Chapter 4: Dogfight
1
The light of daybreak shone down upon Leonardo.
In that flat glow, the wasteland looked terribly bleached out.
Kanami and the other two had headed for the ravine.
Saying they were going to warn the village of Thekkek about the emergency, Chun Lu and Ju Ha had also left without waiting for dawn.
Leonardo sat alone in the wasteland of Aorsoi, feeling as if he’d swallowed rocks. Before long, the indigo dawn passed, and the sun poked its face up over the horizon, but the day didn’t feel all that bright or warm.
The light illuminated all of creation impartially, but it only served to make the world look counterfeit.
In a world flooded with that luminosity, Leonardo kept thinking.
Even now, he couldn’t support Kanami’s course of action at all. The fact that he couldn’t understand it made it even worse. He had no idea what there was to be gained from confronting an army of more than ten thousand.
He just didn’t know what her eyes were focused on.
People of the Earth were People of the Earth. They weren’t human.
Couldn’t she understand that logic? They weren’t human. Every time that question rose in his heart, echo-like, Leonardo desperately shook it off, trying to convince himself that he was right.
“There we go.”
“Huh?”
When he turned around, he saw KR. He still looked like a beautiful white horse, but he’d folded all four of his elegant limbs and was lying on his belly on the ground, relaxing almost like an enormous canine.
“KR… You didn’t go?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“I mean, you’re… You and Kanami go way back, right?”
“Sure, but… Well, I’ve got something on my mind, too.”
Eyes half-closed, KR spoke lazily, as if he was savoring the temperature of the air.
Leonardo couldn’t agree with Kanami’s group.
What they were doing was folly, throwing their lives away for no reason, and he couldn’t go along with that. However, if asked whether he could continue the journey east alone, he had serious doubts he was capable. As if he’d seen straight through Leonardo’s hesitation, KR glanced at him with those intelligent eyes.
“What’re you going to do from here on out?”
“What am I…?”
He tossed a question at Leonardo, and sure enough, the man wasn’t able to answer it.
If he’d known the answer to that, Leonardo thought he probably would have been able to say a little more to Coppélia.
A capital collection bot.
That was what Coppélia had said.
What were bots, anyway? The history of the MMO-type online games that were Elder Tales’ predecessors went back to the 1970s. At first, due to poor communication channels and computer performance and to the cost of those facilities, the user demographic was small, and this had made the genre a minor hobby. However, as the Internet flourished, it had undergone major development.
In the early 1990s, ambitious titles that had formed the foundation of current MMOs were released, and from then up until the 2000s, they’d acquired many fans.
MMOs were characterized by the experience of multitudes of users interacting with one another within the game world. In such games, it was routine for the owners of items to either give or sell them to other players who wanted them.
When it came to selling items, at first people had used the in-game currency or had bartered other items for them, as the developers had assumed they would. However, as the popularity of MMOs heated up, players who wanted to buy high-rarity items and in-game currency with real-world money appeared.
Whether a thing is real or imaginary, if there is demand for it, prices will be set, and it will evolve into a market. The information that movable property in MMOs could have real-world monetary value rapidly became the new understanding in the neighborhood of the Internet.
Resources in the game had more value in the real world than most of the still-young players thought.
In the early 2000s, when the scale of economic activities in currently popular MMOs was stated in real currency and revealed to be larger than the GDPs of some small real-world countries, the trend became known around the world. The interior of the game world was semi-independent from the real world, but since it was linked to that world through the desires of its players, perfect freedom wasn’t an option.
In this way, the sight of in-game currency and items being bought and sold with real money became routine.
Of course, this practice was criticized for warping the normal game experience, and a significant percentage of game administration companies exposed it constantly. However, as long as there were people who wanted it and people who sought to profit by it, exposure was a Sisyphean task, and it wasn’t possible to prevent it completely.
Bots were a kind of program that had been thought up against the background of this era. They were a type of autonomous AI, and they were used to run an MMO character without a player.
Naturally, they weren’t capable of the sort of complex actions players performed, but they could continue simple, programmed actions for long periods of time. Bots were characterized by the ability to play in ways that humans were physically and mentally unable to handle, such as continuing to collect money and items in the same hunting ground for twenty-four hours straight.
There were a few players who used these bots on an individual basis, but the vast majority were used by traders.
In order to create points of connection with the daylight world, the underground society based in China and Southeast Asia used bots to win myriad items and money in MMO games. After all, neither taxes nor criminal investigations could reach them inside an MMO. It was the perfect place to collect untraceable capital and to convert underground money into respectable funds.
Since these bots ravaged hunting grounds and the game environment, serious MMO fans had come to loathe them.
A capital collection bot, set up in the MMO by a money-laundering group headquartered in China—that was what Coppélia’s words had meant.
If she was a bot, her vaguely mechanical way of dealing with things, her blindly repetitive hunting, and probably even her unconditional obedience to Kanami made sense.
It wasn’t a big deal.
She was a mechanical doll, just like the People of the Earth.
“Forget me, KR, what about you? You’re sure you don’t need to go?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It…doesn’t?”
“Kanami’s— She’s going to do what she wants, you know? If it gets her killed, she won’t have any regrets about it. She’s got a Pollyanna brain. The girl’s a serious pain in the butt.”
“Why is she so reckless? That idiot.”
“That’s not recklessness.”
“??”
KR’s laid-back attitude always came off kindly.
“It’s…all the power she’s got. She’s accepting everything with all her might. That’s what it is. That’s important. It’s kind of sad, isn’t it? Kanami has no concept of gears or brakes. That’s the sort of person she is.”
“So, she’s dumb.”
“Well, I’m not saying she isn’t.”
KR said the words with a snort, but he looked satisfied.
“Do you think she can win?”
“I think she’s got a good shot at it. I think that other young lady’s the one who’s worried. Kanami may not look it, but she’s got plenty of raid experience.”
“……”
“Did somebody say something to you?”
Back then…
When Leonardo had caught Coppélia’s wrist, she’d confessed to him that she was a bot. Leonardo’s words had frozen up on him, and she’d whispered to him in a transparent voice:
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