Cana
“I hate it.”
She puffed out her cheeks.
“You hate it that much?”
She nodded emphatically, still wearing that sulky little face.
The pink-haired girl looked down and scratched his cheek in discomfort.
“I think it’s a pretty name. It’s cute, and your voice is pretty too, so it suits you perfectly, doesn’t it?”
“…I still hate it.”
“Hmm… Then how about this? I’ll call you something else for now, and when you feel better later, I’ll use your real name again.”
“…Okay.”
“What should I call you… Oh, I know!”
The man grinned, showing his teeth.
“Kana. Your name from now on is Kana!”
“…That’s simple.”
“Urk.”
“Still, thank you.”
As she said that, the girl showed him a smile he rarely saw.
* * *
Stupid woman.
Another way to put it: a dazed woman.
She’d walked into a mountain where rumors said a murderer lived, fearless as anything, and yet she couldn’t even kill a mere cockatrice and got frightened by it.
She’d spent more than a week bringing food all the way out here because I’d saved her life.
Watching Joni keep climbing the mountain, lugging her supplies, despite not even knowing how to hold a sword properly, I couldn’t help thinking that.
Did she not even consider that she might run into more monsters?
She was the stupidest person I’d ever seen.
“….”
Come to think of it, there was Garid.
Correction.
She was the second-stupidest person I’d ever seen.
Because the greatest fool I knew was Garid.
Anyway, what kind of person keeps going back to the mountain where they nearly died, just because they’re grateful for having their life saved?
It didn’t make sense whether she was an Apostle or not. If she wasn’t an Apostle, then she was throwing away the life she’d barely gotten back, which made no sense. If she was an Apostle, then why did she need to be so grateful in the first place, when her life would only come right back anyway?
Of course, she might have some other scheme besides pure goodwill.
But I didn’t doubt her.
More precisely, it would be more accurate to say I didn’t need to doubt her.
Maybe because I’d been dragged through the mud so much, I was extremely sensitive to hostility directed at me, and I couldn’t feel the slightest hint of ill will from Joni’s behavior.
Even if she did have hostile intent, I was confident I’d win.
Even the Empire’s senile serpent couldn’t easily lay a hand on me, so there was no way I’d lose to some scatterbrained, flimsy woman like her.
If she was hiding her presence from me, then that meant she was stronger than me, and worrying about it would be pointless.
If she was stronger than me, then whether I sensed it or not, I’d die anyway, so what could I do about it?
Besides, if she were that kind of person, she wouldn’t have needed to act weak in the first place.
Hmm. Enough about Joni for now. Maybe I should change the subject for a moment.
Subjectively speaking, my patience was pretty bad.
Mm, no. Not bad—that’s not quite right. Lacking would be more accurate.
Saying your patience isn’t good can still sound a little vague, but if you say it’s lacking, there’s no room for interpretation.
If someone handed me a marshmallow and said, “If you don’t eat this marshmallow by tomorrow, I’ll give you two more,” I’d probably stuff it into my mouth before they even finished speaking.
Maybe it came from something I experienced when I was little, right after my reincarnation… but did the cause really matter?
I didn’t exactly regret lacking patience, so what did it matter?
People often say that when a righteous person can’t tolerate injustice, they become a hero, and when an evil person can’t resist desire, they become a villain.
But I couldn’t even claim to be either righteous or wicked, so I was just some half-baked human who could be neither hero nor villain.
And lacking patience was, in some ways, closely tied to being impulsive.
After the last thread that had held me in place vanished, I, that half-finished human, fluttered down like a leaf torn from a tree and made a vow.
I would never get tangled up with anyone again.
Wait a second!
And yet, after making that vow, I still saved her for the sake of some Granic?
Once again, I was reminded that I was an impulsive, impatient sort of person after all.
I saved Joni, then let her keep coming by every day to bother me, taught her swordsmanship and Granic, and even told her my name.
Nothing about any of it was particularly calculated.
Haaah.
Even though a fair bit of time had passed, the lingering burn of spice still clung to the tip of my tongue.
Why did food like this even exist? Better yet, could this even be called food?
What Joni had brought today was something written as fried rice but read as human malice.
Could you really survive eating this?
The numbing heat seemed to beat that question into my skull.
“Pfft….”
Even I thought it was ridiculous, and a laugh slipped out of me.
A fiery, artificial spice packed with all the aggressively stimulating flavors I’d never tasted in Silia before.
Why, then, did eating it make a faint nostalgia drift up from somewhere in the back of my mind?
“Joni, Apostle, Edel….”
Tap.
Tap.
I tapped lightly on the sword at my waist with my finger and fell into thought.
The blacksmith had said it.
That Edel had brought people over from a continent beyond the eastern sea and bestowed her blessing upon them.
Apostles who had suddenly appeared one day, and a blessing that filled them to the brim with power.
Food with a taste I’d never experienced before. A spicy flavor that somehow stirred a distant sense of nostalgia.
Tap, tap.
“Just what are you scheming, Edel?”
I looked up at the sky, just as I had once before, and asked.
The sky was still clear, and the god was still silent.
“Sedes Holy Kingdom.”
The center of the Edel Church, and the place where Edel had descended. The place in the Ardeena Continent where her divine power still lingered most strongly of all.
If I went there, could I learn the truth?
Even so, I had no intention of leaving the mountain just yet.
I still couldn’t abandon Garid, and that senile serpent would surely be watching with those glittering eyes of his.
By the time a little more time had passed and the kingdom called Grasis became nothing more than a faded memory, it would be fine, wouldn’t it?
Even if Edel was up to something, what did it have to do with me right now?
It wasn’t as if I had no way at all to gather information, so there was no need to get impatient.
I had a fine shuttle coming by every day with food… no, an information source.
Even if she was a dazed, foolish woman, an Apostle was still an Apostle, so surely she knew something.
And judging by the way my existence had spread and brought unwanted visitors to my doorstep, it seemed the Apostles had their own network of information too.
The only thing I was worried about was that I’d impulsively told her my name because of some trace of reincarnated nostalgia….
“I told her not to tell anyone.”
It was a promise no sturdier than pinky swears, something that wouldn’t be strange to break at any moment.
Still, if it was her, maybe it would be fine. Unlike some random person, she was the woman who’d been bringing me food every day to repay her debt for being saved.
And from the way she kept asking me questions, she seemed eager to get close to me, so maybe she was even happy just to have learned my name.
“Phew….”
I’d come to this mountain to live quietly, and yet somehow, things weren’t going smoothly at all.
Why did things keep happening?
Was a peaceful life simply not meant for me…?
* * *
“Kana.”
Gravekeeper.
Kana and gravekeeper. Gravekeeper and Kana.
How could two words feel so different from each other?
Joni rolled the two hard-earned syllables around carefully in her mouth and thought.
Just moments ago, all she’d wanted was for the affection she’d painstakingly built up not to drop, and now that she’d gotten an unexpected harvest, she felt more dazed than happy.
The answer had been the spicy fried rice she’d prepared while grinding her teeth and steeling herself for death, because she’d gotten so stubborn after all the continued silence?
…Why, exactly?
It was the very image of trying to back away from a cow and catching a rat by accident.
She didn’t understand it at all, but either way, wasn’t a win a win?
After sharing that brief burst of joy with the viewers, the worry came right on its heels.
“I said it was a secret….”
Back then, she’d been too rattled by the shock of realizing the key to the route was Phoenix Fried Rice, and by the sudden affection-boost event, to properly understand the gravekeeper’s… Kana’s words.
It also didn’t help that the word itself wasn’t one Joni knew.
Once she thought back on what Kana had said as she came down the mountain, she realized it had meant not to tell anyone, that it was a secret.
Based on Joni’s not-so-short life experience, once you told a secret to someone, the secret stopped being a secret in an instant.
If A says to B, “This is a secret, but… don’t tell anyone,” then B goes to C and says,
“Hey, this is something A told me, but I’m only telling you. Seriously, A said….”
Then C runs off and tells D.
“A….”
That sort of thing.
Joni knew all too well what it felt like to be betrayed by someone she’d trusted, so she never carelessly spilled secrets.
Whether it was her own secret or someone else’s.
This time, she’d meant to do the same—but her profession was the problem.
…Am I screwed?
If she’d known ahead of time, she could at least have muted the stream, but because it happened so suddenly, she’d broadcast the name Kana exactly as it was.
And not just that—it had all been said openly as a secret, too.
Even the viewers who’d witnessed it firsthand already numbered well over a hundred thousand.
And if it spread through every broadcast and community in clip form, she couldn’t even begin to imagine how many people would end up knowing.
Could she expect all those people to keep it secret?
Haha. As if.
Unless they were connected to the network through their nerves like some alien species and shared the same thoughts, that was utterly impossible.
Just look at the chat now, running wild while chanting Kana’s name.
If only there weren’t even a single person with bad intentions among them.
“Okay, everyone. Let’s all calm down a little, all right?”
Why were they overreacting so hard to some NPC in a game? Sure, it was a little more advanced than the AI in other games, but still.
It was something she’d heard so many times during the days she’d struggled to earn Kana’s favor that she was sick of it.
But she didn’t think the residents of this Silia world were mere NPCs.
They thought like people, acted like people, and spoke like people, so how could she possibly think of them as mere NPCs?
And even if they were just NPCs, so what?
Was it wrong to get immersed?
Besides, RPG stood for “Role-Playing Game,” which literally meant a game of playing a role.
If you criticize people for immersing themselves in the performance and thinking like the residents of this world, aren’t you basically denying the entire genre of RPG itself?
The very phrase overimmersed was the problem.
That was what she thought.
So, I’m going to do everything I can to keep Kana’s words.
Though it does feel like I’m already way too late….
Because she didn’t want to betray Kana, who had trusted her enough to tell her.