The gorge was maybe ten meters wide, not even close to the width of Green Boulevard. With nothing but a succession of perpendicular cliffs to either side, he couldn’t see anyplace a person might hide. Plus, there was no need for someone seeking help to hide.
Is it a trap? And if it is, who exactly…? he wondered, and he was about to call out to Chiyuri that they should go back for now.
“Haru! Over there!” Chiyuri cried, and he pointed to a spot on the ground.
He saw a simple circular indentation, about sixty centimeters across and barely ten centimeters deep. There were other similar holes in the area, but the bottom of this one was somewhat strange. Rather than being indented in a U-shape, the center rose slightly. Almost as though a rock of just the right size had been put over a deeper hole…
“Ah… It really is that!” Haruyuki agreed with his own thought, and he crouched directly above the hole. “Oiii! Is someone in there?!”
Chiyuri crouched next to him, and together they held their breath and listened.
A few seconds later…
…Is someone there…?
The voice that came in response was so faint and weak that he wouldn’t have heard it if the wind hadn’t happened to stop.
Reflexively, he exchanged a look with Chiyuri before asking quietly, “That voice… Was it maybe Cotton Marten?”
After half a second, Chiyuri shook her head. “It sounds like a girl’s voice, but it’s probably not her.”
“…No, huh.”
Unfortunately, it seemed that a miracle had not happened. But naturally, this didn’t mean they had the option of simply leaving this person there.
Haruyuki brought his face close to the indentation once more and called out to whoever was in the hole, “I’m Silver Crow from Nega—I mean, Oscillatory Universe! We’re gonna get you outta there. Just hang on a bit longer!”
Although he said they would get her out, the large rock plugging the hole was less tightly wedged in, without a millimeter of an opening between it and the edge of the hole. It was like the lid was digging right into the sides of the hole, and he couldn’t see anywhere for fingers to get a hold and lift it out. This could hardly have happened by accident, so no doubt some malicious actor had pushed the owner of the voice into a deep hole in the ground and then used force to seal her inside of it with a rock.
Actually, no. Until a mere hour earlier, the Deity of Demise, Tezcatlipoca, had been running rampant over the area. This blocked hole had to have been a shelter to protect the owner of the voice. If the Burst Linker who had pushed the rock into place had escaped total point loss, they would have long ago rescued whoever was down there. The fact that this hadn’t happened meant…
Haruyuki cut off his thoughts there and stared hard at the rock in front of him.
“…You wanna try both of us hitting it?” Chiyuri said, and he quickly shook his head.
“It’d be great if that broke it, but we might just push it farther in,” he told her. “And, like, if it doesn’t break even when the Change comes, the system might be treating the hole and the rock like ground.”
“You mean indestructible?!” she cried. “So what do we do?!”
“…Incarnate technique… I could maybe pierce it with Laser Sword, but…” He didn’t have to finish his sentence for his meaning to be clear. If this rock was round and sixty or so centimeters wide, his Incarnate blade might pierce it, but it would also skewer the owner of the voice. And there was a nonzero possibility that a blow like that would put her at total point loss.
If he had an Incarnate technique like Dusk Taker’s Nihilistic Fluctuation that could dig out anything he picked up, he could have safely removed the stone. But Dusk Taker was gone, and no Burst Linker who could use a similar technique came to mind. Not to mention who knew how many days would pass here while he was going through the steps of leaving through a portal, contacting someone, and diving back into the Unlimited Neutral Field?
“Hey, Haru?” Chiyuri asked. “Can’t you cut the stone with your Omega style thing?”
Haruyuki shook his head once more. “I might be able to cut it, but there’s no way I could cut just the stone alone, not with my skill level. I don’t know how big the stone is, either. Can you do something with your Citron Call?”
“From what I can see, it’s been a few days since this stone was embedded in this hole,” she said, frowning. “That’s too much time to rewind.”
“I guess. Hmm.” He frowned with her. “If we had some kind of super-thin, tough tool we could control and push into the gap to lift it…”
“If we had something like that, we’d already be using it!” Chiyuri cried out, exasperated, as she slapped him on the back, and as though this impact were a switch, an idea popped up in his head.
“G-get back a bit.” He pushed Chiyuri away and focused on the place she’d hit him, the joint with the Enhanced Armament Metatron Wings.
Ektenia, the equipment’s fixed ability, was not an Incarnate technique, so it couldn’t pierce the indestructible ground, and even if it could, the risk of injuring the owner of the voice remained. But if he used the wings themselves as a thin and tough tool that he could control, maybe he could pull the rock out of the hole without damaging it.