“...ya! Kariya!”
I was startled awake by the prince’s low, urgent hissing. A sweetness lingered in my mouth—he must have tipped a status recovery potion down my throat.
I was lying on a blanket in the middle of the campground. Wald was kneeling beside me—his expression softened slightly with relief once I had opened my eyes.
A thick fog blanketed our immediate surroundings. It was so dense that I couldn’t see anything past the prince.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. Everything was already like this when I woke up. And since I was able to wake but you weren’t, I think this fog must be causing your unusual slumber.”
Oh, right.
His words reminded me of the Royal Diadem resting on his upper arm—a royal Heraldry that gave him impregnable defense against any sort of mental interference. While I hadn’t been able to resist the effects of the fog and had ended up sleeping like a log, it must not have affected the prince at all.
We had made camp in the woods. If this fog were only a morning mist, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it. But this was far more insidious.
I took stock of our current circumstances. “Looks like there’s been a realm merger,” I said.
“I thought so,” the prince quietly agreed.
A number of different realms had existed in Golden Dawn. Some were parallel worlds to the one people played in and were mainly used for running events, but it was possible to randomly encounter a number of spirit worlds as well.
The Realm of Spirits.
The Realm of the Dead.
The Realm of the Gods.
In the Central Nations, it was relatively common to encounter the first of those, but the last one was more often found in the edgelands.
Considering how relatively calm the prince was, these realm mergers must have been somewhat commonplace in this world as well. But something was off.
“I don’t see any of the horses around,” the prince then whispered to me.
“Maybe the fog is just too thick to see them. I can still sense their presence, so I don’t think any of them have left the barrier— Ah!”
“Bayards!” the prince and I exclaimed in unison.
This must’ve been the work of bayards. These weren’t monsters, but horses sporting void-black coats that dwelled in the spirit realm.
Sometimes, when the world of Golden Dawn merged with the Realm of Spirits, bayards would pass through the boundary between worlds at dawn in search of a mate. Were they to find a horse they wished to court, they would deceive the owner into thinking the time was still night. A bayard would steal away their partner-to-be under the mists of slumber.
“Shit,” I muttered. I could definitely tell the horses were still nearby, somewhere beyond the mist. The prince must’ve quickly woken them up.
Pulling a Sevenstrike Bow from my storage, I conjured a burst of wind and blasted the fog away from us.
As the mist quickly parted, I could see the horses, all gathered near the edge of the barrier. Standing just on the other side was a herd of magnificent black horses.
Suddenly, the white mare turned to look at me.
The bayards couldn’t enter the barrier. The horses would have to leave the barrier of their own volition, so the bayards must’ve been trying to lure her out.
A strikingly handsome bayard called to her, distracted as she was by my sudden appearance. The emotion in his voice was heartrending.
“Oh, fair maiden... Leave your master and cross into the glorious realm of spirits. I swear I shall bring you happiness, my darling,” the black horse crooned.
“Don’t think you can hit on a man’s horse and steal her away, damn you!” I shouted as I loosed an arrow.
The bayard gracefully sidestepped it with ease.
Damn S-rank ghost horses.
Although we both sat on the same S-tier, my forte was technically in crafting, so I wasn’t surprised that my combat skills were lacking compared to the bayard. That probably should’ve been obvious, though, considering its fog had knocked me clean out.
But I was superior when it came to the quality of my craftsmanship. They wouldn’t be able to break through my barrier as a result. That was why the bayard had opted for seduction tactics in an effort to have her leave the barrier herself.
Out of convenience, the powers that be (or, in other words, Golden Dawn’s development team) had made the denizens of the spirit realm speak the same language as ordinary humans. That was why I could hear every last lady-killing line the bayard could muster. This horse needed to shut up with his passionately sticky love letter!
“Hey, packhorse!” I yelled, interrupting the bayard.
“How dare you, knave! I am the one hundred and thirty-ninth prince of my sire, the king, I’ll have you know! You have no right to speak to royalty with such a foul mouth!” he whinnied back.
“We’ve got a prince over here too, and he’s next in line for the throne! So get off your high horse, you one hundred and thirty-ninth prince of losers!”
Creatures of the spirit world here were conceptually similar to the spiritual gods that inhabited all things in Shinto. For them, noble blood commanded both power and respect—or, at least, I thought they did. And, if I recalled correctly, they deeply revered things that had no physical form, like social rank and contracts.
This was the first time in my new life that I’d ever encountered a realm merger, so my recollection of how they were set up in Golden Dawn was fuzzy to say the least. (And the things I remembered were just from a strategy site. I’ve never run into a random event like this before!)