chapter01 · 019-ep18

Episode 18: Trying Everything Out Where Nobody's Around

The day after that, I was out in Minato Ward.

The place: Nanyo-cho. Sticking out west of the city proper, it's nothing but rice paddies and fields. Hard to believe it counts as Nagoya City.

My target: the Nanyo dungeon. D-rank, recommended level up to 100.

I checked the app — apparently hardly anyone comes here. The reason's simple: it's far from the station. Fifteen minutes by bus, then another ten on foot from the stop.

D-ranks pay decently, but few people bother coming all the way out here. Between D-ranks, the subway-reachable Chikusa is just more convenient.

But for someone who can't afford to be seen, it's prime real estate.

When I arrived, it was beyond anything I'd imagined. A single black door standing on asphalt sandwiched between paddies and empty lots, a fence and an authentication gate, and that's about it. Not a soul around — just two bicycles in the bike rack.

"Perfect!"

I shouted, and nobody turned. Correction: there was nobody around to turn in the first place.

I held my card to the gate, the authentication tone chimed, and the door opened.

Now that I'm D-rank, D-rank doors open for me. Obvious, sure — but the feeling is amazing. Yesterday, right after hanging up on Shibasaki-san's call, I did a little fist pump in the middle of the underground mall. That's how good it feels.

Inside, there was the sound of water.

I'd braced for rock passages; what I got were damp earthen ones. Moss on the walls, water dripping from the ceiling. The pale-blue glow apparently comes from the moss.

Different from Chikusa, different from Kanayama. Same D-rank, and the inside is a completely different world.

I touched the moss — cool to the touch, and the very spot I touched lit up too.

This is the good stuff. Every dungeon is different, down to the last detail. If there's anywhere on the surface you can get this, I'd honestly like to hear about it.

Five minutes down the empty passage, I ducked into a dead-end side path. Prep happens here.

Out of my bag came yesterday's cloak, spread open. Black, below-knee, deep hood. Just spreading it out felt like the air got heavier.

Draped on, the hem swayed around my ankles; pulling up the hood dropped the top half of my vision into shadow.

This works. This definitely works.

I drew a deep breath.

"—Before the kalpa's dawn I came, and past its end I remain."

The voice rang down the damp passage. All five lines, straight through to the end.

Bangs lengthen, vision recedes. The world's motion slows, just a little.

I peered into a puddle. A deep-hooded shadow in a black cloak — and beneath it, only the left eye glowing white.

The face is almost invisible. Invisible, sure — and it's STILL exactly the drawing from back then.

Well, can't be helped at this point. That's what I was about to say.

"—Nay. This is inevitable."

THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT! And what's "inevitable" supposed to mean? Don't talk like this outfit was decided before I was born.

Good thing nobody's here — a guy having a fight with his own mouth is, to any passerby, just a weirdo.

First thing to verify: time.

When I measured before, staying silent lasted twenty minutes. But that was at Lv 20, and I'm Lv 68 now.

I started the stopwatch on my phone and shut my mouth.

Ten minutes — no fade. Twenty minutes — no fade.

Past the thirty-minute mark, I gave up waiting. Honestly? Bored. Thirty minutes of standing there in silence turns out to be way longer than you'd think.

At minimum it's no longer twenty minutes; by feel, it would hold close to a full hour. No more worrying about it cutting out mid-fight.

...No, wait.

If silence holds for an hour, doesn't that mean one hour where I don't have to speak? In public too — announce the name, then just stay quiet. I'll get weaker, but staying silent lowers the odds of the chuunibyou being spotted.

The strong, silent mystery man. ...Wait, that's literally what I used to idolize back then.

Whatever. It beats talking. This is a good plan, no? I felt a little saved, honestly.

Next: the Magic Eyes. Four new ones unlocked, and I haven't used a single one in real combat yet.

Focus on the left eye.

"—Midnight sun behind the eyelids, scale that weighs lies, corridor that casts no shadow — deceit peels away, reason inverts, the world bares its back. Open, my left eye."

Letters surfaced on the passage wall.

Nanyo Dungeon — Floor 1

Difficulty: D

Recommended Level: 51–100

The Magic Eye of Truth. Still shows everything hidden. And beside it, one more display had appeared.

Trap: Pitfall (3 meters ahead, center of the passage)

That one's the Magic Eye of Discernment.

I looked three meters ahead — nothing there but an earthen passage.

Threw a stone to test it. The earth collapsed with a rumble, and a person-sized hole yawned open. Deep enough that the bottom was invisible.

Terrifying. Without the Magic Eye, I'd have walked right into that.

Apparently D-ranks just have these set up as standard. I never saw any in Chikusa, probably because it's a maintained, popular dungeon.

Cold sweat — and at the same time, a thought. With these eyes, traps cannot kill me. All thanks to past-me writing "eyes that see through all that is hidden." Gratitude is not what I want to extend, though.

The monster showed up soon enough. A puddle down the passage bulged, and shouldering the muddy water aside, a frog crawled out.

A gray-green frog about the size of a grown man. Wet skin glistening with the moss's pale glow. Its throat pouch swelled and shrank with a gulping croak, and a long tongue hung from the corner of its half-open mouth.

The same face I'd seen in app photos beforehand. Giant Frog. Way bigger than in the pictures, and unbelievably fishy-smelling.

The bulging yellow eyeballs rolled around and stopped on me.

The tongue came. Fast. Fast, but fully visible.

Before the tongue even extended, a thin line raced through my vision. The tongue's path was drawn in midair, as a line. Magic Eye of Karma.

Half a step outside the line. The wet tongue whipped past my ear, lukewarm wind brushing my cheek, then slapped the moss on the wall behind and reeled back into its mouth trailing threads of mucus.

"Hmph... how slow."

Oi. My mouth.

We JUST decided that, didn't we — no talking in front of people. Where exactly does the silent mystery man sneering at a frog live? And what came out was "Hmph... how slow." A normal person says "close one" or "fast" there!

The frog sank low. I could see the power loading into its hind legs, and the throat pouch went flat with a plop.

It jumped.

The gray-green body rose to near the ceiling. And another line was drawn where it would land. Directly above my head.

One step, sideways.

Into the puddle where I'd been standing, the frog's belly dropped. Mud splashed and hammered the cloak's hem, the weight carrying all the way up through my soles. Human-sized is not just for show.

And it's not scary in the slightest. Because I can see everything.

The frog's eyeballs are swiveling around, searching for me again. Slow. I'm already inside its guard.

Step in. Bare hands. While I'm the King I can't bring anything else down, so no weapon.

Even so, a Lv 68 King's fist was far heavier than I'd imagined.

I drove it into the frog's torso, and the fist sank deep into the soft belly. A beat later came the sensation of something passing through from my wrist and out its back.

The frog's body floated up half-crushed and turned to sand while still airborne. The sand pattered down into the puddle, leaving a single scrap of green skin bobbing on the surface.

I opened my fist, closed it. No pain, no numbness. Just the weight of the punch still sitting in my hand.

My heart's hammering all on its own. What is this? The King is THIS strong now? This is way too fun.

Lv: 68 → Lv: 69

• XP earned is halved (King's power in use)

XP still halved as ever, huh. Well, today's about verifying, not XP, so fine.

I released the King — my body got heavy, and the world returned to speed. The letters left my left eye; the cloak stayed.

When I drew a deep breath, my half-healed ribs gave a small creak deep in my chest. Ow. Guess I just forgot about them while I was the King.

Even base-form at Lv 69, my STR is near 50. That alone should put me well above your average rookie.

From here on, weapons.

The weapons volume has katanas, swords, spears, guns — even a category of unclassifiables I labeled "romance weapons." And yet, everything I've ever summoned adds up to two: Nameless and the God-Devouring Spear of the Azure Flash. The rest, never once.

Swords first.

The sword section is the biggest in the weapons volume. Because that's what I was most infatuated with back then, and the power-creep got correspondingly extreme.

The first one is the King's partner sword — no way I can summon that. The second and third are so overloaded with settings they're scary. So I picked one from much further down.

"—Life for firewood, dying embers for a blade. Ash — take form."

Weight gathered in my palm. A slim, elongated longsword in gray, its edge nicked with more fine chips than I could count.

【The Ash-Covered Sword】.

I remember this sword's lore sickeningly well. Because I spent three whole pages on it. Even switched writing styles for the occasion.

The summer of my second year of middle school, I was deep into die-and-retry games. The genre where you die over and over, die again at the same spot, and push on anyway. A worldview doled out in fragments, one tiny piece at a time — and it had me completely. Weapon descriptions that spent exactly three lines on the life of whoever owned them before... I couldn't get enough.

This sword is from exactly that period.

—Once, there were those who kept the flame.

They cast away their names, cast away their faces, and fed their own lives into the furnace as firewood. What it was for, no one alive can say anymore. Only that it had to burn.

The fire runs out. The people run out.

All that remained was ash.

The ash piled, and was trampled, and scattered on the wind — and still it sought a shape. Crumbling time upon time, gathering time upon time, until at last it became a single sword.

This sword was not forged. It gathered.

Therefore no one forged it. Therefore no one has ever owned it.

The sword only waits — for the moment a life burns down to its last.

I wrote this into a notebook with a completely straight face. Even shifted into formal archaic prose halfway through, for the mood.

Don't want to admit it, but rereading it now — it's not bad.

Swinging it, it's light. A touch heavier than Nameless; slim, so it handles beautifully.

A test subject came along promptly. Around the corner of the passage, a second frog crawled out. Same size as the last one. Its throat pouch gave a gulp.

The tongue came just as I set my stance. FAST! Way faster than before.

Right — no King right now, so no lines, and no slow world.

Reacting after seeing it was not going to make it. The instant the frog's throat bulged, I threw my body sideways. The wet tongue grazed the cloak's shoulder and left a streak of mucus across it.

Ugh, slimy.

While the tongue rewound, the frog was already sinking low. Going to jump.

I watched that sequence with the King's eyes just now: hind legs loading, throat pouch deflating, jump. No lines this time — but the order of it, I remember.

Half a step outside where it would land. Mud splashed, and the landed frog's flank came right into view.

I swept the sword through and felt it catch on nothing at all — the momentum spun me half around, and for a second I honestly thought I'd whiffed.

I looked back: the frog stood frozen in its landing pose. A single gray line ran across its flank, and sand had begun to spill from it.

The blade wasn't even wet.

This is nice.

Nameless is quicker for having no weight to it; this one carries clean through the swing. The feel left in the wrist is completely different. Just changing weapons changes how you fight the same enemy — and that is genuinely fascinating.

Per the lore, this sword wreaths its blade in flame when you burn your life. Burn more, and the flame grows stronger — burn it all, and the wielder turns to ash too.

No, I have exactly zero desire to test that. Fighting by burning your own life — what was going on in my head back then?

For the record, its current performance is "a well-cutting slim sword." No flames, no life-burning. Which, in its own way, is a little sad.

I dismissed the sword. The gray blade vanished from my hand without a sound.

Next, guns — the ones I'd been most curious about.

Honestly, the gun pages are under-researched. I didn't know much about guns back then, so bullet types, loading mechanisms — none of it ever got written. Instead, the lore alone is needlessly long.

—A certain civilization stood on the brink of collapse.

The monsters were coming. Nothing could stop them now. Even so, they poured every last scrap of their wisdom into forging a pair of guns.

They were not in time.

The civilization died. The makers, and the ones they were meant to protect — all of it, gone.

Only the guns, which never reached a single hand, drifted for ages through space.

And when the King took that whole worldline into himself, they remained in his keeping.

Guns made to protect, that protected nothing at all.

Their name: 【The Ones Beyond Saving】. The reading: Asotos.

"—The final prayer of a dying star. Two barrels, come — 'The Ones Beyond Saving.'"

Weight gathered in both hands at once.

Two guns. Right — these two are one pair. Because I wrote them as a two-in-one weapon, they come out one to each hand.

Black large-caliber handguns, far bigger than I'd imagined. Not "fits in your palm" size. Long, heavy barrels — just holding them out is work for the arms.

And those barrels are densely engraved with magic circuits.

Too fine to call patterning — lines, circles, symbols carved in without a single gap. The ones I drew over hours with ruler and compass. In physical form the engraving is deep, and it looks far more the part than I expected.

I tried a stance; the grip feel is properly there. But I can't find a magazine anywhere. Actually, there is no such thing as a magazine here in the first place.

No King, so no left eye either. Only one way to find out — shoot.

And there was a target, conveniently. About twenty meters ahead, a third frog sat half-sunk in a puddle. Just its eyeballs above the surface, perfectly still, unaware of me.

I thrust the right gun straight out. Heavy. The barrel's weight dragged the muzzle slowly downward. I want to brace with my left hand, but my left hand has the other gun.

No sights or anything, so I lined the muzzle up just under the eyeball and pulled the trigger.

No sound. No recoil. Instead, a fist-sized ball of white light flew.

The light raced straight down the passage and burst against the frog's cheek. The gray-green body tumbled out of the puddle, and the burst light scattered white through the whole passage.

The frog got up. Cheek gouged open — and it sank low and jumped at me anyway.

Left trigger.

The second shot took the leaping frog square in the chest. Midair, its frog-shape unraveled, and sand rattled down into the puddle. Tiny ripples spread, one after another.

No gunshot, no impact sound. The light streaks — and the frog's already gone.

...Huh. That's normal.

No, the power's there. A D-rank frog vanished in two shots. It just wasn't what I pictured.

What I was hoping for was more, say, a darkness-cannon. Black light splitting the void, whatever it hits returning to nothing, that sort of thing.

And what came out was white light.

Come to think of it, the lore did say this:

—These guns change the size and type of their rounds according to the wielder's MP and attribute.

So the rounds depend on the shooter.

And the me holding these guns right now is not the King. Just plain Ichinose Saku — MP 61, attribute none, probably.

No wonder they're fist-sized.

Fire them as the King, and it'd probably be something outrageous. I have a vague memory of writing that the residue of everything the King has ended lies sunk within him.

But while King, no weapons.

Past me, you didn't think that far ahead, did you.

A small splash of water. From deep in the passage.

I raised my head. Beyond the darkness, two yellow eyeballs caught the moss-light. And at the mouth of a branch path a little nearer — two more.

Two frogs came crawling out, unhurried. Both staring dead at me. Ten minutes ago there wasn't a single one around here.

Ah — the light.

No sound, sure. But that white light ran the whole length of a passage lit by nothing but moss. Same as announcing "I am here" to the entire corridor.

"So that's how it is, huh."

Both frogs swelled their throats at once.

I raised both arms — right gun on the far one, left on the branch one.

Fire. Fire.

Right connects. Light bursts on the far frog's shoulder; it staggers. Left misses — white light slams into the branch wall. The passage lights up all over again.

Flashed again. Don't care anymore.

The branch frog's tongue whipped in. Arms sluggish with the guns' weight, I was late. What the tongue wrapped around was the right gun's barrel.

A yank — my arm and all. My feet skidded half a step through the mud, my body dragged toward the frog's mouth.

Let go? No — they're a pair, two as one. The right one's tied up; the left one's still mine.

Instead of fighting the pull, I rode it forward. Shoved the left muzzle straight into the frog's open mouth and pulled the trigger.

White light burst deep in its throat. For one instant the throat pouch glowed through from the inside, and then the frog's body simply ceased. The tongue wound around the barrel crumbled into sand and spilled away, and my right arm came free.

One left — the shoulder-shot one, crouched low, hind legs trembling.

It jumps. It's going to jump, obviously. I've watched that a hundred times today.

The instant it sprang, I pointed both muzzles straight up. Target: the belly. The whitest part of a frog.

Two lights met overhead and burst. No frog came down. Instead, fine sand sifted patteringly onto my hood.

I shook my head, and sand slid off the cloak's shoulders.

Both arms trembled faintly under the guns' weight. All I did was hold them up, and my shoulders are stiff as boards — and my ribs gave another little creak.

And still my face is grinning. Ribs aching and I want to keep going — something is wrong with me.

Somewhere along the way I lost count of my shots, but not once did it feel like running dry. There's apparently no ammunition concept. What runs out is probably MP.

"Wait — isn't this low-key strong?"

Said it out loud, and I stand by it. No ammo limit — that alone is strong.

But. Two problems.

One: it glows. There's no sound, which makes the light the only thing that streaks through a dark dungeon — spectacularly conspicuous. Learned that one firsthand just now.

Two: the stance is entirely too cool.

These are dual handguns. Large-caliber, black, covered in magic-circuit engraving — and some high schooler is holding two of them in a dark cave, firing white light.

Thank god there was no mirror. I could never have looked myself in the eye. Absolutely unusable in front of people.

Well — what if I tuck one behind my back and fire the other single? Would that read as more understated?

No. Firing one-handed with your other arm swept behind your back is about a thousand times more deliberate.

I dismissed the pair, and my arms went weightless in one go. So in the end, the only thing I can use in public is Nameless.

I took a breather and replayed myself just now.

Three minutes after deciding I'd stay silent, I said "Hmph... how slow."

That plan was dead on arrival. The moment I open my mouth, something comes out; I physically cannot not talk.

Then the only option is changing the approach. If silence is impossible, think about WHAT to say.

Something cryptic, for instance. Short, plausible-sounding, the kind of line that makes whoever hears it think "there must be some deep reason" all on their own.

"—Hmph. I see it all."

I tried it quietly, to an empty passage.

In reality I see nothing. In front of me is a moss wall.

But it doesn't feel bad. It works whether I can see an attack coming or not, and the listener does all the "he's seen through something" work for me.

Got carried away, dropped my voice lower, ran it again. ...Yes. More convincing that time. The way the "Hmph" leads in is more natural now. This is getting fun.

The remaining question is whether I can actually say this in front of people...... no. No chance. Not even a little.