Wizard of the Abyss - Chapter 228

Chapter 228: Flower (2)

TL/ED – Miso

Damyu was being held in confinement by Elysia under the pretext of protection.

She wanted it that way too, claiming that being locked up by a Noble was a far better situation than staying with the Crimson Circle.

When I went to see her with Elysia in tow- Damyu greeted me while lounging comfortably on her bed, reading some bizarre novel.

“U-Undercurrent-nim?”

She, who still called me by that name, obediently handed over the Mission Book before coming out with something strange.

“The Crimson Circle? They aren’t doing anything…”

“What?”

“I-it’s true.”

The Mission Book she handed me showed no commissions at all.

It was only natural the Crimson Circle was sitting still.

No orders had been coming down in the first place, so there was nothing for them to do.

“Hehe… c-can I go now?”

I yanked Damyu back with Water Pressure as she tried to slip away and pressed her for more details.

“How long has it been like this?”

“Since about two weeks before the Ice Age came… The last directive that came down was for everyone to gather at the tower. After that, no orders came at all, so I assumed you’d taken them all out, Undercurrent-nim.”

“Save the flattery. You know those guys aren’t the sort to go down to someone like me.”

“But you brought down Decay, and won’t you be finishing them off soon?”

It didn’t seem to be mere sweet-talk; Damyu tilted her head as she asked back.

“Of the Upper Tier members I knew, Decay-nim was the strongest and the scariest. He felt like the leader. Even if the Upper Tier gets replenished, I don’t really think it’s a fight once you’ve taken Decay down, Undercurrent-nim. Honestly, there was a lot of talk about it internally too.”

“What do you mean, ‘a lot of talk’?”

“Ah, that’s because I did a bit of betraying while I was here.”

Wondering what she meant, I looked over at Elysia, who answered as though it were nothing.

“The ones called Keepers have World-Sealing Pills, right? I figured if we could just steal those, the whole thing would collapse. With Damyu’s help, I took care of all the Keepers who couldn’t move from their positions. I didn’t think of it at first, but she brought it up herself, saying she wanted to prove her usefulness.”

“See? I was a huge help, wasn’t I? Right?”

Looking at Damyu’s smug expression, I couldn’t find a thing to say.

I nodded, vowing that if nothing else, I would absolutely never trust this one.

“R-right. Good job. And?”

“This is what I heard while torturing and sweet-talking the Keepers. Apparently the Crimson Circle’s situation right now isn’t great. Their location’s been exposed to the Empire, Decay’s been taken down, they can’t get any read on Undercurrent’s powers… At this rate, their only option is annihilation, but the Upper Tier isn’t doing anything, so everyone seems on edge.”

“…”

“So I was thinking the Empire had already secured victory, but…”

Damyu tapped her index fingers together, studying my expression with an uneasy look.

“Something bad must have happened.”

“Nothing’s happened.”

“I-if you say so, then I’ll take your word for it. But I’m really good at reading the mood, you know. Right now your expression doesn’t look nor-”

She was earning herself a beating by saying things she didn’t need to. I sealed her lips with Water Pressure and sorted through the situation based on what Damyu had told me.

‘…Why aren’t they explaining the situation?’

I had known from the start that the Upper Tier used the Lower Tier as disposable pawns.

But that was exactly why the smoother the coaxing and deception, the better. Not telling them that the current situation was in fact playing out according to the Upper Tier’s own design, acting as though it didn’t matter whether their anxiety grew or not, went beyond arrogance into dangerous territory.

If everything was true- this was a weakness I could exploit.

A vital point that had popped into view at exactly the right moment, in the perfect position to be struck.

…Was I imagining it, or did it sound almost like they were begging to be stabbed?

After mulling it over for a while, I realized a regrettable fact and let out a sigh.

The fact that I was in no position to pick and choose whether it was a trap or not.

“Damyu.”

“Y-yes!”

“Name me one more Keeper you know about.”

“But I’ve told you all of them already?”

Damyu tilted her head, her eyes wide and innocently clear.

“Oh?”

I smirked, sweeping the area once with Current Sense, then found a chest beneath her bed and dragged it out with Water Pressure.

The reaction was immediate.

“U-Undercurrent-nim?! Why are you doing this?! What are you doing?!”

“Confiscating the World-Sealing Pills.”

“Whaaaat?! I’ll die!!!”

“Then die. Where do you get off lying to me?”

“I-I really…”

“I know you. You’re not the type to lay all your cards on the table. You’d leave yourself a line to crawl back to the Crimson Circle with our secrets in case you got kicked out of here later. Isn’t that right?”

“Do you have proof??? You’re just throwing a guess out there!!”

Damyu flattened herself on the ground, clutching the chest and wailing pitifully.

It was an act so perfect that it made me look like the villain. She turned to Elysia, who hadn’t shown any reaction at all, and pleaded with her.

“Young Lady Elysia-nim! Please help me! We’re friends, aren’t we?! I’m not that kind of person!”

“Hm? We’re not friends, though.”

“…What?”

“And I trust Jern. Sorry. Ah, actually, I’m not really all that sorry.”

She gave a casual shrug of her shoulders as she delivered the death sentence.

In the end, Damyu lost the tug-of-war with Water Pressure and, curled up on the floor like a fetus, declared her defeat.

“Honestly, I wasn’t really hiding it or lying. There is one more person I know about…”

“I figured. Who is it?”

I sighed and pressed her for the answer.

I had to get the name of that person from Damyu, then somehow coax out of them someone who knew the Prophecy.

The reason the Crimson Circle was behaving so strangely even after effectively securing victory had to lie within that Prophecy.

And if that reason was that some element remained which could flip the outcome…

Then it meant I had one more chance.

Damyu hemmed and hawed before she opened her mouth.

“It’s… Cheon-hwa-nim.”

“?”

“W-whenever things get really bad, she lends out World-Sealing Pills. I remember the location…”

A whole string of tedious steps was skipped all at once.

***

Damyu’s explanation went like this.

“Cheon-hwa-nim is the one they call Priestess, you know? Even we don’t really know what she does. It’s just that even Upper Tier people can’t do anything against what Cheon-hwa-nim says- that’s about all we know. That she’s an incredibly important person, I guess?”

“But that’s not the only thing she does. When you’re seriously on the verge of dying from running out of World-Sealing Pills, if you bring a Sacrifice, she’ll exchange it for World-Sealing Pills.”

“A Sacrifice is usually the corpse of a Wizard or a Fallen. But there’s also a story about someone bringing just any random corpse last time and still getting the exchange, so…”

“Anyway, the reason I’m telling you this isn’t because I was really trying to betray you, it’s because it’s useless. Even if you drag an army there, she’s the Priestess, she’d see them coming and flee right away, wouldn’t she? Then the info loses all its value, so I was planning to quietly tell only you, Jern-nim, later…”

Out on the plains, atop a galloping horse.

My lower back was already sore, and with her chattering away nonstop behind me, my headache only got worse.

I turned to glance at Damyu, who was prattling like a bird, and gave her a warning.

“I got it, just guide the way. Is this the right direction?”

“Y-yes, it is.”

Damyu glanced around half-heartedly, then voiced her concern in a small, shrinking voice.

“But… do I really have to go all the way in?”

“You’re the one who said so.”

She was a fake Priestess modeled on Sharmia.

Whether she truly possessed the ability of Prophecy or not, even if she could manage only something similar, capturing her alive would be next to impossible for us.

The closer we got to the mountain where Cheon-hwa was said to receive Sacrifices, the more Cheon-hwa would be able to see us in return.

In other words, even if we reached the location, bringing along knights or wizards would render the whole effort meaningless.

That was where Damyu came in.

“You drive from here. You can at least ride a horse, can’t you?”

“I can, I can, but… will she actually buy this?”

Damyu deftly bound my hands and feet, gagged me, and loaded me onto the back of the horse, asking anxiously.

Riding as a captive was even more uncomfortable. Especially since Damyu wasn’t all that skilled at handling a horse.

“Who knows. Still, if a traitor like you betrayed me one more time and brought me back bound up, she’d probably take it at face value, given what a piece of trash you are.”

“I don’t do that just any old time either, you know. Right now the Crimson Circle’s basically on the verge of collapse, isn’t it? In a situation like this, whether me single-handedly knocking out and hauling in someone as big as Undercurrent-nim would even be meaningful, that’s the question…”

“I suppose it would be hard to believe.”

“Then why are you going through with it? It just looks like a foolish move to me.”

I didn’t tell her that we were cornered enough that a foolish move was all we had left.

Because this one might genuinely betray me.

When I didn’t reply, she drove the horse onward awkwardly with an uneasy expression- and we arrived at a small, unremarkable mountain, the sort that could be found anywhere.

Was this the place?

Dismounting, Damyu carefully scooped me up, almost as though she were carrying a princess, and climbed the mountain, wandering around the midway point as if searching for something.

“Somewhere around here… ah.”

What she found was a small stone slab. A bed-like chunk of stone, the sort where a tall person lying down would have their ankles floating in midair.

It wasn’t a place with mystical energy or any kind of landmark status, just a stone with an unusual shape. Damyu carefully laid me down on it and whispered by my ear.

“You set the Sacrifice down here, take a nap, and when you wake up, a World-Sealing Pill is sitting there. No one has ever seen Cheon-hwa-nim in person.”

“And where does the Sacrifice go?”

“How would I know? Should we sleep first? Or should we search the area?”

“Hm…”

Having ridden through two nights, it was now the middle of the day, with the sun beating down overhead.

Whether she searched or not, would anything actually turn up? It might even be better to set Cheon-hwa, who could well be watching us, at ease.

I kept pretending to be unconscious and whispered even more quietly.

“Just go to sleep.”

“Yes, sir!”

As though she’d been waiting for exactly that, Damyu set out the pillow she’d prepared and flopped down on the spot.

“Phew…”

I’d wondered whether she could really sleep in this rocky, uneven mountain nook, but her ability to drop off within three minutes of closing her eyes was practically supernatural.

Watching her in dumbfounded disbelief, I sighed, closed my eyes, and worked to calm my pounding heart.

‘Was this a little reckless?’

Effectively, I’d rushed out here on nothing but Damyu’s word.

If Cheon-hwa did appear here, it was bound to lead to combat, and this time I’d have to fight alone, without the help of Dersia or Brimdal.

‘Still…’

It had to be done.

Because if I didn’t dig something up now, nothing was going to change.

And so, circulating Current Sense, I waited for Cheon-hwa to appear from somewhere.

One hour.

Two hours.

Three hours…

And eight hours.

Truly nothing happened.

“You crazy little bastard-”

Just as I’d reached my limit, on the very verge of laying into Damyu, who was still sleeping soundly as the evening sunset stretched long across the sky.

I felt a squishy sensation from the stone.

“?!”

The solid texture of the stone turned to jelly. As I tried to pull free, sensing something drawing me into the stone, I hurriedly reached out.

-Swish!

I caught hold of a tree branch I’d pulled toward me. Enough of a grip that I could escape if I wanted to.

But after a moment’s deliberation, feeling the stone turn solid again, I let out a sigh.

“If this really is a trap…”

I’d kill Damyu by whatever means necessary.

With that thought in mind, I let go of the branch I was holding.

My body was sucked into the stone in an instant.

…Feeling, as though I were diving headfirst into a block of tofu.