Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 13 - Chapter 13

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13. Another Way

“Ungh...”

With a shock like he’d been punched in the head—no, like he’d fallen from a high place and hit his body all over—Haruhiro awakened.

Had he been sleeping? Yes, he had been lying asleep on the white sand.

He felt like he’d seen some sort of dream.

It hadn’t been a good dream. In fact, it had been a horrible nightmare.

He couldn’t remember anything from it. Or rather, it looked like he had more important things to think about than some dream.

There was someone’s foot right in front of Haruhiro’s nose where he lay in the sand. That person was wearing long boots, and something resembling a raincoat. It might have been a red raincoat originally, but it was filthy, creating a pattern of light brown and dark brown spots. The overall color was a dark red.

The person held what looked like a shovel. It had a longish handle, with a scoop-like blade on the end. It was kind of dark in color, and had dents all over, but taken as a whole it was almost certainly a shovel.

“Kuh!” That person was swinging the shovel with incredible vigor.

Bam! The raincoated person knocked something back.

“Ah...” Haruhiro said, meaninglessly.

The sharp glance that came his way stabbed into him. “Move it!”

Raincoat wore their hood low over their eyes, and had a black cloth or something wrapped around the lower half of their face. It made it nearly impossible to tell what they looked like. However, from the voice, though not necessarily the way they spoke, and the not-exactly-muscular body, Haruhiro thought, Maybe it’s a woman.

Whatever the case, it was best to do what Raincoat said for now.

Raincoat wasn’t standing there alone.

There was a big man in front of Raincoat, a large man towering over her.

“No way.” For a moment, Haruhiro’s mind went blank.

The man wore a coat no less dirty than Raincoat’s, with woolen mittens on his hands, and was holding a clearly dangerous-looking butcher knife. That butcher knife was now swinging violently towards Raincoat.

Haruhiro jumped up, almost in a daze.

“Kuh!” Raincoat knocked the man’s butcher knife away with her shovel.

Haruhiro backed away one, then two steps, shocked and amazed. It was a wonder she could deflect that. After all, that guy, he was probably bigger than Kuzaku.

It wasn’t so much his height that was amazing, as how thick his upper body, chest, shoulders, and arms were. Normally, humans couldn’t get like that, no matter how they trained. He was clearly off the charts, out of the realm of what was normal, or even possible.

In which case, was he was just humanoid, and not actually human?

There was a reason Haruhiro couldn’t accept that, and it bothered him.

The man’s face.

He couldn’t believe it, and didn’t want to. But if Haruhiro’s vision or memory hadn’t failed him, he recognized that horrible giant of a man.

He knew him well. Intimately, you could say.

“...Why is he me?” Haruhiro whispered.

He had no hair. He was bald. He had no eyebrows, and was deathly pale. That was why they gave off a different impression at first glance, but no matter how many times Haruhiro looked at the shape of those facial features, they were his own.

“That because...!” Raincoat moved up while shouting. She swung her shovel up diagonally. She was fast. “...of the dream you saw, obviously!”

The giant man with Haruhiro’s face may have been caught by surprise, because he couldn’t dodge quickly enough, and tried to block the shovel with his left arm.

However, he couldn’t block it. The giant man’s left arm was cut clean off a little below the elbow.

Was it something... that could cut like that? The blade of a shovel? If you sharpened it like crazy, it could... maybe?

The giant man’s left arm fell to the sandy ground. His mittened left hand was wriggling. The blood coming from the point where it was severed was properly red.

The giant man backed away.

Raincoat held her shovel at the ready, turning just her face towards Haruhiro. “That guy’s clearly a dream monster you created. You have one hell of an id.”

“I have no clue what you mean.”

“I’ll bet. You look new here.”

While they were talking, the giant man backed slowly away, before making an about face and running.

Raincoat didn’t pursue. “Ran away, huh? Well, whatever.”

She shouldered her shovel, sighing.

The giant man’s left arm was still wriggling.

Before Haruhiro fell asleep, there had been a variety of different monsters swarming all over. How about now?

No, they were gone. It was awfully quiet.

There was a something small moving in one of those pink thickets of coral, or plant, or whatever they were made of, and it was casting a white shadow. He didn’t sense anything else. There was no wind, either.

That, and, he suddenly realized, the air wasn’t sweet.

Raincoat started to stride off.

“...U-Um!” Haruhiro called out without meaning to.

Raincoat kept walking for a few steps. Just as he was thinking, Ignoring me, huh? she suddenly stopped, and turned around like it was a hassle.

“What?”

“Uh... I’m not sure what, but, um... where am I?”

“Parano.”

“Is that... the name of this place?”

“I don’t know. But they call this place Parano.”

“Is it one of those things? Like Grimgar, or the Dusk Realm, or Darunggar? Another world?”

“I don’t really know why, but Parano’s the otherworld, apparently.”

“The otherworld...”

The first thing that came to mind when he heard that word was the afterlife.

What did that mean again?

Oh, right.

The world of the dead.

“...Huh? Did I die, maybe...?”

“Maybe.” Raincoat let out a nasal laugh. “If so, then maybe everyone here is long dead. The afterlife, huh? It could be.”

“...Is it just me?” he ventured. “How about my comrades? Oh, right. Um, there were others with me... Kuzaku, Shihoru, Merry, and Setora. Four of them, I guess. Oh, there should have been a nyaa, too. Do you know anything about them?”

“They may’ve been here. May’ve not. A star fell, and there was a huge commotion. They may’ve gotten gobbled up by dream monsters. They may’ve run away. Who knows.”

“I’m asking a serious question here...”

“Yeah, and? I have to give a serious answer? Why? Give me a reason.”

“The reason is... Okay, there may not be a reason, but...” Haruhiro hung his head.

The giant man’s left arm still hadn’t stopped moving. Was it still alive? Sickening. It was that thing’s arm. It’d had the same face as him, too.

Haruhiro’s dagger was lying on the sandy ground. He picked it up, testing his grip. It was the dagger from the dwarf hole.

This place, it wasn’t the afterworld, after all.

“Nah,” he murmured. “I dunno about that...”

“Hey, you,” Raincoat said.

“Uh... yes?”

“Here.”

Raincoat rummaged through the raincoat that had given her her name—though that wasn’t really her name, and Haruhiro was just calling her that in his head.

She pulled out something, lightly tossing it to him. It fell to the ground at Haruhiro’s feet. It was a blackish cloth, with a string attached.

“A mask?” Haruhiro asked.

“Yeah. You’d better put that on. If you don’t, you’ll fall asleep every time the wind blows.”

“Fall asleep... when the wind blows?”

“The winds of Parano are sweet. If you inhale a lot of the sweet wind, you’ll get sleepy. If you sleep, you’ll dream. The dreams you see in Parano become real.”

While dubious of what exactly Raincoat was trying to say, Haruhiro sheathed his dagger, and crouched to pick up the mask. There were layers of cloth sewn together, and it was thicker than he’d expected. It must have been handmade.

“That thing from before,” he said hesitantly. “It was my dream... you said. A dream monster? Right?”

“Before a star falls, the wind always blows. People like you often appear where stars fall.”

“Stars...” Haruhiro tried putting the mask on. As might have been expected from its thickness, it made it a little hard to breathe.

“You’ll get used to it in no time,” Raincoat said, as if seeing right through him.

Haruhiro bowed his head. “Thanks.”

Raincoat waved her hand at him as if his thanks were a nuisance, and then took off walking again.

Haruhiro followed. “Erm...”

“What?” Raincoat responded without turning back.

“You haven’t always been here, either... have you?”

“Well, no.”

“How long have you been?”

“Who knows.”

“You don’t?”

“In Parano, you don’t have to sleep. In general, you won’t even feel sleepy. Not if you don’t inhale the sweet wind.”

“You don’t need sleep?” Haruhiro asked.

“You’ll get hungry, and you’ll get thirsty, too, but even if you don’t eat or drink, it won’t kill you.”

“Wait... I’ll get hungry, but I don’t have to eat? That means...”

“If you don’t die, you’ll find out soon enough.”

“What about mornings, and nights?”

“You could say we have them, you could say we don’t. It’s hard to get a good grasp of time. We apparently don’t age in Parano.”

“You don’t... age?”

“The sense of time, I guess you could call it? That’s already gone for me. I can’t say this for certain, but we probably don’t age.”

I may’ve died, after all, Haruhiro started to think. For now, I can definitely say this isn’t Grimgar. Even if it’s another world, an alternate world, it’s way too different. It’s completely “other” to everything. Is that why it’s the otherworld?

Raincoat shouldered her shovel, her legs moving with smooth steps.

It was an old shovel. Its cutting edge was incredible, but it wasn’t just the blade that was metal, the handle was, too, and they were all rusty. It was blackened all over, and there wasn’t a smooth section on the whole thing.

Looking closely, there were cracks here and there all over the shovel, not just on the handle, or just on the blade. From deep inside those cracks there was something red and glossy peeking through, something with a texture unlike metal, like the meat of some animal perhaps. What was that?

More importantly, was it okay to keep following Raincoat?

Raincoat seemed to know Parano, and how to survive here. She was brusque, but had likely saved Haruhiro, and had given him a mask to protect him from the sweet wind. If he stayed with Raincoat, he was safe for now.

But that’s just me. His comrades flashed through his mind. Shouldn’t he go back and look for them?

Haruhiro turned back as he walked. He let out a strange cry. “Wuh!”

The arm. The giant man’s arm, it was there.

Now that he thought about it, the arm had been alive even after the giant man had fled. There was a trail of blood left on path the left arm, as well as Haruhiro and Raincoat, had taken. It was moving forward by moving its wrist and fingers. Was it chasing them?

“Wh-What...”

...should we do? About this?!

Ignoring the perplexed Haruhiro, Raincoat turned back, and stomped on the giant man’s arm. The left arm flailed around like a fish on a hook. “Well, you’re full of life. Maybe I can steal the id from this on its own.”

“Steal its... id?”

“Let’s give it a shot.”

Raincoat turned the blade of her shovel downward, grasping the handle with her right hand. She lifted up, then brought the blade down on the giant man’s left hand.

Chop! Chop! Chop! She repeated that action several times.

It was just a left arm severed below the elbow, but there was something about this that was hard to watch. Was it because the owner had shared a face with him? Or did that have nothing to do with it? Maybe it did, just a little.

The giant man’s left arm eventually stopped writhing. With its flesh and bones all torn up, there was probably no way it could move.

“Hmm...” Raincoat said. “Maybe it went up a bit. My id. Hard to say.”

“Um, Raincoat-san?”

“‘Raincoat’?”

“...Uh, sorry. I don’t know your name... Mine’s Haruhiro.”

“I’m Alice C,” said Alice, using a masculine pronoun to refer to herself.

“C?” Haruhiro repeated.

“It’s what they call me here. Alice is fine.”

“Alice...” Haruhiro cocked his head to the side.

There was something about that name. It didn’t feel right.

The pronoun Alice was using, it was masculine. Could it be that Haruhiro had been making a mistake?

Haruhiro scrutinized Alice’s face. It might have been rude, but he couldn’t help himself. Well, with the hood over Alice’s head, and the mask covering the lower half of her face, Haruhiro could only tell the shape of her eyes, but it was hard to imagine she was male. Her shoulders were thin, and she was probably ten centimeters shorter than him. Also, her head was small. She was petite, overall.

“Uh... sorry,” Haruhiro said. “This whole time... I was assuming you were a woman...”