“Sneak, sneak, sneak... Pretty impressive that I can really be quiet while I’m saying that. I guess I’m not totally quiet, since I’m saying it, but I still think it’s impressive. As impressive as someone who really pitches faster when they yell. Yeah.”
As Heartia muttered to himself, he looked down at the notebook in his hands. There was a small piece of paper with tiny text scribbled on it. “Let’s see, next is...” The text looked like nonsense, but a message revealed itself if he read it in a certain way—he confirmed what his instructions were.
“Hmm, hmm. At this time, the priestesses have to perform maintenance on the connections between passages 230 to 256, so they won’t be observing here... Can’t believe Lottecia can figure stuff like this out if she puts her mind to it. It’s pretty impressive. Guess that’s why she’s a part of the sanctuary.”
He raised his head and looked down the hallway. It looked like it just extended straight forward, but Heartia’s sharp eyes caught sight of the rift in space ahead of him. This wasn’t something normal people could see. You needed to be able to perceive sorcerous compositions as well as slight changes in the atmosphere.
“Five...three...nine...there we go.” With a nonsensical countdown, he passed through the rift.
There was no change in what he could see beyond the rift. It was just the same hallway, still extending forward. But Heartia was satisfied with his progress, and continued forward quickly.
So this is the sanctuary, he confirmed to himself in the passageway sandwiched by white walls.
The whole sanctuary was a huge sorcerous device with Wyrd Glyphs left in all sorts of invisible places. The residents of the sanctuary were protected by these Glyphs—they had been for a thousand years.
And it would all come to an end in ten days.
Heartia sighed, remembering what Azalie and Colgon had told him. I don’t know how I’m just supposed to believe them... Is it really true? What’s everyone gonna do if ten days pass and nothing happens after all? I bet they’re so confident about all this weird stuff that they don’t even have a Plan B.
As he thought to himself, he proceeded down the hall, turned, waited for the correct moment, and jumped through space. He hid from the observers Colgon called the “priestesses” and headed for the depths of the sanctuary through the shortest possible route.
No matter how far I go, there isn’t anybody around... This place really is empty.
The quiet and clean reminded him of a hospital. A forgotten hospital that no longer had patients or people looking after them. One that couldn’t fall into disrepair.
“No, that’s not right,” he muttered to himself, stopping. He looked back at the note and confirmed to himself—he was about to do things in the wrong order.
But he hadn’t muttered those words because he was about to make a mistake.
“That’s not it... This is a graveyard.” Correcting himself, he took his final step forward.
A strange vague sensation assaulted all of his senses, but he remained calm and waited for it to pass. There was a slight resistance during this transfer as he jumped to a deeper floor. Once it was over, there was new scenery before his eyes.
This was no passageway.
There was a high ceiling and wide walls, a hazy white boundary that gave the impression he stood within a strange void.
There were only two points that had any meaning to him.
One was the spot where he himself was standing. The light here was dim, but there was just barely a shadow at his feet.
The other was the enormous door on the wall in front of him.
There was nothing about the door that could be called ornamentation, but it stood out a lot from its surroundings, its black color making it look awfully grave. It looked about five meters high, and equally as wide. It had to be so huge, Heartia supposed, because of what had to come through it. He smiled wryly at the thought.
“Guess this is it,” he said. “The door to the Ayrmankar burial chamber...” A door that the ultimate sorcery prevented from opening.
The door that was the linchpin of the Ayrmankar barrier.
At least, that’s what Colgon had said. The sanctuary was currently throwing everything they had at this door, and they couldn’t put a scratch on it. They had sent fighting power out of the sanctuary for the last ten years, taking back sorcerous weapons and trying them here, but none of them did a thing to this door.
“A door that won’t open, huh?” Heartia murmured once again, dropping the notebook in his hand along with the piece of paper stuck between its pages. He let a fireball drop from his hand, which burned up the notebook.
I’m sure I won’t be coming back here... He stomped out the burning scraps of the notebook, put his hands in his pocket, and waited.
He was waiting for some change to occur.
Eventually, he felt someone behind him.
Heartia turned around casually. Figures appeared one by one, surrounding him. The first two were shaped like humans, but their eyes shone with an unnatural green color. Their fingers were stretched out to several times their normal length, which Heartia took to mean they were ready to fight. They were Red Dragons.
There was no way he’d win if they fought, of course. Heartia shrugged and put his hands behind his head in surrender.
The next things to appear looked like women, though Heartia didn’t know if they were appearing in response to his surrender. These also looked human—they resembled the Celestials of legend, but the eyes they glared harshly at him with were faint blue, not green. Their hair was dyed green.
“Are you the priestesses?” Heartia asked, focusing on the women despite the aggressive entrance of the Red Dragons.
The priestesses didn’t nod, instead expressing their acknowledgment much more aggressively. “We are the priestesses who revere the sanctuary,” one of them spat. “So you’re the intruder... How did you appear here? There’s no way you could possibly evade our detection and make it here.”
“Oh... I just got a little lost,” Heartia told them, playing dumb.
Colgon had told him that there were two places the priestesses never stopped observing. One was this door. The door to the Ayrmankar burial chamber.
“We’re taking you into custody,” one of the priestesses said, and Heartia didn’t resist.
On the inside, he was listening to another voice, repeating what Colgon had told him.
“There already aren’t enough priestesses, and they have to deal with Azalie and Leticia right now. The burial chamber is a vital part of the sanctuary—if an intruder appears there, the priestesses will be taken by surprise and might divert attention away from somewhere else important. They’re not used to intruders penetrating so deeply. I’ll take advantage of your distraction to seize the other location.”
It’s not like I’m helping you out, Heartia reminded his memory of Colgon. But we are old acquaintances. I’m just glad they’re only arresting me, he added with some anxiety. If they said they were gonna kill me, then I’d have to figure out how to fight them.