novelraw Chapter 1 : Space Adventurer Arc - The Universe and I
Chapter 1 : Space Adventurer Arc - The Universe and I
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This is a new work that began serialization in 2024.
I sincerely hope you enjoy it.
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When I looked up at the sky, the Milky Way blazed with a brilliance invisible in the city. Having retired from my government post at fifty-five to begin a life of leisure, I had come alone to a campground in Yamanashi Prefecture.
「Alone in the world, huh.」
I was born in Kansai, and at twelve I moved to Kantō with my parents. In university I studied international politics and chose to spend my life as a civil servant.
Now I lived alone, still single. For as long as I could remember, I had felt out of place in the world. A persistent sense that this was not the world where I belonged. Because of that, I had made almost no friends, spending most of my life in solitude.
Still, around the time I began my leisurely retirement, I started thinking I ought to try all sorts of things to actually enjoy life. This camping trip was one of them.
The campground sat nestled in a forest with a river nearby - a hidden gem perfect for both fishing and camping. I pitched my tent in a clearing among the trees, boiled water over the campfire, and began preparing dinner.
Not to brag, but with the physique I maintained hitting the gym twice a week, I cut a decent figure in this kind of setting. Born with a height of roughly a hundred and eighty centimeters and a reasonably well-put-together face, I probably looked like a ruggedly handsome older gentleman out enjoying the outdoors.
The sun sank behind the western mountains, and as darkness settled in, even the cicadas fell silent. I dropped instant ramen into a pot of boiling water and set a timer.
The instant ramen I was making tonight was the deluxe version - enriched with chicken stock powder, kelp broth, cabbage and green onion, soft-boiled egg and sliced braised pork. After finishing the ramen, I turned to stargazing.
Stargazing - though calling it that was generous. Nothing professional, just casually observing the Milky Way, constellations, and the moon through a pair of binoculars. I settled into my folding chair and gazed up at the Milky Way.
Moments like these, time seemed to slow to a crawl, and I could truly relax. While searching for Deneb, the first-magnitude star in Cygnus, the starry sky warped - just for an instant - with a sickening gunyari[twist].
「Hm, what was that just now?」
I tilted my head, then studied the sky again. A perfectly normal starscape. Nothing out of place.
「Come to think of it, I saw some strange news online.」
It was a report about rising numbers of missing persons. People who had been alone in nature, vanishing as though abducted by someone. Online, wild theories had spread claiming it was the work of aliens.
Missing persons were hardly rare nowadays, but what these cases supposedly had in common was that they all occurred in secluded places like campgrounds. And there was one more shared detail - every disappearance had happened on a night with a beautiful, clear sky.
Apparently there were rumors blaming aliens, but……you had to question the sanity of whoever believed that. I chuckled at the thought and turned my eyes back to the stars. That was when I heard it - a mechanical vīn[whirring] from somewhere in the distance. I wondered what it could be, and then another vīn reached my ears.
The sound seemed to be drawing steadily closer, and unease crept into my chest. When it swelled louder still, the branches of a nearby tree erupted in a sharp zaza[rustling].
I shot to my feet and looked around frantically. The campfire's glow couldn't penetrate past the surrounding trees. Beyond them, I sensed something move, but I couldn't see it.
Something was wrong - I could feel it - and dread spread through me. I decided to head for the campground's administration building and talk to the manager.
I grabbed my flashlight and smartphone and started walking, making it out to the paved road and heading toward the administration building. When something like a headlight illuminated me from behind and I spun around, a blinding glare flooded my eyes and erased everything around me. A sharp bachi[crack] sounded and something pierced through my body, sending pain so intense I couldn't breathe searing through every nerve.
Light erupted into a frenzied dance all around me. A wild storm of radiance - I sensed the danger and tried to run, but my body refused to respond, as though paralyzed. ……Move, move……I willed it with everything I had, but my body didn't so much as twitch.
The light closed in, and the moment I thought it was over, my consciousness was swallowed by darkness.
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My name is Jingūji Zen. My consciousness surfaced from the darkness, and I felt cold. I tried to open my eyes but realized my eyelids refused to budge.
「Following the antibody immunity nanomachinesh and the language element nanomachinesh, I will now inject the internal adjustment nanomachinesh.」
「Do it quick.」
A gravelly voice with a strange accent reached my ears. The words were not Japanese, yet I understood them perfectly. What was happening? Was this a hospital?
A prick of pain shot through my shoulder. Someone had given me an injection.
「How long till it can move?」
「In roughly one hour (one akushu), he should be able to move.」
I heard a voice with a strange, hissing accent - like air leaking out.
The moment the words『one akusu』 reached my ears, I simultaneously understood that it meant approximately one hour. It felt as though the translation had happened automatically inside my head.
「Once this one's movin', you handle it and start the training. Clear?」
「Y-yes, sir.」
What were they talking about? Training - for what? Where even was this place?
Time passed without my body moving so much as a twitch. Then I began to feel heat welling deep inside me, and little by little, I could move again.
My eyelids opened and I could see my surroundings. And the first thing that caught my eye was a dog-person - human from the neck down, with the head of a dog sitting atop its shoulders. That canine face looked like a Shiba Inu.
Was this Halloween? Nobody cosplays in a hospital. What anime did this character even come from?
「Banatsū, it'sh time to wake up.」
The dog-person spoke directly to me. For some reason the endings of his words sounded strange, but maybe I was hearing things? And what the hell was a "Banatsū"?
『Is this a hospital?』
When I asked in Japanese, the dog-person's face contorted. Wait - that wasn't a costume mask?
「I don't undershtand that language. You should be able to shpeak the common Gapan tongue.」
This dog-person apparently couldn't pronounce his's' sounds, turning every one into 'sh.' That aside, I was about to say it was impossible - when I realized I actually could. Knowledge of the Gapan language already existed inside my head.
「Who are you? Is this a hospital?」
I tried using the Gapan language. I was stunned at myself, but the words came out perfectly. What was going on?
「I'm Shario Barakeru of the Kūshī Race. Thish isn't a hospital - we're inside the Gonuva Empire's shupply ship Brava.」
A ship……were we on the ocean? I sat up on the oddly shaped bed. Looking around, I found myself in a small room surrounded by walls that appeared to be metal. Four strange beds resembling oxygen capsules were arranged inside, and I had apparently been lying in one of them.
「Let me off. I need to get back to……」
The realization that this clearly wasn't Japan choked the words in my throat. The dog-person turned pitying eyes on me.
「What are you shaying. Thish ish shpace.」
The dog-person led me to what appeared to be an observation room. I peered out the window and lost the power of speech. Against a backdrop of pitch-black void, countless tiny lights shimmered.
The wrongness of the scene hit me. I looked downward - no ocean surface in sight. What was going on. There was no way this was actually space.
My insistence that this couldn't possibly be space was utterly demolished at the next place the dog-person took me - a room resembling a cargo hold. The instant I stepped inside, my body floated off the floor and my head smacked into the ceiling. There was no gravity. With Sario's help, I made it back outside the hold.
「Aah……」
Despair and confusion crashed over me in equal measure. I was supposed to be enjoying a camping trip……
「You understand now. Thish ish shpace.」
「B-but there was gravity back in that room.」
「That wash artificial gravity. In the areash where the crew livesh, we generate gravity.」
It wasn't the same gravitational acceleration as Earth's, but apparently something close to it was being produced artificially. At this point, I understood that Sario - who treated artificial gravity as a matter of course - was no Earthling. The dog head wasn't a costume piece, it was real.
I asked why I was aboard a spaceship.
「The Goblin military purchashed Banatsū from the Oni-jin Race dark shyndicate ash an illegal lower-classh citizen.」
So I was being called『Banatsū.』 That didn't matter - what mattered was that I had been captured by an interstellar crime syndicate, then sold off to the Goblin military as a lower-class citizen, a status barely distinguishable from a slave.
The ship I was aboard, Sario explained, was a supply ship built by the Goblins. There was a scale model inside the vessel, and when he showed it to me, its shape struck me as severe and imposing - reminiscent of an old diesel locomotive. For the record, it measured a hundred and seventy meters in total length, painted in dark green. Goblin ships, apparently, were always dark green without exception.
But what even were the Goblins? The only Goblins I knew were the small, ugly imps from fantasy stories.