Epilogue
Satou here. There are plenty of stories that end in unexpected ways, but I think most of them still wind up being happy endings. Even if there are more bad endings in a lot of games, it’s not so bad when you think about it—they just make the true ending that much more meaningful.
“Um, so…what now?”
Arisa hesitantly looked at Hikaru after the blue light of the Prayer Ring had faded.
“Thank you both again. I was able to make my prayer.”
Hikaru bowed her head to us. She had wished to meet the Ichirou Suzuki from her own world.
“B-but…nothing’s happened?”
“I think it worked. The goddess said something like, Your wish will come true soon. Gods can be stingy, but they never lie.”
Hikaru looked deeply relieved.
It sort of seemed to me like using the ring hadn’t changed anything. I guess getting a guarantee from a god that it would happen soon was important to Hikaru, though.
I just hoped that soon wasn’t based on a god’s perspective of time.
“Yeah? Glad to hear it, then.”
“…Uh-huh.”
Arisa gave Hikaru an almost motherly smile.
“Then we’ll have to give you a makeover to prepare for the big reunion!”
“M-makeover?”
“Of course! Girl, we’ll make you look good enough to knock his socks off. Then you’ll land your AU version of master for sure!”
Arisa slipped into increasingly dated terminology as she encouraged Hikaru.
“Okay, Big Sister Lulu, time to teach everyone how you increased your cup size in such a short time!”
“Wha—? A-Arisa!”
Arisa dragged Lulu in to start doing aerobic exercises.
“Boing-boooing?”
“Pochi will get a glass-hour figure, too, sir!”
For some reason, Tama and Pochi joined in right away.
“Me too.”
“If Mia is joining, then I will as well, I declare.”
“H-hang on a minute, Nana! You don’t need to improve your figure!”
“I do not wish to be left out, I protest.”
“Oh, all right. Come join the fun, Liza!”
In the end, even Liza got dragged in, and the entire group started doing aerobics.
“…Hmm?”
As I watched the girls goofing off and exercising, I got a Telephone signal.
“Hello, Satou speaking.”
I answered the call right away. It obviously wasn’t Arisa, which meant it could only be coming from the high elf of Bolenan Forest, my dearest Miss Aaze.
“Good evening. This is Aialize.”
Her voice was always lovely to hear.
“Good evening, Miss Aaze. The sakura are lovely under the moonlight here.”
“Sakura, hmm? They’ve already stopped blooming here, and soon it’ll be time for the azaleas.”
“That sounds nice, too. I’d love to go see them together next time I visit.”
I sensed eyes on me as I chatted with Miss Aaze, and I looked over to find Hikaru, Arisa, and several of the others staring at me.
“Is it me, or has Satou’s face gone all lovey-dovey?”
“He must’ve gotten a call from Aaze.”
“Mm. Definitely.”
I automatically touched a hand to my face.
Was it really that obvious?
I cleared my throat and used my “Poker Face” skill to smooth over my expression.
“Aaze? Who is that, Satou’s girlfriend?”
“Nope.”
“Master already proposed to her and got rejected.”
“Huh. Older, I’m guessing?”
“Try, like, a hundred million years and change.”
Come on—she’s not that old.
“A hundred m… Wait, is she a high elf?!”
“Mm.”
I couldn’t very well keep ignoring Miss Aaze, so I resumed the conversation in spite of Hikaru’s shock.
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s nothing. At any rate, to what do I owe the rare honor of your calling me?”
Usually I was the one who called her. When it was the other way around, I was always a little worried that something might be amiss in Bolenan Forest.
“Adin and the others asked me to request that you come pick them up because they’re done training.”
Adin was Nana’s eldest sister. She and the rest of Nana’s siblings had been training with the elves for a month or so.
“That was faster than I expected.”
“Yes, they’ve all been working quite hard. Hiya is very proud of them.”
I promised to come get them the next day and soon reluctantly ended the call.
The next day…
“Master, we are terribly sorry for the trouble.”
“Don’t worry about it, Adin.”
The eldest sister, Number 1, now known as Adin, was the most fluent speaker of the seven homunculi now lined up in front of me.
According to my AR display, their levels had increased only by 1 or 2, but they’d gained more titles and skills that showed how intensely they’d been training over the past month.
“You all worked really hard.”
“Yes, master.”
The sisters puffed up their chests proudly.
“Mito! Mito is here, I declare!”
The youngest sister, Number 8, who I’d named Huit, pointed at Hikaru excitedly.
All the others turned toward her in perfect unison, as if they’d timed it deliberately.
I forgot the sisters had met Hikaru before.
“Hi again, Hachiko. And the rest of you, too.”
“My name is not Hachiko; it is Huit, I declare! Master named me officially, I boast.”
The other sisters all proclaimed their names to Hikaru, too.
“Ah-ha-ha, I can’t remember all these right away.”
Hikaru politely backed away.
“You know my sisters? I inquire.”
“That’s right, Miss Nana. When I woke up in the ruins, Hachiko—I mean Huit and the others were there with Johnny.”
“We worked as waitresses together, I declare.”
“Mito often got scolded for burning food, I report.”
“H-hey!”
The semi-long-haired Number 5, Fünf, calmly revealed Hikaru’s blunders.
I guess this Hikaru is bad at cooking, too.
“Miss Lulu! Tria mastered all of Lady Nea’s secret techniques, I report!”
“Congratulations, Tria.”
Lulu and Number 3, Tria, high-fived with both hands.
That was all well and good, but I was a little concerned about why she now had titles like Trapper, Trap Master, and Chain Conjurer.
What kind of training did they do in the elf village?
“Satou.”
“Miss Aaze.”
Aaze, who’d been working at the World Tree, came to visit the treehouse.
“Wow, Satou’s voice is, like, a full octave higher.”
“Yeah, that’s Aaze.”
“Wow, she’s gorgeous. Is she really a high elf, though? Not a human?”
“You’ve never met one before? Unlike elves, high elves have adult bodies.”
Hikaru and Arisa whispered among themselves.
“Allow me to introduce you, Miss Aaze. This is a childhood friend of sorts from my homeland, Mitsuko Takatsuki—”
“It’s Hikaru!”
Hikaru quickly spoke over me, evidently not wanting to be called Mitsuko.
“Why, she looks just like Yamato the Hero.”
“A descendant, perhaps?”
The elf teachers Mr. Hiya and Miss Lua appeared behind Miss Aaze.
“Oh, it’s Sir Hishirotoya the Mediator and Lady Lustohua the shrine maiden!”
Hikaru brightened when she saw the pair.
“I haven’t heard that title in a long time. Might you be the real Yamato, then?”
“Y-yes, that’s me. I go by Hikaru now.”
I guess they knew each other.
“I’m terribly sorry that we couldn’t maintain peace even after you helped arrange the ceasefire back then.”
“That’s in the past. Besides, that only went badly because of the interference of fools and some unfortunate coincidences.”
Sounded like they had a real history.
“Hero Yamato, you must not get distracted while addressing Lady Aaze.”
“S-sorry, Lady Lustohua.”
Lua rebuked her a little sharply because of Aaze’s awkward expression.
Hikaru turned back to Aaze and introduced herself.
“I’m Hikaru, an old friend of Satou’s… Well, Satou from a parallel universe, that is.”
“You’re his childhood friend Miss Hikaru? I am Aialize, high elf of Bolenan Forest. Please feel free to call me Aaze.”
Hikaru responded, “Of course, Miss Aaze,” only for Lua to admonish her to say “Lady Aaze” instead. I guess these two must have some complex history as well.
Since Hikaru seemed uncomfortable, we only stayed for the post-training celebration banquet before heading back to the royal capital with the sisters that very same day.
“So what are you sisters going to do now? Join our sightseeing world tour?”
“No, we would still only hold you back. I believe we will go train in the labyrinth next, as Nana did.”
The eldest sister, Adin, responded to Arisa, and the rest of the sisters nodded.
Most of them, that is. The ever-curious Huit and the cooking-obsessed Tria seemed very interested in our journey.
“Oh yeah? We’d better get you some labyrinth gear, then.”
At least they’d be able to use our Labyrinth City mansion and labyrinth villa as a base.
Since Arisa and I wouldn’t be there, I’d have to set up teleport gates like the ones connecting our royal capital home and secret base, creating a shortcut for more efficient hunting.
“Zena and the others are in Labyrinth City. Once we get there, I’ll introduce you to the guildmaster and some other friends.”
It’s always better to have more people to turn to in case of trouble.
“Master, I wish to see Spiderson, I declare.”
Huit gave a brisk salute.
Spiderson was Huit’s name for the long-legged spider crab she had tamed.
“Sure. Let’s go, then.”
We went from the teleport gate in our royal capital home to the secret base where Liza and the others did their training.
“Spiderson!”
SHPYEEEEEDAR.
Huit and Spiderson celebrated their reunion.
“Master, Spiderson seems slightly different, I observe.”
“Maybe it’s because there’s not much miasma here?”
Monsters didn’t like areas without a lot of miasma, and the tamed Spiderson had been staying in a purified area for a while now. Maybe that messed with his biology.
“Mythical.”
Mia muttered quietly.
Maybe she meant that if Spiderson stayed near this spirit-loaded spring, he could evolve into a mythical beast?
I didn’t see any such theories in my books, but it could be a secret known only to the elves or something.
Nana’s sisters all liked the secret base, too, and decided to hang around there while we finished out our stay in the royal capital.
Oh, and the next day, I found out the real meaning behind Tria’s Trap Master and Chain Conjurer titles.
I never thought I’d see the swinging chain traps out of side-scrolling games in real life.
“Extra, extra!”
On our way to the Echigoya Company, I saw someone handing out news bulletins.
These cost money here, unlike in Japan. I gave a large copper coin.
“Wow, they have newspapers now.”
“What’s it say?”
Hikaru and Arisa peered over my shoulders.
The newspaper extra said that the anti-rebellion force sent to Vistall Duchy had taken back the first city.
“I hope this war doesn’t last long.”
“Agreed.”
We reaped a huge profit by using Storage and Return to transport large amounts of Vistall Duchy–made cotton, but I was planning to invest it in the cotton-processing villages, the nearby roads, and so on.
That had annoyed some of the profiteering nobles and merchants for a while, until we mollified them by sharing the profits. It was probably Miss Manager’s sharp business sense that allowed us to make room for them to benefit without lessening the Echigoya Company’s own profit.
“Mr. Satou, over here!”
A girl called out to me from the entrance to the Echigoya Company.
It was Yui Akasaki, who’d been summoned by the Lumork Kingdom from a parallel Japan—the Southern Japan Federation.
“Hey, it’s been a while. Shopping?”
“Not quite! I heard the magic tool Aoi developed was being sold in stores, so my darling and I came to see it.”
Yui introduced the pudgy young man next to her.
He was her fiancé, the heir to the esteemed Ghookuts merchant family of the royal capital. According to my AR display, he was also the illegitimate son of the current king. He didn’t seem to have any claim to the throne, which I hoped meant Yui wouldn’t get dragged into any weird power struggles.
“Ooh, a grass cutter that uses strings for the spinning mechanism? Now, that’s interesting.”
I guess Professor Jahado’s rumored obsession with rotation wasn’t just talk.
We had given Jahado, who Aoi simply called “Professor,” a research lab in a corner of the Echigoya Company factory. He’d already enthusiastically analyzed my coaxial skypower engine and upgraded the design in less than half a month.
If his calculations were right, it should improve the performance by 20 or 30 percent. That was even better than I’d hoped.
Arisa, Lulu, and I left the rest of the group to shop while we went upstairs.
“Hey, it’s the viscount and Miss Master Lulu!”
The redheaded Neru approached us excitedly.
“Hey, Neru. Helping out at the main branch today?”
“Yup! Since we’ve got more franchised locations of the café now, we’re doin’ some research here at HQ.”
She put on the shop uniform purely because it was cute and wound up getting sent to help on the sales floor.
“Do you have a moment, miss?”
“Sure thing! On my way!”
Neru ran over to help a customer.
“You weren’t always a viscount, were you, Mr. Satou?”
“No, I was an honorary knight when we met in the old capital.”
Yui had a good memory.
“From an honorary knight to a viscount? Th-that’s unheard-of!”
Yui’s fiancé looked shocked, then realized he’d been rude.
“My bad—I mean, I’m sorry, Viscount. Please pardon my rudeness.”
He bowed his head to me politely.
This boy seemed well-put-together for his young age. Yui’s future was looking bright.
After checking out the grass cutter with the pair, we headed upstairs to meet with Miss Manager and Tifaleeza.
We were here today to discuss proposed specialties for the settlement we were developing.
“So this is a tomato?”
“It looks delicious.”
“It’s a very nutritious vegetable, although not everyone likes the texture inside.”
“These are grown near the town of Puta, just east of the old capital. They’re known as redfruits there.”
I grew them in my experimental farm in Labyrinth City, too. But that wasn’t nearly enough to increase the popularity of tomatoes in cooking; thus, I wanted to have them here, too.
At the moment, the first wave of settlers had just arrived at the first village I made with my magic, while the trial digging had only just begun on the mines. I was hoping to work out the kinks in this first trial run before building more villages and tunnels.
“Miss Master Lulu, I’ve preheated the stove!”
“Miss Master Lulu, the dough’s all prepared, too!”
“Thank you both. Master, I’m going to teach them the pizza recipe.”
Lulu headed for the kitchen with the Echigoya Company chef and Neru, who’d changed into a cook’s coat from her uniform.
My plan was to add pizza and omelet rice to the menu at the café to help tomatoes become more widely known. Maybe we could even make a specialty restaurant down the line.
While we waited for Lulu, Miss Manager chatted to me about rumors from around the Shiga Kingdom and some other central nations.
“So Yowork Kingdom is working with the Vistall Duchy rebel army…?”
Yowork Kingdom was the neighboring nation that had absorbed Arisa’s homeland of Kuvork Kingdom.
I guess taking over Kuvork Kingdom wasn’t enough for the king of Yowork Kingdom.
While I didn’t want to get involved in any wars between humans, I was entertaining the idea of going to Yowork Kingdom to try to hunt down the court mage who had put the Geist on Arisa and Lulu.
It’d be nice if I could just use map search, but I would need to find some clues from someone familiar with Yowork Kingdom first. At that point, I might as well just go there myself with “Flashrunning.”
“Lord Kuro, this is our take from the items we sold at auction.”
A few days after the auction, I popped by the Echigoya Company as Kuro and was shown a table stacked with a mountain of gold coin pouches.
This was just the proceeds from the auction; the money we made from the Magic Swords and other items we’d sold before the auction to bleed some of the nobles and merchants dry was elsewhere.
“We’ll invest this money in new ventures. I’ll leave the details up to you, Manager. You can use the rest of the money we prepared for the auction, too.”
The amount of money we had saved up was so large that just stashing it away in Storage might have a detrimental effect on the kingdom’s currency circulation.
“L-Lord Kuro! 130,000 gold coins is too much to use for anything short of expanding the royal capital.”
Miss Manager sounded dismayed at the task I was trying to drop on her.
I didn’t think it was that big of a number, but I guess it might be a lot to use all at once.
I’d already taken back the 20,000 gold coins that came from my own pocket for the auction. And of course, I returned the money Hikaru and the others threw in along with some thank-you gifts.
“Expanding the royal capital…”
I could easily level the ground and build the walls with my magic—no, wait. It’d create more jobs to have them built normally, as long as it wasn’t with slave labor.
“That might be good for the royal capital’s employment rate.”
“Lord Kuro, if we invest our funding in that, there’s a high possibility that we wouldn’t be able to find enough staff for the farming and mining village projects.”
I thought it would be fine, since the royal capital has several times the population of the average city, but I should probably respect Tifaleeza’s view, since she knew more about the state of affairs here.
“Gotcha. Sorry for the careless suggestion.”
“No, please pardon me for remarking upon it.”
“Come to think of it, Seiryuu County’s looking for investors to develop its labyrinth, too.”
“I don’t know if outside companies can enter that market, but I can look into it.”
It was possible that they had enough funding already, too. There had been a lot of nobles backing Seiryuu County at the kingdom meeting.
“Other than that, I guess the obvious play would be to expand our own ventures…”
All three of us traded ideas for how to use the money. In the end, we went with my proposal of opening more branch stores in the Shiga Kingdom and surrounding areas, expanding on our production of things like textiles and stockings, giving the cafés more funding, and increasing the amount of facilities around the mining area.
That still used up only about a third of the money, though. We decided to get ideas from the other staff members and Arisa, the company’s official adviser. Hopefully Arisa wouldn’t suggest anything too insane.
“When can we start work on the new branches?”
“The shops themselves should only take about a month to prepare, I would think…”
“But we wouldn’t be able to train the staff in such a short time. It would take half a year at least to prepare someone for the role of running a branch in a far-off land.”
Tifaleeza amended Miss Manager’s estimation.
Personally, I mostly just wanted to set up more locations where I could easily teleport using Unit Deployment or Return, but it seemed it was going to take longer than I thought.
“Lord Kuro, while we’re training new personnel, perhaps we could send a team to secure a property in advance and research demand in the areas in question?”
Miss Manager made a helpful suggestion when she noticed me lost in thought.
That would achieve my main goal of opening more branches.
“Excellent idea.”
I approved it immediately and had Tifaleeza sort out the specifics of the plan.
Normally, Tifaleeza would get to work right away—but this time, for some reason, she was just staring at…my hands?
Ah. I got so excited about Miss Manager’s proposal that I had grabbed her hand in both of mine without even realizing it.
Manager Eluterina was frozen in apparent shock, her cheeks bright red.
Oops, this is borderline harassment.
“Sorry, Manager. Excuse me.”
“O-of course, Lord Kuro.”
Okay, just please don’t hold your hand to your chest with such a wistful expression.
Tifaleeza’s cold glare threatened to freeze us both over.
A few days before we were scheduled to leave the royal capital, I went to the royal academy with Hikaru and my group.
“Miss Pochi, Miss Tamaaa!”
“Oh, our henchmen, sir!”
“Cyna too?”
Pochi and Tama’s friends were nearby.
“You can go play.”
“Aye!”
“Yaaay, sir!”
I could tell they wanted to run over and play with their friends. As soon as I gave permission, they took off like a shot.
Their number of henchmen had gone up from the initial three to around ten. The pair seemed to see it as something like friends anyway; maybe they had acquired more while they were hanging out.
We’d better come back to the royal capital on a regular basis so the pair could keep visiting their precious new friends.
“Aaah! It’s Misanaria from Bolenan Forest!”
Miss Athena, a member of the Shiga Thirty-Three Staves and Sakura Protector, pointed at Mia while carrying a heavy book in her other hand.
“Jibcloud.”
“I-it’s not what it looks like! I didn’t borrow this book because my superiors who took your class were all raving about it! I-it’s just a coincidence! That’s all! I just happened to see it in the library and borrowed it because it looked decent! Got a problem with that?!”
“Nope.”
Mia only shook her head seriously in response to Athena’s rather tsundere-sounding speech.
“Useful. Work hard.”
“…Huh?”
“She says it’s a very informative book and that you should study it hard and keep improving.”
Arisa translated Mia’s incomprehensibly short statements for the confused Athena.
“Thank… I mean, whatever! I don’t need you to tell me that! You may have outdone me last time, but next time we meet, I swear I’ll come out on top!”
“Mm. Can’t wait.”
Mia nodded calmly as Athena huffed and puffed.
We walked on toward our main objective at the royal academy, leaving her standing there, flummoxed by Mia’s unexpected response.
“Miss Lulu! Miss Nana!”
Mr. Gouen’s daughter Sherin ran over, waving excitedly from the direction of the knights’ school.
Compared to when we first met, her running was steady and her breath even.
Behind her was Mr. Heim of the Eight Swordsmen of Shiga, presumably here as her chaperone. Our eyes met, and I gave him a nod.
“I passed!”
“Congratulations, Sherin!”
“I celebrate your acceptance, I declare.”
Sherin hugged Lulu and Nana with a huge smile.
She must have passed the entrance exam and gotten into the knights’ school.
The rest of us all congratulated her as well.
I gave her a stamina-recovery pendant made with a small bloodstone as a celebratory gift, in case she got injured at the knights’ school.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Holy Knight in uniform running up to Mr. Heim.
“…What?!”
Heim bellowed so unexpectedly that we all turned toward him.
Noticing this, he quickly lowered his voice, but it was too late. My “Keen Hearing” skill had picked up the Holy Knight’s report.
“H-hey, what do you suppose is going on?”
“Seems the anti-rebellion force that was sent to Vistall Duchy got obliterated.”
I responded to Arisa in a low voice.
Evidently, the chaos in the northwest of the Shiga Kingdom was far from over.
I’d better avoid getting caught up in that mess when I go look for the Geist-using court mage in Yowork Kingdom.
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