Episode 8 - Tartazan Labyrinth (1)
Special Task Force Captain Derek Baldwin could not make sense of the situation before him.
He let out a sigh of disbelief and asked again, “He hid his strength?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Are you certain? You didn’t simply imagine it?”
“I’m certain.”
Derek Baldwin was left speechless.
At first, it had only been curiosity. Blackmore was a place the Empire itself had left alone for decades, so news that a lowly civil servant was managing that blighted land by himself naturally raised questions.
He had therefore objected to the Chancellor at once, only to hear, in response, “—if the fellow were an ordinary underling.”
With that, His Excellency had slipped him a fragment of information: Luke Richter was not an ordinary underling.
Frankly, it was hard to believe. Even he, the head of the Imperial Special Task Force, a body charged with intelligence and classified affairs, knew nothing about the man named Luke Richter.
So he had only issued an order to verify the truth firsthand.
“Black Wolf, Sky-Piercer, Sentinel, Blood Fang, Revenant... and you’re telling me all of them were found dead in front of his office?”
“Yes. Every one of them was a monster above the aberrant class.”
“Split apart with a single sword strike? Do you honestly think that sounds possible?”
“And yet we found no wounds other than the cleanly severed surfaces.”
“...”
Silence fell.
The neatly bisected bodies of those monsters were, in truth, nothing more than proof of Rudine’s one-sided slaughter, but there was no way for them to know that.
And so the misunderstandings piled atop one another until, after staring at the man in silence, the captain finally gave a short reply.
“...There’s something there.”
At that, the corner of his mouth lifted.
He had honestly expected nothing much, but now that he had looked under the lid, there were suspicious points everywhere. So many, in fact, that he couldn’t even begin to guess what was being hidden, or where to start looking.
He needed certainty.
Certainty that Luke Richter was a card worth playing.
And, as a pleasant bonus, he would satisfy his own curiosity while he was at it.
“The security?”
“No problems.”
Nod.
He waved a hand in dismissal. “Then we’ll bury this for the time being.”
“Understood.”
“You may leave.”
That was the end of it.
The man who had delivered the report bowed and withdrew, and once he was alone in the office, Derek let out a faint, chill laugh.
“The House of Richter...”
With a thin smile, he gazed out the window and murmured, “I’ll start by digging into them.”
Meanwhile.
“Hmm.”
I gently closed my fingers around the stone in my hand. It was the stone Adina had given me, engraved with the Time Rune.
“Just so you know, I don’t actually know how to use it.”
Adina, proudly laying the groundwork for an excuse before anything had even happened.
I ignored her. I already knew how to use runes.
“Rudine.”
“Yeah?”
“Step back for a moment.”
I put some distance between Rudine and myself.
Then, with the intention of absorbing the rune, I slowly drew up the little mana I had left.
With a low hum, the mana wave began to spin, then gradually seeped into the rune stone in my hand.
Now comes the important part.
Runes did not grant power instantly; by ordinary means, they could not be absorbed at all.
To absorb an ancient language infused with divine authority into a mortal body was, by its very nature, a violation of the world’s causality.
You have to twist it.
Gooooo.
With that strange sensation of blood flowing backward, my mana stirred.
A high-level suggestion, capable of encompassing mana itself, bloomed from my fingertips.
It was karma.
The forgotten sin of a god began to twist causality through language.
The countless shapes of the world melted into my deepest consciousness, and at the very instant my original mental image responded to the will of the world—
I absorb karma.
I voiced the prepared activation phrase in a low murmur.
In that instant, the world was flooded with a brilliant white dawn, as though ink had spread across water.
Under the immense pressure of time, everything moved slowly.
A little later.
The piercing voice that rang in my ears was as if it were being whispered directly into my brain.
It has begun.
Primordial language. Runes.
That was the setting, anyway—an ancient language capable of containing the rank of some forgotten great god.
In any case, absorbing it required a corresponding price.
And that price was—
“I give up my mana.”
I answered without hesitation.
The reason I chose mana was simple.
If you sacrifice mana as the price of absorbing a rune, the side effects are the smallest.
It’s not like I had much mana to begin with.
If I’d been born with a vast reserve, I might have resented it, but I was an exception. I’d been born with a pitifully tiny mana pool.
Besides, once the rune was absorbed, I would gain a special resource called Mental Image anyway.
There was no reason to cling to mana.
And then, a moment later, as my vision slowly returned from the all-consuming white, I realized Rudine and Adina were staring at me in open shock.
The rune that had been trembling in my hand had been absorbed into my body.
And beneath my right eye, as if it were a tattoo, the rune’s mark had appeared.
Chirp, chirp, chirp.
When I looked up, I saw a sparrow flying through the air.
I reached out toward the sky to test the result.
Instead of empty mana, an indescribable force gathered at my fingertips.
It was a feeble thing—so weak it made my threadbare mana feel generous by comparison.
But still.
“Accelerate.”
The moment I spoke the activation word, the concentrated force spiraled forward and pierced the sparrow, then—
“Reverse.”
Stopped.
More precisely, it slowed.
It was so close to a complete stop that the difference barely existed.
And it wasn’t just the sparrow. Falling leaves, drifting dust, the gusting wind... everything that came into contact with that gathered force slowed under the crushing pressure of time.
The range is absurdly short.
It was unquestionably a broken ability, but the range was far too short. Naturally, the duration was short as well.
Its applications were endless, true enough, but I still clicked my tongue in disappointment—
“What... just now...”
“...”
The two girls’ eyes were full of shock as they looked at the scene before them, something that defied both phenomenon and law.
After absorbing the rune, Adina, who had been trailing after me, caught hold of my sleeve.
Then she asked in an anxious voice, “I’m part of your group now, right?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then can I ask you one thing?”
I hesitated for a moment, but she had, after all, helped me obtain a rare treasure, so I nodded readily.
“What is it?”
“Who are you, really?”
“Who am I?”
She pricked up her ears and nodded.
It was already suspicious enough that a human was living in a place like this, but more than that, the feat I had just displayed was not something an ordinary person could ever pull off.
So, as a kind of celebration for joining the party, she had decided to ask.
“A civil servant.”
“Huh?”
Adina frowned at my answer.
“So you’re the Empire’s lapdog?”
“That’s rather unpleasant to hear.”
“Why is a civil servant in a hellhole like this?”
“Because I’m the administrator here.”
“...Administrator?”
Naturally, Adina tilted her head, looking utterly baffled.
“There was an administrator in a place like this?”
“One was appointed recently.”
“Then what is that monster?”
“Monster?”
Adina pointed at Rudine with the tip of her finger.
“It’s strange. How can a human aura be this ferocious?”
It was a completely random accusation.
Rudine, hearing that, scowled.
“A talking fox is way weirder.”
“Well, that’s... what?”
Adina froze midsentence.
She glared at Rudine and snapped her silver tail upright.
“Have you said enough?”
“See? A fox that talks is too human. And she’s a coward, too.”
That’s true enough.
When I nodded along, Adina’s face flushed bright red.
“Coward.”
“...”
“Chicken.”
“...”
“Little thief.”
“Grrr...”
The childish staring contest dragged on for quite a while.
I would have liked to watch a little longer, but—
“Enough.”
I stopped them.
We had arrived at our destination: a small cave beyond the forest, the entrance to the Tartazan Labyrinth.
“...Is this the place?”
Adina, hiding behind me, asked with her ears twitching nervously.
I gave a casual nod and started walking.
“What is this feeling...”
As she muttered, a cold, unnatural energy was wrapped around the cave.
Unlike the bright world outside, the inside was unnaturally dark and uncanny.
It was suspicious at a glance.
“Follow me.”
“Okay.”
“Ugh...”
There was no time to waste here.
I planned to finish the exploration quickly, then return to the office and write my report.
When I lit the lamp I had brought with me, the cave, which had been swallowed by pitch-black darkness, brightened around the source of the light.
“...”
There wasn’t anything especially dangerous.
Just dark, cold, and enough to make your sanity peel away, that was all.
As I was thinking that and walking forward, something emerged from the murk.
“Found it.”
It was an altar.
Judging by the patterns carved into it in blood, it had to have been built by human hands.
Seeing something like that in person, after only ever reading about it in novels, was enough to send a chill down my spine.
Still, I couldn’t stop, so I kept walking.
Then Rudine pointed at something.
“...A book?”
At the center of the altar, there was a stone pedestal, and atop it lay a shabby-looking book.
What was shocking, however, was the cover...
“...Human skin.”
It was unmistakably human hide.
It was horrifying beyond words, but I knew exactly what it was.
The Book of Pindal.
The forbidden tome known by that name was a grimoire filled with madness.
A cursed book that would stain the soul the moment it was read, forcing one’s true depravity to the surface.
Under normal circumstances, it was the sort of thing you should never touch. But to enter the depths of the labyrinth, I had to read it.
There was just one problem.
To read The Book of Pindal, you needed a high-ranking shaman who could perform a purification rite.
But—
“Rudine.”
“Yeah?”
“Go read it.”
“Okay!”
I didn’t need any of that.
Rudine, born under the Heavenly Slaughter Star, already had a soul that was thoroughly, hopelessly warped. One more cursed grimoire wasn’t going to make much of a difference.
As expected—
“I’m done reading.”
—the moment she closed the forbidden tome after finishing it,
“!!!”
Kuguguguguuuum!
The earth shook, and the sealed entrance revealed itself at last.