Mare Training: Warhorse Drill
The box Luce had triumphantly hauled back as dungeon loot after their clear was, in truth, little more than a reeking heap of scrap — a jumbled mess of every kind of junk imaginable.
Sonia's modest plan had been to clean up the rusted, worn-out gear just enough to flip it on a secondhand marketplace, and for a while things seemed to be going smoothly. Then she found it: a strange, ancient medal.
Despite the thick coat of angry red rust, the [U]-shaped engraving cut into its center remained unnervingly sharp, its form preserved with almost unnatural clarity.
Without much thought, Sonia dunked the medal into a plastic bowl filled with cola meant for rust removal.
Almost at once, brown carbonated foam began to hiss and seethe, greedily devouring the rust from the metal surface.
A short while later she took up a toothbrush and scrubbed the medal with meticulous care. Scritch, scritch… That faint rasp of friction was, strangely enough, uncannily like the sound her fingers made when they glided up the sleek surface of the white latex bodysuit the Association had issued her.
The familiar, faintly perverse sensation sent a quiet heat blooming deep in her lower belly.
It did not take long to polish the medal until a dazzling gold shone through completely. Up to that point, everything had been fine.
"I shall gladly lend my power once more… Ah? And yet — where is this place…?"
"…Huh?"
Scrubbed clean enough to squeak, the medal gleamed with a radiant golden light.
Like a magic lamp out of some old picture book, it stirred a childish impulse in Sonia — she wanted to test whether it was real pure gold.
The very moment she was about to take a dainty little bite, soft brown smoke began to seep from the golden medal, and then a small explosion filled her vision. Poof!
The being that emerged from the thick haze was neither the imposing beast nor the beautiful spirit Sonia might have expected.
It was a tiny creature no larger than a palm, with a round face and one eye winked shut in a bright, cheerful smile — cute as a toy doll sold in a shop.
Its uniform, a harmonious blend of black and gold, was excessively neat; the epaulettes on its shoulders and the star emblem on its chest made it look like a child trying a little too hard to seem dignified.
Horse ears stood perkily atop its head, and soft brown hair flowed like a rich mane, swaying gently with every movement of its small body and catching a faint sheen of light.
"Even if a peaceful age has dawned, one does grow rather put out when no one summons this body… and yet to appear again as promised feels most peculiar! Still — what a truly unique style this is. How much time has passed, I wonder?"
On a quiet afternoon, Sonia — the handy hero of Sky City — had simply been sorting through scrap.
The strange role-play as Sonyaroid had ended, and even Luce, the D-class adventurer who had set the whole thing in motion, had left. Sonia had been alone in her home — but she was alone no longer.
She stared blankly at the small brown-haired figure floating fluffily before her eyes, shaped like an SD character… a fairy? A spirit?
Everything about it screamed horse. The glossy brown hair, and that mane-like tail cascading richly from the base of its spine. Should she call that a ponytail? Sonia briefly sank into a completely useless line of thought that had no place in a situation this unreal.
The donkey-like ears jutting from its head, the adorable outfit that looked like something from a theme-park event — all of it stripped the moment of any remaining sense of reality.
"Who… are you?!"
"…Can you not tell by looking? I appeared because I require your aid… and yet the one standing before your very eyes is none other than the Horse Spirit, a great guardian deity passed down through the ages! Did you not summon this body because you needed my help as well?"
"…Excuse me…?"
She had only fiddled with the medal the way one might rub a genie's lamp — and the self-proclaimed Horse Spirit that had appeared in a puff of soft smoke launched straight into asking where the carrots were.
"Tsk… to show such discourtesy to a guardian spirit that has been enshrined for generations… Still, I shall overlook it just this once. So hurry and bring me carrots. …And brush the dirt off properly."
Sonia's knowledge skewed heavily toward practical fields like machine repair and building safety inspections. She had no idea what a "Military Horse" actually meant, but even she could tell that the cute little donkey — or horse spirit — floating in front of her was not some ancestral guardian her family had ever worshipped.
It was clearly a far cry from the folk religions of an Earth that had once been so ruined people used bottle caps as currency. This was almost certainly a spirit from the fantasy world Luce and the other demi-humans had crossed over from.
(The Horse Spirit…? What on earth is a Military Horse…?)
Whatever the reason, she could not know. Faced with the self-proclaimed Horse Spirit that had suddenly appeared in her home, Sonia decided to fetch the carrots Sonyaroid had carefully set aside while preparing meals for Luce and herself.
(Then… maybe the [U] engraved on that medal isn't a letter at all, but a horseshoe… or something like that…)
Crunch, crunch!
Atop a chair at the living-room dining table where Sonyaroid had once displayed her impressive cooking skills, the little spirit floated in midair, cheerfully biting into an organic dirt-grown carrot from Sky City with bright, crisp snaps.
Sonyaroid now lingered only as a faint residue of memory in a corner of Sonia's mind — but every action and ability that temporary persona had shown had come entirely from Sonia herself.
With no real effort at all, she opened the fridge, took out a carrot, rinsed it under running water, and handed it over.
When the spirit brazenly and confidently demanded that the peel be removed as well, Sonia stripped it thin with the same deft, precise skill Sonyaroid once had, then passed it back.
Crunch, crunch, snap, snap! The cheerful sounds rang pleasantly through the quiet living room.
"S-so that means this place is another world entirely… What an… enormous discourtesy I have committed…"
"Th-that's right…?"
Having polished off an entire pack of fresh carrots, the spirit tilted the donkey ears rising from its hair as Sonia calmly explained the unbelievable truth.
This was not a fantasy world of swords and magic, but another dimension called Earth — and among the few remaining sanctuaries of humanity, one known as Sky City.
And that while cleaning junk her friend had picked up in a dungeon, Sonia had happened to polish a rusted medal… and the spirit had simply popped into existence.
"D-do you happen to know who last possessed this medal…? As the Horse Spirit, this body reigned as the guardian deity of a storied house that served the imperial court for generations… Even if, as Sonia says, this is another world, the medal is a family treasure — so the one who held it might know something, might they not…?"
"Even if you put it that way… I don't really have a way to… umm…"
Thanks to Luce, Sonia was familiar with the name of that other world: Floren.
A world of swords and magic where tailed beastfolk and powerful mages coexisted. In Luce's words, it had everything from "a weird religion that worships some totally unimpressive angel" to dragons who challenged anyone they fancied to a duel and "performed a very special ritual every time they lost" — a fantasy world through and through.
According to the spirit, long ago it had wandered out from the spirit realm into the human world, happened to incur a debt of gratitude to a certain family, and become their guardian deity sealed within this medal. It added that the last time the family's descendants had summoned it had been quite some time ago.
"…What say you, Sonia? I am sorry to keep imposing… and I know better than anyone how shameless it is for this proud Horse Spirit to make such a request after accepting offerings! Even so, I set aside this discourtesy — this rudeness — and beg you most earnestly. Will you find the one who last held this medal?"
The two-head-tall SD-character horse spirit floating in midair bowed its head deeply. Even the donkey ears sprouting from its hair drooped as it pleaded — but Sonia, seated in the chair across the table, firmly shook her head.
"I think… that would be really difficult…"
"W-why… Sonia… d-do you require suitable compensation, perhaps? If it is payment…"
Not wanting to be mistaken for a mercenary demanding a fee out of nowhere, Sonia immediately waved her hands in strong denial.
"No! It's not that I don't want to — it's just that it would genuinely be hard to find…"
Not that she was unwilling, but that it was nearly impossible. Sonia began carefully explaining just how difficult it would be to track down the last owner of the medal that housed the Horse Spirit.