Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 12 - Chapter 6

6. Calcium

In life, you never know what will happen. No one knows what the future holds. In fact, that may be what life is all about.

“Okaaay! Nexy! To-wah!”

When Momohina struck a mysterious pose, Yume, Shihoru, Merry, and Setora who were lined up in front of her all shouted, “To-wah!” and struck the same pose.

“Next! Se-hah! Sah! Zan, zan! Yarya!”

When Momohina did a spinning kick, knifehand strike, two jabs, and a reverse spinning kick, Yume and the others mimicked her.

“Se-hah! Sah! Zan, zan! Yarya!”

Yume, Merry, and Setora were starting to get good, but Shihoru wasn’t making any progress. It was hard to blame her. Shihoru was a mage, after all. Well, so was Momohina, but she was a special case, so it was probably fair to count her as an exception.

“Next! Chorya! Nata! Fumi! Shu, sha, briin!”

“Chorya, nata, fumi, shu, sha, briiin.”

“You’re lacking energy! Come on, make it snappy! Do-wah! Se-rah!”

“Do-wah! Se-rah!”

“Niiiice! Keep it uuuup!”

Kung-fu lessons on the beach continued. How had this happened? Haruhiro didn’t really know. Regardless, Yume and the girls were learning kung-fu from Momohina, while Haruhiro and Kuzaku were doing manual labor with the other men.

Though they called it labor, all they were really doing was helping the sailors, which was to say pirates, with things like combing the beach for things that had washed up, collecting firewood, and attempting to build shelters and rafts. There was no urgency to any of it, either.

There were a number of barrels from the beached pirate ship hauled ashore, and in them were salted fish, meat, and pickled vegetables, so food was no issue for the time being. For water, they could draw it from the nearby river and boil it to make it potable. If they really wanted to, they could even drink it straight from the river and, well, it probably wouldn’t kill them.

The pirates were bored. If there were booze, they’d have drunk and partied, but it seemed they had already drank the last of it. With their hands idle, they were finding things to do for lack of any alternative. Maybe even killing time was too much hassle for them, because there was no shortage of pirates lying on top of the rocks and snoring.

However, Haruhiro and his group were the new guys, bottom of the hierarchy. If they rested, they’d be yelled at. “Hey, get to work!” It was boring to do nothing anyway, so they lent a hand to the pirates who were moving around.

While they were doing so, the sun went down. Once it was dark out, they lit a bonfire, and posted guards, or didn’t. Kiichi, who had been off somewhere doing whatever he pleased, returned. Eventually, the night ended and day broke. Yet another new day, indistinct from any other, had begun.

The pirate life was a little different from what Haruhiro had imagined.

No, not that he ever had imagined it. He’d never had ties with any pirates. Never thought he’d be involved with them, either. Now where was he? Haruhiro was a member of a pirate crew. But was this what a pirate crew did? Like, were they even doing anything? Maybe not.

Yume and the others spent all day practicing kung-fu. Though, the theory they were just going along with Momohina who was playing teacher because she had too much time on her hands was more persuasive. Haruhiro and the others were her underlings, so if it was a request from the KMW of the K&K Pirate Company, or whatever she wanted to call herself, they had no right to refuse.

They had ended up in this position because of Haruhiro’s losing a mano-a-mano fight, so he was reflecting deeply on what he did wrong. But, at this point, their life on the rocky beach was so relentlessly peaceful that reflecting on it was starting to feel downright stupid.

On the fifth day, a ship came.

The truth was, Momohina and her crew hadn’t been hanging out on that rocky beach for no purpose. They’d been waiting for one of their comrades’ ships.

The ship dropped anchor off shore, and sent out a dinghy. There were three pirates aboard it. Two were human, but one was, incredibly, a fishman.

“Momohina-saaan! It’s me, me! Ginzy. Ginzy is here for you! Momohina-saaan, can you hear meee?! Ginzy is here to collect you, you know?!”

The orc, goblin, and kobold pirates all spoke the human language, even if highly accented at times, so maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. However, it was. The proper race for his race might not be a fishman, but that pirate was pretty darn fish-like. He wore clothing with a design similar to Momohina’s coat, along with a hat, but it was impressive how fish-like he was.

“Ohhh. Ginzy, huh...” Momohina looked blatantly disappointed, even slightly upset. Considering that their fellow pirate, who they had waited all this time, had finally shown up, she wasn’t terribly excited.

“Give it up, KMW,” the bandaged pirate said to Momohina. His name was Jimmy, and his position was apparently something like Momohina’s assistant. “If we set her captain aside, the Mantis-go is a fine ship. With this, we can at least return to the Emerald Archipelago.”

“Well, yeeeeah. You’re right, buuuut...”

“Haven’t you known Ginzy longer than me, KMW?”

“Listen, that means I’ve been made to listen to a whoooole loooot more pointless drivel from him, okaaaay?”

“Oh, when you put it that way, that’s pretty unbearable...”

“He always gets carried away, babbling on and oooon. He wouldn’t be a bad kid if he weren’t so annoying, though. That Ginzy.”

They were saying a lot of mean things about him, but when Ginzy the fishman disembarked from the dinghy onto the rocky beach, he seemed highly unlikable.

“Whew, sorry I’m later than planned. I’m terribly sorry, but, huh? What’s this? Why am I not feeling very welcomed? Huh, huh, huh? That’s weird. You think it’s weird, too, right? I mean, I came here to get you, didn’t I? Even if you ran into a storm, it took some real carelessness to run aground, and here I am, going out of my way to come collect you all. I won’t demand you cry ‘banzai’ three times or anything, but a ‘thank you’ would seem appropriate, wouldn’t you agree? No, no, I’m not going to turn back without you or anything, okay? Why I’d never do such a thing. It’s not like I couldn’t, though, you know? But I won’t. I really won’t. I mean it.”

“What’s with this guy....?” When those words slipped out of Kuzaku’s mouth, Ginzy’s fish eyes glared in his direction.

“Huh?! That should be my line, you know?! I’ve never seen or eaten your face before, okay?! It’d be scary if I had eaten it, you say? That’s just a sahuagin joke! Okay, that’s the part where you laugh! I don’t understand why your sides aren’t splitting!”

“W-We’re new.” It looked like it was going to develop into something troublesome, so Haruhiro forced Kuzaku’s head down, saying, “Go on, apologize.” He then explained, “I lost to Momohina... the KMW... in a mano-a-mano showdown, so we’re her underlings now... or something.”

“Fishishishishishhhh?! You? Had a showdown with Momohina-san? Mano-a-mano, at that?!”

“Huh? Uh, yeah... Um, your eyes are popping out.”

“Of course they are! Momohina-san’s crazy strong! It’s a wonder you’re still alive, you know?!”

“She went easy on me,” Haruhiro admitted.

“I’ll bet! If not, you’d be a pile of fish bones right now. Oh, in the village I was born in, it’s customary to sink corpses into the lake for the fishes to eat, and then we catch those same fish and eat them. Isn’t that gross? You think it’s gross, right?”

“I’m not sure I’d be on board with that, no...”

“I know, right?! I always thought it was gross. Either way, that’s where the fish bones saying comes from, is what I’m getting at. That’s some trivial knowledge for you. Trivia. You’re sure you don’t need to take notes?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, you kidder. It might do you some good to jot it down, you know? Or are you one of those people who thinks anything you forget was unimportant, but you’ll remember the important things? Well, you’ll forget a lot of the important things, too! Too bad!”

...Oh, crap.

Haruhiro wanted to sneak up behind this sahuagin, or whatever he was, and wring his neck right now. He didn’t know how their bodies were built, but there was almost definitely going to be a vital nerve in the neck. If he could quickly deal a large amount of damage to it, he suspected the result would be deeply satisfying. Haruhiro had had a lot of practice with that one idiot, so he figured he had more tolerance for annoying nonsense than the average person, but Ginzy had an inhuman level of annoyingness. Maybe because he was a fishman?

“I’m sorry,” Haruhiro interrupted. “May I ask a question?”

“Yes, yes. If you must. If I can answer it, well, maybe I will? I don’t know, though... You are new, after all, and just an underling, too.”

“Oh... forget it, then.”

“Ask! You’re supposed to ask! You’re still young, right?! I’m young, too, but the world’s not so easy that you can get by with that level of enthusiasm, you know?!”

“No, I kinda forgot my question. Like, it doesn’t even matter to me.”

“Fishhhh!” Ginzy cried, bending over backwards like a shrimp... even though he was a fish, not a shrimp. Though, if Haruhiro said that, that would probably only encourage this fishman to keep going.

“Are all sahuagin, how should I put this... smooth speakers, like you?” he asked.

“Why, yes, we are. Why?”

“Oh, yeah? I see. I’ve never met a sahuagin before.”

“Just kiddiiiing!”

“Huh?”

“That’s a liiiiie! I’m more talkative than your average sahuagin! Nyah nyah, I tricked you. Fishhhh! Fishhhh!”

Haruhiro wanted to commend himself for not pulling a Spider on Ginzy, who was repeatedly bending over backwards in shock, and eliminating a source of stress for himself.

The dinghy made several trips back and forth between the rocky beach and Ginzy’s ship the Mantis-go. Once everyone was aboard the Mantis-go, they hoisted her sails and raised the anchor.

Their course was eastward and a little southward, in the direction of the Emerald Archipelago. Well, Haruhiro and his party weren’t heading for there, but now that they were aboard the ship, they had bigger concerns.

Yes. Seasickness.

Haruhiro and company lined up along the side of the ship, battling with nausea, puking, and then battling with nausea again. When they rolled over in exhaustion to try to get some sleep, the pirates stopped them. If they laid down, they would be fine while they slept, but it would apparently be even worse once they woke up. The appropriate thing to do was drink some water with lime in it, and try to deal with it. That, and to avoid looking down. If they could just do that, they’d get used to eventually, they were told, but was that true? It was hard to believe, you know?

“Well, I’ve never heard of anyone dying of nausea,” Jimmy the bandaged man told them. He would occasionally come to check on Haruhiro and the party. Of all the pirates, he might have been the most decent and normal. “This is something everyone, even those far weaker than you, has been through. You’ll get through it somehow. Though, that said, I’ve never been seasick myself, so I don’t really know what it’s like.”

“So some people don’t get seasick,” Haruhiro managed. “Is it a matter of constitution?”

“Well, I couldn’t say. I’m an undead, so I don’t really understand how you people who are properly alive feel.”

“...Oh. I suppose you wouldn’t, no.”

Outside of his eyes and mouth, hardly any part of Jimmy was exposed. Not just his face; his neck, hands, and even his fingers were wrapped in cloth. Most undead had dirty brown skin. Was it to hide that? But this pirate gang had orcs and goblins, so it wouldn’t be that strange for an undead to be in it. Besides, Jimmy had told them he was undead on his own. It made no sense. There was something wrong with Jimmy, after all.

Yume adapted in about half a day, and set out on a tour of the ship with Kiichi in tow. She apparently went for kung-fu lessons with Momohina, too.

Haruhiro, Kuzaku, Shihoru, Merry, and Setora never quite managed to get away from the side of the ship. Of course, it wasn’t like they were constantly puking; they could talk, at least. It felt like conversation made it easier, but when one of them got sick, the others were dragged along. They were never going to get much talking done in this state.

“You’ll never be proper pirates like that, you knoooow? Nope!” Momohina laughed at them.

Haruhiro agreed entirely, and wished she’d just let them off the ship already. That it wasn’t possible to do so was the scariest thing about a ship. On the high seas, there was no place to run.

Maybe it was because, in spite of the fair weather, the waves were high, and the boat rocked heavily. In the end, three days after they set sail, when an island appeared on the horizon, no one other than Yume and Kiichi had been completely set free from the nauseating grip of seasickness.

Once a sense of relief set in, though, their symptoms lessened a little, so there may have been more of a psychological aspect to it than they had thought.

However, when they got close to the island, it became apparent something strange was going on.

Ginzy’s Mantis-go was headed for a port built in the island’s bay. There were a whole bunch of ships outside the bay. It was a port, after all, and it wasn’t evening yet. If there were a lot of ships going in and out, that would be understandable. However, there were more ships that had stopped than were moving. The crew of the Mantis-go were clearly on edge.

The figurehead of this ship, as the name would suggest, was a statue of a praying mantis. Momohina had been standing atop the figurehead for a while now, not moving a muscle. Her eyes were on the port. It would be scary if she fell off, but knowing Momohina, she probably wasn’t even scared.

Haruhiro and the party were, as before, at the side of the ship. Jimmy happened to have come by at that moment, so they tried asking him what was happening, but he answered, “It’d be faster for you to see it, I think,” and pointed towards the port.

“A bird?” Haruhiro cocked his head to the side. There were bird-like creatures circling over the port. A flock of two, maybe three birds. It looked like three. Was “flock” the right word? They were flying, so they weren’t a herd, at least.

“But—”

“Kind of big, aren’t they?” Yume said.

That was it. They were awfully big for birds.

“Wyverns?” Setora whispered. That made sense.

True enough, they did resemble the wyverns that lived in the Kuaron Mountains and descended on Thousand Valley when the fog cleared.

“There have been dragons living in the Emerald Archipelago since long, long ago,” someone said.

If Jimmy had said that, it would have ended with an Oh, okay. But it wasn’t Jimmy who said it.

Everyone there, not just Haruhiro, turned to look at Merry.

Why did Merry know that?

Merry covered her mouth and looked down, but Haruhiro was the one who was even more flustered.

“Ohh, that,” said Haruhiro. “Um, like, I’ve heard that, too. It’s just something we heard somewhere, so it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s a thing...”

“Ahhh!” Shihoru said in an awfully loud voice. Was she covering for them? No, not necessarily. The pirates were making a ruckus, too.

One of the dragons said to have lived in the Emerald Archipelago since long, long ago had begun descending. If they were dragons, it seemed more fitting to call them a flight than a flock, and one of the three members of said flight had its head facing almost straight down as it descended, or rather fell.

The dragon reached the port, or probably the town beyond it, in no time flat, but what happened after that? It was far away, so it was impossible to tell from here.

“So, basically...” Haruhiro followed the two circling dragons with his eyes as he forced out a sigh.

It was happening again. One of the other two began a rapid descent. Then, the final one joined them.

Dust was rising from the town.

He had already been at a loss for what to do when they’d gotten shanghaied into joining a pirate crew. The boat trip had been the worst ever. Now, finally they were about to make landfall. Or so he had been thinking, but then this.

“...the port is under attack by dragons?”