Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash: Volume 21 (eBook)

Ao Jyumonji (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
250 Seiten
J-Novel Club (Verlag)
978-1-7183-0644-8 (ISBN)

Infos

The star fell, the two gods reemerged, and the children of humanity were reduced to servants.
With fate having thrust yet another burden on him, Haruhiro's journey isn't over yet...
'Awaken.'
A boy awakens. His comrades are nowhere to be seen. Where is he? The masked man in front of him says, 'That's...your name, is it? Manato?'
Grimgar has become a battlefield where the believers of Lumiaris and servants of Skullhell fight a neverending battle. Manato will live in this new land rife with death. Together with a new group of comrades, he must cut a path for himself through the light and the darkness!

Textauszug

1. Laugh If You Want

It was so cold that morning that it had woken him up.

The air in the tent had been chilly and moist. His mom and dad hadn’t been there. He’d assumed they’d probably woken up first and headed out already, and he’d been right. One of them had then come into the tent. He’d known it was his mom when she hugged him tightly through his blanket.

“Listen, Manato. Your father and I have been talking, and we’ve decided we need to go to town.”

When his mom had told him that, what exactly had he thought about it? Manato didn’t remember very well. But he felt like he hadn’t understood that going to town meant they’d be living there. They had gone to town before, after all.

His parents were hunters. That meant they hunted wild beasts with bows and crossbows, spears and knives; they fished, or set up nets to be retrieved later; they foraged for berries, fruits, mushrooms, wild vegetables, fragrant grasses, and medicinal herbs; and they did all of this while frequently moving from place to place.

Even in Manato’s earliest memories, he’d had a knife in his hands. He knew which berries he could eat, and which mushrooms and grasses were definitely bad news, as well as the bugs, snakes, and other critters he had to watch out for—the bare minimum he’d needed to learn in order to survive. His parents must have taught him all that. Anything he didn’t know, he’d asked them. His mom would explain things at length, but his dad sometimes told him to figure it out for himself. Tear off a bit and lick it. If that did no harm, put it in his mouth. If nothing went wrong after a while, then it was more or less safe. That was the method that Manato had learned from a young age.

There were hunters outside of Manato’s family too. When they went after larger prey or hunted an entire herd of animals, they would sometimes work together with other hunters. But they never traveled with others for long. There were some hunters they had worked with a few times, but Manato only had a vague recollection of their faces. He didn’t remember any names.

Manato remembered a number of villages where hunters met up. Those small settlements had usually had maybe a dozen houses and some small fields, and had been inhabited by a bunch of old folks who could have dropped dead at any moment. They’d sometimes had hot springs. But those villages had apparently been taken over and occupied by the towns.

The towns were larger than the villages. Much larger. They had more houses than he could count and tons of people. Too many people. The towns had markets where he and his family could buy and sell things. Hunters would sell their furs and meat at the markets and receive things they couldn’t make in exchange, like textiles, clothes, knives, nails, and glue. But once their business was done, they never lingered long. The townsfolk looked down on hunters and were wary of them. It was best to leave in a hurry.

Since his mom and dad were hunters, Manato was a hunter too.

They’ve decided to go into town. We’re going into town again.

That was all Manato had made of it.

But he’d been mistaken. Badly mistaken.

First his mom and dad took him to the town called Nikoh. He’d been to Nikoh before and seen a sparkling building called the Toshogun from a distance. But Nikoh wasn’t their destination. Manato and his family passed through without stopping. Half a day later, they arrived in a town called Tsunomiya.

It was his first time in Tsunomiya, and the town was bigger than any he’d ever seen before. There were buildings everywhere, and even the narrowest roads had someone walking on them. There must have been an incredible number of people living in the town, yet there were no bodies lying along the roadside even though fly-ridden corpses were usually unavoidable in towns. There were a lot of crows, but none of the roaming dogs and pigs that would eat anything. There were a number of monstrous buildings belching black smoke into the air that shrouded the whole town in a thin haze. The sound of people talking, people shouting, people screaming, and who knew what else was constant.

There was a place in Tsunomiya called Hachimayah Park with a barbed wire fence around it and an unbelievably long line waiting in front of a sturdy gate. Manato had a lot of time to kill while his mom and dad were lined up there. But though he got hungry, he was never bored. There were dozens of kids like Manato around, whose parents were waiting in line. Manato hung out with them, and they’d talk about themselves or tell him about Tsunomiya. He also walked around picking things up.

The boss of Tsunomiya was called the mayor, and he was apparently a yakuza.

Manato knew what yakuza were. They shaved their heads or dyed their hair and always had tattoos. They wore flashy clothes and carried weapons openly, as if showing them off. They walked around in groups too, sometimes only a few, sometimes more, which made it easy to spot them. You had to watch out for them in towns. They were bad news. If a yakuza set their eyes on you, you had no idea what they were going to do.

And the town’s boss was a yakuza? What did that mean?

Manato thought that yakuza were big scary bad guys, so it came as a surprise to him, but it actually wasn’t that unusual. In fact, it was pretty common. That was what everyone told him.

His mom and dad spent almost two full days waiting in line and were finally able to meet the yakuza mayor. Or rather, they were able to meet another yakuza acting as his representative. They asked for permission to live in Tsunomiya, and once they got the okay, they went through the citizen registration process and were given a job by the yakuza mayor and a microapartment.

A microapartment was a room in a public housing complex. It was a lot more spacious than a tent, but the roof was low. Manato could stand up straight in it, but his mom and dad had to stoop.

When he asked about their work, his mom and dad wouldn’t tell him in any detail, but when the sun came up, they would leave the apartment, and they would come back when it went down. They were apparently going to that monstrous building that belched black smoke, which was something called a factory. There was a yakuza referred to as the foreman at the factory, and they had to do whatever he ordered them to. This was called labor. Doing labor was their job. They got one break in the middle of it, and were given food. His dad told him it was barely edible.

When they finished the work, they were given paper tickets. But the tickets weren’t just any old scraps of paper. They were money.

Money could be exchanged for goods in Tsunomiya and the surrounding area. His mom and dad used it to buy food which they brought back to the microapartment. And Tsunomiya didn’t just have meat, fruit, and vegetables. It had richly flavored soup, noodles, porridge, dumplings, dried foods, fried foods, skewers, and a wealth of other things for sale. Manato always looked forward to eating with his parents in the light of an oil lamp before going to bed.

But his mom and dad didn’t eat much. They’d only take a few bites and let Manato have the rest. While his parents worked in the factory, Manato wandered Tsunomiya, being careful not to let the yakuza pick a fight with him, and ate anything he could find that seemed edible. Even then, he was always hungry, so his parents were probably trying to provide for him as well as they could.

But that wasn’t all. There was an actual reason for them not being able to eat very much.

Back when they were hunters, the two of them had limped occasionally, and the grip strength of his dad’s left hand had been very poor. Both of his mom’s elbows, her right wrist, and her left knee had already gone bad. Occasionally, his mom or dad would lose a tooth, and they’d all laugh about it, but it wasn’t hard to recognize that not having many teeth left made it hard to eat. The two of them had gotten awfully thin since they’d moved into the microapartment. Not that they hadn’t been pretty thin before then too.

When hunters didn’t use traps, they had to chase their quarry. That had been hard on them. Manato had spent a lot of time desperately chasing animals around, trying to direct them to where his parents had been waiting. Sometimes the prey had suddenly fought back, which had resulted in some close calls. Manato had been delighted whenever his dad saved him, and he’d actually found it all pretty enjoyable, but it had scared his parents badly every time.

His parents had decided to move to Tsunomiya because they hadn’t been able to carry on as hunters.

They’ll both die soon. It won’t be long. Though Manato often thought that, he never said it out loud, because his mom and dad never talked about how they were going to die. They probably thought of it as an inevitability. All living things, whoever or whatever they were, had to die eventually. That was just the way of things. But they might have been worried because they had Manato. Manato would die eventually too, but how was he supposed to live until then? It was hard to hunt alone. Hunters always worked in pairs, at least. If possible, a group of three people was better than two. If they could get four, or even five, that made things even easier.

But in town, wouldn’t it be possible for Manato to live on his own?

That must’ve been what his mom and dad had been thinking when they’d...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.12.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash
• Illustrationen: Eiri Shirai
• Übersetzer: Sean McCann
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Adventure • Battle • Fantasy • Light Novel • Magic • other world • Survival
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-0644-X / 171830644X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-0644-8 / 9781718306448