Log Horizon - Volume 11 - Chapter 4.1

Chapter 4: Cartoon Heroes 

1 
“Dweaaah?! Whoa, hey, slow down, Fluffers!” 
As she chased after Gumon the enormous wolf, Kanami lost her balance and swung her arms around as if she were swimming. Due to its canals, which were like the type in terraced fields, this huge, deep subterranean cavern was awash in enough water to get the soles of their shoes wet. 
Without turning to look at her companions, Gumon casually scaled the terraces with the grace unique to creatures that traveled on four legs. 
Apparently, this was a regular cavern. 
According to what he’d heard from Hua Diao, there were several hundred small-scale limestone caves in this mountain, a few dozen of which could be traversed by humans. It wasn’t a large-scale dungeon; Krusty suspected that countless instance-type dungeons might have been fixed in place this way by the Catastrophe. 
The floating Magic Light was something Kanami had summoned from a Lamplight Scroll. It was technically a noncombat spell for Magic Attack classes, but convenient, low-level spells were often provided as consumable magic items anyone could use. They didn’t cost much, so seasoned Adventurers invariably slipped them into their belongings. 
Even though it was illuminated now, the damp cave still held darkness, but Kanami didn’t seem to care one bit. She was a Monk, her body encased in skimpy light armor, and she moved through the gloomy cave lightly. She peeked into the shadows and branch tunnels here and there like a restless child. Phrased diplomatically, she was confirming their route; considered normally, she was satisfying her curiosity. 
Krusty watched her without comment. 
It wasn’t as if there was any particular advantage or disadvantage for him, and if she cleared the way for him, that was just fine. 
His thought on the situation was It looks as though trouble just got started. In Krusty’s life, this was a familiar premonition. 
When he was small, he’d thought of himself as a small boat, floating on a stormy ocean. 
To Haruaki Kounoike, the outside world was something unreasonable he couldn’t fight. 
When he was old enough to go to school, he’d learned the phrase haran banjou, “the vicissitudes of life.” The ran in haran meant “big waves.” Banjou meant being incredibly high, or very deep. The whole phrase meant big waves that came over and over, and—with what was in a way a very boyish, reckless obstinacy—it secured a special place for itself in his heart. When he bluffed inwardly, Hey, this is perfect for a surfer, the world of stormy waves became a problem he needed to ride. 
By the time he entered middle school, he was able to dance skillfully on top of the great waves, and by high school, he even felt that most quarrels weren’t stimulating enough. 
Bohemian. Debauched. 
That was what his relatives had begun to call him. 
Of course, as far as he could tell, this wasn’t a fact. He’d never burned through the family’s assets with wasteful spending, and he didn’t feel as if he’d shirked his duties and done just as he pleased. 
On the contrary, he thought he’d always been considerate of his relatives. As the son of a mistress, he was someone who was easy to view coldly, and the Kounoikes were a distinguished family with relations all over Japan. There was nothing harder to deal with than a rich, prestigious family who lived in rural areas. Not only that, but when their main business was moneylending, the difficulty boggled the imagination. Haruaki Kounoike had been a clever young man, so he’d been more than willing to live without causing them trouble or getting in their way. 
That said, that was with regard to himself, and the trouble was a different matter. Those vicissitudes of life—in other words, the various commotions that surged his way—were inevitable. He didn’t cause them. 
For that very reason, he loved them. 
Well, I won’t say I never actively got involved in any of them, though. 
His duel with Elias had been that way. He wasn’t crazy enough to take the first swing himself, but if someone started slashing at him, he’d cheerfully play along. He even thought that, since someone had taken a slash at him, he was missing out if he didn’t make sure they entertained him. 
To Krusty, the current ruckus was another of the world’s performances. Of course, if he was going to put it that way, all the commotions that had followed the Catastrophe had been the same way. He didn’t intend to actively participate in them, but he did plan to savor every battle that came his way. 
As Krusty thought these things, he saw Kanami scale a cliff up ahead. 
Clinging to wet rocks wasn’t really his thing, so he walked down the sloping tunnel that continued to the right. At that, with a flustered shout, Kanami came running after him, passed him, and began walking in front of him again. 
“You like being in the lead, then?” 
“Yeah!” 
Why? 
 That’s a trite question. 
 Is it possible there’s no reason for liking things? 
 There could be one. 
 However, I’m not really interested enough to ask. 
 Has she always liked it? 
 That’s probably the case. 
 She was the first to appear at the hunting grounds conference with D.D.D., too. 
 However, she fell asleep in the middle of the practical business talks (conjecture). 
 A woman who snores during a voice chat. 
 Responsibility as the leader of the Tea Party. 
 Could it actually be the opposite? 
“Were you the leader of the Tea Party because you like walking in front of everyone?” 
The question popped into Krusty’s mind, and the response he got was “Yep, you got it!” Considered in the ordinary way, that reason seemed impossible. Becoming the leader of a community for no other reason than the fact that you wanted to be in the lead walking spot… He’d never heard of such a thing in any guild. 
However, the response made sense to him, too. She was lacking in common sense, so naturally, she wouldn’t be sensible internally. 
Kanami, who was humming as she walked ahead of him, turned around cheerfully, asking, “What are things like over there?” She’d probably gotten bored. 
“What are they like?” 
“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. How’ve you been, these past two years?! And what’s it like on the Yamato server?” 
“Don’t you already know?” Krusty responded in a low voice. 
It wasn’t that he wanted to keep it a secret or that he didn’t want to talk to her, but he was planning to avoid repeating things she’d heard before. 
“Nah… That’s not how it is. I didn’t make contact, and I did other stuff, and I got stopped! I didn’t hear much from KR, either. He wouldn’t give me straight answers.” 
“Could you have brought that on yourself, perhaps?” 
KR had been a Debauchery Tea Party member. He’d been one of the three counselors in that meteoric group (to which Krusty had felt a sense of affinity simply because of the sound of the word debauchery, for some reason.) 
“You’re cold, Krus-Krus. If you walk along silently in a place like this, your glasses will start glinting too much.” 
“…” 
Krusty shrugged. He’d had no intention of ducking her questions; if she wanted him to talk, he wasn’t against doing that. “Okay, so go on: report, report, rhubarb,” Kanami was shouting. He probably should fill her in on the doings of the people of Akiba. 

“The past two years, you said? As far as raid captures are concerned, D.D.D., Howling, and the Knights of the Black Sword competed. Honesty was up and down. Two new guilds, the West Wind Brigade and Silver Sword, improved and rapidly caught up to the top groups.” 
He began by relating news about a harmless topic that wasn’t likely to cause offense: the raid rankings over the past couple of years. 
The real-world rankings hadn’t been prepared by the Elder Tales official site; raids weren’t evaluated that way. Instead, the communities on each server provided them in the form of anonymous bulletin-board rumors and similar things. 
When an expansion pack was released, it included several items of high-end content. The majority of these were full raid chain stories. In other words, extra content. In most cases, one expansion pack included between four and seven dungeons, and one dungeon had anywhere from three to ten raid bosses. In other words, one expansion pack had about thirty “targets.” 
There was a tacit order of precedence regarding these powerful enemies. In many cases, dungeons were set up so that you could capture them in any order you liked, but in practice, unless you defeated the raid enemies in lower-ranking dungeons and filled out your equipment, even if you went up against higher-ranking bosses, you weren’t likely to win. 
The raid rankings were an aggregate of information regarding which guild had defeated its way up to which objective in these expansion packs. 
It took several weeks to defeat a single boss. They needed that much time to analyze an enemy about which they had absolutely no information, get their equipment in order, and train as a team. In other words, every time an expansion pack went on sale, this rankings race—“D.D.D. has defeated the eighth boss.” “It sounds like the Knights of the Black Sword are up to the seventh one now.”—went on for twenty months. That was the Elder Tales raid rankings. 
The rankings also gave a portrait of the power struggles on the server, and to simplistic watchers, they were the guild hierarchy as well. 
“That sounds surprisingly stable.” 
“Expansion pack levels didn’t vary much, either,” Krusty answered. 
On the Yamato server, D.D.D., Howling, and the Knights of the Black Sword were powerful raid guilds with substantial histories. They’d been competing with each other since the days when the Debauchery Tea Party was active. It was also true that the expansion packs that had been released had tended to simply add dungeons, rather than new elements that would upset the preexisting power balance. 
The upshot was that, in the two years since the Debauchery Tea Party had disbanded, the cutthroat race had continued; however, the competition was still going strong, and there had been no unexpected twists. 
“Uh-huh, uh-huh. Umm, what about since the Catastrophe?” 
“That’s…not possible to sum up in a word. Akiba established an organization known as the Round Table Council.” 
“Yeah, I heard a little about that.” 
“Shiroe is the central figure.” 
Krusty mentioned this because he’d begun to feel mischievous. Being complimented made Shiroe uncomfortable. He was an unbalanced, interesting friend. Krusty’s impression of Shiroe was that he was a foolhardy idealist, a specialist in hand-to-hand fighting with an ultra-long-distance firing range. 
To reach an objective, he’d extend his range as far as he had to. Even in situations where he only had to bag the prey right in front of him, he tried to pull in everything, all the way out to the distant horizon, in order to resolve the whole matter and carry through. And even so, he didn’t snipe; he used a drawn katana for all of it. Conditions that would let him attack unilaterally were in place, and yet, the guy himself wanted to get hurt, too. 
It struck him as a strange picture. 
 had been like that, too. 
At that conference, she’d surprised Krusty. It had been a small defeat. The victor had the right to claim the spoils of their victory. 
Why would she offer up her own body and soul? Why would she try to get involved? 
Isaac and Michitaka and all the guild masters who’d gathered for the Round Table Council were a little mysterious. A whimsical component that no one could call efficient had become the sort of nobility that could be termed “leeway” and was helping the organization operate… Although Krusty was probably not an exception there. 
“Shiro, huh? Mm-fu-fu-fu-fu. I knew it. I figured Shiro would turn into a cool guy like that.” 
“Did you?” 
“Yep, yep. Off-road, of course.” 
When he saw her expression—a smile that could only be called delighted—Krusty smiled wryly. 
Apparently, this woman enjoyed what Shiroe was doing. 
He didn’t know which sense of enjoyed was accurate here, but now that he thought about it, this woman could be called the pinnacle of whimsy and waste. 
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t spoken with Shiroe and this woman back in the days of the game, but apparently, his understanding had been shallow then. He hadn’t thought they were people with this much depth. 
“In Yamato, by and large, both Akiba and Minami are peaceful. Of course it’s likely there are a variety of things under the surface, but that’s true of anywhere people live. The town of Akiba has acquired the combined team of the Round Table Council; they’ve solved the issues of plunder and hostile acts and blocked the first wave of damage to the People of the Earth, and by now, I expect they’re approaching the end of the regular raid events.” 
Well, he wasn’t lying. The outstanding problems on the Yamato server had been taken care of, in a general sense. 
That said, to Krusty, it actually looked as though the situation was growing more chaotic. 
It was a problem that preceded both optimism and pessimism: This situation, which resembled the discovery of a new continent, couldn’t possibly end peacefully. 
The Round Table Council’s trouble with training those who were midlevel and below, which it had withdrawn from partway through, probably wouldn’t develop into much of an issue even if Krusty wasn’t there. However, the time they’d bought from the Lords’ Council under the cover of that program would naturally hit its time limit. With the threat of the goblins removed, the relationship between Adventurers and People of the Earth would inevitably progress toward the next stage. That in itself wasn’t a bad thing, but steering their mutual relationship after the hostile entity that had confronted them was gone would be extremely difficult. He would have liked the goblins to remain their enemy until a certain level of exchange had been established as common. 
In the first place, Adventurers and People of the Earth were too far removed from each other. With a difference that great, you couldn’t expect anything from compromises. 
Shiroe, whose heart burned much hotter than his appearance suggested, had journeyed north to strike a balance, but there as well, he must have been counting on chances of victory that were practically a pipe dream. He didn’t think he’d fail, but even if he succeeded, he’d never settle all the problems. 
Or, no, if he succeeded, precisely because he’d done so, Ains would probably go off half-cocked. 
When you looked at the big picture, the circumstances were beyond the scope of individual efforts. 
Of course, it would probably be possible to block small, individual misfortunes. However, to put the situation in order, far more blood was bound to be spilled. 
And it isn’t as though my being there would have changed anything. Krusty shrugged in response to his own thoughts. 
“Why are you all the way out here, Krus-Krus?” 
“I got involved in an accident, I think. It’s what saddled me with this bad status.” 
Krusty answered as smoothly as if he’d prepared for that question in advance. 
He hadn’t come here voluntarily, but he couldn’t say he’d actively fought it, either. 
He was merely a little quick-witted, and if he took a comprehensive standpoint, no matter where he was, he couldn’t influence crowds. This was only natural, as he wasn’t trying to influence them. As a result, whether he was flung off somewhere or stayed where he was, he didn’t really care either way. 
As long as he could find something relatively fun in any given situation, he was content. 
“By whom?” 
“Whom…?” 
Kanami’s question caught Krusty off guard. 
Who had involved him? Who had cursed him? 
Who had defeated him? 
Carelessly, those questions hadn’t even occurred to him. 
As that train of thought flashed into his mind, Krusty looked down. Somewhere along the way, a pale golden light had begun to illuminate him. A cold wind swirled, making his mantle flap. 
The long, winding limestone cavern had led the two Adventurers to the mountainside of Mount Lang Jun.