Chapter 19
SNAKE AND MIRA searched the room, but found no especially useful clues. After several more fruitless minutes, they left in hopes of better news from the two examining the corpses outside.
In the war room, Aaron and Scorpion were crouched down looking at some items lined up on the floor.
“How did it go?” Mira asked Aaron while Snake and Scorpion had a quiet discussion.
Aaron turned his face slightly to her and answered, “Well, take a look,” before returning his gaze to the floor. Before them were the possessions of the dead Chimera Clausen troops: three short swords covered in strange symbols, several vials of liquid, a cloth with magic circles, eight maps, and a stack of dungeon permits.
After looking them over, Mira took one item in hand. “There are eight maps, but it seems as though there are only two variations.” She unfolded the map and saw that it was far more detailed than the ones she had used in-game. Unable to remember what it was a map of, she furrowed her delicate brows and searched her memories.
“Yeah. One is a map of here, the Citadel of Scales. The other is—”
Before Aaron could answer, Mira finally recalled the dungeon that fit the layout of the second map. With a glint in her eye, she said its name: “The Illusory Corridor.”
“That’s right. All four members of Chimera had one of each map on hand. Those are their permits to the Illusory Corridor, too.” Aaron gestured with his eyes to the cards on the floor.
“All four of them had the same?” Mira picked one up curiously. If they were acting as a group, one permit should be enough.
“Yeah, one of each. Chimera goons usually act alone, so it’s not that strange. These four probably all left for this mission individually.”
“I see. That would make them stand out less, I suppose.”
“Exactly. Oh, hey, how was it in there? Find anything?” Aaron looked at Mira expectantly.
She sat in front of the dead men’s belongings and shook her head. “Nothing in particular, I’m afraid. The only unusual thing was that the orbs usually set in the pillars are gone. But it’s impossible to tell whether that was their doing.” Mira put the map back in its spot on the floor and sighed in disappointment.
“Hm… The pillars, huh?” Aaron mumbled to himself. After thinking awhile, he scooped up a bundle of papers and held it out to Mira. “Take a look at these.”
Mira took it and flipped through the pages. “Sketches of the pillars?”
Every sheet in the bundle was familiar—they were drawings of the control room Mira had searched moments ago. There were dozens of them, drawn from every possible angle, including a bird’s-eye view. Numbers in the corner of each page indicated what angle they were drawn from compared to the top-down sketch.
“Seems like it. I don’t remember anything about orbs, but if these pillars have something to do with the Spirit King, then you must be right.” Aaron grabbed another bundle of papers and flipped through it. There were similar sketches of the pillars in this stack, as well.
“Are those drawings of the same room again?” Mira peeked at the one he held and compared it to her own. It seemed to be drawn by another hand, as the style and angles differed. However, the reference numbers were shared between them.
“Yeah. There are two more like it. I don’t know what these pictures mean, but hopefully the fact that we have them now instead of them will set them back.”
“Indeed.”
Even if Mira and the others couldn’t tell what the sketches were for, they must have been necessary for Chimera’s objective of hunting the Spirit King. Mira put the bundle of papers back in its spot and flipped through the others.
They all had different styles, but they were all sketches of the pillars.
“Hrmm. Shall we take a quick look?” Mira stood and headed back to the control room with a bundle in hand. Aaron, excited that Mira seemed to have hit upon something, followed silently.
After a fresh look around the control room, Mira once again scanned the sketches. She matched the numbers on them to the bird’s-eye view diagram, stood in those positions, and compared her view to the pages. She repeated this process for ten minutes and change until she finally muttered, “I see.” She turned and flashed Aaron a confident smirk.
“You look like you’ve figured something out,” he said.
“Only a hypothesis,” Mira answered and folded herself down onto the floor next to Aaron. “Put simply, these sketches were made to get an accurate view of the positions of the orbs and where they fit into the pillars.”
Mira and Aaron sat facing each other. After glancing up at him to make sure he was following, she shifted her gaze to the paper in her hands.
“The positions of the orbs, huh? Does that mean they were important, then?”
“Right. Actually, now that I’m looking more closely…this is precisely my forte. It seems that each of those pillars represents a spirit.”
“Represents a spirit? What do you mean—I can’t make much sense of it.” Aaron stared at the sketch with a frown. He had the natural gift of being able to remember something perfectly after seeing it once, but as spirits were invisible, his knowledge of them was only surface level.
“That’s understandable. I didn’t realize it at first, either. But upon closer inspection, this is something I’m rather well acquainted with,” Mira added with a triumphant smile.
Fighters couldn’t see them, after all. But as a summoner, Mira had seen them many times—and had to fret over them constantly.
“What do you know about skill trees?” Mira began, then launched into her explanation. A common concept in games, they were a display of the complex, divergent ways in which one could develop their skills. They’d existed in Ark Earth Online.
“Skill tree? I think I’ve heard some intellectual types mention that, but I don’t know much about it.”
“I see,” Mira murmured, opening the bundle of papers and tossing some out in front of her. “Put in broad terms, a skill tree is a simplified visual representation of the many routes one could take from the bottom to the top. This should help make it clear.”
Mira pointed at one of the pillar holes in a sketch. “We summoners understand the latent abilities of contracted spirits through skill trees. Looking at this again, I can see that the holes on this pillar are laid out in a skill tree’s shape. There are some I don’t know mixed in, but then again, I have not made a contract with every spirit out there.”
At this point, Mira stood up and touched a few of the control room pillars. “This is wind, this is fire, and this is water. But I have no idea about this one, this one, or this one!” She smacked the last few pillars in irritation. As a summoner, a mage attended by spirits, she couldn’t stand the fact that there were spirits she did not yet grasp.
Though they were in different fields, Aaron sympathized with both Mira’s pride and frustration. At the same time, he was amazed by the number of spirits she claimed to have grasped. Having grasp of a spirit essentially meant having made a contract with it. It meant Mira already had dozens of spirits serving her.
“What an amazing world we live in…” Aaron murmured with heartfelt joy.
So there was a meaning to the positions of the holes, after all. With this lead, Mira and Aaron narrowed down the possibilities.
***
After exchanging ideas for nearly ten minutes, Mira and Aaron came to a hypothesis they agreed on: The orbs themselves were not the most important factor in the barrier suppressing the Spirit King’s influence. It was the positions of the orbs.
Perhaps Chimera had tried stealing the orbs themselves earlier, or had created something similar and realized the barrier wasn’t functioning properly. From there, they must have discerned the meaning of the holes’ positions and sent people in to investigate. That would explain the detailed sketches of the pillars.
Armed with this new theory of the case, Mira and Aaron returned to the war room and shared their findings with Scorpion and Snake.
“The four sets of sketches must have been insurance—they expected us to interfere.” Aaron looked around at the charred corpses, and chuckled darkly, “I bet they didn’t expect this, though.”
“All of them were elites, and they must have thought they had a better chance since they sent a bunch,” Scorpion said. “Chimera members may work alone, but since they were all on the same mission, they all wound up meeting the same dead end.” Now with a new understanding of the four sets of sketches, she looked down at the nearest body.
These corpses were in an awful state, but they were all fresh. The one Scorpion was looking at and his compatriots were all killed at nearly the same time. These people visiting the same place for the same reason had died by the same person’s hand. Those sketches would never find their way back to Chimera, and they wouldn’t learn how to seal the Spirit King.
“Now, what do we do? If they don’t get the sketches, they’ll send more people. We could wait here and make sure we capture them this time around, but…” Aaron glanced at the others searchingly. The mission Isuzu gave them was to capture Chimera Clausen elites. But due to third party interference, their mission had ended in failure.
What next? That was up to the four entrusted with this mission.
To send more elites, Chimera would first need to learn their plan had failed. That decision would only be made after the expected date for the delivery of these sketches had passed.
The most efficient path forward would be to capture whoever the sketches were meant to be delivered to rather than waiting around here. Given the existence of the maps and permits, it was fairly obvious where that person might be found.
“I say we go to the Illusory Corridor,” Mira said. “If they had permits on hand, then they must have been planning to go there directly from here. Why don’t we deliver the sketches in their place, hm? Sounds like a fun idea to me.” She riffled through a bundle of sketches and grinned far more evilly than should have been possible for such a tiny person.
“Yeah. That might be the best plan.” A sly grin crept onto Aaron’s face, almost as evil as Mira’s. Snake had quietly opened a map of the Illusory Corridor and was already memorizing the structure.
“But a team of five went to the Illusory Corridor straight from headquarters, right? Can’t we just leave it to them?” Scorpion trusted her comrades from Isuzu to a fault.
Legend had it that the Spirit King resided in the deepest depths of the Illusory Corridor. It was another of the three places the Hidden had been sent to.
“I would like to, but things are moving a bit too fast,” Mira replied. “If these elites were planning to go straight there with these sketches, they must already be putting the finishing touches on their plan. Their hands may be closing around the Spirit King’s throat as we speak.”
“Agreed. Their mission here must have been to gather information for the sake of sealing his power. Little Miss Mira is right: if Chimera’s plans are in their final stages, they’re sure to go into the Illusory Corridor in force.”
Aaron picked up and opened a map of the Illusory Corridor. These sketches could be the key to Chimera’s plans. Mira, Aaron, and Snake had deduced all this from the belongings of the dead.
“Umm… So basically, they’ll be putting so much into this mission that five people won’t be able to handle them?” Having understood the plan only in the simplest terms, Scorpion cocked her head and looked to Mira and Aaron for answers.
“More or less, yeah,” Aaron confirmed and picked up another stack of paper. He added another hypothesis. “This is assuming they’ve only commissioned four of these though. If one used the four here as bait and escaped, then there will be a fifth set of sketches.”
If they disposed of the sketches, they could stop Chimera Clausen’s plans in their tracks right here. But Chimera had been nothing if not cautious and thorough up to this point. It was certainly possible that another set had slipped by.
Mira cast her eye once again over the four corpses littering the war room floor and recalled how they’d met their end.
“This is just my opinion, but I think a fifth is unlikely,” she said.
“Oh? What’s your logic?” Aaron asked, deeply interested.
“When that Skyfolk man learned who we were, he gladly gave us that information and left. Snake tells me he’s a priest, and for priests, murder is strictly forbidden. Yet he still dirtied his own hands.” Mira recalled the man’s face and added, “Do you remember the look on his face?”
“…I get it,” Aaron agreed, impressed. The long-robed man, with his ice-cold expression and eyes sharp as daggers—Aaron recalled the understandable malice on his face. “He wouldn’t have stopped to talk to us if he was pursuing another, right?”
“Exactly.” Mira nodded, satisfied.
It was decided—they would go to the Illusory Corridor. Before they left, the party disposed of the dead’s belongings. Scorpion recovered the daggers meant to harm spirits and wrapped them in white cloth, Snake used necromantic arts to burn the corpses, and Aaron tossed the sketches into the fire, where they curled to ash.
Mira left them to it. She walked back to the control room and stood in front of the central pedestal. It was an emergency evacuation device.
It had a strict usage requirement: one needed the blessing of at least five spirits. As far as Mira could tell, it showed no signs of recent use. If there was a fifth person, they didn’t exit through here.
***
When they left the Citadel of Scales, the sky was already blooming with stars. The Illusory Corridor lay over a mountain range and to the east. It would probably take a full day of travel by flying wagon.
Mira’s party arrived back at the town of Sarut well after dark. They drove the wagon via land to the city’s outskirts and took flight from there, all to get to their destination as soon as possible.
By midnight, they had already been flying east for several hours. Having cleared the mountains, the wagon touched down on the shore of a lake surrounded by a dense thicket.
The wagon was extremely comfortable—so comfortable that one could sleep soundly while riding. But with four people stuffed inside, it was too cramped to stretch out. They decided making camp was a better option.
Aaron was used to life on the road, and Scorpion and Snake often traveled solo. As well-appointed as the wagon was, they found it easier to relax with their feet on terra firma.
Mira summoned a Holy Knight to guard them overnight and laid out her own futon inside the wagon. She slept soundly within. Scorpion slept atop the roof, and Snake—who felt cozy in narrow spaces—made her bed under it. Aaron stretched out on the driver’s seat.
Next to the sleeping quartet, the lake was as calm as an innocent heart, reflecting the distant, starry sky. It was deep and gentle, allowing the mind to relax and fly up into the heavens.
The water’s surface rippled ever so slightly, and a shadow stole close to the wagon. It slowly approached until it entered the Holy Knight’s perception range. The Holy Knight did not react.
The shadow flitted by their armored guard and passed the sleeping Aaron. Then it slipped, ever so quietly, into the cabin…
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