Translator: Alpha0210
The Central Temple, which served as the main hall, was roughly the size of a castle. It could probably hold several hundred people. For a facility meant simply for holding assemblies or offering prayers, it was excessively large.
Beyond that, comparatively smaller buildings had been raised around it, and among them were a school where lessons on religion were taught, training halls for disciplining mind and body, an enormous dining hall, an obelisk, even a museum.
Lukas observed every place they visited, the structure of the buildings, and all the believers inside them with meticulous care. Yet he could find no trace of a demigod. Well, of course no clue would turn up in a space this open. And even if one did, it would hardly be evidence enough to corner them.
Did that make touring the buildings entirely meaningless, then?
Not that either.
"I have shown you all of the essential places."
"Thank you. Beautiful architecture, devout devotees. Rock-Nox Temple is truly a splendid place."
He said it with a fair measure of sincerity. Whatever secrets might be buried here, that was Lukas's honest impression at the moment.
Some of that sincerity must have carried, because a faint smile bloomed at the corner of Forum's mouth. It vanished as quickly as dawn mist, however.
"But it seems you did not accomplish what you came for. Is there anywhere you would like to see a second time?"
"No. This is enough."
"I see. Then perhaps we might offer you supper before you depart. How does that sound?"
"That would be welcome, but......"
Lukas deliberately let his words trail away and eased into the matter at hand.
"Is there nothing you require help with?"
"Help?"
"Yes. I would like to do something in return for the tour of the temple."
"I am grateful for the offer, but Rock-Nox Temple has no problems. And if it did, it would be ours to solve."
Forum delivered exactly the stiff, by-the-book answer Lukas had expected.
Lukas smiled and said,
"Of course it would be. I have no intention of intruding on the work of your congregants. However, unlikely as I may look, the world calls me by the undeserved name of Grand Sorcerer. And my friends' renown is no less than my own."
"...What is it you are trying to say?"
"There is a saying about the right tool in the right place. Work that would be terribly tedious or difficult for your congregants to carry out might be something we could handle without much trouble at all."
"...As I have told you, there is no such wor–"
"What about the cleaning?"
For the first time, Forum's expression turned to blank astonishment.
"What was that?"
"The cleaning. With buildings this large, every cleaning must be no small undertaking."
"Forgive me, but the temple is cleaned twice a day."
"No doubt. I couldn't find a single mote of dust anywhere inside. But what about the outside?"
"...The outside, you say?"
"The temple roof, the tips of the pillars, the crowns of the divine statues...... Places that are ordinarily out of reach."
"......"
"Places out of reach like those can hardly be cleaned every day."
"And you would do it yourself? You, the Grand Sorcerer? I do not consider cleaning menial labor, but the picture does not come easily to mind."
Lukas laughed low.
"As I said. The right tool in the right place. For the temple it would be a grand undertaking requiring real resolve, but for me and my friends it is not so difficult a task."
"What are you......"
"Five minutes."
Lukas declared it while spreading five fingers.
"Send everyone outside for five minutes, from the temple and from all the other buildings as well. In that time I will finish cleaning them."
"How could that possibly be......"
"I told you at the outset, Warrior Chief."
The instant Lukas snapped his fingers, a shadow fell across the grounds. As though a cloud had rolled in.
But what Forum saw when he lifted his head to the sky was not a cloud.
"I am a mage."
Above the temple,
an enormous pool of water hung suspended.
*
It took about an hour in the end, but Lukas's declaration had been no lie.
The cleaning itself took exactly three minutes or so, finishing a good two minutes faster than promised. The rest of the time was spent entirely on Forum securing permission from the Oesst, Jore, and the other officials in charge.
Naturally, the matter was important to Lukas as well, so he went along for the persuading. While he was at it he also asked after Residue's whereabouts, but there was nothing to show for it.
The cleaning proceeded in three stages.
First, barrier magic sealed every opening in the buildings. This included not merely the doors people ordinarily passed through, but the windows, the ventilation holes, and even the small gaps between one construction material and the next.
Second was the preparation of a vast quantity of water. This too required adjustments of its own. Drop too much water at once and the buildings might be damaged, or collapse outright. Even with barriers in place, they did not wrap the buildings entirely. Doing so would have blocked the running water as well, and then nothing would have been cleaned at all. In any case, a single pass might not wash everything away, so the process was repeated at least three times.
And the last stage was disposing of the leftover water. Lukas dumped it in a stretch of desert some distance from Sarman Village. A place no one traveled, of course. The sun-baked sand drank it up in an instant.
Laid out in words it sounded long-winded, but as mentioned, the entire sequence took less than five minutes, and Forum muttered with a half-dazed look on his face.
"...Can every high-ranking mage do something like that?"
"Hardly."
Schweiser said with a small snort of a laugh.
"Lukas's computational power belongs to a transcendent category. Even if a mage of the same rank existed, he could not finish work like that simultaneously, and in an instant."
"......"
"In an operation on that scale, mistakes are naturally frequent. The barriers around the buildings, for instance, were not a single barrier. He generated a separate one for every hole in the buildings, every crevice liquid might work its way into. Do you understand what that means?"
"Miss even one and there would be a flood inside the building."
"A flood. Haha. Far too rare a disaster to occur in a desert."
Schweiser offered the joke with laughter in his voice, but Forum did not particularly feel like laughing.
So this was the Grand Sorcerer.
The most famous hero on the continent......
...Meanwhile Lukas, having returned to the temple, had finished checking whether anything had gone wrong anywhere. Despite casting large-scale magic in rapid succession, he showed no sign of strain.
"I've been around for a look. As far as I could tell there is nothing amiss, but if you find anywhere the water leaked in or the cleanup was insufficient, please tell me at any time."
"Ah. Yes. Understood."
"...Hm. I've grown a little hungry. Might I trouble you for a somewhat early supper?"
Forum nodded.
"Of course. I will show you to the dining hall."
*
"What was the point of that big cleaning?"
Kasajin said in a puzzled voice.
He plainly did not care for Lukas's little feat of scrubbing the enemy's stronghold clean with his own hands.
...The brief meal ended, and they were moved once again to the guest room where they had started. Forum had stopped the party just as they made to leave.
Lukas began to open a window to greet the desert's evening wind, then stopped. There was no sense in letting their conversation leak out.
"We've grasped little about the demigods, but there are some things we know for certain. One of them is that their pride runs extremely high."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Think it through simply, Kasajin. If I stood in front of your house swinging a blade around and shrieking, would the sight please you?"
"When did you ever swing a blade around and shriek?"
"It's a figure of speech, idiot."
Schweiser said, smacking Kasajin's shoulder.
Lukas gave a short laugh.
"I opened with the seven-star magic Oceanfall, then spread barriers that demand an enormous amount of mana, and used Teleport on top of that. At the end I even blew the moisture away with Howling Tempest. I could have gone about it more quietly, but I deliberately chose nothing but conspicuous spells."
"I see."
"That's right. Because if a demigod is hiding here, it won't sit by and watch that."
"Hmm."
After a moment's thought, Kasajin voiced a rather sharp possibility.
"There might be no demigod in the temple right now, though?"
"True. But that possibility vanished a moment ago. At the instant Forum stopped us."
"......"
Kasajin thought back to Forum catching them just as supper ended and they were about to leave the temple.
His joints were starting to ache for it.
Kasajin smiled and said,
"Then it'll be soon?"
"It'll react in one form or another. It might even crush us to death along with this whole building."
Schweiser grinned, but the words had not been spoken as a joke.
A demigod genuinely possessed the capacity for it, and in any case would feel no guilt at snuffing out human lives by the hundred or the thousand.
"Don't let your guard down. Consider the fight already begun."
"Yes."
"Understood."
And each of them sharpened their focus in their own way.
Kasajin loosened his limbs lightly, bringing his body to tension; Lucid closed his eyes and sank into meditation, though his sword lay across his thighs where it could be drawn at any moment. Schweiser wiped the humor from his face and gripped his staff tight, and Iris turned her gaze out beyond the window.
And Lukas, mana drawn up, finished readying himself to respond at any moment.
How much time passed?
A knock came, and the door opened.
"Good evening."
It was not Forum.
It was a middle-aged man with an indistinct sort of face, and for reasons that were hard to name, he gave off an unpleasant feeling.
"My name is Mirchi. I am a priest of the temple."
An outsider.
Not a trace of the Desert Tribe's features could be found in this man either. His hair was platinum blond, his skin pale, his nose unusually high-bridged. From the continent proper, and the central regions at that?
Lukas kept the assessment to himself and said,
"I am Lukas."
"Yes. I know."
Mirchi wore a smile as feeble as his indistinct features.
"First, allow me to offer my thanks for the cleaning of the temple. It is terribly difficult to lay eyes on a mage out here in the desert, you see. Of course, someone of Lord Lukas's caliber would hardly be an easy sight to catch outside the desert either, but–"
"I'm glad if it was of help."
Lukas cut him off in a somewhat aggressive tone.
Mirchi faltered briefly at that force, then said,
"You dislike empty ceremony, it seems. Very well. I hear you came to the temple to investigate. Did you come away with anything?"
"No. Regrettably."
"I see. Hmm......"
Mirchi mulled it over briefly, with the air of a man performing a role, then quietly opened his mouth.
"...Are you aware that the temple has a place that is never opened to outsiders?"
It was not Lukas who answered this, but Schweiser.
"I've heard rumors of a place called the Holy Land."
"The Holy Land...... Well. I couldn't say about elsewhere, but here I think the Forbidden Zone is the fitter name."
Mirchi swept a hand once across his lips.
"The Oesst appears deeply grateful for the Grand Sorcerer's efforts. While considering how best to repay you, someone put forward the suggestion of permitting you to investigate the Forbidden Zone, which is ordinarily closed to laypeople."
"And that place is the Forbidden Zone?"
"Yes. What will you do?"
That the proposal reeked of something was obvious even to Kasajin, who was comparatively slow on the uptake.
For all his talk of introducing them to the Forbidden Zone, what sort of place it was, why it was called forbidden, what rules had to be observed, whether anyone would accompany them. He had revealed nothing at all.
Was it concealed on purpose? Or was there some other plan behind it?
The answer was plain enough, but not one of them let their doubts show. They all kept silent.
'–It's taken the bait.'
Lukas thought it with conviction and slowly opened his mouth.
"Such an opportunity is not one I could refuse. If you would open the Forbidden Zone for us, I can only be grateful."
"Good. Follow me."
"You'll guide us there right now?"
"Yes."
"The sun has already set......"
"......"
Mirchi did not answer this, and only made the smile at his lips a little more distinct.
A chill crawled up Lukas's spine at the smile of this middle-aged man who seemed to hold no particular power. He could not tell the reason himself.
With a soft rustle, Mirchi slipped out of the room with a ghostlike motion. Lukas exchanged glances with the rest of the party and followed after him.
He had assumed a place called the Forbidden Zone would lie somewhere far off, but he was wrong.
Mirchi never left the interior of the temple. Past the chapel, then into a small corridor beside it. The corridor, wide and bright at first, grew steadily darker and narrower, until partway along the party had no choice but to walk single file. With no lamps and no moonlight reaching in, it was hard to see ahead.
In the darkness only the sound of footsteps rang out clearly. Before long it fell into a precarious harmony with the beating of their hearts, building a strange tension.
"......"
Schweiser felt cold sweat running down his back.
He had no grounds for it, but he felt certain they were walking toward a place that should not be approached. Had his friends not been with him, he might have turned on his heel and bolted even now.
Just as that tension reached its limit, Mirchi spoke.
"Now that I think of it, about your companion."
Companion?
For a moment he did not grasp who was meant.
"He said he would join you a little later."
"...Is that so."
Only then did he realize Mirchi meant Residue. Schweiser nearly let out a hollow laugh.
To tell such a transparent lie, after coming this far.
It was so absurd that his tension eased a little.
"This is the place."
The spot they eventually reached was comparatively open, but Lukas could not tell where in the temple it stood. He had committed the temple's architectural layout to memory in order to place his barriers meticulously, and even so he could not pinpoint the location......
Which meant this was a hidden place.
Behind Mirchi spread a pitch-black cavity. Looking closer, several torches lit a path leading downward.
It was a staircase descending underground.
"Is the underground the Forbidden Zone?"
"......"
Mirchi did not answer.
He merely wore once more a smile much like the one from when they had set out, then bowed politely. And without a word, he quietly took his leave.
He doesn't even mean to hide how suspicious this is anymore. No. Was he like that from the start?
"Isn't that bastard the demigod?"
Kasajin spoke as though he might chase the man down and tear his limbs off then and there. Alone in the party, his manner betrayed no fear whatsoever. In his case it would be neither performance nor bluster, but the plain truth.
Lukas shook his head and held him back.
"No. He's an ordinary human. Whether his mind is ordinary too, I couldn't say."
"Meaning?"
"There was madness showing in his eyes. The kind that only surfaces in someone deeply steeped in something."
"A lunatic, then."
Kasajin nodded as though satisfied.
Lukas gazed down the pitch-dark underground stairs and muttered,
"Let's go down for now. Lucid takes the lead, then Kasajin, me, Iris, and Schweiser at the rear."
"Understood."
Lucid set the first foot on the dark stairs.
–The underground staircase was long. Because it spiraled, the entrance soon fell out of sight, and there was no telling whether the entrance would still be there if they climbed back up. That thought turned into unease, and brought with it the illusion that they were descending into hell of their own free will.
'Every ominous thought under the sun is coming to me today.'
Schweiser shook his head.
He was well aware that he was a man far removed from courage, but today such thoughts came far more often than usual. Had some evil settled over this temple?
Just then Iris stopped walking.
Schweiser nearly collided with her. With anyone else it might not have mattered, but not with Iris, and his heart lurched.
"What is it?"
"The stairs have broken off."
The answer came from the very front. In other words, it was Lucid's voice.
In any case, with four people ahead of him, Schweiser could not tell what the situation was.
"You mean the way's blocked?"
"That is not it. Lukas, what shall we do?"
"We jump."
"Understood."
Huh? Jump down what?
The instant he raised the question, there came a light tap of feet kicking off.
That sound came four times in a row. When Iris vanished, Schweiser understood what "the stairs have broken off" had meant.
"Hmmm......"
Below the severed stairs spread a vast underground space.
The floor was blanketed in sand, the air was somehow faintly bright, and the walls were built like cliffs stacked in layers. Each layer was pierced with dozens of holes, large and small.
There were also what looked like buildings half buried in the sand, apparently worn down by an immense span of time.
Glancing below, he could see Lukas beckoning to him.
And Kasajin spreading his arms with a distinctly unwilling look on his face. Am I supposed to be caught in those hairy hands? Horrifying. Maybe I should ask Lukas for a spell...... The thought crossed his mind for a moment, but from here on it seemed wiser to refrain from magic, if only to conceal their presence.
Schweiser let out a low groan and jumped from the stairs.
*****
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