chap 14 3

“That’s kinda frustratin’. Yume, next time, she’s gonna stay up until you go to sleep. Yume’s gonna look at your sleeping face a whoooole loooot!”
“That’s... fine. Though, when you say it like that, it’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Let me in on this girl talk! No, let me see your sleeping face, too! No, not just your face, your whole sleeping body... Gweheheheh...” “Ranta, you pervert!” Yume shouted.
“You are the absolute worst,” Shihoru agreed.
“Say whatever you like! I don’t care! Geheheheheh!”
“Ha ha... Ranta-kun, you’re sure resilient...” Moguzo said.
“Moguzo! You could stand to learn from me! You’re a warrior! If you don’t get tough, body and soul, how’re you going to be bait for me?”
“Y-You have a point. Yeah. I’ll do my best.”
“No, don’t!” Yume screamed. “If you ended up actin’ like Ranta, Yume’d hate that!”
“R-Really...?”
“Me, too. No question,” Shihoru agreed.
Manato chuckled, watching everyone banter.
Damuro.
That was right. This was the Old City of Damuro. We had come here, like always, to hunt goblins. Then we’d stopped to take a rest in a crumbling building.
I sat down, and then—I dozed off...? Maybe?
“Is the exhaustion building up?” Manato asked me.
“Oh...” I cocked my head to the side. “Maybe it is. I don’t really know, though. But if I just fell asleep like that, it could be. Hmm.”
“What? Did you have a weird dream?” “A dream...” I murmured.
That was right.
I felt like... I’d had a dream.
And a rather... intricate—I mean, lengthy—dream, too.
“Manato,” I said quietly, “how long was I out for?”
“Just for a little while, I think. Why?”
“No...”
I felt like... it had been much too long a dream for that to be true.
But I didn’t remember what it was about.
Not just barely anything, absolutely nothing.
“It’s nothing... I really must just be tired.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, let’s call it a day early, then.”
“Huh? But I’m fine. If I made you all head back early, that’d feel kind of awkward...”
“It’s not your fault, Haruhiro. It’s important to consider our condition. For everyone’s sake.”
When he said that so gently, I could hardly refuse. I’d never once felt like pushing back against Manato.
“Why don’t we head back to Alterna while it’s light out for once, and take it easy?” Manato suggested to all of us.
Ranta grumbled a little, but everyone else was glad. Even Ranta probably wasn’t seriously upset; he just wanted to be argumentative. Manato was good at responding to that. It was a trick I couldn’t hope to replicate. If Manato weren’t around, someone would have long since snapped at Ranta, and something irreversible might have been done.
We left Damuro.
It was my fault, and I did kinda feel bad about it, but honestly, I also felt it was fine to have days like this.
“Should I cook?” Moguzo said on the way back. “We’re making it back pretty early, so there’s time, and it’s cheap.” “I’ll eat at the stalls,” Ranta said.
“Why’ve you gotta go gettin’ in the way of our teamwalk like that, huh?!”
“Yume.” I couldn’t help but point this out. “It’s work, not walk. Teamwork...”
“Mewww. Was that how it was?”
“Of course it is,” Ranta scoffed. “What’d we be walking for, idiot?”
“Murgh. When Ranta says it, it’s super annoyin’.”
“Then don’t make me say it. If you can, that is!”
“B-But...” Shihoru said hesitantly, “I don’t think a teamwalk would be all that bad an idea...”
“Oh, Shihoru, I was thinking that, too,” said Manato. “All of us walking together. Teamwork is for working, so maybe a teamwalk is a better match for us.”
“I... I know, right? I... I think so, too...” “Shihoruuuu!” Yume cried.
“Fwah, wh-what?! Yume, th-this is so sudden...”
“You’re the best!”
“S-Sto—Wait, no, if you hug me, I’m going to trip!”
“Wait,” Manato held his hand up, motioning for us all to stop. “Up ahead. There something there.”
We lowered our postures, squinting. He was right. There was something moving on the other side of the field. I was a little surprised. They looked like goblins. It wasn’t Damuro, but they were in a group.
“One... Two... Three... Four... Five... Six of them, huh?” I said. “That’s a lot.”
“Still, though. Those guys look kinda stupid, you know?” Ranta licked his lips, a hand reaching for the hilt of his longsword. “Why don’t we kill ’em? With a surprise attack, it’ll be easy.”
“That’s true, assuming the surprise attack succeeds.” It was the rare occasion where the cautious Moguzo seemed eager. “Maybe it’s doable?”
“Muh...” Yume readied her bow. “They don’t seem to have noticed Yume and everyone, you know?”
“If we’re going to do it,” Shihoru clutched her staff, “we have to decide fast.”
“You’re right.” Was Manato a little hesitant?
He would be. Manato was the one to decide, after all. Who knew how it would play out? Naturally, we would all accept it, but Manato had the heavy responsibility.
Manato looked to me. I doubted he was looking for advice. Surely he was just seeing how I was doing.
Still, if I nodded now, wouldn’t Manato make up his mind? That was what I thought. Well, I could at least give him a push from behind. I owed him that much at least.
I was about to nod. Then, something flashed through my mind. Things I might have seen, might have heard. It seemed coherent, yet not, all of it being mashed together. It was hard to explain, but... something caught in my chest, and I had trouble breathing.
There was just one thing I knew. We couldn’t do this. It was a mistake.
“Can we not?” I asked. “There’re a lot of them. One of them looks awful big, too. I’m not feeling it... I don’t think we’re ready for this, you could say.”
“Huh?!” Ranta came at me. “You’re the only one not ready here! Me, I’m raring to go! Now listen—”
“Wah!” Yume pointed at the goblins. “They ran away!” “She’s right.” Moguzo sounded a little bit relieved.
Shihoru seemed relieved, too. “Even if we were to chase after them now...”
“We wouldn’t make it.” Manato laughed a little. “Well, maybe this was for the best? Things happen as they must.”
“Tch!” Ranta clicked his tongue and kicked the ground. “Those guys just had their lives spared.”
While I watched the goblins go off into the distance, I thought about the long dream that had just come back to me.
Yes. That was a dream. A long dream I had seen in a very short time.
But was it really a dream? How could I say for sure that this wasn’t the dream?

 

“Awaken.”


I opened my eyes, feeling like I’d heard someone’s voice.
I was in a dark place. Where was this? It wasn’t pitch black. There was light. I stood up and looked above me. There were candles affixed to the wall, a line of them stretching far into the distance.
The walls and floor were hard. They were rock. Was this a cave?
If there were candles, this cave had clearly been touched by human hands. A mine shaft, maybe?
There were people. Several of them, in addition to me. More than just two or three. It seemed there were about ten of us lying down, sitting with our backs to the walls, or sitting up.
“Is anyone there?” one person asked.
I reflexively replied, “Uh, yeah.”
“I’m here...”
“Yeah.”
“I figured as much.”
“How many of us are there?”
“Should we count?”
“And... where are we, anyway?”
“Dunno...”
“What? Doesn’t anyone know where we are?”
“What’s going on?”
“What is this?”
Hearing one voice after another, I thought, That’s strange.
I didn’t know. Didn’t know where this was. Why I was here. Who these people with me were.
“Sitting here won’t solve anything,” one man said, standing up.
“Going somewhere...?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Following the wall,” the man answered in a calm tone. “Going to try heading towards the light.”
That man, his hair was white—no, silver?
My eyes met the silver-haired man’s for a moment. He may have just happened to be looking this way. But he looked at me like I was lower than him.
I don’t like it.
Like the silver-haired man, I’d been thinking of following the wall. But he acted faster than I did. It wasn’t that this frustrated me or anything of the sort. That wasn’t it, but—what was it? It gave me a bad feeling.
“I’m going, too,” the woman said.
“Me too, I guess,” someone said.
“H-Hold on, guys! I’m coming, too, then!” called another man.
One man pointed out that the path continued in the direction without candles, too, but no one was going to go that way. I could tell that.
Everyone here was going to follow the man with silver hair. I was going to have no choice but to do the same.
And in the end, that was exactly how it went.
Eventually, we ran into an iron grate door. When the silver-haired man opened the door, the path stretched onwards, and there were stairs leading up.
Still, you know, I’m not that surprised, I thought. That’s kind of strange. I mean, I have no clue what’s up here, but the one thing I do know is that it’s not normal. This is clearly an abnormal situation.
There was another iron grate at the top of the stairs.
The silver haired man pounded on the grate, loudly shouting, “Is nobody there?! Open the door!” A number of the others started shouting, too, until someone opened the iron grate which had apparently been locked.
Whoever it was indicated that we should “Get out.”
When I passed through the door, this time I was a little surprised. I didn’t think much of anything about the stonework room, but the man who’d opened the door was dressed in a funny way. He wore armor, and a helmet. He even had what looked like a sword hanging at his hip.
What kind of joke was this? Though, the real problem lay beyond that.
Why had I thought, “What kind of joke is this?”
I felt like I could explain, but I couldn’t. Words floated up in the back of my head. Yet before they could surface, they vanished like bubbles.
That was how it felt. It felt pretty unpleasant. This was seriously weird. Which was weirder, what was happening inside me, or what was happening outside me?
The man in armor triggered some sort of mechanism, causing a part of the wall to sink in and an exit to appear.
“Get out.”
When we headed outside, the dimly lit sky stretched out as far as the eye could see. This was the top of a small hill. We had been inside a tower on top of a hill all this time, and we’d just come out of it.
I tried counting our numbers. There were eight men, myself included, and four women. Twelve people in total. Not one of them a familiar face.
I looked to the other side of the hill. There were many buildings packed close together, surrounded by sturdy walls.
“You think that’s a city?” one of them said.
“Rather than a town,” said a thin man wearing black-rimmed glasses, “it’s almost like a castle.”
“A castle...” the sleepy-eyed man whispered to himself.
“Um...” a timid-looking girl asked the sleepy-eyed man, “where is this, do you think?”
“Look, asking me isn’t going to help.”
“...Right, of course. Um, d-does anyone... know? Where is this place?”
The curly-haired man scratched at his curly hair and said, “Seriously?”
“I’ve got it!” said a man who looked like a playboy, clapping his hands together. “Why don’t we just ask that dude?! Y’know, the one who was in, like, armor or whatever!”
When we all turned to look at the tower, the entrance began to close.
“Whoa, whoa, wai—”
Playboy made a run for it. He was too late. The entrance vanished, leaving the spot where it had once been indistinguishable from the surrounding wall.
Playboy tried touching and hitting the wall in all sorts of places, but soon enough he slumped to the ground, dejected.
“Well, this is a problem,” said a girl with her long hair in two braids. She said the word “problem” with a funny accent.
Is she from xxxxxx? I wondered. —xxxxxx...? It’s no good. It won’t come to me.
“You said it,” replied Curly, crouching down, “Seriously...? Seriously?”
“And, now, with that perfect tiiiiiiiming!” a high-pitched woman’s voice rang out. “I appear, you know. I take the stage, you know. Where am I? I’m right heeeere!”
“Right where?!” cried Playboy, standing up and shouting.
“Don’t paaaanic! Don’t be alaaaarmed! But, still, don’t relaaaax. Don’t pull out your hair, eiiiither!”
From the shadow of the tower, a woman with her hair in twintails poked her head out, singing a strange tune. “Charararararahn, charararararahnrarahn. Heeeey. Is everyone feeling fiiiine? Welcome to Grimgar. I’m your guide, Hiyomuuuu. Nice to meet youuuu. Let’s get along? Kyapii!”
“What an annoying speech style,” a man with a buzz-cut said, grinding his back teeth.
“Eek!” Hiyomu ducked her head back into the tower, but soon stuck it out again. “You’re so scary. So dangerous. Don’t get so maaaad. Okay? Okay? Okay? Okay?”
Buzz-Cut clicked his tongue in distaste. “Then don’t piss me off.”
“Yes, sirreeee!” Hiyomu hopped out next to the tower, raising her hand in a salute. “I’ll be careful from now on, sir! I’ll be reeeeal careful, sir? Is this okay? It’s okay, right? Teehee.”
“You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you?”
“Aw, you could teeeell? Ah, ah! Don’t get mad! Don’t punch me, don’t kick me! I don’t like being hurt! Generally, I want you to be niiiice to me! Anyway, is it okay if I move things along now? Can I do my job now?”
“Hurry it up,” said Silver Hair in a low, menacing voice.
“All righty, then,” Hiyomu began with an undaunted grin. “I’m gonna do my job now, okay? For now, just follow after meeee. Don’t get left behiiiind!”
Hiyomu walked along the well-trodden, black dirt path that led down the hill. There was grass on either side of the path. But it wasn’t just a grassy field. There were tens, hundreds, or maybe more, large white stones lined up.
“Hey, are those...” Curly asked, pointing at the white stones. “Could they be... graves?”
“Hee hee heeee,” Hiyomu giggled without turning around. “I wondeeeer. Well, don’t you worry about that now. Don’t woooorry.
It’s too soon for any of you. I hope it’s too soon for any of youuuu. Hee hee hee...”
Buzz-Cut clicked his tongue in distaste again, kicking the dirt. He was ready to snap, but it looked like he planned to follow Hiyomu.
Silver Hair was already walking. Glasses, a woman in flashy clothes, and another much more petite girl followed him.
Playboy shouted, “Whoa! Me too, me too! Me too!” and began chasing after them, then tripped.
I turned back to the tower. If I didn’t follow Hiyomu, and I ran off instead, what would happen?
“Ah...” The sleepy-eyed man groaned. “...It’s red.” The timid-looking girl gulped audibly.
“Ahh,” said the girl with braids. “Mr. Moon is red. That’s super pretty.”
A red moon? That was absurd.
But it was true.
It was somewhere between a half and a crescent moon, maybe.
The moon hanging in the slightly bright sky was so red that it seemed unreal.
Curly said, “Whoa...”
An awfully large man let out a low groan.
It’s different, I thought. This place, it’s different.
The moon, it’s red.
This must be a different place. I’m sure of it.
Isn’t this what I was hoping for?
For some reason, I felt that was true.

 

1. Even if I Don’t Understand The sleepy-eyed man was Haruhiro.
The curly-haired one was Ranta.
The big guy was Moguzo.
The timid girl was Shihoru.
The easygoing guy was Kikkawa.
And I was Manato.
Talking as we walked, I managed to figure that much out.
Though, maybe I should say that was all I managed to figure out.
Not only did we not know anything about this place where the moon was red, we didn’t even know about ourselves. Still, we could all give our names. We could say our height and weight, too. It was just that, if we went for anything more specific—about where we were born, about our families, if we had any friends—we couldn’t reach that information.
It felt like it was there, but reach as we might, we couldn’t touch it. When our fingertips touched it, it slipped away. There was a region like that inside our heads. We couldn’t access the memories there. That was how it felt.
Hiyomu led us to the office of the Volunteer Soldier Corps of the Alterna Frontier Army, Red Moon, then immediately took off.
The office was like a bar, and someone with green hair, a cleft chin, light blue eyes, thick makeup, and lipstick—a man—was waiting for us with his elbows resting on the counter.
“Hm...” He nodded to himself a number of times as he scrutinized us.
“Very nice. Come here, my little kittens. Welcome. I’m Britney. I’m the chief and host here at the office of Red Moon, the Volunteer Soldier Corps of the Alterna Frontier Army. You can call me Chief, but Bri-chan is fine, too. Though, if you do call me that, make sure you say it with lots of love, okay?”
“Chief.” Silver Hair walked up to the counter, cocking his head to one side. “Answer my questions. I know that this town is called Alterna. But what is this Frontier Army and Volunteer Soldier Corps stuff about? Why am I here? Do you know?”
“You’ve got spunk. I’ve got a thing for boys like you. What’s your name?”
“It’s Renji. And I hate fags like you.”
“Oh, do you now...” In an instant, Britney had pressed a knife against Renji’s throat, his eyes narrowing threateningly. “Renji, let me give you a tip. Nobody who calls me a fag lives for long. You look like a clever boy; I think you catch my meaning. Or do you want to try it again?”
“Well,” Renji said, seizing the knife’s blade with his bare hand. “I never wanted a long life, and I don’t care to give in to threats. If you think you can take me, do it, Chief Fag.”
“In due time,” Britney replied, licking his lips and stroking Renji’s cheek. “I’ll take you hard. As many times as I like. And when I’m done, you’ll never be able to forget me.”
Ranta, Haruhiro, and the girl with braids were whispering something between themselves.
I couldn’t take my eyes off Renji. He was a man of steady nerves. Was it confidence? He’d probably seen his share of fights.
“Well, anyway!” Kikkawa got between Renji and Britney. “It’s our first meeting! There are bound to be misunderstandings! Let’s settle this peacefully! Let’s try to get along and be cheery? Okay? Okay? In deference to my good looks!”
“Your good looks?” Renji snorted derisively as he let go of the knife.
“Looks like we have a few reckless ones here,” Britney said, withdrawing his knife. “Eight men, four women. There aren’t quite enough women, but I prefer it that way, and men are more likely to be useful in battle anyway, so it’s no problem.”
I furrowed my brow. “In battle?”
“Right,” Britney said with a smile. It was creepy, to be frank. “Useful in battle.”
“This is a Volunteer Soldier office,” I said, looking down. “So, does that mean we’re becoming volunteer soldiers or something?”
“Oh, my!” Britney clapped artificially. “You’ve got some promise, too. That’s exactly it. You’re all going to be volunteer soldiers. You do have some freedom to decide, though, y’know?”
“Master Choice,” Haruhiro said, slapping Ranta on the back. “You’re up.”
“O-Oh?! I... I am, aren’t I?! Aren’t... I...?”
From what Britney told us, this land known as the frontier was populated by humans and a lot of hostile races. The Frontier Army’s duty was to drive them out and make the frontier human territory.
They didn’t have the numerical advantage, and they were actually at a disadvantage, so the Frontier Army was stretched just to maintain Alterna and their front line outposts. That was where the Frontier Army’s detached force, the Volunteer Corps, came in.
“We volunteer soldiers,” Britney told us, “appear suddenly and unexpectedly, infiltrating enemy territory left and right, surveying, causing confusion, and finding ways to weaken opposing forces. Though we cooperate with the main force, we very rarely engage in organized operations. Most volunteer soldiers act alone, or in small parties of 3-6 people, I think. Anyway, we use our own individual skills and judgment to gather intel and strike the enemy. That is the way the Volunteer Soldier Corps, Red Moon, works.”
He went on to explain that if we became volunteer soldiers, we’d be given a Trainee Badge that identified us as volunteer soldier trainees, and 10 silver coins, worth 10 Silver. So money, in other words. If we didn’t, what happened to us wasn’t his problem.
We technically had the freedom to choose. Though only technically. No idiot would choose to be thrown out, penniless, into an unknown place. No matter how you looked at it, we had no choice but to become volunteer soldiers.
“Fair enough.” The first one to take a Trainee Badge and leather pouch full of silver coins was Renji, of course. “I don’t know about this volunteer soldier business or whatever, but I’ll do it. We’ll talk after that.”
He really did always beat me to the punch. What was with that?
After Renji, the buzz-cut man and flashy woman reached for their Trainee Badges and leather pouches. I was fourth. After me was Glasses.
When Kikkawa said, “Okay then, I’m getting in on this, too!” and went to take two pouches, Britney slapped his hand. “Hey!”
That left Haruhiro and Ranta, Moguzo, Shihoru, the girl with braids, and the petite girl. What point was there in drawing this out?
Though maybe theirs was the more normal reaction.
“What about you?” Britney pressed them on it.
Ranta was the first to approach the counter. “I dunno... I feel like I’m about to get screwed here. I’ve got a vaguely bad feeling about all this...”
“Hmm.” The girl with braids followed behind Ranta. “Where there’s a will-will, there’s a way-way, they say...”
“No,” Haruhiro shook his head. “I don’t think anybody says will-will or way-way...”
“Oh? They don’t? Yume’s always said it with will-will and way-way.”
“You learned it wrong then. It’s just ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way.’”
“Oh. But it sounds cuter with will-will and way-way. Yume thinks cute is important, too.”
“It definitely does sound cuter that way.”
“Doesn’t it, though?”
The girl with braids was called Yume, it seemed.
The petite girl, Haruhiro, and Moguzo all took Trainee Badges, too. That was everyone.
“Congratulations,” Britney said, smiling and clapping. “Now, all of you are volunteer soldier trainees. Work hard and learn to stand on your own quickly. Once you’re—”
I was only half-listening at this point as I thought about what to do next.
Britney had said it was common to form parties of three to six. Well, it did seem like it’d be hard to do alone. First, I’d have to get the ones who seemed like they could fight together. Who and who?
When I went to look, Renji acted before I could again.
But punching Buzz-Cut out of nowhere? What in the world was he thinking?
“Get up,” Renji said.
“You jerk!” Buzz-Cut shouted and tried to get up, only for Renji to immediately kick him, sending him sprawling across the floor.
“What’s wrong? Get up.”
“What’s your problem, you ass?”
“From the first time I saw you, I wondered which of us was stronger. It’s time for me to show you the answer. Get up.”
“Dammit...!”
Buzz-Cut got mad, and Renji pummeled him mercilessly. It was completely one-sided. With a headbutt as the finisher, Buzz-Cut collapsed.

Chapter end