Who Could It Be? (5)
“You’re way too weak for how tough you look.”
“No matter how I look at it, isn’t Haneul just ridiculously strong?”
The boss had barely taken a few hits before this one-legged squid jerky had already turned into shredded dried seafood. I’d been excited to finally face a monster that looked somewhat powerful and get to flex a bit, but it turned out to be so weak I wondered if it was even B-rank. Still, we got something out of it, so that was a relief.
“The ring was in here!”
A metallic glint caught my eye among the shredded mummy jerky. When I checked, sure enough, there was the ring. The one displayed earlier must have been a preview of the boss’s drop item.
“Ugh… it feels like it was inside its body. Is this really a ring?”
“If it fits on a finger, it’s a ring. Simple as that.”
The protagonist picked it up with a dubious expression and slipped it into his pocket. Then, as if something had occurred to him, he asked,
“Now that I think about it, this gate had a lot of elements from movies and games, right?”
“Yeah, it did.”
“And you know what usually happens when you get the final treasure in those kinds of setups, don’t you?”
“Huh? Usually…?”
“This seems like a real emergency now.”
“You didn’t think so when the giant ball was rolling at us?!”
“Of course not.”
I pulled the robot vacuum out of my backpack and had the protagonist sit on it.
“Hold on tight! I never expected to use it like this, so I didn’t install any seatbelts!”
“How tight should I— whoa!!!”
I accelerated lightly all the way to the door. Seeing how well he stayed on, it looked like we could make it to the exit without any problems.
“Where did those three stooges go? They were wrapped in anti-magic chains, so they shouldn’t have been able to use their abilities.”
“Looks like they bolted that way!”
The protagonist, barely clinging to the robot vacuum with one hand, pointed at a wall. A passage that hadn’t been there before had opened up, but it was already collapsed and blocked with sand and stone. Since I wasn’t used to taking many prisoners alive, my binding must have been sloppy and they’d escaped on their own.
“A secret door! And if we can’t even detect them, they must have already gotten far away!”
“Then we’d better get moving too!”
The chain reaction of destruction that had just begun was now trying to burst past the massive door. Dust exploded out through the gaps first, and even that enormous door was barely holding it back.
“I’m accelerating again! If you think you’re going to fall, raise your hand!”
“How am I supposed to raise my— aaaaah!”
The acceleration started once more. The collapse seemed to be spreading from the starting point throughout the entire structure; wherever we went, stone fragments were falling from the ceiling. That’s why I flew ahead of the protagonist and knocked away the falling debris.
Lava floors, closing walls, rooms full of spikes… The puzzles we had passed raced by in a blur behind us. After speeding through the shattered puzzles and the trap rooms being buried under rubble and sand, a sloped corridor came into view.
“We’re going up this time!”
The protagonist didn’t even have time to answer; he just gripped the robot vacuum with all his strength. We shot up the rolling stone slope in an instant. When the now-uphill slope ended and we paused briefly to run straight, the protagonist’s body floated upward from the inertia.
I glanced down. Dozens of meters behind us, a wave of sand dust and crushed stone was swallowing the torches and chasing us like a living thing. We flew over the floor trap that no longer had any floor left and nearly reached the first puzzle room.
But the chamber visible through the passage at the top of the stairs was gradually getting smaller. The stone door that had been open was slowly descending.
“Accelerate! Hold on tight!”
“Ugh… uuuuu…!”
The two of us shot forward even faster and passed through the rapidly closing door, but—
Clang!
Only the protagonist and I made it safely inside the room. The robot vacuum had slammed into the stone door and fallen to the other side. Since the protagonist had been hanging underneath it, inertia must have carried him into the room anyway.
I quickly reached out with my power, pulled the robot vacuum back to our side, and the instant my hand withdrew, the stone door sealed shut. But there was no time to rest. I shoved the vacuum under the sprawled protagonist and activated it again.
The firmly locked stone door was beginning to shake, and the surrounding stone slabs trembled in unison. And as the slabs shook, stone pendulums dropped all at once in what seemed like their final descent.
I pinned every last one of them in midair with telekinesis so they couldn’t fulfill their purpose.
“There’s the exit!”
The entrance we had come through was visible. Unlike before, it looked blocked by something, but with a brief moment of concentration, the obstacles flew forward and out of the way.
Whoosh!
The moment we exited the gate, fresh air greeted us. Even though it was the basement of a construction site and smelled of damp cement, it was far better than the choking stench of sand.
“Looks like the culprits ran away first. Someone blocked the entrance pretty sloppily.”
“Ugh… my arms are numb…”
“Still better than getting buried beyond the gate, right?”
“I think we should find a better method. Like piling up stones to make a chair or something.”
“Then you wouldn’t be able to suffer… I mean, you wouldn’t get to do your arm workout.”
“You definitely said ‘suffer’! This is a life-or-death situation for someone!”
“Aww, I was planning to catch you if you let go~ But you were holding on just fine, weren’t you?”
That was the honest truth. If the protagonist ever lost his grip, I could just teleport over, snatch him up, and carry him. The only reason I held back was that carrying a grown man wouldn’t look good for either of us.
After hearing my explanation, the protagonist took the loot out of his pocket to examine it, then let out a sigh as the tension finally left him.
“By the way, Haneul. Wouldn’t it have been better to just fall out of the gate?”
“Why?”
“Well, because…”
“…From now on, let’s act first and talk later.”
“Yeah… maybe we should.”
After the complete mess we’d become, the protagonist and I returned to the training grounds and used the showers. Fortunately, it wasn’t a busy time, so the women’s shower room was empty. I finished showering in a flash just in case, and when I came out, the protagonist and Peony had already finished and were chatting.
“So we barely managed to escape the collapsing tomb, and…”
“Ooh! So that’s why you smell so strange!”
“Ahem! Peony, how was the bow?”
“Ah! It’s Haneul!”
This guy was trying to score points while I wasn’t around. But I couldn’t let that happen!
“Did the new bow feel good?”
“It’s way, way better than I expected! It feels like it sticks perfectly to my hand the moment I draw it!”
“Hehe, I’m so glad the gift I gave you is helpful, sis.”
“I even broke one of the training dummies inside the range, and everyone around us was shocked!”
But I had already scored points in advance. I hadn’t expected things to go this well, but no matter how it turned out, it was all good!
After a rather chaotic day, we took care of the aftermath of the incident. The ring the protagonist obtained was sent for appraisal to a ‘reliable’ institution outside the academy. When I called the vice-principal to explain what had happened, he sounded like his insides were turning over as he complained. Before the sun had even set, he called back, and the full story of the incident came to light.
The gate discovered during the academy’s construction had been reported by several construction workers to their superiors. However, the higher-ups had threatened them into silence and hired mercenaries to monopolize the rewards inside the gate. The police personally visited those executives and sent them straight to prison, but the whereabouts of the mercenaries remained unknown. That was the extent of the official announcement.
‘But you know, it’s possible the real masterminds higher up cut off their own tails.’
“Tails? What kind of parent company are we talking about?”
‘A big shot, that’s what. Star Plus. They’ve invested in every industry that changed because of gates—from manufacturing to cutting-edge tech and power generation.’
A corporation, huh… In the game, I had only focused on clearing gates and dealing with villains, so I was completely clueless about this side of things.
“I’m not sure. I don’t have any connections with corporations.”
‘Yeah. The habit of only beating up gates and villains all day long for years doesn’t just disappear.’
“Anyway, if you find any information I might need or if there’s anything else, please contact me again.”
‘Oh, and this isn’t about the case, but… do you check All-Time?’
All-Time? Just from the name, it sounded like something related to the internet.
“Is All-Time some kind of internet gallery or bulletin board?”
‘Ah… you don’t know? Never mind then. You’ll find out for yourself tomorrow.’
“Exactly what am I going to find out?”
‘It’s really nothing. Just some childish prank.’
With those final words, he hung up.
And the next day, I learned exactly what that childish prank was.
My humiliating photo was circulating around internet communities.
I silently opened my backpack and pulled out the bat that healed people.
“Perfect weather for fixing one human being…”
The weather today was cloudy, with occasional rain and lightning.