The Light on Mount Wolha
It was a light. There was no mistaking it. What the source was, I couldn't say — but something out here was glowing, in the dead silence of a mountain at night.
If those were the eyes of a nocturnal monster, I was as good as dead. I wasn't a Hunter. I had no hope of shaking a night-prowling beast in the dark and making it out alive.
The thought was enough to freeze a man's blood, and yet my feet kept carrying me toward the glow. Some stubborn instinct insisted it wasn't a monster. The light shone steadily, without so much as a flicker.
It didn't look like anything a living creature would give off. And if it had been a monster, I would already have been attacked and killed — most of them were viciously aggressive.
I moved toward the light as slowly as I could. Every step was careful. It didn't seem dangerous, but I couldn't help being tense. A strange object sitting out on a mountainside in the dead of night, throwing off light like that — the whole situation was wrong.
"I've heard stories about skulls that glow in the dark… Don't tell me it's a murder victim?"
The thought was almost as chilling as a nocturnal monster. It just wasn't realistic. Mount Wolha was far too small a hill to bury a body on. Even the dimmest killer alive wouldn't pick this place to hide a corpse — least of all this close to a hiking trail.
And there was no stench of death. I'd never smelled a corpse in my life, but I was pretty sure I'd know it if I had.
I crept closer, little by little, and what finally came into view was nothing like what I'd expected. I leaned in to get a better look.
It was a die about the size of my fist. To be precise, it was something shaped like a die.
"What is this?"
Light was leaking from one of its faces. Not a blinding glare, but bright enough to catch the eye from a fair distance. The fact that it was night certainly didn't hurt.
I reached for it slowly. If this really was a die, it was the biggest one I'd ever seen.
"Smooth to the touch… Is it metal?"
The surface was quite cold. It felt like polished metal, though I couldn't be sure. The moment my fingers met it, though, I could tell the exterior had been finished to an almost unnatural degree of smoothness.
I couldn't begin to guess what it was for. I picked it up. Fist-sized or not, I'd underestimated the weight — it was far heavier than it looked. It had to weigh at least eleven pounds. For someone who didn't exactly live at the gym, lifting it one-handed was a strain.
"Why is this so heavy?"
A uneasy thought crossed my mind. What if this was one of those Triggers I'd only ever heard about? The instant the idea flickered through my head, I set the die down on instinct.
Something hit me faster than I could let go.
"Aagh!"
Light. A brilliance so intense I could barely keep my eyes open, pouring down over me from the sky. Shock came second. Confusion came first.
I threw an arm across my face on instinct. A bizarre sensation swept through my whole body, as if a hole had been punched straight through my chest. I'd felt it once as a kid, riding a roller coaster at an amusement park — that lurch in your gut when the car crests the peak and drops into a vertical plunge at terrifying speed.
"What… what is this!?"
I had no idea what was happening. Given the nature of my profession, I'd always taken a certain pride in having a richer imagination than most people. Right now, I couldn't even begin to picture what was going on.
The light bore down like a spotlight from above, so fierce I couldn't open my eyes. I dropped my gaze and managed to crack them into slits — and what filled my vision was a sight that made no sense at all.
"Wha—!?"
Even if I hadn't been the type to think out loud, anyone facing this would have let out a scream. I was flying. The ground was shrinking away beneath me.
"What… what the hell!?"
No — flying wasn't quite the right word. I was being dragged into the sky by something.
An old science fiction novel I'd read years ago flashed through my mind. The opening: a man stargazing, a UFO appearing overhead, a beam of light shooting down and abducting him. It had been a striking start. I still remembered it vividly.
The speed of my ascent kept climbing. The houses and buildings on the ground dwindled until they were no bigger than beans, then vanished altogether. A hazy fog rushed past me. Not fog — clouds.
I'd never even been on an airplane. The shock of it was enormous. The whole situation was so bizarre that none of it felt real. My body punched through the atmosphere and kept climbing.
Aside from that strange pressure crushing my chest, I wasn't uncomfortable in the slightest, which was remarkable in itself. An ordinary person — not a Hunter — surviving this kind of altitude with nothing but their own skin was supposed to be impossible. I couldn't have cited the science, but even I knew that much as common sense.
Then I crossed the atmosphere and entered space. From the ground to orbit had taken less than a minute. The blue Earth filled my vision.
Strangely, I felt no awe at all. It was beautiful, yes — but the sheer unreality of what I was living through stripped the wonder right off any sublime natural spectacle.
"Hn? What's that…?"
Something else had stolen my eyes instead. It was incomparably smaller than the Earth, and still more than enough to leave my mouth hanging open.
The opening of that science fiction novel surfaced again.
The aliens who abducted the protagonist had been villains, intent on modifying human genes to breed super soldiers. The hero survived aboard their ship somehow, escaped, and returned to Earth with special powers to walk a hero's path.
I'd quit around chapter five, so I never learned how it ended. I did remember he had a miserable time of it early on.
"Is that… a spaceship?"
Maybe I'd become the protagonist of a novel myself. What had pulled my gaze away from the Earth was a vessel smaller than the planet and still impossibly vast — a thing of surreal design I couldn't imagine Earth's technology ever producing.
The light that had guided me here was coming from that ship.
"Nngh. So this is the inside?"
I was inside the spaceship. I hadn't done a thing. The ship's light had simply brought me here.
That science fiction novel rose in my mind again, and with it a twist of unease. The protagonist in that story was gassed the moment he was taken aboard the UFO, and woke up thirty years later. Thirty years in the novel's time, of course — the author had covered it in a handful of sentences.
"The interior is… how do I put this. Incredibly modern. No — futuristic."
I was standing in something like a vast hall. The ship's entrance, maybe?
Calling it an entrance felt a little off. A ship's deck was probably the better comparison. Either way, the space was enormous.
Lights were set at close intervals, so making out my surroundings was no trouble. The whole place was done in white and black — mostly white, with black used sparingly here and there. It was a palette that could easily have felt like a psychiatric ward if handled poorly. Instead, some exquisite sense of design made the whole thing feel boldly futuristic.
"Hn? That's the die from before."
The die I'd picked up a moment ago was sitting right in front of me. The thing shaped like a die, to be precise. Looking closer, I saw there were no pips on any of its six faces. Calling it a die was starting to feel like a stretch.
"Not a dungeon Trigger, then? Or… could this place itself be a dungeon? Doesn't seem likely, but."
I wasn't a Hunter, but I had an ordinary person's share of common sense. The thought that this might be a dungeon made my body flinch on reflex. Fortunately, nothing attacked me. Nothing yet — or nothing at all? A single word of difference, and my future changed with it.
A Trigger was an object that led you into a special kind of dungeon. The word had other meanings, but that was the one people usually meant. Dungeons you entered by way of a Trigger were called Instant Dungeons. If this die was a Trigger, then this enormous spaceship was an Instant Dungeon.
"But I heard Instant Dungeons were somewhere in another world, cut off from ours… and this looks like it's still above Earth. So not an Instant Dungeon?"
The truth was, everything I knew was civilian-grade. It wasn't enough to make a clear call. I took a slow look around. An alien spaceship fit the place far better than an Instant Dungeon.
Then again, Instant Dungeons came in all kinds of forms. One themed after an alien vessel was entirely possible. I needed more information.
"It's a little unnerving, but I should start moving."
Waiting for someone to come rescue me seemed pointless — I was much too far from Earth for that. I'd look around first. Fortunately, my heartbeat had settled back to a normal rhythm. Proof that I'd found my composure.
Think it through properly and this was a situation where I ought to be worrying about staying alive. My curiosity outran the fear anyway.
I decided to survey the area and take stock. The hall was wide, but door-like openings crowded every wall, as if I were standing at the heart of an anthill. This might well have been the very center of the ship.
A strange sound rolled through the air without warning. The vibration in the atmosphere was more than enough to startle me.
The source was the strange die. It clacked and shifted, humming as if it wanted my eyes on it. My composed body jerked hard.
I was, to be honest, terrified. If I'd needed to piss, I would have done it on the spot. I stared at the die with a look of pure resentment.
With that same eerie hum, it began to rise, little by little, into the air. I watched it with a look of astonishment. Having already been abducted by a spaceship, it wasn't a sight strange enough to warrant genuine shock — but I watched it intently all the same.