Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 16 - Chapter 12

12. At the End of That Gaze

Kuzaku put his back against the wall of the New City, bending his knees and putting his hands together. Kiichi used Kuzaku’s shoulders and head as stepping stones as he clambered up the wall. Haruhiro put his right foot in Kuzaku’s hands. Kuzaku rapidly boosted him up.

They crossed the wall into the New City by night, and proceeded along the ceilings of the tunnel roads. Kiichi was in his element. He easily bounded over the holes in the roofs as he led the way, sometimes speedily climbing a building to look around, and at other times trailing behind to watch the rear. Haruhiro didn’t even have to give orders. Kiichi was a really clever nyaa. It helped that Haruhiro didn’t have to talk to him. Haruhiro preferred to keep quiet as much as possible. Not that he hated people, or anything like that.

They were heading to Ahsvasin.

They tried getting down onto the street they believed led there, but as one might expect, there was a lot of goblin traffic there. Even if he used Stealth, it wasn’t clear he could make it through.

Haruhiro and Kiichi returned to the ceiling of the tunnel road. The buildings around Ahsvasin towered over them like cliffs when they approached. Every one of them was full of holes, which was to say windows, and they were all shaped differently. That limited the number of walls it was possible to scale.

He took a risk, and tried going in one of the windows. The layout was pretty complex. Some of the rooms had a door, while others didn’t. Sometimes, there were gobs sleeping in beds that looked like piles of dirt in the middle of a corridor.

Kiichi took off at some point, but Haruhiro didn’t worry about him. While he was exploring the building, the nyaa came back. Kiichi turned back towards the direction he had come from, and wagged his tail slightly. Haruhiro interpreted that as a request to follow.

Following Kiichi, he came to a room that felt like a cellar despite not being underground. There were pots, large and small, arranged in lines and piles within. What’s this? he wondered. There was a not quite pungent, but unique, stench filling the room. It smelled both moldy and sweet.

He opened one pot, and it was filled with what he could only assume was a mass of mold, stinking a hundred times worse than what he’d already been exposed to. He hurriedly closed the lid, but his sense of smell wasn’t going to recover for quite a while.

There were a number of windows at the top of the cellar room. It would be daybreak soon.

This was likely a storehouse. Was the stuff inside of the pot food? Did they eat it? If it was fermented, that seemed possible.

Haruhiro decided to hide in the back of the storehouse and wait for night. He sensed gobs occasionally, but though they passed by the storehouse, they never entered. Kiichi slept curled into a ball at Haruhiro’s feet. If Kiichi, who had senses many times more sensitive than a human’s, could sleep here, then it had to be safe. But Haruhiro couldn’t let his guard down. Still, if he strained himself too much, he wouldn’t last. He needed to maintain his focus while resting. Turn his attention to the things that mattered. He had his back to the wall, and was halfway to nodding off, but he didn’t miss the slightest noise.

Kiichi occasionally woke up, and left the storehouse.

Haruhiro stood up once in a while to stretch. He ate his portable rations twice, sharing with Kiichi.

The sun set, and the gobs went to bed. Haruhiro and Kiichi left the storehouse.

Kiichi had been walking around the building during the day, so he had a good grasp of the layout. With the nyaa guiding him, Haruhiro was able to find the exit, but there were gobs there so he didn’t approach. He also figured out why the design felt complex to him. Maybe it was a unique feature of this building, but it had no stairs. Because of that, there was no clear distinction between the first floor, second floor, third floor, and so on. Each room varied in size and ceiling height, and most of the corridors were sloped. No stairs anywhere to be seen. Higher rooms were connected to lower rooms with holes, and there were sometimes ropes hanging through them.

Haruhiro decided to keep moving higher and higher. He had to be careful of gobs as he went, so there was no shortage of cases where he had to detour around them. It took time. But slowly, without rushing, he worked his way upward. Ever upward.

He couldn’t seem to go any higher. He searched for a window, and went out through it.

He was maybe fourteen to fifteen meters up. The wind was pretty strong. That made his legs feel a little weak. Kiichi smoothly climbed the wall. Had they made it to the top? The spot where Kiichi was now would probably be the highest point on this building.

Oh. It looked like Kiichi had been showing Haruhiro a route he could use, too. Haruhiro gave it a try, and though it didn’t work quite as well for him as it had for Kiichi, he managed to get up on the roof too.

The roof wasn’t flat. It was sort of like the shape you’d get if you tried to flatten a dumpling. There weren’t any outcroppings at the edge, so if he slipped that would be the end of him. Haruhiro cautiously knelt as he looked up at Ahsvasin, the Highest Heaven. It towered over this building. Had to be over thirty meters tall. One of the five arm-like structures growing out of it extended over the building Haruhiro and Kiichi now stood on.

“It’s huge...!”

He spoke aloud for the first time in a while. Kiichi nuzzled his head against Haruhiro’s knee. Haruhiro gave him a pat, and he narrowed his eyes happily.

“Sorry to make you come along. I think I’d have felt pretty hopeless by myself. You really helped me by being here.”

As if to say “Don’t worry about it,” Kiichi let out a short meow.

Haruhiro took several deep breaths.

Okay. Let’s go.

Haruhiro started descending from the roof. On the opposite side from the direction he’d come. The side facing Ahsvasin. Just as when he had climbed up, there weren’t many places he could climb down, either. He was forced to drop from window to window. If he couldn’t get down from where he was, he would go in through the window temporarily.

He’d have felt hopeless by himself. No, it would have been far worse than that. Without Kiichi’s assistance, this would have taken many times longer. And even then, he still might not have been able to make as much progress.

When the sky started to brighten, he was almost down to ground level. Kiichi had checked that the coast was clear, so Haruhiro went in through the window. He squinted in the direction of Ahsvasin.

I didn’t expect it to look like that.

The area surrounded by massive structures must have been the grounds of Ahsvasin. It was flat land with fences, walls, and a tunnel road leading into the structure. Or at least, that was what Haruhiro thought it would be like, but it wasn’t.

A deep trench had been gouged into the land.

Was that a moat? It didn’t seem to be filled with water. A dry moat? Or maybe they had dug a massive hole, and built Ahsvasin in the bottom of it?

The moat was maybe ten meters deep. Its width was even greater than that. Haruhiro eyeballed it at about twenty meters.

It’s not impossible to cross the moat, he thought. It’s a dry moat, so I can climb to the bottom and walk across. The problem is what comes after that. How do I enter Ahsvasin?

Should I just climb down and see what happens? No, now isn’t the time for gambles. The sun will be up soon. I should hold back for now.

Haruhiro decided to wait inside one of the buildings until night. Kiichi seemed to get that, and led him to a safe place. This time it looked like a closet, filled with sundry items. It was dusty, but easy to stay in compared to the last place. He hardly ever sensed any gobs, and even decided to lie down and go to sleep.

The day was long. He had plenty of time to think about things.

When night fell again, Haruhiro decided to check how far down he could go inside the building. He had a vague sense that there might be a space underneath the moat. If there was, could he get inside it through this building?

Once he had descended a long way, he found an exit with a door. There were no gobs around. He hesitated a little, but made up his mind.

He walked up to the door. He tried pushing and pulling the handle, but it didn’t budge. Then he tried turning the handle. That got the door to move. It slowly opened. He had tried his best to keep quiet, but it was impossible to open the door without making some noise. And it was more grating than creaking.

He peered out through the opening. Kiichi nimbly slipped through it.

It was a tunnel road. Faintly bright. A little farther down the way there was a T-junction. It looked like there was a lamplight past there.

He heard something moving behind him. A gob? There was a gob approaching from inside the building.

It would actually be more dangerous to turn back now. Haruhiro opened the door a little more, and went outside. He closed it behind him. It made an awfully big noise, and he broke into a cold sweat. Had the gobs inside the building heard that? He didn’t know. He’d already closed the door, so he had no way to check.

He must have gotten impatient, even though he hadn’t meant to. He’d crossed a dangerous bridge now.

Kiichi vanished around the T-junction. To the left. Kiichi had turned left.

Haruhiro chased after Kiichi. Out of caution, he stopped at the T-junction, poking just his face out so he could look both ways. He thought his heart was going to stop.

There. On the right side. Gobs. Not far. Maybe five meters away. They had a lamp on the ground, which they were squatting next to, doing something. They hadn’t noticed him. Actually, they were looking down at the ground. Copper armor. Helmets. Shields on their backs, and spears leaning against the tunnel wall. They were armed. These were guard gobs out on patrol, huh?

Haruhiro pulled his face back in. Kiichi had gone left. The guard gobs hadn’t spotted him. Well, from the way they were acting, they weren’t going to pay any attention to Kiichi. If they didn’t think something was there, Haruhiro might be surprised to find that they failed to notice him, too.

He checked the guard gobs once more. They were still squatting over there, doing whatever it was that they were doing. They seemed to be talking in hushed voices.

There’s no telling when the gobs in the building might come out of the door behind me.

I’m going to submerge myself.

Sink.

—Stealth.

Haruhiro went left at the T-junction. Even without turning back, he could tell what the guard gobs were doing. They were still squatting.

The tunnel road soon came to a stop, and turned right. There was no sign of Kiichi. The guard gobs seemed to be on the move. He heard footsteps.

Haruhiro continued down the tunnel road. There was another T-junction. Kiichi poked his head out from the left side quickly, then vanished back down that path. Haruhiro followed. The road curved to the right as it descended. It had quite the slope. He caught up to Kiichi. Or so he’d thought, but Kiichi was fast. It looked like things opened up on the other side of this road.

It was wide.

Really wide.

And the ceiling was high, too.

There were no holes in it. Despite that, it was bright. No, in terms of the actual amount of light, it was probably dim. But it felt pretty bright.

There were these glowing things flying around. Not one or two of them, either. Lots of them.

What in the world were they? They looked like strings. Or snakes. But snakes didn’t fly. Were they insects? They didn’t look like they had wings. They were thin and flat, and gave off a slight yellowish glow. They just twisted around to fly along slowly. They varied a lot in length. Anywhere from ten to thirty centimeters. Some were pretty thin, too.

Were they alive? Maybe he ought to call them lightworms. It wasn’t clear that they were worms, though.

Whatever the case, thanks to the lightworms he had a fairly good grasp of what this place was like, even if he couldn’t see it clearly.

These were probably the underground gardens in front of Ahsvasin. There were lines of what seemed to be statues, and he could pass in between them. The statues were goblin-shaped. Basically, gob statues. They weren’t life-sized. They had to be double, no, triple their actual heights. But the statues were more than just decoration. They were climbable, and every statue had armed goblins on top of it. Some stood, some didn’t, all keeping a wary eye for intruders. One was on the leg of a statue of a cross-legged gob, and another was sitting on the same statue’s shoulder with one knee up. Generally, there were always at least one or two armed gobs per gob statue, and sometimes there could be as many as five. There weren’t as many statues as the countless lightworms, but it wasn’t just a couple dozen of them. It was more than that.

Kiichi hadn’t stepped into the underground front garden. Obviously, Haruhiro didn’t, either.

He wouldn’t say that security was tight, but he still wasn’t convinced he could make it through.

The distance from one gob statue to another varied. Sometimes it was a meter, other times it was as much as three. He spotted gobs walking between the statues here and there, too.

If there was a battle going on, or something else drawing the gobs’ attention, he might have been able to do something. However, even if some were relaxing, these armed gobs were alert.

He had to conclude it would be tough. At this point, at least. If he took his time, he might find an opening he could use.

He didn’t feel confident. In fact, it was best to write this off as impossible.

No matter how cautiously he proceeded, the armed gobs would definitely find him. If even one noticed him, dozens would attack, and he’d be surrounded. From what he could see, a good number of them carried crossbows. He had to take that into account, too.

“...I have no choice but to do this,” Haruhiro said in the quietest voice he could, then crouched and patted Kiichi on the head.

Kiichi looked up at Haruhiro.

“I’m counting on you. Head back to the others.”

Kiichi let out the faintest meow in reply.

Haruhiro nodded three times. Everything was prepared. He breathed in, then out, and stretched. He pulled a dagger from its sheath. Not his own. The blade was red. Hi’irogane. This was Viceroy Bogg’s knife. Nodding once more, he returned the hi’irogane knife to its sheath.

“I’m heading out.”

Haruhiro stepped into the front garden.

Instead of erasing his presence, he expanded his senses as far outside himself as he could, to their utmost limits.

It was like he wasn’t here, but looking at himself from somewhere else. Almost like he was another person.

The first to lay eyes on Haruhiro was the gob sitting on the left shoulder of the nearest gob statue.

The armed gob seemed to instantly recognize there was something there, and that it wasn’t one of its kind. It started to stand, twisted its neck around, and let out a “Wohw.” Then, thinking something like, Oh, come on, is that a human? it shouted, “Fauh!” and readied its crossbow.

That set a whole chain of events in motion. There was an excited hubbub from the armed goblins on all the gob statues. The first armed gob let loose a bolt from its crossbow. So long as Haruhiro knew the shot was coming, he didn’t have much to fear from crossbows. He twisted out of the way of the incoming projectile, but he didn’t run away. Not yet. He waited patiently.

The first armed gob jumped down from its perch.

At the same time, a little farther away, another gob took a shot with its crossbow from on top of another statue. Haruhiro saw this one coming too, so he dodged it with minimal effort.

The first gob hit the ground. Just before it did, Haruhiro rushed between the statues.

Four, no, five armed gobs stood in his way. Some had crossbows in their hands, while others had their spears pointed towards him. They were still confused, though.

Haruhiro charged the armed gobs. Only one of them managed to thrust its spear at him. Haruhiro stepped in, grabbing the shaft and twisting. The armed gob dug its heels in, trying not to lose its weapon. Haruhiro let go without fighting for it, and kept rushing them. He broke through in an instant, and continued past.

Haruhiro kicked one or two of them, sending them sprawling to the ground as he passed. He then took off running before the other armed gobs could attack.

He wanted to use the gob statues to keep the armed gobs from surrounding him. But he didn’t have the leeway to both think and move now. No matter where he went, no matter which way he turned, there were armed gobs there. Some of the clever ones had stayed on their gob statues, and were taking aim at Haruhiro with their crossbows.

How many times had a spear or bolt grazed him? He couldn’t afford to count.

Even if there were times he thought, This is dangerous, he mysteriously found himself unafraid. If he let everything frighten him and tensed up, or did something stupid, he’d either be badly hurt, or be impaled, or shot to death.

That said, he had to admit he was impressed he was still alive.

He’d long since lost track of where he was. At this point, there was always at least one armed gob within a half-meter radius of Haruhiro. The spear wounds in his left thigh and upper right arm were not shallow. They ached, and badly.

Before he had time to think, I may be screwed, Haruhiro had drawn the hi’irogane knife.

“Mod Bogg! Hi’irogane!” he shouted, raising the knife up high.

He meant to dodge the spear one of the armed gobs thrust at him, but felt a strong impact in his shoulder. It hadn’t skewered him, but the spear had shaved a bit off the top of his right shoulder.

“Hi’irogane!”

Haruhiro raised his voice, grasping the spear with both hands and pushing it back with brute strength. The gob managed to keep hold of the spear, but was forced to its knees to do it.

“Mod Bogg! Hi’irogane!”

Haruhiro kicked that gob in the chin, and swung the knife around.

The armed gobs were shouting. They didn’t attack. They backed one, two paces away.

“Hi’irogane! Mod Bogg! Hi’irogane!”

“Hi’irogane, hi’irogane,” the armed gobs all said. No small number of them were looking around in search of something. They were clearly confused. What should they do? They couldn’t make that call for themselves. They needed someone to decide. That was probably what their reaction meant.

Kiichi was maybe ten meters away, on top of one of the gob statues. Looking at Haruhiro, of course.

Their eyes met.

—Or at least it felt that way.

Kiichi suddenly seemed shocked by something, and looked away. Where had his gaze moved? Probably to the top of one of the statues near Haruhiro. It happened right after that.

Something came flying at him. He knew that much.

I’ll dodge it, he was thinking when something struck him in the neck. Or rather, something like a rope wrapped around his neck.

Crap!

Am I gonna die?

“Gweh!”

It tightened around his neck. Then there was a jerk, pulling him upwards. Haruhiro struggled. He used his left hand to search for whatever was around his neck. It was hard. Metal? Like a collar. He strained his eyes downward, and saw it was red. Red metal. Hi’irogane? He looked up. There it was, on top of the statue next to him. A goblin. It had a big scar on its face. And Kiichi was looking its way. That one, huh? The goblin had a piece of red equipment, presumably made of hi’irogane. The rope or chain extending from it was wrapped around Haruhiro’s neck. Haruhiro was bound to the object that was strangling him.

“Sungyah!”

The scarred goblin pulled on the rope, or chain, or whatever it was. Haruhiro nearly lost consciousness. It was all he could do not to drop Bogg’s knife.

Kiichi was gone now.

The rope suddenly slackened, and Haruhiro fell to his knees.

Then the goblin pulled on it again.

“Ough...”

I may have messed up.

Sorry, everyone...