I nodded, relieved. If Tsukuyomi was right, then our true goal hadn’t been uncovered yet. The enemies weren’t worried about me and were letting their guards down. I’d lived with the bastard for over ten years, so I knew his general personality. I was making a show of acting sketchy around Abrasil, so it would definitely be a problem if he didn’t let his guard down. From his perspective, this would be a blade from another dimension, a suprarational hit.
I never would’ve been able to achieve this without the Transport Gate. I could only be grateful to Ms. Kaori for not clueing the other guilds in on it.
“I’m counting on you.” I grinned.
“I know. You just focus on your work over there. You won’t be able to fight with the Lions of Patriotism if you don’t find out where they are.”
“Okay, I’m gonna hang up now.”
“Wait, Shinobu.”
“Hm? Yeah?”
“Since you’re calling me on a moonlit night, why don’t you try calling my sister during a sunny day?”
She started giggling as soon as the words left her mouth. She was probably joking about how she was the goddess of the moon and Amaterasu the sun, but I didn’t understand why that was so funny.
I sighed and looked at Gabriel next to her.
“Heh heh. Heh heh...” Gabriel was chuckling too. “Amaterasu on a sunny day... I didn’t think Tsukuyomi would get me like this... Heh heh ha ha hah!” She was laughing hard enough that her shoulders were shuddering.
I thought you were staying silent on purpose! Was it really so funny that it broke your mask?!
Beside me, Alice looked just as confused as I did as to what they were laughing about. Oh, good. It’s just my summons with a weird sense of humor. I sighed in relief.
†
The Lions of Patriotism’s Agartha Expedition Leader, Taiga Kagura
Floor 3 of Agartha, in the attack team’s base camp
Inside the dark tent, I gazed at the steam rising from my coffee while lounging on the bed.
I don’t believe in anything but American dollars.
I wondered when that became my catchphrase. Probably when I was a mercenary in Europe and my entire unit, comprising foreigners, was thrown away as a scapegoat during a mission. The moment I realized that our lives were cheaper than paper, I punched my superior and left the team. If I was going to put my life on the line, then I would need something of equal value in return, simple as that.
Since then, I had worked as a bodyguard for the mafia and yakuza, and even took on assassination jobs. Anything with a good enough reward.
Even when working in Japan, I requested to be paid in American dollars. They all thought I was weird because of that.
But money was my faith, and the dollar was my god.
Before I started worshipping the dollar, there was only one reason I’d been a mercenary: I’d always been bored of daily life. I lived with fog in my head all the time. I could liken myself to being in a video game, controlling a character called “me” from a higher perspective.
I couldn’t feel alive. I couldn’t get serious about anything.
My daily life was that boring, like a sepia-tinted dream, as if it were someone else’s problem. I was just killing time until death. That was my life.
But a turning point would interrupt that daily routine.
When I was in middle school, I ended up in a bank that was being robbed and was taken as one of many hostages with the barrel of a gun thrust at my head. For the first time in my life, I felt my life put in danger.
No... I don’t want to die...
That was all I could think for a good minute, so I don’t really remember what happened. What I did remember was what happened after I was shot in the shoulder, then pinned down by the robber.
After I stole the handgun from him and blasted all the bullets into his head, the memories from my new life began.
Bathed in his blood, with extreme pain in my shoulder, I thought...
Ah, I feel so...alive.
But as soon as my usual daily life started up again, the fog in my head returned.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that I couldn’t feel alive if I wasn’t toeing the line of death.
After that, I registered with the foreign mercenary unit, then returned to Japan postfallout.
As it turned out, making a living through violence in the world of outlaws wasn’t that fulfilling of a reason to stand on the brink of death. If the way of the outlaw was to eat the weak, then most of their work would involve fighting—you guessed it—the weak.
Life became empty yet again. The same sepia days I’d lived during my school years, where I controlled a game character in third person. I could barely handle it. Maybe that was why I ended up addicted to video games again, like I was when I was young.
And then, four hundred years ago, that incident changed everything.
I was confused upon arriving in the world of La Vita Online. It didn’t take long for the player killings to begin in several areas, when I’d be allowed to dance as wildly as I wanted.
You see, most of my time in the mercenary unit was spent training, hardly ever having been deployed for actual battle. The brink of death simply wasn’t common in that day and age on Earth.
In this world, however, it was everywhere.
In this world, I can get as close to death as I want.
I could put people’s respect for me on the line, my entire existence on the line, and throw myself into whatever challenge I wanted.
When those first player killings happened, I was living with every fiber of my being.
The others were killing for Clan Coins to get home with, but I wrapped myself in the fray, aiming for the killings themselves. I’d even come face-to-face with the beast called Tatsuya Mikagami and fought him as much as I could.
I’d go so far as to call that period my golden age.
Unfortunately, it came to an end.
The player killers who’d won left La Vita Online, and even Tatsuya Mikagami, who I’d only ended up in a draw with, disappeared into thin air.
The next three hundred years were nothing but hell.
The only people remaining were those who didn’t choose to kill other players. Nothing but a bunch of cowards. I was left dejected. They wouldn’t even grind to the level cap, only leveling up just enough to put a safe margin between them and the natives. Then came the gentleman’s pact or whatever between the five grand guilds, who agreed to not opt for war unless absolutely necessary.
My head fogged up once more.
I aligned myself with Imabayashi’s faction. If I wasn’t able to live near death and my head had to be filled with mist, then I was at least going to worship my god, the American dollar.
A voice from outside my tent broke my reverie.
“Mr. Kagura, come inspect this.”
†
“Seems fine to me.”
A giant hole stood smack-dab in the middle of the grand forest. After cutting down the trees, a hole five hundred meters wide and thirty meters deep was dug. I nodded at it.
Inside the hole were a million zombies, which made for an extravagant scene. It reminded me of a cauldron full of the dead.
“How did all these zombies end up outside after escaping?”
“The hole probably wasn’t deep enough at the time. Eugh, it’s gross no matter how many times I see it.” I sighed deeply after mumbling.
“We can’t complain, though,” my subordinate noted. “These are our battle weapons for getting through Agartha.”
“Are we really going to use a hundred thousand zombies during the seventh floor? Only so much fuel consumption should be allowed.”
“There’s nothing we can do. It’s the safest method available to us. Thanks to it, our main job is just to guard the zombies as they make their way through. We’ll be safe.”
Safe. There’s that word again.
Though to be fair, brinks of death involving monsters didn’t excite me, so I preferred the safe method in cases like these.
Humans and monsters... I was always thinking about how different the values of their lives were from one another. Probably because I considered monsters to just be game data.
“Imabayashi sure is crazy.” I purposefully averted my eyes from the mess below.
“Ha ha. You’re the only one who can say his name without an honorific, Mr. Kagura. You’re incredible.”
“Those’re just the terms of my contract.”
I looked back down at the zombies. They were all humans Imabayashi had kidnapped from around the world, including demihumans. Before they were sent here, he’d had necromancers turn them into zombies with magic.
The reason it was important for them to become our weapons was because they were all Zombie Sorcerers—the lowest form of undead-type mage zombies. Naturally, they couldn’t use high-grade magic.
That was the point, though. All we needed them to use was Grade 1: Magic Ball. This spell would only do one or two points of damage, but get this: those numbers were fixed. In other words, if a million zombies used that spell all at once, they’d deal one or two million damage. No matter how evil the monsters were in Agartha, none of them had over a hundred thousand HP up until now.
This had been our method for getting through Agartha, and it had been a surefire one.
Which was why we were completely stumped when Ouroboros on Floor 7 revealed itself to have two hundred thousand HP.
Thankfully for us, Imabayashi continuously sent us more of these damage dealers from La Vita. He was probably causing an uproar by doing so, since he was most likely making entire populations from villages, towns, or even cities disappear.
But even for our high-level necromancers, it was difficult for them to hide tens of thousands of zombies in their shadows. Imabayashi’s current headache was the wasting of Keys to Agartha due to the zombie transportation.
That aside, this zombie attack was an all-purpose plan. Normally, level 100 tanks would have around ten thousand HP, which gave them a massive advantage during PvP.
“I just don’t like this method.” I couldn’t hide my disdain.