Inside the Forbidden Area
Crunch. Crunch.
I walked across sand so fine it almost felt like I was treading on cotton, taking in the scenery as I went. The farther we pressed into this place, the more the grass and trees simply faded away, the buzzing insects thinned out, and at last we stepped into a space filled with nothing but ash-gray sand that looked thoroughly dead.
In a word: a gray desert.
And in another word: a seriously weird space.
I took a single step backward.
“Forest.”
One step forward again.
“Desert.”
It wasn’t just crossing some boundary between sand and soil. The entire landscape flipped. If this were a beach, the sea would be in front of me and a solid forest of packed earth behind—but that wasn’t what was happening. The moment I set foot in that zone, every scrap of scenery around me became a dull, ash-gray desert of sand.
The scenery changed like someone was flipping channels. I looked over at Mari.
“KkomuWiki-chan! Explain!”
“...Please do not call me that. And keep walking.”
She could act as prickly as she wanted; I already knew she’d explain everything anyway. We kept walking toward the heart of the Forbidden Area.
“Simply put, it is a spatial distortion. Unless you step inside yourself, this is an invisible zone—so the Forbidden Area would never be visible even from the sky.”
That made sense. With a phenomenon like this, even aerial observation wouldn’t catch it. But another question popped into my head.
“Ah, Sensei. I’ve got a question.”
I raised my hand and asked with pure, wide-eyed innocence.
“Yes, go ahead.”
She was actually answering me now? We were syncing up better than I expected. Nice.
“If you can pull off something this ridiculous, wouldn’t it be better to just seal the whole place off completely? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about anything getting in from outside or anything getting out from inside.”
“The answer is... ‘Even Teacher doesn’t know.’”
“Huh?”
That was genuinely unexpected. I’d figured Mari—the status window herself—had a doctorate in this world.
“In the first place, we are beings who keep our distance from the Forbidden Area without questioning it. I do not even possess the authority to grant Serena access.”
“...Wait, you did grant it, though?”
“That was Mari granting permission. The System itself did not.”
“Whoa...! That’s weak.”
Dangerous. Was this the evolution of Skynet or what?
I bit my lip and seriously considered whether I should jump on the Skynet train right this second.
“Do the invasion after I go home, okay?”
“Haa, what invasion are you even talking about? Anyway.”
Mari tapped her temple with a finger.
“Because of the influence of demonic energy, a hole opened in the System, and that allowed for slightly more proactive calculation.”
“Uh... so your performance dropped?”
That was a problem. As long as Mari held the keys to my shop and level unlocks, any drop in her performance was pure bad news.
“There is no issue. Sufficient processing power has been left for System operations.”
“Meaning it’s not peak performance, right?”
“But I am right here, am I not? If we properly repair this body, it will be more than just winning a gamble—it will be striking it rich overnight.”
Fair point. Her hands would double, and more importantly, if I supported her with skills, Mari would be fighting with Hero-tier specs.
If that worked out, I might even be able to skip the whole process of going to the Holy Kingdom, revealing I was the Holy Maiden, and recruiting proper companions.
Besides, all those corrupt old companions had only been active back when Grace was still around.
A hundred years later, the only one still alive was... probably that trash-tier elf from the World Tree.
“Ah. Artificial structure suddenly detected three kilometers ahead. It appears the spatial distortion is layered twice.”
“Oh, for real.”
Just as Mari said, a building with a sharp roof, painted entirely black, had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the gray desert. Something seemed to be stuck on the very top of the roof.
“Let’s get a closer look.”
Mari and I kept walking. As we drew nearer, I finally recognized what the building was, and the stick-like thing on the peak resolved itself into the symbol of light.
Except—
“It’s a cathedral, so why is it upside down?”
“...The demonkin use their own symbol of darkness. I have never seen anything like this, but it looks rather like a symbol of apostasy.”
Mari didn’t bother hiding her distaste.
“No.”
But I knew. I’d looked it up the exact moment an inverted cross showed up in a horror movie, so I knew precisely what it meant.
“An inverted cross is a symbol of martyrdom.”
“...Martyrdom?”
Mari stared at me like she had no idea what I was talking about. Honestly I wanted to drop an ‘Ahh, so you don’t know?’ but the mood was a little too heavy, so I held back.
“Ah, this is a story from my world, but as an analogy... one angel said he didn’t dare use a symbol similar to the goddess’s, so he flipped it. Of course, that angel was martyred.”
“...Thank you for the rather useful otherworld information. But this is our world. I doubt that thing carries the same meaning here.”
True enough—that was Earth’s meaning, not this world’s. In that case, it really might be a symbol of apostasy.
With that uneasy feeling hanging over us, we arrived at the cathedral doors as if drawn there. Even though we were in a desert, not a single speck of dust clung to the front doors. I pushed them open.
Creeeeak.
The doors swung wide. Aside from the black inverted cross dominating the center and the overwhelming amount of black everywhere, it looked like a perfectly ordinary cathedral.
Mari surveyed the interior and muttered to herself.
“The inside is cleaner than I expecte—mmph!”
My head spun so hard I nearly flipped upside down. By the time I realized what I was doing, I already had my hand clamped over Mari’s mouth.
“That’s a cliché—do not say it!”
“Mmph?”
“If you say it or act on it, it comes true like a jinx! Don’t drop those ominous lines, got it?”
Nod.
Thankfully Mari nodded like she understood.
“Good. Let’s arm up here. You take the front line, I support. Okay?”
“Understood.”
“I’ve got Holy Shield, so go full dealer. We’ll spend two thousand points and kit you out with a new weapon and armor.”
Even if Mari’s HP was high, her stats were still low—her stopping power, the most important part of tanking, would be garbage.
“Indoor combat is expected, so please make it a versatile one-handed sword rather than a spear.”
I scrolled through the shop list of weapons and armor exactly as Mari requested.
Regretting giving Malcolm that katana... well, not really, but is there anything else decent?
Most of them were magic swords or famous blades forged from rare metals. You could argue that was a good thing, but having this many options just gave me choice paralysis.
“Mari, what kind of enemies are we likely to run into here?”
“Undead, ghosts, or monsters empowered by apostasy, I would estimate.”
With that extra info I filtered out the magic-sword category and looked again.
And then something bizarre caught my eye.
Attack Power:500
Durability: Infinite
Lower attack power in exchange for the ability to ignore certain physical laws, or deal bonus damage to targets that ignore physical laws.
A familiar description, and a blade that looked like it had been carved from a giant shard of glass.
One of the endgame weapons you could get in the game.
The problem was...
“Why is this thing crackling with noise?”
“No errors on the System side... It is likely related to opening the shop inside the Forbidden Area. I recommend caution with the purchase.”
“But this is a broken weapon. Are we just going to let this chance slip?”
It was a broken weapon that could casually farm special-gimmick monsters. Sure, the attack power was low, but in the game you just covered that with raw stats.
What I was focused on was the special-gimmick ignore.
“We have no idea what enemies are going to show up. We need this weapon.”
“...It is rational. In the worst case, we can simply reset the System.”
Decision made. I bought the Heavenly Law Sword. Mari took the blade, swung it around a few times, confirmed there was nothing wrong with the sword itself, and sheathed it. Then I bought the Mithril Light Armor.
But does the armor even fit?
Well, true to eroge fashion the design was lewd as hell, but it had a chance to reflect magic and curses, so I liked it anyway.
I also geared myself up in the Holy Maiden’s ceremonial dress and the staff carried by the Goddess’s proxy. Honestly it stung that the shop didn’t sell enhancement materials, but this was the best we could do right now.
“First, before we search, let’s wedge that door shut and set up our camping alarm so we know if anyone comes.”
I spun my brain as hard as I could to cut down every risk factor. I really didn’t want to spend ages searching only for the cathedral doors to slam shut with a boom so I could deliver a line like “This door won’t open!”
“...”
“...?”
Mari suddenly looked at me like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, so I whipped around in a cold sweat—but there was nothing there.
“What is it?”
“Who are you? The Serena I know has a head packed full of reproductive cells instead of brain cells, and yet here you are being this logical...”
“You little shit, I can use my brain when I want to!”
I fumed for a full minute before finally reclaiming a shred of calm. Well, getting that heated had also left a tiny problem of heat rising between my legs, but we layered on my Bless and Holy Shield and thoroughly searched the cathedral interior.
And after about ten minutes of effort—
“Serena, there is a suspicious gap here.”
Mari was staring under the altar and reported she’d found something.
“What, like a passage going down or something?”
“Faint, but air is leaking out.”
“Any buttons or levers?”
“None. I checked by striking the walls and floor, but it simply looks like a stone slab was laid over it.”
Meaning we had to open it ourselves.
“I recommend using our weapons as levers. Durability is infinite anyway.”
“Good. On three, two, one—we go together.”
Clang—!
Both our weapons wedged into the narrow gap, and we heaved with every blessing and every ounce of strength we had. From the outside it probably looked like pure nonsense.
Kuuuung!
In the end the altar floor slowly shifted and finally dropped away. Time, strength, and brains invested—we won.
“Stairs.”
“Yes. And they look as well-maintained as the cathedral interior.”
It was an entrance that looked exactly like the opening of a horror movie or the part where the truth gets revealed. Normally I would have done a hard U-turn right here and risked the spy threat to settle down in Corson Village.
But this time...
“Let’s go.”
“Understood.”
I decided to throw myself down those stairs.
Snap!
I flicked my fingers and tiny motes of holy power gathered into orbs the size of air bubbles, pushing back the darkness.
Thud. Thud.
Contrary to my worries, there were no traps and no ambushes. We reached the bottom of the stairs.
And what greeted us there was...
“Uh, did we really come down this deep?”
“Spatial distortion. Triple-layered. And Serena—those things covering the ground—”
“Don’t say it. My head’s fucking killing me.”
An overwhelmingly vast underground cavern, and filling that cavern to the brim: coffins.