Every Morning, My Mirror Saves the World - Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Ruiyin narrowed her eyes and studied the bushes up ahead. With one hand, she flipped open the index of the Monster Compendium, scanned it for a while, then lowered her head expressionlessly and rummaged through her backpack. Before long, she had found the entry on “page 2,256 of volume five, book two, part three, installment six.”

Jungle Demon Wolf: a level-three wind-element monster. Small in size and agile in movement. When not acting in a pack, an individual has relatively low attack power. A suitable mob type for beginners to grind levels on.

Okay. That was the one. Ruiyin tossed the backpack back onto Galahad’s back, drew the dagger from her waist, bent low, and prepared to charge in-

Swish, swish. Two sword strikes later, the demon wolves lying in ambush in the brush were dead as a whole nest.

Ruiyin froze with her dagger still sheathed, staring blankly as Lars rushed past from behind with a blood-dripping longsword in hand. After checking the corpses, he looked up in satisfaction. “Ruiyin, there’s no danger anymore!”

After a moment of dead-eyed silence, Ruiyin turned, patted Galahad on the shoulder, picked up the backpack she had just thrown away, and flipped madly through the pages. Her target locked onto “Jungle Mad Rabbit.” Once she had confirmed it, she looked up.

Swish, swish. Lars turned back cheerfully, carrying the rabbit’s corpse. “All clear!”

She silently shut the book, sighed, and started to walk forward.

Swish, swish. Two more cuts. Lars waved. “Done. The brambles are gone too!”

Ruiyin stared at the road ahead, now covered in brambles and the corpses of rabbits, wolves, and snakes, a bloody path where an entire food chain had been wiped out. She lowered her head and asked Galahad, who was crouching off to one side, “Hey… Lars, he…”

Galahad lifted his head, dark circles under his eyes and cheeks sunken, his mind clearly adrift. “…What?”

“…Did Lars do something completely insane to you yesterday? Both of you look abnormal.”

“Him?” Galahad gazed into the distance and gave a long, wistful sigh. “The troubles of youth… How could an old-timer like me possibly understand…”

…With Vigia gone, this guy had somehow become an entire era more disgusting than usual.

They were currently in the jungle on the island. When they had set out that morning, Lars, with eyesight far exceeding that of a college-entrance-exam crammer, had spotted what looked like a man-made structure at the center of the island, surrounded by jungle. Since their search still had no clear objective, this structure, by virtue of its distinctive artificial features, became the rescue team’s first target.

At the time, Ruiyin had strained her eyes in the direction Lars pointed and concluded that not only had this guy never taken a college entrance exam, his eyes had to come with built-in superpowers.

“Strange.” Galahad wiped away the sweat he had worked up carrying the Complete Monster Compendium and looked up in confusion. “Do either of you feel like even though we’ve been walking for so long, we haven’t gotten any closer to it at all?”

Ruiyin stopped. She narrowed her eyes toward the center of the island. The area encircled by forest seemed to be wreathed in mist, and a dome built of massive stones appeared and disappeared within it. They had set out at dawn, and now it was already dusk, but aside from fighting monsters and grinding levels along the way, that building had seemed forever just out of reach.

“We haven’t been walking in circles either.” Lars carefully made a mark by the roadside. “We really have been advancing toward the center of the island, but compared to this morning, that place seems to be… a little higher?”

It was true. In the morning, the island’s center had still belonged to the category of “buildings only people with special abilities can see.” By now, it had become an ordinary building visible to everyone.

Where Ruiyin could not see, Lars and Galahad quickly exchanged a worried look.

They really were not walking in circles. The scenery on both sides was changing constantly, charging headlong in the direction of a fantasy movie. After they killed a monster that looked a little like a chocobo, they rounded a bend, and what appeared before the three of them was, shockingly, a lake.

Its shape was distorted, because several large rocks divided up its territory. Its substance was shallow, because even a level-two invalid like Vigia would not be able to drown in it. Its geology was barren, because there was not even a single fish in the water. Its atmosphere was sinister, because located in the middle of so many monster corpses, it looked at first glance like the set for a horror movie…

But none of these factors could stop Galahad’s feet from rooting themselves to the ground the moment he saw it. Because this little lake was steadily rising with sulfur-scented steam, completely ignoring how unreasonable it was for a hot spring to appear in the middle of a monster forest.

“Hey.” Galahad stood fixed in place, eyes glued to it. “Don’t you think that weird building can wait until later, and what we need right now is rest?”

Lars walked over with a frown and yanked hard on Galahad’s arm. In the end, the other man’s feet were nailed so firmly to the ground that Lars staggered and nearly toppled into the hot spring. Lars reprimanded him sternly, “Galahad! Have you forgotten what situation we’re in right now? We have to…”

Ruiyin turned and looked at Galahad, whose entire posture declared, “I’ll die before I leave!” Then she looked up at the sky and spoke. “That’s fine too, Lars. It really is past the time when it’s safe to travel. Once night falls, a lot of dangerous monsters will come out, right? It wouldn’t hurt for us to rest here for a while.”

“…We have to make sure we have enough energy to fight! Ruiyin, you’re incredible. You think of everything!” Lars ran to Ruiyin’s side, practically wagging his tail, his eyes shining with worship.

Galahad’s position was that after enough of this nonsense, a man got used to it.

The final decision was that Galahad would gather firewood, Lars would start the fire and cook, and Ruiyin would hunt.

Galahad bent over searching the ground for dry branches, but his eyes kept drifting uncontrollably toward the hot spring. Finally, when Lars turned to start the fire, Galahad dropped the wood in his hands and pattered toward the hot spring. Triple jump, joyous dive!

“No!” Lars caught him by the rear plate of his armor just in time, and the Silver Knight face-planted into the ground.

“The preparations aren’t done yet!” Lars declared righteously. “Ruiyin is already back from hunting. We have to get the fire going immediately.”

The woman, still with monster blood drying on her face, leaned against a tree and lazily raised a hand in a wave. Then she flashed her dagger, bared her teeth in a grin, and greeted Galahad with a look that said, “If you don’t finish your work, I’ll kill you, okay?”
“…”

Galahad set his face, then shot to his feet. In a few quick motions he climbed the tree beside them, and the Silver Knight’s firewood-chopping swordsmanship was instantly pushed to its limit. Moments later, a pile of dry branches warmed by the sun came crashing to the ground.

Then he sheathed his sword, stripped at lightspeed, took another running start, hop-skip-jumped, and sprang gleefully forward.

“No!” Lars reacted fast and grabbed him by the underwear. The Silver Knight face-planted again, this time with an added crisis of accidental bird exposure.

“What are you doing?!” Galahad scrambled up in furious embarrassment, clutching his underwear with both hands to protect his bird as he howled, “I’m already done! Why still can’t I go?!”

“We, we, we have to…” Lars’s face flushed bright red as he stammered, “We have to let Ruiyin go… go first…”

As he spoke, he snuck a glance to the side. The instant his gaze met Ruiyin’s, his face turned even more eggplant-purple.

“Why should I?!” Galahad flung out an arm, clearly radiating the attitude of a man who had already lost his face and saw no further use for shame. “I refuse! Since that She-Demon already took over all the men’s hunting work, she definitely won’t care about tiny details like this!”

“That’s right. I don’t mind.” Ruiyin smiled magnanimously. “The place is huge, and there are rocks between us. We can go in together.”

Galahad shot Lars a smug look, then backed up three steps, took a deep breath, and for the third time ran wild and leaped free.

With a muffled thud, the great Silver Knight face-planted for the third time. The front half of his body sank into the shallow spring water while his lower half stuck stiffly into the wind at an angle. A bleak shudder ran from his head all the way to the tips of his toes. Then, after what seemed like a century, he slowly sank beneath the surface amid a trail of bubbles rising from underwater.

“Good.” Ruiyin snapped her notebook shut. “The spot Galahad jumped into was the shallowest after all. Having him go first really was the most accurate way to measure the depth. Lars, stop spacing out. Let’s go.”

With that, she tossed aside the notebook in her hand, which was labeled Preliminary Draft: Lucky T Development Plan, stepped over Galahad’s corpse, and walked to the other side of the rock.

“That She-Demon…” Galahad propped both arms on the rock, using crushed cooling moss as a cold compress for the lump on his forehead while loudly complaining, “She knew this was the shallowest spot from the start, didn’t she? Damn it. One day, I’m not going to be able to take it anymore. I’ll show her a man’s rage! That bastard! Cold-blooded! Violent! Crude! She’ll never get married in her whole life!”

Before he had finished speaking, two idle knocks sounded from the screen-like rock beside him.

Galahad snapped impatiently, “What?”

Ruiyin’s voice drifted over faintly. “Sorry to interrupt. I’m right next door.”

The man’s rage instantly lowered its flag and beat a retreat.

With green moss on his head, Galahad puffed out his cheeks resentfully and swam to the middle of the hot spring. He checked his reflection in his silver armor, frowned, and said, “Lars, don’t you think this shade of green moss doesn’t really match my hair? I do know of a kind of perilla herb that can treat bruises too. Would it look better if I switched… Lars?”

He turned his head to look at the boy who had not made a sound for quite a while.

Lars: steaming in the hot mist.

“Ruiyin is next door… right next door…” Lars’s face was flushed in two rosy patches, his eyes glittering like two pieces of emerald as he stared dreamily at the night sky. “What do I do… I’m staying beside her without any clothes on. This is so rude! Uh… she probably isn’t wearing any either…”

Galahad silently looked down through the perfectly clear water. The boy, already deep in degenerate daydream mode, was blushing with shame all the way down to the tips of his toes.

“…” Galahad felt that he was very normal. Truly.

On the far side of the rock, Ruiyin had no idea that in a space occupied only by people of the same sex, the lower limit of decency could often slide into unknown depths. With one hand, she scooped up her dripping wet hair from the water while carefully washing the Mithril Mirror she had brought with her to this other world.

During the previous battle, she had kept the mirror hanging in the leather pouch at her waist, and it had picked up quite a lot of magical beast blood, dried-ration crumbs, and things of that sort. Add in the lightning-shaped crack from when Ruiyin’s inner personality had acted up and thrown it, and the whole thing could only be described as too tragic to look at. Yet it was precisely this tragic-looking piece of junk that had once summoned the soul of the legendary God of Darkness, Mordova.

The price that time had been one thousand innocent souls.

It was the classic setup for an evil divine artifact. To use it for summoning, you needed either blood or souls. It might be a divine artifact, but for an upstanding citizen like Ruiyin, that bankrupting price meant this thing was basically no different from scrap.

Ruiyin gazed at her distorted face in the mirror, split into two halves by the crack. She tapped the deep-blue mirror surface lightly with one finger and murmured unconsciously, “…Mordova?”

Lars, still in degenerate daydream mode, and Galahad, deep in “a man’s confidence!” mode, heard a sudden commotion from the other side almost at the same time.

First came a splash as something fell into the water, then the sharp clang of metal striking metal, mixed with a woman’s panting and chaotic splashes. The two knights, both gifted with powerful imaginations, thought almost simultaneously: Could Ruiyin have been attacked by a man? Or attacked a man?!

“Ruiyin!” Lars and Galahad appeared on the other side of the rock at the same time.

In the hazy steam, ripples from the recent violent movement still rocked the spring water. Ruiyin’s wet long hair lay in a tangled mess down her back, and one hand held the mirror high. She stood in waist-deep spring water, her bare foot planted on a pitch-black helmet. And beneath that helmet… there seemed to be an astonishingly tall object of unknown gender attached to it…

“Go back.” Ruiyin turned expressionlessly to the two dumbstruck men, slowly grinding her sole down on the head of the Black Knight sinking beneath the water. “Both of your birds are showing.”

Author’s Note:

Mm… I’ve discovered that aside from being an idiot, Galahad might also have a dumb-cute attribute…

The necromancer who already got his boxed lunch: …What the hell happened to the promised one thousand souls?! _(:з”∠)_