Homesteading the Noosphere Page 3

  The slope Isaac surveyed was thickly covered with spring grass, its green as bright as if it had been washed, and a company was racing up it. It was a group of Glass Greaves led by three members of Isaac’s Knights of the Black Sword. There were probably about forty of them in all.

  Even if this was a military drill, working with large groups was inefficient.

  They’d split the knights into five groups, and about three companies were around this hill. As far as he knew, they were running around and around the hill’s base and practicing charging, with a grove of trees as their partner. Isaac hadn’t been born and raised in Theldesia, and he certainly wasn’t a knight, so he had no idea; when they’d told him that this was a knights’ drill, all he’d done was think, Huh. Is that right?

  Young spring grass was surprisingly succulent.

  As the brigade’s name—the Glass Greaves—indicated, the knights wore metal armor supplied to them by the Cowen dukedom, which meant they were pretty heavy. That lot was running up the green, grassy slope toward him, spurred on by their instructors. Many of them got tripped up by the wet grass under their feet and fell clumsily. By the time they were thirty minutes into the drill, that neatly maintained silver armor had been smeared with grass and mud.

  Still, the Glass Greaves jumped back up without complaint, then launched themselves into ferocious sprints, heading back to their places in the ranks.

  The three Adventurers running at the head of the pack—Kouboumaru, Efuri, and Lee Jent—were bellowing at them: “C’mon, c’mon! Whaddaya call those wussy arm swings?!” “Let’s hear some noise, scumbags!”

  Uptight losers, Isaac thought, but what he didn’t know was that he’d been taken off the training because his hot-blooded, sports-oriented, Spartan coaching had been too much for the People of the Earth to handle, and even his subordinates had been massively turned off by it.

  While he sat there in the bright, clear sunlight, watching the scene as if it were somebody else’s problem, all the things he was thinking were fairly rude: Man, those idiots are hardheads. Do they actually have brains in there? Nah, guess not; all our members are dumb. Seriously, there’s just no helping these guys. That said, even as he got disgusted with them, he was smiling a little. Isaac didn’t hate these idiots. He was actually really fond of them. If he’d hated them, there was no way he would have been the leader of a messy guild like this one, even for a second.

  “Stop, stop!”

  “Thirty-minute break!”

  “Go rest, you gutless, empty-headed pansies!”

  The instructors were yelling from about a hundred meters away. No matter what they said, it was blindingly obvious they were enjoying themselves. The three of them glanced at Isaac, whispered among themselves for a little, then ducked their heads, nodding to him. Apparently, they had nothing that needed to be reported. They’d been told to conduct the training any way they wanted, so Isaac just waved back at them.

  He thought they’d probably do a good job.

  Actually, what had surprised him were the People of the Earth.

  The dukedom’s chivalric order, the Glass Greaves, were the House of Cowen’s knights’ brigade, and they guarded Maihama. Since the brigade belonged to the House of Cowen, the de facto leader of Eastal, it was made up of People of the Earth elites. That was what Isaac had been told beforehand.

  That was by People of the Earth standards, though. The group’s levels were only around 25. He’d thought there was no way they’d be tough. Well, he still thought that: They weren’t strong.

  And yet they weren’t as weak as he’d thought they’d be, either.

  The Glass Greaves had guts.

  Just now, they’d managed a two-hour run in that armor.

  Of course, to a level-90 Adventurer, that would have been no more than a morning stroll. Actually, in a world where the concept of “levels” existed, it might not have been anything that praiseworthy. However, even as the group got all sweaty and muddy and was yelled at by Isaac and the others, who were outsiders, and even though the training was harder than anything they’d done before, no one complained. He was forced to admit they were really putting their hearts into it.

  Once back at their lodgings, out of the Glass Greaves’ hearing, Isaac’s companions had praised them, too. It probably meant that, in the two months since they’d begun this drill, the Knights of the Black Sword and the Glass Greaves had started to understand each other.

  Out of the five groups, one of the remaining two was on leave in the city, and the last one was currently fighting monsters in the Dovature Badlands. They’d broken up into small teams and were hunting high-level monsters under the leadership of the Knights of the Black Sword. This was what was known as “power leveling.”

  The growth speed of People of the Earth was far lower than that of Adventurers. According to reports, it was only about one-fifth as fast. Even with that disadvantage, however, if they defeated monsters more than twenty levels above them in rapid succession, their levels would zoom up at a speed that seemed like a joke to People of the Earth common sense.

  Of course, if they just left them to their own devices after raising their levels, they wouldn’t know how to use that combat power, and that was bound to cause trouble. Since that was the case, they put them through physically punishing drills like this one after power leveling and made them fight mock battles until they passed out, forcing them to get used to their heightened physical performance. This routine was the level-boosting drill the Knights of the Black Sword had been conducting for the past two months.

  Isaac opened his eyes a crack.

  Then he closed them again.

  He thought he’d heard something. It was probably just his imagination.

  However, the reality he’d planned to ignore caught him in the form of a youthful voice: “Master Isaaaaac!”

  A boy came running up on incredibly light feet, stopped near the big tree Isaac was leaning against, and caught his breath; his cheeks were flushed. The boy had pale skin and silver hair, and he looked intelligent. His complexion was probably fair to begin with. From the looks of his build, he didn’t seem the least bit tough. That was why, although he’d only run a short distance, his cheeks were rosy and he was breathing hard.

  Even though his throat was rasping painfully, he wore a huge smile. “Master Isaac!”

  “Just Isaac’s fine. That other way you use it is creepy.”

  The boy’s call had almost broken off in the middle so that he could breathe, but at the sound of it, Isaac sat up. A hooded Adventurer and maids came running up after the boy. They set up an enormous parasol to block the sunlight, expanding the shade, then laid down a canvas sheet, which Isaac shifted aside to make room for. The boy looked at Isaac with an expression that seemed to be asking for permission, but the hooded Adventurer—Isaac’s adjutant Lezarik—told him, “Please sit down,” so he did.

  “But…”

  “Doesn’t hearing a kid say ‘master’ make your skin crawl?”

  With his mouth set in a cross line, Isaac spoke to the maids, who were preparing beverages. They only gave disconcerted smiles and spoke vaguely: “Well, sir, we really couldn’t say…” They were probably hesitant to comment on the manners of their employer’s child. And they’ve got good boobs, too. What a waste, Isaac thought, looking even crosser.

  “Listen, kid.”

  “It’s Iselus.”

  “Uh… Iselus.”

  When Isaac spoke to him—giving up on his strategy of doing something about it in a roundabout way, through the maids—Iselus always responded cheerfully. Why does he like me so much? Isaac asked himself.

  “Can’t you do something about that tone of yours?”

  “Father and Mother told me I must mind my manners.”

  “Father” and “Mother,” he says. Isaac held his forehead wearily.

  “See, here’s the thing: I’m bad with stuff like that.”

  “You’re an Adventurer, Master Isaac, and you’re cur
rently training the Knights of Maihama as their instructor, and you also defended Maihama.”

  Both in the old world and in Elder Tales, Isaac had avoided this sort of refined, tiresome stuff. These were things for Krusty and Shiroe—the four-eyes demographic—to handle, not Isaac.

  Still, this small child seemed to have gotten the wrong idea about something, and he’d apparently taken a liking to Isaac.

  He was a kid, and smart, and a weakling. Talk about hard to handle. Isaac frowned and sent the boy a sidelong glare.

  Not only that, Iselus was smiling. There was no telling what he’d thought.

  “I did all that stuff because I wanted to.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I’m not a master or a lord or anything big like that. The elite four-eyes who’s good at that crap is off on a journey right now.”

  “He’s traveling?”

  “Well, I guess it’s nothing to do with you.”

  “Yessir, that’s indeed not correct!”

  Iselus didn’t know Krusty, so it was only natural, but he nodded, suspecting nothing.

  If that Berserker were here, Isaac thought, I wouldn’t have been doing this job in the first place. Deep down, the guy was a lot like Isaac, and yet he was top-notch at hiding his true nature and acting meek. Krusty would have been the perfect person to drill the People of the Earth knights.

  Isaac had heard he’d gone missing under mysterious circumstances, but he wasn’t all that worried about Berserker Krusty. He was sure he’d just turn up one day and say, “My apologies for causing you trouble. As a matter of fact, I found a new raid quest.”

  It was true, however, that things were starting to seem iffy in Akiba due to him not being there.

  It was no exaggeration to say the leader was the team, so a group that had lost theirs became fragile. Isaac had seen several of those cases; for the most part, they ended in ways that weren’t fun to watch. Not that he thought Krusty’s D.D.D. was defenseless… As Isaac was thinking these things, Lezarik called to him in a slightly teasing tone.

  “Isaac the Young.”

  “Quit with that ‘Isaac the Young’ crap.”

  “There, Master Iselus, you see?” asked Lezarik. “You can use ‘young’ as an honorific for him.”

  “Really? ‘Isaac the Young’…?”

  As a rule, the adjutant got the short end of the stick, and he glanced at Isaac with a suppressed smile that seemed to say he wasn’t about to let the opportunity to bait this guy slip past him.

  “People, seriously—”

  “It’s rather dashing, don’t you think? ‘Isaac the Young.’”

  Iselus and Lezarik spoke in a surround-sound chorus. Although there was no telling what was fun about it, Iselus was nodding vigorously, looking as if it all made sense to him now. As they watched him, even the maids started to giggle.

  “Your mouth’s hanging open, Isaac the Young.”

  The problem with Lezarik was that he always, always managed to quit just before Isaac blew up. Just as if it were a game of chicken, right before he hit his boiling point, he retracted his words.

  “Rrgh! Watch it, or I’m gonna use the Black Sword of Pain!!”

  Shrugging in response to Isaac’s yell, Lezarik briskly pulled Iselus by the hand and began saying things like, “Come, let’s go cheer on the knights as they train. That’s a duty for the lord’s whole family.”

  Raking his fingers through his hair in irritation, Isaac glanced at the drilling knights.

  When he looked, he saw that their rushing feet were beginning to slow. Spurring them on would probably be a good way to burn off his annoyance.

  Picking up his trusty sword, Isaac navigated the gentle downward slope.

  5

  “Camaysar, the Genius of Marriage…?”

  Shiroe repeated the name Soujirou had said.

  He’d never heard it before. A vast number of enemies had appeared in Elder Tales since the time when it had been a game, and even Shiroe didn’t know all of them.

  Still, at the very least, he remembered the names of most of the major enemies who’d appeared on the Japanese server. Setting aside the foreign-sounding name Camaysar, it was hard to believe he would have forgotten a moniker as distinctive as “the Genius of Marriage.”

  “Yes, that was what he called himself.”

  “That wasn’t ‘marriage’ so much as ‘marriage fraud.’”

  Nazuna picked up where Soujirou had left off.

  Tatami flooring, paper sliding doors, and an example of beautiful cursive characters hanging in the alcove.

  Shiroe and Akatsuki were in the traditional Japanese room in the guild house of the West Wind Brigade, one of Akiba’s leading combat guilds. Soujirou, its guild master, and Nazuna, his right-hand woman, had come out to meet them.

  The two of them were Shiroe’s old, familiar companions from the Debauchery Tea Party.

  Shiroe’s daily routine was built around tables and chairs, and it was a little hard for him to relax in such a traditional space. Meanwhile, Akatsuki seemed used to rooms like this one, and she’d started on the tea refreshments that had been set out for them. Akatsuki’s room at Log Horizon had been set up traditionally as well, like this one but smaller. Kneeling formally didn’t seem to bother her at all.

  “He was a strange enemy, just as you said, Mr. Shiro.”

  “I’m surprised you ran into one, Soujirou.”

  “Really? I thought you were expecting it.”

  “‘Expecting’ isn’t really the word; I did think that, if I talked to everyone, I might get information about encounters with enemies like him, but…”

  Shiroe and Akatsuki had visited the West Wind Brigade because Soujirou had wanted to talk to them. When he’d brought up the subject over a telechat, Shiroe had been at a place where he could talk right away, so he’d gone over. When he’d run into Akatsuki in the living room and told her he was going to the West Wind for a bit, she’d ended up going with him.

  Shiroe had asked Soujirou about “odd, unfamiliar monsters”: changes in enemies that had appeared after the Catastrophe or the existence of unique enemies. Shiroe had begun gathering information in order to learn about them in detail, and just as he was getting started, he’d hit the jackpot.

  The information Soujirou and Nazuna gave him was just as he’d thought it might be—or rather, it was beyond what he’d imagined.

  “I hear other people have reported encounters, too. It doesn’t sound like it was the same guy, though.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit, Nazuna.”

  “Well, yeah. We’ve got a girls’ information network here, after all. We’re pretty awesome with things like that. Keh-heh-heh.”

  As a matter of fact, Shiroe already had information about the monsters known as Geniuses.

  He’d only just learned that that was what they were called, but reports that new strains of monsters had been discovered on the Yamato Server weren’t actually all that unusual.

  Most of them had been rash assumptions on the part of the Adventurers, who’d lost their external strategy sites. Yet, when he’d gone over those reports carefully, there had been some that definitely seemed to be not mistakes or false memories, but actual new strains.

  After the Catastrophe, as time passed, these eyewitness reports had continued to increase.

  This wasn’t simply a case of information he hadn’t known belatedly coming to light. It was as if the number of cases was growing over time.

  He didn’t think all these new monsters were Geniuses, but according to Soujirou and Nazuna, people besides the West Wind Brigade had apparently encountered them as well.

  From what the pair said, Camaysar, the Genius of Marriage, had been able to disguise itself as a Person of the Earth and bewitch the opposite sex.

  It had taken the form of a young Person of the Earth merchant, infiltrated the town of Akiba, which had lost its urban defense mechanisms, won a variety of female Adventurers over to its
side, and temporarily had influence that made it impossible to ignore.

  Some of the West Wind Brigade members who belonged to Soujirou’s Personal Guard had gotten suspicious and had subjugated the enemy.

  “They’re as reckless as ever, aren’t they?”

  “We’re a guild with high morals, see. If anybody messes with our girls, we show ’em no mercy.”

  “She’s right, my liege.”

  For some reason, Akatsuki nodded in agreement with Nazuna’s words, as if she was proud of them.

  “Did you help them, too, Akatsuki?”

  “No, this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  In that case, Shiroe didn’t understand why she’d nodded so cheerfully.

  Watching Shiroe out of the corner of her eye, Nazuna puffed out her chest, and Akatsuki nodded away, her eyes full of respect. He glanced at Soujirou, sending a distress signal. “What’s this about?”

  The response he got back was an amiable one: “Apparently, they’ve become friends. Girls make friends quickly when they eat sweets together.”

  Soujirou’s the only one who could say things that totally carefree, Shiroe thought.

  Fortunately, his memory was pretty good, and he hadn’t forgotten the tragedy at the Libra Festival… In other words, what had happened to him and his two companions when they’d “eaten sweets together” at the Danceteria cake buffet. In the end, he and Soujirou were men of different calibers.

  Shiroe resolved not to delve too deeply into this particular issue.

  Letting her eyes fall to the sheaf of papers in her hand, Nazuna continued, “At this point, the ones we’ve heard of are Sislau, the Genius of Pestilence; Zahun, the Genius of Scandal; Baglis, the Genius of Measures; and…”

  “And the one we defeated, Camaysar, the Genius of Marriage.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  The sheaf of papers seemed to be a hastily drafted report.

  “We’ve put together detailed notes about all this, but…what the heck are these things, Shiro?”