Who Is That Bravery For? -we can never save XXX The far-too-long journey had eroded their memories. Their home was so distant and visions of their past so faded. Even the immense passage of time no longer registered as “time.” Why had they set off on a journey in the first place? Certainly, there must have been a reason, such as war or disaster or the like. They left their home, boarded a ship that crossed between worlds, and began their journey. They visited several worlds but eventually left those behind as well. Before they even realized it, they’d forgotten the way home. There was no trace of the path they had taken—only a deep, vast blackness. When they lost their way, the desire to go home swelled up inside them for the first time. But without anywhere to go, those feelings soon became naught but a delusion. They merely continued to think of, yearn for, and hope for their home. They no longer had any memory of home. That was why they read and reread the old records engraved into the Poteau, who served as the ship’s central mechanism, and endlessly pined after the fleeting visions it granted them. The ending that was death did not exist for them. After wandering for close to an eternity, they gave up on home. And so they looked to sleep in a sandbox modeled after their home as the stage to spend their next eternity. That was an end of sorts. And that was also a beginning. These were the people who traveled the stars. Their people would eventually be called…the Visitors. “—Whoaaaa.” After listening to that point of the story, Lillia Asplay let slip a slight gasp. I thought I was ready for it, but it was still, you know, uncomfortable. “‘This is a story we must now tell—that of the true creation of this world!’ …That just sounds like a crazy headcanon someone made up when they were twelve. You’re old enough, master; shouldn’t you stop getting so worked up about this stuff?” “What are you prattling about, great Legal Brave of our time? I don’t tell lies in the first place.” “Yeah, I get that. But it’s like, how can I listen to this with a straight face, you know?” A vague smile crossed her face, and she downed her cup of mead. They sat in a cheap bar in a corner of the Imperial Capital’s sixth district, one that was still brightly lit even in the middle of the night. Her vision was a muddled white, thanks to the grease of the meat and tobacco smoke. It was a place far removed from elegance and cleanliness, but the food was solid. Lillia found renewed confidence in her master’s ability to pick a good place to eat. “Okay. So then, according to your creation myth, all the Visitors put their souls to rest in this…sandbox world they created in the Poteau on their ship, right? I’m just gonna gloss over the sudden supernatural turn things took with the word soul for now.” She twirled her finger. “So two of those people, or rather, Visitors survived. One of them is Elq Hrqstn, who we’re gonna go kill tomorrow, and the other”—with a piece of meat still stuck on her fork, she pointed at the man, her master, who sat across from her—“is the visitor from another world Foreigner Nils.” “Don’t point at people with your utensils. Bad manners.” “Okay, but you’re not ‘people.’ You’re a god.” “You don’t point at gods with your utensils, either. Bad manners.” He was exactly right. Convinced, Lillia spun her fork around and ate the meat. The juices gushed in her mouth. The charred bits on the outside were delightfully bitter and delicious. She whirled around and yelled toward the kitchen in the back—“This stuff’s amazing! Chef, another plate!” “Also, I ain’t the same as Hrqstn and that whole bunch. My home’s different, and so’s my path. We’re two distinctly separate travelers who just happened to drift onto the same planet.” “As a regular ol’ human from this world, I don’t really see any difference, though.” “I ain’t as godlike as Hrqstn and that bunch. Not omniscient, omnipotent, omni-anything. I can’t do stuff that’s as varied or as powerful as what they’re doing. I might have some special otherworldly magic, sure, but I can count the number of times I’ll be able to use it on one hand. Two more times, and it’ll be time for me to say bye-bye to this world. “I mean, yeah, it’s true that I’m special. I’m superstrong, supersmart, and super good-lookin’. But that’s about it—can’t manage more than that.” He sure thought highly of himself. I thought you didn’t lie? she wanted to tease, but she decided not to. Unfortunately, it was true that Lillia’s master, this Nils D. Foreigner, was incredibly strong and smart. And it was a little tough to say anything about whether he was very good-looking or not, but… Lillia supposed that beauty was in the eye of the beholder. She wanted to be tolerant of others’ sense of aesthetics. “That’s why I can’t offer much help in the battle you’re about to take part in. I’ll leave the main show to the current Braves, and I’ll take care of the boring stuff behind the scenes like the stagehand I’m s’posed to be.” “…All right. I guess that’s fine,” she murmured as she munched on the raw vegetables that came with their dishes. “And that boring stuff of yours has to do with the True World, doesn’t it?” “Pretty much,” came Nils’s vague response before he tipped his bottle back, emptying it. “And y’know what? I created it at first purely as a secret society to protect humanity. I thought long and hard about that name for two years to give it a clean image, y’see?” “Wait, what?” It took two years to do that? That’s what you came up with…? “And after leaving it alone for a measly eighty years, it gets all outta hand like this!” “Wait, wait, wait—what?” His tone made it seem like this was on the same level as accidentally letting a pot boil over while he’d been standing in the doorway idly chatting with a guest. But eighty years was way too long to be treated like it was comparable to the time it took to prep dinner. Maybe that was simply a fundamental difference in perception that came from being an ageless, undying Visitor. “I’ve totally run out of time while I’ve been walking around doing jack. We’re already counting down to the destruction of mankind. But the org can’t really do anything now that it’s basically in ruins and divided internally, especially since they’ve got no choice but to work behind the scenes. Not much I can do, so I got into contact with the top and gave ’em direct orders for different scenarios. And that’s about when you got involved in all this….” Nils stopped and narrowed his eyes. “Now, Lillia. Do you believe everything I just said?” “That’s not really the most important question here, is it? You weren’t lying, right?” He shook his head. “Then, there’s two possibilities here: Either you’re completely caught up in a cringey delusion or all of it is real… Personally, I want to choose that first option with all my being,” Lillia said with a sigh. “But if I did, you’d probably cry. In the most annoying way possible, too.” “You and Willem sound a lot alike when you say it like that…” “Well, yeah, ’cause we’re both just like you, master. You took a couple of innocent boys and girls and turned them into scoundrels. It’s time for you to take responsibility.” “You talk big for an uninvited pupil, y’know.” Her master was grumbling about something or other, but Lillia decided she would pretend she didn’t hear him. “Well, either way…” As Nils tossed a clump of meat or fat or something into his mouth, both his gaze and expression tensed sharply. “Lillia. Don’t go to the fight tomorrow.” “Don’t talk with your mouth full.” “Mm? Oh right.” Gulp. “Lillia. Don’t go to the fight tomorrow.” He said the exact same thing again after swallowing. How dependable. “Elq Hrqstn is still young. She doesn’t have the knowledge to make the decision on her own to attack and destroy humanity. It’s probably one of the Poteau…probably Jade Nail’s decision to attack.” “How can you tell?” “Because I’ve known ’em for as long as humanity’s been around.” Eugh, he really says that stuff like it’s no big deal. “Then again, I haven’t seen ’em for just as long.” And what he added was eerily unreliable. “The end of the world’s getting close.” He tipped another bottle back. His pace seemed faster than usual. At the same time, she thought she remembered him saying once that since poison didn’t affect him, he never got drunk. “We’ll need the corpse of a Visitor to prevent that. Specifically, the soul of one. Then we gotta process it correctly, and we still need the knowledge and skill to attach it to the ‘seed’ along with an origin spell. If we don’t put this all together right away, then it won’t be long till humanity destroys this entire world.” “Why?” “Explaining would take ages, so just accept it as the premise… But as long as you understand the premise, it’s easy to get what the Poteau are thinking. It’d be unacceptable for their precious Elq’s soul be hurt. That’s why they’ll crush humanity—” “Wait a sec,” Lillia interrupted. “The situation makes it sound like humanity’s at a dead end, though. If we survive, then the world’ll be destroyed, and if we die out, then humanity obviously goes extinct, right?” “Not necessarily. I’ve got the knowledge and skill for the spell. I also secretly constructed an enchantment lab for processing the soul underneath a town somewhere. All we need now is the soul of a Visitor—” “Rejected.” She flatly refused him. “…I’m not finished yet.” “You don’t have to, because I get the gist of it. If I can kill Elq, then that’s good enough. In that situation, you’d get the church’s approval…or maybe some of our comrades are members of the True World—either way, you’d use some kind of connection to collect the soul, cast your spell on it, and that’d be it. According to what you just told me, that should’ve been the original plan. But if you’re going out of your way to tell me to run away from the fight, that means you decided to get your Visitor soul from somewhere else. That’s the reason you got so rattled when I dropped by out of the blue.” She swiped Nils’s bottle, poured what was left into her own cup, and guzzled it down. “…You’re going to use your own soul, aren’t you? That probably isn’t even your second-best plan, so I doubt there’s much chance of success.” No response. “I won’t let you. I’m the current Legal Brave. If anyone’s going to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the world, it’ll be me—that’s my job.” “You—” “I know. I’ll have to go full strength with Seniorious in order to win against a Visitor. I can kill her, no problem, but my chances of coming back are dismal… But, you know…” She grinned her usual grin. She pulled it off. She was confident in her act. “…No doubt I can win if I go full strength. There’s nothing as marvelous as a high chance of victory, because that means the life and resolve I pour out won’t go to waste.” “You don’t have that much of a reason to fight.” Nils’s expression became stern as he said something Lillia hadn’t heard in a long time. How many years ago was it? Her talentless fellow pupil had heard the very same thing on some battlefield somewhere long ago. “You might be sad your hometown was destroyed, but there’s no anger in you. You don’t bear the Brave’s duty or the weight of the Carillon because you want it.” “True.” And just as she did back then, she nodded honestly. However, this time she said something she hadn’t before. “But what can I do? If I quit, Willem will absolutely say he’ll go alone. And if we leave him be, he’ll actually do it, you know.” “…Huh?” She took a piece of fried potato from the basket and popped it in her mouth. As she munched on it, she took all the things she’d noticed before—whether she should have or not—and started lining them up. “The Legal Braves are strong. All the techniques in the world couldn’t touch them; no spell could reach them; no monster stood a chance. And so they’ll win any fight they take on. Why is that?” Nils was silent. “All the Legal Braves shoulder similar tragedies—taking on the burden of various vows and hopes. Without any of that, they can’t be Legal Braves. Once a person gains the background needed for a story, they can start to achieve the kinds of victories that you’d also find in such stories. “I don’t know the rhyme or reason for this. All I’m talking about are the things I’ve seen for myself during my stint as a Legal Brave. Still, I’m convinced I’ve reached the right conclusions. Basically—” Gulp. “—a Legal Brave’s life is a copy of an archetypal hero of days past.” Nils remained silent. “Legal Braves don’t live their own lives. I’m just tracing some other life that’s convenient for everyone else, with a few personal changes here and there. Sophistry and far-fetched interpretations are the basics of enchantments, right? Similar things share the same properties. If there’s an enemy who only a courageous, mighty hero can defeat, then someone who’s led the life of a courageous, mighty hero should be able to defeat them. That’s why our lives are so similar to this lofty hero’s. That’s why we wield such strong power, like that lofty hero once did. As long as we fight, we’ll win. And…” Oh crap. Lillia realized the fix she was in. She felt the corners of her eyes welling up with heat. I thought I decided I wasn’t going to cry anymore. She had vowed to herself that she’d hide who she really was until the very end. Instead, she would be an unlikable, unreadable person. And yet, she couldn’t stop herself. “And just like that courageous, mighty hero…we won’t be able to save the people we really want to save…and we’ll never get to go home to the places we want to. Isn’t that right, Eighteenth Legal Brave Nils Didek Foreigner?” Nils. Before her sat a man with a life (?) more complicated and troubled and terrible than her own. And with a pained expression, he looked away. “It’s not like there are any hard-and-fast rules.” “You’ve told me that before.” Lillia gave a faint smile. “There might not be any explicit rules, but you’re not denying that something like that exists.” No response. “So yeah. I’m glad. I’m glad that what I decided to do wasn’t a waste. Sure, I might not think my anger for my parents and homeland being destroyed or my duty as the Carillon’s chosen are that important. But it’s not like I don’t have a reason to surrender my life to fight, master.” Now that she no longer felt capable of hiding her tears or tricking her master into thinking she wasn’t crying, Lillia cautiously wiped away a tear with the back of her finger. Then, thinking it funny how unusually feminine that gesture must’ve looked, she smiled a little to herself. “Willem has a place he wants to go home to. He has so many people he wants to save. Not like me—I have neither. And I’m pretty sure you’re not like that, either, master. That’s why—” Then Lillia, her voice a little shaky because of her tears, proclaimed proudly: “—Willem is the only one I will never allow to be a Legal Brave. That’s a good enough reason for me. That’s the reason why I’m a Legal Brave and the reason why I will defeat the Visitors tomorrow.”
Chapter 26
14 min read