Log Horizon - Volume 9 - Chapter 2.1

Chapter 2: Village of Thekkek 

1 
The journey was going smoothly. 
Having escaped the ruins of Tekeli, Leonardo and the others were traveling through the land of Aorsoi. Their destination was the place where the land ended: the Far East. Japan. 
However, they couldn’t just go blindly east. 
It was easy to lump it all together as “wilderness,” but midwestern Eured was full of ups and downs. The land itself was a plateau, but there were several hundred mountains running across that high-altitude wasteland. 
Of course, metaphorically speaking, those mountains were no more than wrinkles in the handkerchief of the earth. Compared to the vastness of Eured, they couldn’t have been that tall. 
Even so, for the four people and lone horse who moved over the earth as if clinging to it, this wasn’t true. The mountains that appeared one after another like screens boasted heights of several thousand meters each. 
Because the land was far too vast, their senses had been numbed, and it had seemed as though they could climb over them easily. With nothing to block it, the sky was just that wide. 
To the north was one of the highest mountainous regions in the world, the Tian Shan Mountains. In Elder Tales, this area was called Tian Mai, and it was known as a place where species of dragon-type monsters lived and where no human had yet set foot. 
Many new players found it surprising, but in Elder Tales, which utilized the Half-Gaia Project, unexplored regions weren’t all that rare. 
Even if there was a twelvefold difference in the rate at which time passed, and even if the size of the earth had been halved, this land was vast. In addition, compared to the population of Earth, there were only so many players in Elder Tales. It might be a super-class MMO with a twenty-year history, but the population of all the servers put together was only seventy million. 
The idea of exploring the whole world was a dream within a dream. 
What had regular game play been like in Elder Tales? 
Ordinarily, players would form parties with the members they planned to play with that day in the player town they used as their home base. Alternatively, if they were playing alone, they’d go shopping and make other preparations. Then, using the Fairy Rings, they’d travel to their destination dungeon or field zone. Once they reached their target zone, they’d adventure or do battle. That had been the general flow. 
As long as they played that way, places that weren’t near the Fairy Ring network naturally ended up as unexplored territory. There was really no help for this, and conversely, precisely because that was how things were, it was possible to romanticize the exploration of primitive areas and the implementation of new content. 
The introduction of an expansion pack typically meant that appealing fields, towns, and dungeons were designed for a previously unexplored place, monsters and treasure were distributed across it, a story was established within it in the form of quests, and Adventurers were guided there using the Fairy Rings. 
The projects were a bit like planned community developments executed on a global scale. 
But the region of Aorsoi had low population density. In other words, there weren’t many players, and it wasn’t very profitable. If other areas grew overcrowded, the developers would probably start paying attention to it, but at present there was only arid wasteland rolling away on all sides. 
Four people rode through that wasteland on horseback. 
Leonardo, Elias, and Coppélia each handled warhorses they’d summoned, while Kanami was on the hakutaku that KR was controlling with Soul Possession. 
The morning sun shone down brightly and impartially over the group and the wide world. 
It was easy to call it a wasteland, but its appearance wasn’t monotonous. The ground under their feet was crumbling, dull gray sandstone, but from the sheer, roughly five-hundred-meter cliff on their left, they could see a great S-shaped, winding river far below. 
The river was probably more than five hundred meters wide. Although the land couldn’t have been drier, deep forests of vivid conifers lined the path the river had carved on both sides. 
The green of those forests and the blue of the sky’s reflection in the river were so brilliant that it almost hurt to look at them. 
The party was traveling roughly south across a plateau that looked down over the expansive river. There were a couple of reasons for this: Crossing the mountains would have been difficult, and if they were going east, they couldn’t do it very efficiently without finding a road they could traverse on horseback. 
In addition, as long as they kept going south along the great river, if they happened to run out of food, they thought they could probably hunt some sort of game. When they asked what Kanami had chosen as her production class, they found out she had selected Chef. If push came to shove, they’d be able to count on her. 
“If we keep going south, there’s a village.” 
“You sure know a lot, KR.” 
The Adventurer who was possessing the three-eyed hakutaku, a mystical beast that looked like a white horse, spoke to Kanami, who was on said beast’s back. However, from the volume of his voice, it was clear that he’d been addressing their surrounding companions as well. 

This Kanami woman had a sort of natural leadership, or possibly a cheerful charisma, that pulled everyone around her in with her. She was willful, but there wasn’t even a hint of the deviousness that would have tried to force that will onto others, or of the greed that would have used her willfulness to satisfy her own desires. Her personality wouldn’t have gone over well with everybody, but you couldn’t hate her. 
That said, acknowledging her charisma and respecting her were apparently two different things. 
KR, who claimed to be her old friend, acknowledged Kanami’s leadership, but he didn’t seem to be relying on her sense of geography or surroundings in the slightest. They were crossing the wasteland on what were his very nearly arbitrary decisions. 
For her part, Kanami seemed to generously accept this; she saw no problem with it. Looking at that relationship made it seem she was, if nothing else, made of impressive stuff. 
“A village, you said?” 
“Yes, well… It really could have been a town.” 
“What do you mean, Sir KR?” 
At Elias’s question, KR fell silent and kept moving forward. It seemed more as if he was thinking about how to answer him than as if he was ignoring him. 
That was probably only to be expected. 
Elias and Kanami seemed pretty close. He’d heard that they’d already been traveling together when Coppélia had joined them. Still, Elias was an Ancient. He wasn’t a human from Earth. It was hard to decide whether it was all right to explain parts of the Elder Tales game situation to him or whether those were still secret. 
Since the time they’d made camp the other day, Leonardo and the others had been talking about the expansion pack, and Elias seemed to see it as ritual magic so enormous it affected the world itself. That understanding was correct, in a way—it did influence the world—but it missed the mark with regard to the fact that a game development company on Earth, somewhere outside this world, had created the place. 
Leonardo sighed. It was program code that created this world, not magic. 
Central Eured, the area around Aorsoi, hadn’t yet been sufficiently developed as game content. The topography had been automatically created from satellite photos and laser measurements, and the plants and rocks were program-generated fractal objects. 
In the same way, the “village” they were headed for was bound to be a featureless place that had been generated automatically by an “automatic village creation program” based on random numbers. 
On real-world Earth, villages were built based on the locations of rivers and the type of terrain. Then the villages were linked by roads, and if conditions were good, they would grow into towns and cities. 
Although the world of Elder Tales had been designed based on Earth, even if it had a fictional history, it hadn’t actually gone through progressive development. This meant that, where there was a town of a certain size in the real world, the designers created a residential area, using this method to simulate the growth of villages in a general way. 
For major cities, the game designers were involved from the very beginning, and they modeled them to be unique residential areas bursting with distinctive features. In particular, the cities where the game began—the ones known as “player towns”—had been given elaborate buildings and scenery, and many People of the Earth and facilities had been placed there. 
Midsized cities were mostly places for People of the Earth to live. However, for those occasions when Adventurers visited, they had several shops and People of the Earth who’d been given special conversation data in order to move quests forward. 
That said, smaller villages were created by the automatic village creation program. 
Leonardo was just a player, and the only development system–related knowledge he had came from interviews on game information sites. However, according to what he remembered, once they determined the location, size, and population of a town, they just distributed wooden houses in ways that corresponded to the actual terrain, had some appropriate People of the Earth move in, and decorated the nearby scenery with farm fields and similar things. In other words, the automatic village creation program was a design support program that created villages that “felt legit,” even if they had no distinguishing features. 
“Ordinarily, in terms of the traffic on the nearby river and roads and the scale of commerce, it wouldn’t be weird for the place to be a city or a town, but at this point, it’s just a village… That’s what he meant, Elias,” Leonardo said. 
Over the past few days, Leonardo had built amicable relationships with the members of the party. Kanami didn’t have a fussy personality, and Coppélia was quiet and reserved about everything—a likeable young woman. 
As a hero who’d been born to a fairy and a human, Elias was somehow incredibly difficult to comment on, but his personality itself was uncomplicated, and he was easy to get along with. If you kept an eye out for the delusions of grandeur that crept in sometimes (and he actually did have magic he could use, so you couldn’t unconditionally call them “delusions”), he wasn’t a bad traveling companion. 
“Coppélia has detected a shape that appears to be the village up ahead.” 
As she sat sidesaddle, dexterously controlling her horse, the small figure in the maid uniform pointed out a spot far ahead of them. 
They could see the smoke from several cookfires rising like white threads into the transparent, glassy blue sky. 
Even if the village had been automatically generated, they’d probably be able to replenish their supplies and get food to tide them over for a while. On top of that, if they asked, they might be able to learn about the state of traffic in the vicinity and find out how well the highways were maintained. 
As things stood, they didn’t even know if they’d have to cross a desert in order to go east. Easygoing Kanami aside, the entire party was in agreement that they needed more information. 
“Yes, that’s it. That’s Thekkek, the village I was looking for.” 
So spoke KR in a laid-back manner.