Under the Ice (4) — The Staff (1)
'Ramm wouldn't betray his feelings through a change of expression. Even if he'd worn a human face, it would have been the same.'
The Destroyer, having finished his appraisal, spoke for the first time. But Alan couldn't understand a word of it. The voice scattered into the empty air, and the shape of his mouth left nothing behind in memory.
Alan hurriedly pulled out the spider, but the video, too, came out entirely blank.
'Wait a moment....'
Every recording he'd made since entering the crystal had vanished. Or perhaps it had never been saved in the first place.
'It's not that he didn't communicate — it's that he couldn't.'
There was only one place in the world where such phenomena occurred: the Labyrinth. The script used by the UnderGrounders was veiled in mystery, beyond any hope of interpretation.
But Alan was one who understood fragments, and from the Destroyer's words he fished out a few scraps of meaning.
Alan could not grasp what those words meant, or how the meanings connected to one another.
Once again the Destroyer appeared abruptly before his eyes and jabbed Alan between the brows — and this time, unlike before, he poured something in: an aura of unknown nature.
'Is this mana? I distinctly felt something similar somewhere. Ah — a magic stone.'
While Alan was thinking this, a colossal shadow swallowed the moonlight. He snapped back to himself and raised his voice.
"One last question, please. The city down below, and the blue crystal — what exactly are they—"
The Blue Lady swallowed his final words.
Alan's party rode the wriggling subway out of the Destroyer's domain. The Blue Lady spat Alan out into some valley or other and vanished once more.
Alan, Taylor, and Shiva looked at one another. Their minds were so tangled that none of them could find where to begin.
That was when Cayden woke.
"Wh-where are we?"
"Brother Cayden, you're awake."
"What happened? We were mining in the tunnel the scale-worm made, and then..."
"As for what happened..."
Alan stepped in, cutting Shiva off.
"The tunnel collapsed. As luck would have it, a rock fell right on your head."
"What? And my injury... Oh, Mr. Shiva was here. Thank you for treating me. A rock fell on me and all I got was a lump — I'd call that a bargain."
Cayden rubbed the bump on his forehead. He seemed to have forgotten the entire encounter with the Destroyer. A clean memory wipe — no, since it was the Destroyer, "memory destruction" would be the accurate term.
'How is that even possible?'
Alan shook his head. There was still the matter of Steven to worry about. The plan had been to return to Cayden's uncle Malcolm, give a rough account of the situation, and leave Kasara.
But that proved unnecessary.
"Oh, Cayden. I thought you were dead. Colonel Steven? That man's dead and gone."
Word had come that a massive explosion had torn through a mine owned by MM Corp, wiping out every employee — Colonel Steven included — along with all their equipment.
"You should've seen the mushroom cloud. Enormous. Honestly, I half thought a mana fission bomb had gone off."
"Uncle, what about the other men?"
"MM Corp chased them all out, so they're safe. Though they were all doomed anyway."
Leaving uncle and nephew locked in an embrace in the office, Alan stepped outside. Taylor and Shiva followed.
"Cleanup all tidy and neat, I see."
"Truly terrifying... I hardly know whether I can still call him 'Brother.'"
"He traced the connection signal between the original body and the avatar backwards, and triggered the explosion from there. How is that even possible?"
"The Dest... no, we'd have to ask that man ourselves. Alan, where are you off to?"
"The mart. I'm going to buy some honey."
But Alan never met the Destroyer again. Somehow knowing what he intended, the Blue Lady had surfaced from the earth and chased him off. She took the honey with her, though.
< Under the Ice (4) > — End
< The Staff (1) >
Alan stopped by the airport on his way back to Maze City. He kept glancing over his shoulder until Taylor called his name with studied patience.
"Alan."
"I forget."
"Forget, my foot..."
The Destroyer's will had been unmistakable: I spared you. Do not come again.
Even so, a wellspring of regret bubbled up inside Alan. The city slumbering beneath the glacier-like Icesteel crystal, and the role of the blue crystal within it — he simply could not fathom what they were for.
Since plenty of contract time remained, he and the others repeated mining requests and survey work while Cayden and Malcolm searched for a new mine, but neither the Samramansang nor the Library turned up anything about the city or the crystal.
"If there were myths or legends passed down, I could force an interpretation out of them even by piecing fragments together. But it's all too clean."
"Why myths and legends?"
"Stories of that kind always have an original source underneath. Say someone sees a dragon, and it was really a giant serpent. Or a wolf swallows the moon — when actually it summoned a cloud to cover it. Imagination gets layered on little by little like that, and distortions creep in, you see."
One knowable fact did exist, however. Taylor and Shiva had both reached the same suspicion.
"He's, if anything..."
"He must be staying there to guard the city inside the Icesteel crystal. For decades on end."
"Could be far longer than that. You said you saw what Jake's face looks like."
"Past sixty and still youthful."
"Right. To a Depth 7, age means nothing. What matters is how much power they hold, what abilities and mysteries they command. The Collector's past a hundred, and the Tailor, being an elf, goes without saying."
If even humans, upon reaching the summit, could leap beyond the limits of their lifespan, how far might the years stretch for an elf, a race that was long-lived to begin with?
Alan sat by the window, watching the city shrink into the distance, then turned his gaze toward the Destroyer's domain. Fog — or cloud — crouched over it at all times, and no one knew what happened within.
'The Destroyer...'
He was like a natural disaster wearing the mask of a living being — much as Chairman Marshall did. Every ability he had displayed was outlandish in its own right. Erasing memories with a forehead flick, tracing signals in reverse to trigger a catastrophic explosion.
Alan spoke to Taylor over the mana signal. The plane seats were packed shoulder to shoulder, so they had to speak with care.
Just then, news was playing on the screen affixed to the seatback in front of them.
"And which 'conscientious enterprise' would that be?"
"Albre, presumably."
"See that? They're too busy guarding their own rice bowls. A wolf of nearly their own size is already lunging at their throats."
Alan nodded. If MM Corp had learned the true course of events, they would have sent assassins half a dozen times over by now. Since time immemorial, the dead had kept their silence, and the words of the dead were never admissible as testimony.
Alan turned his head toward the snoring coming from the next seat. Shiva, true to his title as a master of prayer-in-sleep, could fall asleep quickly under any circumstances.
Taylor, seated in the middle, pressed the noise-canceling button on the seat console for him.
"I wonder what Alpha's up to."
"Hard to say. We'll find out when we go down."
"You're not thinking of descending the moment we're back, are you?"
"Maintenance and rest come first, of course."
"You'll want to check whether any new papers or theories have been published, visit your senior to pick up Bloodroot Flower seeds, pay your respects to your acquaintances. Surely you're not planning to finish it all in a day?"
"..."
"...Right?"
Upon entering Maze City, Alan connected to the Samramansang and searched for Alpha first of all.
'Bear pelt, girl, red eyes, helmet flower, tunnel, labyrinth...'
No matter how he combined the keywords, all he got were movies and funny clips. Information on Alpha existed nowhere.
'And if it did exist, it would be hidden away under lock and key.'
The Primeval Forest was, to begin with, a place few could approach, and explorers weren't fools enough to leave potentially Labyrinth-class secrets lying about in the open.
Alan was about to enter the warehouse he used as a home when he stopped short. There was presence inside.
Vito had rented a separate room and stopped by occasionally to manage the place, so signs of habitation itself wouldn't have been strange — the problem was that there appeared to be two people.
Taylor narrowed his eyes.
"That little punk Vito. Decided to invite a sweetheart over just because we're gone, did he? This guy!"
Taylor flung the door open and strode in, arms crossed, radiating displeasure.
"Sion, what are you here for this time?"
"Am I not allowed to come? We're on the same party, aren't we?"
"The matching system ended ages ago. Go home already. Shoo, shoo."
Sion was sitting on the sofa with her eyes closed. Taylor glared at Vito, who stood frozen in an awkward, uncomfortable pose.
"You should've kept anyone out who wasn't one of us."
"Me? How?"
"Well..."
Taylor nodded, conceding the point. If Sion set her mind to it, Vito, an ordinary magitech engineer, would have had no way to stop her.
While Taylor squared off against Sion, Vito sidled over to Alan's side.
Even mid-secure-call, Vito kept glancing about nervously, terrified of being overheard. Alan caught the drift at once.
Leaning against the wall, Vito continued the call.
Watching Vito go, Alan recalled a story he'd once heard.
'He said the world was full of ugly things, so he kept his eyes closed.'
He kept silent, lest saying it aloud shake the man's confidence.
In truth, for all Sion's claims, there was no clear rule to it. Sometimes he'd look up and her eyes would be shut without his noticing when they'd closed. It was the same even in front of familiar people.
'Adolescent personality formation...'
She'd been descending into the Labyrinth since childhood, so it was more than understandable. That illness she'd caught in her adolescence must simply never have fully healed.
"Hey. What are you thinking about?"
"Nothing."
"That tone is your lying tone."
When Alan merely shrugged, Sion turned her head away.
"Fine then, don't tell me."
"So, what brings you here?"
"Am I not allowed to come?"
"Now hold on. Of course not. Did Francois teach you to barge into people's homes uninvited, one after another?"
Sion treated Taylor as though he didn't exist, her gaze fixed on Alan alone. Alan, looking into eyes as guileless as a child's — as guileless as Alpha's — spoke.
"Contact me before you come. We got lucky this time, but there are times I won't be home."
"I'll do that, next time."
"That's a lie. You'll pop up out of nowhere just like today. I've lived long enough to read a person, you know. For all I can tell, you already checked I was back before visiting."
"Didn't you do the same to your friend Cheolsu, old man?"
"Er... well..."
"Exactly. That's where I learned it."
"What nonsense. You weren't even allowed to bring him along unless we were in the Labyrinth."
As the waves of resentment and falsehood settled, Sion cleared her throat and answered his original question.
"As for why I came. That little girl in the Labyrinth..."
"Alpha, you mean."
"While you were away, I went down to look for her, and she was gone."
"Alpha can move between floors, and the Primeval Forest is enormous. It's entirely possible she simply wasn't found."
"The burrow was gone too."
"Then perhaps Alpha is an anomalous phenomenon that repeats on a fixed cycle."
If one could tear the very ground open and plow it under, everything hidden might be laid bare — but the Labyrinth could not be violated in such a manner.
Even if she were eaten by the Titanoboa, she would only...