Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 14.2 - Chapter 4.04

4. Portrait of a Hero

The Bachrose-go was a ship belonging to the K&K Pirate Company.

Not only that, it was the Archduke Deres Pain’s ship.

Naturally, Yume had no idea what an archduke, or a Deres Pine, was. She’d never seen one, never heard of one, and, obviously, never eaten one, either. Though, they said it was a person, so he probably wasn’t food. But though he might have been one in the broader sense of the word, Deres Pine was not exactly human, either.

There was a city called Igor. Not on the Red Continent, or in the Coral Archipelago, but in the north of Grimgar, along the coast. It was quite the large port city. It was in the same class as the Free City of Vele, and had once prospered as the Kingdom of Ishmal’s door to the sea.

However, the Kingdom of Ishmal was no more. It had fallen. Or rather, it had been destroyed. The lands that were once the Kingdom of Ishmal’s domain were now primarily dominated by the undead.

The port city of Igor was not necessarily full of undead every way you looked, but most of its population were from races, like the orcs or undead, that belonged to the Alliance of Kings and were hostile to the human race. The person known as Deres Pain was the lord of Igor, and called himself the Archduke.

Archduke.

Now there’s a title that sounds self-important. He wasn’t just self-important, he was actually important. When you hear he was the lord of Igor, it’s easy to imagine he was just the mayor of a city, and that was what Yume assumed at first, too, but he was actually on the same level as a king of a respectably large nation. After the No-Life King died despite supposedly being without life to begin with, there were four or five influential undead, and Deres Pain was one of them.

Kisaragi, AKA Kisaragicchon, stole that archduke’s ship and made it his own. That didn’t really make sense. But whatever, it was called the Bachrose-go, so it had to be awesome.

The ship was just that impressive, so when Kisaragi later started the K&K Pirate Company, he made the Bachrose-go their flagship. The flagship was the ship the most important person rode aboard and bossed everyone around from, so it was the symbol of K&K, too.

Also, though Kisaragi was the one who started up K&K, he wasn’t the company president, or the chairman, or anything. The president was a woman named Anjolina Kreitzal who had been a pirate all along, and she was also the captain of their flagship, the Bachrose-go, too.

Kisaragi had been leading the Bachrose-go, along with some hundreds of other ships that belonged to K&K, in a search for Momohina, with Yume as an added bonus.

That said, K&K had their usual activities of trade, opening new routes, combat, and pillaging to take care of, and they couldn’t neglect them. Because of that, each ship searched for Momohina and Yume in their spare time as they went about their usual business.

This wasn’t as simple to do as it was to say. Momohina and Yume had vanished at sea, after all. The sea was full of dangers. If a ship was lost in the search, it would be terrible. Besides, they had been tossed from the Mantis-go into the sea in the middle of a storm. If you thought about it normally, there was little hope of them having survived. Little to none. Yeah, the odds were basically zero.

There was no point in searching. So they wouldn’t search. There was no other option. If Momohina’s comrades decided that, it would be impossible to blame them. Honestly, when they were stranded on that remote island, Yume had essentially given up. The possibility that they were being searched for, that someone was out there looking for them, seemed highly unlikely.

Well, of course not. They wouldn’t be lookin’, right?

However, Kisaragicchon and his comrades had continued the search.

The major reason for that was that the Mantis-go had avoided sinking, and her captain, Ginzy, had made it back to the Emerald Archipelago with the other survivors. It wasn’t just Momohina and Yume that K&K went out looking for. There were other crew members who had fallen into the sea, and they were searching for all of them.

“Knowing you, I always sort of figured you weren’t dead. And it wasn’t just me; everyone who knows you felt the same.”

Kisaragi’s mustache, which was too spectacular to seem as if it belonged beneath his nose, twitched as he said that. He was talking about Momohina, of course.

Incidentally, the Bachrose-go immediately set sail from Indelica back to the Emerald Archipelago after that, but Momohina was being weirdly standoffish towards Kisaragi. If Kisaragi called her name, she’d let out a, “Meow,” or a, “Fwuh,” and then run away. Even on the occasional times she talked to him, she wouldn’t look him in the eye. From where Yume stood, she couldn’t help but think, You hugged him super tight, and you were cryin’, too, but maybe that was why she was so embarrassed, and she was acting shy as a result. Yume was not completely unable to understand those sorts of feelings.

Momohina seemed fixated on playing hide-and-seek with Kisaragi, and Yume couldn’t get her to train her as much as she would have liked, so she was left with a lot of free time in her life aboard the ship. She helped the crew out a bit, but her feelings towards those jobs were lukewarm. Every job was so easy that it was done before she could finish thinking about why her feelings towards it didn’t go past lukewarm into just plain cold. Yume finished everything so quickly that the crew sometimes looked at her like she was being a nuisance.

When she got tired of moving around on her own, which she had now, Yume usually hung out at the side of the ship, staring out at the sea.

She wasn’t thinking about anything in particular there. Though, she didn’t try to dispel whatever thoughts did enter her head, either.

Even when the weather wasn’t bad, the waves were high, and they rocked the boat. That didn’t scare her, or make her sick. She was totally used to it now.

She talked with the captain, Anjolina, just a bit. She was a straight-laced, mature woman, and was feared by her crew, but in a good way. No matter how old Yume got, she would probably never be able to be like that. She could see why it was Anjolina, not Kisaragi, who had become the president of K&K and the captain of the Bachrose-go.

But even if Anjolina was the president, the one who was directing K&K was clearly Kisaragi.

He was the leader, but not a leader. It was vague, or maybe half-hearted. Still, everyone in K&K had accepted the strange form it took.

Not all leaders were the same. Just as there were a multitude of different people out there, there were many different leaders as well.

“...That goes for Yume’s and the team’s leader, too,” Yume mumbled, then hung her head.

She had thought about her comrades all the time on the island. She had burst into tears, and wailed, too. It was only supposed to be half a year. In half a year, she would go to Alterna. Yume had asked her friends to wait for her there. She broke her word. It hadn’t been half a year. It had been over two years now. Soon, it would be three. Everyone must have been sick of waiting. No, maybe they had already stopped. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her comrades, but if she was this late, they were bound to assume something had happened to her. Actually, she hoped they weren’t waiting. They were welcome to forget Yume. She wanted them to forget her. It made her very sad. But it was just Yume who would be sad. If Yume was the only one who was sad, she didn’t mind. Yume could tough it out.

When she thought of her comrades, it hurt so bad she couldn’t breathe.

What hurt, how, and why were things she didn’t want to think about, and she couldn’t. It hurt. It hurt more than she could bear.

She noticed someone approaching. Because of the sound of the wind and the waves, it was hard to make out the footsteps, but that person was banging something hard against the ship’s railing as they walked.

Yume looked up.

It was Kisaragi. The hard thing turned out to be his left hand. Kisaragi had lost his left hand, and replaced it with a prosthetic. The eyepatch over his right eye was not just ornamental, either. Those details were strangely pirate-y, and his mustache made a bold statement, too. Though, with how sparse the rest of his beard was, and how smooth a face he had, it looked totally out of place. Fake, even.

“Hey.”

Kisaragi raised his prosthetic hand. It might have been a special kind of prosthetic. Despite how it looked, it moved smoothly, almost like a real hand.

“Hey.”

When Yume mimicked his smile and waved back, Kisaragi narrowed his eyes suddenly, and his mustache twisted a little.

“Ah...!”

“Hm?”

“Hey, listen, that mustache... Could it be...?”

“Oh. This?”

Kisaragi pinched the mustache with his right hand, and pulled it.

It came right off.

“It’s fake.”

“...It is, huh? Yume was thinkin’, Momo-san was wearin’ a fake mustache, too, y’know?”

“She was?”

“Yeah. When we first met. She musta been imitatin’ you, Kisaragicchon.”

“You’re gonna call me that, too? Well, whatever, it’s fine.”

“You say ‘Whatever, it’s fine,’ a lot, huh? Kisaragicchon.”

“No, I don’t. I just make a distinction between things I don’t care about, and those I do.”

“Hrrm. Why do you wear a fake mustache, Gicchon?”

“Now you’ve shortened it? Whatever, it’s fine. When I went to the Red Continent, they thought I was a kid. If I had facial hair, though, I looked like an adult. It saved me a surprising amount of hassle.”

“So, it’s like a woman having boobs, huh?”

“There are adult women who are flat, too, you know?”

“Oh, yeah? Yeah, that’s right, huh? Yume’s aren’t big. Neither are Momo-san’s. But, y’know, Captain Anjolina-san, she’s bouncy-bouncy.”

“You want to keep on talking about breasts?”

“Not really, no. But big boobies feel good when you touch them. Speaking of boobs, Shihoru’s got them, too.”

Yume covered her own chest with both hands. She had no words.

Obviously, that part of Yume’s anatomy was a far cry from Shihoru’s. There was little swelling there, and they didn’t feel plump or soft. She felt an intense longing. Yume loved Shihoru’s boobs. Her thighs and her belly were nice, too, but Shihoru’s boobs were something else. She wanted to touch them. To bury her face deep in them.

Would she ever be able to?

“Shihoru? That was one of your comrades, right?”

When Kisaragi asked, Yume nodded. Moving her head up and down like that was all she could manage. If she tried to force herself to speak, it would have come out weird.

“I’ve heard a bit about you guys. One of you pacified the dragons in the Emerald Archipelago while I was away, right? The hero of Roronea. The Dragon Rider. Haruhiro, was it?”

Yeah.

Haru-kun, he doesn’t act like a leader much, but he’s a real leader. He’s always thinkin’ about Yume, and everyone else. Even more than he thinks about himself. That’s wonderful. He’s the best leader for Yume, and for everyone.

Yume puffed her cheeks up. Her face was probably bright red. She wanted to tell him about it properly, but couldn’t say a word. Really, all she could do was nod.

“Don’t sweat it.”

Kisaragi put his hand—the real one, not the prosthetic—on top of Yume’s head. His hand wasn’t big. Despite that, Yume’s head seemed to fit comfortably inside it.

“You’re Momohina’s apprentice, right? That makes you part of the family. First thing I’ll do is take you back to Grimgar. And if you need anything else, just tell me. There are things I can’t do, but not many. Rely on me.”

Yeah.

...Yeah.

Was it all right for her to nod so carelessly? Kisaragi was saying, “Rely on me,” after all. If she nodded, that meant she would rely on Kisaragi, and that she would depend on him. But even in her uncertainty, she felt compelled to nod.

“...Gicchon.”

“Yeah?”

“Yume, she...”

She was about to cry, and that was why she wasn’t able to say nothin’.

Yume still felt like she was about to cry at any moment. Her heart was so full of emotion, but the tears never came, no matter how much it seemed like they would. She started to feel like, Maybe there’s no need to be cryin’.

That had to be thanks to Kisaragi.

“...Gicchon. You’re kinda cool, huh?”

“Yeah, I get that sometimes.”

Kisaragi gave that simple response, then retracted the hand he’d placed on Yume’s head.

“I am the one and only great hero, after all.”