The Ancient Missing Link (5)

Archaeological research is far harder than exploring ruins. Finding the damn things is what really kicks your ass. I had forgotten that shitty truth for a few months, but three straight hours of investigation drove it home with brutal clarity. No matter what you’re doing, the actual execution is easy. It’s the preparation and the cleanup that’ll grind you into dust.

“Let’s take a break. It’s lunchtime. We need to eat and catch our breath.”

The pocket watch read exactly noon. I led the party toward the nearest safe zone. Franc had been handling enemy detection and trace analysis, and she had finally hit the limit of her concentration.

We climbed to the second floor of a building marked on the map and began preparing our meal. This structure was a safe zone; the undead didn’t respawn here. The sun blazed overhead, but the abandoned hospital atmosphere made the place feel like we’d come for a dare. It was faintly eerie.

Because it was safe, other adventurers had left plenty of trash behind.

“Ugh, disgusting.”

—Clang. Dana kicked a crushed canteen across the floor and spread out a mat. We dissolved jerky and solid soup cubes in water, finished our combat rations, and rested. Of course, while our bodies recovered, our brains still had to suffer. Before the aftertaste of the meal could even fade, it was time for information exchange.

“My lord. Did you sense any reaction from the souls bound to the runes?”

Veronica in her goddess mode asked the question. She had released her Bicorn transformation to conserve mana and maintain the soundproof barrier. She was also keeping maximum distance from Larilura to reduce the curse’s backlash.

“Nothing on my end. You?”

“There were no signs of concentrated dark or negative mana. It flowed like wind from the sky above the city all the way to the underground.”

“Same here. Every combat trace looked like it came from fighting zombies.”

No one had found anything noteworthy. If they had, they would have spoken up immediately. I rinsed the awful aftertaste of the solid soup from my mouth with water.

The map we’d discovered in the Underground Tower had marked a ‘## ## Temporary Base.’ The odds that it lay somewhere in this Mozriun were high. The ghost-city incident that had swallowed Mozriun decades ago didn’t seem unrelated to an ancient civilization’s frontline outpost.

It’s hard to imagine the ruins here are buried hundreds of meters underground like the Underground Tower.

That tower had been excavated by ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a unicorn dark mage using golem-generation acceleration magic. Its extreme isolation existed because it was a recovery supply factory. The ancient nation of Orwalia had built the supply line with obsessive secrecy so the ‘enemy’ would never find it.

War is a war of attrition.

In this world, war meant burning through mana and the superhumans who wielded it. An Elixir capable of reviving even a nation’s greatest asset on death’s door was worth pouring obscene amounts of mana into. One Orichalcum-class fighter was worth more than a thousand grunts, after all.

Still, even the ancients wouldn’t have let every single base guzzle mana like that.

A nuclear shelter was one thing, but according to our reasoning the marked site was a frontline base. Soldiers and supplies had to move in and out with every battle. Replacing all of that with Teleport magic circles? That was nonsense even for a somersault kick. Mana here was the equivalent of electricity and oil back on Earth. Using soldiers as combat cargo to run fighter planes? Even WWII America wouldn’t have burned money that stupidly.

And the ruins here can’t be a potion laboratory either.

Would they mark the location of a top-secret military facility on a map? The reason we’d found coordinates to other bases inside the Underground Tower was because that tower supplied potions. The chance that another potion lab would have shared its location was close to zero.

So the conclusion was simple.

“The ruins we’re looking for will have a physical passage connected to the surface.”

An undiscovered entrance had to exist somewhere in the city.

Of course, we had no idea whether Mozriun’s base belonged to Orwalia or ancient Germania. We didn’t even know if the two nations had been allies or enemies during the great war at the tail end of the ancient civilization.

But that’s not our problem.

In the end we were archaeologists in name only. We were adventurers. To be blunt, we were just tomb raiders. No matter how shiny our name tags, charging into ruins meant our party would be intercepted. As long as the ruins themselves weren’t one giant trap, we’d be fine. We had already prepared tactics for the trap scenario.

Larilura wiped her mouth with a handkerchief and sighed.

“We’ve been wandering around a place where a fight could break out at any moment for three hours and found nothing. It’s more mentally draining than I expected. Looks like nothing in this world comes easy.”

“You’re already whining? We have three different search methods. That’s insanely lucky.”

Dana laughed as she spoke.

Since Nord, Franc, and Veronica were each searching for the ruins’ location in completely different ways, we did have better odds than most ruin investigations.

First, me. I used the Ansuz rune to locate the souls of the missing. The method relied on the hypothesis that the disappearances occurring in Mozriun were connected to the ruins. In a world where human life was held so cheaply, the number of missing persons was abnormally high. The Germania Kingdom Army’s entry-and-exit records helped, but the situation was still far from normal. If the culprit could evade the kingdom’s investigation, they might have already seized the ruins and be hiding inside. That was the gamble I had placed on this exploration method.

Next was Franc. Her reasoning was almost the same as mine, but her role was to examine the city’s remaining battle traces for any that ‘didn’t look like they came from fighting undead.’ The adventurers hunting in Mozriun were at minimum Silver Class. If something serious enough to make them disappear had occurred, noticeable traces should remain. Franc had suggested the idea herself. It was an arrangement that made full use of her sharp eyes and detection abilities. Of course, because she was also detecting undead the entire time, she was the first to reach exhaustion.

Last came Veronica. She would detect the dark and negative mana blanketing the city and locate the spot where that mana was most densely concentrated. If the reason Mozriun had become a ghost city was the ruins we sought, then backtracking the mana should reveal the entrance. Veronica claimed she could see the movement and flow of mana by using the Raidho rune, so we assigned the task to her.

Even with this three-pronged search method, we still wasted three hours.

I reminded myself it was only the third hour of the first day. In old online games that was barely enough time to finish a beginner class change. Expecting results already was pure thief mentality.

──But they say words become seeds.

The person who actually found the ‘first day’s results’ I had dismissed as mere wishful thinking was our Franc, whose actual profession was thief.

“Hey everyone. That alley over there… doesn’t it feel a little off?”

Franc spoke while studying the combat traces left in the narrow passage.

“Off?”

It was genuinely impressive. Finding undead one after another was one thing, but the alley she pointed out was just a dark side street that had caught my eye for maybe one second as we passed. Had she really analyzed whether the darkness inside that alley was ‘strange or not’ in that brief instant? While staying alert for undead?

She couldn’t have been judging every single alley like that the entire way here, right?

If that was true, it would be astonishing.

Knowing Franc’s keen eyesight, we decided to investigate. She pulled on gloves and examined the pattern of the traces, then muttered.

“Yeah. This alley is a bit… no, it’s really strange.”

“Fuck. She’s right.”

I wasn’t as sharp-eyed as Franc, but by thinking logically I could see the problem. My eyes might be inferior, but I was still an intellectual at heart. The desperate desire to always look smart and cool in front of my wives made me rack my brain until the anomaly became obvious.

“Senior. Explanation, please.”

Larilura no longer seemed surprised by this sort of thing.

Her learning speed was excellent, but in the field of neuroscience, comprehension and insight were separate stats. I tapped the flame marks on the wall with my staff.

“Look. The flames spread outward in a radial pattern like they crawled along the wall. There are blade marks on the floor too.”

“What’s strange about blade marks or scorch marks? In a fight you’d expect—”

“Ah.”

Larilura seemed to realize something. She drew a knife from Ringling 3.5’s wrist. The battle knife, sharp enough to cut an ox in half, scraped across the floor. Its depth and width were noticeably shallower than the existing marks. Even a blind man could tell how violently the original blade had been driven into the stone.

“I see~. There are strangely many blade marks on the floor, right?”

“Exactly. Even if zombies had crawled across it, there wouldn’t be this many scratches.”

Two or three marks might have been explained by a half-severed zombie dragging itself along the ground, but the scene looked like an adventurer swordsman had deliberately focused every slash on the floor alone.

“Hmm. So several of them clung to the walls like salamanders? They even fired magic at the wall?”

Dana ran a gloved finger across the burn marks. A ridiculous amount of ash came away. The burns were recent. Some mage had hurled flame magic directly at the wall, leaving a perfectly radial scorch. It was too clean to be incidental damage from an attack aimed at a wraith. It looked exactly like someone had thrown a black paintball the size of a human head against the stone.

This was almost certainly the trace of a Fire Ball spell.

“So something attacked by crawling along the floors and walls,” Veronica murmured. She turned to the squatting Franc. “Franc. Did the adventurers here escape alive? If we can find them and ask what happened, it would be an enormous clue.”

“…They probably didn’t make it.”

Franc deftly picked something up with her thick gloves. It was a tiny fragment of chain so small that even someone with perfect vision might have missed it. A broken piece of an adventurer’s dog-tag necklace.

She removed her gloves and examined the broken cross-section.

“It looks like it was struck hard or yanked. The copper chain snapped in the middle.”

“The necklace broke but only this tiny piece remains? That doesn’t add up. They cleaned up the evidence.”

Dana swept the floor with her boot as she spoke. If the chain had snapped, other fragments should have scattered everywhere. Yet there wasn’t a single additional link in sight.

I put on my own anti-poison gloves and brushed the dust. The two stupid years of active duty I’d spent as a veterinary student had at least taught me something.

“Heh. They cleaned up really well. The dust levels here, five meters ahead, and at the alley corner are all different.”

If the attacker had lost the adventurer party, would they have had time to clean the scene so thoroughly? They would have been too busy chasing after them like a virgin who just had her favorite toy stolen. The fact that the bastard returned to erase his own traces meant the job was already finished.

“…Judging by the battle traces, it must be further inside, right?”

Larilura gazed down the ruined street where the alley continued. These traces came from intercepting an enemy that had emerged from within. It was definitely worth investigating.

—Step.

We silenced our footsteps and emerged from the gloomy alley. There were no buildings, only a well. That well was in catastrophic condition, as if a bear with spicy chicken sauce injected straight into its urethra had gone completely berserk.

Franc sent a signal that there were no signs of life. I took point. It was a skillfully camouflaged entrance. Not a single sloppy detail. If I had needed to ‘hide an entrance around here,’ I would have done it exactly like this. Walking through dust would leave traces one hundred percent of the time. This unknown bastard had demolished the entire ruin to bury those traces.

I would have missed it if I hadn’t been suspicious. The only anomaly was that this particular well had a lid.

“Nor. Come here.”

Franc called me. I fell back as instructed. Temporary retreat. We dashed into a nearby safe-zone building and raised a soundproof barrier. Time to prepare for reconnaissance.

—Whoosh!

Franc pulled a stone fragment from her pouch and tossed it onto the floor. It was a shard from a giant golem core. Then she began the full incantation to create a miniature golem.

“gooo.”

A golem small enough to sit in one’s palm was born. Embarrassingly, it looked exactly like me. Franc frowned, clearly unhappy with the shape.

“Veronica? I didn’t hear that summoning a small golem would turn out like this.”

“Hmm~? Isn’t it fine? I think it’s cute♡?”

Larilura’s eyes sparkled as she mischievously poked the cheeks of the miniature Nord. Veronica waved her hands, insisting it wasn’t her fault.

“If you dislike it, improve the form yourself. A golem infused with spirit-binding rituals naturally takes the shape its creator prefers most.”

Franc’s most preferred form is me?

Looking at the tiny figure that was basically a 3D print of myself, warmth spread ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠through my chest. I didn’t know exactly what the spirit-binding ritual was, but if that was true, didn’t it mean I was Franc’s subconscious ideal type? Fuck! I felt ridiculously good!

“Franc, I think it’s fine like this.”

“No. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠If I make a mistake it’ll be like breaking you. I’ll remake it in my own image.”

Franc spoke with rare firmness. Apparently she hated the idea of anything that looked like me getting smashed. Damn. I’d liked it because it felt like proof of her love. Still, a miniature Franc golem would be adorable too.

“If you’re changing it anyway, why not use a completely different form? If it looks like us, anyone who sees the golem will immediately know who we are.”

Dana said this while grabbing the Nord golem with her gauntleted hand. A very Dana-like remark that completely ignored any romantic implications. The miniature-Franc plan sank beneath the waves. Both Larilura and I grew depressed for similar but slightly different reasons. Still, it was sound advice, so the golem was reshaped into a sparrow.

—Flap, flap.

Thanks to Puppetry, it could even fly by consuming mana. A true flying golem. The sparrow perched on Franc’s finger and preened its feathers like a real bird. The spirit-binding ritual was probably just magic that turned golems into remote-controlled drones. Compared to the bio-drones I summoned with jerky and dried fish, it probably caused less guilt when they were destroyed. Though animals would have better endurance and range.

As the old saying goes, there are no weak Stands in this world.

“I’m counting on you.”

Franc touched her forehead to the sparrow golem’s and launched it out the window. When she took out the bronze mirror enchanted with rune magic, the golem’s field of vision appeared on its surface. It was essentially a golem familiar.

The sparrow flew awkwardly into the well. As expected, a large hole was discovered at the bottom. The golem landed and entered the hole. Wingbeats were too noisy and mana-intensive to use underground. Inside was pitch black. Without the golem’s ability to see in darkness, we would have been helpless. Good thing it was born eyeless. A blind sparrow had survived where a sighted one might not.

The sparrow golem dashed forward while the bronze mirror illuminated the tunnel. After thirty minutes of movement, torchlight appeared. Someone was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠definitely living down here. Our collective intelligence had hit the jackpot.

And when the true nature of the secret passage was finally revealed, Franc let out a small groan.

“…Catacombs.”

Hundreds of white skeletons lay sleeping beneath the ghost city.