The Rule of the Straight Line
Daedalus, you son of a bitch.
"Haa... here again. God, that stings..."
A hollow laugh slipped out before I could stop it, and my parched lips split with the sound.
I'm hungry...
Hungry enough to lose my mind. My stomach had shriveled past the point of shrinking; it felt as if its walls had stuck together and were screaming at each other.
I'd picked up a trick somewhere — the so-called secret to escaping a maze — and tried every version of it. Right-hand rule, left-hand rule, the lot. Keep one hand on a single wall and keep walking, and sooner or later an exit appears. That paltry little piece of knowledge.
Except why the hell are there eight exits, and why is this place such a goddamn mess.
I arbitrarily named one of them Exit One, kept my right hand on the wall, and wandered until Exit Three dumped me right back where I'd started. Next I took Exit One with my left hand on the wall, and this time it was Exit Two that spat me out at the beginning again.
"Shit... I'm hungry..."
Then one right-hand pass from Exit Eight, and one with the left. Failed, every last one of them.
What kind of suffering is this even supposed to be.
I am a beast. More precisely, a monster — the monster out of myth that eats people alive. The Minotaur.
The sordid tale of my birth is dizzying enough that even a modern trash drama couldn't hold a candle to it. King Minos of Crete, arrogant and forgetful, and the sea god Poseidon nursing a grudge and throwing a petty little fit over it.
Then again, they say Minos is Zeus's son. A nephew's allowed to forget a thing or two...
Whatever it was, the collaboration cooked up by the blood of Cronus drove my mother, Pasiphae, clean out of her mind. She coupled with a bull, and the bastard she gave birth to was me.
Half-man, Half-bull.
There wasn't a chance of a mirror existing in this damp, pitch-dark Labyrinth, so even I didn't know exactly what my face looked like.
Should I be calling that a blessing...
My hands, at least, still kept a human shape. Thick and crude, but five proper fingers hung off each one, and the tongue rolling around in my mouth wasn't grotesquely long enough to lick my own nose the way a cow's could. I lifted a hand and felt my face, fumbling. Hard bone met my fingers, but it wasn't the jutting muzzle of a bull so much as something fairly close to a human arrangement of features.
Probably thanks to the maternal bloodline.
My mother, Pasiphae, is a daughter of the sun god Helios.
A has-been, maybe, but still a sun god's blood. Is that what's left clinging to one corner of this cursed carcass, barely holding it in human form?
Come to think of it, I wasn't sure Helios had a single monster among his children.
They say the witch Circe is a daughter of Helios, too...
If I'd been of Poseidon's blood instead—
Then I'd have been a monster, no two ways about it. Poseidon's a monster factory...
I'd have come out hideous enough to make a one-eyed Cyclops look like the cute neighborhood mascot. Of course, the genes from that precious bull Poseidon sent hadn't vanished without a trace. Two horns rose, heavy, on either side of my skull, and the hard feel of them under my fingertips reminded me every single moment that I was no Normal Mortal.
"Daedalus, you bastard..."
The curse jumped out on its own. A uselessly competent little shit. How viciously did he have to knot this Labyrinth for every one of those precious tricks to fail to get me out?
I honestly felt like I was going to die. Maybe I was already half dead. In all the time I'd spent wandering this damned Labyrinth, the corpses I'd found came to fourteen.
At first I thought they were a hunting party...
But the way they lay curled up dead, withered down to skin and bone, told me otherwise. Tributes offered up from Athens. My food, in other words.
"Crazy bastards. If you're going to do human sacrifice, the least you could do is hand out the rations properly...!"
Fury burst out of me. The food they'd rationed out was getting lost in the Labyrinth and starving to death — was that supposed to make any sense? If you're feeding a dungeon boss, you deliver the meal to the door of the boss room. Since when do you toss it at the entrance and tell him to go find it himself?
It must have been about a week into the starvation.
Keep going like this... and I really will tear a person apart and eat him.
I could feel my reason slipping. Sooner or later I'd be down on all fours, craving blood and flesh. For better or worse, the first tribute I found was already rotted past any recognizable shape, a corpse seething with maggots. The revolting stench and the horror of it sent even my appetite fleeing, and a stomach with nothing in it to bring up heaved on dry retches.
That only lasted a moment. If I starved any longer in here — if this pain kept up, the kind that felt as if I'd collapse and die tomorrow — then in the end I would dig into that rotten meat just to stay alive.
And once I got a taste for it, I'd fall. A second time, a third, hunting people and eating them until I was a real monster...
Wander the dark as that monster long enough, and someday the hero Theseus would appear the way fate does and take my head clean off with his blade.
"Graaaaah!"
Terror of that future and a hunger sharp enough to drive me mad on the spot tangled together and detonated. I slammed my head into the wall like a lunatic.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"Why! Why did I have to be born into this miserable shape just to starve to death!"
I'd gone half a month without food, surviving on nothing but the muddy water that dripped, drop by drop, through cracks in the ceiling.
What a disgustingly stubborn bloodline...
A Normal Mortal would have dried out and died long before he had the strength left to vent irritation or rage like this. But this damned, disgustingly fine bloodline refused to let me die so easily. Even starving to death meant enduring several times the agony a Normal Mortal would.
Bang—!
That was the moment I drove my head into the wall in a fury.
Crumb—
Huh?
Wait.
Something was giving way. The hard surface against my forehead broke apart, and chunks of stone the size of fists spilled onto the floor in a rush.
"...This breaks?"
Unable to believe it, I picked a fragment up off the floor. A little force from my fingers and the shard crumbled more easily than I'd thought, running away through them as dust.
The material... is weak.
A scrap of shallow knowledge I'd picked up somewhere came back to me. Western marble statues could carry that unbelievable level of detail not only because the artists were brilliant, but because the stone itself was soft and easy to shape. I had no intention of belittling the effort a once-in-an-age genius like Daedalus had poured into the work. Even so, I indulged a fantasy about how squeezed he must have been when the design of this Labyrinth was commissioned.
He was definitely rushed...
A horrific offspring the queen had dropped after suddenly committing bestiality. Worse, that horrific monster had followed a bull's rate of growth, swelled enormous almost as soon as it was born, and then gone berserk inside the palace, wrecking everything in sight.
King Minos would have ordered a prison built at once, something to lock that monster away...
So how much time did that leave Daedalus?
Not enough.
Daedalus or not, he had to stuff the monster in immediately and finish a maze it could absolutely never escape, in the shortest time possible. If speed meant giving something up, there was only one answer. Give up durability. Pour everything into the Labyrinth's complexity and its enormous scale, and the stuff of the walls themselves was very likely the softest stone around — the easiest to get, the easiest to work.
"I can break it."
Left-hand rule? Right-hand rule? Take that paltry puzzle-solving and shove it in the trash. All I had left was one thing. The real man's rule.
The Rule of the Straight Line.
Go in a straight line. Come to a dead end, and don't look for a path. Break the wall. Soft as this one was, it still wasn't going to blow open in a single punch.
Tough bloodline anyway. I probably won't die.
I set my feet shoulder-width apart and locked my lower body down solid. Then I drove my blunt, hard fist into the dead-end wall — chisel and hammer in one.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The brainless impacts rang down the narrow corridor of the Labyrinth. I threw Ten Thousand Straight Punches. Well — I hadn't actually counted. I'd just kept hitting through a pain that felt like the bones of my fist were about to grind apart, and then hit again, so it was probably somewhere around ten thousand.
Throw the same straight punch over and over, and the brain starts spinning empty just to forget the hunger. One idle delusion chased the tail of the next.
What if King Minos... is actually a ridiculously soft-hearted pushover?
Think about it. Sure, the man stabbed Poseidon in the back, skimmed the offering, and took a curse to the face for it — a Karma Beam, direct hit. But honestly, switch places with him. His own wife falls for a bull, sleeps with it, and gives birth to a bastard. Not even an ordinary bastard. A monster with horns.
Any ordinary king would have strangled the thing with its own cord the moment it was born and driven the wife out after it. He let me live. And this enormous Labyrinth — this is a private standalone house, built for me alone, isn't it? How big is it? Several acres at the very least, easy. And he put this gigantic facility up in the capital of the island of Crete, dead center on the choicest land there is.
Well, now... What parent in the world hands a monster bastard born of an affair an entire underground bunker of several acres, smack in the middle of the most expensive ground imaginable? On top of that, so I won't starve, he goes and accepts pricey human sacrifices from a foreign land and has boxed lunches delivered on a regular schedule.
Thud—!
My straight punch went wide and scraped the wall.
"Ah, shit."
Hunger and fatigue had clearly melted my brain. Mad. Thoroughly, solidly mad. Pushed right up to the edge of collapse, I'd nearly felt a gratitude that man didn't deserve in the slightest.
Pushover or not, if you're going to feed someone, just give them ordinary meat, or bread. Or at least knock a hole in the ceiling and drop it squarely on my head. Instead he goes to the trouble of traveling all the way to Athens for human sacrifices, then dumps them at the mouth of the Labyrinth — a needlessly inefficient, roundabout way of handing out rations. And thanks to that damned system, here I was in this pathetic state, starving and beating on a wall.
For this, I was absolutely not grateful.
Minos, you bastard.
"Ah... I can't move..."
Around I went.
Wham!
Somewhere between spouting nonsense and filling out the ten thousand, I must have ended up collapsed on the floor.
And then—
Rrrrrumble!
The first wall fell.
Well, I'll be... it actually opened?
Ten thousand hits. I beat on it until the bones of my hand shattered and my body gave out and I blacked out, and that was what it took to break a single wall.
How many more do I have to smash before the outside shows up...
I fell asleep carrying that despair, and the moment my eyes opened I wedged myself into the split and stood before the next dead end. Then I threw another ten thousand straight punches.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
I didn't have the faintest sense of how many days had passed.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Nothing but a trance. A body that had neither eaten nor drunk had reached its limit a long time ago. The straight punches going out no longer carried their old destructive force, or even any strength.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Even so, I kept throwing them without pause, at a constant strength and a constant rhythm, fixed on a single thought: that I would become one drop of dew splitting a rock.
Tap. Tap.
Even the sound had gone quiet now. But a rock that stands firm still breaks, in the end, beneath dew that falls without ceasing.
Rattle—
Another wall came down. I couldn't remember anymore how many I'd broken. I was just—
Tap. Tap.
—throwing straight punches, maybe, only so I could hear the dew fall.
Rattle—
Maybe I'd wanted to hear rain in the sound of a wall breaking.
Tap, tap.
And then, splitting the silence that had been circling my ears like a hallucination—
Tap. Tap.
"...So, we really just have to chuck them in there and come back, sir?"
"Ha, look at this kid, scared shitless. Yeah. Toss 'em at the end of this stretch and beat it."
Vivid sound from the outside had begun to reach me. Idle chatter from the soldiers standing guard. Judging by the rise and fall of their voices, one was a seasoned Senior Guard, and the other a Junior Guard who seemed to be on his first posting to this Labyrinth. The junior was terrified to the bone of the mission itself — offering tribute to the monster lying in wait deep inside.
"Still... I heard the original order was to go in ourselves, all the way to where the monster is, and make sure it actually gets eaten..."
"Hey, you little shit. You crazy? Why the hell would we go in there? Whether the monster chows down or they get lost and starve to death, what do I care. Dump 'em halfway and we're done. Who's gonna know."
The Senior Guard's snickering laugh.
The moment I heard it, something inside me went snap.
Why I had been starving. Why those pitiful tributes had withered and died in a maze with no way out. The instant I understood that every last cause of it was those bastards' negligence, a chilling vitality sprouted through my limp fist.
Shhhk—!
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
The straight punches quickened.
Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap.
There was still no sound.
Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap.
I was nothing but falling dew.
Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap.
But dew shatters rock.
KRAAANG—!!!!
The instant the final blow — Ten Thousand Straight Punches compressed into one — sank into the wall, a roar went up and the thick stone collapsed as if it had exploded.
"Eeeeeeek—!!!!"
Through the pouring dust I saw the Junior Guard, scared out of his wits, plant himself on his rear. I blew straight past him where he sat frozen stiff with terror and closed in on the Senior Guard beside him — the one leaning on the wall, dead asleep, and calling it standing watch.
Then I raised the blood-red fist I had ground down and tempered across ten thousand blows — no, tens of thousands — until it was hard as a lump of stone, and brought it straight down on that bastard's skull.
Crack—!
"Gwek!"
He didn't even have time to scream. His head caved in like a firm watermelon bursting, and the man crumpled to the floor. Shaking the hot blood and brains roughly off my fingertips, I slowly turned my head toward the Junior Guard, collapsed on the ground and pissing himself.