The Survivalist Lady

Among survivalists, there is a feat known as the "NOZAWA Challenge."

This globally renowned adventure, a great record established by the Japanese survivalist Kiyoshi Nozawa between 2068 and 2097, consists of traversing every magical terrain scattered across the world.

The rules are simple.

Wearing ordinary clothing with no magical effects and carrying only a single knife, one must travel alone from the edge of magical terrain created by a Grand Magic rampage to its epicenter. No water, food, or wand may be brought in.

Once you plant your country's flag at the epicenter, you escape the magical terrain.

All of this must be done alone and within seven days.

In other words, you must survive the harsh and abnormal wilderness where people die even with full equipment, using only a single knife.

And not just once.

The great survivalist Nozawa, one of the defining figures of the twenty-first century, traversed all thirty-two magical terrains that existed at the time using nothing but a single knife.

Once is the foolish deed of a madman.

Twice is extraordinary good fortune.

Thirty-two successful traversals transformed the unknown Nozawa into a world-renowned hero whom no one could imitate.

Nozawa was an ordinary human. He was neither a Mutant nor a demon. Even though he spent a total of twenty-nine years on it, including meticulous preliminary research and recovery periods, his record was truly unprecedented. Anyone aspiring to become a survivalist knew of this great man.

Fifteen years had passed since Nozawa's time, and survival theory had advanced.

However, every veteran survivalist who attempted the NOZAWA Challenge to follow in his footsteps failed to do the same, withering away before the impossibly high wall.

The NOZAWA Challenge, the ultimate goal pursued as the culmination of a lifetime by elite survivalists who specialized in surviving extreme environments, was also an entrance to hell.

Roderick Hillary, born and raised in Denver, Colorado, America—the place where the Demon Lord disaster ended, overlooking the Rocky Mountains—was also one of the survivalists attempting the NOZAWA Challenge.

Roderick had been familiar with the Rocky Mountain wilderness from childhood and had grown up firing a Gun Wand. In his twenties, he made a fortune publishing accounts of his adventures in Australia.

He began the NOZAWA Challenge after entering his thirties.

In just three years, he had traversed six places—the "Sea God's Great Whirlpool," "Upside-Down Volcano," "Evernight Plains," "Fog of No Return," "Radiant Highway," and "Starvation Desert"—and was traveling by airship so he could complete the seventh during the summer.

Roderick considered survival the ultimate challenge to and proof of himself.

On the harshest land on Earth, he would protect himself with nothing but a knife and accomplish the impossible.

He believed that was the greatest proof of his strength.

Even if he carried a powerful wand and armored himself in powerful magical metal, that only meant his equipment was strong.

Even if he accomplished something alongside companions, that was only because he had companions.

Only by accomplishing a harsh challenge with nothing but himself could he truly prove his pure, untainted worth.

That was why, when Roderick crawled out of the crashing, burning airship carrying a girl in his arms, he immediately regretted it. This was going to be a real problem...

"You possess a marvelous sense of morality. Thank you for saving me."

"Ah... you're welcome."

The girl of about ten, wrapped in an obviously luxurious, fluffy fur coat, performed an elegant curtsy despite staggering as the tremendous blizzard lashed her from the side.

The airship had crashed right in the middle of the "Wendigo Mountain" that Roderick had planned to traverse.

Wendigo Mountain was a magical terrain in North America. The iceberg formed by the rampage of Grand Glacier Magic had sealed the entire surrounding region in snow and ice, creating a harsh land where blizzards raged all year round.

During summer, the temperature rose somewhat and made it easier to tackle, so Roderick had taken a room in a nearby town and planned to attempt the crossing during a week of scorching days.

Come to think of it, he had had a bad feeling from the moment some little young lady or other boarded the civilian airship with a whole procession of black-clad guards.

Rich people who did not use Dragon Service were usually involved in something. Getting involved with them never brought anything good.

Roderick had sensed something fishy and stayed quietly out of sight at the edge of the passenger cabin, but apparently that had not been enough.

An hour after departure, the sound of an explosion, screams, and incantations rang through the airship.

He had no idea what had specifically happened.

But as a result, the airship had crashed in flames.

The only survivors were the girl, protected by the corpses of the guards who had thrown themselves over her, and Roderick, who had made a thick cushion out of whatever materials were available.

He knew without having to ask.

Roderick had been caught up in some kind of incident or conspiracy surrounding the daughter of a fabulously wealthy family.

It was an assassination carried out at the cost of numerous civilians. If this was not trouble, what was?

"I neglected to introduce myself. My name is Ainsell Stuart. May I ask your name?"

"...Roderick."

Her clear Queen's English revealed that the young, blond, blue-eyed lady was from the British upper class, as far removed from survival as could be.

It was nothing but bad luck.

He had been thrown into the harsh magical terrain he was supposed to traverse alone, burdened with an exceptionally troublesome passenger.

In the midst of a violently blowing white snowfield, the airship burned with a roaring flame.

The smell of roasting flesh. The smell of blood. The sharp stench of burning. These unpleasant odors nevertheless gave the two of them enough time to consider what to do without worrying about freezing to death.

Illuminated by the enormous bonfire of destruction, Roderick diligently sorted through the situation while habitually gathering scraps of the airship's torn and shredded hull.

First and foremost, they had to survive.

That was the ultimate goal.

Fortunately, he had committed the environment of this crash site, Wendigo Mountain, to memory. Escaping alone and reaching the town at the foot of the mountain was not impossible.

But if it was not impossible, what was the actual probability of success?

A one-percent chance and a ninety-nine-percent chance were both classified as "not impossible." He should estimate the feasibility and decide how to act based on the result.

As Nozawa said, "Survival is magic-power allocation."

Magic power could become fire, water, weapons, or armor.

By properly determining how to use magic power, one's ability to survive improved dramatically.

Conversely, if one squandered a small amount of magic power on foolish things, survival became hopeless.

Roderick possessed 20K magic power.

With some ingenuity, that was enough to escape the magical terrain.

But what about this British young lady toddling along behind him?

"Lord Roderick, what have you been doing all this time?"

"Gathering resources for survival. Miss Ainsell, how much magic power do you have?"

"20K. I am a fourth-year student at the Magic Academy."

Miss Ainsell accurately understood the intent behind his question and answered with composure far beyond her years.

That was much better than having her scream, cry, and cling to him.

But even so, considering she was a sheltered girl barely ten years old, a total of 40K felt terribly inadequate.

"It is fortunate that you are here, Lord Roderick. I am unaccustomed to this sort of thing. Please escort me to the town."

"..."

Roderick clutched his head at Ainsell's carefree remark.

He had thought she was a calm girl, but he had been wrong.

She simply had no idea how dire their situation was.

She was completely accustomed to being looked after and waited on. She had never imagined there could be situations where that way of life would not work.

Roderick wrote the girl off almost immediately.

To survive, one had to be tough both mentally and physically.

If a sheltered young lady, so delicate that the weight of her lavish clothes might break her, dragged him down, neither of them would survive.

He felt sorry for her, but he had no intention of going down with her.

Roderick spoke as he quickly made a backpack out of the thick cloth and rope he had gathered.

"Miss Ainsell. I'm going a little farther to look for supplies. I'll be back in an hour, so wait here until then. Once I return, the two of us will make preparations to descend to the foot of the mountain."

"Oh? Lord Roderick, you are not very good at lying, are you? Your face says 'Abandon me.' You must have a difficult time at tea parties, don't you?"

Roderick was struck speechless by Ainsell, who delivered this at her own pace without changing her expression.

He had not intended to use an obviously ingratiating tone, and what he had said should have been perfectly reasonable.

Even so, Ainsell had seen through his lie with ease.

The girl apparently lacked the power to survive in the wilderness, but possessed the power to survive in aristocratic society. She was Roderick's exact opposite.

"...No, that's not it. I'll be back in an hour. I won't abandon you. Look, there's no point in both of us going out to scout, is there? Please stay here without moving and conserve your strength, Miss Ainsell."

"Hmm... Very well, then let us make a promise. If you deliver me to the foot of the mountain, I swear I will pay you whatever reward you desire. If I return alive, my father will certainly make good on it. One hundred million dollars, two hundred million, as much as you like."

"That is..."

When Roderick hesitated, Ainsell smiled, removed a lavish ring from one of her slender little white fingers, and pressed it into his hand.

"Please take this as a down payment. I do not know its value, but it was made by one of the first-rate craftsmen employed by our family. It should be worth a respectable sum."

"...Is this made of Hollow Silver?"

"I am told it is made of magical metal. The central stone is a magic stone called a 'Merlin Diamond.'"

Roderick swallowed hard.

It was, in fact, an attractive proposal.

The NOZAWA Challenge took an enormous amount of time and money. If he suffered a serious injury, he would need expensive healing magic, and neither preliminary research nor travel expenses were free.

Although he still had plenty of money from publishing his adventure accounts, it was questionable whether it would last until he completed the NOZAWA Challenge, which could take another ten or twenty years.

Looking to the future, the chance to have a British aristocrat backing him was extremely appealing.

But that was only if he survived.

There was no point in letting greed lead him to bring along a burden, only to freeze to death himself.

After agonizing for some time while weighing his chances of survival against the potential profit, Roderick asked the girl who was pressing down her blond hair to keep it from being blown away by the blizzard:

"This may be rude, but once we reach the foot of the mountain... Is there any chance people like those aboard the airship will attack us?"

"Impossible. I must keep our family circumstances confidential, but they failed to take my life on this airship. That is the end of it. Oh, no, my father may be waiting in a fury like a tiger forced to eat slime, but once he learns that you protected me, Lord Roderick, he will probably grant you the rank of Knight."

"Okay, all right. If you can promise to do everything I say, I'll accept the job of protecting you, Miss Ainsell."

"Yes. I look forward to working with you, Sir Knight."

The girl smiled and held out one hand.

For a moment, Roderick thought she wanted to shake hands, but Ainsell held the back of her hand upward with a proud smile.

Roderick smiled wryly, knelt on one knee in the accumulating snow, and kissed the back of Ainsell Stuart's hand.

Thus began their descent from the mountain.

To begin with, the two of them searched the remains of the airship, where the flames had subsided, for the guards who had died protecting Ainsell and buried them.

Ainsell had stubbornly insisted on doing so.

Roderick unleashed a torrent of foul abuse at Ainsell, who had immediately and blatantly broken the promise to "do everything I say."

"What a fucking brat of a young lady. You can still act like a fucking noble in this fucking snow mountain. Fuck!"

"This is the fucking pride of a fucking noble, you see."

Ainsell laughed lightly as she blew on her hands, which were numb and red from the cold.

For a sheltered young lady, she was far too quick to get used to vulgar American English. Still, it was certainly better than having her rattle on in a British accent.

Having reluctantly indulged the young lady's selfishness, Roderick began the descent while drilling the basics of survival into her.

"No, thank you. I am not taking them off. These are precious shoes my grandmother gave me for my birthday."

"Shut up! How the hell are you supposed to walk through snow in these fucking high heels, you idiot!? Take them off and throw them away! They're nothing but baggage! Is your brain stuffed with shit!?"

Roderick became suspicious when Ainsell, awkwardly maneuvering skis made from the airship wreckage, kept wobbling strangely, then flew into a rage when he discovered that she had hidden a shoulder bag filled with utterly useless cosmetics and a wallet, along with a key case, stuffed toys, and other things, beneath her coat.

"I told you to leave unnecessary things behind, didn't I!? What the hell is this!?"

"They are not unnecessary! Every one of them is precious to me—Ah! What are you doing!? This is tyranny!"

"They make your body heavier, you moron! We don't need this, this, or this! We don't need this, either! Dump this stuff that looks like piss—we'll use it as a canteen and boil water in it later!"

On the first day of their march through the snow, the two of them were both terrified when they encountered an A-rank monster out of nowhere.

"W-what is that enormous white wolf, if you please...?"

"Don't talk... Don't move. Don't provoke it. Pray that it's full."

"W-what if it's hungry?"

"We'll be eaten and die. Even if it's full, we'll die if it thinks we're toys. Just don't move. Make it think we're boring creatures."

The two narrowly escaped after the A-rank monster came close enough to snort at them, and before sunset they built a small snow house.

They huddled together inside the cramped shelter, drank hot water warmed with fire magic, and warmed their exhausted bodies and spirits.

"I was thinking, could we not have safely waited out that A-rank monster by using suspended-animation magic?"

"Hah, what shallow wisdom from a swollen head. If I'd used suspended-animation magic, we wouldn't have had enough magic power to boil this warm water. Then we'd have frozen to death. Am I wrong?"

"...You are not."

"Put something besides shit in that empty head of yours. Understand? Survival is magic-power allocation. Learn to judge when to use magic."

"I shall engrave that in my heart."

By the third day, their hunger had reached its limit.

Roderick thrust his arm into a snow cave and dragged out a winged, snake-like monster, then made the sign of the cross and thanked heaven for its bounty.

"Oh, God! Thank you. I am grateful for this modest blessing, and I shall eat every last bit of it without wasting a drop of blood."

"Ugh... W-we're eating that? That fucking snake?"

"Watch your language, Miss Ainsell. It's better than starving to death, isn't it? Now, this is where we use our magic power. Prepare a plate. First, mince the entire thing finely—bones, skin, and all. Mix its stomach acid and bile thoroughly with the meat. That will make it less likely to upset your stomach. We have no time to marinate and age it properly, so we'll eat it raw. When you feel your stomach starting to turn, use healing magic to cure the symptoms."

"Ugh! I feel like I'm going to throw up. I can't. I can't do this."

"If you can't, you'll run out of strength and die. Eat it. You don't want to die, do you?"

At first, Roderick had planned to leave Ainsell behind when things came to the worst.

However, although Ainsell complained and voiced her despair around the clock, she never shed a tear and never once gave up on surviving.

Ainsell was a delicate sheltered young lady, but she also possessed a hell of a lot of grit.

Even so.

No matter how much snake monster meat she could eat raw, she was still a young lady who had started with neither stamina nor physical strength.

The distance they could travel in a day grew shorter with each passing day, and on the fifth day, Ainsell finally collapsed after managing perhaps two hundred meters.

Roderick was utterly exhausted as well. His physical strength was being depleted, of course, but simply having someone under his protection consumed a tremendous amount of mental energy.

The option of "abandoning her" rose in Roderick's hazy, numb, sluggish mind.

But Roderick helped Ainsell up from where she had collapsed in the snow. He dismantled the skis, untied the two cords binding the boards to her feet, tied them together into one, and used it as a carrying strap to carry the girl on his back.

There was one advantage to her delicate build.

She had no stamina, but she was light enough to carry.

"...No, that's a lie. You're fucking heavy, Miss Ainsell. Are you made of lead?"

"And yet you are carrying me, Lord Roderick. To be perfectly honest, that is surprising."

"What is?"

Ainsell's thin but warm breath, the proof that she was alive, brushed against the back of his neck.

Ainsell managed to force her weak voice into words, loosened the grip of both hands around his neck, and said:

"I have learned a little about survival skills. Even now, if you left me behind, Lord Roderick, you could descend the mountain with ease, could you not? Because you are taking me with you, your life is in danger as well..."

Roderick took hold of the hands around his neck and adjusted them so she was clinging firmly to him.

Then he said aloud what he had thought hundreds of times over the past five days.

"I used to think that conquering the wilderness alone, with nothing but my own body, was the ultimate proof of strength."

"Yes..."

"Without accepting anyone's help. Proving my worth to myself with nothing but a knife. I thought that was the highest ideal."

"Yes..."

"But I was wrong. That was Nozawa's way of thinking. I saw a different kind of proof.

It's simple arithmetic, Miss Ainsell. Surviving with two people, one of them a burden, is harder than surviving alone. Two is greater than one. Twice as much, get it? Twice as difficult! If I escape this fucking mountain while carrying you, Miss Ainsell, I'll become twice as great as I would have been if I'd escaped alone. Can I let this chance pass me by? Of course I can't, can I? Right?"

There was no answer.

However, Roderick knew that Ainsell had smiled.

Drawing strength from the small hands clinging to him with every ounce of their might, Roderick advanced a little farther toward the foot of the mountain.

His legs trembled violently. It was a double blow of cold and extreme exhaustion.

His vision blurred from the snow and lack of sleep.

He would have been much lighter alone. He could have descended much faster. If he had started alone, he would have reached the bottom by now.

And yet, the undeniable reason he could still grit his teeth, tread through the snow, and keep moving forward was the heavy weight of two people.

As Roderick nearly lost consciousness, he chanted an enhancement spell.

Strength flooded his body, and at the same time he realized that once the spell ended, he would have no options left.

Roderick drove the skis desperately onward, straining his eyes for a glimpse of the town's steeples.

But he could see nothing.

No matter how far he went, there was only a merciless silver world of freezing snow and ice-covered mountains.

The magic ran out.

Even so, Roderick's resolve did not.

One step forward.

One more step.

He took another step, then all the strength left his body at once and he collapsed onto his side.

The snow should have felt cold, but he could no longer tell its temperature.

He was no longer even convulsing.

Roderick had exhausted every last bit of his strength.

"Miss Ainsell. Are you alive?"

"Yes... I am alive."

"Can you see that thing in the sky?"

"Yes... It's a fucking dragon. It's coming down here."

"You haven't given up yet?"

"No...!"

"I can't move my hands anymore. Take that ring from my pocket. Throw it far away. Pray that it goes after the treasure."

If that failed, they would die.

Ainsell had become accustomed enough to survival to understand the rest of the unspoken sentence.

Ainsell struggled out of the carrying strap and rummaged through Roderick's pocket with slow, sluggish movements.

After gently kissing the ring she found, Ainsell clenched it in her hand and drew back her arm to throw it far away—then her eyes widened.

The eyes of the girl who had never shown a tear grew moist. The hand that had been about to throw the ring swung wide toward the descending dragon.

Laughing and crying at once, Ainsell shook the shoulder of Roderick, who had fallen down and closed his eyes, and cried out in delight.

"It's a dragon bearing our family crest! Help has arrived!"

Roderick tried to answer, but his tongue would not move properly.

Instead, hot tears spilled from Roderick's eyes as well, melting the snow.

He felt the impact of the dragon landing through the snowy ground. Snow blew away in the downdraft, and hot air rolled over them.

Still lying where he had fallen, Roderick was enveloped in profound relief as he heard the girl's footsteps lightly running toward the dragon and her cry of joy that nearly froze him.

"I fucking missed you, Father!"

"!?"

All the blood drained from Roderick's face.

He had only needed to teach her survival skills, but he had taught her foul language as well.

Even when he tried to explain, his body truly would not move a muscle.

After a while, Roderick's body, which had begun to sweat nervously, was powerfully hauled upright by the hand of a sturdy, broad-shouldered man who smelled of refined perfume.

The voice that addressed him like a biting accusation, tinged with anger, was unmistakably aristocratic Queen's English.

"I will not let you die. What did you do to my daughter, and who are you? You will tell me everything in detail."

"...I'm just a survivalist."

Roderick muttered weakly and lost consciousness as he felt warm healing magic.

He prayed that the bad bug who had led his daughter astray would not be torn limb from limb by her enraged father.

Thus, the escape drama of the young lady and the survivalist came to an end.