3

An Integrity Knight, the ultimate realization of law and order and symbol of goodness, killed a white dragon that served as protector of the human world. In eleven years without ever doubting the way of the world, Eugeo had never considered a concept as difficult as this. He agonized over a suspicion he could neither swallow nor chew, and he shot his partner a pleading glance.

“…I don’t know,” Kirito muttered, no more certain than Eugeo. “Perhaps…there was an incredibly strong knight from the land of darkness who came and killed the dragon…But if that was true, then it doesn’t make sense that the armies of darkness never once crossed the End Mountains to attack. And it certainly doesn’t seem like whoever did it was after treasure…”

He walked over to the dragon’s remains and placed the claw back on the pile, then reached down and dragged out something long from the bottom.

“Whoa…this is really heavy…”

He unsteadily dragged the object about a mel and showed it to Eugeo and Alice.

It was a longsword with a white leather sheath and platinum pommel. There were fine inlaid patterns of blue roses here and there on the handle, making it clear from a glance that it was more valuable than any sword in the village.

“Oh…could that be…?” Alice wondered, eyes wide. Kirito nodded.

“Yeah. It’s got to be the Blue Rose Sword that Bercouli tried to steal from the sleeping dragon. I wonder why whoever killed the dragon didn’t take it with them…”

He crouched down and, grabbing the grip with both hands, tried to lift it, but the best he could do was get the tip a few dozen cens from the surface of the ice.

“…I can’t!” Kirito shouted, and dropped the sword. It clattered heavily to the ice, causing fine cracks to form in the thick layer. It had to be unbelievably heavy for such a slender weapon.

“What do we do with it?” Eugeo asked. His partner shook his head as he stood up straight again.

“It’s no good. We couldn’t get this back to town even if the two of us carried it together. All it takes is a few swings of that ax to get us wheezing, remember. But it does look like there’s other kinds of treasure down under the bones…”

“Yes…but I don’t feel in the mood to go taking it out of here,” Alice murmured gravely. The boys shared her opinion.

They wanted a tiny little prize from a sleeping dragon to show off to the other children, but taking treasure from this place would be little more than grave robbing. The taboo in the Index about stealing applied only to other humans and not here, but just because something was not in the Taboo Index did not mean it was justified.

Eugeo looked again at his friends, then nodded. “Let’s just take the ice, as we planned. I’m certain that the white dragon would have allowed us to do that, if it were alive.”

He walked over to a nearby icicle and kicked at one of the countless ice crystals growing from its base like plant buds. It cracked off cleanly, and he picked it up and offered it to Alice, who lifted the lid of the empty basket and tossed it inside.

For the next few minutes, the trio gathered up shards of ice to put into the basket. When the base of that pillar was clean, they moved on to the next one to repeat the process. Before long, the large basket was completely full of little blue ice crystals that sparkled like precious stones.

“There…we…go.” Alice grunted as she lifted the basket. She stared down at the mass of twinkling light in her arms. “It’s so beautiful. It seems like a shame to take it home and have it all melt.”

“I don’t care, as long as it keeps our lunches fresher,” Kirito opined crassly. She made a face at him, then held out the basket.

“What? I have to carry it back, too?”

“Of course you do. It’s quite heavy.”

Eager to stop them before they started bickering like usual, Eugeo suggested, “I’ll take turns carrying it with you. We need to get going back to the village or we won’t make it by the evening. It’s been nearly an hour since we entered the cave, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah…It’s hard to tell the time when you can’t see Solus. Can’t you use a sacred art that will tell us the time or something?”

“There’s no such thing!” Alice snapped, and turned her head away in a huff to glance at the exit to the side of the vast ice lake.

Then she turned to the opposite wall to look at another exit. She frowned.

“Umm, which one did we come through, again?”

Eugeo and Kirito both pointed confidently—at different exits.

Once they had exhausted the other possibilities—that there should be footprints (the smooth ice surface left no marks), that the exit the water flowed through was the right one (it was flowing out of both), that the direction the dragon skull looked was the exit (it wasn’t pointed toward either)—Alice finally suggested an option that seemed promising.

“Remember how Eugeo stepped on that little puddle and broke the ice? We should find it a short distance down the correct tunnel.”

It was a good point. Eugeo cleared his throat to hide his embarrassment that he hadn’t thought of that himself and said, “Okay, let’s check the nearer tunnel first, then.”

“I still think it’s the other one,” Kirito grumbled. Eugeo pushed him on the back, held up the glowing stalk, and walked forward toward the water-carved tunnel.

Once they were out of range of all that reflective and refractive ice, the formerly steadfast sacred light seemed weak and unhelpful. It hastened their pace down the tunnel.

“…Getting lost so we can’t find the way back. Who are we, the Berrin brothers from the old tale? We should have left a trail of nuts behind us. No birds in the cave to eat them,” Kirito groused, but it was an empty attempt to hide his worry. Oddly enough, Eugeo found it reassuring to learn that his best friend could actually be worried in this situation.

“Don’t be silly, we didn’t have any nuts with us to start with. If you want to start making use of our lessons, why don’t you leave a piece of clothing at every branch in the path?”

“No way, I’ll catch a cold,” Kirito complained, and mimed a sneeze.

Alice smacked him on the back and said, “Stop being stupid and start watching the ground. We don’t want to miss the puddle. In fact…” She paused, then frowned, her brows arching. “We’ve walked quite a long ways, and I haven’t seen any broken ice. Do you suppose it was the other direction?”

“No, I think it’s farther ahead…Oh, hey, quiet.”

Kirito put a finger to his lips, and Eugeo and Alice clamped their mouths shut. They listened carefully.

Beneath the quiet trickling of the brook next to them was a different sound. It was wavering between higher and lower pitches, like a mournful flute.

“Is that…the wind?” Alice wondered. Eugeo thought it did sound quite a bit like the wind rustling through branches.

“We’re nearly outside!” he shouted in relief. “We picked the right way! Let’s go!” He took off at a trot.

“Don’t run, or you’re going to slip and fall,” Alice warned, but she was skipping, too. Kirito took up the rear, his expression suspicious.

“But…is that the sound the summer breeze makes? It sounds more like…the rattle of winter…”

“It’ll blow that hard in the canyons. Let’s just get out of this cave already,” Eugeo said. He sped through the cave at an easy run, the light in his hand jiggling wildly. The desire to get back to the village and his comfortable home was rising within him. If he got some of the ice from Alice and showed his family, they would be stunned.

But ice melts so fast. Maybe we should have taken one of those old silver coins instead, he thought, just as a little light appeared in the darkness ahead.

“It’s the exit!” he cheered, only to immediately sour. The light was reddish. They’d gone inside just after noon and could have spent only an hour inside—but maybe it had been much longer than he realized. If Solus was already descending to the west, they might not make it back to the village by dinner unless they rushed the entire way.

Eugeo sped up. The high-pitched whistling was now loud enough that it overpowered the sound of the river, bouncing off the cave walls.

“Wait, Eugeo, wait! Something’s wrong! It’s only been two hours; it shouldn’t be so…” Alice called out, but he did not stop. He’d had enough adventure. All that mattered now was getting home.

He turned right, then left, then right again, and the red light filled his vision. The exit was just a few dozen mels ahead. He slowed down as he shielded his dark-accustomed eyes, then finally stopped.

There was the cave mouth.

But the world through it was not the one Eugeo knew.

The sky was entirely red, though not from the setting sun. In fact, he couldn’t see Solus anywhere. It was just an endless expanse of a dull, dark red, like the juice of overripe grapes or lamb’s blood.

Meanwhile, the ground was black. The eerie mountain range in the distance, the bizarrely shaped rocky outcroppings closer up—even the water surfaces here and there were as black as cinders. Only the trunks of the gnarled dead trees were white, like polished bone.

A cutting wind set the dead branches to whistling, a mournful howl that droned on and on. It was clearly the source of the sound they’d heard within the cave.

This world, so forsaken by all the gods, could not possibly be the human world that Eugeo knew. Which meant that the landscape before them was…

“The Dark…Territory…” Kirito rasped, only for it to disappear among the whistling of the trees.

The place beyond the light of the Axiom Church, the land of evil dedicated to the dark god Vecta, the world that existed only in the old stories told by the village elders—just a few steps ahead of them. The thought froze Eugeo’s mind, leaving him helpless to do anything but stare. It was as if all this new information flooding into a part of his mind he’d never needed to use before robbed his brain of the ability to process it.

Against the plain white background of his mind, Eugeo saw one thing sparkling fiercely—a verse from the very start of the Taboo Index. Book One, Chapter Three, Verse Eleven: “Thou shalt not cross the End Mountains that encircle the Human Empire.”

“We can’t…We can’t go…any farther,” Eugeo struggled to say through numb lips. He held out his hands, trying to motion Kirito and Alice back.

Just then, there was a heavy, sharp sound from above. Eugeo flinched and looked up at the red sky.

Against the bloodred color, he saw something white and something black, locked in a fierce grapple. They were like tiny grains, so they must have been flying extremely high—but they were clearly far larger than a human. The two objects dashed back and forth, closing in on each other and then breaking apart, the clashing of metal sounding each time they crossed each other.

“They’re dragon knights,” Kirito muttered.

As he said, the two combatants were huge flying dragons, with long necks and tails and triangular wings. Barely visible on their backs were knights with swords and shields. The knight on the white dragon wore white armor, while the one on the black dragon was clad in all black. Even their swords matched their color—the white knight’s shining bright, while the black knight’s trailed a dark miasma.

With each collision of their swords came a blast like thunder and a shower of sparks.

“I suppose the white one…is one of the Church’s Integrity Knights,” Alice murmured.

“Yeah, I bet you’re right,” Kirito added. “And the black one must be a dragon knight for the forces of darkness…He seems to be about as tough as the Integrity Knight…”

“No way…” Eugeo murmured, shaking his head. “The Integrity Knights are the strongest people in existence. They’d never fail to beat a dark knight.”

“I don’t know. From what I can tell, their sword skill is about even. Neither one is breaking down the other’s defense,” Kirito noted. Just then, as if hearing what they were saying, the white knight pulled back on the dragon’s reins to open up the distance between them. The black dragon swept forward, trying to close the gap.

But before the distance closed between them, the white dragon pulled into a sharp turn and lowered its head, appearing to tense and summon its strength. Its neck shot forward and its jaws opened wide. A line of brilliant white fire shot from between its fangs, covering the black dragon knight.

An explosion drowned out the sound of the howling wind in Eugeo’s ears. The black knight writhed in pain and lurched to the side in midair. The Integrity Knight took the opportunity to switch out his sword for a giant bronze-colored bow and loose a similarly long arrow.

It flew through the air with a faint trail of fire behind it and landed smack in the middle of the black knight’s chest.

“Ah…!” Alice let out a little shriek.

The black dragon, the film of its wings mostly burned away, began to plummet. The knight tumbled from the dragon’s back, spraying blood as he fell directly toward the cave where the children stood.

First came the black sword, sticking blade-first into the gravel nearby. Next was the knight, landing barely ten mels away from the trio. Lastly, the black dragon struck the rocky mountain a considerable distance away, shrieking one last time before it fell silent.

The three children watched in silence as the black knight struggled painfully to sit up. They could see the deep hole torn into the shining breastplate. The knight’s head, covered with a heavy helmet that hid the wearer’s features, turned to face them.

A trembling hand stretched out, pleading for help. Then an eruption of blood spilled from the throat of the helmet, and the knight collapsed to the ground with a clatter. Red liquid continued to pool beneath the still body, spreading along the black gravel.

“Ah…ah…” Alice continued to gasp at Eugeo’s side. She stumbled forward, as if compelled, out of the mouth of the cave.

Eugeo couldn’t even react. On his other side, Kirito hissed, “No!!” Alice twitched and tried to stop, but her foot stumbled and she toppled forward. Both Eugeo and Kirito reached out on instinct, trying to grab Alice’s dress.

Their fingers just missed and touched only empty air.

Alice tumbled to the cave floor, her blond hair flying, and grunted.

She just fell over. That was all. It wouldn’t have affected her life more than one or two points, if they checked her window. But that wasn’t the problem. When she fell forward, the fingers of her right hand landed about twenty cens over the very clear boundary line between the bluish gray of the cavern rock and the cinder-black ground. Her white palm brushed the black gravel. The surface of the Dark Territory.

“Alice!” the two boys cried together, reaching down to grab their friend’s body. It was the kind of thing that she would scold them for under normal circumstances, but they were too desperate to drag her back into the cave to think about consequences.

When they lifted her back up, her eyes were still fixed on the fallen knight. Eventually they fell to her hand. The puffy palm had a number of little pebbles and grains of sand stuck in it. They were as black as a brand.

“…I…I…” she stammered. Eugeo reached out both hands to hers in a trance. He rubbed away all the grit and desperately tried to reassure her.

“D-don’t worry, Alice. You didn’t actually leave the cave. You just brushed it with your hand. That’s not a taboo, right? Right, Kirito?”

He looked up at his partner, pleading. But Kirito wasn’t looking at either Eugeo or Alice. He was down on one knee, focusing hard on their surroundings.

“Wh-what is it, Kirito?”

“…Don’t you feel it, Eugeo? Someone…something…”

Eugeo frowned and looked around as well, but there wasn’t even a bug in the cave with them, much less another person. All he saw was the black knight ten mels away, presumably dead. The victorious Integrity Knight was nowhere to be seen in the sky.

“It’s just your imagination. Come on, let’s…”

Take Alice back down the other path of the cave, Eugeo was going to say, but Kirito grabbed his shoulder. Eugeo grimaced and followed his partner’s gaze, then froze solid with terror.

There was something near the ceiling of the cave.

A purple circle, rippling like the surface of water. On the other side of the fifty-cen-wide circle was the vague image of a human face. The face was simplistic, so much so that it was impossible to say if it was male or female, young or old. The skin was pale, without a single hair on the entire head. The wide-open eyes contained no visible emotion. But Eugeo knew instinctively that it was not looking at him or Kirito but at the stunned Alice between them.

The face’s mouth opened and spoke odd, unintelligible words through the purple portal.

“Singular Unit Detected. Tracing ID…”

The marble-like eyes blinked, followed by that strange voice again.

“Coordinates Fixed. Report Complete.”

The purple window abruptly vanished. Eugeo belatedly realized that the thing’s words resembled the mantra of sacred arts, and he looked first at Kirito and Alice, then at his own body. Nothing had changed.

But the incident was much too bizarre to ignore. Eugeo shared a look with his partner, then they helped Alice up and cradled their trembling friend as they proceeded back into the cave. The group began to run in the direction from which they’d come.

Eugeo couldn’t exactly remember how they’d made their way back to Rulid.

When they got back to the lake where the dragon’s bones slept, they crossed right through it to the exit on the other side. They ran back through the long cave in a fraction of the time it had taken them originally, tripping and sliding on the wet rock many times, and by the time they leaped out into the light again, the afternoon sun was still pouring down from above.

Yet Eugeo’s unease could not be forgotten. The thought of that eerie white face poking out of the purple window behind them spurred him onward without rest.

The birds chirped peacefully in the forest branches and the schools of little fish darted here and there in the brook beside them, but the trio marched on in resolute silence. They crossed the hill that was supposed to be the northern pass, then the twin ponds, and finally reached the north end of Rulid Bridge.

When they at last reached the foot of the ancient tree where they’d met in the morning, relief was palpable. They looked at one another and managed weak, nervous smiles.

“Here, Alice, look,” Kirito said, holding out the heavy basket. It was full of the summer ice that was the goal of their little adventure—and Eugeo suddenly realized that he’d forgotten all about it.

He tried to hide his sheepishness by advising, “You should put that in the basement as soon as you get back. Then it might last until tomorrow.”

“…Okay, I will.” She nodded obediently, taking the basket and looking at the two boys. At last, her confident smile returned. “Look forward to tomorrow’s lunch. I’m going to make sure you get a proper reward for all your hard work.”

Neither of the boys was cruel enough to point out that it was Sadina who would be treating them to a good meal. They shared a look, then nodded.

“…What was that pause for?” she asked suspiciously.

They patted her shoulders from either side and chimed, “Nothing! Let’s go home!”

They walked back to the center of town under the true sunset now. Kirito headed for the church where he lived, and Alice went to the village elder’s house. Eugeo arrived at his home on the west side of the village just seconds before the bell rang six.

All throughout dinner, Eugeo was silent. He was certain that his older siblings had never had such an adventure—not even his parents or grandparents—but for some reason, he didn’t feel like boasting about the events of his day.

He didn’t know how he would describe that land of darkness he had seen; nor the battle between the Integrity Knight and the foe on the black dragon; nor, most of all, the bizarre face that had appeared from nowhere. In fact, he felt afraid of how his family would react when they heard the story.

That night, Eugeo went to bed early, hoping to forget everything he had seen at the end of his adventure. If he couldn’t, the awe and respect he felt for the Axiom Church and Integrity Knights might turn into something else altogether.