~oOo~

Log Horizon © Mamare Touno

This work provided under section 107 of the copyright act of 1978

Last edited: 6/13/6: Minori's conversation with her parents

Chapter 4

~oOo~

Soujiro darted forward.

"Votive Sword, Kogarasumaru!"

Deep within his bones, he felt the sword resonate, as he summoned its avatar.

With a primal scream, he narrowly dodged the ice giant's enormous wooden club as Tarutauruga of the Fourth Prison activated his guaranteed OHKO attack.

The air trembled, and Soujiro felt the shockwave of Tarutauruga's club hitting the ground, leaving an impact crater in its wake.

In a show of his impressive reflexes, he used the giant's own arm as a springboard, vaulting himself into the air.

Soujiro had based this body on himself. He had the same messy black hair, the same sub-par height, and the same above-par facial features.

But the capabilities were simply incomparable.

Before, he had trouble running a mile in under ten minutes, largely because of his MMO addiction.

Now, he effortlessly arced backwards, vacuum slashes dealing minimal damage to the raid boss, but gathering hate to himself and away from his casters.

From the other side of the room, he heard a sudden roar.

Heat from a blast wave hit him like a physical force as Ibura Habura laid waste to the territory surrounding him. The double headed serpent writhed as it used its Banquet of Merciless Purgatory, and the six-man mixed cleric, druid, and kannagi party were forced to cast emergency healing spells to prevent deaths and the necessity of using mana-intensive resurrection spells.

The scorching temperature took a sudden nosedive, as Tarutauruga used his White Night ability. Soujiro's reaction time slowed, and the ice giant smashed him across the battlefield.

But the abilities don't overlap, and the healers are able to switch their focus towards aiding the West Wind Brigade, while Silver Sword resumed their offensive against Ibura Habura.

In the eaves of the massive cavern, the fourth six person party fended off shadow vanguards. Even though Ruseato was kept trapped in the anterior cavern by virtue of its massive size, it still assisted its fellow raid bosses by inflicting self-harm in order to activate its ability to spawn minions.

It was a careful balancing act, keeping the two raid bosses on different sides of the cavern. Adventurers had to constantly relocate in order to stay in range of the healers and out of the range of the raid bosses' area of effect attacks, while at the same time making sure each raid boss was thoroughly focused on only one corner of the cavern.

Still, this was hardly the first time Soujiro had participated in a raid, or even this particular raid.

The battle continued, a constant back and forth as the two elite combat guilds hung on by the skin of their teeth against the combined forces of three raid bosses.

But the strategy initially devised by Shiroe held, and they eventually succeeded in reducing the towering monsters into iridescent bubbles.

The pile of loot left behind was nothing short of staggering, but the hundreds of thousands of gold weren't the reward they were looking for.

"Did one drop?"

William Massachusetts nodded.

"Finally!' Soujiro cheered, along with the rest of the adventuring party.

It was a lot of work for a single artifact-class reagent, but for a cause like going back home, it was worth it.

~oOo~

He couldn't perform either the Kannabi or Samurai techniques that had been caught on video.

Because they were Japan-specific-classes.

Wow, he felt like a moron.

He also felt rather envious of the Japanese cosplayer who had been able to perform the Samurai's Challenge technique the Japanese prime minister had demonstrated.

But at least that confirmed that people could figure out how to do techniques on their own, without having to be taught by an adventurer.

And getting equipment, at least for the non-mage classes, wouldn't be difficult, now that it was confirmed any old sword would work.

Not that he had any lying around, unfortunately.

So, what could he do with that knowledge?

Michael got up from his computer chair and started quietly pacing. The size of the room constrained his motions, and he made small, tight circles on the cluttered floor.

It felt like the gears that should have been turning in his head were stuck together with a thick, viscous substance. He knew he should have gone to sleep hours ago, but he'd been trying for so long he'd hate to give up. And anyways, he probably still had way too much nervous energy to go to sleep.

What he needed was some sort of manual or walkthrough. A wiki, or a UI to tell him what to do. A user interface! That was it!

Remembering Sword Art Online, he stood still and swiped two fingers down to the right. No dice.

Blinking twice and karate chopping the air likewise failed.

He performed a variety of other motions, before giving up, at least for the moment. He searched the internet for images of Elder Tale's UI, but it simply faded onto the screen.

Now that he thought about it, there wasn't any variety of center button that was neutral- all had the symbol of the player's class on them. And character creation of course came before any other part of the game. What if he simply needed to choose a class and subclass?

Well, which one did he want to be?

After some thought, he settled on becoming a medicine man- it was North America's unique class, and Michael figured healers tended to be in demand anyways.

Again, no dice.

At this point, he was almost ready to give up, at least for the night. Then, he had a brainwave. After character creation, and before starting the tutorial, characters spawned into the game. What he needed was starting equipment.

What did he have on hand that could qualify?

A broom, to be used as a staff?

A kitchen knife?

He had to admit, he was rather starved for options.

Then, he remembered- his grandfather's brass knuckles!

Slowly opening the door of his room so as not to disturb his sleeping parents, he made his way through the apartment.

The brass knuckles were in a dusty box at the bottom of a closet. They were illegal here in New York, but so was murder and that hadn't stopped anyone.

He put them on.

Immediately, energy suffused his body. With adrenaline coursing through his veins, he successfully activated the user interface by merely thinking of it. With a glance at the brass knuckles, a readout popped up.

"A young scrapper's weapon, this set of knuckledusters are for when the chips are down."

He resisted the urge to activate a skill in the middle of the apartment, and instead slipped on his shoes and grabbed his keys.

He took the stairs down rather than the elevator to work off some of his energy.

Walking to the blind alley on one side of the building, he made a few test punches, while looking through his list of skills.

He psyched himself up.

"Tiger stance!"

Energy radiated off of his body, and the alley was briefly illuminated.

He rapidly ran out of mana and collapsed onto the ground.

Michael felt simultaneously fantastic and terrible at the same time, elation from having succeeded at his goal warring with the total bone-deep exhaustion he felt.

And this was just at level one!

Though that posed something of a problem: without a supply of monsters, he had no clue how to raise his level, and at this point, his ability was more of a party trick.

Maybe he should fight crime.

...Nah.

~oOo~

Minori had managed to successfully extricate herself from the grasp of the press.

The nonstop barrage of questions had been exhausting, and they'd often brushed up against the subject of turning ordinary people into Adventurers.

It was… it was a topic she knew she (and by extension, Log Horizon) had to address eventually. It's not like she or Shiroe didn't want anyone but Rundelhaus becoming an Adventurer. The only known way to do so, however, required not the difficult to obtain, but possible to grind artifact class materials, but instead phantasmal class materials, where there was a hard limit on how many each server contained.

Shiroe had slowly gathered additional reagents by buying them- after all, there wasn't anything suspicious about a high-level scribe buying even the highest level equipment- but it was rare that someone was willing to sell phantasmal class items.

With her remaining thirty minutes, however, Minori had better things to do than mull over what would best be discussed with Shiroe anyways. Namely, tracking down the contact information of her friends' relatives and sending them brief messages assuring them their children (or nieces or nephews or siblings) were OK.

Crescent Moon and Log Horizon had taken a joint photograph, which she took a picture of with her mother's phone and uploaded to the simplistic webpage she'd set up for the Round Table Alliance.

"Hey there, sweetie."

Minori looked up, and returned her father's smile. "Yeah?" Her parents had been acting a little- just a little- frosty after she told them they couldn't meet the prime minister with her. It was perfectly understandable, but it still made her uncomfortable.

Her parents, standing, traded a look.

"Well, we were thinking-"

"Your father and I-"

Both spoke simultaneously, then cut themselves off. Something unspoken passed between them, and her father took the lead.

"Ahem. Well, your mother and I were discussing this earlier, and you haven't had any formal schooling since you were brought into Elder Tale, right?"

"No." Minori did not like where this was going.

"By the time this Elder Tale Business sorts itself out, you'll be old enough to enter high-school. It'll take a lot of cramming, but I doubt any high school would deny you entry, even with two years of junior high missing."

"I'm not attending high school."

Minori's parents had probably expected reluctance, but they evidently hadn't accounted for the possibility of a flat refusal. Her mother's lips pursed, and her father recoiled slightly.

Her mother sighed, and her face returned to a more neutral expression.

"Minori, you've grown a lot more responsible since the Disappearance, but you'll miss out on a lot if you don't choose to go to high school. We're not saying that you need to go immediately, but in the future, maybe."

"I have a job. I'm trained as a party leader and scribe, so I help the Round Table Alliance administrate the Akihabara Adventurers," Minori justified her choice a little petulantly.

"But Elder Tale doesn't have many people actually trained, in actual schools, to do accounting, or lead military forces. I'm sure you and your friends have done a great job, but it's just not sustainable." Her father was beginning to look a little frustrated.

"A lot of Adventurers were college students, or had already graduated. Shiroe was working on his master's degree, and he taught me a lot about what he learned getting his bachelor's in engineering."

"But he-"

Minori's mother placed her hand on his father's arm, and he cut himself off. She leaned forward, with the same expression she gave Minori when she was in elementary school and bedridden from a cold.

"We don't want to be rude, but… Shiroe, well, we don't think he's a good influence on you. We know you respect him a lot, but you yourself told us that he gets called the 'Villain in Glasses.' He's manipulative, and we're not sure it's in your or Tohya's best interest to keep associating with him."

Minori stopped herself from making an angry outburst, as her mother continued. "But you've done a lot of growing up. Can you tell us why you trust him so much? We haven't been through what you have, and perhaps we've misjudged him."

She hadn't wanted to tell her parents about Hamelin. In fact, since they'd been freed by Shiroe, her and the rest of Hamelin's captives had avoided discussing the guild as much as possible.

But her loyalty to her guild leader overrode her desire to not pick at mostly-closed wounds, and she told her tale.

"Shiroe's always had a soft spot for new players. When we were first getting acquaintance with the game, Shiroe used this feature called the mentor system to purposefully lower his level to ours, so we could be in the same party safely. He taught us the basic mechanics, and how to play our classes. That was before the Catastrophe."

She briefly cleared her throat, then resumed speaking, voice softer than before. "After we were transported into elder tale, we didn't know what to do. Me and Tohya had each other, but we were still new players, and didn't have much else. So when a guild called Hamelin offered us a chance to join them, we did."

She continued, explaining how Hamelin had forced their new players to craft materials for the guild, and were trapped inside the guildhall, unable to escape. How they'd gone on overleveled quests, and died over and over. How they'd been effectively slaves, their agency taken away by the controls the guild leader had set over the guild hall.

How Shiroe, in a masterstroke, both freed them from Hamelin and created the foundations for the Round Table Alliance, by outright buying the guild hall.

By the end of her explanation, her parents were hugging her, and she felt tears rolling down her cheeks.

"But that was a long time ago." She wiped her face off. "I have friends I can trust, and a guild at my back."

"I understand. Here." Her father handed her package. "It's a history textbook. We'll leave the decision about going to high school to you and your brother, but promise to at least consider it."

"I will." Minori smiled at her parents.

"We have about three minutes left," noted her mother.

"Then let me tell you about the time I got called in to deal with a man in a pink bodysuit dancing in the middle of an intersection." Her dad grinned, and launched into his tale.

Minori's cheer had been mostly restored by the time she was dumped back into the Akihabara guild hall.

"Ugh, I feel ready to go to sleep."

"That's silly! It's not even noon. I bet you haven't even had dinner!" Tetra's cheerful face took up Minori's entire field of view.

"Aah!" Minori stumbled back.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" Tetra practically dragged Minori out of the room.

"Wait, I need to brief the Alliance!"

"Then make a telepathic call and do it! There's an event going on, and you won't want to miss it."

Minori pulled her arm away from Tetra, but kept pace alongside the pink haired guy-turned-girl.

"Event? What's happening?"

"You'll see!"

Tetra sped up, and Minori did the same to match her. Buildings flashed by, their Adventurer physiques preventing them from feeling truly exhausted. They avoided any collisions largely because the city was suspiciously abandoned, rather than any lack of clumsiness on Tetra's and Minori's part.

It started as a barely-visible glimmer, but as they got closer to the city outskirts, it became clear that there was an iridescent dome surrounding the city, as if Akihabara was trapped in a bubble. Adventurers and People of the Land were moving through it freely, however, so it wasn't some sort of magical barrier.

"What is it?"

"The fairies have graced us with their presence! Now I, Galaxy Idol Tetra, with your help, will-"

"You're here. Good." Shiroe casually interrupted Tetra. "We believe the remains of the large-scale magic we've been performing has gotten concentrated enough to make Akihabara a sort of pseudo-dungeon. The effect will fade, but we've been fighting off low-level elementals for the past hour or so. They're not particularly dangerous, but if we let them get too close to the rest of the city the property damage won't be fun to deal with."

"Got it. What should I do?"

Shiroe pointed. "Tohya, Serara, Isuzu, and Rundelhaus are about a kilometer that way. Coordinate them."

Minori accepted his raid invite.

And to think, she had been ready to relax for the rest of the day.

~oOo~

A/N: Check out realitydeviant's "Relocation". It provided a fair part of the impetus for me to post this fic.

Many thanks kenshin8671. DaystarEld, and Mizu25 for informing me of the spelling and grammar mistakes of the previous three chapters