After a gaping hole had been blasted in Jade’s outer wall, Alex watched as the Hidden Insect Corps and Stella charged into the mine.
The scrawny, blond, shaved-headed youth had been given a simple role: hold the entrance to the tunnels and kill anyone who tried to move between the surface and the mine.
He sat down right at the boundary between cave and open air and began setting up for Oakley’s plan.
The large trunk Alex had brought was packed full of weapons and armor. They were, of course, decoys, props to fool the cultists’ eyes.
When he dug through the jumble of gear, something else appeared from the bottom: a wheeled device, built to disperse insecticide.
The plan was to light this special device and kick it down into the tunnels.
Once it fell to a certain depth inside the ant’s nest-like structure of the mine, it would ignite, belching smoke and insect-killing chemicals through every passage.
Jade’s veins mostly produced iron ore, but a mine fire was never a small matter.
How many will die if we pull this off? Once Oakley-kun takes all the blame, how will everyone react?
He could hardly wait to find out. The anticipation, the sheer delight of it, made him shiver. Alex gave himself a little shake and turned his mind back to the task at hand: finding a flame.
“He said I should use this streetlamp as the fire source, yeah… Wonder what’s so special about it,” he muttered, squinting skeptically at it.
Even as he grumbled, he lit a torch from the Ever-Burning Streetlight.
From that flame, he felt a truly nauseating miasma seeping into the air.
Remembering Oakley’s warning, Alex was careful not to touch the fire directly as he transferred it to the insecticide device.
With a whoomph of greedy heat, the flame spread.
He quickly kicked the device off the ledge, sending it tumbling down into the depths.
This mine had been built by taking an already deep vertical shaft and excavating horizontal tunnels branching out from it. In other words, the vertical pit he’d just kicked the device into connected to every passage.
It’ll take them a good while to climb back from the tunnels to the surface. Can’t wait to see how many people croak before then.
Down below, the Hidden Insect Corps was aggressively carrying out suppression operations.
Just how many cultists would survive the triple-pronged nightmare of insecticide, oxygen deprivation, and holy-fire smoke?
It would be quite a sight.
Several seconds after he booted the device down, a response came echoing up from the depths—screams, raw and ragged.
Half-mad with panic, several members of the Hidden Insect Corps scrambled up toward the surface.
No one could blame them; having holy fire and poison vapors suddenly poured into your workplace wasn’t exactly a calming experience.
Alex raised his sword and swung it toward them two, three times, driving them back.
Then he planted a foot in their chests and kicked them right back down into the dark.
“Road’s closed, so you can’t come through here,” he said cheerfully.
He was the gatekeeper. His job was to keep the chaos underground from reaching the surface troops.
Acting like nothing at all was wrong, Alex sat back down at the entrance.
The next moment, the blizzard-wall in front of him split open, and Joanne stepped through, making Alex jerk so hard he nearly flipped over.
“Yo, how’s it looking over here?” Joanne asked.
“Just finished chucking the device in and sending the Hidden Insect Corps folks back home, so to speak,” Alex replied. “And, uh, that thing is seriously bad news. I still can’t stop shaking, y’know.”
Joanne plopped down right there at the boundary of cave and snow, still in her miniskirt, folding her legs into a cross-legged sit. Propping her elbows on her bare inner thighs, she stared off in thought.
“Oakley knows one hell of a lot for some reason, doesn’t he?” she muttered.
A heretic with insect wings sprouting from her head came buzzing out of the storm. Without even looking particularly bothered, Joanne scooped up a handful of snow, compressed it into a tight ball, and hurled it.
The snowball smashed into the woman’s head with a wet crack.
Her skull shattered, and the insect-person dropped like a stone into the white void below.
“He was born out of a gestation sac,” Joanne went on. “He was never supposed to have a chance to learn anything systematically.”
“That’s exactly why we call someone like that an irregular, yeah,” Alex said lightly.
“I guess.” Her chin dipped, and her translucent white hair slipped forward, veiling her eyes.
Alex’s answer wasn’t what she’d been looking for.
That’s not it, she thought.
She knew better than anyone that Oakley was an abnormal existence.
The problem was that she had absolutely no idea where that knowledge of his came from.
It wasn’t just herbs and poisons.
He understood concoctions, explosives, insecticides—he even knew details about the Orthodoxy cities and their infrastructure.
That wasn’t something you could just hand-wave away with “oh, he’s an irregular.”
He’s hiding something from me. Almost certainly, Joanne thought. I laid everything bare back then, and he’s still keeping his cards close.
When Alex glanced over at her, he noticed a faint, fragile smile on her lips, one that looked like it might disappear if the wind blew too hard.
He started to say something, but a gust tore through the entrance.
When he blinked the snow from his eyes, the expression on her face was gone.
Joanne was back to her usual self.
“By the way, Joanne-sama,” Alex said after a beat. “You think Oakley-senpai can really win against Gerugoroi?”
“He’ll win. No problem at all.”
“But that guy’s got that big fancy executive candidate title hanging off him, right? Is that like… some kind of rank or official position or something?”
“‘Executive candidate’ isn’t something you get handed out lightly. And no, you can’t just call yourself that on a whim. It only means the executive seats are full, so they’re stuck with the candidate label. In terms of pure ability, plenty of them are already at the top.”
“For real?”
“Yeah. Now and then, someone who’s still a bit lacking, like the old Oakley or Fuankilo, manages to claw their way up… but that’s the exception.”
The weight of those words hit Alex hard. Hearing it laid out like that, he felt the difference in their standing like a physical pressure.
And then Joanne followed up, and Alex realized just how far away Oakley really was.
“Within the Aros Temple Cult, the title executive candidate is a mark of honor given only to a few: those whose combat prowess is unmatched among the believers, those who’ve contributed enormously to the cult’s rise, or those who’ve saved us from crises unlike anything we’ve faced before. It’s a name reserved for monsters of that caliber.”