by themselves. Just reading through the circular documents was quite a chore.

  Major guilds such as D.D.D. and the Marine Organization probably had plenty of personnel who assisted their guild masters. Even within the guilds, sensible members had formed backup systems.

  In a sense, this was just like having a private secretarial pool, and they supported the business processing abilities of Krusty, Michitaka, and the other guild masters. Even if they weren’t actual secretaries, it was reassuring to have friends nearby who could be asked to glance over something and give you their opinion on it.

  However, with Log Horizon’s small membership—even though they’d added two more members to bring their total to eight—Shiroe couldn’t hope for a member whose sole function was support of him and the business. Moreover, it was Shiroe who was best at office work anyway. Minori was probably second best. However, Minori was still in training.
If Shiroe kept her busy helping him with clerical work all the time, she’d fall behind Touya, Rundelhaus, and Isuzu, so he couldn’t ask for her assistance that often.

  In consequence, Shiroe was being crushed by mountains of reports and miscellaneous paperwork.

  “Arrrgh, I can’t do this!”

  Faced with a messy heap of correspondence, Shiroe groaned. Of course, that type of work was in his nature, and a large part of him was doing it because he wanted to, but that didn’t mean he didn’t get discouraged. In particular, not being able to go outside for long periods of time depressed him.

  Shiroe gazed out the window.

  Until just the other day, that “window” had been no more than a square hole in the wall, but now it had been fitted with a window frame fashioned from thin boards and a covering made of sailcloth.

  It was afternoon, but unfortunately, it was raining outside.

  The autumn rain beat down on Akiba. Softly, rain like thin silver threads moistened the concrete and struck every single leaf of the ancient trees that grew throughout the town.

  It was a gentle, quiet, exquisitely beautiful sight.

  Even when Elder Tales had been a game, the weather engine had created “weather” in the outside zones. It had been pretty compared to most other games, but in comparison with the shining silver drops that fell onto Akiba now, it really had been no more than a game.

  At this point, it seemed to Shiroe that the sights in this world outshone those of real-life Japan in every sense of the word.

  Evening showers in summer, thunderstorms with lightning and thunder that seemed to split the very air, light rain like autumn mist… Even though they were all rain, they were all distinct, and all were beautiful.

  Shiroe had lived in Japan, where public transportation was advanced and multiple courier services made their presence felt, and the only signs of the season he’d been able to find had been on NHK news. To him, the weather in this world was like a perfect drama all by itself.

  When he drew back the sailcloth just a bit, the air in town seemed to be blurred with endless white lines. It was the rain, falling without a break. Although it was October and not really cold yet, it was likely that autumn would slowly deepen after this. Here and there in the town, people were out walking, not minding the rain; he also saw Adventurers who were hard at work cleaning the buildings and structures they lived in, as if this had struck them as a good opportunity.

  It had been two months since the Zantleaf Peninsula sweep, but dealing with the aftermath had taken more time than expected.

  Or, rather, it might have been better to say that they’d passed the clean-up stage and were beginning to forge a new relationship with Eastal, the League of Free Cities, an alliance of People of the Earth.

  The reports that were delivered to Shiroe also supported this idea. Mentions of skirmishes had grown less frequent, and those of business transactions and material transport had gradually increased. Now that they’d reached this stage, the rest was probably in the jurisdiction of the commercial guilds.

  The Libra Festival, for which preparations were in full swing, was proof enough of that.

  With that thought, Shiroe felt as though a burden had finally been lifted from his shoulders.

  …Only one burden, however.

  What was currently dragging down Shiroe’s mood was the situations coming in from all over. Up until now, he’d had his hands full with Akiba itself, and he’d intentionally ignored the outside problems, but he was fast becoming unable to keep his eyes averted. He’d traced his connections and listened to stories, put them in order, took steps and gathered information, and discovered that the situation had advanced dramatically. Or rather, it had gone too far.

  Well, it isn’t as if I didn’t see it coming, but… To think it would turn out this way, of all things. Good grief, them and us… We’re both…

  Shiroe threw himself into a wicker chair and looked up at the ceiling.

  Several maps, figures, and reports flickered through his mind.

  On the Half-Gaia Project’s half-sized reproduction of the Japanese Peninsula—here known as the Arc-Shaped Archipelago Yamato—there were five player towns. In addition to Akiba, where Shiroe and the others lived, these were Shibuya, Minami, Susukino, and Nakasu. Also known as the Five Great Cities, they had been places the Japanese Elder Tales players could call hometowns.

  When Elder Tales had been an MMO game, because these cities had been connected by teleportation devices known as intercity portals, the distance between them hadn’t really registered, but right now, that function had been suspended. As a result, moving between cities took the amount of time you’d expect, and in this world where monsters prowled, travel was risky. It was fair to say that exchange between the cities had dropped off dramatically.

  It had been five months since the Catastrophe.

  The town of Akiba, where Shiroe lived, had gone through great changes. Its appearance was the same as before, but the way people lived in it and related to one another had changed decisively. Add in the way they interacted with the League of Free Cities and the People of the Earth, and no one could say this was a game anymore. That was how far the situation had progressed.

  Those five months had passed equally for everyone in this world.

  As a result, Shiroe thought, it was only natural that all sorts of other places had changed, just as Akiba had.

  However, Akiba’s transformation had been influenced by Shiroe’s will. He was aware that he’d made every effort in his attempts to change the town. In that case, were the changes to the other cities also being influenced by someone’s will? When he thought about those wills, Shiroe felt something in the pit of his stomach grow heavier.

  Shibuya had probably been the one that had seen the fewest changes.

  In the first place, Shibuya had held a unique position among the five player towns.

  The town of Shibuya had been created last, with the intent of spreading out the players that were concentrated in Akiba. As part of the dispersion project, Shibuya had focused heavily on the gates as an intercity transportation system, and now that the gates weren’t working, the city’s functions were nearly paralyzed.

  As a result, most of the Adventurers who’d been based in Shibuya had merged with the town of Akiba. At present, Shibuya was used freely but infrequently; it was treated as a sort of summer-home district on the outskirts of Akiba.

  In a way, the changes to Susukino had been just as Shiroe had foreseen. Susukino had never recovered from the deterioration of public order that had followed the Catastrophe. On the contrary, that deterioration had ended up transforming it into a lawless city. Over the past few months, almost all the Adventurers who had been in Susukino and wanted to leave it had made their escape.

  At the time, Serara had been a brand new Adventurer, but she’d managed to hide herself and get away. Of course this was due to the rescue operation Shiroe’s group had mounted, and since then, expedition teams organized by the Round Table Council had made several trips to Susukino and rescued everyone who wanted to get out.

  However, although it had been thought that Susukino wouldn’t survive as a player town, even now, it still held more than two hundred Adventurers. They hadn’t been left behind. They’d voluntarily chosen to stay in that environment. Not only that, but there were a few Adventurers from Akiba and Minami who had deliberately moved there.

  In this other world, this Elder Tales made real, there seemed to be a certain level of demand for lawlessness. He’d heard that Susukino had become a town where an Adventurer minority controlled the People of the Earth majority…

  Shiroe didn’t sense any malice in that. Actually, saying he didn’t sense it would have been a lie, but there wasn’t much of it. More than that, Shiroe was simply afraid.

  He had called for human rights for the People of the Earth at the Round Table Council for two main reasons:

  One was as a way for the Adventurers to survive. Here, the People of t
he Earth outnumbered them ten to one. People of the Earth made the foundations of most consumable items, the world’s commodities. If they killed or dominated the People of the Earth, sooner or later, the friction would build and war would break out. No matter who won, it was sure to leave an enormous scar. Protecting the human rights of the People of the Earth was a way to protect their own rights. This wasn’t Humanism or anything like it; it was a pragmatic calculation.

  The other reason was fear.

  Even now, Shiroe had a clear memory of the People of the Earth village where they’d stopped on their way back from Susukino. In that village, for the first time, Shiroe had sensed that the People of the Earth were human. He’d felt their warmth and backgrounds, their personalities and intentions, and he’d seen them as people for the first time.

  To Shiroe, who’d received a standard modern-Japanese education, the idea of turning intelligent “others” into slaves was terrifying. It was such a taboo that it leapt over reasoning like justice and evil and morals to link directly to fear. Of course the idea of becoming a slave was frightening as well, but the mere thought of having slaves and using them himself carried a visceral disgust.

  The chill Shiroe felt from Susukino was rooted in the same thing.

  However, there were only a few hundred Adventures in Susukino. If the scale was that small, there was still hope.

  But this one…

  Minami was…

  …plunging into a situation that far surpassed what Shiroe had predicted, at a speed far greater than what he’d foreseen.

  2

  “Master Shi-ro-e!”

  As Shiroe continued thinking absentmindedly, he was addressed by a lovely voice that sounded both reproving and somehow sympathetic.

  “Pull yourself together, please. Are you eating properly? Sleeping? Hm. You seem to have been sitting there for hours again.”

  “I am, and I am. And I went to the dining hall about two hours ago.”

  Even as he delivered a mild retort, Shiroe stood and accepted a document box from Henrietta.