Log Horizon - Volume 11 - Chapter 3.2

2 
As always, waking up brought a slight feeling of unpleasantness with it. 
He didn’t think he was the type who woke up feeling lousy. It was more that the existence of sleep itself was disagreeable. He thought shutting off your consciousness and resting was irrational. As far as Krusty was concerned, if you were going to spend 25 percent of your life unconscious, it would be better to just shorten your life by 25 percent and get rid of that downtime entirely. 
He checked through his sensations, but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his hands, nor, after a moment’s examination, either of his legs. 
It smelled very damp and stuffy. When he sat up, as he’d figured, he seemed to be in a sealed subterranean cave. The ground he’d set his hands on wasn’t dirt, but slippery rock. Apparently, this was a limestone cavern. The slight stream of water he felt under his palms hinted that his situation was precarious. 
His battle with Elias seemed to have ended by cave-in. 
His memories up until that point were clear. Afterward, he’d probably been caught up in the collapse and lost consciousness. He had about 15 percent of his HP left. His sense that he’d had his fun spoiled was stronger than his feelings that he’d been saved from a tight spot. 
There was a faint light in the cave. The source of the light seemed to be on the other side of a large rock. 
As he was thinking that odd, the silhouette of a head popped out of the boulder. 
“Yoo-hoo, Krus-Krus. You’re awake, huh?!” 
The voice was so cheerful that it seemed out of place underground. 
Krusty held still for a few seconds, then responded, choosing his words carefully. 
“I see you’ve returned, Miss Kanami.” 
“Whoa! Not only are you not surprised, that’s kind of a standoffish response!” 
“Frankly, I feel as if I’d like to keep some distance between us, so…” 
“That’s so mean!” 
He didn’t think that was true. 
To Krusty, she was the sort of person he didn’t dare get close to. 
She wasn’t the type who’d obligingly disappear if he said the magic words, so Krusty got up, then lowered himself onto a nearby round rock, using it as a chair. It wasn’t that he found her particularly unpleasant to deal with, and she wasn’t a stranger, but she was hard to handle. 
She seemed to have changed her avatar, and her class had switched from Swashbuckler to Monk. However, her form—or rather, the impression she gave—hadn’t changed much. Her blue eyes, which seemed intensely curious, were set in an oval outline. Her big mouth that always seemed ready to shout for joy was still going strong as well. 
This was Kanami, “Tourist of Seven Continents,” the legendary Amazon who’d led the Debauchery Tea Party, the group that had caused a sensation on the Yamato server. 
Even in the community outside the game, she was a mystery woman who’d been cloaked in countless rumors. 
Many opinions of her were favorable, such as that she was the legendary leader who commanded the Tea Party, a group of specialists, and that she was an overwhelmingly charismatic beauty. However, there were more than a few—possibly based in jealousy—that were filled with spite. Or rather, to put it bluntly, it was safe to say she’d been covered in hatred. 
If you were victorious in raids, you could acquire phantasmals, fantasy-class items. According to game theory, large-scale, difficult quests yielded high-performance rewards. The sort of rare items that everyone wanted were extremely hard to get. 
Not only that, but in the game of Elder Tales, you couldn’t get them by playing for a long time, or through probability, or by buying them with real money. To acquire them, you needed to be one of twelve like-minded companions. The ones who managed to pull this off were almost exclusively major guilds. 
Most ordinary users thought they couldn’t get the rare phantasmals they coveted because they weren’t in a big guild. Since they didn’t have the “status” of a guild, they weren’t able to acquire items. Even if they didn’t put it into words, a majority of users thought that way… Although it wasn’t that they actually believed it; they merely wanted to think it. 
However, the existence of the Tea Party had flatly disproved that common sense. 
Getting your friends together and going on raids is fun. If you have fun while you play, you’ll get all sorts of things. That had been the message of the Tea Party, Kanami’s group. 
It was the truth. 
Guilds were organizations composed of players, too. In the sense of assembling companions and tackling difficulties, there was no difference whatsoever between the Tea Party and D.D.D. Whether they were a guild or just a bunch of friends, in the end, it was only a name. However, many players averted their eyes from this fact and attacked the Tea Party, which charged into tough zones without adopting a guild tag. They tried to boycott the group for showing, wordlessly, that you could do it if you tried. 
She and her group were getting rare items under their own steam, without being chosen by a major guild, and to the greedy majority, they were something to be hated and excluded. To those players, they were inconvenient: They made them face the fact that people who didn’t attempt raids on their own initiative were short on energy and communication. 
To Krusty, even the phrase “the legend of the Tea Party” was laughable: Now that the Tea Party had disbanded, their own pangs of conscience had simply substituted the “legend” for the history of their ugly boycott. It was no more than a fabrication. 
That said, not only had Kanami paid no attention to that malice, she’d made no attempt to even know about it. As the leader of a raid organization, Krusty had run into her several times back then, and so he knew her: This woman was absolutely not the type to be influenced by that sort of public rumor. 
She was a lot harder to deal with than that. 
“You know, for some reason, nobody gets startled about this.” 
When he looked at her, prompting her to go on, Kanami said, “KR was totally blasé about it, too.” 
Krusty thought she probably had only herself to blame. 
Everything she did was unprecedented, and so no matter what she did, the people around her had just stopped being surprised. 
“I imagine he assumed that, given your skills, it was possible.” 
“I see.” 
Kanami laughed—“Eh-heh-heh!”—and Krusty put just a little more distance between them. 
Ordinary people didn’t cause trouble for their friends. At the very least, they tried not to. 
For that reason, getting closer to someone could serve as a way to decrease the damage they did to you. 
Once in a blue moon, there were people who tried to cause trouble for their friends in particular. Putting distance between yourself and those people was a way to lessen the damage. 
On the other hand, Kanami was the rare person for whom—as far as Krusty knew—neither affection nor coolness had any effect on the amount of damage dealt. As a matter of fact, the amount of damage was determined by the frequency with which you interacted with her: The woman was like a type of natural disaster. Her one saving grace might have been that she also spread around good luck, in addition to damage. Apparently, that didn’t have anything to do with a psychological sense of distance, either. No, the friendliness Kanami scattered in her vicinity was the type that didn’t take the recipients’ wishes into consideration in the first place. She was a terribly bewildering monster: In a sense, by the time you met her, she’d already seeded the area with fortune and misfortune. 
It is a big world. 
He couldn’t deal with her, but she was unusual. 
She was like a rare character that was difficult to encounter. 
The wide world held singularities a youngster like him couldn’t handle, such as people who were inscrutable menaces (like his grandfather), human natural disasters like Kanami, righteous men like Isaac who were moved by personal convictions rather than profit and loss, and people like Shiroe, who endlessly invested resources to solve problems. They just didn’t seem to go the way you wanted them to, but that fact gave Krusty a mysterious sense of satisfaction. 
“What are you doing out here, Krus-Krus? Weren’t you on the Yamato server? There was an earthquake; do you know anything about that? Oh, hey— Waaah! Geez, I’m sorry, okay?!” 

Kanami’s rapid-fire barrage of questions had been shut down by the huge Wise Wolf Gumon, who’d caught the hem of her clothes in her teeth and forced her into a pratfall. As if saying, Never mind, just calm down, Gumon wagged her abundant gray tail in front of Kanami once, then pushed her damp muzzle into Krusty’s palm and, satisfied, settled her large frame down at his feet. 
“Is that little one a friend of yours?” 
“Yes.” 
“She’s really smart. I was unconscious for a while myself, but she dragged me out; she was a lifesaver. She’s intelli-cute! It looks like she knew where you were, too, Krus-Krus.” 
“Did she?” 
Krusty scratched Gumon behind the ears. With the generous attitude unique to large dogs (?), still lying on her side, without even opening her eyes, she wagged her thick tail as if to say, Don’t worry about it. 
“Why are you here, on the Zhongyuan server? Did you keep your return secret?” 
Flatly ignoring the questions Kanami had tossed at him, Krusty asked her questions of his own. He wasn’t trying to be mean, but he didn’t feel as if there would be any profit in giving Kanami information. At this point, he should probably prioritize gathering information. 
Whether or not she knew what Krusty was thinking, Kanami began to answer, saying things as she thought of them. 
“It’s not that I came back in secret, not really, but I did it on the Western European server, you know? Besides, I’d retired because I was going over there, too. It’s far away, and I figured that stuff would wait until I’d grown a bit, and then I just sort of never made contact. Oh, I came back in February or so. Then after that, there was that huge Catastrophe mess, right? On top of that, I didn’t have everybody on the friends list for this body. So then I wasn’t able to make contact, period. Then Eli-Eli was frozen in an iceberg, so I rescued him, and we picked up Coppé-cat in a wilderness of flowers—” 
Apparently, it was Kanami’s fault that an Ancient hero was here. 
“Oh, Eli-Eli is Elias Hackblade. He’s this blond, super-duper-dishy guy, you know, the cover character!” 
He knew. 
Cover was the word you used with books, while for a game, it should have been jacket or package, but he knew what she was trying to say. 
“And then we met up with Croakanardo in the Tekeli Ruins, and KR was there, too, but it sounds like he went back to Yamato. Now we’re traveling with this local girl named Chun Lu, so there’s five of us!” 
The only thing he fully understood from that was that none of this really counted as an explanation. 
“Then there were these things called Geniuses, and we fought ’em, and we won! ‘We Are the Champions’!!” 
Kanami’s words brought a flickering image with them. 
A golden woman. 
…If it was all right to call something with a blood-smeared mouth, disheveled hair, and the striped limbs of a tiger a “woman,” that is. A man-eating noblewoman, buried under luxurious accessories— Shoving down a sharp headache through habit, Krusty smiled slightly. 
The enemy. 
This might also be a product of Kanami’s influence. Without intending to, she sometimes brought benefits to the people around her. And this time, he’d gotten another clue of some sort. He didn’t know what it meant or when it would prove useful, but apparently, he now had more enemies. If the word Geniuses had been the key, then it was probably lurking in his lost memories. 
“What are you grinning about, Krus-Krus?” 
“It felt as if I’d heard something nostalgic, that’s all.” 
“I see. So you say average stuff like that, too, Krus-Krus! That’s a surprise.” 
There’s no call for me to take that sort of treatment from you, Krusty thought, but he looked at Gumon’s wagging tail, considered the subject of maturity, and rephrased his remark. 
“And just what sort of person do you think I am?” 
“Well, you know…” 
Kanami turned her eyes to the ceiling, put her index finger to her lips as if she were remembering something, and began to speak: “Sort of…” 
“…hard, and huge, and…” 
As a Guardian, that was only to be expected. 
“…sort of like you’d shoot beams from your glasses with no expression on your face? In other words, you know, like a super-robot!! Like the Terrifying Megalo-King Robot from Mars!” 
Krusty gazed at Kanami steadily. 
It wasn’t as if he had no idea what she was talking about (although the bit about the Martian robot wasn’t clear). That said, even if she told him that, there was almost nothing about it that he could fix, and since fixing it would be a nuisance, he didn’t want to anyway. Still, it was informative, as well as persuasive enough that he thought most people probably did think of him that way. 
“Good for you, though, Krus-Krus. Way back when, it felt like you kept putting up with stuff so you wouldn’t cause trouble for people.” 
Kanami swung her arms in circles, then cocked her head. 
“In the ages it’s been since the last time I saw you, you seem like you’ve loosened up. That’s great. Although you’ve got a weird ‘bad status’ curse on you. Stuff like that has nothing to do with enjoying life, though, huh?!” 
Apparently, that was how she’d thought of him in the past. 
She probably wasn’t that far off the mark. 
For Haruaki Kounoike (aka Krusty), the son of a mistress, standing out was not an option. While he was studying abroad, surveillance was lax, but after he returned to his home country, he was subjected to unpleasant interference in practically everything. 
Krusty had no intention of cutting into their profits, and he didn’t want to participate in the main family’s business. What he had wanted was to be left alone, but the reality was that it wasn’t going to happen. His grandfather and ? had high expectations for him (illogically, as far as Krusty was concerned), but he wondered, feeling rather ironic about it all, whether that wasn’t a lack of self-reliance, in a way. After all, they were trying to make an illegitimate outsider resolve their family’s recklessness, which had gotten to be too much for them to handle. 
In some respects, Krusty had played Elder Tales as a sort of camouflage. He’d thought that, if he acted like a bohemian who was obsessed with online gaming, the people around him would give up on him. To Krusty, who had been forbidden to devote himself to anything, Elder Tales was his “revels and dissipation.” 
If he’d seemed to be constantly putting up with things to avoid making a nuisance of himself, even in the game, he was ashamed of his petit bourgeois self. 
The walking disaster in front of him had probably just guessed at random and said whatever came into her head, but even then, she managed to come up with things that ran people through this gamut neatly. It stood to reason that the group she’d led, the Tea Party, had left a battle record that shredded the rankings. 
Krusty didn’t think he’d loosened up after arriving on the Zhongyuan server. 
It was because he’d come to Theldesia, a world where the Kounoike main family didn’t exist. 
He couldn’t just do as he pleased, but he was able to act a lot more freely than he had in the other world. He knew the freedom was temporary, but it did make him want to chew things to bits. 
He was like Gumon. Even if he could tolerate lying down in the hope of finding peace and quiet, he didn’t want to be chained up. 
Krusty thought he might be cynical, but he had absolutely no intention of mending his ways. He stood, adjusted his glasses, and spoke to Kanami. 
“If that’s how you see it, I’m glad. It looks as though I’ve aged out of my patience. Shall we go aboveground, so I can continue my hobby? Apparently, someone’s worrying about me as well. Forgetting doesn’t make things go away. —I’d prefer not to, but until then, it looks as if it would be best for us to stay together.”