57. The Arena (1)

In sports, there has to be a winner and a loser, because victory, in the end, is a spoil you can only seize by trampling your opponent underfoot.

But I once tried imagining something else.

What if the rival you fought all the way to the gold medal was the closest friend of your childhood? Or your own flesh and blood?

Could you really rejoice without reservation just because you’d won? And could you smile at the one who beat you, offer 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 answer would differ with every situation and every person. But weighing the situation I was in right now, I could state this 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 signature technique stopped Lillian’s all-or-nothing strike cold. Lillian had poured every last drop of her remaining mana into that one blow, and now she stared blankly at the empty air.

Seraphina, the victor, looked at the loser and didn’t press on with any more sermonizing. She simply slid her sword back into its sheath, as indifferently as if this had been nothing more than her usual morning training.

“…Haah.”

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

Breaking it was my job in the end, since I was the one standing at the center of this whole mess.

“Big Sis Lillian, you stay here.”

At my curt command her shoulders flinched, but she kept her head bowed and didn’t answer. The situation was too urgent to comfort someone whose mind had checked out, yet she’d shed too many tears for me to push her any harder.

“We need to be ready in case something goes wrong. Big Brother Lucius still hasn’t come to.”

I forced myself to keep a businesslike tone and looked at her.

“Having you by Big Brother’s side is the surest insurance we’ve got. I’ll head inside, make sure the third gate’s fully cleared, and come back for you.”

Lillian was still staring at nothing but the floor, but she gave a faint nod.

I turned to Leo, who was shouldering the luggage.

“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 down the baggage and took up a position beside Lucius.

I turned to Seraphina.

“Let’s go, Sister.”

Without a word or a flicker of expression, she stepped to my side.

We left Lillian and Leo behind us and 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 walk the path he’d already cleared. But that path was anything but smooth.

For one thing, we had to advance down a corridor narrower than a tunnel in the real world. Thick pools of blood had formed all over the floor, as if to attest that a wholesale slaughter had taken place here, and the walls were gouged deep with rough sword marks, like knife wounds of their own.

She was right. In the entire length of the passage, we never found so much as a single corpse. Set against that much blood, which hinted at the scale of the slaughter, the corridor was eerily, almost grotesquely clean.

Still, it was hard to imagine Valerian had erased the bodies from the world, because however far off the charts a swordsman he might be, he was no mage. Evaporating a body without a trace wasn’t the domain of swordsmanship.

With no way to figure it out, we kept moving.

The further we went, the more viciously the stench of blood raged, until at last Elli, walking beside me, stopped and retched.

“…Urgh.”
“You okay?”
“…Yes.”

She covered her mouth and barely managed the answer, but her face had already gone pale as a sheet of paper. The reek of rotting, congealed blood was the kind even a trained knight would struggle to endure, and any further in, just breathing would become an agony.

So I parted my lips, thinking I’d have to send her back.

“…”

That was when Seraphina, who’d been walking 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 flew soundlessly through the air and alighted gently on the tip of Elli’s nose as she retched.

“Uh…?”

Elli’s eyes went round.

Eve analyzed Seraphina’s magic and explained it for me. In plain terms, it was a temporary scent-blocking filter.

Right away, the color came visibly back into Elli’s face. She studied the butterfly perched on her nose with care, then bowed her head toward Seraphina.

“Thank you!”

Even at that bright thanks, Seraphina’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. As if she’d never expected any thanks at all, she went on staring only at the darkness ahead and murmured, low.

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

It was a cold way to put it, but she subtly slowed her pace to match Elli’s stride, and that was unmistakably a glimpse of Seraphina’s own clumsy kind of tenderness.

Eve must not have understood what I meant, because she scrunched her brow.

In any case, we pressed forward again.

The further we went, the thicker the reek of blood grew, and the pools on the floor deepened until they wet our ankles.

Something’s off.

If this were one of the special Abysses haunted by wraiths or spirit-bodies, I could understand 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 corridor and shouted. At the end of the pitch-black tunnel, a strange white light was leaking out.

“Let’s go.”

Whatever it was, the truth could be confirmed at the end of this tunnel, so 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 Abyss’s enormous hollow.

It was vast and magnificent, a structure that looked as though the Roman Colosseum had been transplanted here whole, and the moment I saw it, I realized who the boss of this place was.

The Demon Abysses took Solomon’s 72 Demons as their motif, and only one demon was set against the backdrop of an arena.

Eligos.

The demon clad in black armor, riding a black horse and roving the battlefield. The Duke of War and Tactics, a demon in the shape of a knight.

By rights, the spectator stands should have been packed with Eligos’s underlings, because their noise, the frenzied cheers they spewed as they watched challengers die, was the very emblem of this arena. Yet the stands were unsettlingly empty, as if every last spectator had evaporated all at once.

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

It was just as Elli said. The passage leading to the arena floor was sealed off by a barrier that gave off a sticky, red glow, and when I made to lay my hand on that membrane, a system message rose up before my eyes.

Seraphina and Elli, naturally, couldn’t see the window.

How do I relay this?

If I spoke up first as though I already knew, Seraphina would surely press me on the source of that knowledge.

Just as I was casting about for a convincing excuse—

“A bothersome barrier.”

Apparently not liking being stuck like this, Seraphina drew her sword, and a slash of condensed blue mana slammed against the red membrane.

— BWOOOM!

But for all the deafening roar, the membrane didn’t so much as tremble.

The instant Seraphina moved to draw up her sword-energy again—

“…It’s wasted effort.”

From the shadows behind a pillar in the corner of the passage, a mysterious figure swathed head to toe in a black robe walked out. Not even his face was visible, and he approached 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.”

Even at Seraphina’s question, he didn’t stir.

“Who are you?”

Instead of answering, the robed man pointed 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 coldly through the passage.

“Furthermore, for those who form a team as you have, 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’s voice trembled as she mumbled it.

To confirm the loophole in this rule, I threw the robed man a question.

“Hold on. If one of us wins a duel, there’s no way for that person to keep going and take on the other enemies back to back?”

His eyes flashed as though burning.

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

Sure enough, his words matched what I’d known beforehand.

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

In the actual game, Demonic Frontier, users had absolutely loathed this Abyss, because no matter how outstanding your own skill was, a single weak link among your party members forced the raid to fail. You might call it a viciously unreasonable form of collective responsibility.

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: shield-soldier, spearman, cavalryman, archer, and mage, in that order.

“…Where is Valerian?”

Seraphina, who had been silent, glared at the robed man and asked it low, her hand already gripping the sword’s hilt hard enough to crush it.

The man’s shoulders gave the faintest twitch. A current flowed off him that might have been a sneer or might have been some strange thrill. I couldn’t tell.

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

Leaving only that riddle of an answer behind, his form began to blur like smoke.

“Wait! Just tell us straight!”

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

“Let the first challenger step onto the battlefield.”

With those words lingering 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’d now stepped up onto this game board.

My head grew tangled. Once an Abyss boss was slain, it took a full month to regenerate. We’d been delayed two days, sure, but that was nowhere near enough time for a respawn. In other words, Valerian had failed to kill the boss.

Then where in the world did Valerian disappear to?

There was no one anywhere who could answer that. So in the end, the only thing I could do right now was finish this arena as fast as possible and find the truth.

I spoke to Seraphina.

“Sister. Why don’t you go first?”

At my proposal, she gave a brief nod with indifferent eyes, and there wasn’t the slightest hesitation or fear in her expression.

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

Beyond it, 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.