9
Kirito and Ronie returned to their rooms, changed into their normal gear—swords included—and began their search from the forty-ninth floor.
But they did not actually open every door and check every room. Kirito’s Incarnation power was so strong that he could sense Sheyta’s room from across the river, and he could detect the presence of people or monsters through the doors and walls, so simply concentrating from the center of the floor was enough to tell him what he needed to know.
Every time a guard told them off, he would show them the chain with the symbol of the supreme commander on it and move on. They spent two hours rushing from floor to floor, making their way down the castle.
At that point, Kirito was in the third basement floor, a massive storage space at the very bottom of Obsidia Palace. At a hallway intersection, he closed his eyes and focused—only to shake his head.
“Nope…not here, either.” He sighed and leaned back against the black rock wall. The storage area was completely devoid of people; the only movement in the silent corridor was the weak flickering of the ore lamps.
Ronie asked her pensive partner, “So does that mean they’re not in the castle…? Could they have escaped outside?”
“Yeah…But that would have to mean that the injured minion flew over three kilors in just two minutes…”
“Three kilors…? Is that how far you can sense?”
“It depends on the target, but in empty space, and tracking something as large as a minion, there’s no mistaking it. So at a kilor and a half per minute, that would translate to ninety kilors an hour. I can’t imagine that any minion can fly at such an extreme speed.”
“It would be a dragon at that point…Do you think that the dark knighthood is involved somehow, then?” Ronie whispered.
Kirito shook his head again. “I can sense a dragon at ten kilors. And no dragon could fly that far in two minutes, though the dragoncraft might…”
He paused, mouthing the words No way, but then he ruled that out. “No…if they were using the dragoncraft, it would have created a tremendous sound. Nothing as quiet as a stone pestle grinding against a mortar. And…what would a stone mortar and pestle grinding sound like anyway…?” he wondered.
Ronie considered it but couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. Instead, all she could envision was the warmth of Leazetta drinking milk in her arms, without a care in the world, and the way she squeaked and giggled during dinner. Ronie clutched her arms tight around herself.
“Leazetta is the hope that ties the two realms together,” Kirito murmured. “We can’t let her be killed. We just can’t…”
The kernel of sheer determination buried in the midst of the deep concern in his voice took Ronie’s breath away. Kirito was leaning back against the wall with his head down, out of sight. She walked over to him, as if in a trance, and grabbed his shoulders.
“…You can’t, Kirito. You can’t sacrifice yourself.”
After a long silence, Kirito mumbled, “I told you before, remember? If I die in this world, I don’t actually die. So it’s better me than h—”
“No!” shrieked Ronie. “That logic doesn’t apply…I…I’ll never see you again. And I don’t want that to happen…I don’t!!”
She buried her face in his chest. The silver crest pendant bit into her forehead, but the pain in her skin was nothing next to the throbbing that gouged out her heart.
“I will be your page for life. I’ve decided that I’m going to serve at your side forever. I don’t want anything else…but if you decide to make yourself a sacrifice, I will join you. I will force you to have me executed, too!”
It was unfair, turning herself into a hostage. But it was also the unvarnished truth of what she wanted at that moment.
“…Ronie…,” he murmured, his voice full of anguish. He lifted his hands to grab her shoulders.
If he really wanted to, he could tie her in place or even knock her unconscious for two or three days—as long as it would take for everything to be over. But there would be no point. If he had been executed by the time she woke up, she’d simply follow him beyond the veil.
He reached up to stroke her hair and whispered, “Thank you, Ronie. I won’t give up. I’ll find a way to rescue Leazetta…and I’ll return to the cathedral with you. That’s our home…”
Tears flooded from her eyes. Her throat tensed up as she desperately tried to hold in the sobs that wanted to break free.
“…Yes……yes…,” she managed to squeak, and she let her entire weight rest against Kirito. He continued to stroke her hair until she calmed down.
Ten minutes later, they returned to the ground floor of the castle as the six o’clock bells rang. Sheyta and Iskahn were returning from the dark mages guild headquarters at the same moment. They regrouped and shared information—sadly, none of it was directly related to the kidnapper.
“At the guild, they don’t have a handle on the mages who went missing in the war, and they haven’t been doing any experimentation on augmenting minions. I questioned them as the supreme commander, and by the Law of Power, they can’t lie to me,” Iskahn said.
Sheyta gloomily added, “There was one lead, however…About a month ago, at a clay-harvesting spot under the guild’s control, a large amount of the finest clay that had already been extracted and bagged went missing.”
“A large amount? Like…how much?” Kirito asked.
Iskahn scowled and said, “Around enough to make three minions, they said. They handled the incident internally and didn’t report it to the Council of Five…Though I doubt we could have predicted this would happen today, even if we’d been aware of the theft…”
“A month ago…Then it probably does have something to do with the incident in Centoria,” Kirito murmured.
“We already got the report from the guards…but how did your search go?” Iskahn asked.
“Well…we searched from the top floor to the storage all the way underground and didn’t find any minions or Leazetta. It wouldn’t even matter if there were hidden rooms or spaces you didn’t know about. As long as they weren’t hiding in some place completely isolated from consecutive space, they couldn’t have evaded my searching ability.”
“If you say it, then it must be true…Which would mean they have to be far, far away by now…”
Iskahn scratched at his silver-ringed head in desperation. Sheyta reached out to grab his hand and stop him, and she enveloped it with both of hers.
With silence filling the great hall, the sound of the main doors of the castle closing was loud and heavy. The doors, including the hinges, were carved from obsidian, which made the sound of all that rock scraping quite distinct, almost like the rumble of distant thunder. Ronie felt like she’d heard the sound not that long ago, and she searched her memories.
It was…Yes, it was during the test flight of Dragoncraft Unit One at Central Cathedral. In order to keep the craft from colliding with the top of the building, Asuna used Stacia’s divine power to shift the top five stories of the building aside. The massive chunk of marble scraped against itself and made that sound.
Rock on rock…scraping. Like a mortar and pestle.
“…Oh! Um, Lady Sheyta…,” she said, rushing over to the senior Integrity Knight, her mind a whirling blur. “Near your bedroom, is there another large obsidian door like the front gate here?!”
“Obsidian door…? No, all the doors around are wooden, and the window frames are iron.”
“Are there any mechanisms that would involve stone scraping on stone…?”
That question got Kirito involved:
“Oh…! When the guards said they heard a sound like a stone mortar and pestle! Yes…if there’s a hidden door on the exterior of the castle, it might make that kind of noise…but…”
“But if it was just a hidden door, your nose could sniff it out?” Iskahn finished. He crossed his arms. “Plus…I’ve never heard about anything like that near our bedroom. Besides, why would you put a secret door on the outside that no one can use? It wouldn’t make sense unless you could fly.”
“What if…it’s not a secret door…?” Kirito muttered, looking up at the ceiling of the great hall. “You said it yourself, Iskahn. The real top floor is above the current top floor of the castle.”
The commander and the ambassador gasped at the same time.
“The…the fiftieth floor…? B-but it’s sealed airtight, and the guards saw that the chains weren’t cut.”
“What about from the outside? Is there even a single window on the fiftieth floor?”
“……Actually……actually…I think…,” Iskahn murmured, craning his neck as he thought. “When Vecta appeared…and he summoned the ten lords, there was a huge window in the throne room. But now…when you look at it from the outside, there’s just a solid rock face above the forty-ninth floor, without any window…”
“It must have closed up,” Kirito said, absolutely certain now. “When Vecta died and the chains resealed the room, the stone outside must have moved to cover up all the windows. The space was completely cut off from the rest of the world. The stone-grinding sound the guards heard was the rock moving once again.”
“But…but…,” Iskahn stammered, his burnished skin going pale. “Only Emperor Vecta can undo the seal on the fiftieth floor…Would that mean the one who abducted Lea is…?”
He gritted his teeth, afraid of even finishing that sentence. A horrified silence followed, until Sheyta cut through it with a voice like a blade.
“Let’s go to the fiftieth floor.”
Kirito agreed. “Yes…We might learn something if we examine the door.”
Iskahn nodded—anything to wipe away his trepidation.
The four rushed back to the top of the castle without a break once again. Ronie was able to keep up with them without running out of breath this time; perhaps she’d gotten the hang of the process.
The group stopped on the forty-ninth floor and looked up the last stretch of stairs. Either because the palace’s internal heating system didn’t extend that far or for some other reason, Ronie felt chilly air sweeping down the darkened staircase and clinging to her legs.
“…Let’s go,” Iskahn said, starting up the steps. The other three followed.
It was only one flight of stairs, but it felt even longer than the trip from the first floor to the forty-ninth. A set of pitch-black double doors met them at the top. As the pugilist had said, the doors were locked up with huge chains about ten cens thick. They were pulled absolutely tight, with virtually no give.
Iskahn walked slowly down the short hall to the doors, touched the gray chain, and pulled back, yelping, “It’s cold!”
Determined, he reached out again and grabbed it fully. He crouched, shouted, and yanked on it, but the chain only made a slight clanking noise and did not budge.
“…So the seal’s not broken…”
He let go of the chain and touched the black door this time, then used both hands, and even pressed his ear to the surface.
“I don’t hear anything…but if Lea’s anywhere inside the castle, it’s got to be past here…”
The pugilist took a couple of steps back, paused a few moments, then assumed a fighting pose. Red flames curled from his clenched right fist. The chilly air began to vibrate, and Ronie’s instincts told her to keep her distance.
Was he going to punch those chains with his bare fist? Kirito stepped forward at that moment, unaffected by the tremendous battle aura wreathing the pugilist’s body, and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll do it, Iskahn.”
“No…let me do this.”
“Save your fist for the fight against the minions and kidnappers. Plus, I’m good at this sort of thing,” Kirito said simply. Iskahn exhaled, paused, and finally decided to undo his stance.
“You can get away with anything, can’t you? Fine…it’s all yours,” he grumbled, standing back next to his wife.
Now it was Kirito who stood before the chains. His glowing hand delicately brushed the surface of the metal. After repeating the action a few times, he traced a spot in the center of the chain several times with a finger.
“Here…It’s so shallow you can’t see it, but there’s a mark here. Did you do this, Sheyta?” he asked without turning around.
The Integrity Knight said, “Yes. As I said earlier, the Black Lily Sword could have cut through it.”
“I bet…I’m going to use this mark now.”
If she had performed another technique, she might have been able to defeat the kidnapper once and for all. But Ronie chose instead to stop and catch the baby.
The interloper shot through the window headfirst and vanished, melting into the morning light. Meanwhile, Ronie caught Leazetta firmly with her left arm and clutched the baby to her chest. She immediately crouched, laying her sword on the ground, and covered the pitifully wailing child with both arms to provide her with warmth.
“…I know, poor Lea, that was very scary. But it’s okay…You’re safe now…,” she murmured, rubbing cheek against cheek. Eventually, the crying calmed down, and a tiny hand touched Ronie’s face. On her left she heard the sound of the window closing again.
Ronie continued to hold the baby until someone came and put a hand on her back.
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