✦ ✦ ✦
Her voice trailed off into nothing again.
I was shocked. As a general rule, Underworldians were uncomfortable with situations outside their personal experience or expectations. So they had a poor ability to react to impossible circumstances, to the extent that when I cut off his arms, Raios’s fluctlight actually collapsed before his life ran out—or so I assumed.
Even an Integrity Knight had to be struggling with the experience of breaking a hole through a supposedly indestructible wall, getting sucked into the void outside, and dangling from a height that even dragons couldn’t reach. Perhaps though, deep down, the superlative sword-wielding Alice Synthesis Thirty was just another girl.
In any case, given her abundance of pride, I had to assume that the Integrity Knight’s admission of weakness meant she was at her wits’ end.
“Okay!” I shouted. “Then I’ll pull you up to the bar with the chain!”
Alice bit her lip, apparently weighing fear against pride, and ultimately decided that she’d cast her lot already and wasn’t going to change her mind. She tugged on the chain.
“Th-thank you for the assistance,” she squeaked. I gripped the chain, resisting the urge to tease her.
“All right, I’ll lift you slowly. Here goes.”
I carefully pulled it up. The hook under my feet creaked, but it seemed to be able to withstand two people for a bit of time. I lifted the golden knight a few feet, careful not to rock the foothold too much, then held the chain in midair.
“There. You can pull out your sword now.”
Alice nodded, slowly removing the point of the Osmanthus Blade from the white stone. A large amount of fresh weight yanked on the chain, and I gritted my teeth as I held it still. Once her sword was back in its sheath, I resumed lifting.
When Alice’s boots were resting on the first hook below, I instructed her, “Now place both your hands against the wall to steady yourself…good. I’m releasing the chain now.”
I couldn’t see her face due to the angle, but she did subtly tip her head as she clung to the wall. Imagining her desperate expression below that windswept blond hair, I lowered my right arm. She momentarily wobbled, then regained her balance.
“Phew…”
I let out a long breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.
How many more feet until this so-called Morning Star Lookout on the ninety-fifth floor? As long as I could successfully repeat this process, we would make it eventually. The problem boiled down to the time it took to make it up one block. Night would fall eventually, and if we needed to sleep while hanging off the wall.
“Okay, I’m going to go one step higher again,” I warned her.
She turned her panicked face toward me and replied, barely audible through the breeze, “Please be careful.”
“Sure thing.”
I gave her a bracing thumbs-up—a gesture I was certain no one in the Underworld understood—then chanted the system command for a third climbing hook.