Log Horizon - Volume 9 - Chapter 3.7

7 
“Wiped out?!” 
It was evening when Leonardo’s group received the news. 
Chun Lu, a Cleric affiliated with the Lelang Wolf Cavalry, had been contacted by one of her companions, and she reported the content of the telechat to her current group. 
“Unfortunately, our legion raid was annihilated. The surviving unit seems to have been some distance away from the site.” 
“By ‘surviving unit,’ you mean…?” 
“A unit that had been kept in reserve as rear support personnel. That said, there are only a few dozen members. They were effectively annihilated… I never dreamed this could happen.” 
Chun Lu answered Elias’s question, her voice gloomy but not despairing. 
After all, it was a confirmed fact that Adventurers did not die. 
From what Chun Lu said, the Cavalry had chosen their headquarters’ current location because it had a temple. This meant, while they might have been wiped out, the members who’d fallen and hadn’t been able to revive at the scene would be back at the temple. 
Annihilation didn’t mean that the guild itself was beyond all hope of recovery. 
Elder Tales had begun as a game. It had consisted of sword-and-sorcery adventures in the world of Theldesia. Of course, production and interaction were also a big part of the fun, but the majority of the game had been combat. 
However, even combat had existed on several different scales. 
First, there was solo play, where lone Adventurers fought monsters on their own. 
The next step up was party play, in which as many as six companions fought in cooperation. 
Most of the combat in the Elder Tales game had consisted of these two types. There were no actual statistics, but to Leonardo, it felt as if about 80 percent of the content had been playable with those two methods. 
Raids were what players tackled when they’d been through enough of that sort of game content. 
Full raid content was played with twenty-four members, and legion raid content was played with ninety-six members. Combat for large groups like these had been considered high-end game play in Elder Tales. 
Naturally, the difficulty levels were high, and it wasn’t unusual for a single dungeon capture to take close to half a year. 
Since the opponents this time had been gnolls, considering the level difference between the two sides, everyone had assumed the battle would go quickly. However, if they thought of it as a raid, getting wiped out wasn’t all that rare. Even for top-class guilds made up of elites, it was hard to break through a high-difficulty raid on the first try. 
That was probably why, although Chun Lu’s expression was surprised and disappointed, it held no trace of despair. 
The concerning thing was… 
“It does sound as if they saw that double status display phenomenon.” 
“I see.” 
When Leonardo checked with her, Chun Lu nodded. 
“I knew it…” 
“So the phenomenon is spreading.” 
No one in Leonardo’s party—not Kanami, who shrugged, or Coppélia, whose expression didn’t change, or Elias, who was frowning—had any acquaintances at the Wolf Cavalry headquarters. Since they hadn’t been registered as friends, they couldn’t contact them by telechat, and so all of their information had to come through Chun Lu. 
“Their numbers were great, and in the latter half of the battle, they say it was observed in almost all enemies…” 
Leonardo wanted to know exactly what sort of phenomenon this was, and he did want to solve the mystery, but he had no likely sounding hypotheses or methods, so he curbed his curiosity. 
It sounded as if the enemy’s total numbers were close to ten thousand. 
According to Chun Lu, they’d defeated quite a large number of gnolls, but during the battle, an unidentified black dragon had appeared as well. That dragon had spelled the beginning of the end, and the Lelang Wolf Cavalry had been routed. 
There were only six Adventurers in Leonardo’s group, and there was nothing they could do. For now, it was probably best if they kept heading east and, if possible, picked up more information at Cavalry HQ. 
At the time, Kanami and Elias had been satisfied with that as well. 
That night, Leonardo slipped out of his sleeping bag. 
For the duration of this journey, Leonardo’s group was keeping someone on watch at night. They weren’t just a party of Adventurers. Ju Ha, the Person of the Earth merchant, was traveling with them, and they’d decided they should be appropriately cautious as they went. 
They took turns keeping watch, but one of the companions kept stealthily sabotaging the turns system. “Sabotage” didn’t mean that they ducked their guard shift. On the contrary: They intentionally forgot to switch with the next guard. 
It was Coppélia. 
Yawning, Leonardo sat down next to her. 
Coppélia had set a cushion she’d bought in the village down on the desiccated, brittle sandstone and was sitting on it. A magnificently embroidered, quilted garment peeked out from under the hem of her maid outfit. 
“Good morning. Do you wish to be healed?” 
“It’s still the middle of the night. You didn’t wake me up again.” 
“Coppélia does not yet require sleep. She is capable of staying on guard.” 
That was probably true. 
Adventurers’ physical abilities made it possible to shorten the time they spent sleeping. Their tough bodies had excellent powers of recovery, and they seemed to be able to get by on three hours of sleep a night without any ill effects. 
That said, keeping watch at night all alone was a different story. They were companions, and they wanted to keep this journey fair. 
Leonardo, turning silent and sullen, muttered only, “I’ll keep watch, too.” 
Their surroundings were swallowed by darkness. 
This was partially because the group hadn’t lit a fire tonight. Fires were handy for keeping animals away, but there was a good possibility that they would attract intelligent monsters. In addition, when you considered the loss of vision that would follow if the light suddenly went out, you couldn’t say there was no downside. 
However, it wasn’t that there was no light. The moon that floated in the crystal clear Aorsoi sky cast its pale light over the earth. The glow was more than enough to let him examine Coppélia’s profile as she sat next to him. 
“It sure is quiet.” 
“Coppélia detects no hostile monsters in the area.” 
At Coppélia’s response, Leonardo nodded. According to the contact from Chun Lu, after that incident, the gnolls had stepped up their activity. They were probably far enough away, but there was no such thing as being too careful. 
The moonlight shone over Leonardo and Coppélia. 
He averted his eyes from the softness of her illuminated cheek’s smooth contours, looking at the ground instead. 

The two of them sat quietly, not really talking. 
Leonardo was watching the moonlight shift gradually into darkness, as if it were crawling over the earth. 
It was an odd feeling. Shadows moving—that was all it was, but Leonardo realized it stirred up a curious emotion inside him. 
Considered in terms of real-world Earth, the fluctuating shadows would be caused by the movement of the moon, or more specifically, the rotation of the earth. In terms of the game world, it would happen because the light source set in the sky’s texture was moving. 
Either way, the shifting moonlight that fell over the wasteland was the passage of time made visible. Leonardo felt something curious in the perfectly normal fact that time did not stop. 
He was deeply, quietly affected, in a way he couldn’t put into words, by the fact that he existed as an individual in the midst of the flow of time. 
This feeling soon shifted to the girl beside him. It was curious that he was here with Coppélia under the night sky of Aorsoi. If it hadn’t been for the Catastrophe, this sort of thing would probably never have happened. After all, Leonardo was a geek from New York. The Catastrophe had changed everything. All sorts of things had happened. Apparently, this was true where fate was concerned as well. 
“Coppélia will loan you this cape.” 
The next thing he knew, Coppélia was offering him a cloth that looked like a quilt. It was covered in embroidered grapes, violets, and flowers whose names he didn’t know; it seemed like a mantle, and it looked warm. 
The predawn wasteland was cold. She was probably concerned about him. 
“You got this in Thekkek, too?” 
“Yes. It was given to Coppélia.” 
Coppélia took a similar cloth out of her magic bag and wrapped it around her narrow shoulders. 
“Those people gave you a thing like this, huh?” 
Still sitting, Leonardo picked up a nearby pebble and tossed it. Coppélia had treated sick and injured people at the village; it was only natural that they’d thank her. That wasn’t a problem. 
It wasn’t a problem, but it was a little irritating. 
I fielded those annoying little ankle biters, but I… Well, I guess it’s not like I didn’t get anything. 
Leonardo hugged his knees and dropped his forehead onto them. 
A round, pretty rock. A weird scrap of cloth. A branch carved into the shape of a wooden sword. Half-eaten bread. A dried-out dead bug. An amulet made out of hairs from a horse’s tail. None of the things Leonardo had gotten had been any good. 
“You’re lucky, Coppélia.” 
“?” 
“I meant the cape. It’s nice and warm.” 
“Yes. It is a folk craft with excellent heat retentive properties.” 
Only half listening to the off-key response, Leonardo sighed. However, he wasn’t actually in a bad mood. 
“In that village…” 
“Hmm?” 
It was unusual for Coppélia to start speaking of her own accord, and for that very reason, Leonardo was able to wait without hurrying her along. 
“The boy we encountered in that village recovered.” 
“Yeah.” 
That double status display. The boy who’d been driven feral by some enigmatic disease. He was still in Thekkek. Now that he was no longer savage, he was just a Person of the Earth boy. He didn’t have the strength to cross the wasteland alone. If he was going to return to his home village, he’d have to make proper preparations. Besides, even if he made those preparations, the odds that his home village was safe were only about fifty-fifty. 
If that strange phenomenon had affected everyone in the boy’s village, the villagers had probably already scattered. In addition, if that disease had been brought in from elsewhere, like some sort of plague or curse, it was naïve to think that whoever had brought the disaster in hadn’t done any damage to the village. 
If both those possibilities were groundless fears, and if all the members of the boy’s village were still ordinary People of the Earth, then there was a significant possibility the boy had hurt the people of that village—his companions, including his parents and his old friends—through his transformation. 
Leonardo thought that continuing to live as a resident of Thekkek might be the happiest possible future for him. 
“That boy was…orange and green.” 
“Huh?” 
Leonardo had been thinking about the kid’s future, and he couldn’t fathom what Coppélia’s odd words meant. 
“Monsters have green light, and People of the Earth have orange light. That is how it appears to Coppélia. Adventurers have blue light, and Elias has purple.” 
“That’s…” 
“Coppélia believes it is the color of their souls.” 
At that abrupt remark, Leonardo’s eyes went round. 
“Coppélia is not equipped with sight in the ordinary sense of the word.” 
Without waiting for Leonardo to ask his question, Coppélia went on, and what she said was something he hadn’t even dreamed of. 
“Sight? Huh?” 
“Coppélia is unable to see. —To be accurate, Coppélia’s sight is incompatible with yours and the others’. Coppélia is aware of her surroundings through data streams, tags, and the colors of souls.” 
The conversation was nuts. 
However, at the same time, he couldn’t completely deny it. 
If this world was based on a game, then there had to be tags of some sort in the masses of data that were part of objects. 
The Adventurers’ status displays were one easy-to-understand example. If he concentrated on Coppélia, even Leonardo was able to make her name, main class, and level display, layered over his visual field. 
The name, level, and class were “tags.” 
Monsters had monster tags. People of the Earth had People of the Earth tags. He didn’t know the logic behind it, but could Coppélia be seeing those tags as different colors? He didn’t understand the bit about souls, but if that was what she meant, it would technically make sense. 
Is her sight maybe…? 
A special device for people who’d lost their eyesight had been developed some time before. Research that had managed to make people sense images by connecting sensors to their brains had been reported about a decade earlier. Leonardo didn’t know the details, but he’d heard that, at this point, they’d developed a device that let people recognize several different colors and images. 
Had Coppélia been using that sort of device to play Elder Tales? Leonardo wondered about that, but he wasn’t able to say it out loud. 
He didn’t think he and Coppélia were close enough for him to bring up personal stuff like that yet. Immediately afterward, he laughed at himself, thinking that that sounded like a coward’s excuse. 
“Coppélia has no color. That does not mean that Coppélia is transparent. It means she lacks the vibrating body—in other words, a soul—that generates color. Back then, Parallel One disappeared because Coppélia, who is structurally void, approached, and the more unstable soul was attracted—”