The Fugitive (3)
The conversation had turned to waiting out the night down here. The police looked thoroughly worn out. The fact that they'd made it this far suggested they had some genuine skill, but the Labyrinth was never a place that yielded to anyone, no matter how capable.
While Alan was idly wondering what kind of magitech tools and magicware the police employed, Detective Otto struck up a conversation.
"You said your name was Alan, correct?"
"Yes."
"How did you know this was a holoskin? You're telling me you can just... see it?"
When Alan nodded, wrinkles creased the bridge of Otto's snout. On an otter's face, it looked downright adorable.
"Ha. I paid a fortune because they swore the firewall was rock-solid, and this is what happens. I'll have to pay the vendor a visit and turn the place upside down later."
Having overheard the exchange, Shiva leaned toward Taylor and whispered.
"Isn't that something only Brother Alan could manage?"
"Exactly. He even notices the holoskin Sion wears—a run-of-the-mill detective's gear is child's play for him. So, what'll it be?"
"A misunderstanding must be corrected at once."
"Just let it go. It's entertaining."
"But, Brother—"
"If the merchant's been running shady business all along, he'll get taken to the cleaners this time. If not, he'll sail through without a scratch."
"Oh. That does make sense."
Of course, Taylor was egging him on out of simple amusement rather than any such logic. Fights and spectacles had been great entertainment since time immemorial, after all.
Alan inspected the syringe gun mounted on Otto's tail as he asked his question.
"Why did you come down here?"
"Even a favor done in good faith requires a separation of duty and personal feeling. I'm sorry."
"Can't be helped, I suppose. And what's going on over there?"
Where Alan pointed, Shiva, Dennis's party of explorers, and a few of the police officers had gathered and were doing something together.
As it turned out, every one of them was a believer in the Mother Church, and with a Mother Church monk conveniently on hand, an impromptu prayer meeting had broken out.
People were rational creatures and irrational ones at the same time. The more dangerous one's profession, the stronger the urge to cling to something greater became.
Shiva, who had been delivering kind words in his deep, sonorous voice, drew something from within his robes.
"As a special blessing, I shall share the holy water with you all."
"Huh? This isn't... holy water, is it?"
"Tsk tsk. It is holy water. One sip won't even register, so you're fine."
The drink—alcohol, or rather, what Shiva insisted on calling holy water—was in staggering demand all across the world, and the Labyrinth was no exception. If anything, the harder the work, the more people sought it out.
The explorers, long accustomed to drinking mid-expedition, knocked it back without hesitation, and the police were swept up in the mood as well. A few of them even drank from their own supplies of 'holy water' they'd brought along.
As wariness dissolved, mouths began to open one by one.
"Why the hell did that bastard even come down to the Labyrinth? If you're going to steal, at least skip the country."
The very story Alan had been hoping to hear surfaced at last.
"Oh. So that's what happened. A corporation? Or did a public institution get hit?"
"Damn it... ah, pardon my language. At this point everyone who needs to know already knows, so it should be... fine. By the time the explorers down here return to the surface, the news coverage will have run its course. There was a break-in at a subsidiary of Essel Magic Tower."
"A subsidiary, so the security was lax?"
"I couldn't say. The thief fled into the Labyrinth, so the way I see it, Essel Magic Tower could handle it themselves. Why they had to send us down here, I have no idea."
"Connections to the upper brass, most likely."
Try as he might, Alan couldn't think of any other explanation. Otto nodded as well, signaling his agreement. With his psychological resistance broken down, the detective's words began to flow freely.
"We made it this far, but I'm afraid we've hit our limit. We've been using stealth magicware and avoiding combat as much as possible, and yet we keep running into trouble everywhere we turn."
"Police officers and explorers are a different breed."
"But if we go back empty-handed, we'll get bawled out by our superiors. And we can't even find the thief."
"What kind of thief is it?"
"A Rabbitfoot. I'm telling you only so you'll take care."
Rabbitfoot. Just as the name suggested, it was a race of small-statured demi-humans born with the feet of rabbits. Endowed from birth with swiftness and a gift for concealment, they were also prone to falling into a life of crime when their natural talents found no better outlet.
The next day, after weathering one round of combat, Dennis spoke to Alan.
"You're heading further down, right? We're turning back here."
"Why not experience the palace while you're at it?"
"We'll manage that on our own strength. Don't worry about the return trip. We'll be traveling with our police friends, so it'll be far safer than before."
Alan watched until Dennis and the police had vanished completely from sight, then turned around.
"The police worked so hard to get this far, and they're leaving with nothing to show for it."
"My guess is the thief's hiding somewhere around here. Eh, survival comes first—no point pushing it."
Just as Taylor said, the twentieth floor was ideal for hiding. Every single one of the packed-together buildings was a potential hideout, and aside from the palace, the automatons and Undergrounders that appeared here were remarkably weak. On top of that, its position made it a convenient escape route into the Primeval Forest should things go wrong.
That problem belonged to the parties involved; it was none of Alan's concern. With exploration and new knowledge waiting for him, what business did a single thief have interfering?
After roughly two hours of travel, the palace appeared. A grand avenue ran between the city's buildings and the palace itself, and the scenery on either side of that road could not have been more different. The palace felt like an ancient cultural relic, while the city was almost modern by comparison.
Then Alan spotted an open door.
"Looks like someone entered not long ago."
"People ought to close their doors behind them. No manners at all."
The previous visitors evidently had no taste for combat, for there were no destroyed automatons in sight. The resident machines had the look of things that chased off intruders and then returned to their posts—and the moment they laid eyes on Alan's party, they charged without fail.
In the past, they'd had no choice but to punch through quickly, unable to handle the swarming numbers. That was no longer the case. Each and every one of these machines was precious salvage now.
"Grab the mana stones and soul stones first."
Beep—
Box ignored the fighting entirely and set about collecting loot with its pincer arms. When bird- and bee-like automatons attempted suicide bombings, it simply shrugged them off, trusting in its sturdily built frame.
The previous visitors, it seemed, hadn't been able to avoid combat entirely either—destroyed automatons lay scattered here and there. And there, before the great hall where the royal guards waited, someone stood with a hand pressed against the massive door.
The white-haired Rabbitfoot took one look at Alan's party and shrieked.
"Why are you following me?!"
"We're just heading the same way."
"I smell cops! Don't you lie to me!"
With a final screech, the Rabbitfoot hurled itself through the doors into the great hall.
Taylor muttered as he watched it go.
"Do we look like cops to you?"
"We must've picked up the scent from being around them. The lubricant used on magicware does have a rather distinctive smell."
"Can you actually tell the difference?"
"Yes."
Taylor scratched his head, then entered the great hall. The Rabbitfoot slipped past the royal guards and dove through the black door, and the guards, having lost their target, turned their heads backward.
The Fugitive (2) — End
The Fugitive (3)
Alan and the royal guard faced each other across the open doorway. The guard did not step out of the great hall. True to his name, he remained ever at the throne's side.
Alan needed to reach the next floor, and to do that, he had to pass through the door that materialized behind the throne.
The moment they entered, the royal guard gestured. The automatons that obeyed his every command emerged from behind the pillars.
THUD!
A guard standing near the throne leapt down from the dais. When a three-meter colossus of metal hits the ground, the floor flinches and shudders in alarm.
Alan locked his gaze on the royal guard. This was the being that filtered out the rabble of explorers—and the very origin point of the countless Power Suits that roamed the surface world.
Taylor drifted into memories of the old days.
"Back in my day, if you made it this far, you'd break your back trying to subdue them without damaging a thing. These days? Youngsters just smash everything to pieces and pocket the core components."
"For my part, budget constraints had me hand-crafting my own Power Suit from the guard's suit as a base."
Building and modifying a Power Suit by hand, the way Alan had, was the old-school method; nowadays, factories and workshops churned them out by the dozen.
Depending on the technology applied, their uses varied widely, and they proved valuable in every field from construction sites to battlefields. Naturally, the more advanced the magitech they housed, the more the price soared into the stratosphere.
Leopard slunk forward stealthily. Though it was the size of a tiger, it used the pillars to full advantage, and before long it had melted into the scenery. The [Assimilation] runes etched into its outer armor genuinely strengthened its concealment.
Leopard trained its eyes on the royal guard, then glanced back at its master. A silent question: may I attack?
Alan shook his head. Ordinarily they'd salvage only the core components, but with Box's abilities enhanced, the plan was to subdue the guards as intact as possible.
"Then let's begin."
"Brother, will you freeze them as you did before?"
"No. The cryogenic method left fatigue built up in their mana circuits, and I had to redesign every single one. This time I'll use a different approach."
At Alan's signal, Box opened its drawers. Palm-sized spiders came scuttling out—and there were more of them than usual.
The animal-type automatons registered the spiders and lashed out with their forelegs, but Alan's spiders were a far cry from the insects a cat toys with before devouring.
They slipped aside from attacks with soft, whispering movements, and even when struck dead-on they sometimes scuttled away unharmed, pressing on toward their destinations. With walls, ceiling, and pillars all around, the spiders had ideal terrain to work with.
While Taylor and Shiva held back the charging automatons, Alan sent a signal to his spider squad.
The instant they received their master's order, they began drawing silken blue threads from their abdomens. Thread that had no physical substance, and yet could interfere with the material world—a magical filament.
The threads of mana wove themselves together in midair, forming the shape of a vast web, and dropped straight down upon the royal guard. The moment the web made contact, it coiled tight around its target.
The runes inscribed into the thread were [Binding], [Adhesion], [Weakening], and [Slowing]. The spiders' small size meant each thread's power was modest—but even slender twigs, gathered together, will bear weight without breaking.
Some beings would simply ignore a web like this. But the royal guard is not one of them.
The faces of the powerful he had met—the Chairman, the Destroyer, the Professor—flickered through Alan's mind and vanished, one after another.
Once his comrades had the royal guard bound, a portion of the waiting spiders descended to the floor. The rest remained clinging to the pillars—and if you connected them all, they formed a hexagonal column.
The royal guard at the center. The design is perfect. No—it's excellent.
Alan wasn't particularly fond of the word "perfect." A perfect thing was one to which nothing could be added or subtracted, which made it terribly difficult for him to lay his own hands on it. It meant, in other words, that its potential for growth had been sealed off.
Such stray thoughts occupied only the tiniest fraction of his mind; the vast remainder was fixed entirely on the royal guard.
The hexagonal array of spiders began to radiate light—or rather, the runes inscribed across their bellies did.
[Vacuum]
The air surrounding the royal guard abandoned its post. The oxygen went with it.
Nearly every form of life had adopted oxygen and the high energy efficiency that respiration provided, and the Undergrounders were no exception to that rule.
The royal guard's main body was a warrior who wielded Aura itself. It could hold out without breathing for quite a long time—but even that had its limits.
As the air trapped inside the Power Suit gradually bled away, the royal guard thrashed against its restraints. Bound fast in the spider web, though, the struggle registered as little more than light sleep-talking.
Once Taylor and Shiva had finished off their automatons and gathered them in one place, and Box had collected them piece by piece with its pincers, the royal guard's body pitched forward.
The Power Suit detected that its user's life was in danger and opened its back plate—but the back revealed within the opened armor was utterly still.
"Clean, isn't it?"
"Clean?"
"No blood to wash off, no need to worry about scrambled components. Detach the limbs from the torso, store them, done. Am I right? I did consider using nerve gas, but the Labyrinth is an enclosed space. So I changed my mind."
Alan stepped in front of the royal guard, extracted it from the suit, and began disassembling the Power Suit.
"Your artificial lungs would filter out toxins, old man, and Shiva's sacred arts do include means of blocking such attacks—but it leaves an unpleasant feeling all the same, doesn't it?"
"Er... yeah. You're right. Come to think of it, suffocation is much cleaner."
The great hall was soon spotless. Oil from the destroyed automatons still streaked the floor, but even that would vanish with time.
"Shall I build you a Power Suit too, old man?"
"Nah. I rode one once—never felt right. Top-grade magicware can match or even exceed a Power Suit's output. You know that."
"Brother, it sounds to me very much like a request."
"Ahem."
"What about you, Shiva?"
"I too am quite content as I am for now."
Physical cultivators were an exceedingly picky breed, and satisfying their expectations was far beyond any ordinary Power Suit. As their mastery rose ever higher, their skin grew harder than steel—