Eugeo called out, “H-hey! Are you sure about that?”
“Well, it doesn’t look like there’s any other way to get up.”
“Uh…I guess you’re right, but…”
After what the two child knights did to them, Eugeo was stunned that his partner could be so trusting again, but on the other hand, they had no clue how to operate the disc. He simply had to tell himself that if it was a trap, they could somehow jump to the nearest terrace.
They stepped onto the disc through a gap in the delicate handrail. Kirito peered at the glass curiously and told the girl, “Well, uh, take us to the highest floor this can go.”
“Yes, sir. Ascending to the Cloudtop Garden on the eightieth floor. Please keep your hands and feet behind the guardrail at all times,” she replied, bowing, and put her hands on the top of the tube.
Then she sucked in a breath and said, “System Call. Generate Aerial Element.”
Eugeo’s first instinct was that she was about to attack them with sacred arts, but he immediately realized he was wrong. The shining green wind elements appeared inside the clear tube. But it was the number that amazed him—a full ten, which marked her as a considerable master of the arts.
The girl lifted her right thumb, index, and middle fingers off the glass tube and murmured, “Burst Element.”
Three of the elements flashed green, and a rumble started under their feet. With all three of them on top, the metal disc began to rise as though lifted by an invisible hand.
“Aha! So that’s how it works,” Kirito exclaimed, and thus the pieces clicked into place for Eugeo as well. The tube running through the middle of the disc released wind elements, pushing the explosion of wind downward and propelling the disc and the weight of its three passengers upward.
It was very simple once they knew how it worked, but the movement of the disc was so smooth that they barely felt it. Aside from a brief feeling of pressure at the start, it essentially floated up without the slightest bit of movement.
The marble floor dropped farther and farther away, and it hit Eugeo that this floating disc was going to take them to the eightieth floor of the cathedral—in other words, an elevation up in the clouds. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and clenched the handrail.
Kirito, meanwhile, was taking it all in stride as though he’d ridden on such a thing before. He made sounds of admiration as he examined the disc, and when that was done, he turned his attention to the person operating it.
“How long have you been doing this job?”
With just the faintest note of surprise in her voice, the downcast girl replied, “This is the one-hundred-and-seventh year since I received this Calling.”
“A hund—?” Eugeo gaped, forgetting about the distance under their feet. He took over for Kirito and asked, “Y-you’ve been moving this floating platform for…a hundred and seven years?!”
“Not…all that time. I receive a break for lunch, and I do rest at night.”
“Er…that wasn’t what I meant…”
But perhaps it did explain what he wanted to know. Like the Integrity Knights, her life had been frozen so that she lived atop this little plate of metal for what was essentially eternity.
The disc rose, slowly but surely. Whatever emotions the girl might have had, she kept them hidden. As one wind element ran out, she released another, then another, each time with the command, “Burst.” Eugeo wondered how many times she had said that word before and realized that he couldn’t imagine it.
“Hey…what’s your name?” Kirito asked suddenly.
She put on her most pronounced display of confusion yet. “My name is…forgotten. I am simply called the operator of this platform. My name is…the Operator.”
Kirito was unable to mount a reply to this. Eugeo counted the terraces as they passed, and by the time he reached twenty, he felt an impulse to say something to break the silence.
“…Um…so, listen…We’re going up there to defeat a very powerful person in the Axiom Church. The person who gave you this Calling.”
“Is that so?” was her only reply.
But Eugeo pressed on, knowing that his words probably meant nothing. “If…if the Church disappears, and you’re released from this Calling, what will you do…?”
“…Released…?” she repeated awkwardly. The girl named Operator was silent for a whole five terraces.
Eugeo glanced up and saw, to his surprise, that the gray ceiling was now in sight and approaching. That would be the base of the eightieth floor. At last, they were reaching the central core of the Axiom Church.
“I…I do not know anything but the world of this shaft,” the girl blurted out. “Therefore…I cannot possibly choose what my next Calling should be…but if I had a wish…”
For the first time, she lifted her face and stared through the narrow windows on the right wall, out to the pure-blue sky.
“…I wish that I could fly this platform out there…wherever I could go…”
Eugeo saw, now that they were visible at last, that her eyes were the absolute crystal blue of midsummer sky.
Just before the final wind element flickered and died, the disc reached the thirtieth terrace and slowly floated to a halt. The Operator removed her hands from the glass tube, folded them in front of her apron, and bowed.
“Thank you for waiting. This is the eightieth floor, the Cloudtop Garden.”
“…Thank you.”
Eugeo and Kirito bowed back and stepped onto the terrace. She dipped her head briefly one more time, looking down again, and as the wind element weakened, the platform began to descend. That rustling sound of the wind expelling faded, and eventually the tiny, confined world of metal trapped in time was gone.
Eugeo lamented, “…And I thought my old Calling felt endless…” Kirito shot him a look, eyebrow raised, so he explained, “At least I was lucky enough that I could retire after getting too old to swing an ax. Compared to what she’s been doing…”
“Cardinal said that even if you freeze the natural degradation of life, you can’t prevent the soul from aging. Eventually your memories start to crumble, and then it all falls apart in the end,” Kirito said, downcast.
He turned around, forcefully cutting off that line of thought, and faced away from the long vertical shaft. “What the Axiom Church is doing is wrong. It’s why we’ve come all this way to put a stop to Administrator. But that’s not the end of it, Eugeo. The real problem is what comes after…”
✦ ✦ ✦
