Chapter 8 – Misunderstanding (3)

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Translated by Jinmu

Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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Outwardly, Alon had come to Estroban to build connections.

In truth, the reason he had traveled more than a week to get there was the labyrinth south of the territory.

“…This is the place you said you needed to visit?”

“It is.”

“We spent two weeks looking for it, and there’s nothing here.”

Evan slowly scanned the empty forest. Alon did the same.

There was only an old dirt road and dense woods with no sign of anything remarkable.

That was why finding it had been such a miserable ordeal.

In the game it had been easy to locate, so he’d taken it too lightly.

At last, though, he saw the only clue he needed: a small ravine beyond the trees.

The labyrinth he sought was called the Labyrinth of Whispers.

In Psychedelia, players could only enter it in the middle of the story. The reward for clearing it was an item called Constraint.

Once he had that, his business here would be over.

When he and Evan reached the ravine, the latter immediately muttered:

“Anyone can see this place is strange.”

He was right.

Even though the sun stood high overhead, the interior of the ravine was far too dark, as if the light itself were being repelled.

That phenomenon filled Evan with caution.

For Alon, it filled him with delight.

The field effect matched exactly what he remembered from the place where the Labyrinth of Whispers appeared.

Which meant he had finally found it.

“Let’s go.”

“Young master!”

Ignoring Evan’s alarm, Alon stepped into the dark ravine.

The moment they entered, it felt as if the daylight outside had been a lie. Everything inside was swallowed in darkness.

Scattered around them were piles of stone that clearly had not formed naturally. Strange artificial patterns had been carved into them.

Past those piles stood a black entrance, dense with dark, framed by a gate marked with even more unnatural carvings.

Evan stared at it.

“How did you even know this place existed?”

“I’ve been here often.”

“…What?”

Realizing he had spoken too honestly, Alon corrected himself at once.

“A joke.”

“With that face, it doesn’t sound like one. Then how did you know?”

“There are ways.”

“For someone with ways, it took you quite a while.”

“…I didn’t expect it to take this long either.”

As Alon revisited his memories of Psychedelia, Evan asked one more thing.

“So who built this awful place?”

“A friend named Palaon.”

That was how the labyrinth was often referred to in community jokes: Palaon’s weakling dungeon.

Evan blinked at the unfamiliar name, but Alon gave him no further explanation.

“We’re going in.”

And so they did.

* * *

The Labyrinth of Whispers was made of eight rooms.

Each one presented a riddle. Solve it, and you passed safely. Fail, and the punishment was grotesque.

At one point, a hell gargoyle, a monster normally faced only in the middle of the game, was flattened from above by a descending slab of stone, crushed slowly and terribly to death.

Evan watched in disgust.

The most horrifying part was not just that a powerful monster had died so easily.

It was that the same crushing slab hung directly above their own heads as well.

Meanwhile Alon waited for the next door to open as if nothing were wrong.

Evan found his curiosity about his master deepening yet again.

In four years of working together, he had helped Alon rescue children, destroy evil groups, free girls from slavery, pay off a stranger’s debt, and deliver meaningless messages to odd people.

And despite all that, he still had no idea what Alon was truly planning.

The only consistent pattern he had found was that Alon gathered certain children at the orphanage and took an unusual interest in them.

Beyond that, he understood nothing.

He did not know how a young noble who had never once left Palladio territory could know of a place like this.

He did not know how Alon understood the labyrinth’s mechanism well enough to answer each riddle without hesitation.

And yet, precisely because every one of Alon’s strange actions had led to good outcomes, a bizarre trust had settled in Evan’s chest.

For his part, Alon was focusing desperately on anything other than the gargoyle’s execution.

Even knowing it would happen hadn’t prepared me for how nasty it would look.

When the crushing ended and the door opened, he let out a quiet breath.

The only reason he had dared enter a dungeon meant for the middle of the game despite being too weak to fight his way through it was because he knew the answers.

And because this dungeon could be challenged repeatedly so long as the reward had not been claimed, he had ground levels here over and over across countless playthroughs.

That meant he remembered every riddle.

So without fighting a single battle, he and the now exhausted Evan reached the final room.

At its center stood a shabby table.

On it lay a plain ring, so unimpressive that most people would have been openly disappointed just looking at it.

It radiated no power.

But Alon smiled.

It was definitely the item he had come for: Constraint.

And he did not care one bit that it looked ordinary.

“…Young master? The ring you were holding just now…”

Before Evan could finish, the ring dissolved into Alon’s hand.

That was normal.

Constraint was not an artifact that remained in the user’s possession. It was more like an elixir that fused with the body the instant it was used.

“We have what we came for. Let’s go.”

The moment they reached the end, the labyrinth ceased all function, as if everything in it had finally gone still.

Then they stepped back outside and found something waiting for them.

Humanoid golems, armed and standing in formation.

Evan instantly realized what they were from the patterns carved across them.

The piles of stone they had passed on the way in.

He drew his sword.

Alon stopped him.

“This time, I’ll do it.”

“…Pardon?”

Then he spoke the command.

“I enact Constraint.”

* * *

At the very instant the words left his mouth, the world stopped.

Alon’s vision turned black and white. The charging golems slowed as if seen through an ultra-high-speed camera.

Then a voice thundered inside his head.

O fragment that inherits the great will of Niakula, speak the two constraints you may enact.

The voice sounded male and female, young and old, all at once. Merely hearing it made his heart pound and his skin turn cold.

This really is different from the game.

In Psychedelia, using Constraint had simply brought up a selection window. In reality, it was a presence.

An overwhelming, uncanny one.

Forcing down his unease, Alon spoke the options he had already decided on.

“First.”

Speak.

“When using magic, I will perform the hand seals of Babylonia as an absolute requirement.”

What do you seek in return?

“Power enough to twist the laws of the world a little further.”

Granted.

“Second.”

Speak.

“When using magic, I will perform the great incantation phrases of Babylonia as a limited requirement.”

What do you seek in return?

“The same thing.”

The voice fell silent for a moment.

Then it answered.

Granted.

And before the halted world began to move again, it said one more thing:

Human who remembers the hand seals and mysteries of a forgotten great god, I offer my gratitude to you who inherit the will.

Alon was baffled.

Inherit the will? What is that supposed to mean?

He had not chosen those particular options out of any great destiny. He had chosen them because in the game they gave the highest boost to magical attack power, and because he remembered them well after using them so many times.

Even if he did not remember every hand seal and phrase from the game, he knew where to find them.

But before he could think longer on it, the voice concluded:

I shall always watch you, inheritor of the will.

The world returned to normal.

Alon raised a hand.

Mana gathered at his fingertip.

It was pitifully small. Even drawing on everything inside his body, the ball of lightning was no more than the weak glimmer of an old man’s dying dawn.

That did not surprise him. This was the limit of Palladio’s third son.

Then he spoke:

“Refraction.”

The tiny sphere unraveled into lines.

“Repulsion.”

The lines tangled and scattered.

“Azure Light.”

The thing in his hand changed from a mere spark into a crackling, blue, nonlinear radiance of hundreds and thousands of streaks.

At the same time, his fingers formed a hand seal.

His thumb covered his middle finger. Then, by reversing the hand, he made a posture like a Buddhist mudra.

By then the first golem had already reached him.

Alon looked straight at it.

“Diffracted Line.”

He flicked his fingers.

A flash shot out.

There was no proper sound.

Only a low wind-whine after the light and the sight of the golems frozen as if time had stopped.

Then all at once, more than twenty of them shattered and collapsed back into heaps of stone.

Evan, who had been about to rush in to keep them off Alon, stood there with his mouth open.

“What the hell…”