by Mamare Touno
“Mew’re aiding them!”
“So what?”
Rondarg waved a hand, and five spheres of light appeared. Impatience Bolt cut between the caster and Nyanta, emitting tiny arcs of lightning. It was a defensive Sorcerer spell that would automatically retaliate against any close-range attack. Sorcerers were almost never on the front lines, so this wasn’t an important spell for them, but its force was comparably large, and it could serve as the starting point for player-versus-player tactics.
Nyanta’s left arm was smacked away and went numb.
He should have been able to avoid that attack, but an impulse he hadn’t been able to control had driven him forward.
“Many People of the Earth will be lost!”
“It’s what they want. They’re fighting because they want to.”
“Mew could head it off before it starts.”
“Haven’t seen a quest like that around here, Swashbuckler!”
Nyanta struck down Rondarg’s Frost Spear and Burned Stake the moment they were unleashed. Nyanta, who fought with twin rapiers, was among the fastest of the Swashbucklers at sensing activations and interrupting the chants; he was particularly good it. However, at the same time, his own biggest skills had been sealed. Rondarg was trying to shut down Nyanta’s mobility with Astral Bind, which meant he couldn’t use any finishing skills that would leave him wide open.
Even so, ordinarily, Nyanta would have been able to use calm, clever countertechniques to make the match go his way, and he sensed a bitter immaturity in the fact that he couldn’t do it now. His rising emotions were disturbing his control more than he’d anticipated.
“So mew can’t do it without a quest, Rondarg?!”
“Silence, hypocrite. I—I— This world didn’t invite me.”
A cry of bitter grief rang out.
Rondarg, who still wore that shallow, apathetic smile, was crying.
“Look. This world didn’t send me an invite. I’m not needed. Did you get asked, ‘Do you want to go to another world? Yes/No’? Did you choose? I didn’t. I just got pulled in here; nobody asked me. I didn’t get a choice, and I wasn’t welcomed, either. You people were invited, right? That’s why you can be so laid-back, right?!”
“No. Not a single one of us was ‘invited.’”
“I don’t care how it was for you. At the very least, though, I wasn’t asked. I got dragged into this world; it didn’t matter what I wanted. The world didn’t care what I thought; it just tried to use me for its own ends… And so I’m going to use it however I want. Am I wrong, Swashbuckler?!”
A fireball burst into existence. It split into two, then four, then flew at Nyanta with a groaning howl. Nyanta intercepted the attack spell with a throwing card he’d taken from his coat. The silver scrap of iron punched through the fireballs, blocking three of them, but the remaining one made it to Nyanta’s slim swords and scarred them.
You’re wrong.
He wished he could tell him that. Nyanta wielded his rapiers, feeling as if he were being crushed. He slashed through Rondarg’s howling, raging spells and knocked them away, but although this was a fight he should have been able to win hands down, its end was a long ways away.
Rondarg wasn’t wrong. At least in Rondarg’s world, he wasn’t wrong. Even burning with anger as he was, Nyanta understood that. That was what was tearing him apart.
Rondarg’s rage and howls were justified. Rondarg was a victim, and that situation should be rectified. The Adventurers who wanted to return to their old world should have their wish granted promptly and should be compensated.
Of course, it couldn’t possibly be all right for Rondarg to hurt other people or trample on their rights in order to make his own wish come true. Those were the rules of society. However, that society itself hadn’t invited Rondarg. At the very least, he said it hadn’t.
Rondarg was admitting that he wasn’t a participant in this society.
Rondarg was an outsider. He was an outsider to everything there was.
Here, Rondarg was at war with the world. Since he was fighting a war, he thought it didn’t matter what he did to the world, and he wasn’t wrong. It was easy to say that ethics should be observed even in war. However, if asked whether the Catastrophe had acted ethically as far as Rondarg was concerned, the only answer was the bare fact that it hadn’t. In other words, he only wanted fairness: Ethics had been ignored in his case, so he would ignore ethics in return.
There were many Adventurers in this world who harbored the same pain, and they were the ones the town of Akiba had averted its eyes from. Rondarg’s pain was something Nyanta had felt once, something all Adventurers had experienced. In fact, he couldn’t object to his anger.
If someone who thought like that had existed on Earth, if an individual there had considered themselves at war with society, society would probably have been able to use physical force to suppress them. It could use its police force to apprehend, restrain, and imprison them. Depending on the situation, the army might be mobilized. After all, their revenge would be the equivalent of terrorism.
By doing this, society could hand down some sort of punishment. However, the punishment would be “elimination.” It wasn’t the absolute justice of society that made this possible. Society could eliminate individuals with violence only because it had greater numbers; in simple terms, because it was strong, because it could fight.
This didn’t absolve the world of its sin in forcing injustice on an individual without their consent.
“…It’s the same for everyone.”
Nyanta had lowered his swords, and Rondarg’s air disturbance spell Turbulence leapt at him.
Rondarg was frightened and desperate, and his attack sliced into Nyanta.
However, Nyanta couldn’t bring himself to block it, or to return the slash.
It wasn’t that his anger had disappeared. Enough sorrow had enveloped him, surpassing his rage, and all that remained was a crushing pain.
Nyanta couldn’t solve Rondarg’s problem. It was likely that no one could.
It would be possible to eliminate Rondarg with violence, but Nyanta couldn’t believe that to be just.
There had been meaning in rescuing Serara. It was probably lucky that he’d been able to confront the Briganteers in Susukino while he was shielding her. It had meant that Nyanta and his companions had been able to get by without really looking at Rondarg face-to-face. Even now, Nyanta’s Log Horizon comrades were at his back. Because he knew this, he kept desperately searching for words that would reach the man.
5
“Rondarg… It’s the same for everyone.”
In a fight, he could win. He could send Rondarg to the temple, and he could wipe out ten or twenty black spirits. However, that would be a kind of defeat. That awareness was slowly stealing into Nyanta, awakening a pain so great he wondered where his desiccated heart had been hiding it.
And so he frantically searched for words that could reach him.
He thought of Touya. He thought of Minori. He thought of Isuzu and Rundelhaus.
His thoughts went to the children of the Crescent Moon League.
Serara’s bashful expression rose in his mind…
Nyanta remembered all of his young companions.
“It happens to all children, Rondarg. As far as they’re concerned, people, or at least children, are all brought into life unfairly.”
Thin lightning bound Nyanta’s arms like briars. His HP bar was falling.
He didn’t have much time left, and there were only a few words he could get out.
Nyanta knew that those few words probably wouldn’t reach Rondarg. It would take a miracle to get a message like that through to someone in pain, and unfortunately, Nyanta was only a powerless commoner who was unable to work miracles.
“There are parents who will tell them, ‘Mew were born because we loved mew.’ Those are very mewtiful words. However, they’re nothing more than self-satisfaction on the part of the parents. They can’t over
turn the fact that the children weren’t asked for their consent before being dropped into the world. Some children are saved by them, but others are not… All people receive life that way. In this world, and in our old world, and in every world!”
So tough it out.
He couldn’t say that.
Even if it was suffering that everyone experienced, each separate instance of that suffering was an original, something felt only by that particular person. If someone had said that to Nyanta when he was drowning in pain, he would have responded with his fist, just as Rondarg was doing now. In addition, Rondarg wasn’t the only one raising a fist.
In that sense, this world was filled with sorrow.
Rondarg couldn’t be judged by the laws of the People of the Earth. The laws of the Adventurers couldn’t do it, either. Rondarg hadn’t agreed to participate in either group.
To Rondarg, his own injury and destruction were outside his sphere of interest. Nyanta felt as if he understood that pain. When people lose someone important to them, they lose the world. Nyanta had managed to regain it, but it had taken a long time. He’d also been lucky.
“Kill me, Swashbuckler! It doesn’t matter if you do it. Death doesn’t exist here. I’ll never end, and even if you can preach at me, you can’t conveniently exile me. Am I wrong?!”
He wasn’t wrong.
That was certainly one possible ending.
There was an abyss in front of Nyanta, a divide. Rondarg’s irresponsible, careless attitude was directed at the whole world. He’d decided he wasn’t a resident of the place any longer. As a result, he didn’t care what happened to himself or it. Of course, to keep his body alive, and to kill time, Rondarg had to do something, and he called those things quests. He’d decided the world was “that sort of place.” For that reason, Nyanta’s words probably wouldn’t reach him.
However, even if this was the truth as far as Rondarg was concerned, the world held other things. All worlds did.
Nyanta finally realized the true identity of this twisting pain.
Rondarg’s suffering and curse were things all Adventurers could experience. Even Nyanta and Shiroe weren’t exceptions. Not even Minori and Touya, Rundelhaus and Isuzu, or Serara, a girl like a place in the sun.
Nyanta had been searching for words to say to Rondarg, but that hadn’t been all. The root of Nyanta’s pain lay in wondering what he would be able to do for his precious young friends if they were possessed by a similar curse. It was a real possibility. Any Adventurer could become a Rondarg. That was why Nyanta wanted to save him. He wanted him to be saved.
He remembered Minori. That solemn little girl had resolved to follow in Shiroe’s footsteps. Touya’s resolution was to protect his sister, and Rundelhaus’s was to become an Adventurer.
Young people were reborn.
Children who’d been brought into this world unfairly, by force, became young people and resolved to be born again voluntarily.
They carved their identities on their hearts, were born a second time of their own accord, and began to walk into their own lives as infants. It was a sacred contract, and it had been made by a succession of people. It had linked people together, all the way to the present.
In order to protect that, Nyanta thought, he wouldn’t mind turning himself into ashes. He would have done absolutely anything for Rondarg, if doing so meant the man would understand that.
After all, even Shiroe, someone Nyanta liked very much, had concluded that sort of contract and ended up with his own guild.
However, his wish was in vain. The staff Rondarg brandished emitted a flood of unlimited mana, and half-crazed magic that had abandoned both aggro and control swelled and grew.
Then, just before it engulfed Nyanta, it vanished.
“‘Screech, screech, screech.’ Talk about noisy.”
The military saber that had impaled Rondarg’s neck from the back slid out of it again, and a red-haired woman appeared from behind him. Her eyes were narrowed in a smile. Her expression was cruel and bewitching, filled with joy, yet simultaneously like steel.
Rondarg’s bloodshot eyes rolled in their sockets. As his body collapsed, he looked up at the woman and seemed to mutter something, but the words came out as a welter of bloody foam.
The woman looked just a little surprised. As if to prove that the surprise was artificial, her face crumpled, and she spoke downward at Rondarg. “My, my. A message?” There was a viscous, bubbling sound. “Ah, that’s a shame,” she told him. “That’s not a language I know.” Kicking him out of her way, she gazed steadily at Nyanta.
The way she giggled softly, even though there was no telling what was funny here, seemed to warn of deep abnormality.
“Aren’t Adventurers great? You can kill and be killed all you want.”
“Why—?”
“Huhn? …Oh. I just shut him up for a bit. It’s nothing—just like sending him into the next room. Isn’t that right? For you Adventurers, anyway.”
“No!”
Nyanta had shouted it, but he couldn’t prove it.
Rondarg, whom he’d failed to persuade. The People of the Earth woman who’d killed him.
In this world, where death did not separate everything, what “wasn’t right”?
“Whoops, beg pardon. I’m Mizufa Trude, ‘the General Who Dominated the East.’ I’m the field commander here.”
She was gorgeous, bursting with vitality.
Her tall, toned body was wrapped in a military uniform, and the saber she held was wet with blood. He was forced to admit that there was a certain beauty about her, although it wasn’t the sort you’d find in a painting. She had looks that might have earned her the envy of the lovely princesses of Eastal, but she warped them with a coarse smile and blocked Nyanta’s way, her attitude suggestive.
“So mew are Rondarg’s client. Is this how the People of the Earth do things?”
Nyanta felt as if his body was enveloped in white flames. He couldn’t hold back his hostility.
In all likelihood, it would have been impossible to persuade Rondarg. Even so, it felt as though the woman in front of him had stripped him of that chance. His irritation was a bit like self-reproach, and it was merciless.
“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Still talking in your sleep this late in the game… People of the Earth? Adventurers? It doesn’t matter.”
Nyanta was gritting his teeth, and Mizufa smiled at him, her voice beguiling.
“Everyone that’s born into this world uses the cards they’re dealt to kill each other. The strong use their strength as a weapon. The weak use their weakness.”
With that smile still on her face, almost as if this were routine for her, Mizufa slashed at him. As Nyanta parried the saber, his expression twisted in surprise. It was heavy. From the force behind it, it was hard to believe this was a Person of the Earth’s sword.
“You’re questioning domination and military rule? You don’t even die.”
“Why do mew want war?!”
He thought of Shiroe. Of that clumsy young man’s dream.
Nyanta’s guild master’s oblique goodwill had probably predicted this fight. Shiroe’s insight was correct. Too correct. So much so that even their very best attempts hadn’t been enough to prevent it.
“I’ll burn my own life with the alcohol of war. Dance, undead Adventurer!”
“Viper Slash!!”
He’d intuitively understood the meaning of the word.
Undead.
Since they didn’t die, the People of the Earth didn’t even consider them living creatures.
The name was ominous, but Nyanta couldn’t deny it.
He couldn’t tell her she was wrong, either.
However, that had no bearing on the battle. Like a poisonous snake hunting its prey, the Swashbuckler’s sword techniques slipped through Mizufa’s guard, slashing the top of her shoulder open. Nyanta was a veteran swordsman. He was also burning with fury. He had no intention of forgiving this soldier, female or not.
&nbs
p; But Mizufa paid no heed to the blood that dripped from her wound like rose petals. She held her saber at waist level, thrusting and swinging, pressing Nyanta hard.
“Odysseia’s in that town! That band of suicidal cretins. Spoiled little brats who’ve gone crazy from homesickness. Don’t you worry, they’ll spread death around for you!”
“Why?!”
“No need to ask for reasons. If people get stabbed, they die. Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! This is amazing! Fantastic! I just might fall for that keen sword of yours. There’s no intent to kill in your blade, though!”
“Are mew proud of that? Of having the intent to kill?!”
Lightning sketched a lacy pattern in midair.
Striking the line of the blade up again and again, burning with white rage, Nyanta aimed for the base of Mizufa’s throat. Early Thrust, launched as a follow-up attack, had already knocked the woman off balance.
When the world had gone still for the decisive blow, the clash was halted by the hilt of a sword, still in its plain wooden sheath.
With a deeply troubled expression, the long-haired man who’d come between Nyanta and Mizufa sent both of them flying.
6
A flock of wyverns were attacking the towns on the plain.
It was probably one of the residents’ and administrators’ nightmares.
As a rule, if an attack on a town or other residential center was predicted, considered in terms of damage to living spaces and production bases, the best plan was to get as far away from the town as possible and counterattack from a remote location.
Even if they managed to drive them off and there was no direct damage to humans, if the town and its surroundings took damage, it was very likely that the indirect damage would harm their ability to live normally. In the world of Theldesia, with its medieval methods of food production, damage to the production bases could prove to be fatal. Therefore, town walls were a medieval wisdom, intended to protect living spaces from external enemies.
However, there were situations when this wasn’t possible.