Chapter Three: The Unknown World
We ran through the forest, keeping an eye out for any trouble the whole time, and then we came across a road. We started to let our guard down a little bit, figuring that we were far enough away from the shrine.
“So? What’s next?”
“What do you mean?”
“We only teamed up because of the circumstances, right? So what do you want to do now? Split up?”
“Why would we do that?” Kizuna asked, apparently confused by the suggestion.
“Feh... Naofumi? We should stay with Kizuna. It’s dangerous out here.”
It was probably the best way to avoid trouble. But we had only known her for a little while, and she herself said that she was friends with Glass. So I had to be sure.
“Well, if I don’t make sure you’re on our side, you might lead us straight to the altar.”
“You really aren’t very trusting, are you? Besides, if you’re working with Glass then I’d have no reason to challenge you. Besides, I’m not on very good terms with this country, so I’d rather not travel alone. I’d really prefer if we stuck together for now.”
“Hm...”
I didn’t really understand the particulars of her situation, but she said she didn’t want to be alone.
“Crossing the border may prove difficult.”
“Can’t you use a teleportation skill?”
Hey, there’s an idea. I decided to check out my Portal Shield skill.
I called up the list of saved locations, but it was empty.
I guess you had to start over when you went to a new world. The skill itself was still available, so maybe...
I looked in the help menu but couldn’t find any useful information.
I guess the only way back to my world was to wait for the next wave to come.
“There are limits on what I can do. To go anywhere with it, we’re going to have to get there first. Our skills might work differently.”
“I guess so. Mine is called Return Transcript. But you need a tool to make it work, and I can’t use it in this country.”
“Mine is called Portal Shield. I can save three places that I’ve already been to, and then I can teleport to them whenever I want.”
“How convenient.”
“But right now, it looks like all the places I saved are gone. It must have something to do with the distance to the destination.”
“I get it. Sounds like a great skill—but you still can’t use it,” Kizuna said as she brushed dust off of her haori. “We have a couple of options. One of them is that we could head for the border. That way we can get to a country that is safer than this one.”
A border crossing... I hadn’t ever managed to do that successfully. When Melromarc had declared me a wanted criminal, they had deployed a bunch of troops, not to mention the other three heroes, to the border to keep me from getting across it.
“But we’d have to get through a few checkpoints. We might be able to buy our way through, but then we won’t have enough money for the journey.”
“You mean we can bribe our way out?”
“If you buy travel passes, then yes. I’ve only heard of it through the grapevine, but I hear it’s like Edo-period Japan. It’s easy to cross into the capital, but they make it hard to leave.”
Judging from the way that Kizuna and Glass dressed, I was starting to think that this world had a definite Japanese aesthetic. But then again, L’Arc and Therese didn’t dress the same way, so I couldn’t say for sure.
But these travel passes—they sounded like tolls.
The merchant voucher that I had back in Melromarc was similar, but not the same.
“That’s why it’s so difficult to get out of the country.”
“Sounds like a pretty controlled society.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. They mostly just restrict their citizen’s movement out of the country. It’s easy to head into it, though—to the capital. It’s probably even easier now.”
“Why’s that?”
“They don’t realize that I’ve escaped from the labyrinth, which means they aren’t watching out for me. I can probably get close to the dragon hourglass.”
“And what happens if you can do that?”
“Are they different in your world? If I get to the hourglass, I can teleport back to a safe place.”
I’d played MMORPGs that utilized similar systems. Portal skills existed to teleport players around, but generally speaking, only the strongest players had access to them. They were normally used to escape dangerous situations or to return to town after completing a quest. That must have been what Kizuna was talking about, because the skill only returned her to a country or town.
There were devices in towns that you could use to teleport to other similar devices in other towns. They weren’t the same as having a teleport skill of your own, but they were useful in their own way. A lot of games didn’t even have teleport skills, and all the long-distance travel was done through systems like these.
To make matters simple, I’ll refer to them as town portals from now on.
“The other idea is to wait for a wave to occur. I can see the hourglass on my status screen counting down again, so we could use that to hitchhike out of here.”
“Hm...”
So we had a number of options.
The first was to try to get out of this country—which was the country that threw Kizuna into the prison. But to do so, we’d have to get through a number of checkpoints, which would cost money. And there was no guarantee that we’d be safe once we got to the other side.
Another option was to try to approach the dragon hourglass in this country. That wouldn’t cost us any money, but there was significant risk involved in getting close enough to teleport.
The final option was to wait for the wave to arrive and summon us away. I wasn’t very fond of that option.
“How long does it say we have until the wave arrives?”
“Um... About two weeks.”
“That’s a long time.”
There was a limit on how long we could stay in this world. We were in a hurry, and I didn’t want to waste time waiting around. Besides, we had to find Raphtalia and the others. Where were they?
I tried to use my slave and monster control skills one more time, but once again they didn’t work. Lately, it felt like nothing was working. Raphtalia and Filo must have been in this world, but I couldn’t seem to find them...
“First things first, we should work on getting your levels up.”
“Good idea. We’ll need equipment too—and money.”
We would need money to get the equipment.
Kizuna had lent us some clothes, but to be honest they weren’t that great. She must have chosen things that we were able to wear at our low level.
“We need to start investigating, so we should probably head to a nearby town first.”
“Alright. And it sounds like we should stick together for now.”
“Glad to have you two around, Naofumi and Rishia.”
“Yeah, yeah. Rishia, without Raphtalia around, you’re going to have to handle my offense. Oh, and if we have to fight any people, you’ll be the only one that can hurt them. Don’t let me down.”
“Yes... sir! I’ll do my best!”
I sighed. She was so annoying. Kizuna was clearly trying not to laugh.
Why did she have to act so weak? All that power she showed off in the battle with Kyo was going to waste.
We made it out of the forest and found ourselves in a relatively large town.
The town looked... How to describe it... It looked like Kyoto from the Heian period. At first I’d thought it was like the Edo period, but some things about it didn’t quite fit in with that time period.
That’s how the town looked, anyway—the people were another thing altogether. They didn’t look like anyone I’d met in any world up until now. They had long ears, pretty white skin, and blonde hair. They sort of didn’t fit in with their surroundings.
They looked like elves.
“In this world, they’re called the grass people. They’re like the demi-humans in the world you came from.”
“They look like elves to me.”
You know, they actually looked really good in the Heian-period clothes. I was surprised.
But I could tell why. They just looked like long-eared foreigners flopping around in baggy robes. They didn’t wear their hair up in a topknot or anything like that.
Elves were a hunter-like race, but I always pictured them as wearing wizard-like clothing. I guess everyone had a different way of looking at things.
I found myself thinking that these Japanese-style clothes would look good on Raphtalia.
Aside from the elves, I also saw some semi-transparent people, like Glass, walking through the streets.
“Who are those people? They remind me of Glass.”
“You mean you don’t know? Those are the spirit people. People from other countries just call them spirits.”
“Spirits?”
“You might think they are actually souls, but that’s not quite right. But I can see why you’d think so. Their weapons are called things like Soul Splitter, after all. It’s easier to explain if you look at your status menu.”
I opened my status menu and looked at it.
My HP had been replaced by something else and was labeled “life force.” And my SP was relabeled “soul power.”
I was confused. What was going on?
“Spirits have life force and magic power... and if they wield a vassal weapon, then they also have soul power. But all those different powers are combined into energy for the spirit people.”
“What? So when they use magic, they also lose their life force?”
“It seems that way. All their other stats exist as energy, too. They don’t have levels. Energy is everything for them.”
“They don’t have levels?”
“That’s right. But they can be very powerful when their energy levels are high. They have an exceptionally high defense, much higher than a human could have. They can survive attacks that humans never could— they’re famous for it.”
That explained why Glass was so monstrously powerful.
“The problem is that there’s no way for them to recover their energy, unless another spirit person gives them some.”
“So there aren’t any items or spells they can use to recover?”
“That’s right. Unlike humans and grass people, they can’t rely on magic to recover in battle.”
“I never knew that!” Rishia exclaimed, nodding her head.
She had fought with Glass, after all. Of course she would find it interesting.
I know I did.
I’d hit her with the full strength of Iron Maiden, and it hadn’t hurt her. I’d burned her with the Shield of Wrath to no avail.
Huh?
“So if they could find some way to restore the energy they’ve lost, they could be really powerful, right?”
“Yeah, if something like that existed.”
I remembered watching L’Arc dump a bottle of soul-healing water over Glass. It seemed like she had instantly powered up. Did that mean that there wasn’t any soul-healing water in his world?
Hm... I’d have to investigate further. But before that, I needed to start gaining some levels.
“Okay, I got it. So can we hang out around here for a while?”
“It seems safe to me.”
“We walked with Kizuna through the town until we came to a fairly large building. It was bustling with activity. The building looked like an adventurer’s guild.
There were a lot of bulletin boards on the walls that were covered with job postings and wanted posters, promising cash rewards.
Kizuna scanned the postings and came jogging back over to us.
“It doesn’t look like they’ve realized we’ve escaped.”
“Good. But I’ve been wondering...” I said, indicating the back of the room where a crystal of some sort sat enshrined in a machine. It actually looked like a shaved-ice maker.
People filed past the machine and set pendant-like accessories on it, and then they tapped some buttons. It was almost like they were using a computer.
After a short amount of time a little puff of smoke would come out of the machine, and it would produce an item.
“That thing? We don’t need to worry about it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a machine that simulates the drop item functionality that the heroes’ weapons, and the vassal weapons, already have. Crystal people like Therese use them the most. They’re a race of people that receive powers from special stones they call jewels. They built the machine, actually.”
Well, well. I was learning a lot today.
I remembered when we were out leveling with L’Arc in the Cal Mira islands. They had talked about drop items as if they were a typical, pedestrian thing, even though I’d thought they were only possible with the legendary weapons.
So it was looking like drop items weren’t a rare thing at all in this world.
“Well they aren’t as good as the legendary weapons, as far as probability is concerned, but you can choose certain drops and it will make them for you once enough has been saved up. With luck they can even get magic out of things, right on the spot.”
“Is that so...”
The people of this new world seemed to have access to more skill subtleties than what I was used to. So they could absorb defeated monsters into those pendants and then use that machine to produce whatever drops the monsters had.
Before we went back to the world we came from, it might be a good idea to get our hands on one of those pendants. Maybe we could even learn how to make them. We’d be rich.
“That’s amazing. To think of all the items you can get just from defeating monsters...”
“Itsuki could do it.”
I wondered why most people in the previous world couldn’t use drops. If there was some way to replicate the effect of the pendant, it was worth a try.
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