Log Horizon - Volume 9 - Chapter 4.5

5 
“It seemed like something out of an incredibly gallant epic poem, but after that, you passed out from the pain and returned to Yamato, did you not?” 
“Heeeeey, Gar-gar. We promised we wouldn’t talk about that, remember?!” 
“I made no such promise.” 
“Ah-ga-ga-gah! Ooooooh. Seriously, ooooh. Ow! That really hurts, I mean it!!” 
“Hmph. Gutless.” 
When the ribs the girl had lightly jabbed played “do-re-mi” and reached “fa,” KR flung himself away and ran. The girl had already occupied the deck chair. 
Unfortunately, what she’d said was accurate: Although KR had won the battle with the Black Dragon, he’d pushed himself too hard and had passed out. He’d fallen, hit the ground, and died, and as a result, death had returned him to his shelter on the Yamato server. 
If you said one couldn’t look cool that way, you’d be right, but he had taken on a raid boss as a lone Adventurer. There was probably no helping the outcome. Even if he’d had a raid-boss level ally on his side, he’d been pulled into that fight. Coming out unscathed would have been too much to hope for. 
KR and his partner were in a place called Ikoma. Specifically, one of the House of Saimiya’s second residences, located about eight kilometers to the east of the city of Minami. However, its current master was Plant Hwyaden, the enormous guild that controlled Minami. They were using this mansion as their guild headquarters. 
Having returned to Arc-Shaped Archipelago Yamato, KR had taken three days to get himself back into shape and had then gone to participate in Plant Hwyaden, the giant guild that governed Western Yamato. This secondary palace in Ikoma was the hub of that guild, and it held the greenhouse where KR and his partner were living. 
“Merely asking you a question is an utterly foolish endeavor, but…” The girl, who was swinging her feet, addressed KR: “Why do you belong to such a backwater guild, anyway?” 
“Aagh. Ooooh…” 
KR was curled up in an odd position, rubbing his side, but when she asked him “Why?” again, he answered slowly. The slowness certainly wasn’t because he didn’t want to answer, or because it was a difficult answer to give. It was simply that his kicked side hurt. 
“Well, getting meals ready and cleaning rooms is a pain in the butt, you know?” 
“An answer from a direction I never even suspected!” 
The girl was so startled by this that her words overlapped the end of KR’s statement. 
Still, it wouldn’t do to have people startled over a thing like that. While he might not look it, KR was the type of person the world called “a pampered rich kid.” It wasn’t something he was proud of, but he’d never even touched a vacuum cleaner. On top of that, this was another world, one in which electrical appliances like vacuum cleaners didn’t even exist. Cleaning was a professional’s skill. 
“I can’t cook or clean to begin with, see?” 
“What incompetence. Have you absolutely no talent?” 
Hearing that said directly to my face is kind of a problem. 
Communication abilities that let him chat about the latest chocolate offering at the doughnut shop with unfamiliar high school girls probably didn’t count as “talent,” and although he’d technically had a command of four languages in the old world, this world was equipped with an automatic translation system, so that didn’t seem like much of an advantage to KR. 
“Taking care of small girls, maybe?” 
“I am a girl. Not a small girl!” 
She’d evened out the number of (undamaged) ribs on his right and left sides, and KR rolled around again. The ground was close. More specifically, his cheek was pressed against it. So this is what being “down for the count” is, huh? Down for the count because a girl broke your ribs. What sort of game is that? KR desperately hit himself with verbal jabs, trying to distract himself from the pain. Even if you were an Adventurer with recovery abilities, unless you had a specific sort of fetish, painful things hurt. 
“So you’re saying you can do that stuff, Gar-gar?” 
“I am a dragon. As if I’d ever do anything so petty.” 
Holding his sides, KR nodded. I see. 
Come to think of it, that made perfect sense. As a Garnet Dragon, in the natural way of things, if she got hungry, she caught prey and devoured their meat, and if she got dirty, she dove into a lake. She was a monster in the shape of a girl, so trying to make her do things the human way was probably egocentric. 
Her violent behavior might also be some form of dragon communication. 
“I would like stew with shrimp for dinner tonight.” 
“You’re letting human society rub off on you, Gar-gar.” Completely disgusted, KR changed the subject. “So, Leonardo—what do you think of him?” 
“Why would I think of him?” 
KR sat down cross-legged on the floor, which was designed to look like a beach. 
He had the elation he’d felt. It was fact. Leonardo was definitely one of the chosen ones. Someone with a protagonist’s destiny, one that was different from KR’s. Someone who’d been born under stars that let them do uncommon things, like Kanami and Soujirou. One of the people KR idolized and wanted to help. 
Leonardo was an interesting guy, too. If he gave the sympathy he’d felt during that one moment a name, he’d probably be able to call it “friendship.” That word had gotten harder to say as he’d grown older. Coming to share that feeling with someone else through hero stories was embarrassing, too. However, KR had no intention of ignoring what he’d felt. 

“His prospects, that sort of thing.” 
“That’s a foolish question.” 
The girl stretched hugely, then said, as if it didn’t matter, “He uses the skills of the great ones. I can’t imagine he’ll die easily.” She probably really didn’t care. 
The skills of the great ones: That was how the girl had rated Leonardo’s training. The skills of the great ones were training, plus resolution strong enough to warp that training. At the time, KR hadn’t managed to grasp the meaning of that word completely, but now he thought it might mean techniques like Overskill and the Mysteries. It seemed likely that the same phenomena and techniques were called by different names, depending on the region and the community you belonged to. 
“Well, that lot are pretty much strangers to ‘safe travels.’” 
“That’s just as true of this city.” 
She’s not wrong, KR thought. 
Plant Hwyaden, the guild he was affiliated with, and Minami were currently enjoying prosperous times. 
The People of the Earth ruling class had long traditions, and as a result of those long traditions, it had governed Western Yamato with an ossified bureaucratic system. Their rule had been useful in asserting their legitimacy, but on the other hand, it was true that things had remained unchanged. 
Then the Catastrophe had occurred, and many Adventurers had appeared in this world. When you took a broad view of things, the arrival of the Adventurers had brought positive changes to Minami’s governing organizations. 
Simply by existing, Plant Hwyaden had improved public order, cut down on damage from monsters, and dramatically developed the economy. In a way, the Catastrophe had triggered a breakthrough for the country. 
However, abrupt changes couldn’t help but produce distortions. 
Not only that, but Plant Hwyaden was a single enormous guild. It had an internal class system, and the guild’s top-level members, who were known as the steering committee, ran it autocratically. 
KR didn’t think autocracy was a bad thing. Even in Japanese society back on Earth, there had been countless examples of dictatorships in the form of “one-man” corporations and similar things. In fact, there were a multitude of cases where, during the development process, it was more efficient for the person in charge to take decisive, authoritative action. 
He’d seen cases on the overseas servers where everyone had become equally unhappy because no one had tried to take responsibility, and the misery had spread to the People of the Earth. To him, Plant Hwyaden seemed to be doing incredibly well. 
The majority of the Adventurers who’d holed up inside the Japanese server might not understand, but KR had journeyed around the other servers, and he did know: The lack of chaos and orderly recovery on this server were miraculous. 
However, even so, there were those who were left without a place in that dictatorship and system of command, and the city’s ordinary People of the Earth were often trampled on. In the first place, Plant Hwyaden’s control had been established when a few capable Adventurers formed an alliance with the People of the Earth nobles. No one had included the perspective of protecting citizens’ rights for People of the Earth. In that guild’s system of self-government, newbies and low-level Adventurers were weak, too. 
KR knew that Kazuhiko was tearing around all over the place, unable to just stand by and watch the unfairness that had begun to run rampant in Minami. However, viewed from a high perspective, even that was no more than a drop in the bucket, and it was actually making the situation worse. The harder Kazuhiko worked to save people, the easier it was for Plant Hwyaden to govern unjustly. Precisely because Kazuhiko’s Miburo rescued the people that Plant Hwyaden’s tyranny oppressed, no decisive complaints ever exploded. 
There had been no need for the girl to point it out: The situation here was far from “safe.” 
Now that they’d solidified their bonds with the Adventurers, most of the Holy Empire of Westlande’s nobles seemed to be openly enjoying their glory days, viewing the situation as unparalleled prosperity and the opportunity for a great leap forward. However, to KR, all this prosperity and advancement seemed to rest on thin ice. He honestly couldn’t fathom how they could be so giddy about it. 
Of course, their carelessness was due to Indicus’s manipulation of information and Nureha’s skills, but even so, KR thought it was far too irresponsible and thoughtless. Either that, or it could be due to the deterioration of the Yamato nobility, which had lasted for too many generations. 
“That sounds likely,” the girl agreed with KR. “That strange pair we met on the continent… They radiated a curious air of intimidation unlike any enemy I had met before. I don’t believe that I would lose against beings like them, but I can’t declare that I could win, either.” 
Those weird monsters, the ones Leonardo had taken along with him on his screaming leap to the ground… 
Afterward, with a sure premonition in his heart, KR had continued to search for information about them. This was one of the main reasons he’d decided to participate in an enormous guild like Plant Hwyaden. He’d risen to a position of authority as a Ten-Seat and had used it to gather information. As a result, he’d managed to confirm several things. 
“Geniuses.” New monsters by that name had been striding about this world, unnoticed, since the Catastrophe. KR had confirmed that information through one incident in Nakasu and two in Akiba. 
Since it was something KR could detect, it was likely that people with a rank similar to his, or those who had a means of gathering information, would notice the incidents soon. In other words, it was about time for the People of the Earth nobles to pick up on them. If they couldn’t do that, they were pretty much asking people to criticize them for being lazy, and in fact, KR thought they were probably in denial about the fact that things weren’t as peaceful as they seemed. Of course, as a modern Japanese citizen, he was in no position to criticize someone else for that, but even so. 
KR didn’t know how the battle in Aorsoi had ended. 
From the back of the Garnet Dragon, after Leonardo had jumped off, KR seemed to remember catching a brief glimpse of him landing on the ground and fighting. However, it had only been for a moment, and KR and the dragon had had their own job to do. Leonardo’s fight was part of Leonardo’s destiny, and this time, it hadn’t been KR’s role to see it through to the end. This was true for Kanami’s fight as well. 
However, KR was confident that they hadn’t lost. 
He couldn’t imagine Kanami losing in an all-or-nothing bout like that one. The more decisive and highly anticipated the game, the better she did. Even if she’d lost that moment’s contest, she was sure to resolve the incident itself, and she’d save as many as she possibly could. 
Those were the stars that belonged to Kanami and Leonardo. It was what set them apart from supporting players like KR and Kazuhiko. For that very reason, along with a faint pang in his chest, he felt a greater sense of expectation. Someday, Kanami’s group was bound to appear here on the Yamato server. She’d promised to visit this place, so it was practically an established fact already. 
It was also likely that war would break out. He didn’t know what that fight would be like. 
Would Plant Hwyaden, which had grown grotesquely obese, begin creaking and trigger it? Would the nobles lose their heads and launch a war against the Adventurers, or would their opponent be the East’s Round Table Council in Akiba, which was supported by Shiroe? Would the Geniuses threaten KR and his people again? 
He didn’t know, but some sort of fight would probably flare up. This was more than just a vague premonition. There were sparks all over the world. Right now they were hidden, but to KR, it felt as if those sparks were growing bigger by the moment. 
In preparation for that time, he had to get stronger on his own. 
Even if he was a Summoner who could never be more than second-rate, giving up on that final performance wasn’t an option for him. If Kanami was coming back and if Indicus was going to meet her, then he intended to be there for it, no matter what sort of sacrifice he had to make. To that end as well, KR had to acquire the ability to intervene—even if that meant drinking all the Black Dragon’s blood. 
In order to see the storm that was to come and the achingly clear blue sky that would follow it, like the one over Aorsoi… Here, in this secondary residence at Ikoma, KR continued his solitary battle.