Lorentz's Sacrifice
"Flee!"
"Run!"
The Rhinol mercenary band, who had been holding the atmosphere of the street, fled without so much as a backward glance the instant the gunshots rang out.
"Kyaaah?!"
"G-guns?! Hide!"
"Hey! Let us in! Just hide us for a second! Please!"
"Get lost! Don't let anyone in! Board up the windows too!"
Even the ordinary people wandering the shopping district screamed as if the gates of hell itself had opened, scrambling to flee or hide by any means possible.
"What are you doing?! Run!"
"Wait, hang on—"
"Think later! Right now, just run!"
The members of the Wolf Mercenary Band grabbed Kaisent by the arm and began putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the source of the noise.
Tatatatatatata!
Whether a running battle was underway or not, the origin of the gunfire gradually shifted elsewhere. People surged this way and that in a desperate bid to get farther from it, their movements resembling a human wave.
"Hah! Haaah! Hah!"
"If… if we've come this far… haaah! For now…"
"W-we're alive…"
They had run like madmen, throwing any notion of pacing themselves to the dogs. Only once the sound had faded to a tolerable distance did they finally stop, relief washing over them.
When someone suddenly opens fire, bolting in the opposite direction is the correct response. Yet to Kaisent's eyes, these people seemed less terrified of the guns themselves than of something that lay beyond them.
"Kaisent. You remember the history concerning the twenty-first-century Earthlings, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Whoever they are, using guns like that means they're connected to the Earthlings. What happens if you get mixed up with Earthlings who cause a disturbance?"
"…I think I'd end up in the situation I'm imagining."
"Exactly. In the worst case, just recognizing a face and saying hello is enough to get you labeled as one of their associates—and your entire family wiped out along with you."
"……"
"Even if you have a permit, using them inside the city is a completely separate matter."
Simply getting entangled with twenty-first-century Earthlings causing trouble was enough for whole families to be massacred? Only then did Kaisent understand why the people had panicked and fled so completely.
"The captain and the others will have heard the commotion and found somewhere quiet. We should hole up in one place ourselves until things settle down for a while."
"Agreed."
Kaisent's group continued putting distance between themselves and the noise while deciding to wait out the chaos in a suitable spot. If they kept running around in a panic and the knights caught them, they could easily face interrogation.
"We'll wait in this tavern until it calms down."
"The knights will have been dispatched by now, so a few hours should be enough for the situation to quiet."
They ducked into the first decent tavern they found, intending to wait until it was safe. Plenty of others had clearly shared the same idea; the place was packed wall to wall.
"Hey, start us off with a beer each."
"One beer each! Coming right up!"
The sudden flood of customers sent the waiters scrambling to take orders.
"This is going to take a while."
"Just order something light for snacks. We didn't come here to feast."
"Right."
While the others let their tension ease in the relief of having reached safety, Kaisent's thoughts were elsewhere.
Was it them?
The pair who had slammed into him and rushed past before he received the undead subjugation mission. From the feeling and the circumstances, the odds were high that it was those two.
They were moving as if something was chasing them. Maybe they have an enemy, and that enemy found them, and now they're fighting.
He could reason it out as much as he liked, but there was no way to know for certain until he saw for himself.
About my age, maybe?
The memory of the boy who had been fleeing somewhere alongside the man carrying a gun made Kaisent's chest grow uneasy. He himself had been lucky enough to grow familiar with this world and make a living thanks to the Wolf Mercenary Band. Those two, though, had never even been given that chance. They were being hunted, and they had been forced to use guns.
Even if they somehow shook off their pursuers, they would still die for the crime of threatening this world's order.
I want to help them.
The face of a boy roughly his own age, another outsider like himself, moving in terror, rose in his mind. Kind by nature yet timid as well, Kaisent's thoughts inevitably spiraled to the possibility that if anything went wrong, Lillian would suffer for it too.
But if it goes wrong and Lillian gets hurt because of it? I'd be crushing her dream with my own hands.
In the end, his timid nature and the determination not to bring harm to Lillian made him abandon the idea of helping the Earthlings. If there had been somewhere he could hide them all safely, it might have been different—but no such place existed, and he could not recklessly intervene.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Lorentz fled alongside Clint, aiming his pistol with precision and firing back at their pursuer.
Thud, thud, thud!
Even as the shots struck her, the woman kept running as if nothing had happened. Bullet holes riddled her body and blood streamed from them, yet she paid it no mind. Instead she wore an unsettling smile and charged at full speed, intent on killing the two of them.
"Kh!"
Desperate to shake her off, Lorentz hurled an EMP grenade. The woman twisted aside to avoid it, but he had timed the throw for the exact moment of detonation. The blast caught her mid-dodge and left her movements sluggish.
Yet the pursuer possessed a degree of EMP resistance; she only slowed for a brief span. Given time she would recover full function and come tearing after them again to rip them apart.
"Now… cough! Ghk! Gahk!"
"Lorentz!"
"R-run… alone… haaah…"
The long flight with Clint had pushed Lorentz's body and mind past their limits. He had fallen ill and never recovered. Sensing that weakness, the pursuer had launched her ambush. Cornered with no other option, Lorentz had used his guns even knowing the laws of this world.
"No! We run together!"
"I'm… finished… Take… this…"
Lorentz pressed the spatial-transfer device and a pouch of money into Clint's hands.
"It'll need… four or five days… to charge… Survive… somehow…"
"I don't want to! I said I don't want to! Lorentz!"
"Go already! If the knights of this world find you too, it's over!"
"I'm scared to be alone! Please, come with me!"
Crack!
"Stop acting like a child! I— ghk! Gahk! Kehehk!"
Lorentz slapped the cheek of the boy who kept refusing to the end, then erupted into a violent coughing fit that brought up clots of bloody phlegm.
"Please… go, Commander… You alone… are our hope…"
"U… uwaaaah!!"
Seeing the resolve burning in Lorentz's eyes, Clint fled alone down an alley, tears streaming.
"Heh… heh-heh… How… stupid… Surviving… alone… in this world… will be… hard…"
"Shut up…"
Lorentz bit down hard on his lip at the pursuer's mocking laughter and drew every firearm he still carried.
"Halt!"
At that moment several knights appeared. They had received the report much earlier, but the involvement of firearms had forced them to make preparations, delaying them slightly. Thanks to that, they never saw Lorentz and Clint together—a small mercy.
"Earthlings again. Every last one of you only causes trouble!"
"Unauthorized use of firearms in our world is summary execution!"
"Surrender now and we'll kill you cleanly!"
The knights surrounding Lorentz and the pursuer bellowed for them to drop their weapons at once.
"This thing is an assassin sent to kill the leader of our world! I only used them in self-def— cough! Cough!"
"Silence! We have no need to know the affairs of your world!"
If they had to concern themselves with the politics of every other world, Zelsdad would have become an unmanageable mess. The power holders of Zelsdad found the politics and problems of other realms a nuisance, and since sorting them out brought no profit, they simply ignored them.
"…Hoo. In that case…!"
Confirming that talk was useless, Lorentz charged the pursuer and opened fire with every weapon he possessed.
"At the very least I'll drag you down with meeeee!"
Assault rifle, pistol, shotgun—Lorentz poured every round he had into destroying the pursuer. Still partially affected by the EMP, her body sprouted holes and flesh burst outward, yet the ceramic skeleton beneath remained untouched.
The era to which the pursuer had been sent used only metal detectors, so her entire frame—from bones to structure—had been built of ceramic from the start. That ceramic was nothing to take lightly. Super-hard reinforcement was standard, and it had been further nano-particle strengthened with meteorite oxide harvested from a fallen meteorite, giving it a hardness several times greater than industrial diamond. Meteorite also possessed the property of allowing the ceramic a degree of shape change, enabling recovery even after destruction.
Reboot complete. System all green.
While Lorentz attacked, the pursuer finished repairing the EMP damage, then shot forward and drove the edge of her hand into his abdomen.
"Guh-haahk!"
"With this, every obstacle is gone. All that's left is to dispose of the helpless little brat. How convenient for me, organic."
"No… you're… coming… with me…"
Beep—
"!?"
The pursuer heard the mechanical tone from Lorentz's body and tried to leap clear at once. Lorentz locked his arms around her, denying her any escape.
"My last embrace… turns out to be a machine woman… heh heh…"
KRAAAAAANG!!
Lorentz's final measure—a bomb installed inside his own body for the worst-case scenario, designed to take his life in a self-destruct. And it was a bomb accompanied by a powerful EMP.
"EKASDIOIUQWE[UDASK;DH;HASDZXCMBA!!!"
"Wh-what the—?!"
"That's not human?!"
The explosion completely obliterated the flesh, revealing to the knights that the pursuer was no human being. They raised their swords, ready to strike if she resisted—
"WJRDMFCJFLAKFTKFAHFTKFWNRDU……."
—but the pursuer, still emitting strange machine noises, simply lowered her head, let her arms hang limp, and ceased all function.
"Is it… dead?"
The knights approached the unrecognizable remains of Lorentz and the motionless machine woman. They prodded the ceramic skeleton with sword tips; it only swayed lifelessly under the force, offering no reaction.
"Looks dead to me."
"Damn it. The explosion completely destroyed the firearms."
The knights grumbled that they had nothing left to submit with their report.
"Wouldn't the mages like this?"
"You sure? If what that man said was true, this is definitely not a good item."
"What does it matter? It's not moving. Might as well be a corpse."
"Fine. Let's take it for now."
They recovered the ceramic pursuer and left the scene to make their report.
"Lorentz……. Hic… huuk…"
Clint, who had been watching from a safe distance just in case, broke into tears at the reality of being left alone in this strange world. His parents were dead, and now Lorentz—who had protected him even here—was dead as well. All he could do was weep and flee aimlessly somewhere, anywhere.
He ran without thought or direction for a long time, stopping only when his heart felt ready to burst.
"Hah! Haaah! Hwaah!"
Catching his breath and looking around, he realized he stood in an alley he did not recognize. The alley was crowded with the poor who had hidden from the gunfire. And every one of them was staring at him—the obvious outsider—with eyes that held no goodwill.
"……"
He quietly pressed his robe closer and started toward the main street when—
Clink—
Coins in the money pouch Lorentz had given him knocked together inside his trousers. At that sound the surrounding eyes changed. The wariness toward an outsider became the gaze of predators eyeing prey.
The undead crisis had driven the destitute into the city and worsened public order; the people Clint had stumbled upon were refugees from other villages. Driven out by the undead and reduced to beggars overnight, they began slowly closing in at the jingle of coins from an outsider's pocket.
I-I have to run!
Clint tried to flee back the way he had come, but the refugees had already blocked his retreat.
"Hey, making coin noises like that—looks like you're living pretty well."
"Your face is a different color from ours, huh?"
"W-wait…!"
Clint, raised with parental love in the twenty-first century, and these people, raised in the harshness of this world, might both look ragged, but the difference in their complexions was unmistakable. If he stayed, they would take his money. No—if he was lucky they would only take the money. In the worst case they might seize the spatial-transfer device as well.
"Stay back! Don't come near me!"
He struggled and tried to resist somehow, but—
Thud! Thudthudthudthud!
"Guh-haak!"
The refugees beat him as a group and easily crushed his resistance. Pain flooded every part of his body; all he could do was scream.
"Magic Missile!"
At that moment a voice rang out—clean and clear enough to lift the spirits of anyone who heard it, utterly different from the refugees.
Thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip!
"Ugh!"
"It huuurts!"
Magic projectiles from somewhere battered the refugees, who hastily scrambled away from Clint.
"Leave."
"Who the hell are y— ghk!"
A boy perched on a rooftop ordered them to leave, but one refugee, seeing only a cute face without authority, tried to seize the initiative—only to take a full volley of Magic Missiles and go sprawling.
"This time it won't end with a warning."
The boy dropped the polite speech. Sharp arrows of magic began to float into the air around him. Realizing they faced a considerable mage, the refugees fled in a panic.
"Are you all right?"
"Ah… uh…"
"Wait. If you pass out here… you'll… be…"
Mentally driven to the brink and then beaten with murderous intent for the sake of survival, Clint looked up at the boy of roughly his own age who was worrying over him. Relief washed through him—and he fainted.