Icehenge (3) — Icehenge (4)
The instant the lightning-forged bullet struck the surface of the Power Suit, it erupted with fierce currents in every direction. The shield trembled as though it would shatter at any moment.
My handling of lightning-class magic still leaves something to be desired.
The moment the thought crossed Alan's mind, the rings on his visor turned red. Red, of course, meant hostile presence. And there was more than one or two of those rings. All of them were aiming long staves straight at him. Mana was coalescing in their apertures—right before it would flare at its brightest.
Alan switched his eyes. When he opened his right eye—the naked eye alone—the world turned to daylight. The moonlight and the raging blizzard vanished as if they had never been.
Now this is clean. No need to fight at all.
The humanoid figures, as if sculpted from snow, had not followed him this far. Neither had the magic bullets they had fired. There was, however, one problem.
The runes don't show up here.
Which meant that to gather the fragments, he would have to return to the world of night.
Staff in hand, Alan moved to the edge of a pillar and pressed the staff's tip against it, tracing a full circle.
Clunk!
The staff struck something. The transparent legs existed even in daylight.
Well, that changes the story a little.
Alan crossed over to the next pillar and switched his eyes again. The howling blizzard, the enemies glancing about—they were all there. Unfortunately, no runes made themselves felt this time either.
He slipped back into the world of day before the enemies could attack.
Alan repeated the same procedure. Cross a pillar, search for fragments, and skip across space before coming into direct contact with the enemies.
As the pattern continued, the enemies—those human shapes of snow—began to adapt with startling speed, as if they possessed some capacity for learning. They fanned out, aiming separately in all directions, and the moment Alan came into view, they fired their magic bullets without hesitation.
The magic was fierce enough, but Alan's Power Suit was solid, and the time it took him to memorize a fragment was remarkably short.
As he pieced the fragments together like a jigsaw puzzle, the end finally drew near. In the world of night, the rune was complete.
The enemies responded faster than they ever had. Alan's movements were trending steadily toward the center, so with a little thought, predicting him was easy enough.
Alan closed his eyes. Yet his body remained bound to the world of night. And in his left eye, a faint ache pulsed.
A temporary Star Script, was it?
Even with the spells bearing down inches from his face, he did not panic. The completed rune held the power to break through exactly this kind of situation.
The shape-memory alloy of the Rune Canvas shifted. Ordinarily it drew out four runes at once, but this time it concentrated everything into one.
Alan's body glowed faintly. Faint beyond any comparison to the incoming spells—but an unassuming appearance did not mean an unassuming ability.
Every spell turned back on the enemies who had fired it. Each one detonated precisely in front of its own muzzle, wrecking the weapon that launched it.
Spatial distortion? Spatial inversion?
It was a rune Alan was encountering for the first time, so settling on a name would take time. And of course, before that, he would need ample opportunity to verify just what it was capable of.
Happily, suitable test subjects were standing right before his eyes, in plentiful supply.
〈 Icehenge (3) 〉 End
〈 Icehenge (4) 〉
Alan checked the positions of the snowmen. They were not rounded lumps, but true human figures. Shattered by the spells returned to them, they had rebuilt their bodies regardless.
Their weapons were the same. A long icicle materialized out of thin air, and then snow piled over it until it became the very shape he had first seen.
Alan marked the enemies, and the rune shaped from the Rune Canvas swung toward the snowmen. Even in the middle of returning attack after attack, another line of thought came leaping up in him.
Spatial magic shouldn't be usable inside the Labyrinth, though?
Spells that manipulated space—teleportation, expansion, and the like—were refused outright by the Labyrinth. Artifacts discovered within it were a slightly different matter, however. The dimensional packs used by Breaker were Ooparts, and Box's spatial expansion, too, was the fruit of an Oopart called the Wish Fragment.
With so many precedents, artifacts could be shrugged off—but a rune exhibiting this kind of ability was unquestionably strange.
Did Lorenzo opening the Spatial Gate cause some kind of change? ...No, surely not.
If it had, the news would already be splashed across every headline. Maze City would be in an uproar all over again—there was no way Alan could have missed it.
There are runes that touch on space, if only a few.
In which case, it meant that either the space he was standing in now, or the rune he had newly acquired, was special.
It was certainly no ordinary rune. Alan could handle four runes simultaneously, yet right now he had to devote the greater part of his mental capacity to this one alone.
Beep!
At the mechanical sound, Alan turned his attention outward. Every red ring that had marked his visor had vanished. At some point the snowmen were all gone, and only mounds of snow remained where they had stood.
Poking through the snow with his staff, he uncovered a magic stone shattered into fine pieces. Something had been engraved on its surface, but the fracturing had rendered it illegible.
What a waste... Let's call the rune [Space Interference].
It was, in Alan's judgment, the most intuitive name, and one with plenty of room to change or grow in the future. As his mastery deepened, it might even specialize by linking with other runes.
He drew in a deep breath and felt clean air reach all the way to the bottom of his lungs. His body, which had felt like waterlogged cotton, turned light, overflowing with more strength than usual.
All of it was thanks to the rune. He had nearly drained his mana heart dry—such was the appetite of a single rune.
Of course, this was no blessing. The sensation of fatigue sweeping wholly away would soon fade, and his mana overload would produce even more mana than he had spent, tormenting his body in turn.
Suppressing the heavy pressure already squeezing at the inside of his chest as best he could, Alan took a step. Sitting still would never get him out of this strange space.
The closer he drew to the heart of Icehenge, the more corpses he found laid atop the pillars. They were in far worse condition than those on the outskirts—perhaps they had fallen to the snowmen.
Judging by the fabrication years and the craftsmanship of their equipment, the owners were quite skilled...
In the Labyrinth, equipment and skill went hand in hand. By Alan's estimation, these were not explorers who should have lost to snowmen.
Don't tell me they'll reappear?
The mounds left where the snowmen had collapsed stayed just that—mounds. For now, at least, they showed no intention of moving as his worries predicted.
Come to think of it, the blizzard that had raged through the world of night had subsided at some point. Only a moonlight so pale it seemed transparent poured down from above, and the towering ice pillars each flaunted their own translucence.
The brilliant spectacle woven by the moonlight and the pillars stole Alan's gaze—but only for a very short while.
In what could truly be called the dead center stood ice pillars the size of skyscrapers, arranged in a pentagram—the five points of a star.
A strange sensation emanating from that place seized Alan's attention. His mana detection was exceptionally keen, and it never let a phenomenon like this slip past.
His control was equally superb, but every time such a thought occurred to him, Alan laughed at himself.
As they say, doctors can't cure their own illness.
It was the matter of his mana overload. What good was fine control, when he could not tame the mana that was eating away at his own body?
But that was that, and this was this. The moment his foot touched one of the five points, the surrounding landscape warped strangely, as though heat shimmer were rising from the ground.
At the same instant the blizzard began anew, and a presence stirred in the distance. Red rings bloomed once more across the HMD of his visor. The snowflakes pouring down with the blizzard clumped together and took on human form again.
Whether they raised their weapons or not, Alan stretched out his hand toward the heavily distorted space. Naturally, nothing happened.
Of course not. Then how about this?
He recalled the rune that had lain scattered about in fragments. There was no way it had happened to be sitting in this place by chance. The Labyrinth always provided an escape route, and the key to seizing it.
Stimulating the mana heart that had somehow grown robust again, he unfolded [Spatial Manipulation] once more. He reached out his hand as before—and this time, a different result presented itself.
The scenery flipped in an instant. It was an utterly silent room, the blizzard and biting wind gone without a trace. The walls and ceiling were built of massive ice bricks.
Alan stepped forward slowly. Before he had walked even a few paces, a crunching sound came from beneath his feet.
Glass shards with graduations etched into them. A broken flask?
At the realization that this might be a research facility, Alan's eyes sharpened. No one liked free things being passed up, and Alan was no exception—least of all when it was knowledge someone had painstakingly built.
He raised a hand and brushed a nearby desk. A glittering substance clung to the Power Suit's gauntlet.
A powder of metal and magic stone, ground fine and mixed together.
It was a blending method magitech engineers commonly used to draw mana circuits. Slot a cartridge of the powder into a rune pen, and the mixture would melt and be reborn as a circuit.
At the thought that the lab's owner might have been of the same profession, Alan's heart pounded hard—but only for a moment.
Even a cursory look around showed the room to be barren. As if a thief had passed through, hardly anything of substance remained. Only fragments remained, enough to guess at their original shapes.
A wrecked microscope, a shattered mana cylinder, a mortar still dusted with magic stone powder... Even a thief would turn back at this sight.
It had been stripped that thoroughly. Whether the room had always been built this way, or whether someone had come and gone, there was no telling. If he had to guess, the latter was far more likely.
If only I'd been born a hundred years earlier, the Labyrinth would have been uncharted territory. No wait—back then, even the foundations of magicware wouldn't have been properly established. Hmm, come to think of it, if I imagine laying those foundations with my own hands from scratch... that might not be so bad.
With nothing left to spark his interest, Alan's gaze drifted from the center of the room toward its edges. There was, to be fair, one door on the far side.
Stepping over the glass shards that kept crunching underfoot, he planted himself before the door. He expected that something would be required of him again—but his worries proved groundless, for the door swung wide open the instant he gave it the slightest push.
Beyond the ice door lay a corridor of ice. With not a single window, the passage was nonetheless bright, lit by a glow from no discernible source.
The corridor's reason for being was connection. He had left the room, so naturally another space waited at its end. Of course, before that, he would have to pass through yet another door.
Before it lay the traces of someone's efforts to force it open. A chipped axe, a hammer with a broken haft, a ruined cutter, bent pry bars, and more.
Equipment abandoned by those who had come before was piled at the door's foot. They had surely tried wounding it with magic or aura, but the door of ice was smooth, without so much as a scratch.
The moment Alan began to ponder how it ought to be opened, light poured from the door and washed over his entire body. It happened before he could mount any response at all.
The light swept over him from head to toe like an interrogation, then climbed steadily upward until it concentrated on his left eye.
Alan felt heat. Not hot enough to burn, but more than enough to be unpleasant.
A hack?
It felt as though some flow was attempting to force its way in.
Alan, naturally, refused. The artificial eye had been made by another's hands, but it was his eye now. Its reinforcement, its modification—both had to proceed from his own fingertips.
And at the same moment, a vision rose before Alan's eyes. Magicware was made with magic, so naturally its firewalls applied magic as well.
To repel intruders, mental and illusion-class spells were the usual choice. Hacking was an infiltration of the mind rather than the body, which made them especially effective.
In any case, Alan found himself standing atop a castle wall. Before him stretched the maze, moat, and traps of his own design—all of them reduced to ruins.
Boom!
The old man hammering at the castle gate was the cause. His back was ramrod straight, his face that of a stubborn mule, and his hair was gray.
Katan.
Alan had seen his photograph on the Samramansang, and the infiltrating spell hammering at the gate now wore exactly that face.
Their eyes met. And even as they did, the old man kept striving to break the gate. A siege ram that had materialized from thin air slammed into it.
He could hardly accept an unknown spell unopposed. Alan imagined—and an iron gate clanged down, shuddering, to bar the old man's way.
Destroy it and he built it again; break it and he restored it. The most vital resource in mental and illusion magic was will, and in that respect, the wall had no intention of crumbling easily.
The hacking spell—powerful beyond doubt, and bearing, Alan suspected, the hand of Katan himself—