What If (2)
"Knight sirrrr, lookit this! The grand chieftain gave it to me."
"You doin' that while eatin'? Your lifespan's short enough as is—keep starvin' yourself like that an' you'll really kick the bucket."
Here's the tale of how I squeezed my eyes shut to escape reality and slept straight through till night.
"Ain't it just gorgeous? Heehee."
"Kid who claimed he took food with him, why'd you end up lookin' like half a man?"
I pressed my temples for a moment, nursing the headache from sleeping through the afternoon. Yukgui's words, sounding for all the world like a grumpy old grandparent, almost made me laugh. We'd only been apart two days—what "half a man"?
"…Didn't I clearly suggest we cut back on contact?"
That aside, why had they even come? Four days ago I'd laid out the logic: Sangun, who usually never left his nest, gallivanting around would only invite suspicion, so better we simply not meet whenever possible…
"Ah, it's fine. Everyone's just thinkin' he got a taste of wanderlust after crossin' the continent once."
…So that was the story they'd settled on.
Well, a kid who'd lived his whole life in the forest catching a bit of outside air and turning into a rambler didn't look unnatural on the surface. The swamp priests misunderstanding it that way was maybe only natural.
But thanks to that, every excuse I had for turning Sangun away had evaporated. I furrowed my brow ever so slightly.
"You eaten supper yet?"
I'd skipped lunch to sleep—no way I'd eaten—but anyone who reported every detail like that was an amateur.
"I was just about to."
I piled on the lies without so much as wetting my lips. What had been in the provisions I'd received today again? My hand was already digging through the inventory.
"That stuff's for eatin' during the day when you can't light a fire, ain't it?"
That single remark from Yukgui stopped me cold.
A chill ran down my spine.
"Today's full of clouds, so it's fine."
For the record, the root of that line went back to two days ago at noon.
I'd been filling my stomach with preserved rations when Yukgui asked why I wasn't cooking them properly.
But who could answer right then, "I can't light a fire and I can't cook"? Setting the roleplay aside, my actual pride wouldn't allow it either.
So after wracking my brains I convinced him—not wrongly, either—that lighting a fire in daylight risked discovery from the smoke…
"You said you eat fish. He caught some for you."
"Heeheeheehee."
And this was the result. I was surrounded on all sides.
"…Lighting a fire in an enclosed space is—"
"What're you on about? Obviously you go outside to light it."
"……."
No, look. There exist adventurers in this world who simply cannot light a fire.
There even exist adventurers who cannot cook over a campfire.
"Why the long face? You look like somebody who can't cook."
…Damn it!
"……."
"……?"
"……."
"…Hang on. For real?"
No, but listen—this isn't solely my problem, okay? Sure, even in the modern world I sometimes burned food, but I still had the sense to turn the heat down when it started scorching!
But here? Here you can't regulate the fire. When it starts burning you need to lower the flame, and that's impossible.
Under those conditions, turning food into black charcoal is unavoidable, isn't it? Not my fault—anyone would make the same mistake!
"Hoh. Knight sir, you really can't cook?"
"Well now… that's unexpected."
But my valiant defense echoed only inside my own head and never reached them. I wanted to die of embarrassment.
"How were you so confident you'd manage alone?"
"……."
"This fool's gonna starve to death at this rate, ain't he?"
"Ehh, that won't do. Shall I stick a person or two with you?"
"…That won't be necessary."
I wasn't that hopeless a human being… Grilling was the problem; boiling or simmering ought to work fine. If I just had a pot it would be perfectly possible. Sigh.
I continued the argument in my head until I realized the longer I went on the worse I looked. A melancholy truth.
I was someone who always failed the heat by a hair, always botched the water by a hair, always undercooked or overboiled by a hair—but still produced edible food.
How had I ended up branded a culinary disaster, a complete klutz who'd starve if left alone?
"I'll just grow some fruit around here for now."
Mourning my annihilated pride, I gratefully accepted the fruit trees that began to sprout. I'd already been fretting about what I'd eat once the preserved food ran out…
"More importantly, you find anything while stayin' here?"
"…Not really."
Meanwhile, the topic Yukgui switched to was its own problem.
I was staying put and grinding away in search of a solution, but no method presented itself.
"Just in case, I even tried converting demon energy into mana…"
If I flung mana around enough it would convert demon energy into mana whether I wanted it or not. But there was an unbridgeable gap between doing it consciously and having it happen automatically.
"Forget side effects—I couldn't even grasp the method itself."
In the process I'd picked up a few tricks for focusing mana to a single point or projecting it outward, but that was as far as it went. Conversion still gave me zero feel.
Side effects or no side effects, I was blocked at the starting line.
"Ehh… then maybe… sealin's the only answer? I ain't tryin' to take the wind out of your sails or nothin'…"
"Well…"
But just because I didn't know it yet didn't mean a way to hide the demon energy didn't exist. At least, that was what I believed.
"For now, I'll keep at it a bit more."
Otherwise the trail recorded in the reports—my own past movements—would never have boasted such comfortable freedom from pursuit.
"Where's that confidence comin' from?"
While Sangun went off to create colonies of edible mushrooms, fruit, vegetables, and grain nearby so I could feed myself, Yukgui—left alone with me—asked the question. I couldn't tell what angle he meant it from. Even I, used to abbreviated conversations, first felt how out of nowhere it landed.
"You're thinkin' there's a method besides sealin', ain't you."
Fortunately Yukgui noticed my blank look and hurriedly added the rest. Only then did the word "confidence" make sense.
"This is a record of the deeds of the body that existed before I came here… in other words, the original owner of this body."
No need for lengthy preamble. I pulled out the sheaf of documents I'd carefully stored in one corner of the inventory.
"The original owner?"
"Yes."
Then I pushed it right up in front of him so Yukgui could read.
Could Yukgui even read human writing? The doubt hit me the very next moment.
"This is a record? Huh. Technology's gotten real fancy… not stone tablets or clay, but stuff this thin an' flimsy, and still writin' on it."
"…It's called paper. Expensive enough that it still isn't in common use."
"I see… Mm, but knight, there's a small problem."
"What is it?"
"I can't read human letters."
Just as expected, Yukgui shook his head and confessed his illiteracy. Hiding my awkwardness, I pulled the papers back in front of myself.
"It's a record of the original owner's movements, but nothing particularly eye-catching. Most of it is testimony about how single-mindedly he hunted demons, and he never interacted with anyone around him."
And even that was only five years' worth. I lightly scraped the tip of a finger across the letters while imagining the vanished records before that. Even that had to stop immediately—the paper quality was so poor it was starting to lift. An unavoidable digression.
"However… he entered cities without any trouble at all."
"Mm. So that's why? Why you've been clingin' to the hope that some other method might exist."
"Yes."
"This is somethin' worth thinkin' about. How did that human hide it?"
Thankfully Yukgui brooded over the same opening I had found. Even by his reckoning the point was unnatural and promising.
"For starters, tell me more about the movements. What you said can't be the whole of it. There's a mountain of records."
"Mm…"
Movements. Reciting every last one would take far too long, so I would clearly have to pick and choose. What should I mention?
The parts that had made me wonder "why did this guy do that?" while I was reading? Or the questions and guesses written at the end of the materials?
"For one, the records only cover five years. And over those five years his appearance…"
"Appearance?"
I stopped mid-explanation and spun my thoughts at high speed.
Confess that his looks changed and that seemed suspicious → get asked why that was suspicious → answer that the changed looks matched the setting I built → get hit with endless questions from pure half-natives who don't know what a game is, much less roleplaying → everybody dies!
Cold sweat trickled down my spine.
"…From an outfit that was wrapped up tight, he gradually swapped out pieces of gear one by one, slowly revealing his face and figure. Like scattering bread crumbs to lure birds."
"That's a queer thing to do… Why in the world?"
If I showed panic here it was over. I desperately forced a solemn expression and stroked the social face I had just barely kept alive.
Honestly, I would rather die than survive in humiliation…
"And then?"
"He mainly hunted demons or criminals, and apparently took every last one of their corpses with him."
"What?"
"The information gatherers guessed he might have a corpse fetish…"
"You idiot, anyone can see those were sacrifices!"
"There was that guess as well."
An opinion that faded once I started traveling with the Hero, but I swallowed the rest of the sentence.
"He hauled corpses off for the whole five years?"
"More or less, it seems."
"Then there's no gettin' around it—those were sacrifices."
There were things even the information guild hadn't figured out, but this much was within the realm of reasonable conjecture. I acknowledged it on that basis, and Yukgui let out a groan.
"Right. I thought it was odd anyway. Even a Great Demon can't just yank a soul from another dimension—that's never easy… Never expected a trump card like this."
"…You're saying they offered up the things they themselves killed to bring me here."
"There's no other way they could've brought you. Great Demons ain't all-powerful, y'know?"
Suddenly the sheaf of documents in my hands felt heavy with the stench of blood.
"…How many must have been sacrificed?"
"Dunno. I've never offered sacrifices myself, so I can't rightly judge… but at least a few thousand, wouldn't you say? Tearing a hole in the dimensional wall is that hard."
A few thousand at minimum… Well, even totaling only what was written on the records would come out over a thousand. Simple math of twenty a month for five years already spat out twelve hundred.
And he hadn't stopped at a neat twenty a month. At the low end twenty, at the high end hundreds. Factoring in the deeds never listed on these pages, the number could climb higher still.
So two thousand at the very least; if I was bold, maybe three or four thousand.
And that was without counting the demons he had also rounded up…
I unconsciously clenched the hand holding the papers. The thick stack crumpled with a sound like it was about to tear.
"…Did he offer the demons he caught as sacrifices too?"
"Who knows. But demons are living creatures in the end… if you meant to use them as sacrifices, you probably could. Just look at you—or rather, the thing inside you. Over in that city they were happily using their own kind as sacrifices."
"……?"
When I looked at him, signaling for details, Yukgui shrugged his shell and explained.
It was a truth I could never have known: because no one had told me, because solid walls had hidden it, and because when we fled I had never bothered looking inside the city.