chap 12++

Her face was red. She seemed embarrassed.
“Mm-hm...” Yume nodded in agreement.
Oh, you’re going to sympathize with her there? Yeah, you would, I guess.
Yume and Momohina. These two had some strange similarities. But Yume wouldn’t wear a fake mustache. She wouldn’t fire off a gun, either. And she wouldn’t issue a challenge out of nowhere.
“Um, when you say to face you, what do you mean?” Haruhiro asked, just to be sure.
Momohina, with her cheeks still flushed, grinned and gave a thumbs up. “We’re gonna throw down, mano-a-mano, obviously!
You bet we are. Full speed ahead!”
“Full speed ahead!” The men echoed back with hoarse voices.
Mano-a-mano. That meant one-on-one. Bare-handed, then? “You’re on!” When Kuzaku spun his arm in a circle, moving forward, Momohina’s mustache twisted and almost fell off.
“Duwhuh?!”
Momohina immediately pressed her fake mustache back on her face, but Kuzaku had lost his enthusiasm. Knowing Kuzaku, he’d remembered his opponent was a woman, and was wondering whether mano-a-manoing—no, that wasn’t a word that existed—whether going mano-a-mano with a woman was okay.
Haruhiro wasn’t keen on having a fistfight with a woman himself, but he wasn’t sure about leaving it to the women in the group, either.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” he said.
“Heh heh,” Momohina cackled. “Bring it on! This’ll be a cakewalk. Yes, indeed!”
Momohina cast aside her coat. The men let out a cheer, and Haruhiro hurriedly turned to the side. Momohina had been wearing a knee-length coat, but, naturally, he had expected her to be wearing a shirt underneath. She wasn’t. It was bare skin. She wasn’t naked, but she only had a band tied around her breasts in place of underwear, so it was hard to look at her directly. “What’s wroooong? Heyyyy! Come at meeee!” “Can you put the coat back on?” he asked.
“No way!”
“Why...?”
“It’s too heavy to move iiiin! Do you understaaaand?! This feeeeling?!”
“I don’t, really, but can you try to understand how I feel, too?”
“I don’t care about that, so let’s do this! Hoorah! If you won’t come to me, maybe I should go on the attaaaack? Here I coooome!”
Momohina closed in. In an instant, Haruhiro went into work mode like switch had been flipped, jumping back diagonally with all his strength.
Oh, crap. She’s fast. What?
“Hee. Let me guess, you’re no amateur, riiiight?”
That stance. Her left foot and hand were forward, her hips lowered, and her hand open slightly. There was no unused strength anywhere in her body. From a state that looked almost relaxed, she rapidly accelerated. She was the one who was no amateur.
“Entertain me!” she shouted. “Yes, indeed!”
Unlike with a punch or a slap, her arms, her wrists, and even her fingers flexed and assaulted him. Though this couldn’t be the case, it felt like they’d cut him if they hit him. Haruhiro relied on his reflexes to avoid Momohina’s attacks. If he tried to plan out what to do in his head in response to each more, he stood no chance of keeping up.
“Schwing, schwing, schwing, schwing, schwing, schwing, schwing, schwing, schwiiiiing!” she shouted.
What a fierce assault. Fast and flowing. It never let up.
Haruhiro quickly lost the ability to avoid it, and when he blocked with his arm, his arm wasn’t so much knocked away as pushed aside, and he lost his balance. He was cornered in no time. He had no other moves left. Reluctantly, Haruhiro went on the counterattack.
Punching and kicking wasn’t his specialty. He decided to take a combo attack from Momohina, withstand it, and try to grab her arm. A thief’s fighting techniques included a skill called Arrest.
Now.
The moment he thought that, he was flipped over. His arm was grabbed instead, and he was thrown.
“So cloooose!”
Momohina was going for a shot at Haruhiro’s face. Not with a fist, though. What did she plan to do with that unclenched hand?
He didn’t know, but he was sure that one attack would work.
He didn’t do it intentionally. The limiter in his brain must have come undone by itself.
Assault.
Haruhiro jumped away from Momohina, then immediately sprang at her. He didn’t think how to use his hands or feet, didn’t think about feinting to get his real attacks in, none of that. He didn’t look at his opponent’s movements, or attempt to sense them. He cut off all of his responses to just attack.
Attack.
His heart pounded, his blood vessels expanded to many times their normal size, and the blood coursed through his body at an unbelievable speed. It didn’t matter that his opponent was female, or that she was human at all, to Haruhiro in his current state. Meat collided with and crushed meat. They could both be reduced to bloody pulp for all he cared. In fact, he wanted that. When attacking with Assault, Haruhiro was himself, but at the same time not himself.
Even so, it wasn’t enough.
Momohina slipped past his right hand, his left hand, his right foot, and his left foot, turning them aside. She was toying with him. Like he was a child.
This is no good.
Momohina was a weird woman, but not an idiot. She must have known from the beginning that she would never lose a hand-tohand fight. She had lured Haruhiro into a battle she was sure to win. The contest was already decided.
“Is that! The best! You! Can do?!” she shouted.
Having parried the attack Haruhiro had poured every last bit of strength into, she confidently went on the attack. Assault cast aside all reason, completely abandoning defense in order to focus on the attack. If she got him now, he had nothing to give back.
“Delm!” Momohina slammed her palm into Haruhiro’s left flank. Though a direct hit was to his flank, it echoed all the way to the top of his head.
Even as he reeled, Haruhiro fiercely tried to grab her. Momohiro shouted “Hel!” and “En!” striking his left and right shoulders, then his solar plexus with “Balk!” The punishing blows were like stakes being driven into him. At this point, Haruhiro was already losing consciousness. The only thing keeping him on his feet was stubbornness, or guts, or coincidence.
“Zel!” Momohina stepped in, kicking Haruhiro’s left knee.
He fell backwards. He couldn’t keep his footing any longer.
“Arve!”
If Momohina had landed a clean hit on his chin with the palm she brought down, who knows what might have happened to Haruhiro. He might well have died.
Momohina deliberately chose not to hit him.
That wasn’t all. Momohina used the right arm she’d made miss to hug the falling Haruhiro, and to spin him around. At the same time, boom, there was an explosion somewhere else.
Screams and cheers went up and Momohina sat Haruhiro on the ground.
It must have come off at some point during the fight. Her fake mustache was gone.
Momohina’s face was very much that of a young girl. Her real age was unknown, but she looked even younger than Haruhiro and his party. Wait, what had that explosion been just now? Could it have been Blast?
Delm, hel, en, balk, zel, arve... Come to think of it, she’d chanted a spell, hadn’t she? Huh? Then what? Was she a mage?
“I am Momohina! The K&K Pirate Company’s KMW! I’m a kungfu master, a mage, and a woman! Woo!” she shouted.
The men threw their hands up and cheered with gruff voices.
“Oooooooooooh!”
K = Kung-fu Master. M = Mage. W = Woman.
Oh, so that was it. Well, it wasn’t like there was any other KMW, so it was pretty much a straight description of her.
“How’s that?!” Momohina looked down at Haruhiro arrogantly. She looked so... smug. “Flawless! Victory! Oh, yeah! You admit defeat?”
“I admit defeat.”
“Goooood! Now then, from here on, you people are my underlings! Under, under, underlings! Okay!”
“Huh? W-We are...?”
“You bet you are! By fighting mano-a-mano, we formed a bond of bloooood!”
“You say that like fighting makes friends. No, I guess that’s not quite it...”
“It’s fine, it’s fine! Don’t sweat the small stuff! Youth! Power! Guts! It’s YPG! This is pirate law, okay?! Yes, indeed!” “Pirates...”
Come to think of it, she’d been saying something about the K&K Pirate Company. The men were sailors, and Momohina was apparently their captain. Their ship was run aground over there.
Okay, then. This was a group of pirates. That was their pirate ship, and Momohina was the captain. Thus the mustache? No, she didn’t really need one, did she?
“...Wait, we’re underlings? To a pirate? Huh? Seriously?”

 
6. Calcium



In life, you never know what will happen. No one knows what the future holds. In fact, that may be what life is all about.
“Okaaay! Nexy! To-wah!”
When Momohina struck a mysterious pose, Yume, Shihoru, Merry, and Setora who were lined up in front of her all shouted, “To-wah!” and struck the same pose.
“Next! Se-hah! Sah! Zan, zan! Yarya!”
When Momohina did a spinning kick, knifehand strike, two jabs, and a reverse spinning kick, Yume and the others mimicked her.
“Se-hah! Sah! Zan, zan! Yarya!”
Yume, Merry, and Setora were starting to get good, but Shihoru wasn’t making any progress. It was hard to blame her. Shihoru was a mage, after all. Well, so was Momohina, but she was a special case, so it was probably fair to count her as an exception.
“Next! Chorya! Nata! Fumi! Shu, sha, briin!”
“Chorya, nata, fumi, shu, sha, briiin.”
“You’re lacking energy! Come on, make it snappy! Do-wah! Serah!”
“Do-wah! Se-rah!”
“Niiiice! Keep it uuuup!”
Kung-fu lessons on the beach continued. How had this happened? Haruhiro didn’t really know. Regardless, Yume and the girls were learning kung-fu from Momohina, while Haruhiro and Kuzaku were doing manual labor with the other men.
Though they called it labor, all they were really doing was helping the sailors, which was to say pirates, with things like combing the beach for things that had washed up, collecting firewood, and attempting to build shelters and rafts. There was no urgency to any of it, either.
There were a number of barrels from the beached pirate ship hauled ashore, and in them were salted fish, meat, and pickled vegetables, so food was no issue for the time being. For water, they could draw it from the nearby river and boil it to make it potable. If they really wanted to, they could even drink it straight from the river and, well, it probably wouldn’t kill them.
The pirates were bored. If there were booze, they’d have drunk and partied, but it seemed they had already drank the last of it. With their hands idle, they were finding things to do for lack of any alternative. Maybe even killing time was too much hassle for them, because there was no shortage of pirates lying on top of the rocks and snoring.
However, Haruhiro and his group were the new guys, bottom of the hierarchy. If they rested, they’d be yelled at. “Hey, get to work!” It was boring to do nothing anyway, so they lent a hand to the pirates who were moving around.
While they were doing so, the sun went down. Once it was dark out, they lit a bonfire, and posted guards, or didn’t. Kiichi, who had been off somewhere doing whatever he pleased, returned. Eventually, the night ended and day broke. Yet another new day, indistinct from any other, had begun.
The pirate life was a little different from what Haruhiro had imagined.
No, not that he ever had imagined it. He’d never had ties with any pirates. Never thought he’d be involved with them, either. Now where was he? Haruhiro was a member of a pirate crew. But was this what a pirate crew did? Like, were they even doing anything? Maybe not.
Yume and the others spent all day practicing kung-fu. Though, the theory they were just going along with Momohina who was playing teacher because she had too much time on her hands was more persuasive. Haruhiro and the others were her underlings, so if it was a request from the KMW of the K&K Pirate Company, or whatever she wanted to call herself, they had no right to refuse.
They had ended up in this position because of Haruhiro’s losing a mano-a-mano fight, so he was reflecting deeply on what he did wrong. But, at this point, their life on the rocky beach was so relentlessly peaceful that reflecting on it was starting to feel downright stupid.
On the fifth day, a ship came.
The truth was, Momohina and her crew hadn’t been hanging out on that rocky beach for no purpose. They’d been waiting for one of their comrades’ ships.
The ship dropped anchor off shore, and sent out a dinghy. There were three pirates aboard it. Two were human, but one was, incredibly, a fishman.
“Momohina-saaan! It’s me, me! Ginzy. Ginzy is here for you! Momohina-saaan, can you hear meee?! Ginzy is here to collect you, you know?!”
The orc, goblin, and kobold pirates all spoke the human language, even if highly accented at times, so maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. However, it was. The proper race for his race might not be a fishman, but that pirate was pretty darn fishlike. He wore clothing with a design similar to Momohina’s coat, along with a hat, but it was impressive how fish-like he was.
“Ohhh. Ginzy, huh...” Momohina looked blatantly disappointed, even slightly upset. Considering that their fellow pirate, who they had waited all this time, had finally shown up, she wasn’t terribly excited.
“Give it up, KMW,” the bandaged pirate said to Momohina. His name was Jimmy, and his position was apparently something like Momohina’s assistant. “If we set her captain aside, the Mantis-go is a fine ship. With this, we can at least return to the Emerald
Archipelago.”
“Well, yeeeeah. You’re right, buuuut...”
“Haven’t you known Ginzy longer than me, KMW?”
“Listen, that means I’ve been made to listen to a whoooole loooot more pointless drivel from him, okaaaay?”
“Oh, when you put it that way, that’s pretty unbearable...”
“He always gets carried away, babbling on and oooon. He wouldn’t be a bad kid if he weren’t so annoying, though. That Ginzy.”
They were saying a lot of mean things about him, but when Ginzy the fishman disembarked from the dinghy onto the rocky beach, he seemed highly unlikable.
“Whew, sorry I’m later than planned. I’m terribly sorry, but, huh? What’s this? Why am I not feeling very welcomed? Huh, huh, huh? That’s weird. You think it’s weird, too, right? I mean, I came here to get you, didn’t I? Even if you ran into a storm, it took some real carelessness to run aground, and here I am, going out of my way to come collect you all. I won’t demand you cry ‘banzai’ three times or anything, but a ‘thank you’ would seem appropriate, wouldn’t you agree? No, no, I’m not going to turn back without you or anything, okay? Why I’d never do such a thing. It’s not like I couldn’t, though, you know? But I won’t. I really won’t. I mean it.” “What’s with this guy....?” When those words slipped out of Kuzaku’s mouth, Ginzy’s fish eyes glared in his direction.
“Huh?! That should be my line, you know?! I’ve never seen or eaten your face before, okay?! It’d be scary if I had eaten it, you say? That’s just a sahuagin joke! Okay, that’s the part where you laugh! I don’t understand why your sides aren’t splitting!”
“W-We’re new.” It looked like it was going to develop into something troublesome, so Haruhiro forced Kuzaku’s head down, saying, “Go on, apologize.” He then explained, “I lost to
Momohina... the KMW... in a mano-a-mano showdown, so we’re her underlings now... or something.”
“Fishishishishishhhh?! You? Had a showdown with Momohinasan? Mano-a-mano, at that?!”
“Huh? Uh, yeah... Um, your eyes are popping out.”
“Of course they are! Momohina-san’s crazy strong! It’s a wonder you’re still alive, you know?!”
“She went easy on me,” Haruhiro admitted.
“I’ll bet! If not, you’d be a pile of fish bones right now. Oh, in the village I was born in, it’s customary to sink corpses into the lake for the fishes to eat, and then we catch those same fish and eat them. Isn’t that gross? You think it’s gross, right?”
“I’m not sure I’d be on board with that, no...”
“I know, right?! I always thought it was gross. Either way, that’s where the fish bones saying comes from, is what I’m getting at.
That’s some trivial knowledge for you. Trivia. You’re sure you don’t need to take notes?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Oh, you kidder. It might do you some good to jot it down, you know? Or are you one of those people who thinks anything you forget was unimportant, but you’ll remember the important things? Well, you’ll forget a lot of the important things, too! Too bad!”
...Oh, crap.
Haruhiro wanted to sneak up behind this sahuagin, or whatever he was, and wring his neck right now. He didn’t know how their bodies were built, but there was almost definitely going to be a vital nerve in the neck. If he could quickly deal a large amount of damage to it, he suspected the result would be deeply satisfying. Haruhiro had had a lot of practice with that one idiot, so he figured he had more tolerance for annoying nonsense than the average person, but Ginzy had an inhuman level of annoyingness. Maybe because he was a fishman?
“I’m sorry,” Haruhiro interrupted. “May I ask a question?”
“Yes, yes. If you must. If I can answer it, well, maybe I will? I don’t know, though... You are new, after all, and just an underling, too.”
“Oh... forget it, then.”
“Ask! You’re supposed to ask! You’re still young, right?! I’m young, too, but the world’s not so easy that you can get by with that level of enthusiasm, you know?!”
“No, I kinda forgot my question. Like, it doesn’t even matter to me.”
“Fishhhh!” Ginzy cried, bending over backwards like a shrimp... even though he was a fish, not a shrimp. Though, if Haruhiro said that, that would probably only encourage this fishman to keep going.
“Are all sahuagin, how should I put this... smooth speakers, like you?” he asked.
“Why, yes, we are. Why?”
“Oh, yeah? I see. I’ve never met a sahuagin before.” “Just kiddiiiing!”
“Huh?”
“That’s a liiiiie! I’m more talkative than your average sahuagin!
Nyah nyah, I tricked you. Fishhhh! Fishhhh!”
Haruhiro wanted to commend himself for not pulling a Spider on Ginzy, who was repeatedly bending over backwards in shock, and eliminating a source of stress for himself.
The dinghy made several trips back and forth between the rocky beach and Ginzy’s ship the Mantis-go. Once everyone was aboard the Mantis-go, they hoisted her sails and raised the anchor.
Their course was eastward and a little southward, in the direction of the Emerald Archipelago. Well, Haruhiro and his party weren’t heading for there, but now that they were aboard the ship, they had bigger concerns.
Yes. Seasickness.
Haruhiro and company lined up along the side of the ship, battling with nausea, puking, and then battling with nausea again. When they rolled over in exhaustion to try to get some sleep, the pirates stopped them. If they laid down, they would be fine while they slept, but it would apparently be even worse once they woke up. The appropriate thing to do was drink some water with lime in it, and try to deal with it. That, and to avoid looking down. If they could just do that, they’d get used to eventually, they were told, but was that true? It was hard to believe, you know?

 

“Well, I’ve never heard of anyone dying of nausea,” Jimmy the bandaged man told them. He would occasionally come to check on Haruhiro and the party. Of all the pirates, he might have been the most decent and normal. “This is something everyone, even those far weaker than you, has been through. You’ll get through it somehow. Though, that said, I’ve never been seasick myself, so I don’t really know what it’s like.”
“So some people don’t get seasick,” Haruhiro managed. “Is it a matter of constitution?”
“Well, I couldn’t say. I’m an undead, so I don’t really understand how you people who are properly alive feel.”
“...Oh. I suppose you wouldn’t, no.”
Outside of his eyes and mouth, hardly any part of Jimmy was exposed. Not just his face; his neck, hands, and even his fingers were wrapped in cloth. Most undead had dirty brown skin. Was it to hide that? But this pirate gang had orcs and goblins, so it wouldn’t be that strange for an undead to be in it. Besides, Jimmy had told them he was undead on his own. It made no sense. There was something wrong with Jimmy, after all.
Yume adapted in about half a day, and set out on a tour of the ship with Kiichi in tow. She apparently went for kung-fu lessons with Momohina, too.
Haruhiro, Kuzaku, Shihoru, Merry, and Setora never quite managed to get away from the side of the ship. Of course, it wasn’t like they were constantly puking; they could talk, at least. It felt like conversation made it easier, but when one of them got sick, the others were dragged along. They were never going to get much talking done in this state.
“You’ll never be proper pirates like that, you knoooow? Nope!” Momohina laughed at them.
Haruhiro agreed entirely, and wished she’d just let them off the ship already. That it wasn’t possible to do so was the scariest thing about a ship. On the high seas, there was no place to run.
Maybe it was because, in spite of the fair weather, the waves were high, and the boat rocked heavily. In the end, three days after they set sail, when an island appeared on the horizon, no one other than Yume and Kiichi had been completely set free from the nauseating grip of seasickness.
Once a sense of relief set in, though, their symptoms lessened a little, so there may have been more of a psychological aspect to it than they had thought.
However, when they got close to the island, it became apparent something strange was going on.
Ginzy’s Mantis-go was headed for a port built in the island’s bay. There were a whole bunch of ships outside the bay. It was a port, after all, and it wasn’t evening yet. If there were a lot of ships going in and out, that would be understandable. However, there were more ships that had stopped than were moving. The crew of the Mantis-go were clearly on edge.
The figurehead of this ship, as the name would suggest, was a statue of a praying mantis. Momohina had been standing atop the figurehead for a while now, not moving a muscle. Her eyes were on the port. It would be scary if she fell off, but knowing Momohina, she probably wasn’t even scared.
Haruhiro and the party were, as before, at the side of the ship. Jimmy happened to have come by at that moment, so they tried asking him what was happening, but he answered, “It’d be faster for you to see it, I think,” and pointed towards the port.
“A bird?” Haruhiro cocked his head to the side. There were bird-like creatures circling over the port. A flock of two, maybe three birds. It looked like three. Was “flock” the right word? They were flying, so they weren’t a herd, at least. “But—”
“Kind of big, aren’t they?” Yume said.
That was it. They were awfully big for birds.
“Wyverns?” Setora whispered. That made sense.
True enough, they did resemble the wyverns that lived in the Kuaron Mountains and descended on Thousand Valley when the fog cleared.
“There have been dragons living in the Emerald Archipelago since long, long ago,” someone said.
If Jimmy had said that, it would have ended with an Oh, okay.
But it wasn’t Jimmy who said it.
Everyone there, not just Haruhiro, turned to look at Merry.
Why did Merry know that?
Merry covered her mouth and looked down, but Haruhiro was the one who was even more flustered.
“Ohh, that,” said Haruhiro. “Um, like, I’ve heard that, too. It’s just something we heard somewhere, so it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s a thing...”
“Ahhh!” Shihoru said in an awfully loud voice. Was she covering for them? No, not necessarily. The pirates were making a ruckus, too.
One of the dragons said to have lived in the Emerald Archipelago since long, long ago had begun descending. If they were dragons, it seemed more fitting to call them a flight than a flock, and one of the three members of said flight had its head facing almost straight down as it descended, or rather fell.
The dragon reached the port, or probably the town beyond it, in no time flat, but what happened after that? It was far away, so it was impossible to tell from here.
“So, basically...” Haruhiro followed the two circling dragons with his eyes as he forced out a sigh.
It was happening again. One of the other two began a rapid descent. Then, the final one joined them.
Dust was rising from the town.
He had already been at a loss for what to do when they’d gotten shanghaied into joining a pirate crew. The boat trip had been the worst ever. Now, finally they were about to make landfall. Or so he had been thinking, but then this.
“...the port is under attack by dragons?”


7. Jewels and Skulls



The flight of dragons left in the evening. The Mantis-go entered port after that, so by the time they had disembarked and left the pier, it was quite late in the day.
It turned out the dragons had begun appearing ten days ago, and started swooping down like that seven days ago.
The damages extended to the port town of Roronea’s residential district, commercial district, and pleasure quarter. The port had only had one of its piers destroyed, and two of the ships there were heavily damaged. Well, even if that was all that had happened, it still meant one of seven wharves and piers was completely out of commission. The ships were a major asset for their owners, too. Sometimes the entirety of their fortune. It was a huge loss.
That being the case, there were far fewer people in Roronea than usual. Normally, it would have been a wild town with drinking and singing all day and all night, a sort of sleepless city, but none of that bustle was on display now.
“Our company’s main racket is the various taxes we collect from all over Roronea, after all,” a man told them.

Chapter end