A nauseating chill forced her to hunch her shoulders before she heard a surprised voice.
“Tish?!” It was Heartia. He ran over and rubbed her back, and Leticia squeezed her voice out somehow.
“What? You finally noticed? I tried to get your attention earlier...”
“S-Sorry. It wasn’t that I didn’t hear you. I don’t really understand it myself... I was thinking. It just seemed like I didn’t need to respond...” He waved his hands, flustered, and then turned in the direction Leticia had been facing and murmured apprehensively, “Wait, who were you talking to? Was Azalie here?”
“Yes. She’s still a little unstable—” Leticia explained, looking over at Azalie. “She’s not good at showing herself to others without some effort yet. I don’t really get it, but that’s what she says, at least. That’s why she needs people like us, and took us all the way here.”
“This is the sanctuary, Tish!” Heartia shouted like he’d just noticed. He backed up and spun around, looking at the room. “Those people searching us were Red Dragons...”
“That’s right,” Leticia groaned, annoyed.
Heartia was shaking his head like he was still confused. “We’re in a place no human being has set foot in in the last two hundred years!”
“If only I could think of it as an honor.” Leticia searched for Azalie as she spoke. She’d disappeared at some point, so she really must not have had the capacity to make her presence known. With a sigh, Leticia straightened up and said, “I don’t know about there being no humans here for two hundred years.”
“Huh?”
As if to illustrate her words, a figure appeared then.
With no sort of warning or indication, he seemed to just slide into existence from thin air. It was a man who looked like he was clad in black itself. Or maybe like blackness wearing human skin.
Heartia shouted, pointing at the long-haired man. “C-Colgon!”
He ignored the shout and, to Leticia, said simply, “That was fast.”
Leticia nodded. “We’re out of time, right?”
“Right. So I can’t give you a very warm welcome.” Colgon glanced up at the ceiling and asked, “You know how it works here, right? You can only move in the way the priestesses want. They control the connections between all the passageways in the sanctuary.”
“Yes.”
“Those Red Dragons oppose the priestesses as well. They fight under the priestesses’ orders, and lost one of their own in Urbanrama, and just now lost two more fighting the Thirteen Apostles. But the priestesses still have enough power that they have to obey them. Do you understand?”
Leticia got sick of confirming every single thing vocally, so she just nodded. She wasn’t trying to be hostile, but Colgon still stopped talking, waiting for her to speak with a harsh look on his face.
So, what... We have to obey these priestesses completely? “I understand,” Leticia said, resigned.
“H-Hey, Colgon—”
Colgon ignored Heartia once more and continued, “This room is a checkpoint of sorts. If your will goes against that of the priestesses, then you won’t be able to proceed past here.”
“...Well, you got here,” Leticia said, trying to bait him, and Colgon’s expression finally softened somewhat. He’d obviously picked up on her intentions.
“Yes. I’m able to move here because my interests are aligned with theirs.”
So as long as our interests are aligned, Leticia read into his words. The sanctuary is at such a disadvantage that they have to work with anyone whose interests align with theirs, then...
“I’ll give you our answer, then. We’ve brought with us one of the keys to preventing the cataclysm that is about to befall the continent.”
It happened in less than an instant. Before she was even sure if she’d finished speaking or not, the scenery around them changed. She didn’t feel the unnatural sensation that usually accompanied a spatial transfer. This was an absurdly precise perfect teleportation spell—that was all she could imagine after it had been completed.
Leticia stood there in shock, her mouth still open from what she had been saying. The actual features of the room hadn’t changed much. The white walls and floor were the same. But its size was completely different. This room was still sparse, but it had a strangely curved line of chairs. There was no table. There was a podium at one end, and all of the chairs faced it. The chairs were slim and simple. The space was large enough to be called a hall, and it was stuffed with so much silence it was almost suffocating. This was only the second room she’d seen, but Leticia was getting the impression that it was quiet everywhere in the sanctuary. For how huge it was, there was nothing living here.
There was no one other than her in this...assembly hall, she decided to call it. At least, there was no one there when she took a second to glance around. But when she returned her gaze to the podium, someone was standing there. Just one woman, wearing a green robe. She had vibrant green hair and was looking down at Leticia from the raised podium with eyes shining like verdant greenery.
Leticia gulped, her throat feeling dry. This woman’s appearance was familiar to her from old stories, legends, textbooks, paintings...
They were the ancient ancestors of human sorcerers.
One of the six kings of beasts on the continent. The silent beasts, Nornir.
Weird Dragons. Celestials.
The woman raised a slender arm. The movement was theatrical, and it made her limbs seem like theater props in themselves. The Nornir opened her mouth and Leticia was forced to stand there waiting in silence like a boy who was seeing a woman for the first time in his life.
“After a long age—” Even her voice was beautiful. Leticia listened, shivering, captive. “We again greet an age of suffering. You have done well coming here.”
Heartia’s words revived in Leticia’s mind. “This is the sanctuary!”
This was the sanctuary. The center of the Kiesalhiman continent. The holy ground of the dragons, sealed off by the Deep Dragons inside Fenrir’s Forest—they were only able to come here now because the Fenrirs were no longer guarding this place.
Leticia shuddered, suddenly finding her combat gear incredibly uncomfortable against her skin. She was struck by an impulse to take it off. No human could put up any kind of fight here. The peace she had never been able to obtain in her twenty-five years of life existed here. She could just go to sleep, and never wake up...