Operation: Subjugate the Maze Rat
The current had seized her, but it hadn't managed to drag her all the way under. Lupin hung on with both hands locked around a tree root that dropped from the upper cave, bracing against the rush.
She'd ridden water slides like this more times than she could count. Underground ruins were generous with the kind you could enjoy even without a girlfriend, and if a river or a lake sat anywhere nearby, one was practically guaranteed. She hadn't seen either before the drop, but the maze was enormous enough that a connection to some underground vein or tributary wouldn't have surprised her in the least.
And the water slide wasn't what mattered now. She had just been hit with ten music-box fakes in a row, and thanks to that the Maze Rat was, at this very moment, an absolute piece of shit in Lupin's heart. Not once. Ten times. Luring people in with treasure chests, and he couldn't even be honest about what was inside? At the very least, you don't scam the contents.
Common sense, of course, said that opening a chest left in a maze built by a fugitive was irrational to begin with. It would obviously be wired to a trap—who takes a gamble that stupid? The adventurers who had died opening treasure chests in the past were simply less prepared than Lupin, who had come equipped with countermeasures.
"Kyaaaaaaah!"
"Gyaaaaaah!"
Two women's screams came tumbling down from above. The voices were familiar, but Lupin didn't so much as pretend to listen, and just like that Red and Blue were swept away at speed, vanishing down the sloping drop.
"Grrk—!"
Then came Woong—no, Yegor.
Lupin reached out on reflex. She had an obligation(?) to hand this one a gold bar. One of his flailing arms caught in her grip, and the hand still locked on the root slid with a wet skid. Maybe it was the strain of refusing to let go—her Strength Growth Value piled up of its own accord. In the middle of the chaos, Lupin forced a promotion.
The slipping hand slammed shut and seized the root all over again.
"Nnnnngh—!"
"Lupin, let go!"
"The hell? I barely caught you. Why?"
"Our companions were swept away. I have to go check on them."
Yegor was planting death flags by the dozen. Go down there and he'd obviously drown. This was exactly why nice guys living in a survival-of-the-fittest world never lived long. Even in the middle of being furious at the Maze Rat, Lupin miraculously remembered the story about Yegor's family.
"Your home address."
"Why?"
"If you die, I still have to deliver the gold bar, don't I!"
"...Ah. I hadn't thought of that."
Lupin discarded one old treasure-chest memory—something about a chest caught on the end of a railing that had opened and dumped her into a stream dozens of meters below. Into the space that freed up, she recorded Yegor's home address.
"Then live, and I'll see you later!"
The moment she let go, Yegor pinched his nose like a diver and was swept away by the current.
All right. So what do I do now?
Lupin lifted her head. Water poured from the slope above like a burst dam, with no sign of stopping. If she crawled along the ceiling like a damn bug, she might reach the outside again. But leave like this? Not a chance. She wouldn't feel right until she found the Maze Rat and smashed his head in with a music box.
The blood surging with her rage dropped her intelligence back to that of an ordinary human, and a scene from about four years ago surfaced—a situation much like this one, a crisis of drowning. Her body moved before her head could think. Bracing herself with one hand on the root, Lupin drew the Lightning Sword with her right.
"Agh, this stance is a complete mess...!"
All she knew was a single form, and that form only worked from a proper standing stance. She simply hadn't learned it from a proper master. Blades and pointy things had been Lupin's good friends for a very long time.
"Hup. Hup."
The Lightning Sword—companion through fifteen years of Tassili Maksikov's youth, forged by a famous smith of that age—jabbed the cave ceiling beside the root like a toothpick. Rock split by the tree root began to crack, and stones and grit showered down onto her head. Her hand grew busier: cutting away the fine roots, stabbing the stone again, taking a rain of rock. After a few rough jabs, a hole opened wide enough for a person to pass through.
Treasure chests don't lie. Right—the ones who scam you are the people who set them down. Lupin ground her molars, and her fury toward the Maze Rat burned hot.
Even the water slide that had seemed endless had an end. The problem was that the end was a completely dead-end cavern, with no way out in any direction.
Tamara, who had been flailing in the current for a long while, barely broke the surface, grabbed the cave wall, and kept vomiting the water she had swallowed.
"Tamara, are you okay?!"
"Kehuk. Kack... urp..."
"Damn it... what even is this place."
If the oil lamp had at least stayed intact, it might have been different. Swept off somewhere in the current, it couldn't even be found. The cave moss growing on the ceiling glowed with a faint light, but follow that light and there was nothing but wall.
With a splash, Yegor—last to arrive in the underground water cave—shouted as he searched for the other two.
"Everyone, you all right!"
"Yegor?! Are you okay?"
Even in the strong current, he reached the cave wall where the other two clung in a single surge.
"I'm fine. Tamara?"
"I'm fine. Swallowed some water, but I threw it up right away."
Relieved, Yegor looked around—and saw only the same thing Blue had just seen. A vast water cave wrapped in faint light. The only way out was the slope they had slid down, and water kept pouring from it. Climbing back up against that was unthinkable. Nothing but water, with nowhere to set a foot, and all of it so muddy you couldn't even tell where the bottom was.
Blue muttered, her face gone pale.
"Do you think... we can get out of here?"
A form could be unfolded without one's feet on the ground, so punching a hole in the ceiling wasn't theoretically impossible. The problem was destructive power. A Grandmaster who walked the sky might have managed it, but without earth to brace the body, an Aura User's strength dropped sharply. Red and Blue's aura happened to be completely useless for destroying something like rock, and Yegor's was defensive, so expecting him to break the ceiling was a stretch. In other words, the three of them were trapped, and unless they became water ghosts and freed themselves from their flesh, they were not getting out.
Unable to overcome her instinctive fear, Blue pulled Red into her arms. For a moment, nothing but the sound of pouring water filled the cavern.
And then—
"Don't worry."
Yegor drew his sword.
"There's a way."
Thud, thud, thud. Stone crashed and rumbled.
"Agh—ack. Agh. Agh."
Taking a barrage of broken fragments straight to the skull, Lupin burst up out of the stone cave floor. The massive tree root that ran downward stretched out here and there through this cave as well.
"Ha. See? People really do have to use their heads."
Brushing the bits of stone and dirt off her body, Lupin celebrated her success. Make the path yourself, and there it is. But when she went to sheathe the Lightning Sword, the teeth along the tip were completely gone. What else could she expect after jabbing broken rock with the point like a maniac?
"Hm."
Lupin, however, already had it all figured out. She'd simply lie and say it had been wrecked in a life-or-death fight with the lab rat. Wow, a Swordmaster really is something else. He wasn't easy to face at all! And she was in just the mood to feel better only after bringing a blade down on the Maze Rat. With her target set, she advanced without hesitation.
Then another alien smell caught the tip of her nose.
"Sniff, sniff. Another treasure chest."
It was the smell of rust, the kind that rises when metal corrodes against water, air, and everything else.
"...Or not? Is that blood?"
Maybe because she had already been fooled by music boxes ten times, suspicion billowed up. Maybe there was a human corpse in here. She didn't understand it scientifically, but she wasn't wrong—human blood contains oxidized iron, so the smell of blood and the smell of rust tend to register as much the same.
Sigh. I'm the kind of bastard who just can't give up on a possibility...
But just because she was suspicious, could she really not go look? There might be a treasure chest. Even if it meant cracking an eleventh music box, Lupin had to go forward. There's an emerald mine right in front of me!
She passed through as naturally as if she had walked the route before—crossing a chamber where rockfall hammered down from every side along a rope no wider than a finger, then going straight through a space choked with poison gas. Beyond it, a chamber opened that was wide for a cave. A few jars sat against the wall, a roughly made shelf held several books, and bedding lay to one side, its thin cloth worn to tatters.
"Ooooh..."
The rest, in truth, didn't matter. Because it was sitting in the middle of the room. Big. Enormously big. The hinges were just as big. Something this size couldn't be a music box. If a music box were this large she wouldn't have been able to hold back her praise, but—
"Hehe."
Lupin circled the treasure chest, poking and prodding, and quickly became convinced that this one really was a treasure chest. Or a mimic. But so what if it was a mimic? Dopamine always hits harder when you succeed at a challenge that carries risk. She opened the lid without hesitation, and the sound of it opening was as loud as the chest was large.
...?
The fortunate part was that this time it wasn't a music box. The absurd part was that, once again, there was no treasure. A dark-skinned old man with hair gone white lay inside wearing only a thin cloth, and the sight was bizarre—a sword clutched to his chest, for all the world like an Egyptian mummy. Thinking it might be a corpse, she reached out, and through eyelids parted to a slit the pupils rolled and looked straight at her.
She didn't even have time to taste the rising tension before a sword point flew in. The attack aimed at her neck and thrust true. Lupin bent her waist all the way back and spun through a full vertical turn.
"Whoa, that scared me."
What is my luck today, seriously? Ten music boxes, and now a box with a person who stabs people? Did the old man seriously plan to use a treasure chest as a coffin? No. If he meant to use it as a coffin, why attack?
"What wretch is this. How did you reach this place?"
Lupin answered the old man's irritable question just as irritably.
"And what about you. Would you happen to be the Country Mouse?"
"...The Country Mouse?"
"No. What was it. The sewer rat?"
"You mean the Maze Rat."
"Oh, right, the Maze Rat. That's you?"
"Suppose that I am. What do you intend to do about it?"
Lupin immediately gripped the sword hilt in her right hand and dropped into a low stance.
"Finally we meet, you scam-artist bastard! You Ponzi-rat!!"
Mr. Ponzi, that specialist in pyramid schemes, would have found the comparison deeply unfair.
