Chapter 11 — I Can’t Help but Feel like He’s Not Listening to Me at All!
The next morning, Tomochika and Yogiri headed to the port. Through the hotel concierge, they were able to arrange for passage on a boat fairly easily. An enormous cruise ship was docked there.
“I feel like I’ve seen something like this before,” Tomochika commented.
“Looks like the kind of ship to hit an iceberg and sink, doesn’t it?” Yogiri replied.
“I thought so too, but don’t say that out loud!” Tomochika had a bad feeling about this boat.
“It’s okay! Hou’s Crimson Blade could vaporize an iceberg in an instant!”
As Tomochika was looking up at the ship, a woman called out to them in a relaxed voice. Judging from what she said, she seemed to be speaking to Tomochika. Looking to her side, Tomochika found a tall woman standing there with a gentle smile on her face.
“Uhh, is that some sort of super technique or something?” she asked.
“Stop it, mom! Why are you butting into random strangers’ conversations?”
The woman had wrapped herself around a boy from behind. She was resting her rather ample chest on his head, which seemed to make him somewhat uncomfortable. If they had walked all the way there in that manner, they would have stood out considerably.
“Well, really, they were worried about icebergs. I wanted them to relax. Because you’re so strong!”
“I’m so sorry. My mother isn’t very good at reading the atmosphere.”
“Whether it’s an iceberg or pirates, we’ll be fine! Just leave it to Hou of the Crimson Bond!”
Despite the woman’s confidence, her insistence only left Tomochika at a loss for words.
“Sorry, you’re probably totally confused,” the boy commented. “We belong to something like a small mercenary group. We’ve been hired to protect the ship.”
“Uh, you and your mother?”
“Yes...and my older and younger sisters as well.” The boy’s gaze became distant. It seemed he was suffering quite a bit.
“Are there actually pirates?” Yogiri asked.
“Yes. But they rarely attack ships of this size, and if for some reason they do, we’ll be there to protect you. Come on, let’s go! Everyone is waiting for us!” Urging his mother onward, he headed for the boat.
“So, there are pirates...” Tomochika’s sense of foreboding was getting worse and worse.
“There’s no way to get there except by boat. If you really don’t want to, we can try to find a different Sage,” Yogiri offered.
But the only Sage they had any concrete information on at the moment was Yoshifumi, who was in Ent. And the city of Hanabusa, which they had visited a while back, was now under the protection of a Sage named Alice, but that was quite far away, and there was no guarantee she was even there.
“Well, we’ve already come this far, right?”
“Ah, are you going to explain what will happen next? Turn around, you two.”
As Tomochika began to worry, another person called out to her. Turning, she found a Japanese boy standing there, looking at her. She had thought that maybe she’d been wrong, but he was in fact addressing her. She couldn’t help but feel a little put off. The way he was speaking made it sound like he was insulting her somehow.
“Oh? I thought you were like an NPC who existed just to explain things, but you seem a bit different. Judging from your looks, you might even be the heroine of the next event.”
“Um, who are you?”
As a young Japanese guy, her first thought was that he could be one of their classmates, but he didn’t look familiar to her. There were plenty of Japanese people in this world. Even besides those being summoned by the Sages, there were apparently a number of locals who were drawing Japanese people to their world for other purposes, so his presence wasn’t all that strange. However, the way he spoke to her was far too familiar, and the things he was saying were odd. Tomochika’s expression was growing increasingly suspicious.
“I’m Yousuke Hiiragi. If you can talk, does that mean you’re a potential party member? Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m just talking to myself.”
“You’re Japanese, right? Were you transported here?”
“Oh? So that’s the setting. What an odd NPC.”
“I can’t help but feel like he’s not listening to me at all!” Tomochika recalled all the people she had met since coming to this world. These kinds of overconfident strangers rarely listened to a word she or her companions had to say.
“Do you think you’re inside a video game or something?” Just as Tomochika was thinking they’d never get through to him, Yogiri spoke up.
“Hey, what’s going on here? This is a pretty meta conversation. What a killjoy. You can’t just have characters breaking the fourth wall like that. Seems like the kind of move a writer would make to show off how ‘original’ they are.” Yousuke frowned. He wasn’t happy with what Yogiri had said.
“Sorry about the bad writing, but do you mind talking for a bit?”
“What do you want? Won’t there be some sort of event once I get on the boat and go out to sea? Well, maybe this is all to set a flag of some sort.”
“If this is a game, how are you perceiving it? Are you holding a controller in front of a TV or something?”
“Don’t be silly. What do you think VR is for?”
“And how are they making it work? I didn’t think VR technology had developed enough to make a virtual world as realistic as this.”
“I don’t know the details, but I’m in some sort of capsule, I guess.”
“What year do you think it is?”
The answer he gave lined up almost exactly with the date of their class trip, so it didn’t seem like he was using any sort of futuristic technology.
“And can you log in and out at will?”
“That’s enough of that. This is a Fantasy RPG world. I’m not here for boring events like this.”
With that, Yousuke left them behind and headed for the boat. Several people who seemed to be his companions followed him: three maids and an older individual. Maybe because of the conversation they had just had, Tomochika couldn’t help but feel like they seemed to be dolls with no will of their own.
“What’s with that guy?” she thought out loud.
“Inside a game, huh? That crossed my mind, but I figured if that’s the case, there’s nothing we can do about it, so I just ignored the possibility.”
“What? You’re kidding, right? There’s no way a game could be this realistic.”
“If you’re asking if it’s possible, it probably is.”
“Really?!”
“For example, if you used a super powerful computer from the future, you could make a world that simulated the movements of each individual atom. But there’s no way to prove it. It’s like the Butterfly Dream or the theory that the world only came into existence five minutes ago.”
“Well, I guess it is suspicious that the real world would have magic in it...”
“It’s pointless to worry about whether it’s all a game or not, but if it was, then maybe there’d be a way we could just log out to get back to our world.”
Yogiri had been asleep when he was first transported, so it was possible he had been forced into a game at that point. But Tomochika had been fully aware from the moment they had moved from one world to the other. They had been on a bus when they’d suddenly appeared here, so it was unlikely they had been placed into some sort of VR game in the meantime.
That only works assuming you were put into the game at some point in the past, Mokomoko interjected. If you were a character created within a game to begin with, there would be no way for you to log out.
But Tomochika had plenty of experiences and memories from before she had appeared in this world. It was hard to believe they were all fabricated.
“That’s right,” Yogiri replied. “If we were created within the game, there would be no point in even thinking about it. So the only person we have to worry about is that guy.”
“What do you mean?”
“If he thinks this is a game, there’s a chance he might do something crazy.”
“Oh! Yeah, I guess in a game where you can kill NPCs, you just start doing it randomly sometimes, don’t you?”
“So, you’re that kind of person, huh?” Yogiri remarked. “I could never do that. I’ve never even been able to take on assassination quests in games before.”
“What? How did this turn into me looking so heartless?!”
Tomochika felt his statement was somewhat unfair.
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