Swamp Girl! Chapter 62

We proceeded down the cobalt green pa.s.sageway.

It was roomy enough for us to walk side-by-side and still have s.p.a.ce to spare.
At first, we slowly advanced in single-file, senses on high alert, but given the un.o.bstructed view ahead, and the utter lack of branches so far, we eventually loosened up and started walking next to each other.
Palmira had basically kept her sword drawn even so, but it was hard to call her overly cautious. She might have been on edge, but she was no longer as vigilant as she was at the outset.

“…All things considered, this place sure is strange,”

I muttered to myself as I looked around.
The walls weren’t the least bit uneven, somehow processed to be perfectly level. I didn’t realize it earlier, but there was a gap between the walls and the ceiling, through which light leaked in.
The more I thought about it, the stranger it was to me for a labyrinth to be well-lit.
The entire way was illuminated by the light s.h.i.+ning from those slits. They ran along the length of the corridor, always continuing deeper and deeper inside.

What the source of the light was, and how it was continuing to glow, I had no idea.
But at least to my knowledge, aside from the sun, generally nothing in this world could s.h.i.+ne continuously. And even sunlight disappeared at night.

In short, something was maintaining the lights in this hallway.
It was evidence that the labyrinth was functional.
And if it was functional, it wasn’t dying. If it wasn’t dying, then there was something here.
That man definitely went on ahead too. There’s no mistake — something was here.

“…Come to think of it, Palmira.”

“Mn.”

“You spoke with him. What was your impression?”

Come to think of it, Palmira should have been talking to that man about something.
She didn’t just get a good look at him, she even had a conversation with him. So if I asked about his characteristics, what kind of vibe she got off him, maybe I’d remember something.

“………There was something a little nostalgic about him.”

She seemed to be at a bit of a loss.

Nostalgic?
Her reply was too unexpected.
I was expecting something more concrete, like ‘he had big eyes’ or ‘his voice was loud’, so I couldn’t hide my confusion from getting such an abstract response.

Plus, I was pretty caught on the word ‘nostalgic’.
I mean, even I had the feeling that I’d met the guy somewhere, so hearing her describe him as ‘nostalgic’, it wasn’t like I disagreed.
But though my version and Palmira’s seem to be one and the same, well, I don’t know about that. ‘I’ve met him somewhere’ and ‘nostalgic’ are slightly different in nuance.

“How was he nostalgic?”

“…I don’t really know. But I just felt that he was, somehow.”

Even I knew I was asking a difficult question, but sure enough, that was how the troubled Palmira answered me.
Nothing I can do about it, so I might as well ask if anything else stuck out to her.

“What else?”

“Nothing really. He was an ordinary person. To be honest, I don’t really understand why you’re so fixated on him, Chris.”

…When she said that to me, I couldn’t find the words to respond.
Frankly, even I don’t know why I’m making such a fuss over the guy.
I tried to remember.
That red hair. That manner. That [feeling]. I’ve met him somewhere.
And, that one moment our eyes met. I felt some kind of indescribable chill. I don’t know what it was. Even if I dig through my memories, no matter how I try, I can’t remember.

“Chris.”

As I wracked my brains, Palmira tugged lightly on the hem of my dress. When I looked at her, she was looking back at me with her naked blade pointed down the pa.s.sageway.

I turned my gaze in that direction.

I could see something before us. And I could also see that there was a break in the pa.s.sageway ahead.
Not a dead end. It seemed to connect to somewhere else. I couldn’t make out much more than that.

“I hear something.”

Then, as Palmira said, I could hear a faint sound coming from further in. Straining my ears, I caught a hissing sound, like escaping air.
It was an eerie noise. We exchanged glances and nodded. Taking that as the signal, Palmira took point again, her sword at the ready.

Vague as it was, I had a unpleasant premonition.
I felt an ever-so-slight tingling at the nape of my neck, and I unconsciously touched my hand to it.
Even so, there was only one way to go: forward. The path didn’t have a single fork, and it was already too late to turn back.

Will Leon come?

Even if I say so myself, I’m being way too selfish. But while nursing that hope, I cautiously followed Palmira forward.

Little by little, the thing we saw drew closer.
And as it did, something become clear. The other end opened into a chamber.
And as we approached, the hissing sound grew more distinct.

Just what in the world is it? As I wondered, we reached the chamber.

“!?”

The room, or more precisely, the vast s.p.a.ce that unfurled before our eyes left us speechless.
Even Palmira, seemingly dumbstruck by the spectacle, stopped in her tracks. Her sword, which should have been up and at the ready, drooped.

The end of the pa.s.sage opened up into a sprawling cavern. What’s more, it wasn’t of any ordinary size. It was as big as a coliseum I once saw in some city somewhere. And the ceiling arched high above us, too.
But the sight that shocked us wasn’t something like that.
It was the thing hanging in mid-air in the center of the chamber.

“Wh–What is that?”

A huge red sphere.
A great number of tube-like things coiled around it, as if suspending it in the air. Extending from the walls and ceiling, they clung to the hanging sphere.
And every once in a while, some kind of gas vented from those coiling tubes. That was the source of the hissing that we picked up from a distance away.

Standing beside me, staring at it just as I was, Palmira quietly drew closer to me. Her eyes on that sphere, her face was drained of all color.
‘I bet I look the same,’ I thought.
To put it bluntly, the thing before us could be summed up in one word: ominous.
Sure, I’d seen my fair share of freakiness even before coming this far. But this sphere was already more than a simple word like ‘freaky’ could capture. In a manner of speaking, it was like something man was never meant to see. A sinister repulsiveness felt instinctively. An overwhelming bizarreness that raised an intuitive suspicion: ‘Won’t something unthinkable happen the moment I take my eyes away?’

“Yo, Chris.”

“–Aghk–!”

As we stood stiffly, arrested by the sight, a voice suddenly called out to me from off to the side.
My nerves on edge, hearing my name called out of the blue literally made me jump in surprise with a weird shriek.

“Who — !?”

It was Palmira who reacted first. She pointed the sword in her hand in the direction of the voice.
Is it him? The mystery man?
The thought crossed my mind, but only for a moment. Why? Because I knew that voice.

“…L–Lord Lucien.”

Before I knew it, Lucien was standing there with a smile completely at odds with the ambience of the place. I just barely remembered the ‘Lord’ in time.
Then, I took charge of Palmira, who didn’t really understand the situation, and had her lower her sword.

To be honest, running into him in a place like this was just too disturbing. I didn’t trust him.
But he was still the Second Prince. I couldn’t speak recklessly.
Come to think of it, Palmira could be considered a pretty bold rebel for pointing a sword at both the Second and Third Princes of the Empire.

“You should see your face. It’s got ‘What are you doing in a place like this?’ written all over it. Well, that’s my line. So why are you here, Chris?”

With a bold smile, Lucien came closer.
Combined with the atmosphere of the place, the smile on his face was unsettling. I suppressed the urge to back away, but I glared at him all the same.
Yeah, it was the Second Prince that I was facing. But me, forget pointing a sword at him, I tried to punch the guy. It was rather late for restraint.
Still, ‘why am I here’? Well, because?

“…I spotted a suspicious-looking man. When I chased after him, I fell into this place.”

I told it to him straight, without any attempt at deception. Even if I went out of my way to lie, it’d be no use.

“A ‘suspicious-looking man’, was it? Not me, surely?”

“No, it wasn’t Lord Lucien… Did you not see him?”

I asked, probing his real intentions.
The mystery man wasn’t here, at least. Since there was only a straight path up to this point, he must have gone on further, somewhere else.

Leaving that aside, I was stuck on the fact that we ran into Lucien when we went in search of that mystery man.

I can think of two possibilities.

Our mystery man has nothing to do with Lucien, who is simply a third party. Accordingly, our meeting with Lucien is also a coincidence.
Otherwise, he and Lucien have some kind of connection. He lured us here. And as such, our meeting with Lucien was inevitable.

Which is it? The question gnawed at me.

“I see, so it wasn’t me? Hmm, but I was happy to think that you came all this way chasing me.”

His evasive tone all but confirmed that he had a connection with the man.
If he really didn’t know, then when asked ‘Didn’t you see him?’, he’d ordinarily ask about the man first. And let’s not forget how calm he in this rather questionable location.

“…What is this place?”

To keep myself from falling into his pace, I chose my words carefully.
It was already obvious that Lucien had us led here. It may even be that my unusual fixation on the mystery man was the result of magic.
Maybe that was too wild a conspiracy theory, but considering just how friggin’  weird this place was, and how suspicious Lucien was, I had the feeling that anything was possible.

“You’re asking about that, are you? This place, well. It’s the Empire’s — or perhaps, the Imperial Capital’s — most important secret. That’s why only a select few know of its existence. Do you want to know what it is? A secret like that?”

Words that someone might even take as a threat. Lucien said them with relish.
Though he seemed to be goofing around to some degree, the truth was, he was burning with impatience. ‘I want to tell, I want to tell.’ Despite the way he spoke, I could hear it in his voice.

For that very reason, I couldn’t answer. I knew that whatever Lucien was about to say, it sure wasn’t going to be anything good. Even if it weren’t for that, I didn’t really want to ask about the true nature of that ghastly sphere.

But it definitely seemed like it had something to do with me. Well, I don’t know whether that means me, or [Chris], though.
When I found it too difficult to respond, Lucien didn’t bother waiting. As if he planned to from the start, he continued on.

“That, you see, is a tomb. And at the same time, it’s the thing that protects this city. We call it ‘Tetra’s Heart’.”

“A tomb…”

That thing?
Once again, Palmira and I looked up at the sphere. The intertwining tubes. Occasionally, they released a hiss of vapor. It didn’t seem like a tomb at all. The word that came after was far more fitting.
Heart. It was exactly that. A perfect fit. Nestled among the coils of those hissing tubes, it certainly did look like a pulsing heart.

Tetra’s Heart.
Tetra.
I’ve heard that somewhere.

“…The five-Attunement magus,”

whispered Palmira beside me, as I tried to recall where I’d heard the name before.

You knew, Palmira?

I thought, but hearing her words, I remembered it too. At the Brellwandy Adventurers’ Guild, Guildmaster Arc had definitely made a few references to it while talking about the [Legendary Magus].
I didn’t think a story like that would be tied to the place I found myself in now.

“Tetra… Who was she?”

“A magus from the ancient era. She’s considered the one who established the foundations of that which we know as magic. Like your adorable little armsman said, she also had five Attunements. It was Tetra who created the concept of the Attunements in the first place, as the story goes. At any rate, pretty much everything related to magic came from her. A powerful magus. To the point that in this day and age, there’s no one who can compare… And it’s that Tetra who is buried — no, sealed here.”

Sealed.
I see, that described it extremely well.
No matter how I looked at it, the so-called ‘heart’ before me now wasn’t the cage of a dead thing.
If the thing inside had been a living creature to begin with, then it was still alive now.
Or perhaps, being kept alive. It gave off that sort of impression.

“Maybe you’ve heard this about this city, but it was originally an ancient ruin. The castle above us, and the ramparts surrounding it as well. We unknowingly made use of those ruins as a city, you see.”

“‘Unknowingly’, what…”

— do you mean? About this — [Heart].

“This city. This castle. These ramparts. They were the things sealing this tomb.”

‘How stupid.’
Lucien smiled as if he were enjoying himself.

Considering his position as an imperial prince, he was a strange figure. He could even be interpreted as mocking the Empire.
The Imperial Capital, boasting of such grandeur. Whoever laid eyes on it would exclaim in wonder. And think: ‘As expected of the capital of the greatest empire in the world.’

But a prince of that very empire was saying: ‘That sort of thing is all make-believe.’
The t.i.tle that it was supposed to be able to wear proudly? His att.i.tude declared that such a thing didn’t have a single speck of value.

“But that seal will unravel very soon. There’s no such thing as an eternal seal. Never has been. And on top of that, we threw that seal into disarray.”

“…If the seal comes undone, what will happen?”

“The Imperial Capital will probably get blown to kingdom come, then, won’t it?”

Lucien spoke of a terrifying future without batting an eye.
I didn’t really understand what he was thinking. It was just like he wanted to say that he couldn’t care less about such a thing.

On the other hand, I could take it as a lie. Rather, that’s what I wanted it to be.
But with that pulsating thing in the background, there was an eeriness about Lucien that ruled out all other conclusions.

“…Why reveal such a secret to us?”

To me, Lucien’s objective was unclear. He obviously called us here with some kind of purpose in mind.
To show us this place. And I couldn’t imagine that his goal was simply to tell us that story.

“Why indeed. I was thinking that I’d tell you in advance what our objective is, Chris.”

“…’Our’?”

“That’s right. Mine… and Leon’s.”

And just like that, Lucien revealed that gut-wrenching name.

The second half of today’s double update! And it ends on a much more interesting note than Chapter 61, what a funny coincidence that is.