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Chapter 132: Our meeting can be called a miracle, or it could be called fate. Or maybe it’s just a common rarity event in the random event generator called life.

Following the mysterious man who could write Japanese, I can’t help wondering what his deal is.

Although, it can only be one of two things, so it’s not like he’s really that mysterious.

He’s either a gamer, or he knows a gamer, right?

It’s hard to tell since he doesn’t talk… no, learning how to write Japanese should be more difficult than learning how to speak it, right…?

Either way, I hope he’s not leading me into an ambush or whatever~.

I have those kind of casual thoughts about the whole situation.

You know, whatever will happen will happen.

And it’s not like I’m not paying attention to my surroundings.

I’m properly exercising all of my mana sensing and increased perception abilities, you know?

And now that I know there’s a guy who’s good at evading those abilities, I’m putting a lot more effort into it.

It’s not like this guy is beyond my abilities to detect, it’s just that I wasn’t even really trying, I swear.

There’s a difference between passive maintenance and active searching.

As I follow him, I’m starting to understand that he really wasn’t trying to sneak up on me earlier; it was something that just happened.

This guy… he’s just too used to sneaking around, isn’t he?

Like, avoiding the eyes of others is his default mode.

I know the gamers that got transported with me had a ninja assassin in the group, and Hibiki-chan is a shadow rogue, but I’ve never seen someone more suited to the term ‘sneak thief’ before.

Actually…

“Hey. Can you stop? It’s making me feel a little like I’m drunk.”

As he shifts in and out of my perceptions, magic or otherwise, it makes things really disorienting for me.

I mean, I’m supposed to be following him and all.

“… !”

He looks like he’s about to say something, then bows his head and claps his hands in apology.

He didn’t even realize he was doing it, huh?

Sneaking around is really just subconscious for him at this point.

Although he toned it down a little, he still avoids others’ lines of sights and stuck to the shadows as much as possible.

…Well, fine.

It’s not my place to nitpick other peoples’ weird habits.

As for where he’s leading me…

It’s not a shady building that houses a slave merchant like I thought it would be.

Actually, this place can be considered the upper class side of town… if a city built into a dense forest that constantly seems like it’s on the verge of being swallowed up by said forest can even have an upper class side.

By the way… are we trespassing?

… Let’s go into stealth mode too, just in case.

For me, it’s just a case of applying a few Barriers and moving sneakily, but this guy… he almost just about disappears.

If my sensor-type abilities weren’t on high-alert, I wouldn’t be able to detect him at all.

Even with them, it’s like … he’s transparent?

Like, a ghost, maybe?

Although I’ve never really seen a ghost…

… … If there are people of this world with abilities and magics this effective, I call shenanigans.

I’m starting to feel like this guy is a … …

But is he stuck in the wrong body like me and Hibiki-chan or is this his actual appearance?

… He only knows kana, though, so…

… I’m probably getting too distracted considering we’re sneaking into a high-class estate.

Crouched in the overgrown bushes, a Ploids staple even among the fanciest houses, I do my best to sneak behind the man.

Even though it’s a high-class estate it’s in Ploids so it’s actually fairly tiny.

It’s probably the same size as a normal Japanese family’s house, without much of a garden.

Like that, it takes us almost no time to circle around it into the backyard.

Most of the ‘gardens’ in Ploids are more like paved over courtyards surrounded by wildly growing foliage, but you can see the vegetation’s strong vitality even among the paving stones, as they grow through the cracks and sometimes unearth the stones.

I don’t envy the grounds caretakers at all… or more like, is there a point to even bothering to have a courtyard like that in a place where the plants are so tenacious?

Come to think of it, I wonder why the buildings are fine in a city like this…

… Ah, sorry, sorry, I’m paying attention.

So what are we doing?

As the guy I’m with motions out towards the courtyard…

Ah.

Yeah, among the slaves in the courtyard there’s a young, slender woman with an asian face.

And she has a slave collar on.

It’s not that bulky, dangerous thing they put on Hibiki-chan, but the normal type of slave collar.

It’s a little… …

I can’t say I’m relieved about it, but at least her life’s not in danger.

Now that I’ve confirmed that…

.. … Tch.

The people of this house don’t just look rich; they give off the aura that they’re nobles from somewhere so it doesn’t seem like it would be a good idea to just up and snatch her, huh?

Even though I’m fairly confident that it would be easy enough to undo the collar’s spell with my abilities, nobles huh…

What a pain.

If they were Carnus nobles I (or rather Seimei-san) could do something about it, but the slave trade is illegal in Carnus, so it’s likely that this estate doesn’t belong to them.

The only people with slave collars on in Carnus are crime slaves, and they belong to the State to do penal labor, or else they’re slaves accompanying foreigners to Carnus.

Of course there’s probably an illegal slave trade around, even in Carnus, but to own a slave openly like this drops the probability of these nobles being from Carnus by a lot.

… I don’t know enough about the situation to make any conclusions.

Although one part of me is just saying to barge in and make a ruckus, the other part of me is telling me I shouldn’t be too impatient.

Even though I thought I’d lost my restraint after these many months of being in another world.

But if these nobles are from a more militant country like … uh… I forget what that one was called, but I remember Lor saying something about some countries just looking for excuses to raid Unaffiliated territories.

I think I heard the merchant Orvowel say something about people looking for excuses to route the Inorian elves out of Ploids, too… or something.

Anyway, if I start anything prematurely I could possibly kickstart a massive and messy war, so …

I mean, I owe the Unaffiliated people a lot for being able to live my life in this world freely without getting into too much trouble, although it’s mostly the Unaffiliateds from Nyl, but troubling the people here could bring trouble to the people back in Nyl too.

First, I should get more information out of this guy over here.

After a moment, the man I’m with makes some small signals and we slunk out of the estate.

Back on the busy streets of Ploids, he scribbles something down and hands me another note.

Is there some place private where we can’t be overheard easily?

Even if he asks me that, it’s so sudden … um … there was that room above the tavern that the Scarlet Torch showed us to…

Wait.

I have Sound Barrier.

Technically, anywhere can be a soundproofed private area with my abilities.

Although not everywhere is ideal if he’s worried about being seen.

Hmm…

Although I feel better about who this guy is now, I’m still reluctant to bring him back to the inn we’re staying at.

I mean, I’ve only known him, what, an hour?

Even if I feel like he’s pretty much harmless, I don’t want to drag him back and show him Hibiki-chan and the others.

I can’t prove he’s not enslaving people who came from other worlds, after all.

Even if it’s unlikely.

If I can’t bring him to the inn, then there’s the Adventurer’s Guild, but I feel like that could attract a lot of attention.

Maybe it’s because of this guy’s sneaking around, but I also feel like it would be wiser to keep our meeting out off the books, and borrowing anything at the Adventurer’s Guild is very on the books.

If that’s the case, then the tavern from earlier would be fine.

They have private rooms for adventurers to do business in.

Adventurers tend to do business in bars and taverns, after all, and this tavern seems to specialize in that type of thing.

The room I borrowed was on the smaller side, really just a private room for one-on-one meetings, and the whole rear half of the tavern, opposite the kitchen, was lined with rooms like it.

After I plaster our surroundings with magic barriers, I say,

“Alright, the Sound Barrier is up. So?”

“… Ah, aah… haa. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken…”

With a voice hoarse from infrequent use and a distinct foreigner’s accent to his Japanese, the guy I’m with finally spoke up.

It really was as I thought…

Well, I probably wouldn’t have imagined he was just pretending not to speak if Hibiki-chan hadn’t done the same thing, though.

“My name’s Garret Troy, I liked to play Neo World Order on the Japanese servers, but I’m from LA. One day, while playing the game … well.”

I don’t know the game, but I do understand how things ended up for him.

“Ah… um, I’m Jun Imamiya. I was playing Mourning Star before ending up here.”

Right, greetings are important.

“Mourning Star? So everyone who got transported here aren’t all from the same game…”

Troy-san frowns, seemingly immersed in thought.

“… Sorry to break into your thoughts, but can you explain the situation right now? Specifically about what you were asking me to do.”

“Ah… … that’s right.”

Troy-san looks a bit depressed.

“So I’m from NWO, right? Well, I wasn’t the only one who was transported over here, but we were all separated … it seems.”

Seems?

Come to think of it, although Masaki and the others were transported to the same forest in Carnus, its not like they were transported together.

Seimei-san estimated that they were transported here within a few days’ or weeks’ journey of each other, but they’re not sure.

Why?

First off, the forest they were transported to is pretty dense, and although it’s a thin band of trees, it’s a long band of trees through a hilly region.

So even if they all appeared in the same forest, it was difficult to figure out exactly where each of them started from, not to mention if they then traveled directly from that spot to the spot they all met up at, or if some them got turned around and ended up going in circles for a while.

Second, they all found each other fairly quickly.

From what I heard, the wyvern migration was pretty eye-catching.

That forest wasn’t the Inourian forest, after all, and you could see the sky through the trees – and the horde of wyverns streaking through.

The gamers being gamers, they all decided to follow the wyverns for some reason or another (the two extremes being Tatsu-san, who wanted to fight one, and Emi-chan, who thought they might be going towards civilization – to attack it), and the entire horde of wyverns turned out to be reinforcements attacking the Carnus army …

Anyway, all the wyverns led to the same battlefield.

At the time I didn’t think anything of the story, but in retrospect…

Wasn’t it a miracle that the gamers from Mourning Star managed to meet up within a week?

Being dropped in the middle of a random place and all just coincidentally going in the same direction?

You might say they also had the added benefit of all being Friends and having each other listed on Friend Chat so they could coordinate, but that would be false.

They had each other registered on Friend Chat, but for some unknown world conversion reason, they still had to meet up at least once to re-register each other first before they could actually use the Chat.

It really was a miracle they ended up together.

A miracle that I’m beginning to understand didn’t occur for others.

Ah geez.

This talk sounds like it’s going to be super troublesome.

I mean, it already felt like it was going to be super troublesome just from the fact that there were gamers from our world who were enslaved, and nobles are involved.

“How many – hang on. Let me call someone first.”

“Call? Ah, you mean using the Chat.”

“Yeah. Although I don’t think it’s a big deal, I’ve been told I’m too impulsive lately, so it’s better to have an adult on call before I get too involved.”

Even if I’m impulsive I have the ability to get myself out of most trouble, but when it involves politics and nobles?

Hrm… I just have an instant aversion to wanting to deal with that kind of thing.

I’m a lot better if there’s an easy-to-understand solution, you know?

If there’s scheming involved, I’d prefer to leave it to Seimei-san.

[“Hello hello, Jun-kun. I don’t really want to ask, but did something else happen? I know Karin is a bit… well… Or is it that you’ve done something again~?”]

… Isn’t his treatment of me a little rough as of late?

Oh well.

“Ah… well, although both of those might apply, I’m calling about something else…”

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<a/n: The Forge is coming. I swear.
Quick update:
– carpal tunnel/muscle strain-like symptoms are restricting me from doing too much, but it seems to be going – gone for now at my current load
– [This] was started, and is currently at [prologue-3]
– because the prep work for the above is done, I will be attempting to increase the rate of updates, but don’t expect a miracle here.>