Hear Me Out, And Try Not To Laugh

by Ao Jyumonji

  “What’s up? Why are you here? What happened?” Haruhiro burst out.

  “...Sorry.” Kikkawa sat down. “Sorry, Harucchi. Like, seriously, I apologize. But, I...”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Haruhiro. “No apologies for now. It can wait. Can you stand?”

  “...Yeah. Somehow.”

  “Okay,” said Haruhiro. “We’ll head back to where the others are for now. You’re hurt, right?”

  “It’s nothing major,” said Kikkawa. “In my case...”

  “We’ll need to have Merry fix you up.” Haruhiro lent Kikkawa his shoulder.

  “It’s nothing major. In my case...”

  The way he’d said that bothered Haruhiro.

  On the way back, Haruhiro tried asking, “Where are Tokimune-san and the others?”

  “...In the Dusk Realm,” managed Kikkawa. “All of us went. We set out this morning, while it was still dark out. We were trying to get ahead of you. Sorry, Harucchi...”

  “Like I said, don’t worry about that,” said Haruhiro. “So? Why are you alone back here?”

  “They told me to go. So here I am.”

  “I can’t tell what happened from just that,” said Haruhiro. “Did Tokimune-san tell you to run away?”

  “Yeah... That guy, like, says I’m the Tokkis’ lucky charm. That’s why, like, he sent me back to the Wonder Hole alone... to call for help. He figured you guys’d be at the meet-up point.”

  “Help?” Haruhiro went pale. He hadn’t even imagined a situation like this. It was bad. Really bad. “...Any losses?”

  “They’re alive,” Kikkawa said.

  Haruhiro let out a sigh of relief.

  “...But only as far as I know.”

  “That figures,” Haruhiro said, nodding. “Some time must have passed... Well, even so, it means there’s some hope for them.”

  “Hope, huh...” Kikkawa sniffled.

  “Dammit,” Haruhiro muttered. “Why did this have to happen?”

  Haruhiro brought Kikkawa back to where Ranta and the others were and had Merry treat him. Kikkawa had wounds on his left leg, right shoulder, and a deep one in his belly. He’d been in a pretty dangerous state.

  “They do something underhanded like try to steal a march on us, and then this happens to them! Pathetic!” Ranta punched his right fist into the palm of his left hand.

  “Still, that doesn’t mean we can abandon them...” Haruhiro said.

  “First, we need to get a precise account of what happened,” said Shihoru. She was right.

  “Right...” While Kikkawa had finished being healed, he had bled out a lot. He might have been feeling woozy, because he stayed sitting on the ground as he talked. “It was just... Remember yesterday? There was nothing dangerous then, so, honestly, we may have let our guards down a little...”

  “Mm-hm,” Yume crouched down next to Kikkawa, patting him on the head to console him. “There wasn’t anythin’ dangerous yesterday. Did you find enemies?”

  “Hey! Yume! Cut that out! There’s no need to be nice to the guy!” Ranta yelled.

  “It’s fine! Don’t you feel sorry for him?!” Yume shot back.

  “No, Yume. Ranta’s right.” Kikkawa looked away, brushing Yume’s hand aside. “I don’t have any right to have you treat me like that. ...Enemies, huh. Yeah. There were. Enemies. They didn’t even try to communicate. Just attacked us out of nowhere, man...”

  As Kikkawa told the story, when the Tokkis had moved away from the hill with white boulders scattered around on it and arrived in the valley where the white pillar-like boulders were the thickest, the enemy had ambushed them.

  They had been humanoid; they’d worn a white cloth over their heads with holes cut out where their single eye was, and they’d carried extremely sharp spear-like weapons. They had also been about the same height as humans.

  When they’d seen them, Tada had muttered, “They look like a cult.” And so, the Tokkis had taken to calling them cultists.

  The cultists had hidden in between the white pillar-like rocks to ambush the Tokkis. Apparently, they had outnumbered them. What was more, because the enemy had the element of surprise, the Tokkis had started out at a disadvantage. Even so, the Tokkis had put up a good fight and killed seven of the cultists. The rest had fled.

  On the Tokkis’ side, Kikkawa, Inui, and Mimorin had been lightly injured. The Tokkis had two priests, Tada and Anna-san. Tokimune himself was also a paladin, so while he couldn’t heal himself, he could heal his comrades’ wounds. When they had gone to heal themselves, though... that was when they’d realized it.

  “No light magic?” Merry brought a hand to her mouth.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Kikkawa hung his head. “It didn’t work, or it didn’t activate? Something like that. Our Protection had worn off at some point, too.”

  “Now that you mention it... it happened yesterday, too,” said Merry slowly. “I noticed it when we went out there. I just thought the duration on it had run out, though.”

  “Oh...” Ranta’s eyes went wide. “Zodiac-kun vanished, too, huh.”

  “The gods,” Shihoru said in a whisper. “Light magic borrows power from Lumiaris... and dark magic borrows power from Skullhell to produce their effects. That’s why.”

  “It’s another world.” Merry bit her lip. “The blessings of Lumiaris and the malice of Skullhell don’t reach the Dusk Realm.”

  “Meow...” Yume put her hands on her cheeks. “If that’s true, then if anyone gets hurt, Merry-chan won’t be healin’ them, y’know. That’s gonna make it real tough.”

  “That’s terrifying,” Kuzaku said simply. As the one who stood on the front line as the party tank, it wasn’t just a problem, it was a matter of life and death.

  “So, like...” Kikkawa lifted his right hand weakly, then lowered it. “Of course, we panicked. Even though you wouldn’t expect it from us. That’s when enemy reinforcements... or something like that... showed up.”

  “Cultists?” Haruhiro asked.

  “No, not them,” said Kikkawa. “Well, they were there, too. These guys were huge... I dunno how to describe them. Big, white, like statues. They had human bodies, but their heads were like lions’. As for their size... How big were they again? I’d say four meters tall, maybe. Maybe not that much? Could have been three meters.”

  “White giants...” Haruhiro said slowly.

  “That’s right,” said Kikkawa. “There were three of those... guys? Or things? Whichever. Along with a whole pile of cultists. Well, we ran, of course. Not like there was much choice. So, like, there was the rubble of some kinda building? A ruin? Something like that. It was, like, crazy big. We fled into there, but they just wouldn’t give up. They chased after us forever. They searched for us, we ran and hid. A number of times, we had to fight them, and so Tokimune-san and Tadacchi got hurt, too. Well, basically everyone but Anna-san was battered and bruised all over.”

  “You guys really do protect Anna-san,” Haruhiro said.

  “It’s a part of our identity. It’s a thing we do.” Kikkawa gave a weak laugh. “So, Tokimune-san, he told me to run for it. To go and call for help.”

  “Now listen...” Ranta said, rubbing his face. “If you tell us all that dangerous stuff, do you think we’re really going to go? I mean, even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. Everyone has to look out for their own hide, man. Even if, deep down, they want to help...”

  “Well, yeah,” Kikkawa said to Ranta with upturned eyes. “Listen, Ranta. I know that much. Tokimune-san knows it, too. But, still. It was a question of losing everyone or having just one of us get away, that’s what I think. If we’d had to choose just one of us to get out of there, obviously, it would be Anna-san. But Anna-san can’t do anything on her own. Still, protecting Anna-san while all of us ran felt like it’d be a bit too much for us. If we did that, in the end, it’d get us all killed. So, with Tokimune-san and Anna-san not being options, as the one who was only lightly injured, and who had the shortest career as a volunteer s
oldier, I was the one they chose. We were going to risk everything to get one of us out. I just happened to be that one. So, like, with me being the seriously lucky man that I am, I was able to run all this way. But, you know, really... I want to do something to save Tokimune-san and the others. Those guys took me in, man. When I’m with them, I have a crazy amount of fun. I mean, we get along great. Man, I love those guys. That’s why—thanks, Haruhiro. And Merry-chan. For healing me. Me, I’m going back.”

  When Kikkawa tried to stand, Haruhiro blocked his way. He couldn’t say, Hold on. Haruhiro hadn’t decided anything yet.

  Options. How many were there?

  They could choose to let Kikkawa go alone. In other words, abandon him.

  They could choose not to abandon him, and instead go with him.

  They could choose to go back to the Lonesome Field Outpost to gather people, then go to help.

  Haruhiro thought the third seemed like the best option. Now that it had come to this, it was no time to worry about the knowledge of their discovery, the Dusk Realm, spreading. They needed to give up, accept that, and focus on rescuing the Tokkis. And, well, Haruhiro personally had no issue with that. If it was the sort of place that could easily put the Tokkis in a crisis, it was too much for Haruhiro and his group to handle. But, time.

  It would take time.

  If they left for the Lonesome Field Outpost now, it would take more than four hours to get there and back. That wasn’t counting the time it would take to get a group of people together. This was the time of day when all of the volunteer soldiers would be out, so it would probably take some work.

  The Tokkis had been so pressed that they had been forced to send Kikkawa off on his own. The sooner help reached them, the better. Or rather, they had no choice but to hurry.

  Basically, choosing the third option would be little different from choosing the first. It meant those two were the same option. The question was: Would they abandon Tokimune, Anna-san, Tada, Inui, and Mimorin, or would they go save them right now?

  8. Let’s Go Down the Hill

  I’m fine with being mediocre. Just let me be more decisive, Haruhiro thought. I want to become a leader who can make split-second decisions and not leave his comrades feeling uncertain. I probably can’t be the sort that makes them think, “I want to follow him,” but I want to at least be the kind of leader that makes them think, “Well, I guess I’ll follow him.”

  That seems pretty hard, though.

  One more step, and they would be in the Dusk Realm, and yet Haruhiro’s eyes were still looking sleepy. No... he couldn’t see them himself, but he knew they probably were. They had to be.

  The feeling of tension, the indecision, the regret, the feeling of, Yeah, let’s not do this after all, and the thought that, No, we have to do it, were all getting mixed together. At times like this, Haruhiro’s eyes looked even sleepier than usual. He was aware of that himself.

  Of course, it wasn’t that he was sleepy. He was confident that, right now, even if Shihoru hit him with her Sleepy Shadow spell, he wouldn’t feel even the least bit drowsy.

  Despite that, his eyes looked sleepy.

  He couldn’t have looked less prepared.

  “My bad, Haruhiro,” Kikkawa said, sounding sincerely contrite.

  “Well, yeah. This is your bad.” Ranta gave a nasal laugh. “Let me say, Kikkawa. This favor is gonna cost you big, man. You’d better understand that.”

  “Oh, stop!” Yume jabbed Ranta in the shoulder. “You shouldn’t be sayin’ stuff like that. Kikkawa’s havin’ a really bad time right now.”

  “Yumecchi...” Kikkawa teared up. It seemed he really was feeling weak right now.

  “Magic... is usable,” Shihoru said, nodding to Haruhiro. “I can feel the elementals. It’s fine.”

  “I’ll defend Shihoru with everything I have.” Merry hit the ground with her short staff.

  “As for me...” Kuzaku lowered the visor on his close helm. “...I’ll protect everyone.”

  “Let’s take it easy.” Haruhiro scratched the back of his head. “...Hmm. No, that’s not quite right. I’m trying to say don’t be so on edge, maybe. I guess that’s the same thing. Well, just to make sure I get the point across, don’t be reckless. Sorry, Kikkawa, but if things go bad, I plan to pull out. Also, there are a number of points where we have an advantage over the Tokkis.”

  “We have me! The great Ranta-sama!” Ranta puffed up his chest proudly.

  “First, we have information.” Haruhiro, naturally, ignored him. “The cultists. The white giants. We know that there are enemies here. We can stay on guard. Kikkawa also remembers the way to the ruins. We’re also aware that light magic and, though this one is just an extra, dark magic don’t work.”

  “And we have me!” Ranta spun around and struck a weird pose.

  “Also, there are our numbers.” Haruhiro, it went without saying, ignored him. “We don’t have anyone like Anna-san who needs protecting—okay, that was just a joke, but we do have Kikkawa, so we have one more. Kikkawa, you’re a tank, right?”

  “Yeah,” Kikkawa nodded. “Tokimune-san’s a paladin with a shield and everything, but he doesn’t feel very tanky, does he? That’s why I’m our main tank.”

  “Well, together with Kuzaku, we’ll have two tanks,” Haruhiro said. “For now, Kuzaku will be the main, and we’ll have Kikkawa be a sub tank.”

  “Righto,” said Kuzaku.

  “Okay,” said Kikkawa.

  “Now, as for the third advantage—”

  “It’s me, right?!” Ranta burst in.

  “Yeah, that’s right, it’s you, Ranta,” said Haruhiro. “We can sacrifice you any time we need to. That’s a huge advantage.”

  “Heh heh heh... Isn’t it, though? I mean, I’m—” Ranta stopped. “Wait, sacrifice me?! I oughta sacrifice you! Go die!”

  “Also, there’s one more advantage,” Shihoru said, pointing to Haruhiro. “A cautious leader.”

  “Huh?” Haruhiro blinked. Right now, I don’t think I have sleepy eyes.

  “Ha ha! Ahahaha!” Kikkawa, who had been looking depressed all this time, sounded just a little cheerful when he burst into that short laugh. “You can say that again. When we get in our groove and just go boom, boom, boom, we’re invincible, but once we get tripped up, well... we can be pretty weak, you know. Harucchi, your party seems pretty stable. Maybe your lack of enthusiasm is a positive there?”

  “What’s positive about it?!” Ranta hollered, looking ready to puke in distaste. “It’s clearly a negative! He’s a drag! It’s like being at a funeral every day! Try to put yourself in my shoes!”

  “It makes it easy on me.” Kuzaku slowly turned his head.

  “For me, too.” Merry raised one hand.

  “And me.” Shihoru smiled.

  “Yume, too. It’s easy and breezy, and that’s real great, isn’t it?”

  “The only thing breezy is the inside of your head, Yumeeee!” Ranta yelled. “Only you, with your tiny tits, feel that way!”

  “Don’t call them tiny!”

  “If you don’t like it, try rubbing them until they get big!” Ranta hollered.

  “When Yume rubs her boobs, she starts feelin’ all funny, so no!” she shot back.

  “...What, you’ve actually tried rubbing them?” Ranta asked, startled.

  “They’re Yume’s boobs, if Yume wants to rub them, or do anythin’ else to them, that’s Yume’s business,” she snapped back.

  “W-Well, yeah, but that’s not what I meant...”

  “Pervert.” Merry focused an icy glare on Ranta.

  “Deviant.” Shihoru looked at Ranta with blatant contempt.

  It looks like everyone’s starting to get into it.

  Though, in truth, Haruhiro had already thought his presence was one advantage they had.

  Not as a leader, but as an active thief, and as a scout. Haruhiro himself thought that his personality was a good fit for being a thief. He might not be so great in combat, but in exploratio
n or spying, he figured he might be pretty useful.

  Haruhiro’s self-appraisal aside, he was happy to receive praise from his comrades. It helped motivate him.

  “Harucchi.” Kikkawa tapped the back of his gauntleted hand on Haruhiro’s shoulder. “I’ll leave the call on when to retreat to you, and I’ll obey it. For now, you can think of me as one of yours. I may not look it, but I’m pretty useful, you know?”

  “I’ll be counting on you.” Haruhiro punched Kikkawa in the arm. “Okay. I’ll take the lead. Everyone, follow behind me at a distance of around ten meters. The marching order will be Kikkawa, Kuzaku, Ranta, Shihoru, Merry, Yume. Yume, watch the rear for me.”

  “Righty-meow!” she cried.

  Once he had heard Yume’s odd reply, Haruhiro started to walk.

  He set foot in the Dusk Realm.

  The sky that, at first glance, looked like the evening sky, but was actually random colors, hung high above them, and the wind was fairly strong.

  This wind is a bit of a problem, he thought. According to Kikkawa, there weren’t enemies around this first hill today, either. Still, a lack of caution could be the death of us. Those pillar-like white rocks scattered around the grass-covered slope are large enough that a person could easily hide behind them. For those pillar rocks, rather than approach them going straight in one direction, it would probably be better to move left and right to eliminate any blind spots. It’s not easy, but thinking about what I need to do and how to do it as I walk is pretty fun.

  Haruhiro went down the hill at his normal walking speed. When he turned back, Kikkawa nodded and pointed ahead of him.

  Looks like I have the direction right, Haruhiro noted.

  They had left their tents, provisions, and heavy equipment just in front of the entrance to the Dusk Realm. Haruhiro and the others were traveling light.

  Eventually, when the ground leveled out, Haruhiro felt a certain sense of foreboding. He turned back, looking to the top of the hill he had come down.

  Was it needless anxiety?

  There are enemies up the hill. That idea had flashed through his mind, but there were none there. This time, it was my imagination, but it’s far better to wear myself out with unwarranted anxiety than to be careless and let the enemy catch us unaware. I’m gonna take every caution and be overanxious like crazy.