Until Tooru turned seventeen, the Hayasaka family had a standing tradition every summer vacation: they would visit his father’s hometown—his grandparents’ house, for Tooru—and pay their respects at the family grave.

His grandparents were easygoing and kind, and if anything, Tooru remembered them getting along better with his mother than with his father. His father was the taciturn type, and his grandmother would laugh and say, “I just don’t really get that boy.” Though it was her in-laws’ house, Tooru’s mother never seemed uncomfortable there. That might have been because she had already lost her own parents.

His grandparents’ home lay somewhere between the countryside and the city, in a town where rice fields and shopping malls coexisted side by side.

It had become routine for them to lay out futons in a tatami-scented guest room, and whenever Tooru slept there, the two cats his grandparents kept would deliberately crawl into his futon with him.

He had never felt particularly strongly about animals one way or the other, but he remembered liking those cats quite a bit. They weren’t overly affectionate, yet before he realized it they would be nearby, and only when he was asleep would they slip into the futon. When Tooru woke up, they would leave as if to say, Oh, you’re up already, then lie side by side by a sunny window, lazily basking in the light.

It had been hot back then.

Just like now.

The moment that thought crossed his mind, an intense sense of wrongness washed over him, and he woke with a start.

A familiar ceiling. The feel of a single bed against his back. A cat beastkin child, Mika, sleeping while practically clinging to his neck. And, for some reason, an elven woman, Irselia, using his left arm like a body pillow.

The cat ears on Mika’s head were tickling his chin. That must have been why he’d dreamed of his grandparents’ cats.

“……No, seriously, why?”

He muttered the complaint in a low voice, careful not to wake them, but then immediately realized there was no need for that consideration.

He was sure he’d gone to bed alone. The elf currently treating his arm as a pillow was the same one who had bragged about having a special sleeping bag.

Letting out a weary sigh, he first peeled Mika off his neck with his right hand. As he sat up, he carefully pulled his left arm free from the elf’s embrace.

For some reason, both of them made small, dissatisfied groans but neither woke up. Tooru wouldn’t have minded if they had.

Deciding it wasn’t worth worrying about, he yawned, pulled the covers back over Mika, and then, as an afterthought, kicked the elf off the bed—though she still didn’t wake up.

When he returned to the living room, Tia—dressed like a town girl—was watching television.

“Ah, morning, Tooru. Are the two of them still asleep?”

“Yeah… morning. I’m pretty sure I went to bed alone, so why were those two stuck to me?”

“Mika said she wanted to sleep in your bed, and Irselia said she’d keep watch if she did. They didn’t seem to have any bad intentions, so I decided to leave them alone.”

It was too much trouble to interfere, she added with a shrug.

It was oddly detached—Tooru wasn’t sure if “surprising” was the right word, but that was how it felt. Come to think of it, the previous morning, when Tooru had gotten irritated with Irselia’s attitude at that high-end hotel, this Holy Sword wielder had said, Elves are like this.

“Do you… have some kind of history with elves? Like, a grudge or something?”

He took a bottled coffee drink out of the fridge and poured it into a cup as he asked.

For once, Tia gave a clearly strained smile.

“Well… yeah, I do. I’ve had some serious conflicts with them, and I’ve also been recognized by them in a big way. From what I know, Irselia’s actually on the better end of the spectrum. She said she came from Alfheim, right? If so, there might be people there who know about me. Elves live a long time, after all.”

When this world had fused with another, a new landmass had appeared east-northeast of the Australian continent—the Atlantis Continent. Geographically speaking, it was closer to where Mu¹ was supposed to be, but people had started calling it Atlantis, and the name stuck.

That was where the elves had lived.

Other races—beastkin, dwarves, and the like—had appeared scattered across the Earth in various places. Elves alone, however, had emerged on Earth with their cities and civilization intact.

“That counts as one of the better ones? Just what kind of utterly hopeless race are they…?”

“Among elves themselves, they seem to manage well enough without stepping on each other’s toes. Still, you really were fine letting her into your house. She got out of the car and just followed us in without saying a word, so I honestly thought you would cut her down at some point.”

“I wouldn’t. I’m annoyed, not hateful. And Mika was right there in front of the house. I figured she might have had some intention, and honestly, it was a hassle to argue about it. She seemed nice enough to Mika, at least. If she’d messed that up, I’d have drawn Kagetsu and thrown her out myself.”

It was a strange thing to say, but even when Mika’s mother had first dumped Mika on him, Tooru had accepted it. He thought it was fine now, but at the beginning he’d been genuinely troubled. Mika herself had grown attached to Tooru fairly quickly, but he wasn’t used to having children cling to him.

As for Irselia, he couldn’t envision a future where he’d think of her as “not bad,” but neither did he feel like killing her over letting her into his home. If he was already cooking for himself and Mika, he didn’t mind making an extra portion. That was all there was to it.

“Um… I’m sorry, Tooru.”

Tia said it with a clearly pained expression. Tooru didn’t understand what she was apologizing for and could only tilt his head.

“For what? Using half my soul?”

“That part’s not by choice. I’m not deciding to use half of your soul. I do feel bad about it, but that’s not what I meant. I mean… back at the hotel. I made you angry, didn’t I?”

“Ah…”

“I didn’t mean to badmouth you, you know. Arguing with elves is about as pointless as lecturing some thug who picks on newbies at the guild about morality, or trying to teach arithmetic to a dog or a cat. If you’re going to argue, it’s better to just knock them out in one hit—that’s what I should have told you properly. Once you show them your strength, they shut up anyway.”

Since Tia had acted as usual while they were exploring the dungeon with Anthem, Tooru found it a little surprising that she was bringing that incident up again.

“Well… I was pissed too, so I wasn’t exactly in the mood to sit there and listen to a calm explanation. It’s fine. Really.”

More than anything, Tia’s assessment of elves was pretty brutal.

Thinking about it, if someone were desperately trying to teach calculus to a dog or a cat, you’d stop them immediately. It would be too stupid to watch. Not that Tooru himself remembered calculus well enough to teach it—quadratic functions were already suspect at this point.

This was probably a difference in values, a difference in worldview.

The idea that elves—supposedly beings of superior intellect—were viewed as “basically animals, so arguing with them is pointless” had been completely beyond his imagination.

Still, now that he’d actually dealt with one himself, the evaluation felt uncomfortably fitting.

“But… sorry. I guess I’ve always been like that. Even when I was alive, I think I ended up making a lot of people angry because of it.”

“That’s fine too. If there’s something I won’t back down on, I won’t back down no matter who gets mad. That side of you can be annoying sometimes, sure, but, uh… I don’t hate it. It’s better than giving everything up and grinning like an idiot.”

“Yeah. That’s what I like about you, Tooru.”

“Is that so. If there were elves you knew on this side, would you want to meet them?”

“Hmm… not really. I’ve been dead in that world for a long time now. Right now I’m basically just a ghost haunting Lightbringer, right? Being with you—the wielder of the holy sword—is the value of of existence now.”

“‘Value,’ huh.”

Tooru snorted and drained the rest of his coffee in one go. He felt as though sugar were seeping into his brain, though it was probably just his imagination.

“Mmm? You look like you’ve got something you want to say?”

“People talk about ‘value’ or ‘meaning’ all the time, but whose perspective is that from? It’s about whether you have value to someone, right? Having your worth or greatness decided by whether someone else finds you valuable—I don’t really like that.”

Tooru was keenly aware that, socially speaking, he had occupied the position of a “worthless person.” Even subjectively, he could agree with that assessment to a degree.

He wasn’t anything special.

He probably wouldn’t be able to do anything particularly meaningful, and he wasn’t especially interested in contributing to society either. He hoped the world would become a better place, but he didn’t feel like he himself had to be the one to make it better.

Most people were probably like that.

And that was exactly why—if you were to wipe out all those “worthless” people simply because they were deemed worthless, society would grind to a halt in no time.

It was an extreme example, but the idea that someone was worthless in the first place was already an extreme position. There was nothing wrong with swinging just as far in the opposite direction to refute it.

There was value.

Even if it was minuscule, even if there were substitutes, it was always there. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to keep slaughtering tens of thousands of monsters on the upper floors of D-rank dungeons.

Impossible.

“So you’re saying I have value even without using the holy sword?”

“Of course you do. At the very least, you were kind to a cat beastkin kid you’d never even met before. If that counts as worthless, then it means nobody ever has to be kind to kids at all. That’s obviously bullshit.”

“…You’re… quite something, Tooru.”

Tia’s eyes went wide, her face genuinely stunned. Tooru had only said what seemed obvious to him, so he didn’t really understand what part of it was so impressive—but it wasn’t a topic he felt like digging into, either.

He glanced idly at the television screen.

It was 7:30 a.m.

As if on cue, the news program was in the middle of reporting on the Dungeon Stampede in S City.

“Oh… figures it made national news.”

“I’ve been watching for a while now, but the coverage is kind of vague. They’re probably still undecided on how to handle it. But with Anthem’s kids streaming it and all, it’s not something they can completely cover up, so they’re avoiding saying anything definitive.”

Tia’s tone was cool and detached, and Tooru couldn’t help but wonder about her life before death.

She’d been discovered by royalty as a hero and made to swing her sword at their command—that was the story, wasn’t it? If so, she must have faced disasters like Dungeon Stampedes before. Situations where the damage was already done. Probably more than once.

Back at the Sugai Dungeon, when Tooru had tried to speak to Sadoyama Kouji and Kawai Sakiho, Tia had said, That can wait. They were alive, so they could talk later.

Maybe there had been times when “later” never came—times when she didn’t make it in time because of not hurrying enough.

In short, her sense of normalcy was different.

“Tooru, you might finally end up with a collar around your neck from the people at the top.”

She said it flatly.

As Tooru rinsed out the now-empty glass at the sink, he thought for a moment. Then he replied to Tia, who was staring absently at the TV.

“You just never tried to take the collar off. And you never tried to snap the chain.”

He remembered reading somewhere that all power ultimately reduced to violence. At the time, he’d thought that sounded about right. Authority, wealth, political influence—all of it was backed by violence, by the military, the police, the Self-Defense Forces. None of it functioned without that foundation.

In the present day, a nation’s military strength depended heavily on both the quantity and quality of the explorers it possessed. That was because, in practical terms, there was no way to completely prevent a single individual from infiltrating a country.

There had once been an era known as the Cold War, when the world had lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation.

There probably weren’t many explorers who could completely withstand the destructive power of a nuclear bomb—but even without resorting to such weapons, sending a handful of A-rank explorers into a place like the National Diet Building would be enough to slaughter every lawmaker inside, unless it was being guarded by explorers of equal or greater rank.

Structurally, it was the same as the Cold War. A concept akin to nuclear deterrence.

If you strike, you’ll be struck back.

With retaliation as justification, there’s no need for restraint.

Which meant no one could afford to make the first move.

That was how it worked.

On top of that, once dungeons—both an existential threat and a vast source of resources—had appeared all over the world, there was another factor to consider: using explorers who had grown powerful enough to serve as deterrents and grinding them down in wars was simply too wasteful. This wasn’t the time for that. Unfortunately, there did seem to be countries that did it, and others that allowed it to happen.

Setting that aside—

Tooru found it highly doubtful that the kingdom which had once possessed Tia had actually had enough force to truly restrain her.

In the end, her collar hadn’t stayed on because it couldn’t be removed—it had stayed on because of her own goodness.

Probably.

“Tooru, would you accept a collar?”

Tia asked the question without taking her eyes off the television.

Tooru set the glass upside down on the drying rack and gave a careless shrug. If it was a well-made collar, he might end up liking it. If it was shoddy, he’d probably hate it. Either way, it was something he couldn’t know until it actually happened.

◇◇◇

After that—

On a whim, he made two cups of instant coffee and set them on the table, then lazed around watching the television as it shifted from a news program to a news-like variety show.

Somewhere, in some park, a weird pigeon was dancing in time with an old man’s arm swings. Somewhere else, a shop’s jumbo parfait was being praised as exquisite. A female announcer was being made to do some utterly pointless challenge… As long as he watched things like that, the world seemed absurdly peaceful.

No—more accurately, the actual level of peace, whatever index you wanted to call it, was probably the same as yesterday’s. Go back two days, three days, and somewhere in this world, hell would still be breaking loose right at that moment, with someone’s family member being mercilessly killed in the midst of it.

What a mess, Tooru thought.

And that was as far as his thoughts went.

While he was still idly watching TV, Mika emerged from the bedroom and shuffled toward him, her freshly awakened face twisted in sleepy irritation.

“Morning… Tooru, food…”

So he served honey toast to the cat beastkin child. As he watched Mika gnaw groggily on the overly sweet bread, another sleepy figure came out of the bedroom—the elf, also fresh from sleep—who shoved the mobile terminal in her hand toward him with a displeased look.

“I’ve been summoned about yesterday’s incident. It’s terribly troublesome, but it would be cruel to dump it all on Megumi and the others, so I’ll respond.”

“Want breakfast? Toast made from sliced bread, honey spread on it.”

“…I’ll eat. I’ll go change, so have it ready.”

Three minutes later, the elf—who had been wearing a negligee and sporting a sullen just-woke-up expression—returned dressed in that expensive-looking outfit of hers. The timing was perfect; the toast had just finished.

“Tooru. Mom’s coming back, so I’m going home.”

“Tooru. You’ll probably be contacted later, so make sure you respond properly.”

The cat beastkin child and the S-rank elven explorer left Tooru’s house together, both with bread crumbs and honey stuck to the corners of their mouths. Tooru could only think, Do whatever you want.

“Seriously, why didn’t that noble elf say anything about sneaking into someone else’s bed? Normally you’d comment on that, right?”

“…Well, you invited her to breakfast instead of pressing the issue yourself, Tooru, so I don’t think you’re really in a position to complain.”

With Tia’s much-appreciated jab in his ear, Tooru cleaned up the room, which had somehow ended up messy, and figured it was about time to check the online news. Just as he turned on his terminal—

Ding-dong.

The doorbell announced a visitor.

“Did they forget something? No… that elf doesn’t seem like the type to ring the bell, and Mika would just walk in. So maybe Sadoyama-san…?”

Letting out a weary sigh, he headed to the front door and opened it.

A young lady and her butler were standing there.

“Pray pardon us! Might you be Toorubro-sama?”

Tooru quietly closed the front door.

Could I just pretend this didn’t happen? he thought.

He couldn’t.

1. Land of Mu