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Log Horizon - Volume 9 - Chapter 4.1




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Chapter 4: Dogfight 


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: 

“In that village, Coppélia treated eighteen People of the Earth. She blessed forty-nine people. Coppélia did not know if either action had any effect. With regard to these actions, Coppélia was thanked three hundred nineteen times.” 
Coppélia hadn’t said, And that’s why. 
She’d only turned on her heel and followed Kanami. 
He knew that. There was a thorny lump in Leonardo’s chest. A prickly, oppressive sensation. It irritated him and harassed him and made his chest heavy. It seemed to be urging him on. 
The sensation was taking the beautiful wasteland of Aorsoi, illuminated by the flat morning light, and rotting it into a mess of hackneyed textures, and Leonardo knew what it was. 
Those nasty, totally uncute, selfish, snotty little brats in Thekkek who hadn’t shown him the tiniest bit of consideration—it was the same sensation he’d gotten from them. 
That prickly warmth had turned inside out and was raging inside Leonardo. 
He knew. 
He’d really known the whole time. 
What would not the part-timer geek, but the unbeatable ninja-hero that Leonardo loved the most, do at a time like this? He’d known from the very beginning. After all, he idolized heroes more than anybody. He hadn’t even had to think about it: It was self-evident. 
Leonardo was the one who’d been warped. 
He’d been a coward. 
He’d abandoned his hometown because he was afraid. 
He’d hesitated to take the hand he’d been offered. 
He’d had lots of warnings. This world was beautiful and abundant. They, the Adventurers, were the ones who hadn’t admitted that, who’d behaved insolently, and who’d turned it into a lawless wasteland. Leonardo and others like him had taken something that was correct and had ruined it with their selfish assumptions. They were the worst. 
What would he, the coolest guy in the world, do? 
He wouldn’t just stand around in a situation like this, looking on and doing nothing. 
So what if the other people were machines or bots? He wouldn’t hesitate. 
He wouldn’t blame his own cowardice on the other person’s value. 
Master is a person like first light, Coppélia had said. 
What had she meant, exactly? 
Coppélia hadn’t said, Master is a person like the sun. First light was what came before the dawn. It was a sign that the sun was on its way. The messenger that slashed permanent darkness apart. It was a voice that said, It’s all right. Keep watching for just a little longer. 
In that case, what was the “sun” that Kanami foretold? He didn’t know. He didn’t know, but that sun had shone into Coppélia’s soul. That was why she’d left on a journey with Kanami. 
Leonardo turned it around, asking himself what he was. Not the sun; not first light, either. A gloomy, defeatist geek. However, He was different. He would probably leap over any darkness, bantering and cracking jokes as he went, and run off through the light. Leonardo knew. 
The ambition inside Leonardo showed him his path. 
If he thought he wanted to save something, then that meant the something was worth saving. Human, dog, cat, or bot, it didn’t matter. 
On the contrary: Who cared about that stuff? 
It wouldn’t hurt to have one more idiot who risked his life for AIs in the world, would it? Leonardo was a geek. However, he was a geek who worshipped heroes. 
“I’m going.” 
As Leonardo stood up, KR chuckled, deep in his throat. 
“What? Got a problem with that? Huhn! If you want to laugh, go right ahead. Maybe my going won’t change anything, but I don’t plan to just shut up and let ’em hit me. I’ve got a new power, too.” 
“No, I wouldn’t laugh. I’m not Indicus.” 
KR got his white horse’s body to its feet, then stretched his neck out a long way and neighed. His voice echoed for a long time; the neigh shifted into a sound like birdsong, then into a high-density chant—and white light filled their surroundings. 
“Things are heating up. Is this the endgame? It’s the endgame, right?” 
When Leonardo opened his eyes again, squinting in the light, a man he didn’t know was standing there. 
He was an elf, a skinny young man with his hair pulled back in a ponytail. His face was as pale as an invalid’s, and there was an entertained smile plastered over it. His equipment was unique: He was wearing a resplendent mantle with a tattered hem over a tracksuit. On top of that, he held two staffs, one in each hand. As magic-user equipment, staffs weren’t unusual, but using two of them at once was. 
“Are you…KR?” 
“Uh, yes?” 
“—So you’re actually human?” 
“What did you think I was?” 
Snorting, the young man dexterously stuck his staffs into the ground, swung his now-free arms in circles, then stretched hugely. Considering the resulting, almost gratifying sounds, he seemed to have spent quite a long time hunkered down. 
“How did you do that, and what was it?” 
“Castling… You know: the emergency evasion spell that lets a caster switch places with a summoned servant creature.” 
“What, that?!” 
“I just teleported to this server from Japan.” 
Leonardo was taken aback. 
He’d been surprised by the fact that spells worked across server boundaries, too, but he was more startled by how versatile summoning magic was. 
“All right, okay. Things are heating up. I’ll go with you.” 
“Why?!” 
“Well, this is interesting, isn’t it?” 
“Don’t phrase that as a question.” 
“I’ll make it a statement, then: This is interesting. Kanami’s pulling out all the stops. It’s a moronic explosion. Raging stupidity. On top of that, you’re going to give it everything you’ve got, right, Leonardo? In that case, I’ll shoot the works, too.” 
Oh, Leonardo thought. This guy’s another idiot. 
“I can’t use magic well while I’m possessing something else, see. If I’m going to experience something live and in the flesh, my human body is where it’s at. Mm-hmm!” 
Even so, to have left Yamato, where he’d probably been safe, and come to a foreign land so easily, with no insurance… KR, who was wearing sandals, was grinning. 
“—Even I…” 
An enormous magic circle made of light radiated out from the staves he’d stuck into the ground and began to revolve three-dimensionally. 
“I recognize that mask, y’know. I liked ’em.” 
Even as he smiled bashfully, sounds like whistling wind and the resonance of the magic array continued. 
“I want to brag, too. If a hero’s going to show off his new power, I have to show my stuff as well, don’t I?” 
The shining lines that were drawn in the air twisted together in complicated patterns. As they watched, the outlines formed a complex wirework figure, sketching a vivid shape. 
“A summoning…?” 
“Awake, crimson dragon. Graceful, supreme ruler of the contract, wake from your garnet sleep and soar through the heavens!” 
The deep crimson dragon he’d summoned picked the panicking Leonardo up in its jaws, then set him on its elegant neck. KR, who’d settled in behind him at some point, whistled sharply through his fingers, and a moment later they were racing up into the sky. 
With the two of them on its back, the dragon flew higher and higher, almost as if it were melting into the Aorsoi atmosphere.
 



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