The Knights of Camelot Read online

  Although Shiroe was dumbfounded by Nyanta’s words, he was soon convinced.

  When he thought about it, their salting of food items before consuming them had been odd already. If it had only been possible to create food from the food menu, wouldn’t they have had to select SALT FOOD from the menu to be able to add salt at all?

  Players had a minimum of five experience points in the production classes, including Chef, even if they hadn’t acquired those classes. Even though it was one of the most rudimentary cooking operations, the act of salting food appeared to be the most advanced “realistic cooking” technique possible for any player with a non-Chef subclass.

  “Then, uh, Captain, does that mean—”

  “That’s right, Naotsugucchi. I’m a Chef. …Now, how about another skewer?”

  With Nyanta’s encouragement, Shiroe and the others dug into the meat.

  A midsized deer was enough to feed five with plenty left over. It would probably prove to be all the food they needed the next day as well. Nyanta passed around an apple brandy he said he’d made up in Susukino, and the lively nocturnal banquet continued.

  Once again, Nyanta formally introduced Serara to the other three.

  Serara stood politely from where she’d been sitting by the campfire with the others and bobbed her head.

  “It’s nice to meet you. I apologize for not greeting you sooner. I’m Serara; thank you very much for rescuing me. I’m a level-nineteen Druid, my subclass is Housekeeper, and I’m still really new at everything.”

  She sure is an energetic girl…

  Many things about her combined to give Shiroe that impression: her tranquil, girlish face; her small, round, gently sloping shoulders; the hair tied into a ponytail that hung down her back…

  “It’s like, in terms of the three cutest girls in class, you’d be number three, but you’d get the most love letters.”

  “Uh—huh?!”

  At this discombobulating assessment from Naotsugu, whom she’d only just met, Serara found herself at a loss for words. Akatsuki landed a resounding knee kick on Naotsugu’s face.

  “No knees! Quit with the knees!”

  “My liege, I’ve kneed a rude individual.”

  “And now you’re reporting it after the fact?!”

  What had Naotsugu been thinking? He hadn’t even tried to protect his face. Closer inspection revealed that he was holding a venison skewer in each hand and that he’d desperately toughed it out so that he wouldn’t drop them. Seeing that, even Serara laughed a little.

  “Fu-fu-fu!”

  “…Uhm. This is Naotsugu. He’s a Guardian. A very dependable fighter.”

  “He’s also vulgar and an idiot.”

  At Shiroe and Akatsuki’s explanations, Serara nodded, still smiling.

  “I saw you fight on the front line. I’m sorry my clumsy healing spell couldn’t recover you completely.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Naotsugu replied. “You still saved my butt.”

  Serara apologized repeatedly for her low level, but on that point, Shiroe agreed with Naotsugu. He felt that Serara’s focus after she had steeled herself and her resolute use of all her strength were more than worthy of recognition. In any case, with time, anyone could raise their level. She had nothing to apologize for.

  “Naotsugucchi’s always been like this. Please think of him as a ribald person and pardon him. Besides, Serara, he was complimenting mew just then.”

  “Huh?”

  Serara looked up at Nyanta, who was sitting beside her, his already narrow eyes narrowed further in a shrewd smile.

  “He’s saying mew’re the most popular girl in class. Naotsugucchi’s bashful.”

  “Hey, Captain, hold up. That’s not how it is. And anyway, I’m less of a pretty-girl guy than a pantieerg!!”

  Another of Akatsuki’s knee kicks hit home, cutting off Naotsugu’s words.

  “Owwww… You’re getting more and more ruthless there, short stuff.”

  “My liege, I’ve caved in the pervert’s face. I’ve also confiscated his meat.”

  “Huh?—Uh? Aaaaaah!!”

  Akatsuki was gnawing away at the venison skewers she’d taken from Naotsugu during her lightning-fast knee kick.

  “That was a total foul…”

  As Nyanta handed the dejected Naotsugu some fresh-grilled venison, he shifted the topic to Akatsuki. “And who is this young lady?”

  Picking up on the shift, Shiroe began introducing Akatsuki to Nyanta.

  The girl who’d traveled with him and Naotsugu. An Assassin and Tracker. A skilled professional, someone who could be relied upon.

  Akatsuki, who had watched Nyanta fixedly with deadly serious eyes, finally bowed her head and greeted him. “I am Akatsuki, the inexperienced, venerable sage.”

  When Naotsugu started kicking up a fuss about how much differently she treated him, Akatsuki shoved some half-done meat into his mouth. Short stuff! Stupid Naotsugu! The other three just laughed at their endless squabbling.

  “And this is Shiroechi. He’s a very intelligent youngster who acted as a counselor for a group I mewsed to be part of.”

  As Shiroe gave a slight nod acknowledging Nyanta’s introduction, Serara seemed overawed and thanked the sorcerer, over and over.

  She’s a nice, cheerful girl, Shiroe thought.

  Absently, he wondered how old she was.

  From what they could gather, their appearance in this other world was influenced by their bodies in the real world. However, their figures and rough modeling were based on the character data from the Elder Tales MMORPG. Anyone who arbitrarily guessed someone’s age based on their height or figure ran the risk of insulting them. Shiroe had learned this through experience from Akatsuki.

  However, from the way Serara spoke, he didn’t think she could be all that old.

  A high school kid or maybe even a middle schooler…

  Elder Tales had been the sort of game that charged monthly play fees and therefore tended to have a higher average user age than many free network games. However, that was just on average, and middle school players weren’t rare enough to cause astonishment.

  Come to think of it, the twins had been about that age.

  The whole noisy escape from Susukino must have put him on edge. Maybe it was the relief of having reached a safe place or the feeling of freedom that surrounded the lively meal, but Shiroe found himself thinking back to when he’d met them, just before the Catastrophe.

  3

  Of course, when Shiroe had first met the twins, this other world wasn’t an other world yet, and Elder Tales was still a game.

  Shiroe had been spending his days playing the game as a slightly eccentric solo player (as a high-level Enchanter, he could hardly have been anything but eccentric), operating out of the town of Akiba.

  After the Debauchery Tea Party had dissolved, Shiroe had been a rootless wanderer in the truest sense of the word. There hadn’t been any negative connotations to it, though, and Shiroe had rather enjoyed gaming that way.

  In Akiba’s plaza, one could hear voices recruiting party members wherever they went, and at the time, since Elder Tales was still only a game, it had a recruiting channel system that let a player send messages to all areas of the server. He’d used that system to join and battle with stray parties from time to time, and he’d occasionally accepted invitations from Marielle and other acquaintances and gone to dungeons with them. Of course, he’d traveled around on his own as well, exploring zones that interested him while collecting items.

  Shiroe’s Scribe subclass was one of the production subclasses. Scribes’ main talent was the ability to copy books, diagrams, and magical textbooks. In Elder Tales, producing items was nearly synonymous with compounding materials: To produce items, one needed other items to use as material.

  For a Scribe, those materials were paper and ink. That said, not just any paper and ink would do. For ordinary manuscripts, it was all right to use the inexpensive ink sold by NPCs, but it took mag
ic-infused ink to create rare tomes and high-level spell books filled with power. Creating this magic-infused ink was another Scribe task, and in order to do so, the Scribe needed materials such as dragon’s blood and precious ores found deep in dungeons.

  In order to get these diverse materials, it was necessary to go to all sorts of zones, explore them, and get through their battles. With such tasks, even after the Debauchery Tea Party disbanded, and even after she wasn’t there to run Shiroe ragged anymore, Shiroe had kept himself busy.

  It was the twins who spoke to Shiroe first, while he was living this way.

  “Mister, mister. Yo, hold up!”

  “Um… Excuse me. I’m very sorry to bother you. Would it be all right if we asked you something? We had a question…”

  The pair who’d addressed him didn’t even come up to Shiroe’s shoulder.

  The boy was wearing cheap armor and had a katana slung across his back.

  The girl wore a white robe and carried a long staff with bells on it.

  “Sure. What is it?”

  From what Shiroe remembered, they’d been in the crowded streets of Akiba.

  One look at their gear was enough to tell him that the two were unmistakably newbies. Not only that, but since it was gear that was distributed free of charge at the very beginning of the game, they were probably complete newbies. The voices he heard over the voice chat function seemed to belong to middle schoolers or elementary schoolers. Either way, they were young.

  “My spells are weak, and Touya’s wounds won’t heal. I was told to go buy a better spell, but I’m not sure where they’re sold… Do you know, sir?”

  Filtered through voice chat, the girl sounded very well-mannered.

  “I want some techniques, too. If you know, mister, tell us. Pleeease!”

  Their names floated above their heads in green letters. The girl was Minori, and the boy was Touya. They were both level 6.

  The first quest in Elder Tales was a tutorial. Players who chose the town of Akiba as their starting point were forcibly sent to a dedicated zone known as Major Colonel’s Tutorial Ground, where they were made to practice the game’s basic operations.

  Parenthetically, Major Colonel was a non-player character with rather problematic specs: While he looked like a mild-mannered, white-whiskered gentleman, once he was riled, there was no telling what he would do. From his name, it was hard to tell whether he was a major or a colonel, and it made him quite popular with a certain set of players.

  Major Colonel’s training lasted about an hour, and once they’d completed the training, even players who’d just started the game were level 4. Taking that into account, these two were probably perfect newbies who’d just started the game that day or the day before.

  “Is this your first day here, guys?”

  “Yes, sir.” “You betcha.”

  The pair spoke at the same time.

  Shiroe might not have been very good with people, but it wasn’t as if he hated them. He just had a habit of keeping a wary eye out for strangers who might approach him with profit and loss on their minds.

  In that sense, Shiroe didn’t dislike newbie players. They wouldn’t know that Shiroe was comparatively wealthy, and since they hadn’t yet developed the desire to play the game efficiently, the idea of using him would never enter their heads.

  Even with pessimistic reasoning like that, as a player who loved Elder Tales, Shiroe wanted to make beginners feel welcome. This was particularly true when he thought of his own responsibilities as a veteran player.

  “I see… Yes, I’ll show you. It’s this way.”

  Showing them around town didn’t even take enough effort to count as “trouble.”

  With that thought in mind, Shiroe took the lead and started walking.

  After that first meeting with the twins, Shiroe ended up playing alongside them frequently. This was because Touya, who was the polar opposite of shy, would shout to get his attention whenever he saw Shiroe around town and because Minori was very polite and would always call on him to thank him.

  The two really were twins; they’d been born very close together, and Minori appeared to be the elder. A mature older sister with the temperament of a committee chairwoman, she kept an eye on her little brother, who, although bright, was a daredevil that didn’t know how to hold back. That was the pair’s fundamental play style.

  Both twins were in their second year of middle school, and they were so young they seemed like little kids to Shiroe. Since Shiroe had been playing for so long, he’d met all kinds of players, but not many of them had been middle schoolers. Because such an age difference left little in common to talk about, even when he’d gotten to know similar players in the past, he hadn’t taken the opportunity to go adventuring with them. However, these twins looked up to Shiroe and so sometimes traveled around with him.

  Elder Tales was the twins’ first online game, and the brand-new experience had them both excited. They both told him about it in the first field zone they visited together.

  That initial adventure was a considerably noisy affair.

  The second he spotted a monster, Touya would charge at it like a guided missile. Minori would follow him in a panic, and they’d fight hard and desperately until they were almost in tears.

  That heartwarming scene was repeated many, many times.

  Elder Tales had something called a Coach System. In simple terms, it was a system that allowed high-level players to play alongside low-level players. When Shiroe used this system with the twins, although he was technically level 90, his level temporarily dropped to match theirs. In addition to his level, his HP, ability values, attack power, and general status were all considerably reduced.

  The purpose of the system was to lower players’ strength to match that of their low-level friends so that they could adventure together.

  Of course, Shiroe kept his veteran knowledge of the game, and even though he was stat-weak, he still had fairly expensive equipment. All of this meant he was far tougher than the average beginner; however, if that difference had been converted into levels, it would only have equaled one or two. It was a handy, useful system to use when coaching other players.

  Making use of that system, Shiroe raced after the twins.

  He fired attack spells at the enemy to decrease their numbers, but Enchanters’ attack spells weren’t all that powerful to begin with, and his lowered level made them pitifully weak. However, even so, the support seemed to encourage the two newbs.

  “Thanks, mister! Okay, next we’re charging that enemy over there!!”

  “Honestly, Touya, would you wait just a minute?! Listen to me: You’re low on HP!!”

  Sometimes, he’d let them pull him around the hunting grounds all day long.

  Touya was a Samurai, one of the three Warrior classes.

  In Elder Tales, spells and sword techniques were known as “special skills.” In addition to proper names and effects, each special skill came with set values for required MP, cast time, and recast time. Cast time was the amount of time between the point when a player selected a special skill and the point when the skill activated—the equivalent of “charge” time. Recast time was the amount of time that had to pass after a special skill was used before it could be used again.

  One of the distinguishing features of the Samurai class was that many of their techniques had long recast times.

  Although the techniques were powerful, most of them couldn’t be used several times in a row, and many of them were major techniques that could only be used once or twice per battle. This made Samurai the complete opposite of Monks, who built combos from multiple small techniques.

  Since Samurai had many powerful special skills, when they managed to settle a battle quickly, they had the highest attack power of the Warrior classes. In turn, this made Samurai a popular and exhilarating class.

  On the other hand, if an Adventurer didn’t make the best use of the class’s features, they’d run through all their special techn
iques too quickly and be unable to react during the recast time, no matter what happened. The class’s weak point was that players could run out of on-the-spot coping methods and insurance, making it a difficult class to master.

  “Goooooooooo! Helm Splitter!!”

  Touya, who’d charged ahead, brought his sword down on a goblin from the front. The attack went right through the goblin’s shoddy armor and inflicted huge damage, but the subsequent recovery rigidity left Touya wide open.

  “Gugaaaah! Gafu! Gafu!”

  The horde of goblins didn’t let that chance escape them: They rushed him. Touya panicked, but while he was frozen up, he couldn’t even evade.

  “Aah! Touya! Get back, that’s dangerous! Uu… Purification Barrier!!”

  As Minori swung her belled staff, an effect like a shining pale blue mirror appeared, blocking the goblins’ attack.

  Minori was a Kannagi, one of the three Recovery classes.

  The Recovery classes recovered HP, healed their companions’ abnormal statuses, and had a variety of spells to boost friends’ abilities.

  All of the Recovery classes had similar spells by which to recover their companions’ HP. However, each class had its own unique special recovery skills as well, and those skills provided the three classes’ defining characteristics.

  Kannagi were apostles of the ancient gods, and their unique recovery ability was Damage Block. This type of spell put up a certain type of barrier for either one specific companion or for the whole party and would negate all damage until the total reached a set amount.

  In terms of general recovery ability, Kannagi were the weakest of the three classes, but in some situations, the ability to completely negate damage before it happened gave them an extremely powerful advantage.

  On the other hand, because the ability meant the player had to predict the type and range of enemy attacks beforehand, it was tough to master it.

  All the main classes in Elder Tales were designed to make it hard to get better. Since this was part of the game’s complexity, there was really no help for it, but in any case, Touya and Minori didn’t seem to mind. They were just enjoying the game.