by Mamare Touno
Kanami, who’d wrapped a mantle around herself (although her midriff was still exposed), took the way that was a magnet for all sorts of headaches.
If Leonardo and the others had been able to use a map app to get a bird’s-eye view of the area they were walking through, it would have shown them the northern foothills of the vast mountain range known as Tian Mai. In Earth terms, they were the Tian Shan Mountains, the backbone of Eurasia.
Since they had seen these same mountains to the north while they were in Aorsoi and were now seeing them to the south, they must have cut across them at some point, but Leonardo didn’t remember doing it.
To be accurate, they’d spent over half a month prowling around the sort of mountainous region where dragon-type monsters appeared every two hours, so it wasn’t clear exactly when they’d crossed over to the north.
Hanging around central Eurasia—and the Tian Shan Mountains at that—from autumn to early winter was practically signing up to commit suicide, but Adventurer physical capabilities made that sort of recklessness possible, as did the sloppiness of the world of Theldesia.
Since they’d parted with the merchant Yagudo, their party now consisted of five Adventurers. Because there were no People of the Earth with them, they didn’t really understand what “normal” was. Even if they dug through the snow to make a spot to camp and spent the night there, they could get by with a simple Whoa, that was cold; my snot’s gonna freeze, and so there was no way for them to pick up common sense.
That said, here in the Tian Mai Mountains, they’d reached a People of the Earth Wolf-Fang hamlet and a Mountain Hare village, so he suspected that this whole world might be pretty good at the “survival” game.
Of course, it was also possible the real Tian Shan Mountains were a peaceful place that was bursting with life as well and that, as a New Yorker, he just didn’t know about it.
The world opened up with undulating mounds and troughs.
For a hilly area, the visibility was unbelievably good. Leonardo had lived in the canyons between buildings, and as far as he was concerned, it was terribly unsettling. A single hill-like rise went on for what was probably several kilometers, and others like it spread all through the plains at the foot of a seven-thousand-kilometer-class mountain range.
The scale was too big, and it made him feel as if his senses were going haywire. It seemed more like he’d shrunk than as if he was in an enormous mountain range. Wavy ground, like a messy picture drawn by a child—but it was impossibly gigantic. The land was preposterous.
According to Chun Lu, in summer, this area was absolutely beautiful. Radiant green sprang up all over the black earth and the rocks, and the wasteland became a grassy plain. The bushes that were here and there produced berries, and the thin trees grew thick foliage.
At the moment, it was a monochrome landscape: a wilderness of black dirt and gray rock with dead grass clinging to it, and the occasional white drift of residual snow. However, Leonardo thought, it was a place he’d like to visit during the summer.
And then Coppélia might start feeling romantic… Or maybe not…
Still, reality was heartless, and the party kept trudging across wide-open plateau country coated with lingering snow. There were about ten hours of daylight, and they spent nearly all of it traveling. Then, about every two hours, a dragon or wyvern or roc or flying spirit came along, and they fought it. Even Dorothy never went through trouble like this, Leonardo thought, as if grumbling to himself. Although the Oz he knew was the version in the musical.
In this region, there were no boulders taller than they were, no large thickets, no stands of trees—nothing they could use for cover.
The rolling wasteland went on for as far as they could see.
In a place like that, they couldn’t escape from flying monsters, so there was no way to avoid combat.
In the mythologies of all ages and places, dragons were depicted as powerful mystical beasts, and the world of Theldesia was no exception. Even within their various level demographics, dragons were monsters who were stronger than the rest, and that was true here in Tian Mai as well. They were Party-rank monsters with levels ranging from 86 to 90. If Leonardo and the others put their strength together, they weren’t unbeatable enemies, but they also weren’t opponents they could afford to get careless with. On the contrary, the way they attacked individually, one at a time, made them extraordinarily convenient training partners. However, it didn’t always go so well…
“You’re too far out, Elias.”
“This is nothing!”
Elias charged, slashing with his fairy longsword, Crystal Stream. The fierce torrent canceled out the Dragon Breath, but Elias himself had taken significant damage.
“Whoa, support Eli-Eli!”
“Yes, Master. Reactive Heal, Sacred Wall.”
Coppélia, who was in her work clothes—her steel maid outfit—swung her enormous traveler’s trunk around, casting a recovery spell. A chartreuse light and a pale-pink barrier blocked the flames, simultaneously healing Elias’s wounds.
“And-a-boooom!”
Kanami, who’d issued the order, jumped straight up, slamming a vertical kick into the lower jaw of the dragon, who was above her head. A flame-like effect that was unique to the warrior classes shone, fanning aggro.
However, this sequence of events really had been Elias’s blunder.
The key to combat lay in the division of labor. Elias was an Ancient with a level of 100, but by nature, he was an attacker and buffer. He wasn’t a tank, built to gather monster aggro and concentrate attacks on himself. Maybe it was all right for him to be on the front line, but he wasn’t supposed to take damage head-on.
This was less because there was a risk to his life than because the monster’s aim would lose its focus, disturbing their teamwork.
Is Elias losing his cool? Leonardo thought.
Nobody could have said Leonardo was especially good at getting along with people, so he couldn’t declare it with any confidence, but Elias had been strange lately. Particularly in combat, he seemed to put himself too far out. In the first place, although he was a swordsman, his water attacks were midrange and meant for suppression. Even considered in combination with powerful support abilities, he was a midfield mobile fighter; there was no need for him to be on the front line, and actually, having him there increased the risk for the whole party.
Of course Elias had a variety of attack methods, some of them single, short-range attacks, so he wasn’t saying he shouldn’t run up to the front line, period. However, even so, it seemed to Leonardo that they were lacking their former balance.
“Rrraaaaaaaaagh! Fairy Sword: Ice Burial Array!”
With a roar that seemed fit to burst his throat, countless ice stakes rose from Elias’s great sword, then flew at the fiery dragon. Kanami’s attack had thrown the dragon completely off-balance.
That one attack tipped the situation. Or, rather, it would have been a finishing blow…if Elias hadn’t been the one to strike it.
Leonardo charged in, hugging the ground, then slashed upward from that unnatural position with his blade.
Deadly Dance: He’d polished this technique so much that it formed the core of his battles, and it had evolved even further over the course of their journey. He’d ingrained the technique’s elaborate structure into himself through repetitive practice, and he’d used it to bury Rasfia, the Genius of Necromancy, but that had been the beginning, not the end. On the contrary, at that stage, Deadly Dance had been a hand-to-hand technique loaded with restrictions, one that required him to perform set motions in a set order.
If he had even a slight handicap—for instance, if he couldn’t move his leg, or one arm was paralyzed—he couldn’t chain Deadly Dance together, because he had to strike the proper form. At the time, his technique for activating it back-to-back had been very rough. It was a technique he could only pull off against an opponent who was standing still on flat ground; he’d managed to end a fight with it back the
n because both he and his enemy had been in freefall at the time, and there hadn’t been any way to escape.
However, things were different now. Leonardo had sorted predetermined motions into several dozen categories, put them together, and, designing the way they’d circulate with Open Loop Circulation, made Deadly Dance a more sophisticated technique.
It was an idea he’d had ever since the days when Elder Tales had been a game.
Why had it been an idea, instead of a technique? Because there were high hurdles to making it practical. Explained simply, Open Loop Circulation meant fitting the recast times of multiple special skills together to create one constant attack.
Take Venom Strike, for example. It was an Assassin special skill that inflicted extra damage due to Poison, and its recast-time timer had about twenty-four seconds on it. If you used it once, you had to wait twenty-four seconds before you used it again.
Venom Strike was a core attack for Assassins, and naturally, they had to wait twenty-four seconds after attacking. However, just waiting wouldn’t increase the total amount of damage. If they could use some other special skill during those twenty-four seconds, they’d be able to boost the overall damage.
In that case, specifically what sort of special skill should they choose?
Even if they sandwiched in another special skill—Quick Assault, say—Quick Assault had its own unique cast and recast times. The time it took for two Venom Strikes might be enough for three, or possibly five, Quick Assaults; the division almost never came out neatly.
On top of that, recast time fluctuated based on various conditions. Most high-level equipment had special effects that shortened recast time. It was one thing if they shortened it overall, but more of them shortened the recast times of specific special skills. For Leonardo, the recast time for Venom Strike wasn’t its original 24 seconds; it was a finicky time, 22.15 seconds.
In other words, if a player wanted to master Open Loop Circulation, they had to research and practice these varied, unique combinations and structures, and they needed to factor in their equipment as well.
In addition, even if they learned it, a patch or switching equipment could easily send all that training back to square one. That was why, even among die-hard game junkies, only a handful of players even tried to acquire the technique. Naturally, Leonardo hadn’t mastered it, either. Compared with the amount of work you had to sink into it, its performance was just too bad.
That was what he’d thought back when this was a game.
“Ghkguuuuuh!!”
As Leonardo’s Ninja Twin Flames split its scales, the dragon gave a wet scream that seemed to have gone wrong somewhere.
In this world, things were different.
On this adventure, which was now reality, combat abilities were exceedingly important. Whether they were defending themselves or accomplishing an objective, the core of Adventurer abilities was unmistakably combat.
The long time he’d spent traveling had managed to turn a New York programmer into a pretty competent warrior.
“Not yet!”
Elias launched a follow-up attack, bracing his great sword on his shoulder, but the dragon’s HP bar was draining before his very eyes, approaching zero. Kanami’s multilayered attacks and Leonardo’s lethal serial attacks had turned the dragon’s life into rainbows. The falling meter did nothing more than confirm this after the fact.
He must have noticed that. Looking embarrassed, yet still breathing hard, Elias sheathed his weapon.
“Elias—!”
Leonardo was about to call to him, to tell him he’d gone too far ahead, but he hesitated.
It would have been easy to just yell at him, but even if he could imagine what it was that Elias was feeling anxious about or holding in, he didn’t know the truth of it. Leonardo wasn’t a counselor. In Theldesia, where he couldn’t introduce him to a company doctor, there was no guarantee he could give him any useful advice.
To begin with, Elias was an Ancient.
At this late date, he had no intention of being picky about whether somebody was an NPC or a bot, but even so, Leonardo had been made on Earth, and the circumstances of their birth had been different. Even with his project teammate from El Salvador, things had gotten prickly every time they ate lunch (all the nutjob ate was cabbage), so he had absolutely no idea what to talk about with a companion who’d been raised by fairies.
So, how’s the weather over there? We haven’t seen anything but clouds and fine snow for two weeks over here. Oh, I guess it’d be the same for you, huh…?
Leonardo sighed heavily over his own fantasy.
He was tired, too. He would have liked to go talk to a counselor himself.
The more he thought about it, the more that seemed like the right idea. His project team (in other words, this party) needed a counselor who could keep an eye on their mental health. They had a colleague who was from aristocratic stock, a thoughtlessly optimistic, sales-type leader who’d take on any job, and the group’s one bright spot of femininity (Kanami didn’t count), who Leonardo secretly fancied, considered herself an AI.
No wonder Leonardo’s stomach hurt.
“What’s wrong, Leonardo?”
“Nah… It’s nothing. Elias, do you go to a doctor?”
“My fairy blood keeps me from getting ill. Are you feeling unwell?”
“I think I’m going nuts.”
When Elias had asked him a question, he’d tried asking one of his own instead, but as he’d figured, he hadn’t gotten a meaningful answer. There were no corporate benefit service programs in this savage wasteland.
Elias was his teammate. Still, that didn’t mean he and Leonardo had any shared past. After all, he was an Ancient, not somebody from Earth. Leonardo’s expression twisted; he felt rather pathetic. He couldn’t find anything good to say, and that brought on a pang of loneliness.
I wish I could help him out a little more.
Leonardo’s shoulders slumped, and he sighed.
Thinking that, in the end, it seemed as though he ended up worrying about the same things no matter what world he was in, he thought, Oh, I see. I guess this world really is real, and he felt weirdly convinced.
Elias might not eat tortilla-esque things or salt-and-vinegar pickled cabbage, but he was still a foreigner in Leonardo’s workplace.
Leonardo, who hadn’t ever been able to remember where El Salvador was, couldn’t even figure out whether it or Theldesia was farther away.
6
A night in the wilderness, harsh but clear.
Getting up, Elias slipped out of the tent, which had been woven from the wool of Long-Haired Goats.
At night, temperatures were far below freezing. It got so cold that the moisture that had gotten into fissures in the rocks froze, expanded, and broke the rocks down. That was why there weren’t many big boulders in this wasteland.
Elias’s party had pitched their tent in a basin that would have been just big enough to slide two carts into. As a result, the tent wouldn’t blow away, but once he crawled out of the depression, which came up to his chest, the night wind buffeted him.
The thin, shredded clouds drifted away, and the moon illuminated his surroundings.
It was a desolate sight.
As an Ancient, Elias was a warrior with a sturdy body, and his equipment was also pretty tough against cold air, so it only felt like a cool breeze to him. However, the effective temperature might be close to twenty below.
Behind him, the tent swayed wildly. It wasn’t because trouble had broken out; Kanami had probably gotten rough. Both her noisiness and the way she tossed and turned in her sleep were familiar to him by now, and Elias smiled a little.
Ever since she’d rescued him at Ulster, far in the west, Elias had accompanied her on her journey.
At present, an unprecedented peril was attacking Theldesia. The Catastrophe had destroyed all the rules. At this point, it was probably safe to say that the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders had been wiped out.
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br /> It had been a secret operation of vital importance.
Ultimate destruction was bearing down on the world of Theldesia. Having gained insight into the situation from a Darshana—a “memory of the future,” related to them by the prophet Sumiltimahra—the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders had stealthily concentrated their forces.
The past century and several decades of history had been all for the sake of this operation.
The Geniuses, demons who wielded grotesque powers, and an army of several tens of thousands of their kin had been sealed in the Great Stronghold of the End, but the time when that seal would be lifted was drawing near.
Elias and the rest of the Knights of the Red Branch had been in a magic circle on the outskirts of Londinium, waiting impatiently for the Great Stronghold of the End to open, so that they could go to war.
The Great Stronghold of the End was an enormous magical device meant to seal the Geniuses, but at the same time, it was also the demons’ base, the Cradle. To obliterate them or seal them again, the Knights had to teleport to the Great Stronghold of the End, but for that to happen, the seal had to be open.
The instant the seal on the Geniuses was released, the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders would use the Spatial Teleportation Devices they’d built in each location and storm the Great Stronghold of the End. The Geniuses—only just awakened, unable to grasp the situation or work as a team—would be vanquished. That was the outline of the decisive battle to protect the world, which had been promoted in secret, unbeknownst to the world itself.
The Knights of the Red Branch, who were led by Elias, would serve as the vanguard in this top-secret operation, and they gave their undivided attention to their final inspection of their equipment and the spells that imbued them. Everyone was convinced that the maneuver would succeed. After all, the Thirteen Global Chivalric Orders easily had more than five times the combat power the great attack strategy they’d been given by the prophet Sumiltimahra had called for.