Log Horizon - Volume 9 - Chapter 1.6

6 
The wind that blew across the wasteland was already so cold that it felt like a wintery blast. 
Yet for this wilderness, the word night didn’t mean “saturated in darkness.” It meant the silence was filled with a clarity that had lost the inelegance of light. 
The blue of the universe stayed as it was, seeming to lie on the earth, whose colors had dimmed into shadow. If you looked up, its expanse bled into a sky filled with hundreds of millions of stars. 
This was night on the Aorsoi plateau. 
The distant mountains showed their dark shapes only subtly, as holes in the starry sky. 
Leonardo and the others were illuminated by an orange, crackling campfire. 
Leonardo had started the fire, and a tin kettle that Coppélia had taken out of her bag was hanging over it. 
The hissing puffs of steam that escaped the kettle were scattered by the cold highland wind, vanishing almost instantly. 
Having found a windbreak, Elias and Kanami had pitched the party’s tent and regrouped with the rest of the party. Kanami had wrapped herself in a thick mantle of rough cloth. 
Adventurer bodies were sturdy, but the night chill was probably hard for her to take. Because she wore an outfit that showed off her midriff, that was only to be expected. 
Carefully, Coppélia poured a black liquid into four battered tin cups that she’d also taken out of her bag. It was coffee, with plenty of honey. 
“And? What do we do?” 
Leonardo’s mouth was set in a dissatisfied line. As he asked the group his question, he shrugged into a thick tunic he’d pulled out of his bag. 
“What do you mean, ‘what do we do?’” 
“I mean, what’re we going to do now?” 
“I told you already. We’re going to Japan.” 
Kanami answered Leonardo, sounding casual. 
“Did you know you need to cross an ocean to get to Japan?” 
As a geek, Leonardo knew more about Japan than the average North American. Japan was a weird, cool country that was right next to the east side of China, at the very end of the world. 
Leonardo didn’t know exactly where they were, but he did know it was somewhere in the central northwest of the Eurasian continent. In general terms, they were probably somewhere above and to the right of places like Iran and Iraq. 
Travel from here to Japan? Not only that, but do it without Fairy Rings? That didn’t even sound sane. 
“Nah, it’ll be fine. Right?” 
Kanami turned to Elias. Elias nodded, wearing a magnanimous expression. It wasn’t clear whether he really understood or not. 
“If we swim real hard, we’ll get across.” 
Kanami said something ridiculous. She was holding her coffee in both hands. 
Flustered by her new companion’s reproachful gaze, she elaborated: 
“I mean, I moved to the EU a little while back, and they’ve got these old grandpas and grandmas who swim across the Dover Channel. That’s the ocean, you know? The Channel. It’s not much different from the gap between Japan and Taiwan. It’ll work.” 
Was that right? It sounded fishy to Leonardo, but he couldn’t flat-out deny it. When he searched through his fuzzy knowledge, it did seem as though Japan was pretty close to China’s bulge, but would things really go that well? In any case, he was pretty sure the people who made the Dover crossing were refugees, but not saying that was what discretion was all about. Since the “vital fall,” things were pretty much the same everywhere. 
“Anyway, with the Half-Gaia Project, distances in this world are halved. On top of that, we’ve got Adventurer physical abilities. There’s no way it won’t work!” 
When she put it that way, Leonardo started to feel like maybe she was right. 
He didn’t notice that, beside him, Coppélia was quietly shaking her head. 
“…Well, uh, say the crossing-to-Japan thing is fine. What are we going to do until we get there? We’re right smack in the middle of Eurasia, y’know. If the earth is about forty thousand kilometers around, this is a quarter of that—ten thousand kilometers. With Half-Gaia, that’s five thousand kilometers.” 
“If we go five hundred kilometers an hour, then in ten hours we’ll be—” 
“What the heck kind of traveler can do that?! We’d generate sonic booms!” 
Leonardo sighed, and Coppélia spoke to him, quietly. 
“According to Coppélia’s calculations, if we travel fifty kilometers per day, we will arrive in one hundred days. It will be all right. There is a good possibility that we will arrive within half a year.” 
Come to think of it, she was right. 
He’d had a really bad time in the ruins of Tekeli, but three of their four members were level 90. The remaining member was Elias, and he was a definite irregular. Assuming they were just moving along, and this was just a journey through the wilderness, unless they got pulled into some kind of event, he couldn’t say it would be all that dangerous. 
It would have been one thing if they had a time limit, but if they were just traveling, they’d probably get there “someday.” 
However, with that said… 
The mere idea of a journey that would take half a year, more or less, was a weird thing for a modern-day human to have. 
“Why do you want to go to Japan that badly? You said you were Japanese, right, Kanami? Is that why you want to get back there?” 
“Well, I’m not saying that’s not part of it.” 
Wrapped up in her thick mantle, Kanami gazed at Leonardo across the campfire with a smile that wasn’t at all feminine. 
“Don’t you know? Keh-heh-heh.” 

There was no point in asking him that. Today was the first time Leonardo had ever seen her. There was no way he could know about her circumstances. 
When Leonardo shook his head silently, Kanami began to speak softly. 
“This incident… There has to be some sort of cause, right? I want to know what it is.” 
Kanami’s words were as frank as a child’s. 
Those innocent words struck Leonardo square in the chest. 
In that case, Leonardo wanted to say it, too: So do I. I want to know. He couldn’t, though. He’d lived through every day until this one that way, unable to say it. 
Leonardo’s hometown in Elder Tales had been Big Apple. This town, which had been modeled on real-world New York City, held his birthplace, his neighborhood, and his pride. 
In Central Park, the flowers were beautiful all year round. If you left the park’s south side, there was the brick and terra cotta Carnegie Hall. In Big Apple, instead of being a concert hall, it was a place that sold shish kebabs and tacos, but it was the perfect place for Leonardo and the other denizens of downtown to gather. 
If you kept going south on Seventh Avenue, you emerged in Times Square, the messiest, nastiest intersection in the world. Even in crowds like these, true New Yorkers didn’t lose their cool. They had their own destinations firmly in mind, so they were able to keep walking at maximum efficiency, without paying attention to anybody else. The only people who stared up at the skyscrapers with their mouths half-open were yokels visiting from the country. 
They headed, android-like, for the Chrysler Building or the Diamond District or the United Nations Building, but in Elder Tales, all of these were ruins and had been turned into the strongholds of the guilds that haunted Big Apple. 
FAO Schwarz, Trinity Church, Radio City Music Hall. Each of these was used as the headquarters for a renowned major guild, and their crumbling yet still magnificent shapes stood proudly against the blue skies of this other world. 
Simply put, New York was the best city anywhere. 
That was true both on Earth and here in the world of Elder Tales. New York was a megacity overflowing with neighborly love and a power like upturned chaos, and it was Leonardo’s home. 
However, the Catastrophe had changed everything. 
After that nightmarish day, half the guilds had been forced to disband, and half of what remained had morphed into organized crime groups dominated by tyrannical monsters. 
Guilds didn’t have personalities. After all, they were just names—mere systems. And so, in the midst of that confusion, when everyone had abandoned themselves to grief, the guilds that had adopted vicious goals were stronger. 
If they permitted stealing from fellow Adventurers—or from People of the Earth, who were easier to exploit—they generated profit. Power structures grew up around that profit, and as long as they created organizations that used violence to subjugate those below them, those guilds managed to keep existing. 
Meanwhile, the neutral guilds that most players belonged to had been weak. When it came to surviving in this world, individualism and fairness couldn’t serve as goals. At heart, individualism was nothing but personal benefit, and fairness was a guideline for distributing profit. Morality that wasn’t backed by any major authority didn’t even last a week. 
Guilds that proclaimed fairness and solidarity among their participants, but in fact did nothing except try to force responsibility onto one another, fell in a single night. The players got paranoid and jumpy, and they slipped away without saying a word. 
It was true that most players weren’t going to resort to violence, but in the same way, they had no intention of doing anything for anyone else. In other words, in this world, rather than suppressing conflict, individualism was useful only as a way to turn a blind eye. 
To players like these, guilds had probably been nothing more than places that were convenient to use. It was simply that, since Elder Tales had been a game, the problem hadn’t been visible until now. 
Some guilds had been peaceful and had adopted upright principles. However, even guilds like those restricted which players they would accept. Many players had been in shock over the Catastrophe, and their hands had been full just trying to protect their own safety and interests. 
In essence, guilds were mutual aid organizations. But no guilds in Big Apple had been hospitable enough to support players who had zero intentions of aiding one another. 
…Well, I mean, there was rioting. 
After the 6.01 food riots and the subsequent public lynchings, Big Apple had become completely bloodthirsty. Leonardo had spent a long time hiding in the sewers, and the few companions he could really trust also left the city, one after another. 
In the space of a few blinks, his beloved Big Apple had turned into a city of rejection and violence, populated by individualists with dull eyes. 
Leonardo had finally made the decision to leave his hometown as well and had gone on a journey in search of a hiding place where he could lie low for a while. If he was leaving Big Apple anyway, he didn’t care how far he went. That said, jumping into a Fairy Ring that sent him to the opposite side of the globe had been a huge miscalculation… 
“The cause of the Catastrophe… I can’t even begin to guess what that was,” Leonardo muttered, remembering his hometown. 
If there was a cause, of course he wanted to know what it was. After all, if it was something understandable, he thought the people in his hometown probably wouldn’t have panicked so badly and lost all common sense. 
However, as simple as the question was, he hadn’t been able to ask it. His instincts had told him that asking would mean getting involved with the mysteries of this world. He’d unconsciously shrunk down, thinking it would be too presumptuous for a regular citizen like himself to put that question into words. 
As a result, Leonardo gazed at Kanami’s frankness, feeling dazzled. 
“I don’t have many ideas about what would have caused a mess like this. I don’t know whether it’s the direct cause or not, but Homesteading the Noosphere strikes me as fishy.” 
Elias nodded once, agreeing with Kanami. From the looks of it, the two had already discussed this. 
That could be it, Leonardo admitted. 
However, at the same time, it was nonsense. 
The incident had happened on the third of May. The expansion pack had been scheduled to unlock on May 4. 
In Elder Tales, expansion content was downloaded little by little, even during play, using the bandwidth available during the game: the “leeway” in the transmission speed. The Homesteading the Noosphere expansion pack had already been dormant on players’ computers around the world, but it was supposed to be unlocked on the day after that incident. 
In other words, that data was still asleep. 
True, it was odd that the date and time had been so close. However, since the data was still dormant, there was no way to test it. Since they’d been assimilated into the world of Elder Tales, they had no way to directly examine the data on their computers. 
“Well… Yeah, true, the expansion pack seems suspicious. I know the Catastrophe hit right before Homesteading the Noosphere came through. There could be some connection. Still, even if there is, so what? …The fact of the matter is, the expansion pack hasn’t been implemented. In this world, there’s no way to examine something that hasn’t been installed, is there?” 
Kanami was the one to answer Leonardo: 
“That’s why we’re going to Japan!” 
“Why? I don’t get it.” 
“Japan is an eastern country.” 
“Huh…?” 
“It’s fourteen hours ahead of New York. In other words, the Japanese server is the only server in the world where Homesteading the Noosphere was implemented, and that’s where we’re going. If we do, at the very least, I think we’ll probably find some sort of clue.”