Log Horizon - Volume 8 - Chapter 5.2

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“I’m going, too! Wolfie!”
Serara broke into a run, worried about Touya, who’d been sent flying on the front line. However, without sparing a glance for her, Minori looked up at Roe2. Technically, Touya and Serara might need her support, but she chose to stay where she was.
She knew instinctively that this conversation with Roe2 was important and that she would probably never get another chance to have it.
Abruptly, her vision grew sharper, and a premonition whispered insistently in her ears. It was the same agitation she’d felt when she’d run off to defend Choushi from the goblins. The same feeling she’d had when she’d decided to support Shiroe at the Production Guild Liaison Committee.
Something had come to Minori and presented her with a choice. Minori held her breath and, inwardly, chose to take a great leap. She might be wrong, and she might regret it. However, she had to choose. She opened her eyes wide. The assumption that she couldn’t do anything was a chain that bound her. She’d learned that earlier in Hamelin. It had been an expensive lesson. For that reason, she’d never forget it.
Touya had run off toward the battlefield. It might not be the same one, but Minori had to stand on her own battlefield.
Minori instinctively felt that her most important opponent was the one currently watching her with great interest.
“You’re sure you don’t need to go over there, Minori?”
Swallowing, Minori nodded.
“I see. That’s the second time you’ve heard that question, isn’t it?”
Minori nodded again. Roe2 gazed at her.
Behind the round glasses, her eyes were intelligent, and Minori knew she was reflected in their luster. It might have been those eyes that made her think Roe2 looked a bit like Shiroe. Her eye color and the shape of her eyebrows were very similar to his. Even more than the shape of those eyes, that pensive expression reminded Minori of her teacher.
“……”
“……”
The two watched each other wordlessly.
Even with the tension in the air, Minori wasn’t the least bit frightened anymore.
This was very odd, and she thought about the reason. This was an Adventurer she didn’t know, someone she’d only met a few days ago. Because the woman spoke candidly, she was easy to warm up to, but considering what she’d said a few moments ago, even if she viewed it favorably, she had to consider her an unknown.
It should have been all right to feel fear or alarm regarding someone like that, but although Minori felt tense, she couldn’t feel any of those other things. The fact that she felt this way struck her as odd, and she remembered it.
Abruptly, Roe2 raised her eyes and looked in the direction of the battlefield.
Following her gaze, Minori saw an ugly fight. The broken battle lines had made systematic combat an impossibility. She didn’t know where the Moving Temple was, but members of the Odysseia Knights who’d probably resurrected there charged indiscriminately at Nightshades and wyverns alike.
Ordinarily, the level difference should have given the Knights an overwhelming advantage, but the decrease in abilities that followed on the heels of resurrection meant they couldn’t exercise their true power. Not only that, they weren’t even attempting to. They just attacked blindly, killing and being killed, with no regard for aggro management by the Warrior classes or status management by the Recovery classes.
It was a chaotic war of attrition, a lunatic battlefield.
Confusion she’d never seen even in this other world, let alone on peaceful Earth, unfolded before her eyes.
“Awful, isn’t it?”
After she’d nodded in agreement, Minori realized it had been Roe2 who’d spoken.
“That’s really ugly. I’ve never been there, but I think hell’s probably a lot like this. There’s not a single thing to be gained here. Getting involved is terribly risky and lacking in merit. I really can’t understand why they’re doing this… Not that I particularly want to. I doubt it would be possible to recoup the cost of doing so.”
Roe2 spoke to herself, in a voice that was unusually low for a woman’s.
Minori didn’t fully understand what she had said, but her tone seemed to resemble Shiroe’s somehow.
Roe2 and Minori gazed at the battlefield for a while.
A wyvern that had been dragged down to earth and was writhing around as if it had gone mad was killed, the Knight who’d killed it took a Nightshade’s black, flame-like spell in the back, and the confusion deepened.
“That’s not what I meant! Why are you so… There’s gotta be some other way, right, brother? Another way to fight, a better way—”
She heard Touya’s heartrending shout, physically struggling against something.
His voice reached Minori and Roe2 over the party chat. The yell was filled with anger, but what Minori felt was Touya’s sadness. She heard herself in it, the one that couldn’t do anything, that wasn’t allowed to do anything, because she was a child.
That’s not true, she wanted to tell him. There are things you can do. She was saying it to herself as well: There were things she could do. They might be little, trivial things, but she wouldn’t get discouraged over how small they were anymore.
In order to prove this, Minori kept gazing at Roe2.

Lately, the distance between her and Touya had been growing, and although Touya’s thoughts and feelings had once been as close to her own as nested spoons, she understood them less and less often now. However, even so, they were twins. She understood Touya’s anger. His wordless wail was grief for their own powerlessness. It was pure white rage at themselves for being mere children. As his twin, Minori knew this.
The world was far too big and powerful. It was so unfair, it was overwhelming, and it didn’t care one bit about Minori and Touya’s feelings. Everything was like massive construction equipment. It carried Minori and Touya along like a conveyor belt, taking them to the future whether or not they wanted to go, and that future consisted of nothing but being small and overawed. To Minori and Touya, that was how the world was.
At school, at home, and even when they walked down the street, there were far too few things that they had any real control over.
They could choose the color of their sneakers, for example, and the patterns on their notebooks. Sometimes they were able to put in requests for the dinner menu. However, not a single one of the important things was up to them. Not when they’d transferred schools. Not when they’d wanted to spend their birthday with their parents. Not when it came to making Touya’s legs normal again.
Minori knew that Touya, who’d played the part of an obedient kid, had hated his own powerlessness twice as much as anyone else. Precisely because they’d been powerless, they’d tried to push themselves just that little bit further. Because they’d been helpless, they’d dreamed of having their own strength and had fallen into Hamelin’s trap.
Because she understood Touya’s wail, Minori gazed at Roe2 without wiping away her own falling tears.
“Touya is howling. Serara is casting Pulse Recovery on any Person of the Earth she can reach. Isuzu and Rundelhaus are on their way here, protecting the townspeople as they go. —And yet, even so, there’s nothing to be done about this.”
Roe2 gestured theatrically with her right hand, indicating the whole battlefield. Minori nodded in agreement. It was a fact, plain and simple. No matter how her heart ached, facts were facts.
When she saw this, Roe2 asked Minori a question.
“I’m going to ask you something, right here. I hope you’ll tell your answer, Minori.”
“My answer…?”
“Since you asked a question like that, you must have an answer, correct? What are you, Minori? And who am I? Where have I come from, and where am I going?”
The woman’s questions stopped the world.
The roar of the battlefield abruptly receded in Minori’s mind, turning into something like white noise in the background.
Minori thought about what those questions meant.
She had no idea who Roe2 really was. Shiroe, who was an outstanding Elder Tales player, might have been acquainted with her. Alternatively, he could have used his excellent powers of reasoning to solve the mysteries that surrounded Roe2. However, Minori couldn’t do it. She did think there was some sort of secret here, but she had absolutely no idea what it was. Something about the atmosphere Roe2 wore made it seem as if she had come from very far away. That was about all she could say.
Even so, as Minori gazed at the woman, she searched for the answer in her eyes.
She thought not about the parroted question, but about the intent behind it. She thought about the meaning of Roe2’s intelligent smile. She thought about her wish.
And in the midst of that question, Minori found herself.
Roe2 wasn’t asking about Minori’s insights regarding herself. Who was Roe2? What was the truth? Right now, in this moment, even those questions grew less important.
Minori realized the real reason she was so calm: She liked Roe2. She’d felt close to her from the very beginning. She’d wanted to hear what she had to say, and she’d wanted to know what she was thinking. That was why she hadn’t been afraid.
She wanted to get closer to Roe2. That was a strange emotional development.
“That’s not true. I don’t know what you guys think, but this world is—”
“Like that’s even possible. We’re always—”
As she heard the pair’s yells across the party chat, music drifted down with them.
In the midst of a world where wyverns fell from the sky in slow motion, she heard a nostalgic melody. It was Isuzu’s voice, singing as if she was desperately gathering up thoughts that were on the verge of being shredded and stitching them together.
She hadn’t thought she wanted to get closer to the woman because she knew everything about her.
Minori had started wanting to know who she really was after wanting to get close to her.
She hadn’t wanted to be born because this world was fair, because everything was right and brimming with benevolence.
She’d set out on a journey in order to meet something she didn’t yet know.
In other words, the self Minori had encountered was her own wish. Roe2 had been kind enough to ask about the shape of Minori’s wish. It was possible that even the guess about “asking out of kindness” was no more than wishful thinking on Minori’s part. Still, simply having the thought made her feel a gentle light.
The time for solving riddles was past.
All Minori had to do was say her wish aloud, just as it was.
For that reason, she told Roe2 the one answer she needed to say at this point:
“I am Shiroe’s apprentice. You are our big sister, Roe2. You came from far away, and you’ll go far away again, but here, right now, you’re with us.”
Roe2’s eyes went wide, startled.
She really did look a lot like the person Minori loved.