Beneath the Sinkhole
It had begun.
Whuum!
The nearby life forms burst into gobs of blood, and even a monster far in the distance slammed its head into the ground. That wasn't the end of it — joints bent at odd angles, and skin seared and burned.
A bomb? No — this is a detonation caused by a backlash of mana.
While Danny, seasoned as he was, arrived at a guess close to the truth, the direction from which the vehicles had appeared grew brighter. Just like before, fire-lit cars emerged from between the buildings.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The monsters' tight clustering worked against them. Worse still, flames shot up all across the city, including from the buildings that had housed the hatcheries. At first it seemed the army had broken its promise and begun shelling the city — but that wasn't it.
In any case, with the monsters being swept away, the priests' morale soared.
Alan watched the spectacle from the rooftop of a certain building, the burning cityscape reflected in his visor.
"Nice."
"What is?"
"The monster cleanup."
Alan said this with a casual shrug, but Taylor knew better.
Abara was a testing ground where anything went without consequence. You could smash it to your heart's content and harvest all manner of data in the process.
Just as Taylor suspected, Alan was in a mildly excited state.
Where else could he bring buildings down at will? Thanks to the magic stones liberated from the bank — for a good cause, of course — his budget was flush as well.
Still, he hadn't forgotten his actual duty.
Rescue the citizens. Eradicate the enemy.
Even amid the chaos, Alan spotted a group moving with suspicious precision.
< Chimera (3) > — End
< Chimera (4) >
Something odd was mixed in among the instinctive movements — a difference so subtle most people would never have noticed it, but Alan could see it. As he kept watching, a few of the monsters' behavioral patterns proved clearly distinct from their kin's.
Ordinary monsters charged the moment a fire-lit car appeared, but these ones held their ground, or shielded themselves behind other monsters and waited it out.
The same held true in the sky. Winged chimeras flew in thick, shifting shadows. Most of them headed for the school rooftop, but a rare few simply circled the perimeter.
Are they conducting observation?
Abara was currently under a broad communications blackout, so enemies hiding somewhere in the city would be laboring under the same constraint.
"There are suspicious chimeras. Shall we follow them?"
"The ones up there?"
"Yes."
"Will the survivors at the school and the Mother Church folks be alright?"
"The recent support swept away quite a lot of chimeras, and we burned ten hatcheries on top of that. Father Danny is estimated to be Depth 5, so they should hold out just fine."
"Brother Alan, how do you know that?"
"I judged from several factors — how violently the surrounding mana rebounds when it strikes a person's body, their posture, the depth of their gaze, and so on."
"A fair method."
The best approach, of course, was to lay hands on a person's body and examine their mana heart directly — but doing so without permission amounted to a declaration of war. In the first place, most people hated having their mana heart peered into.
Alan's eyes pierced the darkness, observing the flying chimeras. They were grotesque things — bodies of blood-red muscle identical to the other monsters, with bat wings attached, and a membrane that looked exactly like...
"Human skin."
"Probably is. Remember the corpses piled up inside the hatcheries?"
"Yes."
"Disgusting bastards. At first I thought the cartel had hired black mages, but now it's certain. They're connected to the Tailor somehow."
To unleash magic on this scale and wreck an entire city required immense power — which meant the caster was of an extremely high caliber. It was hard to believe that any criminal besides the Tailor could manage it.
"If it's a new one, that's even worse. It means the world's gained one more globally infamous lunatic."
"I doubt the Electo Cartel wanted this kind of ending either."
A whole city had been wrecked. The cartel needed customers and human resources, and its members were ultimately people too — they relied on society's infrastructure like anyone else.
And when things went sour, they torched the entire city? If the decision came from the cartel's own judgment, then the leadership were fools and the organization would collapse soon enough anyway. If not, the odds were high that they were someone else's puppets.
Shiva, who had been monitoring the chimera horde's movements, joined the conversation.
"I'd heard pureblood elves prize harmony with nature, but the odd one out does surface from time to time. To think they could create such horrifying monsters..."
"That's a prejudice. Pureblood elves, like any humans, are shaped by who bore them and what environment raised them." Alan glanced back at the burning skyline. "It seems to be wrapping up now."
The convoy of bomb-cars took a substantial portion of the chimera horde with them as companions on their final ride. The last vehicle obligingly detonated in a suitably spectacular finale.
Plenty of chimeras still survived, but the Mother Church and the vigilance committee should be more than capable of handling that many.
Frankly, if they found even this much overwhelming, they had no business entering a city claiming they'd come to save anyone. What right had those who couldn't even look after themselves to protect another soul?
Some of the flying chimeras that had been circling the battlefield began to break away. A city with its lights dead, the stars gazing down in curiosity at whatever had happened, and a black silhouette gliding silently through the dark.
Alan's eyes tracked the chimera. He'd expected complete blindness once night fell over the dead city, but distinguishing objects proved easier than he'd thought — the work of his artificial eye and his mana cultivation method.
"Let's move."
The pursuit was trickier than expected. The chimera wove freely through the labyrinthine city, while Alan's party had to maintain their concealment, which severely limited their movement.
Winged things were fast to begin with. The chimera soon vanished from sight, leaving them with only a rough idea of its location.
They arrived at a district of buildings that stood, at most, five stories tall. Judging by their appearance and the cluster of everyday conveniences gathered there, it looked like a residential zone.
Alan set foot on the rooftop of a building at the district's edge.
"No hatcheries here, yet it vanished somewhere in this area. Suspicious."
"Sure is. What do you want to do? Search the whole place?"
"No."
At Alan's gesture, Box fired magic bullets in all directions. Flying stealthily and slowly, they settled into their destinations.
Magic bullets built on a Detection base and layered with Stealth, Expansion, and more began reading the surrounding structures. Simply put, they were radar in projectile form.
The nearby scenery etched itself onto Alan's visor — though it looked somewhat different from what the naked eye would see. Clusters of polygons wove together into a three-dimensional picture of the district, and the buildings' interiors were laid bare.
Alan's eyes, which had been sweeping left and right, turned downward. Below lay nothing but pure black. That the underground read as pitch black meant mana waves simply couldn't penetrate it.
"There's something down there."
"Underground's always a good place to hide things. Breaker buried their vaults and secret intel depots in the dirt too."
Alan's party descended to street level. The rest of the city crawled with chimeras, yet this district was quiet — something about it felt wrong. Traces of the massacre were certainly present, though.
A car with a shattered driver's-side window, as if someone had tried to flee in it and failed. A troll doll imprinted with footprints. A shop with its door torn clean off its hinges.
Alan surveyed the ruined city with his right eye, and searched for a way down with his left. That part proved easier than expected.
Once he passed a low-rise apartment building, an enormous sinkhole came into view — connected to the blackened zone, and bearing the most decisive evidence of all:
Flap!
A flying chimera emerged from the sinkhole. Whatever urgent business it had, it beat its wings furiously and made for the sky above.
"That's the only entrance, right? Feels like we'd be spotted instantly."
"I'll send spiders in first."
"You said comms are jammed."
"Jamming is, at its core, still just a mana waveform — there's a workaround. And it's not like we're spanning the distance between cities, so it should be fine."
"Ah, right — you run the same trick in the Labyrinth. Shouldn't be hard for you, then."
Alan had used his spiders without trouble even in forests that interfered with communication. The sight was so familiar to Taylor that he'd nearly made the mistake of measuring Alan against the standards of an ordinary magitech engineer.
Alan's party concealed themselves in a nearby building, and the spiders crept carefully down the sinkhole wall. The jamming rendered the video feed murky, with static crackling through constantly.
The floor of the sinkhole was cleaner than expected. Not a trace of the mucus, tissue, or any of the other substances that made up a hatchery.
"Even villains keep their homes tidy. If chimeras came shrieking out of the floor every five minutes, they'd never get a wink of sleep."
"Workspaces and living spaces should be kept separate. Correct."
Alan paused the spider and took stock. Three passages existed below the sinkhole, and he needed time to decide which one to enter first.
As he watched in silence, flying chimeras emerged frequently from the twelve o'clock and four o'clock passages. The eight o'clock passage was very quiet — though occasionally a chimera that seemed to have finished a scouting run would slip inside, only to reemerge a short while later.
Alan focused on the eight o'clock passage.
"That one, I think. The others look like tunnels connecting to the underground hatcheries."
"Makes sense. Nobody puts the chairman's office where the staff come and go all day."
The spider advanced again. Clinging flat to the ceiling, blending into its surroundings like an octopus, it went unnoticed even when a chimera passed directly beneath it.
Alan's judgment proved correct — the passage showed abundant signs of human workmanship. Support props erected to keep the tunnel from collapsing, magic-stone lamps hung from the ceiling, automatons cleaning up the mucus the chimeras dripped.
At last, in a hall-like chamber, they found people. Given their bulky builds and brutish looks, they appeared to be cartel members.
"Ha — damn it all. Is this for real?"
"Shut up already. How many times are you going to gripe?"
"No, think about it. Abara got wiped off the map. You think this place is coming back from that?"
"So one city got trashed. Big deal."
"No, you idiot — the whole market's gone. What about the tribute money and the revenue?"
Alan's party, listening in, frowned. He'd assumed they were worried about the casualties and property damage — no, all they cared about was their money line.
Shiva rumbled low in his throat.
"We will need firewood."
"Why?"
"They must be purified by flame. If Mother had heard that conversation, She would trade the switch for a whip."
"Alan's antics are unsettling enough without you joining in. What's gotten into you?"
The cartel members kept talking.
"Revenue? We live off exports anyway, so who cares. A world far bigger than this backwater city is waiting for us. As long as the port cities and the ones near the borders stay intact, we're fine."
"Fair enough. Still, I never thought they'd wipe out an entire city. Why'd they do it?"
"How the hell should I know? And if you're even thinking of going over there to satisfy your curiosity, don't. Not ever."
"I know a few curious bastards already died."
The one who'd been snickering pointed at a passage on one side of the hall. It was visibly different from the others from the very entrance — runes painted across the mouth of it glowed with an eerie light.
Alan took in the runes and the magic circle. The security was high-grade; forcing the spider through looked difficult.
"Tricky. Let's just blow it up."
"How'd you jump to that conclusion all of a sudden?"
"It's the simplest option, isn't it? If there's a mage capable of casting large-scale magic down there, we have to strike before they finish preparing."
"And if the Tailor pops out while you're at it?"
"If she were on-site, the army wouldn't have had the leisure of surrounding the city."
Caution had its place, but boldness was sometimes the better part of it. Alan intended to collapse the entire underground in one stroke — taking out the cartel members, the chimeras, and the mage all at once.
"Open."
Box obeyed its master and slid open a drawer. Spiders came tumbling out of the space-expanded compartment without pause. Hastily manufactured, their forms were crude — but the magic-stone explosives strapped to their bellies were very real.
From here on, it was a race against time. One spider might have slipped by unnoticed, but this many swarming in at once was bound to be spotted.
Alan snapped his fingers, and the army of bomber spiders surged forward. Part of the sinkhole wall filled wall-to-wall with spiders.
Taylor, watching the scene through the scouting spiders' feed, narrowed his eyes.
"They're supposed to be on our side, but seeing it like this — it's a little creepy."
"They're not living creatures, they're machines."
"It's a gut-feeling thing. By the way — we got any magic stones left?"
"No."
"Huh..."
"Why do you sound so mournful about it, Brother? Those came out of Abara's own bank, so they ought to be spent on Abara's behalf — otherwise it's simply wrong."
"When did I ever?"
"When we return to Maze City, do have a confession session with me."
"That'll happen before I'm in my grave."
Above ground, all was quiet — but below, the situation was another matter entirely. The cartel members loafing around in the hall scattered in every direction—