In the World Inside the Game (2)
"...Th-this... This can't be."
Zernisha had been the one to take a female form, and so I had held an unshakable belief that Mircania could be nothing other than a boy, or at most a young man. That was why I had gone ahead with Polymorph without a second thought—only for the sight before my eyes to prove shocking beyond words.
I never would have— No. It didn't have to be me. Any player of Icarus Chronicle would have pictured Mircania's Polymorphed shape as a young man clad in blue armor. The official illustration had even drawn her that way: her whole body hidden in plate, a rapier in her hand. No one could ever have imagined that a Polymorphed vessel like this was what waited inside that armor. And now that I myself had become Mircania, it was a possibility I had no wish to imagine at all.
How—how had I been reincarnated here, come to inhabit the body of a Mircania I had been so certain would be male, and ended up staring at this?
"...It feels as if the world is playing a joke on me."
If it wasn't, the situation was nearly impossible to explain. I let out a sigh and quietly rose.
My height... about a hundred and seventy centimeters, maybe? I hated to admit it, but this body of Mircania's stood taller than my old one, and I could feel the slight difference in how high the world sat in my vision. It wasn't much of a difference. Only a very slight one—ten centimeters, just that subtle a gap—and it didn't hinder me in walking or in moving.
The problem, if I had to name it...
"...I can't really... see my feet."
When I looked down, all that met my eyes were the two mounds of flesh on my chest. The first time you move in a new body, the surest way to check your stride and your balance is to watch your legs as you go—but this body shut me out of even that most basic step. Slowly, I began to walk, taking a cautious little stroll across the snowfield.
"Hmm... I wouldn't say the body is lacking in strength, exactly... Still, a dragon is a dragon, I suppose...?"
The movement was quite smooth. Polymorph or not, I felt no particular disconnect in the body, nor any awkwardness. If anything, a human form was far more convenient than a dragon's, and the sensations that came with it were familiar. That there wasn't much fabric to the clothes was a little embarrassing, but it wasn't a problem without a remedy.
"Hmm..."
I sat quietly in the snow and gazed out at the forest and the clear sky. The endless snowfield seemed to declare that this was the north I knew from Icarus Chronicle—Kartz—and the sky, so lucid and beautiful it felt almost uncanny, seemed to say that this was the world inside the game.
"...No. This place isn't inside a game anymore, is it."
If I happened to meet death here, this time there truly would be no next chance. I had been dropped into this place all at once, without a single comforting safety of another opportunity left to me—and yet I was already as good as dead. So I resented nothing. That my present body had taken a woman's form was only a small complaint, hardly a real problem. A different shape and different senses were nothing more than a matter of adaptation, and I did not feel they were something I could not overcome.
For now, I simply had to be grateful for the chance I had been given, and think about what I ought to do, and toward what end I should move. I did not know this place down to every last detail, after all. It was no longer anything like a world inside a game. It was the world in which I would live, for however long remained to me.
I had absolutely no intention of dying without meaning—and still less of living out the ending already written for me, vanishing helpless as dew beneath a silver sword. Now that I had opened my eyes in this place again, what I needed to consider was how to move toward a happy ending, and what I had to do in order to survive. First of all, learning roughly when this moment was would be the very thing I had to do. After that, I would have to decide in which direction to move.
"For now... this has to be Kartz, no question. And the place where I came back to life and opened my eyes must be the world that served as the setting of Icarus Chronicle."
First, I had to steady my heart. I had burned to death in my previous life—whether this was meant as a suggestion that I cool off, or, since I had been a man, an invitation to try living this way for once, I couldn't say. For the moment, I had to yield to the change I had been given. If I failed to accept it and kept turning over complaint and resistance, there would be no end to it, and in the end this problem would never be solved. I knew that better than anyone.
So focus on what you have to do now, Harang.
No... should I be calling myself Mircania now?
"For now... the woods are quiet, so there doesn't seem to be a Monster Wave either... Though not seeing a single animal nearby does feel a little strange."
How to put it—in a forest like this, wild animals ought to have been living in fair numbers, yet all that spread before my eyes was a pristine snowfield and woodland where not even an ant could be seen. The quiet was so complete that it felt suspicious, and a small sense of wrongness began to creep in. Just because I had taken Mircania's form did not mean this world was necessarily the setting of Icarus Chronicle, nor that this place was Kartz. That anxiety slowly pressed in on me.
In the work, Kartz was described as snowfields and forests where the threat of wild beasts and monsters lurked; below them the grand ducal house stood like a shield, and farther down still came the plaza and the city. Here, though, only the shape of snowfield and forest was the same. I saw no wild animals, and no trace of monsters. There was only a woman with sky-blue hair walking the snow, and trees swaying quietly in the wind.
Crunch.
I picked my way carefully across the snowfield, looking around all the while, but it seemed difficult to find any trace of life here besides my own.
"...If this place really is Kartz, then if I keep heading south, a residential district ought to... appear."
Did that mean the thing I ought to do right now was make for the residential district? Medieval in flavor or not, Kartz was still a city born of modern people's invention, and it ran, in its way, on capitalism. If I went there without a coin to my name, would there be anything I could actually do? Even so, I could hardly do nothing at all, and little by little my thoughts began to tangle—because I did not know what I should do this very moment.
"I know less than I thought I did..."
Imagine setting a modern person down in a barren expanse where all they can see is snow and a forest thick with trees. Would there really be many who, right now, could offer a better course than mine, or act more wisely? Ask that, and the consensus would surely be no. There were certainly people in the world who had loved Icarus Chronicle as much as I had, and people of greater equanimity than I, but... I had already set one foot in the realm of death, and so I could remain composed no matter what situation came.
Even so, if I were to meet death again, then it would be a little... No. It would be quite sad, I thought, and bitter besides. This was a new chance at life, won by heaven-sent luck. To die having done nothing at all would be nothing but a waste of that life.
"...Ah. Come to think of it, the Frostflame Dragon was a dragon in the end, too... Would there be a lair?"
A lair—the nest where dragons lived, and, to humans, a place like a home. Zernisha had possessed a lair of her own, and if Mircania was called the guardian dragon of the north, she would surely have one as well. Just as birds build nests and live in them, it was taken for granted that dragons raised lairs and lived in those. The trouble was that I did not know where the Frostflame Dragon's Lair—the place I would now have to call my home—actually lay, and so I wracked my brain.
The prerequisite for the final quest of White Snow's Guardian Knight had been precisely to seek out the Frostflame Dragon's Lair, and it was a quest I had run more times than I could count. If anyone could call it back to mind, it would be me.
"The sun's up, so... going by the sun, the side with the forest was east... which means ahead and to my right from here is east..."
The Frostflame Dragon's Lair lay to the northwest of the Kartz Principality. Turn around where I stood, then, and keep going straight ahead, and the lair ought to appear. I did not know how far it was, but a dragon's body would not tire easily no matter how far I ran, so I should arrive before today's sun went down. To reach that place, pass a day there, and think things through at my leisure, I set off at an easy pace.