Side: Amahashi Kakeru

The family home was exactly as I remembered it.

Back when Grandpa was still healthy, the place had been a working farm, so the property was wide and the barn was big. The barn still held the farming tools Grandpa used to use, stowed away just the way he liked them.

My uncle, who lives nearby, probably used some of it, but the rest had mostly been left untouched.

After Grandpa passed, it was just Grandma and me, working the little field out back to grow vegetables for ourselves to eat. In a normal year I'd have been getting started on the field around now, but this year it had been left alone, and the weeds were already coming in.

"I air the house out now and then. It's the place you come home to, after all."

Coming here, the things from three years ago really did come back to me, vivid as anything.

The day of the move… the day Grandma came home cold… the day Grandma had to go into the hospital and we walked out of the house together, carrying her things…

"Thanks for everything, Uncle."

"What's gotten into you? Out of nowhere like that."

"Nothing, just… felt like saying it."

People's kindness wasn't something to take for granted. Not even between parents and children who shared blood.

I'd learned that the hard way over in the other world.

"Rest up a bit, then show Pricia-san and the others around. Not that there's much to see out in the sticks. I'll handle the preparations for the forty-ninth-day memorial."

"…Yeah."

I took my uncle up on his offer and stepped up into the house.

In the living room, the calendar was still turned to March—the month I'd moved out. On it were the times for the funeral and the wake, written in my own hand.

"So this is where you grew up."

"Yeah. Though going by the time over here, I guess you'd say I was living here up until just a little while ago."

When I noticed how quiet it had gone, Pricia and the others had taken on solemn expressions. I'd made them feel awkward.

Let me shake it off, I thought—and just then my aunt appeared.

"Oh my, they really are all such beauties. We've got nothing to offer, but make yourselves at home and stay a while."

"Thank you very much."

My aunt brought out tea and sweets and started asking the girls what countries they were from, and I was impressed at how well all of them handled it.

The familiar smell of the house I was born and raised in. When I closed my eyes, it felt like Grandpa and Grandma might still come walking out, even now.

Grandpa, Grandma. I'm home. I finally made it back.

There was so much I wanted to tell you about.

The words just wouldn't come.

Side: Pricia

Kakeru's homeland was in a peaceful mountain village.

We had abducted a boy from a peaceful village like this one and turned him into a tool of war. That fact had been laid before me all over again.

I had not known anything of how Kakeru had lived over here.

Kakeru moved as the Hero just as we wished, but he had never been one to speak much of himself…

Of course, even if I had not known, that did not make my guilt vanish.

Still, I did not intend to do nothing but regret. Rather than what was past, I had to think of the present, and of what was to come.

When I glanced around, I saw Sanctina taking in the scenery while she spoke with Kakeru's uncle. As a Saint who serves the gods, how was she taking the Hero summoning, and all that came after it?

Filia had not changed at all. She was the type to view even her own affairs with constant detachment. Never once had she let any of us hear her complain.

Noctia. With her, I could not so much as guess at what she felt. That she had the same sort of heart as a person—that much, at least, I came to know after arriving over here. But that was as far as it went.

No—put that way, it might come across as rude. She had far more human warmth in her than my father, His Majesty, or the people of the royal castle. Whether that was a word I was permitted to use for a member of the demon race, I could not say…

We had been resting a while at Kakeru's family home when Kakeru took us outside, offering to show us the area nearby.

"Skipping school kind of makes you feel like you're getting away with something. Even though I skipped three whole years of it."

The house we stayed at in town had a neighbor's house right next door, but here, the nearest one was far away. Even in our own world, the remote villages out on the frontier had peaceful spots much like this. Perhaps the two were more alike than I would have thought.

Once we left the grounds of the house, fields they call rice paddies came into view again. Why was it that I saw no wheat? Filia had said that the staple food differed from one land to the next.

"Kakeru, what is this place…?"

The spot he led us to as we strolled along had a strange stillness to it.

And the mana density seemed a touch higher here than elsewhere…?

"A shrine.¹It's one of this country's religious sites. Shrines like this one are all over the place."

Ah, so it was something like a church. That explained this peculiar atmosphere.

"Your country is polytheistic, isn't it? Nature worship and the enshrining of gods, all jumbled up together."

"Hmm. Probably…"

To Noctia's question, Kakeru gave a vague answer. Was there something the matter?

"You don't know?"

"In this country, religion isn't close enough to daily life for people to take an interest in gods that don't actually exist. Especially the younger generation. And there's a whole mess of religions all tangled together, so it's hard to make sense of. I figure there's a god enshrined here too, but I don't know who. We only ever called it 'the shrine.'"

When Filia, who had wondered the same thing, asked, Kakeru answered her. The sight of it reminded me of how bewildered Kakeru had been after he was summoned.

He knew nothing of magic, nor of Skills. His Majesty and the others had seemed aware that a Hero summoned from another world was simply like that, and so they were not surprised. But I was shocked.

"Kakeru-san, there is no doubt that this is a sacred place. The response is exceedingly faint, but… I sense a slight trace of holy power."

At the words of Sanctina, who had been gazing at the old wooden structure, Kakeru was the most surprised of all.

In truth, the holy power was weak enough that even I could not sense it. Perhaps no one but Sanctina, who was the Saint, could feel it.

"…What does that mean? There weren't supposed to be magic or Skills over here. Sanctina, do you understand it?"

"I'm sorry, I can't tell anything beyond simply sensing it. I can't rule out the possibility that it's only the power of people's prayers gathering here. The source of the gods' power is the prayers of people, after all."

A shrine of the gods, here in Kakeru's homeland. I had thought there might be some deeper secret to it, but for the moment that was all there was. Noctia and Filia searched a little, thinking there might be a dungeon, but they found none of that either.

Still, there was no doubt that this world was the more complicated of the two.