57. The Arena (1)

In the world of sports, a winner and a loser are born of necessity. Victory, after all, is a spoil you can only seize by grinding your opponent underfoot.

But once, I tried imagining something like this. What if the rival you fought all the way to the gold medal was the closest friend you’d shared your childhood with? Or what if it was your own flesh and blood? Could you really rejoice without reservation, just because you’d won? Could you smile at the one who had just beaten you, hold out your hand, and tell them they’d done well?

Between the winner and the loser, which one watches the other’s face more carefully? The clear answer to that question shifts with every situation, every person. But weighing up the situation I was standing in right now, I could say this much with certainty.

The loser watches the other’s face far more carefully.

The fight between the two of them had ended the moment Seraphina’s killing technique stopped Lillian’s all-or-nothing strike cold. Having poured every last drop of her remaining mana into that one blow, Lillian stared blankly into empty air.

Seraphina, the victor, looked at the loser and spared her any further sermon. She simply slid her sword back into its sheath, as indifferent as if it had been nothing more than her usual morning training.

“…Haah.”

All that lingered in the air around us was the sound of Lillian’s ragged breathing and the cold smell of frost. The misery of the defeated and the indifference of the victor tangled together into an uncomfortable, suffocating silence.

Breaking that deadlock, in the end, was my job. I was the one standing at the dead center of this whole mess.

“Big Sis Lillian, you stay here.”

At my curt command, Lillian’s shoulders flinched. She kept her head bowed and didn’t answer. Things were too urgent to comfort someone whose mind had checked out, and she’d already cried too much for me to push her any harder.

“We have to prepare for the off chance something goes wrong. Big Brother Lucius still hasn’t come to.”

Forcing myself to keep a businesslike tone, I looked at Lillian.

“You staying by Big Brother’s side is the surest insurance. I’ll head inside, make certain the third gate is fully cleared, and come back to fetch you.”

Lillian kept her eyes on the floor, but she gave a faint nod. I turned to Leo, who had the luggage shouldered.

“Leo, you stay too.”

“…Me as well?”

“Yeah. If something goes wrong, you grab Big Brother Lucius and run, no questions asked. I get that you want to come along, but I need you to be the last-ditch safety net.”

Leo looked at me for a moment, then set the baggage down and took up a position beside Lucius. I turned to Seraphina.

“Let’s go, Sister.”

Without a word or a flicker of expression, Seraphina stepped to my side. Leaving Lillian and Leo behind us, we set foot into the thick darkness of the third gate. Lillian’s silence followed heavily at our backs, but for now I had to keep my eyes forward and walk.

Valerian had left the door to the third gate open, so I’d assumed we only had to follow the path he’d already cleared. That path was anything but smooth.

For one thing, the route we had to take was a corridor narrower than any tunnel in the real world. Thick pools of blood had formed all across the floor, as if to testify that a wholesale slaughter had taken place here, and the walls were gouged deep with rough sword-marks, as though they too had been slashed open.

Eve’s observation was spot-on. Down the entire length of the passage, we never found so much as a single corpse. For all the blood, whose volume hinted at the scale of the slaughter, the corridor was eerily, almost grotesquely clean.

Still, I could hardly picture Valerian erasing the bodies themselves from the world. However unconventional a swordsman he might be, he was no mage; evaporating a corpse without a trace was not the province of swordsmanship.

With no way to make sense of it, we kept moving. The deeper we went, the more savagely the foul stench of blood raged, until at last Elli, walking beside me, stopped and retched.

“…Urgh.”

“You okay?”

“…Yes.”

Elli clapped a hand over her mouth and barely managed an answer, but her face had already gone white as paper. The reek of congealing blood gone to rot was enough to break even a trained knight. Any deeper, and simply breathing would turn into agony.

I parted my lips, meaning to tell Elli to turn back.

“…”

That was when Seraphina, who had been walking along indifferently at my side, came to a halt. A faint shimmer of blue mana stirred at her fingertips, and a small, transparent butterfly took shape. Sculpted from ice, the blue butterfly drifted soundlessly through the air and alighted on the tip of Elli’s nose as she retched.

“Uh…?”

Elli’s eyes went round.

Eve analyzed Seraphina’s magic and broke it down for me. In plain terms: a temporary filter to block out the smell.

Color came visibly back into Elli’s face. She studied the butterfly perched on her nose, then bowed her head toward Seraphina.

“Thank you!”

Even at Elli’s bright thanks, Seraphina’s expression didn’t shift in the slightest. As if she had never expected any thanks at all, she kept her eyes on the darkness ahead and murmured, low.

“Don’t fall behind. The road is long.”

Cold as the words were, the way she quietly slowed her pace to match Elli’s stride was an unmistakable glimpse of Seraphina’s own clumsy brand of tenderness.

Eve must not have caught my meaning; she scrunched up her brow.

In any case, we pressed on. The deeper we went, the thicker the foul reek of blood grew, and the pools on the floor rose until they lapped at our ankles.

Something’s off.

If this were one of the special Abysses haunted by wraiths or spirit-bodies, I could have understood it. In those, the very instant a thing dies, its existence is snuffed out along with it.

“I see light!”

Just as my doubts were deepening, Elli pointed down the end of the corridor and shouted. At the far end of the pitch-black tunnel, a strange white light was leaking through.

“Let’s go.”

Whatever it was, the truth waited at the end of this tunnel. I set my doubts aside for the moment and stepped toward the light.

The instant my view opened up, a colossal circular arena revealed itself before us in all its grandeur.

“…What is this place?”

Elli’s question, half a gasp, echoed through the vast hollow of the Abyss. Before us spread an enormous, magnificent ring of an arena, as though someone had lifted the Roman Colosseum and set it down here whole.

The moment I took in the structure, I knew who the boss of this place was. The Demon Abysses took Solomon’s 72 Demons as their motif, and only one demon was ever set against the backdrop of an arena.

Eligos.

Clad in black armor and mounted on a black horse, he roved the battlefield as the Duke of War and Tactics, a demon cast in the shape of a knight. By rights, those spectator stands should have been packed with Eligos’s underlings, whose frenzied cheers at the sight of dying challengers were the very emblem of this arena. And yet they sat emptied to an unsettling degree, as if every last spectator had evaporated at once.

“Young Master, look over there! The doorway’s blocked!”

Elli was right. The passage down to the arena floor was sealed off by a barrier that gave off a sticky red glow. When I moved to lay a hand on that membrane, a system message rose before my eyes.

The system window hanging before my eyes was, naturally, invisible to Seraphina and Elli.

How do I relay this?

If I spoke up first as though I already knew, Seraphina would surely press me on where the knowledge had come from. I was still hunting for a convincing excuse when a voice cut across my thoughts.

“A bothersome barrier.”

Apparently with no patience for this stuck, immovable standoff, Seraphina drew her sword. Blue mana condensed along the blade, and her slash slammed into the red membrane.

— BWOOOM!

But for all the deafening roar, the red membrane didn’t so much as tremble. The instant she moved to gather her sword-energy again, a quiet voice came out of the dark.

“…It’s wasted effort.”

From the shadows behind a pillar at the corner of the passage, a mysterious figure swathed head to toe in black robes stepped out. Not even his face showed; he closed on us with an uncannily quiet gait.

Who is he?

He was an NPC I had no memory of.

“This is a sanctuary ruled by law. No force of arms can open any gate here.”

“Who are you?”

He didn’t so much as stir at her question. Instead of answering, he leveled a finger at the center of the arena and went on in a flat, dry voice.

“So long as you have set foot in this place, you must follow the appointed rules. First, only one may enter the battlefield at a time. Second, every contest is settled by single combat, one against one.”

His voice rang cold through the passage.

“Furthermore, for those of you who form a team, minions will be readied in number to match your own. If three wish to pass through this place, then all three duels must be won before you are granted the right to face the master.”

“…Three duels?”

Elli mumbled in a trembling voice.

To probe the loophole in the rule, I put a question to the robed man.

“Hold on. Once one of us wins a duel, is it impossible for that person to keep going, taking on enemy after enemy in succession?”

The robed man’s eyes flashed as though they were burning.

“Impossible. One soul may receive only one judgment. If three challengers have come, then all three must carry out their own share.”

His words matched, sure enough, what I’d known going in.

“If even one of you is defeated, then all of you forfeit the right to meet the master.”

Back in the actual game, Demonic Frontier, this had been an Abyss the players absolutely loathed. However outstanding your own skill, a single weak link among your party members forced the whole raid to failure. Collective responsibility at its most viciously unreasonable.

I was a solo player, so it never had anything to do with me, though.

Instead, I’d had to fight five duels back to back, in order: shield-soldier, spearman, cavalryman, archer, and mage.

“…Where is Valerian?”

Seraphina, silent until now, glared at the robed man and asked it low. Her hand was already clenched around the sword’s hilt hard enough to crush it.

The man’s shoulders gave the faintest twitch. Something rolled off him that might have been a sneer or might have been some strange thrill; I couldn’t tell which.

“The defeated become nothing but the sand of this place.”

Leaving only that riddle of an answer behind, the man’s form began to blur like smoke.

“Wait! Tell us plainly!”

Elli cried out and lunged at him, but her hand cut through empty air.

“Let the first challenger step onto the battlefield.”

And with those words left hanging in the air like an echo, the man vanished without a trace.

Is he saying Valerian was defeated?

Nothing about it was clear, but one thing was certain. We had stepped up onto this game board.

My thoughts tangled. Once an Abyss boss was slain, it took a full month to regenerate. We’d lost two days, true, but that was nowhere near enough time for the boss to have respawned. Which meant Valerian had failed to kill it.

Then where in the world did Valerian disappear to?

There was no one, anywhere, who could answer that. In the end, the only thing I could do now was clear this arena as fast as possible and dig out the truth.

I spoke to Seraphina.

“Sister. You go out first.”

At my suggestion, Seraphina gave a short nod, her eyes indifferent. Not a flicker of hesitation or fear crossed her face.

She took her first step toward the red barrier. The instant before her body could touch it, the barrier vanished without a trace, like a lie; the moment she had passed all the way through, it roared back up like a fierce blaze and sealed off the entrance.

Beyond the red barrier, I could see Seraphina’s back as she headed for the center of the arena.

At last, the first act of the consecutive duels had begun.