Chapter 4: Pass to Turn

Chapter 4:
Pass to Turn

 

“THIS MEANS we pass, right?” Phem said as she peered down the stairs to the next floor.

“Yeah, but we’re headed for the bottom,” Ein said with a nod, and Cloud nodded as well.

Al smiled at them all, satisfied, while Phem somewhat anxiously glanced at Loren, who was as ever following behind.

“Don’t look at me. I’ve got nothing to say to you,” Loren answered, looking entirely displeased.

“We’re just proctors, after all.” Lapis offered a pure smile, despite her cynical tone.

Ein directed a hostile look at the two of them, then locked eyes with his party members and summoned his resolve. “Is everyone ready? We’re going to reach the bottom, return with the relics of Wolfe, and prove to the school just what we can do.”

“Those damn noble brats who looked down on us’ll be stamping their feet in frustration.”

“We can do it. It would be impossible if any one of us were alone, but we’ve combined our strengths.”

Loren gazed upon this circle of friends, as thoroughly vexed as he had ever been. To be perfectly honest, he was filled with the irresistible urge to insist that they turn back—but after calming down and giving it some thought, he reminded himself that his real business was waiting for him on the last floor. What’s more, according to the headmaster, only the students had permission to access the passage from the ninth floor to the tenth.

Although turning back would have been appropriate advice if he cared about the students’ survival, it was actually more convenient for him if they carried on.

“May I have a minute?” Lapis intruded on their conversation, for once taking over for Loren. Ein and his party seemed suspicious, but Lapis went on regardless. “I want to know about the permissions for the last floor. Could you tell me who has it, and what sort of thing it is?”

“What’s that got to do with you?” Cloud snapped at her, as was to be expected at this point.

However, his tone was less vitriolic than it had been when he spoke to Loren. As long as she kept her mouth shut, Lapis looked for all the world like a wholesome priest; even if she did speak, she came off more than amicably so long as she kept her schemes to herself. She was, on top of that, quite a looker. It seemed even Cloud didn’t have it in him to growl at her.

“Things will only get more dangerous from here on out,” said Lapis. “That information might prove vital in due time, and I want to know before anything happens.”

“Fine, I’ve got it right here,” Ein answered. He pulled out a silver necklace from beneath his breastplate—a silver chain from which a ring of the same color hung.

“May I see it?”

“Y-yeah. Go ahead.”

With his consent, Lapis approached the defenseless boy, pinched the chain, and brought the ring to rest on her hand. She couldn’t take it off of Ein’s neck, so naturally, that made her slide up close to him. His cheeks turned red as he stared at Loren, his head full of what Loren could only assume were pointless thoughts.

“I see, so this is the key. I get it now; thank you.” After studying the ring for a while, Lapis slipped it back into Ein’s armor, smiled, and bowed.

Ein’s cheeks only turned redder with that gesture, yet Lapis didn’t seem to notice a thing. She was quickly back by Loren’s side.

“A-are we good now? Then let’s get to the sixth floor.” Ein’s flush hadn’t lessened, and his voice quavered ever so slightly.

There were no objections; Ein and Cloud took the lead down the stairs, no different to any passage that had come before it. They led, however, to a scene the party had never seen before.

“What is…this?” Phem asked no one in particular—in fact, no one in Ein’s party had an answer. Even Loren and Lapis were at a loss for words.

At the end of the stairs was a stone passageway just like the others. The difference lay in the somewhat cloudy, if otherwise transparent, mucus-like ooze splattered across it. What’s more, this ooze seemed to wriggle bit by bit as they stared at it, slowly squirming along the floor and walls.

“How to put it lightly? This is pretty sickening.” Loren didn’t hide his revulsion at the scene, lit by lantern light.

Beside him, Lapis studied the scenery with intense interest. She crouched by the nearest puddle of goop, and after staring a while, stood and declared her conclusion. “Yes, this is a slime.”

“A slime? You mean that sort of slime?” Even Loren, who had been raised on the battlefield, had heard of them before. The real creatures occasionally slid out into the open once the battles were over, so he had seen them as well.

Slimes were a sort of indeterminate ooze with seemingly no will or emotion—the simplest and lowest form of monster. They could acquire various traits depending on the environments they lived in, but they moved slowly, had relatively low defense, and died if their core was struck by any random stick. This was what the world at large understood to be true about them, at least.

“Probably that sort of slime.”

“Oh, damn… We should get the hell out, then.”

Loren seemed alone in this assessment, as everyone’s eyes gathered on him. Phem looked curious but confused, though her comrades had the look of young men being subjected to the ramblings of an old fool.

“There are a few slimes is all. What are you chickening out for?” Cloud jeered, grinding a lump of goo under his boot.

Being little more than liquid, the slime’s fluid body was brought to an anticlimactic end. Its core was destroyed under Cloud’s heel, its body left to melt along the labyrinth ground.

“What I’m scared of shouldn’t matter to you.”

“Hah! If you’re scared of a monster this weak, that just goes to show how incapable you are,” Cloud mocked.

But Loren wasn’t going to play along. “Did you bring a torch, Lapis?”

“Of course I did.”

Loren drew his knife from his belt, holding it in his right hand, and he took the torch Lapis offered in his left. Lapis struck a shard of flint to light it, and Loren held it high above his head.

“What’s he up to?”

“Don’t worry about him. Let’s just keep going. The fact that we haven’t run into Parmè at all means she’s still farther ahead,” Ein urged them on.

Cloud nodded, taking his place beside Ein as part of the front line. Then came Phem and Al, and behind them, Lapis whispered to Loren, sounding somewhat impressed.

“I didn’t expect you to know a slime’s weakness, Mr. Loren.”

“They’re bad news. Especially because they don’t have any thoughts or feelings to get distracted by. They zero in on their prey and nothing else. Sure, they’re slow, and they die quickly…but in the right conditions, even a skilled mercenary could bite the dust.”

“You have experience, I take it.”

“On an old battlefield.” Loren’s expression turned grim. It took a moment of silence for him to sort through the details. “It was the worst kind of war. Not that there are any good ones out there. I don’t know if it was someone’s sick excuse for a hobby, but there was a lot of magic involved. Anyway, plenty of us came out dead, ally and enemy alike. We didn’t know what to do with all the corpses.”

“That’s quite something… One theory posits that slimes are life-forms that emerge in places where mana amasses or is otherwise thrown out of balance. I understand someone conducted an experiment and managed to produce slimes via this method. With magic being thrown around on such a grand scale as a battlefield, the surrounding mana was likely thrown into disarray.”

When water, blood, and corpses were added to this chaos, it had given birth to slimes.

Loren’s experiences on that field had taught him that slimes generally ate anything that was remotely edible. “And as there were so many corpses, someone got the bright idea to just feed them to the slimes.”

“Ah. I’m already seeing where this is headed.”

“Feed ’em and they’ll fatten up—we knew that. We didn’t think they’d also multiply.”

Regardless of how they came into existence, slimes were still life-forms. As they ate, they of course grew, but after growing to a certain extent, a slime split in two. This was how they reproduced.

Once they’d consume the abundance of corpses, the slimes had grown and grown, then split, taken in more, and grown again.

“The slimes covered the entire battlefield, like a tidal wave. It was a nightmare,” Loren muttered.

They’d eaten not only corpses but earth and water—anything they could reach. The slimes grew in number and volume until they swallowed everything and everyone around them, friend or foe.

“A looming wave of jumbled and melting corpses, see. It was coming straight at—”

“You needn’t explain further. What will you do if I actually imagine it?”

“I still see it in my dreams sometimes.”

“I’ll lose my appetite… Not that it matters, I guess. We’ll be having unappetizing preserved rations for dinner either way.”

Lapis refused his explanation with an aggrieved look on her face. It wasn’t as if Loren wanted to tell the story that badly—but he was hoping his experiences had gotten something across. While Ein’s party seemed just as off-put as Lapis was, they didn’t look any less eager to push forward.

It might be hopeless, thought Loren.

Lapis drew closer than necessary, nuzzling up to him.

“What?”

“Oh, don’t look into it. I simply believe this is, in all likelihood, the safest place to be.”

Her argument was understandable, and Loren walked on without asking for any further elaboration.

Granted, to those who didn’t know their circumstances, it might have seemed like they were flirting. Ein averted his eyes while Cloud audibly clicked his tongue and glared. Al also turned away, purposefully dismissing them.

Phem alone seemed intrigued, staring at Lapis. “Are you two in a relationship?”

“What do you mean, saying it like that?”

“I mean, ah…” Phem’s cheeks reddened at the follow-up question.

“Ms. Phem, I won’t say you’re entirely blind, but you’re observing rather a different phenomenon at present,” Lapis levelly proclaimed. “If you understood our current situation, then you would realize why I’ve chosen to stand here and why I’ve assumed the safest position… Or was that perhaps too difficult to follow?”

“That’s…safe, is it?” Phem said. The implication of the word safe was that they were currently in danger. However, Phem evidently failed to feel any of the peril Lapis was alluding to.

“Forget about them, Phem! Without you over here holding the lantern, we can’t get anywhere. C’mon!” Cloud called her over. While Phem seemed a tad curious about Lapis’s warning, she was soon chasing after the rest of her party, lantern swinging ahead.

“Still, it’s nothing but slimes all over the place,” Al noted. “What do we do?”

“It will take time, but let’s take them out one by one. We should eliminate as many potential threats as possible,” Ein said.

Ein and Al began crushing the slimes on the floor and walls one by one, stepping on them and hitting them with a mace. Cloud personally began piercing slime cores with his sword. Naturally, this slowed the party’s advance considerably.

“They would be completely defenseless if they were attacked now.” Lapis said, as if it were someone else’s problem.

Loren tilted his head. “With so many slimes around, you think there’s something here aiming to attack?”

“Well, I hope there is.” Her tone dropped, and she hung her head, still clinging to Loren.

Slimes were life-forms that ate whatever they could. If they had multiplied to the point that they covered the entirety of a dungeon floor, it was hard to imagine there could be anything left here but for slimes.

“Oi, something’s here!”

This train of thought was cut short by Cloud’s shout from the front.

 

It had fallen at the end of the corridor, just beyond the reach of the lantern light. By some miracle, the slimes had receded around it. It wore leather armor, and its long brown hair lay carelessly tossed about its head. As far as Cloud could tell, it was human.

“It’s one of Parmè’s party members.” Cloud had approached carefully at first, but as he recognized her, he picked up the pace.

It was unclear whether the fallen girl was conscious, but she didn’t react to any of the approaching footsteps.

“H-hey?” Cloud gingerly called out. Still, the girl didn’t move. He turned to his comrades, wondering what to do. They all had the same question, but no one could answer it: Was she alive?

They couldn’t even tell how long she had been there.

Yet with so many slimes around, even if she had somehow been knocked out and fallen here, it was strange that she’d been left alone to be eaten. They had to assume she was dead—not that Cloud could tell just by looking.

“What do we do about this?” he asked.

“R-right.” Ein struggled to respond. He prodded the fallen girl with the tip of his longsword. Despite his timid pokes, she offered no response.

The party exchanged looks—it seemed the girl had met a tragic end. Or so they thought, when the girl’s body suddenly began to convulse. Cloud and Ein retreated a few steps, their eyes fixed on the girl, who had somehow turned face-up.

“Whoa!”

Which of them had cried out? Cloud wasn’t sure. In any case, they were stuck looking at the girl’s face. It was more like a mask made by an uncommonly shoddy craftsman. Its eyelids hung half-open over her eyes, but the eyeballs that should have been behind them were nothing but black holes. Her mouth was open, yet it was impossible to see if her teeth or tongue were still there.

The fact that this collapsed girl had once been the image of a refined noble maiden only made her hollow mouth and eyes all the more unnerving. Worse, even after she had rolled over, her body continued to twitch, and it showed no signs of stopping.

“Wh-what’s going on here?!” Cloud demanded, trying to bluff his way through the uncanniness.

As if reacting to his words, the girl vomited something—it spewed not only from her mouth but from her nose and eyes, gurgling from every orifice.

“Is that a slime?” Ein’s voice quavered as he stared at the expulsion.

He was right—it was indeed a slime. It had presumably attacked the girl at some point, and after it had taken her life, it had infiltrated her body through every opening, eating her from the inside out.

“Which means…” Cloud turned pale as he realized the girl before him was no more than skin. Not a single shred of flesh or organ remained within her body. She was simply packed full of slime.

As if in strange resonance with Cloud’s thought, the girl’s corpse suddenly ruptured and her innards scattered, sloshing outward everywhere. The slime that had eaten her breached back into the outside world.

Its body, which should have been transparent, was dyed a faint red. It couldn’t have been long since she died then, if her blood was so fresh—and her flesh. Her half-digested organs jiggled within the slime’s interior.

“Urgh…”

Cloud was late to react to this spectacle. He was stunned—immobile. The slime wouldn’t pass up this opportunity.

“Cloud, get away!”

Ein hadn’t been there from the start, so he barely made it in time. He blocked the slime’s pounce with his shield, shoving Cloud behind him—but once it had stuck to the shield, the slime began to envelop it, reaching its viscous body towards Ein.

“Bastard!” Ein swung his shield to shake it off, but the slime wouldn’t be dislodged by such a basic maneuver.

Worse, while Ein was focused on shaking it off the shield, he failed to notice that bits of the slime had remained in the girl’s body, which stretched, reaching for his leg.

By the time he realized, the slime already had him by the ankle. Simultaneously, the slime on his shield reached his hand, and Ein finally fell into a panic. “S-save me!”

“Ein! Goddammit! Let go of him!” Cloud snapped to his senses, stabbing his estoc at the slime around Ein’s leg.

Unfortunately, slimes felt no pain, no matter how they were cut, and they only took damage when their core was crushed. A thrusting weapon was frankly useless against them.

The slime didn’t falter no matter how many times Cloud stabbed it, and its body gradually changed color as it digested the boots Ein was wearing. The other one had begun eating his hand.

“Augh?! It’s like my hand’s on fire!”

In the dead girl’s case, the slime had killed her first and then infiltrated her body to digest her. This time, Ein was putting up more of a fight, and it seemed that instead it would eat through him until it killed him. Soon, Ein’s hand and arm began to melt, festering into red and black as if they had been submerged in powerful acid. He desperately clawed at the slime, screaming. “Al! Do something!”

“But what—”

Cloud turned on Al, having realized his estoc was useless. Neither could he grab at the slime with his bare hands.

However, Al didn’t have the means to remove the slime wrapped around Ein’s arm and leg either.

“Umm, wait, I’ll remember it—the way to deal with slimes is—is—” As the rest of them panicked, Phem fished around in her robe, desperately trying to remember any means she might have to resolve the situation. She glanced pleadingly at Loren.

It wasn’t as if Loren didn’t notice her glance. However, as Phem didn’t say anything, he said nothing in return. He simply watched silently as the slime ensnared Ein, and Cloud and Al panicked around him. After a while, he sighed and pointed at the torch he was holding over his head.

Phem thought hard about what he might mean, and the realization came to her suddenly. She produced a small bottle from her robe and dodged past her panicking comrades. As fast as she could, she splattered the contents of the vial on the corpse that had spat up the slime.

Her bottle contained a slightly viscous, transparent liquid, and she spread it not only on the body but on the slime unfolding from it.

“Ein! Hold your breath!” Phem warned. Immediately after, she slammed her lantern against the corpse. Its shattered glass fragments scattered everywhere, and the flame inside instantly swallowed the dead girl whole, blazing up into a raging inferno.

“Phem?! What are you doing?!”

“If a slime has your comrade, you have to burn it! They said so in class!”

Flames were a highly effective method of dealing with slimes. This varied by species, of course, and in some cases, it wouldn’t work at all, but most slime bodies had a high moisture content, and they had an intense dislike of flame.

Phem had slathered the girl’s body with oil—her lantern fuel, to be precise, which had been processed specifically to burn well. The flame spread rapidly, branching down every liquid trail. Eventually, weakened by flame and pain, its body letting off black smoke and an evil stench, the slime faltered and released Ein.

However, Ein wasn’t unscathed by direct exposure to the heat either. He turned his face away, so he didn’t take in any of the smoke or smell, but his body was burned. The moment he saw the slime falter, he pulled the rest of it from his body, coughing as he sheltered his mangled hand, and stumbled away.

“Are you safe?! Are you all right, Ein?!”

“Hardly! That was terrible.”

“I want to preserve my Heal blessing. Can you manage with medicine and bandages?”

Ein had somehow or another avoided the fate of being eaten alive, but he had been left in a state. There were holes in his boots from where the digestion had begun, and unsightly, festering wounds ran down his shield arm. Apart from that, his face and neck had taken damage from Phem’s flames, and he was lightly burned. Al began treating his wounds with ointment—but they had survived.

Lapis had silently watched this unfold from beginning to end. She still clung to Loren as she asked, “How would you rate their performance, Mr. Loren?”

“I’ve hardly got any experience as an adventurer,” Loren replied after some thought, keeping his torch above his head.

“Rate them as a mercenary then.”

“Not the worst, I’d say. Especially when Phem didn’t hesitate to light the fire as soon as she knew she had to.”

Slimes were resistant to physical attacks. They seemed to have no sense of pain, so they felt nothing when parts of their bodies were crushed or chopped off or minced. It was possible to deal with them physically—so long as you had a way of accurately identifying, reaching, and crushing their core. However, without that, the encounter often ended up as it had with Cloud and Ein.

You wanted to exterminate them speedily in order to ensure it didn’t come to that, and one way by which to do that was fire. If you had a magician with magic aplenty, you could rely on them too. Loren’s mercenary company had been lacking on that front, and whenever they’d encounter slimes without a magician on hand, flames had been their only option.

When a slime had captured one of their comrades, there had been no way to remove it save for burning it, comrade and all. Attempts to break the core might just as well end with cutting and crushing your ally, and any of their open wounds would only help the slime digest them.

Loren had unsheathed his knife and taken up a torch expressly in order to fend off any slime that ensnared him. He would use the knife if he could reach its core and was otherwise prepared to set himself ablaze. So long as they were dealing with slimes, he knew the sword on his back was practically useless.

“Shouldn’t you give up and go home?” Loren suggested as soon as Ein had been bandaged up.

However, Ein shook his head, while Cloud looked at Loren as he would at an enemy. “I said we’re going straight to the bottom!”

“I heard, but what are you gonna do for light? Do you have a spare lantern?”

Cloud looked at the fragments scattered around the burning corpse and slime, and only then did he realize their light had been lost.

Smashing the lantern to light a fire had been an exceedingly crude maneuver, but it had been reasonable given the situation. There had been no time to carefully open the lid and transfer a spark. Loren didn’t believe Phem was in the wrong for slamming her lantern on the floor, but it seemed Cloud thought differently.

“Oi, what do we do? We’ve got a long way to go!” Cloud closed in on Phem with a grim face, and Phem looked to their other comrades with an awkward expression.

“Does anyone…have a spare lantern?” she asked.

“I do. It’s all right, Cloud, we’re still good.” Al lit his spare lantern from the fire feeding on the wretched corpse. The mood lightened once they had secured a source of literal light, but their attention soon shifted back to the dead girl.

“She was left out here alone.”

“The question is whether they turned back or pressed on after… Knowing Parmè, I’m sure she went on.”

“She has Mr. Claes with her, though just as a proctor. Even assuming he didn’t stick his nose where it didn’t belong, yes, I’m sure Parmè pressed on.”

“Then what about us?” Cloud asked.

Ein rubbed his wounded arm as he thought, then declared with confidence, “We keep going. This isn’t enough to make us turn back.”

“Let’s give everyone oil and live coals to deal with the slimes. Be watchful—don’t be careless if we spot Mr. Claes or Parmè.”

“It’s burning really well. We can use it to light the coals.”

The slime that had assaulted them writhed with the corpse, but its movements gradually lessened. Having determined that it would be fine to leave it, the party used the corpse to transfer flames to the coals each had on hand.

“I’ll hold the lantern this time,” Al said. “If this one breaks, we really will have no replacement.”

“Start a fire if you sense danger. Here, Ein, if you’re in pain, lean on my shoulder.”

“I’m fine. This won’t be an issue.”

Ein’s shield would have to be discarded, having been enveloped by a slime and partially digested, then deformed by flames. They would have stripped equipment off the girl’s corpse if they could, but she had been burned, and they couldn’t rescue anything useful.

“Phem, mark this spot on the map. I’m sure another slime will eat what’s left of her when the flames go out, but we need to report this when we’re back aboveground.”

“Yeah, got it.”

“Then let’s keep going.”

The party moved on at Ein’s command. Loren was about to follow when he realized Lapis was tugging on his clothes. He glanced at her.

“Mr. Loren, I’ll leave it to you to find the opportunity.”

“Opportunity? Opportunity for what?”

“Oh, various things. For instance, the right opportunity to split off from this party.” Even as she casually alluded to abandoning these children, Lapis eyed Ein’s back. “You’re not planning on following them to the grave, are you?”

“I’m not…but we can’t enter the last floor without them.”

“That is no longer an issue. Just leave it to me, Mr. Loren,” Lapis said with the air of absolute guarantee.

If Lapis was that confident, she definitely had something up her sleeve. But the second she deployed whatever it was, they’d likely be abandoning the students to fulfill their own goal. Lapis had foisted the decision of when to do so onto him, and Loren sighed, thinking over what he ought to do.

 

Regardless of Loren’s thoughts on the matter, Ein’s party proceeded on and on.

Either because a slime had been the heart of the first trap to really impede them, or because Ein was seriously injured, they made sure to crush every slime they saw in any remotely troublesome place, even burning them now and then as they traveled forward. It felt like they were barely progressing at all, but onward they went.

The situation only worsened, however. With his injuries, Ein still had the strength to walk on his own, but with his shield abandoned and his arm burned, he was in no condition to fight.

Cloud might have filled in for him, but his estoc was ineffective against slimes, and thus he couldn’t fulfill the vanguard role. With Al the priest and Phem the magician taking part in the extermination efforts, they were for now able to continue the search—but this would only be possible so long as they had sufficient oil and coal. Neither was in infinite supply, especially the oil. It was their lantern fuel, which they would still need for the return trip.

Luckily, not every encounter required splattering as much oil as Phem had initially used. Dripping a bit and setting it ablaze was enough to send most slimes fleeing, which let them conserve their supply.

“It’s not getting any better,” Lapis muttered, now clinging to Loren’s back.

Cloud and Ein seemed to be under the impression that Loren and Lapis were shamelessly flirting, uncaring of their audience. They eyed them darkly, but Lapis refused to separate from Loren, which Loren was beginning to find strange. At first, she had evaded all his questions as to why, but with enough persistence, she finally opened up.

“My limbs aren’t working entirely as they should,” she murmured. She was clinging to Loren to hide this fact.

“Up you get, then,” said Loren, encouraging her onto his back.

Lapis’s limbs had stopped working once before. It had been a result of a spell that dispersed mana. Consequently, Lapis’s mana-powered limbs had been temporarily disabled.

“Is it like before?” he asked.

Lapis shook her head. “It’s not that I lack sufficient mana to power them. They’re just not listening to me, or rather…”

Given that she struggled to find the right words, it was clear that she herself didn’t have a clear grasp on the problem.

“I believe I could force them to work in a pinch, so please drop me if there’s an emergency,” she whispered from his back.

Loren personally didn’t want to carry Lapis for long. There was no telling when and where a slime might attack. As their bodies were liquid, slimes could climb practically anything and worm through any crevice. Whether they nestled on the tips of the treetops or in the cracks in the walls, they climbed without thought, lurked, and abruptly sprang upon their victims.

Loren had only ever faced slimes on the battlefield, but even in the midst of fights between humans, he had seen multiple mercenaries and soldiers lose their lives to slimes instead. The creatures might, at any point, drop from treetops or seep through slight gaps in luggage or corpse piles.

In a labyrinth, slimes had their pick of where to hide and wait. They could cling to the ceiling to take their prey by surprise or ooze out of walls. The floors were imperfectly paved too. There was no telling where a slime would emerge next.

Now he had Lapis covering his biggest blind spot, which only made the situation more dangerous. Loren wasn’t exactly delighted.

What’s more, as he shouldered her, the students looked at him even more critically. This did not improve his mood.

“Hey, you’re really not turning back?” Loren asked.

“Shut it, you horny old creep.”

The search continued.

For better or worse, they found the stairs to the seventh floor shortly after running across the corpse of Parmè’s party member. While this relieved the students initially, the feeling dwindled when they found that the only thing waiting for them on the seventh floor was an even greater number of slimes.

“Don’t tell me that the sixth floor onward is all a slime breeding ground?” Loren asked, sounding more than fed up with the countless goop monsters covering every surface.

Phem could hardly contain her surprise as she answered. “It…shouldn’t be. I think…”

“Aren’t we in trouble here? Even if we do make it to the last floor, we won’t have the oil to get back.” Cloud was finally starting to sound anxious.

Al pointed to his own bag. “I still have plenty of oil with me. It’s fine. We should have more than enough for the return trip.”

“Why did you bring so much?”

“It’s not called a labyrinth for nothing. I expected us to get lost, so I brought a good deal more oil than I thought was necessary. Luckily.”

“But the way things are going, the next floor will probably be even worse,” said Ein. “We’ll eventually reach a point where we can’t proceed.”

This sounded perfectly reasonable to Loren, but Al answered again, confident as ever. “I’m sure Parmè has exterminated a fair few ahead of us. We shouldn’t have to kill every one of them, in any case.”

“It’s possible she turned back after the death…”

“In that case, wouldn’t we have run into her? We have every reason to believe she pressed on.”

Al said this definitively, and Ein and Cloud exchanged looks, unable to rebut him. After a nod, they continued. Phem eyed their backs anxiously but still chased after them.

Letting them go ahead, Loren followed at a safe distance.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the part of you we’re looking for, does it?” Loren asked Lapis. Her body twitched on his back, and he looked over his shoulder, wondering if anything had come to mind.

As their eyes met, Lapis shook her head. “I don’t know exactly what part of me is here. But no matter what part it is, it wouldn’t cause something like this. Trust me.”

“Well, it’s not like I suspect you’re up to something. But this has to be abnormal, right?”

“Indeed. If the lower floors are in a similar state, that means half the labyrinth has been overtaken by slimes. I’ve never heard of that happening before.” Lapis paused for a moment and, after a long silence, continued. “Yes, I’ve never heard of it. How very intriguing.”

“Keep that hunger to yourself. There’s no guarantee we’re getting out of this alive.”

For now, Loren was leaving the slime extermination to Ein’s party, but if something happened to complicate their ability to return to the surface, it would be up to Loren to take charge. Lapis had prepared spare torches, but he doubted that would be enough. The labyrinth was supposed to get more difficult the farther down they went.

“Oh, please, what do you take me for?” Lapis sniffed. “I’m not so selfish that I would prioritize my own curiosity in a situation like this.”

“I’d hope so.”

Nevertheless, Lapis had the dangerous aura of a woman who would gladly bring herself to ruin if that would sate her curiosity. At least, so it felt to Loren. If it came to it, he realized he would have to knock her out or forcefully drag her to safety. He smiled wryly as he realized he hadn’t even considered leaving her behind.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“It’s nothing.”

Only a little farther down the path, Scena appeared in his field of vision, flapping her tiny wings.

<Don’t worry, Mister. If anything happens, I’ll use my powers to their fullest to get you to the surface no matter what,> she declared, clenching her fists.

I’m looking forward to it, Loren told her.

Perhaps because he had been distracted, he realized Ein’s party had strayed a fair distance ahead. He sped up, then came to a stop.

“Mr. Loren?” Lapis asked, confused. He didn’t answer her, instead staring intently at his feet.

He had picked up a minute vibration from the floor. While faint, the fact that the stone floor was vibrating enough for him to detect it meant that something was amiss farther down the passageway. He raised his eyes to behold the scene he least wanted to see.

There, straight ahead, he saw Ein’s party running with desperation on their faces; they crushed every slime in their path underfoot as they sprinted full tilt. Worse still was what they were running from—a torrential wave of slimes that stretched from wall to wall, flooding down the passage.

Loren’s face froze. Then he made a smart about-face and bolted down the path from which they’d come.

“Oi, you! Proctor! Why are you running ahead of us?!”

“Because I don’t wanna die!”

“At least wait until after we’re past you!”

“You think I’ve got the time?!”

It wasn’t as if Loren had the means to defeat a number of slimes so great that they filled an entire corridor. He could only wholeheartedly pray the monsters didn’t catch up. Until then, he would run as fast as his legs would take him.

He couldn’t even try lighting them up with his torch—not only would he have no way to burn slimes in those numbers, but he could already imagine himself being crushed to death beneath the wave.

“Where did you find so many?!” Loren cried out.

“Hell if I know!” Cloud howled from behind. “They just rushed in from farther down the corridor!”

“If you’ve got time to talk, move your feet!” Phem cried tearfully. “Quick, they’ll catch up!”

“This way!” Al ordered.

Then, suddenly, the sound of their flight vanished. Taken aback, Loren glanced behind him, still running. But all he could see was a semi-transparent wall of slime. The students were nowhere to be seen.

“Were they swallowed up?!”

“No, it seems they took a different branch.” Lapis had watched from her position on his back and seen the events transpire over her shoulder. Ein’s party had taken a detour in an attempt to avoid the wall of slimes.

“Did we lose them, or did they lose us?!”

“Does it matter which?”

“Course it does! There’s a huge difference between them randomly losing track of us and me carelessly losing track of them—the difference between whether we did our job or not!”

“You’re worrying about that now?”

“I guess if I’d waited for them, we might’ve been caught…” Loren’s voice descended into a mumble, though his running speed never fell. He maintained their distance from the slime flood.

Eyeing it from his back, Lapis sighed. “Leave those regrets for after we’ve escaped, okay? Then you’ll have all the time in the world.”

“You’re not wrong about that.”

Loren put those thoughts on hold and continued forward, sprinting down the dark corridors at speeds unimaginable from someone carrying another person, their bags, and a large sword. He pushed and pushed, ever at full speed, his step never faltering.