“Were you?”

“Don’t talk about him.”

She thrust those words at Indicus, brimming with irritation and anger, but they didn’t seem to reach her. It was always like this. Indicus had never accepted any of the wishes Nureha asked of her, with one exception—and it was an exception she’d traded everything for.

“What did I tell you? I did, you know. He’s no good. You can talk to him, but nothing will come of it. He can’t connect to anything. He’s always been like that. He isn’t a player. He’s merely static with advanced abilities. Do you understand? Lady Nureha?”

Nureha’s vision was beginning to blur with pain and fear.

“That’s a man you can never have. He’s just a traitor, but he’s bright. You could probably say he’s scrupulous. He recognizes it, you know. The stink of the gutter.”

Even though she’d been expecting them, had been prepared for them, Indicus’s words hurt Nureha like a blow to the stomach. The memories she’d desperately pushed into the darkness materialized like countless ghosts, trying to drag her back to that familiar hell.

This was the true form of the indistinct murmurs, the things the white shadows whispered.

The past Nureha had shed back on Earth, the memories she’d erased.

“My dear girl, do you really think anyone would touch you? Dirty, sordid, shabby, beggar you? You’re filthy with lies. There’s nothing the least bit real about you. A closer look at what’s ‘real’ about you just reveals a stench worse than rotten sewage. You, who always wore a faint, sickening smile and gazed over here hungrily.”

A mad terror rose again.

A plastic school lunch plate. Soup with garbage mixed into it. Memories of biting her lip in a cramped locker, hoping no one would find her. Memories of having her belongings hidden and having to walk over winter asphalt with bare feet, of falling into a restless sleep in the shadow of the bushes, so that even her family wouldn’t find her. All sorts of recollections of defeat.

“Please understand. No human as disgusting as yourself should be conceited enough to think they could connect with someone else… Don’t you see? I’m the only one who’d associate with a woman as filthy as you.”

The urge to vomit was rising in her throat, and she desperately pushed it down.

She managed to bite it back.

It was sheer luck.

To keep her from registering that weakness, Nureha frantically opened her eyes wide. Indicus had described her accurately. She knew all that without being told. She was more aware of her dingy, disgusting self than anyone.

However, knowing herself was completely different from having someone else point it out to her.

“You’re a very convenient princess to gaze upon from a distance.”

Nureha glared at her, but Indicus’s fingers twisted her ear.

“So. Lady. Nureha. We can’t have you going to Akiba. A little self-awareness, please. This place, Plant Hwyaden, isn’t your salon anymore. You’ll gather lots of puppets and build your castle, and this time, I’ll obtain the whole Yamato server. Remember, Lady Nureha? That was the promise, wasn’t it?”

Nureha’s wish. Nureha’s request.

A dream on which she’d wagered everything, so that she’d never have to go back there.

No matter what she had to do—and she meant that literally—no matter what she had to do, Nureha never, ever wanted to repeat the experiences of her past. That was why she’d joined forces with Indicus. Plant Hwyaden was Nureha’s castle. It was a castle that never slept, filled with countless lights and soft compliments.

“You’re going to make a place for yourself to belong, aren’t you?”

Keeping up appearances so that Indicus wouldn’t see her weakness, Nureha nodded desperately.

“That’s right. It’s about to begin, you know. The Ten-Seat Council.”

Indicus seemed to have lost interest in Nureha. Nureha didn’t attend all Ten-Seat Councils; she wasn’t interested in guild administration in the first place.

“Because you’re the princess, yes. I’ll tell everyone for you, Nureha. After all, you are Plant Hwyaden’s precious, precious guild master.”

Leaving words of sympathy behind her as a parting gift, Indicus’s footsteps receded.

In the midst of the curse from her past and self-loathing that made her writhe, Nureha hugged her sides, folding in on herself, and shrank, becoming ever so small.

Her hands and feet were so cold they hurt, as though her metabolism had dropped. The blanket she’d wrapped around herself was heavy, and it didn’t bring her any warmth.

Her pulse fluctuated violently, and the world sank into darkness before her eyes, as if she were anemic.

All that rose up were terrible recollections and memories of humiliation, and their ghosts tried to drag Nureha back to Earth. The evil spirits attacked her whenever Indicus gave the order, and she had to keep fighting them all alone.

However, the corners of her lips held a very faint smile.

Don’t you see? I’m the only one who’d contract with a woman as filthy as you.

Not true.

That wasn’t true now.

It had been only a verbal promise; you couldn’t call it a contract. It might have been nothing more than an exchange, nearly a jest, said only in passing between the two, but right now, Nureha had one other promise in addition to her contract with Indicus.

Because it’s probably more in line with your wish to have me as an enemy than an ally.

The parting words spoken by the young man Indicus had given up on. They shielded Nureha, if only ever so slightly.

In the distance, a low, metallic sound rang out, announcing that it was nine o’clock.

The hands of the clock advanced slowly, as if they were sticky, and the night still seemed to stretch on forever. Even with very little sleep, Adventurer bodies could function without much trouble. That advantage was also the prison chain that trapped Nureha in the night. She went through repeated cycles of light dozing followed by sudden, terrified awakenings.

In this room, where her customary nocturnal battle would continue… Someday, for sure. Forming the shape of these words—words she’d never once spoken, words like a prayer—with silent lips, Nureha drifted into a shallow sleep.

2

The room, in which several men and women were assembled, had a curious design.

Pillars with carved drapes adorned the walls, finely patterned vases spilled over with fresh flowers, and even the tables and chairs were inlaid with gold. All of it was barely of note though, in comparison to the magnetic vitality of the people gathered in the room.

There were the eight council members, each of them exceptional, along with their attendants.

“Where’s Indicus?”

The question had come from a man with glasses and neat clothes that made him look like a bureaucrat.

“She’s with the princess. She’ll probably be back soon. Don’t worry about it, Zeldus,” a woman in a military uniform answered.

“The designated time was when the moon rose. It’s well past that,” the man named Zeldus huffed.

“The princess is the same as ever.”

“Those two should just get married already.”

A young voice that exuded arrogance and a musing voice chimed in as well, one after the other.

The room was shaped like a gradual staircase; the height of each step was about four centimeters. Though it was really more like a series of low landings than stairs. On each landing, an individual’s unique space had been set up.

Many had sofas or leather-upholstered chairs, and some of the landings were equipped with desks or small bookshelves. All together, there were ten seats and ten different levels. The arches that opened in each of the room’s four walls had also been built at different heights, and the structure seemed to promote coming and going, so it was likely that these levels indicated the rank of the person who occupied them. It was as if the room’s odd construction showed their relationships just as they were.

Kazuhiko sat in a low chair, hugging his favorite katana, while looking around the room. This gathering was the Ten-Seat Council. It was an assembly of the people in charge of Minami’s administration, and in practical terms, it was also the core council of Plant Hwyaden.

Participants in the Ten-Seat Council were called Ten-Seats, after the name of the council, or Seat Officers.

At present, two of the Ten-Seats had yet to arrive: Nureha, guild master of Plant Hwyaden; and Indicus, who had gone to fetch her.

Indicus would probably appear soon, but there was no telling about Nureha. She was capricious and seemed uninterested in the trivialities of the day-to-day running of the guild, and she almost never attended councils like this one. Now that Plant Hwyaden was established and had become an enormous organization, the decisions of Nureha—its founder and leader—weren’t needed on a daily basis. The members were used to her absence.

This Ten-Seat Council meeting was a regular one. Kazuhiko hadn’t heard that there were any special topics for discussion.

However, that didn’t mean he could let his guard down.

The relationships among the Seat Officers were complex and delicate. Plant Hwyaden had been established by assimilating all the Adventurers in Western Yamato, which meant its foundation was unique to begin with. It had a completely different essence compared to the guilds of the former Elder Tales MMO, where players who got along with each other formed groups so that they could play together. The objective of this enormous organization, which had been formed by swallowing up many preexisting guilds, was mutual aid and cooperation in order to survive in this strange world that resembled Elder Tales. In other words, the goal of creating Plant Hwyaden had been the intersection of interests.

It was a single guild that espoused perfect equality, but its internal politics bristled with disparate factions. For people who knew a certain amount about Plant Hwyaden, this was common knowledge.

But this wasn’t all that was unique about its history.

In order to establish this enormous guild, the first thing Nureha had done was twist the guard organization around her little finger. The guards of Minami were a lower branch of the House of Saimiya. In other words, since its establishment, the organization of Plant Hwyaden had been deeply involved with the People of the Earth.

As such, Nureha, as Hwyaden’s guild master and as the “State Councilor of the West,” had gained rank and power.

Meanwhile, the Senate, which had joined the House of Saimiya in controlling Western Yamato, had showed a great interest in Plant Hwyaden and was eager to assimilate it.

Currently, one could say that the town of Minami was in a state of balance in which many forces—each of Plant Hwyaden’s internal factions, alonside the People of the Earth’s House of Saimiya and Minami’s Senate—struggled with each other.

Kazuhiko was part of one of these forces.

The security organization Miburo—the original name of the famous historical Shinsengumi forces—was a department of Plant Hwyaden that protected the peace in Minami and cracked down on corruption and fraud.

However, in practice, it was Kazuhiko’s private army.

Kazuhiko and some of his like-minded colleagues had banded together to halt the corruption plauging Minami as much as possible, and had ended up becoming one of Plant Hwyaden’s internal factions. Their power wasn’t among the greatest in Minami, but because they had some influence, they were allowed a chair on the Ten-Seat Council.

Two guards in short, black, formal Japanese overcoats known as haori stood behind Kazuhiko. Many of the Ten-Seats attended the council with similar guards in tow.

Of course the guards meant nothing at the council, but this sort of posturing was necessary in order to maintain the faction equilibrium.

Squinting his eyes, Kazuhiko glanced at the highest position in the room—the First Seat.

On the top level was an elegant, feminine, elaborately worked throne that looked as if it might have been brought back from fairyland.

The seat’s mistress was currently absent. It was the place where Nureha, guild master of Plant Hwyaden, was meant to sit.

On the level below it were a tea server and silver trolley, and a brusque stool that showed no signs of use. It was currently unoccupied, but practically speaking, it was the second seat in charge of this council: the seat occupied by the maid Indicus.

Those two hadn’t yet appeared, but once Indicus arrived, no doubt the council would begin.

The third landing was wide, with a utilitarian chair and an enormous work desk that took up both sides. At that work desk, a stubborn, cruel-looking, bespectacled young man was silently drafting figures and written instructions. Sometimes he would look up and eject a trenchant comment from his sardonic mouth. It was the third seat, the Adventurer Zeldus, nicknamed “the Watchtower.”

He was the man in charge of Plant Hwyaden’s development and finances. The Iron Chancellor.

On the level just below his, a female soldier relaxed, leaning against her backrest, with a liquor bottle set directly on the floor. This was the Fourth Seat, “the General Who Dominated the East”—Mizufa Trude. She was the strongest general in the Senate, and the greatest commander within the Holy Empire of Westlande’s People of the Earth army.

“The days are boring without the scent of blood. I feel like I’m going to rot. We’ve got all the time there is. If it means I can go to war, I’ll wait as long as they like, even if the moon sets on us.”

The woman was past thirty and beautiful, but rather than the dauntlessness of a soldier, there was a marked sense of criminal cruelty about her. She was sitting in a dissipated way, with her arms spread wide, occupying the center of a sofa meant for two people.

“Didn’t you come here just to drink fine liquor, Lander?”

Lander: a slang word for a Person of the Earth.

The jab had come from a big Adventurer seated in a leather-upholstered chair on the next level down. The Fifth Seat: Nakalnad, “the General Who Conquered the South.” He was wearing rough armor reminiscent of construction equipment, as if to point out that he was a Guardian.

The words had been insulting, but Mizufa agreed with a generous “You’ve got that right.”

“Pretty nice life, hmm?” Nakalnad raised the cup he’d drained; his expression was bitter. A maid as unobtrusive as a stain on the wall approached like a ghost and poured him fresh liquor.

These two were the center of the military, and they were in charge of Plant Hwyaden’s foreign campaigns.

They led, respectively, the People of the Earth military corps and the Adventurer army.

The common opinion among the Adventurers who attended this council was that Mizufa’s seat order was higher out of consideration for the Senate, since the military might Nakalnad actually commanded was several times greater. In the days of the old Yamato server, Nakalnad had been the guild master of Howling, the strongest guild in the Kansai area. Glimpses of Plant Hwyaden’s internal politics showed through here as well.

“I’m sleepy. Why do we meet at night? Seriously.”

The Sixth Seat stretched ostentatiously. Quon, the “Singer of Prophecies.”

“Night’s not the only time you’re sleepy.”

Zeldus’s voice came down from the higher level; he hadn’t looked up from his documents. Quon wore casual clothes—a shirt and jeans—that would have been right at home on a street corner on Earth. The only fantasy-style item was the warm-looking cloak he’d wrapped himself up in.

“I’m keeping an ear out for a GM Call,” he protested.

At his words, several of the participants gave small, wry smiles.

This young man, Quon, didn’t technically have the ability or the desire to hold a seat on the council. It was just that during the Elder Tales era, he had been a game master on the administrative side. Game masters were administrative employees who had avatars just like Adventurers, participated in the game world, and dealt with any trouble that came up there. In simple terms, they were a type of troubleshooter.

Having been a Fushimi Online Entertainment employee, he had detailed knowledge of the circumstances and information on the administrative side. Since he’d gotten pulled into the Catastrophe when he was logged in from his own home computer instead of the dedicated mainframe at the FOE offices, most of his game master abilities had been sealed, but even so, it was possible that he’d be able to help clear up situations. That was why he held one of the ten seats.

GM Call, or “Call from Beyond,” was one of the game master abilities Quon still held. It enabled him to receive pop-up notices with information regarding administrative events that occurred on the Yamato server. He could also receive a summons from FOE, but if they believed what he said, there had been no contact since the Catastrophe, and the only events that had occurred were timed or triggered types.

“So you’re saying your connection to the higher world is fading, eh?”

The old man in the Eighth Seat, one down from Kazuhiko, teased with a chuckle.

“Man, shut up. It was the Council’s decision to monitor calls, remember?”

At Quon’s sulky attitude, the old man cackled. He seemed jolly, but his eyes were blunt with cruelty. The Eighth Seat, Jared Gan, “the Great Wizard of Miral Lake.” He was an authority on magic and history who represented the People of the Earth. Along with Zeldus, his knowledge and magic abilities were being focused into the development of new technologies.

“The princess…won’t be joining us tonight either, hmm?”

As Loreil Dawn, Ninth Seat and leader of the imperial guards, muttered this, Indicus entered. She was a beautiful, intelligent woman dressed in a maid’s uniform. Her footsteps sounded like someone striking rock, and with that sound as its opening bell, the Ten-Seat Council commenced.

“Let me begin tonight’s Ten-Seat Council. For the first topic of the day, we will hear a report on urban welfare.”

Indicus began the council abruptly, without prelude. This topic was always the first one she chose. Holding his breath as if he were diving underwater, Kazuhiko tried to keep his heart cool and collected.

The town of Minami was peaceful and wealthy.

However, it was built on the invisible exploitation of the People of the Earth. At present, there were approximately ten thousand Adventurers living in Minami, and three times that many People of the Earth. There were many restaurants and inns run by People of the Earth, but the majority of them were Servants.

Servants were People of the Earth hired to look after Adventurers. There was demand from Adventurers, since this freed them from having to do odd jobs, and People of the Earth welcomed the positions as lucrative employment. On the other hand, it was true that it was a hotbed for a variety of trouble. Minami’s prosperity was built on all sorts of hidden warps and stains.

Quite apart from Kazuhiko’s thoughts, the council went on.

Currently, the government of Minami’s biggest program involved issuing guild passes.

Adventurers affiliated with Plant Hwyaden and People of the Earth living in Minami were able to receive guild passes issued by the Plant Hwyaden staff office. Passes came in several different ranks, and those who held them could use restaurants and inns that corresponded to that rank completely free of charge. This meant there would no longer be any need for Plant Hwyaden members to walk around with cash. In addition, since the passes would not be purchased, but loaned for free—although they would need to be renewed every three months—it was believed that they would make great contributions to Minami’s development.

As he listened to the splendid report, Kazuhiko renewed his determination.

It was likely that there would be even bigger trouble, and lots of it, from this point on.

He could understand the advantages of the guild pass system. There was great significance in the fact that they guaranteed lifestyles on a certain level for Adventurers who avoided fighting monsters. In addition, Plant Hwyaden would probably be able to implement more meaningful policies, such as purchase management for materials. However, it was the People of the Earth who’d be sacrificed in the process. Miburo existed to preserve justice in the city. That meant protecting the weak. Kazuhiko and the others were fighting to relieve the wretchedness of the People of the Earth, which many Adventurers pretended not to see.

Before he knew it, the council had gone from a report on an investigation of raid zones to the situation in Nakasu, and then continued to current conditions in Akiba.

“Akiba’s sent an army to the northeast, then?”

“That seems to be the case,” Nakalnad answered to Indicus. “It’s made up of five legions, led by ‘Berserker’ Krusty. ‘Black Sword,’ ‘the Hatter,’ and ‘the Old Winged Dragon’ are with them. The report’s from ‘Number One.’”

Although the shape its efforts took was different from Minami’s, Akiba also seemed to be taking great pains over its relationship with the People of the Earth.

In contrast to Minami, which had made connections with the existing local leaders in the House of Saimiya, Akiba’s Council seemed to have chosen to coexist with the League of Free Cities, the People of the Earth organization that governed the area north of the Kanto region. Most of the Ten-Seat Council members felt that that decision had made the difference in Akiba’s and Minami’s speed of reform.

Minami had stabilized far more rapidly than Akiba, and it was producing superior results on all fronts, including lifestyle services and the development of new technology. For Adventurers trapped in this other world, nothing was more important than everyday stability, and Minami was in the process of acquiring it. This was good fortune for the Adventurers who lived there.

“‘Machiavelli-with-Glasses’ is gone, too.”

Pushing his eye mask up, the Tenth Seat tossed those words to his fellows.

It was the laid-back voice of the “Transforming Jester,” who sat in a tropical-style resort chair made of a wooden frame and sailcloth. He had been snoozing peacefully until just a moment ago, but now the council was silent, as if it was holding its breath.

“‘Machiavelli-with-Glasses’ is gone, too.” There was no telling how the Tenth Seat had interpreted the silence, but he repeated himself. “I don’t know whether he went along on the northeastern expedition, but it looks as though he’s made himself scarce.”

The man, who wore a smile that looked a bit too dangerous to call mischievous, was a skinny Summoner, dressed in a rough mantle with ragged edges. A former companion who’d raced across Yamato with the organization known as the Debauchery Tea Party. KR.

From the very lowest level, the grinning KR looked up at his former companion, Kazuhiko, and still higher, at the maid.

“Well? What’ll you do, Indicus? It looks like the ‘static’ that doesn’t go according to your calculations has taken off running yet again…”

3

Shutting the thick wooden door, Naotsugu brushed the snow off himself.

Outside, it wasn’t what he would have called a blizzard, but snow danced in the mountain wind. Although it should have been early afternoon, the thick storm clouds made it gloomy, and the temperature was low.

He was wearing cold-resistant equipment, so he hadn’t frozen out in the blizzard, but his legs had bogged down beyond belief. Naotsugu was a Guardian, and he was wearing full-body metal armor. Technically, he shouldn’t have been able to move around in snow at all in that sort of equipment. The fact that he’d managed to patrol in weather like this was due entirely to his Adventurer’s physical abilities.

“Naotsugu?”

“Yeah, I’m back.”

Shiroe spoke to him from the depths of the lodge, and Naotsugu answered.

He loosened his belt and took off his gauntlets. The gauntlets were the latest prototype-class item, created by artisans, and they hadn’t existed in the days of Elder Tales. They were more versatile than the ones level-90 Naotsugu had acquired on a raid, and while he used them all the time, since they were a handmade item that was more recent than the Catastrophe, Naotsugu couldn’t equip them or take them off from the menu.

Finally removing the weighty items—whose mass made them seem more like a type of weapon than gauntlets—he tossed his other equipment into his Magic Bag, piece by piece. What appeared from under his rough armor was three-quarter-length indoor wear. It was a casual look, no different from what he would’ve worn on Earth.

It certainly was a freezing mountain winter outside, but whoever had built this lodge had understood the region’s seasons well. The log walls were double layered, and there seemed to be straw stuffed between them.

In combination with the thick tapestries, this kept the room at a fairly pleasant temperature.

Naotsugu peeled off his bulky mountain-climbing socks and shoved his toes into slippers. People told him that wanting to take off his socks the minute he got home was an old-guy thing, but he’d been that way ever since he was a kid, and he wished they’d get off his case about it.

“How was it?”

“Nothing wrong. The snow is zipping around and the wind is blowing hard.”

“It doesn’t look like it’ll stop even if we cry.”

“Short Stuff’s the only one who’d cry.”

“There you go again, talking like that just because Akatsuki’s not here…”

In Japanese terms, the room was about ten tatami mats in size.

The fireplace blazed red, and Shiroe, who was camped out on a thick rug, had lots of notes and maps spread around him. Even at a quick glance, there seemed to be at least several dozen. Naotsugu recognized some of them; in particular, there was the map of the nearby area. Densely covered with notes and memos written in red ink, it was a summary of the reports he’d made over the past week.

Although the lodge was warm and comfortable inside, it had been a week since they’d left their friends in Akiba. Naotsugu looked around the area, feeling worn out.

“Where’s the little old guy?”

“He isn’t that old. I think he’s probably around thirty.”

“He laughs like an old guy, though.”

Without looking at Naotsugu, Shiroe—who’d traded his trademark coat for indoor wear—began carefully stacking the nearby memos on top of one another.

“Want some help?”

“No, it’s fine. This won’t take long.”

“Oh, okay.”

He was probably concentrating.

So as not to bother Shiroe, Naotsugu sat down on the fur rug.

“……”

“……”

Shiroe took out a thick notebook, setting it next to the stacked memos, and began drawing up some sort of document. In this world, there were no computers or word processors. Shiroe had muttered that organizing information was rough, but even then, when Naotsugu tried to help him, he turned him down. He’d always been stubborn.

Probably ever since we first met, Naotsugu thought.

Right after he’d joined the Debauchery Tea Party, the idea of grabbing something to eat in real life had come up. Since it was an online game, this was only natural, but the Tea Party members lived all over Japan. As a result, it was really impossible to get everyone together for a dinner party. However, even so, five of them who lived in the Kanto region had met up in the real.

The first time he’d met Shiroe, he’d been drinking pu-erh tea.

When Naotsugu had said, That’s oolong tea, right? Shiroe had explained the difference to him. That explanation had gone on for thirty minutes, and had ultimately extended to the political situation in Taiwan and speculation in tea leaves. The “vital fall” had occurred in the EU at about that time, and even university students hadn’t been able to stay unconcerned about the topic.

Naotsugu and Shiroe’s friendship had begun at that offline meeting.

At the time, they were both university students, and the fact that they lived at a distance that could be covered by a one-hour bike ride if they wanted to hang out was key. Friends outside school were valuable. He’d often taken the stay-at-home Shiroe along as he wandered around town.

He couldn’t count the times they’d been yanked around by Kanami’s whims.

It was so bad that, when she’d said, We’re going to a fish paste factory in Odawara, he’d seriously thought about punching her. Even so, when they actually did go, it had been fun, and the all-important fish paste had been shockingly tasty. Naotsugu thought that Kanami’s personal magnetism, or maybe her sense about things like that, had been really something.

…And so Naotsugu and Shiroe had known each other for a long time.

He was used to kicking his legs out and relaxing beside a silent Shiroe like this. It was something he’d done a lot when he was a student, and he did it all the time at the guild house.

The heat from the fireplace made it to his toes, which had been buried in a snowfield. The stinging tingle gradually eased, and the warmth returned.

Naotsugu twisted around, rummaging through his Magic Bag, and took out a metal canteen and cups.

The liquid he poured out was mog milk. The drink, which had mashed mog fruit in it, was similar to banana milk on Earth.

When he held one out with a “Hrn,” Shiroe replied with a “Mmm” and took it without looking up. They both sipped the faintly sweet mog milk in silence. Friends were like this with each other. Energetic, witty conversation was formal behavior.

“Locked-up-on-a-snowy-mountain-with-Shiro-and-some-old-guy city.”

Even so, Naotsugu muttered vaguely, not out of spite, but because he was bored.

“What, Naotsugu? Lonely?”

“Yeah, kinda. For a resort, this place is super empty.”

“It is pretty rural.”

Shiroe’s response left Naotsugu flabbergasted.

This lodge was a closed zone, but the snowy mountain it sat on was in a field zone that was roughly sixty kilometers per side. Naotsugu had been the only Adventurer in that field zone. Before he’d entered the lodge a few minutes ago, he’d checked using the Frontier Inspector in-zone list, so he was sure about that. You didn’t call an area like that “rural.” It was a trackless waste. What Naotsugu wanted to say was that on the Yamato server, Tearstone was a land-locked desert island.

“Where are you from again, Shiro?”

“Tokyo, almost.”

At that brief answer, Naotsugu heaved a deep sigh. This was the problem with Tokyo natives. They couldn’t tell the difference between rural areas where people actually lived and the back end of nowheresville.

Disgusted, he dropped his head into his hands—he was already resting on his elbows—and rolled around.

About ten days ago, Shiroe had asked him to stay behind and hold the fort. He’d said he was leaving Akiba for a while, and had asked if he’d take care of Log Horizon. Naotsugu had turned him down in one second flat, and here he was.

He hadn’t heard where Shiroe planned to go or what he was planning to do, but Naotsugu thought it was probably to do something tiresome. It also wasn’t something that was needed in general, but Shiroe thought it was necessary. Naotsugu had known right away, just from seeing his face.

If it had been something that everyone would understand was necessary right away, Shiroe wouldn’t have hesitated to ask someone else to handle it. There would be no hesitation over everyone doing something that was necessary for everyone. He was attempting to do this on his own because it would be hard to persuade people of its necessity.

He’d thought this had improved since the Crescent Burger incident, but apparently one or two opportunities weren’t enough to completely cure inborn temperament.

Man, he’s stubborn, Naotsugu thought, but then thought better of it, deciding that this was patent Shiroe as well.

If Shiroe had a bad habit, there were tons of things about him that were good enough to cancel it out. The problem was that Shiroe himself didn’t know this, and this smart-yet-dense friend of his needed to travel with a kickstarter who’d give him hell. Naotsugu prided himself on the fact that, as his old friend, he was suited for the job.

Besides, whenever Shiroe pushed himself like this, the view afterward was fantastic.

If they were on their way to see a view like that, he wasn’t going to surrender his spot to anybody.

“Think you could tell me why we’re shut away in a locked room on a snowy mountain? It’s about time for that.”

“We aren’t shut away. We’re just holing up.”

“Shiro, you’re-never-gonna-be-popular-that-way city.”

“I mean it’s peaceful. You really don’t get it, do you?”

The problem was that, in Shiroe’s case, he was more than half serious.

“…We’re holed up here because I don’t want our location known. It’s fine now, but considering what’s ahead, I’d rather not tip our hand.”

Having finished verbally horsing around, Shiroe began to explain, quietly, bit by bit.

“For the moment, our objective is money. In short, we’re fund-raising. To that end, I need to persuade a certain person.”

“That old guy?”

Naotsugu remembered their traveling companion. The small elf Person of the Earth scholar was holed up in the next room… Literally.

“No, not him. Li Gan is involved in this maneuver. I brought him along so that he could help with the persuasion. What I say may not be enough to get them to trust us. He may not look it, but he’s famous.”

“He really doesn’t look famous.”

“Even if he’s the Sage of Miral Lake?”

Oh, is that what he is? At Shiroe’s words, Naotsugu was convinced.

The Sage of Miral Lake had been a well-known NPC in the Elder Tales MMORPG. That said, Naotsugu had never seen him on a game screen. He was a sage that was mentioned in legends and rumors in the game. He had made an appearance in the backstory for the Nine Great Gaols of Halos, a raid they would speed-run during their Tea Party days.

“So he actually exists?”

“Yes, he does. He does indeed.”

“Why are we fund-raising way out in the mountains, anyway? If you need money, couldn’t you just borrow it from the Round Table Council?”

“Mm.” Sitting cross-legged, Shiroe hemmed, frowning. “It’s a pretty large amount,” he said with a sigh.

Naotsugu felt a headache coming on.

He really couldn’t trust that pretty in this case. Shiroe had looked slightly calmer last time, when he’d been planning to buy up what was now Akiba’s guild center.

“About how much, exactly?”

“In all, about eighty trillion or so.”

It was ridiculous. An absolutely ludicrous sum.

According to the math, that amount was over ten thousand times more than all the money held by all the Adventurers on the Yamato server. It was the sort of amount they wouldn’t be able to scrape up from all the Adventurers in the world, let alone on the Yamato server; the sort of amount that probably didn’t exist in the first place. Naotsugu looked at Shiroe, his mouth hanging open. Shiroe’s brow was furrowed, and he was groaning to himself.

However, on seeing Shiroe groan, Naotsugu understood. Shiroe wasn’t doing this as a joke or on a whim. He thought that amount was necessary, no matter what.

“…Got any ideas about who to ask?”

“The whole amount wouldn’t be possible, so we’ll split it over several installments, take it little by little.”

Although it’s a fact that no matter how we split it up, it isn’t an amount that could ever be “little by little”… Shiroe gave a troubled smile.

“Well, no help for that. Gimme a bit more info. Tell me about this strategy you’ve thought up.”

“There’s no strategy. We’ll wing it, get down on our knees and beg. We’ll just persuade them.”

“Persuade who? How?”

When they’d gotten that far in their conversation, sipping their mog milk, the door to the next room opened and a man in a robe appeared.

“Shiroe. It seems our guest has arrived.”

The People of the Earth magician, who had shifty eyes and an entertained expression, giggled, then thumped Naotsugu on the shoulder. For a Person of the Earth, he showed an unusual lack of reserve. Naotsugu was rather taken aback by his attitude, but Li Gan spoke to him as though nothing had happened.

“Do watch, Naotsugu. No explanations are necessary: Shiroe’s negotiations are about to begin. This is going to be amazing. These negotiations may actually be battle-class, or even national-defense-class magic.”

What did “national-defense-class” mean? Naotsugu’s question was cut off before he finished asking it.

Someone had knocked at the door of the lodge.

Not twenty minutes ago, there had been no Adventurers within a ten-kilometer radius. Did that mean the visitor was a Person of the Earth? …But were People of the Earth even able to travel this far into the snowbound Tearstone Mountains?

As Shiroe and Li Gan watched, Naotsugu took his sword from his Magic Bag and warily approached the door.

4

“Shiro. Company.”

Even before Naotsugu’s announcement, Shiroe had crammed his maps and documents into his Magic Bag.

He’d anticipated that they would have a visitor, and a table and tea service had been set up in the room with the fireplace.

Is that how it’s turned out… Shiroe thought, at the sight of Naotsugu’s perplexed expression as his friend returned from the door. The visitor who followed at his heels wasn’t one Shiroe had expected, but it wasn’t an individual he’d never considered, either.

“This way, please.”

Shiroe felt a bit bad about ignoring Naotsugu, but welcoming their visitor took priority just now. He gestured to a sturdy oak chair.

“Climbing snowy mountains is quite taxing.”

As he spoke, the young man with violet eyes—Kinjo of the Kunie—brushed at the shoulders of his formal outfit with its stand-up collar, although there wasn’t a single snowflake on it, and sat down.

“May I say it’s been quite some time since we last spoke?”

“It has, and you may.”

At Kinjo’s response, Shiroe fell silent. Inwardly, he heaved a deep sigh, thinking that the situation was growing increasingly difficult.

Shiroe had been waiting in this cabin in the mountains, far from civilization, in order to negotiate with the Kunie clan. He’d had several reasons for traveling all the way into the Ouu Mountains, but one was that this area was close to the assumed location of the Kunie clan’s headquarters.

…This is rather, erm…

Shiroe felt that, frankly, this was a problem.

To begin with, he’d anticipated that negotiating with the Kunie clan would be difficult.

At first, all Shiroe had known about this mysterious clan was that they ran the bank. The bank was one of the convenient functions available to Elder Tales players, a service that provided storage for items and cash. Once deposited in the bank, these things could be withdrawn from any bank in Yamato, not just from the specific branch that had accepted them.

The Kunie clan had a transference technique that was different from the Call of Home spell and the intercity gates the Adventurers used, and banking wasn’t the only service they provided.

A home delivery service that carried letters and parcels from one individual to another, a bazaar service that made it possible to buy and sell all sorts of items… They handled a wide variety of things. The guard systems established in most towns were also administered by the Kunie clan.

The Elder Tales players—or, after the Catastrophe, the Adventurers—took the existence of these services for granted. They seemed to be part of the public infrastructure. When, during the establishment of the Round Table Council, Shiroe had said that the Adventurers couldn’t live without the support of the People of the Earth, he’d had this clan in mind.

Of course, at the time, he hadn’t known that these services were provided by the mysterious Kunie clan.

After the formation of the Round Table Council, the Council—and mainly Shiroe—had attempted to contact the Kunie clan. They’d managed it rather easily, and that was when he’d made the acquaintance of Kinjo, the person in charge of activities in Akiba. However, they hadn’t been able to advance beyond that point.

They’d learned that the Kunie clan provided a variety of services in the region of Yamato. They’d also learned that these services were indispensible to the Adventurers. They’d managed to formally greet Kinjo, the Kunie representative in Akiba… But that was as far as they’d gotten.

Kinjo hadn’t openly ignored them or shown clear animosity, but he’d rejected all of Shiroe’s probes with his serene smile and eloquent tongue.

In any case, as Shiroe had thought previously, while the Adventurers couldn’t live without the People of the Earth, the People of the Earth would probably manage to get by without the Adventurers. In this world where brutal monsters reigned, they might not be able to prosper they way they would have on Earth proper, but even so, if they used noncombat zones and magic technology, they’d be able to survive. The Kunie clan was a prime example.

Even if the Adventurers disappeared, the Kunie clan wouldn’t fall. That, more than anything else, meant the cards available for Shiroe to negotiate with were extremely limited.

Even so, Shiroe had continued to gather information in an attempt to acquire ammunition of some sort, and the person he’d dealt with had been Kinjo, who lived in Akiba. No doubt this young man who gave the impression of a seasoned veteran had picked up on Shiroe’s intent; he’d kept intel on the Kunie clan inaccessible. The clan’s organization and actual abilities, their hidden knowledge, their headquarters, ideas, objectives—any and all information.

Shiroe had gotten most of the knowledge he currently had regarding the Kunie clan from Li Gan, rather than Kinjo.

“This is Li Gan. The Sage. Do you know of him?”

“Yes, of course. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I am Kinjo, and I serve as the contact for the Kunie clan.”

“Charmed, charmed. To think I’d have the privilege of meeting a member of the Kunie…”

Li Gan waved a hand in response to Kinjo’s greeting, answering with a smile.

Kinjo also smiled, thinly.

“This is quite the unusual day, isn’t it? I’ve managed to encounter both Master Shiroe of Log Horizon, the great mage of the Debauchery Tea Party and representative of the Adventurers, and Master Li Gan, the Sage of Miral Lake. It is an honor to have been invited to participate in this historic occasion, Master Shiroe. There are few in the history of the Kunie who have been privileged to such glory. No doubt even my great predecessors never dreamed such a day would come.”

Kinjo’s response troubled Shiroe.

Kinjo certainly wasn’t hostile to Shiroe and the other Adventurers. He wasn’t silent, and it wasn’t that he didn’t understand what they said. He simply refused to disclose information he didn’t wish revealed, and he camouflaged even that refusal with this sort of theatrical verbosity.

Shiroe felt like sighing over the coming negotiations. He’d personally sent a request to the Kunie clan of Akiba—in other words, through Kinjo—and had asked to speak to a responsible person in the clan, but he’d never imagined that the man himself would come all this way into the mountains of Ouu.

At that point, a different possibility occurred to Shiroe. However, even during the few moments he spent examining it, the terribly cheerful Li Gan had continued conversing with their guest.

“Your presence has made this splendid occasion even more miraculous. The Kunie… They are a mysterious clan. A clan that supports the countries of Yamato from the shadows, the organization that preserves wisdom of the ancient civilization that once wielded enormous magical power. And you, Master Kinjo, are their leader. I can’t tell you how that raises my expectations.”

“Your expectations?”

“Yes. Master Shiroe here is a veritable jack-in-the-box, you see.”

“Oho. Is he, then!”

I wish you wouldn’t give me impossible setups.

Shiroe glanced at Li Gan, saturating the look with that emotion, but the man’s familiar, gaunt face wore a smile brimming with curiosity.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed. Even if Shiroe was in trouble, this droll People of the Earth sage simply didn’t intend to save him.

“Um, ah…”

“Heh-heh-heh-heh.”

Glaring at Li Gan, who was chuckling, Shiroe began the negotiations.

“Kinjo, the request I’d like to make was outlined in my letter.”

“To arrange for funds, you mean? For a loan?”

It was trivial.

He was asking for money.

“That’s right. I’m glad we’ve managed to understand each other so quickly.”

“Yes. That’s saved some trouble, hasn’t it?”

“I’m much obliged.”

Shiroe would have preferred to hold these negotiations in Akiba. Now, with Krusty and the other major members of the Round Table Council off conquering Seventh Fall, the town of Akiba was quite vulnerable, and Shiroe himself had a premonition of trouble as well. Since Soujirou had stayed there, he thought things would work out somehow, no matter what happened, but even so, he hadn’t wanted to leave.

He’d come here because Kinjo hadn’t let him make that proposal. It wasn’t that Kinjo had turned him down. It was more accurate to say he’d been evasive, letting any requests get lost in light conversation, and had left the matter unsettled. Shiroe was only a university student, and when it came to the art of negotiation, he couldn’t win against a professional.

The fact that Kinjo had easily moved on to the main topic this time was unexpected, but it was also welcome.

“No, no, it isn’t anything to bother yourself about. Saving trouble. That’s very important. To the Kunie clan, it’s very important indeed.”

“I see…”

“You came here because you knew of the Kunie village, correct?”

“That’s right. I heard about it from Li Gan.”

“Oho. So Miral Lake had a record like that… I seem to have underestimated him slightly.”

“I thought it would be good form.”

Shiroe frowned a little as he responded.

It hadn’t been about good form at all.

It had been one of the cards he’d played after learning that the Kunie clan headquarters was in this region, information obtained from his research of old documents with Li Gan. The statement that they knew the location of their headquarters was, essentially, intimidation. This made Shiroe uncomfortable. He didn’t reject the method, and he didn’t intend to hesitate, but that didn’t mean he was doing it happily.

During the Round Table Council affair, he’d been irritated.

He’d wanted to yell Enough already! at the big guilds, who were just sitting by idly and eying the problem, and so he simply hadn’t worried about whether this way of doing things was a threat or intimidation.

However, the Kunie clan was only carrying out its duty, just as it had always done.

“As it is a request from you, Master Shiroe of the Round Table Council, we would dearly love to accommodate it, but I’m afraid we are unable to do so.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it would violate a contract that has been in effect since the time of our progenitor.”

At that answer, Shiroe sighed.

He’d known from the beginning that these negotiations would be difficult. It was why he’d asked Li Gan for assistance, and why he’d looked into a variety of things beforehand. There wasn’t a single recorded instance of the Kunie clan’s bank providing funds to an external party, either through investment or through financing. All they did was pay out money that had been deposited with them. That was it.

Shiroe remembered the chats he’d had with Kinjo in Akiba. Capital-to-asset ratios, credit limits, trust—to Shiroe and the others, these were common banking terms, but they hadn’t gotten through to Kinjo. Of course, when Shiroe had explained them to him, he’d understood what the words meant, but that was all.

The facility known as the bank in Akiba wasn’t similar to the institutions they’d had on Earth. That was the conclusion Shiroe and the others had reached. As a facility, it would have been more accurate to call it a depository with a transfer service; the goal of the organization wasn’t finance.

…In that case, something was odd.

Say he conceded that there was no bank in this world. It was still unnatural that there was no moneylending. Shiroe wasn’t an expert, so he didn’t know all that much about it, but although banks were one thing, the history of moneylending was a long one. He thought he remembered hearing that they’d had it in Rome, and as a country, Rome had existed since before 1 AD. This world was styled after the Middle Ages. If it didn’t have moneylending, its economic development was too rudimentary.

When he’d asked Li Gan about this, he’d only looked mystified, and Shiroe hadn’t been able to get a clear answer out of him. According to Elissa, a Person of the Earth, it seemed as though aristocrats sometimes made loans to lower-ranking nobles and citizens of their domains, but it was rare, and no similar lending or borrowing was seen among the common people.

As a result, merchants didn’t have much influence in this world. Most buying and selling took place between nobles, and merchants were no more than intermediaries and carriers. There were also some People of the Earth who seemed to be half noble and half merchant.

In addition, royals and the nobility weren’t the source of trust in the currency here.

In the first place, the rulers—in the form of the royals and aristocrats—didn’t mint the currency. It was “found” when monsters were defeated. The more monsters that were subjugated, the more currency came into circulation in the markets; in other words, the money supply increased. Apparently, the system on Earth in which nations backed trust in currency didn’t apply here.

In that case, where was the trust?

In universality.

There was one single currency in circulation in this world. It had denominations—gold coins, half coins, and quarter coins—but no name. Unlike Earth, where yen, dollars, and euros existed side by side, there was only one currency, and so there was no need to differentiate it with a name. The coins were simply called “money,” “gold,” or “gold coins.” What was more, Shiroe guessed that they were shared not just on the Yamato server but on all servers: In other words, throughout the entire world of Elder Tales.

In short, the faith that the coins they possessed wouldn’t turn to worthless rubbish one day stemmed not from nations’ might and influence but from the fact that no other currency existed. It might be a more secure value retention system than the one on Earth, where currency could lose its value because one issuing country had fallen. Even if Eastal, the League of Free Cities, or the Ancient Dynasty of Westlande fell, it wouldn’t damage the circulation value of coins acquired in Maihama.

Of course, there was the fact that the coins themselves had the value of precious metal, but didn’t processing them require the skills of a Blacksmith? To Shiroe, the trust in the currency seemed to stem mainly from their universality.

Then there was the issue of the Kunie clan’s banks as well. Even if they were essentially no more than depositories, their defensive capabilities were the real thing. Once deposited with them, money was protected by absolute security. Many banks were in independent zones, and they were usually fortified with guards. In addition, banks had technology that could identify unknown individuals, and money deposited at one branch could be instantly withdrawn from another branch. They even had a function that could settle accounts, including market and zone maintenance fees. They provided a very convenient, advanced system, but it was applied only to coins.

The fact that the system was so very convenient and autonomous seemed to be the reason the rulers didn’t mint their own separate currencies.

“When you defeat a monster, it’s possible to get coins, isn’t it, Kinjo?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Shiroe pressed toward the crux of the matter.

“You can also get several hundred gold coins from treasure chests in dungeons.”

“A feat due entirely to the valor of the Adventurers.”

“If it isn’t possible to get financing from the Kunie clan, what about getting coins from whoever distributes them in those places, before they actually distribute them?”

5

Li Gan was excited.

He was here because he’d been invited by Shiroe of Log Horizon, with whom he’d formed a friendship at the Ancient Court of Eternal Ice. The excitement that event had caused Li Gan was the same as if a storm had come and changed the previous weather completely.

The Sage thought highly of the young man beside him, whose gaze was so intense it obscured both the past and the future. In the library, Li Gan had spoken with feverish enthusiasm of the World Fraction, the fruit of his lifelong research. This man, who’d grasped its background and prospects in a single night, was an unparalleled great magician.

Li Gan studied Shiroe’s profile so intently it was as if he’d forgotten to breathe.

This young man, who called himself Shiroe of Log Horizon, was an Adventurer whose profession was magic. Adventurers were strong. Their abilities were overwhelmingly higher than those of the People of the Earth. Adventurers, this other strain of humanity, were geniuses in everything they did: not only as warriors, but as scouts, healers, and magicians.

However, as far as Li Gan was concerned, that didn’t mean that all high-ranking Adventurers were worthy of being called great magicians. Adventurers had formidable abilities, but for the most part, they were too specialized toward combat. For a magician who used knowledge to peer into the depths of this world, competence with combat magic was really only a digression.

Shiroe was one of the few magicians among the Adventurers who was different, and a great magician at that.

Li Gan believed that in this world, there were four paths to ultimate knowledge.

Each path was independent, and they never touched each other.

In feudal Yamato, technology and knowledge were things that had to be concealed. Acquired knowledge was transmitted quietly, as secret teachings, and in many cases it never left the group in which it was handed down.

One path could be found in the People of the Earth academics, to which Li Gan himself belonged.

In the sense of being able to openly devote oneself to study, that meant the magic academy of Tsukuba, and in terms of hiding in the shadows and preserving knowledge, it was Miral Lake. As the Sage of Miral Lake, Li Gan was the guardian of Miral Lake, “the Lake of Forgotten Books.” The latest in a line of scholars that went into battle against the principles of this world.

The second was probably the Adventurers. Li Gan and the other sages of Miral Lake had always thought that Adventurers had magic and knowledge that was completely different from that of the People of the Earth. Although enormously powerful, the magic they used was the same as that of the People of the Earth. However, for a long time, they had wondered whether their knowledge might not have a different source.

Did the Adventurers isolate a portion of their own souls in some other world? That had been a suggestion for research, and at this point, Li Gan was certain of it. On top of that, there was the possibility that that other world was connected to the Age of Myth. By now, it was nearly common knowledge for Li Gan and the magicians of Tsukuba that the various miracles and inventions that the Adventurers had presented since the Catastrophe were related to those supertechnologies. They called these “science” or “heritage.”

The third was the abilities used by the Ancients. Like the Adventurers, they were a tribe of heroes that was beyond the common sense of the People of the Earth. Although they were of the exact same races as the People of the Earth—humans, elves, dwarves, half alvs, felinoids, wolf-fangs, foxtails, and ritians—the Ancients and Adventurers surpassed their upper limits with ease.

The Ancients had also handed traditions down in secret since time immemorial, and it was said that these existed within secret societies known as knight brigades, which protected regions all over the world.

The fourth and final path was the Kunie clan.

Much about them was mysterious, and even Li Gan could only guess at the full picture. They were definitely People of the Earth, but they weren’t affiliated with Yamato’s academic organization in Tsukuba or with Miral Lake. It was said that they handed down techniques from the ancient alv civilization, and that the sphere of their influence stretched not only throughout Yamato but to the continent as well.

In the sense that they accumulated the knowledge of antiquity and handed it down to the present, they resembled Miral Lake, but they didn’t spread that knowledge. The greatest difference between them and the People of the Earth academics at Tsukuba and Miral Lake was their closed nature. Not only did they not have wide contact with the People of the Earth, they did not conduct research. They were a clan that lacked curiosity and disliked contact.

Miral Lake’s policy was to gather all sorts of information, and in the past, the sage had made dozens of attempts to contact the Kunie clan. However, there was no record of any sage ever having succeeded in exchanging research information.

Now, one member of the Kunie clan was seated at the same table with Li Gan and Shiroe of Log Horizon. Li Gan’s excitement was only natural.

Shiroe’s remark seemed to have badly shaken the leader of the Kunie clan.

Kinjo gulped, looking startled. Then, as if to conceal it, he put on an expressionless mask and fell silent. This lasted for quite some time.

“Do you think that’s possible, Master Shiroe?”

When Kinjo finally replied, Shiroe’s response was to glance at Li Gan and draw his chin in slightly.

Apparently it was his turn. Praying that his leaping heart would calm itself, Li Gan began to speak.

“The prospect of which Master Shiroe speaks is something no one has ever considered before. Now that I think of it, it’s true that it seems to be one of the mysteries of this world. It’s a viewpoint that complements the Spirit Theory. Monsters reincarnate repeatedly. However, souls aside, where does the money come from? There must be some sort of system that issues money to the monsters. And, if it is possible to obtain a new perspective like that, Miral Lake has a vast number of books. Yes, we went over all of them. Books of all kinds.”

Li Gan pushed up the amethyst circlet he wore and scratched at his forehead, as he always did. The circlet was a magic item that had the marvelous effect of endowing him with improved memory and insight, but it was still a metal circlet. It hadn’t been long since Li Gan had inherited it from his predecessor, and he wasn’t used to it yet.

However, without this magic circlet, he probably wouldn’t have been able to accomplish this investigation in such a short time. And, even if he had the circlet, without the books his predecessors had collected and left behind, he was sure he wouldn’t have been able to acquire even the slightest clue.

“In the books, we discovered the village of the Kunie that Master Shiroe mentioned. That, and the gold the Kunie possess.”

“……”

Kinjo’s face remained expressionless.

Li Gan simply inquired. He had done so for a long time now. Those who belonged to Miral Lake collected knowledge. What they gained as a result of their endless collection were new questions. The answer to those questions was new knowledge. They went into the struggle against the resulting questions prepared to die, and the cycle repeated.

“In the very deepest part of the Depths of Palm, the books said, there is a vast vortex of gold. A winding river exists, where money that has appeared from the void vanishes into the void again, and then flows on to a forgotten subterranean garden. Hades first raised his army of the dead out of the desire to obtain this gold. That is found in the traditions as well. The Sage of Miral Lake took part in its defense, fifteen generations ago, and he set a seal on the Depths of Palm.”

This sort of assistance wasn’t all that unusual for the Sages of Miral Lake.

In the process of collecting all sorts of knowledge, the Sages obtained a variety of magic articles. Some were cursed and some were not, but most were extraordinarily dangerous if used incorrectly. The people—mostly nobles—who brought them to the sage wanted them to be sealed safely at Miral Lake.

Being able to grant these requests raised Miral Lake’s reputation and helped to increase the amount of knowledge the sages could gain. Even without that, having items no one else had in their care meant they had more material for research. Miral Lake had a very practical reason for researching the art of sealing. In addition, this art could be used not only to keep objects in custody, but to seal off places and areas.

“On a past adventure, the Nine Great Gaols of Halos, I acquired the Key of Eternal Darkness. This item was created by the Sage of Miral Lake, wasn’t it?”

Li Gan nodded in response to Shiroe’s words, letting him take the floor.

“This key qualified us to challenge the Nine Great Gaols of Halos. That zone was sealed by the…I’m not sure how many generations back, but a previous Miral Lake sage. There are several dangerous, sealed zones. We confirmed this matter as well.”

At Shiroe’s words, a shiver ran down Li Gan’s spine.

In the first place, Li Gan was a lore master, and his combat-type magic was extremely weak. His training wasn’t so poor he’d lose to a band of knights in the service of some petty lord, but that was only against People of the Earth, and his skills couldn’t compare to those of the Adventurers.

Even so, guarded by Shiroe and his friend Naotsugu, Li Gan had gone into the depths of the dungeon.

This was because all that was written in the records of Miral Lake was “I was asked to set a seal, and did so,” and there had been no mention of a method for releasing the seal or details regarding items. When they went to the site, they’d found an enormous bronze door that was over ten meters tall; it actually had been sealed, but the method was in the secret arts of Miral Lake, and they’d learned that it wouldn’t be all that hard to unseal it.

He hadn’t understood what Shiroe had meant by the term “unimplemented zone,” but in their investigation of the materials, they’d learned that countless sealed doors like this one existed all over Yamato. Not all of them had been sealed by Miral Lake, but for one reason or another, entering these regions and facilities was currently forbidden.

“Then you mean to obtain money from this vortex of gold?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe the vortex has some connection to the Kunie.”

“That’s right.”

As Kinjo questioned Shiroe, he finally seemed to have regained his mental composure.

“…In that case, wouldn’t taking gold from it be stealing? Does the Round Table Council intend to plunder?”

He responded with a question, and his voice was cold.

However, with that, it was clear.

There really was that much gold in the vortex under the Depths of Palm. The place was also connected to the Kunie clan. They’d gleaned hints of this from the materials, but they hadn’t been certain. It could have been completely unrelated to the Kunie. Li Gan had discussed it with Shiroe and had shared this possibility, but Shiroe had insisted, and he’d listened and contacted the Kunie clan.

One of their questions had been answered.

The Kunie clan was connected to the secret of the Spirit Theory in some way.

They weren’t positive yet, but Kinjo’s reaction had begun to prove it. The secret of the Kunie reached into the depths of the creation of the world. That conviction delighted Li Gan so much that he wanted to dance a little jig. The Spirit Theory was the greatest thing in his research. At this point, he would have liked to pour a toast with the wine he wasn’t allowed to drink.

However, Shiroe’s voice was pained.

“That’s why we called you. We don’t want to antagonize the Kunie clan. The Kunie are important. Even when it comes to using the money we acquire, unless we entrust future affairs to your people, we won’t be able to make plans.”

“How, or rather, on what, do you intend to use it, Master Shiroe?”

“If I explain that, is there a possibility of securing your cooperation?”

“There is not. Our progenitor’s orders, you see.”

“…Kinjo.”

Before Li Gan’s eyes, Shiroe’s lips tightened as though he were enduring something. Even so, he seemed to be desperately trying to connect a thin thread.

“Kinjo. It isn’t that we don’t understand your progenitor’s order. We understand it only in the way of Adventurers, but we know it is a rule that stretches back to the Age of Myth. We have no intention of telling you to break it. We don’t want to compel you to do something forbidden. However, for that very reason, we want you to search the outer bounds of that rule.”

“……”

“That’s right. In the Catastrophe, the rules changed. We’re in a new era. It hasn’t stopped, either. I’m sure this is—”

Kinjo had closed his eyes. He looked like a steel statue.

Shiroe’s persuasion didn’t seem to have reached his heart.

Li Gan’s delight soon began to fade as well, like the sun going behind clouds. He didn’t know what was happening here in front of him. Since birth, he’d studied only magic theory and phenomenology, and something he didn’t really understand was breaking. Put into words, it would probably be the negotiations. However, for someone like Li Gan, it felt as though he could hear something breaking, something that was too valuable to be expressed with the word negotiations.

Three of the world’s four wisdoms were gathered here, and this was the best they could do?

In spite of himself, Li Gan clenched his hands into fists.

6

The atmosphere in the living room was dazed.

As Shiroe added dry firewood to the orange flames of the fireplace, Naotsugu watched his rounded back. The table had been cleared away, and two sleeping bags were laid out.

It was the interior of the mountain lodge, after the negotiations with Kinjo had fallen through.

That’s a pretty dejected-looking back, Naotsugu thought.

Such was Shiroe.

He’d put the poker in and was adjusting the position of the firewood. He was probably tending the fire with extra care because they’d be going to sleep after this, but he also looked as if he was at his wits’ end and was aimlessly stirring the fire around.

Naotsugu guessed he was probably thinking difficult things about the failed negotiations, over and over. He’d watched the discussion from the sidelines up until a short while ago, and even to him, Shiroe had seemed hard-pressed. Even more so than he’d been on the day the Round Table Council was established.

“Hey, Shiro.”

“Hmm?”

“That’s enough. Come stick your feet in your sleeping bag.”

“Okay.”

Restlessly, Shiroe moved to his sleeping bag, then sat down on top of it, cross-legged. That put him in the same position as Naotsugu.

On Earth, because the fiber materials were excellent, most sleeping bags had been thin and lightweight. However, in this world, high-performance insulating material hadn’t been developed the way it had on Earth, and so in general, sleeping bags were made of felted wool that had been sewn together. They weren’t as good at keeping out the cold as their counterparts on Earth, but since they were thick, they were pretty comfortable to sleep on. Combined with a rug with long piles, they made perfect places to sit.

“Want some, Shiro?”

He showed him a mug of hot wine. Shiroe sniffed, as though he was smelling the air, then turned him down: “No, I’m good.”

He should just have some, Naotsugu thought, but he didn’t press him.

To Naotsugu, it seemed as though on nights like this, you needed to drink some booze and sleep spread-eagled, but Shiroe wasn’t the type. He knew that, even if he left him alone, Shiroe would find his rhythm again. There was no need to force him to go along with anything.

“So, that was a total bust.”

“Yeah.”

As he answered, Shiroe’s expression was troubled.

In terms of results, Naotsugu thought it probably hadn’t been a loss. He didn’t know the details, but Shiroe needed a vast amount of cash. It wasn’t the sort of sum they could collect from the Adventurers. If he wanted to pull together an amount like that, the places he could get it from and the methods he could use would naturally be limited.

After hearing what he’d discussed with Kinjo of the Kunie clan, Naotsugu had begun to see the general picture.

Shiroe was trying to use the settings from the days when Elder Tales had been a game.

When Adventurers defeated monsters, they got the coins the monsters had possessed. If the monster was humanoid and intelligent, the type that would have tools and treasures, this was only to be expected, but Adventurers won coins even when this wasn’t the case. Even if it was a Wild Dog, a Large Boar, or some other animal, for example.

There was technically no reason for this. Elder Tales was a game, and the monsters dropped coins because the game was designed so that players could defeat monsters and use the assets they obtained to grow stronger. In other words, it happened for the convenience of the game.

However, if convenience was the only priority, the game would lose any semblance of reality, and it wouldn’t be as interesting. To that end, a variety of background information had been added. The explanation this time—“Actually, a powerful magical device from antiquity gives coins to the monsters’ souls as they’re reborn”—was one of them.

It was a ridiculous idea. However, since monsters did in fact drop coins, there had to be some sort of cause, and it had appeared before their very eyes as fact. Shiroe probably knew this, and had attempted to use it.

And, Naotsugu thought, it had worked.

In that case, let us meet there. At “the winding river where money that has appeared from the void vanishes into the void again, in the forgotten subterranean garden.”

However, in order to reach it, no doubt you’ll need many brave warriors. The Kunie clan’s answer will depend on how you and the others manage to reach the deepest spring, Master Shiroe, and the results of your challenge.

Those had been the last words Kinjo, leader of the Kunie, had said to them.

They’d been fighting words, spoken in response to a challenge.

Shiroe had ascertained that there was a vast amount of coins in an uncharted zone deep underground. He’d gathered evidence, gone to the site itself to reconnoiter, and even confirmed that they could release the seal and enter the area.

Then he’d confronted the Kunie, its probable owners, with that fact.

At that point in time, Shiroe’s plan had already succeeded. Put in plainer terms, Naotsugu thought, Shiroe hadn’t even needed to talk to the Kunie clan in the first place.

There was a subterranean zone, the treasure they were after was there, and they even had a way to get in, so all they had to do was go there and get the money. Then they’d have won an enormous fortune.

Well, that means Shiro’s probably bummed about something else.

When he thought about what that might be, the answer was automatically clear.

This problematic friend of his had wanted to talk with the Kunie clan, even if it hadn’t been necessary.

There’s no strategy. We’ll wing it, get down on our knees and beg. We’ll just persuade them.

That was what Shiroe had said before the meeting.

At the time, Naotsugu had suspected his friend was only saying he had no strategy, out of his own unique brand of humility, but he really hadn’t had a plan. What a clumsy guy. In spite of himself, Naotsugu laughed a little.

In order to achieve an objective, Shiroe would work out absolutely any kind of plan and make thorough preparations. Even this time, he must have taken a lot of time to set things up. Naotsugu had gone along when they reconnoitered the very lowest area of the Depths of Palm, and from what Li Gan had said, they’d been preparing for that for quite some time. Some of what he’d been researching in his office until late at night, every night, had been in preparation for today’s discussion.

Shiroe had prepared that thoroughly in order to acquire the money he was after, and it had borne fruit in the shape of the Kunie clan’s promise. They simply had to enter the new underground zone, then get the money.

However, he’d had a hope that lay beyond that.

When Shiroe wanted to become friends with someone, he didn’t work out a strategy. He stopped saying anything that wasn’t so straightforward that one couldn’t help but wonder if he was an idiot. Shiroe hadn’t wanted to force his way in and steal the gold, he hadn’t wanted to catch the Kunie clan off guard, and he hadn’t wanted to lie. In other words, that meant he’d wanted to make friends, and he was at a loss because that had failed.

Because Naotsugu knew this, “That was a total bust” was all he could say to his friend.

“And anyway, what was that speech a minute ago? That wasn’t like you, Shiro.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Those were some serious weasel words. There was nothing citified about it. You couldn’t even tack city onto it.”

“It was, huh…”

Naotsugu was irritated and was reproaching Shiroe. However, the response was a very absentminded affirmation.

“That’s seriously cold. I thought we were friends,” Shiroe said. Naotsugu heaved a big sigh.

In the first place, it was only natural that the day’s negotiations had failed.

The Kunie clan had always been terribly tight-lipped, refusing to talk about themselves at all, and Shiroe hadn’t said a word about his all-important objective for acquiring the assets, or about his hopes that the other party would give their consent as well. Both sides had been much too secretive.

With a relationship like that, of course persuasion wouldn’t go well. Even Naotsugu, who was in his first year as a working adult and had been assigned to a job in sales, could understand that easily.

If it had simply been selling a kilo of pepper wholesale for ¥2,450 according to the same deal they’d had for ages, it would have been easy. All they would have had to do was take the order, deliver the product, and send the bill, just as they’d always done for this particular customer. However, if they were proposing a new product or establishing a lasting, long-term contract, things were different. They had to know the other party’s circumstances very well. They also had to communicate their own circumstances to them. They couldn’t be selfish; they had to fit the hopes of both parties together, as accurately as possible. That was the premise, and the rest was sincerity. When trying to convince the other party, it was only natural to attempt to meet them halfway.

That was why these negotiations, in which both parties had hidden too many of their cards, had been bound to fail.

Not only that, but their hand had been hidden from Naotsugu as well.

Naotsugu didn’t know what Shiroe wanted to do with this money once he got it.

He didn’t know why he was in such a hurry, either.

He thought that was really cold.

“What are you thinking now, Shiro?”

“……”

“It’s not over yet, so c’mon, tell me what’s eating you. Spit it out.”

What’s eating me, what’s eating me. Shiroe thought it as if it were some sort of spell. Then he flopped down onto his back and went on, groaning.

“Naotsugu, listen…”

“Yeah?”

“Kinjo said, ‘In order to reach it, no doubt you’ll need many brave warriors,’ didn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

Naotsugu gave a noncommittal answer, wondering what in the world Shiroe was talking about. They already knew where they were going to get the money, so the problem had to be improving their relationship with the Kunie clan. Hadn’t that been what this was about? As Naotsugu racked his brains, Shiroe continued:

“No matter how you look at it, he was announcing a raid, wasn’t he? I mean, it really can’t be anything else. I’m in pretty deep trouble.”

“Why?”

“We don’t have the people.”

“Huh?”

He had no idea what Shiroe was getting at, since Naotsugu himself had anticipated a raid. In the first place, in Elder Tales, when a dungeon meant to be captured by an ordinary party had a mysterious door in its depths, there was a good possibility that it was a raid zone. However, even if that was the case, they should stand a good chance of beating it. Adventurers were immortal, and the Round Table Council (Shiroe) had sufficient manpower. It might take time, but that was all.

“Almost all the guilds on the Round Table Council are being monitored. The current situation is so fluid that a little push is all it would take, and it isn’t possible to get rid of those monitors. I want to keep Minami from noticing us for just a little longer.”

Shiroe’s answer left Naotsugu dumbfounded.

He didn’t want to use the Round Table Council’s manpower. He didn’t want Minami to notice what he was doing. He wouldn’t reveal his ultimate goal. Just how many restrictions did he plan to play under? Naotsugu’s mouth hung open, and he couldn’t close it. On top of that, there was probably a time limit, too. Well, if he didn’t want Minami to know, he couldn’t afford to take too long. That must have been why he’d stolen quietly out of Akiba, Naotsugu realized. After all, everyone except for the Log Horizon members probably thought Shiroe was at the guild hall, doing his job. The idea of getting things done before they were discovered was already a time limit in and of itself.

“Are you a total masochist, Shiro?”

Shiroe, still lying down, denied Naotsugu’s mutter. “Not at all,” he said. “Every day, I think about how I’d love to take it as easy as possible.”

Naotsugu was thoroughly appalled, but those words probably hadn’t been a lie. He knew that.

Shiroe really did think that way. He’d been like that when he was in the Debauchery Tea Party, too. In order to reach their goals, he’d always tried to point out the shortest method with the best chances. When that method looked troublesome and roundabout, it was because the problem itself was serpentine and difficult.

The path that looked winding and troublesome and roundabout was the shortest course. The strategies Shiroe came up with always felt like that.

Once Naotsugu’s friend settled on an objective, he never compromised it.

…Even when he loaded himself down with this much trouble as a result.

About half that trouble isn’t even necessary. I bet Shiro’s worrying too much, and if he’d just let it all hang out, there’d be lots of people who’d help him.

“Well, I guess there’s no help for it, then.”

Naotsugu gave a response that was completely different from what he was thinking.

In the end, Shiroe was a guy who understood a lot of things. He also wasn’t the type to lose sight of what was important. Besides, even if he did end up doing that, Naotsugu would just whack him upside the head.

Shiroe seemed to be in some kind of hurry, but even so, in the midst of that impatience, in order to convince himself, he needed time to roll around. Naotsugu thought all guys were like that, not just Shiroe. He had enough memories of working too hard on his own and causing trouble for the people around him that just remembering made him go beet red. Still, Shiroe thought that sort of thing was necessary.

It was necessary for everybody, and it was even more necessary for Shiroe.

The people around him seemed to have decided to think of him as a schemer and a resourceful guy, but Naotsugu thought Shiroe was actually a pretty clumsy type. Clumsy Shiroe needed a lot of time for hard battles.

During those times, he just had to be there with him.

He didn’t have to worry: Shiroe would probably put out unstinting effort he could feel satisfied with. That was the type of guy Naotsugu’s friend was. No matter what he was doing, he was incapable of cutting corners.

“There’s no help for it. Let’s pull together enough members for a raid. No worries. It’ll work out.”

“Will it…?” Shiroe responded.

“Sure it will,” Naotsugu told him cheerfully, kicking him hard. There’s no development we can’t recover from, Naotsugu thought, but he just grinned at him, without putting it into words.

Besides, he was sure Shiroe would find that dawn.

On Tea Party adventures, that had been the condition for victory. Naotsugu decided to look forward to seeing that view.

In the course of his long friendship with Shiroe, this wasn’t an unusual night.

Apparently Naotsugu’s prediction had been correct. It had been a completely natural prediction, and it would have been hard for it to be wrong, but Demiquas hadn’t forgotten the incident from half a year ago, and he probably wasn’t just going to let it go.

“What do you plan to do outside?”

Shiroe knew the answer to this with absolute certainty, but he asked anyway.

He knew what Demiquas wanted, but even so, he couldn’t just skip all the steps in the middle. It was a conventional exchange of taunts. This was a grudge Shiroe had created in the past, so he couldn’t run from it. Now, when he was right in the middle of negotiations to recruit raid members, he had to avoid showing weakness in front of William.

“Which do you like better, Hamburg steak or mincemeat cutlet?”

“I like tofu.”

“That’s great. Nice and soft. I’ll pound you to a pulp, so get outside!”

“Shut up, Demi.”

However, William interrupted bluntly.

“That guy’s my guest.”

“What the hell do I care?! William, he— My—”

“You lost, didn’t you?”

“—!”

“You lost. And quit picking fights.”

“But!”

“I’ll crush you again, Demiquas.”

William issued the warning in a bitterly cold voice.

Shiroe pushed his glasses up with a fingertip, thinking. He’d known about the circumstances in Susukino through reports. That half a year ago, the confusion after Shiroe’s group had left Susukino had continued. That after the Round Table Council had been established, they’d put together several caravans between Akiba and Susukino, and had finished rescuing the people who’d been left behind in the city. After that, Silver Sword had moved their headquarters to this northern country, and while Susukino’s current atmosphere was slightly barbarous, it had settled down into a frontier player town.

Susukino had been a lawless city, crowded with combat guilds, but because Silver Sword—a group that had pulled off some of the top raids on the server—had moved in, public order had returned, even if it was rather unsteady. William’s group was a guild whose power was right on the heels of D.D.D. and the Knights of the Black Sword on the Yamato Server, and although they hadn’t actively dominated the town, they hadn’t tolerated any insolent boasting from amateurs. To William and the others, anyone who got violent as a group, especially with People of the Earth—whose combat power was clearly inferior to that of Adventurers—was a despicable coward. They wouldn’t let anyone like that talk about Elder Tales or combat.

Shiroe had just witnessed a real-life example from that report.

Six ears were sticking up over the kitchen counter. Felinoid People of the Earth had poked their heads up partway so that their eyes hovered just above the counter, and they were watching the situation on the floor. Those eyes did seem to hold the feeling that this was a bit of a problem, but there was no fear in them.

Silver Sword must have won the trust of the People of the Earth here in Susukino. Susukino was on the front line of the struggle with the Giants, and ever since the days of Elder Tales, it had been a frontier town where tough guys gathered. This time around, that might have influenced things in a positive way.

They probably felt safer now, when Silver Sword—who were disciplined, even if they were a surly combat group—were here as the town’s guardians, than they had when the Briganteers and other scoundrels had swaggered around as if they owned the place.

Finding himself the target of William’s cutting words, Demiquas ground his teeth. He glared at Shiroe with a curse in his eyes and enough force to run him through.

“In the first place, friend, you couldn’t win against Shiroe.”

“Hey, I’ve picked up a few raid items since then.”

True, when he looked, he saw that the Wyvern Leg Guards that Demiquas had equipped seemed to have been drastically modified. In addition, various pieces of his equipment looked well used, showing that over the past six months, he’d participated in several raids. Not only that, but they couldn’t have been low-level raids. The King of Beasts’ Armor was a found item in the Master of Tenvictory Plateau, a field raid for level-90 players. If he’d done that after the Catastrophe, it meant he’d succeeded at a challenge difficult enough to deserve praise.

“Thinking you could win with equipment is the reason you couldn’t beat Shiroe.”

“~~~!!”

Demiquas radiated inarticulate murderous intent. In contrast, William’s laid-back attitude didn’t flicker. Shiroe didn’t know what kind of relationship had been built between the two of them, but he could imagine it. No doubt they’d gotten into a contest of strength and had clarified their respective positions in the hierarchy. William had won a victory so overwhelming that Demiquas was left with no choice but to fall silent.

“And then, and then, the Briganteers lost half their members. Well, you can’t blame them, you know. He got completely shredded by a swordfighting cat who wasn’t even in a guild. That obviously made the foundations shaky. On top of that, the craptastic Rondarg got poached by the West.”

“Hey, self-proclaimed idol. It’s okay for you to say ‘crap’?”

“You mustn’t say ‘crap.’ It will destroy your popularity.”

“Hah! I-I didn’t say it. I’d never say ‘crap.’ It would pollute my mouth.”

“Planning to be one of those anything-for-attention idols, are you?”

“I’m an orthodox, beautiful, galactic idol! I’m so outer space I’d make the Voyager jealous!”

“That sounds kinda lonely. Never mind that, what’s Demiquas up to?”

“I’m not lonely!! Demi-Demi is Silver Sword’s junior member henchman, and so are the Briganteers. And now Susukino’s peaceful. I’m not lonely, all right? Well, about half of it’s because Demi-Demi’s bride is an excellent person. And also, I’m not lonely.”

These cheerful, thoughtless voices reached the table where Shiroe, William, and Demiquas stood in the midst of searing tension. The voices grew louder and louder, probably because they were walking this way. However, apparently, they didn’t have the sense to lower their voices.

Demiquas’s face went red, and tensed with something that wasn’t anger.

“Seriously?! A bride?! What-the-heck city!!”

“He’s a married man, is he? Lucky fellow.”

“No, they’re not married, or rather, he refuses to admit it, but according to my information network—the People of the Earth—his guild house is neat as a pin, his sheets are laundered crisp, and three meals get fixed every day, and his guild members are gaga over her. It sounds like he got himself adopted by a People of the Earth noblewoman.”

“Huh…?”

“He kidnapped this Person of the Earth, thinking he’d turn her into a servant, but she took care of him and he went all soft, The End. I swear, it’s like some ero-game development. Oh, but Mister Naotsugu? Don’t you want me to take care of you? Dweh-heh-heh. I’ll help you out. I may not look it, but I am an idol, you know.”

“Whatever, just get down, you counterfeit idol!!”

Shiroe heard a cute voice laughing—“Gweh-heh-heh!”—in a tone that wasn’t cute at all.

Inconveniently, the other two voices were male, and he recognized them.

“So anyway, thanks to that, Demi-Demi’s really mellowed out lately… Oh. There he is, even.”

That instant, without any lead-up at all, Demiquas flew through the air. Wyvern Kick. The flying kick, which included a glide of about five meters, was a prominent Monk special attack skill. He’d probably activated the skill just by twisting his torso, without using the menu, and he’d done it at a speed that was beyond comparison with what it had been six months ago.

The attack had been made without any preparatory motions, but in a move so quick it was almost impossible to see, Naotsugu rammed it with the shield he’d had ready. The light, clear, high sound was probably proof that Demiquas’s attack hadn’t been a serious one. This was a noncombat zone, so if he had been, the Kunie clan guards would have appeared. Naotsugu also hadn’t blocked it in earnest. He’d just held his shield up over his shoulder, blandly.

However, the attack’s direct target, the slim girl who’d been hugging Naotsugu’s neck, seemed to have been overawed. Her trembling mouth hung open, and she clung to Naotsugu desperately, like a bear cub.

The trio that had come in through the door consisted of Naotsugu, Li Gan, and a Cleric. They’d probably gotten information on Demiquas, who was very likely to be hostile to Shiroe, and had come to meet up with him. However, their timing had been rotten, and Demiquas himself had overheard them chatting as they swapped information.

They probably hadn’t meant anything by it, but the content of their conversation had infuriated Demiquas. Shiroe had to admit that that was only natural. If people talked about something like that in public, let alone revealed things like those while he was in the middle of picking a fight, it was only to be expected. He did think that unleashing a kick in retaliation had been going too far, but if the other guy was Naotsugu, there was nothing to worry about. He was used to getting kicked during his bouts with Akatsuki. Even in Akiba, it was safe to call this particular Guardian an expert in taking flying kicks and flying knee kicks. Considering that his defense rate against Akatsuki was about 50 percent, Akatsuki’s kicks might be on par with those of a professional Monk in real life.

“He kicked?!”

“Way to take advantage of the confusion: Where are you putting your hands?! Don’t cling! Quit leaning on me!”

“Dammit, Tetora. What’re you shooting your mouth off for?”

Thanks to their conversation, which completely failed to mesh, the situation got even more chaotic.

Apparently, the Cleric that was hanging on to Naotsugu’s neck for dear life was called Tetora—a cute name. On checking her level and guild, it all became clear to Shiroe: Naotsugu had probably brought her back for the raid. If they recruited another helper or two, plus himself and Naotsugu, they’d manage to pull a full raid together somehow. Just when Shiroe was about to breathe a sigh of relief, William spoke, an entertained smile on his lips:

“Perfect timing. Add that healer and Demi, and we’ll have enough people. You saw how hot-blooded he is. He can settle his score with Shiroe during the raid. Hah!”

At his sardonic laugh, Shiroe felt the mood he’d had up until a moment ago fly to pieces.

The raid to explore the deepest part of the Depths of Palm looked set to bring Shiroe unending worry and trouble.

4

The preparations for their departure went forward without a hitch.

Most Adventurer property was kept in their rooms or guild halls, in the rented safe-deposit boxes at the bank, or in their own luggage. It was common sense for veteran Adventurers in this world to have several weight-reduction bags, also known as Magic Bags. It wasn’t at all unusual to carry around with you consumable items and equipment you’d need on an adventure, just as they were.

On top of that, Silver Sword was a guild that specialized in raids. For its elite members, their daily routine was combat. After William gave the order, they were fully prepared by evening.

In this post-Catastrophe world, the time they experienced seemed to be twelve times as long as it had been when Elder Tales was a game. In addition, now that they couldn’t make free use of the Fairy Rings, traveling long distances took a shocking amount of time. In order to reach the Depths of Palm from Susukino, they would have to cross the Laiport Strait. Shiroe, Naotsugu, and Li Gan had flown across the strait on griffins, but that didn’t seem possible with a group of twenty-four.

As a raid guild that had participated in the struggle for supremacy on the Yamato server, Silver Sword had many members with flying mounts, but not everyone had them. It sounded as if they would have been able to find enough if they’d strained themselves, but William simply decided to travel overland. Shiroe went along with that decision.

Silver Sword was William’s guild, and he was best suited to take command.

Shiroe and Naotsugu understood this logic very well, so they’d placed themselves under his leadership. The ones who grumbled about this and that were Demiquas and Tetora. Possibly because his pride got in the way, Demiquas didn’t seem able to get by without complaining, and for her part, Tetora plagued Naotsugu with remarks like “I want to become a flying idol.”

Good grief. She’s really taken a shine to him, Shiroe thought.

For Naotsugu, all sorts of springtimes were probably on their way.

If they were going overland, there was only one route: They’d go through the tunnel that ran under the Laiport Strait. As was usual in Elder Tales, this underground tunnel, Z539, was a dungeon. However, for a twenty-four-member full-raid unit whose members’ average level was 93, it was no threat at all. In the first place, anyone who was level 40 could get through this particular dungeon as a solo player.

Led by William, the raid unit was currently advancing through this dungeon.

In Elder Tales, the basic unit of group combat was the party, or in other words, six people. This sort of party formed the foundation of twenty-four-member full raids as well. Full raids were composed of four squads of six members each, put together, and at times like this, the parties were referred to by numbers One through Four.

There was infinite variety in raids, and no single correct configuration existed. However, in general, the basic pattern was for the First party to be built to be outstanding at defense, and for the Second to emphasize balance so that it could act as a mobile unit. Since the main duty of the Third and Fourth parties was attacking, their members were chosen with an emphasis on firepower.

You could say that organizing parties was the first tough problem in raids.

The basic idea when putting them together was the members’ classes. For example, the warrior in the First party—in other words, the main tank—would have to draw attacks from the strongest monsters to themselves at all times, throughout the entire raid. To that end, they needed the highest possible defense abilities, high-level HP, and the ability to attract monsters’ aggro with the strongest taunts. The only class to fulfill all these requirements was Guardian. Samurai was another potential candidate, but when you took the presence or absence of shield equipment into consideration, Guardians were more stable.

However, this was just a general theory.

When the participating Samurai had a higher level than the Guardian, or when the quality of their equipment was better, this wasn’t necessarily true. In addition, the personalities of the Adventurer acting as the main tank had an even greater influence than their equipment or level. Since tanks were at the very center of raids and had to take enemy attacks for an extended period, the position carried a heavy burden. Techniques were necessary, of course, but so were strength of will and bonds with the defender’s companions. Even among Guardians, there were Adventurers whose minds tended to focus on attacking, and who didn’t like guiding or protecting their compatriots. Those were better suited to being in command, or to being active in the Third or Fourth attacking parties, than to being tanks.

In short, organizing parties that would participate in a raid was a difficult puzzle in which you couldn’t discover the best combinations unless you carefully considered not only class and level, but the personalities of all the participants. The weak points and actions varied depending on the monster you were fighting, and when you considered countermeasures for those as well, there were innumerable answers. It was a tough problem that had worried commanders for twenty years.

Shiroe guessed that this was the reason William had chosen to travel overland: so that he could grasp the personalities and habits of the new members and refer to that information when forming the actual parties.

I doubt this is going to help him much, though.

Shiroe, who’d thought this, had been put in charge of the Second party.

Its members were:

Shiroe the Enchanter.

Naotsugu the Guardian.

Tetora the Cleric.

Voinen, a Druid.

Federico, a Swashbuckler.

Demiquas the Monk.

Voinen and Federico were Silver Sword veterans, and they’d given Shiroe a much friendlier welcome than he’d expected.

The problem, naturally, was Demiquas. Every time a battle began, he leapt out faster than anyone else in the party, crushing monsters as if venting his anger on them. The monsters’ average levels were between 30 and 40. Demiquas was level 93, and the fact that he could tear through them like rice paper was only to be expected. However, you couldn’t see either personality or teamwork that way.

Shiroe had spoken to him a few times, attempting to reprimand him, but Demiquas only gave short, threatening responses, and it wasn’t possible to have a conversation.

“There’s no point in rushing things.”

As Voinen spoke to him, he wore an amiable expression.

“It would be nice if we managed to finish up before the year’s out.”

In a way, Voinen’s thought was only natural.

In the first place, raids weren’t the sort of problem you could break through in a day once you’d tackled them. Even in his recollections of the Elder Tales days, there had been countless normal (albeit raid-rank) monsters and between five and ten boss monsters to a single raid zone. If they weren’t careful, even normal monsters could wipe them out. With boss monsters, usually a party would feel out their abilities while getting annihilated dozens of times, then finally find a way through to win.

When they got wiped out in raid zones, they wouldn’t be sent back to the Temple in a player town. They’d revive at the entrance to the zone. The zone entrance functioned as the same sort of resurrection area as the Temple.

Even if they got annihilated, they could tackle the zone again from the entrance, but the number of attempts would probably be a large one. Thinking it would take about a month was valid.

As if to support Voinen’s remark, on William’s instructions, Shiroe had laid in more than a month’s worth of provisions and consumables. Not content with this, cautious Shiroe had stuffed his Magic Bag to its limit with a variety of materials and tools, and as a result, they’d probably be able to hole up in the zone they were capturing for about two months.

That would be convenient in terms of giving their watchers the slip as well, he thought. Susukino was remote and sparsely populated, but it was still a player town. It was likely that they’d be noticed. If it was possible for them to lie low in an undiscovered zone, that would probably be safer. Shiroe didn’t know exactly how far they could rely on that, but…

All that said, he didn’t want to take a lot of time.

Even if they were holed up somewhere, the longer it took, the greater the danger of an information leak. In the first place, if Shiroe’s prediction was correct, their watchers weren’t the sort who could be shaken by simply switching zones. Nyanta and Akatsuki were creating an alibi for him back in Akiba, but even then, he didn’t know how well it would work. As a result, he wanted to settle this as quickly as possible.

In the midst of Shiroe’s anxiety, he noticed traces of loneliness within himself.

“That’s odd,” he murmured, scratching his cheek with his index finger.

He’d only spent six months there, but he missed his guild home, nestled in that ancient tree. He wanted to be in the dining room with the fragrant wood flooring Michitaka had made for them, listening to everyone’s cheerful voices. He wanted to drink roasted green tea on the veranda, out in the gentle wind, as he watched the evening sun. For that to happen, he had to make this mission a success. He was a guild master now, Shiroe thought, psyching himself up.

“Wow?!”

When Shiroe glanced in the direction of the weird cry, Tetora was looking at him, her eyes round.

“What, what’s up?”

“Shiroe smiled! He was smiling to himself; I saw him!”

“Well, yeah, he smiles.”

“Really?! I’d never seen it before…”

The perpetrators of this incredibly rude dialogue were Naotsugu and Tetora.

“Shiro’s, y’know… He’s moody, see.”

“Oh. I see… Poor Shiroe. Want to see my panties?”

“You’re an idol. You can’t show him those willingly.”

“I wouldn’t show him. I just asked. I was only curious. If I were going to show them, I’d pretend it was an unavoidable accident. Then I’d report whoever saw them.”

“You really are the worst idol ever.”

“Oh, stop. Naotsugu. Even if you fall for me all over again, I can never belong to just one person, you know.”

Their combination, which left no room for anyone else to get a word in, startled Shiroe. Before his very eyes, Naotsugu barked, “I’m not falling for you” at Tetora, and Tetora clung to Naotsugu, saying, “Only a tsundere would say something that cold. I’m going to climb you.”

They really must have hit it off.

As he watched, even Shiroe forgot his annoyance at the rude words and began to feel oddly entertained. Come to think of it, it was only the second day since they’d met. It was only natural that she hadn’t seen him smile; they knew practically nothing about each other.

Tetora, who’d apparently proceeded to say something that made Naotsugu mad, broke into a run, and the man took off after her. Shiroe didn’t attempt to stop them. Those two would probably be able to take down any monster they ran into in the dungeon with no trouble, and in any case, Demiquas had taken care of all the ones nearby.

Even so, Shiroe did wave at them and call, “Be careful.” From behind him, a voice spoke: “You people are seriously confident, aren’t you.”

William was fully equipped, and he carried an enormous bow on his back. He came up alongside Shiroe, gazing ahead of them with a sharp expression.

“They’re not confident so much as easygoing,” Shiroe answered.

At those words, William seemed to smile wryly.

Over the past few days, he’d come to understand that William’s sharp, wary expression didn’t actually reflect what he felt inside. The expression was his default, and it didn’t mean he was in a particularly bad mood. His small, ironic smile had no deeper meaning, either. It was just William’s usual face.

A good raid commander had to grasp his members’ personalities and the direction they wanted to go. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to determine their party formation or disseminate orders properly.

Meanwhile, the members of a raid also gradually got to know the raid commander who led them. If they just obeyed their commander’s orders, there was no point. They had to understand what the orders meant and the intent behind them, and then, for the first time, they’d gain the speed of response that was necessary to teamwork.

Shiroe, who’d been entrusted with the leadership of the Second party, had consciously attempted to grasp William’s character, and as he did so, he’d learned that William thought about his guild members and those around him far more than anyone could have imagined from his habitually cross expression.

In a way, that was only natural. If William didn’t have abilities on that level, he never would have been able to command Silver Sword, a combat guild that showed up on the server rankings.

“He looks the same as always.”

The fact that William’s gaze was turned toward the big man who was destroying a monster made the meaning of those vague words clear. True, in terms of the Second party’s teamwork, Demiquas was the only one out of step.

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

Shiroe felt apologetic, and the emotion showed through a little in his words. However, William smiled fearlessly, stroked his thin chin with his left hand as if pinching it, and squinted his sharp eyes as though there was a wry smile in them.

“Still, he came to raid, too. He’ll learn. Even I and the other knuckleheads learned. If you don’t learn, you really can’t go any further.”

Several pieces were missing from William’s words, and Shiroe wasn’t yet able to understand what he meant.

5

Three weeks had passed, and the party was in the middle of their capture.

Their plans to aim for a month had crumbled easily, and the future had grown less and less clear. Even after three weeks, they’d only managed to defeat two bosses. They didn’t even have a grasp of the entire zone.

The party’s atmosphere grew harsher and more fatigued.

“Damn yoooooooou!”

Inwardly cursing at Demiquas, who was doing the howling, Voinen desperately cast Heartbeat Healing. It set Demiquas’s HP to recover incrementally for twenty seconds. The green-and-orange pulse that surrounded the big warrior was the spell’s effect.

Demiquas went from a rush—his specialty—to pounding the ochre-colored slime creature with middle-guard jabs.

Lightning Straight. The full-force attack, which he’d leaned far forward to launch, punched through the mud-like enemy with incredible ease. However, Voinen came very close to screaming, That won’t work!

Demiquas’s attack pierced the Orc Jelly’s body, scattering it with a sticky sound. The substance, which had splattered all over, gave off a foul stench and began to dissolve. White smoke was rising even from Demiquas, the one who’d launched the attack. Orc Jellies had powerfully acidic bodies, and attacking them at close range did great damage to the attacker as well. In spite of this, the enormous slime, which was over five meters, didn’t seem to be bothered all that much.

“What did I tell you?!”

Voinen began running toward his companion. The hot-blooded idiot’s charge had taken him outside the twenty-meter range in which recovery spells were effective. Heartbeat Healing, which he’d cast on Demiquas before, was continuing to recover his health, but it was nowhere near enough. Unless he maintained his HP by combining Instant Recovery and Small Recovery, Demiquas would go down again.

Demiquas always fouled up their teamwork this way, and Voinen was irritated with him.

From the drainage outlets on their right and left, new Orc Jellies appeared with weighty sounds.

It was a melee.

There were twenty-four members in this raid unit, led by William, whom Voinen followed. It was composed of four parties, but only the First and Second had defensive capabilities above a certain level. Because the First party was specialized toward defense and holding the enemy in place, it had to draw lots of Jellies on the frontline.

The Third and Fourth parties were in charge of firepower, and their mission was to exterminate enemies. Their makeup emphasized defeating monsters, but their defensive abilities weren’t all that high. Their role was to swiftly dispatch the monsters the First party had attracted.

That meant the role of the Second party, the one Voinen was part of, was to act as a mobile force.

When more monsters appeared than the First party was able to hold back, their mission was to divide them up and immobilize them. When many enemies had launched a surprise attack on the raid unit, they had to protect the “softer” Third and Fourth parties from them.

As you’d expect, the star of the raid was the First party, which faced off against the biggest, strongest enemies without giving an inch, but the Second held a tactically important position that required resourceful decisions and immediate responses. Unless all members understood the role their own party had to play, coordinated teamwork was difficult.

They were being pursued by monsters that had ambushed them from both sides.

The First party was projecting out onto the front line, which made it hard for them to turn back. Demiquas had gotten impatient with the slow-moving battle, and had charged their way, but encountering enemy reinforcements at that moment in time was highly dangerous. The enemy reinforcements had appeared on either side of the Third and Fourth parties, or in other words, the defenseless rear guard. The spellcasters, who had been performing long-range attacks, were particularly lightly equipped. If attacked, they’d go down easily.

Hey, you’re in no shape to talk about other people!!

As far as Voinen was concerned, he was running after Demiquas, who’d gotten too far ahead.

Conscious of his feet, which seemed to be striking the ground much too slowly, he kept a wary eye on the translucent, dirty, gelatinous walls.

This might be bad. Just as Voinen thought it, a mass of silver charged in from his right.

“Anchor Howl!”

With enough spirit to set his eardrums buzzing, the Guardian drew one of the Orc Jellies. It was Naotsugu, who was also from the Second party. Voinen had heard that the guild he was from was famous but small, and he was impressed for the umpteenth time. From his actions, Naotsugu was far more accustomed to raids than Voinen had expected.

The monster, its repulsive body quivering, seemed to have locked on to the newcomer. Naotsugu held his shield up defensively; he probably understood that if he actively went on the attack, he’d get hit with an acid counterstrike, and the damage would increase. In terms of technique, the way he cleverly used taunting skills and his shield to keep the damage down might have been even better than Dinclon, the fellow Guardian who was Silver Sword’s full-time tank.

The Jelly that had come up on the left, as if to catch Naotsugu in a pincer attack, stretched upward like swelling mochi, then stopped moving.

He didn’t even have to hear Astral Hypno’s sharp chant to recognize the Enchanters’ hypnotic spell. A monster targeted by it would stop moving entirely, although for only about twenty seconds. Naturally, since it was “hypnosis,” inflicting even a little damage would undo the status and let it start attacking again, but even so, being able to cut down on the number of enemies participating in a battle was an enormous help. Since this was a raid zone, the monsters that appeared were all beefed-up, large-scale enemies bent on confrontation, and the time they spent hypnotized was reduced to about four seconds. However, with even four seconds, it was easy to sprint past a stretched-out monster and reach the front line.

“Enemy reinforcements; requesting support! Orc Jellies, direction of travel: eight o’clock!!”

The voice of Shiroe, who’d cast the hypnosis spell, rang out.

Obeying that call, the Third and Fourth attack parties changed their targets. The first to connect was Commander William’s Rapid Shot. Crystal arrows glittered like falling stars, opening fist-sized holes in the gigantic Orc Jelly’s side. Then an unbroken rain of flame, ice, and lightning magic attacks poured down.

Without exception, raid monsters had stupendous HP. Even under concentrated attacks from ten people, it took a long time to finish one off. Naturally, the Orc Jelly that Shiroe had stopped in its tracks became active again, but in that four seconds, it was quite possible for a Guardian to store up aggro.

Voinen saw a lightly equipped Cleric bounding around.

The healer, whose name was Tetora or something like that, also had more combat experience than her appearance suggested. Her guild was Light Indigo, an insubstantial outfit he’d never heard of, but she seemed to have adapted to the raid in a week. Her equipment was light, in contradiction of the generally observed formula for Clerics, who were able to equip full-body armor. However, he sensed an uncommon instinct in the way she understood this and contrived ways to move around that didn’t expose her weak points.

Tetora darted in and out with short, quick movements, again and again, scattering Reactive Heal around. Then, when the Orc Jelly contracted, compressing itself, she took advantage of the motion to hide behind Naotsugu. This was a player technique that used the Guardian’s powerful defense as a fortress to protect the other player from raid monsters’ powerful ranged attacks.

“Naotsugu, are you okay?”

“Just fine. Bring it on, slime city!”

“Woohoo! You’re so cool, Naotsugu!”

“Hey, you just used me as a shield!”

“I’ll recover you, so sacrifice yourself for me again!”

Those two were noisy every time, and Voinen laughed in spite of himself. Shiroe and his two companions hadn’t lost a bit of their toughness. It was really something.

A strange light shone down from the zone’s high ceiling—probably some sort of magic light or luminescent mushroom. Thanks to that, even though this was a dungeon, the faint glow meant it wasn’t hard to see their surroundings. When they were exploring, they had the assistance of their Bug Lights as well.

However, even so, they were several hundred meters underground. Now that they’d entered Abyssal Shaft—the raid zone under the very lowest level of the Depths of Palm—even at the smallest estimate, there were several hundred million tons of dirt, sand, and bedrock over their heads. For Adventurers, who were former ordinary students and average adults, this was significant pressure.

In addition, when they were exploring like this, the complicated structure and the drainage outlets meant they never knew when they’d be ambushed, which added even more stress. The capture situation wasn’t going very well, either.

It wasn’t that they were slacking. This zone was simply more difficult than Voinen had anticipated.

They spent from eight to ten hours a day fighting ten-odd monster battles, give or take a few. That was the best they could do. Every battle was a hard one, and it took time for them to prepare themselves again. The range they’d explored wasn’t expanding much, either.

Even so, the three who’d joined up temporarily didn’t seem the least bit discouraged.

This, even though the members of Silver Sword, top elites led by William, were feeling quite a lot of tension. Compared to ordinary Adventurers, these three add-ons were displaying activity that went far beyond competent. But it seemed to stem from their personalities, rather than their levels, special skills, or equipment.

“Here I go. I’m going. If you fall in love with me, I’m really sorry.”

“Whatever, just do it.”

“Tee-hee. All right, here it comes! In response to everyone’s requests… Please listen! Aurora Heal!!”

Rainbow light danced wildly, and the wounds of their companions over a wide range in the surrounding area began to recover. The Orc Jellies’ ranged attacks pulled in not just the targeted tank but all the attackers who were close enough to launch close-range strikes with swords and axes. His comrade Federico’s HP was down to about half. Of course, it was Voinen and the other healers’ job to heal them if they could, but in terms of their role, they really had to prioritize the Warrior who was taking all the monsters’ attacks directly.

In order to fill the hole Voinen had left when he ran after Demiquas to provide support, Tetora had used a big skill that took a long time to chant.

“Yessss! Aren’t I smart and cute and just totally perfect?!”

“Yeah, yeah. Your attitude blows, but thanks for the heal! Hiyah!”

“Concentrate your attacks! Avoid making close-range attacks!”

Shiroe sent a support spell at Tetora. At the same time, Federico, who’d been freshly healed, returned to the front line.

Despite the fact that the voices behind him still sounded like they were enjoying themselves, Voinen was desperately casting recovery spells one after another.

Apparently, these Orc Jellies were pretty bad opponents for the Weapon Attackers and Warriors. Each time they were hit at close range, spray flew, inflicting damage that was almost like a counterstrike. The abnormal statuses and ranged attacks that resulted from their powerful Acid Smoke were threats as well. Just one of them would have been bad enough, but when four or five of them attacked at once, as they were doing now, it was really hard to cope.

“Demiquas, get back!”

“Over mooks like these?!”

As he shouted, Demiquas retreated with Phantom Step. Pungent white smoke was rising thickly from both his arms. The damage to his weapons had to be enormous as well.

“Dammit, hurry up and heal me!”

“You don’t have to holler. I can hear you just fine.”

Voinen began to chant Heal. Demiquas didn’t have much HP left; if he made another charge like this, he’d be unable to fight in no time flat. He’d probably retreated because he understood that, but Voinen didn’t appreciate his cursing and irritated attitude.

Demiquas probably hadn’t liked his response. Demiquas glared with ferocious eyes and spat, “If you’re hearing me, then get the lead out!”

Voinen sighed. Good grief.

True, Demiquas was a pain in the neck.

As a member of the same party, he wished someone would do something about him.

If Voinen charged around all on his own the way Demiquas did, the healing work would utterly break down. And yet, since he rushed ahead without a thought for the ranges of Voinen’s spells, their formation got dragged around, and it set them up for tough spots like these.

Understandably, the guy had died a lot. Because there were always Recovery classes in the area during raids with lots of people, when someone died in combat, it was possible to resurrect them right away. To Voinen and other raid-guild Adventurers, it was something insignificant, like passing out, but even so, while you were dead, you couldn’t do anything. From the perspective of fighting power, dying meant nothing less than lowering the performance of the entire raid unit.

Lately, as you’d expect, he’d learned, and he’d retreat like this before he died, but in terms of efficiency, Voinen couldn’t approve of this, either. While he was waiting for recovery, the First party was supporting the vanguard. That First party increased their output to make up for the hole left by Demiquas’s retreat.

In other words, the man’s selfish charges were being shored up by the goodwill and support of those around him. If that broke off, these grandstand plays could easily pull down the entire unit and destroy it.

Still… Voinen thought as he ran alongside Demiquas. Voinen had layered on Healing Wind and Heartbeat Healing, and Demiquas was returning to the front line as if he were a beast released from a chain.

Viewed fairly, Demiquas was still extraordinary.

Their exploration had lasted three weeks, and they’d been deep underground the whole time. They’d fought harsh battles one after another, day after day. They’d never actually been annihilated, but the individual participants had probably died more than ten times each.

When ordinary people were put in a situation like this, it was perfectly natural for them to get stressed and take it out on the people around them. It was far stranger for Shiroe and the others from Log Horizon to be able to stay cheerful under these extreme circumstances.

Voinen thought of himself as an elite, particularly when it came to raids.

He followed the William. He was aware that he was a veteran of hell.

It wasn’t just Voinen. All the members of Silver Sword thought this way. They prided themselves on being the toughest on the server.

However, even Silver Sword—a guild that specialized in raids, a guild that had boasted of being the strongest—had been reduced to about forty people, 20 percent of its pre-Catastrophe core members. There were also some who, although still on the register, had withdrawn from the front lines of raids.

At present, particularly when the Adventurers were challenging a zone whose level matched their own, raids were simply that hard.

As proof, D.D.D., who’d bragged about being the top guild on the server, was playing around with the combat level-50 goblin conquest at Seventh Fall.

Voinen and the others thought this was hilarious. The idea of all those level 90s lining up for a level-50 zone… They should call themselves a large-scale-play guild, not a raid guild.

However, precisely because he had that pride, he couldn’t completely write Demiquas off. The big Monk was dumb, and he didn’t understand teamwork. Since he never listened, he caused trouble for everyone around him. His attitude couldn’t have been worse. He had almost none of the stuff it took to conduct the joint operations known as raids.

…But he wasn’t a coward.

In the thick of a level-90 raid, end content that even D.D.D. had backed away from, in the midst of raging death and violence, this insolent Monk never stopped moving. He didn’t hesitate to make contact with monsters. His eyes never flinched away.

Voinen knew this had roots in Demiquas’s envy of Shiroe and Silver Sword. Even so, this wasn’t the sort of terror that could be overcome with that alone. How could you possibly confront clumps of slime that were several times taller than you were, and magical beasts who devoured your own limbs before your very eyes, on the strength of your pride alone?

With no help for it, Voinen cast protective spells on himself and Demiquas.

The situation was bad.

Their exploration was making no progress. This was probably the toughest battleground on the server, one that was gradually wearing away even Silver Sword’s stoicism. However, he couldn’t leave this rowdy man to die. For now, he just ran, in order to fulfill the heart’s desire of every healer: to prevent damage.

6

William, who had the trust of the Silver Sword members, was suffering.

They’d finished fighting for the day. In a camp that was too full-scale to call temporary, he tossed away a sheaf of papers detailing the results of their exploration to date, kicked back so far in his sailcloth chair that he nearly fell over, and stretched.

“This ain’t good.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Shiroe of Log Horizon was there with him. This bespectacled young man drew maps so beautiful that William’s couldn’t begin to compare. William sat with his legs carelessly apart in a wide-open stance, rocking his chair, and sighed. Even he could tell Shiro’s eyebrows were drawn together.

“About how many more do you think we’ve got?”

“Let’s see…”

Shiroe ran a fingertip across a particularly large, illustrated map.

“Three. No, four.”

This was the number of estimated boss enemies for the zone.

There were many different types of raids, and this zone was a typical “explorable” raid dungeon—one that had a set map that wasn’t randomly redrawn every time you entered it. The content in raid dungeons resembled the content of ordinary dungeons, only expanded and reinforced, made over to suit the larger groups associated with raids.

The dungeon zone was larger than the ones designed for small parties; it had many passages and small rooms, and sometimes there were traps and riddles. There were impressive great halls and caverns at strategic points in that dungeon, and, to protect those strategic points, powerful raid bosses.

All raid enemies were targets meant to be subjugated by a raid unit. In terms of this zone, since it had been designed to be attempted with twenty-four people, if they’d tried to challenge it with the manpower of a six-person party, they would simply have gotten kicked to pieces. It was bad enough that, even if they went in as a full raid, there was the possibility that they’d be defeated if they got careless. However, with normal raid monsters, Silver Sword was able to steadily continue their exploration. Even up to this point, they’d kept gradually filling in the zone map.

The problem was the raid bosses. Defeating them would require different tactics from the ones used for normal monsters.

In this zone, they’d managed to subjugate Vandemie of the First Garden and Elreida of the Fifth Garden. In addition to being powerful, both had had special abilities, and they’d been compelled to fight complicated battles.

“That’s rough.”

“Yes, and the battles with the previous two were pretty acrobatic.”

Raid boss battles always were.

If all they did was get powerful players together and challenge them, it was hard to even fight a decent battle, let alone win.

They hadn’t been quite annihilated in either fight, but that only meant there had been no single moment when everyone was dead. They’d retreated more than twenty times, in the sense that of the twenty-four members, several survivors had taken to their heels and resurrected the others in a safe area. Including the resurrections during combat, the members had been rendered unable to fight a considerable number of times.

Of course, they’d been rewarded in a few ways. They’d obtained lots of high-ranking materials of the sort that could only be acquired on raids, such as Primordial Mud, Variable Hide and Star-Iron Sheet Metal, from the Orc Jellies, Mutant Griffs, Venom Hydrangeas and Minotaur Marauders that appeared along the way. These were drop items that could be used as material by Adventurers with artisan-type abilities when they made items. As material, they resulted in extremely high-performance items, and they were so valuable there was no telling what sort of prices they’d bring.

In addition, they’d gotten a total of seven powerful fantasy-class equip items from Vandemie of the First Garden and Elreida of the Fifth Garden.

This sort of equipment had always served as huge motivation for the major raid guilds that competed to be first on the server. In particular, the items they’d acquired this time were all types they’d never seen before. In terms of performance, they were natural extensions of past fantasy-class items, but to Silver Sword, it was more than enough of a military achievement to broadcast.

Shiroe poured steaming coffee from a rough, twenty-centimeter kettle.

As he gazed at it, William calculated the remaining days.

“Ten days…probably isn’t gonna happen.”

“…”

What was worrying William was the issue of supplies.

Each time they fought, the Adventurers’ equipment wore down a little. When they died, it took more damage than usual, and it couldn’t be restored with a resurrection spell. It took constant repairs to keep equipment in proper shape.

Naturally, this was common sense in Elder Tales, and William had included it in his calculations. On explorable raids like this one, it was an issue that people had been worrying about since the Elder Tales era. Their raid unit included Blacksmiths, Armorsmiths, Tailors, Woodworkers, and more. All major guilds knew that you were supposed to conduct repairs in the spaces between battles.

However, in order to do that, you needed materials that could be used to make those repairs. Under the circumstances, without fully equipped workshops, they went through the components used in repairs at a furious rate. On top of that, the materials used to repair the equipment owned by members of a top-class combat guild like Silver Sword—in other words, fantasy-class items—were fantasy-class themselves.

It wasn’t just repairing damaged equipment. The same went for the Crystal Comets William used. These arrows paid out explosive damage, and they were fine articles made by top artisans using fantasy-class materials. Since they were consumables, it was possible to make approximately five hundred of them from the material item, Divine Rainbow Crystal. However, when it came to a series of battles like this one, even five hundred was a trivial amount. Of the nearly ten thousand Crystal Comets he’d prepared, he’d already used more than two thousand. This could be said for all consumable items, including potions, balms, charms, and scrolls.

In short, raids formed their own unique cycle.

In order to maintain the equipment acquired in raids, you needed materials acquired in raids, and through them, you gained the right to challenge more difficult raids. If you succeeded at a more difficult challenge, you got equipment whose performance was even higher. However, in order to maintain it, you had to keep attempting very difficult battles.

In order to balance this cycle, stable, historic raid guilds would regularly conduct raids in which they could procure good materials, even if the difficulty level wasn’t all that high, to replenish their supplies. However, after the Catastrophe, with the Fairy Rings not functioning correctly, it was hard to make the circuit of the raid zones that were scattered across the world. Even if that had been possible, Silver Sword was an active combat guild. The decision to compromise and go to a tepid zone for the sake of replenishing supplies was repellent to them.

William had spent the time since the Catastrophe in a whirlwind of activity.

He didn’t regret it, but even so, it had led to his disgorging the vast amount of material items and supplies that he’d stored up earlier. As long as they had full-raid-class numbers, William prided himself that they were the strongest combat group on the server. However, the state of their coffers was terrible.

“I have some material I pulled together in Akiba as well.”

“About how long do you think it’ll last?”

“Even if we add that, twenty days.”

Shiroe’s response was also hard to take. From what he’d heard, Log Horizon was a weak guild with just eight members. The fact that a place that tiny had enough to supply Silver Sword’s unit of top elites for twenty days was astonishing all by itself, but even so, it wasn’t enough to get them through the situation. It had taken them three weeks and a lot of trouble to defeat two bosses. It would be hard to do twice that much and defeat four bosses in twenty days. From past experience, bosses got stronger the farther they went.

There was one other thing William was worried about.

The cause lay in the young man in front of him.

Shiroe, who was looking down silently as if to hide his expression, was keeping a lot of secrets.

To begin with, this zone was unnatural.

Vandemie of the First Garden.

Elreida of the Fifth Garden.

William hadn’t seen the other bosses, but he could guess their names. They were probably Mezalaclau of the Second Garden, Ibra Habra of the Third Garden, and Tartaulga of the Fourth Garden. The bosses who guarded this zone had the same names and forms as the nightmare superintendents of the Nine Great Gaols of Halos. Of course, they weren’t exactly the same. In the Gaols of Halos—raid content that had been provided with the Sacred Heart expansion pack—they had been called Vandemie of the First Prison and Elreida of the Fifth Prison. They were raid bosses in the shape of a winged serpent and a forgotten white horse. These had reappeared, with their names and shapes slightly changed. Naturally, they were powerful, and their past capture methods had been consigned to oblivion.

In games, reusing character data wasn’t unusual. This zone was just one of many examples. There must be some kind of background there…assuming this world was a game.

He didn’t know whether Shiroe was hiding something, or whether he was unable to say it.

In any case, he was in no position to criticize other people.

That was William’s honest feeling on the matter.

He didn’t think they were wrong. Not about having left Akiba, and not about having gone on all those raids in the North. He didn’t think they were wrong, but Silver Sword had put too much distance between itself and a variety of voices. People couldn’t move forward by correctness alone. William hadn’t wanted to know that. He’d wanted to think that simply screaming “We’re the strongest” would be enough. He’d thought that if his friends got cold feet, all he’d have to do to rid them of their unease was raise his voice.

However, he’d realized that in some cases, it wasn’t enough.

In the end, maybe William had been wrong, and he just didn’t want to admit it.

…Wrong to turn down Shiroe’s invitation and reject the Round Table Council outright that day.

William wanted to talk about this with Shiroe.

However, right now Shiroe seemed to be harboring some big secret—although William had no idea what it might be—and looked like he was suffering. William wasn’t mature enough to go down on his knees and ask for the answer to his own doubt when Shiroe was like this, and he had no desire to become that sort of adult.

He felt like making fun of himself for his childish pride. He also felt like turning defiant about it: What’s wrong with that? It’s fine the way it is!

The conditions of their stores were gradually growing worse, and they were fighting a raid deep underground, where there was nowhere to run. What could he say to his companions from Silver Sword, who were following him through these deteriorating circumstances? He was a game junkie, and the only thing in his entire life that he’d ever put serious effort into was Elder Tales. What could he possibly offer them?

William thought he was nothing. All he had was empty bravado.

A child, swinging around that bravado—his one and only weapon—and putting on a bold front. That was him. However, if he had just one weapon, it was only natural for him to use it. As a gamer, William understood that.

“What do you think, Shiroe?”

“About what?”

At that question, William scratched his head roughly.

He couldn’t answer a question like that.

In other words, William needed a chance, too: Either to challenge, or to surrender.

To prove who he was, and who he wanted to be. Was there any difference between Demiquas, who lost his way and picked fights with everything he saw, and Silver Sword?

And that chance was right in front of him, in the midst of the battle. William had decided this himself.

For that reason, even if it hurt, the only thing to do was keep going.

* * *

“Waaaaaaugh! That’s not it!”

“Agh?! Why d’you yell all of a sudden?!”

Tetora, who’d been creeping up on Naotsugu again, was startled, and she banged her small rump on the ruin’s cold stone floor. Naotsugu waved his hands to gloss things over: “That’s not it, it’s not like that. I’m sorry, though.” He lent her a hand and helped her up.

As if to hide what he’d been thinking, Naotsugu muttered, “Some lives are just like that, eh?”

“Naotsugu, you look like a grade-school kid who told his gorgeous teacher he liked her on his test, then got busted when his classmates saw it.”

“What’s with that weirdly specific comment?!”

“Dweh-heh-heh-heh. And? Something got you down?”

Tetora’s expression seemed to say, I’m not letting you get away, but as far as Naotsugu was concerned, having her pursue that topic was a huge help. As a result, he went along with her misunderstanding.

“Yeah, actually, it’s about Shiro.” He pulled a particularly sour expression.

Tetora’s triumphant face shone even brighter. It probably meant, That’s just like me! I asked a critical question! I’m so smart! As Tetora puffed out her chest for absolutely no reason, she looked incredibly dumb.

…Well. Naotsugu couldn’t just let Tetora soothe him like this.

It was true that something was on his mind, but he wasn’t sure how to talk about it.

“Hey. Food.”

Federico had approached just then, and he held boxlike dishes out to them. They were filled with generous helpings of brown stew and asparagus. Since Naotsugu had been thinking, he was a bit late in noticing, but Tetora immediately accepted hers with a beaming smile and a “Thank you, Federico!”

As befitted someone who called herself an idol, Tetora was popular. The raid members had accepted her in no time and made a pet of her. She even seemed to have a few actual fans.

As proof, a smile appeared on Federico’s bearded face as well, and he said, “Nah, it’s fine.” From the way he’d handed them their portions and gone away, he seemed as if he might be a lot easier to get along with than his appearance suggested. He was probably going to deliver Demiquas’s and Voinen’s portions as well. The pair from Silver Sword willingly took on odd jobs like this. You really can’t trust advance reviews, Naotsugu thought.

“Let’s hurry and eat, Naotsugu. Then you’re going to tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Yeah.”

Answering vaguely, Naotsugu looked around for a good place to sit.

They were in one of the countless small rooms in the Abyssal Shaft zone. The room was “small” only in comparison to the scale of the dungeon; it was actually about fifteen meters square, a space roughly the size of a smallish gymnasium, cut into a rectangle. There were carvings on the enormous pillars, although they weren’t ornate, and it had the atmosphere of some kind of palace or religious building. Its high, barrel-shaped ceiling gave off a faint light.

There had been tons of rooms that looked like this space in the surrounding area. In the hours since they’d begun their exploration that day, they’d made an exhaustive search of those compartments, and had continued to exterminate any monsters that appeared.

The pair sat down, using a granite pillar that had crumbled just the right way as a bench.

“Thanks for the food.”

“Thanks for the foooood!”

Astonishingly large chunks of meat peeked out of the stew they’d been given. As he stuffed his face with it, Naotsugu brooded. This was pretty hard to explain. It was a fact that Shiroe was at the heart of the problem, but the bit about things being “bothersome” was just a feeling.

If he extracted the issue simply, it was that Shiroe seemed to be suffering somehow.

However, the guy known as Shiroe was a natural worrier, and he tended to take on a lot of things and be hard-pressed to keep up with his work. Possibly because of that, to people besides Naotsugu, apparently Shiroe always looked slightly troubled and pained.

Naotsugu didn’t think that was true, however.

Even if his expression looked pinched, Shiroe was entertained by all sorts of things, and he often cut corners and slacked off. He even sulked and went to sleep at his desk fairly frequently.

Still, to the multitudes that weren’t close to him, Shiroe always seemed to be dealing with a tough problem, and his weakness was that even when he really was having trouble, no one understood. Shiroe was always hemming and groaning to himself, but even so, in the end, he generally solved the problem, and so it was hard to register his limits, the things he really couldn’t do anything about all by himself. It was even harder to explain this to other people.

After all, even Naotsugu couldn’t explain how to tell what sort of stern expression was only a pose, and what sort of expression meant he was actually in trouble. Naotsugu knew…but only vaguely.

Right now, Shiroe was probably suffering a lot more than he appeared to be.

However, even that was only a hazy feeling.

He couldn’t explain it.

“See, Shiro’s…” Slowly, Naotsugu began to speak. “He sort of looks like he’s maybe in trouble.”

“‘Maybe’?”

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s go save him. Okay?”

Tetora, who’d skewered a piece of asparagus with her fork, made a snap decision.

Don’t say it like it’s easy ’cos it ain’t, Naotsugu huffed.

“People call that four-eyes ‘Machiavelli’ and other stuff, but he’s not crafty so much as he’s a show-off. He’s thinking, ‘Is it all right for me to call for help? Is it okay for me to do a job like this?’ Stuff like that.”

“I see. At heart, he’s a hermit.”

“Yeah, he’s a hermit. There’s no denying that.”

“He needs an idol!”

“I’m pretty sure he’s okay there.”

“Then why did he come all the way out to this hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere?”

Naotsugu almost answered, Because he needs money, duh, but then he realized that that wouldn’t be an answer at all. Shiroe wasn’t the type who found happiness in accumulating money so he could stare at it. Money was a tool to use for some other purpose. It had been that way during the Crescent Moon incident, too. That prompted the question, In that case, what’s he going to use it on this time? but come to think of it, Naotsugu didn’t know the answer to that.

During the Round Table Council affair, it had been used to buy up the zone that housed the bank. However, obtaining the bank hadn’t been Shiroe’s objective, either. He’d only needed a weapon, in order to get the Adventurers of Akiba to the negotiating table.

What would he use the money for when he got it? What did he intend to do by using it that way? Now that he thought about it, Naotsugu hadn’t heard about any of that from Shiroe. Shiroe was a close friend, and he could trust him even without knowing. However, when he had to explain it to a third party—Tetora—it was a problem.

Reason, reason…hm…

Naotsugu racked his brains, and then the words came to him, like a divine revelation.

“I’m just guessing, but I think it’s to protect his house.”

“His house?”

“I’m not talking about an actual, physical building. I mean the place he lives.”

“In other words, his guild?”

“I don’t think it’s just the guild. I don’t really know, but…”

Chewing on a piece of bread he’d soaked in his stew, Naotsugu kept talking, saying things as they came to him.

“If we’re going to live, we need food and a roof over our heads, stuff like that. Then we need people. No matter what, we need a place where we can be with the people we’re close to. In the old world, that was probably family, and in this world, it’s the people in our groups and our guilds.”

Over the past six months, Naotsugu had watched Marielle and the Crescent Moon League.

A place where everyone could feel at ease. A place where they woke up, did their jobs, had dinner, made a racket together, and told each other We made it through another day. Good night!

The importance of it, and its warmth, and the kind smiles that supported it.

“But see, even things like that need a place to belong.”

“Huh?”

Tetora didn’t get it, and Naotsugu kept talking, as if he was trying to persuade her. He was pulling things even he didn’t know from some place deep inside himself.

“It’s like a house for our houses. In other words, it’s Akiba. You can’t just have your own guild, all by itself, in an empty world. Because, see, it’s linked to all sorts of other stuff. Even guilds need a place to belong. Duties, and companion guilds… It’s connected to other places like those, and I don’t really know how to put it, but we’ve got to take care of things like that.”

That was probably the case.

It was also likely the reason that Shiroe had spoken so desperately during the establishment of the Round Table Council.

“Towns are like huge houses. If the town isn’t happy, none of the guilds in it can be happy. All the people that live in those houses will be unhappy, too. Shiroe’s the type who’d go head-to-head with the town or something even bigger to protect his own small house.”

“A home, huh…”

When Naotsugu looked at Tetora, worried about whether his explanation had gotten through to her, he saw an expression he hadn’t expected. It was her usual smile: triumphant, self-important, kind, and strong.

“Protecting the place where you belong is important. For wolves like us, it’s the most important thing there is. If you’re expecting that much from Shiroe, he’s an amazing person. —Even greater than I’d heard. I don’t know what we should do about our guild, either.”

“Light Indigo isn’t doing so great? I haven’t heard much about that guild; did you lose lots of people after the Catastrophe or something?”

“No, it’s not like that. And anyway, in terms of your explanation, Light Indigo isn’t a guild or a house. It’s more like a waiting room, or a workplace.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Is it an idol training school or something?” Naotsugu asked, confused.

However, Tetora said, “Thanks for the food!” and clapped her hands together over the square dish, then grinned and poked Naotsugu’s cheek.

“It’s pretty much an idol training school. We’re all idols who protect the places everyone’s hearts call home. I knew coming with you was the right decision! No wonder my charisma sensor went off. Even without the Light Indigo business, I’ll stick with you until the very end of this raid, absolutely!”

Naotsugu didn’t really understand Tetora’s proud smile, so all he could say was, “Yeah, please do.”

2

“Dwehchoo!”

“My, my. That wasn’t a very ladylike sneeze, was it.”

“My nose itched like crazy.”

At a table in a warm dining room, Henrietta chided Marielle.

Marielle looked around, wondering if cold air had blown in from somewhere, but the Crescent Moon League’s dining room was the very picture of peace.

They’d requested a dining room where everyone in the guild could eat together, and the room was spacious and high ceilinged. The Crescent Moon League was a genuine midsized guild now, with more than forty members, and it was hard to fit numbers like that inside. Even so, they’d managed to get two tables that seated sixteen people each, and if they brought all their chairs in, everyone fit.

At mealtimes, this room was filled with noise and bustle, but now, early in the evening, it held only Marielle, the guild master, and Henrietta, her right-hand woman. The atmosphere was tranquil.

Ever since the Catastrophe, life in Akiba had been eventful.

There had been many painful things, and many things that had made them so happy they’d wanted to dance. Through all sorts of events, around the time of the Libra Festival, it had seemed as though the town had slowly remembered what it was supposed to be. It wasn’t like the dazzling smiles that had been seen right after the establishment of the Round Table Council. However, the people who walked around town had begun to look as though they were savoring the happiness and abundance of being able to relax and live stable lives every day.

Winter here was colder than it had been in their old world, but in the town of Akiba, time was passing peacefully, predominantly.

It was the same for Marielle.

Over these six months, she’d been trying hard to act like a guild master, but lately she’d been able to take it easy. It had begun when Henrietta said, “If you frown like that all the time, you’ll turn into a prickly middle-aged woman, you know.” Marielle couldn’t forget how, in the instant she’d been lectured, her guild family had looked away from her and giggled a little. She hadn’t felt it herself, but she must have been too tense.

She’d have to give it some thought and do better. Marielle gave a soft sigh.

Henrietta, the person who’d delivered the lecture, also seemed to have relaxed a bit recently.

Asuka was helping her manage the accounts, apparently. Since she was involved with duties for the Round Table Council as well, she was gone quite frequently, but she did have enough time to slow down and spend the evenings like this.

The two old friends took sips of cocoa out of thick mugs, which they held closely, to warm their palms.

“……? ……?”

“Oh, Nanami? What is it?”

Henrietta spoke to the little girl who’d looked in through the door, then come trotting over. The girl made a slight detour around Henrietta, then hesitantly peeked up over the edge of the table, looking around.

The girl had joined the guild just recently, and she was still terribly shy.

Henrietta—one of the causes of that shyness—had lowered her eyes and was pretending to coolly drink her cocoa, but Marielle noticed that the corners of her lips were twitching.

The day Nanami had come to the guild, Henrietta had launched into a wild, joyous dance, tumbled the little girl around with the force of a large coin-laundry dryer, and dressed her up in so many outfits that counting had gotten tiresome after thirty. Nanami had finally burst into tears, the Assassin Hien had objected fiercely, and since then, Marielle’s friend had refrained from doting on her too much.

However, even if Henrietta had repented, the experience had probably been rather horrific for Nanami, a Person of the Earth. At times like this, she tended to keep her distance.

“Wanna sit on my lap?”

Marielle put an arm around Nanami’s waist and scooped her up onto her knees.

Now Nanami, who was still very young, was able to see over the entire table.

Since it had been built to seat sixteen, the table was both wide and long. Spread across it was Marielle’s carving knife, the woodworking tools she’d been using, and some fine-grained maple scrap wood; a rough income and expenditures estimate, which Henrietta had been calculating at her leisure; cocoa for two; and cloth sacks. For safety’s sake, Henrietta returned the carving knife to its bag. Marielle was grateful to Henrietta, who always covered for her smoothly, even when she was silent.

Nanami’s eyes were wide with curiosity, and she was fidgeting. Marielle put an arm around her, pulling her rump closer, and felt herself smile involuntarily. She couldn’t have said exactly what it was, or how, but all sorts of things had seemed very precious to her just then.

Illuminated by soft magic light, the dining room was warm and calm. Part of the kitchen was visible through a large aperture, and inside, two Chefs were busily making preparations for dinner. When they listened carefully, they could hear voices conversing, moving down the corridor, greetings from companions who’d returned from outdoors, and the cheerful responses that came back.

Nanami smelled like fresh laundry. Marielle probably did, too. To Mari, this seemed a bit like a family bond.

“Would you like some cocoa? Or were you looking for Hien?”

Henrietta held a mug out to Nanami, tilting her head. Nanami flinched, looked up at her face, looked at the cocoa, then looked at Henrietta again. The little girl turned back, as if asking what she should do. Marielle smiled at her: “Go on, take it.”

Nanami set her hands on the mug, carefully so as not to spill any, and took it. It was big for her, and it was all she could do to use both hands and drink cautiously.

“!”

Apparently the sweetness had been a shock.

Nanami froze, looking startled.

To the Adventurers, this girl was as naïve as could be; everything she saw fascinated her, and she seemed to want to learn so badly she could hardly stand it. This entertained the guild members, and they made a pet of her and had her try all sorts of things. However, Nanami herself seemed to like Hien—the first person she’d met—the best. When he wasn’t there, she turned timid and fidgety, and her eyes were always searching for her reliable “big brother.”

Nanami sniffed at the cocoa, seeing what it smelled like. Then, seeming to have decided she liked it, she held the cup as if it were a treasure and kept drinking.

I hope she relaxes like this, slowly, little by little, Marielle thought, taking care not to let Nanami slip off her lap.

Nanami, who’d been drinking eagerly, abruptly went still.

When she peeked in, sensing trouble, only a mouthful of the cocoa remained.

Nanami was probably thinking, I drank it all by myself! What should I do? It was Henrietta’s!! or something of the sort; she went awkward and began acting suspiciously, and Marielle smiled at her.

“You don’t have to worry. Umeko won’t get mad about somethin’ like that.”

“I will get angry about being called Umeko, however.”

At that bone-chilling comment, Marielle made an exaggerated show of fear. Nanami was adorable as she looked back and forth, timidly comparing their expressions, and the two of them burst out laughing. That exchange made Marielle certain that Henrietta felt the same warmth she did, and the idea made her far too happy.

We’re a good guild, aren’t we?

She was proud of that.

“Man, is it cold out there!”

Although what it had said hadn’t been anything like a homecoming greeting, at the sound of the cheerful voice, Nanami straightened like a clockwork doll and looked around.

“That sounds like Hien. I imagine he’s in the entrance hall.”

Failing to register Henrietta’s casual attempt at earning points, Nanami nodded with a grateful expression, then hopped down from Marielle’s lap. She hugged Marielle, who was smiling at her, then went off in the direction of the entrance hall on slightly unsteady feet.

“Honestly!”

“What’s the matter?”

“That Hien is so popular. I’m a bit jealous.”

“You say that, but it’s all ’cos you spooked her with that horror show of yours, Umeko.”

“Ma-riiii…”

The two of them giggled together.

Being able to tease her old friend like this made Marielle unbearably happy.

“—In that case, that sneeze a short while ago must have been Master Naotsugu.”

“Dwah?!”

“…However, that world was short-lived.”

Her friend, who’d been smiling in harmony with her just a moment ago, now wore a mean smirk and plunged into a cross-examination.

“Was it Master Naotsugu? Was Master Naotsugu talking about you?”

“How on earth would I know?!”

This might be a world of magic, but it wasn’t so magical that you could instantly sense things like that.

“I see. I’ll check with him via telechat, then.”

This clever maneuver, which seemed to blaspheme fantasy, left Marielle with her back against the wall.

Going to this friend of hers for advice on romance might just have been a mistake. Marielle thought she’d regretted it more than a hundred times by now. Henrietta really was a capable worker, and she fielded a vast amount of work every day, but she had interests to match, and the ones at the head of the list were dressing up little girls and tormenting Mari. She was a mother-in-law. It was scary.

“Eeeeep! Spare me!”

“Why?”

Don’t ask me “why,” I can’t do that! Marielle muttered the words to herself. She had no idea what expression to wear; she averted her eyes, but even so, in a spirit of resistance, she kneaded her fingertips together.

“’Cos…”

“Yes?”

“We only telechat once a day, at twenty-one hundred, after dinner.”

“……”

Henrietta accepted the words Marielle had let fall, and there was a silence, as though she was digesting them. Then she responded with a stupefied “Huh?”

“Huh?!”

“I-I’m not sayin’ it twice!” Marielle retorted.

Henrietta wore an unusual expression: Her mouth hung open so far it was nearly square.

“I mean, he’s on a raid, y’know? He’s in the middle of a real tough job! It’s life or death, only we don’t die! Still, listen, I know Naotsugu’s fightin’ with everythin’ he has, and Shiro’s probably thinkin’ like crazy, and I can’t bother them. So I promised I’d only telechat at night, when they’ve got their camp set up—”

Henrietta, who was pressing her fingertips to her temples and seemed to be suffering through a headache, sighed.

What a rude friend. Apparently Marielle’s consideration wasn’t getting through to her.

“That wasn’t what I was asking about. Or rather, I suppose it may have been… So you telechat every day?”

“Right.”

Marielle didn’t really understand, but she nodded.

“I tell him about what Akiba’s like, and what Akatsuki’s been up to. Come to think of it, I told him about Nanami yesterday. Remember I made her a new smock? I talked about that. And about how we went to buy rubber boots together, and how Hien and li’l Nanami danced in the entrance hall. I told him about that new tandoori chicken, too. We both kept sayin’ how we wanted to eat it together. Naotsugu’s a big guy, so I bet he could eat three of ’em, y’know? Maybe even four, since they’re spicy! Then we talked about how lassi was good, too, and how we really did want to go out to eat together, and we just went on for so long… Say, Henrietta, you thought the tandoori was yummy, too, right?”

“Um.”

Henrietta stood. She looked as though she might have heartburn.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to run a delivery over to the Production Guild Liaison Committee before dinner.”

“Oh.”

“If this goes on, I’ll be so full I won’t have room for dinner. Honestly, Mari, you’re so… What’s the word…?”

Henrietta’s shoulders slumped, and she left the dining room with an armful of files. Marielle waved, watching her friend go. Lately, this had been routine at the Crescent Moon League.

Even though Marielle wasn’t aware of it, a white victory star had appeared on the Sumo Wrestling score chart in Henrietta’s mind.

The outcome of this battle for the star had been a contest just as fierce as the raid.

3

Just as the scout team had reported, a dull, dark purple suit of armor knelt, perfectly still, in the center of an enormous, bowl-shaped coliseum. When they’d measured from a distance of more than a hundred meters using a Gunner’s Lock-On Sight, its height seemed to be about sixteen meters. It was probably a golem or a type of giant.

Raid bosses’ detection ranges were wide, but they were also unique. In this case, it was likely that the battle would begin when William and the others entered the coliseum.

The enemy was Ruseato of the Seventh Garden.

To William, this enemy had the same form as Ruseato of the Seventh Prison, whom he’d fought many times in the Nine Great Gaols of Halos. Its characteristics would probably be the same, even if its abilities and tactics were stronger. According to the scout team’s reconnaissance force, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden seemed to have White Knight and Black Knight modes as well. He remembered it being a difficult boss who switched between the two sets of abilities as it attacked.

William raised his hand to the level of his shoulder.

That alone was enough to focus the raid members’ eyes on him.

They’d had a briefing session beforehand. The scout party had charged and died many times over, and even as they did so, they’d brought back valuable information. Even Shiroe of Log Horizon had admitted that, with the tactics they’d built through combining this information, they had a 50 percent chance of victory. For a first battle, that wasn’t a bad figure at all.

He felt heat swelling at his back.

Grabbing that chance, William brought his arm straight down.

Obeying the order, the unit flooded into the room like a river that had burst forth. With the First party in the lead, they plunged down through the grayish-white spectator seats.

They slid down the ruined, crumbled walls, surging forward, forward.

In general terms, the range of a monster’s attacks was proportionate to its size.

Goblins were only about 140 centimeters tall; bare-handed, their attack range was just a couple dozen centimeters, and even if kicks and spears were included in the calculations, it was no more than a meter or so. However, if it was a troll two meters tall, you needed to figure that the range of the club it swung around was about three meters. From the size of the enormous raid boss in front of them, they had to assume that its attack range was fairly large.

At Shiroe’s suggestion, the Silver Sword group had spent the past few days training to gauge ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-meter standard points implicitly. Thanks to that, they wouldn’t misjudge distances with this giant enemy.

However, even that wouldn’t come until after they’d launched the first attack. First they had to get into the enemy’s attack range; then the vanguard would reach the front line, and the fragile spellcasters and long-range attackers would have to be posted in a safe area beyond the outer edge. They’d need to change their attack positions constantly, but their strategy used the difference between the enemy’s range and their own. Unless they made expert use of tactics that involved taking up positions in a blind spot, the rear guard wouldn’t be able to last through the raid boss’s attack. Each attack was simply that powerful.

Running at the head of the muddy torrent, Dinclon charged into the twenty-meter range as if he meant to split it open. As though life had suddenly been breathed into it, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden stood. Its visor looked like mechanical armor, and the crimson light that seeped through its gaps ran down like water as the monster raised its enormous halberd. He saw Dinclon, shield at the ready, grit his teeth and prepare for the impact. His efforts paid off, and the Silver Sword Guardian, reinforced by heavy armor, blocked the raid boss’s first attack.

The damage was slight, about 10 percent of his total HP.

Still, that didn’t mean the enemy’s attack power was low. Purification Barrier, which had been cast on Dinclon before the battle began, was a damage interception spell. Cast by a high-level Kannagi, the spell had negated about 4,500 points of damage that should have been taken by the target. In other words, even after that had been negated, he’d taken damage. If the barrier spell hadn’t been there, he would have lost more than 30 percent of his HP to that single attack.

It was fearsome offensive power.

However, even that had been factored in. The damage obstruction, which had been canceled, was recast immediately.

Dinclon, the Guardian at the head of the First party, was the leading edge of the unit. In terms of arrows, he was the hardest possible arrowhead. The steel Warrior, who’d had a series of recovery spells cast on him, reached the feet of Ruseato of the Seventh Garden and used the special aggro skills Anchor Howl and Taunting Shout in rapid succession.

This marked the beginning of the battle.

“Begin the assault!”

From the Third party, William sent the message to the entire group.

With support songs from Bards, varicolored magic and projectile attacks rained down on the raid boss. In a raid like this one, it was hard to tell, but a terrific number of weakening effects were layered over Ruseato now. This was another reason for incorporating all twelve classes into the full raid. Save for a few exceptions, the same weakening effect couldn’t be layered over itself, but a many-sided net cast by a variety of classes displayed its effect on powerful enemies.

The fusillade of attacks clouded their field of vision for a moment, and heavy explosions seemed to rock the earth.

Ruseato had swung its great steel weapon as if to gouge out ten meters around itself. The attack had killed two members and left several who had been engaged in close combat near death.

The attack was so brutal that even Dinclon lost half his HP.

However, the Silver Sword battle lines didn’t collapse.

The unique Kannagi resurrection spell, Soul-Calling Prayer, teleported the dead to the feet of the caster and revived them. In addition to this convenient spell, which simultaneously evacuated the members to a safe distance and resurrected them, a Summoner who’d summoned a Carbuncle chanted Phantasmal Heal. This HP recovery spell, an oddity among the Magic Attack classes, didn’t measure up to a recovery spell from the usual classes, but it did more than enough to lighten their burden.

Recovery classes besides the Kannagi prioritized recovering wounded members. While this was going on, Dinclon didn’t retreat a single step under Ruseato’s attacks.

The powerful attack that had mowed down the surrounding area a few moments ago had probably been one of the raid boss’s certain-kill attacks.

That attack had been branded on the eyes of the Silver Sword members. A shabby Summoner who stood next to William, holding an adorable, fluffy Carbuncle by the scruff of its neck, began to count in a steely, determined voice. As that voice rang out, everyone listened to it.

Without exception, raid bosses’ enormous attacks had conditions.

One major condition was—to use the vocabulary of the Adventurer-players—Recast Time. Powerful attacks couldn’t be unleashed back-to-back. Each skill had its own cool-down period. There was no telling whether that time would be ten seconds or thirty, but the cool-down time itself had to exist.

As they’d discussed beforehand, the Summoner was counting in order to measure it. Of course he kept up his magic attacks, and he didn’t neglect his response to the combat situation.

In the days when Elder Tales had been a game, they could just leave this sort of count to an external program, or—if handled in a low-tech way—to a stopwatch hung beside the monitor. Raid bosses’ every action had been analyzed by the millisecond from reference videos of recorded play, had been compared against the logs, and everything about it—attack damage, attribute, range, interval, motion, penetration rate, critical rate—had been laid bare.

Raiders had shared that information through cloud services, discussed it in chat rooms, and gone on the attack with the latest, most efficient techniques.

“Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one…”

A hoarse yet firm tenor voice overlapped with the sound of swords, the ring of clashing steel, and the noise of the thunder and flame attacks that raced through the air.

The members each focused their five senses, desperately buckling down in an attempt not to miss anything that voice said, and not to lose sight of the enemy before them.

In this world, where everything had been swallowed up by chaos, Silver Sword had continued to fight, and had rebuilt tactics as primitive and awkward as this one.

It might have been possible to call it the ruined state of a once-powerful guild.

That count was crude and undignified, yet it held a prayer that greedily hungered for victory.

When the count, delivered in an unamplified voice, reached twenty-six, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden raised its great steel halberd. The fearsome attack of a few moments before was on its way.

However, William’s companions showed no fear.

The Assassins and Swashbucklers leapt through space.

The Bards and Druids sprang back, putting distance between them.

The Clerics cast defense-boosting status buffs in rapid succession on the warriors who’d chosen to tough it out.

Handling the second attack like this was splendid.

After the roaring blast had passed through, the attack had not caused any deaths.

Some players had lost most of their HP, true, but the recovery unit’s spells were already healing the damage.

They’d skillfully dodged one of the enemy’s attacks.

The corners of William’s lips rose ferociously.

That wasn’t all: The raid boss, whose very armor looked like a blade, had to be hiding all sorts of twisted attack methods. After all, it hadn’t even changed its shape yet.

Still, this wasn’t bad. Even as he thought that things were going fairly well so far, William fired arrows.

Before he was aware of it, his throat had sent up a savage yell: “More damage! Get the lead out, speed up and chip away at him!”

He fired an astonishing number of arrows.

As if prepared to dash themselves to pieces, the offensive ranks struck with their swords or unleashed flame, pulling Ruseato into ranged spells colored with light and darkness.

William knew. Without exception, boss monsters that appeared in raid zones had vast HP. The amount was overwhelming. Dinclon, a level-94 Guardian in an ultra-top-class raid guild like Silver Sword, had a bit under eighteen thousand HP, and raid boss monsters had HP that ranged from one thousand to ten thousand times that much.

Say Ruseato of the Seventh Garden’s HP had been shown on a meter. If it had been, they could have seen this, but although the offensive ranks were dealing out attacks without a pause, the reduction was truly miniscule. It was such a gradual fall that, on a meter, it probably wouldn’t have been visible to the naked eye. Still, keeping it up was the only way to defeat a boss.

“Careful, watch its feet!”

A sharp voice spoke. It belonged to Federico the Swashbuckler.

Abruptly, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden began to move sluggishly, and a black substance that wasn’t quite a mist or a liquid flooded from under its feet. The substance moved, undulating, spreading rapidly, immersing the floor of the arena.

“Damage detected, attribute: Poison! Action—No, it’s a move obstruction! Attack speed and force both down!”

Dinclon’s report reached his ears. When he looked, something like a black, viscous liquid was wrapping around Dinclon’s plate boots and tugging at them, emitting faint lightning.

For a moment, William hesitated.

There was damage, but it was very slight.

The flickering lightning was an attack that had been repelled by damage interception. The fact that lights as small as that were appearing one after another, and that the barriers hadn’t been breached, was proof that the damage was trivial. He could tell that it wasn’t inflicting serious damage even on the close-range attack members, whose defense was lower than Dinclon’s.

A special attack that only inflicted slight damage, and which hindered movement—the instant William sensed danger, Ruseato of the Seventh Garden began to walk, its footsteps heavy.

Dinclon used multiple Anchor Howls, trying to stop it from moving, but they were negated. With a bursting effect unlike the usual one, they rolled off the surface of Ruseato’s armor.

A low-damage range binding attack.

Realizing the intent behind it, William screamed:

“Range interception! Range recovery!”

As if his yell had thrown a switch, the unit moved.

A barrier that looked like a translucent dome; faintly shining defense spells; the thin orange layer that indicated Reactive Heal… And yet a single attack blew them all away. Ruseato’s metal body, which had begun to lay waste, was more a weapon than a monster. An enormous construction machine was bounding around with the agility of a cat. It brandished its halberd as if licking the ground with it, attempting to cut down Silver Sword like it was no more than reeds, or sheaves of straw.

Still. Even so.

More than half their members were left.

And, even as it quailed from the pain, a voice that refused to retreat was continuing to count.

“First healer, maintain the front line! Second party, fall back, resurrect and restore, Third and Fourth reduce the damage seventy percent; prioritize restoration!”

Deep in his throat, as if he couldn’t quite hold it back, William laughed.

When he licked upward, the stuff that had dripped down the side of his nose tasted like blood.

It was like concentrated iron. It was the taste of the raid William wanted.

The enemy was strong, just as they’d anticipated, beyond what they’d predicted.

And William’s group was still standing.

The fight had only just begun.

4

Demiquas, who’d retreated ten meters in one move with Phantom Step, squeezed a blazing hot sigh from his lungs as he recovered his own HP with Resilience.

The battle had fallen into an infuriating deadlock.

Gritting his molars as if meaning to shatter them, he focused intently on the enemy.

They had to inflict damage on Ruseato of the Seventh Garden as they parried its brutality, all while its armor was deep purple. That was just as their advance intel had said, and it had gone fairly well. Demiquas and the other close-range attackers had landed blow after blow on Ruseato’s obstinate armor, whaling on it and putting cracks in it.

However, when those cracks had sketched a pattern like tree branches all over Ruseato’s body, it had shed the armor as if it was peeling a boiled egg.

What had emerged was a Ruseato as white as a hospital ceiling.

The armor that had been stripped from that bleached figure melted into the shadows at its feet, then stretched up, creating shadow warriors. The deformed warriors had thin, featureless silhouettes and held giant war scythes at the ready. Since they were entirely black, they looked like two-dimensional shadow-pictures.

The white Ruseato unleashed beams of light, and Demiquas evaded them.

Compared to what had come before it, it was a limp, weak attack.

And now, thanks to his self-recovery, he was ready to charge again.

Having spotted a good opportunity, Silver Sword launched repeated wave attacks, but the shadow warriors blocked them. Compared to Ruseato, both their range and their attack power were nothing. However, there were too many of them to ignore. Even now, there were already more than ten.

The unit dodged Ruseato’s careless attacks, gradually taking down the shadow warriors as they did so.

Dinclon, the main tank, really couldn’t handle this many enemies on his own. Five warriors, including that foul Naotsugu, had to draw them off.

The shadow warriors surged in, like insects drawn by the scent of nectar.

Demiquas took aim at the pack with Wyvern Kick.

This flying, gliding kick had a field of fire of about fifteen meters forward, and it could be used both to move and to attack. It was Demiquas’s greatest forte, his absolut Geheimnis. If he unleashed this attack, Demiquas would land right where the enemy was thickest in a single bound. As a general rule, this was a bad move. Ruseato was a high-level raid boss, and it was hard to avoid his attacks, so if he shook off his healer and other reinforcements, Demiquas would be in a dangerous position. However, the black shadows in front of him were raid enemies, not bosses. To Demiquas, a martial artist, enemies that waved around big weapons like that were easy to take on.

With a piercing fighting yell, Demiquas became a deep green meteor.

He crossed the coliseum almost as if he were coasting through the air on a snowboard, crashed into the chest of a shadow warrior, and slammed a Tiger Echo Fist into its body, which left it looking like it had been pierced by a cannonball.

Leaving an echo vibrating in his ears, the raid mob brought its scythe down as a parting gift. Demiquas repelled the attack by a bare minimum with Back Hand, then, squaring off slightly by raising his right knee until it almost touched his chest, he lashed out with Shadowless Kick.

The enemy flew apart pitifully, like a dropped watermelon.

However, since one shadow warrior had been defeated, Ruseato absorbed the darkness that had been generated, and it seemed to have recovered some HP.

In other words, this was why they were taking one step back for each step forward.

White Ruseato recovered its own health.

The shadow warriors were catalysts for the process, and they also bought it time. Apparently, Ruseato’s white reincarnation recovered strength over a set period of time so that it could attack again. Then its armor would be dyed black once more, and it would unleash powerful attacks, moving tirelessly, as though it had just begun to fight.

Outlasting that hurricane certainly wasn’t impossible, but that was assuming Ruseato was their only opponent. If the shadow warriors stayed, the vanguard, who’d lost the greater part of its HP to Black Ruseato, would fall to those great scythes.

Healers supported the health of the raid unit. However, both the Kannagis’ barriers and the Clerics’ Reactive Heals had tolerance limits.

It was nearly all they could do to fight Ruseato of the Seventh Garden by itself.

They couldn’t afford to leave the mobs alive. That said, when they defeated them, they recovered Ruseato. For a short while, there had been twenty shadow warriors, and thanks to that, the unit had been pushed to the brink of collapse.

Infuriatingly, the one to find a way out of that situation had been Shiroe.

Black Ruseato generates a number of shadow warriors equal to the number of people who had inflicted damage on it.

At that discovery, Silver Sword had rallied.

They left the attacking to powerful attackers, while the healers and weaker members refrained. When they did, when Ruseato transformed into its white incarnation, they were able to decrease the number of shadow warriors it generated to ten or so.

Shiroe the coward, who did nothing but give orders from the rear, was someone Demiquas meant to avenge himself on, someone he’d never forgive. He’d shattered Demiquas’s pride, had even destroyed the Briganteers organization he’d worked so hard to build. If only those three hadn’t come to Susukino, Demiquas and the others could have slowly acclimated themselves to this world. If only that Shiroe hadn’t come…

He could forgive the cat-headed swordsman. The swashbuckler had blocked Demiquas’s path and swung his swords. However, from beginning to end, the coward among them hadn’t even looked at Demiquas.

The man didn’t even seem to remember his name.

Demiquas could clearly remember Shiroe’s expression when he’d reappeared in Susukino. When the man had seen Demiquas, he hadn’t looked troubled. That was fine. Shiroe was probably strong; Demiquas had seen that on this raid. In that case, at the very least, he could have sneered or looked contemptuous.

However, the only emotion he’d seen in the damned Enchanter’s expression had been the thought, What a pain.

Demiquas slammed the rage he couldn’t abide into a shadow warrior.

Lightning Straight came back at him, as if to run him through.

He evaded that attack with Phantom Step, kicked it upward with Aerial Rave, then landed a Wyvern Kick in its wide-open side. As it blew away, he slammed another Wyvern Kick into its back.

Shiroe saw Demiquas as no more of an opponent than that.

As if he could go without killing Shiroe! The thought was like flame, and it burned him to the core. Someday, he swore, he’d bring such pain down on Shiroe’s head that he’d regret he’d ever been born into this world.

However, now wasn’t the time.

Frustrating as it was, he didn’t have the ability right now. At this point, even he had to admit it. This Shiroe guy was tough. It was true for his equipment, too, but even his techniques outstripped Demiquas’s.

When Demiquas had joined this raid, at first, he’d been planning on attacking Shiroe from behind. He’d laid monsters out as practice. He’d thought that had raised his spirits: His body had been a lot lighter than usual. Demiquas’s fists had vanquished the monsters, just as they were tearing apart shadow warriors now.

He’d thought he’d gotten used to the atmosphere of the raid, but then he’d noticed a small sword icon spinning around his wrist. The unfamiliar icon was Shiroe’s Keen Edge… That was all it was: Demiquas had only been in high spirits from that guy’s reinforcement spell. When he looked for proof, he found it in spades. Haste, which had linked up attacks more quickly than usual; True Guide, which had let him break through the defense of attacks at higher levels than normal.

Just like now.

A shadow warrior that had approached to cut Demiquas down raised its great scythe.

There was still half a second of bind time left for Wyvern Kick. Demiquas should have taken the attack by a hair, but it didn’t happen.

Shiroe’s support was so subtle that, if this had been the very beginning of the zone capture, he wouldn’t have noticed it. What had he called it, Mind Shock? It was a spell that used the shock wave from an impact to make a monster’s consciousness go dim. The monsters he normally went up against would have been one thing, but it was only able to stun the raid monsters that appeared in this zone for a second at most. However, that one second was enough for Demiquas: He got out of the enemy’s attack range with Monkey Step, turned back, and unleashed a big spin kick, Dragon Tail Swing, as though he were sweeping over the surface of water.

Demiquas’s full-power charges and devastation all fell within the parameters of Shiroe’s estimates.

That escape and the subsequent spin kick had looked like Demiquas’s fierce combat, but Shiroe had merely let him perform them.

Of course, the guy didn’t have Demiquas’s attack power or martial arts.

All he’d done was cause a little distraction and use a measly reinforcement spell. There was no way he’d be able to take down a powerful monster with makeshift trickery like that.

However, what mattered was the fact that Shiroe had guessed what Demiquas was about to do, and had been able to help him without his catching on. Shiroe was predicting Demiquas’s actions perfectly. Demiquas had expanded his skills enough on this raid to know what that meant.

Someday, I’ll slaughter him.

When I do, I’ll do it in front of everybody.

I’ll smash that pasty face and make him drown in tears of remorse.

I’ll get a fantasy-class on this raid—

Boost my level, polish my techniques—

Demiquas bounded around, destroying one enemy after another.

His class, Monk, was a Warrior class that had both attack power and the ability to keep fighting. Although he didn’t have as much offensive power as the Weapon Attack classes, his HP and ability to handle abnormal statuses were incomparably high. That meant he could charge into the midst of the enemy and survive, and it also meant he could stand his ground, even in the raid boss’s attack range, and keep right on attacking. Demiquas kept on shoving, kicking, mowing down, and attacking to the very limits of his techniques, moving as his blazing body dictated.

Yet the battle progressed with painful slowness.

When they were temporarily cornered, William’s feverish commands managed to get them on their feet again. The frontline defenders and healers, keeping the enemy weakened: If this vertical line was functioning properly, they wouldn’t be wiped out easily. Then they simply had to eliminate the shadow warriors and chip away at Ruseato’s HP, suiting their actions to the combat situation.

It took time, of course. During that long time, countless decisions were made, and they all had to be dealt with calmly, deliberately, without error, and promptly. This series of actions was all there was to raids.

Demiquas was heat.

Demiquas was flame.

He evaded the attacks of the enemy in front of him, pierced them, destroyed them.

He leapt at Black Ruseato, brandishing fists of thunder as if to shatter its armor.

His mind gradually emptied until he was simply immersed in the fight, propelled by erupting heat. No more thoughts of when he had been in rotten Susukino; no more thoughts of the day he’d fought Nyanta. Demiquas thought of nothing and became one with the battle.

As a result, he didn’t realized that the situation had changed until he heard a scream go up behind him.

It would have been harsh to blame Demiquas. Even for experienced raid members, it had been far too sudden. The enormous iron grates set in the eastern and western sides of the coliseum had opened completely. From the dark gaping holes, Tartaulga of the Fourth Garden, a frost giant with white eyes and frozen whiskers, and Ibra Habra of the Third Garden, a fiery serpent like a living, writhing corona, appeared.

No sooner had the monsters taken half a step into the coliseum than they unleashed storms of ice and flame from either side. Their target was the Fourth party, which had been concentrating all its attacks on Ruseato. The party was annihilated in an instant, and the side effects alone did massive damage to the rest of the unit.

At the preposterous sight, Demiquas felt an disturbing fluid rush into his mouth from his innards.

This was too much.

Demiquas and the others were fighting Ruseato of the Seventh Garden right now.

Wait your turns, he thought.

They’d fought Ruseato and kept exterminating his kin, the shadow warriors. When the balance had tipped ever so slightly and the enemy’s numbers increased just a little, Demiquas’s group had been in danger of being wiped out.

Just when things had started to go smoothly. Even though that path had been no more than a faint possibility, like stepping onto thin ice.

Now, at this point, here came two bosses whose ranks equaled Ruseato’s.

Even Demiquas could tell, very clearly.

They couldn’t win.

This wasn’t about tactics or strategy.

The difference in fighting power was so overwhelming it destroyed trivial little tricks like those. In order to fight these three at the same time, they would have needed a legion raid with ninety-six people, not a full raid of twenty-four.

Deep in his ears, he heard a flat voice he’d heard somewhere before.

This world isn’t a game anymore. That’s finished. Your time is over.

The realization came to him, then: Just the way Adventurers put together strategies, the monsters left their posts to concentrate their power.

If Demiquas had been a guardian of the dungeon, this would have been an obvious tactic, the first one he came up with.

Combine their strength and exterminate the Adventurers.

That natural thing had happened, and that was all.

The air of the coliseum, which had frozen with that terribly cruel despair, was shredded by screams it was hard to believe had come from human throats.

A face the size of an extralarge advertisement on the wall of a movie theater closed in on them: The frozen giant had bent over and brought its fist down on the members. There was a sticky, splattering noise, and then the Summoner was just a stain in the coliseum.

The counting voice that had put Demiquas at ease was gone.

Demiquas roared, charging like a gale at Shiroe—who was just standing there, stunned, eyes wide—and shoved him hard. Shiroe rolled three times, four, before Naotsugu caught him. It put him outside the range of the Frost Giant’s twisted club.

“Take that, ya damn coward,” Demiquas laughed at him.

In exchange, his left leg had been crushed to a pulp, but he’d gotten to see Shiroe look like an idiot, so he was still ahead.

Kill those cheating raid bosses! Demiquas spat on the ground.

However, neither Demiquas nor Shiroe managed to escape the brutality of Ibra Habra of the Third Garden, the flaming serpent whose writhing body shed a rain of fire. It wasn’t just the two of them. Naotsugu, Tetora, and William. The veterans of Silver Shield, who were stronger than Demiquas, and who’d crushed him like a bug no matter how many times he came at them.

All their moisture was gone in an instant, and in the midst of flames that made their bodies twist in agony, the twenty-four members of the conquest unit were annihilated, just like that.

5

Having just passed through a hut where a foul smell drifted, the line of Krusty’s shapely nose warped slightly. The members of his guild called him thick-skinned, but even for him, the stench of the goblin dwelling had taken its toll.

Takayama had accompanied him, and it had been so bad her eyes had begun to smart partway through.

Compared to the hut’s interior, with its soiled straw and accumulated filth, it was far better outdoors, even under a freezing winter sky. In any case, Adventurer bodies were sturdy when it came to environmental differences like cold and heat.

This seemed to be true for Krusty as well.

He shrugged his shoulders once, then left the goblin dwelling behind him, as if he had no further use for it.

The dwelling was primitive—just a shallow pit dug in the earth, with a post set in the center and lots of tree branches and grasses piled up around it to act as a roof. There were several like it clustered in the surrounding area.

This was one of the goblin villages in the Silverluck Mountains. This part of the wilderness held countless villages like this one, each with about fifty dwellings. Together, each encampment had probably been home to roughly three hundred goblins.

By now, most of them were deserted.

The Akiba Expedition Army Krusty led had subjugated about 30 percent of them.

They assumed the remaining 70 percent had gathered at Seventh Fall, where the Goblin King reigned.

It had already been a month since the expedition began.

During the interval, Misa Takayama and the rest of the expedition army had explored the surrounding area, confirming the locations of goblin villages and sometimes attacking them. The army’s advance had been slow and careful.

From the beginning, the idea that the conquest of Seventh Fall and the defeat of the Goblin King wouldn’t be difficult had been common knowledge for the Round Table Council. During the blank period of the Catastrophe, the goblins of Eastal had bred prolifically, and had reached a scale not often seen in history. To the People of the Earth, this was a disaster straight out of their nightmares.

However, to the Adventurers of Akiba—or at least to the combat guild members who’d reached level 90—they weren’t a big threat. Although this was a raid to storm Seventh Fall, according to Krusty, if they went in with a select group of several dozen members, it should be possible to put down the Goblin King inside of two days. Takayama agreed with this prediction.

In the first place, the defeat of the Goblin King wasn’t the goal of this operation.

The goal was to secure the safety of the People of the Earth who lived in northeastern Yamato. That meant the problem was the several tens of thousands of goblins themselves. Even if they successfully subjugated the Goblin King and the now-leaderless goblins then overran the Silverluck Mountains, they would have to declare the operation a failure.

With that in mind, the headquarters with which Krusty and Takayama were affiliated was moving with intentional slowness and combing the mountains. At present, there were several dozen Adventurer units deployed in the Silverluck Mountains, scouting and sporadically engaging in combat.

As a result of this maneuver, which was a bit like chasing fish into a net, most of the goblin villagers seemed to have gathered at Seventh Fall. They thought they were mustering forces to begin their opposition to the Adventurers, but to Takayama and the others, it was merely a development that matched their strategy.

Takayama followed Krusty, making for the stream.

Members of D.D.D. were investigating the interior of the village and the area around it. That said, under the circumstances, it wasn’t likely that any Goblins had remained behind. They were only confirming the situation, and no one was all that tense.

Krusty and Takayama traveled along a small path, cutting off conspicuous branches as they went.

The well-trodden path was probably an animal track the residents of the village had used when they went to collect water, but Goblins were less than 140 centimeters in height. These two individuals were tall, and as they made their way along the path, the thick branches at face level snagged them and made it hard to walk.

When they emerged on the dry shore at the river’s edge, the wind made them narrow their eyes. It carried a chill that swept away the gloomy air, and it felt pleasant to Takayama, but beside her, her guild leader expression wasn’t good.

She’d noticed this tendency of Krusty’s around the time the Libra Festival had ended, and it seemed as though the anguish was growing more severe. Riezé had been so worried she’d wrung her handkerchief, but up until now, Takayama had left it entirely alone. This was because Krusty was a grown man, and she’d thought it would annoy him to have someone of the opposite sex worrying about him.

Though I suppose being an adult doesn’t have much to do with it. Boys are always delicate, at any age.

Takayama’s workplace experience made her think this.

Besides, she’d known Krusty for a long time. She knew more or less what that worry was about. That was why she’d thought she’d take this chance, when they’d left the headquarters and gone scouting, to talk with him about it, just a little.

“Milord?”

“Hm? What is it, Ms. Takayama?”

After a time lag so slight it was barely noticeable, Krusty turned a pensive face toward Takayama.

“You don’t seem to be feeling well lately. Is something troubling you?”

“Hmm.”

Krusty brooded, covering his mouth with his fingertips. He was wearing thin leather gloves today, instead of his usual Adamantite Steel gauntlets. His midweight armor suited his sturdy frame well. He was a good-looking guild master. The series of people who were fooled by this was never-ending, but it was certainly useful as far as administration was concerned. Harboring this impression, she asked straight-out about what she’d felt:

“Are you bored, sir?”

Looking down at Takayama out of the corner of his eye, Krusty thought for a little while. Then, as though ducking the question, he put on a dignified expression, smiled wryly, and raised both hands as if he’d given up.

“…That’s a problem. Yes, I’m bored.”

“Put up with it, if you would.”

“I’ve put up with a lot of it, and here I am today.”

Takayama sighed heavily.

She’d thought this was probably the case, and she’d been right.

Krusty looked intellectual, and it was true that his actions were logical and precise. He had the brains and the charisma to bring people together. He’d launched and managed D.D.D., the largest guild on the Yamato server—truly an achievement to be proud of. D.D.D., which had absorbed 1,700 members, was larger than a midsized corporation in the real world.

However, that public image wasn’t all there was to Krusty.

This alabaster young man, who had been placed in charge of running even the Round Table Council, was terribly mischievous and had a fickle personality.

One fact that Takayama and a few of the other veteran members knew was that Krusty had created the enormous organization known as D.D.D. because he’d wanted to see what would happen. In the first place, D.D.D. wasn’t a guild. It was part of a personnel exchange system Krusty had thought up, and the guild was just one of its structural elements.

Apparently, one day, Krusty had had a certain thought:

This Elder Tales game is terribly interesting. However, in order to get absolutely everything interesting out of it, you need lots of acquaintances and friends who’ll have fun adventuring with you. The administrators are aware of that, and they actually talk about it. There are all sorts of systems for finding companions built into the game… But if the users created a personnel exchange system that surpassed all that, and if they used that system to conquer end content in the form of raids… Wouldn’t that be rather interesting?

That was why D.D.D. had been formed.

In other words, it hadn’t needed to be structured like a guild. The guild system had just happened to exist in Elder Tales, and it had been convenient, so they’d used it. Back when Elder Tales had been a game, the focus of D.D.D.’s activities had been audio chat and their headquarters’ website, and both these systems had been proposed by Krusty. The periodic directors’ meetings and the personnel distribution system, which focused on raid unit division, had been his ideas as well.

He seemed to have been interested in constructing an autonomous organization in which the divisions produced results by acting independently, rather than being commanded by him personally. For that very reason, even though D.D.D. had grown so powerful, it had managed to remain a well-ventilated organization.

This had continued even after the Catastrophe. Krusty had seen the establishment of the Round Table Council as a rare, potentially beneficial opportunity, and had sought to expand his organization further and make it more autonomous. As a result, Krusty’s curious drive to “see” had been satisfied, but the number of ways were dwindling in which he was required to contribute to the administration.

In short, he’d gotten bored.

Takayama understood her friend’s feelings quite well, and she also thought they were troublesome. Although Krusty was bursting with talent, he was the type of man who had so much of it he was hard to associate with. His talent was excess power, and, for better or for worse, it sowed unforeseen trouble and confusion around the area.

When Krusty was bored, nothing good ever came of it.

He certainly wasn’t an outlaw, and since he was a rational human being, the final results were often beneficial to those around him. However, the commotion and work that occurred in the process were a pain in the neck for Takayama and the others. It had seemed to her that the boredom had been somewhat alleviated after he’d discovered Raynesia, but she might have been overestimating the girl.

It’s unreasonable to push this onto the princess, isn’t it…?

When she thought it over carefully, she was filled with remorse.

She had to say a few words, at least. When, thinking this, she caught up to Krusty—who had gone on ahead, strolling down the stream—he was leaning over, inspecting the rocks that were strewn around.

“What is it?”

“Hmm…”

Krusty readjusted his glasses, which had slipped a bit when he bent down, and held the object he’d picked up in front of her eyes. It seemed to be a spearhead.

The mountain stream drew a great arc in that area, and at the inner edge of a deep pool, there was a dry riverbed littered with rocks that were smaller than a child’s fist. Patches of lingering snow remained here and there, but in summer, it would have been the sort of cool mountain scenery that invited barbecues.

Krusty kicked several rocks, rolling them away with his toes. He seemed to have found traces of something.

“It looks like this was a training ground.”

“A training ground? That’s why it’s been leveled a bit, then,” Takayama responded, accepting the idea.

Now that she was paying attention, she saw that the larger rocks seemed to have been moved all the way over to the thicket of trees. When she looked closely, there were scattered fragments of wood and pieces of battle gear in the gaps between the rocks. This place had probably been used for quite a long time.

The idea of Goblins training themselves had never occurred to her before, but if they were plotting war, it was only to be expected. That said, she couldn’t imagine that they’d managed to amplify their military power that way—compared to Adventurers, Goblins’ levels were very low.

Having thought that far, Takayama registered Krusty’s gaze, wondered at the seriousness in it… And then, in the next instant, she understood:

Goblins. Conducting combat training.

That was a possibility that hadn’t existed before. Just as Takayama and the others were attempting to conquer the Seventh Fall raid using a method that was completely different from conventional ones, the Goblins would be able to prepare a return strike using methods that were completely different from anything they’d used before now. This world was not Elder Tales. Takayama wondered how often she would have to realize that before it finally sank in. She was filled with the urge to rail at her own incompetence.

“Milord, let’s return immediately, report this to the rest of the army and send word.”

“We’ll have to issue orders to search the training ground and investigate its influence.”

“Yes, sir.”

After this terse exchange, the pair went back the way they’d come, over the dry riverbed, heading for the village. First, they needed to return to the settlement and meet up with Richou and Kugel from the scouting team. Then they would probably have to travel along the ridge and return to the headquarters.

Takayama was flustered, and it took her longer than it should have to notice that her weapon, a great, folding, military scythe, was vibrating slightly. In the blink of an eye, it emitted a strange, metallic sound and cast a hot red light over the area.

This weapon had been acting strange lately.

It wasn’t that its performance had deteriorated. On the contrary: It seemed as though its offensive abilities had increased, so she hadn’t sent it out for repairs, but even on this battlefield, it had sometimes begun to vibrate and radiate enough heat to make her writhe.

As a result, with a dubious expression on her face, Takayama drew her weapon from her back, intending to check its condition carefully. It should have been a casual activity, one that required hardly any thought at all.

However, an impact as if a large dump truck had crashed into it ran through Takayama’s arm. The shock had been so great she knew the bones of her arm had shattered instantly, and her eyes went wide. Krusty snatched the weapon from her, and then she saw a dark red space envelop him, cutting a sphere out of the world.

Her own weapon flashed red, sending a magnetic field out from the center of the warp, drawing everything into it.

It seemed to be enfolding the guild master of D.D.D. into itself.

Krusty had used his other hand to shove Takayama away, but she didn’t recall asking him to do any such thing. Desperately, she reached out for him, thrusting her hand into the warping space.

However, there was a sharp, severing sound, and then the silence of the night left Takayama behind.

Her right arm had disappeared, along with her old friend Krusty and her great scythe, which bore the name “Calamity Hurts.”

She was looking up through her eyelashes as if she were sulking, but Shiroe knew her expression grew very gentle when she smiled.

A satisfied, cheerful, bashful smile.

As if inviting Akatsuki to follow, Shiroe began to walk down the beach again. After all, there didn’t seem to be any information to be gained from staying where he was, and Akatsuki, who was twirling around at the waterline, seemed to want to move forward.

The two of them made their way along the beach, taking their time.

He didn’t sense any malice or hostility here at all, but even so, it was an unfamiliar place.

Shiroe kept a careful eye on their surroundings, but Akatsuki seemed to be relaxed.

When he looked back, she was bent over, scrutinizing their tracks in the sand.

When Shiroe noticed this, he turned back and stopped, and she ran up to him with a lightness that made her seem weightless. She spun around him.

Then the two of them began walking again, side by side, and sometimes Akatsuki went on ahead, checking the waterline or pointing at a large bird in flight.

The girl was like a swallow, and her cute camel-colored duffel coat suited her very well.

Possibly because she was a little cold, her cheeks were faintly apple colored, and she sometimes walked ahead of him as if to hurry him along.

This world really must be connected to Elder Tales.

The atmosphere was vast, and the low sound of the wind, unique to the outdoors, showed its slow movement. It harmonized with the sound of the surf, forming the basic background noise for the world. The only other sound was the noise of their footsteps.

Maybe because she was a little frightened of something, Akatsuki’s footsteps grew slower, and she started to lag behind.

Shiroe waited for her patiently, taking his time.

Waiting didn’t bother him at all.

At some point, pure white phosphorescence had begun to drift down from the sky.

The light was endlessly pearlescent and pale, and it fell equally over the dunes and the wide ocean, Shiroe and Akatsuki.

Startled, Shiroe touched it with a fingertip, and felt his heart ache at its dreamlike fragility.

It was just like the snow he’d touched as a child: Even when he thought he’d caught it, when he looked at the palm of his hand, it was gone.

Akatsuki’s eyes were round, and Shiroe nodded to her.

They were both seeing the same wonder.

They were touching the same marvel.

For no reason at all, this brought Shiroe a sense of peaceful satisfaction.

Fear, anger, and regret were all melting into the quiet winter beach. The two stilled in the face of such silence, and its serenity purified them.

“I didn’t think it would be such a quiet place,” Shiroe murmured, stopping at the edge of a perfectly clear, blue inlet.

“Mm.”

From beside him, Akatsuki responded.

The response had been brief, but Shiroe had sensed a feeling of awe in her voice that matched his own.

From far, far beyond the horizon of the ocean, a sound like a church bell echoed faintly.

It seemed almost like an old signal from an unknown species that had lived in isolation since its birth, for tens of thousands of years, and was attempting to communicate its existence to its companions.

Although he had no grounds for thinking so, Shiroe was sure that this inlet was a special place.

Next to him, Akatsuki trembled slightly before she released a heartrending sigh.

At that, for the first time, Shiroe realized Akatsuki had met with death as well.

Even if it was temporary, death was death. It had passed mercilessly over Akatsuki, and had left its mark. She must have felt grief, as well as humiliation.

However, Akatsuki’s eyes at the moment were a little more mature, and far stronger, than the ones Shiroe knew.

If, as William said, death taught you something, then they had a duty not to waste it. Shiroe swore this firmly in his heart, even though he didn’t know what the purpose of that duty might be.

If that was why this inlet took memories, then he wanted to offer them himself, as compensation.

That was Shiroe’s wish.

This was a necessary ritual, in order to become someone who knew just a little more than he’d known yesterday; in order to overcome his regrets and get closer to something he’d wanted.

Shiroe took a small knife from his pocket and voluntarily cut away a tiny piece of his memories.

Seeing this, Akatsuki cut off the tip of her ponytail as well and let the sea take it.

The snow that fell from the sky, this blue ocean—all of it was made from emotion shards.

As liquid energy, soul fragments created the sound of the surf.

The tears shed by Adventurers who hadn’t made it to this inlet were also swallowed by the ocean. This was more a certainty than a guess. Right now, Shiroe was seeing the Spirit Theory with his own eyes.

A small hand gripped his coat.

Without taking his eyes off the ocean, Shiroe whispered, “Amazing.”

Akatsuki nodded. Until the throbbing in their chests subsided, they both gazed out over the sea.

“You fell, Akatsuki?”

At Shiroe’s words, Akatsuki looked startled, but she nodded.

Gazing desperately up at him, the young woman opened her mouth to speak.

Or rather, tried to speak.

It seemed hard for her to do so; she gave it several tries, then shut her mouth tightly in a thin line.

When Akatsuki looked up at him again, she had tears in her eyes, but they seemed to be tears of frustration more than sadness. In the end, she hugged her inner pain to herself, confessing none of it to Shiroe.

Her expression hurt him. To be here in the first place, Akatsuki had to have gone up against a very difficult problem and been defeated. He wished he could have helped, but he hadn’t been there.

“I see. That makes two of us, then. I died.”

“You, too, my liege?”

“Mm-hmm.”

When he closed his eyes, it came back to him—Silver Sword’s firm voice:

The ring of clashing swords, of blazing flame and freezing cold spells.

He wasn’t frustrated because he’d failed to win.

What frustrated him was the fact that he hadn’t done all he could, hadn’t accomplished what he’d needed to do.

However, Akatsuki’s burning eyes didn’t hold the slightest trace of fear.

She might have been defeated, but she hadn’t lost.

Shiroe didn’t know what had happened, but as he looked at her, he sensed that they were the same. That pain was Akatsuki’s treasure. The pride of someone who’d resolved to fight, pride that must be retaken.

That meant there was no need to comfort her.

“I messed up. My predictions were too naïve. —I didn’t believe completely.”

He’d been reluctant with his words.

He’d been reluctant to take others’ hands.

He’d been reluctant to give it his all.

“I don’t understand.”

The voice seemed to be on the verge of tears, but it was desperately trying to encourage him. Shiroe wanted to tell her, It’s all right. I understand. I know you’re working hard, Akatsuki. I know you’ll understand someday. Maybe you’re a little lost right now, but it’s a detour you need to take.

…But he couldn’t say it yet. The petite young woman was fighting. Shiroe was fighting, too. Neither of their raid battles was over.

“It’s funny. I never thought I’d get to meet you here, Akatsuki.”

“Yes, my liege. It’s funny.”

So he touched Akatsuki’s small, round forehead, praying to the inlet that all the things he couldn’t tell her would get through to her somehow.

Mistakes couldn’t be erased. However, as Adventurers, they could stand up and try again.

“…And so I’ll try one more time.”

“I’ll try again, too, I suppose— Everyone taught me.”

Countless phosphorescent particles drifted down over the two of them.

This world was one horizon leading to eternity, with all emotion etched into it.

That understanding made the world’s light even clearer.

From far away, the sound of the surf rolled toward them.

It washed over the shining beach, lapping at Shiroe’s and Akatsuki’s ankles.

Shiroe smiled at his friend. Their time was ending.

However, it was linked to their reunion.

He moved the hand he’d set on Akatsuki’s head slightly, feeling troubled. As a rule, right about now, he could have expected a flying kick from her. Don’t treat me like a child, et cetera. But because it didn’t come, and because Akatsuki’s expression was serious, he wasn’t sure how to stop.

Akatsuki, looking perplexed, began to say something. The music of the water kept Shiroe from hearing her voice, but he didn’t worry over it. The sensation of her hair, like fine, cool silk, remained on his fingertips.

Its softness definitely saved Shiroe.

3

When William opened his eyes, he was looking up at a ceiling so high that it blurred in his vision.

A hoarse voice spilled out of his stinging throat.

He knew how pitiful and mangy his face looked, but he couldn’t hold back the rumble that seemed to be leaking out of him. In the only resistance he could manage, he rubbed his arm roughly across his eyes. He didn’t even have to check to know that they were wet.

He’d been crying like a child. The disgrace of it crushed his chest.

Around him, low, moaning voices rose, one after another.

The members of Silver Sword were automatically resurrecting, one by one.

This was the entrance to Abyssal Shaft, the beginning of the zone.

William’s group had been wiped out, brought back to this place, and revived.

It was the sort of annihilation that always accompanied raids, but it was something different as well.

Three raid bosses had appeared and kicked William’s unit to pieces.

This informed Silver Sword of two facts:

First, that there was no way they could win this fight.

Second, raids were built on a very delicate balance between being winnable and unwinnable. Guilds that had gotten equipment together and trained repeatedly fought through battles that were like walking a tightrope, and in the end, they won: That was a raid. Therefore, if three large-scale boss battles linked together like that, there was—without exaggeration—absolutely no chance of victory. The more used to raids one was, the better one understood this.

There was no possibility that they could win this fight.

It was despair that painted William’s heart pitch-black.

The second news was even worse. No—it was bad beyond comparison. If raid bosses were able to band together now, and if it was happening everywhere, it meant there was no longer a single raid in the world that Silver Sword could win.

Of course, in a raid that players with very low levels—say, level 50—could attempt, if an extra boss appeared, they might be able to deal with it. However, when William’s group thought of raids, that wasn’t what they pictured. They weren’t banding together to seek out weak enemies and torment them.

The raid William and the others wanted was the type where they fought an enemy on their level and their blood seethed in their veins, and that type of raid had just died.

The breath William spat out was stone cold. An indescribable listlessness was torturing him.

The same could be said for his companions. Their low, crushed-sounding voices went on endlessly.

Anything William had been able to understand must have been clear to everyone in Silver Sword as well.

They hadn’t even needed to be annihilated: The instant the raid bosses had appeared from the great gates of the coliseum as reinforcements, the raid members had known.

This world had rejected them.

Forcing his limp body to move, William sat up, only to see Silver Sword in the process of being crushed. It wasn’t the sort of scene where anyone could have said nonsense like, “I don’t want my comrades to see me looking pitiful.” Simply being wiped out wouldn’t have done this to them. Hearts broken, the members just lay there or curled up, without the energy to stand. They were suffering, all vitality gone.

To Adventurers, physical pain wasn’t lethal. What was searing their souls was the brand of having been exiled from the world.

He heard sobbing. Disgraceful weeping, escaping from full-grown adults.

William knew the reason behind it. He’d been in contact with it himself until just a moment ago.

Losing memories was nothing. William could declare this more firmly than D.D.D., who left a safety margin when they acted, or the Knights of the Black Sword, who pressed forward with their captures through strong teamwork, or Honesty, with their damned egalitarian principles. This was something Silver Sword could say precisely because it had, without question, been wiped out more often than any other raid guild on the server.

The instant between death and resurrection when they were shown their own mistakes and imperfections, that soul-chilling torrent of memories, chipped away at raiders’ souls. They needed to win only a little. No matter how many mistakes they’d made, they could make a fresh start, saying they’d corrected their errors and had grown… But how could they cancel out a mistake they couldn’t fully atone for, or regret they couldn’t shake?

Voices reverberated inside him like echoes from the past.

“And? What is that good for?”

“Wow. A game, huh…?”

“On a PC? These days? What’s wrong with social network games?”

“You stay home on holidays?”

To hell with that.

William spat the words out.

“Well, sure, you don’t look like the type that gets asked to go sing karaoke and stuff.”

“You mean you talk to the computer, right? Yikes…”

“Why don’t you pick a hobby that could be useful to you someday?”

“Mm, yeah, there are people like that out there, too. Why not?”

To hell with it.

William roughly wiped his face.

He attempted to leap to his feet, but pathetically, his knees were quaking.

He tried to yell, but realized he had no words that would encourage his friends. What was he going to do, inspire them? Tell them they’d win the next one? He couldn’t do that. It would be a lie. Then should he tell them to shake it off and invite them to go find a different raid with him? Leave this place and run home… That was impossible.

Could he scowl at them and deliver a parting shot of “Let ’em say what they want,” as usual? There was no way he could. His comrades were lying there, prostrate with apathy, and words like those wouldn’t reach them.

William’s mouth hung open, and his gaze swam.

He saw Dinclon. Touko. Junzou. Eltendiska.

He gazed at his friends, one after another.

Then, before long, he stopped being able to look at anything except his own feet.

William was watching his own guild crumble, and he didn’t even have anything to say to them. His heart had been knocked down so many times; every time, it had been shown its own flaws and laziness and had pieces shaved off it, and now there was nothing left in it for him to offer them.

William searched desperately.

He looked for words he could share with his comrades.

However, he found nothing in his frightened, cringing heart.

He heard a voice mutter, “So, what, is this the end?”

He didn’t know who it had been, but one of his companions had probably said it. At the words they’d heard from a corner of the sprawling hall, everyone sucked in their breath. After all, it was something that scared everyone here to the point where they’d been trying not to think it.

Those words set a question even William couldn’t run from right in front of him.

We’ll go back to Susukino and become a good guild that keeps the peace.

The People of the Earth will probably be grateful. This world runs on the law of the jungle, and the Ezzo Empire in particular gets a lot of monster attacks. People are desperate to protect their way of life. That’s what Susukino’s like, and as long as Adventurers behave themselves, they’re popular there. We could even mingle with the People of the Earth, get girlfriends and stuff. We don’t have to stick with raids; if we’re just conducting defensive quests in the area around the town, Silver Sword’s combat abilities are good enough.

It was so utterly ridiculous that William felt as though his insides were on fire.

“Maybe so. Probably so. I think so. But so what? To hell with that.”

Surrendering to his frustration, William rebelled, without a thought for the consequences.

That probably wouldn’t be a bad way to live.

It was a way of life that skillfully avoided trouble in this other world, purchasing safety.

…But it was also exactly the same as the words of “advice” the adults with know-it-all faces had given William.

“Yeah, we lost. Total annihilation. We might be through. It was probably useless. Like those other guys always say, we’re probably just idiots who’ve been doing stupid stuff this whole time. We’re shut-in game junkies. Total rejects. —But who cares? We already knew that. We’re doing this with our eyes open. Still, we like games. We chose this.”

It would be okay to end it. That was what William had thought.

However, even if they lost, even if they were through, there was something they couldn’t ignore.

There was something they absolutely couldn’t just leave.

William went on, as if the blazing, roasting heat inside him had given him a shove.

“It’s nothing big. We lost in a raid, that’s all. This stuff happens all the time. No need to be shocked. All this means is that the wins-and-losses data recorded on the server will go up by one, or it won’t. ‘Games are just kid stuff. It’s about time we grew up and went back to town’—I’m never gonna say that. I won’t let any of you say it either. We lost, and maybe we’re crap maggots and the lowest of the low, but I won’t let even God say it was useless.”

To William, raids were something special.

They were the heart of Elder Tales, which gave them about the same meaning as “the center of the universe.”

“What does the bit data recorded on the server mean, anyway? Is that what you asked? It’s got meaning. Because I decided it did. I decided it was something awesome, something fantastic. The lot that believes there’s some ‘correct value’ that the powers that be decided, and that it plays the same way for the entire country… Guys who believe a line like that can’t understand this. Guys who say ‘The value you people believe in is stupid, and that means you’re wrong’ won’t understand this as long as they live. No matter how dumb we look, no matter what kind of a gilded fake it seems to be, if I—if we—think it’s awesome, then it’s awesome. Isn’t that choosing? I’m here because I chose to be!”

To him, this was a sacred oath, and he wouldn’t let anyone diss it. With a chest-searing pain that he couldn’t hold back even by gritting his teeth, William harangued them.

At some point, the members of Silver Sword had sat up, or planted themselves on the ground, and they were looking up at their guild master and field battle commander.

“We spent time in Elder Tales. We spent a long, long time there. Tough enemies showed up, and we took up our swords and our bows and charged at them. We rushed them, yelling like little kids. Then we either won, or we lost. Yeah, that’s right, all of that was just bits on the server turning into ones or zeroes. What about it? We got obsessed over it. That’s awesome. If we won, we were flying high, and we’d celebrate the victory. We’d divvy up the fantasy-class stuff equally and drink a toast. If we lost, we’d get frustrated, hold a review meeting and kick up a ruckus until after midnight. If you want to call that pointless, you go right ahead. Maybe it’s a toy or a showy trinket, but it doesn’t matter. If we think it’s awesome, and we decide to sink our time into it, then it’s the real thing!”

William howled. He expelled the heat from his lungs, loading it with resentment and bitterness.

But that was as far as it went.

The flames that had pushed him into motion blazed up all at once, burning him to ashes body and soul, and vanished. Victory and defeat belonged to combat; they were a part of it.

Raids were the most sacred of all battles.

They were something that should not be violated.

Making light of them meant showing contempt for the enormous amount of time William and the others had spent striving for them. William’s group had lost the match, and now they were broken. There was no way to reverse that.

As a result, there were no more words for him to say.

There wasn’t a single thing that could rouse his comrades.

“…I mean, we were like that, you know? That’s what we were, right? I dunno about guys who have all sorts of stuff. Guys who can live cleverly and be popular have pretty much everything, so they can just get by on that. Do you have something like that? Anything’s fine. Anything that can take you as far as you want and help you make friends with anybody. It could be brains, or looks, or a cheerful personality, or funny jokes. Anything’s fine, so do you have something like that, the stuff that makes guys who shine in real life all shiny? Do you? …I don’t. I don’t have one single thing.”

Even so, still looking down, William went on in a low mutter.

It was no longer a secret that belonged to a sacred battle.

It certainly was true, but compared to the magnificent Elder Tales, it was trivial. In short, it was William’s small, personal confession.

He no longer had anything that would let him throw out his chest and address the members. Even so, the guild master of Silver Sword continued to face them.

4

“Listen. I never said it before, and I couldn’t say it before, but you’re my friends. Without the game, see, I can’t make friends. Seriously lame, right? What a loser. But because I had the game, I managed to get by. And because I had the game, I knew what you were thinking. When I game, I think, ‘Oh, this guy wants to be recovered,’ or ‘This one’s dropped back, but she really wants to move up,’ or ‘This one’s all hesitant so they can’t say it, but they really want this armlet that boosts magic strength.’ And that’s not all. I think things like, ‘This person really thinks about what’s best for their friends,’ or ‘That one’s a coward, but they’re shouting at the top of their lungs,’ or ‘He’s tired, but he psyched himself up and logged in today.’ I can tell stuff like that. I really do understand.”

William desperately strung together scraps of words that wouldn’t flow smoothly.

It was fragmented sincerity, and not the least bit organized.

It was the last remaining flame, no more than the tip of a fingernail.

Elder Tales had taught William a lot of things. If it hadn’t, there was no way a high school kid who was bad at talking and couldn’t make friends could have made it as a guild master.

He doesn’t understand others’ feelings. Self-righteous. Inconsiderate. Uncooperative. Can’t stick with anything. Can’t read atmospheres. Doesn’t try to be part of the group.

Even an isolated boy who’d been told things like that—who had thought that, if that was how it was, his critics could shove it and he’d have none of it—had been able to make a few connections in Elder Tales. He’d treasured those connections and protected them, making sure not to treat them carelessly. As long as William had lent his ear to the very first friend he’d taken into his thin arms, Elder Tales revealed many secrets to him.

The first secret he’d learned had been teamwork.

With some players, it went well, and with others, it didn’t. Some players were skilled, and some were lousy. Slowly, he’d figured out what he had to do in order to work with them. In short, William just had to match their pace. When he’d thought a player was lousy, he simply hadn’t understood what they were trying to do. If he synchronized himself with them, most players’ moods got a lot better.

He then began to go on raids.

The required teamwork grew harder and harder, but William didn’t let himself fall behind. Little by little, the number of players he could make small talk with increased. Once he tried connecting with them, he found they were all good-natured people.

The second secret: Strangely, on nights when they’d had fun talking about stupid stuff, their win rate rose. He learned that dumb, pointless stories had a mysterious power that brought victory to their efforts.

William learned more and more.

Some of his friends were in good shape, and some were in bad shape. Condition was important. He started taking an interest in how other people lived. Some of his friends played enthusiastically, and some were low-energy. His friends had all sorts of worries. Of course they did. He realized, belatedly, that everyone else was just like he was. Then he started to understand what they wanted. It was simple: They all wanted to go on raids and win.

Who should get recovered this time? Which enemy should they concentrate their attacks on? Should they press forward with their attack, or call in substitutes and build their strength back up? Should they go all out, or keep it to about 70 percent?

Even if they disagreed on what they needed to do in order to win, each of them wished for the best. It just wasn’t going well, that was all. They went along resolving those little mistakes and disagreements, one by one. Finally, they won, and even though it was a small victory, William’s group was over the moon.

The third secret had been a little painful for William.

He’d learned to ask the people around him questions, and to be open-minded.

It had happened only after his friends had learned to put up with William’s short temper, but he’d managed to learn a little. After he’d learned it, he was able to understand that it was necessary.

Many raid guilds were short-lived. Twenty or more members fought harsh battles, winning or losing, over and over. If they were lucky, they could get treasure every time, but even if they were victorious on a raid, there was no guarantee they’d get the fantasy-class items they wanted. Naturally, dissatisfied members cropped up, and strained relationships and calculations about individual interest appeared. In a situation like that, most raid guilds didn’t even last half a year before disappearing.

Before Silver Sword had destroyed itself with the strife that always accompanied raid guilds, the people in question had learned enough tolerance to be able to talk with each other. William learned to trust the people around him and speak frankly, and the guild members learned that, although their leader might be short-tempered, he wasn’t malicious. For a raid guild, this was a very fortunate thing.

William did sometimes wish he’d picked up on that secret a bit earlier, but on the other hand, it was a secret he’d managed to learn precisely because he’d wanted to protect this guild.

By the time William understood the secret to spending time with others, Silver Sword had begun to develop a reputation as an up-and-coming raid guild.

“So I know now, too… You feel like that was it, don’t you? Game Over. It didn’t work. You feel like this is the genuine end. It might be. It might be, but…”

For that reason, William understood.

He knew how pitch-black everyone’s feelings were right now.

He knew that, with their precious raids taken from them, they were watching him and feeling like abused dogs. Even if he felt so pitiful he couldn’t look at his friends, he knew.

“When I came to this world, I’m not gonna lie: I was happy. That must’ve been true for you guys, too, at least a little. I bet nobody here was one hundred percent against the idea, right? I mean, this is Elder Tales. The world we threw ourselves into like idiots. The world of the raids we’re better at than anybody. I thought, ‘This could work.’ But more than that, more than anything, I was glad I was with you. You’re just like you were in the game, see. Me, too, but anyway. I guess that doesn’t matter. As long as we can go on raids together, I’m good. There’s nobody in this world who’ll make fun of us, either.”

William sniffled.

The veteran field commander, the elf sniper with the byname “Mithril Eyes,” was no more.

“Still, that’s why even if we lose, we can’t run. Listen! Maybe we can’t win. Yeah, we probably can’t. In fact, we’re almost certain to lose. But that’s no good; there are some things we absolutely should just not admit. And anyway, if we go home like that, what are we going to do? If you take this away from us, what do we have left?—we played Elder Tales so hard we scared other people away! These past two years were solid Elder Tales for me. It’s all I thought about, morning to night. I ate, slept, and bathed just so I could do this. I even studied for Elder Tales. If you want to call me a washed-up loser, do it. I’m such a hardcore gamer no one wants to be around me. I’m such a social misfit that I can be psyched beyond belief, all night, over a single rare item. I played this thing for keeps… So I can’t cut and run just because a second or third raid boss showed up. Hell, even if I ran, where would I go?! After I ran, you think I could make fun of games and live like that? Like I could make friends if I stopped raiding? Should I laugh a little and say, ‘Boy was that a big fat waste of time…’?! Up yours. To hell with that.”

It was all mixed up.

Were they supposed to stand their ground and just keep dying? How many more times would they have to feel like that?

They’d been able to suck it up and get through it because they’d had a hope of victory, but that hope was gone now.

What you’re doing is just a game, even if the world’s changed; it’s just a game, you people are parasites, completely worthless, and you can’t even win at that game— How were they supposed to face a reality like that?

“I…I’ve run before. I was confused, but I finally got it. It was in Akiba, at that first Round Table Council. Back then, I’d just gotten started in this world, and I wanted to go raiding so bad I couldn’t stand it. That’s why I didn’t join the RTC: so I could go on raids. That’s the truth. I’m not lying. But I also thought, ‘These people are doing something really dumb. What a waste of time. I’m surprised the pigs can keep that up when they’ve got no shot at winning.’ I made fun of them. I did something I hate so much I’d deck anyone who did it to me. It cracks me up. I know now. I ran. It looked like it wasn’t gonna work, so I just let it go right by me.”

Even so, there were players who hadn’t run.

That was something William idolized.

The legendary band of players who’d been formidable opponents for the big guilds in tough raids, even though they weren’t a guild themselves.

William had still been a new player, and hearing about their exploits had thrilled him.

It had thrilled him so much that he’d resolved that someday, even if he was a loner, he’d get them to let him join that fantastic team.

By the time William had gotten himself leveled up to 90, the group had disbanded. It struck William as an awful betrayal. They hadn’t waited for him. Not only that, but its members had gone back to playing solo and scattered, without forming a guild. Then what was the point of leaving those legends? he’d thought.

“But Shiroe won. I thought that raid was pointless and impossible and they’d never win it, but he won it, and he made Akiba. It was the raid that made a town. I shouldn’t have laughed at that. —I thought he was an awesome raider, and a great commander.”

There was a player who’d fought, without running.

The high ranker he’d once looked up to really hadn’t been ordinary at all.

“Because when that guy, Shiroe, got down on his knees and asked, I jumped at the chance. ‘Of course we don’t have a shot at winning. I’d expect nothing less. Machiavelli-with-Glasses brought this one in, so obviously we’re all gonna go through hell. You can tell the guy’s a damn pain-in-the-butt sadist just by looking at his face!’ But…I also thought that it would be fun. I thought it would be great if we could win. Why? Because we’re hardcore raiders!”

William could feel the heat gathering in the air. When he looked up, he saw the faces of his guild members. Their expressions held pain like his, pain they were unable to vent.

They might be able to give it just one more try.

The heat that dwelled inside them gave him that impression. William had set his comrades on fire.

However, there was no sense of victory or achievement there. Instead, he felt stifling pressure and responsibility.

William was a guild master, and he was about to lead his comrades into the jaws of death, an unwinnable battle. Neither Krusty nor Isaac would have made that decision. Although they were combat guilds, they’d been smart enough to understand the significance of the Round Table Council and give it their cooperation.

I am a seriously dumb guild master.

William’s lips were on the verge of trembling, and he bit them hard.

As he tasted seeping iron, he scrabbled frantically for a plan.

He wanted to win. He wanted to win more than he ever had before, but it wasn’t for his own glory. It was from the frenzied desire to give his comrades victory.

5

Shiroe’s consciousness returned in the way dawn gradually began to turn the world blue. Words filtered down to him, like light through water.

It was a mutter like a scream.

A man’s halting voice, protesting unfairness.

William’s confession was quiet, but Shiroe never lost track of it as he regained consciousness. As if prompted by those words, he began thinking to himself.

Shiroe tended to be isolated, and his normal state was monopolized by pondering, to the point where it was inseparable from his own orientation.

The fact that there was a “self” he could question seemed to be proof that his mind was awake.

The first thing he did was start to confirm the circumstances and examine future developments.

Flatly rejecting the dizzying, drunken feeling and the bewilderment of resurrection, Shiroe began analyzing the raid capture and its peripherals without a moment’s delay.

In the first fifteen seconds, he understood that these were seriously difficult circumstances. It would probably have been more accurate to call them impossible. Only twenty-four people could enter this zone, and it wasn’t possible to overthrow the enemy’s total forces with numbers like that.

If it had been just Ruseato of the Seventh Garden, they could have won.

His grasp of the monster’s distinguishing characteristics was complete, more or less. In Black Knight mode, Ruseato gave off single, powerful attacks, reflection of close-range damage, and ranged attacks. In White Knight mode, these switched to self-recovery and kin summoning.

Almost all raid bosses had a variety of distinguishing features. They took special actions and went through transformations depending on elements such as time and remaining HP. It was safe to say that seeing through these features and putting together tactics was the foundation of defeating raid bosses.

He’d finished studying these features for Ruseato of the Seventh Garden. That didn’t mean they’d be able to win right away, but he did feel they’d be able to win if they practiced a few more times. They wouldn’t have to suffer through hideous consequences like being wiped out in order to practice; even if the front line fell, they’d only have to retreat temporarily. He could say they had a shot at victory.

However, when it came to the frost giant, Tartaulga of the Fourth Garden, and the fiery serpent, Ibra Habra of the Third Garden, things were different. They hadn’t even scouted those two yet. He didn’t know how far it was safe to use Tartaulga of the Fourth Prison and Ibra Habra of the Third Prison as reference, but it was likely that the two attacks that had annihilated Shiroe’s group had been ordinary ranged attacks. They were probably attacks with massive damage and recast times of anywhere between 50 and 150 seconds. They weren’t certain-kill attacks, and they weren’t “distinguishing features” they’d have to capture. He had absolutely no hope of conquering them.

In addition, those two would attack at the same time. That wasn’t all: It was even possible that other bosses in this zone would join the fray. No matter how you looked at it, they were done for. They had no prospect of victory whatsoever.

Shiroe listened to the warning voice inside him: Don’t think about why it’s impossible. Think of solutions. The kind words were entirely correct, but they did make him feel like complaining that the demands were always too hard.

In his mind, a row of blue cards sat before him, to his right. These were the conditions he had. His advantages or, in other words, his weapons: Silver Sword’s experience, his friends, support from the Round Table Council, the facts that had been made clear to him up until now, and information.

Farther back on his right were the difficulties he had to overcome, in the shape of phantom cards. Ruseato, Tartaulga, Ibra Habra, and the other bosses they hadn’t seen yet. They’d nearly gotten through the dungeon area in this zone. Almost all the map was clear. The only things left were the three, or possibly four, bosses.

He thought up several strategies, then sorted them based on the possibility of making them happen. The odds were so low they didn’t really merit discussion, but he tinkered with each strategy, seeing whether he could improve them. They really weren’t at a place where they could be put to practical use.

The various reforms in this world were subject to individual limitations. For example, when developing a new dish, the level of the Chef dictated whether or not it would be possible to make it. In combat, this manifested as more severe personalization. Even if you had a lot of powerful weapons, their use was limited by their level. For example, even if he’d had a Gatling gun and trench mortar now, he’d barely have been able to make use of them. More than powerful weapons and spells, they needed to break through the circumstances.

He knew he was asking the impossible, but right now, for Shiroe, the word retreat didn’t exist.

Next, Shiroe began analyzing not their advantages but the difficulties they’d need to overcome, the weak points in their forces.

There were special capture methods for most raid bosses. Even if they didn’t look like obvious shortcomings, it was possible for attacks that seemed powerful at first glance to have vulnerabilities.

Feeling as if he’d just had a sudden flash of inspiration, Shiroe desperately followed the thin thread of his thoughts.

Prisons or gardens, they were the guardians of something. Were they aware of their own roles, especially now that they had wills of their own? They’d cooperated in the battle a short while ago, and when he wondered why reinforcements hadn’t made an appearance until Ruseato of the Seventh Garden was obviously losing, he thought the key to a breakthrough might be there. However, he couldn’t deny that there were some naïve hopes in there as well.

Temporarily discarding those fond hopes, Shiroe set about constructing and selecting a more realistic capture method. Even after several dozen attempts, though, he hadn’t managed to come up with a strategy that seemed any more reliable.

The fantasy that was almost a fault seemed to have the best chance of success.

There was no way to calculate the actual odds, but it seemed to be worth betting on.

“Hey, Shiro. You awake?”

“—Yeah.”

Naotsugu had spoken, leaning in to look at him.

Shiroe sat up, stretching his stiff back, and found himself on a marble bier with a blanket spread over it. There was no telling what the square stone had been originally, but apparently he’d been asleep on top of it.

Naotsugu had been leaning over that stone to look at him, but when Shiroe adjusted his glasses, he seemed relieved. Shiroe turned away, looking back at the open space.

Tetora sat nearby, cross-legged. The two of them were the only ones near him.

He could hear William’s thin voice. It was a high voice, trembling but proud; a voice you’d never have imagined belonged to the commander of one of the leading combat guilds on the server. And yet, it couldn’t have been more appropriate.

The whole time his eyes had been closed, Shiroe had listened to those words.

He’d listened to the many sobbing voices as well, and the groans that cursed their helplessness.

As a result, Shiroe nodded again. “Yeah.”

In the hall, as they watched, the members of Silver Sword slowly got to their feet. They were gazing at their guild master. This probably wasn’t something Shiroe and the other non–Silver Sword members were to hear, and for that, Shiroe was grateful to Naotsugu, who must have read the atmosphere and then carried his body to this corner, away from the crowd. At the same time, however, Shiroe needed William’s words. The person standing there was just like Shiroe at sixteen.

Elder Tales had caused him a lot of pain.

Being labeled by strangers. Having judgments made about him based solely on what he could do. Never really being seen.

Still, at the same time, it had given him gifts that were much greater.

Captain Nyanta, Nurukan, Aihie. They were all good friends. Kanami had taught him what easygoing meant. He’d learned self-control from Kazuhiko, and the strength known as trust from Naotsugu.

As he watched Silver Sword from a distance, Shiroe thought they were a good guild. He also thought William was an excellent guild master. The idea that they had all gone through “that” made his chest feel tight. What if it had been him? He probably would have gotten back up, but he didn’t know if he would have been able to encourage his companions with words that genuine.

When Minori and Touya were heartbroken, what could he tell them? What could he do for Isuzu and Rudy? He didn’t feel as if there was anything.

He recalled Akatsuki, but in his mind, the small Assassin had just looked angry.

The thought struck Shiroe as a tiny bit funny, and he laughed.

He felt as if he’d been told, I’m the one who protects you, my liege, so mind your own business.

People were incredibly complicated. Shiroe knew Akatsuki was worried about him; that the friend who shoved him away brusquely with an angry expression actually worried twice as much as most people. He now knew that Akatsuki was worried about him, even as she was fighting somewhere far away.

This was no time to get discouraged in a place like this.

“I want them to win. Don’t you, Shiroe?” Tetora murmured as she sat cross-legged, rocking back and forth.

Her back was to Shiroe, and from where he was, he couldn’t see her expression. Still, her voice had been strong, and he was able to answer with an honest “Yes.” But then, it hit him: He wanted them to win. To have Silver Sword win. He wanted to break through this difficulty with this raid team, as one of its members. Tetora’s frank words took shape within his emotions and promptly became resolve.

“You say some good stuff sometimes,” Naotsugu quipped.

“I am a first-class idol, you know.”

As they gazed at William in the distance, Naotsugu and Tetora spoke to each other briefly.

That was all it took: Although the three of them hadn’t said anything in particular, their thoughts had overlapped. As a group, they didn’t know what form “winning” would take, or what it would feel like. However, whatever they did, they knew that they couldn’t let Silver Sword die like this.

That was already a set decision, and the only problem left was how to make it happen.

“And? What do we do? Got any ideas, Counselor?” Naotsugu asked, indifferent and cheerful. He’d phrased it as a question, but he was really just looking for confirmation.

Shiroe’s friend had no doubt that there was a way to break through this. He figured that Shiroe was bound to come up with something… And so, Shiroe pushed up his glasses and answered.

“There’s something I have to tell you, Naotsugu. You as well, Tetora. And William. The rest of them, too. I should have told you why this raid is necessary, and what’s inside this place, and why I want gold. I leaned on you, and I was trying to do it all myself. If you’ll forgive me… I have a slightly better strategy. Only slightly better. The odds of winning are fifteen percent.”

“Great, bring it on.”

“That’s perfect.”

“I also need to tell Kinjo and the others about our wish, and about the land of Yamato. This time, when we speak, I’ll look him in the eye.”

Shiroe tried to imagine it.

A squad of more than twenty undying members who simply would not give up, surging into your headquarters.

Once there, they mounted a zombie attack. Even if you wiped them out, they got back up, conquering little by little. Nothing could be scarier. Both the fear and the wariness were only natural. It was probably pride that kept him standing in the way, even now. That pride was the will to protect the People of the Earth and Yamato.

The Kunie clan had adhered to the words of their progenitor and guarded Yamato for a long, long time.

Shiroe, who had been from modern Japan, couldn’t begin to fathom their unity and loyalty.

“I came to speak with you, Kinjo.”

“Since you’ve made it this far, it is our duty to hear what you have to say.”

“……”

At Kinjo’s hard voice, Shiroe froze up.

He’d seen it coming. This was his punishment for having harbored doubts and created unnecessary friction. Shiroe had shut Kinjo into a shell of hostility. For that very reason, the young man in white told himself, remorsefully, he had a duty to give him a thorough explanation.

“Is it all right to assume that this stream of gold coins is what I thought it was?”

“…Yes, that is correct. In accordance with our agreement, we will disclose it to you. All the gold coins in Yamato are produced here and return here. A supremely ancient technology that even we are unable to understand or control circulates the gold. From this vast torrent, coins are distributed to dungeons and monsters. This mechanism is the secret that lies in the darkness of Yamato. It is something unspeakable that the Kunie clan has kept secret for centuries.”

At those words, Shiroe noticed something else.

To ordinary People of the Earth and the nobles of the League of Free Cities, the fact that the Kunie clan had managed this mechanism might seem like a betrayal. They might think they’d been providing funds to goblins and orcs.

Shiroe, who knew the Elder Tales game, didn’t think this. He understood that it was just a system, and that it wasn’t good or bad. However, the People of the Earth had fought against the demihumans for a very long time, and he wasn’t sure what they’d think. If this fact were to be revealed, a movement to expel the Kunie clan might break out all across Yamato. It might even develop into riots or a massacre.

Kinjo’s wariness was only natural. Shiroe hadn’t given it enough thought.

“Neither I nor the others have any intention of revealing the truth of this zone or its existence to anyone else.”

Even as he wondered uneasily how persuasive his words would be, Shiroe spoke to him.

“—As you have reached this place, in accordance with our progenitor’s rules, you may take the gold with you.”

However, the things that were going on in Shiroe’s heart didn’t seem to have gotten through to Kinjo. In a voice that was as hard and wary as ever, he delivered a practiced-sounding statement.

“In the course of our long history, a portion of our progenitor’s writings have been lost. Even we no longer know whether you will be able to take one thousand gold coins from this place, or one hundred million. However, the tradition is to communicate our progenitor’s words to you.”

Kinjo gazed at Shiroe with eyes that seemed to blaze like flames.

No one was swinging a sword, but this was a clash that might surpass, and would certainly not be less than, the battles he’d come through before.

Feeling that gaze with his entire body, Shiroe forced a swallow, although his mouth was dry as dust. It made him aware of his own weakness. He’d managed to behave so nonchalantly during the Round Table Council affair, but now the strength was draining out of his knees, and it felt as if he might sit down right where he was.

However, he remembered William’s profile as he’d howled. Akatsuki’s worried expression as she looked up at him. Naotsugu’s consideration as he joked around, trying to make him smile. Nyanta, who watched over him attentively; Minori and Touya, who trusted him; Isuzu and Rundelhaus.

What he felt now wasn’t weakness.

I want them to win, Tetora had murmured.

When you wished for victory for someone else’s sake, and you thought of the pain of having failed, you wanted the best so much it hurt. Shiroe the solo player, who’d been able to be irresponsible because it was just him, no longer existed. Shiroe hungered for results more than anyone else. He wasn’t able to understand others’ feelings well, and this was the only way he could pay them back.

“‘The gold of the Kunie is treasure that brings both fortune and misfortune. Great wealth lies not in wealth. Beware the beast in thy care. It shall destroy the world.’”

Kinjo’s words sank into Shiroe. Several interpretations spread like ripples, then grew quiet.

The poem could have been taken as a sinister prophecy, but Shiroe saw it as a benediction.

Deep in his heart, he felt warmth and a gladness that he’d come here.

Shiroe and Kinjo spent long moments surrounded by the distant, ringing sound of countless bells.

Slowly, Shiroe took a single contract from his Magic Bag. Then he ripped it in two. Before Kinjo’s wide eyes, the torn contract turned into softly shining flames, then flew away like a flock of butterflies.

Then, from empty space, gold appeared.

“What’s—”

“A contract was just established and fulfilled. The Round Table Council does not seek wealth.”

As Shiroe spoke to Kinjo, he was smiling faintly.

It was the continuation of what he’d really wanted to say, the talk that had failed at the snowy lodge.

“We don’t even need the rights to the guild center. I think we have enough power to live peacefully in Akiba at this point. I’m grateful to the system that gave us that opportunity, but it’s time for it to end. The conclusion we reached is that even if more trouble occurs, we should resolve it using different methods. —By being established, then torn up, this Contract Technique is complete.”

Kinjo seemed bewildered, unable to grasp his meaning. Shiroe puffed out his chest.

He was proud of the fact that the Round Table Council had been able to agree to this, that it wasn’t just something he himself wanted.

“We transfer all rights to the town of Akiba, including the guild halls, Temple and commercial center, to the Yamato server itself. In addition, by destroying the contract, I have made the transfer permanent.”

There had been a lot of difficult behind-the-scenes negotiations and long discussions on the way to this point.

Some had held the opinion that cancelling rights they’d purchased was sheer foolishness.

However, after reconciling various merits and demerits, they’d arrived here. The purchase of zones that could be bought and were linked directly to sanction functions could only be described as the seeds of discord.

In the first place, zone purchases themselves yielded no profit. Since there was a possibility that someone would buy them someday and would push disadvantages onto them—in other words, that they would be attacked—not buying them wasn’t an option. As a result, the Round Table Council had used nearly all of its budget and loans from the major guilds to purchase the Temple, the commercial facilities, and Akiba’s aboveground urban zone.

However, now the maintenance fees had become a problem.

It had been one thing when it was just the guild center, but the cost of the Round Table Council’s real estate assets—which included the town of Akiba—had swelled to over ten million gold coins per month in maintenance fees alone. This was a big financial burden.

There was an assumption that they would be attacked, and the burden came about as a result of defending against it. That was the structure. A faction centered around Shiroe and Henrietta had explored various possibilities in an attempt to reduce that burden, and had gone through many debates. This expedition had been the result of it all.

“This is… Then you say this money is the cost from when those were purchased?”

“Yes. ‘All gold is produced here and returns here,’ correct? Since the contract has been fulfilled, the funds used for purchase returned to the ground at my feet, in exchange for the written contract. Just as I expected.”

“Did you come here to explain that, Master Shiroe?”

“In a way, yes.”

“In that case, the matter of financing—what of that?”

Shiroe’s glasses had slipped slightly, and he pushed them back into place with a fingertip.

“That’s the main issue. We would like to purchase all the aboveground zones in Yamato: forests, mountains, lakes, adjoining marine areas, et cetera. Then, as I’ve just done, we would like to immediately destroy the contracts for all of our purchases and transfer them. As I’ve demonstrated, if we return the ownership rights for the purchased zones to Yamato, the money used for the purchases is returned… The land of Yamato should return to Yamato’s hands.”

Kinjo clenched his fists so hard they were white. He seemed to be desperately controlling his agitation.

“We can’t process all the building-sized zones, and for now, we think they should be fine as they are. However, at the very least, we would like to fix all field zones so that they can never be owned. Besides… The People of the Earth can’t purchase zones.”

This was a thorn that had been piercing Shiroe’s heart for a long time.

“This situation is abnormal. The Round Table Council doesn’t want to become the spark that starts a war. We aren’t denying the act of owning territory. However, we think contracts between people should be enough. We don’t need the zone purchase system now… And so please lend the Council the necessary funds. Loan us money to return to this stream, so that we can get by without destroying ourselves.”

7

The ground was rough rock that stank of sulfur.

Thinking that only an idiot would lie down in a place like this, William lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling. When he turned his head to the side, he saw charred arrowheads and rags dyed strange colors on the ground. It might have been somebody’s equipment. It was in wretched condition.

He was so tired his whole body felt puffy with heat, and even that small movement seemed to be too much trouble. The great cavern was eerily silent, and the sounds of hissing steam and dripping water echoed loudly.

The present—which was smelly, hot, painful, listless, and disgustingly dull—was a moment of supreme bliss. William knew the liquid flowing down both sides of his nose wasn’t blood, but he didn’t even think about wiping it away. He’d pulled his bow so much that his arms had gone on strike, and anyway, the companions who were lying on the ground here and there were probably crying, too.

They’d won.

They’d gone through massive amounts of resources, and some comrades had been rendered unable to fight. At times, it had been a cycle of resurrection spells and bouts of unconsciousness. When Demiquas had come back, covered in blood from head to toe and pursued by shadow warriors, a premonition of defeat had crossed his mind. However, the fact that they’d already defeated Ibra Habra of the Third Garden had paid off. At that point, the Second party had plunged into a delayed battle in the passage, and they’d wrenched a high-wire victory out of the coarse melee.

He couldn’t do a thing anymore. If black-armored Ruseato had appeared in this great hall now, William knew he’d be beaten with no trouble at all, as easily as an infant. The members were all torn up. They were covered in mud and dirty water, burned with ice and flame, completely exhausted—and they also shone.

Sitting up slowly, William looked around the cavern and laughed.

His laughter was quiet, but before long, it rang out cheerfully.

They’d won.

How awesome is that? he thought.

He was too happy for words. The earlier frustration and self-reproach and unease and even the despair were all being washed away.

“Awesome, that was great!” he yelled in exhilaration. William thought his lack of vocabulary was a bit sad, but that only lasted a moment as well.

“That was totally awesome! My friends are awesome, they’re all completely awesome!!”

Federico, who was lying down, was waving at him.

Dinclon had stuck one of his hands into a puddle and was cooling it off. His bangs were all limp and floppy; it wrecked his handsome face.

Odiso was lying facedown, moving a thin rod like a bus guide’s flag. A small Alraune abruptly appeared and, after getting scared and dithering a bit, dragged a canteen of water out of Odiso’s belongings and passed it around to everyone.

Only a few of the members could move, and even then, shifting positions and sagging limply seemed to be about all they could do. Put without exaggeration, Silver Sword was currently just short of annihilation.

Still, even if they’d been nearly wiped out, a win was a win.

Yeah. Seriously awesome.

All William could do was repeat awesome, awesome in his heart, over and over, as if it were the only word he knew. His comrades seemed to sparkle, dazzlingly bright, to the point where it stung his eyes and he couldn’t look straight at them. He was absolutely positive it wasn’t because he was tearing up.

“We won.”

“Yeah.”

“We won.”

“We actually won, huh?”

Small mutters and responses like these were being repeated around the vast space.

On hearing them, William was so happy he could have burst. He was bad at talking, but his companions’ murmurs sounded like they didn’t know any other words, either. The thought that there wasn’t much difference between them entertained him.

“Hey, guild master.”

“What?”

William responded to Federico’s hoarse voice. Federico sat up, moving like a semi-invalid. “That. That over there,” he said, pointing at a mountain of treasure with his chin. It was the fortunes left by the fiery serpent Ibra Habra and Tartaulga the frost giant. A mountain of gold coins, jewels, and other items that could be traded for cash, several dozen material items, and “phantasmal items”—fantasy-class weapons and defensive gear. Since they’d defeated two bosses, there was quite a lot of it.

Most of the equippable items were nontransferable. William, the raid leader, would have to hold on to them for the moment, then divvy them out among the members.

When it came to dividing up items, there were several methods. You could look at total raid participation up to the present and have members compete with achievement points, or you could decide on a priority order among the members able to equip those items, or you could have the members who wanted them play rock-paper-scissors for them and leave it up to fate. These methods were an issue that all raiding guilds dealt with through repeated trial and error.

Fantasy-class items were powerful, and raids were often conducted specifically to acquire them. Masterpieces with special signatures and abilities that couldn’t be obtained any other way commanded respect from the whole server. Sometimes, as with the name “Knights of the Black Sword,” they even became a guild’s glory.

There were many guilds that had collapsed due to the way they divided rewards. Consequently, all guilds took the greatest possible care regarding management and reward division.

Since the era of the game, Silver Sword had used the point system. This was a method in which members used achievement points from the number of raids in which they had participated to place successful bids on items. However, when they’d defeated a boss that was completely unknown and had never been defeated before, the items weren’t distributed by points. Instead, that privilege was customarily left to William, the guild master. Distribution according to the points system felt fair, and members found it hard to complain about it. On the other hand, items went to whoever wanted them, provided they spent points, which meant that items could end up with owners who weren’t optimal from the perspective of improving fighting power.

Specific distribution by William was an arrangement that gave newly acquired, powerful equipment to apt members, so that they could conduct future captures efficiently.

His body had finally recovered, and William whipped it into action, stood, and approached the mountain of treasure. When he opened multiple layers of acquisition windows and the information was displayed, he saw rows of items that the raid bosses had dropped. Each and every one of them was the sort whose might was apparent in its name.

Well, of course. This was the first time anyone on the Yamato server had tackled a raid that was over level 90 straight on and gotten through it. After having scaled a peak he’d aspired to, William felt surprisingly calm.

Lynkeus’s Eye.

Absolute Fire and Ice Blade.

Ouroboros Scale.

All were appealing. Everyone who’d participated in the raid would be able to confirm this information from where they were. Each of them sat up, checking windows that floated in empty space or looking in William’s direction. In the midst of their hopeful gazes, the silver-haired young man thought for a while. Then he turned and spoke to his comrades.

“Moon Katsura-Flower Charm. This thing.”

It was a charm fashioned from intricately carved metal.

Four stylized flower petals bloomed, rather proudly, in a circular frame.

“I want to give this to Machiavelli-with-Glasses.”

Just then, a certain feeling faded rapidly from the area. It was a type of strained hostility, and it was also an edgy tension they’d been feeling ever since they entered the zone.

Federico’s nose twitched as if he were sniffing the air. Then he muttered, “It’s gotten kinda warm.”

The members of the raid team understood, more clearly than if someone had explained it to them, that their capture of this zone was over. Technically, they hadn’t subjugated Ruseato of the Seventh Garden yet, but it wasn’t necessary anymore. The zone’s hostility toward William and the others had vanished, and it had turned into a safe area.

“I guess he did something.”

As he spoke, Dinclon raked up his dirty bangs with his fingers.

Just as he’d said, Shiroe seemed to have succeeded in the negotiations he’d predicted. William had thought he’d pull it off, but at the idea that he’d really done it, he felt himself break into a smile again.

“Listen up: This is a good item. Its resistance and ability value boost are both top-class. That’s why I’m giving it to Machiavelli. He’s not Silver Sword, but he fought alongside us, and he’s a comrade.”

The answer that echoed in the great cavern was agreement.

As he listened to that proud chorus, William began to hand out the next trophy.

8

Four days after they’d said good-bye to William’s group:

Shiroe and the others alighted on an elevated road that was covered in greenery. As the griffins flew away (they’d exceeded the time limit), Shiroe, Naotsugu, and Tetora waved to them, then slowly began to walk over asphalt from the Age of Myth.

“Honestly! You’re so cold, Naotsugu.”

“I. Am. Not! My armor’s heavy, so the griffin doesn’t like carrying two riders.”

“So you say. Pull the other one. I bet you really have that spot reserved for somebody, don’t you?”

“Ow. Ow! What’s with that comeback?!”

“Heh-heh-heh! I am an idol, you know!”

As he listened to the two of them cheerfully horsing around, Shiroe looked up at the sky.

It was a bright, peaceful winter sky. Due to the season, it would probably only last another hour or two, but the sunlight poured down on their path.

After that, he’d met up with William and the others, left the Depths of Palm and traveled with them to Susukino. In a complete turnaround from the beginning of their journey, they’d traveled together in an amiable mood.

Demiquas seemed to have undergone some great emotional change. His curt attitude was the same as ever, but he’d stopped flaring up at the Silver Sword members. As before, he didn’t talk to Shiroe’s group, but Shiroe wasn’t bothered by it.

Every night of their return journey, they talked with the Silver Sword members about all sorts of things. Most of the conversations were very practical: They exchanged information about various things that had happened after the Catastrophe.

They hadn’t talked about their life stories or discussed their worries.

Silver Sword knew most things about Akiba’s current situation. For Adventurers in this world, who were able to telechat, as long as you had acquaintances, it wasn’t hard to get information about distant places. However, Silver Sword didn’t know much of the latest news about production or inventions. Thinking it wasn’t the sort of thing to hide, Shiroe made an effort to share their results in those areas. In return, Silver Sword gave him information on things as well, such as new materials they’d seen on their raids in the Ezzo Empire.

What both parties spent the most time talking about was the vast amount of material items they’d obtained on this raid. Shiroe had taken some, but most had remained with Silver Sword. If they wanted, Shopping District 8 and Grandale would probably come up to Ezzo to do business with them. Silver Sword needed to use these trophies as capital to replenish the material they’d used up.

Every night, as they sat around a campfire and ate their provisions—which were nearly gone—they talked about various aspects of their trophies, about equipment that might be possible to manufacture new, and about future courses—in other words, they talked about the exact same things they’d talked about when Elder Tales had been a game, and that was all.

However, Shiroe and the other participants felt a deep satisfaction.

They’d won their way through a very painful raid battle.

They didn’t need unnecessary conversation. This was fine.

Naotsugu polished a new equipment piece he’d acquired, humming as he worked; Tetora sat on a rock, smiling brightly, legs swinging; and even Demiquas participated, his mouth set in a dissatisfied line, lazily using his elbow as a pillow. Shiroe looked at this, then returned to his discussion with Silver Sword. After all, it was the only souvenir he could leave on this short journey.

Theirs was a fulfilled, triumphant return.

He’d spoken briefly with William, too.

William had said they’d stay in Susukino. Giants appeared in Ezzo as field raids. This was the same as it had been in the Elder Tales days, but he said that sometimes new monsters joined them in the attacks. Speaking awkwardly, “Mithril Eyes” told Shiroe that they’d repel these and recover their fighting power, preparing for further raids. William added, at the end, that he was also worried about Susukino.

Shiroe nodded, agreeing with those words. There was nothing about the decision that he could object to. William was a fine guild master, and Shiroe thought the resolution was a good one.

“Add me to your friend list,” William said.

Friend lists were one-way streets for both parties. Even if you’d added someone, they might not have added you. If you’d registered someone, you could contact them, so ordinarily, no one asked the other party to register them in return. If you only wanted to contact them, you could just add them to your own list, and that was all it took.

As a result, Shiroe understood that William’s words meant, If anything happens, contact me.

He was quite possibly feeling self-conscious: William’s expression was even sourer than usual.

“You’re already on it,” Shiroe answered.

“That’s fine, then,” William responded, and raised a hand.

That had been the end. They’d simply parted ways with Silver Sword, the group William led.

In Elder Tales, there weren’t many top group players who conducted raid captures. No matter how large the guild, the size of its leading-edge raid capture group was limited. There had been fewer than five hundred of them on the Yamato server. The number wasn’t large enough to feel sorry about parting with them. They were always running beside you, and you could fight together again anytime. Shiroe had learned this from William.

This might be another world now, but that probably hadn’t changed. When he’d lived on Earth, Shiroe thought, that sort of relationship had been there, too; he simply hadn’t known about it. Although he couldn’t sense them, he had lots of unknown companions who were fighting the same way he was fighting. To Shiroe, this was no small discovery.

Even now, he had many companions who weren’t affiliated with his guild.

Their biggest objective in returning to Susukino had been Li Gan. He’d made himself right at home in an inn, and his attic room had been bursting at the seams with materials. He was surrounded by books that had been brought in from who-knew-where and unintelligible notes he’d probably written himself, and he seemed very excited.

Apparently, he wouldn’t be able to leave Susukino for a while longer. He seemed to have made progress in his research on the intercity transport gates. Shiroe and the others said good-bye to him, then left Susukino. Li Gan said he’d need to investigate the other gates soon, and they had plans to meet up in Akiba.

Then they’d traveled through the sky by griffin, and had finally reached Lesswall. If the griffins had been able to hold out for another thirty minutes or an hour, they’d have made it to Akiba easily, but they’d fallen just short. That said, it wasn’t far enough that they’d have to set up camp and put it off until tomorrow.

If they walked for a while to stretch their legs, then summoned their horses, they’d reach Akiba after dusk. Naotsugu and Tetora knew this, and they seemed carefree.

“Whoa, hey, hold it, don’t climb that!”

“If I wait, then may I climb? Respond, please.”

“What-are-you-a-kid city?”

“Children don’t smell half this sweet. Heh-heh-heh.”

“Where did you learn a line like tha—uh, huh? Ri-right.”

Naotsugu abruptly broke off his comedy routine, pushing Tetora away with a “Sorry, my bad!” then took off running, too impatient even to summon his horse. Tetora, who’d landed bottom first, pouted a bit. Looking dissatisfied, the idol came up beside Shiroe, then twirled around.

“It isn’t going well. Maybe I’m not charming enough.”

“Don’t tease him too much.”

“If it wasn’t ‘too much,’ it would be boring.”

Chest puffed out, Tetora’s face was so proud it nearly shone. Shiroe shrugged his shoulders.

“When are you going to tell him you’re a boy?”

“That’s a secret until he figures it out for himself. It’s more fun that way.”

“In that sense, this just might be an important time for Naotsugu…”

With regard to Miss Mari, Shiroe continued silently. The people in question seemed to think they were keeping it under wraps, but the fact that Naotsugu and Marielle’s relationship was developing was something Shiroe and Nyanta were tacitly supporting… That said, their support was purely mental: They had no intention of meddling.

“Understood, sir! Just you leave it to me!” Tetora was beaming, and Shiroe sighed, unsure whether Tetora understood or not. He knew the kid was really the type who could read atmospheres, but being able to read them was one thing, and whether or not he acted accordingly was up to him.

It wasn’t that momentum hadn’t been a factor, but Shiroe was the one who’d let him join the guild. He did think he might have inadvertently made life rougher for Naotsugu.

That said, aside from the way he tended to overdo it, Tetora definitely wasn’t the sort of talent who could be turned away because of his personality or ability. He’d really wanted to join, and he’d also come recommended by a friend.

“I wasn’t in Susukino because Kazuhiko ordered me to be there, you know.”

“I’ll trust you on that.”

“Besides, I think…you’re probably more able to help people than I am, Shiroe.”

“Log Horizon isn’t a charity.”

“But the world isn’t hard-boiled enough to let you stay uninvolved, is it? It really is a problem.”

You’ve got that right. Shiroe was forced to agree with Tetora’s oddly world-wise opinion.

He’d bought the guild center in order to protect Akiba from a disturbance he couldn’t yet see.

But knowing that wasn’t enough to resolve the issue, he’d bought up more zones.

However, once he’d done it, he hadn’t been able to pay all the maintenance fees, and in that case, he’d thought it would be better to dissolve the contracts and convert them into zones that couldn’t be privately owned.

For that to happen, he had to free the rights of ownership to the whole Yamato server from the system, in perpetuity.

His first idea hadn’t been that strange.

It had been clear to everyone that the zone ownership system was a potential source of future trouble. Shiroe had thought that since he’d been the first one to use it that way, it was his responsibility to set matters right.

However, it had taken a long time to carry out that plan; he’d had to use a variety of connections, and had ended up going all the way to the Ezzo Empire and the depths of the earth. This world really was difficult to deal with.

Still, it’s not as if that’s anything new.

Now that he thought about it, things weren’t much different from the way they’d been in the days of the Debauchery Tea Party.

Once he started to move, all sorts of unexpected things happened. In the midst of it, he was made conscious of his lack of power. It had been a while, but looking back, he saw that it had happened every time. He remembered KR’s irresponsible words: That’s just the stars you were born under. Don’t give up!

“Aaaaah!!”

Once they made a big detour around a crumbling, dangerous section of road shoulder and skirted a mountain of rubble, their view opened up. Tetora pointed down the road, got excited and broke into a run. Ahead of them was a group wearing coats in all sorts of colors, waving at Shiroe. Tetora charged at them at a furious pace, then seemed to have started some sort of ruckus with Naotsugu, who was desperately making excuses.

Smiling wryly but feeling warm inside, Shiroe kept walking slowly.

The Captain, Minori and Touya, Rundelhaus and Isuzu: They had come out just to welcome them back. There were Crescent Moon League members there, too; while Naotsugu, at his wits’ end, was being hugged from both sides by Marielle and Tetora. Henrietta bowed to Shiroe silently with a gentle smile. Serara was there, too, standing happily next to Nyanta. Shouryuu and Hien were there as well.

As he began to approach the waving group, Shiroe sensed a presence and turned around.

“Have you grown a little?”

“That’s mean, my liege!”

His passing comment seemed to have made Akatsuki mad, but she did look slightly more grown up. She was wearing a shawl over ninja clothes he hadn’t seen before, and she really did seem kinder and braver than she had when they’d parted on the shore.

Unable to understand why that was, Shiroe gazed steadily into the small, adorable face, but… “Don’t be rude, my liege,” Akatsuki said, and circled around behind him.

Shiroe, whose eyes had begun to follow Akatsuki down past his side, abruptly realized that this scene was just like it had been before, and he felt his mood grow gentle.

Akatsuki had fought on a battlefield of her own.

Just as he’d seen on that white shore, Akatsuki must have reclaimed something, too.

She’d gotten just a little stronger.

The world was moving.

While Shiroe had been working hard, his companions had been fighting just as hard in other places. Just as Shiroe had sensed in William, even if he couldn’t see them, he had countless companions running beside him. The realization was encouraging, and it made him feel as if he’d been rescued somehow. After a long journey, Shiroe had returned to Akiba and had been reunited with the companions who’d kept up the fight while they waited for him.

Once Shiroe noticed the feeling, he wanted to share it with them; he searched for words, but his quiet happiness kept him from finding the right ones. However, there was no need to hurry. He’d have all sorts of time to tell them.

Akatsuki was gazing up at Shiroe through her eyelashes, as if she was waiting for him to speak.

“I’m home, Akatsuki.”

“Welcome back, my liege.”

The lost swallow had returned to the branch where it could rest its wings, the treasure it had won through protecting others safe in its breast.

Even if he’d made mistakes, her stubborn guild master had made her wish come true, and had returned.

For now, with the smiles of children showing their trophies to each other, they simply welcomed each other home.

<Log Horizon, Volume 7: The Gold of the Kunie—The End>