by Mamare Touno
She was a lot harder to deal with than that.
“You know, for some reason, nobody gets startled about this.”
When he looked at her, prompting her to go on, Kanami said, “KR was totally blasé about it, too.”
Krusty thought she probably had only herself to blame.
Everything she did was unprecedented, and so no matter what she did, the people around her had just stopped being surprised.
“I imagine he assumed that, given your skills, it was possible.”
“I see.”
Kanami laughed—“Eh-heh-heh!”—and Krusty put just a little more distance between them.
Ordinary people didn’t cause trouble for their friends. At the very least, they tried not to.
For that reason, getting closer to someone could serve as a way to decrease the damage they did to you.
Once in a blue moon, there were people who tried to cause trouble for their friends in particular. Putting distance between yourself and those people was a way to lessen the damage.
On the other hand, Kanami was the rare person for whom—as far as Krusty knew—neither affection nor coolness had any effect on the amount of damage dealt. As a matter of fact, the amount of damage was determined by the frequency with which you interacted with her: The woman was like a type of natural disaster. Her one saving grace might have been that she also spread around good luck, in addition to damage. Apparently, that didn’t have anything to do with a psychological sense of distance, either. No, the friendliness Kanami scattered in her vicinity was the type that didn’t take the recipients’ wishes into consideration in the first place. She was a terribly bewildering monster: In a sense, by the time you met her, she’d already seeded the area with fortune and misfortune.
It is a big world.
He couldn’t deal with her, but she was unusual.
She was like a rare character that was difficult to encounter.
The wide world held singularities a youngster like him couldn’t handle, such as people who were inscrutable menaces (like his grandfather), human natural disasters like Kanami, righteous men like Isaac who were moved by personal convictions rather than profit and loss, and people like Shiroe, who endlessly invested resources to solve problems. They just didn’t seem to go the way you wanted them to, but that fact gave Krusty a mysterious sense of satisfaction.
“What are you doing out here, Krus-Krus? Weren’t you on the Yamato server? There was an earthquake; do you know anything about that? Oh, hey— Waaah! Geez, I’m sorry, okay?!”
Kanami’s rapid-fire barrage of questions had been shut down by the huge Wise Wolf Gumon, who’d caught the hem of her clothes in her teeth and forced her into a pratfall. As if saying, Never mind, just calm down, Gumon wagged her abundant gray tail in front of Kanami once, then pushed her damp muzzle into Krusty’s palm and, satisfied, settled her large frame down at his feet.
“Is that little one a friend of yours?”
“Yes.”
“She’s really smart. I was unconscious for a while myself, but she dragged me out; she was a lifesaver. She’s intelli-cute! It looks like she knew where you were, too, Krus-Krus.”
“Did she?”
Krusty scratched Gumon behind the ears. With the generous attitude unique to large dogs (?), still lying on her side, without even opening her eyes, she wagged her thick tail as if to say, Don’t worry about it.
“Why are you here, on the Zhongyuan server? Did you keep your return secret?”
Flatly ignoring the questions Kanami had tossed at him, Krusty asked her questions of his own. He wasn’t trying to be mean, but he didn’t feel as if there would be any profit in giving Kanami information. At this point, he should probably prioritize gathering information.
Whether or not she knew what Krusty was thinking, Kanami began to answer, saying things as she thought of them.
“It’s not that I came back in secret, not really, but I did it on the Western European server, you know? Besides, I’d retired because I was going over there, too. It’s far away, and I figured that stuff would wait until I’d grown a bit, and then I just sort of never made contact. Oh, I came back in February or so. Then after that, there was that huge Catastrophe mess, right? On top of that, I didn’t have everybody on the friends list for this body. So then I wasn’t able to make contact, period. Then Eli-Eli was frozen in an iceberg, so I rescued him, and we picked up Coppé-cat in a wilderness of flowers—”
Apparently, it was Kanami’s fault that an Ancient hero was here.
“Oh, Eli-Eli is Elias Hackblade. He’s this blond, super-duper-dishy guy, you know, the cover character!”
He knew.
Cover was the word you used with books, while for a game, it should have been jacket or package, but he knew what she was trying to say.
“And then we met up with Croakanardo in the Tekeli Ruins, and KR was there, too, but it sounds like he went back to Yamato. Now we’re traveling with this local girl named Chun Lu, so there’s five of us!”
The only thing he fully understood from that was that none of this really counted as an explanation.
“Then there were these things called Geniuses, and we fought ’em, and we won! ‘We Are the Champions’!!”
Kanami’s words brought a flickering image with them.
A golden woman.
…If it was all right to call something with a blood-smeared mouth, disheveled hair, and the striped limbs of a tiger a “woman,” that is. A man-eating noblewoman, buried under luxurious accessories— Shoving down a sharp headache through habit, Krusty smiled slightly.
The enemy.
This might also be a product of Kanami’s influence. Without intending to, she sometimes brought benefits to the people around her. And this time, he’d gotten another clue of some sort. He didn’t know what it meant or when it would prove useful, but apparently, he now had more enemies. If the word Geniuses had been the key, then it was probably lurking in his lost memories.
“What are you grinning about, Krus-Krus?”
“It felt as if I’d heard something nostalgic, that’s all.”
“I see. So you say average stuff like that, too, Krus-Krus! That’s a surprise.”
There’s no call for me to take that sort of treatment from you, Krusty thought, but he looked at Gumon’s wagging tail, considered the subject of maturity, and rephrased his remark.
“And just what sort of person do you think I am?”
“Well, you know…”
Kanami turned her eyes to the ceiling, put her index finger to her lips as if she were remembering something, and began to speak: “Sort of…”
“…hard, and huge, and…”
As a Guardian, that was only to be expected.
“…sort of like you’d shoot beams from your glasses with no expression on your face? In other words, you know, like a super-robot!! Like the Terrifying Megalo-King Robot from Mars!”
Krusty gazed at Kanami steadily.
It wasn’t as if he had no idea what she was talking about (although the bit about the Martian robot wasn’t clear). That said, even if she told him that, there was almost nothing about it that he could fix, and since fixing it would be a nuisance, he didn’t want to anyway. Still, it was informative, as well as persuasive enough that he thought most people probably did think of him that way.
“Good for you, though, Krus-Krus. Way back when, it felt like you kept putting up with stuff so you wouldn’t cause trouble for people.”
Kanami swung her arms in circles, then cocked her head.
“In the ages it’s been since the last time I saw you, you seem like you’ve loosened up. That’s great. Although you’ve got a weird ‘bad status’ curse on you. Stuff like that has nothing to do with enjoying life, though, huh?!”
Apparently, that was how she’d thought of him in the past.
She probably wasn’t that far off the mark.
For Haruaki Kounoike (aka Krusty), the son of a mistress, standing out was not an o
ption. While he was studying abroad, surveillance was lax, but after he returned to his home country, he was subjected to unpleasant interference in practically everything.
Krusty had no intention of cutting into their profits, and he didn’t want to participate in the main family’s business. What he had wanted was to be left alone, but the reality was that it wasn’t going to happen. His grandfather and had high expectations for him (illogically, as far as Krusty was concerned), but he wondered, feeling rather ironic about it all, whether that wasn’t a lack of self-reliance, in a way. After all, they were trying to make an illegitimate outsider resolve their family’s recklessness, which had gotten to be too much for them to handle.
In some respects, Krusty had played Elder Tales as a sort of camouflage. He’d thought that, if he acted like a bohemian who was obsessed with online gaming, the people around him would give up on him. To Krusty, who had been forbidden to devote himself to anything, Elder Tales was his “revels and dissipation.”
If he’d seemed to be constantly putting up with things to avoid making a nuisance of himself, even in the game, he was ashamed of his petit bourgeois self.
The walking disaster in front of him had probably just guessed at random and said whatever came into her head, but even then, she managed to come up with things that ran people through this gamut neatly. It stood to reason that the group she’d led, the Tea Party, had left a battle record that shredded the rankings.
Krusty didn’t think he’d loosened up after arriving on the Zhongyuan server.
It was because he’d come to Theldesia, a world where the Kounoike main family didn’t exist.
He couldn’t just do as he pleased, but he was able to act a lot more freely than he had in the other world. He knew the freedom was temporary, but it did make him want to chew things to bits.
He was like Gumon. Even if he could tolerate lying down in the hope of finding peace and quiet, he didn’t want to be chained up.
Krusty thought he might be cynical, but he had absolutely no intention of mending his ways. He stood, adjusted his glasses, and spoke to Kanami.
“If that’s how you see it, I’m glad. It looks as though I’ve aged out of my patience. Shall we go aboveground, so I can continue my hobby? Apparently, someone’s worrying about me as well. Forgetting doesn’t make things go away. —I’d prefer not to, but until then, it looks as if it would be best for us to stay together.”
3
“Achoo!”
“Have you caught a cold, Princess Raynesia?”
“Has the cool wind chilled you?”
The two young ladies, Apretta and Fevel, were frowning at Raynesia in concern, and she waved her hands slightly, denying it.
“No, not at all. Water Maple Manor is warm, after all. I’m sure it was because my father and mother are gossiping about what a failure I am, back at home.”
Raynesia, who was seated on an incredibly fluffy sofa that had been made by the artisans of Akiba, gave a little smile. She didn’t have to smile very broadly. This sort would get through to fellow People of the Earth aristocrats just fine, and ladies preferred it for its refinement.
In Akiba, where the winds of early summer had begun to blow, Water Maple Manor towered majestically on the town’s main street as the guest house for foreign dignitaries and the official Akiba residence of the Eastal exchange official. In a compact, comfortable drawing room, reached by crossing a crimson carpet, three ladies had assembled and were enjoying their first animated conversation in quite some time.
Today’s guests were Apretta, the daughter of Marquis Lester, and Fevel, granddaughter of Baron Sugana. Because they were all relatives of the lords of Eastal and belonged to the same generation, they had made their society debuts at the same time the previous year, at the Lords’ Council. Since then, they’d deepened their friendship by exchanging letters. Partly as a result, the atmosphere of the visit was genial, and although she was conducting herself as though it were official business, to Raynesia, it felt like a bit of a vacation.
“And how did you find the town of Akiba?”
Feeling a little nervous even so, Raynesia asked them a careful question.
The atmosphere in Akiba was, frankly speaking, too much for her to handle.
Every day, explosions went up here and there, enigmatic fliers and booklets streamed in from who-knew-where, and even the shops opened new locations, or remodeled, or vanished before anyone knew what was happening. Having no history meant, in a way, that everything was like a dream. The face of the town changed on a daily basis.
Adventurers dressed in outlandish garb (she was told it was armor and magic equipment), would recruit companions in the square in front of the guild center or under the Great Silver-Leaved Tree, then abruptly sit down and begin selling their combat trophies, right there in the open air. This was also an everyday occurrence.
Even if she put it mildly, the town was a seething mass of lunacy, and Raynesia couldn’t possibly control or take responsibility for it.
However, on the other hand, she didn’t want people to hate it. The timid question she’d asked the aristocratic girls had been an expression of these complicated feelings.
“It’s, it’s simply—!”
“It’s wonderful!”
Whether or not they knew what Raynesia was thinking, the two began to speak, beaming and shaking their clenched fists slightly.
“What do you suppose it is? That sensational foodstuff.”
“It’s sweet. Sweeter than cream made with the finest sugar and milk.”
“Vivid herbs in a rich bouillon, supported by a soup as robust as the earth!”
“One mouthful and it feels as though you’ll melt, body and soul!”
“The full-bodied harmony of small dried sardines and safa broth!”
When what they said was mixed together, it was completely incomprehensible, but the lady-in-waiting who’d shown them around managed to guess that they probably meant Milk Pudding and Yes House Ramen, where they’d stopped while they were in Akiba. Apparently, the two of them had encountered Akiba’s gourmet foods.
Gingerly, Raynesia sent out a further probe.
“Wasn’t there anything dangerous or raucous?”
“Dangerous?”
“Raucous?”
The two girls looked at each other blankly, then began to speak, reviewing their memories of the day.
“In terms of dangerous things, I would say the number of items on the menu.”
Apretta quietly closed her eyes—which slanted down at the outer corners—in rapture, folding her small hands as if in prayer, and continued.
“Princess Raynesia. Are you familiar with ‘ramen,’ a soup dish that has four types of main ingredient, two types of broth, and three types of topping with which one can vary the flavor? On principle, one would have to eat it twenty-four times before one could understand it completely.”
Her voice was as serious as if she were speaking about territorial defenses, and Raynesia also straightened up, firing herself with enthusiasm. If she didn’t do that, she felt as though she’d fall off the sofa.
“Rather than raucous, I would say the town is lively.”
With a determined expression, Fevel smiled, her cheeks flushing until they were the color of apples.
“During this one day, I saw more Adventurers than I’ve seen since I was born. The Adventurers laugh a lot, and they like music, don’t they? No matter where you go in Akiba, little sounds reach you from some unknown source.”
Fevel praised it with a blissful expression.
When she heard that, Raynesia finally felt relieved. She’d had a lady-in-waiting whom Elissa had trained show them around the town, so if there had been any trouble, she would have contacted them promptly. She’d also been given a report that the pair had enjoyed themselves, so she hadn’t been terribly worried. Although, she hadn’t known whether the town had made a good impression on them.
Apretta and Fevel were noble girls who were Rayn
esia’s pen pals, after a fashion. In the course of their correspondence, the two of them had taken an interest in Akiba, and they had been wanting to visit for a while now.
Raynesia had also wanted to invite them for quite some time, but in this world, travel was a serious affair. The residents of the domain had to stay near their farmland or risk losing their livelihoods, and nobles needed to make arrangements for the formalities and security personnel, which meant that travel required large-scale plans and preparations.
The Adventurers, who set off for far-flung places that would take weeks to reach without even giving it much thought, were exceptional beings.
The girls’ visit had finally happened because Adventurers from Silver Sword had volunteered to escort them here, and they would be able to meet up with the Lords’ Council on the way back. Naturally, the fact that Marquis Lester and Baron Sugana had been moved by the girls’ entreaties had been a significant factor as well.
“I’m very pleased you found it to your liking.”
Raynesia thanked them, feeling a strange delight.
She wasn’t the one who’d created this town, and as a rule, the Adventurers wouldn’t listen to her. Still, she’d lived here for more than half a year now. She’d experienced their kindness, just as much as their outlandishness.
Even if they were her pen pals, these girls were related to lords by blood, and it was possible this would influence imports to Akiba. They might affect the town, either positively or adversely.
To Raynesia, the Adventurers of Akiba were unbelievable epicureans. She’d heard that quite a few of them spent over half of what they earned on meals. The marine products and rice that came from Marquis Lester’s and Baron Sugana’s territories were probably important to the Adventurers as well.
Aside from these political motives, she hadn’t wanted the two of them to dislike this town. No, not just these two: anyone. This was the first place Raynesia had ever been posted to.