Chapter I: Day-to-day Life I
A few days had passed, and once Kohaku had finally been freed from cuddle-hell, the tiger suddenly said it wanted to explore the town a little. I decided to tag along, too.
We left the inn and walked down the main street. Once we got out in the open, we decided to head for the marketplace, since there were always loads of different kinds of people around there.
The marketplace always had a bunch of stalls and mats out selling all kinds of things, from food and sundries to clothes or antiques. We walked in among that crowd as I let my eyes wander from stall to stall, idly searching for any good bargains.
«It really is quite crowded here.»
«Well, we are in the town center. When you’re looking to get something for cheap, this is typically the place everyone comes to.» Kohaku and I were able to converse without other people hearing. A summoner was mentally connected to their contracted beast, and as such, we could communicate our thoughts through something akin to telepathy. I was really glad to learn this, since if people caught me talking to a tiger in the middle of the street they’d probably think I’d lost my mind.
Although Kohaku had taken a cub’s form, a tiger was still a tiger, and tigers typically stood out when taken around in public. That said, the most that would ever really happen was people looking on from a distance as though they’d just passed some people filming a scene for a movie or something. Nobody ever overreacted to the sight at all, and every now and then some kids or girls would come up and pat Kohaku on the head.
We had decided that Kohaku should take on the form of a cub when other people were around. Because of that, Kohaku would sometimes make purring noises when being petted, to the great delight of any girls present, leading to further cuddly torture. Just when I’d finally freed my tiger from our own party’s female captors, poor Kohaku had to put up with yet more attacks from all directions. Watching the sight made even me feel bad...
That said, there really were a lot of people around. I had to make sure I wouldn’t get separated from Kohaku. Though we could’ve just used our telepathy to find each other in no time, it’d still be better if it didn’t have to come to that.
While we probably wouldn’t have gotten separated anyway, I decided to pick Kohaku up and carry the little fuzzball around. Didn’t want the poor thing accidentally getting kicked while weaving in and out of the huge crowd. Kohaku tried to resist at first, but eventually calmed down and rested in my arms.
As we were walking, Kohaku suddenly looked up and to the right, as if catching notice of someone.
«My lord, is that not Yae over there?»
«Hm?» I lined my sight up with Kohaku’s, and sure enough, I found Yae crouching down, trying to cheer up a 4-year-old girl who was sobbing away in front of her. They were at the end of the street, out of the way from the hustle and bustle of the crowd.
“Hey Yae, what’s up?”
“Touya-dono? And Kohaku, too?” Yae seemed relieved to see us. It was rare to see her make an expression like that. What’s wrong here, I wonder...
“Who’s this girl?”
“I’m not quite sure, but it seems as though she’s lost, it does.” A lost kid, huh... I wasn’t surprised considering the size of the crowd. I scanned the crowd from left to right, and suddenly felt that finding this girl’s parents could prove to be quite the challenge.
“Excuse me, what’s your name?”
“Waah... mommy... I want my mommy... aaah...” No good. She was so upset she couldn’t even tell me her name. I had to calm her down if I wanted to find out anything from her.
“I have tried to ask her for her name and personal details, but my attempts have borne no fruit, none at all.” Yae frowned as she spoke. Hmm... gotta make her talk somehow.
I lifted up Kohaku in my hands and held the tiger cub in front of the crying little girl. The girl was startled into silence for a moment, but her expression quickly twisted into one on the verge of tears once more. I transmitted a mental order to Kohaku.
“What is your name, child?” Kohaku began talking to the young girl. The girl, who had until that point been doing nothing but crying, suddenly stopped at the sight of a talking tiger cub. She blinked and rubbed her eyes several times as if she was trying to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.
“What might be your name?”
“...L-Lim...”
“I see. So your name is Lim.” The little girl gulped and nodded in response. Alright, the Kohaku distraction plan was a success. Pretty much anyone would be completely taken aback if a white tiger cub started talking right in front of them. Next up, the search begins.
“[Search]: Lim’s Family.” I cast [Search], which was easily one of my most useful Null spells. It was capable of finding anything I specified, but only within a radius of fifty meters... and this was one of the times it failed me. That meant that the girl’s parents weren’t anywhere close.
“Did you find anything, then?”
“Nope. Not a trace. All I learned was that they’re not anywhere within fifty meters of here.” Hm, what to do... I could always walk around with [Search] activated and hope they come within 50 meters of me... Man, the short range on this thing is super inconvenient...
Oh... there’s a thought. I wouldn’t be able to tell if someone was a member of Lim’s family at a glance. That may have been why my [Search] spell wasn’t reacting. The fact that I couldn’t tell whether something just wasn’t there or if the spell was simply failing to react to it was another one of the spell’s shortcomings. I simply couldn’t grasp what sort of standards it operated by.
That time I found the poison using my [Search] spell, I don’t think I would’ve been able to identify it as poison at a glance, but had I ingested any of it, I would’ve been able to tell immediately that I had been poisoned. Why did that cause it to react? That time I went looking for vanilla, too, I could tell that it was what I was looking for because it smelled like vanilla... I simply couldn’t detect any pattern to it.
Thinking about it in a very rough sense like that, I could ask the person in question if they were the one I was trying to locate with [Search], and they could lie to me, meaning I wouldn’t recognize them. Maybe that was why it wasn’t working...
I decided I needed more information, so I motioned to Kohaku once more.
“With whom did you come here?”
“...My mommy.”
“What color clothing was your mother... er, your mommy wearing?”
“Umm... they were green.” Thanks to Kohaku, we got a lot of information from the girl. Lim’s mother had long, light brown hair, was wearing green clothes and a silver bracelet, had blue eyes, and was fairly thin. I had enough information to form a vague image of her in my mind. Now if I saw anyone matching the description, I would probably think “This person could be Lim’s mother,” or something along those lines. I tried casting the spell once more.
“[Search]: Lim’s Mother.” ...But there were no hits. My efforts were in vain.
“Did it work this time, perhaps?” I shook my head in response. It seemed like the problem really was the hopelessly short range of the spell. It would’ve been extremely useful if it was the size of, say, the map app as it appeared on my smartphone’s screen. Was there anyone who could create a [Search] app for me?
...Wait a minute.
My map app, and my [Search] spell... Should I try? Well... it’s worth a shot at least. I pulled my smartphone out of my pocket.
“[Enchant]: [Search].” I attempted to infuse the [Search] spell into my phone using [Enchant]. A tiny light left my fingertip and flowed into my smartphone’s screen. Onl
y one way to find out if it worked... I fired up my map app and focused it on the area nearby with myself at the center. I zoomed out so that the map covered not only the marketplace, but all of Reflet, then entered the words “Lim’s mother” into the search bar. A single arrow appeared on the screen indicating that my target was located there.
“Wow, it actually worked!” Lim, who had been cuddling Kohaku, jumped back a little at my sudden outburst, but it didn’t seem like I’d frightened her to tears, which was good.
I stood up and lightly patted Lim on the head.
“Let’s go get you back to your mommy, yeah?” Off we went to the place the map pointed to.
“Mommyyy!”
“Lim!” I felt an indescribable sense of relief at seeing the little girl reunited with her mother after several hours of being lost. We found Lim’s mother at the town guard’s station. It was something like a police box, I figured. Which, honestly... meant the whole thing would’ve been over if we’d just made the sensible decision to take the girl to one of the town’s guards and explain that she was lost. It had taken longer than it should have to sort the ordeal out, but I managed to gain quite the useful little thing from it.
Yae and I bowed our heads slightly as we saw off the mother and daughter, Lim happily waving her hand as they walked away.
“Hey Yae, there’s something I wanna test out. Could you play along with me for a bit?”
“Hm...? I do not mind, not at all, but what might it be...?” I took Yae to Aer’s cafe, Parent, and then asked her a number of questions while we placed our orders.
The questions were about Yae’s home. I asked her to describe to me everything about its appearance from the outside, the layout of the rooms, how the family dojo was set up, all as detailed as possible. I also learned that they had a pet dog, that there were sakura trees in their garden, and even of the scratches on a wooden post where Yae would compare her height with her older brother.
Having derived what I figured would be enough information, I fired up my map app and input the [Search] spell, trained fully on Yae’s house. In response, a small arrow showed up pointing to the far east of the continent, at a specific location in Eashen.
I zoomed in on where the arrow was pointing. Oedo, in Eashen. Somewhere in the east of that area... A place called Hashiba.
“Okay, Yae, tell me if I’m right or not. Is your house in a place called Hashiba, in the east of Oedo? Somewhere with a shrine nearby.”
“That’s absolutely correct, it is, but... how could you possibly know this much, I must ask?” Yae gave me a startled look, and I learned that the experiment was a success. I had gained a search engine that functioned with a global range. Finally, a more useful application of that spell.
I had never been able to locate people or animals or the like on my map before, but my map app had been upgraded with a brand new function. Still, I needed to know quite a lot about what I was searching for in order to narrow the results down with any degree of precision.
When I explained all of those facts to Yae, she asked me if I could test it out by searching for her brother. I asked several questions about her brother and learned that he had a peculiar scar on his cheek, which made narrowing the results down pretty easy.
“Looks like he’s in the dojo. He’s moving around a lot in there, so he might be in the middle of a match.”
“That very much sounds like brother, indeed.” I handed over the smartphone to Yae so she could see the screen better, and she smiled as she gazed at the little arrow that was her brother.
“My brother is a rather gentle person by nature, you see, but he becomes completely different when holding a sword, he does. He gets so entranced with his swordplay that he has, on occasion, completely forgotten to eat anything at all, he has.” Yae talked away quite happily about her brother. All the while, she continued to gaze at his little arrow on the screen with a look that said she wanted to see him again.
“Sounds like you’re really close to your big brother, huh?”
“...Indeed, that may be so. I do love my strong, kind, good-natured older brother, I do.” I could tell even from how she spoke that Yae must’ve been very close to him.
“Come to think of it, you somewhat resemble my older brother, you do, Touya-dono. For instance, your gentle attitude and kind-hearted nature.”
“Well, it’s quite the honor to be compared to the big brother you love so much.” I shrugged and drank my water. There was no way my swordsmanship was on the level of Yae’s big brother, so she must have just meant that I had a similar personality to him.
“That’s correct. You are very much like the older brother I love so... much...?” Yae drifted off mid-sentence. She raised her face from the smartphone’s screen and met my eyes with her own. Her face turned beet-red in an instant and she suddenly grew all flustered.
“I-It is not like that, yes?! I meant only to say that Touya-dono resembles my older brother, not that I love you as I do my older brother, b-but that does not mean I dislike you, it does not, only that, umm... yes, right! My older brother is family, and I love him like family! It’s a familial kind of love... Love?! N-Not in that sense, of course, not at all! You understand, of course, yes?!” Yae suddenly spewed forth something resembling human language, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was saying. I simply thought that it was nice that she loved her big brother like that.
“Thanks for waiting. I’ve brought your order!” Someone brought out a large tray covered in a great amount of light foodstuffs, most of which Yae had ordered, and set it down before us. Yae, her face still bright red, began wordlessly munching away at the snacks in front of us. She really did go through food at an astonishing pace...
I figured she was probably just embarrassed to have found herself admitting to someone else that she loved her big brother dearly. I decided to keep my stirring suspicions of her brother complex to myself, though, in order to save her further embarrassment.
◇ ◇ ◇
I returned to the Silver Moon Inn and went straight back to my room. There was something I wanted to try out.
I had learned that I could enchant specific spells into the apps on my phone, so it was likely that I could do more with that.
For example, the spell [Long Sense], which allowed me to project all five of my senses across great distances. What if I were to enchant that into my phone’s camera app?
“[Enchant]: [Long Sense].” I tried testing it out. When I fired it up, what filled the camera was not what was on the other end of its lens, but instead a perfect capture of what I was seeing with my own field of vision. I tried manipulating the field of vision it reflected by moving my own “sight” into the room next door. I sent my vision further yet until it reached Linze’s room. Linze herself wasn’t there. The room appeared to be vacant. Just then I remembered her saying that she was going shopping with Elze.
Gazing down at the smartphone’s screen with my physical body, I could see Linze’s room on the camera. It was a weird feeling, having two sets of eyes trained on the same place. It was like looking at something in a game displayed on both an upper and lower screen. My real eyes and my projected eyesight.
I pressed the button on my phone to take a picture... and it worked. Didn’t expect that. The photo that the camera had taken was of the inside of Linze’s room.
I could now take clear photos of things from great distances away. I could even sneak my vision in and take photos of the inside of a perfectly locked room. In fact, it was highly likely that I could record videos using this method, too.
Right on that note, I heard a door opening and focused my vision toward it. Linze had returned. That probably meant that Elze was back, too.
While my thoughts idly drifted in that direction, Linze began taking her clothes off. She removed her top and started unbuttoning her blouse. Her beautiful, pale skin suddenly filled the whole of my vision.
W-Whoa there, hold on a sec?! Not good, very not good! I should’
ve noticed sooner, but all I’ve done with this spell is turn myself into a peeping tom! I shut off my [Long Sense] as quickly as I could react.
That was a close one... Any longer and I would’ve been able to see... everything...? Darn, it really was so close, too... No! No no no, no! If anyone ever found out about that incident, I’d lose everyone’s trust right away. I had to avoid that at all costs. Trust was hard enough to gain the first time around, but losing it once would only make it even harder to gain back. I made the right decision...! At least, I liked to believe so. No, wait a minute... Even if I’d just kept watching like that, it’s not like anybody would have found out... Right...? Hmm...
“...Touya, are you in?”
“Y-Yes?! Wh-Whatever could be the matter?!” My internal conflict was interrupted by Linze’s voice and a couple of knocks from the other side of my room’s door. I hurriedly shoved my smartphone back into my pocket, then opened the door slowly and Linze’s face came peeking through. She was wearing different clothes now.
“Ah...? Is something the matter?”
“N-Not at all! Why, whatever might have given you that idea?! N-Now that’s cleared up, can I help you with shomeshing?” I bit my tongue. I really needed to calm myself down.
“Today, at an antique store, I found this and bought it, and umm...” Linze presented a rolled up object to me. It was some kind of wrapped wooden tube containing a parchment. I looked it over, and it was written in a language I’d never seen before.
“So, what is it?”
“I believe it’s a magic scroll, but it’s written in Ancient Magic Script, so I can only read a small part of it...” Ah... that explained why she brought it to me.
First, I took an empty glass from atop a table and some silver coins from my wallet. Next, I cast [Modeling] on the items and transformed them into a pair of glasses. I used my magic to enchant the glasses with the ability to read Ancient Magic Script. Thus, I completed the process of creating my Perfect Translation Glasses.
In Another World With My Smartphone: Volume 2 Page 1