Duplicate key.
“…Oh!” He let out a small cry and opened his storage once more. He scrolled through the item list rather than the Enhanced Armament and quickly closed it after finding what he was looking for. “It’s not Fufuan, but I know a safe place.”
Chiyuri nodded without asking where, and she crouched. She brought her face close to Taupe Cape, who was still hanging her head, and began to speak in a quiet voice.
Before too long, she helped Taupe to her feet and looked at Haruyuki. Apparently, Taupe had accepted the proposal.
In which case, they needed to move from this place. Their destination, the Mejirodai area of Bunkyo Ward, wasn’t even two kilometers as the crow flies, but it was far too dangerous to go on foot with the thoroughly spent Taupe Cape. That said, however, the emotional weight of embracing an F-type avatar—a girl he’d just met—and flying there was too great.
This is no time for being a big shy baby, Haruyuki scolded himself.
“Excuse me,” he said, going around behind Chiyuri and Taupe standing side by side, and he wrapped an arm around each of them at the same time. He made sure he had a good hold before he deployed the wings on his back.
Since his flight ability had been strengthened by two, he tried to go easy on the vibration of them, but even still, this meager force generated a gravitational acceleration on par with a drop-of-doom type amusement park attraction, and he hurried to cut back his output. If it had been only Chiyuri he was carrying, he might have taken decisive action and executed a super-high-speed challenge with no advance warning whatsoever, but it would have been inappropriate to give free rein to this sort of mischievousness at this moment.
He ascended to just a little higher than the range of the rocky mountains lining the gorge, before shifting to hovering. If he was going to prioritize evading Enemies, then he should get more altitude, but he was worried about the missing Urocyon and Complicator. Urocyon had promised to let Haruyuki leave if he could survive for five minutes and to let the portal stay buried until midnight on July 28, but he’d said nothing about not attacking if he encountered him in some other place.
Thus, Haruyuki hung in the air at an altitude of about thirty meters, where he was hard to spot from the ground as he felt around for the presence of Enemies.
“…So this is the flight ability,” Taupe Cape murmured, from where she was held against him, not hiding her admiration. But this was quickly followed by an unexpected question. “Why didn’t you use it in your duel against Zel this morning?”
“Umm…” He called up his memories of the battle that now seemed like the long-distant past. “Zelkova was expecting me to come flying in, so I approached on the ground and got him to let his guard down from above.”
“Oh. Huh. Makes sense.” Taupe nodded and fell silent once more.
Haruyuki wasn’t sure whether or not to add that it definitely wasn’t because he hadn’t taken Zelkova Verger too seriously, but eventually he went back to enemy detection without saying anything. After confirming there were no Enemies or avatars in the area, he lightly vibrated his wings.
He headed toward the southwest in a horizontal gliding movement, like sliding through the air. He slipped past Ecomuse Town towering over the landscape and flew slowly as he looked to the gorge of Otowa Street on his left, when low ground with too many small rocks to count came into view up ahead. The real world’s Zoshigaya Cemetery.
Since annoying, dead spirit-type Enemies occasionally lurked in places like this, he decided against passing directly overhead and instead detoured to the south. From there, he flew in a straight line and descended to the ground in front of a single massive rock more than two hundred meters wide.
He put on the brakes immediately before the feet of Taupe Cape and Lime Bell touched the earth and stayed there motionless for a second before letting go of them. Once they had both planted their feet on the hard stone, he let out a short sigh and looked straight ahead.
The single stone building blocking the way was a five-star hotel with a nearly 100-year history in the real world. In front of it was a lake boasting clear water, unusual for a Wasteland stage.
“…Is this really it?” Chiyuri looked dubious.
Haruyuki replied in the affirmative before opening his storage again. He pulled out the item he’d found earlier and let it dangle from his right hand.
“Follow me,” he told the two girls, approaching the water’s edge, and then kept on walking. The lake was extremely shallow, maybe not even five centimeters deep.
When the three of them had advanced ten meters or so, sending ripples spreading outward across the tranquil water’s surface, fog began to suddenly drift up around them, growing thicker in the blink of an eye until it eventually painted his entire field of view a singular white.
He nodded at Chiyuri making nervous sounds and Taupe Cape standing next to her, before brandishing the item hanging from his right hand, a large key with a decorative blue string tied to it. When he shook it lightly, the cool ting of a bell rang out, despite the fact that there was no bell attached to it.
Instantly, the white fog parted, and the proud gate to a Japanese-style manor with a tiled roof appeared. Haruyuki looked back again and said, “This is Oumutei… Centaurea Sentry’s house.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Haruyuki had been given the duplicate key to Oumutei by Centaurea Sentry four days earlier in real time, right before the mission to attack the Sun God Inti. He’d said that he wanted to have more time for his sword training, and Sentry had thought about it for a mere three seconds before handing him the key and telling him he could take whatever he wanted from the kitchen.
He should really have given the key back right after the Inti mission was over, but because of the succession of unpredictable developments like the appearance of Tezcatlipoca and Haruyuki’s Legion transfer, he had completely forgotten about it.
He hadn’t had any contact with Master Sentry for three days now, not since the regrettable failure of the mission to rescue Silver Crow. He wondered if she was perhaps staying at Oumutei as he slipped through the manor gates, but the large samurai house was silent. There was no hint of any person’s presence. Not knowing whether he was disappointed or relieved, he opened the front door.
“Hello!” he called out, just in case, and then led the girls first to the kitchen. He opened a fridge disguised as a set of shelves, and found that the inside was mostly taken up by bottles of sake. He dug out three bottles of the only nonalcoholic drink—carbonated water meant for mixing with the sake, apparently—and set them down on the table in the center of the room.
“If you’d rather have regular water, there’s a well in the garden,” he said as he did so.
“This is great, thank you,” Taupe Cape quickly replied from where she sat on a chair, and she twisted the cap off. Perhaps she was excessively thirsty—she had no sooner brought the bottle to her lips than she had gulped down the whole half-liter bottle in one go.
As he watched this out of the corner of his eye, he opened the other refrigerator. This one was stuffed with all kinds of food and crammed with tea cakes, but only Sentry knew how to serve them. Thinking they probably wouldn’t go very well with fizzy water, he pulled a slab of expensive-looking yokan jelly wrapped in bamboo sheathing out from the back of the fridge.
He opened the wrapping and cut the twenty-five-centimeter yokan log into four pieces with a knife. He put one slice on his plate and one on Chiyuri’s, the other two on Taupe Cape’s plate, added bamboo skewers he found in the kitchen, and then returned to the table.
Sitting directly across from him, Taupe pressed her hands together and thanked him before cutting one slice into another four parts with the skewer. She ate one piece slowly now, as if truly savoring what went into her mouth.
Just as Haruyuki realized he was also hungry and picked up his own skewer, a drop of water fell with a splsh onto Taupe Cape’s plate. For a second, he thought the roof was leaking, but Oumutei wasn’t that cheaply built, and anyway, it didn’t rain in a Wasteland stage.
The source of the water drop was Taupe’s eye lens. A new droplet spilled out from her left eye, trickled down her face mask turned toward the table, and dropped onto the plate. But Taupe didn’t move to wipe her eyes; she simply continued to eat one bite after the other.
Haruyuki also cut a piece of his own yokan slice and brought it to his mouth. A rich yet refreshing sweetness spread out over his tongue, followed by the simple flavor of the azuki bean the jelly was made of. It had probably cost an arm and a leg in the shop, but he was sure that Centaurea Sentry wouldn’t be mad at them for eating it.
So the three of them silently ate, and Taupe Cape kept crying.