The Seal
"So, have you finished mapping out the maze?"
"I have, but..."
Everyone's attention turned to Alan as Sion spoke up again.
"And?"
"The entrance exists, but there's no visible exit."
"So it's just a storage facility for people? Like a slaughterhouse?"
"A slaughterhouse, Sion... I have to wonder who taught you to talk like that."
Taylor shook his head, and Shiva, standing beside him, made an unmistakable hand gesture indicating that the person in question was none other than his own esteemed senior.
"That's one possibility, but if the goal were simple storage, there'd be no reason to build something this convoluted."
Ever since meeting the Destroyer, Alan had felt his eyes and mind grow sharper. The mysterious energy the being had bestowed upon him aided his control over mana—at least where his brain was concerned.
"The maze is split into upper and lower levels, but if you look closely, a fixed pattern repeats itself throughout."
"I don't get any of that... but hearing you talk, it does sound familiar."
"You said that when you came here before, there was a magic stone as a reward, remember?"
"Yeah."
"Roughly where was it?"
"The layout is completely different now."
"Ignore the physical shape and just think in terms of spatial coordinates. The overall footprint of the maze should be identical."
Alan's left eye glinted, and the maze he'd mapped out in his mind materialized before them in the form of a hologram.
"Was this thing built to be passed through at all?"
"I couldn't say."
Taylor clicked his tongue, while the sheer intricacy of the display was enough to make Shiva's eyes spin in circles.
After studying it for a long while, Sion tapped a single point on the projection.
"Somewhere around here?"
"That would be about right... looks like a zone with zero cryo-humans. That's the only notable spot anywhere in the vicinity."
Shiva tried to whisper to Taylor, but the difference in their height forced him to bend down and speak against the man's side instead.
"Brother, did you understand what he meant? Was there ever a place where no Undergrounders were kept?"
"No idea. Looks like he's gone and hammered the whole maze map into his head. Is that even possible? Without a Brain Expansion Device?"
"There is such a thing as Servant Syndrome, you know."
"Those people trade their health for extraordinary abilities. Well, Alan's arguably a madman in his own way too. Effort breeds joy, and joy inevitably tips into obsession."
With Alan once more taking point, the group moved smoothly without any map at all. Even when the corridor split into tentacle-like branches, he pressed onward without a moment's hesitation, until they reached the point Sion had marked.
Alan retrieved a magic stone from inside Box. It was an item he carried on hand to soothe the artificial eye whenever it went into overdrive.
"Is there anything you don't keep in that box? Why do you need one of those, though?"
"You said the maze changed completely, didn't you? So I'm doing the opposite of what happened before. Originally, the stone was taken—so this time, I'm putting it back."
The moment Alan set the magic stone on the floor, the walls on all four sides blazed with brilliant light. With a faint tremor, a thick cylinder spun round and round as it rose upward from the ground. Inside, a staircase spiraled down.
Down they went, naturally enough. Below lay a spare, cramped room. There was nothing but a desk and a chair—and seated in the chair was an enormous skeleton.
Alan approached at once and examined its pelvis. Seeing this, Taylor opened a comm channel.
"What are you doing?"
"The ilium of the White Mountain Range had no tailbone, remember?"
"And this one does."
"I wanted to check whether they're the same species. Though this one is far, far bigger. The charred bones we found in the mountains were, if anything, roughly the size of modern humans."
As Alan turned his head, he noticed characters carved into the wall. The gouges looked as if they'd been scraped out desperately with fingers—the depth of the strokes matched the skeleton's finger bones, and the fingernails themselves lay scattered on the floor just beneath them.
"There's something written here. Weird script. Or is it a drawing?"
Sion couldn't even begin to guess what was there, but the words were perfectly legible to Alan.
I was deceived. What I believed in was never real.
The topmost line was saturated with negation. The crooked, drunken shape of the characters seemed to mirror the carver's state of mind exactly.
The writing beneath it was savage.
You will gain nothing. And that goes for you, too—the one reading this.
Whether by coincidence or not, the very instant Alan finished reading, the room shook.
Alan looked up at the sudden tremor, the savage words he'd just read flashing through his mind.
You will gain nothing? Is the plan to trigger a quake and bury us all down here?
But the shaking stopped almost as quickly as it had begun. The ice adorning the walls and ceiling remained so pristine that one would never guess anything had happened at all.
Then Alan's head snapped to the left. A massive presence stirred within the ice wall that had registered no mana whatsoever. Sion felt it too.
"Something's coming."
Even as she said it, her blade sang free of its sheath. The sword streaked through the air, slicing empty space at blistering speed.
CLANG!
From what they'd assumed was empty air came the shriek of metal striking metal. Simultaneously, ice shrapnel scattered in every direction, glittering.
Alan studied the source of the movement with the naked eye. The long tentacle Sion had intercepted was carved from a single mass of ice—so clear and translucent that until the moment of impact, the space had appeared to hold nothing at all.
Tentacles rarely come alone.
True to the thought, the wall writhed and pushed out several more of them. They were made of ice, yet they moved with fluid, startling speed.
The thing clinging to the ceiling crept forward like an assassin, while the one slithering along the floor approached with the flickering quickness of a serpent's tongue.
Three tentacles revealed themselves first. Sion sheared through them without a flicker of hesitation, and Shiva's fist shattered the one Taylor had pinned down with his mana sword.
Alan simply watched.
"Alan! Move!"
"I know."
Listening to Taylor's worried voice, Alan surrendered his body to the Power Suit. Mimicking the movements of Taylor, Sion, and Stephen, the suit carried its master out of harm's way with economical, unfailing precision.
Alan turned to follow the tentacle that had swept past him. Behind him stood the skeleton—and the tentacle had been reaching for it.
Sensing something, the tentacle wound itself around the bones with startling speed. Despite its very thick body, it possessed the delicacy of a finger. The skeleton, coiled tight within the tentacle's grip, was drawn straight into the ice wall.
So it wasn't trying to devour it after all.
The skeleton was being stored away. Standing upright, just like the Undergrounders sleeping within the walls of the maze.
Apparently the creature had no intent to kill—but entombed forever inside a wall of ice, the result amounted to the same thing. And if consciousness remained alive in there, it would be far more horrifying still.
"Move! Now!"
At Taylor's urging, the party scrambled back up the stairs. Thankfully, no tentacles assailed them during the transition from chamber to maze.
The moment Alan was clear of the staircase, he spotted a severed tentacle lying at Sion's feet. It twitched for a moment before being absorbed straight through the floor.
"It just keeps regenerating?"
"Then I'll keep cutting until we're out of here. You can manage that much, right?"
"Yeah."
Sion answered Taylor's question with utter confidence. Her entire bearing declared that whatever the Snowfield threw at them, she was the stronger one.
Spurred on by Taylor, Sion took the lead—granting Alan the time he needed to study the tentacles.
The Glide runes inscribed into the Power Suit's legs reduced friction to a bare minimum, so when he took hold of the Panther's tail, the pair looked for all the world like a dog sled team.
Alan's eyes swept rapidly across the surroundings, taking in the tentacles lunging at them from every direction as well.
The maze as a whole isn't hostile.
That much was a mercy. If the entire structure had come alive against them, he wouldn't have had the luxury of such observations.
Beyond the ice walls, he could feel a presence bearing malice—though whether it truly counted as malice was debatable.
To find out, Alan hurled a single iron plate thick with mana. Perhaps because he'd etched it with a mana circuit mimicking the flow through a living body, the tentacle snatched the plate right out of the air.
Then, just as it had with the skeleton, it wound the plate up tight and slammed it into the wall.
So its whole game is to grab and hold whatever it can.
Repeating the same maneuver over and over, Alan back-traced the creature's mana and movements. By the third plate, its nature had come into much sharper focus.
"It's an amorphous type. The main body is a slushy, semi-liquid mass, and its weapons—the tentacles—are ice, as you can see."
"That's literally a jellyfish, is what that is."
Alan nodded at Taylor's words.
"On a rather different scale, granted. It moves through the ice itself. The maze is both its body and its means of travel."
"Then how do we dodge it? No—how do we kill it?"
Sion asked the question as she batted aside yet another tentacle. She spoke while facing forward, yet her voice reached Alan as if she were whispering directly into his ear.
"Most likely an ice spirit. Even if it's not, it'd be some manner of ethereal monster. Its main body is inside the ice wall, so destroying it completely would mean punching through the wall itself."
In other words, impossible with the means they currently possessed. Everyone present had witnessed Sion's failed attempts the moment they'd first entered the maze, after all.
The tentacles seemed to have adapted to the iron plates he kept throwing—they began evading the decoys and targeting Alan directly. He dodged by a slight twist of his waist, of course.
CRASH!
The impact of a strike slamming into the floor jolted his whole body. The tentacles were solid masses of ice, and their mass was terrifying accordingly.
"It would've been far more troublesome if they erupted from the ground beneath us."
The instant Alan finished speaking, a tentacle surged up right beneath Taylor's feet.
Taylor snapped his shotgun around on pure reflex. Magitech-reinforced slugs tore from the muzzle and hammered the enemy without mercy. The sheer force of the barrage cracked even the hard-frozen ice.
Without a moment's hesitation, Taylor kicked his front leg upward in a footballer's strike, and the tentacle that took the blow burst into shards.
"It's not all that hard, is it. If I were designing this maze, I'd have simply buried the whole thing and been done with it."
The moment Alan offered his opinion this time, the tentacles moved again. Several strands poured out of the ceiling, braiding themselves together like twisted rope, then dropped—all in evident intent to plug the corridor completely.
Sion's blade flashed once more. A gray sword aura, fierce enough to send a chill down the spine, raged as if determined to erase its earlier humiliation, carving the bundle of tentacles to ribbons.
WHUMP! WHUMP!
Chunks of ice came crashing down among the party. No one, of course, was in any danger from falling ice of that size.
"So that's the extent of it. The other—"
"Alan! Would you stop jinxing us?"
With Alan's predictions coming true one after another, Taylor hastily shouted him down. Then, almost in the same breath, he thrust his mana sword at the next tentacle bursting from the floor.
Watching all this, Alan gestured to Box. Alan was a magitech engineer; instant physical reaction like a front-line warrior's was beyond him.
Analyze, identify the weakness. That process took time—but in exchange, it let him hit far, far harder.
Box, floating along at his side, popped open a drawer. From within the automaton's body rolled out a sphere roughly twice the diameter of a baseball.
Dropping thudding to the floor, the sphere trundled along at Alan's heels like an escort vessel screening an aircraft carrier.
Alan spotted a cluster of tentacles massing with every intention of sealing off the corridor ahead. Even Sion would need considerable time to cut through that many—her weapon was a sword, and no matter how keen its edge, a sword is a short line.
"Fire."
At its master's command, the sphere rolled rapidly forward. Outpacing the party, it formed itself into a wedge.
Click-click!
The sphere's surface folded open to reveal a jet-black lens. The black flash-heated to a furious red in an instant.
And then—fire.
Several beams of red light struck the tentacles blocking the corridor, shoving them—no, melting them clean away. The ice caught squarely by the searing thermal rays turned to steam almost immediately, and the corridor transformed into something like a sauna.
"Brother, is that... could that possibly be the Gatekeeper's eye? Did we truly fell enough of them to supply this?"
"No."
Certainly not. The Gatekeeper on the 10th Floor had been a valuable prize indeed, and plenty of parties had their eyes on it.
Quite some time had passed since the Gatekeeper's lens first came into Alan's hands, so its structure had long since been fully analyzed.
"The output looks far stronger than the original."
"I've improved it, of course."
The thermal beams the sphere unleashed were far more powerful than the Gatekeeper's own attacks. What's more, the rune Alan had inscribed on the sphere—[Liquefaction]—was tailor-made against ice.
"The trade-off is that it needs recharging after every shot."
Box's pincers darted out and gathered up the collapsed sphere with practiced efficiency.
"I suppose I should build in a function that has it come back on its own when it's time to recharge. Come here."
At Alan's call, Box scurried over to his side. A mana cable snaked out of the automaton's body and slotted into the chest of the Power Suit.
"Brother, what is that?"
"Charging. If it were urgent, I'd burn magic stones, but we have a little time to spare right now."
After all, Alan's mana—