by Aneko Yusagi
But these travel passes—they sounded like tolls.
The merchant voucher that I had back in Melromarc was similar, but not the same.
“That’s why it’s so difficult to get out of the country.”
“Sounds like a pretty controlled society.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. They mostly just restrict their citizen’s movement out of the country. It’s easy to head into it, though—to the capital. It’s probably even easier now.”
“Why’s that?”
“They don’t realize that I’ve escaped from the labyrinth, which means they aren’t watching out for me. I can probably get close to the dragon hourglass.”
“And what happens if you can do that?”
“Are they different in your world? If I get to the hourglass, I can teleport back to a safe place.”
I’d played MMORPGs that utilized similar systems. Portal skills existed to teleport players around, but generally speaking, only the strongest players had access to them. They were normally used to escape dangerous situations or to return to town after completing a quest. That must have been what Kizuna was talking about, because the skill only returned her to a country or town.
There were devices in towns that you could use to teleport to other similar devices in other towns. They weren’t the same as having a teleport skill of your own, but they were useful in their own way. A lot of games didn’t even have teleport skills, and all the long-distance travel was done through systems like these.
To make matters simple, I’ll refer to them as town portals from now on.
“The other idea is to wait for a wave to occur. I can see the hourglass on my status screen counting down again, so we could use that to hitchhike out of here.”
“Hm...”
So we had a number of options.
The first was to try to get out of this country—which was the country that threw Kizuna into the prison. But to do so, we’d have to get through a number of checkpoints, which would cost money. And there was no guarantee that we’d be safe once we got to the other side.
Another option was to try to approach the dragon hourglass in this country. That wouldn’t cost us any money, but there was significant risk involved in getting close enough to teleport.
The final option was to wait for the wave to arrive and summon us away. I wasn’t very fond of that option.
“How long does it say we have until the wave arrives?”
“Um... About two weeks.”
“That’s a long time.”
There was a limit on how long we could stay in this world. We were in a hurry, and I didn’t want to waste time waiting around. Besides, we had to find Raphtalia and the others. Where were they?
I tried to use my slave and monster control skills one more time, but once again they didn’t work. Lately, it felt like nothing was working. Raphtalia and Filo must have been in this world, but I couldn’t seem to find them...
“First things first, we should work on getting your levels up.”
“Good idea. We’ll need equipment too—and money.”
We would need money to get the equipment.
Kizuna had lent us some clothes, but to be honest they weren’t that great. She must have chosen things that we were able to wear at our low level.
“We need to start investigating, so we should probably head to a nearby town first.”
“Alright. And it sounds like we should stick together for now.”
“Glad to have you two around, Naofumi and Rishia.”
“Yeah, yeah. Rishia, without Raphtalia around, you’re going to have to handle my offense. Oh, and if we have to fight any people, you’ll be the only one that can hurt them. Don’t let me down.”
“Yes... sir! I’ll do my best!”
I sighed. She was so annoying. Kizuna was clearly trying not to laugh.
Why did she have to act so weak? All that power she showed off in the battle with Kyo was going to waste.
We made it out of the forest and found ourselves in a relatively large town.
The town looked... How to describe it... It looked like Kyoto from the Heian period. At first I’d thought it was like the Edo period, but some things about it didn’t quite fit in with that time period.
That’s how the town looked, anyway—the people were another thing altogether. They didn’t look like anyone I’d met in any world up until now. They had long ears, pretty white skin, and blonde hair. They sort of didn’t fit in with their surroundings.
They looked like elves.
“In this world, they’re called the grass people. They’re like the demi-humans in the world you came from.”
“They look like elves to me.”
You know, they actually looked really good in the Heian-period clothes. I was surprised.
But I could tell why. They just looked like long-eared foreigners flopping around in baggy robes. They didn’t wear their hair up in a topknot or anything like that.
Elves were a hunter-like race, but I always pictured them as wearing wizard-like clothing. I guess everyone had a different way of looking at things.
I found myself thinking that these Japanese-style clothes would look good on Raphtalia.
Aside from the elves, I also saw some semi-transparent people, like Glass, walking through the streets.
“Who are those people? They remind me of Glass.”
“You mean you don’t know? Those are the spirit people. People from other countries just call them spirits.”
“Spirits?”
“You might think they are actually souls, but that’s not quite right. But I can see why you’d think so. Their weapons are called things like Soul Splitter, after all. It’s easier to explain if you look at your status menu.”
I opened my status menu and looked at it.
My HP had been replaced by something else and was labeled “life force.” And my SP was relabeled “soul power.”
I was confused. What was going on?
“Spirits have life force and magic power... and if they wield a vassal weapon, then they also have soul power. But all those different powers are combined into energy for the spirit people.”
“What? So when they use magic, they also lose their life force?”
“It seems that way. All their other stats exist as energy, too. They don’t have levels. Energy is everything for them.”
“They don’t have levels?”
“That’s right. But they can be very powerful when their energy levels are high. They have an exceptionally high defense, much higher than a human could have. They can survive attacks that humans never could—they’re famous for it.”
That explained why Glass was so monstrously powerful.
“The problem is that there’s no way for them to recover their energy, unless another spirit person gives them some.”
“So there aren’t any items or spells they can use to recover?”
“That’s right. Unlike humans and grass people, they can’t rely on magic to recover in battle.”
“I never knew that!” Rishia exclaimed, nodding her head.
She had fought with Glass, after all. Of course she would find it interesting.
I know I did.
I’d hit her with the full strength of Iron Maiden, and it hadn’t hurt her. I’d burned her with the Shield of Wrath to no avail.
Huh?
“So if they could find some way to restore the energy they’ve lost, they could be really powerful, right?”
“Yeah, if something like that existed.”
I remembered watching L’Arc dump a bottle of soul-healing water over Glass. It seemed like she had instantly powered up. Did that mean that there wasn’t any soul-healing water in his world?
Hm... I’d have to investigate further. But before that, I needed to start gaining some levels.
“Okay, I got it. So can we hang out around here for a while?”
“It seems safe to me.”
“We walked with K
izuna through the town until we came to a fairly large building. It was bustling with activity. The building looked like an adventurer’s guild.
There were a lot of bulletin boards on the walls that were covered with job postings and wanted posters, promising cash rewards.
Kizuna scanned the postings and came jogging back over to us.
“It doesn’t look like they’ve realized we’ve escaped.”
“Good. But I’ve been wondering...” I said, indicating the back of the room where a crystal of some sort sat enshrined in a machine. It actually looked like a shaved-ice maker.
People filed past the machine and set pendant-like accessories on it, and then they tapped some buttons. It was almost like they were using a computer.
After a short amount of time a little puff of smoke would come out of the machine, and it would produce an item.
“That thing? We don’t need to worry about it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a machine that simulates the drop item functionality that the heroes’ weapons, and the vassal weapons, already have. Crystal people like Therese use them the most. They’re a race of people that receive powers from special stones they call jewels. They built the machine, actually.”
Well, well. I was learning a lot today.
I remembered when we were out leveling with L’Arc in the Cal Mira islands. They had talked about drop items as if they were a typical, pedestrian thing, even though I’d thought they were only possible with the legendary weapons.
So it was looking like drop items weren’t a rare thing at all in this world.
“Well they aren’t as good as the legendary weapons, as far as probability is concerned, but you can choose certain drops and it will make them for you once enough has been saved up. With luck they can even get magic out of things, right on the spot.”
“Is that so...”
The people of this new world seemed to have access to more skill subtleties than what I was used to. So they could absorb defeated monsters into those pendants and then use that machine to produce whatever drops the monsters had.
Before we went back to the world we came from, it might be a good idea to get our hands on one of those pendants. Maybe we could even learn how to make them. We’d be rich.
“That’s amazing. To think of all the items you can get just from defeating monsters...”
“Itsuki could do it.”
I wondered why most people in the previous world couldn’t use drops. If there was some way to replicate the effect of the pendant, it was worth a try.
Chapter Four: Selling Drop Items
“Hey, are there pawn shops in this world?”
“Sure, there are shops. But... what is a pawn shop?”
I showed Kizuna the white box corpse that I’d stashed away in my bag. She cocked her head and looked confused. “Sure, you can use that thing as a box, but it won’t sell for much. The drop item you get from it is worth more.”
I was starting to understand. If replicated drop items were as common as they seemed to be, then shops would rather buy real drop items. I’m sure there were also times when raw materials were worth more than their drop items.
We did our best to absorb all the information we could at the guild.
“Looks like there’s a lot going on—apparently there was a prison break in the next country over.”
“There’s someone just like us out there.”
“Seems so—but at least they aren’t looking for us. Oh, look. There’s a sketch of the wanted people.”
“That is seriously a rough sketch. I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
It looked like the sort of sketch that police officers made from listening to a witness’s description. The face might as well have been a yokai or something out of a kabuki play.
“I’ve heard things about their prisons. They are supposed to be very rough. They have a way of negating your level gains and everything. I wonder how these people escaped?”
“You don’t think it could be Glass or Raphtalia, do you?”
If it was, then we were about to walk into some serious trouble.
“Oh, I don’t think so. What are the chances? I’m sure they’re just fine.”
“Right. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy to find them. It wouldn’t be like how you showed up just in time to save us from those kappa.”
“Hehe.”
“Haha.”
Kizuna and I laughed dryly.
“Feh...”
Uh-oh. We were laughing but Rishia started whimpering as usual.
“Anyway, Glass is pretty famous in this world, isn’t she? If she broke out of prison, I’m sure we’d hear about it.”
“Yes, well. . . It’s hard to know how much you can trust this type of information. They lie about the enemy state all the time. Saying things like people are on steroids when in reality their soldiers were literally giants...”
“Sounds like we shouldn’t pay much attention to it then.”
If it were true, that meant we’d have to find a way into the neighboring country.
We didn’t have time to go chasing after every unsubstantiated possibility.
“There are rumors that the neighboring country is developing new weapons. I hear things about savage monster experiments. It’s creepy.”
“You don’t think people are just having fun spreading rumors, do you?”
“Could be. Not everyone has entertaining lives like you and I do, Naofumi.”
“The world might be like a game, but people can get used to anything, can’t they?”
“Sure. But I hear they are researching teleport technologies, trying to duplicate the teleport abilities of the legendary and vassal weapons. They’ve already made a Return Transcript replica, but that’s not all...”
“They’re trying to make it so that everyone can use teleportation skills? That’s unthinkable where I come from.”
I had never heard of anyone trying to do anything like that in the world I’d been summoned to. Maybe I just didn’t know about it.
We chatted for a while, and soon enough the sun began to sink low in the sky.
“Naofumi, what do I need to do to learn to read the writing here?” Rishia muttered, flipping through a book she’d taken off of the shelf.
That’s right. Rishia not only couldn’t talk to people of this world but also couldn’t read anything that they wrote.
“I can’t read it, either. I can only handle conversation because my shield translates for me.”
Kizuna agreed. “Same for me. The only reason I understand what Rishia says is because my weapons translate it.”
“Oh... I didn’t realize... I thought that you understood our language.”
“Kizuna, can you read and write the language here?”
“Just the simple stuff. Glass was very insistent on it.”
“Wow... I’m impressed.” I reached for the book that Rishia was flipping through. It was very old, but I thought I had seen some of the characters before. Sometimes, it even looked like there were kanji mixed in. Maybe I could read it if I had enough time to practice.
The language in Melromarc was very different from what I was used to, like English and Japanese, so translating between them was difficult.
I didn’t have the energy to invest in study, though. My shoulders started to ache.
“It’s getting late. What should we do?”
“There are some inns where we could rest. We should be okay since our escape hasn’t been reported. No one has recognized me yet. I don’t think anyone would, except for maybe some high-ranking officials.”
“And you don’t think they will report our escape soon?”
“I did hear some rumors about something popping out of the labyrinth, but everyone is saying that whatever it was disappeared immediately. We should stay cautious, but I think we’re okay for now.”
I wasn’t sure I felt safe, but I’d still rather stay in an inn than out in the fields.
> “Do you have money?”
“I sold some drop items I didn’t need, so I’ve got enough to cover the three of us.”
“Should I sell some stuff, too?”
“Like the box?”
“No, like drop items from the world I came from.” I figured that they should be worth a lot, considering how rare they were in this world.
But then again, it might attract unwanted attention if I started showing off tools and items that no one had ever seen. They might not even be able to read the item names—like what had happened with my armor.
“That’s not a bad idea. Normal things from your world might fetch a good price here.”
“It would depend on the dealer. We don’t want to attract too much attention.”
Dealers decided what things were worth by considering their effects or their rarity. That worked fine if they knew what they were dealing with, but how would they react when they saw something brand new?
The best test would be to see if Kizuna recognized the items first.
“Well, I think we’re all tired today. Let’s save the money talk for tomorrow.”
“There’s a larger town a little further down the road. Maybe we should head there first.”
“I’m tiiiired...” Rishia sighed.
I knew how she felt. Adventuring in unknown lands really sapped your energy. Our levels were low, too, so we had to stay on guard all the time.
If we were going to make money and get better equipment, we should probably wait until after I’d powered up my shield and gained a few levels. I’d need a fair amount of money to make it work, anyway.
At least we’d gained a few levels since we woke up in the cell. Rishia and I were going to have to level up together. But I was still worried about her poor stats...
According to Kizuna, we were in enemy territory, which meant we would have a hard time recruiting additional party members. Still, I’d seen plenty of people that looked like adventurers out in the streets, so it wasn’t necessarily impossible.
Kizuna led us to a nearby inn, and when we got to our room I started to think about what drop items I had that might sell for a good price. It was a difficult task, especially because I didn’t know anything about the local culture, and I didn’t want to cause trouble.