Chapter 45
Chapter 45
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 45
Chapter Title: The Night of the Small Miracle
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Mayches, even while being grabbed by the collar, calmly reached out and patted my head.
“Even if you solve it by the book, the difficulty doesn’t go up at all. Don’t worry.”
Is that what you say right now?! I’m going crazy. I thought I just had to watch out for the participants’ bizarre team kills, but things were chaotic both inside and out.
Isn’t this basically me playing the game on the highest difficulty level all by myself?
I was already anxious that they might not escape in time, and now I had to keep an eye on wherever Mayches’ dark machinations might reach next.
“Come on, Aiel. Let’s have some snacks.”
“No!”
“Ah, Aiel...”
“I already ate my share for today.”
I had to hold back if I wanted to eat dinner later.
Mayches chuckled and pulled me into a tight hug.
Rather than shoving Mayches away, I decided to refocus on the screen.
“Anyone can see this is about finding this statue among ten thousand pieces and placing it right here, right?”
As Bamper spoke while looking at the photo in the frame, the other friends nodded as well.
Yes! Once they snapped out of it, they were quick to assess the situation.
Stage 2 consisted of pure white walls and floors marked with evenly spaced black lines, forming grid-like boxes.
Inside them were crammed ten thousand colorful statues of all shapes and sizes... which should have numbered a hundred.
In front of Mayches’ friends stood a wall with a picture frame hung on it.
The frame contained a single photo.
It was a wide shot of the stage 2 party hall.
In the photo, a small torso sat on the display shelf directly below the frame, but in reality, only a lone scene-save magic device occupied that spot.
“So we have to find it and recreate the exact scene for the photo. Does that mean we need to search the whole place?”
“Easy. No time to waste, so let’s each hurry and look.”
With that, Calipan began bouncing around the party hall like a rubber ball.
He seemed intent on inspecting every one of the ten thousand statues in this white expanse one by one.
“Right, then let’s us...”
“...Wait a second.”
At that moment, Yan spoke up in an odd tone.
He lightly ran his finger over the human-shaped statue placed in front of him.
From the hair, across the forehead, to the rounded tip of the nose.
“If Jayhan’s method works here.”
One of Yan’s eyebrows arched with a hint of mischief.
He suddenly called out to Calipan in a loud voice.
“Calipan!”
Calipan dropped straight down from the ceiling and landed in front of Yan.
“Why? Every second counts right now.”
Yan extended his right hand toward Calipan.
“Lend me your sword for a sec.”
“What? You say that to a swordsman?”
“Don’t you want to escape? Time’s almost up. Let’s wrap this up fast.”
“Casually detaching a sword from my body is―”
Daluh cut in.
“If we fail the escape, your comrades will be pretty disappointed.”
“Ha, whatever... I did waste a lot of time in the maze, so I’ll lend it to you just this once.”
Yan holding the long sword cut a striking figure.
As far as I knew, Yan had never properly learned swordsmanship.
He’d grown up among skilled mercenaries, but they’d only taught him basic self-defense techniques.
That was because Manurus Friedelric, the leader of the Baltan Catric mercenary band and now the guildmaster, had opposed it.
‘Yan creates things that touch people’s hearts. So no killing intent should linger on the blades he wields.’
As expected of a guildmaster, his foresight was impeccable. Sure enough, from the moment Yan turned dark―
...As I briefly recalled the original story, Yan suddenly began briskly striking at the statue with the sword in hand.
Ka-gang! Kang! Kang! Kang!
“Huh?”
Maybe it was my poor eyesight, but Yan’s movements resembled those of a seasoned swordsman.
His balance was perfect, the blade dropped without a hint of wobble, and it even looked somewhat fluid.
What was even more astonishing was that every statue he struck at seemingly at random began to resemble the small torso from the photo the moment the sword made contact.
I stared blankly at Yan.
...What the heck! The bar for “basic self-defense” is set way higher than normal?
“Come to think of it, Sir Yan takes the same swordsmanship class as Sir Calipan...”
The skill levels varied wildly, of course, but that still meant Yan was in the advanced swordsmanship course.
Mayches shrugged as if to say, See?
“Ten thousand or even a hundred thousand—once they figure out the right approach, they’ve got endless ways to escape. They picked the easy route, though, so now I want to mess with them even more.”
“Brother, quiet.”
On the screen, Yan shouted.
“Got it! Hurry and take it to snap the photo!”
Yan had perfectly recreated the statue from the photo in that brief moment.
It was something he’d accomplished in the time it took me to make instant curry.
As Calipan bounced back, swiftly placed the torso, and activated the device, Yan grinned smugly and muttered.
“They couldn’t have seriously meant for us to comb through all ten thousand statues.”
Of course not.
On the back side of the frame—which Mayches’ friends hadn’t even touched—were three equations. Solving them yielded the x, y, z coordinates in the party hall.
The statue at those coordinates differed from the one in the photo.
That was to prevent them from finding it by sight alone.
But since it was the statue at those coordinates, they’d investigate it eventually. And anyone who picked it up would notice it was far heavier than the others.
Smashing the suspicious statue would reveal the correct torso hidden inside.
It was smaller than the rest for that very reason. They weren’t supposed to carve an identical duplicate precise enough to fool the magic device...
I watched Mayches’ friends move on to the next stage and checked the clock.
The clock on the tea table now read eight minutes remaining.
They’d cleared stage 2 in a mere three minutes.
Unbelievable as it was, their clearing speed was picking up.
Outside the large bay window, a white, round full moon glowed softly.
Calipan squinted at the moon intently before speaking up quickly.
“It’s a fake moon. The clouds, the sky—everything.”
The room they’d moved to this time was far smaller than the previous stages.
It recreated a noble’s bedroom in a virtual space, complete with a magically conjured landscape visible through the window.
Beneath the moonlight filtering in, Jayhan picked up a piece of paper from the bedside table and handed it to Daluh.
Daluh read the words aloud.
“The time when darkness swallows the light.”
Just then, Bamper and Yan discovered a locked wardrobe and a safe.
“Hey! There’s a puzzle here! Looks like solving it reveals something!”
“Hmm, maybe it’s hinting at a lunar eclipse?”
As his friends bustled about, Daluh stared down at the paper in silence, recalling that morning.
The temple staff had been hit with one surprise after another that day.
“Daluh actually ate a proper meal instead of just skimping by on fruit?”
It started with the fact that the usually finicky, picky eater of a saint had eaten a hearty breakfast without so much as a word of protest.
“Daluh processed all the believers’ petitions in just two hours?”
“Daluh handled the national cooperation paperwork in one hour?”
“Daluh finished the saint’s prayer log in thirty minutes...”
“Daluh did it again...”
It was all thanks to the miraculous string of rapid task completions from Daluh Dea, the one and only saint of Irenaias.
The saint was normally so meticulous and devoted to every detail that everything took him longer than anyone else. A prayer that took others an hour dragged on for three as he poured his heart into it. Paperwork others cleared in two hours took him five, as he gave each document his fair and undivided attention.
But today, for some reason, the saint’s efficiency was at an all-time high.
He was knocking tasks out like beans stir-fried in a lightning bolt. Our saint?!
The temple staff, caught off guard, seized the moment to shove every document they had at him.
If not today—when divine inspiration seemed to strike—they’d have sat on these for another week!
But the saint, who had risen at dawn and finished his entire morning schedule early, slipped his arms into his white priest’s robe embroidered with golden thread before closing his eyes wearily.
He slowly shook his head, his light purple hair swaying gently.
“Tomorrow’s work must be left for tomorrow. That way, tomorrow’s me can contribute to the world and serve as well.”
“Ah, truly...!”
The priests, who had gathered en masse in the saint’s official office to wait their turn, hastily tucked the documents they’d brought under their arms behind their backs.
Daluh headed for the door with uncharacteristically brisk steps.
The priests watched his retreating figure with concern and offered their advice.
“Please take care of yourself, Daluh.”
“Yes, you’re still quite frail.”
“Try to conserve your holy power if you can. Normally it’d be one thing, but right now, don’t go making a sea out of holy water or anything. Understood?”
Daluh paused briefly with his hand on the doorknob, saying nothing.
But soon, he turned slightly and flashed an innocently pure expression at the priests behind him.
He was terrible at managing his expressions when listening to nonsense, but when he set his mind to deceiving others, his acting was spot-on. (Naturally, credit where it’s due—his friends.)
“Thank you for your concern. I won’t use any holy power unless it’s urgent, so no need to worry.”
Finishing the brief recollection, Daluh murmured softly.
“It’s urgent.”
Eight minutes left. Three stages remaining.
Daluh lightly clasped his hands together.
His neatly manicured fingers tensed slightly, infused with the saint’s (urgent) resolve.
“Hey, Daluh, what are you―”
A massive shadow gathered outside the window and slowly began devouring the moon.
The moon, starting from one edge, sank into darkness. It thinned like the subtle curve of a smiling eye before yielding to a perfect, restful black night.
A night of radiant silence descended—a small miracle.