Coin Toss
After finishing my conversation with Alberic, I went over to the leader of the group, only to find…
"Um… er…"
The captain, who had just watched my earlier performance, was clearly wracked with agony over how to even speak to me. I decided to spare him the suffering.
"You can just talk normally."
The moment I turned back into a regular person, the captain broke out in a cold sweat even worse than before.
"Ah… thank… you."
"Don't mention it. So these were highwaymen? Or bandits? There were a lot of them."
"Well, you see…"
So they really were highwaymen. If they'd been mountain bandits, he said, the numbers would have run into the hundreds.
Is this empire even okay?!
"I see. And they were out here robbing people because…"
"They're thralls. They gathered out of resentment toward free citizens and launched the attack."
Die!!! You free-citizen bastards!!!
Voices thick with rage. Eyes that promised death without fail. And a madness that charged straight in without ever thinking of running.
The battle just now had been the desperate thrashing of people who lived at the very bottom of this world.
That was why fifty of them could stand against ten. The moment a free citizen got mixed in, they would have been crushed on the spot.
Looking at the corpses of people who had died with nothing but resentment and fury in their hearts, I felt a stir of pity.
"Hmph!!! Blinded by jealousy, the lot of them! Nothing worth fretting over, man of the Golden Wind."
Alberic stepped forward after seeing the sorrow on my face.
"We are of the same kind—not of different stocks! We are brothers and sisters, every one of us!"
Uh… is Alberic trying to comfort me?
Still, stretching "we're all human" into that many words…
"Because we are the same… we share the same flesh, and the same crimson sea within."
The captain's expression beside us was slowly rotting.
"And whether one walks or one is of noble blood, a blow from cold, hammered iron sends them all alike into endless paradise."
Alberic fixed me with melancholy eyes and raised his voice.
"Yes!! We are no different from those who crawl!! They are merely ones who, blinded by jealousy, stain their hands with blood!!"
After talking with him earlier, I could more or less translate Alberic-speak by now.
He wasn't wrong.
Even back in reality, whether you were a gym rat who could take on five hundred men with three, a weightlifter who hoisted a ton, or a fighting champion—
a skinny guy with a knife could still kill you.
People here were stratified by life force, that mysterious energy. But life force only made you stronger. It didn't toughen your skin or harden your flesh.
Five thralls piling onto an ordinary free citizen would kill them just the same.
So what Alberic was saying, in his own way, was that these people were murderers who tried to kill others simply because they were angry.
"Therefore… do not grieve… man of conviction who bears the Golden Wind. You have done no wrong…"
Hmm… Alberic talks weird, but he seems like a good guy…
After a speech like that, I had to give him some service in return.
"Ahhh… my thanks… man who holds the world. Your earnest counsel has stilled the ripples on the lake of my heart."
"Not at all… O Golden Wind…"
Alberic's comfort really did ease my mind quite a bit.
I guess wounds of the heart really do heal through talking with people.
"Ahem… ahem…"
The captain beside us, his face gone pale, cleared his throat.
Yikes. Looks like he can't take any more of this.
"So… what kind of work do you do? Judging by the wrecked wagon and the dead horses, are you merchants?"
"Ah… ahem… yes, that's right…"
"As the knight said, I'm Beira, a merchant."
Beira looked at his shattered wagon and dead horses with a bitter expression.
"Haah… have you heard about the patrol company that was wiped out by a demon?"
"Yes. They said it was a giant demon with stag antlers."
"Because of that demon, everything from small caravans to the big trading houses has ground to a halt…"
From what Merchant Beira was saying, with the major caravans stopped, prices were naturally climbing. And anything with a shelf life would skyrocket—there was no refrigeration in this world, after all.
"So you hired mercenaries and started making the circuit yourself, chasing the high profits."
"Yes. But then something like this happens before we've even gotten far."
Still, if the patrol company is gone, can't they just form a new one?
"Doesn't the empire reorganize the patrols?"
The stag-antlered demon had been dead for a while now. So why hadn't they come?
"It'll probably be reorganized next year."
"Next year?!"
"Because of the knights."
Beira explained how the patrols worked.
Serving in the patrols was an enormously honorable post—and an enormously dangerous one—so they selected high-ranking knights through the tournament. Then the Imperial Highway Force received its mission directly from the emperor himself.
"That sounds like it would take forever…"
"Yes… exactly."
Soldiers were easy enough—there were always surplus mercenaries to hire. But the knights had so many ceremonies and so much travel time that reforming a patrol company simply wasn't possible.
"This is an emergency. Can't they just streamline the ceremonies?"
"That's why it should be reorganized around next autumn."
"What about dispatching people from elsewhere…"
"Pardon? Of course not. A single company is already responsible for a stretch of imperial road the size of a duke's entire domain. Expand that any further and they couldn't manage either side of it."
They're already patrolling a massive area. Stretch it any more and it might as well not exist.
A duke's domain, huh…
I'd heard the ranks when I was learning to read—duke, marquis, count, viscount, baron. I guess people everywhere think more or less the same way.
"Anyway, Beira, what are you going to do now?"
"Sorry?"
"Your horses are dead and the wagon's damaged. You can't exactly stay here forever."
"Ah—that's why we're heading for an Armed Inn."
An Armed Inn?!
Ohhh… if things go well, we might be able to travel together.
"The wagon just needs the wheels fixed, so I'm planning to pay the mercenaries extra to push it."
So basically a rickshaw. Life force gives people superhuman strength, so the idea actually works.
"Hmm… I see. So as long as someone can pull the wagon, you're set."
"The mercenaries will have a rough time of it."
"I'll handle that. Can you pay me for it?"
"What? How? Even with your incredible martial skill, hauling it alone could injure you."
"Just a moment."
I pulled out my whistle.
"That's…?"
Tweet—tweet-tweet!!!!
A sharp, powerful blast rang out from the whistle.
"Woof woof!!! Woof woof!!!"
"Cawwwww!"
Hugin and Hati came racing toward the sound. Blanc was… ah, there she was, bouncing along in invisible mode with little pong-pong noises.
"A Dire Wolf?! Good heavens… and a white one, at that."
"This white wolf is Hati."
I stroked Hati as he pressed in close around me.
"This guy is ridiculously strong. Strong enough to pull a wagon in place of horses. Need the help?"
"Yes!!! Thank you!!! Sir Knight!!!"
Oh boy. He got so excited he called me a knight.
"Hup!! I—I'm so sorry! You're on a secret training journey under the Blade Covenant… I truly apologize!!"
"Ah… right… well… it's fine."
The Blade Covenant and secret training, huh…
Walking around with a wooden practice sword instead of steel got me these kinds of misunderstandings. And if someone was on a secret training journey, the polite thing was probably just to pretend you didn't notice.
That was probably why those two earlier hadn't called me a knight either.
I calmed Beira down as he kept apologizing and moved the conversation along.
"Just make sure the pay is good. How far is the Armed Inn, by the way?"
"Ah! Not far at all."
"Oh, so it's close."
"Yes—about two weeks and we're there. Truly close, isn't it? Hahaha."
What?! Two weeks?! That's insanely far!
So when that old man back in the village said a month on foot was "close"… he actually meant it?!
Everything I'd heard earlier suddenly lined up with everything I'd experienced.
No patrols… no reinforcements… roads that were dangerous… enormous profits… a forest free for hunting… no outsiders coming to the village…
The empire was the size of a continent.
………………
I finally understood just how absurdly, unnecessarily vast the empire was.
But how could a nation of this scale even hold together in this era?
No—thinking about it, ancient Rome, Persia, and the Mongols all held absurdly huge territories too. So maybe it made a kind of sense.
I sat inside the wagon Hati was pulling.
The mercenaries were so grateful they didn't have to haul the thing themselves that they even took me off night-watch duty and told me to rest easy.
Hugin flew overhead. Hati seemed to be having fun pulling the wagon.
"Pong~"
Blanc… judging by the cheerful way she was spinning circles around me, she was enjoying the crowd of people.
Day and night kept trading places. Talking with the mercenaries and Alberic day after day, I grew close with them.
Several days later, night fell once again.
We made camp for the night and, with time to spare, lit a bonfire and let the conversation bloom.
No matter how many times I insisted I wasn't a knight, not a single person believed me.
"I'm not a knight. I haven't even been knighted…"
"Hahaha, so you're a free knight!"
"I haven't been knighted, but I keep the Blade Covenant…"
"Truly remarkable."
As the night deepened and people began swapping stories one by one, I shared one of my own.
Had they ever heard anything like it before? The women mercenaries kept squealing beside me, and the others listened with open wonder.
"Whoa. That's a genuinely profound story, Haren…"
"My own identity, huh."
"Probability… and despair…"
The story I told was from a game that had left a deep impression on me.
A man undergoing a brain scan blinks—and finds himself in an unknown space. That space is the deep ocean. And his body isn't human flesh at all, but a diving suit.
The protagonist meets bizarre machines and descends ever deeper into the abyss.
I adapted it a little for this world: the brain scan became a demon's trick, the diving suit became a puppet body, and the deep sea became hell.
"O Golden Wind… this tale is terribly sticky…"
Alberic struck a mysterious pose as he spoke.
"To think that the self—that is, the 'present me'—is copied whole, and another 'me' then acts…"
Huh? Alberic's chuunibyou concept just slipped.
He must have been really moved by the story.
The most striking—and most messed-up—part of that game's story was this:
At the start, the protagonist undergoes a brain scan. So the one exploring the deep sea is a being pasted in from that scan.
Later, to go deeper, the current diving suit isn't enough. He needs to transfer into a heavier one. But then—
It wasn't Ctrl+X, V. It was Ctrl+C, V.
Not cut-and-paste. Copy-and-paste.
The original "me" in the first diving suit, and a new "me" copied into the deep-sea suit—both exist at once.
Personality, thoughts, memories, experiences: all identical. Only the suits are different.
Two protagonists.
And then the deep-sea-suit "me," following the advice of the being that has been helping him, kills the original "me."
The ending plays out the same way.
The protagonist switches to the deep-sea-suit version of himself. He launches a supercomputer from the abyss into space—a machine holding countless scanned human brains.
Orbiting like a satellite, powered by the sun, it creates a virtual paradise where those humans can live.
The protagonist works to enter that paradise himself. And he succeeds.
But the method of getting in… once again, wasn't Ctrl+X, V. It was Ctrl+C, V.
The protagonist who didn't realize that is left alone in the dark abyss, furious. Meanwhile, the other "me" arrives in paradise and lives happily ever after.
Isn't that a thoroughly unsettling ending?
In the game, the moment the protagonist is duplicated, it's explained as a coin toss: the one who loses is left behind, and the one who wins lives in paradise.
"Ahhh… a coin toss…. Truly, it represents life and death itself…"
"Indeed… O man who holds the world…"
"A duel with another self… and the ending…"
Alberic gazed up at the moon with misty eyes, lost in thought.
"Two duplicated men… so in the end, what decides the self is the 'body,' isn't it?"
Beira took a drink from his waterskin and continued.
"Memories, thoughts, experiences, habits, speech, knowledge… everything the same, and the only difference is the body."
I just smiled at that and poked at the bonfire with a stick, shifting the embers around.
Once the story ended, people traded their impressions of it.
Hugin… Hati… Blanc…
My friends were in view too. Resting well.
I looked up at the sky.
The reason that game's story pulled me in so deep was that the protagonist and I were in a similar situation.
Maybe the real "me" was living just fine back in reality, and "I" was a copy that got dropped here.
In a world where gods and demons actually existed, nothing was impossible.
So which "me" won the coin toss?
I truly wanted to know.