Missing
1.
-Swoosh!
A massive red dragon landed heavily on the floor.
The dragon, its blue eyes flashing, stared up at the endless ceiling, drew in a huge breath, and then converted that breath into a powerful blast of magical energy before exhaling it in a roar.
-KWAOOOONG!
The breath tore through the dark sky, which held not a single shred of light, and shot toward the ceiling, whose end I couldn’t even tell was there.
And yet, as time dragged on, not only did I hear no sound of the ceiling being smashed apart, even the glow of the breath itself faded away.
Like a meteor vanishing into the void.
“……”
The dragon kept staring at it.
No matter how far it flew through the sky, there was no end in sight, and even when it hurled that magical breath upward like this, there was no sense that it ever reached anything.
In other words, it was as if I’d fired it toward some distant heaven.
But this wasn’t the outside.
This strange place, sent into existence the moment a blinding white flash swallowed the train, was clearly called a dungeon prison, and yet there was no ground above from which one could ever escape.
-Boom!
“……I give up.”
In the end, Louis realized this was nothing but a waste of energy, so she dropped her dragon form and reverted to human shape.
The outline of the dragon vanished, and in its place stood a pretty blonde girl.
Honestly, it was most comfortable to stay in her original form, but if she wanted to conserve her stamina at a reasonable level, a human body was the best balance.
“What the hell kind of place is this?”
An endless spread of darkness.
In this place where not a single ray of sunlight reached, there was no end no matter how high she flew, and no end no matter how far forward she went.
It felt like being trapped in a maze with no exit.
Places like that supposedly existed in the world, too—labyrinths you could enter but never leave.
-A village swallowed by fog long ago.
-The boundary between the mortal realm and the underworld.
-A mysterious ruin deep beneath the sea.
But thankfully, this place didn’t seem to belong to that category.
Young dragons were taught during flight training about places they must never approach, by the adult dragons.
And since one couldn’t simply enter them through a teleport scroll like what had just happened to her, this was probably some artificially made maze-like place.
It fell into the sort of category people usually called a dungeon.
“Did you find anything? Any exit?”
The Turk Merchant Guild employees asked Louis anxiously.
“Nope. Nothing.”
Louis shook her head.
“I see……. Haa, then this whole expedition is screwed.”
They, too, had been dragged into this mysterious place along with Louis.
That was why, when Sian headed toward the train, it had been completely empty, and why no one could be found inside it.
“We misidentified the escort on our end. I think we paid too much attention to the rumored thug and the monsters.”
That had happened after Louis had easily subdued the beast-kin.
Surprisingly, taking them down hadn’t been all that difficult.
The problem was what happened next.
-Smack!
“Ow, what the hell?!”
Just as Louis tried to transform into a dragon inside the train, a tentacle suddenly appeared from the ceiling and slapped her across the face.
Stinging from the surprise attack, Louis rubbed her right cheek and snapped at the tentacle.
-Sliiiiiide.
But the tentacle only glared back at Louis in irritation.
It couldn’t speak, but it did its best to express what it wanted with that squirming, sticky body of its.
“……Turning into a dragon on a train is insane? You’d blow the whole train apart? Oh. Right.”
Obviously, no matter how spacious the train was, it couldn’t possibly handle Louis’s size in dragon form.
Even if the train had a barrier, it would never withstand a purely physical limit like that, and if Louis had transformed right there, that entire carriage—and probably the two adjacent ones as well—would have been torn apart from the inside.
Thanks to that, a catastrophe had been averted.
-Thwack! Thwack!
“Hurk?!”
So, in the end, Louis subdued them with her fists.
Maybe because Sian had beaten her so often, she knew exactly where to hit someone to drop them in one shot, and the beast-kin had foamed at the mouth and collapsed.
“Ah, that’s better.”
Then, loosening her wrists as if relieved, she moved on to the next carriage. She was checking whether there might be other members of that same gang.
-Creeeak
“The humans in here are……. the expedition staff?”
But there didn’t seem to be any other gang members.
The people across the way were all Turk Merchant Guild employees tied up with ropes, and apart from the ones Louis had just put down, there didn’t seem to be any beast-kin at all.
So Louis opened the door without worry—
“Hey! Don’t open that do—”
-Rip!
“Huh?”
Suddenly, she heard that sound in her ear, and in front of her eyes she saw a scroll split cleanly in half.
-Flash!
And then a blinding white light swallowed the train.
It was a trap the beast-kin had stuck near the entrance to the hostage car, in case they themselves were ever taken down—a magic scroll set to teleport them to a specific location.
So when Louis opened the door, the scroll was automatically torn, and once it activated, everyone in the train vanished from sight.
They had all been teleported somewhere.
-Slither, slither
And so, the only living thing left in the train was another tentacle that had come out of the box trapped with Louis…….
Thanks to Sian’s sealing magic placed on the box, only the half-body of the tentacle had escaped the teleport scroll’s range.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
2.
“……”
I couldn’t sleep.
All the other adventurers were already asleep, and even the tentacle had stopped moving and was sitting still, but I just couldn’t.
After I took that age-reducing potion, even my body’s habits changed like a kid’s, so I’d always been sleepy. But right now, I didn’t feel sleepy at all—not even the slightest trace of fatigue.
The potion’s effects were wearing off little by little.
“Hmm. Looks like I’ll make the deadline by the skin of my teeth.”
Fortunately, by the time I met that thug bastard again, the potion’s effect would still be hanging on by a thread.
Actually, at this point I could cancel the potion’s effects right now, but I’d already endured so much in this body that it felt wasteful to make it all meaningless.
Sometimes, I figured, it might be necessary not to crush someone by force, but to subdue them a little more rationally.
“What nonsense.”
……No, the truth was there was another reason I couldn’t sleep.
Rarity / Grade
Unknown.
It’s a necklace made from a soul stone.
[“That’s Cressia’s necklace. I swiped it from her ages ago. If you have it, you’ll probably be able to find your way there.”]
This was the crystal the Transcendent of Time had handed over to me back then.
Apparently, it had been an accessory owned by the Transcendent Cressia.
I’d never seen anything like it in Novel Online.
Judging by the fact that it was made from a soul stone, it probably had some special power, but unfortunately I had no idea what that power was.
“I saw something similar to what I saw then.”
But I had had a strange dream.
It was a scene similar to the one from when I first came to this world, though this time, you could say the viewpoint was different.
“And there was someone who looked like me.”
I saw a silver-haired girl in my dream.
She looked a lot like me—no, very much like young Sian.
To be exact, she looked exactly like I did now.
But that wasn’t the important part.
What bothered me was what happened after that.
I had once experienced something similar to the eerie thing that happened to that girl.
-Crackle…….
It wasn’t exactly the same, but when it came to the idea of the world disappearing, it was practically identical.
But what was even stranger came next.
The girl fled from the darkness, only to reach the edge of a cliff and be driven to the brink of being taken by that “thing.”
-Thump!
At that moment, I felt a strange pain.
The more danger she was in, the more I watched, the more that odd pain tightened in my chest.
And with that pain, one thought surfaced in my mind.
If that girl dies, I die too.
I didn’t know why I thought that, but I knew one thing for certain: I had to save that girl.
In the end, I stopped watching and intervened there, using magic to make her come to her senses.
I shouted at her that it was all just a dream, that she had to get out of that place as quickly as possible. I even used magic.
Well, I didn’t have any particularly brilliant method in mind, so I just cast a spell to strengthen her mind…….
“Anyway, it worked. She woke up.”
That girl came to her senses, and I woke up from the dream and returned to reality as well.
But when I recalled that memory, I had to wonder whether that really had been me.
And then, on top of that, I’d added something strange at the end, hadn’t I?
Completely against my own will, I’d said, “Don’t trust the transcendent.” as if I simply had to say it.
Which transcendent was I talking about?
The three Transcendents who had created the present world.
-Cressia, the Transcendent of Space.
-Diabella, the Transcendent of Time.
-Delatros, the Transcendent of Life.
Which one of them had I meant? Honestly, Delatros was the most suspicious, but there was no way I’d believe a bastard like that in the first place…….
……Which left Diabella, or maybe Cressia.
I didn’t know.
One of them I barely knew at all, and the other was a pervert whose brain was stuffed full of nothing but lust, so there was no telling.
-Sluuurp.
If it was something important, maybe I should look into that instead of worrying about meeting the thug.
-Slither.
“……I don’t need it.”
This thing had apparently eaten a few people when I wasn’t looking.
Its sense of self had become weirdly strong lately.
It should have been asleep a moment ago, and yet somehow it had woken up and was offering me warm milk.
-Sluuuurp…….
It even looked dejected when I refused.
Maybe this thing wasn’t just a tentacle after all.
Come to think of it, it had absorbed hundreds of adventurers, Louis, and on top of that the hero, a mid-tier demon, and even the demon king’s mana, so it couldn’t really be called a normal tentacle anymore…….
If I wasn’t careful, I started worrying it might become more dangerous than the demon king.
I was already beginning to suspect I’d created the strongest boss monster in the mortal realm with my own hands.
-Sluurp
Of course, even now its appearance and habits were dangerous enough as they were.
And apparently that tentacle liked Aria, because it had been licking its lips over her since a little while ago.
For the record, that tentacle’s type was blonde women, and if the target possessed holy power, it absolutely lost its mind.
It seemed the tastes of everything it had absorbed had all mixed together.
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