Who Could They Be? (2)
As I stood there in the basement of the construction site, staring blankly at the gate, Siwoo spoke up first.
“Shouldn’t we report this to the academy? A bunch of extremely shady characters just walked into an extremely shady gate.”
“I’m not sure. Our tailing’s been working so far. Wouldn’t it be better to follow them a little longer and handle it ourselves?”
“We don’t even know if those suspicious people you mentioned are enemies or not.”
He had a point. The only evidence we had was the fact that they’d infiltrated the academy in broad daylight.
“We’ll figure that out if we keep following them, right? They’ve been incredibly suspicious so far, but if they turn out to be harmless… well, that’d be disappointing.”
Still, how could I possibly ignore it? An unknown gate had appeared inside the academy. Of course we had to go in. Not knowing what kind of monsters might appear or what rewards were waiting? Only a coward would pass that up. And since those pathetic amateurs were the ones entering it, the risk probably wasn’t too high.
Come to think of it, how had those amateurs managed to sneak in successfully?
“Their infiltration seemed pretty sloppy. Why didn’t the academy catch them?”
“Right? The story does have a few surprise attacks, but Haneul crushed every organization that tried them.”
“There are still a few small cells left, though… Ugh! Whoever they are, whatever they’re after, however they found this place! We’ll just find out ourselves!”
I gave the talkative protagonist a shove, pushing him through the gate. The way he pretended to resist but still let my hand move him told me Siwoo was just as curious about this situation as I was.
“Aren’t you excited? What do you think the inside of the gate will be like? What kind of rewards will there be?”
“Hey! Wait a sec—”
Crunch!
Siwoo left a long furrow of footprints behind as he was dragged into the gate with me.
Despite our rather loud entrance, no one seemed to have noticed. Luckily, those suspicious figures weren’t waiting right at the gate’s entrance.
“Haneul, you…!”
“Now that we’re inside, we’re accomplices, aren’t we? You looked like you were having fun too, Siwoo!”
“What part of that was fun? Besides, I just got pulled in!”
“Look around. I think your opinion might change.”
The interior of the gate was a dark stone chamber made of reddish limestone. At least the torches hanging intermittently from the pillars were lit, casting a faint glow across the narrow, long corridor. Countless pillars stood in rows along the walls, and here and there, statues modeled after strange shapes kept watch. The stone floor below was littered with shards of broken pottery and bone fragments. Sand mounds dotted the area, burying things I couldn’t identify.
“This… looks familiar, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Could it be ancient Egyptian ruins or something like that?”
“Egypt, you think?”
Now that ruins had appeared, even Siwoo seemed fully immersed. Adventure! Exploration! Rewards! No man could resist that combination.
I snatched a nearby torch and shone it on one of the statues.
“Three legs and four arms… As far as I know, this definitely isn’t Egypt.”
“Well, it is a gate. It’s not like it would actually lead to Egypt.”
“The theme feels similar, though. Shall we keep moving?”
“We’re really going in? Shouldn’t we at least tell Pioni first?”
“We can finish quickly and head back! It’ll be fine!”
I returned the torch to its place and headed down one side of the corridor. My detection skill had picked up the earlier suspicious group in that direction, and the footprints led the same way.
As we advanced cautiously, I sensed a presence ahead. I gestured silently to Siwoo, and he lowered his stance, creeping forward on quiet feet.
Unlike the narrow passage, the space ahead opened up dramatically. The ceiling was so high that light couldn’t reach it, making its height impossible to gauge. On the far side of the chamber, three figures stood with their backs to us.
“Now we can see them with the naked eye too.”
“Seeing them doesn’t help when they’re all wearing robes. I still can’t tell who they are.”
Whether it was some transparency effect or perception interference, the three were now visible even without skills. But they wore plain brown robes with no patterns or symbols, offering no useful information.
“Let’s see… Two of them look adult-sized… and one is smaller than you, Haneul?”
“Pfft… Isn’t that a total midget?”
“Haneul… Those guys don’t seem ordinary, but they could still be children.”
“No way. And even if they were kids, anyone who joins operations like this often probably can’t sleep early or drink milk. They’d end up permanently stunted!”
At my confident declaration, Siwoo stared at me. Was there something on my face?
“Ahem. Anyway, should we ambush them now? I think we can take all three.”
“Hold on, Haneul. They’ve been messing with that wall pretty intently.”
The three figures were pressing and turning sections of a wall covered in murals. It looked exactly like…
“Are they solving a puzzle?”
“A puzzle? Inside a gate? This isn’t a game or a novel… Oh.”
“I don’t really get it either, but puzzle-type gates do exist.”
The game had featured puzzle-type gates too. Gates with almost no combat where solving puzzles granted rewards at the end. They were interesting the first time, but once you learned the gimmicks they became nothing but annoying obstacles and fell out of favor. For a game that encouraged multiple playthroughs, it was the worst possible content. The developers must have been discouraged by players’ reactions, because only a handful of puzzle gates existed from the early days.
“Puzzle gates aren’t my specialty, so I won’t be much help.”
I shook my head. I had only solved the game’s puzzle gates by memorizing the answers, so I possessed zero creative puzzle-solving instinct.
“Still, it’s confirmed they’re operating illegally.”
“How can you tell that when they’re wearing hoods?”
“Normally when a gate connects to another civilization, they bring in specialists. These guys don’t look like they did that. And the way they’re solving it with brute force…”
Boom!
A sudden loud noise echoed throughout the chamber, filling it with clouds of sand dust. When the dust finally settled, one of the robed figures lay sprawled on the ground. A massive stone weight had fallen exactly where he had been standing. The fact that he still hadn’t gotten up suggested he had barely dodged it. The other two figures rushed over, and when the small one stood, they seemed relieved.
“Whoa… So that can actually happen.”
“...Traps like that wouldn’t work on you, right, Haneul?”
“They wouldn’t. But if you destroy the gimmicks while progressing, the rewards can disappear.”
Unfortunately, I only learned that after my possession. In the game I had thought, Why solve the puzzles when you can just smash through with force? So I destroyed secret doors and traps alike, only to suffer the consequences later.
Clatter…
The sound of winding chains filled the air as the stone weight shot back up toward the ceiling and vanished into the darkness.
Because of the unexpected incident, the three figures gathered together and began talking. After a brief discussion, the smallest one pulled out something long and put it to his lips.
Toot-toot! Tweet! Toot-toot!
Cheerful brass notes rang out, and red-clad, hat-wearing dolls sprang up from the floor, lining up in neat rows. The way they moved their feet in perfect rhythm, gathering with flawless coordination, would have been impressive.
If they hadn’t only been knee-high, that is.
“Is that… a summoning ability? More importantly, don’t they look like nutcracker dolls?”
“No, the way they’re controlling the dolls suggests it’s a different ability. The dolls themselves look like pre-prepared items.”
“How can you tell all that just by looking…”
“Once you grow as big as me, it comes naturally. Don’t rush it.”
Siwoo stared at me blankly again. No matter how many times I played dumb, he kept stepping on every landmine. Did he have no sense at all?
Bleh! I stuck my tongue out at him. Only then did he look away, embarrassed.
Once all the dolls had gathered, they somehow produced a drum and began beating it in time with the melody, blending their rhythm into the brass music. The dolls marched forward in step and started searching the walls thoroughly.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Traps fell in numbers that made the previous ones seem laughable. Even as their comrades were smashed to pieces beside them, the dolls continued carrying out their duties with dedication. Wooden splinters and stone fragments flew everywhere. The trio hid behind nearby fallen rocks and simply watched.
In the end, the secret passage surrendered to their laborious physical hacking and opened itself, bringing the frenzy to a close.
“We should probably keep tailing them. They seem better at solving puzzles than we are.”
“We didn’t infiltrate illegally like them. Can’t we just bring in a specialist professor?”
“No way! If we contact the academy, they’ll steal our rewards! We don’t even know what’s behind this puzzle. We can’t risk that!”
Just imagining the director of academic affairs made me shudder. He would definitely come up with some nonsense excuse to take every artifact or reward we found. And since his reasoning would technically be correct, I wouldn’t even be able to argue.
“Then what? We just keep following them?”
“We’ll tail them until they solve all the puzzles. Then, right before they claim the reward, we snatch it first!”
“That… sounds like something villains would do…”
“No, they’re the villains. An honest person wouldn’t infiltrate the academy in the first place, right?”
“I guess…”
“Exactly. Anyway, after we get the reward, we can capture those three and interrogate them. Then we’ll know everything for sure.”
Sigh. Siwoo really was a complete novice.