by Aneko Yusagi
Something odd must happen to equipment when it crosses the barrier between worlds. That would explain why Glass and her friends were dressed so strangely when we ran into them inside of the Spirit Tortoise.
“Take it off. There’s no point in wearing it if it isn’t helping.”
“O . . . Okay.”
Rishia obeyed my order and slipped out of the kigurumi. Finally, she was wearing normal clothes for once.
“So? Kizuna, how did you end up in this place?”
“I’ll tell you, but I’d rather you explained how you got here first. It wouldn’t be fair if I was the only one answering questions around here.”
She had a point. Besides, she was probably only answering my questions because she wanted to find out more about us.
“Where should I start?”
“Tell me how you got here. I’m curious what brought you to a place like this.”
She was one of the four holy heroes, so there was probably nothing to lose by cooperating with her...right? Then again, I didn’t really want to cooperate with the other three heroes I knew. They didn’t listen to anything I said. But my level was so low here that I didn’t see what choice I had. I needed her help. If she decided to turn on us, we wouldn’t stand a chance.
I decided to carefully watch to see how she reacted to my story.
“First things first . . .”
I started with how I was summoned to the world, how I was framed, and how I was exonerated, and I went on to tell her the main points about the other three heroes.
“Uh-huh. And then? What brings you to this place? To my world? I thought the four heroes weren’t allowed to cross between the worlds.”
“Ah, so you know about that?”
When Kyo escaped after our battle, I tried to follow him through the portal—only to discover that I couldn’t get through it. A warning appeared, saying that the four holy heroes were not permitted to cross over to other worlds.
Ost, just on the verge of death, intervened on our behalf, which is how we were able to get through the portal. Kizuna seemed to know all about the difficulties that crossing over entailed.
“There was this giant monster called the Spirit Tortoise that collected the souls of people killed in the waves and used them to make a barrier to protect the world from the waves. Anyway, someone took control of the monster and used it to go on a rampage.”
“Heh . . . A protective beast? We’ve got something like that over here, too. We’ve got the Black Turtle and the White Tiger, but I don’t know much about those legends. You say someone took control of this thing?”
“That’s right. He was crazy. His name was Kyo Ethnina. We chased him through the portal he made back to this world.”
“Hm . . . Maybe you played right into his hands. Maybe this was a trap.”
“ . . . I’m starting to think the same thing.”
Kizuna rocked in her chair and nodded. “I see. Sounds like a real disaster.”
“It was terrible. Still, Kyo was obviously violating all sorts of rules, so a few people, who were our enemies, ended up helping us out.”
“I don’t really understand it all yet, but you say they were your enemies?”
“Yeah. Glass and L’Arc Berg.”
I remembered everything about Glass and her friends and what had happened before we woke up in this place.
As things stood, we had put aside our differences to focus on fighting our common enemy, Kyo. Still, I wouldn’t call them allies.
I’ll start with Glass.
She was a beautiful woman with long black hair, and she wore a kimono, which made her look very Japanese. When we fought with her, she used folding fans for weapons, and her fighting style looked like dancing. Even after implementing all of the other heroes’ power-up methods, she was still so powerful that I wasn’t able to defeat her.
I don’t think she was human, because she seemed to turn a little transparent from time to time. I still didn’t know very much about her—she was a mystery.
L’Arc is next. His real name was L’Arc Berg. When I first met him, he seemed like a dependable, nice older-brother kind of character. He was laid back and easy to talk to.
After I was exonerated of my crimes, I met him on a boat we took to the Cal Mira Islands. There was a special event happening on the islands that would give us more experience points than usual for our battles with monsters.
I didn’t know we were enemies at the time. I just thought that he was a tough fighter and a nice guy. In fact, we even fought together for a little while. But then a wave occurred close to the islands. We were in the middle of fighting against it when he turned on us. According to him, he had to kill me for the sake of his world. Glass said the same thing.
He had spiked red hair, and he was very muscular. He clearly knew his way around the battlefield. He was handsome, too, but unlike Motoyasu (the other handsome guy around here), nothing about him was irritating or obnoxious. I actually liked him. If we weren’t enemies, I would have wanted him to join my party.
He fought with a giant scythe. Just like Glass, it was a special sort of weapon.
It was as powerful as you’d expect, but apparently he only had as much power as he had during our fight because we happened to be fighting at the same time as a wave. Still, he held his own just fine in the battle with Kyo, so it’s safe to say that he was a pretty powerful fighter.
At the very least, he was certainly stronger than the other three heroes in the previous world.
He had another person with him: a woman named Therese.
I hadn’t spoken with her very much, but she was clearly his partner.
She wore her glossy, blueish hair pulled back in a French braid. The color of her hair seemed to change a little depending on the angle you viewed it from. And when she used a magic spell, her hair turned red, which is something I’d never seen happen to a human—at least not humans in the world I was from.
She was calm, and warm, the sort of woman you’d go to for help. Both her and L’Arc seemed to be kind and dependable people.
She was a magic user in battle, and she normally used magic to cast support effects on L’Arc and Glass. The magic she used was strange, though. It seemed to depend on the accessories she wore in battle. When she cast spells, her accessories would flash and create a magic effect. I assumed it was a special form of magic from their world.
I can’t speak authoritatively on her personality, but from what I’d seen, she was very emotive and sensitive. I made her a bangle once, and she was very appreciative.
I think she was probably L’Arc’s . . . girlfriend. Maybe.
Anyway, those three were helping us chase down Kyo.
We had to find a way to punish him for what he’d done in Raphtalia’s world—for all the chaos he’d sown. That was why we followed him through the portal. We had to make him pay.
After we jumped into the portal, I found myself in some kind of fast, ferocious current, bathed in light. I thought that if we let the current carry us along, it would take us to Glass’s world.
That’s it—I remember now.
The direction the current carried us started to change, darkness swallowed the light, and suddenly we were being carried along by the current in dark space.
And that was when I heard it, the voice of the enemy. I heard Kyo speaking to us.
“Heh heh . . . You didn’t think there would be a trap? How stupid are you?!” He laughed, and lightning crackled in the space around us.
I held up my shield and prepared to blast through whatever trap he’d prepared for us.
But it didn’t work. A crashing sound filled my ears and pale lightning crackled in the darkness.
“Ahhhh!”
“Ugh, damn it!”
“Mr . . . Mr. Naofumi!”
“Ugh . . .”
The current that carried us along suddenly split, branching off in different directions and carrying us away from each other. It was like one of those tubular waterslides that split in
to different paths.
“Raphtalia!”
I reached out to her, desperate to keep us together, but it was too late. I couldn’t reach her, and she slipped away.
Damn it. I wondered . . . Could I save her with a skill?
“Air Strike . . .”
Before I could finish calling for the skill, Raphtalia and the others had already slipped far, far away.
“Mr. Naofuuuuumiiiiiiiii!”
“Raphtaliaaaa!”
I lost consciousness.
And according to Kizuna, I woke up in the middle of an inescapable labyrinth.
When I finished telling my story, Kizuna stopped rocking her chair and jumped to her feet.
“Glass! Where did you meet Glass?!”
“Do you know her?”
“She’s a close friend. She’s the person who gave me this haori.”
I’d wondered about her outfit, a haori paired with a western, gothic dress. It made sense if it had been a present. Still, she wore it naturally enough that I’d assumed it was some kind of fashion I didn’t know about.
So she knew Glass well enough to have received a present from her—what did it mean?
“If Glass has teamed up with you to take that guy down, he must really be a bad guy. No doubt about it,” Kizuna nodded, more energetic than she had been.
If she knew Glass, then that settled it: Kizuna must have been one of the four holy heroes from Glass’s world.
“And L’Arc nii-chan was with her, too? How’s he doing with Therese?”
“How should I know?” Seriously. I had barely even held a conversation with Therese. How should I know about their private lives?
“Is Glass here, too?”
“I don’t know. We fell into a trap of some kind while we were moving between worlds, and I ended up here.”
“Right . . . right. I probably would have known if she was here, anyway . . .” Kizuna muttered, nodding. I guess it’s my turn now.”
“Yeah. Start with how you ended up being summoned to another world in the first place.”
“You want me to start way back then? Well, I guess you told me your story . . .” she said, and began to speak.
Chapter One: The Hunting Hero
“I had the chance to participate in a special game with my two sisters...”
“A game?”
“At first I thought that I was in that game world, but no matter how long I waited, I never met my sisters. A bunch of stuff happened, and eventually I realized I was in another world altogether. I'll spare you the details.”
How was she supposed to enter a game world with her sisters?
Her story reminded me of the other three heroes, except that they had all mentioned something about dying. But hey, she was skipping over some important stuff—what was all this about “entering a game world?”
“Are you talking about VRMMOs? Did this game happen to be called Brave Star Online?”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“One of the heroes in my world said that the world was just like that game.”
“Oh yeah? My game was galled Second Life Project. There was another one was called Dimension Wave, too.”
“Second Life Project?”
I’d heard of Dimension Wave before. It was the console game that Itsuki talked about. I couldn’t help but be intrigued by Second Life Project, though.
“It’s just how it sounds. It was one of those simulator games where you get to have a second life online. The game prepared these special pods that you go inside to enter the game world. They liked to say that a day on the outside is equivalent to a few years on the inside.”
It sounded a lot like what Ren talked about, but the technology seemed older. Ren had made it sound like VRMMOs were commonplace, the sort of thing that a normal family might have in their living room. At least, that’s how I’d pictured it.
“It’s a great system for working people that don’t have a lot of time to spend on games. It’s a quick way to feel refreshed. I think they call them VRHMMOs? It’s short for Virtual Reality Healing MMO.”
“Sounds like a real time-saver.”
Time is a seriously limited resource, and playing games takes a lot of time, even more so if you play online games. Back when I was in college, I knew someone that had to stop playing games altogether when they got a job. On the other hand, I knew someone that quit their job so they’d have more time to spend on their online games.
“Game 1 let in anyone that wanted to play, but you had to be admitted by lottery to enter Game 2. Of course my sister was admitted, so the three of us were able to join.”
“Hm...”
“Everyone starts the game together and ends it together. The game has a schedule that everyone has to commit to.”
That sounded like a bit much from what I was used to. It’s not that I couldn’t understand it; it just sounded like the plot of a futuristic movie or something. But if everyone started and ended at the same time, and if everyone was online at the same time, then that sounded like a very fair system.
And if it only took one day in the real world, that would save a lot of time.
“So I thought I was joining that game. After they summoned me, they started explaining a bunch of stuff. I just thought it was the tutorial.”
Oh man, now she really sounded just like the other three heroes in the previous world.
She thought she was playing a game but was actually summoned to another world. At least that was better than the other heroes, who knew they were being summoned.
And I had just read a book. How boring!
“Huh...”
“There weren’t any waves when I was summoned.”
“Then why did they summon you?”
“Because the ruler of the monsters, the Dragon Emperor, was causing havoc.”
“Sounds like a retro game to me.” It sounded like an old RPG to me.
“I know. That’s what I thought. It didn’t sound like the kind of game that was on the website. Even the instructions made it sound like something else.”
“So then what happened?”
“I went on a few adventures. I took a journey by boat. One day an ominous wind was blowing, and a ghost ship appeared. Glass and her friends helped me solve the mystery of the ship, and it disappeared. We ended up crashing, and I found myself alone in unfriendly lands. I was captured and thrown into this labyrinth. I already knew what sort of place it was, so you can imagine how angry I was to end up in here. I couldn’t stop thinking that I’d be here until I die.”
“Yeah...”
Just how unlucky was this girl? I felt like we’d been through similar things, so I was starting to sympathize with her.
“From then on, I’ve been struggling through every day, here in the labyrinth. I decided to stop counting the days—the years—a long time ago.”
So that’s why she didn’t know anything about the waves—or about the world.
Whatever the specifics were, we’d both been through similar hardships, and now we were both stuck in the same prison.
“How old are you, anyway?”
She looked like she was about middle-school age.
So if she was as old as she looked, then she must have been summoned to the world when she was still in elementary school. I guess I could picture that. I’d seen plenty of anime that involved young kids being teleported to other worlds. Maybe that was what had happened to Kizuna.
“Me? I’m eighteen.”
“Ha! You’re kind of an old loli-ba...” I stopped short of saying what I was thinking. Raphtalia would have been disappointed in me if I’d let that slip.
Speaking of Raphtalia, she looked like she was about the same age I was, but in truth she was only about ten years old. If I made fun of Kizuna for the opposite thing, it would hurt Raphtalia’s feelings.
“What’s the matter? Weren’t you going to call me a loli-baba?”
“It’s nothing. But hey, you know what that is?”
Heh, it was starting to make sense. All the summoned heroes shared certain otaku-leaning traits. But wait a second—what if people with legendary weapons stopped aging? In some ways that would be a great thing, but what would people think if you came back after being gone for thirty years and you hadn’t aged at all? I don’t think that would go over very well.
But there was no point thinking about it until I found a way home.
“Anyway, what’re you going to do now?”
“Do I have a choice? I can’t exactly stand around killing time here.”
“That’s what I thought. But you know, I’ve been looking for a way out of here for a long time.”
“You can tell me to give up, but I’m not going to.”
On the one hand, it would be nice to avoid the waves for the rest of my life, but on the other, I didn’t want to spend eternity wandering around the labyrinth.
“Feh... Naofumi, I haven’t understood anything that you two are talking about.”
“You’re supposed to be smart, but you can’t keep up with a simple conversation like this?”
“Hey, you’re making fun of me, aren’t you?!” Rishia cried.
I sighed. I was starting to miss Raphtalia.
Why did I have to get stuck with Rishia? Raphtalia was so much easier to talk to.
“Feh...” she whimpered, backing away from me.
God, she was annoying.
“I’m not telling you to give up. I haven’t given up, either.”
A grumbling sound roared from Rishia’s stomach. It had been a long time since we’d had a meal, and we’d done a lot of fighting since then. I asked her about it, and she started to giggle.
“Perhaps we should eat?”
“What do you have to eat around here? I’m guessing monster meat.”
“There’s fish, too. We’re right by the ocean, so you can fish all you want.” Kizuna went back toward the labyrinth for a minute and came back with food. It was mostly dried meat and fish and a few pieces of fruit.
“If you want sashimi or something, I could go catch a fish or two.”
“Do you have any medicinal herbs? I have some things, too, and if we combined our resources we could come up with some seasonings.”