Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 7 - Chapter 17

17. Racing Past Today and Tomorrow

Even with that said, after spending ten days working in the City of the Dead Ones, Haruhiro began to wonder if things were all right like this. And it wasn’t just him; apparently everyone felt that way.

When hunting for prey in the City of the Dead Ones, there were times when they weren’t all focused properly on the task at hand. Obviously, when they were actually fighting a dead one, everyone got their butts in gear, but they were clearly having a hard time getting over it. It was the same for Haruhiro, so he understood keenly what they were going through.

It took some courage, but as the leader, he suggested that maybe it was time for them to go back. No one objected.

This time, they planned in advance for a fifteen-day trip. It might be a few days longer or shorter depending on the circumstances, so they built in some elasticity to cover for that. Once they decided it wouldn’t be a long-term stay, he suddenly felt more motivated.

That’s right, he thought. No use dragging it out. Staying focused over a short period is best.

Their second trip to Waluandin went pretty smoothly, considering they didn’t have Mr. Unjo with them.

We’ve gotten used to Darunggar, was a thing Haruhiro had to avoid thinking. Getting used to things was scary. It was probably best to jump at every little thing, and to feel the pain in his stomach.

Haruhiro scouted out Waluandin on his own. That was overwhelmingly more efficient, and it was less dangerous, too.

Past the entertainment quarter, he found an area that was packed densely with igloo-like houses similar to those he had seen in the villages. That was where the lower-class orcs lived, apparently. The slums, you could call it. Even on the really steep hills, there were igloos built as if they were stuck onto them. He had to admit that was kind of impressive.

Fire Dragon Mountain was on the other side of Waluandin. There was a path there, somewhere, which supposedly led to Grimgar.

In broad terms, there were two ways to reach Fire Dragon Mountain. One was to make it through Waluandin. The other was to travel around Waluandin and cross the mountains.

If they were going to cross the mountains, they would have to pass along the outside of the mine or the slums. Both areas were pretty dangerous, so they’d want specialized equipment for the task.

Incidentally, if Haruhiro were asked what that specialized equipment might be, he’d have had no answer. He was no specialist, after all. Even their outdoor specialist, Yume the hunter, had no experience with climbing mountains. If they were going to try to cross the mountains, it was going to take thorough preparation. It wouldn’t be the next thing they did, but the thing after the next thing, no doubt.

If they were going to try to make it through Waluandin, they’d have to aim for a time when the orcs were less active, and choose a place the orcs weren’t likely to find them.

They knew that the orcs in the villages seemed to sleep at night, so it stood to reason that the orcs in Waluandin did the same. Making full use of Stealth to investigate on his own, Haruhiro had been able to see that the Waluandin orcs, waluos for short, made a distinction between night and day in their lives.

The entertainment quarter was bustling with waluos at all times. However, it looked there were more waluos there in the afternoon and night, and less in the early morning and before noon. For both the workshops and the mine, no one worked there at night. The slums were always kind of noisy.

Then again, at the present moment, Haruhiro only knew what he could discern from his side of the lava river that served as the city’s border. Even if they could sneak through the mine or workshop district at night, there might be obstacles past there that would prevent them from going any farther.

He wanted to infiltrate Waluandin and learn more somehow, but he really couldn’t bring his comrades for that. If he were to come out and say it bluntly, not that he would say anything at all, anyone he brought would just get in the way. This was one thing Haruhiro would have to do alone.

Now for the next task. This time, they decided not to get greedy, and when the predetermined fifteen-day period was up, Haruhiro and the others safely returned to Well Village. They spent the next day heading out to the City of the Dead Ones and earning money.

For the next day, and the next next day, and the next next next day, and the next next next next day, and the next next next next next day, and the next next next next next next day, and the next next next next next next next day, they worked hard in the City of the Dead Ones.

Hunting was a volunteer soldier’s job, but they couldn’t let it become too routine. Haruhiro and his party had earned the nickname the Goblin Slayers, so they were used to spending a stupid amount of time frequenting the same hunting grounds—they were even pretty good at it—but they also knew to be afraid of getting used to things.

“Urgh!” Kuzaku was earnestly trying to hold off a violent assault by a lion dead one.

Not just with his shield. He used his longsword for defense, too. He lowered his center of gravity while being careful not to end up in an unbalanced position, then held in there. He was holding in there.

He kept a fixed distance from the lion dead one. Kuzaku was making fine adjustments to his positioning based on how his opponent moved. He did a splendid job of staying at that range, and the lion dead one seemed to be having a hard time with it. One-on-one, Kuzaku could keep the lion dead one occupied. He’d gotten to the point where he could.

Everyone acknowledged that Kuzaku was improving as a tank. They trusted him, too. That was why Merry could move up at times like this and trip the lion dead one with her head staff.

Kuzaku would never let the lion dead one get away. If she didn’t think that, Merry wouldn’t be able to leave Shihoru’s side.

Incidentally, Merry wasn’t crazy strong or anything, but the priest’s self-defense techniques had been created to help the weak defend themselves, and developed from that starting point. Making use of centrifugal force, or something like that, she amplified her weak power into powerful blows against those who meant to harm her. If she got a clean hit in, her individual strikes could be more powerful than Ranta’s.

The lion dead one tripped. Kuzaku was quick to jump on it... or not.

“Gwahaha!” It was Ranta. Ranta, who had been watching closely for his chance, used Leap Out to jump in and assault the lion dead one. His willingness to go all in at times like this was his one praiseworthy quality. His black blade plunged through the lion dead one’s right eyeball. “Take that!”

“Get back!” shouted Haruhiro.

Ranta jumped back and away, possibly even before he heard the words. His black blade was left stuck in the thing’s eyeball. Even as it writhed in pain, the thing had tried to hug Ranta with all its love. In other words, Ranta had gotten away before he’d had his back broken by its deadly embrace.

“Eheh... Let there be curses...” Zodiac-kun, who was floating nearby, said something either auspicious or ominous, and it was hard to tell which.

The lion dead one rose up. Yume let loose an arrow, but it twisted to avoid it. Right after her, Shihoru cried, “Dark!” and sent out her elemental.

The humanoid, or more like star-shaped, elemental Dark sank into the lion dead one’s chest. It immediately began convulsing and fell to one knee.

“Hah!” Kuzaku made a big swing with his longsword and slugged the thing in the side of its head with it. He then followed that up by whacking it in the chin with his shield.

“Yeah!” Merry slammed its neck with her head staff.

“There!” Ranta leapt at the thing. He tore his black blade free, then slashed it. He slashed at it. Even if he couldn’t cut it, he slashed it like crazy. Whenever Ranta took a rest, Kuzaku and Merry gave it one or two hits, and then Ranta went back and resumed his flurry of blows.

Haruhiro watched over his comrades as they fought, paying attention to their surroundings. Yume, who was next to Shihoru, had nocked an arrow and was also on guard.

Haruhiro and the others had relocated their hunting grounds in the City of the Dead Ones from the Northwest Quarter, where the remains of the marketplace and the Warehouse District were, to a place just inside the Southwest Quarter. If they’d continued taking things in steps, the Southeast Quarter would have been the next level up after the Northwest Quarter, but the east side was mostly covered in mist.

The dead ones of the Southwest Quarter were clever and vicious, but Haruhiro and the others had found that in the area closest to the Northwest Quarter, dead ones that were comparatively easy to take down would show up.

They were mostly ones like the lion dead one they were fighting right now. There was no questioning that they were powerful enemies. Even so, if they all focused their efforts properly, they had gotten to the point where they could practically guarantee they’d be able to take one of them down.

Enemies on this level were good. Even if they wanted to relax, they couldn’t. It wasn’t impossible, but they couldn’t just defeat them in a routine manner. Instead of a moderate level of tension, it was just a bit higher than that. They had to improve themselves, adjusting things day by day, or they’d never survive. But as long as they did things right, they could manage.

“Haru-kun.” Yume gestured towards a building to the south with her chin.

“Hm?” Haruhiro squinted at the building.

There was something poking its head out from the collapsed second floor section. No, it just looked like it might be. That was all.

Haruhiro shook his head. “No. It’s fine.”

“Yume got it wrong, huh. Sorry ’bout that.”

“Hey, it’s fine.”

“Take that! Let Skullhell embrace you!” Ranta landed the finishing blow on the lion dead one. “Bwahahahaha! I’ll drink well again tonight!”

“What are you, a mountain bandit?” Haruhiro muttered with a sigh. Haruhiro was a thief himself, but he didn’t want to think he was in the same class as Ranta. He absolutely was not.

They hunted in the City of the Dead Ones for ten days, then left on another roughly fifteen-day expedition. When they did it like this, they could spend their days looking forward to the next one.

It wasn’t good to think too much about the future, but if they only ever had their eyes on what was directly in front of them, it became suffocating. Striking a balance was important. If all they did was charge blindly towards shining hope, they would neglect to watch their feet and fall into danger. Likewise, if they kept looking down under the weight of despair, they would grow exhausted and unable to walk.

They couldn’t live on hard times alone, and good times were never going to last forever. It was best to cry when they felt like crying, and smile sometimes even when they didn’t feel like smiling.

In the middle of their third expedition, though Haruhiro only heard about this afterward because he was out investigating alone at the time, Ranta and the others were attacked by orcs. There were two orcs, and though they managed to kill them somehow, Kuzaku and Yume were both wounded and things looked bad for a while.

Both of those orcs had looked thin, and young. They’d worn no armor, but carried bows and arrows, swords, and knives. They’d been outfitted like hunters. It might be that they’d headed out to hunt, and chanced across Ranta and the others.

With this event serving as a trigger, they’d changed the location where the other five stayed on standby during their fourth expedition and moved to a spot near the Hot Spring River instead. Haruhiro had Ranta and the others hunt gujis, which were like badgers, while he moved forward with his exploration of Waluandin. He’d gotten to the point where he could slip into the city at night, if he was alone.

During their fifth expedition, they found a small stone tablet in the ruins of Alluja. When they returned to Well Village and showed it to Oubu the Eyehand Sage, the sage bought it off them for a large coin, 1 rou.

When they were camping outside the village later, Ranta said, “You know...” and started talking with uncharacteristic degree of sincerity. “I can sort of understand how the people here felt, clinging to Skullhell. When it’s this dark, it’d make anyone want to be embraced by Skullhell.”

“It’s easier to understand why they clung to Lumiaris,” Merry countered. “When it’s this dark, the normal thing is to seek the light.”

“I’m sure that’s normal for you,” Ranta retorted. “But listen, you, what’s normal is different for everyone, you know that?”

“‘You’?” she repeated.

“...I am really sorry,” Ranta said without emotion. “Merry-san, please, forgive me.”

“He’s not putting his heart into it at all...” Shihoru said.

Ranta got down and performed a kowtow. “I’m so sowwy! I was wong! Fogibe me!”

“There’s nothing more worthless than a kowtow from you,” Haruhiro said with a wry smile as he poked the fire with a stick. “...Gods, huh. It just doesn’t feel real to me. I mean, there’re actually gods. They exist. I always thought they were, like, fictional? Or something...”

“If they weren’t real, I couldn’t use light magic.” Merry showed him the palm of her hand. “But until I came here, I might not have fully believed in them myself, either.”

“Oh, yeah.” Kuzaku nodded. “I could see that. Gods are like an example for us, y’know. Or the source for one? The reason? The basis? Something like that. Like, there’s Lumiaris, and if we assume she’s always watching, we can behave righteously, maybe?”

“Elhit-chan the White God’s real.” Yume was resting her head in Shihoru’s lap, while also having Merry attached to her leg. “Elhit-chan shows up in Yume’s dreams and everything. Yume wishes she could meet Elhit-chan...”

“So, let’s talk seriously here.” Ranta disabled his kowtow mode, switched to sitting with his legs crossed, and crossed his arms cheekily. “Really, everyone’s afraid of dying and stuff, right? Since we’re alive, we don’t want to die. But still. We’re gonna die. Someday, for sure, we’re gonna bite it. There’s no getting out of it. It’s the conclusion of our lives, you could say. When you think about that, I dunno... It feels overwhelming, right? It’s hard to deal with, maybe.”

“...Even for you?” Haruhiro asked, struck by an unexpected feeling.

Ranta snorted and laughed. It was a laugh that felt forced, somehow.

“I’m talking generally, man, generally. I’m above and beyond all this stuff. Besides, dying is just a part of my life, right? Even if other people’s deaths feel, well... y’know. You’ve got to accept your own death, or you can’t live. You’re born, and then you die, and that’s life. Basically, it’s a cycle, man, a cycle.” Ranta spun his index finger around in circles. “I’m sure you people don’t get it, but Skullhell’s teachings include views on life and death like that.”

“We have that in Lumiaris’s teachings, too, of course,” Merry said quietly as she rubbed Yume’s thigh. “In the beginning, there was light. All life is born from that light, and will return to it. That’s why we see the light when we die.”

“When we die, we fall into the darkness, obviously,” Ranta snorted.

“No we do not. Darkness is only a side effect produced by the light not shining somewhere. If you avert your eyes from the light, you’ll be mired in darkness. That’s all.”

“You’re wrong. Darkness is the original, and the light came after it. I’m telling you, the root of all things is darkness.”

“This is why I can never get along with a dread knight who blindly follows Skullhell,” Merry muttered.

“I don’t need to get along with you! I don’t want anything to do with the cowardly believers of Lumiaris!”

“Don’t fight over this nonsense.” Haruhiro tried to step in as leader and mediate, but both Merry and Ranta turned to glare at him.

“Nonsense?!”

“Whaddaya mean, nonsense?!” Ranta yelled.

“I... I’m sorry.”

“Both...” Shihoru helped him out. “Can’t it be both? In the beginning, there was light and darkness. I think they’re conflicting but complimentary elements...”

“Like everyone here, huh.” Yume rubbed her cheek against Shihoru’s lap, speaking in a relaxed tone. “It’s ’cause everyone’s there for her that Yume’s able to keep on livin’, y’know.”

That got everyone to settle down.

Well, since they were always together, conversations like this were bound to happen. The guys were always talking about pretty stupid stuff, but what was it like for the girls? Did they talk about love and romance, maybe? Maybe not? Or did they? Though Haruhiro was curious, he couldn’t ask them, so that mystery was going to remain a mystery to him forever.

Ranta used the 10 rou worth of black coins that he had saved to buy a two-handed sword from the blacksmith of Well Village. It was a two-handed sword, so the hilt was long, but the blade itself wasn’t that large, which made it surprisingly light.

Most swords had an unsharpened section just above the base of the blade called the ricasso. The ricasso on the sword Ranta had bought was long, and had a protuberance at the top of it. When he used to it strike a finishing blow, gripping the ricasso apparently made that easier for him, and there were other uses for it, too. Knowing Ranta, he would come up with all sorts of things through trial and error.

He named his sword RIPer, and bought armored gloves so he could hold the ricasso good and tight. By the way, he’d borrowed the money for those gauntlets from his comrades.

His black blade was solid and still usable, so he handed it down to Kuzaku, who performed a paladin ritual that involved carving a hexagram into the blade and marking it with blood as proof. By doing this, he could use the light magic spell Saber to bestow Lumiaris’s blessing upon the blade.

The party acquired a helm which was reminiscent of a hawk’s head in the City of the Dead Ones, and Kuzaku’s helmet just so happened to be getting really damaged at the time, so he swapped it out. Ranta named it the Hawk Helm, but Kuzaku really didn’t like that.

Yume had made the curved sword that she’d picked up in the City of the Dead Ones, which was around the same length as her machete, one of her favorite weapons. Haruhiro kept calling it a wantou, which was the word for a curved blade, so Yume had decided to nickname it Wan-chan, which was a cute word for a puppy. Honestly, Haruhiro felt that was kind of wrong.

Merry’s head staff broke, so she bought a staff with a hammer on the end from the blacksmith. That was probably because she had a lot more chances to participate in attacking now. She had clearly chosen her weapon with an eye towards its destructive power.

Though Shihoru hadn’t changed her equipment, her elemental Dark was gradually getting stronger. The more attached to Shihoru Dark got, the bigger he seemed to grow, and also... the more cutesy his form became. On top of that, he could now produce effects similar to Sleepy Shadow, Shadow Complex, and Shadow Bond. He wasn’t all-powerful, though, and Shihoru had to will just one of the impact, confusion, sleeping, or stopping effects into him, but he was still amazing.

According to Shihoru, she would eventually be able to mix and match different effects. If so, she’d be able to deal damage while stopping the enemy, or weaken them on top of dealing damage, along with a number of other possibilities. That was even more amazing.

Haruhiro ended up with a stiletto that was to be used exclusively for skewering attacks in his right hand, and a knife with a hilt guard for sweeping, slashing, and stabbing in his left hand. The former he had found in Herbesit’s underground, while the latter he had looted off a dead one.

They hadn’t seen Mr. Unjo. He was supposed to visit Well Village occasionally, but Haruhiro and the others tended to spend a lot of time away on expeditions, so they were probably just missing each other.

Every time they visited Herbesit, Rubicia’s tower crossed Haruhiro’s mind. He thought about going there someday, but never did.

One day, Ranta invited him to the grocery store in Well Village, where they drank a whole lot and got absolutely hammered. It wasn’t just Haruhiro. Everyone drank as much as they could, and they had a great banquet with the blacksmith, the flattened egg with arms from the bag shop, the off-duty guards, and even the giant crab grocer. Ranta, Haruhiro, and Kuzaku took turns arm wrestling with the blacksmith and all lost badly, then the three of them took him on as a team and still lost. He had vague memories of all of this.

As his comrades got drunker and drunker, he recalled sitting next to Merry and they talked. What did they talk about? He felt like he’d had a good time, but he didn’t remember a word of what they’d said.

Well, as long as he hadn’t said anything weird. The next day, Merry was acting the same as ever, so it was probably fine.

It’s fine, right? he tried to convince himself.

Ever since that one time, the receiver hadn’t vibrated again. No one commented on it, but it was probably just a matter of bad timing.

That was probably all. That was what Haruhiro decided to think.