Chapter 121

Underground Hub “Listen, d’you know what bein’ an adventurer means? It’s where people wind up when they’ve got nowhere else to go.” The man, who was himself an adventurer, spoke firmly to the girl in front of him. Adventurers were known as scoundrels who lived in the Wild Frontier, a mass of territories outside the nations bound by the three-caste system. While this man was near the prime of his life, the two girls in front of him were quite the opposite. The silver-haired one was around sixteen or seventeen, in a nun’s habit. And the other one was practically an infant, so young that she couldn’t have been more than ten years old. “Folks who shoulda never been born. Folks who ran into nothin’ but walls wherever they turned. Failure after failure, till it all fell to pieces, and that’s when we went to the Wild Frontier. Not that it matters to you kids, but each of us ruined our lives before we fell this far down.” The vast majority of people who became adventurers were from the Commons or the Noblesse. It was incredibly unusual for someone from the Faust to stoop this low, though it happened on rare occasions. No matter how much they were trained, educated, and carefully selected, some people were born to lose everything in life. Strength was all that mattered in a place beyond the protection of any laws. And this group of men had distinguished themselves as especially strong, even among such hardened adventurers. At least, until a few months ago. So how did the man wind up talking about this to two girls young enough to be his own kids? He snorted at himself to shake off the brief existential crisis, then continued his speech. “You reap what you sow. I’m man enough to admit that. But for those of us who fell through the cracks of society’s three castes… Well, this here is our last bastion.” The man looked out the window, where there was no sky to be seen. He saw only the roof of an underground hub, lit by a smattering of Guiding lamps. The dimly visible passage was lined with bars, general stores, restaurants, and so on. The reason for its irregular illumination was that the town had no Guiding Force lines, and thus the lamps were only powered by the Guiding Force of present individuals. The land’s Guiding Force was completely dried up in the center of the continent. In a world where civilization flourished with Guiding Force as the foundational source of energy, places without any flow of that power to provide basic functions were generally considered uninhabitable. Few people traveled through such regions. The underground hub was shockingly quiet. This place was even farther below the large caved-in area created by the Starhusk. It was a base two hundred meters underground in the northern region of the Wild Frontier. It had long been conjectured that there was an ancient city in this place where no normal person could live. This rumor, recorded in writing and traded in whispers, attracted adventurers like moths to a flame, until they gathered and formed this underground settlement. It was the final destination for people who could no longer live in the towns or villages above. “Mm-hmm. I see.” It was the adorable and clearly precocious child who nodded after the man’s speech. While her elegant features gave a smart and sophisticated first impression, her tone was downright cheeky. This bold and haughty attitude also helped her look fashionable even in the unusual outfit she wore: a loose kimono over a white dress with three holes down the chest. “In other words, introducing us to a guide to take us to the City of Ruins was a bald-faced lie. You tricked us to take us here and hold us captive.” The man nodded. “That’s right.” He’d acquired information in advance that the girls who came underground three days ago were aiming to infiltrate the City of Ruins. He and his group were under orders. The adventurers who made this place their stronghold had fallen under the control of a certain man just a few short weeks ago. His orders were absolute. They were not to let the two girls proceed any farther, no matter what. Thus, the men spread information to bait the pair hiding in the subterranean hub. And just like that, they’d been caught. “We want to remain down here…and we can’t let you two jeopardize that.” The men glowed with phosphorescent light as they pulled out their weapons. Guiding Enhancement was a fundamental battle technique. Users drew upon Guiding Force produced from their souls and cycled it through their bodies to enhance their physical prowess. Each of them gripped a weapon engraved with a battle crest. Some even carried Guiding guns, contraband weapons. The little girl narrowed her eyes, displeased at the obvious show of hostility. “Do you know what you’re dealing with, exactly? We’re rather famous, you know.” “So I hear.” The leader of the adventurer group nodded at the girl’s rather arrogant words. The destruction of the holy land. The suppression of the Mechanical Society’s front lines in the eastern regions of the Wild Frontier. The abolishment of the class system in Grisarika. All three were drastic upheavals of the sort that one might expect once in a hundred years. What these girls had accomplished was known across the continent. If anyone aware of their identities was still foolish enough to underestimate them just because of their young age, they’d surely be called a fool. And yet the man antagonized them. “When pushed to pick a side, we’ll always pick whoever’s stronger.” His voice had a distinct tinge of fear. “And I seriously doubt that you two could beat the likes of him… Of Genom Cthulha.” That was all that mattered. The men were bound by the power of fear. Their opinions would not change; there was no room for negotiation. They were vastly outnumbered. The two girls who’d been lured here under the pretense of a negotiation were sitting ducks in the middle of a hunting ground. But the pair had survived odds like this several times over. The black-haired girl’s fearless smile never faltered. “Hmm. Well, I hope you don’t live to regret that.” Despite the fact that they were at an overwhelming disadvantage, the little girl in the white dress and kimono looked completely confident as she accepted the declaration of war head-on. “Okay, Sahara, you’re up! Take them out!” The girl’s bold proclamation put the men around her even more on their guard. Her companion was dressed in a nun’s habit and had a Guiding prosthetic right arm. It was clear from her complete lack of tension despite being surrounded that she was no ordinary young woman. A few of the men even intuited that she might be Governor Sahara, who was said to have taken over for the Director of the Fourth. Even if they didn’t know this little girl’s identity, Governor Sahara was famous as an authority in the east. She had dominated the front lines of the Mechanical Society and was hailed as a modern-day hero. A sliver of terror ran through the men. What if they couldn’t take her down even with their superior numbers? However, the one called Sahara only regarded her companion blankly. “Hang on a sec, Maya. What do you mean? I can’t fight all these guys.” Maya, the little girl who’d been talking such a big game, closed her mouth abruptly at this deadpan declaration. Unbothered by the girl’s reaction, Sahara went on in a casual drawl. “Yeah, this is a little too much for me. I mean, these guys look pretty tough. They’re not just your average thugs, you know. I’m guessing most of ’em were Noblesse before they became adventurers. And it’s a whole squad of ’em, too. You guys were in the military together and took the fall after some political battle or something, right?” The leader of the adventurers was impressed by her deduction, despite himself. Once, he’d been a commanding officer, but his group was banished after losing a political conflict. Unable to remain in the nation where they’d been born Noblesse or to flee to other countries, they’d survived by dirtying their hands in the Wild Frontier. Maya didn’t care about their struggles, though. All she wanted to know at the moment was the difference in strength between her side and theirs. To put it even more simply, she only cared if she and Maya would be able to make a quick escape. “What…? Then how are we going to get out of this?” “You seemed so confident that I assumed you had a plan, Maya. You don’t?” “Not at all.” There came another long, heavy silence. “Grab ’em.” “Wait, wait, time out! Stop! Cut! Let’s start over from the top, please!” The men decided they must have been wrong about the girl in the nun’s habit being the Governor. She was obviously just some idiot who happened to have the same name, clothes, and appearance as the infamous figure, traveling with a small child. Still, they kept on guard as they closed in intimidatingly, their expressions hard. Maya waved her hands frantically. “I’m sorry, okay? I suppose I got a liiiittle too carried away there. Yes, I’ll admit that much.” Even surrounded, she tried to talk her way out with undeniably impressive bravery. For a girl who appeared to be ten years old, at best, this level of courage was nothing short of an incredible natural gift. “We might not look it, but we’re actually rather important in the east, you know? If you gentlemen want to walk freely under the sun again, I’m sure we can help you out. You must be sick to death of living in this hole in the ground, right?” “You can get us off scot-free even after all the crimes we done, can ye?” “……” Cold sweat ran down Maya’s face. She pressed her adorable little mouth into a straight line and looked away in a show of irritation. “I dunno. I’m just a kid.” It was a very honest reaction. For a child her age, it was tempting to praise her for her honesty, but such candidness could sometimes be a disadvantage in negotiation. “Make sure you take these brats alive, boys. Even clueless kids like this could be useful hostages for dealin’ with our real target…Flarette.” “Sahara? Are we really done for? You don’t have any tricks up your sleeve to turn things around?” As Maya looked to Sahara for some salvation, the nun simply shrugged, her eyes as lazy as ever. “Nope. Just give up already. I did ages ago.” “What?! Nooo!” While their little two-person comedy skit put a damper on the tension, it wasn’t reason enough for the men to show mercy. The adventurer group who lived in the Wild Frontier, where power was everything, circled around the intruders to get rid of them for good. As a different young woman was eating at a sketchy food stall in the underground hub, she heard the kind of clamor that could only mean trouble. Although the underground settlement that had formed naturally near the City of Ruins was small, it possessed its own ecosystem. There was no shortage of people who couldn’t live in their homelands for one reason or another yet weren’t strong enough to do battle. Left with few options, they sold to adventurers. She heard metal clashing against metal and sensed the invocation of a crest conjuring. On top of that, there came the pop of Guiding guns and the out-of-place shrieks of a little girl. In this enclosed underground space, sound echoed persistently and refused to fade. The last shriek in particular was so loud and piercing that she suspected it might have been audible from everywhere in the subterranean settlement. “What in the world did those two get into now…?” she grumbled quietly as she slurped up the last of her noodles. The young woman was so beautiful that her silhouette stood out even in the dimly lit underground hub. As she placed her chopsticks on the emptied bowl, her light tawny hair swayed, held in a ponytail with a large black ribbon. She was none other than Menou, also known as Flarette, Flare’s successor. Once an Executioner who hunted taboos, she’d betrayed the Faust and had done enormous damage to the holy land, which made her a wanted criminal. Her blue-based attire only betrayed a trace of her former life as a member of the church. “Now, now, don’t be so mean, li’l Menou,” the voluptuous beauty next to Menou chided her lightly. She wore vertical-striped slacks and a short jacket, showing plenty of her smooth, brown skin. Despite sitting at the food stall, she didn’t eat anything, only beaming at the other girl cheerfully with an attitude that cut a stark contrast to her glamorous appearance. “It’s nice that they have so much energy, don’t you think? As a big sister, I think that kind of liveliness is much better than sitting around being gloomy in this dark cave!” “There is such a thing as too much energy. Really, that pair gets into trouble the second I take my eyes off them. Especially Sahara.” “Don’t you think you’re being too hard on my poor little sister? If you ask me, it’s that other pip-squeak who’s to blame.” “You’re just too soft on Sahara, Abbie. She can do things if she puts her mind to it, but at this rate, she’ll be lazy forever.” “Aww, I think it’s better to be plenty soft and sweet on her! She’s the sort of girl who tends to go where life takes her, after all. And I want to make it so that she can’t live without me at all! That’s love, I tell you.” “Please stop. For her sake and mine.” Sahara seemed to have bonded with Maya recently. They were a good influence on each other. While Menou conversed with Abbie, she paid the bill for her meal and stood. Finally, she strode toward the source of the increasingly loud battle, her long legs moving elegantly in small black shorts. “How much longer will it take to survey the terrain down here?” “Almost done, I think. This place is bigger than I expected.” Abbie held up a fingertip, on which perched an ant the size of a pinky finger. On very close inspection, it was clearly an inorganic insect made of mechanical parts like gears and springs—an insect-style conjured soldier. Menou had never seen conjured soldiers as small as the ones Abbie produced. After reaching the northern region of the continent and overcoming all manner of obstacles to make their way underground, Menou and company had hit a snag just outside the City of Ruins. The reason was simple—they didn’t know the way. “It looks like they’ve just been digging in random directions. There’s no clear route, and some of the passageways have caved in partway through. Some are full of poison gas or flooded with water… Really, this is no place for human beings to live.” “They’re only here because they have no other choice, I suppose.” “It’s such a mess that I still don’t have a handle on the whole place, but I did find an entrance to the City of Ruins!” The underground hub had formed when adventurers gathered and settled there. Its nature was not unlike the Balar Desert, where Menou had first reunited with Sahara, but since it was an underground area that didn’t see much traffic, it was all the gloomier. On top of that, a wanted criminal like Menou couldn’t risk making contact with such an exclusionary community, so she relied on Abbie’s specialty of miniature conjured soldiers to thoroughly search the place for the route to the City of Ruins. “It worries me that Michele hasn’t followed us here,” Menou said. “Ughh, Michele…” Even the normally carefree Abbie grimaced at the mention of that name. Michele was an Inquisitor who’d chased Menou and the others around the moment they reached the north side of the continent. She was a high-ranking priestess of the Faust who received direct orders from Hakua, and she was powerful enough to wipe out Menou’s group on her own. They’d assumed that Michele would continue to pursue them in the underground hub, but surprisingly, she’d yet to make an appearance. “Is it really such a problem that she hasn’t shown up yet?” Abbie asked. “Sounds like a good thing to me.” “Do you realize it’s been three days already? She was right on our tails aboveground. It’s weird that she’s suddenly abandoned her pursuit,” Menou replied. “Maybe she’s just focusing on blocking the exit.” Abbie offered her opinion based on the underground map she was making. “From what I can tell, the way we entered is really the only way in or out of this place. Maybe she figures it’s more effective to just lie in wait for us up there than to go to all the trouble of chasing us down here.” “That certainly would be worse for us.” Truth be told, it would have been preferable for Menou and company if Michele had pursued them. Michele was strong. Her amount and output of Guiding Force, the basis of strength in battle, was exceptionally high to the point of being downright superhuman. More likely than not, Michele could power an entire city on her own. But while Michele was far too overpowered to engage in one-on-one combat, she would be at a disadvantage in a subterranean region. There was a very real risk that she might destroy the entire underground hub just with one swing of her sword and a crest conjuring. Fortunately for Menou and the others, Michele had the good sense not to lay waste to everything around her. Even when she had a goal, she was still careful about her methods. Had she only followed Menou and the others below the earth, where she’d have to limit herself, they might have been able to trap and bury her alive. Even then, it was debatable whether they’d actually be able to defeat her, owing to the woman’s absurd life force, but Menou figured it would be enough to stall her for a while, if nothing else. However, Michele herself was surely aware of her weaknesses in tight quarters. “She did blockade the entrance,” Abbie mused. “It’s been hard on a lot of people down here, like the person who ran that food stall.” “Right, I’m sure their supplies have been drying up without anything coming in. You don’t think Michele intends to keep us in here until we starve to death, do you?” “I get the feeling she’s not that patient…” Adventurers and other rough types in the north used this underground hub as a base. Given the relative size of the population, there was some trade with the nearby towns to secure food and other necessities. Evidently, Michele had cut that trade off, using the Faust’s authority. She was only able to do such a thing because Inquisitors possessed a great deal of individual power. This had brought a lot of negative attention to Menou, Abbie, Sahara, and Maya, who’d slipped belowground while evading the blockade. While she probably wasn’t actually planning on starving them to death, turning the adventurers against them by blaming them for the blockade was most likely a part of her strategy. “I suppose she wouldn’t make it easy for us.” Menou sighed. “So what are we going to do when we have to leave?” “I really don’t want to fight her… Should we dig our way out?” Abbie suggested. “Excavating a new exit? I don’t know…” Menou looked up at the tunnel ceiling. It might have been impossible to dig through for humans, but with Abbie’s ability to produce all kinds of insect-like conjured soldiers, surely she could find a way through. But of course there was a problem. “If we opened up a new hole, wouldn’t it cause a cave-in?” “Maybe, maybe not. That kind of calculation is way outside my wheelhouse. I’m an intuition-based conjured soldier, you know. Even these little ones are made from the feelings that overflow from my soul.” “Let’s not risk it, then.” Menou tried not to dwell on the fact that Abbie apparently made precise Guiding vessels based purely on feelings and intuition, and put aside this route for the time being. The weblike underground hub was home to roughly a thousand people. It consisted of simple, clustered settlements on stable areas of the foundation, as well as wider mine-like passages like the one Menou and Abbie were walking in now. If they messed up the balance while trying to dig their way out and crushed innocent citizens in the process, the guilt would be terrible. As for Michele, the Inquisitor chasing them around, Menou still couldn’t devise a way to fight her and win. For now, it was all she and the others could do to avoid her. She put this process off for now as they arrived at the source of the commotion, where things were quickly heating up. Menou drew her dagger from the belt on her thigh. It was an unusual weapon, with the hilt in the shape of a gun’s grip. In this especially complex network of subterranean passages, Menou sent Guiding Force into her dagger gun. Guiding Force: Connect—Dagger Gun, Crest—Invoke [Guiding Branch: Barrel] The crest conjuring produced branches made of Guiding Force, which formed the shape of a barrel. In moments, there was a gun glowing with Guiding Light in Menou’s hand. She put the muzzle to the wall and closed her eyes. The battle raged just beyond the wall. She couldn’t depend on her sight. Instead, she assessed the relative positions of the people inside the room based on sound. While accounting for the wall’s thickness, she carefully adjusted the position of the muzzle, then pulled the trigger. “…Guh?!” A hoarse voice echoed from somewhere. The bullet had pierced the wall and hit the leader of the men. Chaos erupted in response, which Menou observed, if only barely, through the hole in the wall. Undeterred, Menou fired again and again. Now she only sought to stir up more confusion, not to hit anything in particular. Any leadership and order inside the chamber crumbled quickly, thanks to the random shots. A girl in the fight seized upon the discord to break through a window and escape. The silver-haired young woman in the nun’s habit, Sahara, waved calmly as she carried Maya on her back. “Thanks. You saved us.” “Don’t mention it. I know Maya is adorable, but try not to indulge her reckless whims, all right?” “Why do you assume this was all my fault?” Though Maya protested from Sahara’s back, she was indeed the one who’d caused this, after growing bored of three days without excitement underground. She’d dragged Sahara on an independent search for information. It didn’t help that Abbie had fanned that rebellious streak with constant arguments. During this exchange, the enraged men emerged from the building Sahara and Maya had just escaped from. “Flarette…” The man who seemed to be the leader glared at Menou, invoking her alias with contempt. “We were hoping to use that brat as a hostage to make you come along quietly, but I guess no such luck.” “I’ll thank you not to underestimate our secret weapon. She’s not so easy to capture, you know.” The sense of tension that had been lost for some time now abruptly returned. More adventurers had emerged from nearby buildings to capture Sahara and Maya before Menou’s intervention. Apparently, they’d organized two groups to surround their targets. Menou’s brow creased at the unexpected increase in opponents. “…What in the world did you two do?” The situation was worse than she thought. This could easily be the majority of combat-capable adventurers in the underground hub. “Oh, nothiiiing…,” Maya replied in her usual cheeky tone. Since she only looked like a child of barely ten, no one was wary of her, no matter what she did. The only exceptions were those who knew she was an Otherworlder with the Pure Concept of Evil and a rogue piece of Pandæmonium who’d gained independence. Sahara was the real problem. She should have stopped Maya from causing too much trouble. “I hate to say it, Menou, but this is an emergency. We don’t have time to point fingers right n—” “Sahara. You thought if these men took you hostage, you’d be able to leave relatively peacefully, didn’t you?” Menou interjected. Maya whipped around to stare at the girl who’d been carrying her. “Is that really what you were thinking?!” Sahara’s expression didn’t falter. “Of course not. It’s so mean of you to falsely accuse me. And Maya, you should really trust me. Mwuhhh, mmph!” “That’s the face you make when you’re lying…! Some servant you are, darn it!” Maya grabbed Sahara’s cheeks before she could finish giving excuses. It was great that they were getting along and all, but this was hardly the time. They were surrounded. “I take it the rumor was true, then?” Menou asked Sahara, who only trembled in response. “I thought so. Then he really is in the City of Ruins… Genom Cthulha.” She’d been right to assume Michele wouldn’t stop at sealing them belowground. Genom’s presence here changed everything. Whispers had posited for a while that Michele and Genom were working together, although nothing had been confirmed. Sahara had probably agreed to look for information in the underground hub with Maya, in the hope she might verify the rumor. Upon learning it was true, she’d undoubtedly jumped at the first chance to give herself up as a hostage so that she wouldn’t have to go to the City of Ruins. Maya looked increasingly confused by their conversation. “Gennum? Who’s that?” “He’s infamous in our line of work,” Menou answered. A monster among monsters, born into the Commons caste. For better or worse, he was the individual who’d brought about the most change on the continent in the past several decades. Slave trader. Arms dealer. Priestess killer. He dominated an organization that dealt in the illegal sale of anything considered taboo and eliminated anyone who got in the way of his business, whether they were knights or even priestesses. As someone who’d once been a part of the Faust, Menou found it hard to believe that any priestess would ally with Genom. As strange as it was to admit, a priestess working with Menou was more believable. Genom had simply killed far too many priestesses. “That one’s a monster in every sense of the word. It’s not even a matter of how scary or strong he is. I never want to see him again.” Sahara, who’d battled Genom in the Wild Frontier, touched her right arm. Before she reunited with Menou, Sahara had encountered Genom in the Mechanical Society. At the time, she’d attacked him mostly out of desperation and despair, which resulted in her losing her original right arm and very nearly her life as well. She only survived that encounter because Genom spared her on a whim. It wasn’t his strength that shook Sahara to her core. Rather, it was that she still didn’t understand the first thing about him, even after fighting. “Let’s think positive, shall we?” Menou patted Sahara on the shoulder. “It’s still better than Michele.” “Is it, though…?” Truthfully, since Menou had never encountered Genom herself, she couldn’t say for certain. Instead, she sidestepped the question and readied her Guiding gun. She had to get her best friend Akari back. If achieving that goal meant adding more casualties, she wouldn’t falter. The adventurers surrounding her and her companions were no exception. They’d come all the way to the depths of the northern continent to acquire a Guiding weapon that would help them fight Hakua Shirakami. With all the men’s attention focused upon her, Menou spoke softly in defiance of the tense atmosphere. “Let’s force our way through this all the way to the City of Ruins.” A girl nearby knew that the Starhusk wasn’t a weapon of mass destruction. She watched as Menou and her companions let loose on the adventurers. They’d left their base in Grisarika Kingdom and come to the northern reaches of the continent, traveling for weeks on end to find this place, all under the misapprehension that the Starhusk could damage Hakua. Hakua Shirakami was strong. In fact, such a word was insufficient for how drastically she outmatched all others. “…What a fool.” The girl spoke too quietly for anyone else to hear. The sound of her voice was drowned out by the noise of battle. It was bad enough that they were chasing after something that wasn’t what they thought, but they labored under the misunderstanding it would give them a chance against their enemy. Should things continue and the group enter the City of Ruins to seek control of the Starhusk, it would lead to trouble. What would happen if she left them to their own devices? The girl had heard tell of that future. The adventurers fought Menou and the others frantically. Using Genom Cthulha’s name to stoke fear in them had been wise. The girl carefully evaded Menou’s notice as she sent Guiding Force into her cloth-wrapped scripture to record the battle. The speed of Menou’s conjurings. The extent of her Guiding Enhancement. The conjurings she used most. The power of her Guiding gun. All of these factors were recorded in the girl’s scripture as moving images. This projection was the girl’s strongest scripture conjuring. She could invoke it incredibly quickly and construct the conjuring with great stealth. Since the scripture was wrapped in fabric, there was very little visible leakage of Guiding Light. However, in the midst of battle, Menou suddenly looked her way. The girl flinched and withdrew her face behind the dirty cloth. She squeezed a younger girl close to her, pretending to tremble in fear while still valiantly protecting her—all an act, of course. Still, she was confident that she wouldn’t be discovered, not in Menou’s current condition. Sure enough, she remained undetected. Nearly a thousand people lived in the underground hub. Roughly 30 percent of them were capable of fighting. Out of those, even fewer were actually useful, and most of them were in the group currently chasing Menou and company. Since adventurers and the merchants who catered to them had forged a living community here, however small it might be, there were a few noncombatant women and children around. The girl who’d infiltrated the town under the guise of one such helpless child continued recording Menou and her three companions as they fought. Eventually, they broke through the adventurers’ defenses and headed deeper into the area. They were forging down the path that led to the City of Ruins, the functional core of this place. “Here’s your reward.” She handed payment to the orphaned children who’d helped provide her cover, stood, and cast the cloth aside. While walking away from the kids who shrieked in delight over the money, the girl opened her scripture. Guiding Force: Connect—Scripture, 1:4—Invoke [The Lord’s will is relayed through all of heaven and earth, reigning far and wide.] She invoked a communication conjuring to contact her superior aboveground. The response didn’t take long to arrive. Continue pursuit. That was all it said. “That’s my darling Michele for you.” Once she reached the temporary base she’d made in the underground hub, the girl turned the valve of the water pipe. There was no need to disguise herself as a dirty street urchin anymore. All that came out was cold water. Was the water heater broken, or did it just not exist? She couldn’t very well expect to be provided with reliable utilities in a place like this anyway. Counting herself lucky that there was water at all, she took a shower to wash off the dirt, then changed into her usual attire. Specifically, the girl donned indigo priestess robes. She put on white gloves, then tied up her pink hair into pigtails with two red scrunchies. Then, finally, she pulled her mantle around her shoulders. An Inquisitor’s uniform, as befit Momo’s current position. Menou and the others had found the City of Ruins. The space below the northern Wild Frontier changed in nature, depending on the depth. First, there was the spiral staircase that led down from the surface. The stairs alone went almost a hundred meters down, but they were ultimately still just an entrance. Past the staircase was the passageway-like underground hub. There was no map of this place, for it was populated mostly by scoundrels and criminals. The labyrinthine subterranean passage spread in all directions, like an ant colony. Without a guide, it was all too easy to lose one’s way. While these two spaces were unusual, they were still ordinary, in a way. The passages had once been somewhat more efficient, but the humans who lived down here had expanded them purely to cause trouble, resulting in this chaotic mess. The place in the northern continent’s Wild Frontier truly known as the City of Ruins was beyond the underground hub. Documents claimed the place existed, yet no one had ever reportedly found it. There was an entrance from the underground hub, and adventurers had discovered a door that seemed to fit the description, but none had managed to get past the gigantic thing. An urban legend claimed the door opened occasionally, inviting a chosen individual inside. It was an incredibly suspect-sounding rumor, but Momo happened to know for a fact that it was true. It happened about half a year ago. Momo had been charged with looking after Akari and had brought her here, beneath the lands of the northern reaches of the continent, as a possible place to hide her. Once she passed through the underground city where people came and went, she was invited into the City of Ruins by the one who dwelled inside. “……” Momo closed her eyes and recalled what she’d seen. The heart of the city rested deep—a cavern that was a miracle merely by nature of existing. Such was the place called the City of Ruins. And the facility that controlled one of the Four Major Human Errors, the Starhusk, loomed at the center of this hollow. The prophecy that the Astrologer had told Momo there still echoed in her head even now. “…Tch!” She kicked her heel into the white box she used as a chair. There were several loud thunks as Momo repeatedly exacted her frustration before finally opening her scripture. The images she’d recorded in secret earlier were reproduced inside. Momo had wanted to capture the battle, no matter what. There was no telling who she might have to fight. She had to raise her odds of winning in any way possible. “Not that this’ll help much…” Watching the group dispatch some common ruffians would hardly reveal the depths of their abilities. Each of them undoubtedly kept aces up their sleeves. It was too much to hope that ordinary adventurers were strong enough to draw those out. Abbie, a Primary Triad conjured soldier; Maya, the child of a Concept of Original Sin; Sahara, the Governor of the Fourth, even if she hadn’t earned the title; and of course, Menou, Flare’s successor. Momo analyzed each of the four girls’ movements with rapt concentration. Once, Master Flare had said that Momo became a priestess relying entirely on natural talent, yet now she studied like any true Executioner, to win at any cost. Brute strength wouldn’t be enough this time. None of her techniques were sufficient. The element of surprise and sheer dumb luck would probably be on her opponents’ side. Those four girls were blessed, almost as if chosen by fate. Momo would cheat, lie, and wheedle her way into their hearts—whatever it took to achieve her goal. She wasn’t strong enough to be picky about her methods, not in a world like this one. She needed to focus so she wouldn’t lose to any of them.