Three days out from shore, the ship had settled into a rhythm Sekai already hated. The deck rose and fell under his shoes, the rigging creaked, and the horizon refused to change. He leaned on the rail and said it out loud, mostly to hear a voice that was not the wind.
"So much free time."
Fury was an elf used to solid ground, and the sea had knocked her flat. She was shut in her cabin, still green, still refusing food. Leafa had vanished into her own room the moment they cast off and had not come out. That left Niña, who found him at the rail with her usual calm.
"We're over open water," she said. "We just have to bear with it."
"Yeah, I know." Sekai kept his eyes on the gray line where sky met sea. "I was wondering if something's going to happen out here, and what we do if it does. It'd be plain dumb to assume a seven-day crossing stays quiet. Anything that can go wrong, will."
Niña tilted her head. "What do you mean, something on the sea?"
"It's a natural occurrence in games. You've never seen Final Fantasy?" She shook her head. "Assassin's Creed?" Another shake. "Not even the board game Battleship?"
She thought about it, brightened as if a memory had almost surfaced, then shook her head again.
"Anyway," Sekai said, "fights on the water happen all the time. Pirates. Krakens. Ghost ships." He let the last one sit. Skeleton crews, rotting sails, a hull that should not still be floating. Back home, people would have filmed it, titled the clip Real Ghost on Video, and watched it trend before lunch. Here, he actually wanted to see one. "I digress. If an event hits—"
"No way!"
The shout came from the bow. Sekai straightened. Already? Ghost pirates, or—
"Dragon!"
"Okay," he said, amazed in spite of himself. "I was not thinking that."
Leafa was suddenly beside him, coat snapping in the wind, eyes fixed on the shape tearing out of the cloud bank. "It used to be a sea monster. I was preparing for this. The thing in front of you is—"
A fish that became a dragon. Sekai only knew one name for that. "Bahamut!"
"Baha-what?" Leafa said. "You mean Behemoth?"
The dragon's shadow swallowed the deck. Its voice rolled over the ship, low enough to rattle the planks.
"Who here? Was it you? You were the one that summoned me?"
Leafa frowned at the growl, hearing only noise. Sekai heard every word.
"Whoa, it can talk. Sorry for calling you Bahamut. You're Shenron. Did I somehow gather the Dragon Balls?"
"The dragon's what?" Leafa asked. "And it's talking? It's a ferocious monster, and this ship is far too small for a fight."
"So you feign ignorance. Then—"
Fire gathered in its jaws, white at the core.
Sekai slapped his chest where the controller usually sat. Nothing. Pockets. Nothing. "Oh, shit."
He bolted below. Leafa stared after him.
"Aren't you a hero? You're running?"
He found it wedged under a sword rack, down and right stuck, select jammed in like grit under a keyboard key. No time to wonder how. He hit pause.
The world locked. Spray hung in the air. Leafa was frozen mid-step, already raising her blade as if she meant to bat the fireball aside. She was not Link. That blast would take the mast, the deck, and everyone on it the moment he let time move.
"Well," he told the silent ship, "let's calm down first."
He stepped in, worked his hands over Leafa's chest, and pressed his face into the give of it until the panic in his ribs eased. "Okay. Refreshed."
He bit his thumb, smeared the bead of blood across his palm, and ran the signs: Ram, Dog, Snake. Knees bent, he slammed both palms to the deck.
"Doton. Gōremu Shōkan. Gankichi!"
The golem rose inside the stopped second. Together they lowered a lifeboat, lashed it to the hull, and hauled until the ship crept a few inches off the fireball's line. Sekai unpaused.
The blast roared past the bow and died in open water. Leafa and the dragon both stared at the empty air where the ship had been.
Sekai cupped his hands. "Hey, Bahamut. I probably summoned you. My D-pad got stuck with select. Debris in the buttons. My bad."
He held the controller up. The dragon did not care. Another fireball swelled.
"Whoa, whoa, are you not listening?"
Sekai nudged the stick right. The blast veered harmlessly off the starboard side. Left did the same.
"Why can't I hit you?"
"Like I said. I'm your master."
The third fireball was larger. Sekai paused again, climbed, and let time run only when he was seated between the spines.
"Phew. Much better. You gonna try to shake me off? I wouldn't recommend it."
"You got on my back? In an instant?"
It had not been an instant. It had been a long, ugly climb while the world held still. Sekai kept that to himself and grinned. "Someone has a brain. Recognize me, or face death."
The dragon went quiet. Then the hostility drained out of its voice.
"In an instant, you mounted me, when not even the fabled heroes ever did. Very well. I accept you as my Master."
That easily? He was not about to admit the controller had taken days to figure out.
Leafa looked up at him as if the sea had rearranged itself. The dragon's enmity was gone. She could understand it now, every word, as if language had been taught in the space of a breath. No one had taught it anything.
Ten minutes later Fury came up from below, steadier than she had been all voyage, and stopped dead. A dragon was on the aft deck, licking a wing.
"What is this?"
Niña brightened. "Fury, you missed it. It's Bahamut-san."
"You named it?"
"Sekai did," Leafa said, coming up behind them. "He is an odd fellow. Apparently it is his summoned beast. I have never seen a dragon attach itself to a human. Who exactly is Sekai?"
"Shore ahead!"
Sekai shaded his eyes. Cliffs, a wall, towers. "That must be the next stop. Mount Cape."
"Master. Are we heading there?"
The tone was closer to a partner than a beast addressing an insect.
"Yeah. Seems so."
"Master, your human ships are much too slow."
Bahamut took the line Sekai made fast and pulled. The helmsman yelped and let go of the wheel before the speed took the skin off his hands. Niña laughed into the wind. A week of sailing folded into an afternoon.
At the harbor the shouting started before the gangplank touched stone. Dragon. Huge dragon. Flee. We're all going to die.
"You're standing out too much," Sekai told it. "I got it from here."
"Very well, Master. I shall retire to the sky."
It climbed, circled once, and held. The panic thinned when it did not dive. Leafa adjusted her coat.
"Well, we're here. If you'll excuse me." She paused and looked back. "Oh. Kuzuno, Sekai. That cute thief informed me. If you intend to have an audience with King Mount Cape, then beware the retainer woman behind him."
She walked off across the planks and did not turn around.
"Wait. Beware, or be aware? Hello?"
No answer. Am I being ignored?
The castle sat where a castle had no business sitting, poured over a cliff above the water, walls sheer enough that a siege ladder would have been a joke. Up close it stopped being a castle and became a fortress. The gate alone could have swallowed their ship. Stone answered stone with a low, endless groan as the wind leaned on the battlements. Two spearmen watched them come. One took in Fury's ears and the cut of her clothes.
"Well, there is no other Brave accompanied by a Dark Elf. Oh. You could tell?"
"You are the Brave-sama and his honorable party from Belltree, correct? This way, please."
Above the parapet a shadow flicked past. Bahamut's voice dropped out of the sky, cheerful and ruinous.
"Master, shall I blow up this castle with a Fireball?"
"Stop. Stay away."
The guards pretended not to have heard a dragon offer to erase their workplace. They led the three of them through a gatehouse, up a stair that seemed to have no top, and into a hall of banners and cold light. A child sat the throne in a crown too large for his head. The woman beside him did not look like a retainer. She looked like the room had been built to frame her.
"So you are the Brave who saved Belltree."
The king managed a thank-you for the trouble of coming all the way out. Sekai was still staring at the woman.
"A child? And what's up with the smoking hot witch next to him?"
She smiled as if she had heard worse. "Since there are neither telephones nor internet, how did you hear about my fame from such a distant country? Are there homing pigeons?"
"Well, travel is a natural part of an RPG, so it's all right, but—"
"Brave-sama, do you not know?"
Her name was Lovisa. The League of Mages had dispatched her as adviser to the king. High mages could speak across countries by secret arts that were, in her own words, akin to sorcery. There were League mages in Belltree too. Information moved whether or not anyone invited it. The boy on the throne called her words delightful and himself unworthy of them. Lovisa accepted the praise without blinking.
Sekai let the pause sit on his face. Basically, that hot witch manages the country.
The king straightened, eager. "Yes. The fact that Brave-dono appeared upon my invitation will be proof to this talk."
Sekai did not answer. The controller was already in his hand. Time stopped.
He stepped in close. The dress slid under his palms. He filled both hands and held, comparing, shameless about it, then crossed to Fury and did the same while she stood frozen with her arms half raised. Bigger than Fury's. For real. An endangered species. He let go only when the joke had run its course, wiped his expression back to blank, and released the world.
Lovisa had not moved. "Now, we have a request for Brave-dono."
Night after night, ghouls roamed the capital. Graveyard snatchers, corpse-things, the kind of monster that got back up. The crown had tried. They kept coming, one after another, no matter how many times they were cut down.
Sekai rubbed his chin. "Ghouls? Like the graveyard corpse snatchers from games? Much like zombies?"
Lovisa had no idea what games were. She only knew the things revived.
"For the Brave-sama who drove away the King of Darkness, ghoul extermination might be an unsatisfactory request. Nonetheless, would you please undertake it?"
Something about it bothered him. The peaceful street they had walked to get here. The way Lovisa stood closer to the throne than the king did. He smiled anyway.
"All right. I will take care of it, since it seems like a main quest."
The boy's eyes went wide. "That is also my will, Brave-dono."
Later, with the party already turned toward the doors, the king's nerve caught up with him.
"Is this truly appropriate, Lovisa? To invite a Brave from afar. What if he—"
"Your Majesty, please entrust the whole matter to me. I feared it might trouble the King."
"Moreover, you said that he drove away the King of Darkness, didn't you? This is news to me."
She did not answer that. At the window she watched the sky. Without her support, she had told him, the country could not hold up. He had called it flattery. It was sticking in her throat now, because something up there was looking down on her.
A Bahamut hung high over the roofs, lazy as a hawk that had already eaten.
The castle town, by daylight, did not look like a place under siege. Carts, children, a man hauling lumber, women with baskets. Niña shaded her eyes and grinned.
"Although she said ghouls come out night after night. The castle town is so peaceful, huh."
Leafa had taken the best inn in the city. Shrimp was the specialty. She was already at a table on the square when they found her, sword propped against the chair, and she did not pretend to be surprised.
"Did you meet that mage? Kuzuno, Sekai."
"In other words," she said, once Niña had called the woman a puppet and gotten a blink for it, "it is under their control. Not only that. Ever since that woman became adviser to the king, we of the Council of Swordmasters were denied entry to the castle. This country is the puppet of the League of Mages."
Sekai glanced back at the walls. Lovisa was at a high window, small against the stone, watching the street.
"That viper is plotting something. I still do not know what it is, but I will surely find out."
Leafa drank and did not look at him while she said the rest. She had been begged into the work. Covert action suited her. She had the ability to investigate a conspiracy, and she had been strong enough to keep climbing even after she changed jobs to assassin. The question she finally aimed at him was simpler.
"Does that happen to be the reason why you came to Mount Ghoul Cape? Not for Mount Ghoul Cape extermination?"
"We're going to taste the local shrimp specialty," Niña said, which was not an answer. "Do you want to join us?"
Leafa's mouth tightened. "You leave me no choice. I will go with you."
Sekai blinked. "Do you mean me? The aloof one-woman army?"
"Yeah. My treat."
Night took the peaceful street apart.
They came out of the alleys the way the king had described, bone and hide and too many teeth, and they did not stay down. Sekai put a practice swing through the first skull and told Niña what every zombie game had already taught him. Head or neck. Against undead, that was the whole trick. The ghoul came apart before it finished its lunge.
Bahamut's shadow crossed the moon.
"Master, shall I erase the Ghouls along with the city?"
"You don't have to."
He did not need a capital turned to glass to clear a spawn. The dragon banked, disappointed and obedient, and settled over the rooftops like a second night. Sekai rolled his shoulders, controller warm in his pocket, and faced the next mouth in the dark.
"Now. Let the ghoul hunt night begin."