Seal (3)
Power was overflowing. Whenever the Taylor Cultivation Method tightened his control, the mana heart swelled in size as if it had been waiting for its turn—like rivals competing against each other.
"It's like aerial refueling."
At Shiva's remark, Alan glanced sideways at Box. The little automaton bobbed along on its levitation unit, so the image was easy enough to picture.
Only a fraction of his mind was on the conversation. The rest kept churning through how to escape the maze and which methods might actually work on the tentacles.
The next rune to inscribe is [Slowness]. Target: the spiders.
Beep—
The Rune Canvas, a magitech tool forged from shape-memory alloy, etched and reshaped runes freely at Alan's will. That meant it could adapt fluidly to rapidly changing situations.
Alan had also installed a Rune Canvas inside Box. While the final inspection still had to pass through Alan's own hands, skipping the early and middle stages of production saved an enormous amount of time.
When Box opened its drawer, palm-sized spiders went scuttling up the walls and ceiling in every direction. The more complex the Star Script Alan fed into them, the flashier their movements became—which, conveniently, made dodging the tentacle strikes that much easier.
"Don't touch that tentacle."
Up ahead, the tentacle most heavily coated in spiders was completely listless. It hung limp as a man who had gone three days and nights without sleep.
The effect of [Slowness]. Alan was using runes to conjure something very much like magic. It wasn't a proper spell, so the efficiency was poor—but then, he had mana to burn. If anything, the problem was having too much of it.
Poor efficiency could be compensated with sheer volume, and the results came out accordingly. The intermediate process didn't matter. What mattered was how you dealt with the situation.
The tentacles were connected to the main body, so anything done to a tentacle echoed back to its source. [Slowness] spread through the anemone like a contagion.
Before anyone noticed, a freshly charged sphere popped back out and spat its radiant beam. After several repetitions, the tentacles had visibly thinned.
It was a war of attrition, and Alan preferred exactly that kind of fight. Once the enemy's strength drained away, it was easier to capture—and a live specimen offered far more to study than a destroyed one.
Whether it read Alan's thoughts or simply sensed the crisis in its shrinking bulk—
Kiiirik!
The monster Taylor had dubbed the sea anemone let out its first proper shriek, withdrew its tentacles, and burrowed deep into the ice wall to hide.
"Cheap bastard."
The wall wouldn't so much as crack under Sion's attacks, leaving them no way to finish the anemone off.
"Alan."
"You mean we need to secure a retreat route first, right? The entrance is this way."
"See, you get it even when I don't say it. I trained you well."
"Brother, lying corrodes both mind and body."
"Oh, come on—it was a joke."
There was no need to spread out a map. The maze's layout was already mapped inside Alan's head, so they only had to retrace their steps to the entrance.
The problem was—
"The entrance is gone."
"Son of a—"
As a curse slipped out of Taylor's mouth, Alan recalled the phrase he had read in that room.
[You will gain nothing.]
Strictly speaking, if the labyrinth never let them out at all, then nothing would have been taken from them. Whatever they might have gained, they hadn't left the maze yet.
But the Labyrinth definitely had an exit. Even in the darkest place, there was always a single point of light.
"Perhaps the labyrinth's creator is a kinder soul than I expected? If it were me, I wouldn't have left an exit at al—"
"Alan. Words become seeds."
"Let's focus on finding a way out for now. What struck you as the most suspicious thing we've seen?"
"The Ice Sea Anemone. But how exactly do you plan to catch something that swims freely through solid walls?"
"We herd it. Weaken it thoroughly through its tentacles, then drag it out."
"And if it flees into the wall?"
"I checked earlier—it only roams within a certain range. Which means its territory inside the ice maze is limited."
Of course, this approach was only possible for Alan's party. Each of their individual capabilities was so exceptional that even being separated wouldn't pose much of a problem.
Before long—
Kiirik!
A massive bulk of ice came dragging out of the wall. If they couldn't go in after it, then all they had to do was pull the thing out instead.
The anemone flopped onto the floor and immediately tried to slink back into the ice, but Alan's runes sealed every route, leaving it nowhere to run.
"Alan, what now?"
"Dissect it, obviously."
A blue light rose from Alan's fingertips, sharp as a scalpel.
In the maze, at a spot where several passages converged into a fairly open area, Taylor scratched his head.
"Dissect?"
"Yes."
"When you put it that way, the word just sounds... off. Call it an investigation."
"You butchered the Primeval Forest's creatures without a second thought."
"That's how you get the magic stones out. It's just... hearing you say 'dissect' sits differently."
Alan shrugged as if he had no idea what the old man meant, and kept working.
The blue blade jutting from his fingertip was a type of mana sword—a crude brute-force construct that poured in mana with total disregard for efficiency. As a result, its cutting power was monstrous.
The anemone's main body was the size of a shuttle van, the bundle of tentacles attached to it was absurdly dense, and despite being made of ice, they were supple and elastic.
Just as Alan had suspected from the start, it was something close to a spirit. A special kind of ice formed both its body and its weapon, and it could command the surrounding ice at will.
"Does it feel pain?"
When Alan shaved off one tentacle with a rasping slice, the anemone convulsed.
Kiiik!
"It's screaming."
"That doesn't seem to be a pain response. It feels more like... irritation, somehow."
As if to prove the point, the tips of the anemone's tentacles turned toward Alan. Not that the creature could attack or flee even if it wanted to.
Chains woven from [Binding], [Adhesion], [Weakening], and [Slowness] were coiled tight around its tentacles and body, so the anemone's rebellion was, frankly, adorable.
"This is too easy—"
"Don't jinx it. Every ominous thing you've said all day has come true on the spot."
"Brother Alan is hardly a Word-Commander, surely. Still, our party's level is high enough that we subdued it unharmed—any other party would have suffered dearly."
That much, Alan could concede.
A creature that swam freely through ice no explorer could touch, striking wherever it pleased, in a maze made entirely of ice, where only one-sided attacks ever came in—for any other party, it would have been a living nightmare.
Their hands kept moving even as they talked, and the giant anemone was soon carved into pieces that lay spread across the floor like a street vendor's wares.
Sion was busy maintaining her sword and paid the whole thing no mind; Taylor had seen that particular scene too many times to be squeamish. Shiva usually went stiff-faced when looting, but this time his expression was calm.
"This one isn't gruesome at all."
"Because it's ice."
Just as Alan said, the anemone's body wasn't divided into organs the way a human's or an animal's would be. Being close to a spirit, it was simply ice, all the way through.
"So there's no need to sort anything. Only the core and the hide are unusual."
Once those two parts were separated, everything else melted away. The core was cold yet squishy like jelly, and the anemone's outer skin was smooth as silk.
"Given that it hides in the ice and sticks out only its tentacles, it either evolved or was created by stripping away the main body's defenses."
Alan carefully stored the core away. The precision testing equipment was up on the surface, so a detailed examination would have to wait.
Instead, he turned his attention to the hide. Being the size of a shuttle van, it yielded a considerable area once peeled off.
Taylor had been watching Alan's investigation over his shoulder when he witnessed something strange. The hide had settled onto the floor—onto the ice—and fused with it almost completely.
"Alan, the hide's sinking!"
"Yes, I see it."
When Alan, holding one edge, gave a firm pull, the hide billowed up and rose.
"So the hide was the reason the anemone could swim freely through the ice."
Alan launched into further research, and several hours later he reached one conclusion.
"Wrap the hide around your body, and you can move through the ice. The more hide you have, the faster you go."
The test subject was a scout spider. One with finely cut strips of hide bound around its torso was now paddling through the solid ice as if swimming.
Sion's drowsy, nodding eyes went bright and sharp, and even the seasoned veteran Taylor's mouth fell open.
"This is huge. Make a tent out of that hide and you could sleep safe and sound inside the ice."
"That's assuming the hide's ability is permanent."
Relics that appeared within the Labyrinth often bent its rules slightly. Items acquired inside them carried the same qualities, though some turned to junk the moment they left the ruins behind.
"And the maze we're in now is a kind of ruin, so we won't know until we get out."
"Then we just use the hide to escape through where the door vanished?"
"I doubt it'll be that easy, but let's try."
Thought alone never moved anyone forward. To obtain results, you had to act. Talk was cheap—that was a truth Alan knew all too well.
"Sealed solid."
Of course, acting was no guarantee of good results either. The spider Alan sent through did nothing more than admire the crevasse passage beyond the transparent wall before trudging back.
"Then we'll need to find a way to make the vanished door reappear. The first place or anomaly that comes to mind—"
"The room with the sleeping Undergrounders and the skeletons."
"Oh."
"Alan, wipe that 'how did you know' look off your face. You think I've been in this line of work for so many years and can't deduce one thing like that?"
As it happened, one of the Undergrounders stood right in front of them. Both hands crossed over its chest, eyes closed, standing perfectly straight.
"I don't sense anything special about it. Its mana is as absent as the wall's, it seems."
"Brother, then that means every Undergrounder in this maze is a corpse."
"Yes."
Shiva offered a short prayer to Mother, and Taylor pressed his palm against the ice wall.
"So this place isn't a maze after all. It's a graveyard?"
"That's what we're about to find out."
Alan's head turned to one side. He hadn't noticed it with his eyes or his mana senses, but once he actually operated a spider inside the ice, something was definitely there.
A transparent, threadlike tube connected to the Undergrounder ran along the wall, leading somewhere. The other Undergrounders were the same. He followed the tubes until they arrived at a familiar place.
"They lead to the stairway that connects to the room with the skeletons."
The transparent tubes, too, headed downward. They didn't stop at the room—they kept sinking further below.
Alan sent a spider down. The one gliding through the ice suddenly dropped out of it. There was a hidden chamber there.
The tubes emerging from the ice bunched together there and ran on toward something. At the center of the chamber, inside a cylindrical glass tube to which the tubes were connected—
"A black fragment?"
"Show me too."
At Sion's demand, light blazed from Alan's left eye. A hologram unfolded, recreating the chamber exactly as it was.
Alan asked the three watching the hologram:
"Do any of you happen to know what that is?"
"..."
All three met the question with stony silence. One thing, however, had become clear: if they wanted to escape the ice maze, that fragment was the key.
"Which means we'll have to find out ourselves."
They unrolled the hide coiled atop Box's head, cut it to size, and wound it around each of their bodies. Transparent cloaks wrapped them from shoulder to toe.
When they draped the hide over themselves and fed mana into it, their bodies sank slowly downward. Despite being inside solid ice, it felt like swimming through deep, heavy water.
Even with clumsy swimming form, the Power Suit's strength propelled them along smoothly. A short while later, Alan's party had all arrived at the bottom.
The moment Taylor landed, his face twisted.
"Ugh..."
Shiva was no better.
"That fragment. Seeing it with my own eyes, it feels utterly vile. I am not normally a violent man, but right now I find myself longing to lean on violence. Are you well, Brother Alan?"
"I can manage it."
The power the Destroyer had infused into him stirred vigorously for the first time—mainly around his head.
"And you, Senior?"
"I'm fine."
Perhaps because Sion was stronger than anyone else present, the faintest flicker of a change in her expression was the extent of it.
If one had to put it into words: Taylor and Shiva looked as though a cockroach had dropped squarely onto their faces, while Sion had the air of someone watching it all through a telescope from a safe distance.
Alan strode straight toward the glass tube where the black fragment floated. The closer he came, the more the Destroyer's power receded—and the darker black radiating from the fragment grew fainter as well.
The moment he pressed himself against the glass tube, the Destroyer's power vanished entirely.