The Trap Dungeon and the Ring of Divinity
On a deep night when the snowstorm had only grown fiercer, the young knight Lergal stood on the dim landing of the tavern stairs, looking utterly at a loss.
"I'm sorry, Raul. Our commander, he..."
"He's a stubborn old man. The textbook kind."
"Pardon?"
"I mean he's completely closed-minded."
"Ah... yes. To be frank, that's not wrong. Still, at heart he's a good man."
Raul stared for a moment at Lergal, who had only just become more awkward while defending that stubborn old man.
So this is the famous 'he's a good kid.'
With an amused curve still lingering at his mouth, Raul said, "Well, you don't need to apologize on Lergal's behalf. I already know that's more or less the average for knights."
"When you put it that way, it leaves an even more bitter aftertaste..."
"Anyway. Have you been to Latina?"
When Raul asked with an easy smile, Lergal's eyes lit up.
He spoke with a childlike expression, telling Raul about the conversation he'd had with the vigilante Sam, his daughter Yuna, and the village elder priestess of the Goddess of Abundance.
Even Raul found their recent circumstances fairly amusing to hear about.
How long had they talked like that?
At some point Lergal suddenly looked toward Raul's side with a strange expression and asked, "By the way, that person who has been with you since the guild..."
The one he was looking at was Aila, who was still far too busy playing with Horus.
"Ah, her? Well..."
Raul was weighing how to explain it without mentioning the Cinder when Aila, having heard the exchange, answered readily for herself.
"Me? I'm the old man's this. This."
She flashed a playful smile and flicked out her little finger.
"That would be..."
For a moment, perhaps because the imagination peculiar to adolescent boys had kicked in, Lergal's pupils trembled as if an earthquake had struck.
Raul let out a quiet sigh. "She's just a fast-footed porter."
"Eeeh, you really don't know how to have fun! Old man, you gotta mess with kids like this!"
"Huh?! Are you making fun of me? And don't call me a kid. Do you even look in the mirror, servant lady?"
"Hey, little knight, what was that? Are you trying to say something about my height?"
"That answer tells me you know perfectly well already."
"What was that?"
"No matter how much of a servant you are to Raul, talking back to a knight is not proper."
Raul pressed a hand to his forehead as the two of them, suddenly scandalously loud, started bickering among themselves.
He didn't particularly like noisy people.
***
The next day, Raul headed for the place he'd agreed to meet the knight commander and frowned.
Because in the pale dawn, where snowflakes and fog had tangled together before his eyes, there were only four people present.
"Why is it just the two of you?"
Raul had brought Aila with him when he asked.
Then Knight Commander Dmitri, who appeared with Lergal, wore an openly mocking smile and said, "Do you really need to bring the entire knight order to see the skill of the great holy warrior?"
At that shameless attitude, Raul's brow furrowed deeper.
"Didn't you say we were going straight to Kurzhen's Labyrinth?"
"The full expedition gathers the day after tomorrow. Today I called you here to test whether you and that servant of yours will really become a burden in the maze."
Raul's voice dropped. "You planning to keep acting like this?"
"Like what?"
"You call people out and order them around without even giving them proper information? That's what the knights of Zern call honor?"
Raul brought up honor, the very nerve of knights, and the name of the house they served.
He was ready to throw himself into a fight if the bastard took the bait.
But unexpectedly, the knight commander remained calm.
"If I speak plainly, holy warrior, it was because I judged that you would not come. I lead the knight order. In matters of trust, I am obliged to be twice as cautious as most."
"So lying to people makes you honorable, then?"
"I admit that it's not honorable conduct. However, as the knight commander, I cannot trust anything unless I see it with my own eyes. I would ask that you understand my position as well."
...
What a thoroughly polite way to be rude.
And yet he had the nerve to be so smug about it.
Raul clicked his tongue at the sight of a knight born to nobility, one he'd not faced in a long while.
In any case, they needed to ask about the astrologer's whereabouts, and if he failed to join this expedition, their entry into the labyrinth where the relic slept would only be delayed.
So Raul flexed and unflexed his fist for a moment before saying, "Then how about a wager, knight?"
"...A wager?"
Dmitri blinked, taken aback by Raul's abrupt remark.
"Yeah. If I fail your little test, I'll just hand this over."
Snikt-
Raul drew the weapon sheathed at his back, the Sun King's Excalibur.
Its dazzling splendor and the scarlet flame pattern engraved along the blade were enough to leave even a knight commander momentarily speechless.
"But Dmitri, if I pass your test, you'll give me that ring you're wearing on your left hand. How about it?"
When Raul casually pointed to the hand tucked inside his gauntlet, Dmitri's face abruptly hardened.
Fortunately, the pointless question of how he had noticed an invisible ring did not leave his mouth.
"This ring is..."
"I can tell at a glance. It's an old one. But you already figured out that this holy sword isn't just some ordinary object either, didn't you?"
"..."
Dmitri held his tongue.
But the fact that he could not immediately deny it meant the matter was already more or less settled.
"If you accept the wager, then I'll properly take your dishonorable initiation test. If not, then I guess this is as far as you and I go."
With that final probing remark from Raul, a faint trace of greed flickered in Dmitri's eyes, which had fallen silent for a moment.
Just as expected.
The legendary holy sword set before a knight was a very effective thing indeed for blurring judgment.
"Fine."
He accepted the wager exactly as Raul had anticipated.
***
The place Dmitri brought Raul and Aila to was Anok, an A-rank labyrinth near Asmos, a trap dungeon.
"Anok appeared more than ten years ago. And yet no one has ever conquered it to the end. Do you know why?"
Dmitri asked Raul as if it were part of the test, his face eager to show off his knowledge.
Raul, walking without a word, smiled faintly and answered, "Because there were absurdly many traps, and no treasure worth finding. What's more, Anok is a notorious trap dungeon. Even traps that have already been triggered restore themselves after a few hours, so it's a dungeon with high difficulty and no reward."
At that, Dmitri's expression stiffened.
"...Didn't you say this was your first time in a labyrinth city?"
"It is."
"Then how could you possibly..."
"This much is common sense. Got a problem with that?"
"...No. Let's hurry."
As his pace quickened, a vein visibly twitched on Dmitri's forehead.
Trying to show off his knowledge in front of me, of all people.
Raul gave the man a light sneer and looked ahead again.
They would soon be there.
As with most labyrinths, Anok was a stone structure with traces of the ancient still left here and there throughout the building.
As soon as they stepped inside, a damp heaviness unlike the air outside greeted them.
"Ugh, I hate this."
Of course the first to complain was Aila.
"You've been to worse places and survived just fine, so stop whining. Let's move."
Raul snapped at the Cinder girl and hurried them along.
The condition Dmitri had set for passing the test was to reach the sanctuary on the second underground floor, the midpoint among the surveyed zones discovered in Anok.
He made it clear that everything would be judged there: the ability to detect traps along the way, and the means used to deal with them.
But Raul's steps never hesitated.
"Ah, Lergal. Don't step on that plate."
"Yes? Ah, thank you, Raul!"
He even helped Lergal, who had been blindly following the route he'd taken.
How could a man claiming this was his first time here be so relaxed, and how could he know the traps of a trap dungeon so well?
Dmitri even began to suspect that Raul might be an exceptionally skilled liar.
Then it happened.
Click-
Something moved beneath the foot Raul had just placed.
Dmitri immediately smiled broadly and looked forward.
"Ah, right."
Raul even muttered something stupid and hesitated, and a venomous arrow with terrifying speed shot toward his chest.
Whoosh-!
That speed was enough that even Knight Commander Dmitri would have had trouble reacting in time.
There was no way to avoid taking the poison arrow.
Then that holy sword...
As Dmitri smiled greedily, the unexpected happened.
Thup-
Raul caught the incoming poison arrow.
Not by forcing a high surge of aura to block it.
Not by enduring it with divine power like a holy warrior.
He simply caught it with his hand.
"Hm?"
A vacant sound escaped Dmitri's mouth.
For a moment he wondered if he had seen wrong.
To catch Anok's trap barehanded?
He had never once heard anyone say such a thing.
Right when he was trying to understand what in the world was happening, Raul muttered something strange and began behaving even more strangely.
"Ah, that's right."
With those inexplicable words, he suddenly began stepping on every trap laid out before him with his own feet.
Whoosh-!
Whizz-!
Rattle!
Rumble!
Poison arrows, huge ballista bolts, iron spears coated in acid, and even spellbooks that erupted in flames as they flew toward him.
Traps of every shape and kind descended on him, yet Raul caught them all barehanded without the slightest change in expression.
"...What in the world"
The sight kept unfolding, impossible to understand even while watching it with his own eyes. Then Raul suddenly stopped in place and pulled out the arrows and spears he had been gathering neatly behind him.
Next, he hurled the whole pile straight ahead.
Whiiiiish-!
With a tremendous roar, the projectiles cut the air in rippling waves before striking what had looked like a perfectly flat, empty labyrinth floor and triggering a massive explosion.
KWOOOM!
Dmitri flinched at the blast.
Because the same scenery had gone on for so long, he hadn't realized it, but what lay ahead was the especially notorious "explosive zone" even within Anok.
The usual way to get through it was to use a mage's spell to deliver a heavy impact to the ground and force the trap in the explosive zone to detonate harmlessly into open soil.
In other words, Raul's throw carried destructive power on par with a mage's spell.
"No way..."
Only then did the knight commander finally grasp clearly that Raul was a powerhouse one level ahead of him... no, several levels ahead.
"How on earth can this be?"
Dmitri's test ended anticlimactically.
***
"This ring was bestowed upon me by the lord of Zern when he appointed me as commander."
As soon as they came out of Anok, Knight Commander Dmitri raised both hands and declared his defeat, then handed the ring from the wager over to Raul and added that remark.
"I see. Then why the polite speech?"
"Having witnessed the holy warrior's skill with my own eyes, I concluded that you truly were the holy warrior Raul that Lergal had been speaking of all along."
Watching the knight commander change his attitude as easily as turning over a palm, Raul honestly felt a little sick inside.
"That was pretty flimsy, wasn't it? For a knight."
"...I formally apologize for my earlier rudeness. I am sorry. However, intelligence reached us recently that a monster has appeared in the royal capital, one that wears another's flesh and blood as its own. Please understand that I had little choice but to be cautious."
Dmitri's tone had grown very stiff.
And in fact, Raul had heard of the existence of something that wore another's flesh and blood and imitated them.
Acid Race.
A particularly troublesome wraith in gas form.
Sure enough, as a knight commander, it wasn't exactly a bad policy to suspect others first.
His judgment determined the lives of eight knights.
But that still didn't mean Raul was about to open his heart to him now.
The greed that had flickered in his eyes, and the arrogance peculiar to knights of this age, had been all too real.
"Well, I can understand it, but I don't feel like understanding you at all."
"...I apologize again. Still, as long as you keep your promise to join the expedition, I will be satisfied."
"Don't worry about that."
That was beneficial for Raul as well.
Raul let out a faint sigh as he looked at Dmitri, whose manners were every bit the knight's despite the man's roughness.
What an absurd irony.
If the youngest man in his knight order, Lergal, was a knight's knight, then Dmitri, the commander of the Zern knights, was a knight who was far too unknightly.
It almost felt as if the commander's and the youngest knight's positions had been reversed, though in this collapsing age of ruin, perhaps that was the new normal.
Raul swallowed the urge to strike the back of Dmitri's head and decided to continue the uncomfortable journey with him.
Still, there had been a gain.
The legacy of the noble house of the venerable Therion Kingdom, Zern.
He wasn't sure how it had ended up in Zern's hands, this ring imbued with divinity...
Well, do I really need to know that?
Raul was satisfied just having obtained a new divine artifact.
The amount of divinity it contained was smaller than the princess's rosario, but Raul knew well that the synergy with Halo, and the results produced by such things accumulating over time, would by no means be small.
'Mimir's minor divinity' resonates with Halo.
The Blessing stage of the Ring of Courage has increased.
Raul smiled faintly at the welcome message.
Dmitri only now spoke frankly about the schedule for the expedition he had assembled.
"We were planning to hold a meeting tonight to prepare for the gathering the day after tomorrow. I am very pleased that we can welcome you, holy warrior, to that gathering."
"Yeah, sure."
Even after Raul's dry reply, he kept going with exaggerated laughter.
"Our total force is twenty-two. Based on the information gathered by the very few who survived from 'Kurzhen's Labyrinth,' we've already hired mages and scholars from the mage tower, along with renowned sword mercenaries and adventuring parties led by Gold Plate adventurers."
As Raul listened to the endlessly continuing speech, a question suddenly occurred to him.
"What about the astrologer? From what I heard yesterday, there was supposed to be an astrologer who pointed us toward the relic."
Dmitri's eyes twitched, and after a brief silence he answered.
"As expected... as a holy warrior of Motala, you are interested in the whereabouts of the sacrilegious one."
"No... not really."
Raul finally understood why the knights had flown into such a frenzy over Lergal's words.
They thought that if Raul learned the astrologer's whereabouts, it would cause a major problem.
Well, in common sense, that would be the correct reaction.
In any case, pushing harder about the astrologer right now would likely backfire, so Raul pulled back at a reasonable point.
How much farther did they walk after that?
Raul eventually arrived before a building tucked into a particularly dark shadow within the city itself.
"Please wait here for a moment, Raul. I'll explain the situation to the knight order and come right back. Now that the commander has acknowledged you, everyone will trust you without question!"
Lergal seemed genuinely glad that Raul had overwhelmed Commander Dmitri, and he left those words with a bright smile.
The moment he and the commander went inside the building, Raul turned to the side and said,
Beside him stood Aila, who had managed, for once, to remain quiet and trouble-free all day.
"You head back to the inn for now..."
But before Raul could finish, both of them turned their heads toward the building at the same time.
Clang--!
Because suddenly, there had been a very small but unmistakable collision of metal against metal.
"Let's go."
With those words Raul moved, and Aila fell in beside him.
Bang-!
The hideout of the Zern knight order burst open as the entrance door was smashed apart.
Inside, where dust was billowing everywhere, there were dark-masked assailants and a field of knights' corpses, every one of them torn apart piece by piece.
Without hesitation, Raul kicked off the ground and flared white lightning with a crackle-!
And then, what he seized out of the darkness was the hidden blade flying toward the throat of the dazed knight Lergal.
"R-Raul?!"
Lergal stared in shock at Raul and the hidden blade in his hand.
Once Raul confirmed that he was unharmed, he looked forward again and said,
"Yeah. I was wondering why things were going so smoothly."
The dark-masked assailants all at once let their eye sockets glow a deep violet.