Lost Child of the Dawn Read online

  “As I told mew, it’s night.”

  “For ramen, then.”

  “I suppose I must.”

  He shrugged, and Roderick left the laboratory, in which he’d spent who knew how many hours, with his older friend.

  Since it was winter, hot soup would probably taste wonderful.

  4

  It was a cold night.

  The wind that stabbed her cheeks had a metallic chill to it. Kyouko sneezed hugely, then looked around. That had been a pretty impressive one. Really unladylike.

  Thinking that Master Soujirou would probably be disillusioned with her if he found out, she rubbed at her nose, which had started to tickle again.

  For Adventurers who’d reached a certain level, the cold air of winter wasn’t a threat. They could use their equipment to shut out damage from the cold. However, saying they weren’t cold would have been a lie. In particular, the information they got through their sight and hearing that told them “It’s probably cold” convinced their spirits of the cold, long before they took physical damage.

  As a result, Kyouko was hurrying to the guild house.

  More than half the guild members were probably asleep there already.

  While she’d been talking business with Shopping District 8—or rather, just chatting—it had gotten very late. However, it had been worth it: Kyouko’s Magic Bag was stuffed with loot. She’d actually managed to get three salt-pickled salmon. Some of her companions would cry tears of joy if she fed them this. After all, it tasted like home.

  If all goes well, maybe Master Soujirou, too—

  Conjuring up sweet daydreams, Kyouko broke into a grin.

  They’d eat lunch together. The menu would be onigiri, naturally, made with plenty of salmon. “Master Soujirou, you have some of your lunch stuck to your cheek.” “I do? Which one?” “The right one.” “Huh? Where, where is it?” “I guess I’ll have to… There, I’ve got it.” Munch. Heh-heh! Kidding!

  In one of Akiba’s back streets, Kyouko turned bright red.

  Her twelve-cylinder maiden engine was going full throttle, repelling the midwinter’s night wind.

  Kyouko was an athletic type in any case, and her temperature rose easily. She had a good basal metabolism. If it had been Fragrant Olive, she would have gotten a nosebleed and collapsed. The anemic elf’s ability to fantasize left Kyouko’s in the dust.

  “Wachoo!”

  However, the mental lunch-date fantasy seemed to have made her careless. A sneeze that couldn’t be called ladylike burst out. It really was a problem.

  That sneeze had gotten her teased both in middle school and in high school. “What the heck, Kyouko?! You’re like some old guy!” She could still remember it. One of her classmates in brass band had told her that. She’d actually liked the boy quite a bit, too. Calling a girl an old guy… That had been mean. She’d been pretty wounded by it.

  True, she’d been a dedicated athletic-club type for ages, and in her class, she’d been less of a feminine type and more of a laughs-with-her-mouth-wide-open type, but even so, she wished he’d chosen his words more carefully. Such as, maybe, “Now there’s a sneeze that hints at real greatness.” …No, actually, that would have been awful. Really terrible.

  Kyouko thought about these things as she walked.

  Even so, she realized—although it was a bit late for such realizations—that the way she sneezed was the same in this world, too. It had seemed only natural, but come to think of it, it was odd.

  Although the fact that I’m in another world is odd enough to begin with.

  She directed a verbal jab at herself.

  Possibly because of the sneezing, she wasn’t in top form tonight.

  The greenery whispered. The air was cold and felt stiff somehow.

  Night wind had blown through the spaces between the ruined buildings, rustling the trees. Then, by the time Kyouko noticed, there was a man standing in the darkness ahead of her.

  He was about 175 centimeters tall, a man with long hair. A tight black tank top and leather pants. He wore sturdy jet-black armor on his arms and legs only, which gave him a strange silhouette, but strangeness on that level wasn’t uncommon in Akiba, a town of Adventurers.

  What made Kyouko stop in her tracks was the indescribable feeling of intimidation that rolled off the man.

  Feeling as though her spine had frozen, Kyouko paused. She even took an involuntary step backward.

  As if he didn’t like the distance she’d put between them, the man came forward.

  In the wan glow of the Bug Lights the Round Table Council had had installed, the man wore a black mask that resembled a blindfold. Although she had no idea when he’d drawn it, he held a sword that seemed to absorb the pale light.

  The blade rose smoothly, as if pulled by a string, and Kyouko’s body reacted to it before her mind did.

  Kyouko was level 90, and a veteran Guardian too. The West Wind Brigade had a reputation for being a harem or girls’ club, but in terms of achievements alone, it was among Akiba’s top five combat guilds.

  Kyouko was skilled enough to be the captain of the West Wind Brigade’s second company.

  However, that was all thanks to her Adventurer body.

  As the silver light passed by, seeming to skim the surface of her eyeballs, greasy sweat broke out along Kyouko’s spine. The first thing to surface from the midst of her fragmented thoughts was the feeling that she was about to be killed. The man in front of Kyouko was going to kill her. The next thing to surface—the word PK—was shattered by the words in town.

  No, even in town, it wasn’t as though murders couldn’t happen.

  It was just that the guards would teleport in and stop them.

  In that case, if she hung on until the guards came…

  In the worst possible scenario, she’d probably die. However, even if she did, she’d revive in the Temple. That was an Adventurer’s prerogative. There was no need to be afraid. In any case, at level 90, there weren’t many things that could kill her easily. Guardians had the greatest defense of all twelve main classes. Since she was in town, she wasn’t wearing her armor, but even so, she was physically sturdy. It’s all right; I can get through this. There was no need to be too afraid.

  Thus, she tried to calm herself down.

  …But it was no good.

  The man had stepped in close enough that he could have kissed her, and when he smiled, showing the red, wet cavity of his mouth, the composure Kyouko had managed to scrape together fell to pieces.

  He was too fast. Too fast for her to follow, even with level-90 kinetic vision. Or no, was it technique, rather than speed? When she stared at him steadily, he seemed to slip through the gaps between her thoughts with slimy invertebrate movements, closing the distance before she was aware of it.

  She was only able to follow the first few silver flashes.

  Kyouko saw the man grasp the hilt of a sword that had sprouted from her stomach.

  No.

  The sword the man held had run her through.

  Expelling something from her lungs that was less a scream than a clot of damp air, Kyouko leapt backward.

  However, when she landed, the sneering man was toying with a blade that had grown from her thigh.

  Possibly the serial damage had hit her with a bad status effect: The blood that flowed from her wounds wasn’t stopping. Kyouko ran through the alleys like a wounded hare. Her throat stung and wouldn’t let her scream the way she wanted to, and her limbs felt limp, as if she had a fever.

  The fact that, even so, she managed to maintain her agility and field several attacks was due entirely to her Adventurer body.

  As she continued to raise wordless screams, Kyouko desperately kept trying to gather her thoughts and think of a way to escape.

  Subjectively, a long time seemed to pass.

  Far too long.

  Shaken by her terror of the man, who kept sticking her with his sword any way he pleased, she’d almost lost her sense of time, but even so,
too much time had passed.

  “Ah, agh! Aie!”

  Kyouko couldn’t make the words come out. Stabbing her through the chest, the man warped the red cavern of his mouth into the shape of a smile.

  “The guards won’t come.”

  As she understood the meaning of those words, a doubt like roaring static filled Kyouko’s mind. That was against the rules. She’d never heard of such a thing. The declaration had been far too unfair, and Kyouko slammed her raised fist into the man.

  However, a blade sprouted from that fist.

  The sight was almost comical. At some point, the man had jumped back, holding his sword out as if to thrust, and had stopped Kyouko’s fist with it. Overwhelming speed and technique that surpassed Kyouko’s, even at level 90. Soujirou might have been able to follow the attacks with his Mystery, Clairvoyance, but she couldn’t see through them.

  Again and again, Kyouko struck out with her fists and her feet.

  Kyouko had zero martial arts experience, but Adventurers’ physical performance was fast and destructive enough to lead even a bear around by the nose. Those attacks fell prey to the man’s blade, almost as if they were drawn into it. The single sword that hung from the man’s right hand sliced Kyouko apart, protecting the man as if it had multiplied by a thousand.

  She didn’t understand.

  She had no idea what in the world was happening.

  Kyouko didn’t know why the guards weren’t coming, or why a PK had been allowed to run loose in the middle of town, or why a monster like this had infiltrated Akiba.

  Kyouko couldn’t even think straight anymore, and she kept fighting as if delirious with fever. However, if Kyouko seemed feverish, the man was lunacy itself. Smiling a sticky smile, the man ran his sword through every inch of Kyouko’s body, as if tormenting her, toying with her.

  The midnight battle came to an end in silence.

  The late-night wind that blew between the buildings carried away the sound of their struggle.

  Kyouko fell, still not understanding, and as if it had been promised from the beginning, the man stabbed his bright sword into her neck. As her vision dimmed, fading to black and white, Kyouko saw the blood that clung to the sword, her own blood, turn into frozen crystals and sift away.

  Even though it was midwinter, they looked like pale pink flower petals.

  Was the lethargy that lingered in her limbs frostbite? Tears that weren’t from sadness fell from Kyouko’s eyes onto the immobile remains of her arms and legs.

  Kyouko had been on the brink of reaching something. However, in accordance with the laws of this world, she was sent to the Temple. By the time she woke and reached the guild hall where her companions waited, it was the next morning.

  And so rumors of the murderer who threatened Akiba’s winter spread like wildfire.

  5

  A killer had appeared, one who dominated Akiba’s nights.

  The news spread even faster than the wind that blew over the town. On the first night, there had been three victims. The next night, just one. However, on the third day, a group of five had fallen.

  Since several of these had been veterans from combat guilds, it seemed safe to say that the murderer’s preposterous combat abilities had been proven to be far greater than those of level-90 Adventurers.

  At first, people thought the incident would be easily resolved.

  To begin with, this world had been modeled on Elder Tales, and in it, there was power in numbers. Even if the murderer was a bit stronger than an individual, if six people in a functional party formation surrounded him or her, it was assumed they couldn’t lose.

  The peculiar conditions of this world also gave them an advantage when it came to capturing the criminal. All the victims had been killed by the murderer, but they were still alive. Even if Adventurers died, they were shunted to the Temple and reborn. As a result, there was a wealth of eyewitness testimony regarding the murderer, and of combat information.

  Enbart Nelles.

  No guild affiliation.

  Level 94, Samurai.

  Long, dark hair with hints of indigo and a mask like a blindfold. Metal armor that encased his arms and legs.

  With that many characteristics, they’d assumed that investigating would be easy. True, the incidents had occurred late at night, but that didn’t mean they had to limit their search for the criminal to nighttime. As a matter of fact, guilds—particularly the West Wind Brigade and Honesty, which had suffered damage—were continuing to hunt for the culprit.

  However, even now, a week after the incidents, they hadn’t so much as glimpsed him, and the number of victims kept growing.

  When Adventurers killed other Adventurers, the term for it was a “PK,” or “player kill.” It was one way of playing, and the act was currently restricted at the zone level by Akiba’s Round Table Council. Yet, even though adventurers who committed PKs again and again were known as player killers—also abbreviated PK—that didn’t mean they were automatically called “murderers.”

  To begin with, the town of Akiba was a zone under the protection of the guards.

  If a violent act was committed there, a magical alert went to the guards’ station immediately, and the guards—People of the Earth in special equipment—went to capture the offender… Or they should have. At this point in time, it was clear that something very strange was afoot.

  Of course, in the process of their investigation, the Round Table Council had inquired at the guard station. As a result, they’d learned that, at the time the incidents had occurred, the guards hadn’t detected any abnormalities. Apparently, at least as far as the Elder Tales game system was concerned, no PKs had occurred.

  Rumors about the uncanny cutthroat spread rapidly through Akiba.

  However, this wasn’t because the incidents were an object of serious terror.

  Instead, the stories were taken more as a morbidly fascinating urban legend.

  After all, to Adventurers, death wasn’t that great a risk.

  It did have a certain disadvantage, of course: the danger of losing memories from the old world. Through a careful information disclosure maneuver by the Round Table Council, this fact had gradually become known to the town of Akiba. The dejection regarding this destruction of memory wasn’t a small one, and it was particularly marked among the Adventurers who were involved in production classes in the town.

  However, on the other hand, it was true that there was a certain mood of pragmatism as well.

  This was probably due to the fact that Adventurers who had experienced death a dozen or so times said that the destruction of memory wasn’t significant enough to feel like a problem; in fact, they were still participating in the town of Akiba without any trouble, just as their companions were.

  Either way, the Adventurers lived in this world, and inevitable fates were inevitable.

  Even if they were attacked by the murderer and became a victim, it wouldn’t do them any critical damage.

  In addition, although the Adventurers of Akiba didn’t say it outright, it was partially because they placed great confidence in the Round Table Council, or RTC.

  The RTC, which had been established less than a month after the Catastrophe and had handled Akiba’s self-government ever since, had produced a variety of tangible and intangible achievements. The Adventurers shared a common experience that gave their community a clearer origin than any in the old world: the shock of the Catastrophe, and the following devastation; given that, the residents of Akiba were quite proud of the representative system that had risen out of the ashes. They’d even managed to pull together and hold the Libra Festival last month.

  In other words, the term monstrous clearly expressed the strangeness of the incident itself.

  Unfairness that deviated from the system. A monster that attacked out of nowhere, like a natural disaster.

  —And yet, even so, the damage wasn’t severe. On the contrary, the incidents seemed designed to cause only terror, and they were almost li
ke a campaign tale. Most of the citizens of Akiba thought that, even if he behaved ferociously now, the matter would be resolved before long.

  In any case, ever since the Catastrophe, all sorts of abnormalities had cropped up in the world and new incidents occurred nearly every day. And, too, as the largest Adventurer city on the Yamato server, Akiba was one big sieve of information. Mysterious incidents, mildly troubling incidents, hair-raising incidents, anxiety-inducing incidents—all sorts of things were here.

  It was true that this serial killer wasn’t the sort of problem that could be neglected, but Akiba had several other, bigger problems at the moment.

  The two that could be deemed Akiba’s main concerns were the Seventh Fall Subjugation Operation and the sudden rise to power of an enormous guild in Minami.

  The Akiba expeditionary force, which had been victorious in the Zantleaf war, had finally begun its invasion of Seventh Fall, the castle of the Goblin tribe. The Goblin King appeared in the course of the Return of the Goblin King quest, and his strength changed depending on how active the Adventurers were during that event. In the confusion that had followed the Catastrophe, the Adventurers had ignored the Goblin King, and he’d developed to the point of plotting to send soldiers into the Zantleaf Peninsula. No doubt he was stronger than any previous raid boss.

  No matter how high the difficulty level had risen, the enemy was fundamentally a Goblin, a midrange demihuman. Naturally, if this had been a game, he wouldn’t have posed enough of a threat to worry about.

  However, on the other hand, they couldn’t ignore the fact that it was possible that common sense from the game no longer applied to the post-Catastrophe world. In addition, even if he was a threat the Adventurers could cope with, it wasn’t hard to imagine that he might be lethal for the People of the Earth.

  Due to these circumstances, Akiba’s Round Table Council had dispatched a subjugation force composed of elites.

  It had 450 members, with Krusty as commander-in-chief.

  Of course, these troops were being dispatched to subjugate the Goblins and to bring stability to northeastern Yamato, but at the same time, the expedition was part of their exchange with Eastal, the League of Free Cities.