The commotion in the remains of the concourse erupted into a cacophony of confusion and shrieks. This shaking was worse than it had been before. The masonry of the walls scraped together loudly, and loosened stones began to protrude. There came the sounds of things breaking and collapsing. A shower of dust rained down from the ceiling.
Seeing people knocked down by the vibrations trying to stand back up, I shouted, “Stay down! Stay low until the tremors stop!”
I raised my head, meaning to ascertain the situation.
“Anyone next to a brick wall, crawl away from it—it could break apart and fall on you! Everyone else, arms over your head and wait it out!”
Normally, in the case of a severe earthquake when indoors, it was safest to get away from the bases of any thick beams and evacuate to small, shut-in areas like restrooms. But with this many people packed together, giving instructions like those would have been even more dangerous.
I stayed on my hands and knees on the floor myself, waiting for the shaking to subside.
Unfortunately, it swiftly worsened. Just as I heard the booming of the quake get close to us, a rapid succession of deafening fractures sounded from somewhere below. The noise quickly grew louder, moving closer, until finally, the ground lurched. The plaza we were in was becoming a hill; one side slanted toward the cliff.
“Grab on to something!” I bellowed, ramming my fingers into a gap between the stones in the paving. As I watched, shuddering in trepidation, the floor tilted slowly, ever so slowly, its angle getting steeper.
I met Mizuho’s gaze. She stared back at me, eyes opened wide in terror through her glasses. If the ground continued to turn over like this, we’d all be tossed straight to the bottom of the abyss…
Everyone had been struck speechless by fear, and even the babies had stopped their crying. Through the tense silence, the floor’s slanting slowed…
…and stopped.
Just as we were about to breathe a sigh of relief, the greatest, most earsplitting roar thus far rang out. Like a bolt of lightning, or an explosion, or drumfire—but no, this impact was incomparable to those. It was enough to make me think the world had split in two.
The entire concourse itself began to slide to the side—and down the cliff.
The silence broke as everyone screamed in unison. Like a children’s sled tossed down an expert ski course, the plaza and all the structures around it started slipping down toward the dark below.
The protracted rumbling had caused the cliff itself to change in shape. The exposed cross sections of rooms and passages collapsed and disappeared into the abyss. And the fissure itself was rapidly widening. As the distance between the cliffs grew, the walls, which had been close to being vertical, angled, forming a sharp slope that widened toward the top. I was witnessing the very moment of a rupture that seemed to slice the dungeon in half.
And so we slid down the labyrinth’s cross section, with its hundreds of floors stacked atop one another, riding the remnants of a devastated nation.
To say it was an incredible sight would do it a disservice.
I’d once seen a sectional diagram of the Kowloon Walled City, a high-rise slum settlement that had once existed in Hong Kong and where illegal buildings were stacked up. There were rooms everywhere you went, shops and markets lined up deep inside the buildings where the outside light didn’t penetrate, temples built inside torn-down sections of wall, lifelines and air ducts piercing vertically across floors… What I was now seeing was like a scaled-up version of that. With its insane construction of stone and lumber, this dungeon went on for as far as the eye could see. To my right, to my left, and above and below. Tufts of forest seemed to have been stuffed into gaps, and massive rivers formed waterfalls from floor to floor as they went down. The figures of people and similar creatures, of beasts in their packs, of strange monsters you’d only ever encounter in nightmares—I saw them all in that cross section. Yet a moment later, they were gone. This vast maze was neither quiet nor abandoned. Countless beings dwelled within it.
Million Dungeon. Now I knew just how accurate the name of this world really was.
It was at that moment I truly understood that I had left Earth.
Until now, I hadn’t quite grasped the situation. I’d listened to Mizuho’s explanations without objecting but had never felt wholly convinced. Could you blame me? She’d told me I’d been whisked away from my planet to another one entirely. The crazier response would have been to believe it.
But the sight before me had both the weight and the sense of reality to crush my doubts.
I really had come to another world.
Our downward slide stopped with an impact, its momentum sending bodies rolling across the stone paving. The chorus of screams and breaking rock ceased. Finally, the awful quake had ended. Echoes bounced through the fissure, growing ever quieter before dying out completely.
I stood up carefully.
The impact of our halt had pushed the former Romans into a single cluster by the wall. Potesara extracted himself from the mess of people trying to untangle their limbs from one another. He looked around, turning his thick neck this way and that, and slowly and nervously, he asked, “Is it…over?”
The plaza had been severely damaged by the slide. Flagstones had come loose, the wall around the outside of it had fallen starting from the edge, and the ceiling was completely gone.
“Is everyone safe?” I called out. “Is there anyone you saw before who is missing?”
People were still recovering from the terrible shock, but they called out to one another and started helping others to their feet.
Mizuho was alive as well. She was trying to stand so she could make sure the children were safe.
I stepped up to the edge of the chamber to see what state our surroundings were in. Surprisingly, the slanted-over stone statue of the king had survived. It had several small pieces missing and a few new cracks, but the sliding fall hadn’t shaken it off. It must have been firmly affixed to the plaza’s foundation.
I shone my flashlight around to scan things over and immediately groaned.
“Potesara, come over here for a second,” I called, waving him over.
The now inn-less master wobbled over. As far as I could tell, he seemed to be taking the lead with things, and everyone else looked to him. Getting closer to him seemed a wise decision.
“What is it?” inquired Potesara.
I pointed out where the light was shining. When he saw what I had, his face hardened like stone.
“That isn’t good,” he remarked.
“Nope.”
What remained of the concourse, atop which we all rested, was hanging precariously over the edge of a large river flowing down the slanted slope of the fissure. The concourse was barely stable right now, but another tremor could knock it loose. The river fell off acutely, not very far up, becoming a waterfall. From there, it was a straight drop.
“Everyone needs to get out of here. Potesara, could you tell everyone?”
“Yeah, I will… Shouldn’t you be the one to tell them, though?”
“I’m a stranger who just arrived today—I doubt they’d listen to me so easily.”
“Do you think so? From what I’ve seen, you’re fairly experienced. You’ve been trying to save everyone, haven’t you?”
I gave him a shrug. Potesara’s lips turned up in a thin smile.
“I think I like you, Taiga, one with no title. If I still had my inn, I’d have bought you a drink.”