"Watching you was starting to feel stifling, so I came out, kid."
The Ferryman—or the woman—said.
"Am I dead?"
Enkrid asked back. He'd been fighting, then opened his eyes and was here. His instinct said no, but it was a question thrown out to confirm.
"No."
The woman shook her head. Her braided hair moved. It didn't sway softly—if you looked at how it swung heavily to the side in a sharp whoosh, a reasonable suspicion rose that she might use even her braid as a weapon.
"Then?"
"Let's say I stretched time for a moment to meet you."
If he tried to nitpick, it would become a story without end.
Enkrid stopped trying to understand and looked at her. What was this woman's purpose in coming out?
The Ferryman—or the woman—didn't drag things out by circling around.
"Want to learn something from me?"
Straight to the point. At those words, Enkrid's ears twitched. He wasn't a fairy, yet the muscles of his ears moved on their own. That was how tempting it sounded.
"You crazy bastard—looks like learning one thing is more exciting to you than your situation right now."
The content was a rebuke, but her expression looked intrigued. A woman who was part of the Ferryman. He didn't know if she'd come with good intentions, but what she'd just said did whet his appetite.
Even without an answer, Enkrid's will to learn was like an anchor dropped deep into the unconscious.
He answered with his eyes, and the female Ferryman spoke with her usual hearty grin.
"It's time to accept the result of the action you chose, mortal. You're wondering if this is the right answer, aren't you? Sorry, but the right answer is something you have to prove with your actions. That's my first piece of advice."
If you chose, then take responsibility and see it through.
That was what it meant.
The woman raised a finger and touched Enkrid's forehead. Her hand was warm. Even if this was an illusion, that was how it felt.
"Look."
A memory seeped in. More precisely, it was a memory delivered by the woman who was part of the Ferryman.
Enkrid became her inside that memory. There was no moment where everything scattered like grains of sand. The surroundings simply changed all at once.
He saw several people whose faces were hidden. It was hard to even make out their clothing. All he knew was that the people before him were comrades—and that they were in the middle of fighting an enemy.
The memory seeped in and spoke about the present.
"Damn it, we took the wrong way."
"A colossus is coming in."
"■■■■, what are you going to do?"
A name? The address part didn't come through. Instead, he felt her mindset.
'We're screwed.'
Huh?
Outwardly she looked calm, but inside she wasn't.
'But what can we do? We're already here.'
You just go.
This woman was more brute-minded than he'd expected.
"Hey, this is the best option. If we'd gone the other way earlier, we'd be even more swarmed. Fight!"
The Ferryman—no, the female knight—shouted. Enkrid understood who the Ferryman was now.
They were a collective. People swallowed by today's curse. Meaning, once upon a time, they too repeated today. They used that to fight, and lived their today.
Thunk!
She leveled the spearhead forward. She dashed ahead and split apart a monster called a colossus—something more than five times her size.
"Burn it!"
Burn, smash, split. That was how they dealt with "Root." Of course, this method only succeeded in part.
At first, burning it with fire worked well, but at some point the Root bastards resisted flame. That made it a headache.
Enkrid acquired a few more pieces of information.
'Root's specialty is mimicry and creation.'
They look at the enemy, learn, then make monsters as if stamping them out to fit their mold. If you use fire, they make monsters with resistance to flame and fight.
'No. That's wrong.'
The voice inside split. Instinct seized the error.
'It doesn't give birth to monsters or make them.'
Inside the memory, Enkrid looked straight at the enemy's true nature.
'Everything is one.'
A colony is a swarm. That's a form where countless individuals gather and follow a leader.
'But it isn't Root.'
This was the opposite.
What this woman was fighting wasn't a colony. It was a single monster. One individual had changed into the shape of a swarm.
In other words, it was a demon that had turned into the Demon-lands itself. A trait comparable to the six—no, now five—lords of those Demon-lands, you could say.
If the heat-bearing companion had shown a trait of splitting itself and moving here and there, seeking hosts.
'Root is all, and yet one.'
Root was a monster—an evil thing—that evolved into a swarm-form.
Outside the memory, the ones Enkrid had been fighting and the one he was seeing now looked different, but at the fundamental level they resembled each other.
The Will was one, and under it they fought. They acted as if they were all a single connected whole.
'These are hands and feet.'
A monster with fin-like things attached and stabbing in a lump that resembled a trident was a form he'd never seen before, but—
'A roundhouse.'
The way that monster swung a spear with one hand, twisted its waist on a slant, aimed for the blind spot of its field of view, and drove in a second spear was similar to what he'd seen outside the memory.
The shape was different, but the meaning inside it was the same. Looking at the spearhead of that monster now, Enkrid recalled the enemies he'd fought. Along with that thought, information rising from the unconscious accelerated and drew out a conclusion.
The Demon-lands Silence was the past of the monster called "Root." The monster Root mimicked and remade its own body, building its territory.
'That's how it survived.'
It sent out colossi, sensed a limit, died, and prepared what came next.
At that time, Root hid its true body, and since it hadn't yet reached the level of a Demon-lands, it was only called a moving swarm.
Time in the memory flowed without rest. He couldn't see every fight. It was more like it paused only at important moments so he could look around.
The carriage kept running, yet at intervals it seemed to stop with a ridiculous force.
Then when it started again, everything swept past with no process of acceleration at all.
"Who will you save?"
Someone's question struck his ear.
'I couldn't answer.'
It wasn't Enkrid speaking—it was another self.
A moment came where only one of the two could be saved. A horrible moment of choice. Even if you insisted it was right, an unchanging truth came creeping in, filled with dread.
The female Ferryman chose. Because of that, someone died.
Heh heh heh—some Ferryman mocked "me."
"Aaaah!"
A wail of grief burst out.
A wife who lost her husband cried. A husband who lost his wife cried. A child who lost their parents cried. Parents who lost their child cried.
It was horrific. Miserable. In that agony, the Ferryman pressed for today's repetition.
"Try enduring again. Keep enduring like that."
I will. She gritted her teeth and rose.
'Somehow.'
She struggled.
She replayed what she'd realized right before giving up, but does that bring the dead back alive?
'Was my choice right?'
She suffered. In the memories Enkrid perceived, he didn't see the moment she gave up.
Instead—what filled his mind vividly was the memory of honing the technique of handling Will to the extreme.
The spearhead she swung against a colossus that withstood fire.
Breaking and smashing them one by one didn't balance out. Compared to her stamina, there were far too many colossi she had to kill and erase.
'What do I do?'
She wandered, searching for a method. Holding her spear and enduring among dead comrades, she advanced one step at a time.
It was one scene in the memory. Kneeling, she gripped a spear thick enough to be murderous in her right hand, using it as a support. Then she lifted the head she'd been bowing. In her eyes, a fierce light gathered.
She was the finisher who ended what historians call "the Age of Colossi."
"Now I get it."
The her in the memory muttered. Before he knew it, his body had separated from hers. Enkrid watched her from one step away.
A woman. A Ferryman. A knight who lived through the Age of Colossi.
She lingered, briefly, in the memories of the past.
She'd realized far too late, but she found a way to deal with the enemy. However, her mind was worn down too much. Knowing that, she completed only the technique and threw away her life.
More precisely, you could say her talent completed the technique on its own.
With vacant eyes, she reviewed what she'd learned and realized, and in a single day finished the technique.
If she focused on fighting, she didn't have to recall lost comrades and dead people, so she spent what remained as a berserker.
And that was how she ended her life—killing what she assumed was Root's true body. Then she shut herself inside a prison wrapped in the darkness of the abyss.
After that final moment passed, she forgot herself, floating and wandering. She existed only as a part of the Ferryman.
Then her memory awakened.
You could say that while watching an interesting bastard, she suddenly remembered who she truly was.
A story that meant nothing to a mortal even if he knew it.
"Now I know, you bastards."
Along with the sound of the woman in the memory muttering again—
Clang—
The woman's figure, head lifted, split and shattered. Enkrid saw the broken fragments crumble and scatter, becoming a single person. Before he knew it, he was standing again in the forest clearing.
"If you changed a property, you should be applying it too, right?"
She came out and spoke. Enkrid understood what she meant to convey. There was no need to struggle for it—hadn't she told him directly through the memory?
It was the applied course for property change.
Still, a thought came to him. Hadn't he already been applying it?
Maybe she'd read that, because she lifted the corners of her mouth and laughed. It was still that hearty grin.
And now, through that smile alone, he also knew that it was an attempt to hide the fragile self inside by showing confidence.
Mixing laughter into her voice, she said:
"Clumsy, kid. Second lesson. Learn it. It was my specialty. Property change—'Wave.'"
Enkrid had skimmed the other's memory, so it was like he'd already experienced it once with his body.
"Go on. Do it."
A demonstration wouldn't be needed. The Ferryman expected it, and Enkrid did not indulge that expectation.
"Hup."
It didn't work. He slid his sword and set it against the spear-like wooden rod the woman held. The rod that should have rippled and burst with Wave trembled, then stopped.
"I told you to do it, didn't I?"
The Ferryman said again.
It was a dream, but he had plenty of experience training in a place like this. So the gap in sensation from reality wouldn't be the problem.
The core was understanding the principle and using it.
"Is your talent seriously the worst? How does a guy who's a knight and even learned Indules still suck this badly?"
After dozens of similar attempts and failures, the Ferryman said.
Enkrid ignored her and repeated it endlessly. He tried to digest what she'd taught him.
"This is really dizzying. You've survived this long somehow? The Goddess of Fortune must really love you."
Hearing complaints here and there, he learned something new like that.
If refusing to give up was also a weapon, Enkrid was someone fighting while holding the continent's best weapon.
'It's similar to what Ragna did to me.'
After fighting Aspen, Enkrid recalled how Ragna had used a technique similar to this in sparring—and he had blocked it with Wavebreaker.
"Don't compare some half-baked grapple to my 'Wave.'"
The female Ferryman said. Enkrid agreed.
'At the knight level, everyone can use a bit of it.'
Sword Echo, more or less. A technique that spreads a wave through the weapon's vibration.
Ragna had used vibration and wave to heighten the cutting power of his sword.
'If you go further, it's also possible to shake the opponent's whole body through vibration.'
You dig into the concept of Wave and open a new path. What the female Ferryman showed was further beyond even that.
'This Wave—if it touches, it breaks.'
He changed the Will inside his body into water, then shook it. He transmitted that vibration into the opponent and detonated it. Unless you countered with Will of a similar level, you collapsed.
She was forcing Will's transformation to that level. Over and over, Enkrid repeated the process of taking what he'd grasped with his head and performing it with his body.
'This is fun.'
The female Ferryman thought that. The man before her kept thinking and repeating attempts without end. At no moment did he stop thinking, and he didn't stop moving either. If his Will ran dry, he would sink. Then it would be over. But that never happened.
'He doesn't know how to give up.'
She'd seen it many times, but she watched it again with fresh enjoyment.
The current Enkrid looked like a beast that had starved for months finally taking the tastiest prey. In other words, he looked damn good.
What she'd borrowed was a crack in time. A meeting that happened inside accelerated thought.
As the price, until the moment the Ferryman gave up everything, she would lose her "right to speak."
"Are you giving up time for nothing but this kind of play?"
Another Ferryman asked.
To the Ferryman, there was no joy other than watching. Wishing for a moment like this while even giving up cognitive ability was stupidity.
In the light spilled by a purple lamp, the gray hide of a face was revealed. Without even turning around, the woman said:
"Yeah. I believe it's worth it."
"Another foolish choice."
Hearing the rebuke, she closed her eyes. Her time was coming to an end. The small space that had wedged itself into a crack of accelerated thought was closing.
"I learned well."
Only then did Enkrid say it—having finally, more or less, grasped how to use the technique.
"Yeah. See you again."
They would meet again. Someday, they would face each other again. The woman believed that.
With those words, Enkrid opened his eyes again.
The moment he opened them, he saw Dunbakel's lips. Pushing away that face that had come right up close with his hand, he said:
"If you're going to wake Sleeping Beauty's prince with a kiss, shouldn't you at least be a beauty?"
"That's not what it was. I was about to bite you."
"If the fairy saw that, it'd be a death sentence."
Enkrid said, pushing himself up. How long had he been out? It hadn't been that long.
If you asked why he thought so—
"You get sleepy and you just sleep?"
Rem was still cracking jokes, wasn't he.
In the dream, Enkrid had peeked into memories, recognized what the opponent was, and even mastered a technique to face them.
"My sword?"
"Up ahead."
They'd been pushed back and forced to retreat by the giant monster horde. Enkrid couldn't see Night.
Well, if it was somewhere on the ground up ahead, he could just pick it up. Enkrid tightened the fastener on the monster-scale gauntlets he'd worn instead of the thousand gauntlets.
It was the moment he needed Audin's way of fighting.