Chương 5: Book 1: Chapter 3 - Yōma [Part 2]

[LOCATION REQUEST RECEIVED] GPS: Unavailable Network Geolocation: Unavailable Map Cache: Available Astronomical Observation Log: Available Terrain Estimation: Partial Historic Geographic Reference: Unstable Processing... Shimon waited, and the corpse continued to stare at nothing.

[OFFLINE LOCATION ESTIMATE] Country: Japan Region: Kantō Historic Province Estimate: Shimōsa / Musashi border zone Hydrological Landmark: Large river consistent with Edo River system Terrain and settlement pattern consistent with Konodai region Confidence: 61% Warning: Historic reference data conflicts with observed events. Shimon read the panel twice. Then a third time, sifting through the meaning there.

"Konodai," he said. The name struck some old dusty shelf in his memory. A battle. Or two battles. The details were hazy at best. It was the sort of thing he half-knew because he had once lost an ironman game campaign after failing to secure a river crossing, then spent two hours reading articles to justify his firm belief that the game had in fact cheated somehow. Konodai vaguely meant Chiba to him, which meant the Edo River, castles, and bloodthirsty regional warlords.

A place that existed, or had existed, but not like this. More importantly, to the best of his knowledge, it had not contained much in the way of monsters.

"Observed events," he said carefully.

"What conflicts?" Observed events include non-standard military banners, unregistered clan identifiers, unidentified biological hostiles, and system-level metaphysical overlay incompatible with known physical models. Most of that was rubbish, just more technobabble and more evidence of the absurdity of his situation. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until sparks bloomed. Japan. That was the first good news. Sort of. He was in Japan.

Not Mars, not a completely alien world, not a fantasy continent where everyone had names involving too many apostrophes. Japan meant food he might recognize, customs he might half-understand, and a language close enough for the chip to work with. Japan also meant that he had been thrown into a version of it where monsters were real, and the UN Charter and human rights did not exist.

"Show map." A translucent map unfolded in his vision. It was not perfect. Large sections were shaded in grey where modern roads, bridges, rail lines, and cities should have been. The chip overlaid cached historical geography against what it had observed: river, slope, battlefield, castle, forest, probable road, possible settlement. The castle sat ahead and slightly north-east by the chip's estimate, marked with an uncertain red outline. The battlefield lay south-west.

The cave had been tagged as Temporary Domicile with a small icon. Shimon studied the map with great intent.

"Nearest village," he said.

"Not the castle. Village near the castle, preferably one with people, food, and a lower chance of violent encounters." Route Planning Parameters: Avoid battlefield. Avoid castle gate. Avoid dense forest where possible. Prioritize roads and inhabited areas. A blue line appeared. It curved through the woods, down a slope, and joined a road that ran roughly toward a settlement on lower ground near the castle's outer economic orbit. Estimated distance: 4. 2 kilometers. Travel time: 58 minutes. Threat level: Unknown.

"Threat level: Unknown, that is the least comforting unknown I have ever seen." He almost laughed again, but stopped himself because he was not entirely sure he would be able to stop. Packing took very little time, because he owned almost nothing, and most of what he owned had belonged to dead people yesterday. He took the dead man's knife. He took the remaining lump of cold millet or rice wrapped in leaves and forced himself to eat half of it despite the way his stomach objected.

He drank the last of the stale liquid from the gourd. Of his old clothes and shoes, he wrapped them into a cloth bag. Perhaps he could sell them as curiosities somewhere. Then he took a moment to adjust himself, because apparently survival depended upon it. The strange thing was that he understood more than he had before. Not perfectly, but the knowledge was there now, sitting under his skin like a borrowed habit.

The Ronin class and its new armor skills had left something behind in him: an echo of hands tightening cords, shoulders settling beneath weight, armor plates shifting when a man breathed. He knew, in the same unsettling way he now knew how to stand with a sword, that the dō should sit higher on his torso, that the kusazuri needed room to move over his hips, that badly tied suneate would rub his shins bloody before noon. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It felt as if he had done this before. The armor he had looted was still not the best. The dō, a battered cuirass of lacquered plates and old lacing, sat badly on his torso until he tugged and adjusted it. The cords were stiff with dried mud and blood, but his fingers found the knots with an ease that did not belong to him. The kusazuri hanging from the bottom of it, those skirt-like armor panels meant to guard the hips and thighs, had been catching against his stolen clothing.

He shifted them, loosened one cord, tightened another, and suddenly they slapped less awkwardly against his legs. Kote sleeves covered his forearms, the cloth beneath its mail and little iron plates stained brown-black, but mismatched. The suneate on his shins were also mismatched, one tied more securely than the other, and the haidate protecting his thighs had clearly been made for a shorter, broader man.

Shimon pulled, retied, shifted, and cursed under his breath until the whole arrangement felt, for lack of a better word, better.

"I should probably pick up a helmet somewhere," he muttered. A kabuto, ideally. Something between his skull and the many exciting ways this era had invented to open it. He considered moving the body, looking at the dead man lying at the cave mouth, one arm bent under him, face turned toward the place where Shimon had slept. Flies had already found him. Not many yet, but enough.

"I should bury you," Shimon said to himself more than anything. In that moment, a part of him meant it. He also meant to be a better person, call his grandmother more often, eat vegetables, and sleep eight hours. But the ground outside the cave was stony. He had no shovel. There were monsters in the woods. He could not spend an hour making a symbolic hole for a man who had tried to kill him.

"I'm sorry," Shimon said. Then he stepped around the body and left. The forest in the morning was both better and worse. Better, because daylight had returned. Worse, because daylight revealed enough detail to prove that imagination had not been doing all the work. The trees were wet and close, their leaves heavy with overnight mist. Spiderwebs jeweled between branches. Mushrooms grew in pale clusters along fallen logs.

Once, he found a mark scored into the bark of a tree at shoulder height: three deep parallel gouges that could only have been left by a monster. The blue route line led him through the undergrowth. He followed it with his trusty spear held in both hands. The two swords bumped at his hip with each step, but they felt better now, having adjusted them as best he could. His stolen clothing smelled of smoke, sweat, iron, and damp cloth. His feet hurt inside primitive sandals.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, his modern self kept trying to warn and complain to him about blisters. A sound came from deeper among the trees. Click-click. Shimon stopped. Click.

"No," he whispered. He decided to move faster. Not running, because running made noise and burned through Stamina. But he walked with greater purpose, stepping over roots, ducking under branches, letting the chip's route guide pull him through the path of least resistance. The young man pointedly did not look back. He had seen too many movies warning him against that course of action.

Another sound came to his left, a thin chittering whine that rose and broke, and his grip tightened on the spear until his fingers hurt. The blue line bent downhill, and he followed it with the obedience of a man who had lost all faith in free will. Slowly, the trees began to thin after what felt like an hour and was, according to the chip, seventeen minutes. The ground softened, then opened into a strip of grass and scrub at the edge of a narrow track. Beyond it lay a proper road.

But proper would be a generous term. It was packed earth churned by feet, hooves, wheels, rain. Ruts ran through it like wounds. Puddles reflected the grey sky. Shimon almost cried from relief as he spied people moving along the so-called road. A stream of them. Men with bundles on their backs. Women carrying baskets. Boys driving thin oxen. Two old men pushing a handcart stacked with firewood. A woman with a child tied to her back and another clinging to her sleeve.

A pair of monks or priests or something priest-adjacent in patched robes, one of them carrying a shakujō—a wooden pole topped with a finial of metal loops, which jangled when shaken. Several men carried spears and an assortment of weaponry. A kago—a wooden palanquin—passed with two muscled bearers, the passenger hidden behind lowered blinds. Later came something finer: a norimono with lacquered panels and a small retinue around it.

Spearmen walked to either side, servants trailed behind with boxes and bundles, and a mounted man with a hard face rode near the front. Shimon stared as they passed. The mounted man was armored, but that was not the part that held Shimon's attention. He was riding a bipedal lizard perhaps seven meters from nose to tail, with powerful hind legs, small grasping forelimbs, and a long snout filled with teeth. Tyrannosaurid, a quiet part of his mind supplied. It was a dinosaur.

The terrified young man swallowed and stood very still until the beast and its rider were farther down the road. Only then, gathering what little courage remained to him, did Shimon step onto the road. A few people looked at him, but not much else happened. Most of them simply looked away. He had been prepared to be shouted at, accused, challenged, bowed to, arrested, recruited, or killed. But then again, compared to a thunder lizard, he probably looked quite banal indeed. A few eyes lingered on the swords.

A few on his height. He was not enormous by modern standards, but here he stood taller than most men around him, lanky and narrow and pale beneath the accrued dirt. One older woman gave him the particular glance reserved for strange young men who might become trouble. A boy stared until his mother cuffed him lightly on the back of the head. Shimon released a breath he had not known he was holding.

"Actually working," he whispered in modern Japanese. The road, it seemed, did not care about his existence. So he joined the flow and kept his mouth shut. Questions, he decided, were dangerous. Questions could land him in a very hot spot of trouble. Questions could become the sort of social interaction that ended with someone discovering he did not know who currently controlled the region, what year it was, which clan he was pretending not to belong to, or why his accent sounded so strange.

Best keep his mouth shut, he affirmed. He walked, and deep inside his brain the biochip listened. After five minutes, a prompt appeared in blue. Local language corpus expanding. Observed speech pattern: Japanese-adjacent. Detected variance from modern Japanese: Significant phonology drift, archaic vocabulary, regional register, unknown loan terms, metaphysical terminology. Current comprehension estimate: 64% contextual, 41% literal. Would you like to begin analysis of local languages and update speech protocols?

A wave of nostalgia hit him. This had been one of the advantages of his parents selling him out to a corporation. Shimon could master languages, and master languages quickly, as his grades in Spanish and Japanese had shown. Yes, he affirmed mentally.