Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 13 - Chapter 17

17. Things That Change, Things That Don’t

How long had they been buried alive? It was pointless to think about it. Time held no meaning in Parano. Even if he’d had a mechanical watch, it would probably have stopped, started, turned clockwise, turned counterclockwise, and been utterly useless.

Alice C had used the magic shovel to dig a passage to the surface, making it easy to escape.

Once they were out, Ruins No. 6 had been reduced to a pile of rubble. Very few buildings remained—six of them to be exact—and they were all half-destroyed, or buried in the rubble.

“Looks like that’s the end of my hideout,” Alice said. “Damn Ahiru. Next time we meet, he’s dead.”

“This was all Ahiru’s doing?” Haruhiro asked.

“I told you. In Parano, anyone can use magic. Ahiru’s magic is the same type as mine.”

“Philia? Or whatever it was called?”

“Yeah,” Alice’s eyes narrowed, and there was a laugh.

Haruhiro still hadn’t seen Alice without the mask. What sort of face did that person have?

“Magic in Parano can be widely broken up into three types... no, make that four types. But I’ve never seen the fourth. There’s philia, narci, and doppel. Magic generally falls into one of these three types.”

Alice went on to explain what those meant.

Philia was love. Love used curses to imbue a specific object, like a commonly used item, or a weapon used to protect oneself, with power. These were called fetishes.

“The source of philia is the fetish,” Alice said lifting the shovel. “The charmed item makes the holder stronger, giving them magic. If they lose hold of the fetish, the owner weakens, becoming unable to use magic. I’ve killed dream monsters with this. It seemed weird to go spelunking empty-handed, so we figured we should bring some tools. I was holding it. Not by coincidence. I don’t know why, but I wanted to carry it. I said I would, and I was allowed to. Maybe I had a premonition or something. In the end, it saved me.”

“So... that shovel became a fetish?” Haruhiro asked slowly.

“Haruhiro, you have a knife or something like it, right?” Alice asked. “Maybe it’ll become your fetish. Maybe it won’t. By the way, Ahiru’s fetish is a belt. The one around his waist.”

“How’d he topple that many buildings with a belt?”

“Search me. I’ll bet he worked hard at it, prepping every building one by one.”

“That seems like it’d take a whole lot of time.”

“Whether it did or didn’t, it’s all the same in this place. You either do something, or you don’t. Ahiru did. He’s weaker than I am, but he has a goal, and he won’t give up. He can’t beat me, so he harasses me, and tries to call me to the king’s place.”

“The king?” Haruhiro repeated.

He was ignored. Alice didn’t answer questions Alice didn’t want to answer.

There were hardly any flat spots in the sea of debris, so they climbed up and down, repeatedly jumping over and diverting around obstacles as they gradually made progress.

In the beginning, Alice went ahead, and Haruhiro followed behind in silence. But Alice gradually started stopping to sigh, and swinging the shovel around pointlessly. Alice seemed sick of this, so the choice of course was apparently not very efficient.

When Haruhiro took the lead instead, having Alice just decide the general direction, they picked up the pace considerably.

“Could it be that you’re used to this?” Alice asked.

“Uh... Well, yeah,” Haruhiro said. “Decently so.”

“Hmm. Were you living like a survivalist, or something?”

“It’s a long story.”

“You don’t get it. You don’t need to worry whether the story’s long or short.”

So, as Haruhiro walked from one piece of rubble that looked like a viable foothold to another, he told Alice all about himself, or rather his group.

He didn’t start at the beginning, which was when they’d awoken in Grimgar more than a year and a half ago. He didn’t go through all the events in order. He’d jump from here to there, moving back and forth. He was, he would have to admit himself, a bad storyteller. Or maybe, because this was Parano, it was just naturally turning out that way.

When they were finally out of Ruins No. 6, there was water spread out over a wide area just past the white sand. There was no current. Was it a lake? In the distance, there was a milky white smoke.

“Where is this?” Haruhiro asked, but Alice shrugged.

“I’d have to guess I probably haven’t seen it before. There aren’t many places that have existed all along. As far as I know, there are Ruins No. 1 through Ruins No. 7, which are the remains of seven towns and their surroundings, Mt. Glass, the Iron Tower of Heaven, the Valley of Worldly Desire, and the Sanzu River.”

“The rest change?”

“If you remember all the landmarks, you’ll get by fine.”

“Ruins No. 6 doesn’t vanish, then,” Haruhiro pondered. “That’s why you were living there, huh?”

“That bastard Ahiru really got me this time.”

“You think he got caught up in it, too?”

“He’s stubborn, so I figure he’s alive. If he were dead, I couldn’t kill him. I need him alive.”

Alice walked out on to the surface of the water like it was no big deal. Did they plan to swim?

When Alice’s right foot touched the surface, ripples spread out from there. They didn’t sink.

Was it not water? It seemed it was a surface that was clear and that reflected light like water. What was more, when stimulated, it produced ripples.

The bottom wasn’t visible. It was just clear all the way.

Haruhiro tried walking, too. When the ripples that spread with each step touched, they negated one another. If not interrupted by another ripple, they would spread out forever.

“First, we need to find a place to settle down,” Alice said, making many ripples.

“I want to search for my comrades,” Haruhiro said.

“I heard that. You want my help, too, I’m sure. Well, honestly, I doubt they’re alive, and searching for people here isn’t simple.”

“You said it’s a matter of whether we do a thing or don’t, Alice. That being the case, I’ll do it.”

“‘My comrades. Everyone. Everyone. My comrades.’ That’s all you ever say. If your comrades told you to go die, would you do it?”

“If that were the best option.”

“Plenty of guys who’d say that are all talk, but you might actually go and do it.”

“I don’t say things I don’t think.”

“If I help you, what’s in it for me?” Alice demanded.

“Ahiru has a goal, you said. What about you? You just want to get stronger?”

He got ignored again. Alice probably didn’t want to say.

“If you help me, I’ll help you in equal measure,” Haruhiro said at last.

“You?” Alice laughed out loud.

It didn’t even offend him that much.

Alice had said that anyone could use magic in Parano. But Haruhiro had yet to discover his magic. Alice was probably thinking, What can you even do?

“You can decide whether I’m of any use later,” Haruhiro answered.

“No, Haruhiro, I don’t think you’re useless. You were a thief, right? It sounds like something out of a game, but you can use those skills here, can’t you?”

“A game?”

“They show up in RPGs and the like, don’t they? Thief characters. They’re fast, and steal items. Well, I was never into games much. But it’s not like I’ve never played one.”

“I don’t... really know, but if I can avoid panicking, those... Did you call them dream monsters? I think it’s not impossible for me to fight monsters like those.”

“It’ll be up to your magic, I guess. If all you can manage is common dream monsters, there’s a crazy guy out there you won’t stand a chance against.”

Was that “crazy guy” the king?

The clear surface that was not actually a lake was now completely covered in ripples.

In the smoky distance, he could vaguely make out something like a pillar that reached up to the polka dot sky.

“That’s... the Iron Tower of Heaven?” he asked slowly.

“Yep. Think of it as Parano’s navel. If you use the Iron Tower of Heaven as a point of reference, along with things like which direction you need to go in to get to which ruin, you can figure out relative locations that way.”

Just how much longer would they have to walk to reach the Iron Tower of Heaven? He wanted to ask, but he refrained. He could more or less guess the answer on his own. In Parano, thinking about time, or how much longer something would be, was meaningless.

“So, dream monsters, they’re not that common, huh?” he asked.

“It’s my fault. The weak ones get scared, and run off. It’s different when a star falls and everything goes wild, though.”

“You’re famous?” Haruhiro questioned.

Alice shrugged. “I’ll bet that dream monsters can sense ego. They don’t have any themselves—they can’t—but they want it, so they attack people. But when an ego is too strong, it becomes threatening to the dream monsters.”

“When you kill dream monsters... you can steal their ego?” Haruhiro asked.

“Id.”

“You can steal that, and get stronger?”

“It’s not that you’ll get stronger. Your magic becomes stronger.”

It seemed it was the nature of ego and id to fluctuate in order to balance each other out.

If Alice had an ego of 100, Alice’s id would settle at around 100. The opposite was also true. If Alice killed a dream monster with 10 id, Alice would go up to 110 id. From there, Alice’s ego would automatically get stronger until it approached 110. It wouldn’t happen all at once, but grow gradually.

“If my ego were... let’s say 10, would my id be 10, too?” Haruhiro asked.

“More or less, yeah.”

“So if I kill a monster with 10 id, my id will become 20, and my ego will increase to 20, too.”

“That would be the hope.”

Alice was being evasive. Were his calculations off? No matter how he thought about it, ten plus ten was twenty, but maybe not in Parano.

When they reached the edge of the land of ripples, they came to a place with sand that could only be described as pure blue. Here and there, there were yellow, mushroom-like things with their caps spread out. Were they mushrooms?

When the two of them got closer, the yellow things were two meters across, and looked like turtles carrying mushrooms on their backs. They didn’t move, and were hard as rock to the touch.

They were really bizarre, but not particularly surprising. Parano had lots of strange things. Or rather, it was full of nothing but strange things.

“I have to find my magic...” Haruhiro muttered.

“I survived because I had my shovel,” Alice agreed. “Hup!”

And Alice jumped on top of one of the yellow mushrooms that was not in fact a mushroom.

“In that moment, at least, this shovel was all I could rely on. Only my shovel. One way of thinking about it is that something like that may have a possibility of becoming your magic, and...”

“...It might not?” Haruhiro finished.

“Why do you think the dream monster you gave birth to took that form?”

“That’s... I wonder. I feel like I had a dream, but I hardly remember it.”

“That’s how it goes. Even if we’re able to convince ourselves that something’s the answer, it’s awfully hard to find absolute proof.”

In the blue sand where the yellow mushrooms that were not mushrooms were scattered around, the two of them walked, and walked, and walked.

It all seemed like a made-up story. Even when it came to events that were carved into his head and heart, the moment Haruhiro stopped being able to feel they had actually happened, they fell to pieces and slipped through the gaps in his fingers.

Without the other person known as Alice C, even if he had survived, his sense of reality would have weakened, vanished, and he might have lost all his memories.

At some point, the number of mushrooms that were not mushrooms increased to the point that they blotted out the surface, making it impossible to see the sand.

The tops of the mushrooms that were not mushrooms were slippery, making it hard to walk, but the two of them had to press onward.

Suddenly, he felt hungry. His guts were wriggling in search of food. Despite that, his stomach didn’t growl.

His throat was dry. He wanted something to drink. He didn’t know why, but there was a pain in the back of his eye.

“Water,” Haruhiro gasped. “Something to eat...”

“Didn’t I tell you this the first time? Even if you don’t eat or drink, you won’t die. It’s been a long time since I’ve put anything in my mouth.”

“But it’s driving my crazy.”

“Why not drink your own spit?”

Haruhiro decided to try that. He wasn’t satisfied with that answer, but if he didn’t drink something, spit or otherwise, this was going to get out of hand.

The garden of yellow mushrooms that were not mushrooms was suddenly replaced by rugged, gray rocks. The rocks had countless little horsetail-like things growing off of them. They’d be edible, wouldn’t they?

He plucked a few, and when he went to toss them in his mouth, he realized Alice was watching him, and stopped.

When he squeezed the small pseudo-horsetails, a golden yellow fluid came out, and it stank like it was rotten. The fact that he still felt an urge to lick it was, he had to admit, terrifying.

The rocks rose and fell, and they found them going down when they tried to climb and going up when they were trying to descend.

When he turned upwards on an impulse, there was no sky. Turning to his right, he saw the sky there. It was like he was walking on a wall, but he didn’t fall.

It wasn’t like that all the time. The ground formed a gentle spiral, with the sky above sometimes, below at others, sometimes to the left, and sometimes to the right.

Occasionally his hunger and thirst made a comeback. He often resented Alice for being perfectly fine with this state.

Hunger and thirst stirred up the heart. Because of that, he tried to extinguish his frustration and hatred. It worked sometimes, and didn’t others.

He was finally starting to be able to see the Iron Tower of Heaven clearly.

“It’s like a radio tower, isn’t it?” Alice said. “Too big and too tall, though.”

Alice was saying things that he felt like he understood, but maybe didn’t. Regardless, the Iron Tower of Heaven, true to its name, was assembled from iron materials, and was a grand structure that seemed to reach up to the heavens.

Looking at it from the spiral hill, it wasn’t just the tower itself that was iron, but the area around it, too. There were tens—no, hundreds—of ten-meter rusty iron walls surrounding the tower.

The iron walls had gates with iron bar doors. When they went through one gate, another iron wall stood in their way on the other side. They followed the wall, and there was another gate. They went through the gate, and then followed the wall again.

There was a gate. They went through it, following the wall.

This repeated for a long time.

“I remember the path, but if I didn’t, we’d get lost,” Alice said. “There are a lot of dead ends.”

“It’s practically a maze.”

“That this place doesn’t change is its one saving grace. If it changed every time, we’d have to go by trial and error.”

Slowly but surely, he was becoming more able to cope with the hunger and thirst. In place of those discomforts, or maybe not, his longing for his comrades grew stronger and stronger.

Whenever it got to be too much, he asked Alice for permission, and then screamed his head off while rolling around.

Alice didn’t say, Are you an idiot? or What are you doing? or anything like that.

When they were through the iron maze, there was a mountain of old iron scraps piled up, and on top of them, the Iron Tower of Heaven rose into the sky.

The Iron Tower of Heaven had an external set of stairs. It was just an iron frame with steps about a meter wide and no hand rail, so it would have been tough on someone with a fear of heights.

The steps were made of iron, and thin enough that they warped a little if you stepped down on them hard. The whole set of stairs shook a little, too.

When they had gone up about a hundred meters or so, the stairs stopped. There was a ladder. A long ladder. It had to be fifty meters, at a minimum.

The wind picked up, and it tasted sweet even through the mask. He was a little scared, but he somehow made it up the ladder, and then there were more stairs to climb.

He climbed stairs, climbed a ladder, climbed stairs. Climbed a ladder, climbed stairs.

Alice came to a stop at a landing on the stairs.

It was a strange landing. If one were to name this landing, it would probably be for the statue of a man, sitting with his legs over the edge of the landing.

Was this statue iron, too? Or had it been made just by packing rust together? It seemed like it could have been. That was how rusty it was.

The man was medium weight, medium height, and in his twenties or thirties. His hands were on his thighs, and he seemed to look off into the distance.

Bam! Alice whacked the statue in the head.

“When something’s here too long, this happens.”

“What happens?” Haruhiro asked hesitantly.

“It rusts. Yes, humans do, too.”

“Then this guy was...”

“Before he rusted, he was living and breathing.”

“Someone you knew?”

“He’s been here whenever I’ve come, you know. Rusting a little at a time. I warned him he was in trouble, but he insisted it was fine, so... he got what he wished for.”

The man, of course, didn’t move a muscle. Was he still alive? He didn’t look it. But this was Parano. It might be that even with his whole body turned to rust, he wasn’t dead.

“We can’t stay here long,” Alice said. “If you’re fine with rusting, it’s another matter, though.”

“It’s dangerous, you mean?”

“You’ll be fine if you don’t stay. I’ve come several times, and even gone up higher, but I haven’t rusted.”

“Whether we’re here a long time or a short one, this is Parano. I thought time didn’t matter...”

“It shouldn’t, no. But the fact of the matter is, he’s turned to rust, hasn’t he?” Alice said, patting the man on the head. Then Alice pointed in the direction the man was looking.

The majority of the ground was covered in a milky white haze. It was like a sea of clouds. However, there were places dotted around where the terrain was exposed.

When he looked in the direction Alice was pointing, were those flowers, maybe?

There were flowers of many colors blossoming.

“That’s Ruin No. 2,” said Alice. “Or it used to be. Bayard Garden. I’ll be going there to play next.”

Alice started descending the steps they had climbed with light steps.

Before chasing after her, Haruhiro tried touching the rusted man’s cheek. It was cold. The rust got on his fingers.

While he rubbed his fingers together to get the rust off, he muttered, “I will find my comrades” to himself repeatedly.

And in order to do that, he needed Alice. That was why he’d follow for now.

He was just buying time, right? He didn’t really want to search, did he? He was afraid to search for his comrades, and afraid to be forced to accept the results. This was just him putting that off, wasn’t it?

Besides, even if he looked around for them, he might never find a thing.

He felt his knees going weak. He nearly ended up crouching.

Alice was going down the stairs. They’d be out of sight soon.

He was struck by an urge to sit down next to the man.

Of course, he wouldn’t do it.

Not for now, at least.