The Rabbit Mask
“What… the hell are you talking about?”
Abo’s question brushed past my ear, but I didn’t bother answering.
Any further explanation would have been meaningless.
They would understand soon enough—with their own eyes, and with every bone in their bodies.
I set off toward the depths of the ruins without a word.
After walking for some time, a broad corridor blocked our path. Massive stone statues lined both sides in a grim procession, and far ahead a stone door glowed with a faint light.
“What, it’s just a hallway? Nice and wide. Feels open.”
The moment Kado carelessly lifted a foot to step forward, I barred his way.
“Stop.”
“…What now?”
He grumbled, but the open irritation from before was gone. After the illusion mushrooms and the Echo Hunters, he had begun to grasp the weight of my warnings.
Instead of answering, I picked up a pebble from the floor and tossed it lightly down the corridor.
Just as the stone arced toward the ground—
CRACKLE-ZZZT!
A thunderous roar tore through the air. Threads of blue mana, woven like a spider’s web across the entire corridor, flared into view all at once.
The tiny stone touched those threads and vanished into a handful of ash without even a scream.
“…Holy shit!”
All color drained from Kado’s face. If I hadn’t stopped him, the thing reduced to ash would have been him, not a pebble. Abo, pale as a sheet, pressed herself tightly against my back.
“A mana-reactive barrier. The slightest contact turns an intruder to dust.”
I explained while staring at the barrier.
“To open the door, you have to slip through that dense web and hit the release mechanism on the other side.”
“That’s insane! How are we supposed to get through that?!”
There was a way.
To pass this barrier, two things were required.
One was the Explorer’s Glasses inside Kado’s dimensional pouch.
Without them, you couldn’t even identify the mana traps hidden in the barrier.
The problem was that he treated them as his mother’s keepsake and wouldn’t let anyone touch them.
In the original story I had to lure other monsters to create chaos and “borrow” the glasses for a moment. Getting caught meant an instant drop in affection.
And more than a few times, I had actually died.
The other was Abo.
The precise mana manipulation needed to disable the barrier was something I couldn’t do. Only she could handle that role.
But in the original, Abo had been extremely closed off. She trusted no one and never opened her heart easily.
To persuade her, you had to offer moonshadow moss—a rare material that grew only in the Moonlight Forest.
You had to keep wandering that dangerous forest and, if luck was on your side, maybe find some.
Either way, there was no free path.
My hand drifted of its own accord to the heavy weight at my waist.
The Dimension Distortion Pouch.
Inside it lay one of the keys to the solution: the Explorer’s Glasses.
The problem was that they weren’t mine.
How do I divert their attention? How do I slip my hand into the pouch and take the glasses without anyone noticing? I was still mapping out the scenario when—
“Hey.”
Kado’s voice made my heart drop.
Did he catch on to what I was planning?
“Pull the glasses out of that pouch.”
“…What?”
“You’re the guide. You might actually be able to do something with them.”
My thoughts froze solid.
This was a choice I had never once seen in the original.
I stared at him blankly, wondering if I had misheard.
“You’re telling me… to use them?”
The sacred relic he had never allowed anyone to touch, calling it his mother’s keepsake.
The Explorer’s Glasses he had never once lent across hundreds of playthroughs…
And that Kado
was telling me,
with his own mouth,
to put them on?
“Tch. You said you were doing the guide job properly. You seem to know the most about this kind of mess out of all of us, so just use them.”
Still blunt. But something else was clearly mixed into the words.
Not suspicion—clumsy trust.
Instead of using me or keeping me at arm’s length, he was offering the key to this situation of his own free will.
A voluntary kindness from him that I had never once witnessed.
Then a careful tug on my sleeve. Abo.
“I’ll… try too.”
“…Huh?”
“Disabling the barrier… Saya, if you show me the path with those glasses… I can do it… I’m confident with fine mana control.”
The strange heat no longer glittered in her eyes.
In my memories I had spent whole nights searching this forest for rare moonshadow moss just to win her favor. I had bowed my head and bargained for her help.
But the girl standing in front of me now was volunteering for that dangerous role without asking for anything in return.
I looked at the two of them in turn.
A path once stained with distrust and transactions had, without my noticing, become a path walked with comrades who faced crises together.
I nodded silently and took out the glasses.
“All right. Let’s begin.”
The moment I put them on, the world transformed.
Between the thousands of lethal blue mana threads, a thread-thin path glimmered faintly into view.
I drew a deep breath. Her life—the life of the girl who had trusted me—hung on a single judgment of mine.
“Abo. Follow only my voice. Not even a little mistake.”
“Okay. I trust you, Saya.”
And so the life-or-death traversal of the ruins began.
“Three steps straight ahead. Lead with your right foot… Good. Stop there. Three threads above your head. Duck your upper body completely.”
Abo moved without the slightest hesitation at my commands. The tips of her hair brushed a blue mana thread and the air around her crackled. Cold sweat ran down my spine.
“Half a step left. Watch the barrier on the floor… Now straighten up. Two paths ahead of you. The right is a trap. Go left…”
Tens of minutes stretched into eternity. At last Abo reached the stone door on the far side.
“You’re there, Abo! Straight ahead—the palm-shaped crest! Channel your mana into it!”
The instant her trembling hand touched the crest, the blue light filling the corridor unraveled with a soft hiss, dissolving like threads coming undone.
“…We did it.”
Thud.
The tension left Abo’s body and she sank to the floor where she stood.
I pulled off the glasses and exhaled a rough breath of my own.
“Hmph. You two actually make a decent team.”
Kado’s gruff praise.
A scene that never existed in the original.
An expression I had never seen inside the game.
Not theft or transaction, but the feeling of trusting someone and being trusted in return.
A corner of my chest grew warm. But there was no time to linger in sentiment.
My gaze turned to the far end of the corridor, where a heavy darkness settled over an altar.
At the heart of the altar, half-swallowed by stone and moss,
a black aura flowed as thin as silk,
carrying a dense threat within its quiet pulse.
As I approached the altar, Kado called out uneasily.
“Wait! Saya, something feels off about this place!”
But I did not stop.
Between the countless carvings on the altar, I softly recited the ancient words that matched my memory exactly.
“What sleeps here is no beast. It is instinct itself, abandoned and left behind by mankind.”
My voice broke the silence of the ruins. Kado’s face stiffened; Abo went pale and took a step back. Both of their gazes flew to me like blades.
“The moment you don this head, you shall no longer be yourself.”
The instant the chant ended, I thrust my hand without hesitation into the black aura at the center of the altar.
A cold that cut to the bone. At its end, something smooth settled into my grip.
When I drew it out, their eyes flooded with shock.
What rested in my hand
was a rabbit mask as pale as moonlight.
Across its silent white face,
slender silver veins wound like waterways, covering the mask.
It was an ancient relic left by those who had abandoned their humanity to survive—an artifact that dragged its wearer into the instincts of a beast.
Then a voice rang inside my skull.
Wear it.
Cast aside that powerless flesh and become a beast of pure strength.
I could not tear my eyes from the mask.
My heart hammered wildly. My body burned with the urge to put it on.
“Saya! What the hell is that creepy thing?!”
Kado’s shout barely let me cling to reason.
Ugh, just holding it is enough to make me lose myself. But it’s not time yet.
I carefully wrapped the mask, swallowed a ragged breath, and tied it tightly with cord before burying it deep in my bag.
“Y-you… you’re taking that with you?”
Kado asked as if he couldn’t believe it.
“Yeah.”
I answered firmly.
“It’s like a last-resort… insurance for survival.”
At my reply his brows twitched. He looked back and forth between me and Abo with a face full of dissatisfaction, then finally couldn’t hold it in.
“So in the end, we used my glasses to map the traps, Abo risked her life getting through them… and that ominous ‘insurance’ goes to you while we walk out empty-handed?”
I heard the fragile trust crack again. His point was fair.
Instead of answering his complaint, I gave a short laugh and pointed a finger at the walls of the ruins.
“Who said empty-handed?”
“What?”
“Look up carefully. Those glittering things.”
Dozens of mana stones shone softly around the ruins like stars in the night sky. At a glance they looked like ordinary light-source stones, but the reality was different.
“Those aren’t ordinary mana stones. They’re high-purity magic crystals with almost no impurities. Their mana efficiency and value are far higher than dozens of regular stones put together.”
“High-purity… magic crystals?”
I drew the dagger from my waist and lightly tapped the nearest crystal embedded in the wall. A gem-cut blue crystal fell free with a clear chime and settled into my palm.
“Here.”
I tossed it casually to Kado.
“Wha—!”
The moment he fumbled and caught the crystal, his expression froze.
The cold, dense pulse of mana in his hand. Overwhelming energy, as if a tiny living heart were beating.
“Th-those… all of them… are like this?”
His gaze, colored with shock, lifted to the ceiling. Dozens of blue stars scattered everywhere. Each one was a treasure worth more than most magic tools.
I smiled in satisfaction.
“Yeah. Plenty for you siblings. No complaints, right?”
Kado only opened and closed his mouth, looking back and forth between the crystal in his hand and me. All that remained was the awe and excitement of a child who had just held a treasure for the first time in his life.