The Altar Beneath the Arena
Attending a necromancer academy meant Simon had seen more bones than he could count, but human remains still carried a feeling no other bones ever had. And when they turned up in a place this suspicious, under circumstances no one had expected? All the more so.
"Let me take a look."
While Mayrin stood frozen for a moment, Simon strode over and examined the bones. Fractures and damage ran all across them, and along the ribs were strange marks that looked unmistakably like bite impressions.
"Judging by the skeleton, two men and one woman. They haven't been dead all that long, either. And…" Simon slowly closed his eyes before adding, "They weren't starved, and they didn't drown. They were murdered."
"…!"
Mayrin's face drained white.
"D-don't say such terrifying things!"
"That's simply the truth."
As Simon rose to his feet, his eyes narrowed to slits.
"The Balkeje family, the owners of this arena, are definitely hiding something."
[Boy.]
Just then, Pier's avatar spoke into his mind.
[Eleven o'clock.]
Simon shifted only his eyes toward the direction. A black shadow slid across the ground there, then vanished in an instant.
"Mayrin! After it!"
"Wh-what? Chasing what, exactly?"
Simon surged with jet-black and tore off at full speed. Mayrin looked utterly bewildered, but she matched his pace without missing a beat.
"Someone else is in this cave!"
Thoom!
Simon activated jet-black across his whole body and accelerated. Running along the cave wall, he sprang with all his might, seized a protruding ledge above, and clambered up and up.
'Does this tunnel lead all the way to the surface of the arena?'
Pat! Pat!
Simon scaled the rock face with the agility of a wild animal. Anchoring Cloud to the walls and vaulting from point to point, he drew an admiring gaze from Mayrin — who quickly got to work tracing a magic circle at her own feet.
"Coming with you!"
Shhhhhhhraaang!
Ice erupted beneath her two feet, and she too climbed the wall in her wake.
A sudden chase. As they pushed their speed higher, the fleeing figure gradually came into view. It ran on all fours, and judging by the size of its shadow and its footprints, its frame wasn't especially large.
"We have to catch it!"
At Simon's gesture, a skeleton burst from subspace and sheathed his arm.
Thwang! Thwang! Thwang!
He loosed bone rounds one after another on the run, but in terrain he'd never seen before, they kept sailing wide.
Trying to aim while sprinting, Simon scraped his shins raw and smacked his head against stalactites hanging from the ceiling. The terrain was on the fugitive's side.
'Damn it!'
By the time Simon wove past the jutting rocks on the cave floor and looked up again, the runner had vanished without a trace.
"Did we lose it?"
"Leave this to me!"
Mayrin, catching up behind him, closed her eyes and extended both hands forward. Within the circle she spread, high-order equations wriggled like earthworms into position, and in one stroke she even inscribed the runes.
⟨ Scrutor ⟩
The magic circle condensed into a sphere of black, then rippled outward like a shockwave. Brow furrowed in concentration, Mayrin thrust an ice blade raised in her right hand toward a pillar off to the side.
KRA-KOOM!
The instant the ice blade shattered the cave pillar, something shot out from the rubble.
"Ah!"
It happened far too fast to react. The thing pounced on Mayrin at lightning speed, and the two of them plunged off the cliff together.
Simon sprinted desperately to the cliff's edge.
SPLASH!
Below, he saw Mayrin and the fugitive plunge into an underground pool.
[Kuh-huh-huh! Now this is a fine crisis, is it not?]
Pier said, cackling.
[Is this not precisely the moment to wield a Legion Commander's power?]
"…No."
If he donned Pier here, there would be no excuse left — Pion would be exposed as Simon, plain as day.
Not that it was necessary.
"Mayrin's got it."
KRRAAAA-KOOM!
In the middle of the water, a flower of ice bloomed, exhaling a pallid chill. The surrounding water froze solid into a sheet of rime, and there between its unfurling petals, the monster hung trapped.
"Nice one, Mayrin!"
Simon extended his right arm — the Bone Handgun equipped — forward.
Shhhhhhrang!
At the same moment, two more skeletons emerged from subspace and swallowed the Bone Handgun whole. The bones interlocked and reassembled into a shape with an extremely long, slender barrel.
Simon finished his aim on the monster snared in the flower of ice and, without a flicker of hesitation, pulled the trigger of his will.
Clack! Click!
The bones ratcheted back to their extreme, and then — CRACK! — a compact Bone Sphere fired at tremendous acceleration.
The recoil knocked Simon flat, and the sniper rifle shattered, bones scattering in every direction.
KRA-CHOOOM!
But the accuracy and the power were beyond doubt. The Bone Sphere torn from the barrel punched clean through the creature's chest in a single shot.
—Kiiiiiiieeeek!
A shriek of agony rang out.
He could have taken its head in one blow, but he had no intention of destroying it before extracting information.
Simon dropped straight down onto the ice Mayrin had frozen in place.
'!'
He'd assumed it was a monster. It was a naturally-formed undead.
A body so gaunt its ribs showed through the skin, a face warped like kneaded flour dough, a few straggling strands of hair fluttering from its scalp. Rotten saliva drooled in ropes from its mouth. An undead impossible to pin down with any single word of description.
'So that thing is what killed those people.'
The undead clutched at the ice sheathing its lower half and thrashed violently. Cracks spiderwebbed through the frost — kkak, kkak — and then—
CRASH!
It burst free of the ice and charged.
'Ah!'
Mayrin, having just escaped her own ice as well, cried out at the sight.
"Simon! Get clear!"
The undead's jaws gaped wide, and a jet-black brimming with blind fury toward the living rolled off it like a lingering echo.
Simon stood exactly where he was, staring it down with utter composure.
[Halt.]
FWAAAAAAAH!
The undead, a heartbeat from pouncing on Simon, seized mid-motion. The command was so overpowering that the entire cave seemed to darken to a black-blue hue.
For an instant, Mayrin felt every hair on her body stand on end.
'Simon?'
He was nothing like the Simon she knew.
That expression. That presence. That suffocating pressure that could freeze even an undead in fear and send it fleeing.
It was just like—
'That time….'
—Kiiiiiiiek!
The undead fleeing from Simon spotted helpless Mayrin and leapt at her instead. Startled, she scrambled to her feet in a hurry — forgetting the very ice she had laid down, she slipped and landed hard on her rear.
'Aaagh! What am I doing?!'
She flailed in a panic. The moment the undead bared its teeth and lunged to tear into her—
KA-BOOM!
Simon fell from above. Pinning the writhing undead flat against the ground, he sat there cross-legged with perfect serenity, smiling.
"You okay, Mayrin?"
Ba-dump.
Ba-dump.
She nodded, gasping for breath. For some reason her heart was pounding, and she couldn't seem to catch her breath.
"Y-yeah! Thank you!"
Simon had apparently cast some manner of curse — the undead's body was slowly going slack.
Three hours later.
"How horrifying."
Committee Chairwoman Jane held the undead Simon and Mayrin had captured up before the arena's owners, her voice like a blade of ice.
"You have mouths, I assume. Say something, then."
A monstrous undead had been lurking inside their arena.
The Balkeje family, its owners, collapsed prostrate to the floor.
"W-we have committed a sin worthy of death!"
The 'famed aquatic arena' of the Balkeje region was an ancient ruin that royal royalty had once used as a playground of pleasure.
Their kingdom had fallen long ago, but its descendants survived, running the aquatic arena and scraping by on what little it brought in. The Balkeje region was unfit for farming and hardly rich in resources, leaving them wholly dependent on tourism. The one blessing their ancestors had left them was this arena — perfectly suited as a vacation retreat for nobles.
Then one day, people began disappearing from the arena, one by one.
Dark rumors spread, the nobles' footsteps ceased, and the arena's fortunes slid steadily downward. The Balkeje family had been too busy covering it all up to do anything else.
"I see."
Jane nodded silently. The Balkeje kinsmen bowed their heads to the floor.
"There is truly nothing left to hide now!"
"We will gladly pay damages! We won't take a single coin in usage fees!"
"The incident is resolved and the arena is safe, so please — the Dark Festival…!"
Jane turned her back on them.
"We will be returning the arena to its original location."
"?!"
The Balkeje kinsmen's mouths hung open at the utterly unforeseen.
Teleporting a facility that size would cost a fortune rivaling the price of building the arena from scratch. And they were canceling it? The family had been certain that once the arena was set down on Kizen's land, the contract was as good as sealed.
But Jane was unmoved.
"We have no intention of holding the Dark Festival at a venue that nearly compromised our students' safety once already."
Snap.
At the flick of her fingers, the minions swarmed in and arrested the Balkeje family.
"W-wait, Professor! We'll pay for our sins, gladly!"
"Please, reconsider returning the arena at the very least—!"
They thrashed desperately even as they were dragged away, but there was no chance whatsoever of Jane changing her mind.
She turned to the committee staff.
"Investigate every Kizen insider who vetted the Balkeje Arena and approved the contract. There is no way they didn't know about those rumors. Connections were clearly involved."
"Yes, ma'am!"
Once the committee staff had gone, Jane turned to Simon and Mayrin with a warm smile.
"Exemplary work as ever, Student Council. You've prevented a catastrophe in the making."
Bathed in Jane's praise, Mayrin couldn't hide her smile and answered, Thank you! — but Simon's reaction was somewhat dazed.
"Are you really sending this arena back? The cost would be—"
"There's no law saying trouble won't strike twice at a venue that's already failed once."
Jane smiled serenely.
"More importantly, I'll be reporting both of your efforts to headquarters and to Lady Nephthys. Very well done."
Thankfully, everything seemed to have worked out.
Mayrin looked at Simon in relief.
"Good outcome, right?"
Simon nodded slowly.
"Mmm… I suppose."
Simon swept his hair back and narrowed his eyes.
'It's… really resolved, isn't it?'
Deep within the Balkeje Arena, where darkness hung thick as cloth.
Seven hundred meters from the site strewn with the bones of the undead's victims.
Beyond a narrow, naturally formed passage, in a place no human hand had ever reached.
Drip.
Drip.
Water gathered on the long stalactites and fell, bead by bead. A depth unknown even to the Balkeje kinsmen who had tended this place their whole lives.
Drip.
Drip.
And on the wall of that place — something utterly straight and true was fixed.
A symbol that had no business existing in the Dark Alliance.
Drip.
Two long wooden planks, crossed.
Drip.
An unmistakable cross.
The symbol of the Goddess Deva.
Had the people of this place laid eyes on it, they would have collapsed where they stood, aghast.
Beneath it, the heads of the dead were arranged on silver trays.
It was an altar.
A blood offering to the Goddess.
Slap.
A long tongue, glistening with saliva, touched the tip of the cross.
Ssssssss—
Up the gritty surface the tongue climbed, slowly, leaving a trail of wet slime in its wake.
At last it reached the very crown of the cross, and red lips pressed against it in a kiss.
"Soon now… into the embrace of Ruin."
A white the color of death.
It filled the cave to its darkest corners.