The Deepest Prison (2)
The moment I hauled open the supply depot's heavy iron door and stepped through, what stabbed at my nose was the viciously damp air of the underground.
Tartaros was far more complex inside than it had looked from without. Less a simple prison than a vast stone labyrinth, built to strip an intruder of any sense of direction. Every wall was the same gray brick, and the torchlit corridors split without end as they climbed toward the upper floors.
"Tch. These rats just keep coming."
Viper's grumble had barely faded when the clash of armor rang from the corner dead ahead. A breath later, guards and jailers spilled out in a pack, swords leveled.
NPCs, they said. The soldiers are better than I expected.
They weren't scarecrows padded out to fill a headcount. The men moved as a single organism, tightening the encirclement, and the sense with which they held the gap between shield and sword was anything but ordinary. It was like watching thoroughly drilled elites. And the greatest problem of all was that the force holding the interior was larger than I'd anticipated. With the barracks sitting right next door, a suppression unit had already been formed and seemed to be tearing through Tartaros.
Clack. Clack.
The strike of armor fittings, distant at first, raced closer along the corridor. The heavy tremor of dozens of overlapping footsteps shook the floor.
"There!"
Torchlight shadows stretched long from beyond the corner, and soldiers with drawn swords burst out like a broken dam.
Clang!
Waldstein knocked a soldier's sword aside in a spray of sparks, and in the same instant countless red trajectory lines sprang into being around my body. Trajectories so honest they were easy to read. I tilted my head just enough to let the first soldier's blade slip past. In the heartbeat before he lost his balance and fell, Waldstein grazed the nape of his neck and passed on.
Shhk!
The rank stench of blood mixed with the damp underground air and stabbed at my nose. The second soldier came in behind his shield. I dropped low, almost rolling across the stone, and drove in between his legs. The moment the sword passed over my head, Waldstein shot straight up and punched through beneath his jaw.
"Ghk... kuhk..."
With a sickening tear of flesh, he toppled backward. Two men down in a blink, and fear took root in the eyes of the soldiers coming after.
I closed the distance on them by inches, never once ceasing to watch my rear. I'd struck a temporary alliance with Viper, but this was a battlefield where a knife in the back would surprise no one. Handing someone your back and trusting them completely was a fool's game.
Thud!
From behind, Viper buried his axe in the chests of the jailers closing in. When our eyes met, he grinned.
The blade hidden behind that smile is plenty sharp.
With the heated voices from the broadcast booth, each team's route was drawn in its own color across the giant screen.
All of Tartaros was heaving with intruders, but the most efficient movement belonged to Go Tae-min and Viper, who had taken the supply-depot route. The depot was a key point sitting within arm's reach of the cell blocks, and thanks to that the two of them had reached the very threshold of the blocks with fewer numbers than the other teams, and without spending nearly so much of their strength.
Shhk—!
Three jailers who had barred the corridor crumpled to the floor. Go Tae-min, sprinting as he flicked the blood from his sword, suddenly halted near a corner and signaled the Viper following behind him to stop.
Instead of answering, Go Tae-min pointed past the corridor on the far side of the corner.
Breaking the stillness, rough shouts and the keen ring of metal echoed from far off. Someone who had entered from another sector was already locked in a fierce fight with the cell-block guard.
At Viper's question, Go Tae-min gave a silent nod. Charging out blindly now would be worse than slipping in behind the commotion another team had made. That was the fastest road to the target.
Viper was quietly impressed. The more he watched, the more this partner suited him down to the bone. A calm that never lost its composure, even inside a slaughterhouse where every second was desperate. On top of that, a superb sense of space that found the way in the shortest time, even in a maze. And above all else—this man had not relaxed his guard toward Viper for a single instant.
A meticulous bastard.
In truth, Viper's original plan had been simple. The moment they reached the cell block, he meant to bury his axe in this skilled partner's back. From then on, thinning out a future rival would be far more economical than joining strength with anyone. But the man in the demon mask had not allowed him so much as a handbreadth of an opening.
A deep smile hooked the corner of Viper's mouth. It seemed things would not go his way just yet.
This is why Nova Arena is fun.
A stage where prospects with monstrous talent appeared without end, and where prey that threatened the hunter lay scattered everywhere. A fine hunter's worth was decided by what prey he took. In that sense, the man before his eyes was, to Viper, quarry of irresistible appeal. As he stared at the man in the demon mask, a sticky killing intent and a thin thread of delight spread through his gaze at once.
Sooner or later, the chance will come.
Tartaros was a vast detention complex made up of thirteen cell blocks in all. Each block was a massive stone building three stories high, and—peculiarly—movement between them was possible only through corridors linked underground. Even if a prisoner broke out, he would be trapped in a complicated maze, and flight would be anything but easy.
Setting foot in the cell-block sector, I let out a short sigh. Thirteen blocks was easy enough to say, but the scale was far too vast to pick every lock and confirm the target one door at a time.
Finding him won't be easy... huh?
I was running the corridor with that thought when I stopped dead. An alien radiance wavering in the distance had halted my feet. Viper, coming up behind, seemed to have seen something similar; he asked in a low voice.
"You seeing it too, pal?"
I nodded in silence.
The participants in Match 6 each had to rescue an assigned principal, and from that rescue target's body flowed a unique light that only the corresponding warrior could identify. But that light was far more intense than I'd thought. A vivid, fierce violet, leaking down from above the stairs. It was clearly marking the target's current position. Thanks to that, I was spared combing this enormous prison like a man hunting rats.
With consideration like this, finishing the mission shouldn't be all that hard.
In a target-rescue mission, the greatest gate was securing the target's exact location. If the guideline was this certain, all that remained was a race against time.
But unlike my optimistic reaction, Viper let out a long sigh.
"...Just how vicious is this mission's difficulty, that they'd spoon-feed us the target's location this blatantly?"
Ah. So that was it.
The essence of this mission wasn't the search. It was survival. Telling us the target's location outright meant, paradoxically, that hell began the moment the target was secured. The Arena hadn't offered us a convenience. It had kindly planted a signpost on the road toward the line of death.
Then I need to move even faster.
Whatever the danger, the priority was securing the target before the situation worsened any further.
"What. You're headed that way, pal?"
At Viper's voice I paused mid-step on the stairs and turned my head. He wasn't on the upper flight I was taking. He stood at a slant in the mouth of the opposite corridor, where the dark lay thick. Our targets were different, so splitting directions was only natural. When I gave a light nod, Viper snorted a laugh and lifted his bloodstained axe a little.
"Let's meet again alive. You're not gonna die in a dump like this, are you?"
"..."
A nod.
I held Viper in my gaze a moment longer, then left his cheerful farewell behind and launched up the stairs without a backward glance.
The second floor of Tartaros, reached without a sound, was far more wretched and naked than the first. The walls were smothered in mold, and between the rows of bars prisoners thrust out their hands and clamored to be let free.
Shhk—
Go Tae-min killed the jailer watching the corridor entrance, then took the ring of keys. Finding the room where the target was held was not difficult. The third block. The last room on the second floor. Unlike the cells lined to left and right, built of iron bars, this end room alone was sealed by a solid iron door, cut off completely from the outside.
"..."
As Go Tae-min crossed the corridor, his expression hardened. One step. Each time the iron door drew nearer, a pain without cause drove sharp into one side of his chest. At last he reached it, pushed a key in, and turned with care.
Click—
With a precise metallic sound, as if a vise were seating home, the heavy door opened. The scene beyond slowly revealed itself. There, a young man hung precariously from chains.
Go Tae-min stared at the man bound in iron with eyes gone flat and still. Only the sound of rough breathing, and now and then the scrape of chain, filled the heavy silence.
This man isn't Lee Jong-hyuk.
Blond hair, blue eyes—someone of an entirely different people. Even so, an atmosphere that overlapped in some uncanny way pressed heavy on Go Tae-min's heart. A complete stranger, and yet a face more than enough to summon someone's ghost.
Then the young man, head hanging, slowly opened his eyes. In the instant their gazes locked taut across the empty air—
"...!"
The young man's pupils twitched as if in spasm. Small wonder. The one standing before him was drenched head to toe in raw blood, wearing a grotesque demon mask. The red eye-light flashing inside the dark cell was terror in itself.
"Did you... come to kill me? To shut my mouth?"
A voice wrecked and cracked, shot through with the rasp of metal, broke from the young man's lips. A gaze mixed of fear and despair hovered unsteadily over Go Tae-min's mask.
Instead of answering, Go Tae-min slowly shook his head. Then, as if to settle the young man's unease, he set weight on every word and spoke them clear.
But the man's eyes were still full of doubt and fear. Go Tae-min's appearance was far too savage for a rescuer, and the mask hiding his face offered no trust at all.
Go Tae-min showed him with action instead of words. He roughly undid one of the chains binding the young man's arm, then tossed him the rest of the key ring.
"You undo the other one."
"...For real? You came to save me?"
The young man looked back and forth between his own wrist and the keys with dazed eyes, as if he couldn't believe it.
Go Tae-min answered in a cold voice, the feeling wiped clean from it.
"If you can't believe it, just stay like that. I'm not about to drag along some bastard with no will to live."
While the young man stared blankly at him, the sound of a heavy iron door being kicked came from the end of the corridor.
"The end room is open!"
"Do not let that heretic get away!"
Urgent footsteps hammered down the narrow corridor and closed on the room. Go Tae-min pressed himself flat to the wall behind the door and held his breath.
"He's still in there! But he's undoing one of the restraints—"
The instant the first jailer crossed the threshold, Go Tae-min swung without hesitation.
Shhk—
The jailer, vital point cut true, clutched his throat and fell without even managing a scream.
"Ah—ahh!"
The second jailer, coming right behind, reflexively raised his sword, but Go Tae-min was a beat faster. He knocked the swinging blade aside with his left hand and drove his sword deep into the opened chest.
Thud!
That was the end of it. Shoving aside the corpses as they cooled, Go Tae-min stepped out of the solitary cell. The time it had taken to deal with the two of them was barely a second.
"Follow me if you want to live."
"Rrgh... all right. No—yes. I understand."
The young man, having freed the remaining restraint, staggered after him. In the corridor, the restrained beat of combat boots and the rough slap of bare soles tangled in a strange rhythm. Go Tae-min flicked the beads of blood from his blade and strode toward the far end of the passage.
From here on, it wasn't hide-and-seek. He had to take the fastest road out before every route was cut.
Though it may already be too late.
Behind the mask, Go Tae-min's eyes sank cold. Taking the supply depot he had infiltrated as the starting point, the left led here, to the cell block, and the right to the parade ground and the main gate. The problem was that the cell block itself was one enormous maze. A deformed structure, in which thirteen independent buildings were bound together by a vast gallery called the Grand Corridor. Seal off any single sector, and it became no different from a giant sealed chamber, perfectly cut off from the outside.
Go Tae-min moved on, sweeping one by one through the offices connected to the Grand Corridor. The young man, tension written plain on his face, stuck close behind and asked carefully.
"What... are you looking for?"
Go Tae-min answered without turning his head.
"From here on, a section that has to exist."
"A section that... has to exist?"
The young man asked it back, puzzled. Go Tae-min went on, studying the firmly shut wooden doors.
"When you design a facility like this, what's the first space you have to consider?"
"Uh... it's a prison, so wouldn't they start with the rooms to lock the prisoners in?"
At that, Go Tae-min shook his head.
"No. This is a sealed space. Let a fire start by mistake, and everyone burns to death together."
"A sealed space..."
"So when they build a place like this, the first thing they make is a space for the people who have to be kept alive."
"People who have to be kept alive? Who's that?"
Go Tae-min jerked his chin indifferently toward the ceiling.
"The high-and-mighty. The royalty and noble lords who drop by here now and then. Don't you think there's a private emergency passage hidden somewhere, just for them?"