The Staff (2)
Alpha had appeared. Alan found himself wondering whether the child was a soul bound to the Labyrinth, or a false lifeform fabricated by the Labyrinth itself.
He was heading downward in search of that answer, yet the deeper he descended, the more tangled his thoughts became.
Maybe I should have lied my way into being Rector's disciple — no, the Collector's — and picked his brain about the Labyrinth.
Of course, it was nothing but idle fantasy. Alan knew all too well what would happen to anyone foolish enough to deceive a being like that.
Making an enemy of him and dying for it would be a disaster. There are still so many books I haven't read.
Alan finished the thought and looked over at Sion. Her gaze was tracking Box as it floated lazily through the air.
“Did you come here to tell me about that thing?”
“No. I came to ask when the next expedition is.”
“Did you quit Breaker, by any chance?”
“I'm not planning to collect my severance pay just yet.”
Even a fool who knew nothing but the sword — which Sion emphatically was — had her moments of perception. Judging by the way things were going, his intent to descend separately from her was obvious.
“I have no idea where I'm supposed to use that staff you got from the graveyard. I could show you.”
“Floor thirty-three.”
At Alan's instant reply, Sion's eyes went round.
“How did… you know that?”
“Chairman Marshall told me.”
“I never heard that.”
“You did. Francois mentioned it, and you just let it wash over you.”
Sion shot Taylor a sidelong glance, then closed her eyes. Her eyes were the same ones she'd been born with — no artificial augmentation.
Usually a Brain Expansion Device and an artificial eye were bundled together as one unit to enable communication, but not everyone went that route.
Human desires came in endless varieties; some people simply couldn't bear the thought of anyone laying hands on their eyes. Others had different reasons entirely, the way Alan had with his training.
Normally the artificial eye acts as the antenna, but your Expansion Device has a pretty high-grade signal amplifier built in, senior.
While Alan was making a note of that, Taylor turned to Sion, who had opened her eyes again.
“What did Francois say?”
“…”
“If you're going to make a deal, you need to know exactly what cards the other side is holding. Gamble blindly like you always do, and it'll blow up in your face.”
Sion offered no answer, only a hang of her head, and Taylor snickered. Alan watched the little scene play out while mapping out his next move.
The energy the Destroyer infused into me.
He had no idea what it actually was, but it certainly felt like a magic stone, so he intended to structure his investigation around that assumption.
Alpha.
He wouldn't be satisfied until he confirmed it with his own two eyes. He would search for any clue — anything at all — about Alpha's disappearance and the vanishing of the burrow.
Once his plan was roughly sorted, he looked at Sion, who was sulking.
“Come back in a week.”
“Alan…”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, don't mention it. In exchange, can I attach motion-detection sensors to you?”
He still hadn't fully charted every one of Sion's movements. And she kept improving, too — there was no telling when the end of that progress would come.
“As many as you like.”
Sion gave a small smile, and a little while later she left. Taylor didn't turn his head until he'd watched her car disappear through the window.
“So that was the real objective?”
“Partly. Though I doubt the senior came all this way out of pure goodwill either.”
“Jake sent her, I'm guessing.”
No matter how kindly the Chairman of Breaker was rumored to be, no one could take that reputation at face value. Besides, the man was an explorer himself — his hunger for the unknown would lose to no one's.
“If you refuse her, he'll probably just plant someone else in secret.”
“He's got plenty of people to spare for that. My bet is he wants to see how we handle what's down there. Come to think of it, if someone has to tag along, Sion's the best option.”
“In what way?”
“Uncharitably, she's an idiot. Charitably, she's pure-hearted. For all we know, Jake calculated that we'd think exactly this and sent her on purpose.”
“That sounds like the right answer. Get some rest, then.”
“You too.”
“Later.”
Alan took out the staff he'd obtained from the graveyard. In the light, its surface gleamed — especially the sections carved with unknown script.
Alan wrapped the staff in sturdy synthetic fiber cloth. Once he'd finished off the protruding parts, it looked like a perfectly ordinary object.
“Come here.”
Beep—
At Alan's call, Box rolled up on its treads. The floating device salvaged from the Death Eye had been installed, but since there was no telling what situations lay ahead, a backup means of locomotion was only prudent.
He loaded the staff into the floating carrier the automaton was towing and set off for the rendezvous point. After linking up with Sion, they passed through the gate of the Labyrinth.
Racing to Floor 29 — where they'd met Alpha — as fast as they could manage, the first thing that came into view was the vine that jammed mana signals and radio waves.
Alan sent a spider scuttling up one of the trees that towered like a skyscraper. He'd designed it to push through the vines' interference to a reasonable degree, and it transmitted crisp footage back to him.
He surveyed the terrain through the spider's eyes. Truthfully, the forest was so dense that rather than terrain, he fixed his position by the exceptionally colossal trees.
“It's over there.”
He located where Alpha's burrow — the child's den — had been and moved toward it, and just as Sion had said, it was truly gone.
The Labyrinth had a habit of reverting to its original state; even if someone had packed the burrow full of earth, it would have vanished in no time. Which meant the Labyrinth's mysteries had intervened.
Naturally, Alpha's traces were gone with it, making pursuit impossible. There was nothing to be done. The plan to test how the Destroyer's energy reacted to the site had been wrecked in a single stroke.
“We go down, then.”
Just as Alan said, the party abandoned any lingering attachment and headed for Floor 30. A forest far darker and denser than the one above greeted the unwelcome guests.
They made their way through the woods, hunting as they went, until Taylor yawned in evident boredom.
“Can't we just find the bear? That thing trails after the gate like a lost puppy.”
The bear was the watchman of Floor 30. Thinking of the bear naturally brought the Destroyer to mind, but an abyss of difference yawned between the two.
“We'd have to know where it is first. If that were possible, we wouldn't need to feed magic stones to a compass — wouldn't that be nice.”
“Wait, is that—?”
Taylor pointed at something. In the dark woods where barely any light penetrated, something far blacker was moving slowly.
“The gate. Well, what do you know — we got lucky.”
But someone had apparently already passed through: there was no bear, only the gate standing abandoned.
Taylor added his cold-weather gear and muttered as he fastened it.
“You think if we offered the bear here honey, it'd just let us walk past?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Bears lose their minds over honey. It's how they are. Just thinking out loud.”
At Sion's question, Taylor looked away innocently. Shiva smoothly cut in.
“Brother, exploration is no joking matter. That isn't even a real bear, and you're offering it honey.”
“What, a man can't make a joke now?”
As the two of them began to bicker, Sion lost interest.
Taylor and Shiva, who'd been raising their voices, both quietly shut their mouths as well. Sion belonged to a different organization, after all — they had to be careful about what they said around her.
Alan gave them both a nod of acknowledgment: well handled. The information that the Destroyer loved honey was, in a way, extremely useful — which was precisely why it couldn't be spread around carelessly.
There's more than honey behind why he let us go. If someone else tried approaching him with honey and got killed for it, I'd only feel sick about it.
Alan recalled the touch of the Destroyer's finger against his brow. Of all the countless places on his body, why had the being pressed its finger to the glabella — the point that glowed when one's mana was drawn upward?
He shoved the complicated question aside and passed through the gate. The moment his boots landed, a line etched itself across his visor: minus ten degrees Celsius.
Crunch!
Snow that was closer to ice than powder compressed underfoot with its own distinctive sound.
The floors collectively known as the Snowfield lived up to their name — nothing but snow and ice as far as the eye could see. Here the automatons reappeared, along with animal cyborgs, and naturally they were far more powerful than the ones that crawled out of mazes and caverns above.
“Minus ten degrees.”
“That's practically balmy. Wait till you run into a blizzard or a proper snowstorm. Then you'll learn what a land of true extremes means.”
Before Taylor had even finished speaking, the snowflakes thickened and the visibility shrank dramatically.
“Good grief. Miss the warmth already, old man?”
“A forward base would be nice, like we had in the Primeval Forest, but the nature of these floors makes that a tall order.”
The culprit was the crevasses. They spawned at random, and when they vanished, they erased their own traces on a whim.
Explorers descending this far could feel the tremors and clear out in time — but a fixed structure like a base could do no such thing.
No organization or individual, however flush with money and resources, would erect a building that was guaranteed to collapse for the sake of a little convenience.
While Alan was scanning the surroundings, the blizzard began to swallow everything around them. He couldn't see a hand's length ahead, and even mana detection grew difficult. Like the vines of the forest, every single snowflake carried a grain of mystery within it.
The visor's temperature display flipped rapidly. The readings swung wildly, so keeping his body in peak condition demanded painstaking preparation.
Alan was inscribing [Heat] runes onto his comrades' equipment when a pack came charging toward them, drawn by exactly that. A swarm of cyborg lynxes.
“They showed up early just to make us sweat.”
Each individual was wreathed in an attribute — flame, lightning, ice. Some dribbled poison or caustic fluid.
“They came prepared by element. The device in the torso looks like the power source.”
“Don't bother with the fire ones.”
“Why not?”
“They're the weakest.”
And with that cryptic remark from Taylor, the battle began.
Alan drew and raised the staff he'd been using since he first entered the Labyrinth. Runes coiled around its body, and a mass of blue light gathered at its tip.
The lynxes were numerous, and among them were ones that slunk beneath the snow only to erupt upward without warning.
Alan's eyes caught even the faintest movement, so he'd already registered their presence.
Factoring in speed and strength, its head should come up around… there.
He finished the calculation in a flash and swept the staff in a light arc. Its tip cleaved through empty air — and met the skull of a lynx leaping out of the snow.
BOOM!
A thunderous explosion tore the lynx's head to shreds. Beneath the hide, an intact metal skull was visible, but the flames had penetrated all the way inside, and it collapsed where it stood.
With Sion in the party as well, the battle was over in the blink of an eye. Taylor, having witnessed Alan's exploding staff in action, asked:
“New weapon?”
“A light one, for self-defense. Even with the Power Suit mimicking your movements, senior, there are limits. A sword demands fine, delicate control, so I judged that a blunt weapon suits me better.”
“You hear that?”
Sion's shoulders shot up.
“That was not a compliment.”
“Swords are delicate. I handle them well. So it's a compliment either way.”
“Must be nice, never having a stressful day in your life.”
Alan left the two of them to it and walked over to Shiva.
“Shall I modify your gauntlets? If every moment of impact triggered an explosion, your combat time would shorten considerably.”
“Wouldn't I get caught in the blast myself?”
“We just set the direction. And even if something did go wrong, you're sturdy enough to shrug it off, Brother.”
“Brother Alan…”
Shiva narrowed his eyes, which was rare for him. In the middle of it, a strand of his beard trembled faintly, and he turned his head toward it.
“Hm? Something's coming.”
Sion was already looking that way. Before she'd even finished speaking, a heavy thud rolled through the air, and beyond the blizzard a huge black shadow appeared.
“The blizzard made us slow to notice it.”
“This enemy is very large.”
“Enemy? No.”
Before Alan could even question Sion's choice of words, the shadow revealed itself. It was an Ice Golem resembling a land tortoise — except instead of a shell, it carried a three-story building sculpted from ice on its back.
“Wow!”
Alan's mouth fell open on its own. At the sound of his awe, Taylor chuckled.
“Alan, that's not an enemy. Stand down.”
“You knew already, didn't you?”
“I was curious what you'd look like when you were surprised, so I kept quiet. My mouth's been itching to say something, so holding it in was worth it. Didn't expect to run into one on Floor 31, though.”
Taylor traced a fixed pattern in the air with his lantern's glow, and the tortoise stopped. Ice froze solid out of thin air, forming a staircase that led up to the building.
Taylor stamped his foot on the ice and said:
“It's an inn and a restaurant — just think of it as a hotel. We've been running without rest, so let's take it easy here tonight.”
“It's cramped.”
Alan offered his brief review upon seeing the chairs and tables packed shoulder to shoulder on the first floor. The furniture and the building materials were all ice, yet somehow, impossibly, warmth radiated from them.
The explorers already seated inside heard Alan's remark and hid little smiles. Seeing that, Taylor leaned in and whispered at his ear.
“You're showing your rookie stripes, so they must find you adorable.”
“The Power Suit's exterior is—”