Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 20 - Chapter 2

2. The Two Who Would Become Legends

I didn’t know this back then, but there is an old legend in Grimgar that goes like this:

There was nothing but the sky and the sea until at some point the nameless one, humanlike in form, came from beyond the sea.

The nameless one sowed myriad seeds in the sea.

The myriad seeds germinated, and bloomed into countless lives.

When those lives ended, their bodies sank to the bottom of the sea, where they accumulated over time.

Thus did the land come to peek out from beneath the waters, and eventually a continent took shape.

On this continent, too, life went on birthing more lives, and they increased greatly in number.

The nameless one with a humanlike form returned to the continent, sleeping and waking for eons.

Countless lives bloomed and fell as the nameless one watched over them, and the forerunners were born. The continent teemed with life and color.

However, one day the primordial dragon danced down from the sky, and it chased off the nameless one.

Having taken the place of the nameless one, the dragon made its bed on the continent. There it slept until it was buried in the earth, and the land was filled with a silent fertility.

Later, the peace of the continent was broken when two gods drifted here from beyond the sea and sky.

When the dragon awoke to the sound of a great clamor, it found that the two gods had made servants of the forerunners and were fighting each other.

The dragon crawled out of its bed, and went into battle to punish the two gods with death.

The forerunners were caught up in this intense struggle, and it continued for a long time.

With no sign of the conflict abating, the nameless one felt sorry for the forerunners, and made a red star fall from the far end of the heavens.

The dragon shattered the red star, but its shards put down roots in the land, and became dark tumors. These dark tumors spread over the continent.

The two gods disappeared, buried beneath the tumors, and the dragon crawled back into its bed.

However, the dragon had exhausted its strength in striking down the red star, and would never wake again.

The dragon died in its sleep.

No humans appeared in this story. That’s because the human race is a relative newcomer.

The forerunners were said to have been the ancestors of the elves, dwarves, centaurs, and kobolds. They look so different that it’s hard to believe that they all descended from the same race, but they have been living in this land for much longer than us humans.

And at the very least, both the elves and dwarves have legends of the forerunners, the primordial dragon, the two gods, and the red star.

The hornedfolk tribes of the Northern Frontier—that land of extreme cold—and the piratsians who made their home in the Nehi Desert also have a longer history in Grimgar than humans do. There are tales told of the two gods even among those peoples, who are not forerunners. The hornedfolk fear Grimgar’s red moon because they associate it with the red star, while the piratsians worship the primordial dragon as their ancestral deity.

Having escaped Riverside Iron Fortress through the secret passage, Ranta, Yume, and I headed east toward the Wonder Hole.

To describe it briefly, the Wonder Hole is a massive natural tunnel.

In this case, I use “natural” only in the sense that it wasn’t crafted by people. It would be hard to imagine that any race of people, human or otherwise, could have created it. Not that I could imagine a natural phenomenon capable of creating it either. The Wonder Hole is more than a hundred meters across, and based on the shape it took as it sloped into the ground, it looked to me like it could have been dug by some incredibly massive creature. It’s also so absurdly long that it barely felt like an exaggeration to say that it went on forever. It is truly beyond human comprehension.

The Wonder Hole had been known of since long, long ago. According to the old legends, the primordial dragon had made its bed on the continent, where it had slept until it was covered in dirt. Later, when the two gods and their followers had begun fighting, the primordial dragon had crawled out of its bed to stop them. Where was that bed? Here. The forerunners believed the Wonder Hole was the place the dragon slept. Their name for it was “the Bed of the Dragon.” They feared and revered it, and they made a point of never getting too close to it.

Apparently, the Kingdom of Arabakia had been investigating the Wonder Hole even before they had been forced to withdraw to the lands south of the Tenryu Mountains. But the exploration had only begun to progress in earnest after Alterna had been built, and volunteer soldiers started to take an interest in it.

Most humans thought that the Wonder Hole had been formed when a series of limestone caves, lava pipes, fissures, valleys, and other such formations connected with one another. But who can really say? I think the primordial dragon did exist, and that maybe the dragon’s bed might have too.

Now, did that mean the Wonder Hole in its entirety was the dragon’s bed? I’m not so sure about that. I suspect that it started with the dragon’s bed, and over time it expanded from there. I have no direct proof of this, but there is corroborating evidence.

We were more than a little surprised when we reached the Wonder Hole. It was unchanged. In fact, the closer we got, the fewer sekaishu we saw, and when we got within a kilometer of it, we didn’t see any at all. Not even those black scraps.

The slope leading down into the Wonder Hole was grassy, and giant herbivorous pseudo-chickens known as melruks were scattered around the area, seemingly not having a care in the world. It was a rustic scene, one that the Wonder Hole was famous for, and it hadn’t changed a bit.

“It’s way too peaceful here,” Ranta murmured, taken aback.

Yume, like the hunter she was, spotted something halfway down the slope and raced toward it.

Losing Itsukushima and Poochie had, as you’d expect, been a painful blow for Yume. But I can’t remember Yume ever getting particularly depressed about it. If I wanted to point to some sign that losing them was affecting her, maybe she was talking a little less. But that was about it. If anything, losing her father figure had made Yume stronger. She would later go on to birth a son and become a mother, but that was a choice she made, a proactive decision on her part.

Yume needed to become a mother. Not so much to preserve her bloodline, but because we needed to give birth to and raise a generation of children who would come after us. Looking back on it now, I think Yume felt it was her duty. Every living creature has an instinct to reproduce, and is naturally equipped for the task. Maybe Yume was just following that biological imperative, but she changed after Itsukushima’s death. I can’t help but feel that way.

What Yume found halfway down the slope was the ashes of a campfire, and traces of a rather large number of people having slept in the area. Her assessment was that fifty or so people had camped there, and after investigating for myself, I agreed with her.

“They were volunteer soldiers,” Ranta concluded. “The survivors from Riverside Iron Fortress fled here and set up camp.”

“Yume’s thinkin’ it wasn’t just one night. Maybe they were here a few days? There’s a spot a li’l ways away that they were usin’ as a toilet, and a dump where they discarded bones and stuff.”

“So they were hunting melruks to eat? They saw that the sekaishu were avoiding the area for some reason, so they camped here to recover their strength, and then entered the Wonder Hole...?”

The area around the Wonder Hole was apparently a safe haven. Though there were more survivors than I had expected, they must’ve only narrowly escaped from Riverside Iron Fortress nonetheless. It was no surprise that they had decided to stay there for a few days. In fact, I wouldn’t have blamed them if they’d settled there permanently.

But they’d gone into the Wonder Hole instead.

Why was that?

We debated the subject as we set up a campfire within the survivors’ former camp. Though I was loath to disrupt our newfound peace, even if it was only a temporary one, I killed a single melruk, butchered it, and ate it. The melruks in front of the Wonder Hole ran around and made a ruckus over the death of their friend, but they settled down soon enough and peace returned.

We knew of a watering hole less than a kilometer from where we were, and had a source of food. There was no need for us to be in any rush to decide our next move, so we remained in the survivors’ former camp for three, no, four days.

Thinking back on those four days soothes my heart, and fills me with a feeling of satisfaction.

We had lost many people who were important to us. Our past was nothing short of a disaster, and our future looked dark. Yet despite that, during those four days, I was probably happy. Was I looking away from the things I didn’t want to see, and avoiding the thoughts I didn’t want to think? Not necessarily.

We talked about things. Talked about them at length. There was no shortage of topics, many of which we could only have talked about between ourselves. I don’t think there was any subject we actively avoided.

We talked candidly about Kuzaku, Setora, and Shihoru.

And about Merry, the No-Life King.

Merry had died once, but a mysterious man named Jessie offered to bring her back, and I accepted. Jessie had been Jessie, and yet at the same time not Jessie. There had been something inside him that was not him.

In short, the No-Life King.

Established theory held that the No-Life King had died in 555 A.C. That’s weird on its own. What does it mean for an undying king to die? Didn’t people describe him as undying because he was unable to die?

The truth is that the No-Life King never died.

The No-Life King had been lurking inside other people all the way up to the present day. Even now, that monster is still alive.

Did Jessie deliberately tempt me into doing it? I’ve thought about that so much I’m sick of it, but he never forced me to do anything.

“She can come back to life, like me, who already died once.”

“But there is a price to pay.”

“She’ll be coming back in my place.”

“You people aren’t stupid, so you understand, right?”

“This isn’t normal.”

“It’s common sense that people can’t come back to life, and that’s a fact.”

That’s what Jessie had said.

He had told us that he could do it, but that his method for doing so went against the laws of nature, and we would pay a suitable price for it.

If I had been thinking clearly, would I have refused?

I couldn’t have.

No matter how many do-overs I might have been given, I would always have made the same choice. Merry had died, I had let her die, and I couldn’t leave it that way. I didn’t want to lose her. I’d have taken any deal, no matter how unfavorable, so long as it let me erase that loss.

That was why I didn’t regret having taken Jessie’s offer. Rather than fall into regret, self-blame, and self-pity, I needed to rack my brain and think about how to improve the situation we were in. That was the least I could do to atone. Even if it wasn’t something I could ever fully atone for, I had to do it.

I talked about that with Ranta and Yume while we stayed at the site of the survivors’ former camp in front of the Wonder Hole. I was probably quivering the entire time, but I managed to get what I wanted to say across without coming up short for words or breaking down into tears. I was on one side of the campfire, and Ranta and Yume were sitting on the other. They were naturally snuggling up to one another. Ranta was facing left, and Yume was facing right. Ranta had his right knee up, with his elbow resting on it. Yume’s knees were more relaxed. Ranta’s left and Yume’s right arm were touching.

“Man, if that’s what you think, I guess that’s how it was,” Ranta said quietly.

Yume puffed up her cheeks a little. “There’s no need to say it like that, ya dummy. It’s Haru-kun talkin’, and he’s talkin’ about Merry-chan. So this stuff affects all of us.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“If ya know, then ya coulda said it differently.”

“It doesn’t matter how I say it. Like it or lump it, we’re all in this together. I’m with you to the end. You got that, Haruhiro?” Ranta had called me by my actual name, and was looking me straight in the eye. “We’ve had our differences, yeah,” he continued. “And honestly, there were times when I thought we’d gone our separate ways. But I was wrong. I’m gonna stay the course now. I’ve made up my mind. Sure, you really don’t have what it takes to watch my back, but bitching and moaning isn’t gonna get us anywhere. It’s time to buck up. So struggle uselessly like you always do, and at least try to keep up.”

Did I nod in response? Make a clever remark? I don’t really remember, but I know one thing for certain: It was a huge relief to hear Ranta say that. It may well be that him saying that was what let me start thinking about the future.

So, why had the surviving volunteer soldiers entered the Wonder Hole? We came to the conclusion that they were looking for something. If the survivors were going to have any kind of future, then it had to lie somewhere beyond the Wonder Hole. The survivors had pushed forward to grasp some kind of hope.

But if we were correct about that, what exactly were they trying to find?

Soma was one possibility. The strongest volunteer soldiers hadn’t taken part in the recent battles. It wasn’t just Soma and his comrades who had been absent, though. The key members of the Day Breakers like the living legend Akira-san and the Typhoon Rocks had been absent too.

Soma was a warrior of such rare talent that everyone knew of him. Even now, after having seen his sword strike with enough power to split mountains and part the seas, I still am not able to fully gauge his skills. All I really understood about him was that he was really strong. As a person, he was very human once you got to know him, but everything about him seemed inhuman. Just how inhuman? Beyond what a mediocre guy like me could even comprehend. He was a genius. That kind of hackneyed word is all that comes to mind.

Unparalleled genius that he was, Soma couldn’t help but stand out, but the other members of the Day Breakers were no slouches either. Kemuri was an incredible paladin blessed with a solid physique, while Pingo was a necromancer who had the flesh golem Zenmai and was a talented mage on top of that. Lilia the elven sword dancer had mastered the blade to a degree that no human could ever hope to match. Shima the shaman was a healer and an ex-thief, and also adept at martial arts.

They were a well-balanced party, and overwhelmingly powerful.

It’s meaningless to ponder this, but if Soma’s party and Akira-san’s party had gone head to head, which would have come out on top?

Though he tended to say he was already over the hill, Akira-san had unsurpassed willpower, stamina, and experience, and from the outside he looked like he was still in his prime. In addition to Akira-san, there was also the dwarven axe-wielder Branken and the tall warrior Kayo, giving Akira-san’s party a collection of exceptionally powerful front-liners. They had a solid back row too. The young half-elf Taro was an amazing archer, their priest Gogh could also use magic, and they also had Miho, who was said to be the greatest mage of her generation. Akira-san and Miho were married, and up until Soma had appeared, it had been indisputable that they were the strongest volunteer soldiers alive.

There were also the Typhoon Rocks, who were every bit as unique as Soma or Akira-san’s parties. There was Kajita, the bald-headed berserker; the dread knight Moyugi, who was a tactician; Kuro the ex-hunter, a sublime warrior who was in tune with nature; Sakanami, who’d worked many jobs and was always unpredictable; and Tsuga, the ex-paladin who said he was a priest, but had a somewhat mysterious work history. It was no exaggeration to say they were a collection of badasses. They were right up there next to Soma and Akira-san in terms of their combat potential. If I said that they were the number three team, nobody would object.

That added up to eighteen people if you included the golem Zenmai. But they weren’t just eighteen people. They were eighteen people who each had the strength of a hundred, no, several hundred.

It’s possible that if they had joined in the battle from the beginning, Grimgar’s history would have unfolded very differently. If Soma and the others had been there, maybe the Southern Expedition could’ve been repelled. If that had happened, Jin Mogis never would have seized power in Alterna. The No-Life King might never have been revived, and we could have continued living our lives as volunteer soldiers while we tried to figure out how to get Shihoru back.

I don’t genuinely believe that, but the eighteen of them were powerful enough that I can’t help but wonder. Or maybe I’m overrating them?

For me, it’s all in the past—and not just a long time ago, but a different era. It’s so distant now, it feels more like a fantasy than reality. I once ran into a fire dragon in another world called Darunggar. The terrifying beast was huge, like a mountain, and could breathe fire. But maybe it wasn’t actually all that big. Maybe my memories have blown it up to many times its original size, turning it into a massive creature that resembles, but doesn’t actually match, the original.

Well, even if that is the case, for us volunteer soldiers back then, those eighteen people were figures who inspired absolute awe. Maybe the Typhoon Rocks were on a slightly lower tier than the other two, but that was mainly because Soma and Akira-san were just in a totally different class. It’s no lie to say that they were borderline deified. Heroes like them deserved to be treated like gods.

Those eighteen hadn’t joined in the fighting.

Why not?

Because they hadn’t been around.

Soma had been exploring the Wonder Hole. In the past, he had traveled through it to reach Undead DC, which was all the way up near the Northern Frontier, surrounded by the Great Whiterock Mountains. Because of that accomplishment, when Soma had announced that there were signs that the No-Life King would return and that he was founding a new superclan called the Day Breakers, everyone had found him reasonably persuasive. Soma had brought Akira-san and the Typhoon Rocks with him, and they’d continued exploring the Wonder Hole.

Actually, my comrades and I had also been members of the Day Breakers. I don’t know how Io and her party had joined up with them, but for us, it had just sort of happened. But because we’d spent so long in the Dusk Realm, and then Darunggar, and then Parano, we had no idea what Soma and the others had been up to. There’d always been a massive wall in between us.

Anyway, back to the Wonder Hole.

They had been focusing on exploring it.

I didn’t know this back then, but during the series of battles that had occurred, rather than being in the vicinity of the entrance to the Wonder Hole where the melruks lived, they had been hundreds of kilometers inside of it. They had infiltrated Undead DC, and had been on their way back through the hole when everything had gone down. So even if they had tried to return, they couldn’t have. They’d been much more than a couple days’ travel away. However, the volunteer soldiers had known where they had gone.

If they could simply join up with Soma, they would have a chance to get out of this alive. They could expect to be protected. Even if they couldn’t overcome the present situation, if they could at least survive it with Soma and the Day Breakers, there was hope for the future.

We only came to a final decision the night before we set out. There was no more directionless worrying about what our next move should be. Ranta and I both knew what we had to do. I’m sure it was the same for Yume too.

Did we have trouble making up our minds? We probably wanted to sit around that campfire, just the three of us, for as long as we could. But even so, the entire time, we had been making portable food like dried and smoked meat, drawing as much water as we could, and preparing to set out.

“I guess we should get going,” Ranta said, putting his arm around behind Yume’s back and pulling her close to him.

Yume tilted her head to the side, making a face that seemed to say, What’s that about? but she didn’t try to push Ranta away.

“Yeah,” I replied, nodding, and Ranta nodded back.

“Better get a good night’s sleep, then,” Yume said.

The next day, we entered the Wonder Hole.

The first part of it was less a cave, and more a valley that gradually sloped downward. The volunteer soldiers called that area the valley of holes. The valley was home to the small demi-humans known as spriggans, duergar, and bogies. They hunted melruks and often attacked each other, but this time we didn’t see any of them. There were only insects and small animals. The valley of holes was bizarrely quiet.

I’d heard that the Wonder Hole had recently been flooded with a new race of creatures called grendels.

Inside the massive structure of the Wonder Hole, there were numerous points where it connected to other worlds. Every once in a while, a team of volunteer soldiers would discover a new one, and when that happened, they’d start exploring the new frontier. But it was usually the other way around, with otherworldly creatures coming into Grimgar. The locals, having never seen or heard of these creatures before, would treat them as new races. If the need arose, they’d name them sometimes.

“Grendels” wasn’t what the new arrivals called themselves. It was a name the volunteer soldiers had given them. It wasn’t clear to anyone where the name had come from.

When we had awoken in Grimgar, our memories had been missing—or maybe I should say they’d been stolen or destroyed—anyway, all we had been able to remember was our names, and we’d forgotten almost everything else. We had been able to speak, and had possessed an understanding of the natural world, human society, and what was common sense. Sometimes, memories that clearly had nothing to do with Grimgar would come back to us too.

Did the word “grendel” come from one of those missing memories? I don’t know, but the first time I heard it, I had a vague sense that it was something horrifying. Maybe it was something that existed in the world that we’d come from? Or from a story told there?

Whatever the case, grendels were a major threat, both to the volunteer soldiers and to the creatures living in the Wonder Hole. Not just to the three kinds of demi-humans in the valley of holes. There had once been a colony of ant-like creatures known as the muryans in the next section beyond the valley of holes. The complex tunnels of the muryan nest were still there, but there was no sign of the muryans themselves.

According to Ranta, the three kinds of demi-humans and the muryans had been massacred by the grendels, and they were gone now.

The grendels dismembered their victims, removing heads, guts, bones, and teeth to take back with them. They were probably eating at least some of that.

For a long time, the valley of holes and the muryan nest had been littered with the dead bodies of the three demi-human races and the muryans. But eventually, the insects and smaller animals of the Wonder Hole must’ve eaten them or something, because we didn’t see them anywhere.

I can’t imagine that the three demi-humans and the muryans went extinct. They’d probably abandoned their homes and fled out of fear of the grendels.

This next part of the story took place after Alterna had been taken over by the orcs of the Southern Expedition.

Britney and the volunteer soldiers who’d escaped the city had been trying to set up base inside the Wonder Hole. Riverside Iron Fortress had also fallen, so there hadn’t been any other place for them to go.

The Wonder Hole had been one of the primary areas of volunteer soldier activity, so it was sort of like their backyard. There were obviously a lot of dangers, but any volunteer soldier worth his salt had camped out in the Wonder Hole at some point. Some of the creatures that came from other worlds were edible, and since it was underground, there was groundwater they could use. If that hadn’t been the case, then not even Soma and his group would have been able to survive their months-long dives into the hole that saw them traveling hundreds of kilometers into it—and over a thousand when the return trip was counted as well. I don’t know if it makes sense at this point to say home is where you make it, but the Wonder Hole was livable enough. Or it should have been.

Unfortunately, their timing had coincided with the grendels rapidly expanding their territory.

The Volunteer Soldier Corps had fought the grendels in the area that was referred to as the kingdom of devils, beyond the valley of holes and the muryan nest. Initially, between the corps and the regular forces of the Frontier Army—the real Frontier Army, before Jin Mogis had usurped that name—they’d had a force of over a hundred people who had escaped Alterna. That number had included a lot of priests and paladins, so they had been able to drive off the grendels with hardly any deaths. But though they had won, the grendels had made it very clear that they would not be easy foes.

At first, it had been over a hundred volunteer soldiers against less than ten grendels, but those ten had stubbornly refused to give up, and eventually, reinforcements had arrived to support them. The Volunteer Soldier Corps had ended up fighting around thirty grendels, but had somehow eventually managed to force them to withdraw.

After the battle, the corps had only been able to find five grendel corpses. Unlike the volunteer soldiers, the grendels hadn’t had magic to heal their wounded, yet the grendels had fought a long battle against a force more than three times their size with only five deaths.

They had high individual combat ability, communicated with what appeared to be some sort of language, and were skilled at fighting in groups. The grendels were terrifyingly accustomed to combat, like a natural warrior race.

That hadn’t been enough to force the Volunteer Soldier Corps to back down right away, but the grendels had attacked them every day after that, and sometimes more than once in the same day. Despite that, the volunteer soldiers had been able to endure the constant defensive battles, always coming out of them basically fine, but most of the regular forces had died.

Eventually, they had decided to retake Riverside Iron Fortress instead, and had left the Wonder Hole on November fifteenth, 659 A.C.

Two months after that, when Ranta, Yume, and I stepped into the kingdom of devils, it was so silent it made my ears hurt.

The rock walls were hewn into incredible structures—the work of creatures the volunteer soldiers had called baphomets.

The baphomets were humanoid creatures with goatlike heads who carried staves. They used those staves and their hands to make all kinds of things. They weren’t aggressive, and wouldn’t attack volunteer soldiers unless they were attacked first. They were the artists and architects of the Wonder Hole.

But the baphomets had abandoned the dwellings that they’d built there.

By the time the volunteer soldiers had fought the grendels, the baphomets had already left the kingdom of devils. Had they fled after having their fellows massacred by the grendels? Maybe they had moved somewhere else, and were still practicing their arts and architecture. I even found myself hoping that they were. The quiet hanging over the kingdom of devils was cruel and suffocating. This is a hackneyed way to describe it, but it was as silent as the grave.

The yellow-green lights around us looked less like the fruits of the baphomets’ diligent handiwork, and more like some kind of mood lighting meant to accentuate the heavy silence. I was carrying a lantern because some places in the Wonder Hole had no light at all. The sky was visible above the valley of holes, but we had needed to provide our own light in the muryan nest. The kingdom of devils was a different story.

It had been a while since I’d last been there, so I took a moment to think about whether it had been like this before. Had whatever gave off this yellow-green light always been there? Probably not. I asked Ranta and Yume, who said it was the first time they’d seen it.

We looked for the light’s source, and found that it was coming from a bunch of twelve-sided objects that could have fit in the palm of my hand. These dodecahedrons were made of thick glass or something, and they had a luminous object of some kind sealed inside. Also, upon closer inspection, we determined that the light wasn’t constant, but fluctuated slightly in strength.

I dunno how many there were. We found them on the cold, smooth stone floor, on the pillars the baphomets had created lining the passageway, and inside of rooms. There was no rhyme or reason to it. It felt like they’d just been placed anywhere they could be.

Yume frowned when I picked one up and looked it over. I felt that there was something off about it, and soon started to notice a certain unpleasant sensation.

“Oh...?” Ranta said, covering his ears with his hands.

When I saw him do that, I mentally went “Oh” myself and realized what was up.

Compared to the muryans’ nest, the kingdom of devils was so quiet that it made our ears hurt. But maybe that wasn’t quite right. Maybe my ears had been detecting an anomaly. A sound so quiet you couldn’t hear it, as such—or rather, something that wasn’t quite a sound. And it had gotten stronger. Not quite like a ringing in my ears, but maybe close to it. I made a mental connection between the phenomenon and the dodecahedron. Hadn’t the change occurred after I had picked it up?

I put the dodecahedron back down in the corner. I had a feeling it would be best if I put it exactly where I had found it. I did my best, but I wasn’t sure that I had gotten it exactly right. Still, when I put the dodecahedron back, the sensation that was like a ringing in my ears finally went away.

For a long time, we didn’t talk about it. I didn’t have a logical reason to feel this way, but on a gut level I just knew that we had messed up. And if we’d messed up, we weren’t going to walk away from it scot-free. We usually paid a price.

While there was clearly some kind of purpose behind the design of the kingdom of devils, to me it essentially looked like an apartment complex divided into four or five levels, with the individual “rooms,” which were neither particularly tall nor deep, completely open on the side that connected to the passageway.

We hid in a room on the third level with no dodecahedrons in it. Looking out from within the room, I was able to keep an eye on the one I had put back in its place out in the passageway. I had Ranta and Yume stay in the very back of the room, while I situated myself at the entrance to watch the dodecahedron.

I was using Stealth, just in case. It was an obvious precaution. But what if I got spotted anyway? I readied myself, playing through a number of scenarios in my head.

I don’t think I waited for long. Not that I was really waiting.

It would have been best if nothing came, although I suspected something would. Because I never expect things to go well.

The grendel wasn’t quiet by any means. He was wearing metal armor all over his body, as well as a poncho that was like a straw raincoat, woven out of some kind of hard fiber. He had a spherical object with two earlike protrusions over his head, and a peep hole in the front that looked like a cross between a W and a U, protected by some kind of lattice behind it. It wasn’t fine enough to block a needle, but it would have stopped a sword from being thrust through the opening.

He was carrying a weapon composed of a long handle with blades on either end of it, both of which were straight. The handle and blades were merged together and seemed unlikely to come apart unless the weapon was destroyed. It looked pretty solid and hefty.

They—the grendels, I mean—weren’t easy to tell apart at a glance. However, there were individual differences between them. Even the smaller grendels were at least 1.8 meters tall, while the larger ones stood at easily more than two meters. They were at least somewhat bigger than humans in pretty much every way—I guess they were built more similarly to orcs.

Also, they wore globes over their heads with varying numbers of protrusions. The vast majority of grendels had two, and they looked like ears because of that, but occasionally you saw a grendel with three. Grendels with four were less common than that, and those with five were rarer still. If my memory is correct, there have even been sightings of grendels with six or seven protrusions, but those were almost unheard of.

There were also differences in the shapes of their weapons, which were simply called double blades. The handles were a meter to a meter and a half long, with sword blades extending from either end. The blades could be straight-edged, sickle-shaped, cross-shaped, spear-like, or on rare occasions, even ball-ended. Was that because of personal preference? Fighting style? Tribe? I don’t know, but while the grendels’ weapons all had some basic features in common, there was some variety to them, even if it wasn’t particularly impressive.

This particular grendel’s weapon had a roughly two-meter handle, the blades were straight-edged, and he had two protrusions on his head. I guess you could say that he was a typical, ordinary grendel of average level. I know I’m repeating myself, but I had suspected that one might come, and he didn’t betray my expectations, so I wasn’t all that shaken up.

He came down the passageway toward us, making distinctive metallic sounds.

Hard metal armor grating against itself. Heavy objects striking against the floor. That was all the noises were, and yet there was something distinctive about those sounds when it was a grendel that was making them. Even now, I can remember them quite clearly. The moment I heard them, my immediate thought was I know what that is. They’re sounds that I’ve heard many, many times since then too. I doubt I’ll ever be able to forget them.

The grendel walked straight to the dodecahedron I’d put back. He was obviously seeking it out. He was holding his weapon in his right hand, but then he transferred it to his left before crouching down with a rattling noise to pick up the dodecahedron on the ground. I assumed that meant he was right-handed.

With the dodecahedron resting in the palm of the grendel’s hand, that sensation like my ears were ringing started again.

Here’s what I think might have been going on.

Those dodecahedrons activated when they were moved from the spot they had been placed in. This was the sound they made when activated, and it was a sort of alarm. Grendels were able to detect that alarm even from a long distance away. When I had moved the dodecahedron earlier, that had triggered the alarm, and the grendel had heard it and had come to check.

The grendel passed the dodecahedron to his left hand, returning his weapon to his right, then began wandering around the area. His spherical headpiece with its two protrusions slowly turned right, then left, then up, and then returned to looking straight forward. He seemed to be looking around. Was he searching for something? For whoever had moved the dodecahedron? In other words, for me?

He went back and forth without entering any rooms. That was no reassurance, though. I kept my guard up, but I didn’t feel any fear. It’s not that I was confident he wouldn’t find me. I had no choice but to stay still and keep my Stealth up regardless. In times like those, my mind went almost completely blank. If I had started thinking, then a mediocre guy like me would have had trouble staying calm. I think I knew from experience that uneasiness invited mistakes. Experience. In the end, experience was the only thing I could rely on. Experience can also lead to preconceptions, which are another source of errors, but I needed to have something to guide me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to take a single step forward. I wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere.

How long did he keep looking for us? It might have been ten, maybe fifteen minutes. But then the grendel suddenly came to a stop in the middle of the passageway, and set the dodecahedron down on the floor.

Was he putting it back again? No, that wasn’t it. He brought his right foot down on the dodecahedron, and it didn’t look like he was just stepping on it. It was more like he was striking it with his heel. When he moved his foot off of the dodecahedron, the object was no longer emitting light. It had definitely been giving off a yellow-green glow before then. Was it broken? It didn’t look like it had been crushed. But anyway, he picked up the extinguished dodecahedron, and then he left.

Even once the grendel was out of sight, and the metallic sounds had faded away, it was several minutes before I moved again. I was mentally sorting out what he’d been doing.

First, the dodecahedron had set off an alarm when I’d moved it. That alarm had attracted the grendel. He’d checked the specific dodecahedron that had sounded the alarm. That dodecahedron had been returned to its original place, but the grendel had still searched for intruders. He hadn’t been able to find us. He had then stepped on the dodecahedron to extinguish it, and carried it away.

I relayed everything I had seen to Ranta and Yume.

“Guess that means the dodecahedrons are alarms, then, huh? Looks like we shouldn’t go touching ’em carelessly,” said Ranta. “And by the way, don’t just go messing around with stuff like that, you dolt, Parupiro. I mean, those things were clearly suspicious. Shouldn’t you have been able to figure that much out right away? Are you an idiot? Yeah, you are, huh? Man. You’ve always been such an idiot. Sheesh...”

Sometimes Ranta would bad-mouth me like this, trying to make me mad. It was just his way of communicating. Although he never explained this to me himself, I knew he was always trying to suss out what other people really felt. No matter what their real feelings were, it was more valuable to hear the truth than it was to hear some polite words, platitudes, or other things people might say to keep up appearances. I think that’s how Ranta felt about it.

Regardless, if the dodecahedrons were alarms, then that meant the grendels were on guard against something. There hadn’t been alarms before, so the grendels must’ve been preparing themselves to deal with an enemy—and a new enemy coming from the direction of the Wonder Hole’s entrance at that.

Is that good news? Or is it the opposite?

I couldn’t be sure one way or the other, but no one suggested we turn back.

We decided to continue on past the kingdom of devils. Obviously, if anything went wrong, we were going to run away immediately. Without anyone who could cast light magic, we needed to avoid taking even minor injuries.

Why didn’t the three of us choose to take no risks, and just survive together? That wasn’t an option that ever occurred to us. But why was that? Thinking back on it now, I can’t help but wonder, but at the time, pushing forward felt like the natural thing to do.

If we’d had nothing to hope for but survival, we would have made that our sole focus for lack of other choices. But we believed that if we steeled ourselves and pressed onward, there was a possibility that we could reunite with comrades. There might have been a better future waiting for us.

Instead of living for the sake of living, people choose to live for hope. In other words, if you have hope, you might die, but you might also live. However, without hope, you can only die. Isn’t that just how it is to be human?

People can remain human as long as they have hope. Although, truthfully, that might be nothing more than wishful thinking on my part.

On the other side of the kingdom of devils there were several kilometers of limestone cave. The caves had dodecahedrons scattered throughout them too, casting a yellow-green light over all the stalactites and stalagmites. It was a breathtakingly beautiful scene, but there was no time to stop and take in the sights.

There was a dome-like structure about a hundred meters into the limestone cave area.

It was made up of more than ten frames, twelve to be precise—yeah, it was twelve—that had translucent walls inside of them. There was also a luminous object inside, giving off more of that yellow-green light, and I could make out the shape of someone sitting inside of it.

It was something we would see countless times after that—a grendel tent. We could tell from the outside that there was only a single grendel in there.

Later we would learn that while some tents only had room for one, there were also tents that had room for three or four, and even larger ones that could house upward of ten grendels. They all had the same shape, though. Domes made up of twelve frames using translucent materials. The grendels inside were usually sitting. I’ve never seen a grendel walking around inside one of their tents, except for when they were going in or coming out of it. They didn’t lie down either. It can’t be because they don’t sleep, but to the best of my knowledge, grendels never lie down.

I had Ranta and Yume stand by while I thoroughly scoped things out. I checked out the area past the tent too. There wasn’t another tent anywhere for more than a kilometer, and no sign of other grendels.

There was one tent and one grendel. My guess was that this grendel would rush to any alarms that activated in the kingdom of devils or the limestone cave and check for enemies. Something like a sentry, I suppose. And if so, he was all alone, covering a fairly wide swath of territory.

After I returned, did we spend a long time discussing what to do? I don’t have any recollection of that. I had been considering whether we could take him out while I was scouting. When I got back, I found that Ranta and Yume had been thinking the same thing, and the argument was more about how we would strike than if we were going to.

“It’s three against one. If we can’t win in this situation, we’re not gonna get anywhere,” Ranta said.

“And then it’d be back to livin’ the campfire life, huh?” Yume added.

“It doesn’t seem like the grendels go outside at all, so if we have to, we can just hightail it for the exit. Easy.”

Ranta would play decoy. He would approach the tent, let the grendel spot him, and see how it reacted. Meanwhile, I’d move into a position where I could get behind the grendel unnoticed. Ranta would lure the grendel out of its tent and fight it, and Yume would join in. If it looked like there was no hope of us winning, I would distract it, and then we’d bail. If it looked like we could fight it, we’d take it on together. If anything seemed strange, like if we saw something other than the grendel moving, we’d put our safety first and retreat.

“This is the stuff. For all my complaining, this part really makes my heart pound,” Ranta said before we moved into action. “In the end, we’re volunteer soldiers. Violence is our way of life. We’re incurable.”

Was I like that too? I don’t think I was all fired up. I’ve never liked fighting, and I still hate it now. But even if I wasn’t burning with passion, it’s true I was ready to kill, so I was just as bad as he was.

I went ahead, moving ten meters past the tent, and crouched down behind a stalagmite. I was carrying a dagger and a short sword that had a blade shaped like a flame. My wrists had been wounded when I had lost to a man named Takasagi, and they hadn’t fully healed yet, but they weren’t so bad that I couldn’t wield a weapon. I held the dagger in my right hand, ready to strike. There was no need to give all my cards away from the beginning.

Though he wasn’t on my level as a thief, Ranta could mask his steps too. He was carrying a nameless katana. I think it had once belonged to Takasagi. Ranta had already drawn it. His footsteps were nearly silent, but he wasn’t even trying to hide. Ranta was boldly approaching the grendel tent. I had no clue where Yume was, though. Was she hiding somewhere? Once Ranta started fighting the grendel, she was probably planning to launch a surprise attack and back him up.

Yume was a pacifist by nature, and not bloodthirsty at all. Yet despite that, she had a natural sense for battle, and was incredibly athletic.

I’m glad the two of them left their bloodlines in this world. Knowing that those two have descendants is enough to make me feel incredibly emotional on its own, but their genes are also incredible. If Grimgar is going to have a future, then their blood may help carve a path to it. Though, that’s just my selfish hope.

When Ranta was about three meters from the tent, the grendel inside started to move, grabbing his weapon and rising to one knee. The dome-shaped tent had twelve frames which supported it. The walls were twelve translucent facets. And as the grendel was standing up, he put his left hand on the facet nearest to Ranta. When he did, the translucent wall became completely transparent. Or rather, it disappeared.

The grendel pounced out through the opening, and attacked.

Two protrusions. A straight-edged double blade. Roughly two meters tall. This was probably the same grendel that had come to investigate the dodecahedron in the kingdom of devils.

There was a metallic sound as he lunged, rapidly swinging his weapon, not vertically, not horizontally, but two times diagonally. If Ranta had stayed where he was, then he definitely would have been cleanly bisected. But Ranta wasn’t going to just sit there and get cut up without a fight.

The dread knights have a technique in their unique fighting style called Missing. My understanding is that it casts an illusion on the enemy by using muscles that humans don’t usually use, and with timing that we find unnatural. Basically, it catches the enemy off guard and makes them misread the dread knight. That’s simple enough to say, but it isn’t so easy to actually do.

Ranta slipped through the grendel’s blade, easily moving around to behind him on the left side. Now, it’s obviously impossible for him to have actually slipped through the blade; that was just how it looked.

The grendel seemed to lose track of Ranta for a moment, but found him again quickly enough. He closed in and took another two diagonal swings at the dread knight, but the result was exactly the same as the first time. Ranta slipped through the grendel’s blade, easily moving around to behind him on the right side.

Ranta smirked. He was probably thinking something like, Hey, it works.

That said, the grendel wasn’t an easy foe. He didn’t press the attack, but swung his blades in a composed manner as he got a read on what Ranta was doing. His body was facing Ranta, but he occasionally turned his head back and forth. The enemy didn’t think Ranta was alone. Or at the very least, hadn’t ruled out the possibility that Ranta wasn’t his only opponent. He was thinking that there might be others. But at the same time, he wasn’t being hasty. His movements felt calm.

Yume hasn’t made her move yet. I won’t either. It’s not time.

Ranta held his katana in both hands, bending both knees as he lowered himself. His back was bent quite heavily, and he never stayed still for a moment. He was constantly swaying in all directions.

What will his next move be?

“Pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa.” Ranta brought his lips together and blew air through them repeatedly, making an odd noise. I don’t think there was any particular meaning to it. But maybe his opponent would read into it and think that there might be.

The grendel didn’t react. He wasn’t going to be thrown off by Ranta acting a little weird.

“Heh.”

Ranta smiled faintly. A moment later, he jumped hard to the right—or so I thought, but then he was on the left. Then again to the right. No. The left.

The grendel swung his weapon in a quick, compact motion. To the right. That was where Ranta appeared, swinging his katana down diagonally. The grendel had read his moves, and was trying to block his slash.

However, Ranta disappeared again. No, he hadn’t vanished. Ranta was still there. In front of the grendel. Down low. He was thrusting his katana upward from a low posture. Ranta was aiming for the grendel’s exposed neck, in between the straw-raincoat-like poncho and the globe-shaped helmet with two protrusions.

The grendel reflexively leaned back, dodging Ranta’s thrust. Could the grendel recover from that position? Would he try to attack despite his unbalanced posture, in an attempt to drive Ranta off?

No. He did no such thing. The grendel simply rolled backward. Then, as he got up from his backward roll, he swung.

Ranta used a move that wasn’t quite a step, and wasn’t a jump, but was rather this sort of smooth shuffling of his feet to get out of the way of the grendel’s weapon. The grendel didn’t follow up on his attack, and Ranta was able to put some distance between them.

“Whew...” Ranta broke into a grin. “You’re good. But with the way you look, I wouldn’t’ve expected you to be so straightforward—”

In the middle of Ranta’s bantering, the grendel suddenly charged in with no warning, swinging his double blade around in circles.

“Whoa! Yo! Hah!”

Using the same moves that I described before, Ranta slipped through the blade to the left, and to the right, and got behind his opponent. The more the grendel attacked, the more chances he gave Ranta to figure out his moves. For a speedy guy like Ranta, if he could see the enemy’s moves coming, he could react.

A moment later, a small shower of sparks came from between them. It was Ranta. His katana had hit the grendel. But even when he landed a blow, it didn’t so much as make the grendel flinch. Ranta was attacking while evading a double blade that was spinning around like a windmill caught in the gale, so there was no way he’d be able to land a decisive blow. But were his attacks really that ineffective?

The grendel’s helmet, armor, and poncho—together, they were a terrifyingly effective defense. And the grendel was fast too. I’m sure part of the reason for that was his incredible strength, but his armor must have also been designed to not interfere with his movement.

And there was that weapon too. Not only could it thrust and slash, it could also make use of centrifugal force for spinning attacks. Spinning attacks inevitably left openings, but the grendel could afford to take a few blows from his opponent and still be fine. He had good armor, so they didn’t faze him.

He made use of unusual tools like the dodecahedron alarms that doubled as lights and the translucent tent, and he looked bizarre to our eyes, but like Ranta had said earlier, the grendel’s fighting style was straightforward and steady, without any holes in it.

Was it about time for Yume to do something? If she hadn’t acted yet, then it meant she couldn’t afford to. If Yume was going to make a move in this situation, it would be when Ranta got into trouble.

As things stood, the grendel’s attacks weren’t decisive enough. Though, maybe it’s not fair to the grendel for me to put it that way? Ranta was only able to keep dodging the grendel’s double blade because of his unorthodox and, in some ways, supernatural movements. I could never have done that. I’m sure even Yume would only have been able to go toe-to-toe with the grendel for a minute at most, maybe less.

Ranta had an unusually high amount of stamina, but he was still human, so he had his limits, and his moves were gradually getting less sharp. Eventually, he wouldn’t be able to move his legs anymore.

It should be the same for the grendel. But even if the grendel runs out of stamina first, can we beat it? Is there any way we can kill that creature? How?

I decided to make a move. I came out of the shadow of the stalagmite, and closed in on the grendel’s back as it was trading blows with Ranta. Ranta had detected me, but was pretending he hadn’t. We were perfectly in sync on that. I knew Ranta, and Ranta knew me. Possibly better than either of us knew anyone else. That didn’t mean we knew everything. It was a partial understanding. But the parts of each other that we did know were core to us, and if we knew them, then we knew everything that mattered.

That’s why he had me do what I did.

I didn’t want to do it, but I had no other choice.

Who else but me could have done it?

I’m not glad that I did, though. Not one bit.

But if it had to be done, and if it was what he wanted—no, I and I alone know that it was what he wanted. I know it all too well. And that’s why I had to do it.

Ranta slipped through the grendel’s blade, heading right, with motions that flowed like water, flapping his lips as he moved away from the enemy.

“Pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa...”

Those weird noises he was making seemed to chase after him.

He can’t be messing around at a time like this. No, that’s not it. It’s intentional.

The grendel tried to attack Ranta by following that sound, or perhaps he was lured in by it.

Just one more step, and my dagger would reach the grendel’s back. That was why Ranta chose this moment to deliberately draw the grendel’s attention.

But the grendel apparently knew he was being baited. He didn’t swing for Ranta, but tried to turn.

Did he know someone—namely, me—was behind him?

Either way, I was faster. I didn’t bury my dagger in the grendel’s back. He was covered in armor there, and wearing a poncho made of metallic fiber on top of it. It wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t pierce that.

I held my dagger with a backhand grip and struck his poncho. I felt my blade scratch it, but I was already moving around to his left side, kicking his right knee as a parting blow. That gave me momentum, and I quickly jumped away. If I was lucky, that would be enough to throw him off-balance. And even if it wasn’t, wouldn’t it at least make an opening for Ranta to attack?

“Hyahhhh!”

Right after I kicked the grendel’s knee, Ranta used his katana to smack that globe-shaped helmet with the two protrusions on it twice, from the right and the left. They weren’t light taps either; he was really whaling on it. Maybe a little too hard.

Was it doing anything? I don’t know, but the grendel showed signs of faltering. That said, its helmet wasn’t cracked open, or even dented. It wasn’t knocked askew either. And the grendel was going to counterattack soon.

“Mewwwwww!”

That was when Yume made her move.

It didn’t surprise me, and probably didn’t surprise Ranta either. If anything, Ranta leaning too hard into hitting the grendel’s head had been a lead-in to this.

Yume appeared beside the grendel and pounced. A flying kick. She went high—surprisingly high. If it were me, I’d have gone for its back, but Yume wasn’t me. She was bolder than I was. Yume planted a jump kick on the grendel’s face. With both feet. The grendel was bowled over. And as for Yume, she executed a midair spin and landed with style.

“Meow!”

“How’d you like that, Paru!”

I could understand Parupiro, but where the heck had “Paru” come from?

I swallowed any complaints I had, though, and took off running, and now that little moment is something I look back on fondly.

We got the hell out of there.

I think we spent the next forty-seven days just running around and fleeing from the grendels that we couldn’t have beaten even if we had ever tried to fight them again. Were we simply trying to grasp some sort of victory, no matter how small it might have been?

Thanks to Ranta and Yume, I wasn’t crushed by reality. But what, ultimately, were we even trying to accomplish? If you’d asked me that back then, I would’ve had a hard time answering. But though they were physically taxing, when I look back on them, the impression I have of those forty-seven days is that they really weren’t all that bad. Maybe the reason I’m able to feel that way is because I now know for a fact that our seemingly pointless struggle actually did have meaning to it.