<A demon? That explains it. The instant I got like this, I could tell she wasn’t human. Not that I could tell what she really was—I’d never seen anyone like her before. A demon, then…>

Loren was rather impressed that Scena had sensed that much in the first place.

Looking rather proud of herself, Scena next pointed at the sword propped up beside him. <And that’s not a normal sword either. I’ll need to study it more to sort it out, but it broke through a Lifeless King’s defensive magic, and it seems to restore your stamina a bit, though rather gradually.>

If that’s true… Loren glanced at the sword. Sure enough, when he’d fought Scena, his sword had managed to strike her body without issue, and sure enough, Lifeless Kings were generally protected by strong barriers both physical and magical.

Loren already had a vague idea of where the sword had come from—the curious and emphatic demon across the table. If she had been the one who procured it, there was no telling what other abilities it might possess.

His thoughts were interrupted as his cheeks were sandwiched between soft palms and his gaze was forcefully turned back toward Lapis.

“Mr. Loren? Are you listening?”

“Sorry, my mind wandered along the way.” Loren didn’t want to risk stirring up trouble with a lie and so opted for honesty; that was usually his best bet.

While Lapis seemed awfully displeased, she released him, pressed her hands against the table, and strengthened her tone as she brought herself closer to his face. “Okay, are you listening now? I’ve finally pinned down the location of one of my parts!”

“And that’s got something to do with our next job?”

“Precisely!” Lapis’s face lit up as she spread out a sheet of paper that she had presumably torn off the guild’s bulletin board.

Adjusting his posture, Loren scanned through the quest posting that had been slapped down before him. Once he finished, he stared long and hard at Lapis’s face.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that. You’ll make me blush.”

“Not my problem. Is this seriously an adventurer-worthy quest?”

The doubt in Loren’s eyes was entirely justified. Nevertheless, Lapis nodded with a smile, as if to say this was completely normal. As such, Loren looked at the details of the quest again.

It read:

From: Wolfe Adventurer Training Academy

This year’s graduate training will be held in our school’s underground labyrinth. We will pay thirty silver per head. The quest entails proctoring our graduates on their journey through the dungeon as well as guarding them in case of emergency.

“Since when did adventurers get an education?”

At a glance around the bar, not a single adventurer in sight seemed particularly educated. They were the sorts who drank while the sun was up and spent their days grumbling about that and everything else—not that Loren was any better, in that regard. For that matter, Loren had been able to call himself an adventurer without having received a single day’s worth of training.

Lapis answered slowly, choosing her words carefully. “It’s an adventurers’ school in name only. As I recall, its true purpose is to gather individuals of talent—nobles and commoners alike—in order to mold them into champions and leaders of men.”

“Like Claes?” Loren asked as he recalled the face of the red-haired young man who’d fought alongside them in the city-state of Hansa.

Claes had a gift, a certain grace only present in those with innate talent. While this was still largely only rumored, it was said that adventurers like him often had the backing of some nation or another. Claes did fit the image of someone who had trained in an establishment like the one Lapis described.

“Right, I do think Mr. Claes came from a similar institution.”

“In that case, I’m not feeling up to it.”

In short, if it was a facility that nurtured talents like Claes, it would be chock full of people like Claes. Loren didn’t really mind being condescended to—to a point. That didn’t mean he would willingly skip into a place where hordes of the sort of person who naturally looked down on others would flock.

“And anyway, what’s a graduation exam got to do with what you’re looking for?” he asked.

“The thing with Wolfe Academy is that a vast labyrinth stretches beneath its campus.”

According to Lapis, underground labyrinths were actually surprisingly common all around the world. It wasn’t particularly rare for a city, and consequently an adventurers’ academy, to be built on top of one. People were often drawn to exploring labyrinths for the artifacts and resources hidden within them. People who managed to claim such prizes would prosper, and their good fortune would entice even more people to the area, leading to the gradual establishment of a permanent settlement.

Meanwhile, adventurer-training academies within cities were often built directly on top of these labyrinths. The instructors, all of whom possessed a certain level of ability, were the first line of defense against the dangers within the labyrinth—as were the talented youths they had gathered to receive their teachings. In that sense, the school as a whole was expected to serve as a sort of lid to seal the dangers away from the general populace.

On the school’s side of things, fulfilling this role meant receiving tax-funded support. Not to mention that the shallower, less dangerous parts of the labyrinth could be used as an excellent training ground for the students.

“Usually, only the shallowest levels are open to students, but all restrictions will be lifted for the practical examination.”

“By the sound of it, it’s not like the labyrinth belongs to the academy. You can’t just go in as an adventurer?”

“That might have worked with any other labyrinth,” Lapis replied with a somber face. “The one beneath Wolfe is something of an exception. Wolfe Academy holds complete ownership over it, and it forbids entry to all outsiders.”

“Well, why’s that?”

Loren did not in the least understand the merits of owning a labyrinth. Sure, the items excavated from within it could no doubt turn a pretty profit, but barring all outside entry would inevitably inspire antipathy in the rest of the adventuring community. It was also hard to believe that the students and teachers conducted any particularly profitable expeditions.

“There’s a bit of speculation, but nothing definite. Perhaps the Wolfe labyrinth is far less dangerous than its size would suggest, or perhaps it has certain resources they would stop at nothing to monopolize. Or maybe there’s something terribly dangerous sealed within it, something they want to keep concealed from anyone who might not already know of it.”

These were all questionable rumors at best—at least, that was how Lapis saw them. All she knew for certain was that Wolfe Academy had somehow locked down exclusive ownership of the labyrinth under its campus.

“Can’t say I’m interested, but you’re saying you’ll find what you’re looking for there?” Loren asked.

“I’m saying there is a high possibility.” With those words and none further, Lapis nodded in earnest.

Loren exhaled a long, shallow sigh. “Well, fine. Not like we got any other leads. Let’s take the job.”

“I knew I could count on you, Mr. Loren. Let’s apply as a party of two. I’ll handle the transportation and preparation.”

The moment Loren gave his consent, Lapis swiftly swept up the quest posting and rushed from the bar to the reception desk with a skip in her step. As Loren watched her go, his second order of cheap swill finally arrived. He filled his mouth with that foul-tasting drink, whose only saving grace was high alcohol content.

<Hey, Mister—isn’t your weapon a bit big to swing around in a labyrinth?>

The sword Loren had used as a mercenary had already been considerably large. His new black blade was even longer. It wasn’t made for fighting in tight spaces. What’s more, he’d only just started using it, and he had quite a ways to go before it would feel like a true extension of his limbs. It was entirely possible that he wouldn’t be able to wield it properly in the narrow confines of a labyrinth.

“Well, I can use it well enough, as long as there’s a bit of space.”

If the quest posting was to be trusted, Loren’s main job would be to accompany the students, not to fight. In an emergency, he would need to keep the students alive, but as long as nothing too dicey happened, he was given to think that this might well work out. The labyrinth was, after all, the sort of place that an institution would send its own students into. The way Loren saw it, the instructors wouldn’t send their kids into even the shallower stretches if the labyrinth contained anything they couldn’t handle.

<I highly recommend preparing a side weapon.>

“I’d agree with you there, but I’d have to dig myself even deeper into debt for that.”

Although he knew Lapis wouldn’t collect, it was a sub-optimal feeling to see the sum of his debt increase. Even a completely ordinary weapon would require a good bit of silver.

“And there’s no telling what strange thing she’ll have me buy next. Though I guess I should get myself a dagger.”

Loren’s remaining hazard pay would likely cover that much, and if it didn’t, he could scrounge up some scrap metal and hammer out a dagger with the blacksmithing contraption from Hansa. Though if he did, he would have to do it in secret. Lapis would kick up a fuss if she ever found out he had avoided relying on her. Loren sighed as he gazed at the waves in his mug of cheap ale.

“So why are you here?” Loren asked in a less-than-friendly tone.

The red-haired individual faltered a bit, but he answered. “What’s wrong with me taking a request from my own alma mater?”

“So this is your school we’re headed to?”

The world, which seemed so vast at first glance, really was so small. Loren’s tired eyes had fallen on Claes, who was shrinking a bit where he sat on the other side of the carriage. Loren was still a copper-rank adventurer. The fact that an iron rank like Claes had taken the same job meant that the quest had no rank restrictions.

Next to Claes sat his party members: Ange the magician, Leila the knight-ish woman, and Laure the priest, in that order. The day after Lapis had submitted the paperwork and declared she would handle all their transportation, Loren had found himself boarding a guild carriage and sharing the ride with some familiar faces.

“Weren’t you hospitalized or something?” Loren asked.

“Sure was. Your priest did a number on me.” Claes said this with the tone of a man who nursed a grudge.

However, the ponytailed culprit beside Loren smiled beatifically, not offering any particular reaction.

Claes went on. “Thing is, it was just some mental fatigue and a bit of whipping. They said I could be released so long as the wounds closed up. I decided I shouldn’t take any quests that’d get in the way of my recovery, so here I am.”

“Meaning this job’s gonna be smooth sailing?” Loren asked.

“As long as nothing happens. We just need to walk with the students. Pretty straightforward, right?”

Those words did make Loren feel a little uneasy, but the job sounded simple enough. Of course, his goal wasn’t to make easy money off some kids. His true aim was to find the piece of Lapis’s body supposedly tucked away in this underground labyrinth. He would either have to sneak off when the students weren’t looking or guide the students in that direction. It was entirely likely that this whole thing wouldn’t be so simple after all, at least not for him.

“Not to mention, the students taking the practical are generally pretty skilled. You’ll only find goblins and kobolds in the shallower parts of that labyrinth. Honestly, it would be harder for something to go wrong.”

“You shouldn’t dismiss goblins out of hand. They’re tricky bastards,” Loren absentmindedly muttered.

Claes seemed a little startled by this. Goblins were the sort of pests that any competent villager could deal with. Claes clearly didn’t know what he was supposed to do with this admonishment. However, he also plainly felt a certain weight in Loren’s words and could tell he shouldn’t dismiss them either.

“It’s just an honest warning,” said Loren. “Up to you whether you take it.”

“R-really? Got it… I’ll take it to heart.” For a moment, Claes seemed to worry that he was being mocked, but Loren’s face and tone were the epitome of seriousness. It really was a heartfelt piece of advice.

“That aside, your buddy there keeps giving me a look.” Loren had realized mid-conversation that Ange the magician’s attention kept shifting between the window and himself. “You need something?”

It seemed Ange hadn’t noticed she’d been found out, though in Loren’s point of view, her glancing was so blatantly obvious that he couldn’t comprehend how anyone could have failed to pick up on it. It was starting to get on his nerves, which was the only reason he brought it up.

“Oh, yeah, Ange’s…” Claes trailed off. “C’mon, Ange, you can say it.”

“Umm… During our last quest, I heard it was you who saved me,” Ange mumbled.

During their previous run-in with Claes, Ange had been attacked by a bone dragon near Hansa, suffering near-fatal injuries in the process. Loren had been the one to save her from the undead beast’s massive jaws. Ange had apparently heard about it from one of her comrades, once she’d recovered.

“Guess so, in a way.”

“I want to offer my thanks, Mr. Loren. I would have surely died had you not come to my aid.”

“Sorry for stealing the limelight from your boyfriend. I’m sure he’ll manage some dashing rescue next time.”

Loren had by now managed to grasp that Claes had a thing for Ange. He certainly didn’t have any intentions of putting Ange in his debt; he hadn’t expected any gratitude to begin with. He honestly, un-cynically hoped Claes would be the one to have her back if some similar peril befell her again.

“Yes, I’ll be counting on him.”

“Though here’s hoping he’s got nothing to worry about.”

A hero who saved the damsel in her time of crisis—that certainly had a nice ring to it. However, if Loren had his druthers, he would have all those in his care avoid crises altogether.

“I’ll do my best to meet your expectations, Ange.”

“Claes…”

The two stared into each other’s eyes, taking each other by the hand—and Loren quietly looked away.

The guild’s carriage wasn’t particularly spacious, and it seemed only these two parties were participating in the quest, meaning they were the only ones around. Despite the close quarters, a young man and woman were whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears. Loren felt he should have been somewhere else entirely—so much so that he was inclined to throw himself out of the carriage.

Laure and Leila wore fantastically unpleasant expressions, glaring at the couple, who remained in their own little world. Meanwhile, to Loren’s side, Lapis looked like she had received some great epiphany; her faraway gaze wandered with no goal in sight.

Loren wished for nothing more than to arrive at their destination, and fast, but physical distance wasn’t something that could be shortened with a wish and a prayer. According to the briefing he had received in Kaffa, even if they’d left town at the break of dawn, they wouldn’t arrive at Wolfe Academy until nightfall.

Then I might as well sleep, he concluded.

Most things in life worked themselves out in the space of a good nap. Someone in his old company had told him as much, once before. When Loren had first heard those words, he’d thought, What’s this slacker going off about? In his current predicament, they struck him as the profound wisdom of a great sage.

“I’m going to sleep, Lapis. Wake me up whenever.”

“Of course. Sweet dreams, Mr. Loren.” Lapis sounded as if she were desperately stifling some emotion to maintain her calm.

Loren let his gaze trail out the window before shutting his eyes. He waited patiently and intently for sleep to take his mind away.

Loren didn’t know how much time had passed since then. He opened his eyes to a gentle rocking of his shoulder. He shook his hazy head to drive off drowsiness and lifted his body from where it had slumped against the side of the carriage. Lapis was holding him by the shoulder, softly rousing him.

“The driver said we’ll arrive soon.”

“I see. Thanks for waking me.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it.”

He took his eyes off Lapis, turning them back to the rest of the carriage, only to find himself astounded by what he saw. Claes’s party, sitting across from them, were to a one soundly asleep, loudly snoring with their mouths open wide. If it had been just one or two of them who dozed off, he would have understood. Things happened. But all four was a bit much. He couldn’t help but feel something artificial at work, and he glanced doubtfully at Lapis.

“What did you do?”

“That mood was getting rather unbearable, so I may have surreptitiously cast Sleep.”

Loren cursed to himself. He had fled to dreamland before Lapis did, meaning there had been no one left to rein in her ruthless impulses. Without someone to keep her in check, she was the sort who bottled up all her stress until it spiked—at which point she abruptly resorted to drastic measures.

“Ain’t that a bit reckless?”

“It’s all right. I did it secretly. No one’s going to remember,” she replied, sounding ever so confident.

Loren wasn’t the least bit convinced. Not only was Lapis a priest using magic—incredible in and of itself—in this instance, she hadn’t even loosed it upon her enemies. How could that possibly be all right? On the off chance that someone did notice her doing this sort of thing, it might prove to be a fatal error with terrible consequences.

Then Scena, lurking as ever in the corner of his vision, reassured him. <It’s all right, Mister. The redhead and his friends fell asleep without noticing a thing.>

How d’you know that? he asked.

As it turned out, Scena had let her astral body peek very slightly out of Loren while he slept, and that had been right about the time when Lapis cast her magic.

<I just peeked a little, I promise. Lapis didn’t see me.>

They didn’t actually know whether Lapis could see Scena’s astral projection, but it would be far better to work under the assumption that she could.

Negligence will be our undoing, Loren thought, and Scena meekly nodded to this.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Loren?”

“It’s nothing. Just coming down with a headache, thanks to a certain someone.”

“Is that so? You really ought to take better care of yourself. More importantly, that’s our destination over there.” Lapis pointed out the carriage window.

A considerable amount of time had passed since Loren fell asleep. The sun had begun to redden, and it illuminated an impressively large town as well as its surrounding landscape.

Kaffa was decently sized, all things considered, but compared to Kaffa, this was a massive metropolis. According to Lapis, it was a trade city called Monte Lugar. It didn’t have any particular specialty products, but the resources regularly excavated or otherwise supplied by the adventurers’ academy kept its industries hopping across the board.

“On top of that, the town is frequented by the noble scions who attend the academy, as well as by their relatives. The merchants gather to cater to them, and business is consequently booming, or so I’ve heard.”

“Not the sort of place I’d visit, then.”

Civilians tended to keep their distance from those in the mercenary line of work. There was little to be done about this, as those in the trade earned their bread with the detestable work of war. The company Loren belonged to had been relatively well regulated, as far as mercenaries went. Nevertheless, it took all sorts, and some mercenaries could hardly be distinguished from brigands and thieves. For that reason, they were largely shunned in places where normal people flourished. A mercenary’s private life was largely relegated to associations with their close friends and coworkers.

It seemed Lapis had managed to surmise this much from Loren’s brief statement. For a moment, she seemed unsure. Then she replied, “If you’re an adventurer now, it’s exactly the sort of place where you belong.”

“Maybe.”

“Yes, I’m sure of it. We’ll head to the guild as soon as we arrive. I know you’re tired, but the inn and so forth will have to wait.”

“We can’t book an inn first?”

“At this hour, the guild desk will have closed by the time we finish settling in. We need to report our arrival and inform them that we’ve taken the quest.”

“You sure the inn won’t close on us by then?”

If Monte Lugar was a prosperous town, Loren expected there’d be fierce competition for rooms. In his experience of stopping by towns between wars, it had always been a scramble to find rooms for even a handful of men. It wasn’t rare for mercenaries who lost in this scramble to end up camping on the outskirts of town.

“I think we’ll be just fine. Worst-case scenario, we can have the guild introduce us to someone. A guild in a town this big must have a few good recommendations for adventurers in our situation.”

“What about waking up Claes?”

They had come on the same quest. Loren had found the boy and his party more or less contemptible when they first met, but at present, he didn’t think they were bad people. The thought of abandoning them left him feeling fairly awful, in fact.

“Let’s wait until we’re a little closer to town. Any more of that sweet-talking, and I am afraid I will turn murderous.”

“You have a point.”

Claes and Ange clearly didn’t mean any harm, but that didn’t make them any more fun to watch. Loren accepted Lapis’s decision without any objections.

While the carriage was stopped at the entrance to the city, they were let in rather easily and not subjected to any particularly intense inspections. Other travelers received more exacting once-overs, and as a former mercenary, Loren had expected to receive the same harsh treatment. It always wasted a good deal of time. Strangely, the simplicity of this entrance was a bit of a letdown.

Lapis explained that it was on account of their carriage having been prepared by the adventurers’ guild, including the driver. The guild guaranteed the authenticity of the adventurers it associated with, which meant that so long as they traveled by guild-regulated vehicles, they could enter towns with hardly any inspection.

In that case, Loren wondered if he could just go wherever he wanted if he stole a guild carriage—but it seemed the drivers were paired with their carriages, and there were ciphers and keys involved with the work.

“If either the carriage or the driver is missing, the guild’s guarantee is void,” Lapis went on.

If that weren’t enough, any attempts to falsify or illegally use a guild carriage, once discovered, were immediately met with the death penalty, no exceptions.

In any case, it took just a bit more jostling in the carriage before they arrived at the Monte Lugar adventurers’ guild. The pair said their thanks to the driver as they hopped out, only to realize they had completely forgotten to wake up Claes’s party. They convinced themselves that Claes would wake up eventually, or that the driver would lose patience and wake them in due time. They had to see to their own responsibilities first.

As their job would take place at the academy, all they had to do at the guild was hand over the certificate of quest acceptance they had received before leaving Kaffa. It was over in no time at all.

“Let’s ask where we can find an inn and call it a day,” said Lapis.

It was already beginning to grow dark outside. The school had shut its gates, so visiting it would have to wait until the next morning.

“Tomorrow, we’ll head to the academy after breakfast and ask our client—the Headmaster—for further instructions. Does that sound all right?”

“No complaints. Is this quest really supposed to be this laid-back?”

“It seems that once a proctor arrives, they select a team to go with them. It’s an involved process. Their examinees don’t necessarily enter the labyrinth all at once.”

“Makes sense. Might be a pain, though,” Loren murmured after he’d thought about it for a bit.

Lapis looked a bit perplexed. “What will be a pain, exactly?”

“There are gonna be multiple teams, right? I don’t know how big the place is, but if they all go in at once, you’ve got more guarantee that you’ve got an ally if things get rough.”

“Oh, yes, if only one team is allowed at a given time, they will be essentially isolated in the labyrinth. The difficulty of the exam would likely increase.”

“Exactly my point. Though I guess in your case, it’ll be more convenient if there are fewer people nosing around.”

Once they leveraged their position as exam proctors to enter the labyrinth, Lapis would need to conduct her own search, and she would need to operate subtly so as not to be found out. The more teams that were running around, the higher the chance that she would be spotted. An unfavorable situation, certainly.

“Well, I do have a way of getting around that, if it comes to it.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Loren, even as he thought, It’s definitely not gonna be anything good.

Lapis peered at him as if it were blatantly obvious. “If we just incapacitate everyone—”

“All right, I got it. Having fewer teams is better for me too.”

Even as a hardened mercenary, Loren felt a pang in his heart at the thought of putting students out of commission merely for Lapis’s convenience. He was willing to work to keep her search away from prying eyes.

But taking out students… The second he thought those words, Loren realized that he had, for some reason, known he would be the one doing the dirty work. He shook the thought from his head.

“Oh, it’s all right,” Lapis insisted. “I’ll do it quietly, before they realize what’s going on.”

“Give it a rest. They’re students, right? This is their exam. How are you going to take responsibility if they fail?”

“There’s always next year.”

“I’m not helping you.”

“I thought not,” Lapis declared, and she even managed not to sound particularly disappointed.

As Loren began to wonder if he would be able to stop her if she actually attempted anything, Lapis gave him a sunny smile and waved her hands before her chest. “I’m only joking, of course. I’ll think of something better if it comes down to it.”

“Your jokes make my blood run cold.”

“Then how about we warm it back up? Some food and ale should do the trick.”

It was right around time for dinner. Lapis didn’t enjoy rowdy establishments, and while in the past, Loren had often been dragged to town entertainment districts by his fellow mercenaries, there was no longer anyone to invite him. He was completely unfamiliar with Monte Lugar, though if he wanted to drink, he believed he would be perfectly satisfied with the guild’s bar. This was all to say that he didn’t feel inclined to wander.

Fortunately, Lapis ushered Loren toward the guild bar. Unlike in Kaffa, the staff of this guild had no knowledge of Loren’s circumstances. In Kaffa, even when he placed an order without paying up, the staff knew that Lapis would come around to pay later, so he was still served. In other places, Loren had to eat out of his measly pocket change or share a meal with Lapis.

“You’re not going to say you want to eat all by your lonesome, are you?”

“Not exactly.” Loren was still sentimental enough to feel that food just didn’t taste right when he ate alone.

“Then let’s eat together. We’re already set for the inn, after all.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Apparently, this guild runs an inn on its upper floors. I managed to book a room for two, so we’re not going to be sleeping on the streets.”

Loren knew of several bars that put up guests on their second floor, but he had already considered the guild’s bar to be their side venture; he hadn’t thought they would go as far as to manage an inn as well—a side venture of a side venture. He wondered just how far they intended to cast their financial net, but to be fair, inns and bars were both indispensable to adventurers. Some guild outposts probably traded in weapons and armor as well.

“We won’t know how long we’ll be in the labyrinth until tomorrow’s briefing. We might have to manage on preserved foods for a while, so let’s splurge a bit today.”

Lapis hadn’t managed to obtain any details on the exam in advance, but she explained that an expedition into a labyrinth could take days or even weeks. As they would be accompanying students, Lapis found it hard to assume that it would be such a long haul, but she could easily see the academy mandating preserved food only, just to ensure their charges were used to it.

“There’s no need for us to follow the same restrictions, but it would be dreadfully awkward to have a sumptuous feast right next to the students being forced to gnaw on dried meat.”

“Can’t say I disagree,” Loren said, taking a seat at the bar. He handed the menu to Lapis without even looking at it.

Lapis looked it over and decided on her own order before sending a quizzical look at Loren.

“Order whatever for me,” he said. “You’re the one paying, after all.”

“You can order whatever you want,” Lapis said, not denying that she would be the one footing the bill.

Loren, however, shrugged. “I’ve been to my fair share of pubs, but at most of them, you can just say, ‘Get me some meat,’ and that’ll be the end of it. I’ve got no idea what to order.”

“That’s…interesting to say the least. What did you do in Kaffa?”

“I trusted the waitress’s recommendations.”

Loren had become a regular customer at the guild bar in Kaffa, and the waitresses all knew his face. At first, he really had only asked for meat, but once they’d broken the ice a bit, the girls had begun telling him the daily special or whatever they enjoyed most on the menu.

This was an exceedingly valuable source of information to Loren, who hardly concerned himself with food. However, this was obviously the first time he had visited the Monte Lugar establishment. It wasn’t as if the waitresses here wanted anything to do with him.

Loren had assumed he would have no choice but to place a generic order again, but if Lapis was eating with him, perhaps he could foist the responsibility off on her.

“I think it’s in your best interest to develop at least a little interest in these things,” she said.

“On the battlefield, you’re grateful when you get to eat at all. Sure, good taste is a plus, but food serves its purpose as long as it fills you up.”

It wasn’t rare for Loren to have nothing on his plate. He prioritized quantity over quality. Most times, his meals weren’t a source of enjoyment and were rather a necessary activity to prevent himself from dying of starvation. This had been the case so often that he had begun to think that the nature of food didn’t matter as long as it fit in his mouth.

“How uninspired—but there’s no sense complaining about it now. What’s done is done.” Lapis went on muttering something quite foreboding about having to rehabilitate him, then began to consider his meal alongside her own.

Confident that Lapis could handle it, Loren took the opportunity to look around the bar. The atmosphere wasn’t so different from the establishment in Kaffa. Moderately boisterous, moderately run-down, moderately grimy, and moderately jolly. As long as a bar served the same function, perhaps it inevitably shared a similar vibe. At least, that was what Loren thought until his eyes locked on a group that stood out from the rest.

A party of awfully young kids. With three boys and one girl, they were somewhat unbalanced, but they seemed to get along well enough. They were speaking in low voices and were deeply immersed in their conversation as they curiously glanced around. Their table was lined with humble food and a few cups, but they hadn’t ordered any form of alcohol.

How often did adventurers come to a bar to do anything but drink? Loren couldn’t help but study them. At least, he did until his observations were cut short by a group of mean-spirited adventurers.

As they passed this out-of-place group, one of those adventurers zeroed in on the lone girl—a sprightly kid with short black hair. The girl’s comrades stood, trying to put a stop to this, but the adventurer’s buddies got in their way, preventing them from coming to her aid.

Seeing the kids in distress—the girl obviously upset and her comrades blocked—Loren stood without prompting from Lapis. Plenty of mercenaries got it in their heads to argue with staff of all varieties, and even if they went too far, this was often played off with a laugh. However, if they belonged to a decent company, any mercenary who got rough with a fellow customer would be rightfully dogpiled by his own comrades.

Loren had been raised with these expectations and norms, and he therefore could not ignore the scene unfolding before his eyes.

As Loren made his way toward the quarrel, Lapis called out, “Mr. Loren?” But her eyes never left the menu. Loren turned, wondering if she was going to tell him to keep his head out of trouble. But all she said was: “Get involved if you want, but no killing, okay? I don’t want to end up in jail before the job’s even begun.”

“Of course, I know. I’ll hold back.”

“I agree that they’re an absolute bother, but make it quick. I’ll have ordered by the time you’re back,” she said, showing no real concern for the matter.

“I’m counting on you,” he said, and he proceeded on his way.

With Lapis idly seeing him off, Loren went on toward the quarrel only to find himself startled by the supposed victims. He had realized they were young from afar, but up close, they seemed like little more than children. They couldn’t have been older than fourteen or fifteen—the world at large classified all such folks as firmly in the age of minority. The age of adulthood varied by region but was generally somewhere around sixteen.

The adventurers messing with them had considerably more years under their belt. One of them, who looked a bit older than Loren, had grabbed the girl by the arm and was trying to drag her somewhere.

As she was pulled away, the girl’s face was stricken with shock. Her comrades consisted of a well-built boy with short blond hair, a somewhat flighty-looking boy with longish brown hair, and another boy with the same brown hair in a bowl cut. The last one wore the clothes of a priest; he was a little shorter and seemed especially timid.

In the time it took Loren to survey the group, both the adventurers and the kids had noticed him and seemed somewhat taken aback. Everyone stopped moving.

“Wh-who the hell are you?” the adventurer who was grabbing the girl’s arm snapped in a threatening voice.

Loren offered no immediate response. Instead, he spent a moment closely inspecting the girl’s face. She stared back at him, wide-eyed and confused. After a moment, he asked her, “You’re not messing around, are you?”

“N-not at all! These guys suddenly demanded I have a drink with them…”

“Hah!” The adventurer holding her leered. “I see a brat loitering around a bar at this hour, of course I’m gonna show her how to properly enjoy the place!”

The girl tried to shake her arm free, but she couldn’t wrest herself from the adventurer’s grip. She remained in his grasp no matter how much she struggled.

Having confirmed her distress, Loren called out to the three boys who had been intercepted by the other adventurers. “Want help?”

“Yes, please! Help us!” said the blond boy.

“Shut it! We don’t need none of it!” the flippant one snapped.

“Hey, c’mon, Cloud!” protested the bowl-cut kid, trying to mediate.

What followed was a chorus of crying, screaming, and enraged yells. Loren was startled, to say the least. He understood he had been the cause of this outburst, but he had only intended to intimidate them into leaving. Swooning and incontinence had not been part of the plan.

“Aren’t they a bit fragile to be your peers?”

“No, you’ve got my blood running cold too,” Claes stammered.

Meanwhile, Lapis peered at Loren with a baffled expression. His attempt at intimidation hadn’t hit her as it had everyone else—it was more that she seemed suspicious that something truly extraordinary had unfolded right before her eyes.

Did I do something weird? Loren wondered as Scena popped up in the corner of his eye.

<Perhaps I shouldn’t have mixed a dash of Lifeless King into your aura.> She smiled.

What are you doing? Loren sighed, but she flitted around his field of view, making a face as if she couldn’t contain her irritation.

<I mean, they called you filthy, Mister. You’re just going to take that?>

Loren didn’t really know how to respond. A part of him felt a little happy she had gotten angry for his sake, but this chaos felt a bit out of hand.

I appreciate the sentiment, but let’s tone it down next time, he told her. And while she didn’t look convinced, she nodded and disappeared once more.

“I have the strangest feeling. Like I just sensed a flash of an ominous presence,” Lapis said flatly, staring at him.

Presumably, Scena had only exercised a mote of power and for just a split second, yet Lapis had picked up on it. Astonished as he was by her sensitivity, Loren played dumb. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

“Oh, really? Perhaps I’m imagining…no, perhaps you’re genuinely just a profoundly terrifying person, Mr. Loren. Enough so that you can induce such a disaster with a mere threat.”

“These students are just delicate. I mean, we’re all battle-hardened survivors. Guess I’m just a bit much for brats who’ve never seen real combat.”

Lapis still didn’t seem convinced, but she also didn’t offer any other explanations. While she cocked her head quizzically, she didn’t pry further. “Is that how it works? In any case, back to work.”

“The headmaster’s office, right?” said Claes. “I’ll take you there. Follow me.”

With Claes leading the way, Lapis and Loren whispered between themselves.

“Ain’t he acting a bit too friendly? At least, compared to how he was when we first met him?”

“How should I put this? I’m starting to think he’s bottling it up and waiting for the opportune moment to stab us in the back.”

“Can’t you just say I’ve turned over a new leaf? Not that I care…” Claes muttered.

Whichever it was, having a graduate at the lead meant they wouldn’t lose their way. While his shoulders drooped, it didn’t seem like Claes was about to abandon them, and soon they were free of the chaos.

“The Wolfe Adventurer Training Academy was founded three hundred years ago in honor of the adventurer after whom it was named,” Claes explained as they walked, though no one had asked him.

Lapis quietly listened, always eager to collect a new piece of knowledge. As for Loren, the name of some guy from hundreds of years ago did little to entice his interest.

Generally speaking, those in the mercenary profession tended to think simply and in terms of the immediate. Very few thought about the future. Loren shared this mindset for the most part. The clerical manager in charge of Loren’s education had told him day after day to fix that habit, and he had reconfigured himself somewhat. However, his tendency to focus only on the tangible present often came out when he was dealing with matters in which he had absolutely no interest.

Maybe that’s why my wallet’s so light, Loren thought as Claes’s explanation went on.

“I don’t think I need to tell you about Wolfe, do I? I could regale you with his achievements for days, and it’s no exaggeration to say that almost everyone in this academy aims to someday measure up to his legend.”

“Could you please tell me what he achieved? Unfortunately, my priest training has left me rather estranged from general world knowledge,” Lapis said, although Loren suspected that she was lying out her ass.

In the first place, Lapis was, in truth, a demon—a race that lived in solitude and secrecy in a small but well-guarded territory. Honestly, he doubted she had completed any holy training whatsoever.

On top of this, Lapis was the sort of girl who never held back on her preliminary investigations. She had known they were headed to Wolfe Academy from the first, and it would have struck him as highly unusual if she hadn’t already looked into every aspect of the place.

That left him asking why she was making Claes explain anything at all. Seeming to sense his concern, she leaned over to answer this in a whisper. “I’m just checking my answers.”

That made sense. It was always worth comparing your intel with what others had been told.

“Well, let’s see,” said Claes. “It was too long ago to say whether this is entirely true, but several records credit him with slaying a dragon, and there are tons of accounts of him discovering ruins of the ancient kingdom. Also, he hunted down and sealed away a dark god.”

“Have you ever wondered if it was all made up?” Lapis asked, entirely sans tact.

When they’d first met Claes, he would have been infuriated by someone questioning the authenticity of an adventurer he respected, but it seemed he really had matured. He smiled wryly, and he didn’t even raise his voice. “I can’t blame you for wondering that. But numerous sources have come to consensus on his deeds. And then there’s the labyrinth beneath the academy.”

“What about it?” Loren asked. As the conversation had segued into something relevant to his work, his interest had reignited.

Claes seemed a bit taken aback by his sudden return to the conversation, but he carried on with a smile. “It’s said that Wolfe himself created the labyrinth beneath the academy.”

“You don’t mean he dug it, do you?” asked Loren. Though that’s quite an achievement too.

It just didn’t seem like the kind of accomplishment that adventurers were usually credited with.

“Apparently, he took control of a preexisting labyrinth.”

“You can do that?”

“Some say he figured out the inner workings of the labyrinth’s core, but there are no records left of that. The thing is, if you look around the labyrinth, you’ll see why people think that just might be true.”

Claes went on to explain that the labyrinth beneath the academy was divided into distinct sections—as if it had been organized in terms of difficulty. It seemed to be almost deliberately designed to be a training ground, which had led people to believe that Wolfe had left it behind for the sake of future adventurers.

The shallow floors were relatively safe, while the danger rose the deeper one went. This was the same for other labyrinths too, which led Lapis to ask if this one was really anything special.

“Our labyrinth is ten floors deep, but you can usually only get to the ninth,” said Claes by way of explanation. “You can’t enter the tenth without the headmaster’s permission.”

“Are you saying the proof of Mr. Wolfe’s achievements is on the tenth?”

“I am. I only saw it once before I graduated, mind you. But if you do your job right, and your examinees reach the ninth floor, you’ll be rewarded with entrance to the tenth. They get the headmaster’s permission before the exam begins,” Claes explained.

That sounds important, thought Loren. They had accepted this quest for the purpose of finding a missing part of Lapis’s body, and given Claes’s explanation, there was a good chance it was on the tenth floor.

As long as they got the students to the ninth floor, it seemed it would be a relatively uncomplicated task. This also explained why the labyrinth wasn’t open to the general public. Loren didn’t know what defenses the tenth floor possessed, but Claes described a number of defenses that had been put in place to prevent outside adventurers from breaking in and making off with the treasures Wolfe had left behind.

“Oh, and the exam will continue until the students give up hope,” said Claes. “You should prepare for a long stay. I believe the record is a whole month.”

“And we have to stick with them the entire time? Doesn’t sound too profitable, then.”

“Yeah—that’s why it’s mostly only graduates who take the quest. Why did you?”

Loren couldn’t answer that question; he couldn’t exactly say he had business with the labyrinth.

“Pure curiosity,” Lapis replied without missing a beat. “Neither Loren nor I are proper adventurers, so we were interested in what a training academy might be like.”

She answered so smoothly that she must have practiced in advance. Claes accepted it without a second thought. Somewhat amazed by her quick thinking, Loren awkwardly averted his eyes.

Finally, Claes led them to the headmaster’s office. The request was from the school, but their client was more specifically the headmaster. It was therefore only natural to meet the man himself, and Claes cracked open the doors.

“Well met! I am the Headmaster of the Wolfe Adventurer Training Academy, Wolfe XV!”

Claes stiffened at the voice that suddenly boomed from the open doorway. Loren clapped his hands over his ears while Lapis swiftly darted behind him.

Loren had barely managed to guard himself in time, and Lapis escaped unscathed. Claes, however, had taken the sound waves head-on, and a chill ran down Loren’s spine at the sight of the poor man’s quivering knees. The chill grew stronger when he saw the ostensible headmaster.

The figure beyond the door looked less like a man than like a small mountain. He wore formal clothes befitting his title, but on a scale that defied common sense. Loren was decently tall himself, but the individual behind the desk was already at his eye level—even while sitting.

“What are you standing there for?! Come in already!”

Loren kept his ears covered; the walls were visibly shaking. Why did this guy think he needed to shout when they were right in front of him? Either way, he gave Claes a push on the back.

Despite the stiff smile on his face, Claes timidly dragged his feet into the room. “It’s b-been a while, headmaster. You haven’t changed one bit.”

“I’m glad to see you’re in good health!”

Loren winced. No matter how hard he covered his ears, the voice bled through. Lapis was holding her head, barely withstanding the assault even from her hiding place.

“U-umm, Headmaster, sir. Could you speak a little softer?”

“Silence, Claes! You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to since you graduated from my school?!”

“I’ve been reflecting on the matter…”

“Hmm? You have? You certainly don’t seem as bad as the rumors say.” The headmaster’s volume dropped ever so slightly. He was still speaking rather loudly, but he had fallen to a level that could be endured without earplugs.

Loren released his head while Lapis nervously peeked out from behind him.

“You’ve had a change of heart, Claes. I see you’ve learned humility.”

“I’m sorry for troubling you.” Claes lowered his head.

The headmaster snorted. “If you’d been as bad as I heard, I would have had to retrain you from the ground up before I could confidently send you out on your next job.”

“I’ve been blessed with an opportunity to learn.”

“You got lucky.”

The headmaster and Claes carried on a conversation Loren didn’t quite understand, but they reconciled just as incomprehensibly, and that was the end of the matter.

As such, Loren remained at the ready to run at any time even as he called out to the now-satisfied headmaster. “Hey, can we talk about the job yet?”

“Oh, sorry about that. I heard a thing or two about a former student of mine who was getting up to no good. I thought I might need to teach him some manners, but it seems that was unnecessary.”

“Glad to hear it. Please keep that voice in check,” Loren said, all the while wondering if maybe it was actually the headmaster who needed to learn some manners.

The headmaster glanced between Loren and Lapis, as she peeked out from behind Loren’s back, then looked back to Claes. “You’ve brought some skilled fighters this time. Were they the ones who triggered your reform?”

Claes hung his head a bit. “It’s embarrassing, but yes.”

“Hmm. You, big fellow. I need to thank you somehow.”

“I’d lose to you in the size department, I think—but either way, I don’t care for thanks. Let’s just get to the job.”

The headmaster placed two stacks of paper on his desk. They were of normal size, but in this giant’s hands, they looked like tiny scraps. Loren drew closer to pick one up.

“That’s the register of the students taking our next exam. This time, we have your party and Claes’s. Just the two of you.”

“The name’s Loren. The one behind me is Lapis. We’re a party of two.”

From behind Loren, Lapis stealthily slid the documents from the Kaffa guild across the table. After scanning through them and ensuring their verity, the headmaster tucked them away in a drawer. The quest had now been officially accepted. Once the job was done, the headmaster would return those papers with his seal of approval.

“Your job will entail accompanying the students. We generally don’t permit you to assist, but you can offer advice. They should take full responsibility for themselves while in the labyrinth, and it is not your responsibility if they lose their lives. Don’t worry.”

“You wouldn’t mind if we rescued them before that, would you?”

“Of course not. But if anything happens that requires your intervention, you are to promptly return to the surface. The examinees are expected to keep a map, but you will be handed your own map of the labyrinth in advance.”

The labyrinth had already been used for the same exam several times before, so the map was fairly comprehensive. In case of emergency, they were supposed to use it to return. Otherwise, it was hands-off; it would be impossible to gauge the examinee’s true strength if they received help from their proctors. In other words, the exam was over the moment a proctor determined help was necessary.

“Clearing the fifth floor is enough to pass, but they’re entitled to go as far as they’re able. Of course, the floor they reach will correspond to their grade. The exam only ends when the examinees reach the fifth floor or lose all hope. Any questions?”

“I heard from Claes that we would be permitted entrance to the tenth floor if we managed to reach the ninth. Is that true?” asked Lapis.

“It’s true. To be more precise, you will need to beat the keeper of the ninth floor to reach the stairs to the tenth. The passage from there is usually sealed, but I will hand the students the appropriate permissions to pass through.”

“Is that the only reward? Sounds a bit lackluster.”

“If they manage to bring something back from the tenth floor, I’ll permit that as well.” The headmaster grinned, taking Loren by surprise. The license to retrieve a treasure from the horde of an ancient adventurer sounded genuinely wondrous. “The same goes for the proctors. If you’re able to take anything, go ahead. However, know that if something happens to you, it’s not our responsibility.”

“Well, I guess we have some outrageous traps to look forward to.”

The way the headmaster put it suggested that there was something on the road back that no student or adventurer could possibly hope to face. Loren wondered if perhaps they would only be allowed to return if they were empty-handed. What would they have to defeat in order to escape to the surface with their loot?

“So with two parties, who’s going to be in charge of who?” Loren looked at Claes, but Claes urged Loren to take his pick first.

As Claes was a graduate adored by the current student body, he was presumably confident that he could take care of anyone he was assigned to. With that in mind, Loren looked through the documents on both parties and placed one of them on the table.

“Please assign this one to us.”

“Very well,” the headmaster nodded. “On what did you base your decision?”

Loren scanned the top page again. “I felt a bit of a connection.”

Still hiding behind Loren’s back, Lapis peeked over his shoulder at the bundle of papers he had selected. As soon as she saw the party leader’s name, she nodded her acceptance.

It read “Ein”—the leader of the kids they’d met at the bar.

Their introductory meeting was over in no time flat. This was largely because they weren’t strangers to begin with. At the bar, Loren had been able to tell the kids were pretty young, but looking at them in broad daylight, he felt rather conflicted about their entirely childlike auras.

“You have an old-looking face after all, Mr. Loren.”

“I’m aware. You don’t need to tell me.”

The truth of the matter was that Loren didn’t know his own exact age. If he counted back to the time he’d known how to count, he could surmise he was a little over twenty, but he didn’t know the actual answer. No one around him had ever seemed to care, and as a mercenary, Loren had thought the number meaningless. His occupation was one where few ever grew old enough to care about age.

But once he found himself looking at the faces of these young students, he felt strangely decrepit.

“It’s all right. You’re still young,” Lapis said.

“I don’t need consolation either. How old are you anyway, Lapis?”

“Oh, Mr. Loren. I’m surprised to hear such a roundabout death wish coming from you.”

“Hey, now…”

“Just kidding. I’m just as old as I look.”

If so, then she wasn’t as outrageously old as demons were known to get. However, this was Lapis making the claim; he didn’t know whether to take her at face value.

“We’re happy to have you aboard. Thanks for agreeing to be our proctors.” Ein, the party’s leader, greeted them with excess energy. He was well built, his firm physique draped in chain mail, and his sword and round shield giving him the look of a run-of-the-mill front-line fighter. His short-trimmed blond hair just added to the look.

“Not that we needed one,” sniffed Cloud, the brown-haired, flippant-looking boy. He wore a leather breastplate with fewer moving parts than Loren’s, and the weapon hanging from his belt was a long, slender blade called an estoc. Loren presumed he was a swordsman who focused on speed.

“Just quit it, Cloud. You’re dealing with professional adventurers—they’ll be scary if you make them angry.” This awfully meek statement came from Al, the boy with the bowl cut. This one wore priest vestments with a long mace dangling from his belt. The design of his robes shared some similarities with Lapis’s.

Al professed himself to be an apprentice priest in service to the supreme god, but his flinching demeanor made it hard to believe that he served the supreme being who sat at the summit of the pantheon.

“Thanks for helping me out last night! You really saved me there.” This came from Phem, a girl with an unusual amount of pep in her step. She had short black hair and wore a robe while carrying a wooden staff—a rather orthodox look for a magician. She was indeed a magician, and with her graduation near, she claimed to be able to cast elementary magic once a day.

After the introductions were over, Loren watched the party prepare from afar. He whispered to Lapis, “Do you think they’ll be able to reach the tenth floor?”

They had already brought all their own belongings from the inn, which were split between Loren’s sack and Lapis’s backpack. Loren couldn’t wear a backpack due to the sword already strapped across his back, so he instead had a loose sack dangling from his left hand. On top of this, he had a brand-new, if crude, knife on his left hip.

“You’re able to use a knife, Mr. Loren?” Lapis casually asked, sending the conversation in a completely different direction.

“For what it’s worth. You use them to slit throats when you have to.” He drew the weapon as he said this. It was certainly shaped like a knife, but it was far too long and unwieldy for everyday use. Its blade was as thick as that of an axe.

“That’s practically a shortsword. I’m surprised they had that at the weapon shop.”

“They had it at the one in Kaffa. The guy there guaranteed it was sturdy but said no one was buying it ’cause it looked too unrefined. I got it for ten silver.”

“I would have gotten one for you if you asked.”

“It’s just a side weapon. Only has to cut well enough,” Loren replied, but Lapis huffed discontentedly.

He had coincidently run into both his coat and sword at a shop in Kaffa—at least, that was the official story. He’d already interrogated the shop owner and established that Lapis had been moving behind the scenes to provide his gear. She would never admit it aloud, but it was essentially an open secret.

The set had cost Loren—or rather Lapis—thirty gold coins, which had saddled him with a small fortune’s worth of debt. However, he had been more or less certain from the start that both coat and blade were likely worth far more than that. If he’d asked Lapis to procure a side weapon, it was clear as day that she would have found something staggeringly expensive. Perhaps his equipment had come absurdly cheap given its real value, but that didn’t mean he had the leisure to waste money.

“So what are your thoughts?” he asked as they watched the group struggle to pick out their supplies.

“You mean about their skill level? Yes, let’s see. This is going to be difficult.” Lapis’s frank appraisal was rather harsh. “They can most likely make it to the fifth-floor pass line, somehow or another. But I don’t know about anything beyond that.”

The map they had been given displayed the location of traps; it also provided information on the monsters residing on each floor in excruciating detail. Going off that intel, Lapis had calculated the general difficulty of each level.

“Though that’s assuming that the monsters born in this labyrinth are no different from normal monsters.”

“Why would they be different?” Loren asked.

Perhaps it went without saying at this point, but as a former mercenary, Loren had never entered a labyrinth before. He hadn’t known there was a possibility that the monsters in a labyrinth might differ from the ones found elsewhere.

“To put it simply, normal monsters leave corpses when they die. Labyrinth monsters leave only certain parts of their bodies, and the rest gets reabsorbed into the labyrinth.”

“Does that impact their relative strength?”

“It can. It really all depends on the labyrinth’s scale. Don’t let your guard down just because they look familiar,” said Lapis. “However, the labyrinth we’re headed into is used for school exams, so I’m fairly sure they’ll be the same, if not weaker, than our usual fare. If worse comes to worst, we can get rid of those four, and—”

Talk about a dark turn.

“And then what?” Loren cut her off. “Take a shortcut to the bottom floor before filing a report? I’m not helping you do that.”

“Oh, at least say you’re going to stop me. Or do you intend to sit on the sidelines?” she retorted.

Loren turned away and played dumb.

This nonchalant banter would, admittedly, have made for a terrible fuss if Ein or his fellows had caught wind of it.

“On that note, I’m guessing that part of you is on the tenth floor, but why would it be there?” Loren asked. “What’s it doing with the belongings of some three-hundred-year-old adventurer?”

It had occurred to him that a demon like Lapis could very well have been walking the earth back then, but if Lapis was to be believed, she hadn’t been born at that time. That still left the question of how her body part had gotten there.

Lapis thought for a moment, choosing her words carefully. “Presumably… My parents secretly snuck in. Either there’s a secret passage somewhere, or it’s the sort of place my parents could easily sneak into.”

She said that, but the academy was the exclusive owner of the labyrinth, and strict security measures protected its entrance. Loren hadn’t heard of any adventurers successfully robbing it either. On the other hand, Lapis’s parents were naturally demons as well, and Loren had no idea what level of security you’d need to keep them out of a place.

“Who are your parents, exactly?”

“Do you want to meet them sometime? I could introduce you.”

Loren could tell that some other meaning lurked behind her smug smile. Still, he decided to answer honestly. “I’d rather not. More importantly, what’s your basis for thinking it’s here?”

For a moment, she looked disappointed; as for his question, however, she reached out and took his right hand. There seemed to be no logical reason for it, and Loren was a little surprised. Lapis paid him no mind and squeezed, asking, “Mr. Loren, can you feel where your right hand is?”

“Of course, it’s my right hand. It’d be weird if I couldn’t.”

“It’s the same for me. It is a part of me, so I have a vague sense that it’s in the area.”

Was the grip on his hand really comparable to the feeling in a part that had been torn off of her? Loren still didn’t get it. But he could tell it was the sort of sensation no vague thought could really get a handle on, so he accepted it and avoided probing any further.

“Say we’re assuming this is a given. How are we supposed to get down there?”

“I can’t help but think that it would be easiest to just incapacitate those four with Sleep and finish our business while they’re out—”

“All right, looks like they’re ready.” Loren cut Lapis off at the pass before she could conceive any more callous stratagems.

Lapis quickly shut her mouth as Ein’s party approached, their bags all in order, psyching each other up for the task ahead of them.

“The pass line’s at floor five, but we have our sights on the tenth floor,” Ein said.

“We can totally do it,” Cloud agreed. “Not a problem.”

“You really think so?” Al murmured.

“Let’s do this thing!” Phem crowed. “We’ve been training and studying for this day.”

Loren was pleasantly surprised to see Ein leading the charge. While Lapis didn’t seem to think they had the skills to reach the bottom floor, they were at the very least aiming for it. In that case, as long as Loren could help them reach their goal, he could also complete Lapis’s objective without resorting to any drastic measures. That seemed far preferable to the various dangerous things that came out of her mouth.

“Let’s hope our advice is enough to get them there,” he said to her.

“That sounds a tad optimistic to me,” said Lapis.

It would have been that much easier if he could have helped them directly, but the students were playing the lead role in this quest, and Loren and Lapis had to act the part of side characters.

“How about we secretly help out a bit to make sure?” Lapis pushed.

“Sounds like we don’t have much of a choice.”

“All right, let’s go.”

On Ein’s order, Loren, Lapis, and the students started off toward the entrance to the labyrinth. The entrance itself was in the school building—to prevent anyone unaffiliated with the academy from getting in. However, keeping the worst-case scenario in mind, Loren warily scanned for traps along the way—just in case the academy was even more gung ho about keeping out intruders than they advertised.

Loren had assumed the entrance to a labyrinth would be a sinister sort of place. That wasn’t the case for the labyrinth they were entering this time. The entrance consisted of an austere, unfussy set of stairs leading down from a room on campus.

This was somewhat of a letdown to Loren, but he reminded himself that the exterior design didn’t necessarily correspond with the level of danger.

That entrance room was where they met up with Claes again. He was, it turned out, leading a group of four girls. While Ange the mage stood behind him, the sour look on her face made clear that she was heartily displeased with the situation. Loren couldn’t help but smile—just a bit.

“Are you going down too?” Claes asked, and Loren nodded.

For some strange reason, the girls following Claes looked at Loren with venom in their eyes, and he had to tilt his head. Sure, Claes was clearly popular—or rather, he seemed to have amassed a fair bit of…affection—but was it really so troubling to them for him to be friendly with another guy?

As Loren puzzled over this, he suddenly recalled the contents of the documents on the examinees that he had seen in the headmaster’s office. “This isn’t the party I remember.”

Not that he recalled the examinees he hadn’t picked in detail, but he was sure they hadn’t been all girls. What’s more, the girls behind Claes all seemed to be sword fighters, and the other party’s composition hadn’t been so unbalanced.

“The moment we heard Claes would be the proctor, we had that party swap with us,” said one of the girls behind Claes. She had an imperious expression and blonde ringlets. She stood in front of Loren with her chest stuck boldly forward, showing no signs of fear, and she spoke as the representative of her group. “How foolish it was of them! Honestly, to think they gave up the opportunity to be proctored by a man they called a prodigy when he attended the academy.”

“Who’s she?” Loren asked Claes, making no attempt to conceal his preemptive exhaustion with this kid. I wasn’t asking you, girl.

Claes smiled stiffly. “This is Ms. Parmè Pentatonic. I don’t imagine you’d be familiar, but she’s the daughter of a count in a nearby state.”

“Be grateful, adventurer. Someone of your lowly stature wouldn’t usually be permitted to talk to me.” The girl called Parmè turned her chest away, looking down her nose at him as best she could, given their height difference.

Without so much as a glance at her, Loren addressed Claes again. “Does peerage give you benefits in this school?”

“Officially, students are all treated equally without consideration to any external factors. However, the exceptionally talented students, and the ones of high birth, do tend to throw their weight around… My apologies.” Claes’s voice shrunk very slightly as he spoke.

“Why are you apologizing?” Loren sighed. Claes was clearly ashamed of whatever he’d done as a student, but faced with his penitent attitude, Loren couldn’t help but think Claes was overdoing it.

“That’s right! You needn’t apologize to one of his ilk!” said Parmè.

“All right, could you please tamp it down?” Loren said. “Especially if you want any favors down there.”

Parmè looked ready to lash out, but Claes stopped her with a stern side glance.

On Loren’s end, he didn’t care how much any student shouted at him—it was still better if he didn’t have to deal with this one at all.

That said, he promptly lost interest in that crowd and turned his attention to Ange, who was sulking behind them. “That’s a real face you’re making there.”

“You understand where I’m coming from, don’t you?”

“More or less. But stay like that, and you’ll get Claes all worried. The students won’t take to you either.”

Perhaps Ange didn’t care how the students felt, but when Loren brought up the chance of her distracting Claes, her expression straightened just a bit. There was still a crease on her brow, though, so Loren glanced away.

“Where are the other two?” he asked.

“On strike. We’re the only ones on this job.”

The quest hadn’t stated any requirement for the number of party members required to proctor. Apparently, Claes’s other comrades—Leila and Laure—had determined that they would be unable to withstand the atmosphere and refused to join.

“Then couldn’t you have stayed with them?” he asked.

“And leave Claes alone with those girls?” Waves of outrage rolled off of Ange, as if Loren had said something unbelievable. Loren winced back, overpowered, and tried to make some distance, but Ange came straight at him. “You listen here. Sure, Claes has his looks going for him, and his skills are decent. Thanks to all you’ve done, he’s lost a bit of his arrogance, and he’s mellowed out. But I’m telling you, he still makes moves on girls just as quickly—that part hasn’t improved at all!”

“I don’t remember taking pains to fix that in the first place.”

Loren didn’t exactly not know this about Claes—he’d just thought of it as not his problem. Given that Claes had three women in his party, and they all had feelings for him, Loren had an impression that the kid worked fast. But even if that was the case, it seemed harmless enough—to Loren, at least.

“If I shoved Claes and a party of women into a labyrinth without anyone to keep an eye on him, they’d all have hearts in their eyes by the time they stumbled out!”

“I can’t say I understand.”

“Nine months later, we’d have a flood of girls claiming: This is your child!”

Isn’t that going a bit too far? Loren thought. But when he looked at Claes, the man was staring into the middle distance, his face a ghastly pale.

They finally encountered their first monster right when they reached the second floor. They had ultimately failed to encounter anything on the first floor and soon came upon the stairs leading down. There, they spotted four goblins in a hut, just a short walk from the entrance to the second floor.

Ein’s party swiftly got into formation, and they reacted with a speed that suggested a considerable amount of training. Loren hadn’t expected much, but that alone made him consider giving them passing marks.

Compared to that… Loren thought as he watched the goblins ready themselves for these intruders. Not all that long ago, he had gone through hell in an ancient ruin filled with the horrid little creatures. But as long as each side had equal numbers, goblins were just as weak as most of the world thought them to be.

In fact… Loren knit his brow. These goblins seemed even weaker than he had expected. If he hadn’t heard that a labyrinth’s monsters could be influenced by the scale of the labyrinth, he would have assumed this pack was sickly or otherwise enfeebled.

The goblins clumsily flailed the crude shortswords and spears in their hands. As the party’s two vanguards raised a battle cry, Loren knew it was practically over. However, they weren’t the first to attack. That prize went to Phem, the magician.

Loren would have chalked the party up for a failure if she had deployed her single use of magic at that moment. But Phem didn’t cast, nor did she swing her wooden staff. She had hung her lantern from the latter, after all. Instead, she freed her right hand to throw a dart from her sleeve.

The dart flew with force, stabbing straight into the shoulder of one of the goblins. Unfortunately, its needle wasn’t too long. A goblin’s skin was thick—about as sturdy as the cheapest leather armor—and a dart with just barely enough power to pierce it couldn’t deal much of any damage.

At least, that was what Loren thought. Contrary to his expectations, the goblin clutched its shoulder as it toppled and writhed on the floor.

“All right! It worked!” Phem clenched her fist.

“What a piece of work. She slathered it with poison.” Lapis glanced at Phem with appraising eyes.

Between Phem, who used poison, and Lapis, who immediately realized it was poison, Loren had to wonder who had the nastier mind. His thoughts were dispelled by the clash of blades.

Ein and Cloud had closed in and engaged the remaining goblins—Ein had caught two with his shield while Cloud took on the last one.

Ein’s fighting style was concerningly passive. He concentrated both his shield and sword on defense, and he didn’t seem to have any intention of wounding his foe. However, taking the blows of two goblins meant he was indeed fulfilling his role as a vanguard.

Cloud used his speed to get in as many cuts as he could. His estoc was specialized in thrusting and wasn’t fit to lock blades. For that reason, he slipped through his enemy’s attacks, ensuring that he was the only one dealing damage. In this particular engagement, his goblin opponents were so weak that it was an all-around pitiful sight to behold.

Cloud’s goblin foe completely failed to keep up with his movements. Even so, it desperately used sword and shield to fend off Cloud’s thrusts, attempting to get in a counterstrike. Cloud never closed in too far—he always dodged out of range after getting in an attack, and the goblin swung through empty air.

In Loren’s eyes, it was a waste. Why continuously inflict small wounds on a weak goblin? It was as if Cloud was messing around. If he wasn’t, he was ridiculing his opponent, and it wasn’t great to watch.

“Al! Do it! I have it pinned down! Get it!”

“Ehhh?! It’s still moving!”

“Yes, now make it stop moving!”

Holding his mace in both nervous hands, Al approached the first goblin, which Phem had taken out. She stood beyond it, her foot planted on its back to keep it down.

“Hurry up! The poison isn’t that strong!” she urged.

“Ugh… I know…” Half in tears, Al lifted his mace.

The goblin flailed harder as it saw Al raise his weapon, desperately attempting to escape Phem’s foot, but Phem ground her heel down.

“Take this!” Al’s voice was a bit too weak to call a yell as he swung his mace down to crush the goblin’s head. However, he missed his mark, hitting it around the shoulder blades. The dull thud was followed by the goblin’s shrieks of anguish.

“Hyah!” Al tried again, this time hitting the arm that the goblin raised to shield its face. Its broken arm was bent in an uncanny direction.

As the goblin shrieked even more loudly, Al wiped away his sweat and stared, baffled, at the mace in his hands. “Why can’t I hit it?”

Loren could contain himself no longer. “I mean, how the hell are you supposed to hit if you’re swinging with your eyes closed?”

As a proctor, he wasn’t supposed to offer advice when no one asked for it, but at this rate, he got the feeling that Al would eventually end up hitting Phem by mistake. Even if he didn’t, the sight of the goblin being forced to remain on a painful mortal coil was a tad too pathetic to bear.

“But if I keep my eyes open, I’ll have to see what happens when I do hit…”

“Fine, then don’t. But if you do, why’d you even become an adventurer? In the first place—”

Loren was about to wade in and grab the kid when Lapis wrapped her arms around his waist from behind, stopping him from going forward. Al, still bewildered by Loren’s lecture, suddenly remembered that the goblin was still alive and once more held his mace aloft.

“What’re you doing, Lapis?” Loren growled.

“I do understand how you feel, but rein it in for now. You’re overstepping your role, and this is probably where they’re supposed to learn these things.”

“Still…”

“Yes, I didn’t think it would be this terrible either. However, even if they’re taking the graduation exam of an adventurer training academy, that doesn’t necessarily ensure they’re ready to pass it.”

Loren’s frustration remained fixed on his face until he finally clicked his tongue and lightly placed his palm against Lapis’s head to remove her from his waist. He meant to signal that he was fine now, but she wasn’t letting go.

“Oi, Lapis.”

“Mr. Loren, did you always have such a shockingly slim waist?”

“I’m thicker than you. Don’t worry. More importantly, you’re saying this is all part of the labyrinth experience?” Loren asked. Lapis released him, apparently not fully understanding his question. “I mean, the goblins here are monsters born from the labyrinth, right?”

“Yes, I don’t see any sign that they could have come from the outside.”

“Which means the labyrinth created those weakened goblins for the purpose of the exam, right?”

Lapis turned her gaze to Ein and his party.

Ein continued drawing the focus of two goblins, never going on the offense, and carrying on a battle that was essentially a stalemate. Cloud, meanwhile, was still inflicting small cuts on the slow-moving goblin. The goblin that Al and Phem had attempted to take out was thrashing in its struggle to escape, especially after Al’s mace missed again. At the same time, Phem was trying to stab another paralyzing dart into its back.

“Mr. Loren, a labyrinth’s monsters do vary in strength based on its design, but I’ve never heard of a labyrinth that deliberately produced weakened entities.”

“Yeah, well, look at them.”

“No, think about it. If it could produce and then weaken a monster, why couldn’t it just use less energy to produce a different, naturally weaker monster in the first place? Why would a labyrinth choose the more elaborate process?”

“Don’t ask me.”

There was no way Loren could hope to understand something Lapis didn’t. But as he threw in the towel, so too did Lapis. Nevertheless, she folded her arms and frowned as she watched the party fight.

“If you say they’ve been weakened, they probably have been,” he admitted. “The problem is more the why.”

Just in case, Loren also secretly turned his mind to Scena and asked whether this was her doing. He suspected she could have used her energy drain to yield a similar effect, but she confirmed that she’d done no such thing.

“I simply cannot believe a labyrinth would do something so inefficient,” Lapis insisted. “In which case, I can think of two potential explanations.”

“The first?”

“Something weakened them following their birth.”

“And the second?”

“The system that produced them has suffered a malfunction.”

“You can’t guess which is more likely?”

“I don’t have enough information.”

Whichever it is, there’s definitely something going on here, Loren thought with a sigh. He could already tell this was going to be a pain. If only it had been one of Scena’s little tricks. “This reeks of trouble.”

“If I weren’t looking for a part of me, I would be considering turning around and leaving right this instant—although I would also be mulling over the penalties for failing a quest, or the fines for abandoning it halfway.”

“Just for reference, around how much is the fine?”

“Five times the reward. Can you pay that, Mr. Loren?”

“You know how lonely my wallet is.”

Naturally, Loren didn’t have sufficient cash to pay anything like that. He didn’t know what sort of calamity awaited him if he failed to do so, but either way, a grim future was most definitely ahead of him.

“I won’t hold it against you if you slip out on your own,” Loren said. He was under the impression that Lapis had funds enough that the penalty would be little more than a slap on the wrist.

This was probably true, but Lapis smiled cheekily. “You must be joking. I’m the one who wanted to take this job.”

“Oh, really?”

Loren hadn’t been counting the swings, but by pure coincidence, Al finally got the goblin’s head. That was the final blow—the goblin convulsed one, two, three more times before falling motionless.

Once the life had left them, the monsters of the labyrinth were absorbed into its walls, leaving only a portion of their bodies behind. At least, that was how it was supposed to be. Yet after crumbling away, the goblin left nothing in its wake.

“Huh? What?” Al looked nervously around.

“How strange. I guess they don’t always leave something.” Phem, on the other hand, seemed intrigued by this unprecedented result.

Meanwhile, Cloud finally defeated his opponent and rushed over to Ein to take over one of the two he had been keeping contained. Behind him, the defeated goblin crumbled and melted into the floor, once again leaving nothing to remember it by.

After that drag of a battle with the goblins, they soon found the stairs to the third floor. Again, they encountered no further monsters. The absence of obstacles made clear that something was very wrong. Loren wondered if Ein’s party was feeling anxious as well. On the contrary, they seemed relieved by the lack of combat.

“At this rate, we’ll be at the pass line in no time,” said Ein, and his party members happily nodded.

As far as Loren could tell, if the academy graduated adventurers at this party’s skill level, the probability that they would all be alive a year later was about the same as the probability that he would suddenly learn magic in the next five minutes.

He had been misled by the word examinee; once again, he was reminded that the exams weren’t taken solely by those with the skill to pass them.

“They won’t last long,” Lapis mused indifferently, having reached the same conclusion. There was little Loren could do but nod. “Incidentally, have you noticed, Mr. Loren?”

“You mean how there’s no signs of Ringlets?”

Lapis looked a little dissatisfied with his answer—not because he was wrong, but because she had plainly hoped to start the conversation with him asking, What do you mean? However, the cause for concern was fairly obvious to him, and he couldn’t always play dumb just to keep up with her antics.

What concerned them were the whereabouts of Parmè’s party, the one Claes was tagging along behind. According to the map the headmaster had given them, each labyrinth floor only had one set of stairs leading down. With so few obstacles, it wouldn’t have been strange if they’d caught up before long.

However, they hadn’t seen so much as a hint of Parmè’s party.

“They seemed to be better at combat, so I’m sure they’re blazing forward even faster than we are.”

“I doubt we passed them.”

Ein’s party had wasted a good chunk of time on the weakened goblins. It was hard to imagine they could have outpaced their competitors.

“The way this is going, don’t you think they’re on the fifth floor by now?” Loren asked.

“Hmmm…” Lapis mumbled to herself, unfolding the map while Ein and the others weren’t looking. “That depends on how skilled they are. If they’re about on par with our gaggle, I’d say they’re on the fourth floor, no farther.”

“If you’re wondering about Parmè’s party, they’re the academy’s top swordswomen,” Phem piped up, intruding upon Lapis’s monologue.

As the rest of her comrades walked ahead, she was the only one who fell back to join Loren and Lapis. Her mere proximity seemed to irritate Lapis. Loren hid her grim expression behind his hand—he wanted to try getting some information out of Phem.

He had concluded that his words couldn’t be taken as advice so long as they had nothing to do with the labyrinth exploration, and thus, he wouldn’t be violating the rules by asking. Or so he hoped. “Is that ringlet girl that strong?”

“Incredibly so. The girls in her party are all among the top ten sword fighters of this year’s examinees.”

“Ain’t there a pretty big difference between you and them?”

“Does it feel that way?” Phem laughed, but this was no laughing matter. If her words were to be believed, Parmè was definitely already on the fifth floor or beyond. “We’re not nobles, and it’s not like we’ve got any real talent. We’re just the oddballs and leftovers.”

“Wait, isn’t the academy a place for those with talent?” Loren asked. At least, that was what Lapis had said. He looked sideways to see her shaking her head, insisting she hadn’t been lying.

“That’s generally the case,” Phem agreed. “But you know, gather enough people with talent, and you’ll still find yourself with the truly incredible and the not so incredible.”

I guess so, thought Loren. It was a simple equation—there were degrees of talent, and for everyone who possessed a shocking ability came another who, next to them, could be barely recognized as having any ability at all.

“Sure, the upper crust can cultivate a friendly rivalry all they want. But what if you’re just slightly above average and you’re put face-to-face with true genius?” Phem asked. “You’d start feeling inferior, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, I see what you’re saying…” Loren muttered.

In a nutshell, while the school branded itself as a place to nurture talented individuals, a portion of its student body wasn’t actually talented—or rather, they also accepted students who had no special skills to speak of. While Loren wondered why they would do such a thing, Lapis offered an answer.

“Certain people feel more secure when they know there are people below them,” said Lapis. “It’s an effective means of boosting confidence in one way but a rather foolish one in others.”

Phem laughed again. “It’s not so bad. They still teach us, and they train us to fight.”

Does Claes know about this? Loren wondered—though he concluded that the kid had to be in the dark. If Claes had known, he would’ve been too embarrassed to saddle Loren with a party of predetermined failures.

“And we get financial support from the state too!”

“If they’re supporting you, the school must be taking a handsome cut.”

In order to nurture the actually extraordinary talents, the school also took in students who they expected would never amount to anything. The school was probably taking funds from the state to finance this operation, which meant the headmaster was in on the corruption. That surprised Loren, as the large fellow hadn’t seemed the corruptible sort.

However, Phem denied this hypothesis. “The school’s probably getting something, but the headmaster wouldn’t know.”

“Why? Isn’t he in charge of the place?”

“Other people manage the school. The headmaster is…you know? He’s descended from the adventurer who founded the academy.”

Yeah, I could tell by the name, thought Loren. Then he realized, “Wait, they’re just using his name to hide their scheme?”

“If you think about it, the headmaster is just another hired hand,” Lapis added.

It was as yet unclear if the headmaster was privy to the deal, but Loren got the feeling that he’d be the sort to fight back against the whole thing.

“Anyway, you get the picture. I don’t know what the headmaster thinks about us, but we were never expected to pass this exam,” Phem said.

She seemed content, but Loren couldn’t help but see danger all around. Normally, these students would have failed and been sentenced to either continue their lives as students or quit and choose a different path.

However, for some reason, the labyrinth was practically devoid of monsters. They were only on the third floor, but Loren foresaw the fourth and fifth floors would be similar stories. If that happened, this party would pass without meriting their victory, and they’d be sent off into the world as supposedly first-rate adventurers.

This would ultimately prove to be a disaster for these kids—and it would likely be even worse for whoever hired them.

“I have a question.” Lapis raised her hand. “Is that priest—your Mr. Al—in the same boat?”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard Mr. Al serves the supreme god. The other gods might not be so selective, but not just anyone can serve the supreme.”

Strongest in the pantheon, the supreme god was the most exalted deity, he who stood above all others. Anyone who wished to serve him either had to hail from a prestigious lineage or be uniquely talented. Thus, Lapis explained, she couldn’t comprehend how a priest of the supreme god could have found his way into a self-admitted failure of a party.

“Al is a bit different. His full name is Alford Veronica, and he’s the second son of a noble. Apparently.”

Well, if he’s a priest and a noble, doesn’t that make him pretty impressive? Loren couldn’t help but wonder. The way Al handled his mace was downright regrettable, but that wasn’t a huge flaw if he could perform his priestly duties.

“Oh, well, Al isn’t just the kind of guy who’d befriend commoner dregs like us. He’s helped us a ton with his knowledge and blessings. He’s really dependable.”

“That guy?” Loren muttered. Al’s general mien was far from what anyone could call reliable, so Loren found this hard to believe.

However, Phem didn’t look the least bit like she was joking; she was serious. “I mean, he’s a bit of a coward, and sure, he’s terrible with weapons.”

“I can hear you!” Al sarcastically chimed in from ahead.

Phem paid him no mind. “But he really is reliable. Just look at us—we’re only here because Al assured us that we would definitely pass. That if we could clear the fifth floor, the tenth floor wasn’t a far-off dream. That’s what got us motivated to take the test this year.”

“I’ve seen you guys at work—you do all your training, and you focus in class.” Al still sounded as quiet as ever, but he spoke with confidence. “Sure, it doesn’t always work out, but I think it’s totally possible if we combine our strengths.”

The other three nodded, convinced. These students, written off as failures, were doing their best to defy the world.

Upon bearing witness to this scene, Loren whispered to Lapis, who had been spacing out beside him. “So what are their actual chances?”

“Who knows? Perhaps someone will awaken to secret talents along the way. Perhaps one of them is hiding a predilection for blind rampages akin to your own, Mr. Loren. I cannot weigh in on the matter.”

“But there’s also a chance we were right about them.”

“It’s not a bad thing to have hope. Probably.” Lapis sounded as if her heart wasn’t in it—as if she was simply saying these things because the situation called for it.

Loren felt there was no need to put it like that, but at this rate, it seemed the kids would pass regardless of their proctors’ evaluation or their own abilities. They were, after all, waltzing unhindered through their test.

“I see the next stairs!” Ein’s words from the front made the others jog forward.

Watching their backs, Loren couldn’t help but wonder where the hell the third-floor monsters had gone. There was clearly something wrong with the labyrinth, but the party pressed on, refusing to see it. He didn’t even know what part of this problem was most concerning.

Loren’s fears became reality. Without receiving any further insights into what was going on, they proceeded through a monsterless fourth floor and found the stairs to the fifth.

He couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Isn’t this messed up?”

This exploration was supposed to be an exam, but if his internal clock was to be believed, they had reached the pass line in just over half a day. This speed was abnormal, as was the cause.

Not only had they encountered no more than one group of monsters in the entire labyrinth, they also hadn’t come across any traps. With nothing to slow them down, they had simply walked their way to the fifth floor. Of course, such an unimpeded stroll wouldn’t take them long at all.

Loren suddenly turned to Lapis, since she had the map. “Hey, are they…ever lost?”

“You’ve picked up on something rather key, Mr. Loren.” As always, Lapis checked the map, making sure none of the others could see her do it. She spoke like an old detective talking to her assistant. “There’s something wrong with those children. They occasionally make detours, but…they’re almost always taking the shortest route from entrance to exit. As if they know the path.”

Loren gazed at the four backs ahead of him. The magician, Phem, was in charge of recording the distances and directions that the party traversed on their map. However, the party leader, Ein, decided their path, though at times Al weighed in.

“Additionally, our map shows the location of traps, but with the route they’ve chosen, it’s strange that they haven’t fallen for any of them yet.”

“They didn’t go off?”

Loren could think of only two reasons why a trap wouldn’t activate. First: the trigger mechanisms had failed. Second: someone had disabled them before they passed through. If it was the former, that meant there really was something wrong with the labyrinth. If it was the latter, perhaps they should have been thanking Parmè’s party—or the earlier intervention of a third party.

“We can write off the flippant kid.”

“I agree. He doesn’t seem like the scheming type.”

However, the remaining three remained under suspicion. Loren couldn’t say if the culprit was plotting something or just cheating, but presumably one of them had information that only a proctor was supposed to know.

“Does the exam end on the fifth floor?” Loren asked.

“No, it’s concluded only once they discover the stairs to the sixth floor. The rest is left up to the examinees’ discretion.”

“I see. Hey, you lot,” Loren called out to the party.

This was less than acceptable behavior for a proctor, but Loren knew it was necessary and that Lapis would turn a blind eye.

“What is it?” Ein doubtfully replied. Despite his large build, crew cut, and generally rugged appearance, his fighting style had long since made clear that he wasn’t aggressive by nature. He did best in either a supportive or defensive role.

“If you find the stairs, the exam’s over, right?”

“Yes, well, for what it’s worth.”

“In that case, would you be willing to withdraw here?”

Loren proposed this seemingly out of nowhere. A look of surprise crossed Ein’s face, and Cloud charged forward in his stead. “Hey, you old bastard, the hell are you—”

“Haven’t any of you noticed? You only encountered monsters once during your entire final exam. Apart from that, you haven’t had to deal with a single trap. Isn’t something strange happening here?”

Cloud lost his initial momentum at these words, and Ein looked away.

While no one wanted to look a gift horse in the mouth, it seemed they had indeed realized something in this stank. They had likely wondered if there was any point in passing this exam at all.

There’s still hope for them yet, Loren thought, only for Al to butt in.

“That doesn’t make sense! This examination was prepared by the school. If something wasn’t working as intended, someone from the academy would have canceled it before it even began.”

“H-he’s right! We were allowed to enter the labyrinth. We’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about!” Cloud declared, having regained a bit of steam.

Loren scratched his head. “This ain’t about being embarrassed. Some errors are found in advance, others after the fact. Don’t you think something’s clearly wrong if the labyrinth isn’t functioning as intended?”

“It could have been set to this level!”

Loren didn’t know if the labyrinth’s difficulty could be lowered for the exam. The labyrinth was controlled by the school, so perhaps it was possible. However, if the school had really done that, it could no longer be called a training academy. It would only be a production plant for corpses.

“Why would they lower the difficulty for students who are about to become adventurers?”

“Well…” Cloud struggled to find the words.

Al stepped in to help him. “Why, it’s possible the school is showing some consideration, boosting our confidence by making sure our exploration is a success.”

“Th-that’s right! Maybe—”

“If you accept that, then the teachers are all unfathomable idiots,” said Loren.

Success was definitely one way to inspire confidence. Loren knew that, and he’d seen it play out time and again in his company when the old hands would scheme up a way to impart confidence and courage to the new recruits.

But Loren had seen how tricky this could be. The second the curtain was pulled back, those who had been deceived lost everything they’d gained. If you carried on in this way, you couldn’t ever let those involved realize what had really happened. No mean feat when you had to keep the difficulty of a manufactured problem just low enough to guarantee success. You couldn’t get away with half-baked measures.

Moreover, their current situation was so blatantly manufactured that it was all but instantly meaningless in the confidence-boosting department.

“Then what do you want us to do?!” Cloud snapped.

“I told you. Turn back. Report the labyrinth’s abnormalities to the headmaster. You’ll have to retake the exam, but that’s better than passing like this.”

“Don’t screw with me! You want us to fail after coming this far?!”

“I ain’t screwing around, kid. I’m serious. And if we’re talking about passing, you guys have already failed in my eyes. If I let you walk out of here adventurers, you’d be sleeping in the dirt in less than a year.”

Cloud was once again at a loss for words.

“That’s merely your opinion,” Al said, sticking up for him again. “The future is known only to the gods. You are no god, and I find it hard to believe you can see our future.”

“I can make a pretty good guess.”

“Then it’s entirely possible you’ve guessed incorrectly.”

“Do you think I’m wrong?”

“At the very least, I don’t think anyone asked for your advice.”

Once an examinee accused Loren of infringing on their test experience, there was nothing more he could do. Worst-case scenario, they would report him to the school for interfering in the exam, and he would be burdened with a heavy penalty.

Loren had been unable to help himself from offering critical advice, uncalled for as it was, but perhaps he had stuck his nose where it didn’t belong. Not that he particularly cared.

Of the party, only Phem seemed a bit divided, while Cloud and Ein firmly clung to Al’s defenses.

Loren shrugged. “I see, my bad. I can be a busybody.”

Once Loren backed off, the party immediately headed back down the labyrinth corridor ahead. Ein seemed a bit anxious, while Cloud had a grim look in his eyes, and Al looked as if he had already forgotten the debate.

As Loren slowly trailed after them, Lapis commended his efforts. “At least you tried, Mr. Loren.”

“Sorry about that. It’s all my fault if this ruins our job assessment.”

“Oh, no, not at all. I already had a vague feeling that this quest would be another failure regardless.”

Another failure. Loren’s face darkened.

Since becoming an adventurer, Loren’s success rate had been achingly low—rather, the only quest he’d ever succeeded had involved herb gathering, and the others had, to a one, ended in failure. If this quest was yet another failure, he wouldn’t be paid, and his reputation would continue on its downward spiral. Those rumors that he was a gigolo leeching off of Lapis would become even more credible.

“I’m not in any position to worry about others, am I?” Loren laughed in self-derision.

<You can do it, Mister,> Scena cheered in a corner of his mind.

“It won’t be your fault that we fail, though,” said Lapis.

“Say what you want, but the results speak for themselves. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s treated as a failure.” Loren’s shoulders drooped.

Lapis, meanwhile, was beginning to wonder if Loren was the one in need of a success to boost his confidence. For some reason, whenever Loren took on a job, quests that didn’t sound so difficult suddenly turned into unbelievable ordeals.

Unfortunately, she was certain he would know instantly if she orchestrated a simple task that he would be sure to overcome—and what if that job also exploded and ended in failure? He would lose even more confidence.

In that case, Lapis thought as she walked beside him, rather than taking simple jobs, we should just take whatever jobs we want. If they happen to fail, I’ll just find whatever reason I can to say it isn’t Mr. Loren’s fault and console him that way. Why, that sounds most effective!

“I do think the adventurers’ guild has a high opinion of you, though,” she noted. “I’m the one who turns in our quest forms, and each time, they look at me as if in wonder that we’re still alive.”

“That just makes this even worse…” Loren mumbled. “It means I don’t know when to quit. At best I have enough luck to escape my problems.”

“That’s a skill in and of itself—though if I say that, we’d have to accept that these students not running into monsters comes down to luck as well.”

“If it’s a skill to have the kind of rotten luck that makes me pull the short straw with every single quest, then I—”

“Ah, let’s stop there, Mr. Loren. Nothing good will come of this sort of ruminating.”

While Lapis’s face remained calm, she was internally panicking, desperate to put a stop to this train of thought. She’d thought she could lift Loren’s spirits by offering cheerful topics, but she hadn’t realized just how powerful Loren’s negativity could be. Once his thoughts slanted in that direction, he would see any and everything in a negative light, and it became difficult to offer any assistance.

Loren’s face froze. Then he made a smart about-face and bolted down the path from which they’d come.

“Oi, you! Proctor! Why are you running ahead of us?!”

“Because I don’t wanna die!”

“At least wait until after we’re past you!”

“You think I’ve got the time?!”

It wasn’t as if Loren had the means to defeat a number of slimes so great that they filled an entire corridor. He could only wholeheartedly pray the monsters didn’t catch up. Until then, he would run as fast as his legs would take him.

He couldn’t even try lighting them up with his torch—not only would he have no way to burn slimes in those numbers, but he could already imagine himself being crushed to death beneath the wave.

“Where did you find so many?!” Loren cried out.

“Hell if I know!” Cloud howled from behind. “They just rushed in from farther down the corridor!”

“If you’ve got time to talk, move your feet!” Phem cried tearfully. “Quick, they’ll catch up!”

“This way!” Al ordered.

Then, suddenly, the sound of their flight vanished. Taken aback, Loren glanced behind him, still running. But all he could see was a semi-transparent wall of slime. The students were nowhere to be seen.

“Were they swallowed up?!”

“No, it seems they took a different branch.” Lapis had watched from her position on his back and seen the events transpire over her shoulder. Ein’s party had taken a detour in an attempt to avoid the wall of slimes.

“Did we lose them, or did they lose us?!”

“Does it matter which?”

“Course it does! There’s a huge difference between them randomly losing track of us and me carelessly losing track of them—the difference between whether we did our job or not!”

“You’re worrying about that now?”

“I guess if I’d waited for them, we might’ve been caught…” Loren’s voice descended into a mumble, though his running speed never fell. He maintained their distance from the slime flood.

Eyeing it from his back, Lapis sighed. “Leave those regrets for after we’ve escaped, okay? Then you’ll have all the time in the world.”

“You’re not wrong about that.”

Loren put those thoughts on hold and continued forward, sprinting down the dark corridors at speeds unimaginable from someone carrying another person, their bags, and a large sword. He pushed and pushed, ever at full speed, his step never faltering.

Claes and Loren turned back to the wall, where they saw the torn scraps of Parmè’s ruined clothes and undergarments swaying in the slime, and they finally understood what had happened.

“So that’s where that ripping sound came from…”

“Well, they were almost completely dissolved, so of course they wouldn’t hold up.”

Then they turned to their female counterparts.

As if to say “nope!” Lapis shoved the lit torch at Loren while Ange chucked her staff at Claes. Claes took the staff to the face, falling to his knees, while Loren just barely managed to catch the torch. Dutifully turning their backs to the three women, they began to burn down the wall.

Although she had been saved, Parmè sobbed and covered her face for a while more. It took a bit of consoling from Ange and Lapis, but she eventually regained her composure.

During that time, Claes raised his face again to see if she was all right, only to be silenced by Ange’s tightly clenched fist. Loren meekly devoted himself to the monotonous work of burning the slime with the light of the torch.

Once Parmè was stable, Ange produced a light blanket from her bags and wrapped it around her. Lapis checked her chemical burns and wounds. Knowing she had been trapped by a creature composed of strong acid, Lapis had been prepared to treat serious injuries. However, while Parmè’s burns weren’t light enough to be optimistic, neither were they serious enough to warrant pessimism.

“There’s nothing too serious, but the burns extend over nearly her entire body. Mr. Loren, may I use a Heal on her?” Lapis asked. She had determined that the injuries would definitely leave scars if left alone. She clearly found the thought of letting such a young girl be so dreadfully scarred rather pitiful, and Loren readily nodded.

“Go ahead, I don’t care.”

“Are you sure?”

For adventurers in a labyrinth—any adventurers at all, really—it was no exaggeration to say that a priest’s Heal blessing could be a matter of life and death. Given that, Claes seemed hesitant about this decision to use one of its limited uses on Parmè.

“Yeah, it’s probably a bad move from a combat perspective,” Loren agreed.

Parmè had lost all her equipment; she could no longer be counted as a combatant, and worse, she was practically a hindrance. Loren could see why someone would question the choice to treat wounds that didn’t seem to pose a threat to her life.

“She’s planning to become an adventurer too. I’m sure she has the resolve to bear scars,” muttered Claes.

“Maybe so. But it’s fine.” Loren placed a hand on his shoulder as if to say “Don’t think so hard about it.”

Claes let it go.

Nearby, Lapis readied herself to deploy her blessing. “O god of knowledge, would it kill you to sift through some of that stupidly expansive knowledge base of yours to pick out an appropriate method for treating this girl?”

“That’s not a real prayer, is it?!”

“Prayers have no definitive form,” Lapis said matter-of-factly as she touched Parmè’s body.

The blessing quickly took effect, healing the parts of Parmè’s body that had been eaten away by the slime. In fact, Parmè’s skin was even beginning to look healthier than it had before.

“Is it just me, or was that prayer more effective than nearly any I’ve seen before?” Ange muttered, sweat beading her brow. It was as if she was struggling to comprehend what she was witnessing.

“Salvation comes to those who believe,” Lapis intoned.

“So what’s the actual story?” Claes asked, but it wasn’t as if Loren had the answer.

“Like I know. Don’t ask me,” he grumbled. Maybe it’s because demons pack more punch in general.

At the same time, he couldn’t guarantee that the way Lapis worded her prayer had nothing to do with it.

“We can think about that later,” he said. “Now that Ringlets can move, we should get going. Not a single good thing will come of loitering around here.”

“I’m…sorry for the trouble.” Parmè hung her head. She had lost her arrogance from before.

However, that excess humility wouldn’t be good for morale. Loren tried to offset it with a joke. “Are you gonna parade around naked with a blanket?”

“I-I must graciously accept what I’ve been given.”

He had expected her to snap back, but she simply went along with it. If anything, her face reddened again. Loren was starting to fear he’d made it even worse when Lapis deftly sent him a lifeboat.

“Ange and I could at least offer some undergarments.”

“It’s an emergency, after all. I’ll give you whatever fits.”

Adventurers tended to pack as lightly as possible. They were expected to be in the field for long periods of time, and when sent off to hunt or explore, they generally carried only the bare essentials. All the same, even adventurers knew to pack spare undergarments, and Lapis and Ange were no exception.

Some might have wondered why anyone would waste the space, but an adventurer’s job generally entailed injury or mucking through filth. Sullied undergarments could worsen wounds or lead to illness. Those in the trade had learned this by experience.

While they often didn’t have the space to pack full changes of clothes, it was common sense to at least have replacements for the cloth that most directly touched one’s body.

“I have a spare set of boots you can borrow too,” said Ange.

Magicians didn’t have much in the way of heavy equipment, so they were often able to carry more supplies. This was true for Ange, who had packed boots, expecting her current pair might be ruined by a trap.

“For the top…mine will be a bit too loose. Ms. Ange’s look just right for you.”

“Grr…”

“As for the bottom…hmm? Ms. Ange’s will slip right off of you. There’s no helping it. You can have some of mine.”

“This doesn’t make any sense!”

“And on top of that… Mr. Loren, lend me a shirt.”

“You got it.”

Given Parmè’s height, Loren’s shirts were long enough to reach around halfway down her thighs. She wore a blanket over that, and when Lapis handed her a torch, she even had a role to play while she couldn’t participate in combat.

Parmè lowered her head. “I really am grateful to all of you. I will find some way to repay you…”

“Leave it for when we’re on the surface. We still don’t know if we’ll make it.” Loren tried to sound as businesslike as possible. If he gave her hope and they failed, that would make the subsequent despair even worse for her. He didn’t know what lay ahead of them, and he couldn’t let her assume she was safe.

“Parmè, do you know what happened to your peers?”

“I’m sorry, Claes. I had my hands full getting away. By the time I realized it, a slime had caught me. I don’t know where the others are.”

For a moment, Claes looked disappointed, but he swiftly regained his calm. Parmè was scrunching herself up apologetically, and he patted her on the head to reassure her.

“Claes…” Parmè’s cheeks flushed.

Ange angrily cleared her throat.

Loren had been absentmindedly watching this when Lapis came up beside him, holding the labyrinth map.

“Feeling a bit wistful?” she asked.

“You gotta be kidding me. That stuff’s just not for me. Don’t see what’s so good about it anyway.”

“That sounds like you, Mr. Loren. Incidentally, will we be heading straight for the ninth-floor keeper?”

Reuniting with Parmè had been an unforeseen complication. While they now had someone they needed to protect, Loren didn’t think it would impact their search too greatly. In fact, if anything, they were in an even bigger hurry to get to the surface, though they would still likely have to defeat the tenth floor’s guardian.

“Claes, Ange, you two protect Parmè. Lapis and I will deal with the enemies.”

“That’s not—no, you have a point,” Claes conceded. “Got it, leave her to us.”

First, they would need to find the keeper that guarded the exit from the ninth floor. Loren declared that he would handle it alone. Claes put up another brief objection, but after thinking it over, he relented.

He’s become pretty perceptive, Loren thought as he lined up with Lapis, who was slowly regaining control of her limbs, and walked at the fore.

“So, here we are…”

Not long after they rescued Parmè, they reached their destination. The only enemies they encountered along the way were slimes, and as they dodged and burned them, the party reached the location on the map where the keeper was said to be. Nothing awaited them there save for a motionless stone doll, both its hands and knees pressed against the floor.

It would have been taller than Loren if it were standing, but something must have happened. It showed no external signs of injury, yet neither did it show any signs of moving.

“Is this supposed to be the keeper?” Loren asked Claes, seeing as he’d been here before.

Claes nodded. “It’s a stone golem that the school made. But I didn’t expect it to be out of service.”

“Is it strong?” Loren asked, wanting to be sure.

Claes, with his knowledge of this specific labyrinth, and Lapis, with her abundant knowledge about everything in general, nodded at practically the same time.

“It’s weaker than a metal golem, but a stone golem is still a formidable foe. It’s no easy task to put one out of commission.”

“Good news for us, though. The question is: Who did it?”

They were about to enter the tenth floor without fighting anything to get there. However, someone must have done this to the golem, and whoever it was couldn’t have turned back here, satisfied with their handiwork. It was very likely they had gone on to the tenth floor. In that case, it was highly possible that their party would run into them.

“There’s barely a scratch on its surface.” Claes inspected the golem. “I recall it having a self-repair function. If someone managed to do enough damage to knock it out, it shouldn’t still look this good.”

“Then how’d they take it out?”

Even magic would have left burn marks or caused fragments to fleck off.

“If they went at it fair and square, there’s a blessing that causes damage without inflicting wounds,” said Claes.

“Are you talking about Force? That’s one of the few offensive blessings.” While Lapis half-confirmed his hypothesis, she shook her head. “Force is pure impact, and it rarely leaves wounds. However, it’s only an elementary blessing, and its output is feeble. Do you think a parlor trick like that could take out a stone golem?”

“Maybe not…”

“It might have worked if it were performed by a high-ranking priest. But why would a high-ranking priest be here? And why did they defeat the keeper?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

They had too little information and no basis on which to make any decisions.

“What if it wasn’t fair and square?” Lapis asked Claes. “What means could they use?”

“I’d hate to think this was it, but the golem does have an abort key—it’s a password that changes every month… Naturally, the professors know it. Perhaps someone could have bought it off one of them.”

That would be a clear instance of cheating, hence why Claes would have preferred to dismiss the possibility. However, given the evidence before them, they needed to take it into consideration.

“Whatever it is, we have to go down and see,” said Loren.

“You’re not wrong about that.”

“Then let’s get going. Everyone, be prepared. Don’t let yourself be surprised, no matter what comes out.”

Beyond the unmoving stone golem, there was a door in the stone wall. Knowing it had to be the entrance to the tenth floor, Loren sent a signal to Lapis. She approached, turned the door’s knobs, pushed, then pulled, but it was all to no avail.

Having confirmed it was tightly sealed, Lapis placed her palm on the surface and muttered something under her breath.

The answer, at the moment, was a resounding no. With Phem ready to rain down scroll-powered hell, and Ein and Cloud standing by, blades drawn, neither Loren nor Claes had a clear shot at Al.

“Say we return to the surface now,” said Loren. “What are we supposed to tell the headmaster if we don’t know what the hell you’re up to?”

“You still think you’re going to return? Well, that’s not my problem.” Al seemed astounded by Loren’s ignorance, but he also apparently felt the need to justify himself, when given the opportunity. “It’s nothing special. I am of noble blood, but I’m second-born. Even if I took up an adventuring career, I’d never amount to anything. Don’t you agree?”

“I think that’s up to you, really.” The way Loren saw it, whether an adventurer achieved anything of note had nothing to do with their lineage. It did depend on talent, he couldn’t deny that. But he saw no reason why the second son of a noble couldn’t succeed in life.

“Maybe I wouldn’t be doomed if I had a talent like Claes over there.”

“We all have our own way of looking at things, so I won’t say you’re wrong. But get to the point.”

“Luckily, I had the intellect to become a priest, and when I left home, I managed to make off with several interesting documents. I went through the papers, hoping to find anything useful, when I came across an intriguing bit of information on the Wolfe Adventurer Training Academy. You are aware of Wolfe’s achievements, I assume?”

“More or less,” Loren hardly remembered any of the history Claes had regaled them with during his school tour. Having considered the information rather useless, Loren had neglected to listen. If he’d known it would come to this, he would have paid a bit more attention.

“Wolfe had numerous accomplishments, but one among them caught my attention,” Al went on. “They say he sealed a dark god—and that seal should be somewhere around here.”

“A dark god?” Loren knit his brow; that sounded shady at best. He vaguely remembered something like that coming up somewhere in Claes’s rambling. “Right…something about exploring ruins and dragon slaying or whatever.”

“You weren’t listening, were you?” Claes’s shoulders sagged, but Loren wasn’t going to waste time consoling him, not now.

“I am and always have been a priest to the supreme god. But say I were to revive a god no one else believed in. Say I were to become his priest—what then?”

“Huh?”

“Wouldn’t I become that god’s high priest? His greatest follower?” Al sounded mighty proud of himself for landing on this notion.

Loren, meanwhile, had no idea how he was supposed to react. He took his eyes off this self-indulgent monologue, his gaze pleading. He was looking to Lapis—and everyone else, for that matter—for an ounce of logic.

The way Al’s life was going, serving the god he served, he would end up just like any other priest, forgotten in the crowd of those like himself. Therefore, he sought a new path. This much Loren understood.

However, how did you get from there to reviving some dark god in order to become its high priest? This idea toed the line between sense and nonsense, and Loren hadn’t the slightest idea what to do about it.

“Lapis,” he said. “Tag in.”

“I don’t want to, Mr. Loren,” said Lapis, regarding him with a dire look. “That exchange made clear to me that he isn’t someone I can reason with. Please don’t dump your problems on me.”

Loren gave up on that angle. He’d thought Lapis, who never spared any effort to acquire more knowledge, might be willing to step in, but she clearly intended to leave the negotiations to Loren.

“Ahem, one more thing.” Loren scratched his head, not having much of a choice. He turned from Al to Phem, who was smiling impishly. “What are you doing over there?”

“Well, I mean, I’ve got no real talent for magic. If I graduate like I am and become an adventurer, the best I can hope for is to be picked up by some third-rate party and ordered around for the rest of my life. In that case, I thought it might be nicer to bet on Al, seeing as he’s here making a name for himself and all.”

“This is a dark god we’re talking about. You sure you’re gonna come out of this okay?”

“Mmm, well, he promised to pay me, and it’s not like the other gods have anything against the one sealed here. I looked into the matter—briefly, albeit—and I didn’t find a single church with anything to say about whatever it was that sleeps beneath Wolfe Academy. And if this powerful entity were one that other gods bore grudges against, then wouldn’t it be strange if it didn’t appear in any of their scriptures? So I’m thinking it’s nothing too special.”

“If the god’s not that great, what’s the good in serving it?”

“Ah, you may be right there.” Phem seemed taken aback, as if she had only just realized that.

The rest of Loren’s party looked at her wearily, while Loren exuded the air of a man tired of dealing with this shit.

Nevertheless, Al’s expression remained triumphant. “I’ve already located the seal.”

“What?”

This story of some dark god’s forgotten seal reeked of exaggeration, if not total fabrication. If Al hadn’t already found it, Loren wouldn’t even have had to be the skeptic he was to consider it little better than a fairy tale.

However, each motion buoyed by confidence, Al reverently produced something from the pocket of his vestments. It was a box around the size of the palm of his hand, gleaming with metallic luster, etched with complex patterns across its surface.

Al held it up as if it were an offering to a god above. “This is the container of the god sealed by Wolfe.”

“Must be a pretty shoddy god, then.”

Sure, the patterns were intricate, but it didn’t have any ornamentation—no gems or silver or gold. The box itself was metal, but it didn’t shine as a precious metal would. Forced to guess, Loren would have said it was iron.

In other words, it was the sort of thing any blacksmith could make for a handful of coins, yet Al seemed convinced. Loren wondered how serious he could possibly be, but just in case, he raised his guard, taking a stance with his drawn sword beside him.

“If we assume the box is real…” At last, Lapis opened her mouth. Loren hoped she would take over talking the kid down—but instead, she bowled him over. “Then, and this is pure conjecture, perhaps it’s connected to why the labyrinth isn’t producing any of its normal monsters and is rather filled with slimes.”

“As expected of a priest to the god of knowledge.” Al nodded. “You’re probably right.”

Loren got the feeling that the bar had once again been raised for the god of knowledge’s other priests, but that was beside the point at the moment.

Lapis’s hypothesis sent a shock through the party.

“What do you mean, Lapis?” Claes asked.

“Slimes manifest when the mana in an area is overabundant or in disarray. Don’t you think both of these things might happen if something called a dark god were about to awaken?”

“Th-then the labyrinth’s current state…” Ange stammered.

Lapis nodded. “Yes, the cause could very well be the dark god sealed in that box over there. Its awakening has caused a massive outbreak of slimes and upset the labyrinth’s internal systems.”

“But…Al didn’t get here until just now,” Claes pointed out.

Normally, the labyrinth was controlled by the school. The door to the final floor was sealed so that no one could get past it. No matter how much Al had plotted to awaken this dark god, it was hard to imagine he could have interacted with it until he reached it.

Lapis’s answer to this wasn’t an answer at all. “This is probably a coincidence.”

“Huh?”

“I’m saying it’s a coincidence. Or, well, if something like the dark god’s will existed, you could say this was inevitable, and I wouldn’t be able to deny it.”

“It is the will of the dark god,” Al plainly declared.

“Very well, then let’s just say it was inevitable,” Lapis conceded.

The party stared at Lapis, not knowing whether to be shocked or fed up at this point. For now, she continued her explanation.

“In short, we have that future high priest’s plot to awaken the dark god, and we have the dark god’s awakening, which is tampering with the labyrinth. We must either consider this confluence to be a complete coincidence, or…the will of the dark god has made their simultaneity inevitable.”

“But either way, he’s got nothing to do with this,” Loren said, to make sure.

Lapis nodded.

“The dark god feels my devotion and yearns to waken in turn. How could you call this anything but a result of my devotion?!”

Al was fixated on the idea that this was meant to be, but to everyone else, it just seemed like an unfortunate coincidence. What’s more, this coincidence had already killed at least one student. They could no longer write it off as youthful overambition. However, they didn’t necessarily have to take out Al and Phem. Neither had really done anything so far.

“What do we do about this?” Loren asked.

“Well, it would be appropriate to capture him and turn him in to the school,” said Claes, though he didn’t sound too confident.

“Then let’s do it already.”

“Do you think a mere adventurer can catch me?” Al crowed.

As Loren stepped forward, Ein and Cloud once again blocked him with their weapons. Behind them, Phem had taken out another scroll to keep him in check. If he wanted to do anything about Al, he needed to get past all these obstacles first.

“If I can just awaken the god before you reach me…” Al couldn’t imagine that a handful of adventurers were a threat as long as he could undo the seal while Ein and Cloud held them back.

However, all his hopes would be for naught if he couldn’t undo the seal. And that was one thing about which he could not yet be certain.

The documents he had taken from his home had not included the method to release the seal. However, the seal had grown loose enough to influence the labyrinth, and so he was certain it would take only one more push.

Al poured his faith into the box in his hand—when two dull thuds sounded in front of him.

Al raised his eyes from the box. What had happened?

Ein and Cloud had spun and toppled to the floor. He swallowed his breath. Loren had thrust the tip of his sword toward Phem, stopping it at the tip of her nose before she could deploy a scroll.

Loren narrowed his eyes at Al. His voice wasn’t loud, but it was cold. “Give yourself up, or I’ll make mincemeat out of you.”

Al wanted to ignore that simple threat, but the murderous intent underlying it was too real to deny. He swallowed as he watched Phem drop her scroll and feebly teeter into a crouch.

Al’s hands had lost their strength. The box fell from his fingers and bounced over the stone floor with a shrill clang. He soon found himself following Phem’s example, collapsing under the weight of Loren’s words.

“Do you think that’s settled?” Claes asked Loren, seeing as Al and Phem had lost the will to fight.

Loren shrugged without offering a reply. Of course, he knew how to intimidate people, but he likely owed this newfound ability to incapacitate them with the pressure of his will to Scena. The girl was proudly sticking out her chest in the corner of his eyes. Otherwise, it was hard to think that these soon-to-be adventurers had lost their will to fight after a mere glare.

“For now, let’s tie them up with a bit of rope. We wouldn’t want them running rampant again.”

“All of them, right?” There was pity in Claes’s eyes as he looked at Ein and Cloud.

Those two didn’t seem to be in on this scheme. They had been manipulated and then knocked out by Loren. Objectively, they had been treated abysmally.

Even so, Claes agreed that they had to be tied up. Neither Lapis nor Ange knew how far the Hypno spell would maintain its power over the boys, so they needed to be rendered powerless before they regained consciousness.

“All of them,” Loren confirmed. “It’s unfortunate, but they mismanaged their comrades. Just keep telling yourself that.”

“Got it.” Claes nodded. He took the rope Ange had retrieved from her bags and started by binding Phem and Al, as they were still awake.

“What are we going to do now?” Lapis asked Loren as they watched Claes work.

“What do you mean, what? We use that transfer gate whatnot to return to the surface.”

“But what do we do about that?”

Loren followed Lapis’s gaze, and his expression stiffened upon landing on the object of her interest. He found himself looking at the box Al had dropped.

It had been little more than a metal box in Al’s hands, and it had been left on the floor. Now, however, the patterns on its surface emitted a sinister purple light.

“Hey, now… Don’t tell me…”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you.”

They had established that the labyrinth’s abnormalities and Al’s plan had nothing to do with each other. Consequently, this meant that tying up Al would do absolutely nothing to resolve the dark god situation.

“We did all that, and it’s still waking up?!”

“We came at the wrong time.” In spite of Loren’s panic, Lapis was horribly blasé. But her general mood had no bearing on whether they could survive this predicament.

“Wh-what’s happening?!” Parmè cried in dismay.

The light from the box grew more and more intense. It let off lightning flashes of purple, covering the entire room. No one could possibly call this remotely normal.

“Ooh, god has revived to save me from my captivity!” Al squirmed like a bagworm, overcome with emotion.

“Claes, whack him good,” Loren ordered.

Claes begrudgingly delivered a chop to the back of Al’s head. The boy slumped momentarily, but he immediately recovered, pushed past Claes, and inched his way toward the glowing box.

“Give me your strength, o, dark god!”

“Shut up and sleep.” Loren irritably sent his heel into Al’s head. The blow came with a heavy thud, and this time, it properly knocked him out. Al slumped, convulsed, and was at last rendered immobile.

Everyone apart from Loren feared he was dead, but Loren merely kicked Al’s unmoving body to the sidelines and faced the box once more. “Seriously, what do we do about this?”

“I’m not sure there’s anything we can do,” Lapis said, resigned.

After a moment of thought, Loren spoke again—as if he had had a brilliant idea. “How about we leave and pretend we didn’t see anything?”

“Looks like it’s a bit late for that,” Lapis said, staring intently at the box. In fact, Lapis seemed genuinely pleased. The rest of the party looked by turns disheartened and dismayed. “Something’s about to come out.”

“Can’t say I didn’t see it coming.”

Ever since leaving the mercenary gig, Loren’s life had been nothing but a stream of bad luck. It was high time he recognized his own chronic misfortune—there was no way playing dumb would ever have worked out for him.

“Here it comes. Everyone, try to stay conscious.”

If they took all they’d heard as a given, this was an entity great enough to be called a dark god. Who knew what would happen in the moment they witnessed such a being manifest in the physical realm?

Just as everyone braced themselves, the box on the floor let off a conspicuously stronger flash. It was bright enough to scorch the eyes, and Loren couldn’t resist covering his face, though he made sure the box never left his sight. Its outline fell to pieces. Gradually, the light increased in volume, taking on a completely new form. Loren could only stand there and watch.

Eventually, the light died down, and what stood before them was a young-looking man. He had sleepy eyes and bedraggled hair, and he wore the sort of clothing one might find on any citizen of any town. Loren’s attention was drawn first and foremost to his eyes, which were strikingly purple.

“Good grief. Where am I now?” The man scratched his head and his back, his sleepy gaze shifting this way and that.

Loren adjusted his sword and glanced at Lapis. She intuited what he was trying to say and shook her head, confirming his suspicion. Purple eyes indicated that rather than a god, they had landed themselves a demon.

Loren didn’t know whether to be relieved because a demon had to be easier to deal with or to be aggrieved that he had run into a demon in the first place. Worse, from Lapis’s reaction, the fellow seemed to be a complete stranger.

“No answer? Well, whatever. Guess I’ll go find a bed.” Stifling a yawn, the man turned his back to them when they had failed to muster a response.

Finally, Loren managed, “Who are you?”

The man opened his mouth to answer. Then shut, opened, and shut it again. Eventually, he sat on the spot and said, “Answering that’s going to be a pain.”

“Are you the dark god sealed by an adventurer called Wolfe?”

Given all they’d seen thus far, that couldn’t be far from the truth. But Loren asked again, needing to know.

The man shifted until he was lying flat on his back. “Well, let me think. I’ve been called the god of sloth before. I think. Yeah, back then, there were so, so many people out to kill me. A real bother, I’d say.”

“So you really are a dark god?”

“Who can say? Does it matter? I’m fine as long as I’ve got a place to sleep.” The man rolled over until he was looking at Loren. “I remember that Wolfe guy. Yes. He said I could sleep in peace if he sealed me, so I let him. Why am I out here again?”

“That’s probably because the seal degraded over time,” Lapis muttered. “There’s no such thing as an everlasting seal. You’ve been contained for hundreds of years now, so the bindings came loose.”

“Oh, damn. It’s been that long already? Then Wolfe must be dead now.” The man lifted himself into a cross-legged position. “Which means it must have changed a lot up there. It may be fun to look around a bit. Troublesome as that sounds.”

“How about quietly letting yourself be resealed here?” Loren proposed, though he knew the likelihood that this would work was slim.

As expected, the man shook his head. “I was thinking a seal wasn’t so bad if I could sleep. I’m sorry to say, it wasn’t nearly as comfy in there as I’d hoped. You just can’t beat a nice, fluffy bed.”

“I can’t allow a dark god to escape on my watch!” Claes declared, his longsword at the ready. Beside him, Ange had the tip of her staff locked on the man; she was already preparing to cast a spell.

The man glanced at the two of them, his eyes screaming that this was more trouble than it was worth. Then he shifted his gaze to Loren, who still hadn’t moved, and Lapis, who stood tense in his shadow. “What about you two?”

“I don’t know,” said Loren. “If possible, I’d like to settle this peacefully.”

“What if I told you that wasn’t gonna happen?”

“Then—”

“Enough. Hearing your answer would be a pain.”

Hey, you’re the one who asked! Loren thought.

The man, however, ignored him; he placed his index finger on the floor in front of his crossed legs and began writing something out in small, slick movements.

Before anyone could figure out what he was doing, Claes made his move. His legs had been enhanced by his Boost, allowing him to close the distance in the blink of an eye. He swung the sword right at the man’s neck while the man was still writing.

Everyone expected a spray of blood and a flying head. However, reality and imagination often differ. Claes’s sword halted the moment it touched the man’s unguarded throat.

“What?!”

“Your technique’s decent, but your weapon’s a dud. You couldn’t cut my nails with a blade that dull.”

While he was shocked to have failed, Claes jumped back to regain himself. The man did not follow. He continued writing on the floor, and once he was done, he lifted his index finger once more.

“I’ll leave a little something to keep you busy. Have fun. If the time comes, let’s meet aga… No, let’s not…”