Chapter 17
AS THE EVENING DEEPENED, the twinkling of starlight overhead banished the foul haze, and the city tried to put itself back to normal. Under a streetlamp, Emella and her friends parted ways with Mira and Tact after extracting a promise to attend their afterparty at the Spring Flurry, a local tavern.
The little summoner set off for the Mages’ Guild with Tact in tow, grumbling to herself about mandatory fun. She was so cross with herself that she failed to notice what was going on at the guild halls until she heard Tact say, “Looks like they’re busy…”
She looked up with a start at the scene before exchanging a glance with the boy.
“Quite,” she muttered.
Grabbing the boy’s hand, Mira waded into the office through a sea of people and found a corner that seemed to be relatively quiet compared to the rest. It happened to be near the recycling bin for dungeon passes, so she took the opportunity to do her civic duty.
The moment she slipped the used pass into the slot, the box chimed and a girl’s voice said, “Thank you for your cooperation and assistance.”
“What in the world?” she mumbled as a tiny hologram of a girl appeared standing atop the box for a few seconds. After bowing to Mira, she vanished. This left the summoner to wonder if this was a work of ethereal magic or if it was a product of Solomon’s technomancy.
Tact took a more practical approach and began peering into any slot or opening in search of the missing palm-sized girl.
“Oh, Miss Mira!” a voice rang out, and she turned to see Eurica holding some documents and walking her way.
“Ah. It’s you,” Mira said after taking a moment to recognize who was approaching.
“Did you already visit the Ancient Temple?”
“Hrmm, yes. That business is all wrapped up, so I figured I should recycle the pass.”
“Oh, well, thank you. May I ask who the child is?” Eurica asked with a glance at Tact, who was still investigating the recycling bin.
“I met him yesterday, and he says he wants to be a summoner! I understand the guild gives some sort of aptitude test for that. Can we have that done here?”
“My name is Tact, and I want to be strong like Miss Mira!” Tact gave Eurica a bow, his face set in a look of determination.
“Well, hello, Tact. I’m Eurica. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said with a gentle smile. “As a friend of Miss Mira’s, I am sure we can get this sorted out quickly if you’ll just give me a moment; Miss Mira and I have a little business to attend to first.”
It took Mira a moment to realize what Eurica was talking about.
“Ah, yes. You mentioned some other paperwork or something?” she asked, wondering if she’d been told what it was and simply forgotten. “Hrmm, very well. So long as I’m here, we might as well get it over with.”
“If you’d just come this way, please.” Clutching some papers, Eurica pushed through the crowd still assembled in the building. Mira took Tact’s hand once more and followed along.
She led them behind the counters, then up the steps to the guild leader’s office. With a brief smile to indicate that they’d arrived, she raised a hand and rapped lightly on the door.
“I’ve brought Miss Mira as requested, sir.”
“Oho, is that so?” came a voice from inside. “By all means, show her in.”
Eurica stepped aside from the slightly cracked door and then bent over so she could speak to Tact, face-to-face. “While Miss Mira has her talk, you come with me. We’ll see about getting that aptitude test done.”
Tact seemed ready to burst with excitement, then looked to Mira to make sure he was allowed to go on alone. She gestured to Eurica with her free hand and nodded.
“This might take a while; go ahead,” she said, untangling her fingers from his grip.
“All right!” Tact quickly moved to take Eurica’s hand instead, and Mira watched the two go off down the corridor to assess his magical potential.
Opening the door to the office, she called, “You wanted to see me?”
Leoneil was polishing his glasses and waved the cloth in her direction as she entered. A moment later, he had them perched back on his nose. He looked her up and down, gesturing to the seats by the coffee table. Before she could even sit, an attendant entered from a side door and began laying out cakes and tea. From the looks of it, Leoneil or his staff had taken notes on Mira’s favorites.
“You look to be in high spirits,” he said with a smile as he retrieved two items from his desk and made his way to join her. “Well, first off, these are for you.”
Popping a piece of cake into her mouth, Mira glanced over and saw a black card and a sealed envelope in his hand.
“What’s this? Solomon’s doing, no doubt,” she mumbled through her bite of cake as she placed her fork next to her plate and picked up the card. It was black and smooth as glass, and had strange sigils etched on the back.
“That pass will allow you to enter the restricted areas.”
“Restricted areas?” Mira questioned with a suspicious glance.
Leoneil had anticipated the question, and he reached beside his chair to retrieve a map of the Schmegoffe region and surrounding islands. They’d once been a zone in Ark Earth Online.
Placing a finger on a symbol, he asked, “Have you heard of dungeons called the Devils’ Labyrinths?”
“Hrmm. I’ve heard of them,” Mira said noncommittally. This situation smelled of more work—the Devils’ Labyrinths had a reputation for dropping good loot but being a pain to clear.
The Devils’ Labyrinths were dungeons governed by a unique set of rules. Danblf had practically lived there for a while, so it stood to reason he’d have mentioned it to Mira.
Leoneil nodded at Mira’s terse answer. “Good. That’ll make this easier, then. It’s always been a…different sort of place, but its eccentricities have been increasing. We’ve been forced to classify them as a special restricted area.”
“Eccentricities? What do you mean?”
The Devils’ Labyrinths were quite different compared to standard dungeons. All the enemies in the dungeon were stronger subspecies of other monsters. The chests and bosses in the deepest reaches of the dungeons would sometimes carry extremely rare items bearing the name of devils themselves—hence the players’ nickname for them.
Why the strong monsters? Why the special equipment? These were the primary mysteries surrounding the dungeons, but if the guild leader was saying something had been “increasing,” he must have been referring to something else.
“It seems that after a certain amount of time has passed after being looted, the treasure in its vaults is…replenished.”
“So wha—I mean, oho… Well, now, that is interesting.”
It had seemed to be the most obvious and uninteresting statement in the world…or rather in the game. But the days were gone when players simply waited for a dungeon to respawn so they could run it again.
When Mira’s party had descended into the Ancient Temple earlier that day, monsters still dropped loot, but the massive chest at the dungeon’s end no longer contained any treasure at all. If there was a dungeon still behaving like that, then it was interesting indeed.
“So you’re saying…there’s some issue surrounding these reappearing treasures?” Mira asked, immediately hatching a scheme to farm the loot and reap boundless profits.
“Of course Danblf’s pupil would immediately hit upon the issue.” Leoneil nodded, oblivious to her ulterior motives. “Just so. Once the word spread, adventurers flocked to the dungeon. More lives were lost in fights over treasure than were lost clearing out the monsters. The situation got so out of hand, we had to make the area almost entirely off-limits.”
Leoneil grimaced and traced a spot on the map, a dense forest on Alcait’s southwestern frontier.
“This is the Primal Forest, and that pass will allow you entry to it and the Devils’ Labyrinths. I had to pull a few strings to get it done, but when the king asks…” His words seemed to begrudge the chore, but his eyebrows were piqued with interest.
“You don’t seem too broken up about it, though.”
“Oh, no, no! I requested a little favor in return,” he said with a smile. “Always good to have the king owe you one.”
“Hopefully nothing too big. He’s got a lot on his plate at the moment.” She put down the card and picked up the sealed envelope. “And this?”
She held the envelope up to the light and peered at it, but the paper was too thick to make anything out.
“Arrived just this morning via dragon post and addressed to you. Sent by someone named Lily. Do you know her?”
After a moment of consideration, the name rang a bell. Lily had been her designated maidservant back at the palace.
A shiver ran down Mira’s spine. “Hrmm, I-I know her.”
“Well! I’d be interested to meet the woman who could elicit such a reaction from the pupil of Danblf himself,” Leoneil said with a good-natured smirk.
Mira had no idea why Lily would go through the trouble of sending her a sealed letter—but it couldn’t be good. At least it wasn’t another box of gothic lolita clothing. She chucked the letter into her Item Box and resolved to read it later.
“Changing topics. Demons.” Mira eyed Leoneil to observe his reaction. She got a raised eyebrow.
“It seems you’ve seen something,” he said after a moment of silence—his tone was concerned, but not surprised.
“There was a demon on the sixth level of the Ancient Temple,” she said, taking another bite of cake and washing it down with some tea. The guild leader had asked her to scout the dungeon, and she saw no better time to make her report.
“Really?” he asked with a worried look. “A demon? Not a Lesser Demon, but an actual, full-on demon?”
“A third-ranked count at that.”
Leoneil’s jovial nature was banished by the news. He knew what his intelligence network was hearing—but those had just been rumors. Now there was little doubt that the corrupt entities that had been eradicated thirty years ago were reappearing in the world. To make matters worse, they were on his doorstep.
Perhaps some had survived?
Had the report come from any other adventurer besides Mira, Leoneil would have simply regarded it as exaggeration or false boasting. If Mira hadn’t come with the king’s recommendation and validation that she was Danblf’s pupil, he probably wouldn’t have believed her either. He might not like it, but this was a highly credible report.
“But how?” he murmured to himself, turning over recent events in his mind. “No, I see. That accounts for…”
“You seem to have some idea.” Mira watched his eyes go wide and his mouth tweak into a smile.
“Ah, yes. It has to do with the ward at the Ancient Temple.” He fidgeted, pointing at the air as if tracing the lines of connection between clues that had seemed unrelated until now. “Let me review—the Ancient Temple is a dungeon with only one way in and one way out. We installed the ward that controls that access point.”
“Indeed,” Mira mumbled through another bite of cake.
“Demons can’t just walk through the wards—but the demon was there. So how did it get in?”
“Hrmm, the ward was active.” She nodded, allowing herself to be drawn into the unfolding riddle.
Leoneil noticed and reached over to pull another document from the corner of his desk before tossing it to her. Unwilling to drop her forkful of cake, she batted at the flying papers with her off hand and knocked them onto the sofa.
“About a month ago, we had a problem with the warding system. The cause was unknown at the time, but your report is another piece of the puzzle.”
Picking up the sheaf of papers, Mira checked over the information written on them. They appeared to be maintenance and inspection records for the warding system at the Ancient Temple Nebrapolis. Most of it was meaningless to her, but her eye caught on a column that listed causes of failure.
It said that an incredibly strong force had been applied to the ward from the outside.
“I don’t know how tough your ward is, but that demon might have been able to breach it.”
“Just so. When I read the reports, I believed them to be in error—wishful thinking on my part! A demon count would have doubtlessly been able to disable the ward on a C-Rank dungeon, but who would have thought such a monster even existed?” Then he muttered, “It makes perfect sense in hindsight.”
“So we think this demon showed up a month ago?”
“That’s a reasonable assumption, since that’s when we first started having trouble with the ward.” With arched eyebrows, Leoneil looked over the rim of his spectacles at Mira. “That also lines up with the appearance of the zombies.”
He sat back and brooded over everything he knew about the situation in the light of this revelation. He muttered an occasional “I see,” “but then,” and “that means…” Meanwhile, Mira focused her attention on her cake and a certain sentence in the report.
Whereabouts of one investigator still unknown.
“I can’t imagine the zombies and the demon are unrelated. Which means that the outbreak this evening must have had something to do with the demon.” Gathering his thoughts, Leoneil looked out his window over the city that had been a battlefield barely an hour ago. “Quite serious indeed. Do you know the current whereabouts of the demon?”
Speculation was all well and good, but the threat needed to be addressed. And the sooner, the better. Forces would need to be mustered and an expedition mounted to neutralize the enemy.
“Dead,” said Mira flatly. “He was useful as a…test subject for me to try out my battle skills now that…I’m no longer with Master Danblf. It, uh, always pays to see how one’s skills work in the real world.”
Visually relieved, Leoneil flopped back in his chair and let out a long, sighing breath. “Wonderful. Simply marvelous. I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised, but at the same time, the city cannot thank you enough for that service.”
Then his face clouded over, and a frown returned. “But even if we know the cause of the zombie outbreak, we still don’t know the reason. I thought perhaps the zombies were searching for something, but if a demon was involved, then that hypothesis doesn’t hold water.”
“Hrmm. If they were searching for something, it would have been easier to use Devil-Bats or the Ceiling-Eyes.” Mira reeled off the monsters from memory. They’d been frequent summons for demons in need of scouts during in-game events. Zombies were cannon fodder at best.
“Well, whatever the reason, that doesn’t explain that whole incident this afternoon. It was very different from the actions of the zombies we’ve observed before. They’d been worrisome but nonviolent.”
As Leoneil continued to ponder the hidden truth behind the incursion, he submerged himself entirely within his own subconscious. Somewhere, there was an answer, if only he could turn every clue on edge and assemble the puzzle properly. He stared up at the ceiling, trying to think of everything in new ways.
Leaving the man to his brooding, Mira enjoyed a few more slices of cake, then quietly thanked his attendant and showed herself out of the guild leader’s office.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login