After the floating feeling subsided, she landed on a cold stone floor.
“Where…am I?”
As Alina’s vision recovered from the dazzling light, her surroundings became visible. Alina narrowed her eyes as she realized she was in a completely different place from the fighting arena.
It was a large, circular room. It was dead quiet and dim, with lines of cold and smooth black pillars along the walls. The walls and floor were all made of the same smooth black stone.
“…A hidden dungeon…”
She heard Jade’s voice from her side. He’d been teleported, too. Gose was nowhere to be found. Looking all around, Alina happened to notice the object that was illuminating the room.
“This is…”
It was a green crystal, shining dim and pale, the same one that Gose had carried. A number of green crystals were spread about the black room.
“Best not to approach. They’re crystal gates.”
Jade stopped Alina before she could touch one.
“Crystal gates?”
“Yes, crystal gates from some unknown maker…,” Jade said as he looked around the crystal-filled area. “There was that incident where monsters were appearing on the Altano Plains, right? It turned out that the monsters were being teleported in from a crystal gate.”
Now that he mentioned it, she recalled there had been an incident like that while she was overwhelmed with tournament duty.
“So then does that mean the monsters that showed up on the plains were teleported from this hidden dungeon?” she asked.
“Most likely. But why is it that Gose was able to use the green crystal gate at the tournament arena…? There were already a number of giant crystal gates made by the Adventurers Guild installed at the arena. The interference should have made his crystal unusable…”
“—With how large the stage was, we were just barely out of interference range.”
With a start, Alina looked toward the source of the voice to find Gose emerging from the darkness.
“You can thank the Adventurers Guild for that, since they wanted to show off by making such a pointlessly large arena.” Gose chuckled mockingly. While he appeared to be a boy, there was a sober shadow in his eyes.
With a completely different air to him from before, he shrugged his shoulders. “I meant to bring the Executioner here alone, but it looks like you’re here, too. That’s fine, I guess.”
“…Who are you?” Jade stepped in front of Alina, his voice low and wary. Of course, it was clear that Gose was no ordinary adventurer.
“I don’t matter here, do I? Come on, Executioner, it’s your time to shine.”
Gose took a step forward, and lights lit, as if in response.
The lights instantly became a line, then a circle, mixing and overlapping in a complex pattern to form lines of text. Eventually, this all became one giant magic sigil, floating dimly in the darkness. Then white specks of light brought forth the magic sigil. They rose like bubbles, converging in the center of the magic sigil to create a human shape.
“I-it couldn’t be—!”
Jade’s breath caught, and Alina’s eyes widened.
A golden-haired man emerged from the white light.
He was engraved with the mark of Dia, and there was a black stone in his forehead—he was a living relic, a dark god.