Chapter 38: The Dungeon’s First Defense (2)
Freya got back to her feet, brushing off her suit, then rubbed her hands together.
"...Right. Phase two, done."
She glanced at the butterfly screens still fixed on Nymeria, where Aria seemed to be up against something far too strong for comfort, and forced herself to look away.
Let’s focus on what’s happening here for now.
She turned her attention back to the dungeon screen, and Naïa spoke up beside her, in the steady tone of an administrator following her own plan.
"We’re now entering phase three, the riskiest one of all. Sear the chicken."
That role suits her awfully well, and maybe one day she really will be running this place while I’m away.
"Exactly. Let’s hope everything goes as agreed this time too."
"It should. The only two things that worried us while we were putting the plan together were whether he could spot our traps, or whether he’d be clever enough to work out where we were leading him. From what I’ve seen so far, he has neither."
Freya nodded at Naïa’s words and turned back to the screen.
The little imp was finishing up burning in the middle of his chamber, the oil clinging to his skin feeding the flames and letting nothing go out. He didn’t think about it any longer, already far too enraged for that, and charged into the only corridor that would get him out of there.
Except that at the end of it, Mei was waiting.
The giant was backing away, dragging the tip of her enormous black blade along the floor, and oil ran off the steel without ever running dry, leaving a thick, unbroken trail behind her.
Tucked into the crook of her free arm, Laïa dropped her pink flame into it to set the passage alight as they went.
The demon threw himself into the fire without a second’s hesitation.
His body blistered as he pushed through it, but he held out thanks to that resilience worthy of his rank, and he eventually worked out that he’d have to deal with the flames before he could deal with them.
With one wide swing of his scythe, he raised a gust of wind that flattened the fire for several meters and snuffed everything out ahead of him. The little girl relit it right behind him without even turning around, and Mei’s sword kept filling the corridor faster than he could empty it.
The real problem, though, came from the corridor itself, which was far too narrow for him.
Even though the stone gave way effortlessly under his blade, he had no room to wind up without the scythe scraping a wall, and he had to make do with short, badly aimed swings while running after them.
Ahead of him, the two girls tore along without ever slowing, Mei lengthening her stride with Laïa clinging to her breastplate by one arm, the other stretched back to sow fire behind them.
The corridor was turning into a tunnel of flames closing in on the demon by the second.
Then Mei jumped over something on the ground, and the imp leapt too out of pure reflex, remembering all too well what had been waiting for him the last time he’d put a foot in the wrong place.
He was growing angrier and angrier, unable to close the distance between them no matter what he threw at it, his howls bouncing down the corridor well ahead of him.
Mei jumped a second time, he copied her again, and the corridor turned sharply to the left right after.
The giant took the bend at full speed before he swung into it after her, and it was precisely then that he realized he’d lost count of something, because she no longer had anyone in her arms.
The kick caught him square in the stomach with every bit of force two meters of steel could put behind it.
He flew backward, plowing along the floor for several meters, before lifting his head to find the enormous black sword already filling his entire field of vision.
His reflexes saved him all the same, his scythe catching the blade at the last instant, but the handle jammed against the corridor wall in the movement and stayed stuck there a millisecond too long, during which Mei was already in the air.
She brought both feet down together into his stomach and sent him crashing into the far wall, where the blue glow lit up beneath him before he’d even touched the stone, and he vanished on the spot.
When he opened his eyes again, his scythe was no longer in his hands, left buried in the wall he’d just been thrown from.
There was no giant, no child, no fire, nothing but corridors running in every direction, every one of them identical to the last.
The labyrinth had taken him back.
"GRAAAAAAAAAAH!"
The howl came up from the depths of his throat and spread through the labyrinth, rolling from corridor to corridor until it came back at him from three junctions at once.
"RRRRHAAAAA— GRAAAH! GHHHR-RAAAAAAAAH!"
He struck the wall with both bare fists, again and again, tearing out chunks of stone that opened onto nothing but more corridors.
Then he threw his head back and screamed at a ceiling that gave him back nothing but his own voice.
"GRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Mei and Laïa came out into the Heart chamber a few minutes later, black with soot from head to toe, the giant carrying the monster’s enormous scythe across her arms.
"You two did some very fine work."
Laïa let out a little cry of delight and ran across the room to press herself against Freya’s leg, who ruffled her hair with a laugh.
"Thank you, madam!"
"You played your part perfectly, and you didn’t miss your timing with the flames a single time."
Beside them, Mei set the scythe against the wall and stood there, hands behind her back, fidgeting with her gauntlets.
"...Thank you..."
"You come here too."
The giant hesitated a good second, then shuffled over and crouched down in front of her, taking off her helm to reveal her blonde bob flattened by the metal and thoroughly plastered down with sweat.
Freya ran a hand through her hair, and Mei’s face went red in the space of a heartbeat.
"None of this would have been possible without you, so you’ve got every reason to be proud of yourself."
"...Th-thank you... madam..." she breathed, staring resolutely at the floor, her ears scarlet.
"On the other hand, you both reek of smoke, so remember to wash up and clean your things as soon as you get a moment."
Laïa sniffed her own sleeve and jerked her head back, nose wrinkling.
"Bleugh... but it’s not even my fault, the corridor was what stank!"
"The corridor stank, did it. And I suppose the corridor is also what got soot all through your hair?"
The girl touched her head, looked at her charcoal-black fingers, and apparently had nothing left to say to that, which drew a tiny laugh out of Mei that she smothered behind her gauntlet at once.
"So, madam?" Laïa piped up again, already onto something else. "Is it time for phase four?"
"Exactly, we move on to letting the chicken simmer."
She nodded toward the screen.
"This one’s going to be the longest of the lot, because there’s nothing to do but wait for him to work himself up and eventually find his way out of the labyrinth. So we’ve got a bit of time before he reaches us here, and I’ve placed a butterfly on the route he’ll have to take, which means I’ll warn you the moment I see him coming. Get some rest in the meantime if you need it."
Laïa was opening her mouth to answer when Naïa’s voice cut across her from the far end of the room.
"Madam!"
Freya spun around.
Naïa was standing in front of the screens, her face completely white, and she raised a trembling hand toward the two that had still been broadcasting Nymeria a few minutes earlier, both of them now entirely black.
"What’s going on?" Freya asked, already crossing the room.
"I don’t know." Naïa was speaking fast, her voice climbing as she went. "She’d beaten the woman with the blindfold, everything was fine, so I followed your conversation for a few seconds, and when I turned my head back to the screens there was already nothing on them."
Freya stopped in front of the two black rectangles and stared at them for a moment without saying anything, because her brain got straight to work the way it always did, hunting for the rational answer that would explain the whole thing in one sentence.
Alright, this happens, there’s bound to be a simple reason.
She ran through the possibilities one after another, calmly, starting with the most reassuring ones.
Distance, maybe, since the skill is Rank C and it must have a limited range that Aria would have ended up exceeding as she moved away. Or the mana down there, so saturated it could easily burn out a spell that weak. Or even duration, if I misread the description and they had a limited lifespan from the start.
Except none of those three answers explained the real problem, the one she’d been circling around and pushing away since the beginning.
They both went out at the same time. At the exact same second.
That was when something tightened in her chest, something cold that had nothing to do with reasoning, and that crept slowly up her throat.
No, stop it, you’re panicking over nothing, and panicking has never once helped you think.
She breathed in, once, then a second time, except the air didn’t go down properly and stuck somewhere in the middle, so that her hand rose on its own against her sternum while her heart began pounding harder and harder all the way into her temples.
Then she suddenly remembered the bird existed.
She turned, spotted it perched on the ledge beside her, and lunged for it with both hands.
"Aria?"
The familiar didn’t so much as twitch between her palms.
"Aria, answer me, that’s an order, do you hear me?"
Nothing came, not even that faint crackle that always came before her servant’s voice, and Freya tightened her fingers around it, bringing it closer to her face.
"Answer me right now, please, just tell me you’re alright and I’ll leave you al—"
The bird dissolved between her hands.
It didn’t fall, it didn’t break, it simply came apart into black dust that slipped through her fingers and scattered before it even reached the floor, exactly the way familiars do when the bond tying them to their master has just been severed.
Freya stayed there, hands empty, staring at the spot where it had been a second earlier.
Something really has happened to her.
Her breathing broke apart completely and her legs gave way beneath her, dropping her to her knees on the stone.
She’s dead, she has to be dead, otherwise she’d have answered, because she always answers me, even when she shouldn’t, even when I tell her to be quiet, so if she isn’t answering it’s because she can’t anymore, and if she can’t anymore it’s because there’s no one left to do it.
No, not her, not now, not after everything she said to me that night, not when I’ve just ordered her to come back alive and she told me she’d obey.
Not you, Aria, not you, anything but you, not you, not you, not you...
She barely felt the two arms that caught her by the shoulders, Laïa clinging to her and repeating her name, and Mei who had dropped to her knees on the other side to hold her up without daring to say a word.