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Cast of Characters Arc 2: Genia and Merula, Unveiling the Deepening Mysteries
— Late in the 10th month, 1,547th year, Continental Calendar — Parnam Castle —
On this day, as temperatures were starting to get chilly, Parnam Castle was very quiet.
Of course it was, though. Right now, all the people who might have been at the center of all the usual noise at the castle were away.
The master of this castle, the provisional king Souma, was reinforcing the Union of Eastern Nations against the demon wave at the behest of Empress Maria of the Gran Chaos Empire. He was being accompanied on this campaign by his fiancées Aisha and Roroa, along with many other people.
Furthermore, as his first primary queen Liscia had returned to her father Sir Albert’s domain to give birth, Carla and many of the other staff had been sent with her.
Because of that, Souma and his merry friends were almost all away. In spite of that, things had stayed fairly lively until recently, because of Duchess Excel Walter being there holding down the fort.
But then, because of the situation changing in Lastania, the place Souma had gone to reinforce, he’d ended up needing Excel’s power as a great water mage. Upon hearing this, Excel had taken the plan drafted by Prime Minister Hakuya and gleefully headed for the Union of Eastern Nations.
Then yet another person who was at the center of the usual noise was gone.
Parnam Castle was very peaceful and quiet without Souma and his people around. To the point that the castle’s workers, who had grown accustomed to the hubbub, now felt something was lacking.
However. There was still an energetic pair left in the castle.
“It’s time for Genia—”
“—and Merula’s—”
““—‘Let’s Test It!’””
Thrusting their fists skyward, the overscientist Genia Maxwell and the high elf from the Spirit Kingdom of Garlan raised their voices in unison.
Though she had shouted along with Genia, once they were done, Merula’s shoulders slumped and she let out a sigh. “Hey. Do we have to do this every time?”
Genia poked Merula’s puffed-up cheeks. “It’s important to get into the spirit of things, Merumeru.”
“I told you not to call me Merumeru!” Merula protested.
But Genia laughed it off and began speaking in the direction of no one in particular.
“Now then, as for where we are today...”
“Who are you talking to?! Are there ghosts here?!”
“Ta-dah! This is the Summoning Room where the king was summoned as a hero.”
“Come on, who are you talking to?!”
“Hm? I’m imitating one of Big Sister Juna’s educational programs. As if there were a broadcast jewel over there.”
“Save your playing around for somewhere else! Ugh!” Maybe she was fed up with playing the straight man in this comedy routine, because Merula’s shoulders slumped hard. “Just give me a break. Sir Ludwin and Souji are both away for today.”
“Big Brother Lu is with Souma and the rest up north, and Sir Souji has gone to the border with the Lunarian Orthodox Papal State, right? That means we’re both without our keepers,” Genia grinned.
“Don’t call them our keepers! You don’t mind being treated like a pet, is that it?”
“I don’t really mind. Meeeeow.”
“Please be human, for the sake of Sir Ludwin’s stomach, if nothing else.”
Merula was as much of a research maniac as Genia, but she had proper common sense when she got away from her research. That was why, with Genia’s keeper (?) away, Merula was being forced to act as the straight man in this duo.
Trying to get back on track, Merula put her hands on her hips and said, “Honestly... So, you were saying this is the room King Souma was summoned to? Is this the place where he and Liscia had their fated meeting, too?”
“I hear those two met in the governmental affairs office. The king had just finished an all-nighter, so he may have had black circles under his eyes, too.”
“There’s not a shred of romance in that...”
They were talking about the hero summoned from another world and this country’s princess, so couldn’t the two have had a more dramatic meeting?
Then again, recalling both of the relevant individuals’ faces, well, it was certainly like them.
“So, we’re investigating this room today?” Merula asked.
“Yep. The king’s asked us to research the system known as ‘hero summoning.’ Of course, it’s a mysterious thing that calls people from another world, so even an overscientist like me is going to struggle to completely understand it.” Genia shrugged.
Merula crossed her arms with a pensive look on her face. “Hmm, don’t you think King Souma knows that? He’s hoping we can still find some hint anyway. I’m sure of it.”
“Yeah. You’re probably right about that. So then, Merumeru, enchantment magic is your specialty, right? How does this room look in your eyes, I wonder?”
Merula narrowed her eyes a little and touched the wall.
Because she’d already shifted her head into researcher mode, being called Merumeru didn’t bother her in the slightest.
Merula looked around the room and then said, “I can tell that advanced spells have been woven into this entire room with no gaps, no waste. It’s a higher-level enchantment technique than we could possibly hope to replicate today. Even I can only read a fraction of it.”
“Hmm... If even Merumeru can’t read it, I think we can safely conclude this room itself is a product of overscience, like the Jewel Voice Broadcast jewels.”
Having said that, Genia reached out to touch the wall, but Merula stopped her.
“Don’t touch it too much. If even a small part of it is lost, we can’t replicate it.”
“But you touched it, didn’t you?”
“I only touched where it was safe to. You can’t even tell the difference, right?”
“Well, I don’t have much knowledge about enchantments, after all...” Genia withdrew her hand and brought it to her chin, cocking her head to the side. “But... doesn’t this feel a bit odd? Even if there’s an enchantment too complicated for us to replicate in modern times here, is this something where a single room’s worth would be enough? It’s like a baby trying to lift up a rhinosaurus.”
“I’m not sure about the analogy, but... I agree.” Merula looked around the bare room. “It’s true that this spell has been woven in a complicated style with maximum efficiency, but I don’t think this volume could be expected to bring about such a large effect... In fact, looking around, I feel like it’s all the same sort of spell.”
“Hm? What do you mean?”
“The spells carved into this room were likely made with one single objective in mind.”
Genia seemed not to understand. “Well, yeah? I mean, this room is for summoning a hero.”
“When we talk about summoning a hero, that’s the emergent result of a variety of overlapping phenomena, right?” Merula bent her fingers, counting off the conditions for the summoning. “It requires connecting two worlds, selecting a person who meets the criteria, transferring that person without regard to time and space...”
Each of those conditions was important, and if even one of them failed, Souma wouldn’t have been summoned.
Merula stopped counting. “...Well, anyway, there’s so much more to the process than I could enumerate. What I’m trying to say is this room is just one part of that process.”
“Wha?! You’re saying this room is only part of the hero summoning?!”
“That’s what it would mean, yes.”
“Incredible...”
If all the spells packed into this room were just one part of the system of hero summoning, just how large was the full scale of it?
And where exactly was it?
While trembling at the massive scale of this overscience, Genia was burning with curiosity.
“In that case, we’ll have to figure out this room’s role first!” she declared. “If we know what process the spells in this room are a part of, we can likely figure out how important this room is.”
“True. I can decipher parts of it, so let’s give that a test.”
And so their investigation began.
— Two months later, on a chilly day —
I sighed loudly, looking around the governmental affairs office. “Hahh...”
“Don’t sigh,” Hakuya chastised from beside me. “You’ll get me down, too.”
No, no, this was the sort of thing that would make anyone want to sigh.
It was just the day before yesterday that Liscia had given birth to twins. But in my position as king, even if my children had just been born, I couldn’t stay with Liscia and the twins forever.
While looking at their sleeping faces, I had received a message from Hakuya back in the castle:
“I heard the children were born safely. Congratulations. Now, for the sake of those newborn children, please return here and resume your work as king.”
Even as everything else had been going on, the paperwork that I, the king, needed to settle had continued to pile up.
“We’re fine, so go do what you have to do, Souma,” Liscia had told me, so I’d left Aisha, Juna, Roroa, and Tomoe there and ridden Naden back to the castle.
Oh, geez... I seriously wanted a system of paternity leave. If this was how it was going to be, I wanted to finish work for today quickly and fly back to Albert’s domain.
“Let’s take this at full throttle, full turbo!” I exclaimed, looking around for my ride.
“Oh, if you were looking for Madam Naden, she flew back to Sir Albert’s domain, you know?”
“She left me behind?!” I yelped. “How could she?!”
As I was getting enraged at this unexpected betrayal, suddenly there was a knock at the door.
I called out, “Please, come in!”
It was the researcher duo, Genia and Merula, who showed up. They were usually so boisterous, but today they seemed somewhat out of sorts for some reason.
“What’s wrong, you two?”
“Well... we have a report to make on the investigation you requested.” Genia said, her eyes wandering.
The investigation I’d requested? Oh, the one on the ritual of hero summoning.
If I could find out just a little about the workings of the ritual that brought had me here, I might be able to figure out if there would be others summoned like me after this.
I wasn’t holding out any hope that I’d be able to travel back and forth between my old world and this one, though.
“So, what did you find out?” I asked.
“Only a very tiny thing, really,” Genia said. “It’s about that summoning room... Let me come right out and say it. The spells in that room had nothing to do with summoning someone from another world.”
“...Come again?”
Huh? The room they’d been calling the Summoning Room had nothing to do with summoning someone? ...No, but... Whuh?
“I’m here, and I was summoned, you realize?” I said.
“That’s true. But... nearly all of the spells in that room concerned linguistic ability.”
“Linguistic ability?” I repeated.
“Allow me to explain,” Merula took over. “This is only as far as I can decipher it, but the spells in that room were all related to what you called ‘the hero’s mysterious translation powers.’ I was able to pick up words connected to language on the walls, floor, and ceiling. Basically, the function of that room was merely to make it so that the hero could communicate with the people of this world.”
“Merely...?”
My voice trailed off.
So, basically, that room wasn’t for summoning heroes, it was like being put through a crash course in foreign languages for communicating with another world (or eating Translation Jelly)?
I cocked my head to the side. But it’s a fact I was summoned to that room, you know...?
“Well, we can’t say definitively that it’s all about translation powers,” Genia interjected with a wry smile. “Merumeru’s ability to decipher the spells was limited, so we can’t say for sure that there was nothing related to summoning in that room.”
As she spoke, she got more and more enthusiastic.
“But if the translation ability required spells that complicated, I can’t even imagine what it would take to summon a person from another world. I don’t see it fitting into the spaces that Merumeru couldn’t decipher. That’s why we came up with a hypothesis!”
Genia held up her index finger.
“That room is just a small part of the hero summoning, and all it contains is the spells to enchant the one who is summoned with the translation ability, and the spell to initiate the hero summoning system. In other words...”
“That room only has the translation function and a switch, and a hero summoning system too vast to fit in that room exists out there somewhere?” I finished.
“Exactly!” Genia said cheerily. “You really are quick on the uptake.”
None of this made sense to me anymore. The room I thought had summoned me was just a part of a larger system...?
“Well then, where is the rest of the thing that summoned me?” I asked.
“Well, when you considered all the spells needed just for your translation ability, I think it would have to cover more than just this castle. It would take the size of this entire capital city.”
“The entire capital...? It takes a spell that ridiculously big?!”
“Yeah. On that note, there was another thing that caught my attention. You’re aware of the shape of the castle walls around this city, right?”
“Yeah. They’re circular.”
I hadn’t paid it much mind, but the walls around the capital Parnam were unusual in that they formed a circle. (Refer to the beginning of Chapter 1 in the first volume.) Most other cities were rectangular, so it felt as though special attention had been paid to the appearance of the capital.
Genia pulled out a map of Parnam and spread it out on the table. “I want you to look at the map of this city. When you look at Parnam from the air... doesn’t it look like a sort of magic circle to you?”
““Huh?!”” Genia’s words made both Hakuya’s and my eyes go wide.
Now that she mentioned it, it did look like a magic circle or a mandala.
The castle was in the center, and there were large roads leading out in the four cardinal directions, while smaller roads spread out like a spider’s web.
And, though they couldn’t be seen on this map, there were also the secret escape tunnels for the royal family which we now used as a sewer and aqueduct system crisscrossing each other underground.
If they had enchantment spells carved into them, too...
“Basically... the capital of Parnam itself was created to summon a hero?” I asked.
“That’s our thought.”
“Hakuya, you said the king who founded this country was summoned from another world, like me, right?” I asked. “Wasn’t Parnam built by the first hero king?”
Hakuya was well versed in this country’s history. He shook his head with a stern look on his face. “No, the Elfrieden Kingdom was founded by the first hero king, but there was a kingdom in this land before then. It’s said that the city of Parnam dates back even further than that.”
A city that predated the first hero king...
In that case, Genia and Merula’s hypothesis was sounding more and more realistic. Maybe one of the “old ones” like the Mother Dragon, Madam Tiamat, was involved.
It looked like more research into this matter was going to be necessary. Not just by Genia and Merula, but a large number of researchers.
“Did you learn anything else?” I asked.
“Well, there was one thing that bothered me,” Merula said. “We talked about how the spells in that room were meant to allow the hero to communicate with the people of this world, but... I felt it was a little indirect in the way it did it. I don’t know, it felt too roundabout.”
“Roundabout?”
“I meant that if their only goal was to allow the hero to communicate with the people of this world, they didn’t need a spell that complicated. If I recall, you speak the words of your world’s language, and we understand them as the common language of this continent... right?”
“...Yeah. I feel like that’s how it was explained to me.”
I spoke Japanese, and the people of this world understood it as the official language, Continental Standard. But it was still Japanese, so when I tried to explain words or concepts that didn’t exist in this world, they didn’t understand. Words like “smartphone” and “anisong,” which didn’t exist yet in this world, were not translated.
That was likely why, when Juna sang a song that I had sung in exactly the same way I had sung it, Liscia couldn’t understand the lyrics.
“That. That’s what I’m talking about.” Merula looked bothered by this. “Honestly, it’s too roundabout. Rather than making us understand the language of your world, it would have been far simpler to make you understand ours. If the spell did that, the only target would be you yourself.”
She... certainly had a point, yeah. Compared to influencing the minds of an unidentified number of other individuals, it would have been much faster to change just mine.
“The thing is, you’re able to write in the language of this world, right?” Merula went on.
“Now that you mention it...”
I could read and write the language of this world. That was why I could do paperwork.
That was likely because I had been made able to understand the writing in this world. If so, why didn’t the spell do the same thing for spoken language?
“Why do you think that is, Merula?” I asked.
“Well... I feel like that was the intent of the people who created these spells.”
“Their intent?”
“No matter what, they wanted to leave your language behind. I can feel that intent. Even if it made the spells painfully complex as a result.”
My language... huh.
Now that I thought of it, there was that cube-shaped object that I’d encountered with Naden in the Star Dragon Mountain Range.
It had been creating a tempest and bombing wildly as if in a violent rage, but the moment it heard my voice, it had suddenly seemed to stop.
That time, Tiamat had said I was the “key,” but... maybe the real key was in the language I spoke.
Augh... My head was starting to hurt. I felt like I was starting to understand, but I still didn’t understand anything. It was frustrating.
In the end, I wasn’t going to figure it out by talking about it here, so I decided to continue investigating this matter.
Seriously... What is this world?!
The two of them left, and work was done for the day, so I mulled it over in my head as I headed for the courtyard where a wyvern was waiting to take me to Liscia and the twins.
This world was where I, my wives, and my children lived.
I could only pray that no more unsettling events would occur here.