~oOo~

Log Horizon © Mamare Touno

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

Chapter 16

~oOo~

The four Akihabaran adventurers sat around a western-style coffee table. Krusty's house was spacious and well lit, but lacked any sort of homey charm.

"BologneseMaster, you're more or less good where you are. Do you have any objections to continuing to work at your twitch stream, and maybe taking talk show appearances as necessary?"

BologneseMaster replied in the negative.

"Minori will need to play the role of a courier, at least temporarily." Facing her, Krusty added, "I understand Shiroe has already calculated how many trips you'll be able to take between worlds per day?"

Minori nodded. "Tohya did the math, actually. The theoretical maximum available time for me is four hours, twelve minutes, but each trip I take here takes off eight minutes. Re-entering the world of Elder Tale doesn't take any time off. Taking into account the three second casting time, I could technically make about thirty one trips. Given that I probably want to stay on earth for at least two minutes each time, I'll likely be able to take at most about twenty trips per day, and probably closer to fifteen."

Krusty nodded. "Okay."

Shoryu agreed with the reasoning behind the other two's assignments, but wasn't quite comfortable with what he'd be doing.

"I'm just not sure that teaching people how to use magic and Elder Tale abilities is a good idea. I get that it helps reassure them after the genius attack, and that a lot of people are figuring this out on their own anyways. But teaching them ourselves puts us explicitly at fault. For now we can technically blame the prime minister for showing off, but we'd have to take responsibility for people getting hurt if I taught them to use magic. Unless there's something I'm missing, I think the better PR move would be to wait and let them figure out for themselves, just in case."

Krusty silently looked at Shoryu. He looked at Minori, who returned his gaze. Perplexed, Shoryu and BologneseMaster watched them. Krusty broke eye contact and sighed. "You're missing two things. The first is a prediction- that because monsters spawn near mana use, Earth will begin seeing monsters spawn soon. If that's true, I want as many people as possible trained to defend themselves. The second…" He looked again at Minori, who nodded.

"I found out about this extremely recently. It's been a closely kept secret for over a year, and Shiroe only gave me leave to tell you and BologneseMaster. To tell you that he can turn ordinary people into immortal adventurers, like us. Case in point, Rundelhaus Code. Aside from Log Horizon and those of us in this group, only the prime minister, and possibly a small number of his chosen advisors, know."

Shoryu blinked. Then, he blinked again. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it when he realized he had nothing to say.

This was...

Well, magic was already a big deal. It would change how people lived and worked, how mankind understood science and itself. But, ultimately it was just another tool. As far as anyone could tell, however, adventurers were actually, literally, immortal.

Shoryu knew that he'd been somewhat inured to the weight of that realization; before the Catastrophe, he hadn't spent enough time thinking about his mortality to be significantly affected by his newfound lack of it. But the idea that he'd just keep living without end, unless he somehow got banned from the last cathedral he came into contact with and died, was both terrifying and thrilling.

So that anyone could theoretically become immortal was mindblowing. Science fiction had been ruminating about the Singularity in reference to self-aware computers for decades, but the outcome of this would be just as unpredictable.

"There is, of course, a drawback. Shiroe says he's bound primarily by the availability of phantasmal-class materials. Even if he gets a more reliable source, he can only make an extremely limited number of people immortal. And since there's really no fair way to decide which people get to become immortal, I can pretty confidently predict that'll be an absolute shit show one way or the other, and I'd prefer that as many people as possible could have the abilities to stand up to immortals, so ordinary people aren't marginalized and power doesn't concentrate into too few hands."

Krusty gestured with his right hand, searching for words. "Shiroe… he hopes he can find artifact or production class replacements for the Phantasmal Class materials, but with all the other work he needs to do research is going slowly. And even if he does, we still have the problem of manufacturing them. Most overskills can't be taught, and we have very few scribes high level enough to ape him anyways. Minori could quickly make the transition, but hasn't yet to keep Shiroe's plans secret. Aside from her, about one in a hundred people are scribes, so we have a bare handful of high level scribes in Akihabara."

"So," he said, "one way or another, we're going to be introducing a new source of inequality into earth. Perhaps for a good reason, but we need to make sure the populace at large can guard from the abuse of power by a select few."

BologneseMaster quoted something in English. Shoryu didn't quite understand. "What?"

BologneseMaster waved it off. "Spiderman reference."

Okay, then.

Shoryu hummed. "I'm not entirely comfortable with it, but I'll do my part of the plan, then."

Krusty opened his mouth, then closed it. He thought over his words for a few seconds, then said, "actually, Shoryu, I believe I have a higher priority task for you. We've more or less confirmed that Nureha is on earth. She's keeping a relatively low profile, but we can at least guarantee she's here. I need you to track her down"

Shoryu blinked. At least this was more his speed, even though he lacked the Tracker subclass. "You got it."

~oOo~

Tracking someone who could change their appearance at will had proven to be exactly as difficult as Shoryu had thought it would be. It's wasn't that nobody had claimed to see her. It was that everybody had claimed to see her. Had he chosen to hare off after each and every 'lead' (and he used that term loosely) he'd have to scour the entirely of Tokyo.

The Plant Hwyaden website, which she was using as her exclusive point of contact (likely to get attention for the guild) had plenty of pictures and even a few videos taken by her, but she had been circumspect in taking them in featureless, if not necessarily poorly lit, places.

But as it turned out, these pictures had all the information Shoryu needed.

Pictures, when taken, had a variety of metadata stored by the camera, such as the camera name, aperture size, and the date they were taken.

Shoryu wasn't a computer wiz, but he'd spent enough time messing with Elder Tale screenshots to know his way around the "properties" screen.

And while most popular websites stripped metadata from images for privacy reasons, the Plant Hwyaden website was built by amateurs, and it showed.

So while his original intent had been merely to compare the times the photos were taken in the hopes of sussing out Nureha's schedule, Shoryu found out something far more valuable- that among the metadata included in the photos were her GPS coordinates.

The rest was only too easy.

He knew the phone she was using, and he knew the general route she had taken over the last two days. He couldn't fathom why she was hiking to Mount Fuji at walking pace, but he didn't need to.

It took three buses and some hurried explaining to his parents to get to his destination. From there, under the guise of playing an augmented reality game, he kept a watch out for a woman with a specific windows phone. The first category was broad, but the second, at least, was thankfully not.

~oOo~

"You've been wandering across this park for the past hour. I can't help but wonder what you're doing."

Shoryu looked up from his phone to find a blond woman looking curiously at him.

A small dog nipped at her heels, and Shoryu found himself once again annoyed at how short he'd made his character. Maybe she was actually his height, but with her hat she had a few inches on him.

"I'm playing one of those mobile augmented reality games-"

Shoryu took in more of the woman out of the corner of his eyes, trying not to seem like he was ogling her. She wore a long dress, and had an over the shoulder bag rather than a purse.

"You know, the ones where you-"

Her left hand held a phone.

The last post made by Nureha had happened a little under three minutes ago, it was why Shoryu had been distracted enough looking at his phone for the woman to sneak up on him in the first place.

"-use the GPS on your phone to-"

A phone, a bag.

Dazaneg's magic bag.

Dropping the cheap, prepaid smartphone, Shoryu sprang backwards.

Backflipping over his outstretched hands for extra space, he placed himself outside of the maximum range for Astral Hypnos.

His feet skidded across the grass as he crouched for better balance.

Nothing happened.

For a moment, he thought he'd just made an incredibly embarrassing overreaction.

Then, the woman laughed. Her face flickered in a way that almost reminded him of his computer monitor the last time he'd had a graphics card crap out, squares of light appearing and disappearing. Her hair went from blond to black in chunks and her clothing changed design.

"Ahh, I suppose this disguise has long since stopped being convincing anyways. So, were you looking for me for any particular reason, or did you just want a chat?"

Being honest, Shoryu was rather stumped. He'd focused so much on finding her he hadn't really considered what he'd do. A dog who'd caught a semi truck, so to speak.

"No? Then, are you here to fight me, the evil seductress of Plant Hwyaden? The Chosen Hero to the Demon Queen, to convert me to the side of light?"

Shoryu popped out his ears and tail in response.

"With your penis?"

What.

"But I'm sure an attractive man like yourself has plenty of girlfriends. I can tell you take good care of your tail."

Well, he did, but- What in the world was he thinking!? Shoryu let got of his tail, which he'd inadvertently grabbed. He blushed furiously, his mind going in directions he'd rather not.

"But maybe you're just here for a fight. And I wouldn't object, were you to ask for one. I find myself rather interested in how I stack up to Akihabaran adventurers."

Despite being flustered, Shoryu's first instinct was still to refuse. People didn't start duels unless they were confident about winning, or wouldn't be adversely affected by losing. Given that Nureha being sent to the Cathedral would set back Plant Hwyaden's plans, it was likely the former.

But in that case, he already knew why Nureha was so confident- despite their reputation for being poor solo classes, Enchanters were an absolute terror one on one.

Why? Astral Hypnos. While they had the mana, Enchanters could trivially immobilize their opponents, while still having time to attack physically and cast other spells.

But Shoryu hadn't exactly been slacking these past years, and had come up with more than a few ways to deal with enchanters.

It maybe wasn't the smartest idea despite that, but the Round Table had wanted the measure of her capabilities for a while. And anyways, anything was better than the teasing.

"A duel it is, then."

With no further warning, Shoryu attacked, swords pointing towards Nureha. He opened his mouth, as if to call out an attack.

As soon as his feet made contact with the ground, he sprung backwards. His legs extended explosively as he kicked up a small cloud of dust.

Nureha's spell fizzled out, no appropriate targets in her range.

He repeated the maneuver again, Nureha wasting mana to no effect.

To be perfectly honest, Nureha wasn't as good a player as Shoryu had expected she would be. By staying right at the outer edge of her range, Shoryu could easily feint in, cause her to use Astral Hypnos, then pop right back out before the spell took hold and put him to sleep.

She was a competent player, sure, and Shoryu was impressed at her response time and knowledge of her own maximum range, but it was clear she hadn't done a lot of dueling after the Catastrophe. Fighting monsters was still much the same, but fighting another person, face to face, had completely changed.

Nureha was stuck on the idea that players behaved predictably, largely bound by the limitations of their abilities. Shoryu knew better.

So after baiting her a few more times, Shoryu put his plan into action.

He came into range, let her start casting Astral Hypnos, and then exited.

But this time, he tumbled gracelessly backwards instead of regaining his bearing.

Pretending to have been affected, he fell over and lay still, allowing Nureha to approach him.

This was the riskiest part of his plan. Should she decide to cast Astral Hypnos again, just to be sure, he would be stuck asleep until Nureha ran out of mana. With his vitality and the low offensive capability of the Enchanter class, he'd probably survive. Hopefully. Still, letting her equalize the playing field could be disastrous.

But if she fell for his gambit, he could blitz her, nullify an Astral Hypnos with Razor Edge, and finish her off while she suffered through a cooldown cycle.

Ten seconds. Nine seconds. Eight seconds.

Shoryu barely prevented himself from tensing up.

Seven Seconds. Six seconds.

Shoryu slowly exhaled.

Five seconds.

Nureha didn't act. Just as planned.

Shoryu inhaled. He would act at the nine second mark, when she was closest.

When he woke up, he found himself in Akihabara's cathedral.

~oOo~

A/N: I took the week off to address a few of the more common (constructive) criticisms I get: that I have too many characters to care about, that Michael isn't interesting enough for his dominant role in the plot, and that my writing was a rather interlude heavy. As such, I'm discontinuing end-chapter interludes to refrain from diluting my writing. You'll see two long interlude-only chapters at the end of this arc and as the epilogue to the story. Thanks for all the feedback, and as always, thanks you to my beta Mizu25!