Chapter 447

I feel sleepy.

“…….”

I slowly opened and closed my eyes. I must have been asleep with my head hanging for quite a while, because when I tried to look ahead, my neck wouldn’t move. No, I couldn’t see anything in front of me either. I couldn’t tell whether the world simply felt black because it was dark, or whether I had closed my eyes and was only imagining that I’d opened them again. I couldn’t feel anything throughout my body. I had no strength in it.

‘I’m tired.’

I want to sleep just a little longer. With that thought, I closed my eyes.

But then an inexplicable discomfort washed over me, keeping me from falling asleep. The skin from my temples down to my cheeks and neck felt tight. Every time I moved even the slightest facial or neck muscle, it felt as though my skin might tear. I carefully ran a hand over my lips. I could feel something powdery.

“Ugh…”

There was a small piece of stone under my tongue. I had no idea what was happening. The space was cramped and suffocating, like being trapped inside a coffin. What had I been doing? What was I doing right before this? I needed to remember, but my body was heavy and my head was foggy. In this darkness, I couldn’t even tell where my body ended.

I curled my fingers and toes, testing them. The sensation of my toes touching the inside of my shoes was unpleasant. But little by little, I began to understand what was where, and what made up the space around me. I no longer felt like I was inside a dream.

At least, I thought I didn’t.

‘…Wait.’

Something slightly soft was caught beneath the glove on my left hand. Before I could pull at it, I noticed another problem that shocked me.

I couldn’t feel my right leg below the shin.

If I moved it a little more, tried again and again, maybe I could feel the muscles moving. But there was no room to move my leg. I pressed down on the thin object caught beneath my left hand and struggled to move my leg somehow.

“…ka…”

Huh.

I rolled my eyes toward the sound. Beside the huge chunk of stone blocking my left side and the shattered glass, a voice came from beneath my left hand. This time, it was clearer—a complete word.

“Luka.”

“…What? You too…?”

“You know…”

It was Elias. Why was Elias here?

He started to say something, then fell silent for a long while before finally whispering, “The smell of blood is really strong.”

“Really?”

“Can’t you smell it?”

“No.”

I answered with a quiet sound in my throat and slowly drew in a breath. A little dust mixed into the air as I breathed. It smelled like the day after it rained. The smell of blood? I wasn’t sure. It smelled like mold and dust.

“I don’t smell anything.”

“Really? Then why are you talking so slowly?”

“I am?”

“Yeah.”

I narrowed my eyes slightly. The skin over my left brow pulled painfully, as if it might split. For some reason, only now did I start to question what exactly the chunk of stone blocking my way overhead was, like the capstone of a dolmen.

“What is this?”

“Prison, 3rd floor.”

Knast, zweiter Stock. My mind snapped awake. I remembered everything. Once I realized exactly what the thing above me had originally been, a chill ran through my entire body. I tried to sit up quickly, but struck my head against a jagged brick and collapsed back onto the ground.

“Careful.”

Elias whispered.

“The building…! The victims—wait, are you okay?!”

“Yeah. I put up a barrier and knocked it away. I’m worried someone else might have been hit by the debris we knocked loose. But, Luka. I told you, I can smell blood…”

“No, I don’t know what you’re talking about. More importantly—!”

“I’m not bleeding, at least. So it must be yours.”

Again, only now did I become aware of what was pulling at the skin beside my face.

Blood.

It had been running down from my head and pooling on the floor. I thought I had already completely woken up from the dream, yet somehow the world was becoming clearer and clearer.

“What about Leo? The other mages?”

“Lord Rothenhahn probably got Leo out. At least, that’s how it seemed before communications were cut off. Leo was right by the main entrance on the first floor.”

Right. Yes. Leo had been standing in front of the first-floor entrance, using his ability on the corridors to either side. As long as the entrance side had remained intact, he would have been in a position to escape as soon as he realized something was wrong. It depended on which way the building had collapsed, but Leo could have wrapped his vines around the building on the opposite side and escaped, so—

“Wait.”

“Yeah?”

“Did this just happen? Why can’t I hear anyone clearing the rubble?”

For some reason, I could faintly hear a distant, rumbling breath, but the sound I should have been hearing was nowhere to be found. Leo could have used his Special Ability to move the rubble. It would have taken a lot of strength, of course. And since we had been on the upper floors, if they were already clearing the wreckage, we should have heard them directly above us. The same would be true if someone other than Leo was doing it.

I need to warp first. It was one of those moments when I was grateful that magic existed. I tightly gripped Elias’s finger, recited the coordinates of my office in my head, and snapped my fingers.

Snap—

“…….”

Nothing changed, except for the sound being added to my memory.

“Luka, that hurts. You’re going to break my finger.”

“Why…? Wait, why?”

Warping doesn’t work. I kept snapping my fingers while calling out every other coordinate I knew. Then I slammed my hand against the floor. Nothing changed.

“I already tried. Warp doesn’t work.”

“Then…!”

“Wait! Don’t use magic. We don’t know what’s above us. If you just blast your way out of here, the other rubble could come crashing down on us.”

Elias muttered in a low voice. I heard his hair rustle, as though he had turned his head. Then he continued.

“Think about it. We can’t warp, and we can’t hear anyone clearing the rubble… What do you think that means?”

I knew. There was only one possibility.

Feeling a headache coming on, I answered, “It means we’re in a different coordinate system.”

“Yeah. When the building collapsed, the vitriol and our mana must have slammed into the coordinate system hard enough to tear a hole in it. We fell through that gap. Otherwise, none of this makes sense.”

“…Listen. The reason Pleroma’s coordinate systems could be destroyed was because they had laid copies over our original world. But the ground we were standing on was the original. The original can’t be destroyed.”

“Luka. Have you ever thought that a coordinate system might actually be its own dimension? You said time gets stretched out there, too. Just look at how differently time flows from ours. Doesn’t that make it obvious? It’s an entirely different dimension.”

“…….”

“All this time, whenever we went into Pleroma’s worlds, we were moving between dimensions different from our original one. There could be another dimension beneath ours, too. Besides, who says dimensions have to lie flat beside one another? I don’t think they necessarily do. If we were magic scholars or physicists, we might be able to give a proper answer… but that’s what I think.”

“…No. If something like that existed, the mages would have discovered it long ago. If this were true, it would be a discovery capable of shaking the very foundations of national security. There’s no way they wouldn’t have known.”

“Hmm.”

Elias seemed to think for a moment. Then he refined his theory.

“Or maybe someone cast a new spatial spell right when the building collapsed. If that’s the case, the culprit must have been nearby. If that’s what happened, maybe we can force out all the strength we have at once and destroy the space around us. Then we might be able to return to the coordinate system we came from.”

“…That’s a hopeful thought.”

The problem was that we had no way out in the first place. I couldn’t exactly use magic carelessly with someone beside me, and things might have been easier if we’d been on the third floor. But we’d been on the stairs between the second and third floors, which meant the ceiling of the second floor—the floor of the third floor, or zweiter Stock, as they called the third floor in Germany, just as Elias had pointed out—the walls, and even the roof were all probably piled on top of us. We had to be careful.

“Nikolaus.”

“What?”

“You know, I actually set up a scholarship.”

“I know. It’s something you’ve been interested in for a while and have been working on for some time. I didn’t know you’d set it up this early, though.”

“There are five elementary schools, and… a Gymnasium, too. Remember this. Even among commoners, it’s only for those who aren’t bourgeois. Just keep covering their tuition until they can go to university. If I don’t make it out of here, look after it for me.”

“Eli.”

“It isn’t a request. I actually set it up under your name. St. Nikolaus.”

“Sorry, but didn’t you say you could smell blood?”

“……”

Strictly speaking, wasn’t I the one more likely not to make it out of here? Why leave something like that to me? I slowly opened and closed my eyes. After a long silence, Elias spoke in a trembling voice, almost as though he were angry.

“Exactly. That’s why I’m telling you. Don’t fall asleep again.”

“Of course I won’t. What’s with you?”

I rubbed the lump beneath my left hand and muttered, “We’ll get out together. I’m completely fine.”

“A person who’s fine doesn’t take forever to say one word and then another. And just now, when I told you that I’d set it up under your name, you didn’t even give your usual snort. You’re practically asleep right now. Aren’t you?”

“I’m really awake. And I can be like this sometimes.”

“You’re not acting like yourself.”

“I am, Eli.”

“No, you’re supposed to say, ‘Really?’”

I didn’t answer and closed my eyes. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was because I’d only just woken up, or because I’d hit my head, but I couldn’t seem to think about anything. Maybe it was the darkness. I couldn’t understand how my thoughts were supposed to be slow when my brain was following the conversation just fine.

“Are all your arms and legs okay?”

“One leg is a little questionable, but I’m not bleeding. I’ll be fine.”

“……”

Silence fell.

“I never knew the smell of blood could be this terrifying.”

It was Elias talking to himself. Then he whispered and asked me, “Have you ever gotten your hands completely covered in blood? Not just a little splattered on you. I mean enough that you could practically wash yourself in it.”

“No.”

“Did you know blood dries really quickly?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you know how your skin shrinks as it dries, too? The skin on your hands gets bone-dry. It feels like everything from your wrists down has shrunk to about 0.85 of its original size. If you look closely at the boundary between your wrist and hand, you can actually see the skin pulling tight. And there’s this awful feeling between your nails and the skin around them. Once that happens, you can’t stand not washing your hands immediately.”

“That’s a weird way to put it.”

“Weird? I’d call it extremely realistic. Keep that in mind, Luka.”

“Even if I do, I can’t wash myself right now.”

“That must hurt.”

“It does.”

I gave him a short answer and simply kept breathing. Then I heard something moving outside. Elias began speaking again, his voice now as calm as if he were reading from a book, spreading through the darkness.

“When I was little, I went pheasant hunting with the adults once.”

“Really?”

“I was good at hunting even as a kid. Whenever the adults were struggling, I’d just sweep through and get everything.”

“……”

“Luka?”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

“I used to hunt mana-made pheasants in the hunting grounds because I wanted to beat my distant cousins. So I was almost winning. My cousins only used wands, so they were terrible at hunting. …Yeah, I guess that’s why they didn’t even know pheasants liked reed beds. A pheasant made of mana is still a pheasant, you know. Wouldn’t it naturally be in a reed bed? We’d already hunted so many pheasants out in the fields that there weren’t any left to catch, so I ran over there. And, as luck would have it, there was this huge, brilliantly colored cock pheasant completely distracted by drinking from a pond.”

“……”

“The dog tried to run over, but I stopped it. The pheasant was sitting in such an easy position to catch that I knew the dog would scare it off before I could get it. Everything was perfect. The wind was blowing downward from behind me, the pheasant was busy drinking and didn’t notice anything, and it was so big I didn’t think it would be able to fly very well. I stopped about fifty meters away, aimed just slightly above its head, and pulled the trigger. But the sound was kind of strange.”

I opened my eyes and looked toward where Elias was.

“The sound of the bullet going through its body was… wetter than it should’ve been. Like something with several layers had burst apart. It only lasted a moment, but if you’ve hunted before, you know when something sounds wrong. It was different. I was about to lower the gun from my shoulder and run over when I heard a scream. It made this choking, hacking sound, like someone squeezing the air out of its lungs. The moment I heard it, my feet stopped. I couldn’t make myself run. So I just stayed there.”

“……”

“The dog didn’t bring the pheasant back. Instead, it just stood there staring at the pond where the pheasant and I were. In the distance, I could hear it struggling to get back up, scratching at the grass and beating its wings. For minutes. It was supposed to be a pheasant made of mana that we were hunting.”

“……”

“Turns out the adults had mixed one real, living pheasant in among the mana-made ones. You could call it an Easter egg, I suppose. And of all things, I ended up shooting the one that was actually alive.”

“How old were you when they let you shoot a gun?”

“Ten, I think.”

“I can’t believe it. I wonder what those adults were thinking, letting you come hunting with them. So… what happened?”

“I’d shot a real pheasant. So it died.”

His answer was dry.

“After the sound of its wings stopped, I went over to the pond. The dirt had turned reddish-brown. So had the grass. It looked like the card gardeners from Alice in Wonderland, painting the white roses red before the Queen of Hearts arrived. The grass where the pheasant had fallen looked as though it had grown red from the very beginning, so I sat there in the clover field and watched until the blood dried.”

His dry voice seemed to carry the smell of blood with it. I pictured a young Elias sitting in that field of red grass. Watched. What had he been watching? The grass? The pheasant? The blood? I said nothing. I didn’t want to imagine what he had been thinking back then.

“Who would’ve thought a life could depend on something as insignificant as this?”

“……”

“Without this liquid, an entire world disappears. Forever. No matter what you do, it never comes back.”

There were people who could turn back time and bring things back, but that was beside the point. If they came back that way, they would already be in a different world from the one before. They wouldn’t be the same person anymore.

“So, Luka. That’s what I was thinking about.”

I said nothing. I wanted to say, I’m sorry, but that wasn’t the kind of answer he was looking for. It wasn’t as though I’d deliberately fallen and slammed my head into a rock. This wasn’t something I had to apologize for. He was simply saying it because he wanted to keep me awake. That was why he kept talking.

Staring into the darkness, I said quietly, “Then to you, blood means death.”

“Yeah. So you can’t go to sleep.”

I burst out laughing. I wanted to pat him on the back, at least. I’m not going to sleep, all right. How long are you going to keep this up? I wanted to reassure him, but there wasn’t much I could do under this pile of rubble. And even if I tried to explain at length, Elias probably wouldn’t like it much. Hadn’t he just said I was talking too slowly?

So, when Elias demanded to know why I was laughing, I gave him a different answer.

“Same for me. Blood means that to me, too.”

Conceptual death. Maybe that was the better way to put it. Elias said nothing. That silence itself was a question. Now it was my turn to explain why I felt that way. But I didn’t speak. The answer continued only inside my head.

The weight of life had been forgotten and turned into a tool. And it wasn’t a problem limited to blood alone.

I hated looking at it. I hated its smell. And drinking it, of course, was out of the question. Because it was too metallic? Because it tasted bad? But if that were all, it would be such an easy reason to live with. Because it wasn’t natural? Yes. That certainly made it more disgusting. But the world was already filled with things that weren’t natural. If I wanted everything around me to be natural, I should just leave civilization and society altogether. Then what was it?

It was because blood—and the benefits gained from blood—diminished the weight I placed on life. I was afraid that might happen. Just as Pleroma did. Just as those who believed everything could be bought with gold did.

That was why I didn’t even want to consciously acknowledge that I could absorb mana through blood and gain something from it. I was afraid that thinking about it over and over would eventually make me numb to it.

“Luka, you can’t fall asleep again.”

“I’m not sleeping. You should stop talking, too. More importantly, if we ended up here when the building collapsed, that means the others who were inside might have fallen into this coordinate system too.”

“Yeah.”

Elias answered in an empty voice, as though he didn’t want to think about anything at all. I knew why. He was probably afraid that the others who had been on the first floor might have been crushed to death. I said nothing more. Instead, Elias began speaking again.

“Also, Luka. Keep your barrier up properly. There’s still vitriol all over the place.”

“Yeah. Now let’s figure out how we’re going to get out of here. How about firing some mana to check what’s above us?”

“Mana can’t pass through stone. Too bad Philip or whatever his name is isn’t here.”

Elias continued, tapping the stone with his finger.

“I’ve got a little more room on my side. The debris from the pillars is supporting the collapsed floor here. The third-floor floor gave way toward your side, Luka. Judging by how little of the third-floor wall and roof debris there is above me, most of it must have fallen toward you. And the moment I fire mana and break this rock, all the weight it’s supporting on this side will shift over to you. You’ll get crushed to death. Ah. No way out, huh? We could push this thing forward together on three.”

“Can you lift a house with mana?”

“Haha. Then what about this? I was thinking we could fire mana through our fingers and cut the stone into a square.”

“It’s not wood. I think the stone would split apart before you could cut it like that.”

“Actually, I think so too. Then the center of gravity would shift again and you’d get crushed… Damn it. Are we just going to stay here forever, yelling for someone to save us until we die?”

“Should we dig through the floor?”

“That too…. I can’t exactly say it would improve our chances of survival. We’re pretty high up, so digging downward would take forever.”

So getting out through the top would be faster. I agreed.

I knocked on the limestone wall that used to be the ceiling. The sound was heavy. Lift this chunk of stone by brute force? Unless one of us had a Special Ability that enhanced physical strength, it was ridiculous. A mage could use mana to strengthen their body to some extent, but I had never heard of a mage being strong enough to lift a one-story house and carry it away.

Were we really going to be trapped here just like Elias said? We couldn’t be. I needed to know what had happened to Leo, what had happened to the other mages, and what had happened to the victims. There had to be a way…

‘Wait.’

A way?

I held my breath. The moment I caught onto the sound I was looking for, I quickly asked Elias, “Eli. Is there a gap on your side?”

“Hm? Just a tiiiny one. Air’s coming through here. We don’t have to worry about suffocating. We might have to worry about starving to death, though. Good thing I usually eat a lot, so…”

Elias started rambling on about something. There was no time for that. I had found a way out. We had to act now. I pressed the one finger of his that I could reach and said, “Keep leaking a little mana through there. Make it flow over the stone on my side.”