Chapter 15 - More Enemies
"What are you talking about?" "Get lost!" yelled Kazuya at the creature, but it kept hovering over and around him, causing the young man to spin until he fell to the ground.
"I apologise, but you cannot get rid of me—for now at least," it said to Kazuya. "Now tell me, what do you want to call me?" it asked.
Kazuya frowned at the creature; normally introductions are supposed to be uttered the other way around, so it was needless to say that this was a strange fellow.
He sat on the ground, frustrated by the mere presence of this tiny creature. "Tell me, if I give you a name, will you leave me alone?" he asked the small creature.
"I cannot promise that, but maybe I can try," it replied naively.
"How about... Gaichu?" Kazuya said mockingly. "It fits your personality quite well." "Now leave me be!"
"Alright then, Gaichu it is," it said out loud with excitement, which slightly surprised Kazuya. It knew nothing about the name it had just been given and was excited about it.
"Do you even know the meaning of the name I just gave you?" Kazuya asked in disbelief.
(By the way, "Gaichu" is the Japanese word for "pest").
"I don't know," the creature thought out loud with a hand on its chin, "should I care?"
Kazuya arched a brow before continuing, "Okay, so if you are alright with the name, can you go now?" he asked the little spirit creature.
"How?" asked Gaichu, not sure what Kazuya meant by telling him to go.
"The same way you came, you idiot!" he replied angrily.
"Where is that?" asked Gaichu, still not sure what Kazuya was trying to say.
"I don't care, just get lost!" Kazuya yelled at it, losing his patience.
"Get lost? Is that even possible? "I can do that," it asked sincerely, as it had never anticipated such a question before. It was a creature that knew only the information vital to the game but had too little information on human slang and how conversations worked.
Kazuya covered his face with both palms, not knowing what to do with this little fellow who had just appeared out of nowhere.
"I don't know how to "get lost" as you wish, but I can hibernate for a short while if you want. "But I doubt you would want to do that, as I have a huge wealth of information on the next stage of the game," she was still saying when Kazuya cut in.
"Well, if you could hibernate, then why haven't you done so since I told you to leave me alone?" "Get out!" Kazuya said out loud to it.
It remained unfazed by his slight tantrums, but did as it was told: "Alright Kazuya, see you soon," it said right before closing its eyes and disappearing, "Call my name if you need anything."
After it disappeared, Kazuya remained sitting on the ground, close to the graves of his wife and child. Memories of their precious moments together filled his mind. Thoughts that were intended to be fun and nostalgic became painful and sore, and he couldn't help it.
He thought that after defeating the giant goblin last night, the game would be over and he would be prompted to log out. But that was not the case, and the big thing was, he was glad it wasn't!
He felt like logging out and going back to the real world would be doing his dead family a disservice. Thoughts and passions related to the outside world and this world of fantasy collided in his head, yet he couldn't seem to let go of this one.
Whenever he would try to remember a fun time in the past, like a blissful birthday commemoration or a periodic joyous occasion, he would feel different memories of that same event from the two different worlds clashing against each other in a way that almost drove him crazy.
For example, a memory of his 16th birthday in the other world would clash with that same event in the present world. In this world, he was 23 years old with all the vital memories of his life in mind, but in the outside world, he was 17 years old, and he remembered that as well!
This was one of the main reasons staying in this fabricated world felt more real to him right now than the real world, as he felt like he had spent a lot more time bonding with this world than he had with the other, which made no sense in actuality but was what the state of the game entailed for him.
This is not the average isekai game he was used to. This game had gone so deep into his mind that distinguishing it from actual reality was like counting all the stars in the sky. It had kept him bound in the shackles of fiction and fantasy, and the crazy thing was, he did not want to be free.
He had spent all night pondering on this and could not come up with an answer to a lingering question.
What now?
Everything he loved and cherished in this world was gone. So where would he go from here? This was where his conflict came from.
Going out of this realm into the real world felt like pretending his life with his family wasn't real (and it wasn't), but staying in this world with nothing to hold onto felt sickening. It wasn't only his family and property that were taken from him; the village in which he grew up and settled had also been destroyed.
With nothing in mind, he fell to the ground. At that point, he could feel himself gradually losing his grip on sanity. He slowly began to chuckle silently to himself, and from there, he began to laugh out loud. He laughed hysterically until his stomach began to hurt while he squirmed on the ground like a madman with tears pouring from his eyes.
He felt so pathetic and useless that he could not help laughing at himself. He laughed until his throat became sore and his face hurt from smiling too much. While staring at the bright sky, he wiped the tears from his eyes and took a deep breath, delighting in how pathetic he was.
But all his self-destructive thoughts came to a halt when he heard footsteps approaching. The village was so empty that he could hear the footsteps clearly enough to determine that they were coming from afar, given the way they sounded.
He swiftly got up, picking up his sword, and wondered who the oncoming people were—if they were actual people. Maybe they were fellow villagers who hadn't known about the massacre or people from neighboring places coming to see what went on last night through the ruins of the settlements.
Well, there wasn't much to see. Unless they would be interested in counting corpses and searching for survivors—something that hardly crossed Kazuya's grief-stricken mind.
Though if he had heard a cry for help, he might have helped rescue the victim, who also survived the destruction. But as far as he knew, he was the only survivor.
He ran to the open square right in the middle of the village and frowned angrily at what he saw.
...More goblins.
They were about a dozen or so in number. They were going about, salvaging as much as they could from the various houses in the village and the graveyards of all the victims—goblins and humans alike—picking up whatever they thought was valuable.
They were all armed with weapons. It seemed like they assumed there might still be a threat in the village, and even the way they maneuvered the village seemed very cautious.
They saw the dead giant goblin lying dead on the ground with a sword-shaped hole in his skull, and it seemed to make them all the more cautious about everything.
The mere sight of those creatures annoyed him to the core. He wished he could wipe their race off the face of the earth with the snap of a finger, or better yet, have the pleasure of taking his time to cut them all down with his sword.
Normally, they had been likened to lower animals searching for food and valuable resources all the time without bothering themselves with humans unless they had an encounter with one.
But now, suddenly, they can have an organized attack against the village, one so unanticipated that the able youth of the land who were supposed to defend it could not take the situation seriously enough until it was too late.
However, Kazuya did not have the patience to wonder how such pathetic creatures became so smart in such a short time. Vengeance was on his mind, and he couldn't help craving more of the thrills he got last night from slapping those creatures.
He wanted more of the same, and it seemed like Raijin had granted his wish.
He walked out of his hiding place with his sword drawn, ready to resume the carnage he had wrought the previous night.