Stranded (3)
Dawn was breaking.
I had fallen asleep later than the Valkyrie and risen earlier. Constant vigilance over our surroundings meant I had barely slept at all.
"Haa..."
As a result, I was thoroughly exhausted.
Fortunately, the monsters vanished like shadows the moment the sun rose. It seemed they only became active from early evening until dawn.
That did not mean I could go back to sleep now, though.
Because—
"Ugh..."
The Valkyrie was stirring.
The woman rubbed her eyes and pushed herself upright. She scratched at her thoroughly mussed hair, then surveyed her surroundings. Those golden eyes locked onto me dead-on. In the space of a few seconds, they filled with raw hostility.
"You're awake?"
"……"
The Valkyrie had been about to snap into a combat stance when she realized the blanket covering her was a Magic Kingdom military uniform. She let out a strangled scream and flung my clothes away without a second thought. The uniform arced through the air and vanished into the underbrush.
"Hey!"
Whether I shouted or not, the Valkyrie paid me no mind. Pale-faced, she busied herself straightening her own clothes.
She let out a sigh that sounded almost like relief. Then she began groping across the ground around her.
"Looking for your weapon? I put it over here."
I had quietly taken her spear during the night, half-expecting her to try to kill me the moment she woke. She had been gripping it so tightly that every time she tossed in her sleep I nearly had a heart attack.
"O holy Goddess..."
"Skip the prayer and go pick up what you just threw, would you?"
"Tsk."
"Oh? Clicking your tongue at me?"
Utterly insolent. She had to know whose kindness had let her sleep so soundly.
"Why didn't you kill me last night? You had every chance to finish it."
"No, look—haa..."
I started to raise my voice in return, then stopped. It was draining. What was the point of arguing with someone who could not even understand the words?
More importantly, I could not lose sight of the real goal.
Survival. And escape.
That meant I could not fight the woman in front of me. I had to persuade her instead.
"Listen."
I pointed at the monster corpses scattered all around us. That alone was enough. The Valkyrie's face hardened as she muttered,
"……It wasn't a dream."
She did not move. She seemed lost in thought. While she sat there, I picked up the wooden spear and club and headed into the brush. I retrieved my uniform and shook the dust from it.
Whoosh.
The Valkyrie turned her head. Timing it perfectly, I laid my hand against a large boulder.
"Depict."
The change began the instant the word left my lips.
For the first time, artificial carvings appeared on a stone surface that until now had been shaped only by nature. The faces of the monsters, the shoreline, the life raft, and the two of us—everything rose into view like a masterful painting.
The images did not remain still. They shifted with the flow of time.
The first to move were the monsters we had seen the day before.
The creatures that had come ashore prowled the island and attacked people. One person died. Another was dragged back to their lair and never returned.
That was the first ending.
"Turn the page."
This time the island's landscape took center stage.
A life raft appeared. Two people sat inside it—me and the Valkyrie.
In the carving, we pushed off into the open sea.
We never reached another island. Before we could, we starved, died of thirst, succumbed to heatstroke, were attacked by sea predators or monsters, or met a storm that capsized the boat.
That was the second ending.
"This doesn't seem like an ordinary island. Given the monsters, it's at least cut off from the outside world. We can roughly tell north from south by the sun, but... there's no way of knowing how far we'd have to go before we hit inhabited land."
I spoke quietly and evenly. It did not matter if the Valkyrie failed to understand the words. What mattered was the non-verbal layer—tone, inflection, stress, length. As long as I could convey that I meant no hostility, that was enough.
"So my thinking is that we need thorough preparation before we even attempt an escape."
"……"
The Valkyrie had fallen silent. Conflict showed clearly on her face.
Next I carved plants and animals.
The image was a swan holding a peace lily in its beak. Swans and lilies were universal symbols of peace; they were used everywhere as signs of truce or anti-war sentiment.
Even with different languages, there was no chance she would misread the meaning.
"Let's cooperate. Only until we leave this island."
She could not understand the man's language.
But what he was trying to say was easy enough to grasp.
The woman bit down hard on her lower lip.
"……"
Last night her strength had given out and she had collapsed into something closer to a faint than sleep. Even so, the man in front of her had neither killed her nor laid a hand on her. He had clearly had the chance.
From that alone, he seemed to possess at least a minimum of moral sense.
Yes—even if he was a mage.
"Kh..."
A sudden spike of pain forced a groan from her throat.
Her side burned. The place the monster had struck her the day before still throbbed. She could not push herself too hard.
That was not all. Whether from spending the night soaked through or something else, a chill was rising through her body. Overall, she was in poor shape.
If she went all-out, she could probably kill this man. The problem was what came after.
Realistically, she had no confidence she could survive alone on an island this bizarre. It was almost certainly an uninhabited island untouched by civilization. Otherwise the monsters' presence made no sense.
Her thoughts settled into something like order.
"……O Goddess, please grant me a stay of execution."
She offered a brief prayer, then lowered her hands.
I held the spear out to the Valkyrie. A gesture of truce.
All that remained was whether she would accept it.
If she did, that would be excellent. If she refused, she would probably try to drive the spear I had just handed her straight through me. Given the obsessive drive Valkyries had always shown toward killing mages, it was a perfectly plausible outcome.
In that case I would have no choice. I would have to steel myself for death and take this woman—
That was as far as the thought got.
Thud!
The Valkyrie drove the spear into the ground and crossed her arms. She looked at me with eyes that had grown noticeably calmer.
"Fine. It doesn't look like there's any other option."
Her tone was subdued. I was certain.
It was done. I had succeeded in persuading the Valkyrie.
"Good thinking."
"Only until we get off this island. The moment I rejoin my flight wing, you're a dead man."
The cold, settled gaze remained, but the raw fury of the day before was gone. She too had understood that in a situation like this, setting emotion aside and cooperating came first.
"All right. Since we're stuck like this, we might as well learn each other's names."
I could not keep drawing pictures every time I needed to explain something. The limits were obvious. I needed to learn the Holy Kingdom's language as quickly as possible so we could actually communicate. Starting with an exchange of names seemed like a sensible first step.
I pointed to myself and enunciated slowly, clearly.
"Erihi. Erihi Ronshstein."
"Erihi Ronshstein...? That's you?"
"Yes. That's my name."
The Valkyrie stared at me in open shock. The next instant, the voice that had been softening filled with murderous intent once more.
"Don't lie to me. Is that real?"
I had no trouble reading the grudge hidden inside that frost-cold tone.
What? That was not the reaction I had expected.
"I've seen that name on our unit's kill list. Erihi Ronshstein, 1st Class Mage, Magic Stone Officer. Do you have any idea how many of our classmates your magic stones killed? Roughly two hundred, I'd say."
It was the first time I had heard the Valkyrie string so many words together.
Judging by the atmosphere, she had already known my name and hated me for it.
Had I already been marked on their side?
"Command has been itching to catch you for months. Standing orders were to kill you on sight if we ever met."
Her face twisted and smoothed out again and again. She seemed to be fighting to control her emotions. The complete inability to hide her expression suggested a rather straightforward personality.
I gestured before her rage could completely override her reason.
"And your name?"
"Me?"
The Valkyrie pointed at herself with a blank look. Yes, you.
"……Rachel."
"What?"
"Rachel. Rachel Brokenheart."
The pronunciation was clearer this time.
Rachel Brokenheart.
The moment I heard the name, a strange atmosphere settled over us.
How to put it—a sense of dissonance? Déjà vu? I felt certain I had heard that name somewhere before, yet the details refused to surface...
Ah.
I remembered.
"Don't tell me—‘Black Cat' Rachel?"
Since the war began, a handful of Holy Kingdom pilots had become living nightmares for the Magic Kingdom air force.
One of them was the Black Cat. Over the past two years she had flown six hundred sorties alone and racked up more than two hundred confirmed kills—the Platinum Ace of the Holy Kingdom air force.
She had appeared not only in countless skirmishes but in several of the major battles that had flipped the entire course of the war. A giant among giants. And that was the moniker attached to her...
"……That's you?"
I had expected a face with a few more lines on it.
She was this young?
No—that was not the important part.
Among all the dragon knights, the Black Cat was the pilot who had single-handedly killed the most of my comrades.
Of course I knew her reputation well; I had even held a kind of wary respect for it. There had been nights I lay awake wondering whether I would be the next target.
The resentment had piled up accordingly. I had once read the after-action reports. This woman was the one who had killed my superior officer and one of my academy seniors.
I narrowed my eyes and studied her.
Black hair, yellow eyes.
Now that I looked, she was the perfect image of a black cat.
I had only ever known the moniker, never the real name, which was why I had not recognized her at once. Looking again, it was painfully obvious.
That aside—could I actually trust her?
Not some ordinary Valkyrie, but the woman who had killed people I had been close to?
"……"
"……"
The name exchange had been meant to open a channel of conversation. Now that we actually knew each other's names, both of us had fallen quieter again. If anything, the wariness between us only seemed to have deepened.
Even so, what needed doing was clear.
"Location check. Food. Water."
Of those, confirming our location took priority.
There was always the slim chance a native settlement existed nearby.
"Let's head over there first."
"The hill?"
We kept our distance as we started toward the rise.
"Why are you behind me? Walk in front."
"Don't stand behind me."
"Come now—ladies first."
"Keep your distance. Unless you want to die."
"This is driving me insane."
You never show your back to an enemy. In the end the Valkyrie and I walked side by side with a careful gap between us—a kind of compromise.
That was how we climbed the hill.
From the high ground the island looked smaller than expected. A simple layout: a small forest in the center, ringed by a reverse beach of grass and gravel. That was essentially all there was.
The weather was clear enough that we could see the entire island at a glance. Nowhere was there any trace of civilization.
"We should check that forest."
"There might be people in there. A primitive tribe or something."
The Valkyrie seemed to have reached the same conclusion.
Hoping against hope that someone else might be present, we spent two full hours combing the woods—and came up empty. Every direction was nothing but green and more green. Not even a hint of human presence, let alone signs that anyone had ever lived there.
In the end, the damnable prediction had been correct.
"Ah."
"Ah."
The Valkyrie and I returned to the forest entrance. Walking had finished the survey for us. We wiped our faces at the same time.
"Damn it all."
"Damn it all."
That was the moment it became certain: we were shipwrecked on a deserted island.