CHAPTER 412: ARC 6, CHAPTER 28: SURFACED

"You must stand back!"

"It’s a mimic, I’m not that worried..."

The Scorching Inferno had a massive longsword that gleamed in reds and gold, embedded in a dark metal that was barely visible around the edge. The sword glowed with runes all over as he was in a battle stance against a chest.

Meanwhile, Hotaru stood behind him, sealing her lips shut tight and staring.

"Oh, so you know about this thing," he turned to look at her.

"It’s an amorphous creature, somewhat of a cousin to slimes. They can take most shapes and can shift their colours for camouflage.

But a lot of adventurers handbooks easily teach you how to identify them. For one, they lack a seam where the latch would open it; also, with a right enough angle, you’ll notice that its texture doesn’t look like wood or metal should."

"Yeah, I knew that, I could tell. Didn’t need the walking dungeon guide to tell me," he swung his sword around his entire form. "Watch how its done~" he said with a lowered voice as flames scorched up the sides of his blade.

"PFFF!!!"

A hose of orangish-red fires bore down on the poor chest that squealed and screeched out as it burned from the flames. Smoke and dust rose into the air with the acrid scent of burnt flesh akin to rotten eggs.

Hotaru pinched her nose and snarked, "Thank you so much,"

"No problemo," he clicked his tongue and saluted with his sword.

"Shall we continue?" Hotaru walked to the door they entered for.

"Yeah, sure," he latched the longsword back onto his back and followed after her. "Hey, mind if I ask a question?"

"Depends, but sure."

"You seem like, depressed? I don’t know, I mean you don’t look excited to be here," he tried to get into her view.

"Is it that obvious?" she raised a brow. She sighed, "I just pictured this going differently. I wanted an adventurer and this seemed like a fantastic idea," a small grin painted itself, only to be wiped away immediately. "Then of course, this happens.

I’m not with the people I want to be with and I’m stuck with..."

"Alright, look, I’m not that dense, kay? I get it, you’re irked out by me—girls like you always are for some reason."

"Excuse me?" she faced him while walking into a densely populated room of barrels and pedestals with items upon them.

"It’s sorta hard to figure out the exact way you act, so I don’t know how exactly to play it and I can’t just restart, so I just blurt out whatever and suddenly it’s instant hostility; it’s a whole thing, you probably wouldn’t get it."

"If you don’t know how to talk to people, then maybe you should reassess yourself," Hotaru said with her ears pricked and tail rising.

"Whatever the case," he ducked his head sheepishly. "For what it’s worth, I’m sorry."

The two had paused in their exploration as Hotaru watched the man await a response. The wolf-girl took a deep breath, allowing her tail and shoulders to relax, "It’s fine. Let’s just work on getting out of here and please stop hitting on me."

"I gotcha, not like I was winning you over anyway," he raised his head and glanced at the puzzle in the room. "Glad the sorry option worked, let’s get to it," the remorse had completely disappeared as he walked, almost as if it were an act rather than being genuine.

The redhead pursed her lips and placed her face into her hand, "I really need you Jotou..."

"BLASSTTT!"

"What the," Hotaru’s ears pricked as the faint sound rumbled through the walls.

The Inferno was examining the puzzle as dust snowed down, "The hell was that?"

"I think I might know..."

_

"AHHHHHHHH!!!!"

An Asobi and a mirrored version of herself rotated around the room, avoiding the sheer volume of echoes being bombarded forward into a bulky stone-like creature about two metres tall.

Its grey stone body began to crack and rumble as Tiffany’s scream began rupturing its form into bits of gravel and dust. It shattered into pieces with a low grumble with its debris falling to the floor.

"-Ahem," Tiffany stood poised and massaged her throat. "Let this be acknowledged as true fact, that I, Stella Vespertillio, hath triumphed over this hulking golem of stone and earth~!"

"Yayyy," Asobi and the mirrored Asobi clapped. "Time for treasure!" she skipped over to the treasure chest in the small room that the golem appeared to be guarding.

"Nay, cease!"

The chest’s hinges creaked as they opened.

"Oh. Mind me not."

Asobi gasped.

"What!?" Tiffany ran towards it past the destroyed golem.

"There’s bombs!" Asobi took out a few small pellets that had unlit fuses.

"Uh... Gingerly now..." the blonde took them off her hands and set them aside—very carefully.

"That wasn’t why I was gasping though," the elf rummaged her hand through and the jingle of coins was unmistakable. Asobi picked up a, triangular coin? "Huh? It looked like armite."

Tiffany pulled one out from the chest, "Tis indeed familiar—a combination of platinum and gold. Perchance, we behold coin from the likes of history. However their veritable value is beyond mine erudition."

"Oh so it’s old?"

"Fret not, coin such as these may nonetheless remain of substantial worth even within such an era of this mortal realm."

"Uh..."

"You’d get the value of the platinum and gold at the very least. If the rest of the labyrinth’s filled with these, even though it’s old money, it wouldn’t be more valuable than armite now cause there’s a lot of it. That’s my best guess," Tiffany shrugged.

"Wow, you’re really smart!" Asobi cheerily told and continued examining the chest.

"I’d disagree, but t-thank you..." her eye darted to the side.

The raven-haired woman pulled out a yellowed scroll and a bluish-green leatherbound tome, "These’re the only things that were under the nacho coins."

"Na-cho?" the blonde’s creased her eyebrows.

Asobi shrugged and hummed before she hand the scroll to the other to read.

"A spell—Songcutter," Tiffany’s eye widened. "This magic is learnable by one such as I!"

"Ooo, fantastic! The book’s empty," Asobi flipped the pages.

"Ha! Tis a most fortunate discovery," Tiffany said as she held up the scroll and let out a boisterous laugh.

"Yay! Now how do we get out of here?"

"Ah, an elementary solution will do. Labyrinthian conundrums requires one to find the heart of it all. Come, we shall travel with the procured treasure and seek our departure. Allow mineself to be thine guide through these timeworn halls."

She posed with a hand above her eyepatch and let out gentle echoes out of the room, allowing her to figure out the paths ahead before they travelled down them.

_

"Another one?" Jotou bemoaned and rolled her eyes.

"It’s the point of the entire Gauntlet," Fumeko swung around a pouch of coins in her grip.

"We’ve done three we can do a fourth," Jotou hyped herself up.

"First one was a matching puzzle, second was the system of levers, third one was the wall with the hidden room I found."

"That I blasted through," Jotou recapitulated.

"Mainly cause we couldn’t even find a mechanism to activate it, I assume it had something to do with the stones in the wall. So what’s this one gonna be," Fumeko held a hand to her chin and noticed the symbols on the wall.

Jotou stood by a large door with some sort of combination lock of four symbols needing to unlock it. "At least it’s been fun solving puzzles with you."

"Wish cases and mysteries were this easy," the brunette remarked.

"I don’t think there’s a mystery out there that can’t be solved by the both of us detective," Jotou giggled.

Fumeko gave a smug smirk, "That’s probably true. Anyway, what do you have on your end? It’s a bunch of symbols in a grid here."

"Checks out; there’s a lock here with four symbols. Is there a pattern?"

The detective squinted, "Not really. But there is a separate set of four lines at the bottom outside of the grid. Looking at it, solving each line would be the combination to that lock." "Woosh."

Fumeko appeared next to the combination lock, "Yup, same looking symbols." "Woosh." "The way it’s all together, it may not be a grid."

Jotou had walked over to the symbols on the wall, checking around the barrels and the single column in the middle of the room. "Well yeah, look at the symbols right before the last one in each line," she slid her finger downwards on the symbols.

"They’re all the same symbol."

"I’d guess they just decided not to give enough spacing for each line. It looks like damn algebra equations, bleh," Jotou walked away and towards the lock.

"Unfortunately, it might actually be math and each symbol’s supposed to be a number," Fumeko began piecing it together.

"Yeah, pass, I’m just gonna brute force it, it’s only eight symbols on a four-coded lock," Jotou began doing as such on the gears with the etched image of each symbol, each creating the sound of shifting mechanisms throughout the room.

A minute or two passed while each divided their work. "If the thing’s trapped be careful," Fumeko stated as the sounds of the mechanisms were getting louder. "Try this; the triangle with a dot first, the square snake-looking thing, the crescent facing up so it looks like a smile and-"

"Ca-Chunk!"

The seam between the doors cracked open and Jotou glanced through the gap. She looked back to the other, "If the last one was the square with a circle in it, you were correct. I was already on it."

"Happy to be redundant." "Woosh."

The two pushed open the door into a well-lit hallway that led to a spacious circular room. Sparkling in the hue of diamonds, a perfectly spherical orb was affixed to a totem of some elven being holding it.

For how fresh this labyrinth looked, the totem appeared to be the only thing to be rather weathered. So much so that no features could be recognized and bits of it had crumbled off.

However, the orb was still pristine and the two approached it. "Finally," Jotou remarked.

Fumeko glanced around. There were at least over forty similar hallways that all led to closed off doors at the end of them. "Let’s get out of here then."

Both of them touched the orb one after the other and a greenish-blue hue wisped around them—the feeling being similar to Fumeko’s teleport spell.

Within the blink of an eye through greenish shrubs and followed by the scent of petrichor, the two popped up outside of the labyrinth from where previously, all the adventurers had gathered.

"None of the doors down there in the final room were open... You think we’re the first ones out? Or that the doors shut automatically?" Fumeko looked around the scenery.

"Hotaru, Sobi and Tiffany aren’t out yet at least."

Some of the workers of the guild were lazing around at a picnic table and food, as well as various documents. They all simultaneously turned, some with widened eyes and two with sudden panic as one of the two clicked a stopwatch.

"Sixteen minutes and thirty-four seconds... That’s- Has that happened before!?" one of them queried.

An old refined woman with guild attire nodded, "Perhaps a decade or so ago; not in a long time. We have to check the records."

Two of them rushed up to Jotou and Fumeko. "Oh, my-! Who are you two? We need to know how you so quickly got out of there?" a lady requested details in nervous excitement.

"How much treasure did you get!?" the other, a young man, asked.

"We got sixty-three platinum and a little more, so not that bad," Fumeko brought the pouch up.

The lady tilted her head from one side to the other, "Treasure count’s a bit average, but still!"

"We weren’t exactly looking for a lot to be fair," Jotou replied.

"You look, familiar," the young man squinted at the blonde.

"Sorry, yeah, I’m Jotou Howllett." ’No point in hiding it. The cult already knows where we are anyway. Not like they’d buy the Anastasia Keel story if I’m recognized.’ "And this is Fumeko Namora."

"Hey."

"W-wait," the lady looked at the two up and down again, "You mean, the Jotou Howllett and Namora as in!?"