The First Cleaning
Somehow, they had made it out.
It had been grueling, but experiencing the Tower of Time firsthand had a strange charm to it.
Simon had witnessed, with his own two eyes, the historic moment when a communication crystal was being forged—as if he had been there for it in person. If experts and scholars of the field had come to witness such a moment in history, he suspected they'd have wept hot tears of gratitude.
And beyond that, the Tower of Time was filled with countless other scenes of history manifesting as "anomalies." Now, at last, Simon understood why guests had braved such dangers—even the presence of a murderous madman like Girdon—to enter it.
"Merida. Over here."
She trudged along after him, nodding off as she went, yet somehow never straying from his side. Apparently it was true that she could understand speech even while asleep.
Before long—
'Found it.'
He spotted work to be done.
One side of the tower's wall glowed black, as if it had been painted over with dark paint. From a little distance away, it looked as though a hole had been punched clean through the tower.
And near the center of that night sky, something writhed—a mass of red flesh, pulsing like a living heart.
The tumor-like growth protruding from the tower was called a "Core," and destroying it was the only way to cut off the flow of monsters pouring out of the dungeon. The Ivory Tower called the job "Cleaning."
"Merida, ready?"
Simon drew an axe from his subspace and held it at his side. Faint blue light shimmered along its edge—an artifact provided by the Ivory Tower, capable of destroying the Core.
"Mm."
Merida's eyes were properly open now, and she was raising her Jet-Black.
They had divided the roles between them. Simon would take the artifact axe and destroy the Core, while Merida held back the waves of dungeon monsters. The moment he started attacking it, every monster in the vicinity was bound to come swarming.
"Here we go."
Simon swung the axe back over his shoulder, tilting his body sideways—and then drove it down onto the Core with everything he had.
Crack!
Harder than he'd expected. The Core's outer shell had split, but the blade hadn't sunk in deep.
Simon raised the axe again—
Zzzzzzzt!
Zzzzt!
The dungeon's monsters were swarming toward them. Simon glanced to the side and his face twisted.
"……What is that?"
Monsters, as a rule, were shaped by the continent's plant and animal life, so most of them looked at least somewhat familiar.
But not that thing.
Six razor-sharp legs. No face, no features at all—just a violet orb jammed dead center into its torso. It wasn't a monster. It was like looking at an alien lifeform that had no business existing in this world.
'So these are the Tower of Time's monsters.'
"Keep hitting it, Simon."
Merida raised her arms. Magic circles she'd prepared spread out above her head and began firing curses like artillery. The kaleidoscopic storm of curses raining down was a spectacle to behold—and the monsters caught in it visibly wavered.
"Huh?"
Merida blinked.
The Tower of Time monsters had staggered once, then kept coming as if nothing had happened.
"The curses aren't working."
She looked rattled. Simon hammered at the Core with the axe again and again as he shouted back.
"Curse resistance?"
"No—the effects are applying. They just keep moving like it's nothing even with the curses on them."
Exhaustion curse Exhaust, motion-sickness curse Sickness, blindness curse Blind, petrification curse Petrify—curses that worked on virtually any monster simply wouldn't take hold on those alien-looking things.
Shnk!
A monster dropped down on top of Simon as he attacked the Core. Interrupted, he sidestepped and slammed it away with his shoulder, sending it flying.
"Then what about applying a curse to an object directly? Like you showed against Girdon!"
"……It's not as easy as it sounds."
Curses were, generally speaking, techniques designed for fighting living things—humans, monsters, and the like. There were curses that could be applied to objects directly, of course, but they were inevitably inefficient. Weaker effects, shorter durations—and above all, a monstrous drain on Jet-Black.
Merida cast something like a gravity curse, and a few of the alien monsters floated up into the air—but it barely made a dent.
There were simply too many.
"Then let's switch roles!"
Crunch!
Simon drove a Jet-Black-wrapped fist into the violet orb embedded in one monster's torso. With a squish!, blue blood came pouring out. It smelled like vinegar mixed into cooking oil.
"I'll hold the monsters! Merida, you take the axe and destroy the Core!"
"I'm bad at Battle Arts."
She planted both hands proudly on her hips.
"I quit after the first semester."
'Is that supposed to be a brag!'
The girl ranked 4th overall had a strangely long list of weaknesses—especially when her brother Phantassus could pummel an entire room unconscious with nothing but Battle Arts.
Zzzzzzzt!
Now the monsters weren't just pouring in from one direction—they were closing in from the opposite side too. Unless they thinned the numbers fast, things would get dangerous.
"Hup!"
Crack!
Even in this chaos, Simon's Battle Arts were a masterpiece. He crushed a monster's face with his heel, launched himself skyward, and booted away two monsters that were diving at Merida mid-air.
The moment they hit the wall, they burst with a splat!, blue blood spraying everywhere.
Back on the ground, Simon immediately opened his subspace.
"Come out! Skeleton Knight!"
His choice: the Skeleton Knight.
The Knight emerged from the subspace and immediately began to spin, whirrrrr.
"No, no! That's not what I called you for! Stop!"
At Simon's command, the Skeleton Knight froze. Standing still without spinning somehow seemed to discomfort it; it creaked and rattled, broadcasting a mental impression of deep dissatisfaction at Simon.
"Grab the axe on the ground there!"
The Skeleton Knight picked up the axe.
"Destroy the red thing!"
The Skeleton Knight swung the axe.
Crack!
It did land a full-swing blow on the Core—but its waist spun around three full times in the process, rotating like a top.
At this point it was less a habit than a full-blown rotation addiction.
'What's gotten into you two today?'
Partner and summon both acting strange. Simon, fighting a lonely battle on his own, felt like crying.
Merida, for her part, had gone visibly deflated at meeting opponents her curses couldn't touch. But a rank-4 skill set didn't just evaporate—she pivoted to Dark Dynamics, her second-best discipline, and began working elemental magic instead.
"They don't burn, and they don't get soaked."
Like Phantassus, she conjured waves of dark-water magic and pushed the monsters back, then said it sullenly. And in pushing them back, she'd only drawn an even larger crowd of them at once.
"Merida! Have you tried Sleep?"
At Simon's words, Merida scrunched up her face.
"You think things that shrug off the full seven-piece set and a half-gravity curse are going to fall asleep?"
Even as she said it, she spread Sleep across her palm and lightly touched it to the body of a nearby monster.
"!"
Then something astonishing happened.
The monster simply stopped—as if time itself had frozen for it, or as if its power had been switched off.
"It's actually…… asleep?"
Simon kicked the monster away as he shouted.
"No—I don't think it's sleeping!"
Ordinary Sleep employed a "Rune of Slumber" that put a living creature directly to bed. But the Sleep used by Phantassus, Merida, and Simon instead employed a "Rune of Tranquility." These monsters possessed a powerful suppressive force against external changes—but Phantassus's Sleep, being no hostile change, seemed to register in their systems not as an attack but as some other kind of command.
His best guess: a kind of dormancy. Or a return to standby state, awaiting orders.
"Nice."
Merida came alive at last, darting around like a fish returned to water. Wherever she passed came a tap-tap.Tap.—the sound of her palm touching flesh—and the monsters froze in their tracks.
With the front line suddenly stopped in place, a traffic jam broke out among the monsters pressing in from behind.
"You're doing great!"
This was exactly why Merida had been dispatched to this tower.
Simon guarded the flank, mixing Battle Arts and Sleep in equal measure. With a boy and a girl rampaging across the battlefield before that wall like a night sky, the monsters' clocks stopped one after another.
"Haaah!"
Simon kicked off the ground and hurled himself into the thick of the writhing mass of monsters. At the same instant, his palm rippled grey.
Bahil Remake — Sleeperz
Shaaaaa—
Grey smoke billowed outward, and the surrounding monsters froze in unison.
Merida, still fighting hard, whirled toward Simon in shock.
'What—the tranquil-rune version, as a wide-area Sleep? How did he do that?'
But showing she had no intention of being outdone, Merida raised both arms high.
Fwoooosh!
Her sleeves billowed. Long lengths of bedding cloth unfurled from them, lashing around the nearby monsters and hoisting them into the air like laundry on a line.
She immediately crossed her palms and triggered the curse.
Sleep Link
Every monster tangled in the bedding went limp at once—all of them under the effect of Sleep.
This time it was Simon who marveled inwardly.
'So that's how she applies it. Curse majors really are on another level!'
Simon and Merida were shining. Even in the middle of desperate combat, neither could stop stealing glances at the other's Sleep, busy learning from one another.
And Simon's Skeleton Knight, entrusted with smashing the flesh—
Splat! Splat! Splat! Splat! Splat!
—seemed to have finally found its rhythm.
The Knight gripped the axe in both hands and spun its whole body like a top. The axe bit into the Core, spun back around, bit in again, and passed through—over and over.
In no time at all, the Core was hanging in tatters.
"W-well done!"
Was it perhaps a little too obsessed with spinning? But as long as the results were good, it was fine.
His partner and his summon had come back to life—and then, a short while later—
BAM!
The Skeleton Knight finally pounded the Core into fragments with the axe, destroying it.
The instant it broke, the swarming alien monsters scattered and burst like brittle crackers, and the wall and floor that had become a night sky peeled away, slowly reverting to ordinary stone.
"We did it!"
Simon bent over his knees, gasping for breath and laughing.
Merida dusted off her hands and walked over, her face expressionless.
"Good work."
"You too."
The moment the two of them met palms in a high-five—
Whoosh—
Drowsiness flooded in, and Simon staggered, nearly falling over. He spun around and shouted.
"Merida!"
"Ah—sorry."
Merida snapped her fingers.
"It's a habit."
The first "Cleaning" had given them some trouble, but from the second one on, they found their rhythm and cleared the floors quickly.
Simon and Merida made a full circuit of the 50th floor and succeeded in smashing both of their assigned Cores.
The 50th floor was clean now. Not a single Core remained.
With the job done, the two of them retreated to their quarters in the Safe Zone. The moment Merida opened the door, she bolted inside and dove onto the bed—then began nodding off right where she landed, curled up in the cat-loaf position.
"……Merida, you need to wash up before bed."
Simon sighed and pulled off his uniform jacket.
"I'm washing first."
In the next instant, her uniform went flying, piece by piece. Simon flinched and hastily turned his back. He caught a glimpse of her stockings smacking into the wall with a thud!
"You could stand to be a little more care—"
She breezed right past the remark, dashed into the bathroom, gave herself a cursory wash, changed into pajamas, and settled comfortably into bed.
She'd pulled out pajamas, sleeping socks, a sleeping cap, and even a hug pillow—she was taking this very seriously. One could feel the strength of her personal convictions about sleep.
"Ah."
Lying down, she looked over at Simon.
"I have a sleeping habit."
Simon nodded. Sleeping habits weren't something you chose—not like it was her fault.
"Snoring? Teeth grinding?"
"No, it's more like… sleep-talking."
Great, what now. Simon smiled and waved a hand.
"Fine, noted. Sleep first."
He wanted to change out of his clothes, and quickly.
Merida nodded, pulled the blanket up to her chin, and closed her eyes.
And fell asleep almost instantly.
"You sleep all day every day, and still—"
And so it was that Simon.
Paid, in full, the price of underestimating her sleeping habit.
Simon had never yet seen Merida get a proper night of "sound sleep."
The truth was, the dozing she did on benches or at banquet halls wasn't really sleeping at all. For Merida, nodding off here and there was her baseline state.
And when night came and she lay down in bed for a genuine night of "sound rest"—
FWOOOOOOM!
FWOOOM!
Her sleeping habits were absolutely catastrophic.
"Mmnyaah, mmyah. Phantassus, big brooo…"
Hugging her pillow, she rolled back and forth across the bed, flailing her arms wildly and muttering to herself—and each time, curses went spraying out of her, smashing against the floor, bursting against the walls. It was absolute pandemonium.
'Haaaah……'
Yanking the blanket irritably over his head, Simon concluded that any hope of sleep tonight was dead.
'That brother, and that sister.'
Both of them had wretched sleeping habits.
Granted, compared to Phantassus, who laid waste to everything around him every single night, she was downright adorable—but to Simon, the one actually living through it, it was pure misery.
'Well, whatever. I had work to do anyway.'
Simon rose three hours after falling asleep, scratching his bed-mussed hair.
A few rapid-fire curses later, Merida had rolled back onto her stomach and was snoring peacefully again. Simon tucked the rumpled blanket around her, checked several times that she was genuinely asleep, and stepped outside.
'Better hurry, before the sun comes up.'
Simon's real "assignment" started now.