The Key (4)
The external armor clattered shut, and the bulky lens that emerged in its place turned toward the sky.
Beep!
Rat-a-tat-tat!
The warning siren and gunfire rang out almost simultaneously. The automatic turrets, having spotted the suspicious orb, raked the area where Box had staked its claim with a hail of machine-gun fire.
When the sphere and the bullets collided, sparks flew. Against the pitch-black night sky, those sparks looked unnatural—and of course, they drew every eye.
"We're under attack!"
The moment someone shouted, the sphere Box had launched spewed blue light in every direction. It wasn't a disco ball scattering light at random; it beamed precisely only where it needed to.
The turret that had fired first bowed its head deep. One by one, like dominoes, the turrets along the wall went dead.
The orb was a massive mana pulse grenade. It discharged a powerful waveform in the form of light, frying the mana circuits inside the machines.
Of course, every attack invites a defense. The Death Eye, protected by shielding technology, merely shuddered from head to toe.
The instant the turrets fell silent, the Death Eye moved. The camera that had been staring down the orb flushed crimson, and a torrent of mana churned around it.
"Hurry and deal with that... huh...?"
One of the cheering security guards wore an expression of pure incomprehension. Surely the Death Eye's powerful beam was supposed to destroy the suspicious sphere.
With a strange whine, the Death Eye dropped limply to the ground. Invisible from the guard's vantage point, a single spider clung to the machine's back.
"If remote hacking won't work, you make contact."
"A spider can't exactly walk back to you either, so it's still remote hacking, isn't it?"
"The spiders are my limbs. Slightly different."
"Hm. And what's next?"
Taylor and Shiva stared intently at the feed streaming from the reconnaissance spider, thoroughly entertained.
Having cleared the wall in an instant, the spiders scattered to every corner, skittering across grass, pipes, and asphalt alike.
Alerted by the alarm, security personnel came pouring out.
"What now? What's going on?"
"There! On the left!"
Where the man pointed, a spider was crawling rapidly across the ground. The matte-black coating alone made its sinister intentions plain.
"Hurry and deal with—...."
The guard's words slowed, and his head drooped. His strength drained, his body crumpled to the ground. Near his mouth, the grass stirred with each breath he took.
Taylor, who had been lamenting the absence of popcorn, asked a question.
"Oh. What's that?"
"A spider, obviously."
"Not that. Which runes did you use?"
[Sleep] and [Stun]."
"That's way too potent for those."
"You're the one who taught me about poisonous plants back in the swamplands, remember? I combined sleep-inducing plants and mushrooms and made them into a gas. It won't show on camera, but that whole area must be saturated with it by now."
Taylor turned his eyes back to the spiders on the screen. They looked like ants through the feed, but at least he could track their movement.
"So what you're saying is they carry sleeping gas in their bellies? You studied botany too? That's more effective than I expected."
"Madam Yohwa taught me."
"Huh. Never took her for the type to hand that kind of thing out..."
"Fairy actually told me. I brought her good honey, and she just opened up."
"I should tell you to keep discipline in line one of these days. Did you buy the honey at the market again?"
"No. Unlike the Destroyer, she only wants the expensive stuff."
"That man's gone too long without a taste of sweetness. Fairy eats the finest honey at the greenhouse every day. That's the difference."
The spiders spreading through every corner of the plant shook loose mana with their [Sleep] waves and sprayed gas besides, escorting the humans off to dreamland. It was, quite simply, the kind of trick you couldn't counter if you didn't know it existed.
"Why didn't you just use this method earlier? Much more pleasant to watch."
"Remembering the past made me a little angry. I'm fine now."
Alan commanded a large number of spiders, and now that they were moving openly, the reconnaissance proceeded far faster than before. They crawled freely across the bodies of sleeping guards without a hint of hesitation, combing every inch of Damas Tech.
And in the underground laboratory, they found the key. The spider shoved aside a researcher slumped face-down over a desk full of microscopes and extracted it.
"Looks like an ordinary silver key. Kind of boring."
But to Alan it looked different. The small characters engraved on the key were written in the language of the Labyrinth—which was exactly why Taylor and Shiva couldn't see them.
The inscription read:
[Let a Veil Be Lowered to Conceal the Radiance]
It was entirely different from the phrase he'd discovered thanks to the Collector.
Let a veil be lowered to conceal the radiance.
Let a lamp be lowered to light the darkness.
Anyone could hear the difference plainly. Alan tried to tease meaning out of the phrasing, but with only what he currently knew, it eluded him.
Sympathetic significance? Or...
BOOM!
Alan's deliberation did not last long.
Something crashed down onto the front of the van, and shards of asphalt scattered in every direction. The windshield, peppered by the debris, cracked into a spiderweb of fractures.
The instant Taylor registered the impact, he dashed outside. The thing that had fallen from above was a person.
< The Key (3) > — End
< The Key (4) >
Alan surveyed the situation outside through the shattered windshield. The figure sprawled on the asphalt was a Lycan dressed in something close to military fatigues.
A tiger's bright yellow eyes turned toward them. Lycans were beastfolk, so alike their animal kin that you could almost call them animals walking on two legs.
Because of that, their innate strength was decided by what beast they resembled. A tiger was, naturally, upper tier.
By the time Alan stepped outside as well, the Lycan facing off against Taylor had opened his mouth.
"There was a suspicious smell, after all."
"How'd you find us?"
"Thermal camera. A van with three thieves huddled inside tends to stand out when it's the only one on the lot."
"Thieves? You might not say that if you knew the circumstances."
"Why would a mercenary need your sob story? Money moves me. I don't ask about my employer. That's the basics. Hm. Now that I look closer, you're no mercenaries, are you. Explorers?"
Taylor gave the mercenary's words only half an ear as he opened a channel to Alan. The blue glow that used to leak from his eyes during calls had been stilled by Alan's modifications.
[The item?]
[Not yet.]
The spider had the key, but returning would mean crossing a gauntlet of obstacles.
The Lycan mercenary had not come alone. Confident in his own skill, he'd arrived here first while his teammates combed the interior of Damas Tech.
The mercenaries strode past the sleeping security guards and headed underground. Somewhere down there was the spider carrying the key.
They moved fast, and every time a vent came into view they kept tossing something inside. The seeds sprouted with explosive speed, their trunks sealing off the ventilation ducts, while some wheeled contraption raced along the interior spraying a sticky fluid.
It was as if they knew the spiders' infiltration routes. Under these conditions, the spiders alone would struggle to break the encirclement.
Alan made a swift decision.
[Taylor, go in with Shiva.]
[And you?]
[I can win. More importantly, if this attempt fails, there's no telling what happens. Bury that key deep enough and the excavation rights fly away for good.]
Taylor snorted before he could stop himself. Even with a powerful enemy right in front of him, the boy was worrying about the future.
[Ha. That's just like you.]
Alan was a monster. In the good sense, not the bad.
Taylor had watched Jake Marshall since the man was a young man. Their paths had diverged, but their growth curves were the same: where ordinary people climbed one step, a genius took the elevator.
If it were a stair-climbing contest, it would be cheating, plain and simple. But what could you do? The world had always worked that way.
That was old thinking, of course. These days he was on Alan's side of the equation, and it felt very reassuring indeed.
Still, worry crept into his voice. It welled up on its own, regardless of Alan's actual skill.
[Run the moment it gets dangerous.]
[The problem is you two, not me. Out here it's open ground; in there, it's buildings.]
[I'm not so old you need to worry about me yet.]
Taylor turned. Shiva had been listening on the same channel and fell in close behind him.
Left alone, Alan looked at the mercenary.
"You waited. Kind of you."
"Three at once is honestly a bit much. If you'll kindly remove yourselves, that suits me fine."
"And your teammates?"
"They've got to earn their keep too. Can't just freeload off me, right? Kneel and surrender right now, and I'll settle for confiscating your equipment."
"I was about to say the same thing."
By the look of him, the mercenary specialized in close combat—and that meant Box's cannon support would be difficult. One careless mistake and Alan would get caught in the blast radius himself.
[Box, go help Taylor and Shiva.]
Beep!
The thing answered with a short chirp and leapt down from a nearby factory chimney. Thanks to its levitation unit, it drifted along like a balloon.
"All set? Then..."
The mercenary let the words trail off—and his very figure vanished from where he stood. Before Alan's eyes could finish a blink, the tiger's face lunged out of the darkness dead ahead.
"Let's begin."
A fist sheathed in fur but built of dense bone and gristled muscle came swinging in a broad arc. That was merely how it looked from Alan's point of view; the true speed was terrifying.
BOOM!
Alan dodged, and the innocent van took the blow. The driver's-side door crumpled violently and caved inward. The vehicle tilted on its side, nearly toppling.
WHUMP!
The half-standing van came back down with a resounding crash, and in that same instant Alan's Power Suit took its first hit.
Wow. What is that fist...
An impact like colliding with heavy machinery rocked his entire body. The Power Suit kept him from injury, but the violent vibration still coursed through him—and that alone was enough to make Alan's frail body cry out in pain.
Whether or not its master's body rattled like a man inside a massage chair, the Power Suit performed its duty. Wherever a blow landed, a disc-shaped shield materialized and detonated outward.
Each time the mercenary's strike came in, a force of similar magnitude answered it. Like explosive reactive armor.
KRAKOOM!
When the two forces collided, thunder split the air. The mercenary kept driving his fist forward, utterly indifferent to the fierce rebound.
"Nice suit. I'll be taking it!"
Legs kicking off the ground carved deep trenches in the asphalt, and the wind kicked up by the collisions sent shards of stone whirling in every direction.
The reactive shielding works well, but something's missing.
Where his limbs moved almost of their own accord, dragged along by the Power Suit, his mind calmly took stock of the situation. Then it spun up the Rune Canvas.
[Absorption] [Grudge] [Condensation] [Repulsion]
The moment the four runes took form within, the explosions he returned to the mercenary grew far more savage.
[Grudge] was not an expression of any physical phenomenon—it was a rune tied to the heart. And yet, mysteriously, its power rose all the same.
If the Power Suit broke, he would have to repair it, and that would cut into his study and research time. If he failed to recover the key, the ruins would be closed to him altogether.
Which made the mercenary more than deserving of a grudge.
The mercenary, who had been enjoying himself thoroughly, suddenly retreated a step.
"What, did I kill your parents or something? What's got into you all of a sudden?"
"Just finish what you started."
This time Alan waded in personally. Strictly speaking, the Power Suit did.
He caught the mercenary's counter with his forearm—and that spot detonated as well. The violent force knocked the man's arm wide, opening a clean line of space straight through to his chest.
Alan dipped slightly forward. He intended to ram the mercenary's chest with his shoulder. At the very least, the man would walk away with a few cracked ribs.
But the mercenary's fist moved first. Abandoning his pushed-back right hand, he flicked up his left with blinding speed and hammered Alan's shoulder.
The Power Suit's reactive shielding detonated once more, and the mercenary used the rebound to launch himself backward.
A tiger is still a cat. His muscular body twisted fluidly in midair before settling on top of the wall. The crouched tiger grinned.
"That was close."
"So that's another way to evade it."
"I've been through shields and spells of that breed more times than I can count."
The tiger spread both arms wide and dropped. Alan predicted his landing point and moved to strike—but once again the mercenary's body writhed like a soft-bodied creature in midair, wrenching hard at the waist to vault clean over Alan's head.
Alan spun around and thrust out his arms. Their fingers interlocked, and the two locked into a contest of raw strength.
"From the look of it, that shield only reacts to impact."
"You know it, and so what—"