Breaking into an Empty House
Even if I'd only ever half-played this game, that didn't mean I'd never touched any others.
Break whatever can be broken. Open every treasure chest you find. If a space suddenly yawns wide, stay on your guard. And if a glittering butterfly appears, follow it.
When an NPC strides off ahead without a word, you follow if you want the quest to move, and when a glittering butterfly leads the way, odds are good a hidden reward is waiting at the end. That formula had held in every game I'd ever played, so even with no idea what was coming, I had no reason not to chase the thing. If it turned out to be a trap, I'd think about that when I got there.
Still, I was fairly sure I'd never seen an event like this in Eternal Arcadia. Don't tell me this was some kind of hidden.
A hidden, right out of the gate.
As I've said, I never much liked hidden events. A hidden only pays if you already have the information; out in the real world, you sweat your way through the whole thing and the reward is some worthless title more often than not. Most of them are a hassle besides—quests you have to play by hand, with no macro to lean on.
In the end, whether your character gets into a hunting ground or gets an invite to a raid is decided by the number that measures how strong your gear is. Some players go looking for that content on purpose and clear it, calling the whole business "building your foundations"... but to me it had never been anything but a scheme for wasting time. Specs I could raise with a macro—taking longer on the clock, maybe, but costing less time actually at the controls—were simpler, and more efficient.
The situation now, though, was very different.
For one thing, I had no macro that would grow me on its own and run my hunts for me. I myself had become a character inside the game. There was nothing I could do but operate this body.
For another, this was more fun than I'd expected.
Back when I'd thought of it as nothing but a program I left running like a mining rig—no interest, no affection, just something to farm gold with—I hadn't known. You take the abilities and the information you have, hunt down clues, turn up the things that were hidden, and push on toward somewhere. And the sense that all of it was reality, not a virtual world on the far side of a monitor, felt strangely new.
Is this why people go to escape rooms? Whenever the subject came up online, I'd always thought, Is that actually any fun? It's pretty fun, isn't it?
Well. To be fair, Unit 1 had already solved most of the annoying parts. But as I said before, a subordinate's ability is your own.
I was turning that over when the butterfly suddenly stopped in one spot.
"Here?"
Flutter, flutter.
I was pretty sure that meant yes. Tilting my head, I looked over the place where it had landed. Nothing but a blank stone wall...
"Wait. What."
Looking closer, a section of the wall stuck out just a little farther than the rest.
Don't tell me...
Was something hidden behind it? I reached for the wall at once, then stopped, because it wasn't only dust caked on there. Spiderwebs were snarled all over it too. With the light coming off the butterfly, the filth only showed more clearly.
After a moment's thought about what to do, I called Unit 1.
"Unit 1, get over here and take a look at this."
A person ought to know how to use their tools.
At my order, Unit 1 came straight up in front of me and set a hand against the bit of wall that jutted out.
Press...
The stone slid inward like a Jenga block, and it went deeper than I'd expected. Good thing I hadn't put my own hand on it. Unit 1's arm kept pushing in until, from somewhere inside the wall, there came a soft tok, and it stopped.
"Something in there?"
When I asked, Unit 1 rolled a hand around inside—shoulders shifting with the motion—then drew the arm back out. In that hand was a little wooden box no bigger than a palm.
I had no idea how long the box had been sitting inside the wall, but nothing on it was rotten or broken, so the contents were almost certainly fine as well.
"Ooh... open it, quick!"
Under my expectant stare, Unit 1 didn't stall any longer and opened the box. Inside, wrapped in a scrap of cloth faded to red, lay a single silver ring.
"...A ring?"
A crest like a bird's wings was engraved on it. The surface was full of old scratches, but the luster had hardly faded at all. I didn't put it on right away. There was always the chance it was actually a cursed item. Even so, I felt as if I'd seen this ring somewhere before.
Hmm. Where had I seen it?
I was still turning that over when the butterfly that had led us here settled on the ring, folded and unfolded its wings a few times, and then abruptly vanished.
What? I never dismissed the summon. Well—more accurately, I didn't know how to dismiss a summon, but anyway! The thing disappearing was outside the plan. I'd meant to use it as a temporary lantern, and it just up and vanishes? Now I can't even get a proper look at the ring!
I was fuming alone over my summon's one-sided breach of contract when a strange light seeped from the gaps in the ring's pattern.
"Oh—wait, this is..."
That shape. That image. I definitely remembered it.
"Isn't this the basic ring they hand out in the tutorial?"
With the light on it, I could tell. It was exactly the image I'd seen in the item window. No wonder the name Elysia had felt a little familiar. It must have been because the ring's name, the Ring of House Elysia, had stuck somewhere in my head.
Wait. Did that mean everything I'd been through in this mansion so far was the tutorial?
"What a letdown..."
The strength drained out of me until I felt hollow all over. No wonder it had felt like I was being led along. Had the whole thing been designed that way from the start?
I hadn't known at all. By the time I played Eternal Arcadia Online, the tutorial-skip function was already in, so I'd always blown past the entire tutorial and used the option that let me claim nothing but the reward, walking away with the ring and nothing else. All I'd remembered was roughly what it looked like.
"Well, still... at least now I know it isn't cursed."
I let out a long sigh and slipped the ring onto my finger. If it wasn't a cursed item, there was no harm in wearing it, and as I recalled, the ring they handed out in the tutorial had been pretty decent. Otherwise I wouldn't have remembered it in the first place. I'd have sold the thing as it was.
The option was... I couldn't remember exactly, but I was pretty sure it had something to do with mana. Being a tutorial handout, the specs weren't anything amazing. Still, seeing as I didn't even have that basic ring on me now, it had to be a lot better than bare hands.
Sure enough, once I had it on, drawing mana up out of my body felt considerably easier. As if I could move it while concentrating a little less. I tried summoning a few times as a test, and there was a definite difference in how much focus it took. It might have been a placebo, but if it at least felt that way, it seemed like a decent item. Pour mana into it and the light grew a little stronger, too, so in a pinch I could probably use it like a lamp.
The butterfly, incidentally, did not appear in any of the summons that followed.
Where did that thing even go? Don't tell me it caught on to my plan to shove it into a glass bottle the moment it showed up again and turn it into a semi-permanent lamp.
"I'm telling you, I heard it!"
At the edge of the village, in the middle of the tavern, he raised his voice.
"It was a child's voice. She definitely cried out for help."
That voice he'd heard in the forest earlier in the day. It had unmistakably been a little girl's last scream.
"Aigoo. This fellow's been at it since noon, and here he goes again. You were drunk then, weren't you? So what, you misheard a birdcall, or a fox, something like that?"
"Because of what you said, we checked every child in the village. Not one of them was hurt. Not one of them was missing."
But the man wouldn't bend.
"I said that's not it!"
Bang.
He slammed a fist down on the table and went on.
"I've spent my whole life in the forest, cutting wood. You think I can't tell a human voice from an animal's cry?"
A claim staked on a woodcutter's entire life. The force in it quieted the tavern for a moment.
That was when the woman eating in silence in the corner quietly set her utensils down.
"Tucker. That story just now—is it something you can actually stand behind?"
"Evelyn...?"
Neatly tied brown hair, skin tanned by the sun, and sharp eyes that seemed to have spent longer looking at the forest than at people. The hunter, Evelyn Hedwin. Finding anyone lost in the woods, person or beast, so long as a trace remained—that was her work. If Tucker needed someone who could prove his words, Evelyn was a woman who could do more than that, and the fact that she happened to be in the village today was, for him, something close to luck.
"Perfect timing, Evelyn! Of course it's something I can stand behind! Look, I may run my mouth and brag the rest of the time, but I'm not the sort of bastard who brags when a person's life is on the line—!"
Before the man could ramble any longer, Evelyn lifted a hand and stopped him. Hearing the same story over again would only waste time. Instead, the hunter asked the question that actually mattered.
"...Just tell me which direction."
"It was... the forest to the southeast. You know. The side with the abandoned mansion."
"Hm."
Evelyn sank into thought. The abandoned mansion... Lately the wolf packs around there had been moving in ways she didn't like. Could this have something to do with that?
"I'll have to check. Then, around dawn—"
That was when it happened. The tavern door flew open hard enough to bang, and a man burst in. An ordinary farmer of the village, and Mari's father—Daniel.
"Daniel, what's the matter? In such a rush..."
He didn't wait for the tavern keeper to finish. Fast, and desperate, he shouted so that everyone could hear.
"Mari—has anyone here seen our Mari?"
"Mari? What about Mari?"
"I haven't seen the girl since around supper!"
"What?! Mari?"
While everyone reeled, Daniel scanned the faces seated in the tavern, caught sight of the woodcutter Tucker, and suddenly flew into a rage, lunging at him.
"This is all your fault, Tucker, you bastard!"
"Wh-what? What did I even do?!"
"What did you do? If you hadn't been filling the children's heads with that strange talk—!"
What had happened was this. The children had overheard Tucker say he'd heard a child in the forest crying for help, gotten curious among themselves, and gone into the woods. But it was far too late in the day, right around the time the sun began to set, and before long they fled back out.
...Mari, though, had not been able to follow.
At that, Tucker had nothing he could say. He had never told those children any such thing himself; they had eavesdropped on the adults' talk and acted on their own. Even so, none of that would reach the ears of a father who had lost his only daughter. All he could do was send Evelyn a look that begged to be saved.
Following that look, every eye in the tavern turned toward the hunter. Having taken in every one of those gazes, and the whole of the situation, Evelyn Hedwin let out a deep sigh, drained the lukewarm beer in her wooden cup in a single swallow, and had no choice but to rise.