“Mm...”
Lisa slowly opened her eyes as the early morning sun filtered through the window.
The morning soundscape filled her ears: birds tweeting as they flew past the window and farmers greeting each other as they started the day.
She could also hear noises that sounded decidedly less peaceful—SCHWOOMPH! CLANG! THUD!—but half asleep as she was, she didn’t pay them any thought at first.
Rubbing her bleary eyes, she looked toward the window and saw—
“Hai-yah!”
“Bo-caw?!” (“Oh, no!”)
SCHWA-TING!
—Zankei, a black-feathered cocco with long, silver wings, soar past the window following the clang of a shrill, metallic impact.
Then, a little farther back, she saw Zelos and Ukei leap at one another and trade a flurry of kicks midair.
For a moment, Lisa thought she might still be dreaming. Why was such an intense battle unfolding right outside her window?
“H-Huh?! What?!”
Unable to stop herself, she rushed to the window for a better look. She watched as another pitch-black cocco—Senkei—split into several clones, all of which made a mad dash toward Zelos.
The cocco had used an assassin combat skill called Phantom Onslaught, which created clones of the user to launch a flurry of attacks.
But Zelos was prepared. He also split into clones and used them to protect himself from the bird’s attacks.
“Bok?!” (“What?!”)
“Not today, you don’t.”
Senkei had no idea when it had happened, but all of a sudden, Zelos was right behind them. He concentrated mana into the palm of his hand, then released a blast of energy at the cocco’s back.
Ukei and Zankei took the opportunity to swoop in and attack their owner from the left and right simultaneously. It wasn’t enough. Zelos caught Ukei’s strike with his left hand and parried Zankei’s slash with the combat knife he held in his right.
“Co-kah...” (“So he managed to stop that...”)
“Bok. Kebok-a-baw.” (“Just what I’d expect from Leader. He won’t let us land a single talon on him.”)
A violent battle was playing out in this tranquil little farming village. Even a cockfight didn’t get this intense.
Lisa stared in confusion at the spectacle. Huh? Since when have chickens been so good at martial arts?
“You can’t even call those coccos anymore, can you?” Shakti said, suddenly standing behind her.
“Wh-Whargh?! Shakti! You were awake?!”
“As if I could sleep with all that racket out there. It’s the crack of dawn—what are they doing?”
“Uh... Warming up for the day, I guess? It does seem a little too hardcore for that, though...”
“If that’s a warm-up, the training they do in Isalas wouldn’t even count as stretching. Honestly, it looks like they’re trying to kill each other out there.”
Both Zelos and the coccos were launching all-out attacks as if it were nothing.
Maybe this was them holding back. Still, it was hard to call this training in any way, shape, or form. It looked every bit like a fight to the death.
“Aren’t coccos supposed to be cute little monsters?” Shakti said.
“Those things don’t even look like monsters at all. More like biological weapons,” Lisa replied.
As the fighters traded slashes, sparks flew through the air, and deafening blows rang out.
Coccos were only meant to be fodder. Trash mobs. But these ones? These ones were devastating.
Sure, this wasn’t the first time Lisa and Shakti had been forced to revisit their preconceived notions of normality...but this went so much further than just that. This was the kind of thing they’d only ever seen in manga, and here it was, right before their eyes. Fantasy worlds sure were something.
“Is, uh... Is this the part where we give up on trying to understand this place?” Lisa said.
Shakti nodded. “I think so. Let’s just...do some cleaning. Last night left a real mess.”
Yui’s rampage had done a real number on the place, and she was only a guest here. Looking at the aftermath again, Lisa and Shakti could do nothing but sigh.
“Yui’s, uh... She sure is possessive, isn’t she?” Lisa said.
“People like her are dangerous,” Shakti replied. “Depending on who they’re with, they might even kill themselves just to get revenge on their partner. Fortunately, Ado’s the kind of guy who treasures his spouse, so I don’t think that’d happen. But if he were some controlling, cheating bastard instead, then...well, things would be a lot worse.”
“You sound like an expert. Is this another one of those things you looked up on the internet?”
“Lawyers have to look through a lot of court cases and mediations. But also, yes—the net does make it easy to find gossip articles.”
“Can’t do that here.”
“Still, people here are purer, if you get what I mean. More human. They aren’t drowning in a sea of culture and civilization like people back on Earth, so they really value their homes and their families. Well—everyone here isn’t like that, obviously.”
A civilization’s lack of advancement wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
With less irrelevant information, people in this world often turned out purer and more grounded.
Yes, crime still occurred, but most perpetrators simply had violent, shortsighted personalities, had gone down the wrong path due to unemployment, resented watching the rich enjoy their affluence while they were stuck in poverty, or other things of that sort.
Any kind of skill or academic background was usually enough to help someone secure a job; surprisingly few criminals went down that path because they wanted to. Having options helped.
The only problem was this world didn’t have things like tech schools. So if you wanted to learn skills or get that academic background in the first place, you had to, say, spend a lot of money, or apprentice yourself to a crafter.
“The thing is, from everything we’ve seen so far, I get the vibe that being a mercenary is the most common profession here,” Shakti said. “The second would probably be construction. The big jobs are all male-dominated, so women have pretty low status here. Sure, a good number of women work as apothecaries, mages, or alchemists, but it still seems like most are just housewives.”
“What about priests?” Lisa asked. “We’ve seen a decent number of female priests and pastors, haven’t we?”
“The church is pretty much the same: The ones in charge are all men. I heard from Zaza that women in the clergy don’t get paid as much as the men. And while church doctrine ‘strictly forbids’ priests from physical contact with the opposite sex, it sounds like exceptions are pretty much a given if a priest gets with a noble. They say it’s some holy doctrine, but the whole thing’s set up to encourage priests to end up with nobles. After all, if a priest marries a noble, it gets the Faith that much more leverage. It’s all self-serving. I hear the big temples and churches even arrange marriages for their priestesses.”
“Wait—so they call themselves a holy priesthood, but the leaders are just getting women to seduce guys so that they can increase their own influence? What do they take women for?” Lisa sighed. “There really aren’t that many decent jobs for women in this world, are there?”
As far as Shakti was aware, priests lived within a hierarchy with strict rules and a primarily male upper class.
That part wasn’t all that different from the nobility. But when it came to marriage, the wishes of male priests took priority, while the wishes of female priests were often ignored altogether. Their bosses—a head priest or head pastor—would often decide the female priests’ futures by forcing them to marry their son or some other relative of theirs. Marrying for love was next to unheard of for priestesses.
The Faith would sometimes even arrange political marriages with foreign nobles, and some abbeys that officially trained priestesses were run like finishing schools that raised sheltered young girls for marriage.
Still, you could never completely put a lid on human emotion and instinct. Sometimes, prostitutes or criminals managed to seduce priests; other times, love syndrome set priests spinning out of control, sleeping with whomever crossed their paths.