It was several hours later that there was a change. Both Zenjirou and Yngvi, having already returned to their chairs, let out noises of confusion as the view outside the window was suddenly cut off. Earlier, they had tried out most of the other functions, turning the front, rear, and both sides partially transparent. They had been enjoying the ride while looking out at the scenery and sky, but it had all returned to the ash-gray color of the walls.
Reflexively, Zenjirou turned to look at the panel in the center of the sleigh. In the center of the panel itself were large words that said, “Control disabled,” and “Please be seated.”
Yngvi’s gaze seemed to have been dragged to the panel along with Zenjirou’s. “‘Control disabled,’ ‘please be seated’?”
“We’re probably near Utgard,” Zenjirou explained immediately. “So we can’t change things from inside now.”
Flights on Earth required you to put your seat belt on and turn off any electronics that you’d been allowed to use for the rest of the flight when it came to takeoff and landing, so it was probably a similar situation. The difference was that they’d been forcibly stopped from looking outside, but even Zenjirou could assume that this was to hide the exact location of Utgard. Yngvi was considerably more cunning, so he’d also have realized that.
“I see. Then let us wait peacefully.” His actions and posture—sitting still and upright in his chair—matched his words, but his expression was still filled with irrepressible excitement and joy.
About thirty minutes passed after the controls had been disabled before the panel finally changed to say, “Landing complete.” The slight sense of weightlessness had indicated to Zenjirou that they were coming in for a landing, even without being able to see outside.
“Have we stopped?” Yngvi asked, not entirely sure of the situation.
Zenjirou thought his words over before answering carefully. “Maybe? We might have landed but still be traveling on the ground.”
With the lack of visibility, it was hard to distinguish between being stationary and moving at a constant speed. The request to be seated had been replaced with “landing complete,” but the controls were still showing as disabled. Therefore, all they could do was guess blindly.
“In a sleigh, though?”
Zenjirou considered the comment. “Ah, right. It would be rather difficult to travel on Earth with a sleigh. I can’t feel any shaking, so even if we are moving, it might just be low-altitude flight. Something like floating just above the ground,” he suggested, holding his hands around ten centimeters apart to demonstrate. He was picturing the hover cars he had often seen in older sci-fi movies, vehicles that used some unknown mechanism to float and simply traveled in a straight line.
Indeed, the mechanism that the flight thus far had used was definitely unknown to them, so it wouldn’t be unthinkable. Then again, the “landing complete” notice would technically be false.
While he was considering that, the text saying that the controls had been disabled vanished, replaced by the previous array of five options.
“Brother.”
“Right.”
Zenjirou nodded slightly as his brother-in-law stared at him with eyes sparkling just like his second wife’s. He touched the panel to turn all four walls into windows. His eyes were immediately met by blinding white. The walls had become transparent, but white was the only thing they could see.
“Snowfields?” Zenjirou mumbled.
Yngvi responded, squinting against the glare from the reflected light. “It looks closer to ice than snow,” he commented. “They’re ice fields.”
An endless, flat expanse of white lay outside. Whichever of the four windows they looked through, all they could make out was paper-white ice as far as the eye could see.
“Oh, ice. Well, either way, I can see why they prefer sleighs over carriages,” Zenjirou replied.
“So can I.”
A sleigh would be far more efficient over the ice than a carriage. Despite being able to see that, there was still something bothering Zenjirou. “I can’t feel any swaying at all, so I suppose the sleigh really helps. Honestly, it more or less feels the same as when we were flying.”
His casual comment brought Yngvi back to his senses. “No, they really don’t. Normal sleighs bounce around even more than horse-drawn carriages. If you look—and can make it out from all the white—we’re on a maintained road,” he said, pointing out of the front window.
Zenjirou turned to look, straining his eyes. All he could see was that he was surrounded on all sides by white ice. The glare from the sun made it difficult to see, but his eyes gradually grew more used to it so that he could see the road Yngvi was talking about.
Their surroundings looked like a flat, featureless expanse at first. Closer inspection revealed ridges and trenches in the ice, their shadows barely visible. That was the surface of the ice field, and sliding over it would irregularly jolt the occupants of a sleigh. The one they were riding, however, wasn’t shifting at all, because the route it was taking was completely smooth. It was a line cut through the ice, unnaturally flat. It certainly qualified as a road.
“Incredible. Do you think they use magic to maintain it?” he asked.
“Probably. It would be possible to do it physically, but the effort required would be immense.”
As the two spoke, the view out of the front window finally showed something other than featureless ice. It was a black line, visible on the ice, right on the border between the white ground and blue sky, abruptly breaking the border between them.
“Is that a cliff face?” Zenjirou asked.
“It’s more like a fortification. Given how regular it is, it’s clearly man-made. I imagine Utgard lies behind it.” The excitement in Yngvi’s voice had grown even stronger.
“Its regularity? Yngvi, you can see that from here?”
“I can. My eyes aren’t as good as Freya’s, but they’re still sharp.”
“Huh, that’s incredible. Oh?”
As he spoke, Zenjirou felt that something was slightly wrong. His experiences since arriving in this world had made him learn that it was better to not ignore such feelings. So what was it? It was Yngvi saying that his eyes were good. Was he wrong about how good his eyes were? No. The prince could see that it was a man-made wall while Zenjirou could only see a dark line, so his eyes were definitely better than Zenjirou’s, at least. The true reason for Zenjirou’s sense of wrongness was set in stone with Yngvi’s next statement.
“It’s an extremely high wall, though. The ice makes it hard to judge exactly, but I’m sure it’s taller than our palace’s.”
“Oh, that’s it,” Zenjirou let slip.
“Uh? What’s it?” Yngvi asked.
“Something just felt off, and I figured out why. With how tall it is, it’s odd that we’d both notice it at the same time despite our differing eyesight. I don’t know if they’ve used magic or something else, but I think it’s hidden until you’re within a certain range.”
“Oh, I see,” he replied, tapping a palm with his fist.
They were currently in a sleigh with 360-degree visibility with nothing but flat ice in every direction. That meant that the wall itself would stick out and be visible from the horizon, in which case it was odd that Yngvi hadn’t noticed it first. All Zenjirou could make out was a murky shape above the horizon, but Yngvi had been looking straight ahead the entire time, so he should have seen it earlier. And yet, the two of them had noticed it at essentially the same time, which meant that something must have prevented Yngvi from seeing it until then.
“Incredible...” Yngvi breathed.
“It really is. I dread to think of the kind of spell it would have taken to hide something like that.”
Just as Yngvi thought, his praise, which had lacked a subject, had gone over his brother-in-law’s head, and he laughed in amusement.
The sleigh slid over the ice, approaching the massive wall. Metallic gray gates were open within it, and the sleigh passed through them. The gates seemed absurdly large to Zenjirou. The castle itself might be gargantuan, but did they need to scale the gates themselves up to match? They were tall enough that a mobile crane could have easily passed through them even with its boom extended.
“The gates move on their own as well,” Yngvi commented.
“Wouldn’t moving them physically be cruel?”
As far as he was concerned, moving them with brute strength alone would effectively be torture, but the prince shook his head.
“No. According to the histories from father, Utgard is inhabited by the descendants of giants,” he said, hinting at an explanation.
“Ah, so that’s why the gates are so large. I suppose it would make sense to move them manually, then. Uh...does that mean the representative we’re going to meet is a giant too?”
It felt foolish to ask after this long. Uppasala had given Zenjirou plenty of information on Utgard, including the truth of its ancestry. But saying “they are descended from giants” didn’t necessarily mean that it was still populated by giants. Descendants of giants and giants themselves were not necessarily the same thing. He had pictured exceptionally tall humans, but considering the scale of those gates, the giants would have been big enough to treat African elephants like lapdogs.
“Who knows? The records are at least a century old, so they are not too credible, but the depictions of their envoys were not exceptionally large.”
Zenjirou nodded at his words as the sleigh slid to a stop. “We’re here?” he asked.
“I would wager we will be switching over to that,” Yngvi said, pointing out of the window. There was a vehicle waiting, pulled by two large reindeer like the sleigh. However, this one was a carriage with four wheels beneath it.
Although outside the gate lay an endless expanse of ice, the same did not hold true for the inside. It made sense when Zenjirou thought about it. Less snow and ice would make life far easier.
While he was considering that, the door opened by itself. The wind that whistled in through the door was obviously going to be colder than Capua’s with its position in the Southern Continent, but it was also far colder than even Uppasala in the north.
“Brr, it feels like the middle of winter all right.”
“It doesn’t feel quite so cold to me,” Yngvi commented. “It’s definitely colder than Uppasala, though. Let’s hurry to the carriage.”
“Let’s,” Zenjirou agreed, easily ducking out. They didn’t really have enough with them to call it “luggage.”
“Watch your step,” Yngvi warned him.
“I will. It’s definitely slippery.”
The pair walked diagonally from the sleigh and climbed into the carriage pulled by the reindeer.