Toward the Capital (1)
She asked me bluntly.
"So what now?"
I shot back with a look that said, why are you asking something so obvious?
"Aren't we going to the Imperial Palace? You just relayed an imperial command on my behalf."
"I asked because I wanted it not to be true. If you said you were going to kill me, I'd have fought you right here and now."
Watching Irelphi sigh openly to my face, I couldn't manage a single word in reply. It was pure instinct—the law of the jungle, rigorously enforced.
I really want to smack the back of her head once. Just once.
Setting aside Irelphi's insufferable attitude, she had been my executioner mere moments ago, carving up my limbs and torso like butcher's meat.
Even now, every time that pain surfaced in my memory, gooseflesh crawled up my skin and the phantom agony flared as if it were fresh.
It's unjust. Utterly unjust, I tell you...
Netionpis the Founding Noble was without question the most wicked bastard in history—but that wasn't me. I was nothing more than an innocent, perfectly ordinary person dragged into this world against my will.
At the very least, I had no reason to be hacked to pieces by her, no reason to be spoken to so coldly. If the raids in the game were brutal, well, I apologize for that too.
I was in the middle of fantasizing about revenge when she spoke, and I flinched hard.
"If you want to go to the palace, you'd better do something about that corrupt qi first. An ordinary person would hemorrhage just from standing next to you."
"Corrupt qi? Me? Where would I even get something like that."
Corrupt qi—on someone as pure-hearted as me? Preposterous.
But halfway through shaking my head, a rather obvious fact occurred to me.
Oh. Right. This is Netionpis's body. So... maybe.
Unable to endure her icy stare, I cleared my throat and fumbled for an excuse.
"...Which was a joke, obviously. I've just been sealed up alone for so long that I've forgotten how to gather and control my energy."
"That's absurd—no, actually, after hundreds of years alone, I suppose that could happen."
It was a flimsy, last-minute excuse, but Irelphi seemed to accept it in her own way. She stepped right up to me, formed a blade with her index and middle fingers, and pressed them against the space between my brows.
"Hyaaagh!"
Trauma freshly rekindled, I shrieked and scrambled backward onto my backside. Irelphi glared at me, visibly irritated.
"What's the matter with you? You treat me like I'm a monster—when the actual monster here is you!"
Actual monster? Ha. Spare me the shamelessness and take an objective look at yourself, woman!
That cry from my heart, of course, never found its way out. It simply curdled and died inside me.
"...Your fingers are so cold. I was just playing a little prank."
"Stop fussing and come here."
At those words, my body moved on its own, carrying me to stand before her. Then Irelphi's fingers touched my brow, and a cool, azure energy rippled across the surface of my skin before sinking out of sight.
"I can't control the qi itself, but I've sealed it at the surface. You won't have any trouble touching ordinary people now."
"Uh-huh. Sure. Great."
I knew this technique.
It was Holy Memory, one of Irelphi's signature protective abilities. It was precisely why, when I'd tried to break through her in the game, I'd needed siege weapons—battering rams and the like—properly modified for the job.
I offered my admiration as quietly as I could manage.
Incredible. Just like that, she crushed Netionpis's qi flat under a barrier in a single instant.
Only because I didn't truly know this body's specs and had none of Netionpis's experience could I think so lightly of it. A Founding Noble was, in reality, an absolutely monstrous existence.
According to the journal I'd found, the original protagonist and heroine of Eldchain had fought him for nine days and nine nights before barely managing to seal him away. That alone told you everything about his stature.
And there's the fatal flaw—they couldn't kill him, so sealing was just the second-best option.
And the woman who had taught that body the meaning of helplessness and casually bottled up its corrupt qi—just who on earth was she?
"We're leaving now. If I see even the faintest sign of betrayal, I'll grind you to sand and scatter you to the wind. Do conduct yourself accordingly."
"Ha, of course. As if I'd have a choice."
I was doing my best to keep up the bravado, so as not to be underestimated.
"Wow, this is incredible!"
I kept craning my neck, gasping at everything in sight. Every single thing that crossed my vision made my heart pound.
And no wonder—the scenery of a game I truly loved was spread out before me in real life. Asking me not to get excited would have been asking the impossible.
"I know this place. It's Citris Village."
"You may also pretend to know it when it's written right there in plain letters."
I tossed a question at her indifferent reaction.
"Then do you know why the village is called Citris?"
Caught off guard by the unexpected question, her pupils wavered for a moment before her face flushed red.
"There's no... need to know things like that."
"Well, whether you knew it or not, you just smashed your way through it, so the answer was on the other side. Figured it that way, huh."
I grumbled under my breath. Fortunately, her hearing seemed to remain at ordinary human levels, because she didn't quite catch it.
"What?"
"Nothing... my mouth ran ahead of me."
We were taking a modest meal at a small tavern. I could have gone on without eating or drinking forever, but she could not.
For all that she was a greater monster than I was, she still needed to eat and sleep, a biological human who needed to—well, expel waste, too.
"I get the strange feeling I've become the subject of some unpleasant thoughts."
"Society calls that paranoia, I hear."
There wasn't supposed to be a pattern that reads the player's mind, though?
I hid my thoughts behind an even more brazen expression. Irelphi seemed on the verge of snapping, but then meekly returned to chewing her bread.
Somehow she seemed to be gnawing at it more aggressively than before, but I made a point of ignoring it.
"So?"
"What?"
"The village name... why is it Citris?"
Ashamed of being unable to hold in her curiosity, Irelphi wore a faint sheen of embarrassment on her face.
"Oh, that? It's because they had no sheets. The village was too poor to afford even those."
Irelphi's reaction to my perfectly casual answer was a sight to behold.
"Ha. I was, the fool, to expect, humor or, wisdom from, a man who wouldn't have, survived a single, season, in any proper, era."
As she spoke, Irelphi's facial muscles contracted with every other word, choking off her very breath.
To the point she could barely get the sentence out.
That was when an old woman seated right beside us chimed in.
"Now look here, pretty lass. The young man's right. Not a hundred years back, this village ate but twice a day, morning and evening. Lunch was only when somethin' worth celebratin' came along."
"Th-that can't be. And I didn't even know that! I'm so sorry..."
I had inadvertently dredged up the village's unfortunate history. Irelphi's face, on the verge of detonating, darkened at a rapid clip.
"Now, now. The young man's the well-read one—it's no fault of the lass. Why, there are plenty of facts even the village old-timers don't know. How'd you come by it, young man?"
"Hmm, because I'm even more of an old-timer than the old-timers?"
It was the plainest of truths, and yet I felt a violent jolt run through my entire body.
Irelphi's narrowed eyes gleamed. She was, with practiced ease, exercising that terrifying technique of throttling her killing intent to wound me from within.
"I'll apologize on his behalf, ma'am."
"Heehee, no need. A learned young man with his head wanderin' off somewhere else, that's a rare thing."
With that, the old woman shuffled off and vanished.
Irelphi soon withdrew her killing intent, and we lapsed back into a mealtime wrapped in dead silence.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound of me boredly drumming my foot, eating nothing and doing nothing at all.
"Irelphi."
"Yes."
"You thought that was funny, didn't you?"
She paused, taking a moment to parse what I meant, then stammered.
"N-no? I didn't?"
"Right."
For a long while after that, the surrounding chatter seemed to ring out abnormally loud. Eventually I couldn't hold back and fired off my question.
"What happens when you get hyped up?"
"What are you trying to do, exactly?"
"You get hypped."
"..."
By pure chance, her mouth was full of food when I delivered the answer. She clamped her jaw shut for dear life, cheeks trembling, desperately fighting not to spit the contents across the table.
"Fine, I understand now. That's your taste in humor."
"What are you—!"
"So if the king moves to the right, then to the left, what do you call it?"
"I don't want to know—"
"Kingly zigzagging."
"Hmph!"
"Ohh, so that's the kind of thing you like?"
Etiquette of dining be damned—Irelphi flung down her utensils and clamped both hands over her mouth.
Left alone, she was a dazzling beauty to behold. But to me now, she was something more like a terrifying, pitiable woman.
"Cut. It. Out."
"Mmph!"
So there was a line—funny was funny, but this was intolerable. Faced with the sheer force of her glare, my old trauma came roaring back and I shut my mouth for good.
Just as Irelphi reached for her utensils again, she suddenly asked:
"By the way—you dropped the honorifics partway through. Why are you speaking down to me now? If you're going to call yourself a noble, I'd expect you to keep proper manners about it."
"Honorifics? To the person who sliced off the limbs of someone offering no resistance, and cut them in half at the waist besides?"
"That's what you call a reason—?!"
Irelphi's eyes narrowed dangerously.
Truthfully, she had every right to feel wronged. The fact that she had grudgingly used honorifics at all with me—the one person in the world deserving of universal loathing, Netionpis—spoke volumes for her straightforward character.
But that was that, and I might have Netionpis's body while being entirely innocent of the crimes, so I was the wronged party here if anyone was. And so, walking a razor's edge of insolence, my casual speech was my own petty, cowardly revenge.
"If it bothers you so much, you speak casually too."
Though knowing Irelphi's temperament, I doubted she ever would—
"Oh, fine. Maybe I'll just throw the whole thing overboard, then?"
"..."
"..."
Perhaps it was because I stared back at her with eyes wide as someone who had just witnessed the heavens split open.
Irelphi cleared her throat, then stole a furtive glance at my face.
"...I shall refrain."
"Uh... right. Good call."
For one fleeting moment, I had glimpsed it—Irelphi's unrestrained, off-the-rails side. The one that belonged to a DLC boss.
As payment for my provocation, I was forced to endure a mealtime that had grown several times more awkward, for a very, very long while.
Even after passing through Citris Village, we walked for several more days. The clothes she'd shredded to ribbons with her sword strikes were replaced with money from her own purse—an added bonus of the journey.
The Great Cavern where I'd been sealed lay far from the Imperial Palace, an isolated place, so the journey demanded a great deal of travel time. Naturally, there would be days when darkness fell before we reached the next village—and today was exactly one of those days.
"We should prepare to camp."
"I didn't bring a single thing to prepare with, you know?"
"Neither did I."
"...What?"
My eyes met Irelphi's. Where mine were probably flooding with bewilderment, hers were utterly steady, without a ripple of concern.
"Like... something to cover ourselves with?"
"Is that necessary?"
"...No."
Netionpis's body had endured hundreds of years in the cold, damp depths of the Great Cavern. Cold and heat had been transcended long, long ago.
"I pay no mind to cold or heat either."
Doesn't that strike you as unreasonable? Your very existence, I mean.
It was a moment in which hundreds of years of Netionpis's hard-won adaptation were summarily denied.
"Still, without any defenses, we could run into something dangerous, couldn't we?"
"Like whom?"
"...Like me."
Watching her ask the question back with a face of pure, innocent curiosity, I forced out the answer. My fault entirely—for one moment, just one, I had thought of Irelphi as a woman.
Apparently dismissing my words as nonsense, Irelphi gave no reply and walked into the forest.
A short while later, with a crash of a falling tree, she reemerged.
In the end, all the "preparation" she'd managed was felling some wood and building a campfire. And that wasn't for warmth, but to keep the surroundings in view.
"This particular species burns long and clean, you see."
That was why she'd gone into the forest instead of chopping down any old tree nearby.
For a noble, memorizing the practical properties of different tree species was an odd habit, and her apparent familiarity with camping in the wild struck me as a little strange.
"Well then..."
We each claimed a spot and lay down, and I gazed up at a night sky unlike anything I'd ever seen, in this life or the last.
Beneath a sky so clear it seemed made of glass, the stars glittered so close and so bright they looked ready to come pouring down.
Sleep had always been a mere hobby to me, but under a sky like this, I thought, I could probably sink deep into genuine rest.
That was my state of mind—right up until the small hours of the morning, when I heard Irelphi talking in her sleep.
"When you get... hyped... you get hypped... kingly... zigzag... hee hee..."
She really does laugh at it.
That my assessment of Irelphi had been plummeting in a steep, catastrophic decline ever since our first encounter—of that, not a single soul in this world would ever suspect a thing.