Date (2)
Now that I thought about it, the labyrinth Lirintos didn’t actually matter all that much in the original story.
The reason was simple. The heroine, Stella, received Dragon's Tear from the Crown Prince, curing her of the Curse of Misfortune, and everyone else just moved on without even knowing she’d ever been cursed in the first place.
In other words, to put it plainly, there was no reason for it to be there, so it never got much attention.
Besides, the episode where Stella contracted the Curse of Misfortune was a one-off to begin with, so why waste pages describing some damp, filthy underground labyrinth? There was barely enough room for the grand love story between the dazzling Crown Prince and the beautiful heroine as it was.
……Well, it had already stopped being a beautiful love story the moment some new character barged in at the end and confessed she was pregnant with the male lead’s child.
Still, for all those reasons, Lia and I had entered the underground labyrinth of Lirintos, which the original novel barely mentioned at all, and were now walking forward for about thirty minutes in search of the demon woman Grace, who supposedly knew how to lift the curse.
“Hmm….”
According to the scant description of Lirintos—less than a page in the entire original novel—if you followed the right wall from the entrance for about an hour, you’d eventually reach the labyrinth’s center.
That made it sound less like a labyrinth and more like a two-hour round-trip cave, but the reason Lirintos was called a labyrinth had nothing to do with its structure.
The real reason was the illusion magic laid over the surrounding land, making it impossible not to wander no matter how long you walked.
The illusion spell radiating outward from the labyrinth’s center was a fourth-tier spell. Unless you were a very competent mage, there was no way to break through it, and ordinary people who weren’t sensitive to mana wouldn’t even realize the magic was there.
Which was probably why it had gone undiscovered all this time, sleeping quietly beneath Reinhardt territory.
But now that I’d found the proper path, the illusion magic—its very purpose being to deceive the world—would start to unravel, and before long, others would discover the entrance to Lirintos too.
-, .
Water dripped behind me as I lost myself in thought. Lia, walking a step behind me, must have been hit by water falling from a stalactite, because she suddenly let out a startled gasp and shook all over.
“Eep!”
“Are you all right, Lady Lia?”
“I-I’m fine, but… um, you know. Cain?”
“Yes?”
“You, uh. Do you like gloomy places like this…?”
“Huh? What do you mean, like them?”
“……N-never mind!”
“Ah, yes.”
That was odd. Why start talking and then stop?
She looked like she didn’t want to say more, so I decided to let it go and got back to work.
I offered my left hand so Lia could hold onto my sleeve, and with my right hand I kept brushing the wall as I pushed deeper inside.
After about five minutes like that, we finally came across one of the monsters that lived in Lirintos.
“Grrrrr….”
“Ca-Cain! A monster, a monster appeared…!”
“Yes, so it seems.”
The monster growling at us with that awful voice was a Hellhound. Just as its name suggested, it had a pitch-black body as if it had crawled straight out of hell, with three doglike heads attached to it.
Despite its appearance, it was an extremely dangerous fighter. In the original, I vaguely remembered it saying that you’d probably need to be a full knight to beat one one-on-one.
It was my first time seeing a Hellhound in person, so without thinking, I focused on studying its shape. Then Lia suddenly seized the hem of my clothes and tugged hard.
“C-Cain…! Don’t just stand there and watch. Do something. Please do something. I’m scared….”
“Ah, understood. I’m sorry, Lady Lia.”
I took hold of the sword hilt with my free right hand. The finely honed blade slid free with a metallic ring and settled into my grip.
-Grrr, grrrrrr!
Realizing I’d drawn my sword and identified me as the enemy, the Hellhound sprang toward us with another of its awful growls. Lia screamed, and I moved my hand.
With a single clean stroke, the sword blade plunged in and split the Hellhound’s middle head perfectly in half. It was as if I’d sliced through water with a knife. The beast’s weak point—the center head—was cut cleanly apart, and it collapsed to the ground.
Not a trace of postmortem twitching. A neat, instant death.
“……W-what happened, Cain?”
“Yes, I sent it to Lord Pluto’s side.”
In this world, saying someone had been sent to Lord Pluto’s side was a refined way of saying they’d been killed.
Lia seemed to understand that too. She opened her tightly shut eyes, looked down at the floor, and then let out a cry when she saw the Hellhound with its middle head split in two.
“Ahh, hiiii-!”
“There’s no need to be this frightened, Lady Lia. We still have a long way to go.”
“……C-couldn’t I just go back home?”
Lia looked up at me with eyes gone wet and asked the question.
She looked so pitiable that for a moment my heart almost wavered, but I steeled myself and shook my head.
“No, you can’t. Let’s keep going together.”
“Eeeh….”
* * *
Meanwhile, in the center of the labyrinth Lirintos.
Grace, the demon woman sitting on the makeshift chair she’d set up for herself and watching Cain and Lia make their way toward the labyrinth’s center, was once again in shock.
Th-this can’t be real. It just can’t be real…!
The reason was Cain’s swordsmanship, which had far surpassed her expectations.
The brat she’d seen before—Cain—didn’t just carve through a Hellhound’s head like paper. He had split a cave orc in half, too, despite its skin being as hard as stone and notorious for giving swordsmen a hard time.
And when a wraith appeared—an incorporeal monster made to resist physical attacks and one of the prepared defenses against intruders—he had simply poured mana into his blade and cut it apart, erasing it in a single strike.
What kind of ridiculously strong little monster is that?!
She’d already known he was no ordinary child when he cut down the assassin who had reinforced his body with physical augmentation, but who could have imagined that he’d already know how to use a mana sword at such a young age?
If this kept up, every countermeasure Grace had prepared would become useless. The boy’s swordsmanship was monstrous, so the monsters scattered throughout the labyrinth would be of little help, and if she sent out monsters made of spirit bodies, he’d just cut them all down with mana sword techniques anyway.
……W-what do I do?
She didn’t know how they’d found where she was in the first place, but if she left them alone, it was only a matter of time before those brats reached the labyrinth’s center, and with it, her.
If that boy found her—if that black-haired brat, who showed not a shred of mercy, saw her, a black mage who had dabbled in forbidden dark magic…?
……She didn’t know for sure, but he absolutely would not leave her alone.
A chill ran down her spine.
Grace had just begun trembling in dread at the future she could already picture when, through the ears of the cave rat sharing her vision, Lia’s urgent voice reached her.
“Cain! Below us, down below!”
“Pardon? Below us? What do you mean?”
“Something’s coming up from beneath our feet. I can feel a strong flow of mana!”
“Understood. Lady Lia, please hold onto my neck!”
Cain swept Lia into his arms in a princess carry and sprang backward in one swift motion. Right after that, a giant centipede burst through the cave floor and lashed out with its sharp mandibles, tearing into the very spot where Cain and Lia had just been standing.
Thanks to Lia’s warning, Cain avoided the ambush. He swung his sword, severed the centipede’s sharp jaws, and then split the monster cleanly in half from the top of its head straight down to finish it off.
[Cain, are you okay? You’re not hurt, are you?!]
[Yes, I’m perfectly fine. And you, Lady Lia? Are you injured?]
[No, I’m fine.]
[Then I’m glad. But how did you know something was coming up from below us, Lady Lia?]
[Well… I’m a little sensitive to the flow of mana. So I just instinctively knew something was coming toward us from beneath our feet.]
[Is that so? How fortunate. If not for your sensing ability, both of us would have been in serious trouble.]
[N-no, that’s not true. If it weren’t for Cain’s swordsmanship, it wouldn’t have mattered if I noticed it ahead of time.]
[Then shall we say this was a joint effort between the two of us?]
[Ah. S-sure…?]
……These two.
She was facing a serious crisis, and these kids, who still had milk on their lips, were off hugging each other and flirting in an underground labyrinth.
Grace nearly snapped and spoke up then and there, infuriated by the sudden sickening sweetness of Cain and Lia, but she barely managed to rein herself in and swallow the rage.
“……Haa.”
Calm down, Grace. This isn’t the time to get distracted by that. Didn’t they say crisis is opportunity? Now, while those brats aren’t paying attention to their surroundings, I’ll strike from behind and subdue them…!
Grace focused her mind. What she was using was black magic of the sixth circle: Creation of Life.
Although her rank was low and she could only create imperfect lifeforms, that would still be enough to subdue two overconfident little brats.
Above the six-pointed magic circle, which overflowed with ominous energy at a glance, appeared the form of the venomous insect created by Grace, the caster.
Grace transferred her will into her newly created construct and ordered it to fly above Cain and Lia’s heads and inject them with poison.
“Hehe. You must never let your guard down in a labyrinth that belongs to someone else’s front yard, little boy….”
As Grace curved her lips into a strange smile, her creation—the venomous insect—left the center of the labyrinth and sped toward Cain and Lia.
The two of them weren’t far from the center, so the insect was able to reach above their heads in less than thirty seconds. To drive its poisonous stinger into Cain and Lia, it plunged downward in a rapid, acrobatic dive directly toward the top of Cain’s skull…
──Thwack!
[What was that?]
……Or rather, it would have, if it hadn’t been annihilated in midair.
The reason was simple. Grace didn’t know it, but Cain’s five senses were exceptionally sharp, and if he focused, he could even hear the flutter of a bird’s wings from thirty meters away.
“N-no way…!”
Watching her creation lose its life because of Cain’s indifferent flick of the hand, Grace screamed without meaning to.
She had never expected him to notice even that, and now she had no more means of resistance.
As if to drive the nail in deeper, Lia, who had been quietly staring at the insect’s corpse, pointed off in one direction with her index finger and said,
[Cain, that bug. I think it came from over there.]
[Pardon? How did you know that?]
[When the bug flew in, I felt a suspicious flow of mana. I’m sure of it—the source is over there.]
……Eh?
Staring at the direction Lia pointed, Grace nearly lost her mind. The place Lia indicated matched the location of the labyrinth’s center—where Grace herself was—without even a hair’s breadth of error.
“……Hah!”
Panicking, Grace sprang to her feet.
She had no idea how that brat had discovered her position, but now that she’d been exposed, the workshop was irrelevant.
Workshop or no workshop, she needed to run before those brats got here. A workshop was precious to a mage, but her life was more precious than a workshop that could always be rebuilt.
Just as Grace made up her mind and was about to move, Cain crouched down on the spot and picked up the insect’s already dead head between his index finger and thumb.
[Hey, you who sent this. Can you hear me?]
“……W-what?!”
[So, stay right there and wait. If you try to run and I catch you, you know what’ll happen?]
[I’ll find you one way or another and turn you into someone who can never use magic again. That’ll be worse than just losing your arms and legs, you know?]
[Behave yourself.]
With a flick, Cain threw away the insect’s head and moved on.
Grace, who had been seeing and hearing everything through the cave rat,
—thud.
slumped to the floor, because Cain’s red eyes, filled with that warning, were still vivid before her.
“A-ahh….”
She nearly wet herself on the spot.