The Lord of the Ivory Tower's Declaration
Thud. Thud.
Through a silence so thick it suffocated, Vermund, Lord of the Ivory Tower, was descending the stairs.
Long gray hair spilling down to his shoulders and a dark, sprawling beard. His thick brows lent his face a rather stubborn, uncompromising cast.
He wore an ivory robe, and in his hand he carried a magic staff.
He doesn't look anything like Serne.
That was Simon's impression. Of course — he was her adoptive father, not her birth father, so it was only natural.
But if he had to pick one thing they did share:
Kuguuuugu-!
That peculiar aura of menace, a charisma that kept everyone at arm's length.
It was exactly what one would expect of the man who ruled the Ivory Tower — a vast organization, a city unto itself.
Still, he didn't seem to be in the best condition; his complexion was pale and his gait slightly uneven, as if he were limping.
"Lord Vermund."
Daniela approached and bowed his head.
"I bring a report. Girdon attacked the Tower's invited guests and fled into the Tower of Time. The festival must be halted at once, and an army dispatched to capture him."
"Daniela."
A flat, toneless voice flowed from the Lord's dry lips.
"You never change, do you. Especially that stubborn streak of yours."
"......"
Daniela kept his head bowed in silence, waiting for the verdict. The Lord of the Ivory Tower leaned on his staff and descended into the banquet hall.
Then he looked around at the assembled guests.
"Honored guests, welcome to the Ivory Tower. The festival will proceed exactly as planned, and we will take responsibility for apprehending Girdon ourselves. Rest assured."
A murmur of confusion rippled through the room — and, in equal measure, cries of delight at the news that they would still be allowed into the Tower of Time.
Daniela's face, by contrast, had gone chalk white.
"But Lord Vermund! A criminal suspected of mass murder is inside the Tower of Time! He nearly killed those children just now. Children! At the very least, let us capture Girdon first and—"
"I've already heard that report, Daniela."
The Lord of the Ivory Tower swept his staff through the air. A blue radiance — not jet-black, but pure mana — spread out across the entire banquet hall.
Crack-kik!
Click!
The shattered hall began to repair itself at an astonishing speed.
Broken plates fused back together, snapped table legs righted themselves, fragments crawled onto ruined columns like flesh regrowing, and the steel bars and pipes Girdon had hurled about floated up and drifted out the windows.
"...!"
Simon's eyes went round.
Time.
As though the clock itself were running backward, the banquet hall returned, pristine and whole, to exactly how it had looked before Girdon had reduced it to rubble.
"I hereby declare."
Thump.
The Lord struck the floor with his staff.
"The Festival of Time will continue, and the Tower's own soldiers will hunt down and arrest the lurking Girdon. None of you will be harmed by him. But should anything happen to our guests because of Girdon — should it come to that."
He slowly placed a hand over his chest.
"Then I, Vermund, Lord of the Ivory Tower, will answer for everything with my own name."
One of the guests, who looked wealthy enough, tipped his head sideways and spoke up.
"Answer for it? Answer for it how, exactly?"
"I will step down from the seat of Lord of the Ivory Tower."
A buzz went through the crowd!
The weight of that statement was enormous. Even the guests who had still been hesitating began nodding along — well, if the Lord himself is willing to go that far.
Only Daniela's expression curdled further.
"...Lord Vermund! This is a matter of the guests' very safety!"
"Is even my seat not enough for you?"
"That is not what I mean—"
"If you feel that strongly, then let's put it to the guests themselves."
The Lord of the Ivory Tower turned to survey the onlookers.
"The Ivory Tower will answer for your safety, honored guests. But if you find the Ivory Tower untrustworthy, then you are free to forfeit your chance to enter the Tower of Time and go home."
Kachunk!
At the movement of his staff, the doors of the banquet hall — the way out — swung open.
"Of course, once you leave, you cannot return. What will it be?"
In the heavy silence, the guests exchanged words among themselves, each weighing the choice.
Ten minutes passed like that.
Out of more than a hundred people, not a single one left. Even Daniela, watching, looked taken aback.
"You see, Daniela?"
The corner of the Lord's mouth lifted.
"No one wishes for this festival to stop. Even—"
His head turned toward Simon and Merida.
"—those children, the very ones Girdon attacked."
"......"
Simon winced.
Sorry, Professor Daniela... but there's nothing I can do.
This dispatch evaluation was pass-or-fail. He had to clear the assigned mission before he could return to school. Whatever variables sprang up in the field, it was the student's job to resolve them — that was precisely why Kizen granted its students the Investigative Authority and Command Authority in the first place.
Kizen was an institution without much give in it.
Granted, with a criminal like Girdon tangled up in things, there might be some room for appeal if he were prepared to accept the lowest possible grade. But Simon had received his orders straight from headquarters.
He could not back down. Not ever.
"Then we'll assume no one is going home."
The Lord of the Ivory Tower moved his staff, and the exit doors closed. This time, a different door opened — the one leading to the Tower of Time, the door Girdon had passed through moments before.
"I wish you all a pleasant journey through the Tower of Time."
After the Lord of the Ivory Tower and Daniela withdrew, a company of armed Ivory Tower soldiers entered the Tower of Time ahead of everyone else.
Their task was to track the trail Girdon had left behind and capture him.
The guests' turn would come two hours later. After a somewhat tedious wait, the announcement that they could finally enter the tower drew a great roar of cheers from the crowd.
Simon gave a crooked smile.
Girdon or no Girdon, these people were planning on going in from the very start.
The Festival of Time came only once every five years.
Everyone dreamed of seeing it at least once, but becoming one of the hundred invited guests actually allowed inside the tower was like plucking a star from the sky. You had to pay the Ivory Tower faction a steady toll — in money or in favors — just to get your name on the list.
On top of that, the guest himself had to be a necromancer capable of protecting his own body within the Tower of Time.
No matter how safe the lower floors were said to be, a dungeon was still a dungeon. The odds of combat breaking out were high.
"Right then — departure!"
And so every last invited guest passed through the doors of the banquet hall and set foot into the inner tower.
"The Tower of Time is, in the truest sense, the 'homeland' of our Ivory Tower. It is also a place we must one day reclaim, no matter what."
On the way into the inner tower, an Ivory Tower guide leading the guests spoke in an impassioned voice. For a good while he delivered a speech praising the long, storied history of the Ivory Tower.
"We bore a duty to record two thousand years of history and pass it down to posterity! Once is enough for a tragedy like lost history — like lost magical technology. So we carved our magic, our arts, and our history into the tower itself, layer upon layer. But ink and paper alone carried too great a risk of being lost."
And so they had created the magic of time.
In those days there were no mana-recording devices or Memorial Crystals, so they had devised a recording magic built upon an intricate, colossal magic circle.
At first it was a primitive technology — 'Time Artifacts' much like cylinder records or phonographs — but the mages labored on, ever striving to seize time itself and pin it in place.
The entire Ivory Tower threw itself into the time magic project, and just as that fervor reached its peak—
"The Dungeon Gate opened."
Had humanity's obsession with time — its arrogance — called forth such a peculiar dungeon? That dungeon devoured every spell and every material the Ivory Tower possessed, and it only grew larger.
"The dungeon strengthened without end! The continent fell into grave peril — but through the sacrifice of the Mage of White Frost, who was Lord of the Ivory Tower in those days, and his disciples! We saved the continent from an abyss of time!"
Listening to the explanation, Simon scratched his head.
...So didn't they just clean up a mess they made themselves?
At that moment, one of the guests raised a hand.
"Why can't the Ivory Tower simply destroy the Dungeon Master and the dungeon with its present strength?"
"This dungeon has existed on the continent far too long. Scholars warn that if the tower were to vanish now, spacetime itself would warp, with consequences too grave to predict."
In truth, this was one of the Ivory Tower's most important arguments for its continued necessity — its very survival — on the continent.
We are the ones who hold the continent's spacetime in our hands.
"Even now, our Ivory Tower keeps that terrible monster of time locked within the tower! Even now, the Tower of Time drinks in and records the time of the continent itself! If only to honor the noble sacrifice of the Mage of White Frost and his disciples, we must keep this place standing, forever!"
By the time the lecture had gone on about long enough, they arrived inside the tower itself.
The Tower of Time, once the ancestral seat of the Ivory Tower, spanned from the first floor to the hundredth. The closer one drew to the topmost floors — where the Gate had opened — the stronger the dungeon's influence became.
From the first floor, where the banquet hall stood, up to the twentieth, the tower was arranged as an ordinary museum. Down here, encountering dungeon monsters or witnessing anomalies was a rare thing indeed.
From the twentieth floor up, anomalies occurred two or three times a day; from the thirtieth onward, they say, conditions are just right for observing them.
And at the very summit, on the hundredth floor, dwells that famous Dungeon Master, the Frozen Clock. Entry to floors ninety through one hundred is strictly forbidden to outsiders.
"Girdon has been confirmed to have passed the seventieth floor and is currently holding position on the eightieth."
the officer in charge of the Ivory Tower contingent announced.
"Floors seventy through eighty-nine are now under lockdown. Until Girdon is captured, ascending to those floors is prohibited."
"Aw, come on! What gives?"
"Seventy and up is where the highlight is!"
The invited necromancers who looked confident in their own abilities voiced their disappointment.
"Then surely floor ninety is still open to us?"
asked an elderly necromancer in a robe. The officer shook his head.
"My apologies. Even for our most honored VIPs, floors ninety and above are off-limits."
"Boring year, then, I suppose."
With practiced ease, the invited necromancers dispersed in every direction.
"Hi there! You two are with me — I'll show you around!"
Mird of the Ivory Tower Academy came hurrying over to Simon and Merida.
"First time in the Tower of Time, right? This way!"
The two of them weren't guests, after all — they were officially dispatched students, here to assist the Ivory Tower with its work. Their destination was the fiftieth floor.
Following Mird, they walked straight along the tower's side until they reached a vast chamber where staircases stretched on without end.
Those stairs connected floor to floor — all hundred of them — but running up and down so many levels was unthinkable, so the Ivory Tower operated a magic-circle elevator.
Simon's party, along with the other guests, all stepped aboard.
Hm.
Simon observed the other guests closely.
Some, apparently intending to tour the museum first, got off at the second floor right away. The younger-looking novices stepped off at the twentieth.
The thirtieth and fortieth floors seemed popular too; a fair number of people descended there.
From the fiftieth floor onward, the crowd thinned to less than half — and there, Simon, Merida, and Mird got off.
"You have to use the assigned quarters only — that is, unless you'd like to wake up to a dungeon monster on top of you. Oh. And never, ever enter another room without permission."
As she led them toward the lodgings, Mird rattled on breathlessly with the briefing.
"If you find anything that belongs to the Ivory Tower, report it. There's a reward. Take it without reporting and it's theft — you know that, right? And I'll assume you've memorized all the rules and regulations the Ivory Tower gave you."
Near the elevator stood a room that appeared to serve as their quarters.
This was the safe zone.
Beyond it lay territory under the dungeon's influence, where monsters might appear.
"This is your room. If anything happens, contact me with this."
She handed over a communication crystal.
"All set? Great — I've got afternoon classes, so I'll be—"
"Mird."
At that moment, Merida spoke. Mird, halfway to the magic-circle elevator, turned back with a question mark on her face.
"Thank you for the tour."
Merida held out her hand. Mird went "Oh," smiled, and stepped closer.
"Think nothing of it."
And the instant their hands clasped—
Piiing—
Drowsiness flooded through her whole body.
Huh? Wh—
The world spun round and round. Merida's curse landed in swift succession, and Mird crumpled where she stood, fast asleep.
How much time had passed?
"Hahk!"
Mird bolted awake. Her whole body was drenched in sweat.
"Hah! Hah!"
Her pupils spun wildly.
Just now.
She couldn't remember it clearly, but it felt as if she'd been trapped in some horrific nightmare.
Every muscle in her body ached dully, and her mouth tasted of sugar — the stale sweetness of a body pushed past its limits.
What... what happened to me?
She was sprawled flat on the floor.
A little ways off stood Simon, scratching the side of his head with an awkward expression, and facing her, Merida stood perfectly still, staring straight at her.
"Y-you two — what is this?! Do you want to die?!"
"You. Back in the banquet hall."
Merida continued, her voice level.
"You lured Girdon toward us on purpose, didn't you? You kept saying 'Kizen' out loud, over and over, so he'd hear it."
"F-! Undo this curse right now, you Kizen sons of bitches—!"
The moment she got that far, Mird's head sagged forward.
Sleep had taken hold of her again. As if she were dreaming something dreadful, every joint in Mird's body creaked like a marionette's as she thrashed and convulsed.
Snap.
Merida snapped her fingers, and Mird's eyes flew open again.
"You lured Girdon to us on purpose."
"W-wait—!"
Mird gulped down air through bloodshot eyes, breathing in ragged gasps.
"Just— just talk! Talk to me! Use words!"
"Answer."
Merida said, re-chambering another Sleep.
"Who ordered you to?"