The Bloodfiend Labyrinth (3)
“Wow. Old man, you’re seriously insane. Whoa. How can you even think about delaying the reinforcements just so you can keep the treasure for yourself?”
The red-haired assassin Aila looked at Raul and laughed brightly.
“You don’t know this, but for someone like me, an ownerless holy relic is exactly the kind of thing worth doing that for.”
“Because you’re a holy warrior? Or because you’re the legendary Grail Knight?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
The two of them carried on their conversation in voices so unhurried they might have been chatting on a safe street inside a city. In truth, though, they were already walking through the inside of the S-rank maze that had swallowed five expedition parties whole.
“Anyway, let’s hurry up and do the next one. I’m tails.”
“Fine.”
Ping.
Even inside the maze, the two of them were tossing a coin as if nothing were the matter.
Raul snapped the silver coin he’d flicked with his thumb out of the air at impossible speed and opened his palm.
“Heads.”
“...Old man, are you cheating? How can I lose three times in a row?”
“It’s luck. Quit whining and get ready. There—it's coming.”
Raul’s tone was teasing, but the thing unfolding in front of them was anything but lighthearted.
When he lifted his head along the bluish glow of the stone walls of the ancient ruin, there really was a gigantic centipede glaring down at them from above, its black eye sockets gleaming.
That was a beast.
An insect-type giant beast called the Tunnel Claw, an A-rank extermination target.
Ordinarily, the moment one was spotted, it would send an entire expedition into a panic, but Aila, who had been assigned to handle it, merely wrinkled her nose as if she’d lost her appetite.
“I really hate things with too many legs...”
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Repulsed by the sound of the beast skittering across the ceiling, she kept rubbing her arms and then leapt forward without making a sound.
Thwok!
The one who screamed at the impact was not the girl whose frame was two heads shorter than Raul’s.
Kwaaaaaaaak──!
The beast, which would have stood well over five meters tall if you propped it upright, vomited up green-black viscera over and over before dying in short order.
“Good work.”
Raul welcomed Aila back warmly as she returned with both eyes and mouth flattened into a single line.
She let her arms hang limply at her sides, looking drained.
“It stinks so bad I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
Raul glanced at the rough map he’d bought from the advance party and answered, “Good. They said there’s a little spring just up ahead. Let’s wash up there and eat something.”
“Really?”
Instantly, Aila’s eyes lit up as she looked up at him.
Raul nodded.
Sure enough, after a short walk, the sound of flowing water reached them.
Raul took out a magical stove that burned mana stones as fuel, along with a simple set of eating utensils.
Then, from far away, he heard Aila’s voice as she took off her clothes one by one.
“Old man, you really better not peek, okay?”
Raul laughed despite himself at the sticky, almost sultry tone that came out of Aila’s mouth.
“You could pay me and I still wouldn’t look.”
“What? I’m not that much of a child.”
“You are that much of a child.”
“Aw~ how embarrassing!”
Embarrassing, my ass.
Raul let out another dry snort at the voice of the girl, all puffed up with groundless confidence.
Setting aside everything else, traveling with Aila really was comfortable. She listened surprisingly well, was extremely obedient when other people were around, and, as he’d seen for himself, was even competent.
It reminded him of those early days, when he’d kept traveling without much thought alongside her...
Smack!
Raul slapped his own cheek hard enough to make an audible crack.
However nostalgic the old memories were, this was still a maze.
He focused on the soup beginning to bubble in front of him instead.
He sliced in a precious lump of butter he’d stocked away back in Coyad.
He mixed the maze spring water they’d drawn earlier with flour, turning it into a sticky batter, and tore it into small pieces like hand-pulled dumplings before dropping them in.
Then he cut up generous chunks of salted cured meat and let everything simmer slowly for a long time.
With no sunlight inside the maze, the sense of time grew vague, but even so, the sky must have been breaking with dawn by now.
Then the Maze Administration Bureau has probably already ordered the guilds to assemble their reinforcements.
If he hadn’t thrown out that advice about finding a rune mage, then diligent Lergal and Dmitri, who was practically drunk on Motala, might really have sent the rear party in after just a day.
Raul calmly shook his head at the thought he’d come up with.
That would have been too early.
For his plan to work properly, the reinforcements needed to be delayed just enough.
And, come to think of it...
Was the holy relic supposed to be here really the holy sword he was looking for?
After thinking it over for a moment, Raul gathered a faint trace of divinity on the back of his right hand and let it shine.
The light of the Stigma was still pointing north-northeast, even here in the maze.
So it’s here... or it isn’t.
This place was so large that it really did live up to the word “maze” in its name, and he still couldn’t make a clear judgment.
Well, what could he do? He would just have to go see for himself.
If he was lucky, he might walk away with two holy relics instead of one—the holy sword and something else besides.
“Damn, that smells good!”
Just then, Aila came over, shaking out her wet red hair like a puppy.
Raul looked at her and narrowed his brows slightly.
“You’re splashing water into the food.”
“So what? It still smells delicious.”
“I said I don’t like it. Go sit by the pile of dry branches and warm yourself by the fire.”
“Yes, sir~”
Raul ladled the thick soup into a rough bowl and carried it over to the fire where Aila sat.
She was drying the blood-red hair and the soaked clothes clinging to her body, and when Raul held out the soup, she broke into a grin.
“Thanks, Mom.”
Raul’s brows drew together again.
“Who’re you calling Mom?”
“You feed me, you set up water for me to wash, and you even pay my debts for me. At this point, aren’t you already my mom?”
“Who paid your debts? And if anything, make it Dad. What’s with Mom? Mom, my ass.”
“Right. Dad.”
“I’ve never had a daughter like you.”
Even with Raul’s dry rebuke, Aila just doubled over laughing, clutching her stomach.
Before long, she scooped up a big spoonful of the steaming meat broth, blew on it a few times, and put it in her mouth.
The next moment, she spun the spoon around in the air with the hand holding it and shouted, “It’s good! This is really good!”
Her reaction was so explosive it was oddly gratifying, though her table manners were beyond hopeless.
“Eat properly.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“I’ll hit you.”
“Hehe.”
Despite Raul’s grumbling, Aila kept slurping up the soup with that same vacant little smile of hers, and since he’d made a generous pot to begin with, Raul filled two more bowls for her.
She looked like a skinny reed, but she really could eat.
“Good grief. Who’d have thought we’d be enjoying this kind of luxury in a maze of all places? If I told the other guys about this, they’d never believe it.”
“The other guys... you mean the Embers?”
“Yeah, them.”
Raul watched Aila blink her large eyes over and over again.
“Come to think of it, you’re a pretty unusual Ember.”
The Embers Raul knew from the game were nothing like the girl in front of him.
They were an openly hostile group, always wrapped in anger to an excessive degree, pathologically fixated on the success or failure of their missions, and for reasons he never fully understood, always blocking the player’s path.
But Aila, sitting right here, was strangely different.
Far from anger, she was always busy grinning.
Unlike the rest of them, who lived with revenge and grudges on their lips, she seemed to live on an entirely different kind of language—one full of optimism, of all things.
How can the Embers be like this?
When Raul muttered something like that under his breath, Aila, who had already shoveled down the third bowl of soup, puffed out her cheeks like a squirrel and said abruptly, “Well? Maybe because I became an Ember for a different reason than most of them.”
“...Reason?”
Raul’s eyes sharpened at the information about the Embers, who had remained a mystery even after he’d collected every ending with all eighteen classes.
Aila nodded and answered, “The kids who’re raised as Embers usually have seen every ugly thing under the sun and ground their teeth over it.”
“What do you mean, ugly things?”
“All kinds of things. Kids abandoned by their parents, kids who lost their parents to beasts, children of people who were starved to death while being harassed by imperial officials, and kids who were almost beaten to death by their so-called parents before running away from home.”
“...So how are you different from those kids?”
When Raul asked in a seriously measured tone, Aila gave a snort of laughter and replied, “It’s nothing much. I just went because they said they’d teach me how to use a sword and feed me. I didn’t even know ‘that place’ was an Embers training facility until after I’d already joined.”
“A facility, then?”
“That’s really nothing special either. Just an orphanage. A huge chain spread all across the Empire. An orphanage sponsored by Clown.”
Aila said it in a truly indifferent tone, but Raul was so shocked that he nearly stopped breathing.
So the terrifying assassins of the Empire had really been abandoned, wounded orphans after all...
In another country, maybe that wouldn’t have been so strange, but in the Empire, orphans were far from rare.
An empire where the top 0.01 percent held more than ninety percent of the economy and the political power.
“Ha...”
He wasn’t a Saint anymore, but Raul had been entangled with the Empire more than a few times.
Usually as Mimir’s Holy Knight or the Blind Crusader.
And every time, the Empire had used dirty, petty methods to let the core forces of corruption slip away.
In the end, none of the other classes had ever been able to reach the heart of the Empire.
They would get there someday, he’d always thought.
The final class would wage open war on the Empire someday.
Raul had played that game with that thought in mind all along, but in the end, none of its classes could even stand face-to-face with the Empire’s central power.
The bait existed, and the role was set, but there was never any direct fight in the end.
What that meant in Exeria, Raul—who was one and only six-star class, the Saint of the Beginning—understood all too well.
I knew, someday, I’d end up facing the Empire...
The more he heard about the Empire’s situation, the more revolting it became—enough to raise goosebumps.
Raul looked at Aila’s cheerful face.
In an environment like that, she’d managed to keep that personality and that smile.
That, too, was in its own way proof that she was probably not quite sane.
Raul did not ask the stupid question of what had happened to her parents.
He simply held out the bowl, half-full of soup, toward her.
“Want it?”
“Huh? Really? Is that okay?”
“Yeah. I’m full now.”
Aila beamed and took Raul’s soup.
It was the very same smile she’d worn a moment ago, and yet now it looked a little different.
Watching Aila shovel in the soup with food smeared at the corners of her mouth, Raul suddenly found himself thinking this:
A terrifying assassin.
An innocent girl ignorant of the world.
And at the same time, one who had the awkward manners of someone trying too hard to act like an adult—wasn’t she, perhaps, the cold self-portrait of this miserable, desperate world?
He said nothing more.
They sat in front of the crackling vermilion campfire for dozens of minutes.
Aila, worn out from everything she’d gone through, was nodding off.
Then her head tipped to one side, and her body followed, pitching forward.
“Ah—?!”
Startled, she opened her eyes, straightened herself up, and wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth with a hiss.
Only then did she sweep her unfocused gaze around before looking at Raul and asking, “Did I fall asleep?”
“About an hour.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I was planning to rest once after we got into the maze anyway.”
At Raul’s calm answer, Aila blinked.
“That... doesn’t really make me the one who gets to say this after you let me rest so well, but is this really okay? We came here early because we were in a hurry, remember? We’re still only on the top floor of the maze, and we haven’t even gone a quarter of the way through the map they gave us.”
Raul gave a thin smile at how seriously Aila was thinking about the exploration.
“It’s fine. I was wandering around this whole first layer anyway because I was looking for something.”
“Looking for what? The map already shows a path down to the third layer.”
“Not a path. A passage.”
“Huhhh?”
Maybe she was still half-asleep, or maybe she was just normally like this, but Aila let out a baffled hum as though she couldn’t make sense of Raul’s words at all.
Seeing that, Raul decided that seeing was believing after all, and stood up from his seat.
“You rested well, right? Then pack up and get up. Let’s go.”
But when Raul abruptly headed somewhere else, Aila pulled out the rough map and voiced her confusion.
“Uh, old man. Not that way. It’s this way. Huh?”
Still, Raul kept walking as though he heard her only halfway, and then stopped in front of a dead-end wall.
“See, old man? The advance party’s map says this is a dead end too.”
“No. This is right.”
Raul answered the grumbling Aila dismissively and reached out to press a hand against the wall.
Then a familiar kind of message appeared before his eyes.
“Ancient Understanding reacts to the ancient technology it has come into contact with.”
“Would you like to enter the ancient secret passage?”
When he pressed the button, the blue light spread across the entire stone ruin, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Before long, with a grating rumble and a heavy boom alternating back and forth, the dead-end wall in front of them suddenly split cleanly in two.
“What the—?”
And there, just as Raul had said, was a dark, sloping passage.
“Ancient ruins were facilities the ancients actually used, after all. It wouldn’t be strange at all for there to be a passage like this, something that lets them move quickly to wherever they want to go.”
“A-a passage? You can just use something like this? You don’t even know where it leads, and you’re just going to rip it open like that?”
Raul looked at the rarely nervous expression on the Embers girl and smirked.
“Don’t worry. I know exactly where it leads.”
“Huh? How do you know that, old man?”
“I have my ways.”
Then, just as Raul was about to step into the passage, Aila hurriedly cut in front of him with a flustered voice.
“Wait, wait, wait! Then at least tell me. Where does this passage lead?”
“The lowest floor of this maze.”
“Whaaat?”
Raul gave a quiet snort at the shocked look on Aila’s face and started walking again.
From the beginning, he had planned to obtain the holy relic first, before fighting the Bloodfiends.