Estelle explained that the majority of the low-rank adventurers in Ivalia purposely worked on the first to eighth floors. Once people found out there was a return device on the fifteenth floor, things would probably change a lot. Any adventurers who were at least strong enough to defeat reptilas could get to this point, then teleport out of the dungeon without having to waste time and resources fighting their way back to the entrance.
“I guess this is something we should report to the guild, right?”
“Of course!” Estelle exclaimed. “It isn’t particularly valuable to us, but it’s much more important to the guild than the hidden room. This might even earn you a promotion, Sai.”
“Dang, that’d be pretty nice.”
It made sense that Estelle was three ranks higher than me, since she’d been adventuring longer, but the size of the gap had been in the back of my mind for a while now.
“So should we hurry back and report this immediately?”
“No. First, let’s conduct some tests ourselves. It’ll be a problem if the guild can’t locate this device when they send their people to investigate.”
“Yeah, good point. Unlike the hidden room, this one has a door, so maybe we can figure out how it works.”
We had no idea how to close the passageway to the hidden room, and there might not even be a way. The wall here just turned into a swing door, though, so it seemed like it should be possible to close it again. We walked back out to the stairs, and I put my hand into the squarish depression again and gave it a pull. The door closed with a faint click.
“Oh, the door and the passageway disappeared,” I said. “So did the handle.”
At this point, the door was almost impossible to distinguish from the other sections of wall nearby. After I took my hand off of the wall, it became completely indistinguishable.
“Can you open it again, Sai?”
“I’ll give it a shot,” I said. “Let’s see what happens if I touch the same place—yeah, okay, it retracted again.”
“If the door opens whenever you put your hand in that handle, it should be possible to reproduce these results,” said Estelle. “But how to mark the specific location?”
We spent a little time walking up and down the stairs and conducting tests. In the end, we discovered that the handle appeared when you paused on the step in the exact middle of the stairs between the fifteenth and sixteenth floors and touched the wall sixty centimeters above the step. It worked the same way when Estelle touched it, so probably anyone could activate the door. Mana seemed like the only precondition to opening the secret passage.
“All right, I believe we now have enough information for a detailed report to the guild,” said Estelle. “I imagine they’ll praise us for our hard work.”
“Yeah. I’m kind of confused about why nobody has ever managed to find this before, though,” I said. “All you need to do is touch the wall...”
“Hmm. At the moment, I have two hypotheses,” said Estelle. “The first is that you may have to spawn and defeat a special boss like the armed reptila before you can trigger the door. I have no idea what conditions are required to spawn the reptila, however.”
There were all kinds of conditions that might have been relevant—maybe an adventurer had to reach a certain floor or slay a certain number of reptilas beforehand, or maybe it was purely random—but we didn’t have any actual evidence for any of those possibilities, so it sounded like Estelle’s first hypothesis was off the mark.
“The second is that it was simply a coincidence—that none of the adventurers who have come this way before have ever touched the specific place where the mechanism is concealed,” Estelle concluded.
“Is that really plausible, though?”
It wasn’t like I knew the history of this dungeon in detail, but Ivalia had grown up around it and become famous as a dungeon city, so the dungeon was obviously really important to the local economy. There had to have been countless adventurers who’d passed by this spot. It was hard for me to believe that none of them had ever touched the wall where I had.
“I believe it’s plausible. The handle is located in an inconvenient place.”
“Oh, you mean because so few adventurers explore these floors at all? I mean, I guess that makes sense, but...”
“Yes, that’s one way of looking at it.”
I cocked my head at Estelle’s choice of words. “One way? What do you mean?”
She just laughed at my reaction. “I’m talking about the exact spot on the wall. For example, Sai, do you think someone like Adonix-san would have accidentally touched the wall right there?”
“Uh, I guess not...”
I was under 160 centimeters tall, which bothered me a little. Adonix-san, though, was massive—definitely over 180 centimeters and possibly close to 200. He wouldn’t have been likely to touch the wall low down, and the majority of adventurers were a lot closer in height to him than they were to me. Even female adventurers, who made up only a small fraction of all adventurers, were mostly taller than me.
“...Well, results are all that matter in the end,” I said. “We don’t know exactly what led to this discovery.”
“It’s true—even if your blessing played a role, we’ll probably never know for certain,” said Estelle.
“...Okay, let’s head back to the guild and report what we found here!”
Estelle just laughed at that, so I urged her to hurry as I headed back inside the room with the return device. This magic circle isn’t going to, like, summon a demon, is it? I know I can trust Estelle, but...
“Uh, Estelle, are you sure this is a return device? What if it’s actually a trap and it teleports us somewhere else in the dungeon?”
“There are teleportation traps in some dungeons, but they’re generally hidden so that you don’t notice them before stepping on them. This is the first time I’ve seen a return device in person, but I have difficulty imagining that something this conspicuous could be a trap.”
“G-Got it...”