“He gave me a pretty fearsome glare.”
“Huh,” Heartia said before resuming his unenthusiastic inspection of the weapons—his ear was pointed Colgon’s way, so Colgon was relatively sure he was at least listening to him. But the weapons probably held an equal amount of his interest.
Piled chaotically on the floor were all sorts of sorcerous weapons the Celestials had created in the past. Most of them were completely useless, since their mechanisms weren’t understood. It took a good amount of time to decipher the Glyphs written on them and figure out how to use them.
They were looking through the pile of junk from one end to the other, but once they’d looked through them all, a new mountain would appear that they hadn’t inspected yet. This went on for some time. It was never ending.
“Err,” Heartia turned around awkwardly and said, “I think this is good for now. It’s getting kinda cramped in here.” He indicated the room around them.
The junk was starting to fill the space. His words had been directed at the girl standing in the tallest spot in the room—she didn’t look back at him or react in any sort of way, but she stopped transferring the items in when he asked. Heartia sighed, looking up at Lottecia as she peered into a device with vacant eyes—morbidly so.
The whole room was the device, really. It was cylindrical, with a tall ceiling. The piles of junk were so high they almost touched the ceiling; Heartia was a little worried they would crash down around them. The floor was pure white, a gentle concave slope. The whole sanctuary was made up of these seamless, pure-white walls and floors, but in a sealed space like this, Heartia couldn’t help feeling like he was at the bottom of a pot.
There was no sort of door leading in or out. Unlike the floor, the walls were packed with complex patterns. They weren’t carved in or pasted on or drawn with paint. The walls were simply crowded with Wyrd Glyphs as if they were a natural inclusion.
The walls also had one other difference from the floor and ceiling—about halfway up them, there was something like a terrace where someone could relax, although with no ladder or stairs leading up to it and no railing around it, Heartia didn’t know how relaxing it would be. The only furnishings present were some small chairs, but they were bafflingly numerous. Dozens, all around the circumference of the room. Lottecia was sitting in one of them.
The ceiling was blank like the floor.
“Pluto’s here,” Colgon muttered, and Heartia looked up.
Colgon was standing on the floor like him, but he was looking at the wall. Of course, it wasn’t the actual wall he was looking at but the shining Glyphs on it that were showing images of the outside on them. Heartia didn’t know what location the Glyphs were showing, but he assumed it was somewhere just outside of the sanctuary. It was a dark forest with a sandstorm obscuring the darkness almost like snow.
Colgon must have noticed his gaze. He turned around quickly and, after noticing the short blade in Heartia’s hand, said, “Seems the summoner is functioning.”
Heartia nodded wordlessly. This device—the room—maybe the entire sanctuary? Colgon had told him what purpose it served and what name it went by.
The Second World-Seeing Tower. The Demon King Summoner.
All Heartia was curious about was whether Colgon was going to look up at Lottecia, but he showed no signs of doing so, concentrated purely on the junk all around them, the Celestial sorcerous weaponry.
Heartia thrust the shortsword through his belt, liking the feel of it for some reason. The junk in here was all summoned from elsewhere in the sanctuary by Lottecia as a test of the summoner’s capabilities.
“Still, if it were just moving things around, the Celestials should have been able to do that with a much smaller device,” Heartia said as he picked up another sorcerous weapon. This one was a whip with a much more impractical shape. He didn’t like the weight of it, so he put it back down and added, “This device is more powerful than that, right?”
“Yeah. We haven’t drawn out its true power yet,” Colgon said with the slightest glance up at Lottecia.
Heartia watched him out of the corner of his eye. He wanted to see the way Colgon looked at her. If there was any emotion—he wouldn’t go so far as to say affection—in his eyes. Or if he really thought of her as nothing but an artificial human like he said.
But it happened so fast, he couldn’t tell much from it.
He went back to looking through the weapons, concentrating on the closest mound to him.
“...Colgon, what’s this?” Heartia suddenly asked.
“Looks like a sword.” Colgon walked over soundlessly.
Heartia could tell that it was a sword. Grabbing its hilt, he said, “I’ve seen this shape in a painting somewhere.”
“I’m sure you have. That one’s famous.”
“This is the Sword of Hypnocayen!” Heartia exclaimed, dropping the sword and backing away from it.
✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦
“So it is,” Colgon said appreciatively.
“What do you mean ‘so it is’?! This is a legendary monster-slaying sword, isn’t it?! It killed the Kesion Vampire—”
“That’s why I said it is. Where else other than the sanctuary did you think it would be?”
Heartia opened his mouth to argue, then realized that Colgon had a point and shut it again. He sighed deeply. “I see... This is the sanctuary. It hardly feels real, though.”
“If you want it, go ahead and take it,” Colgon said disinterestedly.
Heartia looked back at the Sword of Hypnocayen, but said, “I don’t want it... If I’m carrying around something like this, it’ll be obvious that I stole it.”
“I don’t think there’s anyone who would be bothered by that at this point.”
“We could have been attacked with something like this if we screwed up, huh...” Heartia was really starting to get annoyed. He looked down at the shortsword in his belt, contemplating putting that back as well, when he noticed that Colgon had gotten awfully quiet at some point. He glanced back at him to find the man staring at the image on the wall again.
What’s going on with these two, really? It was Colgon who had taken control of this device from the priestesses while their attention had been elsewhere...and it was Colgon who had spent several days instructing Lottecia sufficiently to manipulate the device this well herself.
They appeared to be working together, but they’d barely exchanged any direct words with one another. At this point, Lottecia had no expression, like a doll, and was just sitting in one place without moving. As far as Heartia knew, she wasn’t eating or sleeping at all, but that didn’t seem to be affecting her health any. Of course, that didn’t mean she seemed like she was in good health either...
Heartia pressed a hand to his forehead. Lottecia was like a doll, but if a dollmaker actually crafted a doll with an expression like hers, he would be called insane.
“It’s a war outside. Pluto’s certainly got guts,” Colgon—the insane dollmaker himself, perhaps—said casually.
He wanted to say something completely different, but Heartia asked Colgon a practical question instead. “It’s four days now, right? Is this checkmate? I dunno for which side, though...”
“I’ve never lost a game.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Heartia said, used to his bragging.
But Colgon was uncharacteristically insistent. “It’s true. There’s a secret to it. If you’re able to win, then you can just play the game as normal.”
His curiosity piqued, Heartia asked, “And if you’re losing?”
“Simply get up and leave. No one would bother stopping you and forcing you to continue playing.”
“...Can you really call that winning?”
“That’s what winning is, really. Betting your life on something everyone else thinks is pointless for the sake of your own satisfaction.”
Heartia understood to a degree what Colgon was saying, but before he could speak up, Colgon turned around.
His cloak flapping behind him, he said, “It looks like I have to get going.”
“What about Krylancelo?”
“He’ll be here soon...or it might take a little while longer. It depends on the spirits. But he’ll be here eventually. Before that, I have to—” Colgon disappeared before he finished.
Heartia looked up. There was no change in Lottecia, but he was sure it was her who had transported him. Even without Colgon ordering her, she did what he wanted her to as if she could predict the future now.
What is going on with these two, really...? Heartia averted his eyes, unable to understand the two of them.
Still there in the Second World-Seeing Tower after Colgon had vanished, he muttered, “If you’ve got money riding on the game, then I don’t think you’d be able to get up and leave so easily, though...” You could end up owing someone without meaning to.
In other words, you’re not as logical as you think, he added silently, yawning.