Chapter 201: Silence Spell

The out-of-control surge of emotion and the answered name poured down through the already thinning veil.

It was this very power that had delivered the Chief Responder from behind the veil into the Unresponsive Pit.

And it was this same power adding fuel to the fire for whatever lay at the bottom of the pit.

"The riot above, and the attack below..."

"It is no coincidence," Mr. Hutton finished for him. The old gentleman had clearly reached the same conclusion.

"They are two halves of the same ritual."

"The Branch Office won't openly intervene in a labor dispute." Wentworth tightened his grip on his twin blades. "The police and the army can handle the surface."

"Since things have reached this point, our job is to handle the ether half of it."

Lieutenant Colonel Ord looked toward the Pit Core.

The Chief Responder was already nearing the center of the Pit Core.

"We still have to stop him. We can't let him reach that spot."

Everyone in the cavern moved at once.

White currents of air spiraled up Lieutenant Colonel Ord's Steel Prosthetic Arm as he gathered the power of the Gale tradition at his fingertips.

Wentworth's Enchanted Twin Blades cleared their sheaths.

Mrs. MacNeil pulled those Spirit Lodging Vessels from her leather suitcase.

Mr. Hutton stepped up to the inscription altar, ready to analyze the incantation the Chief Responder was chanting.

The instant they all lunged at the Chief Responder, he stopped in his tracks.

He turned his head, looked at the group, and asked a single question.

"Will you answer, or not?"

The question didn't just strike their ears—it echoed from the very bottom of their chests, catching up from outside their eardrums.

Inside and out had inverted.

Beneath Richard's feet, the silver plate Mr. Hutton had personally restored let out a roar.

Someone on the other side had just rapped their knuckles against the newly closed seal.

After the knock, the other side asked: Did you hear it?

In that split second, everyone present with Inspiration did the exact same thing.

Their nerves bypassed their conscious will, pushing the words 'I heard it' half an inch up their throats.

That half-inch was the margin of safety Mrs. MacNeil's grain of coarse salt had bought them.

The Unresponsive Pit hadn't been shattered, but it had been "asked."

And that single question was enough.

The seal worked both ways. Asking the people outside the door if they were willing to answer was, in itself, a reverse incantation.

Immediately afterward, the entire core area flipped.

The hundred-and-fifty-foot layer of rock overhead vanished, replaced by a sea of stars.

But no matter how deep the night sky was, there was always a sense of distance between the stars.

This sea of stars had no depth. Every star felt pressed directly against the retina while simultaneously hanging at an infinite distance.

They were motionless, radiating a cold so intense it made a person want to immediately squeeze their eyes shut.

It was a starry sky reflecting upward from the bottom of an immeasurably deep well.

If a person stood at the bottom of that well and looked up, this was what they would see.

"Everyone, do not move."

The old gentleman's voice echoed from somewhere in the cavern.

Richard heard it.

But the words shifted the moment they reached his eardrums.

"Am I... never going to cross that threshold in this lifetime?"

The sentence carried directly through the ether layer. It was the one thought in the old man's heart he desperately wanted to keep hidden from anyone right now.

Within this inverted core area, every repressed thought became a genuinely spoken word.

Richard whipped his gaze to the side.

Old Biggs was facing him.

His lips didn't move.

But words seeped from his chest, illuminated perfectly by the cold light of the starry sea.

"Senior Sister, from beginning to end, have I never managed to make Teacher happy, even once?"

Richard couldn't help but hear it.

He wanted to cover his ears, but he knew it would be useless. This wasn't sound at all.

In the outer ring, Wentworth stood frozen, gripping his twin blades.

Richard had dealt with the inspector squad leader several times before.

Richard knew he was cold, knew he was fast, and could see exactly when his twin blades left their sheaths and when they returned.

But Richard had never known Wentworth buried a thought like this in his heart.

"Old Kay, if I could have blocked that claw for you..."

Wentworth's own breathing rhythm hadn't even faltered.

Yet the sentence had just echoed through the minds of everyone with Inspiration.

Next came Ms. Maud, Mr. Spence, the Group 1 leader, the Group 2 leader...

Pony, the recent military academy graduate, harbored the simplest thought of all:

"...I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die!"

Richard began trying to hypnotize himself.

He didn't know what his own sentence was.

He didn't dare think about it.

His teeth bit down on the fresh grain of coarse salt tucked beneath his tongue.

The instant the jagged salt crystals ground into his tongue, the sensation tore him away from that sentence.

He had been a hair's breadth from pushing those words from his chest to his throat, and from his throat to his lips.

Cold sweat broke out across Richard's back in waves.

This was the true "answer."

To confess the most vulnerable sentence in one's heart beneath the gaze behind the veil.

That was exactly what the Chief Responder wanted.

With every person who confessed, the name at the bottom of the pit would be carved one stroke deeper.

But the danger wasn't over.

The shadow beneath his feet came alive, assuming the exact same posture it had in Nail Alley.

It raised its arms from the sides and slowly brought its hands together around his neck.

Richard's windpipe locked tight inch by inch. The suffocation was real; his lungs began to lack oxygen, and his vision darkened.

Richard bit down on the grain of salt beneath his tongue.

That bit of salty, grinding pain dragged him back from the overwhelming suffocation.

He remembered that night in Whitcom. He had innovatively reversed the flow of [Breathing: Healing], pushing the ether repair medium directly into the shadow at his feet.

The shadow itself was an entity of the ether layer; Healing was even more effective on the shadow than it was on physical flesh.

Reaching the third-cycle exhalation phase of Fourfold Breathing, Richard drove the ether from his Seat of the Sun down to his feet.

The shadow strangling his neck was steadily caught by the warm Healing current, settling harmlessly back against the ground.

His windpipe released, and air rushed back into his lungs.

Richard gasped for breath, holding onto the edge of the light lock to steady himself.

The Chief Responder was still advancing, step by step, toward the center of the Pit Core.

Worse, that question—"Will you answer, or not?"—had caused things that had been "called by name" to begin appearing throughout the core area.

They drilled out from the shadows beneath the starry sea, from the cracks in the stone slabs, and from every unseen corner.

Some were birds with snapped necks, some were faceless children, and some were merely writhing masses of black shadow.

They ranged from the lowest to lower-tier evil creatures, and taken individually, none of them were particularly strong.

But their sheer numbers were staggering.

In the span of just a few breaths, the entire core area became a chaotic dance of monsters.

Not a single one of the things summoned by the name-answering possessed a physical body.

The Hunters' Silver-Lead Bullets, Enchanted Axes, and enchanted blades merely dispersed small chunks of them, only for the entities to immediately reform a blink later.

"They're incorporeal!" the scarred-brow female leader of Group 1 shouted, firing a shot.

A faceless child shattered from the impact, only to instantly re-form. "You have to infuse extra ether to disperse them!"

"We don't have enough ether!" someone yelled in despair.

Standing in the innermost ring, Richard watched the chaos unfold.

The responder group was the bait, used to draw the Hunters into attacking.

The inversion was interference, briefly trapping everyone in their own battlefield.

The chaotic dance of monsters was a drain, forcing the Hunters to bleed their precious ether dry bit by bit.

And the Chief Responder himself would walk to the center of the Pit Core to deliver that final "answer" while everyone else was overwhelmed.

As a spirit medium, Mrs. MacNeil was the first to break free from the inversion.

She opened her leather suitcase, and seven spirits lined up in a row before her.

The inversion had pulled everyone beneath the veil, but it had also bolstered the power of the mystical side.

She raised her hand, and the seven spirits shot out in seven different directions.

The wolf spirit housed within the fang pendant was the first to charge.

It opened its jaws, spewing out threads of gold that blockaded the phantoms trying to breach the innermost ring.

The weaver woman housed in the wooden comb remained seated, holding countless invisible threads in her hands.

Those threads tangled around the Chief Responder's ankles, wrists, and neck, restricting his movements inch by inch.

With every step the Chief Responder took toward the Pit Core, the threads pulled tighter.

The old woman housed in the Bone Bracelet remained motionless and silent, her eyes closed.

She was the anchor for the entire area, tightly tethering the inverted core area to the material world on the other side.

With her there, the group wouldn't be completely lost.

Mrs. MacNeil held her Moonstone Pendant out before her and strode toward the Chief Responder entangled by the weaver woman.

"Can we talk?" the spirit medium asked.

She wanted to use the moonstone to negotiate and stall for time.

Even buying just half a minute to give the Hunters a chance to breathe would be enough.

The Chief Responder stopped in his tracks.

"Yes," he said.

The medium's heart stirred.

"What do you want? What did that thing at the bottom of the pit promise you? We might be able to talk."

"We can," the Chief Responder replied.

"Stop what you're doing." Mrs. MacNeil stared at him. "We'll send you out of here, back to your normal life."

"Alright," the Chief Responder answered.

"Stop right now."

"Alright."

"Tell me who put you up to this."

"Alright."

Mrs. MacNeil's expression changed.

The Chief Responder had agreed to her every question. Every single one.

But his chanting of that true name never stopped.

He agreed to everything while doing the exact opposite.

His blind compliance was spine-chilling.

"It's no use." The medium lowered the Moonstone Pendant. "He is no longer someone you can reason with."

"He will just agree. He will agree to whatever you ask."

The negotiation had failed.

By this time, Mr. Hutton had also managed to tear himself away from the inscription that was judging him.

Leaning against the inscription altar, the old gentleman used a universal verdict to forcefully suppress the awakened inscription.

Then he raised his head, zeroing in on the active true name rolling off the Chief Responder's tongue.

"I will dismantle his spell." Mr. Hutton's voice was frail, but he forced himself to stand straight.

His expertise on the Scholar path had come into play at this very moment.

Mr. Hutton began to decode the answering Spell Formula the Chief Responder was chanting.

He avoided touching the true name directly, instead dismantling the structural matrix operating around it.

The old gentleman chanted his verdicts, phrase by phrase.

With every phrase he chanted, the rhythm of the Chief Responder's chant hitched for a beat.

And for every corresponding verdict he chanted, one of the phantoms summoned by the name-answering was banished back to its origin.

"...By the name that should not have been called, return to the place you should rest."

As Mr. Hutton finished the line, one of the faceless children in the Half-Depth silently dissipated, never to reform.

"It's working!" the Group 1 leader shouted.

But Mr. Hutton's face grew paler by the second.

The Chief Responder had summoned far too many phantoms.

The old gentleman's chanting speed couldn't outpace the rate at which the phantoms were summoned.

Furthermore, every verdict he chanted aggressively drained his already depleted ether reserves.

In the outer ring, Ms. Maud and Mr. Spence were already hard at work by the two stone rings closest to the inner circle.

The moment the Chief Responder triggered the inversion, the five active rings within the nine-layered stone formation destabilized.

The halo on the Fifth Ring had flickered the moment he settled.

Maud was working to patch that flicker.

The Fifth Ring's halo stabilized once more.

On Mr. Spence's side, he was taking a completely different approach from Maud.

He was chiseling a new auxiliary groove just outside the sixth ring.

"Patching it won't be fast enough."

"The moment it flows in, it'll wash out the rings. I have to add a diversion channel."

"Do you have enough time?" Maud asked.

Spence's response was clipped. "Keep your eyes on the Fifth Ring. Leave the rest to me."

Maud grunted in agreement and returned to the Fifth Ring.

"Inspector."

Mr. Hutton shouted during a brief pause between his verdicts, "Can you rush him? Interrupt his chant directly!"

Wentworth had already snapped out of the hallucination of Old Kay.

The inspector squad leader tightened his grip on his Enchanted Twin Blades, shifting his Fourfold Breathing into the explosive rhythm of the Path of Blood Ignition.

Wordlessly, Wentworth launched himself at the Chief Responder.

But right as he was about to close the gap to the Chief Responder...

The Chief Responder raised a hand.

He didn't look at Wentworth. He didn't even turn his head.

That hand simply pressed down gently in Wentworth's direction.

Dead silence fell.

Within that tiny space, every active Spell Formula and breathing method rhythm was utterly scrambled.

Wentworth's ether burst was brutally interrupted.

Once a circuit was interrupted mid-burst, it would idle and backfire, devouring the user.

Wentworth froze rigid just three steps away from the Chief Responder, his face flushing violently red.

Standing in the innermost ring, Richard saw it all happen.

On the other side, Lieutenant Colonel Ord simply used the power of the Gale with surgical precision, sniping the phantoms that neared the innermost ring one by one.

He seemed to be waiting for something, conserving his strength for a more critical moment.

But Wentworth was about to suffer a devastating blow from this.