Log Horizon - Volume 8 - Chapter 5.4

4 
“Keh-heh-heh-heh. Ah-ha. Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha…” 
Roe2, who’d looked startled, bent nearly double and laughed for a while. Then she patted Minori’s head, gently. 
“Here, on this battlefield, that’s your answer?” 
“On this battlefield, that is my answer.” 
The eyes behind the round glasses narrowed softly in a smile. “Even if nothing changes?” 
“It means there are some things we can change.” 
Roe2’s question hadn’t been intended to make her give up. Minori took it as encouragement. 
“Now, at a time when Touya’s huddled up?” 
“He’s just resting for a little while. He’ll get up again soon.” 
For that reason, Minori was able to answer without hesitation. Predictions of indefinite misfortune were a hammer meant to temper her blade of blue steel. They were the ring of the anvil, so that Minori could obtain the strength she wanted. 
“I doubt your words will get through, Minori.” 
“But we’re together right now.” 
It might be no good. There was a possibility that it would fail. 
Still, that mattered a lot less than the fact that she was able to make an attempt now. 
Some sort of important choice had been made. It wasn’t that Roe2 had presented the options and Minori had chosen. Roe2 had helped with an answer Minori had carved inside herself. Like the time she’d determined to protect Choushi, and the time she’d decided to act as the rear guard for the Libra Festival, the resolution had welled up from deep inside her and had dyed her in its colors. 
A premonition of change set Minori’s heart trembling. It wasn’t a vague assumption. It would truly change her, and had changed the world. Just as she’d experienced before, her vision was rapidly recolored, starting at her feet, and in the midst of it all, Minori gazed at Roe2. 
She held out a hand to the woman. She’d been given permission to reach out. 
Minori carefully stored Roe2’s kindness away, deep inside herself. 
This experience mingled with Shiroe’s words in her and became the root of a new, great tree. She knew this quite clearly. 
“I heard the word ‘please.’” 
“Yes.” 
“Right. Good, Minori. Fine. I am your big sister, after all.” 
“Yes!” 
“Summon!” 
Backlit by the evening sun, Roe2 waved an arm casually, and a powerful magic circle appeared. 
The Pale Horse came running up. From where she sat astride it, Roe2 held out a hand to Minori. She took it; it was noticeably tepid. 
Startling at the thoroughbred’s energetic movements, Minori clung on tightly. But Roe2 spoke to her merrily: “True. I seem to have overlooked that. We have a duty as those who lead the way. It would be very uncool of us to shake off the hands you’d stretched out to us. Yes, ‘uncool.’ I’m glad that word was in my brother’s vocabulary—we really should live gallantly.” 
With the sound of powerful hoofbeats, the Pale Horse raced through the air. 
Minori was so taken aback by its true abilities—which it hadn’t shown once while it was pulling the cart—that she couldn’t even open her mouth. 
“Big sisters don’t abandon little sisters. I’ll internalize that rule. I’m probably the first Traveler to stand beside you. I didn’t think this would happen, but I feel quite cheerful.” 
Minori burned those words into her heart. 
Unfortunately, she didn’t understand their meaning in the slightest. 
However, every single one was a piece of some important secret. 
Without being told, Minori assigned herself the role of delivering them to Shiroe. Right now, Minori was in a special, reborn world; in this world, meetings were part of an important secret ceremony, and they had special meaning. Even now, she could feel Touya’s bitter grief so keenly it hurt, but her heart danced at the premonition of a storm that would blow all of it away. 
“The larger element clusters grow, the more stable they are, but their behavior becomes deterministic. That’s true for countries, and for planets, and for the Milky Bridge. They also begin to let tiny pieces fall.” 
An iron pole fell toward them, but the Pale Horse knocked it flying, not even bothering to go around it. 

“It’s only natural for all people to wish for happiness. However, that’s also the origin of sadness. For example, in Theldesian history, take the alvs, who shook off their former neighbors’ hands, and the humans who destroyed those alvs. Individual anguish is truth, but errors of misunderstanding are compounded, and when they become too great for individuals to manage, they sear the world. Grief, anger, and despair are poisons released into the world.” 
Roe2’s words were mild, but they held the ring of sublime wisdom, something like the echo of a memory keeper relating a legend of irreparable destruction. 
“You don’t understand, do you?” 
Behind Roe2, Minori shook her head. 
She didn’t want to pretend she had understood. 
“Your words are inconvenient things, aren’t they? This restriction-riddled protocol is dragging down the inference engine’s maximum. You can’t even construct proper clouds, and everything you do is peppered with loss. You don’t even have a method for stably expanding clusters. You live in the midst of this unfair isolation, as if you were in the Stone Age. That’s awful. It’s just too much.” 
There was no accusation in her voice. No pity, either. Only understanding and empathy. 
Her cloak fluttered in the wind, and Minori squeezed it tightly. 
“But Empathiom is transmitted. So much so that those of us who are suffering from a lack of resources don’t understand it. This is how you do things, isn’t it?” 
An enormous explosion went up. 
It was probably a phoenix’s suicide attack. The Pale Horse Minori and Roe2 rode charged straight through the middle of the roiling flames. At that point, Minori was finally able to see the state of her surroundings. There was fighting. Fighting everywhere. 
Skillfully maneuvering her summoned horse, Roe2 destroyed wyverns and Nightshade Servants the whole way, brandishing the true power of a level-90 Adventurer. 
Minori cast Purification Barriers. She cast them on People of the Earth and on Odysseia Knights. 
Yet even as the rapidly changing scenery and battlefield kept her on her toes, Minori came to a curious conclusion. 
What she was casting right now were countless barrier spells. They were the foundation of Kannagi healing, barriers to halt falling HP. It was one of the major spell systems from which battles were composed. 
Minori had wanted to make them into something that wasn’t a combat technique. 
She wanted them to be like water to the thirsty and the possibility of rescue for People of the Earth who were fleeing from the flames. For the Odysseia Knights, who were swinging their swords as if they’d gone mad, she wanted them to be a small reminder that their bodies were precious. 
In other words, they were Minori’s hope, her ego: She wanted to protect all life, to put an end to this. With the wish that that ego would become a prayer, Minori kept casting Purification Barrier to the limits of its recast time. 
The confusion of the battlefield seemed endless. 
Several times, she saw Serara and Touya. Both were still fighting. 
In the midst of the dizzying melee, Minori was on the verge of grasping something mysterious. It was the “full control encounter” she’d been chasing ever since she’d heard about it from Shiroe, but it seemed to have been expanded in places. The People of the Earth parents and children who thanked her over and over as they fled, the knights who knelt as if they were exhausted—they weren’t Minori’s friends, but in this moment, they were companions who were sharing this place with her. 
As Shiroe had shown her several times, in the midst of a mental world without clouds or conjectures, Minori felt as if she’d heard their wordless cries. 
They were cries of hatred for this place that brimmed with sorrow, and cries of longing that wished for better choices. 
If Minori had used her own awkward words to express them, she would have had to call them prayers of entreaty. 
“Little brothers and sisters!” Roe2 called out loudly. 
She’d raised her Staff of the Wise Horned Owl high in the air, and white light was drawn to it. With a smirk, she made a mischievous announcement. 
“Your big sister will not abandon you! The first friends I made in this world are angry at this place, which generates only sadness. A ruined princess who was once unable to understand or be understood and was abandoned is screaming inside me.” 
Touya, who was standing in the rubble and crossing swords with a knight, abruptly looked up. 
Rundelhaus, who was encasing countless wyverns in coffins of ice, turned around. 
Drawn by Wolfie’s gaze, Serara lifted her head, bewildered. 
Isuzu, who was singing without bothering to wipe her tears away, saw white wings spread as if to enfold the town. 
It was the white of a snowfall that covered everything. 
“Thou who hast broken thine contract, walk with me. Sword Princess: Al Quinjé!” 
Roe2’s summoning spell activated with a flash of light that illuminated the area. 
Her summoned servant, Princess Lace, revealed her true form. Minori thought it was probably the Combat Skill Summoning known as Sword Princess, a woman holding a harp, but it was completely different from the spell she knew from Shiroe’s classes. 
The spirit’s face was covered by a veil-like sealing cloth, and she couldn’t see her expression, but she felt a tranquility woven with sadness. Radiating a divine light, the beautiful woman with the harp raised her arm in a gesture that seemed to trace Roe2’s, layering the sound of her harp over Isuzu’s song. 
In the midst of the notes emanating from the legendary Ruquinjé’s harp, Roe2 looked decidedly proud.