by Mamare Touno
He was echoing the reasons Kanami had given him, verbatim, just after they’d met.
As a matter of fact, you could have called them a flight from a situation in which he was likely to despair, the straw that he’d clung to. However, through their adventures in Thekkek and at Ruined Colonnade Tonnesgrave, Elias had felt it clearly.
A great disaster, unparalleled in history, was about to occur in this world. It was a storm that seemed likely to rewrite the principles of the world he’d believed to be unchangeable.
Elias was convinced that what KR and the others called “the Catastrophe” was no more than the beginning. After all, the defensive operation that Elias and his companions had attempted to execute that night had failed, and terrible beings had invaded the world.
“Yamato has all these new powers. They say many Adventurers there have raised their combat ranks as well.”
“Is that so…? I must relay that tale to the Queen Mother of the West,” the Enchantress murmured.
The night at her back, she then turned and asked Elias, “What are your thoughts on this disturbance, Lord Elias?”
“The Geniuses are the cause,” Elias spit.
Belatedly, Elias realized that that hadn’t been the sort of tone one should use when speaking to women. He was a knight, after all, if an imperfect one. Elias bowed his head. “My apologies. I was irritated.”
However, the Enchantress smiled thinly in the light of the moon, which was now low in the sky. “No, it doesn’t bother me,” she responded generously.
In the midst of an awkward atmosphere, the two resumed their journey through the rocks.
He hadn’t paid any attention to it when he was at the foot of the mountain, but a strong, irregular wind had begun to blow.
Under weather conditions like this, even an Ancient couldn’t afford to leap up carelessly. Both when jumping down and leaping up, he restricted his jumps to his own height.
Dyed with shadow in the cold moonlight, Elias asked, “The Ancients of Zhongyuan… Erm, what happened to them?”
“I wonder. Some fell; some were wounded; some fell asleep.”
The Enchantress’s response was brusquer than he’d expected.
The words had seemed to push him away, and Elias was rather embarrassed, but he thought they might be the woman’s way of setting her feelings in order. She’d probably lost most of her companions.
“I expect we shall meet someday, at the end of an unchanging mission.”
“I see…”
At the word mission, he had no way to respond.
For the Ancients, mission meant a job where they were tasked with orders to use up their lives. These were duties that must be carried out, and they had been engraved on their souls at birth. In a broad sense, all Ancients existed to protect this world and the People of the Earth. Their methods and ways of being differed, but ultimately, that was their objective.
The Ancients occasionally came into conflict with one another, but those situations broke out because their positions and approaches to problem resolution were different, and they were never so bad that they couldn’t talk it out. It allowed Elias to respect and sympathize with Enchantress Youren, who belonged to a chivalric order in a different region.
“~~~~!!”
A few meters above them, they heard a hoarse scream. It seemed to belong to a girl; the dawn wind nearly shredded it, but it echoed clearly in Elias’s ears.
Reflexively, he glanced at Youren. He couldn’t read her expression, shrouded as it was by her veil, but she nodded once, tensely.
“It may be the magus. Take care.”
“Of course!”
Reluctant to spare even the time it would take to respond, Elias sprang into motion like an arrow shot from a bow. Using the branches of a pine as footholds, he mobilized all his muscles, tearing gravity away. Up until a moment ago, he’d been moving at an efficient pace that was considerate toward his partner, but now he threw that consideration to the winds.
There were no subsequent screams, but he knew which way to go.
Behind him, he could sense that the Enchantress was moving as well, and that her speed was several notches higher than it had been before. Apparently, she really couldn’t keep up with Elias’s top speed.
Until just a short while ago, the world had been lit only by stars, but at some point, the darkness had begun separating into jet-black and a subdued indigo. The towering shapes of the mountains were deep-black silhouettes, and the space above them was no longer perfectly dark but instead was shifting into a hue that had a sense of transparency about it.
Here on the Eured continent, the sunlight was golden. It was one thing when it was in the noon sky, but at this hour, as dawn approached, the ridgeline was colored with gold inlay. It was a sight that was utterly different from the sunrise in the mist-covered land of the Ulster Knights Sword Alliance. The plateaus of central Eured may have been desolate, but precisely because of their desolation, they had a bleak beauty.
Elias slashed through that thin, sharp dawn light and leapt over an area where a giant boulder formed a peak. The lone figure of a knight flew into the sight of his strengthened Fairy Eyes.
He looked aristocratic, and he was wearing dark-blue armor.
Even though he stood casually, his incomparable might was palpable.
The magus’s spectacles gleamed in an abnormal way, and he shook the young girl who hung suspended from his hand. Faced with the steely strength of his arm, the petite person’s scream rang out with abject helplessness. The idea that he might be one of the Ancient companions the Enchantress had mentioned vanished from Elias’s mind in an instant.
A magus threatening a girl.
“—D-don’t eaaaaaat meeeeee!”
The moment he heard that scream, Elias ran through space toward the wicked Genius. In response to the excess of mana, his beloved Crystal Stream began to vibrate, resonating, and he gripped it tightly, swinging it down on the evil.
Elias was thinking only of smiting his friends’ enemy, and freeing them.
5
A little while earlier, before dawn, when all signs of morning were still far from the sky:
Krusty was also on Mount Lang Jun, at its peak, walking through the palace garden.
Hua Diao was trotting in front of him. She was short, so when she tried to walk in front of Krusty, whose height was in the 190-centimeter range, she invariably ended up dancing around him. Even so, yesterday’s “vanilla” seemed to have been effective: She spoke to him merrily, with a melting smile.
“They say it smells sweet!”
“They’re right,” Krusty answered. Even as a kid, he hadn’t been all that into desserts, so he couldn’t really relate to the martenfolks’ delirious dances for joy. (Although if someone had asked him, Well, what could you relate to? he would have been at a loss.)
There were no signs of dawn’s approach yet.
They were planning to descend Mount Lang Jun and go shopping in Shimanaikui today. He hadn’t been able to tell how far it was from what Hua Diao had told him, so he’d decided to leave before daybreak. It was also true that the excited martenfolk had been racing around the table, and he’d been steamrolled by their enthusiasm.
Since they were planning to pass through a dungeon overflowing with monsters, Krusty was wearing his Einherjar’s Armor. The full-body, phantasmal armor, which was made of ebony steel, was practically his trademark. Its big, dark-blue silhouette appeared in raid capture videos, and it had always stirred up the emotions of players on the Elder Tales Yamato server. He wasn’t holding a weapon, but aside from that, he’d put on all his partial armor and supplementary protective gear, and he was basically fully equipped. A cloth shopping bag he’d brought from the shrine hung from his shoulder.
Relying on the lamplight from the Bai Tao Shrine behind them and the even fainter starlight, Hua Diao—who was in high spirits—went on, walking straight past the entrance to the cavern, heading toward the edge of the garden.
/> This fairyland was at the peak of Mount Lang Jun.
Similar to Mount Huangshan, the World Heritage site in China’s Anhui Province, the landscape consisted of sheer cliffs, terraced stone ledges, and twisted pines so dark they looked like shadows. Naturally, this miraculously cleared mountaintop garden ended as abruptly as if it had been cut off.
In short, all that lay beyond it was sky: It was a cliff.
“Master Immortal.”
“Hmm.”
“Shimanaikui is that way. In the mornings and evenings, they say they hold a market on their main street. I hear there’s an even bigger market on Sundays. I’m sure they sell sweet things there, too.”
“I bet they do.”
“Thank you in advance.”
With a sunny smile, Hua Diao ducked her head in a bow.
Apparently, this was as far as she meant to take him, and he was expected to jump off the cliff and go shopping. Putting a finger to the tip of his slim jaw, Krusty lowered his cool, scholarly eyes and thought for a moment.
Then he grabbed the collar of the heavenly official—who’d been smiling cheerfully, planning to see him off—lifted her casually, and jumped over the edge.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Trailing a scream she herself wasn’t entirely aware of, Hua Diao plummeted down a cliff face illuminated by the dawn morning star.
Her transformation had come undone from sheer shock, and she kicked and struggled in Krusty’s hand, stunned. Her smooth-furred body was wrapped in a baggy bundle of cloth, and only the obi was cinched tight.
Krusty, who hadn’t even dreamed that she’d change her shape, stuffed the cloth-swaddled otter into his bag. Personally, he didn’t sense any real danger, but if Hua Diao struggled and managed to jump away into empty space, things might get complicated.
Trapped by the bag, Hua Diao flinched and fell silent, as if she’d been startled. But soon she poked her head out, looking around.
Her mouth fell open, and it seemed as if she was about to scream again.
However, to change the trajectory of their fall, Krusty smashed the cliff with his gauntlet, and as if the impact had triggered it, she let out another feline—or possibly avian—shriek.
Even if Krusty was level 93, he couldn’t jump straight off a sheer cliff like this and emerge unscathed. He wasn’t a Monk who’d acquired Feather Fall, or a Magic Attack class who knew Fly.
Krusty’s class was Guardian, and his abilities were built around provocation that drew enemy attacks to him, and heavy-armored defense.
Not only that, but the Soul Darkening Curse, that irreversible bad status, was currently eating away at him. Considering that two of its effects were NATURAL HP RECOVERY IS SUSPENDED and HP MAY NOT BE RECOVERED THROUGH RECOVERY SPELLS, OR THROUGH FACILITIES OR ITEMS, HP recovery was bound to be extremely difficult, if not impossible. In this condition, he should probably avoid taking damage. As a matter of fact, Krusty’s current HP was only half of its maximum.
To that end, Krusty stuck his fist into the cliff wall, using it as an impromptu brake.
With his mass, it wouldn’t be enough to stop him, but his momentum decreased dramatically. His high-level physical abilities gave him astounding kinetic vision as well.
Using the trunk of a twisted pine that grew from a split in the rock as a springboard and shifting to a sideways vector, Krusty aimed something like a flying kick at the rock shelf opposite them, thrusting his armored foot into it.
“Mashter Immortal?”
“What is it?”
Krusty responded to the otter, who was pale with terror and kept opening and shutting her mouth.
“Cloud…?!”
“Cloud.”
Hua Diao’s question had been fragmented into a single word, and Krusty thought about it for a few moments, frowning. Then he realized she probably meant the clouds Immortals rode on when they flew. If he recalled correctly, that was an immortal wizard skill. He thought he’d seen a short story by Pu Songling about it. The martenfolk were under the impression that Krusty was an immortal wizard, so she’d probably thought he’d be able to do something like that as a matter of course.
Now that he thought about it, when Hua Diao had showed him to the cliff’s edge and smiled, she might have meant Take a short trip by cloud from here, go shopping, and come back. The spot had only looked like the edge of the garden to Krusty, but it might have been a dedicated flight platform for Immortals.
Of course Krusty wasn’t an immortal wizard, and he couldn’t use skills like that one.
However, in visual terms, riding a griffin and riding a cloud didn’t look that different. Come to think of it, there had been Immortals who rode large birds, too.
If using auspicious animals such as dragons, tortoises, and cranes as mounts counted as an Immortal skill, then Adventurers were probably qualified to be immortal wizards.
“The cloud is on vacation.”
“Huh?!”
“My cloud works on a three-days-on, four-days-off schedule.”
“What?!”
As she compared that with her own work environment, Hua Diao’s eyes darted around in bewilderment. After making that declaration, Krusty left the cliff, which had partly crumbled into rubble, and jumped lightly down the last five meters.
He’d thought he’d made an extremely careful landing, but his massive full armor clanged heavily. The impression it gave was as violent as a collision, if not as bad as a fall.
“Mashter Immortaaaaaaaal?!”
The otter seemed to be shrieking at every opportunity. Stuffing her back into the bag, Krusty surveyed their surroundings.
The rocky area, which was illuminated by the dawn light, wasn’t the sheer cliff from a moment before.
There were still terraces that were taller than he was here and there, but red-brown dirt peeked through, and he seemed to have reached something that resembled a mountain track. A series of enormous, towering rocks soared into the air like the fairylands, making for the peak of Mount Lang Jun.
“Traveling on foot may be very difficult.”
“I think you’re right,” Krusty murmured. He wasn’t even worried about the return journey.
He’d jumped because it had seemed like less work, but he could have crouched and gone down a cliff like this one as well. That meant he’d also be able to climb back up. If it looked as though it just wasn’t going to work out, he’d just summon his griffin. Since they were on different servers, he wasn’t positive it would come, but he did have the summoning whistle in his Magic Bag.
“We haven’t brought a lunch, you know…”
Hua Diao asked her question timidly, in a voice as if she were looking for instructions. “We’ll eat out somewhere when we get there,” Krusty responded.
“We may find some sort of wonderful food!”
As usual, the otter’s mood had brightened promptly. Holding the bag with her inside it, Krusty began his descent, sometimes leaping over the gaps between rocks, sometimes detouring around them. It was the first time he’d tried it, and he thought this bag maneuver wasn’t bad. He didn’t know what Hua Diao’s physical abilities were like, but if she could stay in the bag like this, carrying her was a lot less work.
Hua Diao had begun asking what they’d find in town and saying that if there was sausage she wanted to have that. She was so cheerful it was hard to believe she’d been screaming just a little while ago.
“It really is all about food with you people, isn’t it? Are you sure you’re heavenly officials?” Krusty asked, secretly a little disgusted. Weren’t they just marten officials, rather than heavenly officials?
“I told you, we’re heavenly officials,” she replied. “If a person gives up their desires, they can become an immortal wizard. Since you are already an immortal wizard, Master Immortal, you aren’t interested in beautiful women like Enchantress Youren or beautiful girls like me, and even when you eat delicious food, it doesn’t make you smile. It’s amazing, but to be honest, I’m not jealous.”
“Ah.” Krusty gave a noncommittal response.
He didn’t really know whether Enchantress Youren was beautiful or not. It wasn’t because she hid her eyes behind that thin silk; he could tell that her appearance was generally attractive, but she didn’t have that decisive feeling that would have marked her as beautiful. Her presence was suspicious. Krusty’s opinion of the woman was that she was like part of the scenery.
Of course, she probably had goals or plans of some sort, but they all felt “borrowed,” somehow. There didn’t seem to be anything she could do on her own; she had no decisive will. Or was it possible that she didn’t even have any strong desires? If she was like that, she wouldn’t be able to make anything happen regardless of who for and, in Krusty’s opinion, might as well have been dead to begin with.
As for Hua Diao being a beautiful girl, when he thought about it in earnest, he didn’t have much reason to deny it. She was shaped like a girl, so there was no problem with calling her one, and Krusty didn’t have the sort of life experience that would have allowed him to tell a beautiful otter from an ugly one. If she claimed to be a beautiful girl, his only thought was Hmm. Is that so?
However, in her case, her motives were almost entirely focused on delicious food (particularly sweets). Even if she was a beautiful girl, there was no point to it. Her abilities weren’t connected to the world.
Of course, that didn’t mean they were bad people.
Only a minority of humans were connected to the world—those individuals who tried to accomplish something based on their wills or goals, subsequently worked to acquire abilities, and consequently managed to influence their surroundings. Shiroe, the inveterate worrier who’d established the Round Table Council, was a good example. The rewards of making that choice were slight; the demands from those around him only grew, and as a result, he was forced to shoulder even more trouble. Ordinary people understood this, so they didn’t choose lives in which they’d have to make big decisions.
Krusty almost began to wonder where he fell on the spectrum, but he immediately abandoned the idea.