by Mamare Touno
The current wasn’t fast, so the sound of the water wasn’t harsh on the ears. On the contrary, it echoed quietly in the enormous cavern, turning into soothing background noise.
Kanami, who’d been walking in the lead, turned around several times, going slower than usual. He’d thought she might be worried about Coppélia, but apparently, that wasn’t it. Her gestures were comical: She put a hand to her chin in an odd motion and held her head. She didn’t look as if she was having trouble with anything, but Leonardo realized that she was, and so he wondered:
“Kanami, are you worried about Elias?”
“Uh-huh.”
Kanami nodded like a little kid, and Leonardo felt mildly annoyed. “If you’re going to worry, you didn’t have to go out of your way to leave him there, y’know.”
It was true that he wouldn’t have been able to go in with them, but in that case, they could have at least tried a few other ways. If there was no other way, and they’d had to make him stay behind, then they could have taken their time, camped for the night, and talked him into it.
“Mmm… The thing is, the face Eli-Eli was making was kind of scary.”
As she spoke, Kanami kicked a rock by her feet, hard. Her answer startled him.
“It was sort of like…he wanted to fight, maybe? Or maybe take stuff out on himself? That kind of face. So I thought it would be better if he stayed behind. Besides, there’s just no way heading into a dark cave with a face like that could be a good thing.”
Kanami spun around lightly, pulling Coppélia into the conversation with a single word: “Right?”
However, Coppélia only answered in her ordinary tone of extreme calm. “Coppélia doesn’t really know, Master.”
For his part, unlike Coppélia, Leonardo was feeling something very close to shock.
He hadn’t thought that Kanami—who seemed like the sort of miraculous creature you’d get if muscles and reflex nerves acquired intelligence—would be considerate of others and try to resolve issues this way.
He’d thought that this Kanami-being could do nothing but cause unforeseen trouble.
Kanami just might have evolved.
…Amazing.
“Hey, Kanami.”
Leonard had been planning to tell her You’re pretty awesome, but Kanami didn’t wait for him. “You’re kinda cold, Coppé, you know that?” she shouted.
“?? Coppélia is not currently under a bad status.”
It was Coppélia’s fault, too.
Kanami had sent her a sign that she wanted someone to pay attention to her, and she’d obliviously shot her down. As a result, Kanami broke into a run, faking tears, and bolted ahead of them. She went so fast that, due to Adventurer physical strength, her wail generated a Doppler effect. Her pointlessly artistic cry echoed: “Weh-eh-eh-eh-eh…”
This was technically a dungeon, so Leonardo thought she should be more careful than that. However, when he looked hastily around at the other members, Chun Lu—the local—told him, “There are no forks for about thirty minutes, and monsters shouldn’t appear.” Her calm expression showed that she’d gotten used to Kanami’s weird antics.
Are you sure that’s okay? Leonardo looked back and forth between his companions and the darkness up ahead, but he was apparently the only one who was worried, so he shrugged and gave up.
After all, for engineers, switching over was important.
This limestone cavern was fairly enormous. As a result, they got by without feeling any sort of claustrophobic pressure. Having lost sight of Kanami, Leonardo and the others advanced steadily through the darkness, following her without getting impatient.
“Lord Elias is like a clear spring sky, but spring is the season of thunderstorms as well,” Coppélia suddenly said, as if talking to herself.
Leonardo was beside her, keeping a sharp eye out for enemies. “What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you request information regarding Lord Elias from Coppélia?”
Oh, I see, Leonardo thought.
Apparently, as far as Coppélia was concerned, that exchange with Kanami was still in progress.
“Was that response insufficient?”
Her voice was as quiet as always, but it sounded vaguely sad to Leonardo. The shadows in the cavern kept him from being able to read the little expression that was framed by her glossy indigo hair. She was a petite, beautiful girl, and everything about her was like a work of art.
Feeling the emotion he always felt when he looked at Coppélia but hadn’t been able to put a name to, Leonardo told her, “Your answers have lots of poetic metaphors in them, huh?” After the words were out, he felt frustrated with himself: What kind of tactless dolt am I anyway?
It wasn’t like this was in middle school.
“Coppélia’s basic vocabulary includes meteorological forecasts and information on the four seasons from every country.”
“Ah, I see…”
The memory of the night in Aorsoi when they’d talked on top of that boulder rose in his mind.
Coppélia had commented that Kanami was “a person like first light.” He didn’t think she was wrong about that.
That audacious woman dove into trouble way ahead of everybody else, and in the end, she arrived at new developments by force. In that sense, she was exactly like the dawn. Calling her Eos, the goddess of the dawn, would probably be going too far, though: In Grecian myth, she was such a beauty that they described her as having “rosy fingers.” He thought giving Kanami an evaluation like that would be praising her too highly. She was more like the war god Ares, laying waste with a tank.
In other words, didn’t that make her the type of person you couldn’t have in Sales?
She’d probably manage to get huge orders, but there was no telling what she’d promise the customers.
Man, would that be hell, Leonardo muttered to himself.
Coppélia had said that her vocabulary included meteorological forecasts and information on the seasons. In other words, she was using weather reports to describe others’ personalities. It was routine information that had nothing to do with poetry, but coming from Coppélia’s lips, it sounded poetic. Didn’t that prove Coppélia herself was poetic, instead of the words?
What sort of person is he, or she, to you?
When he actually thought about it, that question seemed really difficult, and it also seemed to hold a variety of meanings.
Like the weather, people changed. Nobody was all sunshine, all the time. People had all sorts of sides to them. As you watched someone else’s shifting heart, you were changing as well.
“Coppélia looks at Master. She looks at Lord Elias. She looks at Lord Leonardo.”
What’s with the “Lord” business? The words had made it as far as Leonardo’s throat, but the way Coppélia looked made him swallow them back down.
“Your colors are complicated, and they change continuously. In an attempt to understand them, Coppélia puts them into words. Coppélia has portraits of everyone inside herself. They are a variety of colors. They seep into Coppélia’s own color and brightly illuminate her surroundings. Coppélia is very—”
She broke off. Her eyes had been turned to the darkness far ahead, but now she let them fall to the ground at her feet. She shook her head, looking like a lost child.
“She doesn’t understand them very well.”
“I see.”
The tactless geek from New York didn’t have any fancy words he could say to her at a time like this. He’d only said the words and nodded gravely. He was the only one who’d thought it looked grave; he was aware that he was actually being awkward.
From the way she’d spoken, he thought Coppélia’s “doesn’t understand” hadn’t had any negative emotion behind it. It might merely have been a wish, but Leonardo didn’t really know.
Apparently, Coppélia had a portrait of Leonardo inside her, too.
What about him?
Did he have an internal portrait of Coppélia?
Obviously
, he did.
It was a picture of a young girl with a prim face on a pale background the color of cherry blossoms.
She wasn’t wearing her best smile. If he’d had to say, her face was blank, as if she’d been caught off guard. However, if he stroked those soft cheeks with a feather pen, it looked as though she’d giggle in a soft voice and smile for him. That was the sort of expression it was.
Even he thought something was wrong with him. Apparently, his head had caught some malware.
That was what Leonardo thought.
It would have been great if the portrait of Leonardo inside Coppélia showed a sharp, cool hero, but, well, New York engineers understood that most things didn’t work out that neatly.
From up ahead, they heard a weird cry, something between a “Yeowp” and a “Gneaaarr.”
It was Kanami.
Something had apparently made her happy; sporadically, he heard a voice that sounded simultaneously flustered and delighted.
“It really is fluffers and cute! It’s just like I imagined: It’s the perfect kind of hairy!”
When they got closer, as he’d figured, Kanami was clinging to the neck of a huge wolf that had to be two meters long. The giant wolf had gray fur and an intelligent face, and it was wagging its tail in a reserved way, looking vaguely put-upon.
“…So the wolves in this cave aren’t monsters?” he asked.
“No, they are monsters,” Chun Lu corrected.
As this exchange went on, Leonardo was forced to notice that there was no battle under way. It was odd.
“Then why is it like that? All, uh, friendly.”
“I would guess…” Tilting her head, Chun Lu answered carefully, “It may be a Wise Wolf someone has already tamed. It could be acting on its own because its master is nearby. When you encounter the wolves of this cavern, combat begins, and after the battle, if it’s possible to train them, you can. That’s how it usually goes.”
Apparently, that was how it was.
Kanami seemed to have forgotten she’d just run off in tears; she’d called Coppélia over and was making her pet the wolf’s neck. Kanami herself kept hugging it tightly and nuzzling it with her cheeks.
“Hey, Kanami.”
“What, Croakanardo? I’m not giving you this one.”
“Uh, that’s right, you’re not. It sounds like that wolf’s already been tamed. It’s somebody else’s, not yours. Don’t hang all over it like that.”
“Awwww! Even though it’s fluffers?!”
The condition of its coat has nothing to do with anything. Leonardo put in the retort mentally, but it didn’t seem to get through to Kanami. She was seriously asking the wolf things like “Hey, kiddo, where are you from?”
After letting itself be thoroughly petted, the wolf seemed to feel that it had done its duty. Although it wasn’t at all forceful about it, it slipped out of Kanami’s embrace, took two or three steps, then slowly wagged its tail.
What a well-behaved wolf. Leonardo was impressed.
Its composed attitude projected dignity, showing a character that was far more intellectual and thoughtful than a half-baked human (say, for example, Kanami).
“It is a very intelligent wolf.”
As if thanking Coppélia for her comment, the wolf gave one low whine, then abruptly looked up at the cave ceiling.
“What’s the matter, huh? Was there a bat or something?”
“There shouldn’t be any flying magical beasts in this cave…”
As Kanami and Chun Lu spoke, they also looked up at the ceiling, which was shrouded in darkness. Coppélia and Leonardo looked up, too, although they didn’t speak. The wolf’s gesture had pulled them all in.
There was a soft, dry sound somewhere, and a moment later, they realized that a small rock had fallen. Leonardo and the others had no idea what that meant, and they exchanged glances—but in the next instant, a tremor big enough to make them feel as if they were floating hit the cave.
What, an earthquake?! Jesus!
The roar of an enormous mass collapsing echoed.
In the midst of an impact that shook him around, making him lose all sense of forward and backward, left and right, Leonardo caught Coppélia’s slim wrist, trying to pull her into his arms.
However, he had no idea how far he’d managed it.
With a memory of falling into cold water, Leonardo’s mind was abruptly enveloped in darkness.
2
As always, waking up brought a slight feeling of unpleasantness with it.
He didn’t think he was the type who woke up feeling lousy. It was more that the existence of sleep itself was disagreeable. He thought shutting off your consciousness and resting was irrational. As far as Krusty was concerned, if you were going to spend 25 percent of your life unconscious, it would be better to just shorten your life by 25 percent and get rid of that downtime entirely.
He checked through his sensations, but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his hands, nor, after a moment’s examination, either of his legs.
It smelled very damp and stuffy. When he sat up, as he’d figured, he seemed to be in a sealed subterranean cave. The ground he’d set his hands on wasn’t dirt, but slippery rock. Apparently, this was a limestone cavern. The slight stream of water he felt under his palms hinted that his situation was precarious.
His battle with Elias seemed to have ended by cave-in.
His memories up until that point were clear. Afterward, he’d probably been caught up in the collapse and lost consciousness. He had about 15 percent of his HP left. His sense that he’d had his fun spoiled was stronger than his feelings that he’d been saved from a tight spot.
There was a faint light in the cave. The source of the light seemed to be on the other side of a large rock.
As he was thinking that odd, the silhouette of a head popped out of the boulder.
“Yoo-hoo, Krus-Krus. You’re awake, huh?!”
The voice was so cheerful that it seemed out of place underground.
Krusty held still for a few seconds, then responded, choosing his words carefully.
“I see you’ve returned, Miss Kanami.”
“Whoa! Not only are you not surprised, that’s kind of a standoffish response!”
“Frankly, I feel as if I’d like to keep some distance between us, so…”
“That’s so mean!”
He didn’t think that was true.
To Krusty, she was the sort of person he didn’t dare get close to.
She wasn’t the type who’d obligingly disappear if he said the magic words, so Krusty got up, then lowered himself onto a nearby round rock, using it as a chair. It wasn’t that he found her particularly unpleasant to deal with, and she wasn’t a stranger, but she was hard to handle.
She seemed to have changed her avatar, and her class had switched from Swashbuckler to Monk. However, her form—or rather, the impression she gave—hadn’t changed much. Her blue eyes, which seemed intensely curious, were set in an oval outline. Her big mouth that always seemed ready to shout for joy was still going strong as well.
This was Kanami, “Tourist of Seven Continents,” the legendary Amazon who’d led the Debauchery Tea Party, the group that had caused a sensation on the Yamato server.
Even in the community outside the game, she was a mystery woman who’d been cloaked in countless rumors.
Many opinions of her were favorable, such as that she was the legendary leader who commanded the Tea Party, a group of specialists, and that she was an overwhelmingly charismatic beauty. However, there were more than a few—possibly based in jealousy—that were filled with spite. Or rather, to put it bluntly, it was safe to say she’d been covered in hatred.
If you were victorious in raids, you could acquire phantasmals, fantasy-class items. According to game theory, large-scale, difficult quests yielded high-performance rewards. The sort of rare items that everyone wanted were extremely hard to get.
Not only that, but in the game of Elder Tales,
you couldn’t get them by playing for a long time, or through probability, or by buying them with real money. To acquire them, you needed to be one of twelve like-minded companions. The ones who managed to pull this off were almost exclusively major guilds.
Most ordinary users thought they couldn’t get the rare phantasmals they coveted because they weren’t in a big guild. Since they didn’t have the “status” of a guild, they weren’t able to acquire items. Even if they didn’t put it into words, a majority of users thought that way… Although it wasn’t that they actually believed it; they merely wanted to think it.
However, the existence of the Tea Party had flatly disproved that common sense.
Getting your friends together and going on raids is fun. If you have fun while you play, you’ll get all sorts of things. That had been the message of the Tea Party, Kanami’s group.
It was the truth.
Guilds were organizations composed of players, too. In the sense of assembling companions and tackling difficulties, there was no difference whatsoever between the Tea Party and D.D.D. Whether they were a guild or just a bunch of friends, in the end, it was only a name. However, many players averted their eyes from this fact and attacked the Tea Party, which charged into tough zones without adopting a guild tag. They tried to boycott the group for showing, wordlessly, that you could do it if you tried.
She and her group were getting rare items under their own steam, without being chosen by a major guild, and to the greedy majority, they were something to be hated and excluded. To those players, they were inconvenient: They made them face the fact that people who didn’t attempt raids on their own initiative were short on energy and communication.
To Krusty, even the phrase “the legend of the Tea Party” was laughable: Now that the Tea Party had disbanded, their own pangs of conscience had simply substituted the “legend” for the history of their ugly boycott. It was no more than a fabrication.
That said, not only had Kanami paid no attention to that malice, she’d made no attempt to even know about it. As the leader of a raid organization, Krusty had run into her several times back then, and so he knew her: This woman was absolutely not the type to be influenced by that sort of public rumor.