Chapter 45

I reached out and nervously touched the craggy gray wall. It felt hard and cold—so much so that it reminded me of concrete.

“A synthetic wall? Why would this be here?”

I heard Shirona mutter from behind as she peered at the wall.

“A synthetic wall?”

I turned around to face her.

“Yes. It’s a wall often used by Diggers,” she explained. “A sturdy, makeshift wall created using stone powder, water, and earth magic. Apparently, they use it to reinforce excavated tunnels so they don’t collapse.”

If that was the case, then Mora must have built this. But why? Past this was a one-way wall, meaning this synthetic barrier created a completely sealed space. Why would she do such a thing?

“Do you think the two of them are inside?” Shirona asked with a sigh.

“Doing that would mean trapping themselves. Common sense suggests it was built from the outside,” I ground my teeth at the sheer absurdity of the situation. “But then again, I can’t think of any reason to build a wall here other than to ‘trap oneself’ in the first place.”

And I couldn’t think of a single reason why they would want to trap themselves.

“True,” Shirona said, falling into thought.

“Hey! Can you hear me? Are you in there?”

I pounded on the synthetic wall with all my might and shouted, but there was no response.

Left with no other choice, I readied my sword, but—

“It’s no use. Synthetic walls are quite sturdy. If you really want to break it, I think you’d need explosives.”

“Eni…”

I felt a surge of resentment that she wasn’t here with us right now.

“Perhaps we can see what’s happening inside from the other side,” Shirona suggested.

“The other side?”

I asked for clarification, but I caught her meaning almost immediately. She meant the other side of the one-way wall. From there, the wall should be transparent.

“Alright, then—”

I was about to suggest that the two of us head to the floor above right away when my eyes met Shirona’s.

I understood intuitively that we did not trust each other.

I suppose that was only natural. In a situation like this, one couldn’t help but see everyone else as suspicious—just as Brad had. In fact, I felt a sense of danger at the thought of heading to the upper floor alone with Shirona. I couldn’t shake the suspicion that she might take a sudden opening to kill me. It seemed Shirona felt the same way.

Our thoughts raced in the instant our eyes met.

In that case, should we both go together to inform Jin’s party? If we were moving in a situation where we didn’t know when we might encounter them, it would be harder for one to attack the other. But I felt that would take too much time. Shouldn’t we confirm the situation inside as soon as possible?

In the worst-case scenario, Hunt and Mora might already be murdered.

“Do you have a coin?”

I reached a conclusion in an instant.

“A coin?”

“Let’s split up. One person will go to the upper floor and check the interior from the other side. The other will inform Jin’s party, bring them back here, and destroy the synthetic wall. Given the strength of the monsters around here, we should be fine on our own. We both understand the layout of the dungeon, after all.”

“I see. That’s why you want the coin.”

Shirona understood immediately and pulled out a coin. It was a Pace gold piece.

“I’ll do the toss. In exchange, you decide which side means what, Shirona.”

No sooner had the words left my mouth than I took the coin and flipped it high into the air. I caught the spinning coin on the back of my left hand and covered it with my right.

Now, neither I nor Shirona could know if it was heads or tails.

“Heads. If the Pace Royal Castle shows, I go up.”

“Alright.”

When I lifted my right hand, the coin revealed the side with the cross mark. Tails.

“Then I’ll be the one to go up.”

“Okay.”

With this, neither my machinations nor Shirona’s will could have influenced the result.

I immediately dashed off, and Shirona ran in the opposite direction.

Good grief. I never imagined I’d end up acting alone in a dungeon.

With a sigh, I used a blast of air to blow away a Metal Crab that appeared. There was no need to actually defeat it; I didn’t need to explore this area thoroughly. I just had to reach that spot—the place on the upper floor where I had seen the stairs through the transparent wall.

I slashed at slimes with my sword while leaping over obstacles with physical enhancement. I stopped using just the floor, kicking off the walls and even the ceiling to speed my progress.

But seriously, what was going on?

First of all, Hunt’s words just before we split up had been strange. Add to that the wall Mora had apparently built. What on earth was happening?

“…What?”

I reached my destination at last, still questioning myself. The sight there made my body freeze. I slammed on the brakes.

There were stairs behind a transparent wall, leading to a synthetic wall. And in that narrow space were Hunt and Mora.

That was the scene I had vaguely imagined.

But there was nothing like that.

Where the transparent one-way wall should have been, there was only a deep red barrier.

A red wall. I realized its true nature instantly.

Blood. Blood had been smeared thickly across the transparent wall from the other side. No—perhaps “smeared” wasn’t the right word. Had something happened over there, causing blood to spray everywhere?

Whatever the case, something was happening.

If it was only covered in blood, I could still pass through. I had just made up my mind to take a step forward when—

“Stop!”

I heard a shout—or rather, a scream.

My body stiffened reflexively.

“Ah… who is it… I heard… footsteps…”

Even after I realized the voice, which quickly turned thick and pained, belonged to Hunt, I remained unable to move for a while, as if paralyzed.

Ah, so the one-way wall lets voices and sounds through, I thought blankly.

“Who is it?” the voice asked, the words woven between ragged, wheezing breaths.

“I-it’s Van!”

I answered in a hurry. The paralysis seemed to lift from my mouth alone.

“The detective…”

Beyond the red wall, the pained voice responded properly.

“Who else… is with you?”

“I’m alone. But everyone else will be here soon. They’re going to blast the wall on the other side—”

“Eni, then…”

Hunt replied, grasping the meaning of my frantic, somewhat incoherent words.

“Wh-what happened? Are you okay?”

“Listen… don’t come in… it’s a waste of a life…”

The words cut off with a strange, wet gurgling sound.

For instance, someone might cough up blood and it would end up looking exactly like that.

“It’s a Shadow… they really exist. Dammit, what a joke. Even Mora’s synthetic wall was useless.”

“What?”

The Shadow—a monster that manipulates space itself. He was saying it actually existed?

“We fled inside, but it still got us. Mora is… she’s gone. And I’m—dammit.”

The sound of his quiet, bitter clicking of the tongue—sounding more like a man who had already accepted his end than one who was just frustrated—chilled me to the bone.

“There’s no saving me. Run. Do you hear me? Tell the others about the Shadow and tell them to run. No one can stand against it.”

If I moved now—right now—and pushed through that red wall, I could see what was happening on the other side. I might even be able to save Hunt.

And yet, my legs refused to move. I felt utterly pathetic.

“Ah… it’s here. The black shadow… that’s it. That’s the Shadow. Can you see it? Can you see it too?”

Before Hunt’s delirium-like whispering could even finish, an explosive roar and a massive shockwave rocked my entire body.

“What?! Ah—!”

I threw myself flat in the confusion, but I realized what had happened almost immediately.

An explosion. Eni had demolished the wall from the other side.

“Ugh!”

Perhaps driven by the desperate feeling that I had to act now while something was happening, or perhaps bolstered by the relief of knowing the others were there now that the wall was gone, my body finally moved.

In the next instant, before I was even consciously aware of it, my body lunged toward the red wall of its own accord.

“Whoa!”

The moment I tried to pass through the one-way wall, my vision was obscured and something sticky clung to my skin.

I cried out instinctively and wiped my face.

It was obvious when I thought about it—if you pass through a wall smeared with blood, that blood is going to get on you.

“Dammit!”

Wiping the blood from my face, I managed to open my eyes. The first person I locked eyes with was Eni.

Yes, Eni was there. Beyond the crumbled synthetic wall, she was staring at me with a look of pure shock. Beside her stood Shirona, Watch, Jin, Henya, and Kijiitsu.

Every single one of them was staring at me with stunned expressions.

No, wait.

It wasn’t me they were looking at. They were staring at the scene between us.

The narrow space that had been enclosed by the one-way wall and the synthetic wall was drenched in blood. And there was no one there.

Except for one thing.

“H-hey… look at this.”

I pointed at it with a trembling hand, my eyes fixed on the floor at my feet.

“This is…”

I hoped someone would say it for me, but no one answered.

“This… this is that, right?”

I had no choice but to describe it myself, my voice thick with dread.

“It’s an arm, isn’t it?”

A man’s arm, severed from around the bicep. I couldn’t say for absolute certain, but…

“Isn’t this Hunt’s arm?”

No one responded to my question.

“I can’t say anything for certain given the circumstances,” Shirona said, offering her findings after nearly an hour of investigation. “But there are two types of blood here. The proof is in the spots where they’ve mingled and clotted together.”

“Mora and Hunt, then. The math adds up,” Jin said, stroking his beard.

“Is that arm Hunt’s as well?” Watch asked, sounding bored.

“I can only say ‘probably,’” Shirona replied with a shrug.

Eni, apparently nauseated by the sheer amount of blood, was leaning against a wall on the other side of the destroyed synthetic barrier.

“Still, it’s a strange story. To think a Shadow actually exists.”

Henya looked at me, his eyes filled with a sinister, mocking glint.

I understood why. It was a preposterous claim, and I was the only one who had heard the statement. I knew I looked suspicious, but…

“As Shirona can testify, it was a total accident that I was the one who came to this side,” I said.

Henya snorted and looked away. That was exactly why we had done the coin toss.

“But it is certainly strange,” Jin summarized concisely. “If what Hunt said is true, he and Mora were killed here by some monster called a Shadow, and then the bodies vanished, leaving only Hunt’s arm behind. If there really is a monster that can manipulate space, then bodies vanishing or anything else happening wouldn’t be a mystery at all. But on the flip side, if such a thing truly exists, we have no way to fight it.”

A smile that was a mix of despair and mockery played at the corners of Jin’s mouth.

“There would be no reason for Hunt to lie on the verge of death,” Watch said calmly.

“But listen,” Eni said, her face pale as she finally found the strength to join the conversation. “Look at it this way: if this Shadow thing is the culprit, we just have to work together. If we all cooperate and stay on guard, we can handle it, right?”

That optimistic outlook held a certain kind of truth. If the culprit was an outside force, then all we had to do was unite. If this party of first-rate adventurers stood as one, we might actually make it.

The problem was…

“I suppose,” Jin said.

“Yeah,” Watch added.

“True,” Shirona agreed.

“Hmph,” Henya grunted.

“…” Kijiitsu remained silent.

And then there was me. “You’re right. For now, it’s certain we won’t survive unless we cooperate.”

The real problem was that not a single one of us—not even me—truly believed in our hearts that we should trust everyone here and unite.

“Anyway, regardless of what happens next,” Jin said, drawing our scattered gazes together. “There’s no way we can keep exploring the dungeon. We have to go back. Even if the Treasure family holds a grudge against us.”

He gave the only answer anyone could accept.

“We should return to the camp for now. Any objections?”

No one spoke up.

Even if not a soul there truly trusted the man who had said it.