With our destination decided, we left the Shadow Village immediately.
That said, we could not simply depart without dealing with the strange creatures that had attacked the village. Leaving them unchecked would have been disastrous, or so we thought.
“Ki… kisha… sha…”
“K… ka…”
“Blub… blub…”
For reasons utterly beyond our comprehension, the creatures were scattered across the ground like fish washed up on shore, gasping weakly as if starved of air. They were in no condition to fight. We did not even need to intervene.
What… happened?
The ones that had attacked us earlier had moved normally. Did the air itself turn hostile this time? That sounded absurd, and yet, given everything I had experienced so far, I could not dismiss it outright.
The strangest part was that I had done nothing. I had not asked for help, nor had I consciously acted. The phenomenon simply occurred. Still, it worked in our favor, so I chose not to dwell on it too much.
“What is happening?” the bound leader muttered, staring at the incapacitated creatures in disbelief. “We struggled so desperately against these monsters, and now they end up like this…”
The man had come along as our guide to the enemy’s stronghold, restrained under Yaiba’s watch. He clearly could not reconcile what he was seeing.
By the way, his name was Gonbei.
As we continued onward, Yaiba spoke while keeping Gonbei firmly in check.
“Gonbei-dono. What is the state of Eikyō now? Is it overrun by these strange creatures?”
“Yes,” Gonbei answered grimly. “And that is not all. There are countless mechanized weapons deployed as well, devices beyond anything we know. But worse than all of that are the attendants serving that being.”
“Attendants?” Yaiba asked. “Are they different from those creatures?”
“Entirely different,” Gonbei said, his face draining of color. “They understand our language and can speak it fluently. They command powerful mechanized weapons at will and wield bizarre, unnatural techniques. I cannot even imagine how one could defeat them…”
He was genuinely terrified, even while bound.
Attendants of those things, huh. So even fish get promoted? Like some kind of career ladder? Do they eventually become yellowtail or something?
Putting the joke aside, something important occurred to me.
Those earlier creatures had not triggered Universal Language Comprehension, nor had Analysis worked on them at all. What exactly are they? Are they even native to this world?
The deeper we pressed on, the more unsettling the mystery became.
There was no way those strange creatures were stronger than the evil god Lulune had picked up somewhere and casually eaten. Still, the questions only kept piling up.
“Steel yourselves,” Tsukikage said sharply. “Eikyō is just ahead.”
For a while, we had been moving through terrain that could barely be called a path, weaving our way through dense forest. It was all part of avoiding detection by those creatures. Then, at last, we broke free of the trees, and our destination lay before us.
Just not in any way we could have imagined.
“W-What… What is that?” Yaiba murmured, his voice hollow with disbelief.
No one, Gonbei included, could answer him.
Because before our eyes…
“What are those iron boxes…?” Tsukikage whispered.
Eikyō, just as Tsukikage had said, looked like a far grander version of the Shadow Village. But floating above the city were countless iron boxes, unmistakably resembling spacecraft.
That alone would have been shocking enough. Inside the city itself stood bizarre towers unlike anything this era should have been capable of producing. Pale blue lines of light ran across their surfaces, glowing faintly.
And there was not just one.
They were arranged at regular intervals, encircling the entire city.
The towers were so overtly science-fiction in design that they clashed violently with the surrounding streets, which still carried the unmistakable atmosphere of samurai and old Japan. The contrast was jarring to the point of absurdity.
“Y-Yaiba,” I asked carefully, partly to confirm my own sanity. “Those structures… were they there before?”
Still staring ahead, Yaiba slowly shook his head.
“N-No. They were not. Such things have never existed here… Never.”
“This is getting worse by the minute,” Al muttered. “This isn’t just an invasion from another continent. The gap is way too big. This looks like an entirely different world’s level of technology.”
She was right. Everything spread across Eikyō reeked of science fiction, of a civilization that simply did not belong on this planet.
If that’s the case, I thought, then those creatures really are beings from space, aren’t they?
I had not seen any other continents, so I could not say for certain. Still, if they truly possessed the power to construct structures like those, then it made little sense that they had never appeared on this continent before.
“For now, we enter Eikyō,” Yaiba said gravely. “Until we see it with our own eyes, this is impossible to believe.”
His reasoning made sense.
So, using what he described as a hidden passage, one he and the others had relied on when fleeing the capital, we slipped into Eikyō without incident.
Moving carefully, we kept ourselves concealed as we surveyed our surroundings. Just as expected, the strange creatures roamed the streets openly, yet not a single human was in sight.
More than that, now that we were close, there was no denying it. The towers that did not belong to this era, and the objects unmistakably resembling spacecraft, were very real.
“Gonbei-dono,” Yaiba asked quietly, eyes fixed on the sky, “those iron boxes above us…”
“Yeah…” Gonbei answered, bitterness heavy in his voice. “Those are warships. We’re killing ourselves just trying to build iron ships that float on the sea, and they already have iron ships that fly through the sky. Tell me, how are we supposed to fight an enemy like that?”
“There is no ‘how.’ You simply die.”
“!”
A distorted, mechanical-sounding voice echoed down from above us.
We snapped our gazes upward. Hovering in midair was one of the fishlike creatures that had attacked us before. But this one was different.
Until now, the creatures had been nothing but raw instinct, charging mindlessly without even a trace of reason. This being, however, had addressed us directly. It possessed clear intelligence.
Moreover, its body was clad in what looked like silver armor, sleek and unmistakably science fiction in design.
Faced with this new variant of the creature, Gonbei’s face drained of color, his body beginning to tremble.
“A-Ah… you are…” he whispered.
“I am not alone.”
“!”