Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 14 - Chapter 14

14. Not Wandering [gone_gone]

This slope was very hard to walk on. It wasn’t just bumpy; it was bumping up and down. The places where he stepped might suddenly bump up, or sink down out of nowhere.

Not just a little, either. It could be anywhere from ten centimeters to over a meter at times.

It wasn’t hard enough to call it rocky, but it wasn’t dirt, either. Nor was it smooth like sand. It felt like clay, only not sticky. It was uniformly gray, but blackened in places, giving it a look not entirely unlike marble. That really messed with his sense of distance.

It was dynamically rising and falling, but sloping downwards on the whole. This might have been better than a constant downhill slope. Having some change kept him from getting bored, at least.

If he let his guard down, he’d lose balance, so he couldn’t get lost in thought. That spared him from thinking about things he didn’t need to, but still, That’s not good, he thought.

Alice and Ahiru who were more used to Parano than Haruhiro were going on ahead of him. While following the two of them, how many times had he repeated to himself, I can’t just leave this to them, now?

The flow of time in Parano was unique. Was a second in Parano a hundred seconds in Grimgar, or was it the reverse? Did it go back and forth? Did it meander? Did it flow entirely differently?

Nothing was certain, and he could think of no way to test it, but he felt that he could be sure time wasn’t flowing at a uniform rate.

Haruhiro, of course, felt that was abnormal. But not so for Alice and Ahiru. They’d likely started out with the same feeling of wrongness about it as Haruhiro, but at some point while living in Parano, it had become normal for them.

In Haruhiro’s mind, the result of that was that everything, even their thought patterns, had been influenced by Parano. He wasn’t sure about Ahiru, but Alice was by no means a stupid person, yet neither of them ever really planned things out in an ordered, logical fashion. The changes in Parano were likely too intense for that.

When it came to places that didn’t change, there were maybe a little over ten, all of them ruins or similar. Even if they were traveling from Ruin A to Ruin B, the distance as a straight line didn’t change, but the terrain in between changed by the second, so the road there was different each time. It was exceedingly difficult to predict when anything might happen, so they were fundamentally required to act on the spur of the moment to respond to an evolving situation. Given that, any plan was going to go to waste in no time.

Planning existed to carry out things in an efficient manner. Efficiency was a ratio of reward to effort expended. For instance, if it took a year to bake a loaf of bread, you would have to say that was highly inefficient. However, in Parano, the concept of time was awfully vague.

Did it take a year to bake that loaf of bread? Ten days? One day? A few hours? No one could say for sure.

Haruhiro and the others might be experiencing a kind of deathless, timeless immortality in this other world, Parano. The fact was that if something happened to them they would die, so they weren’t unkillable at all, but if they could avoid danger, they’d likely live indefinitely. That was the illusion, at least.

This situation dulled his sense of whether something absolutely had to be done right now.

Sure, he was worried about his comrades, and he wanted to see them, and they had to get back together. But if they were all right, well, “Haste makes waste,” as they say. Maybe it didn’t have to be done right this second?

No, obviously, he ne`eded to confirm his comrades were all right as soon as possible. It was just that, hurry though he might, it was questionable if there was anything more he could do. It was unimaginably difficult to search for people in Parano. Mind-numbingly so. If he wasn’t patient about it, he’d go nuts.

If after all that, he just stopped caring, would he meet an end like the rusted man at the Iron Tower of Heaven?

I won’t end up like him, was something he fervently believed at the moment. However, if this situation dragged on indefinitely, how about then?

Haruhiro might well make the same sort of decision as the rusted man, or Sleeping Man in the Scarlet Forest.

Alice and Ahiru still had an attachment to life. Still, their spirits had definitely been eaten away at by Parano’s eternity. It was surely the same for the lonely king guarding the door in Elephant Castle. And Itou Nui wasn’t as strong-hearted as any of them, so she had given up on living.

It was Haruhiro who had dealt the finishing blow to her, so he had no intention of dodging responsibility for his role in it. Even so, when Nui’s wish to be reunited with Alice had come true, she’d had no more reason to cling on to life. Having become one with Nui using Resonance, Haruhiro could say so for certain.

To Nui, living had been a terrifying and grueling ordeal, like crawling through the darkness in search of something. Alice had been her sole light.

The moment she saw that light again, Nui had felt, This is enough. I never want to suffer again. I’ll be engulfed by the light and let it end.

Like Sleeping Man, the rusted man, and Nui, would Haruhiro eventually choose to end himself in some way? It was possible Alice or Ahiru might, too. Kuzaku’s new group and the rest of their comrades likewise. He couldn’t be sure that none of his comrades had already given up on life like that.

He was going to find them before they were completely absorbed into Parano. Then they’d persuade them to defeat the king and open the door.

He didn’t know where or what heaven was, but Haruhiro’s party had come to Parano through a door. The door in Parano likely led to another world, too. It could well be Grimgar. He wasn’t sure he should get his hopes up, but he had no reason to reject the idea outright.

It probably wasn’t going to do any harm thinking, It’d be nice if it was.

After descending the bumping marble-patterned slope for a long time, suddenly the bottom of a valley came into view. There was a sudden steep cliff in front of them, so it was probably a valley.

Haruhiro came to a stop despite himself. “There sure are a lot of them...”

Alice and Ahiru were pressing on. He’d be in a spot of trouble if they left him behind, so Haruhiro earnestly kept his legs moving.

“That’s the Valley of Earthly Desires...” he said.

There was a mass of something writhing in the cliff. Like a massive swarm of insects. Some moved left and right, while others were clambering up the cliff.

Looking around, it wasn’t just Haruhiro and the other two who were descending the slope to head to the valley—no, the cliffs on the other side. Maybe they were avoiding Alice and Ahiru’s powerful magic, so they were quite far off, but he could see what looked like dream monsters dotted about here and there.

Haruhiro eventually caught up to Alice. “That valley... or the cliff, rather... where does it start, and how far does it go?”

“Beats me. You know, Ahiru?”

“How should I?” the man shot back. “If you go, you’ll find out.”

“Well, get going,” Alice said.

“Me?” Ahiru was incredulous. “You can’t be serious, right?”

“I said go.”

“No way. I’m not going.”

“Why not? It’d be amusing if you did.”

“Not for me, it wouldn’t. You’re kind of like the king, Alice. Well, I guess that’s probably why he liked you.”

Alice snorted in response, but said nothing.

When they got even closer to the bottom of the valley, more and more of the buglike dream monsters vanished out of view. They hadn’t actually vanished, of course. The dream monsters grew cautious of Alice and Ahiru, and moved away. Still, they didn’t run.

While keeping a distance from Alice and Ahiru, they rushed to get ahead of the rest and cling to the cliff. Then they climbed.

“Should we climb, too?” Haruhiro asked.

“Are you crazy?” Ahiru demanded.

“Well, I think I’m still sane, Ahiru.”

“Having you call me that kinda pisses me off. You’re just a tag-along...”

“Tell me your real name and I’ll use it.”

“...I forget. I don’t even remember it anymore. Ahiru’s fine.”

The dream monsters didn’t get in their way. Thanks to that, Haruhiro and the other two were able to focus on climbing.

If they couldn’t get absorbed in the task, it wouldn’t be possible. That was partly because of the steepness of the incline, but just like the slope on the way down, this cliff bumped in and out, too. When they laid a hand or foot on part of it, it might jut out or pull in. It was ridiculously dangerous.

How were they able to climb all the way to the top without giving up? That was a mystery, but they did it.

Beyond the Valley of Earthly Desires, flat land spread out as far as the eye could see. It was blue, like a tranquil sea. No matter how far they walked, they would surely find nothing here. He couldn’t help but feel that way. Even so, the few monsters that succeeded in ascending the cliff pushed on towards the horizon.

Haruhiro and the others walked along the edge of the cliff. They weren’t just walking. They were keeping a close eye out for anything other than dream monsters, anything human.

The phantasmagoric nature of Parano was really harsh upon those who came here from other worlds. Alice had lived in Ruins No. 6, Ahiru in Ruins No. 5, and the king had built Elephant Castle at Ruins No. 1. The rusted man had met his end at the Iron Tower of Heaven, and even Nui, fallen to become a trickster, had taken up residence in Ruins No. 3. Even Haname, who was likewise a trickster, was making Ruins No. 2 her garden.

Humans were drawn to places that didn’t change. When humans were in Parano, they stayed in places that didn’t change, or moved from unchanging place to unchanging place, one of the two.

If his comrades were alive, they were sure to visit unchanging places. If he went around the unchanging places, he’d eventually encounter Kuzaku, who was traveling with a woman and two men he didn’t know.

Haruhiro suspected he was taking things too easily. It wasn’t as if he didn’t think that maybe he, too, was being affected by Parano’s poisonous influence. But was there any better way? He considered waiting in the Valley of Earthly Desires forever until someone came, but that would be slow in the extreme. His thinking might be dyed completely in the colors of Parano while he was waiting, and he couldn’t deny the risk that he might fall into darkness.

The cliff gradually got lower, and finally reached a height where the area below could no longer be called a valley. This was the end of the Valley of Earthly Desires, apparently. He never did end up spotting another human being, but Haruhiro was surprised at how little he had lost hope.

“We can’t climb Glass Mountain, right?” he asked. “Let’s go to the Sanzu River next.”

Neither Alice nor Ahiru objected.

When was the last time he’d exchanged words with either of them? They were with him, but they were being awfully untalkative. No, maybe not. Were they? It was hard to say.

No matter what happened on route, it was rare for any of it to move his heart.

Oh, yeah? Hm, okay. Huh, all right then, was the extent of his reactions.

It might be incredible that Alice had held onto the desire to go through the door to heaven, or that Ahiru hadn’t given up on his wish to save Yonaki Uguisu. Did Haruhiro feel that way because his own will was getting weaker?

Whenever he felt that it was, he forced himself to remember his comrades’ faces.

I want to see them. I have to.

I’m going to see them.

I want us all to go home together.

To Grimgar.

Oh, but... what sort of place was Grimgar, anyway?

Was he pining for it? Was Grimgar a homeland that merited Haruhiro wanting to return to it?

The Sanzu was a great bubbling river. The bubbles weren’t due to a swift current. There was an endless supply of sparkling rainbow bubbles forming on the surface, then flying away. The flow itself was slow. Or perhaps it only looked that way. The far shore looked hazy through the countless bubbles, almost like a mirage.

The riverbanks were packed with small white pebbles that were like beads. He couldn’t tell from a distance, but when he came closer, there were small mounds of pebbles. Had someone piled them up? Or had they ended up like that naturally?

The next thing he knew, Haruhiro was crouched down piling up stones.

“...Huh? What am I doing...?” he mumbled.

Looking around, he saw Alice nearby, and Ahiru a little further away doing the same.

“Hm... You just feel like stacking them when you come here...” Alice murmured.

“You do, for some reason...” Ahiru agreed.

Both Alice and Ahiru seemed to be stacking reluctantly, as if they had no choice but to pile up the rocks.

Then why don’t they just stop? Haruhiro thought, but he himself was piling up rocks, too, for some reason.

The pebbles were the size of his pinkie fingertip, smooth, and rather hard to stock. Even if he managed to stack a number of them well, they’d suddenly come tumbling down.

“This is frustrating...” he muttered.

This is no time for stacking pebbles was a thought in some corner of his mind the whole time, but there was always one more pebble he had to stack before he was satisfied. Once he stacked that one, he wanted to stack another.

No, no, there was no need for stacking them at all. He wanted to stop himself. He wanted someone to stop him. Was it the same for Alice and Ahiru?

“Can we stop doing this?” Haruhiro asked.

“I wish I could stop, too...” Alice responded.

“Same here...” Ahiru agreed.

“No, if we don’t all stop together, I feel like we’ll never be able to stop. That’s just a feeling, though...”

“Then you stop first, Haruhiro.”

“You start, Alice. Or Ahiru can go first instead.”

“Ohh! Now it fell over, you idiot,” Ahiru complained. “Now I’ve gotta stack them again!”

“This is no good,” Haruhiro muttered.

Mustering all of his willpower, he grasped his right hand, which was reaching for a pebble, with his left, and he tried to stand, but couldn’t.

I can’t stand because I think I can’t. I can stand, he told himself. I can stand. I can. I’m gonna stand. Yes. I’m gonna stand. Look, I stood.

“W-We have to run!” Haruhiro grabbed Alice and Ahiru by the scruffs of their necks and ran away.

No, obviously he didn’t have the raw idiot strength to run while dragging them both with him. Still, once he fled the riverbed at what felt like a run to him, he completely forgot why he’d been stacking pebbles at all.

“What was that?” Haruhiro panted.

“Who knows.” Alice’s lips were pursed. Was that because of feeling awkward? Alice had piled up a crazy number of pebbles.

“That’s how the Sanzu River is,” Alice said. “I probably piled up even more than last time I came. Does repeating the experience increase the desire to stack?”

“It feels like you could stack them forever,” Ahiru said. “Not that I wanted to stack them at all...”

Ahiru looked wistfully back at the riverbed. He actually looked like he wanted to stack them.

“Let’s make sure we don’t get to close to the riverbed while we look around for people,” Haruhiro told them. “Just maybe... one of my comrades might be stacking pebbles.”

If this was a river, there was a fountainhead and an estuary. Or did rivers not work like that in Parano?

Whatever the case, they headed upstream while taking note of anything happening in the riverbed. The compulsion was so strong that he expected at least someone to be piling pebbles, but though there were signs of stacking everywhere, nothing was moving. He didn’t see any dream monsters, either, so the mysterious magic of the pebbles that made people want to stack them must not work on dream monsters.

“Who did all that stacking?” Haruhiro wondered.

“People like us, I guess,” Alice answered.

“Wonder where the guys who did it went,” Ahiru commented. “Think they committed suicide by drowning themselves in the Sanzu River?”

That was an ominous thought.

Well, to be honest, Haruhiro had been thinking the same thing, but this was Parano. Couldn’t they go on stacking pebbles for eternity?

Perhaps not.

Time flowed even in Parano, people would age, and all things would rot eventually.

Could he say for certain that wasn’t true?

The far bank was gradually coming into clearer view. That meant the river had narrowed.

The times he remembered his comrades, he made a point of repeatedly thinking, I want to see them, I want to see them, I want to see them.

Let’s go home. To Grimgar.

When he just thought about Grimgar, that was too vague, so he tried to imagine Alterna. Even more specifically, the places he had probably spent the most time in, like their room in the volunteer soldiers’ lodging house.

He only remembered it well enough to go, It was kind of like this, I think? though.

Was he pining for it? Was Grimgar a homeland that merited returning to?

Not really; it wasn’t as if he’d been born there. He’d awakened to find himself in Grimgar for some reason. He didn’t remember anything from before, so he couldn’t say where exactly, but it had probably been some other world.

The Dusk Realm, Darunggar, and now Parano. There were apparently multiple worlds. Where had he been before Grimgar? Could it, surprise, have been Parano?

Yeah, no. That was clearly not it.

But on the one-in-a-million chance that this was his homeland and he just didn’t remember it, there might be no need to go back to Grimgar. Haruhiro would have come home. If so, wouldn’t it be best for him to live here?

No... he wasn’t seriously thinking that.

The fountainhead of the Sanzu River was a round fountain. It was maybe ten meters across at most. The water seemed to be endlessly flowing out of that spring. The bubbles were shooting out at an incredible speed, too, and they danced wildly around the area.

He seriously considered looping around the spring before checking the downstream direction before deciding against it. This was a hunch, but if they stayed near the Sanzu River any longer, they’d no longer be able to resist the pull of the magic pebbles. The estuary would have to wait for next time.

Haruhiro and the others visited Alice’s former home in Ruins No. 6, as well Ruins No. 5 where Ahiru had built all the statues, and Ruins No. 3 where Nui had lived with the girl dolls.

At Ruins No. 3 with its scattered doll parts, dream monsters were rapidly gathering around, but when they saw the group, they took off running.

The king’s castle was at Ruins No. 1, and Ruins No. 7 was the territory of the king’s vassal Rainbow Mole. It was right in the middle of enemy territory, so they looked at Scarlet Forest and Rainbow Mole’s Nest from a distance, but there were no new discoveries.

They tried Ruins No. 2, too. Bayard Garden had been destroyed by Haname’s own power, but it had been restored, if not to its former glory, and flowers of many colors were blooming.

Obviously, they didn’t touch a single one.

It seemed the bird man they had met on their previous trip here, Suzuki-san, had moved on. They didn’t spot him.

They went to the Iron Tower of Heaven, too. With the girl dolls still scattered around, Alice didn’t want to climb the tower. Haruhiro went up to the landing where the rusted man and Nui were with Ahiru.

They saw Nui not at all rotting, but slightly rusted.

“Ah...” Ahiru whispered, looking up to the polka dot sky.

I didn’t want to bring it up with Alice, but I was secretly worried she’d rot before she rusted, Haruhiro thought.

Well, everything else aside, at least Nui would be spared from rotting.

There were seven ruins. Only Ruins No. 4 remained.

“That’s Mimic’s town,” Alice said.

According to Alice, Ruins No. 4 was where a trickster called Mimic and the yomus lived.

“Yomus?” Haruhiro asked.

“They’re dream monsters. They live in that town, following a bunch of rules set out by Mimic like ‘No talking,’ or ‘Be quiet.’”

“So there’s a place like that, too. Or rather, there are dream monsters that act like that, too.”

“I’m sure there are all sorts of dream monsters,” Alice said. “But if you were to say these ones were special, you wouldn’t be wrong. If you break the rules, the yomus will attack, so it’s not exactly safe.”

“If you kill dream monsters, you can take their id,” Haruhiro said. “By taking their id, your ego will grow, and your magic will get stronger. With your strength, Alice, couldn’t you deliberately break the rules, and, uh... The yomus, was it? Couldn’t you kill them as they came at you, and make a ton of id that way?”

“Even if I could, I wouldn’t,” Alice said. “It’s a pain to explain why. You tell him, Ahiru.”

“What, it’s my job now...?”

Though he griped about what a hassle it was, Ahiru explained.

Ego was your strength of self. Whether or not you were selfish had nothing to do with it. It was the degree to which you rationally saw yourself as different from others, and were definitely aware you were yourself and no one else.

In contrast, id was the power of your unconscious, instinctual impulses and desires.

Ego and id generally fluctuated up and down but remained roughly equal, and a scale with the two placed on either end would sway, but remain mostly even.

If you killed others and took their id, what would happen? Naturally, your id would rise that much, so the scales would be tipped.

“Id is your impulses and desires,” Ahiru said. “When it gets stronger, well, you know. It turns out like A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“Huh? I don’t think I get the reference...”

“It’s like, you know in your head what you’re doing is a bad idea, but your lower half doesn’t listen.”

“...Ohh. That sort of thing, huh. I think I can imagine.”

When that happened, you would try to suppress those impulses and desires. In other words, your ego would rise, and as a result, the id and ego would happily be balanced again.

Ahiru stopped. “Hold on, you’ve gotta be way younger than me. What is going on with kids these days?”

“I don’t know that I’d say ‘these days,’” Haruhiro said. “I mean, this is Parano.”

“I guess you’ve got a point.”

Haruhiro more or less understood the relationship between ego and id.

Alice, and likely Ahiru as well, had raised their egos by stealing id from dream monsters. Ego was the source of magic. The higher your ego rose, the stronger your magic.

“But the thing is, try as you might, you can’t steal ego,” Ahiru said. “Only id. Still, if you just keep building up your id—”

“It’s fine if your ego can keep up, but... it can’t, right?” Haruhiro said slowly.

It isn’t something that can be converted into numbers and precisely calculated, but for sake of argument, let’s assume Haruhiro has an ego score of 50. His id score is roughly 50, too. A certain dream monster has an id score of 10. Haruhiro kills that dream monster, stealing its id. Haruhiro’s id rises 10 points up from 50 to become 60, creating a 10 point gap between his ego score and id score.

In order to close that 10 point gap, Haruhiro’s ego score will rise. Eventually it becomes 60, equalizing his ego and id scores.

However, now assume that dream monster’s id score was 50 instead. It was a tough foe, but with help from Alice and Ahiru, Haruhiro killed it. Haruhiro’s id score will rise 50 points to become 100. His ego score is 50, so the difference is 50.

“In my experience, when you kill someone who’s on about the same level as you, you’ve gotta watch out,” Ahiru said. “It feels like... there’s this itch, it drives you crazy, and you get these irresistible urges.”

“Irresistible...” Haruhiro murmured.

“If there are enemies in front of you, you’ll want to kill more,” said Ahiru. “You might think once you’ve killed them all that the problem sorts itself out, but it doesn’t. What comes after that is a breakdown of the balance. The fall into darkness.”

“You become a trickster?”

“Yeah. People fall into darkness when their ego drops too far, or they steal too much id. If the gap between the ego and id is too great, desires and impulses run wild. At that point, it’s too late. You can only become a trickster.”

For Haruhiro with his ego score of 50, it will be the same if he kills a single dream monster with an id score of 50, or ten of them with an id score of 5 in close succession.

It won’t be easy for him to take out an id-score-of-50 dream monster, but he might be able to mow down id-score-of-5 dream monsters one after another.

And if he massacres dream monsters with an id score of 5, he’ll go well past the danger zone.

“Everything has its limits, and it can be hard to see where they are, huh?” Haruhiro said.

“Have you never done that thing?” Ahiru said. “Where you’re about to cum, but you hold back and do multiplication tables in your head?”

“I’m not sure what situation you’d do that in, but no, I probably haven’t.”

“Seriously? I guess it feels like a wave that was about to wash over you gently receding. When your id, which was about to go wild after growing, is suppressed by your growing ego, that’s about what it feels like.”

“So if you haven’t felt that, and you keep stealing id, it’s easy to fall into darkness?”

“If your will weakens, your ego falls, so—no, maybe your will weakens because your ego falls? Whichever it is, that’s bad, too. If you get ridiculously down and depressed, that’s the end for you here.”

They climbed an awfully twisted hill and the town came into sight.

There was a thin haze, but he could tell there were many buildings, gardens and stone walls, and roads, too.

Were there people?

Yes, there were. Moving on the road. Lots of them. Not so much walking as running, probably.

“That’s Ruins No. 4?” Haruhiro asked. “It doesn’t look like a quiet town to me.”

Alice thrust the shovel into the ground, taking a deep breath. “Looks like something’s going on.”

“You can just ignore those guys usually,” Ahiru put in. “They’re harmless.”

If they were harmless, that might be another reason Alice didn’t try to earn id in Mimic’s Town.

Haruhiro began descending the hill towards the town.

“Ah, hey!” Ahiru chased after him.

What would Alice do? Haruhiro didn’t turn back. Alice would probably come.

As he got further along, his heart raced. There was something going on in that town.

Who had caused it?