Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 20 - Chapter 3

3. The Difference Between All of You and Me

Forty-seven days. I just happened to keep track of the number, and I haven’t forgotten it since for whatever reason.

Narrating what went on during those forty-seven days would only bore you. After all, we never got to the point where we could fight the grendels on even footing during those forty-seven days, nor did we manage to kill one of them using any kind of unorthodox tactic. All we did to the grendels was harass them.

Even with the three of us working together, we couldn’t defeat even a single lone grendel. Well, maybe if we’d fought them to the death there would have been a chance, but there was no way we were going to do that.

What could we do, then?

We tried to put together something resembling a strategy, but no matter what ideas we came up with, we basically never put them into action. The holes in our plans would come out as we discussed them, and we’d always decide they weren’t realistic.

It wasn’t going to be easy to kill that sentry grendel. So, was there some way we could get around him? In order to find out, we tested various things, like what triggered those dodecahedral alarms, and how he would react when they went off.

I’m pretty sure it was on the eighth day that I tried applying a powerful shock to one to turn it off, and ended up having to fight the sentry grendel when he came to the kingdom of devils. It went pretty much the same way as our first fight with him. We ran. And that time, we fled all the way outside the Wonder Hole, and spent another night at the survivors’ former camp.

The sentry grendel started sitting outside his tent, not in it. There was no question that he was wary of us.

If I moved alone, I could slip past the sentry grendel undetected. I passed through the limestone cave area, and went as far as an area that was known as the voxels beyond that.

I unfortunately have no idea what the word voxel means, but there were a whole lot of cubic stones of varying sizes there. The floors and walls were made up of them too.

Had some otherworldly creature dug through there and created those cubic stones? Or were they some kind of remains? Or maybe an effect of magic or something? People had a lot of guesses about them, but nobody knew anything for certain.

Anyway, the volunteer soldiers called them cubes. The voxels area was full of nothing but cubes.

Those dodecahedrons were scattered around the voxels too, emitting their yellow-green light, and there were a couple more grendel tents as well. I spotted one small tent that was just big enough for the single grendel sitting in it, and a larger one that housed three, before returning to the room in the kingdom of devils where Ranta and Yume were waiting, where I passed on what I had learned.

A few days after that, the grendels came to the kingdom of devils even though we hadn’t done anything to set off the dodecahedrons. And it wasn’t just the lone sentry. That time, there were three of them.

The grendel trio searched every nook and cranny of the kingdom of devils. I’m not sure I would have been able to hide until they went away even if I’d been on my own. For lack of any better options, we made the decision to flee the room that we were staying in well before the grendels got close to it. They chased us, but we managed to get away. I guess you could say we picked up a useful piece of information during that encounter—that we could outrun them. But then, Yume and I, being a thief and a hunter, used light equipment, and so did Ranta, plus the three of us were all light on our feet. The grendels weren’t slow, despite how heavy their equipment was, nor did they tire quickly. It was definitely not the case that grendels were significantly slower than humans.

After that, out of an abundance of caution, I went to the kingdom of devils by myself, and I found they had set up a tent there—a small one, with one grendel inside.

I continued on to the limestone cave, and found that the tent that had previously been there was gone, replaced by a larger one. There were two grendels inside it, and a third sitting right outside. It looked like they’d changed their security arrangements. I couldn’t imagine that being a very positive development. They were probably getting serious about dealing with us. That was bad news.

Or was it?

We felt a sense of impending crisis, but somewhere in our hearts, maybe we were happy about the change in the situation. We wanted to do something. Our greatest enemy wasn’t the grendels, who we couldn’t beat in a fight; it was our own sense of powerlessness.

We couldn’t do anything. There was nothing to do. It all seemed hopeless. But if something happened to disrupt the status quo, then we’d do what we could to capitalize on it, no matter what ‘it’ was.

The grendels had pushed into the kingdom of devils, where we’d been able to stay before. We had to do something about that. Just racking our brains over what we should do, or what we needed to do, felt like doing something. But we were struggling in vain.

There were survivors deeper inside the Wonder Hole. There was a chance that we would be able to reunite with people we knew, maybe even people we’d fought shoulder to shoulder with. We had things to hope for, but almost no prospect of obtaining them.

We were stuck in the region around the entrance of the Wonder Hole, with no foothold that would allow us to progress. Honestly, I suspect that we were beginning to feel like we’d never be able to move forward. We couldn’t even kill a single grendel. If there were tons more of them further in, we were clearly out of luck.

Even so, we kept pestering the grendels in the kingdom of devils. Occasionally, their numbers would be bolstered by reinforcements from the limestone cave. The grendels began laying dodecahedrons in the muryan nest too. Eventually, I went and scouted the voxels again, and found that there were more tents in the area than before, along with quite a few more grendels. When things started getting dicey, we left the Wonder Hole. Then, when the enemy settled down, we headed back in there again.

If we kept at it, there was a chance that we’d find an opening eventually. I feel like I remember Ranta saying something along those lines, but I’m not sure he even believed it himself.

Forty-seven days. That’s how long we lived like that, but even if it had gone on for a hundred days, it probably would have just been more of the same. I think we could have kept at it for two hundred, even three hundred days with no change. If we could have done the same thing for years and years, then at some point, would we have been able to say that, in a way, we were happy? I wonder about that, looking back on it now. Maybe I can think that way because of how things turned out. On the forty-seventh day. Though, to be precise, there were signs of what would happen before that.

The grendels’ behavior changed. On the forty-fifth day, I was scouting out the limestone cave by myself, and there was only a single grendel sitting outside of a medium-sized tent. I remember thinking it was weird that he was all by himself. They had been gradually intensifying their security prior to that, but on that day their numbers had suddenly thinned out. I had no idea what could be going on.

I didn’t go as far as the voxels. I got the feeling it would be dangerous to do so.

The next day—the forty-sixth—the tent in the kingdom of devils was empty. The sentry grendel was gone. And there was once again only one grendel in a tent within the limestone cave.

Then, on the forty-seventh day, I went to the kingdom of devils with Ranta and Yume. The tent was vacant, like before, and we saw no sign of the grendel. But that wasn’t all. We continued on to the limestone cave, where the medium-sized tent there had likewise been abandoned. The grendels were gone. That actually made me more uneasy, and Ranta got all worked up about it.

“There’s gotta be something up. I mean, something musta happened to them. Maybe we can move on now?”

I was still cautious, or rather, timid and indecisive. “Even if we push ahead, if there’s even a single grendel, we won’t be able to keep going.”

“Well, how about tryin’ and seein’, then? And if it’s no good, we can come back here real quick,” Yume suggested.

“Yume’s right,” Ranta said. “We’ll go as far as we can, then bail if it looks bad. That settles it.”

We headed through the limestone cave toward the voxels.

Though Ranta and Yume had both been to the cave before, that was their first time in the voxels. There were an incredible number of cubes piled up in the voxels, which was a bizarre sight and a huge contrast to the beauty of the limestone cave. But I had seen it many times before, and Ranta and Yume weren’t exactly mesmerized by the unusual view either.

The moment we entered the voxels, we heard swords clashing. And voices too. Human-sounding voices.

“Hey!”

Ranta didn’t need to say anything more than that. I took off running, and the other two raced to keep up with me. I think I totally lost my head at that point. The voxels were filled with pillars and hills made of cubes. Visibility wasn’t great. But though I couldn’t see who was shouting, I could tell the voices were probably human, and what was more, they sounded familiar. I knew those people.

I raced between numerous pillars of cubes, and climbed up and down several hills, before coming to a stop close to the summit of one of them.

There they were. Humans, at the foot of the hill. They were armed. Volunteer soldiers. The volunteer soldiers were fighting. Against the grendels, of course.

We had a pretty good view of it in the yellow-green light of the dodecahedrons. I counted five people, and was able to identify them in an instant.

There was a priest wearing glasses. But despite being a priest, he was wielding a warhammer. A massive one, larger than anything I could ever hope to swing. It was Tada. Tada of the Tokkis. I watched as he hammered a grendel’s head and pulverized it.

There was a mage too. Though, mage or not, she was holding an impressive longsword in each hand. The tall woman swung her blades around gloriously. Despite being a magic user, she didn’t hesitate to block the double blade of the grendel she was fighting, and was holding her ground even if she couldn’t push it back. Mimori. It was Mimorin.

They were alive.

After we’d found Tokimune’s remains at Riverside Iron Fortress, I’d half given up, no, almost entirely given up on them. They’re the Tokkis. Tada, Mimori, and the others would’ve fought to the end alongside Tokimune. I’d had a pretty strong feeling about that, given how tight the bond between them had been. But knowing Tokimune, it was possible he had sacrificed himself to clear a path for his precious comrades to get out alive. If Tokimune had ordered them, Move onward, my friends, with his bravery and good cheer, they’d have swallowed their tears and forged ahead without looking back. That was the kind of people the Tokkis were.

Tada had crushed a grendel, and Mimori had pulled another away, boldly fighting it one-on-one. But while Tada might have had the strength for it, Mimori was a woman. Sure, she was blessed with height and skilled with her blades, but it was hard for me to imagine her being able to push through a grendel’s defenses. Who knew how long she would be able to keep fighting it evenly. Not that there was any need for Mimori to hold on. As I’d crested the hill, I’d witnessed Tada crushing one grendel, and Mimori crossing blades with another. That was pure coincidence. I had only witnessed one scene of the battle. But one scene flows into the next, and things never stop changing.

Someone let out an enthusiastic “Hey!” and rammed his body into the grendel Mimori was fighting. Well, not so much his body as his shield. The shield bash knocked the grendel off-balance.

“Kikka!”

Ranta shouted the man’s name with glee. Though, to be perfectly accurate, his name wasn’t Kikka, it was Kikkawa, but I guess Ranta mispronounced it in the heat of the moment.

Once his shield bash was successful, Kikkawa pulled back. Mimori didn’t push the attack, though. Someone else landed the finishing blow on the grendel.

“Hi-yahhhhhh!”

A warrior named Ron with close-cropped hair charged in, swinging a greatsword that looked like a massive meat cleaver at the grendel with pure brute force. It wasn’t as easy to do as that description made it sound, though. Without an uncommon amount of strength and more guts than most people had, attacking effectively that way would have been impossible. It also required experience. Unless someone had experience in battle, they wouldn’t be able to really put their strength to use when the time came for it. That was why warriors who fought the way Ron did tended to lose their lives before they learned to fight like that. Like my comrade Moguzo had.

The road to becoming a powerful warrior is a thorny one, and there aren’t any shortcuts to speed things along. You simply have to keep trudging along an incredibly steep path, with thorns scratching you from all sides. Ron had plodded his way up that path, and had eventually reached a pinnacle of sorts. It was possible that Tada, despite being a priest, had attained a similar level of skill.

However, the other warrior among the combatants—who had been lopping off the right arm and then the head of another grendel while Ron had been making his move—was cut from a different cloth. He had a bulkier build than Ron or Tada, and his overall physical attributes were off the charts.

Did he rely more on strength or finesse? If I had to pick, I’d have to guess strength. But strength wasn’t all he had. There was flexibility in his incredible power. He was fast, but he varied his speed, and almost never stopped moving. Even when he was completely still, he seemed to be flowing gently. He was incomparably intense, yet aloof. He was impossible to resist, and demanded submission, like a majestic force of nature.

I know that he was also intelligent. In terms of his personality, he could be tough to deal with. He wasn’t very open, and seemed obstinate. But on the other hand, he took things as they came, and had a mature, philosophical look in his eyes as he regarded other people. His swordsmanship was forceful in a way that completely swallowed up his opponents. He wasn’t bound by form, and transcended mere adaptability. He had an unimpeded flexibility that seemed to not even care whether he won or lost.

His silver hair was even longer than the last time I’d seen him. He wasn’t wearing that armor of his, the relic Aragarfald, but it was obvious that he wouldn’t be. Because I had seen the night-clad one wearing it, I’d mistakenly assumed that he must have died at Riverside Iron Fortress with Tokimune and Britney. I had even convinced myself that it was him inside the night-clad one we had encountered there.

I had awoken in Grimgar on the same day as Renji, and we had enlisted at the same time, but we weren’t comrades, nor was he my friend. He’d always been special. And I wasn’t. I was middle of the pack at best. Or more like the bottom of the barrel. But he was just built differently.

Anyone could have guessed that he was going to rise to the top. And that was exactly what he’d done. He was a bird that soared into the sky, while I was an insect crawling on the ground. If we hadn’t happened to enlist at the same time by pure chance, then I never would have even had the chance to look him in the eye. We lived in different worlds. Normally, we’d never have met, but we had both coincidentally been in Grimgar.

Renji was wearing something like a breastplate, but other than that, his armor was minimal. His weapon of choice hadn’t changed. He was still using the single-edged greatsword that he had taken off the orc Ish Dogran. But knowing him, he probably could have torn through these grendels with nothing more than a rusty, bent blade.

How many grendels had Renji and the others encountered here in the voxels? Even just in the time since I had climbed the hill, Tada had crushed one, Ron had hacked up another, and Renji had cut down a third. There were more grendels around them collapsed on the ground—and grendels normally didn’t even lie down to rest.

Only one grendel was left standing. Renji turned to face him, holding the sword of Ish Dogran in a fighting stance. Though, actually, while I called it a fighting stance, in reality he was simply holding his blade in one hand, with his arm held straight out, pointing at the grendel. His stance was wider than his shoulders, and his knees weren’t even bent. He was basically just standing there.

I can recall Ranta staring intently at Renji at that moment. What a guy, I thought. Ranta was trying to learn from Renji. If there was anything he could steal, he was going to do it. It was absurd to try to use Renji as a reference. It was like a turtle watching a horse gallop and trying to figure out how to run like that, even though there’s no way a turtle could ever run like a horse.

“Uuuuuueeeeeeehhhhhhh.” The grendel let out a low groan, then began spinning his blade around in a figure-8 motion.

He was a good head taller than Renji, and his helmet had more than two protrusions. It had three. The blades of his double blade were like iron balls with spikes, so maybe it wasn’t exactly correct to call them blades. Regardless, this grendel was way tougher than the ones with only two protrusions.

The grendel made the first move. But from where I was standing, it looked like all he was doing was slowly approaching Renji, trying to get the weapon he was already spinning around to mow down his foe. That seemed easy enough to avoid.

Renji stepped aside, out of the way of the grendel’s blade. But the grendel didn’t stop; he just kept pursuing Renji, who evaded again in the same manner. The two of them were moving in circles. The grendel kept spinning his weapon, but didn’t strike out with it.

We were all silent—not just Ranta, Yume, and I, but the rest of the volunteer soldiers as well—and we barely moved at all. Everyone was watching with bated breath.

I gradually figured it out. The weapon that the grendel was swinging around probably had the power to inflict a one-hit kill. It had a long handle, and considerable reach. If Renji got in range, the weapon would strike immediately. It was like there was a weapon that could kill with a touch coming at him.

On top of that, despite being isolated and alone, the grendel seemed perfectly composed. His steps weren’t short, but he was clearly taking them at a relaxed pace. There was no telling when he might pick up the pace and go in for a sudden attack.

I doubt I could have kept my cool in the face of an attack like that. I’d always end up thinking, This is bad. I need to do something.

“Renji!”

Someone shouted Renji’s name. It was that mage who wore black-rimmed glasses. Adachi. He had joined up at the same time as us, and was one of Renji’s comrades.

“Back off,” Renji said, probably to Adachi.

The mage simply adjusted his glasses, saying nothing in response.

The grendel increased the pressure right after that. It looked to me like his stride suddenly doubled in length. Renji’s sideward movement sped up to match him. The grendel changed things up further, altering the way he was swinging his weapon. Its reach grew considerably.

Renji jumped back. Had that panicked him? No, that wasn’t it. He moved back, and then forward again a moment later, thrusting the sword of Ish Dogran with both hands.

“Whoa!” Ranta cried out in admiration.

What had Renji thrust at? I couldn’t tell. But somehow he’d gotten past the weapon that the grendel had been swinging around with incredible force and had gone for his opponent’s hands. The weapon suddenly stopped spinning. Renji then raced past the grendel’s side, landing a decapitating blow as he went.

“I could do that,” Ranta murmured.

That was something he thought he could imitate. He didn’t necessarily mean it was something he could do right that moment. But even if it seemed like an incredibly lofty goal, Ranta was certain that it wasn’t completely impossible for him to reach it. He’d build the strength necessary to get him there. Ranta was the kind of guy who could think that way.

“Let’s go!” Yume urged, and we descended the cube mountain.

“Ahhhhhh!” Kikkawa shouted out loud when he noticed us. “It’s Haruhiro! And Ranta! And even Yume! It’s Haruhiro and Ranta and Yume, whoaaaaaa! Haruhirooo! Rantaaa! Yumeee! Woo-hoooooo! Nice! You’re still alive! Banzai! This is like the best thing ever!”

Kikkawa had tears in his eyes. Mimori raced forward, and hugged me with all her might. I don’t know why, but she had a thing for me. But I couldn’t return her feelings, so I’d had to reject her. But that time, I just stood still, letting her hold me. She was stronger than I was, so it hurt, but I didn’t say a word in protest.

“It’s good... It’s good, yeah. You’re a son of a bitch, though. But it’s good, yeah. Anyway...” The petite priest, Anna-san, who was the flag bearer of the Tokkis and the life of their party, was crying too. I remember that Tada slapped me on the back. It knocked the wind out of me for a moment. Inui was there as well, saying cryptic things like always. And he was still wearing his eye patch. All I remember about him is that he was always acting weird, and doing things that made no sense. But about a third of the hair in his ponytail had gone white. I’m sure that he was struggling too, in his own way.

Yume hugged Anna-san, and then also hugged Team Renji’s priest Chibi as they celebrated our reunion. Chibi was an incredibly quiet woman, and even to this day I have no idea what she was really like. But after joining up with them, I saw her get emotional like that a number of other times. Though she wasn’t one to voice her feelings, she could be incredibly caring. Despite her small stature, she stood head and shoulders above most healers, and was also a highly observant jack-of-all-trades. She was more loyal to Renji than anyone, and Renji knew it, so he trusted her implicitly. If Renji hadn’t put such massive trust in her, she wouldn’t have turned out the way she had.

Ranta was having fun bantering with Ron. The two had always seemed to mesh well, and through our later shared struggles, they became as close as brothers.

Ron was one of Renji’s comrades. I would say that they were war buddies and had a relationship built on trust, but they couldn’t really open up to one another. Renji was more closed off than most people, and seemed to refuse to get emotionally involved with those around him. That was probably irksome for a guy like Ron, but Renji was just too appealing as someone to fight alongside, and to have watching your back. This was the point when Ron finally gained a friend in Ranta. I think it was probably good for him.

Once Mimori released me, Adachi came over for some practical, businesslike talk. There aren’t many people with a brain as intricately organized as his. Once he heard my explanation, he briefly explained to me that our forty-seven-day struggle had not been in vain after all.

The surviving volunteer soldiers who had escaped Riverside Iron Fortress had, as we’d speculated, entered the Wonder Hole hoping to join up with Soma. They’d had to eliminate the grendels to advance, and it had been a difficult struggle at first. Even so, they’d had an impressive group consisting of Team Renji, the Tokkis—who had still kept using that name after losing Tokimune—Kajiko’s six Wild Angels, and the four remaining survivors of the Berserkers and Iron Knuckle. They had also been fortunate enough to have Chibi, Tada, Anna-san, Cocono of the Wild Angels, and Wado from the former Berserkers for a total of five priests. They had been able to fight tenaciously, and had eventually learned to fight grendels.

They’d advanced little by little, and had managed to reach the place that the volunteer soldiers called junction one. That was where the main route and sub route of the Wonder Hole split. The sub route wasn’t really any smaller than the main route, though. In surface terms, it took the long way around the Crown Mountains in the Quickwind Plains, splitting into multiple branches, before returning to the main route once again. The point where this sub route and the main route reconverged was called junction two.

Junction one had been a tough spot for them. The grendels had built fortifications in the area, and had been amassing strength there. Renji and the others had tried to conquer the grendels’ base, but had taken major losses, including three deaths—one of the Wild Angels, one of the Berserkers, and a member of Iron Knuckle. Ultimately, they hadn’t been able to capture the fortifications, but they had been able to get over to the main route.

They had advanced further from there, and after fending off several pursuers from the fortifications, they had realized something. They were a collection of powerful soldiers, and despite not being a large force, they had been able to break through the fortifications at junction one even if they hadn’t been able to seize them.

There had been several waves of pursuers afterward, but never more than around ten grendels at a time, and usually only five or six. Even in small numbers, grendels were tough opponents, so I certainly wouldn’t say it was easy for them, but they had managed to beat back all the enemies that came after them.

That had made them wonder if there weren’t all that many grendels in total. At the very least, they weren’t a fecund race like the goblins, who could show up in such numbers that they seemed to pour out of the ground like a wellspring.

Each grendel was an excellent combatant. Superb, even. But unlike carnivorous beasts, it was less that they were natural predators, and more that each was individually skilled at fighting. They couldn’t have fought like that unless they had training and experience.

It was not hard to imagine that the number of protrusions on their helmets represented a sort of class hierarchy. Trained soldiers fought under a commander, and eliminated foes in an organized fashion. Were they a small elite force like that?

After breaking through junction one, Renji and the others had encountered various difficulties like encountering monsters they’d never seen before, getting lost, and being ambushed by the small units of grendels that were pursuing them, but had continued to make relatively smooth progress until they had reached junction two. The grendels had a larger, more hardened fortification there than the one they had at junction one.

It turned out that the sub route was firmly under the control of the grendels, who had blocked it off at the two junctions that connected it to the main route. This is still unconfirmed, but there’s probably a point somewhere in the sub route that connects to the grendels’ homeland, or what we might call the “world of grendels.” The grendels had entered the Wonder Hole through there, and were expanding their control.

Having already struggled with junction one, Renji and the others had stood no chance of taking over junction two. With no way to make more progress on the main route, they’d had to consider turning back. But even getting out of the Wonder Hole would have required them to break through junction one again.

Their backs hadn’t been totally against the wall at that point, but they had still been at an impasse. They might have been forced to turn around and accept the losses they were sure to take trying to break through junction one again, if not for the junction two fortifications coming under attack from someone else.

“No way. Was it Soma and his group?” I asked, and Adachi didn’t keep me in suspense.

“That’s right.” He nodded. “We came here searching for Soma, and then he came and found us on his own. You could call it good luck, but it was luck we made for ourselves. When fortune comes your way, you just have to seize it. And that’s what we did. With Soma’s help, we drove the grendels out of the fortress at junction two. It hurts to admit it, but Soma’s group is on a completely different level from us. He’s got his own party, Akira-san, and the Typhoon Rocks. They’re the strongest force we’ve got at this point. The grendels were clever, though. They retreated before we could wipe them out. Their commander was a seven-protrusion grendel who fought Soma in single combat. Of course, Soma still won.”

That was how the volunteer soldiers had taken junction two, but they had concluded it would be unwise to try to hold it.

First of all, as a grendel fortification, it had been constructed out of a mysterious metal, a translucent material, and those yellow-green lights, along with other things they had brought in from their own world. Repairs would have been an issue. The gates and a part of the defensive walls had taken serious damage in the battle, and had been unusable as they were. Fixing them would have required materials to replace what had been damaged, and acquiring those materials would have taken a lot of time and effort. Thus, repairing the fortifications had been effectively impossible.

What was more, while the grendels didn’t seem that numerous in absolute terms, there had still been between a hundred and fifty and two hundred of them stationed in the fortress at junction two. If the volunteer soldiers had tried to defend it, their security would have inevitably been thin in some areas. And what would they even have been defending it for? It was unclear whether there was any value in doing so.

Besides, it turned out that Soma and his group already had a base of operations. Not in the Wonder Hole, though. It was outside.

Though the Wonder Hole seems endlessly long, only six entrances have been found that connect it to the surface. One of those was at a point a hundred and fifty kilometers from junction two on the main route. It came out at a spot on the opposite side of the Jet River, which flowed along the western edge of the Quickwind Plains. The terrain there was complex and inhabited by dangerous beasts, but it provided a source of lumber and water. The orcs’ and undead’s reach didn’t extend that far, so Soma and his group had chosen it as a good location to set up a number of shacks and establish a small village. As the village of the Day Breakers, it had been named Daybreak Village. They had built a storehouse for food preserved with salt or vinegar, sowed the seeds of useful local plants to make something resembling a small farm, and even had plans to dig a well.

Renji and the others had been led to Daybreak Village. There were only a handful of shacks there, and they were too shoddily made to really think of it as a true village. It wasn’t even a hamlet. For one thing, there wasn’t usually anyone living there. Uninhabited buildings would fall into ruin in no time, and easily rot away. But with maintenance, they’d provide roofs to sleep under, and they had ovens that could be used to cook and provide heat. The storehouse, which was half underground, might not have had an abundant supply of food, but it had enough that the volunteer soldiers wouldn’t run out immediately. And if they needed additional shacks, they could always build more. Most volunteer soldiers didn’t mind doing a little manual labor, and the more dexterous ones could make any tools they needed in their daily lives for themselves.

Volunteer soldiers had always been less like soldiers, and more like explorers or adventurers. It wasn’t a job you could handle if you had no idea what to do when you were missing an important piece of equipment, and we were used to coming up with ways to compensate for what we didn’t have.

We lost Alterna. If we have no place where we can stay, we just have to find a good spot and create one. Once we do, that will be our place to belong. It will become a place for us to defend.

The volunteer soldiers in Daybreak Village had shared information with each other and discussed what they were going to do from then on.

Soma and his group were mainly going through the Wonder Hole to enter Undead DC so they could look into what moves the undead were making and probe their secrets.

There were the original races in Grimgar known as the forerunners, and orcs and goblins had come after them, followed later by humans. But the undead were different. The No-Life King had given birth to their race. The undead would stop functioning if their heads were destroyed, but every other part of their bodies could be reused. If an undead lost an arm, for instance, they could pluck an arm off another undead that had ceased functioning, and stick it on themselves. Obviously, if a human tried that, it wouldn’t do anything. But an arm from an undead that had ceased functioning would attach itself to an undead that was still active. If you took it to an extreme, and swapped the heads of two undead, they could both remain active with their bodies swapped. That was the nature of the life-forms—if you could call them that at all—that the No-Life King had created.

They say that even with all his power, the No-Life King had still died. Except he hadn’t. He had simply been lying dormant in Castle Everest in Undead DC—or so the rumors had claimed for a long time. I already knew that the No-Life King wasn’t dead at all, but if he had lived on by entering the bodies of people like Jessie and Merry, the question of why remained.

The No-Life King had created the undead. But he was said to have died. Had no more undead been born since? I’ve killed—or if that’s not the appropriate term, then I’ve destroyed or terminated the functioning of—a lot of undead myself.

If the undead king was the one who birthed the undead, one would expect their numbers to decline over time. But that wasn’t happening. Even after the No-Life King had allegedly died, more undead had continued to be born, with uncremated remains coming back to life as something like zombies. We referred to that as the No-Life King’s curse. It had apparently stopped happening since the No-Life King had awakened inside Merry, but we still didn’t know what it really was. There are a lot of mysteries surrounding the No-Life King and the undead.

For humans, life and death are always important. They’re an issue that might lie at the root of all our thoughts and beliefs, and the more we think about them, the more the No-Life King and the undead disturb us.

The lives we’re given as humans are finite. Death is an absolute end. No one can avoid death; it’s the end point we will all reach someday. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Because we were born, we must die. There’s just no helping that. Being alive, whether we like it or not, is a straight line that heads toward death. We’re free to say that we don’t want to die, and to wish we could keep living forever, but it’s a wish that will never come true. All we can do is live for the moment. Live. Now. Live. Live. We meet, we part, and sooner or later, the end comes.

I don’t want to part with her. Of course I don’t. I can’t accept that her smile, which is burned into the back of my eyes now, is something that I’m never going to see again. I want to be with her. Forever, if possible. I don’t want it to end.

Life and death are inseparable, but I want to sever them from each other somehow. I want to cut life away from death. Is that silly? Is it an infantile wish? Do you think this is the nonsensical desire of someone who doesn’t know reality? Well, what if eternity is real? What if there is a way to separate life from death?

What if the rules we believe are firm and immovable aren’t universal at all? What if they have limits? What if there are situations where they don’t fully apply? And what if we could discover what conditions give rise to those exceptions?

For instance, humans can only live for around a hundred years, but what if there were a drug that could double that time, and all of the risks involved were explained to you, and you could meet someone who had actually taken it, and could see the results for yourself, and then you were asked, well, would you like to take it too? Would you turn that down? Could you refuse with no reservations? What if drinking that medicine didn’t just let you live two hundred years, but three hundred? Or if it extended your lifespan to four or five hundred years? Would a life like that be too long, and you’d get sick of it? What if you were told that if you don’t take it, you’ve got a hundred years, if that, but if you do, you’ll get a thousand, or an eternity? If you had the choice between living a hundred years, and maybe not even that long, or living for eternity, can you say for sure that you would never choose the latter?

What if.

If life and death could be parted, and each could be its own wholly separate thing, and it wasn’t about my own life, but I could meet a friend who I had been separated from? If the dead could come back to life, then what? What if I could reclaim what I had lost, but didn’t want to lose, and never should have lost? If we could uncover the secrets of the No-Life King and the undead, then maybe, just maybe, we would be able to isolate life from death.

Honestly, it was a surprise to me that Soma and his group thought that way. I had thought of them as, I don’t know, more above it all than that, but maybe that was simply the way I wanted to imagine them to be.

I had lost Manato and Moguzo, and I had let Merry die. I hadn’t been able to accept losing her too, and as a consequence, I had invited the No-Life King closer to us. I had witnessed his revival firsthand. Things had turned out like this because I was weak and mediocre. That was what I was thinking.

But even if it had been Soma in my position, he might have made the same mistake. If even someone like Soma had weaknesses, then maybe he had parts of him that were mediocre too, like I did.

Anyway, Renji and the others had rested and recovered at Daybreak Village, and then they’d started to think about what to do next. Because of how long they’d been inside the Wonder Hole, Soma and his group had been unaware of the situation on the surface, so they must have had a lot on their minds about that. Also, the revival of the No-Life King and the activation of the sekaishu had created a few more immediate problems.

During their last excursion, Soma and his group had acquired multiple relics from Undead DC, or rather, they had seized them from the undead there.

However, for some reason, the sekaishu had an intense reaction to relics. Did they just hate the strange magical items? Well, since the night-clad ones seemed to be sekaishu that had absorbed relics, then the answer was probably not that simple. But there was no question that the sekaishu gathered in places with relics.

When Soma and his group had left the Wonder Hole and headed toward Daybreak Village with relics in their possession, the sekaishu had advanced toward them from all over. It hadn’t been long before Adachi of Team Renji had picked up on the fact that the relics had been the cause, and they had turned back to the Wonder Hole temporarily. Then, after leaving the relics there, they had set out again, and the sekaishu hadn’t approached them again. That was one of the events I was told about. Something similar had happened at Riverside Iron Fortress, when Renji had followed Adachi’s advice and ditched his armor, Aragarfald. That had saved Renji’s life.

Basically, what all of that meant was that relics could no longer be used outside of the Wonder Hole.

Soma had originally been using a set of relic armor called the Magai Waiomaru, and Akira-san had been using a relic dagger called the Fatalsis. They’d also amassed a number of other relics in their time as volunteer soldiers, which they had discovered the uses of and utilized to great effect. None of them were safe to use on the surface anymore. Relics could make a decisive difference in battle. There was no denying that this development would make the Day Breakers less effective in combat.

Could nothing be done about the sekaishu?

The No-Life King’s actions were also of interest.

What would the orcs, who had once been his allies, do now? Would the undead, who had been created by the No-Life King, gather under him as expected?

What about neutral factions, like the free city of Vele?

It seemed very unlikely that the dwarves of the Ironblood Kingdom, or the elves who’d gone to them for shelter, had been completely wiped out. So then, what were the surviving dwarves and elves up to now?

What were the volunteer soldiers supposed to do?

Even now that they had Daybreak Village as their base, and as a potential new hometown, their numbers were far too small for it to not be a concern.

Were there really no other survivors? They couldn’t know for sure that there were no others on the surface, waiting for their allies to come and rescue them. And at that point, even if it was just another one or two people, anyone they could get would be a valuable human resource.

Soma, Renji, and the others had left Daybreak Village and returned to the Wonder Hole. Though the grendels had reoccupied junction two, it had been relatively easy to simply pass by them. By the time the volunteer soldiers had reached junction one, the grendels had been in a state of confusion. The grendels in the base there had been sending squads southward on the main route, which was the direction of the entrance with the melruks.

The grendels are fighting something—or someone, aren’t they? That’s what the volunteer soldiers had thought. If so, maybe there were others who, like Renji and his group, had made it to the Wonder Hole.

The volunteer soldiers had conquered the fortress at junction one, and then they had split into two groups. Soma and his group had stayed behind at the junction one fortifications, investigating the sub route beyond there and fending off any enemy reinforcements. Team Renji and the Tokkis had continued southward down the main route, heading toward the entrance in search of survivors.

In short, our struggle had served as a signal to the other volunteer soldiers.

Well, even if we’d done nothing, they might have come eventually anyway. But if we had given up on the Wonder Hole altogether and set off traveling toward some other destination, who knows what might have happened. We probably wouldn’t have met the volunteer soldiers. It’s possible that we would have just dropped dead somewhere. Or been found and killed by the night-clad ones.

We had somehow managed to hold out in the Wonder Hole for forty-seven days despite having been unable to kill a single grendel, and this was the result of our efforts. We had been able to meet up with Team Renji and the Tokkis.

We left the Wonder Hole with them for a time. Unfortunately for the melruks. We caught a few of them, cooked them up, and ate everything but the feathers and bones.

The campsite had originally belonged to Renji and the others, while we had only used it for a night, or maybe it was two? I don’t have clear memories of it, but I do recall sleeping all the way until morning without ever having to stand watch. It was really quite unusual for me to be able to sleep through the night without waking once.

When I woke in the morning, one of the first things I saw was Renji, naked from the waist up, silently swinging his sword.

I said he was swinging it, but they were slow, graceful movements. It might have looked like he was engaging in some pretty erratic behavior from a distance, but even though I wasn’t a warrior myself, I felt like I could tell what Renji was seeing in his mind’s eye. Even as strong as he was, he was trying to defeat an enemy far stronger than him. Renji had a firm image of whoever that foe was, and he was desperately trying to fight them with his sword alone. He must have noticed I was watching, but he kept on swinging regardless. I focused my gaze on Renji, never tiring of watching him.

When I came to my senses, Ranta was awake, and crouching down next to me.

“He’s pretty tough, man. Seriously.”

“Ranta. You don’t have to do what he does.”

“You moron. Do you seriously think I’d be able to catch up to him just by copying him? Well...I’d say it’s gonna take me fifteen years.”

“What is?”

“I’m gonna catch up to him in the next fifteen years. Using my own methods. Fifteen years... That’s how long it’ll take as I am now. But once five years have gone by, maybe I’ll be able to say I’ll get there in another five.”

Even then, I didn’t have much hope of us both surviving for ten years. But I wish I could have at least found out what he’d have said in five.

Even if Ranta had grown rapidly, Renji would have gotten even further ahead, and the gap between them might have only grown. That’s what I would have thought. When I chased after someone, they were only going to keep getting further away.

But Ranta wasn’t like that, so the future could have been different for him.

I wanted to see it. If only I could have.

I know I say this too often, but I can’t help thinking that way.

After that, we joined up with Soma and his group at the junction one fortifications. Then we headed to Daybreak Village by way of the fortress at junction two.

There was nothing there fit to be called a building. There were just a handful of shacks, and yet it still crossed my mind that it would be a fine place for our travels to end. It had been a long time since I’d washed my hair or body. I’d long since stopped caring about whether I was unclean, or if I stank, but I wasn’t able to look straight at the women for a while after they got cleaned up, and couldn’t go close to them either.

“Whoa, girl! Damn, you’re hot!” Ranta said that to Yume, without any indication that he was exaggerating. He had tears in his eyes.

It was true, Yume was a very beautiful woman. Though, if I was trying to be fair, I should say that Yume was a beautiful woman too. After all, the people staying at Daybreak Village also included Soma’s comrades, Shima and Lilia the elf, Akira-san’s wife Miho, and Kayo—though those two were much older than us—and also Mimori and Anna-san from the Tokkis, Chibi from Team Renji, and Kajiko, Mako, Azusa, Cocono, and Yae of the Wild Angels for a total of thirteen women including Yume, and I thought every single one of them was almost mystically beautiful. It even inspired some kind of fear in me. I did my best not to talk to them, and even avoided Yume. Ranta teased me about it, but he also said, “Hey, man, I get it. Kind of.”

“Yume’s the only one for me,” he continued. “But as a living being...as a male, maybe it’s just how we’re built. I may or may not start fantasizing sometimes...thinking anyone’ll do at this point. Even though I know now’s not the time for that.”

Was that right? Were things really like Ranta said they were? I don’t really know. I was a young human male at the time, and healthy too, so surely it was natural for my body to have those kinds of urges. But I feel like somehow, as a human, I was incredibly afraid of those kinds of animal desires.

If Merry had been by my side, maybe things would have been slightly different. But she was out of my reach. Was I pining after her? I was certainly thinking about her. I wanted to see her. But she wasn’t herself. The No-Life King was inside of her. Was she the primary owner of that body, or was he? I had forced her into that destiny. If the No-Life King’s return had triggered the situation we were in, then it was all my fault. No matter what, I could never be forgiven for it.

I had revealed everything to Yume and Ranta, but they hadn’t blamed me for it. I had committed a sin so grievous that “grave” didn’t even begin to describe it, and yet I was going unpunished for it.

In Daybreak Village, I did whatever work I was told to. Expanding the village’s facilities, acquiring resources, processing them, there were all sorts of things that needed doing.

I was well suited to just doing as I was told. I didn’t complain, and actually had no complaints. I kept thinking about that. I had been thrust into the position of team leader, and had tried to fulfill the role to the best of my ability, but I hadn’t been even remotely good at it. Nothing suited me better than plugging away at simple labor. Even free will felt like a burden to me. I was given orders, and I followed them. That was my true nature.

In Daybreak Village, there was active debate about what we ought to do, and what we were going to do. If anyone had asked me, I would have answered. But I never voiced my opinions proactively, because nothing resembling an opinion ever arose in my head.

I didn’t want to think. And even if I were to use my head, I couldn’t imagine myself coming up with any kind of brilliant plan.

In Daybreak Village, I was the most inferior. Everyone was better than me. I lost what little self-confidence I’d had, and became thoroughly depressed. But you could say that so long as I kept working, my depression wasn’t that much of a problem, so I could be as depressed as I wanted.

I’m aware it wasn’t a healthy mindset to have. Everyone was facing forward in their own way, even if we had different approaches. I had to do the same. I understood that. I wasn’t the kind of person to hope for things. I couldn’t ask for, or desire, too much. I was a small person. I wasn’t a large enough vessel to hold any kind of ambition. All I wanted was to live out the rest of my natural life alongside the comrades I felt at ease with. That was all I wished for. Just that. Except, thinking of it as “just that” was not something I could do anymore. Because of the mistake I had made, it became a wish that was far too much for me to ask for. I was afraid to even admit I wanted it.