Icehenge (3)

"The ascent speed has improved, which shortens the descent time by the same margin. If you factor in the whole journey, it should come out about the same as usual."

"Really?"

"Yes."

Alan, his modifications complete, pressed himself tight against the pillar. The moment he activated the device, his body strained to shoot upward. From that state, he moved his hands and feet. Thanks to the buoyancy unit, the same effort carried him four to five times farther than before.

The thought How high am I now? had barely formed before he'd already passed the 100-meter mark.

Good. The sky's still clear.

Ignoring the aura of rune script he could feel nearby, Alan made for the summit.

"Whoa."

The exclamation escaped him the moment his boots touched the top. The entire world had turned blinding white. The pillars standing in ranks nearby only added to it, completing a scene of unearthly wonder.

With all of creation lying beneath his feet, he felt as though he had become the master of the world. The scholars who had climbed up here before him must have felt much the same.

No blizzard this time. Is the Labyrinth done with its pranks?

Alan walked the summit in search of the source of the shimmer. With time to spare for now, whenever he sensed rune script he'd spare it a casual glance.

Each pillar's top was vast, easily the footprint of a skyscraper, and the sky remained clear. There was time yet.

At that same moment, at the base of the pillar—

"Shiva..."

Taylor let out a word that might have been a curse or might have been a name. Shiva, who had been holding his ground stubbornly, fell silent this time.

A blizzard. Snow raged down harder and fiercer than anything they'd seen yet. Ten meters of visibility? No—it was thick enough that even five meters ahead was hard to make out.

Taylor, well on his way to becoming a snowman, kept staring upward. There was still no sign of Alan, who had climbed up.

"Brother, it's no use."

Shiva seized Taylor by the waist. He too was all but buried in snow.

"He said clearly that he'd come down once the sky darkened."

"I know Brother Alan fibbed about not sleeping, but he doesn't lie about things like this. Something's happened. Let's get inside the tent, for now. If you go missing climbing up there too, the problem only gets worse."

Taylor did as Shiva said and retreated into the tent. His unburned eye had melted in the heat radiating from the mana-stone lamp, leaving the floor damp.

Even peering at the pillar through the clear vinyl, snow clung to the surface until nothing could be seen at all.

Box and Leopard had apparently grasped how serious the situation was, and stayed meekly close. Even the pincer ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠claw that habitually jabbed at Taylor in teasing hung limp.

"Drink this, at least. I put sugar in it—it should ease your nerves a little."

Shiva handed over a coffee. It was sweet enough to sting the tongue, and it did snap his mind awake.

"Brother..."

"You're about to ask if anyone's ever come back after going missing. Give me a moment, I'm thinking."

Taylor dove headlong into the murky sea of memory. How long did he swim? An old news article glimpsed in his youth surfaced at last.

"I did read a paper once about Katan rescuing an explorer who'd gone missing. Did they say it was luck?"

Alan scoured the summits in earnest, hunting for the shimmer and the presence of rune script. Each pillar's surface area rivaled that of a high-rise building, so there was plenty of ground to cover.

He was working up enough heat to sweat despite the sub-minus-ten cold—entirely thanks to the Power Suit—and had been roaming diligently when something struck him as odd, and he lifted his head.

Why are all the shadows the same length?

In the clear sky hung the sun and nothing else. A searing eye was etched into a blue curtain without a single cloud.

Alan observed the sun through his visor. He even kept a clock displayed on the HMD, watching sun ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and display side by side.

After watching for a while, he identified the source of the wrongness.

The sun isn't moving.

Unlike the Primeval Forest, the Snowfield had day and night. The celestial bodies should have been observed to move accordingly, but the sun clung to one spot as if nailed there.

Alan moved to the edge of the pillar and looked down. With no blizzard, visibility was perfect—yet he could not see the tent set up at the pillar's base, nor Taylor, nor Shiva. The group of scholars clinging like ants to the neighboring pillars was gone too.

Why on earth?

If this happened the moment one climbed to a pillar's summit, then every explorer who had ever set foot up here should have vanished without a trace.

And yet how many explorers and scholars had testified to standing on top, looking down, and finding the view beautiful?

This was unmistakably an anomaly. Naturally, his mind turned to the correlation between blizzards and disappearances. Those who had ignored the blizzard and tried to wait it out had invariably vanished.

Could a blizzard have swept through without my noticing? In which case, is the blizzard itself a phenomenon that isolates space?

Alan rummaged through the Power Suit and produced an extremely thin shard of steel plate.

Best to check whether going down is even possible.

The plate fluttered down like a sheet of paper, and once it sank below a certain height, it crumbled into powder with a dry crackle. Experiments from other positions gave the same result.

Having learned that descending meant disaster, Alan's gaze naturally turned to the summits of the other pillars. No matter how he looked, he couldn't find anything unusual.

Even so, he didn't despair. The Labyrinth only meted out trials it deemed survivable. Even if almost no one ever reached the answer, a solution existed.

To break the situation open he needed at least some small clue, but nothing presented itself—and so Alan's thoughts drifted, quite naturally, to the shimmer.

When the blizzard raged, if he clung to the pillar and looked up with his left eye, he'd seen light. There had been pillars that showed nothing but darkness, it was true.

I couldn't tell whether it was rune script or Star Script, so I left it alone, but...

However he turned it over, there seemed to be no other option now.

He put thought into action at once. Charging his fingertips with mana, he rubbed the area near his left eye, and a galaxy unfurled in broad daylight. In the input window, black as deep space, countless Star Script characters glittered.

This was the cumulative result of all the functions Alan had reinforced and added over time. A magitech engineer freshly initiated into Star Script who saw this vista would think, This path was never meant for me.

Alan's hand plunged into the sea of stars. Star Script held its place even as his fingers brushed past.

Poking around here and there, he secured a space in which to input the pillar's shimmer, then charged his fingers with mana. Each delicate poke and prick gave birth to a new star.

When the work was done, Alan closed his eyes. A faint current of mana pulsed through his left eye—confirming the script had taken. It was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Star Script.

It'll take time to apply, so let's wait a moment. No need to rush.

At last he felt the mana settle, and opened his eyes. His guess about the Star Script had been right—because a new landscape spread out before Alan.

To put it precisely, the world had been split in two. His right eye still showed the broad light of midday. His left eye, on the other hand—

So this is a night with a light snow falling.

The visor's HMD was gyrating wildly.

This was no malfunction. The right half of his body existed in a world of minus ten degrees; the left half existed in a world of minus thirty.

He didn't know exactly what mechanism was at work, but he did know that his body was straddling two ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠worlds at once.

Alan closed his left eye only.

External temperature: -10°C.

The visor's readout settled down obediently. For the first time, the sensors on both sides were detecting the same temperature.

Alan closed his right eye only.

External temperature: -30°C.

The same held true in reverse. Both temperature sensors now agreed on minus thirty.

Interesting.

Depending on which eye he kept open, the space his body occupied changed. He didn't understand the principle, but it was a fascinating situation all the same—fascinating enough that, if it were up to him, he'd have lingered to play with it.

Of course, he couldn't afford to, so he set his mind to finding a way out. He looked at the world through his left eye alone—through the artificial eyeball.

First, the sky. Despite the fat snowflakes streaming down, the moon flaunted its presence with perfect clarity, sending moonlight down through the dense black clouds all the way to the ground.

The moon hasn't moved an inch either.

Which meant escape was a long way off. Alan lowered his gaze again, sweeping his surroundings—and spotted an object he had never seen before.

Snow was piled over something. He approached and brushed it away to find a human explorer lying with eyes closed, as if asleep. A frozen corpse.

Wondering if the man might have left behind some clue, Alan searched his effects. He was well accustomed to corpses by now, having seen his fill of them since Lanka.

Prying open the frozen clothing produced a single notebook. Even in an age when knowledge could be rapidly acquired and stored via Memory Crystals, there were still those who preferred analog methods.

That was the end of the pages. Alan fastened on the words fifty years.

So that's why...

There was a reason the man's gear looked so oddly outdated. He'd assumed it was a matter of funds, but it was a matter of decades. What read as antiquated to Alan's eyes must have been fairly cutting-edge in its day.

Alan examined the man's corpse again. Feet pointed outward, head toward the center. It looked as though he had been walking inward from the edge when he collapsed.

The center had already been searched and held nothing, so Alan faced the edge instead. Snowflakes fell furiously beyond the pillar.

...?!

After watching for a long while, Alan shot to his feet. Strangely, the snowflakes kept swerving away from a particular point. He connected them one to another, and at the end of that line stood another pillar.

When he probed the spot with his staff—

Thud!

The sound of striking something solid. An invisible bridge floated in midair. The man must have barely crossed it before his strength gave out.

Alan pressed hard along the transparent path, testing it, then committed his weight. Even the massive Power Suit climbing aboard failed to dent the bridge.

That was how he traveled from pillar to pillar. Every so often he came across a corpse, and when he inspected their equipment, the manufacturing years were all over the map.

When he reached one of the pillars forming the heart of the structure, something finally registered on his senses.

Star Script? No. This is a fragment of rune script.

Despite being a mere fragment, it was more intricate than any rune in common use. If it were ever brought to a complete form, he suspected it would exhibit tremendous power—or something singular.

The instant Alan committed the fragment to memory, it vanished. Like a fish sensing the presence of a person.

I'm really not that frightening...

Alan raised his head. At the same moment, orange circles bloomed across his visor, here and there. Within the circles, human figures were visible.

Orange meant caution—or identity unknown. One of the figures that had appeared without warning atop a pillar raised a long rod.

The hole bored into the rod's tip lined up on Alan. It was no mere ornament—the hole vomited forth a bolt of lightning.

Vzzt-crack!