The Beginning of Another World Read online

  “Akatsuki is a role player,” Shiroe answered, also whispering. “He doesn’t say much, but he’s got skills. Solid ones… Under the circumstances, though, he’s probably as depressed as the rest of us.”

  They’d already lost sight of Akatsuki; he’d gone deeper into the ruin by himself. His behavior seemed a bit more impatient than usual.

  The room smelled damp and dusty. The morning sun streamed in through chinks in the crumbling walls and narrow windows in ruler-straight lines. The place really had been some sort of shop, most likely a restaurant: The room they’d entered was spacious and terribly jumbled, with several scattered tables, chairs, and sofas tipped over or resting at crazy angles.

  Akatsuki turned then, staring at Naotsugu with eyes that seemed troubled and somehow accusatory.

  Shiroe took that as his cue to make introductions.

  “Akatsuki, this is Naotsugu. Guardian. He’s an old friend of mine, and he’s pretty reliable. You can trust him.”

  “Naotsugu here. Nice to meetcha! I dunno if you’re an open type or a moody type, but whenever you want to talk about raunchy stuff, count me in.”

  It was a typical Naotsugu greeting: much too straightforward. You just met this guy, Shiroe thought, feeling very close to his wits’ end, but Akatsuki’s expression was tense, as though he didn’t have the emotional leeway to care.

  Was Akatsuki always this on edge? Shiroe wondered privately, as the uneasy silence lengthened. He didn’t say much, but unless I’m remembering wrong, he used to be light on his feet and love fighting.

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  At last, Akatsuki spoke, letting the words fall in a voice so faint it was barely audible. It was a very thin, unreliable voice.

  “Did you need me for something?”

  Akatsuki nodded silently in response to Shiroe’s question. Even then, he seemed to be agonizing over something. He took two or three deep breaths, then spoke, as if he’d made up his mind.

  “I want to buy your Appearance Reset Potion.”

  Akatsuki’s voice was faint, but Shiroe heard what he said quite clearly. Even so, it took a while for the content of the words to travel from his ears to his brain, and he had to think for a bit before he really understood what he’d heard.

  The Appearance Reset Potion was a limited-edition item that had been distributed at an event Shiroe had attended just after he’d started playing Elder Tales. It had been a free gift in some sort of sales promotion campaign intended to draw in more Elder Tales users. From what he remembered, the campaign itself had been a tie-up with online radio and a pretty shoddy affair. It was a badly designed event, with an appearance by some unknown, here-and-gone voice actor and the announcement of a new song thrown in haphazardly, and even the Elder Tales administration team probably wanted to forget it had ever happened.

  Any game with a history of twenty years was bound to have several ridiculous campaigns in its past, and no doubt there were countless limited-edition items associated with those campaigns.

  Elder Tales players created their characters right after they began the game. Eight races. Twelve classes. Name. Gender. Then there were other items to fine-tune: height and body build, facial texture, hairstyle, hair and eye color. The “body build” category allowed players to adjust a dozen or so measurements, including chest diameter, leg length, and shoulder width. Of course, things like figures and faces had no effect whatsoever on battles, growth, or any other aspect of the game balance, so seasoned users tended to just punch in likely looking numbers and go.

  The Appearance Reset Potion was exactly what it sounded like: an elixir that let players change the appearance of the characters they’d created at the beginning of the game. That said, since appearance didn’t affect game difficulty at all, the potion was little better than a gag item. In line with the extremely shoddy sales promotion campaign, although it was incredibly rare, it was just a “fun” item with no practical significance.

  …Until now.

  “A-A-Akatsuki… D-don’t tell me…”

  Shiroe’s tone earned him a very focused glare from Akatsuki.

  “You’re a girl?”

  In sharp contrast with his intrepid, exquisitely skillful professional killer’s looks, Akatsuki nodded his head meekly.

  That faint voice. Akatsuki had been working hard to disguise it, but it had been a woman’s voice. In this world, with text chats no longer an option, there was no way to hide it.

  “…Okay. I did not see that coming.”

  Beside Shiroe, Naotsugu had frozen up, too.

  3

  Shiroe made a trip to the bank and withdrew the Appearance Reset Potion from his deposit box. Back at the crumbling shop, he handed the item to Akatsuki. The Assassin looked visibly relieved to be holding the pale orange vial.

  “Wait here.”

  Akatsuki disappeared into the shop’s interior. Interior wasn’t quite the right word for it; there were no other rooms farther back. There was a single-panel, freestanding screen at the border between the kitchen and the rest of the shop, and apparently Akatsuki’s belongings were stashed behind it.

  That’s not safe, Shiroe thought. Don’t tell me he—uh, she—has actually been living here… But the atmosphere was tense, and he knew better than to actually ask.

  “Hey, Akatsuki. You okay back there?”

  “Fine… Gkh!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This potion…hurts. A lot.”

  Akatsuki seemed to have drunk the potion right away. An orange light the same color as the potion glowed from the shadows behind the screen. Akatsuki’s response to Naotsugu had been tinged with pain, and that had worried Shiroe, but it was nothing compared to what came next. He felt his face go pale.

  Sounds were leaking from behind the screen. Sounds like a whole bundle of chopsticks being snapped in two. Sounds like wet rags being ripped to shreds. Sounds so awful he didn’t want to know how they were being made.

  Whoa, hold it, no, that can’t be okay—

  “Ugkh…agh…”

  Worried, Shiroe had started toward the screen, but Akatsuki’s groan seemed to nail his feet to the floor. It certainly did sound like a woman’s voice, and a very young woman at that. The strangled cries of pain continued, but Shiroe was paralyzed by the idea that if he kicked the screen out of the way he might accidentally see her naked.

  Belatedly, Shiroe realized why Akatsuki had never used voice chat. Voice chat would have instantly telegraphed her gender to other players, and since she was role-playing as an Assassin, she would have found it terribly inconvenient.

  “It takes all kinds, I guess.”

  Naotsugu sighed. He’d picked up a fallen stool, dusted it off, and sat down on it. Shiroe was startled, too, but it wasn’t an inconceivable situation. In current online games, where voice chat was the main mode of communication, it wasn’t common for players to play as characters of a different gender, but it wasn’t as if it never happened. Elder Tales had a reputation for being complex and expertly executed, a game for experienced gamers. Both men and women enjoyed online games, but at least according to a statistic Shiroe had come across in a magazine article, women tended to prefer lighter games. In Shiroe’s own experience, about 70 percent of the players in Elder Tales were male and only 30 percent were female. Akatsuki was a player who loved combat and had a detailed understanding of the system, so Shiroe had never suspected that “he” might actually be a “she.”

  “It’s over. I’m okay—thank you.”

  The Akatsuki who emerged from behind the screen was a girl not quite 150 centimeters tall. She had long black hair that swayed as she moved, and as Shiroe had guessed from her voice, she was surprisingly lovely. Since she was more than thirty centimeters shorter than her former character, she seemed to be drowning in the black men’s outfit that had fit her earlier character. She looked like a little kid who’d dressed up in her dad’s work clothes. Still, there was something adorable about the delicate white ankl
es that peeked out of the thick, upturned cuffs and the tiny fingers poking out of the rolled-up sleeves.

  “Whoa. It’s an actual pretty girl. A real one.”

  Naotsugu’s mouth hung halfway open as he muttered.

  Shiroe had to agree.

  In this world, basic figures and hairstyles seemed to have been inherited from the Elder Tales model settings. However, recent observations seemed to indicate that elements of their real-world counterparts had been blended in as well.

  Shiroe’s character in this world was a half Alv, a hybrid of the human and ancient Alv races. Alvs were supposed to be slender and brimming with curiosity, but when he’d checked the mirror at the inn, his face bore a marked resemblance to the one he wore back home in the real world. Since that resemblance included what people told him were his mean-looking sanpaku eyes, the discovery had left Shiroe rather depressed.

  Unlike Shiroe, Akatsuki was a pure-blooded human, and if the same logic were applied to her, she was beautiful, full stop. Large black eyes in a pale oval face. Eyebrows like elegant arcs of deep black ink. If she looked like this even through the warped lens of the game world, the real Akatsuki must be incredibly lovely—the sort of girl anyone would call a beauty.

  That said, Akatsuki’s new body was quite small. The top of her head didn’t reach Shiroe’s shoulder, and she might not even have been 150 centimeters tall.

  In Elder Tales, players had very fine control over the details of their Adventurer’s figure and appearance. The male Akatsuki had been very tall.

  He’d probably had at least thirty centimeters on the current Akatsuki. Shiroe’s character was only a few centimeters taller than the real-world Shiroe, and even he’d had a hard time walking at first. The handicap the disaster had inflicted on Akatsuki must have been dozens of times worse.

  Shiroe felt paralyzed. He hadn’t expected her to be so pretty.

  “…Nope. No way.”

  Naotsugu spoke, breaking the tension.

  “I take back what I said. You can’t be an open perv, a moody perv, or any kind of perv, because you’re not a guy. You’re one of them that wears the panties. Don’t you forget it.”

  While that was no doubt true, it was an unreasonable declaration, and it seemed to puzzle Akatsuki.

  “Lord Shiroe. Is this person deranged?”

  “No, he isn’t deranged, he’s just… Um. He’s just fundamentally weird.”

  “What about me is weird?!”

  “Strange either way, then,” Akatsuki said, watching Naotsugu out of the corner of her eye.

  Possibly because the voice chat restriction had been lifted, Akatsuki’s responses were much more relaxed than they had been when Elder Tales was a game. Still, the way she spoke—as if she was economizing on words—fit perfectly with Shiroe’s mental image of Akatsuki.

  …Although that cute voice of hers is really disorienting.

  “Hey, I asked you a question! What about me is weird?! I was born one hundred percent male! What sort of guy would I be if I couldn’t talk dirty once in a while? It’s like my calling. Not that I’d expect a girl like you to understand…”

  Naotsugu, puffing out his chest proudly over absolutely nothing, shot Akatsuki a look and snorted contemptuously.

  “Still, that sounded pretty rough back there. Here. Drink up.”

  He tossed her a canteen filled with well water. Shiroe and Naotsugu had taken to buying well water because it was the cheapest thing there was, and everything else tasted just like it anyway.

  “Thanks.”

  Akatsuki looked a bit surprised by the gesture. She probably couldn’t figure out whether Naotsugu was a weirdo or a considerate type who was good at looking out for people. Still, she caught the canteen and gulped down quite a lot of its contents without coming up for air. Apparently she’d been really thirsty.

  There in the damp-smelling shop, the three of them took up whatever positions felt comfortable and settled down to talk.

  According to Akatsuki, she’d been living in this ruin for five days, trying to stay out of sight and unable to get much of anything to eat or drink. At first, Shiroe couldn’t fathom why she’d do a thing like that, but as he listened to her story, he began to understand.

  The difference between this body and Akatsuki’s former one had been so large that she couldn’t even walk well. She’d been able to sidle slowly around town, but if she’d gotten caught up in any trouble, she wouldn’t have been able to cope with it, and she’d assumed that the probability of running into trouble was very high. In this world, with text chat no longer an option, if she wanted to buy anything or contact friends, she’d have to speak. She could have communicated by writing notes, but even that would have made people treat her with suspicion.

  Of course, it wasn’t as if the act of speaking carried a penalty. She would simply have been a man with a woman’s voice. However, a tall, fierce killer who spoke with a woman’s voice would have been a glaring contradiction, and the combination would undoubtedly have attracted attention. Akatsuki had expected trouble, and she probably would have gotten it.

  “Then I remembered that earlier when I was in a party with Lord Shiroe, he’d mentioned an Appearance Reset Potion. I thought, if I had that, I could at least get myself out of this mess.”

  “I see,” Naotsugu said.

  “…Still. I think you should’ve just played as this midget model version to begin with.”

  “Don’t call me a midget.”

  Akatsuki gave Naotsugu a sharp glare. She had a very forceful gaze. It had been forceful before she drank the potion, too, but now that she had her own form back, her incredibly serious gaze, loaded with willpower, was so persuasive that Shiroe thought it could probably bore a hole through solid rock.

  It didn’t seem to bother Naotsugu, though.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with calling a midget ‘midget,’ short stuff.”

  “I don’t want to hear that from a weirdo.”

  It was very like Naotsugu to casually pull food and drink from his pack and offer them to her, giving her what she seemed to need even as he teased her, Shiroe thought. Akatsuki seemed to realize that, too. She didn’t seriously snap at him, and she seemed a bit out of her element.

  “Part of what makes games fun is being able to do things you can’t do in real life, you know?” she said, sulking a bit. “Just like with fantasy and sci-fi. For me, that ‘thing’ was being tall.”

  When she put it that way, she had a very good point.

  “Well, yeah. I guess there’s no help for that.”

  Naotsugu’s voice was superficially sympathetic. He shot a glance at Akatsuki.

  “……”

  “Yep, there’s no help for that. It’s not your fault, Akatsuki. I’m on your side here. Everybody’s got the right to dream.”

  At that, he smiled as if he understood everything, then flashed her a thumbs-up. In the next instant, Akatsuki had hit him square in the face with an elegant flying knee kick.

  “No knees! Did you seriously have to use your knee?!”

  “Lord Shiroe, may I knee kick the weirdo?”

  “You already did it! Don’t ask for permission now!”

  On seeing that exchange, Shiroe was unable to choke back a laugh. That they didn’t look as though they were actually on bad terms made it even funnier.

  “Way to score points by being a good lil boy all by yourself,” Naotsugu accused.

  “Would you keep this weirdo on a tighter leash?” Akatsuki demanded.

  After choking back his laughter more successfully for a little while, Shiroe turned to Akatsuki.

  “It is easier being in a body that’s more like your own, isn’t it?”

  Akatsuki considered the question for a minute, then answered with the too-serious expression Shiroe was beginning to expect.

  “The male body looked really neat, and its reach was much better, but…there were issues.”

  “Yeah? What was the problem?” Naotsugu asked.

&nb
sp; These two hadn’t met before, but they already seemed to have gotten used to each other. From what Shiroe could remember, Akatsuki tended to be cautious about human relationships, but Naotsugu’s Naotsugu-ness seemed to have disarmed her somewhat.

  “Um… Using the bathroom.”

  Akatsuki looked down, mumbling.

  Naotsugu! That’s sexual harassment!!

  “Oh, right. Because you had a wiener!”

  Naotsugu! Don’t make it worse!

  “Um. So, uh. Changing the subject! The measurements of this version are closer to your real body, right?”

  Shiroe asked, executing a supremely clumsy change of topic in an attempt to help out Akatsuki, who’d gone red and was looking very uncomfortable. Even for a woman, she was quite short.

  “Yes.”

  Akatsuki nodded, tugging at bits of her baggy clothes, her expression earnest.

  Part of that’s probably to hide her embarrassment over Naotsugu’s dirty old man comments, but…

  Even then, Shiroe thought, she was an oddly serious girl. She had a habit of keeping her eyes fixed too long on whatever she was looking at. When she looked at people or things, she looked so hard she seemed to be staring. The habit had probably belonged to the real Akatsuki in their former world, and it gave the slight girl an earnest, desperate air.

  “That means the height difference problem is solved, then. It’s easier to walk now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Thank you,” Akatsuki said in concise gratitude.

  Her brusque tone, her abruptness, her habit of gazing fixedly at things. In Shiroe’s mind, that combination was gradually overlapping with his image of the old Akatsuki, the taciturn, professional fighter. Physically, they couldn’t have been more different, but her serious behavior seemed to him to be the very essence of Akatsuki. Little by little, he felt the gap between the slender girl in front of him and the Akatsuki he knew close.

  “How much should I pay you? Will everything I have be enough?”

  Akatsuki asked Shiroe a hair-raising question, fixing him with a gaze that was just this side of a glare.

  “I only have about thirty thousand… Could you settle for that?”