The Wand (3)
"Hardly what I'd call adorable."
"Anyone who comes all the way down here couldn't care less about that."
The moment they sat down at a round ice table, an elf server approached. Every employee of the mobile hotel was an elf—and judging by the faint hum of mana about them, every one of them was presumably a mage as well.
The food arrived remarkably fast. Alan had assumed they would simply heat up retort pouches, but no—this was honest, properly cooked food.
Of course, it was expensive. The prices ran ten to twenty times what you'd pay on the surface.
"We're in the Labyrinth, and not just anywhere—the 31st floor. Of course it costs that much. Lodging's no joke either, so unless an explorer's dead on his feet, most people camp out."
As Alan and his companions savored the warmth and aroma of the meal, the explorers already seated below headed back upstairs, until only Alan's party and the servers remained on the floor.
"So the floor above must be the lodgings. Hm?"
Alan lifted his eyes casually upward—and found a white-haired elven elder leaning against the stairway railing.
"That's Lady Sophia. Owner of the golem, and owner of the Mistletoe Inn. As you can see, her staff here are all elves."
"Whispering right in front of your elder, are we?"
Alan could feel the mana churning around her. Her presence was woven into the golem itself, and into every corner of the building.
"It was a fascinating sight."
"And will you be paying for the privilege?"
"Then would you share the design principles of the golem?"
"Only if you hand over that staff."
Sophia pointed at the wand tucked in the floating carrier. Buried as it was among the rest of the loot, she had pinpointed it without a moment's hesitation.
At the spectacle, Sion stepped in.
"No. That one belongs to Alan."
"You're evidently not part of Breaker's event, so run along, dear. I'm speaking with the owner here."
"Then I'm afraid there's no deal to be had."
Alan's answer, naturally, was also a refusal.
"My mistake. Age makes one impatient, it seems."
Sophia apparently believed that her approach was what had tipped Alan off to the staff's value—but there was no price in the world that would change his mind.
An ice golem?
Difficult, certainly, but the schematics could be obtained on the surface.
The staff?
It had absorbed the gravestone in the graveyard; a second chance to acquire it would never come. And it carried the mysteries of the Labyrinth within it.
One was expensive but obtainable, the other nearly impossible to price but unobtainable at any cost. There was simply no comparing the two.
Wishing them a pleasant stay, Sophia climbed back up the stairs.
"She's clearly a powerful mage. Strange that she runs an inn down here."
"Lady Sophia and her disciples and subordinates all specialize in ice magic."
"Ah—a fine training ground, then. Harvesting magic stones and materials must be easy for them too. That attribute source the lynx was venting made for an excellent specimen."
Alan handed over the magic stones recovered from the lynx to cover their meals and lodging. A full day's earnings vanished in one stroke, but a comfortable night's sleep was worth every last coin.
Taylor burrowed straight into the blankets laid over the ice bed.
"We'll move on toward the next floor tomorrow."
"It's more comfortable than I expected."
"Everything except the price. Honestly, you're lucky just to catch this place at all."
"Hmm."
Alan was eyeing Box, curled up in the corner, asleep—or rather, in power-saving mode.
"What?"
"If we made you bigger, you could carry us, couldn't you? Then as we descend the Labyrinth, you'd handle any combat that breaks out on your own, while I read books or study new knowledge. A wonderful plan, really."
Beep!
Box, evidently aware the conversation concerned him, woke with an indignant squeal.
"He's mad at you."
"It was merely feedback."
"Even so—say we do build you that big. How's anything going to fit through the doors? The ice golem's fine, since it's made of ice and can just be rebuilt."
"We'd have to disassemble him piece by piece to get through, and reassembly would be a nightmare. We'd need a dimensional pack."
"The ten-billion-won ones Breaker uses? You'd need several."
"Money is the problem, then."
"Don't get any dangerous ideas."
"Not the faintest intention of it."
"That's exactly why it worries me, coming from you."
Alan shrugged and left the room. He intended to wander through as much of the hotel as he could, examining the interior and cataloguing which enchantments had been worked into which parts.
I should get off at the 32nd floor. Getting off at 33 would be as good as advertising exactly where the staff is meant to be used.
Even as the thought ran through his head, his eyes never stopped combing the golem's interior.
So the core isn't a single one—there are several. They designed each one to handle only simple operations, cutting mana consumption and errors. Should I be embedding multiple soul stones in Box too, then?
In human terms, it amounted to planting a separate brain in the chest, the arms, the thighs—every part of the body in turn.
Up on the stairs, Box poked just his camera eye out and stared down anxiously at his master, who sat on a first-floor chair, lost in thought.
< The Wand (2) > — End
The Ice Golem bearing the inn on its back marched steadily onward. The weight of a three-story building was a ponderous thing, and every step it took sent the Snowfield booming.
The golem's sheer bulk and the noise it generated meant the Labyrinth's monsters came swarming at every opportunity, but the golem was solid, and even when something did break, the fact that its flesh was mere ice made repairs easy.
Thanks to that, the explorers who discovered the Mistletoe Inn and entrusted their bodies to it could enjoy comforts rivaling home, even on the frozen earth.
Waking from his sleep, Alan turned his head toward the window. Beyond the glass, the whole world had dissolved into white.
Water ran in the shower room, and Shiva sat on his own bed, carefully combing out his beard.
"You're awake, Brother."
"Was the bed comfortable?"
"I never imagined I'd feel such peace in a place crawling with monsters that defy Mother's will. I heard from Brother Taylor in passing that the cost is hardly trivial..."
Somehow, bookkeeping had become Taylor's job. Shiva was a monk with little interest in worldly wealth, and Alan, given money, would have cheerfully spent an unlimited sum on magitech knowledge and materials instead.
"You mentioned that if we linger any longer, we'll burn through every last gain from the descent."
"Do I? Then let's do exactly that."
Taylor, just stepping out of the shower room, caught that remark.
"This place costs what a top-tier suite in a five-star hotel would. Unless there's a reason to stay?"
"We can't tell what Star Script is carved into the golem's core, but we can get a rough sense of how Lady Sophia designs her mana circuits and drivetrain, can't we?"
Running the golem was itself part of the training she provided for her disciples and subordinates. The money from the inn business was merely the added value flowing out of that.
"Then we'll skim a share off whatever we earn later and give it to Shiva and Sion."
"Yes, sir."
"Brother, I really needn't receive anything."
"Tsk. When an elder gives you something, you say 'thank you' and take it—you don't talk back every blessed time... That's a joke. You earn your pay, that's all. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a decent healer?"
The priests of the Mother Church could heal with a word through their holy arts, whose principles still lurked shrouded in mist—but mages were another matter entirely.
Battle-medic mages were among the most demanding of professions. They had to master magic on its own terms and be deeply versed in the human body. In effect, it meant training in magic and medicine at the same time.
Ignorance of anatomy meant an overcast spell could induce cancer, or a perfectly healthy skull could sprout horns.
Alan agreed with Taylor's reasoning.
"One way a Labyrinth explorer confirms his own worth is the money that lands in his hands. And Shiva gives most of his income away as it is."
"Understood."
Just as Alan had said, they kept riding the turtle on and on. Safe and warm—but slower than a man on foot.
That wasn't to say it moved at the pace of an actual turtle. Explorers' travel speed far outstripped anything an ordinary person could imagine. Bodies reinforced by mana and magicware crossed broken terrain as if it were a paved road, and cut an hour's journey down to under thirty minutes.
Granted, that assumed combat ended swiftly and no one took wounds. It was a matter of relative speed—from the outside, they looked quite fast indeed.
Reaching the 32nd floor, Alan's party disembarked at once. As they made their way out through the first floor, Sophia's gaze followed them from where she stood at the stairway railing.
Sion met her eyes, then gave a small shake of her head.
"Tailings are rude, Grandma."
"Hmph. Judging by Breaker's movements, it lies somewhere between the 32nd and 34th floors. Even without the key, finding the location alone would leave plenty to dig into."
Sophia snorted and waved off Sion's remark.
Outside, the party's shoulders hunched on their own. They had barely set foot in the snow, and their eyes were already trailing after the receding golem.
"Cold. This is why inertia is so dangerous. Once you're comfortable, you just want to stay comfortable."
As if to drive the thought right out of his body, Taylor hurled himself into the snowbank, and Panther rolled in beside him.
Alan looked at Sion.
"Sophia knows the staff is the key, doesn't she?"
"That old woman's over a hundred years old."
"Then she was born right around when the Labyrinth was discovered. If she's spent that whole span of time down here, she must have heard a great deal."
Perhaps that was part of why she ran the inn at all. Shared food and drink loosened tongues, and loosened tongues let slip the curiosities people kept hidden away.
"So that's why she keeps showing up on the restaurant stairs."
"A peeping-tom granny, that one."
"Did Francois teach you that?"
"Nope."
Sion pointed at Taylor, who was still shaking snow off himself. Alan narrowed his eyes. He had a fair idea where Sion's supply of slang and foul language came from.
"Why are you looking at me?"
"Nothing at all."
"Don't tell me you think it's pathetic for an old man to roll around in a snowbank?"
"That has absolutely nothing to do with it."
To avoid crossing paths with the Ice Golem, Alan's party skirted around the 32nd floor and headed down to the 33rd. The golem was such a conspicuous presence that giving it a wide berth was easy.
The moment they set foot on the 33rd floor, a fierce blizzard greeted the explorers once again. The wind blew so hard that the snow fell nearly parallel to the ground, like rain on the surface.
Taylor raised his voice to be heard over it.
"If it weren't for the thermal goggles, we'd be blind."
His front was plastered with snow and his back was clean—everywhere, that is, except where his eyes were. The snow that touched the goggles melted instantly and streamed away.
With the wind dead against them, every step forward was leaden, as if they were wading through the depths of a deep lake.
Shielding his eyes, Alan asked Sion, who was pressed close against his back.
"At this rate, reading the terrain will be impossible. There's mana even in the falling snow, so the mana-wave detector is being overwhelmed."
"It's fine. Keep moving forward."
"You do realize that's the fifth time you've said that?"
"This time I mean it. Do you know what we're walking on right now?"
"There's a slope, but not a steep one—so a hill, I'd say."
When Alan crested the hill entirely, the blizzard died away as if it had never existed, and the clearing sky laid the whole surrounding landscape bare at a glance.
Hills, hills upon hills, packed close together—like dozens, hundreds of upturned bowls strewn across the earth.
With the blizzard gone, Sion—until now clinging to him like a cicada—slipped around to walk abreast, scanning their surroundings. Her head, darting busily this way and that, finally locked onto one spot.
"Follow me."
She had been here several times before, so obeying that instruction was the wisest course. After all, she'd been assigned as their guide in the first place.
After crossing several hills, Sion stopped. The spot sat just short of a summit—difficult to observe from outside, while from here, a careful lean of the body was all it took to scout the far side.
"We camp here."
"The sun's still high."
"When your senior gives an order, you listen. Where do you get off talking back every single time, junior?"
Listening to the two of them bicker, Shiva sidled up next to Taylor.
"Brother, that tone sounds awfully familiar."
"..."
"Brother?"
"No idea what you mean. Must've picked it up from Francois."
"Perhaps a confession is in order, then..."
"I don't know what you're talking about. Go make yourself useful."
Shiva retreated under Taylor's rebuff, and camp preparations began. Taylor threw himself into the work with such fervor that no one had a chance to strike up another conversation.
Still, when Shiva did manage to slip in another question, he deigned to answer.
"You truly didn't know about this place, Brother?"
"Same department, different jobs. And when I dropped out mid-career to become an instructor, my clearance got downgraded. Sion—how long do we wait?"
"One day? Two days? Three days?"
"Why does it keep growing?"
"We wait. That's the first thing."
Just as she said, they waited twenty-four hours—and nothing changed. Even when Taylor shot her a doubtful look, Sion shot back with perfect shamelessness.
That night, Alan felt a tremor and shot upright from his bedroll. The vibration was spreading from somewhere far below. The entire earth was groaning in agony.