No matter how hard I tried to, I couldn’t keep myself up. Not only had I lost my balance from leaning forward, but my legs were thrown by the tremors. I had no way to stop myself from losing my footing.
I casually floated through the air. It was a perfect head over heels tumble.
I crashed to the ground.
That had to be the same spot where Yuri’d slipped off Mugi too. Perfect timing.
Unh!
Her big butt landed right on my slim belly.
“That was an aftershock!” shouted Yuri, still on top of me. Who cares?! First things first! Before you start yelling stuff, get the hell off of me!
We could hear the sound of rocks cracking and the mountain breaking up. This was a huge earthquake. The tunnel floor was moving up and down like pistons in an engine.
Rocks and sand rained down like a waterfall.
That’s when I finally realized it.
We were in a tunnel. The mountain the tunnel was cut into was collapsing. Dirt and rocks falling in the tunnel meant…
We were going to be buried alive.
A rock fell from the roof of the cave and struck me in the wrist, knocking the flashlight from my hand.
The moment it left my fingers, the flashlight went dark. It was crushed under falling rocks.
Back to darkness. But now we had nowhere to escape to. Inside the rock tunnel, the very idea of finding a place to avoid the falling rocks was absurd.
I gave up. Let fate play this hand. If it was us versus the mountain then there was nothing we could do to change the odds. Take us now.
At this moment of extreme desperation, something soft spread over Yuri and me. I tried to feel what it was with my hands.
Big, soft, warm.
Of course! It’s Mugi! Mugi had covered us with his body to protect us from the falling rocks and debris.
But if the entire tunnel collapsed, it wouldn’t be much use.
The extreme pessimist in me had a hard time seeing an upside to this turn of events.
At least half a minute had gone by and the earthquake continued.
The sound of falling rocks and stone being crushed resonated through the darkness. I was completely resigned to the fact that this tunnel was going to collapse eventually. Yuri lost it. Lying on the floor she was doing some sort of horizontal ballroom dance by herself.
While she writhed gracefully, the earthquake gradually settled down.
Mugi got up, off of us.
“Mgya.”
With my eyes firmly shut tight, I held Mugi’s head with both hands. He was trying to tell us to get up. An aftershock might come or maybe we were in the quiet calm before the big storm, so to speak.
I slowly lifted my head up.
Please… please don’t let a big rock fall on me now.
I mumbled to myself as I slowly opened my eyes.
Light. I blinked my eyes repeatedly. I wasn’t able to open them all the way.
Squinting, I examined our surroundings. Yuri was to my side. Yuri was sitting up and staring dumbfounded behind me.
Huh?
Light? I can see Yuri?
It’s actually bright out!
I tried to get Yuri’s attention.
Her eyes were two dots. Her mouth was forming words, but no sound came out.
An opening. A giant hole. In the tunnel wall.
It must have opened up during the earthquake. That final rumble that I thought would be the end of our lives in this world was the opening of this gaping hole. What do you know? It was less than ten meters from where we were huddled under Mugi. Just a tiny bit closer and the closing credits would have been rolling up the screen. For sure. A cold sweat suddenly covered my body.
“Grrrr,”
Mugi let out a low growl as he quietly walked toward the edge of the hole. The hole was about five meters wide. Almost as wide as the tunnel itself. Bright light came streaming in through the hole obliterating the darkness of the tunnel. Looking that way at Mugi hurt my eyes to the point that tears were starting to form. But not turning away, I felt that something was strange about this light. It was frightfully white. It didn’t feel like it was flowing in naturally but was inserted into the darkness.
“Nyagau,” Mugi moaned as he turned his head. It seemed that he wanted us to follow him.
Yuri and I looked at each other.
“I think Mugi has something to show us,” I said.
“I think I’ve already seen it all,” Yuri replied strongly.
We stood up together and walked over to the front of the hole.
Standing near the edge, we poked our necks through the hole to see what was on the other side.
“Ah!”
“Aah!”
Nothing could have prepared us for what we saw. Nuts! I should have bet Yuri when she said she had seen it all. She certainly couldn’t have expected this!
What we saw through the other side the whole was…
A giant black egg.
It was the same black egg we’d seen in our clairvoyant vision!
I couldn’t tell how far we were from the black egg. I guessed within one kilometer. The cliffs and rough terrain continued from here all the way to the black egg, and the rock formations actually appeared to form a sort of monument, a pillar holding up the egg. The sky was covered in a thick grayish fog, and no blue poked through that I could see. Naturally, I couldn’t see the sun, either. In one part the fog covered the surface of the ground, and as the colors were so close it was hard to tell where the rocks ended and the fog began. It was a cold monotone vision.
The scene looked like an India ink drawing.
The egg was huge. Truly gigantic. With nothing to compare it to, it was hard to be more accurate than that. I would put the height at over 300 meters, easily. If this was really the living egg of some unknown creature, I surely didn’t want to meet whatever had laid it.
“Kei…”
The silent Yuri spoke. Her speech sounded forced, yet was barely a whisper.
“If that is the same egg we saw, then… then we are seeing the… seeing the key to the case now.”
“I think seeing it is all that we should be doing, if that.”
“Yeah, but,” she said, gaining her voice, “it isn’t like it’s going to just sit here like this forever.” She took her ray gun from her holster. “The hole in the wall those soldiers who were waiting for us made is right over there.”
“And also the place where the invisible jaws arrived.”
I readied the heatgun.
“Grrrr…”
Mugi got low to the ground and his feelers whipped through the air.
It was anticipation for battle.
We had no choice but to move forward.