“This is driving insane.”
A sigh escapes naturally. In the inner pocket, opened by a wriggling sensation, the Goddess Statue was precisely pointing at the dying Gear Doppelganger.
Perhaps it’s because it hasn’t yet properly devoured or replicated another being.
Parts of the Cogwheel Remnant were long broken, but the remaining main body… The sticky sli-like part was stubbornly enduring the attacks from Lydia and Benny.
Of course, it’s only holding on, but still. Its combat power drastically decreases when it’s not mimicking anything, but its regenerative power seems imnse.
Even if only a tiny amount of its tissue remains, it seems to regenerate in an instant.
In fact, the Gear Doppelganger had already been shattered several tis and devoured by Shadow, yet it keeps regenerating from the few scattered pieces that flew off during the process.
However, at this rate, it’ll be completely annihilated in less than a minute. It ans the path shown by the Goddess Statue will be cut off.
“Ugh! I really have no choice!”
Scratching my head wildly, I ran toward the Gear Doppelganger being dismantled by Lydia and Benny.
Karen usually tried to stop at tis like this…but perhaps because she also witnessed the process of receiving the will of the Goddess through the statue beside .
She simply followed, cloaked in divine power, ready to fight at any ti, without a word.
“Wait! You two, please stop for a mont!”
“…? It’s almost over.”
“I get it, so Jonah, stay back. If it replicates your appearance, it might beco troubleso.”
Lydia, burning the Gear Doppelganger with aura with a puzzled expression, and Benny, making a rather bold statent nonchalantly.
“The statent that you can’t attack if it’s wearing my face, even if you know it’s fake. It’s sweet and I appreciate it, but what I ant was to briefly stop beating up the Gear Doppelganger.”
“…Jonah. ntal contamination?”
“There shouldn’t be such a monster on the 3rd Floor.”
Lydia and Benny, eyes wide open in shock. They look like an author who just woke up two hours before a deadline, as if nothing unusual had happened.
In other words, an expression of soone who witnessed sothing absolutely impossible…sothing that should never occur.
“No, is it really that shocking for to say not to kill a monster?”
“Yeah. I still rember. Jonah, smiling widely, slitting a goblin’s throat without hesitation.”
“Right, right. The Jonah who thought of monsters as machines that spit out money when stabbed?”
“…So everyone thought of like that.”
Of course, monsters are like pockets that drop money when you stab them, and I do think it’s better to earn money with a smile, but…still, isn’t this too much?
Well, I was surprised, but Lydia and Benny did slow down the speed at which they were thrashing the Gear Doppelganger after listening to .
For now, they seed focused on maintaining the status quo, chopping it finely at a rate that matched its regeneration speed.
I held out the Goddess Statue in front of them.
“I don’t really know what this ans either, but the Goddess Statue is pointing at the Gear Doppelganger. Maybe these roaming fragnts are the key to where the seal is.” 𝔯𝒶𝐍О𝐁Ëś
“Hmm. That makes sense.”
Benny nodded at my words, continuing to unleash intangible shockwaves without pause.
“It was supposed to be strictly sealed, and it was so engrossed in the Goddess’s hair that it didn’t even think of escaping, right? But the Pope forcibly broke the seal and stole the hair.”
“That’s right. And where she used that hair was…”
“Whoa! I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know!”
Benny scread and shook her head vigorously. No matter how violently she shook, her unwaveringly comfortable chest seed a bit pitiful.
“It’s hard enough to hear a disgusting story, but hearing it from a man’s mouth is even tougher?! Enough, let’s just get to the point!”
“Okay.”
Maybe she was exhausted from yelling. Benny sighed deeply as she continued to speak.
“It couldn’t be that the seal is completely broken. If it were, the 3rd Floor would have long been the domain of the Pri Doppelganger. Maybe she just opened the entrance for a mont or created a gap to slip through.”
“Probably so, right?”
“But no matter how exceptional the Pope is, she isn’t the Goddess herself, so it’s impossible to perfectly restore the seal. That’s why such fragnts occasionally appear on the 3rd Floor.”
“I think so too. To add a bit, those stories about so Catastrophe being absorbed into the Labyrinth and so parts overflowing and mutating are likely just nonsense to cover up the truth.”
The information gathered by adventurers is compiled and distributed by the Guild. And based on this, adventurers explore the Labyrinth once more.
This has been the tradition since the Guild was established, and it’s the trust they share with each other.
That’s why no one suspected anything. Sotis, research is incomplete, or the collected information is incorrect or lacking, leading to slight corrections.
They wouldn’t have thought of deceiving from the start. How could they shake the foundation of Pangrave, maintained over a thousand years of trust, for personal gain?
It’s impossible for those who ascended to the papal position through faith, not as ordinary rulers, to make such a choice.
…Pope Claudia the Third accomplished that great feat!
“Sigh.”
Sighs keep escaping. It’s already the umpteenth ti today….
But well, after listening to Benny, I get the gist.
Isn’t it a universal rule for field bosses to drop key items that lead to hidden areas?
The world doesn’t roll as smoothly as I set and nailed it, but there are often tis when the content I subconsciously think of matches up quite well.
Perhaps such content is implicitly included within the settings I’ve directly specified.
As I nodded, Benny tore a chunk out of the regenerating Gear Doppelganger with her bone claw and fed it to Shadow, then spoke.
“That’s the point. If the Goddess pointed to this guy as the path to the seal, and if we speculate on the process through which the Fragnt of Catastrophe leaked out, the Gear Doppelganger could indeed be the path leading to the seal… In other words, if we enter the sealed space like this, it will be hard to get out at the right ti.”
“Huh?”
Co to think of it, that’s true. If I’m on the way, I can just sneak a look from afar and run back. That was my plan from the beginning.
But if I move through the Gear Doppelganger… I don’t know the exact thod or principle, but it’s likely that it involves surpassing space itself rather than physically arriving.
I might suddenly drop right in front of the Pri Doppelganger, and even if that’s not the case, the option to retreat the way I ca would disappear.
Benny is asking if I’ll still go despite that.
After a mont of contemplation, I nodded.
“Still, I have to go. Karen said that the Pope’s hair theft was almost 50 years ago, right? If that much ti has passed, it’s probably not a situation with much leeway.”
“Well, considering that nothing has happened even after 50 years, it might be okay. Preparing a bit more could be a way.”
“Benny’s words are usually right. But….”
I took out the Goddess Statue from my inner pocket. In the anti, its posture had changed again; now it seed to be mimicking a touch rather than pointing at the Gear Doppelganger.
“The Goddess wouldn’t ask to do anything harmful. So I think it’s fine.”
-Wooong!
Perhaps moved by my words, the Goddess Statue glowed warmly, scattering bright light around.
It’s just bright light filled with divine power. It has no particular effect, but basking in it makes one feel warm and pleasant.
Receiving it at the unpleasant bottom of the moat, it suddenly feels like I can breathe freely.
Though small in scale, Karen crosses herself at the unmistakable miracle, and Benny’s hardened expression softens.
Lydia, as always, maintained her usual indifferent expression….
“If Jonah’s going, I’ll go too.”
“It might be dangerous, you know?”
“That’s why I’m going, isn’t it?”
“Gasp.”
Lydia, speaking thrilling words with that indifferent expression.
Lately, even without excessive praise or acting scenarios, there are tis when she helps with a knightly aura.
I nod lightly to express gratitude and head towards the Gear Doppelganger, which is in a constant cycle of regeneration and decay at this very mont.
A sticky liquid reminiscent of tar. Yet, the densely embedded large and small gears evoke a strange sense of disgust.
It’s not that I have trypophobia, and they’re just simple gears, so why is that?
Tilting my head in curiosity, I cautiously reached out with my hand, and the gears began to gather and combine on their own.
The intact ones fit together seamlessly, while the broken gears filled in their missing parts with a dark substance.
What was ford was a skeletal hand-shaped mass of gears.
Startled by its appearance, like an ancient arm suddenly erging from pitch-black crude oil, I steeled myself and reached out. Then,
rumble!
The Gear Doppelganger began to writhe violently.
Countless shapes surfaced and vanished on its surface, and the gears scattered in all directions, starting to form unknown patterns.
But perhaps sothing was amiss. It kept transforming wildly, yet the shapes wouldn’t stabilize and kept collapsing.
The form that the Gear Doppelganger was trying to materialize crumbled, and then repeatedly attempted to change, only to collapse again, gradually swelling.
At the mont it reached almost three tis its original size.
Pang!
It shattered into pieces with a small explosion.
“Huh.”
I just touched it with my hand, and in the daze of wondering what this was.
A small sphere erged from the debris that scattered.
Pure black to the point of being mind-altering, resembling a deep hole with no visible bottom.
Centered around that sphere, a small breeze blew, and then, at so point, it beca a vortex, starting to draw everything in.
The phenonon reminiscent of a black hole engulfed the scattered remnants of the Gear Doppelganger, and at the mont it absorbed all the flesh.
Boom!
With a low rumble, it beca a giant door towering high.
“……”
Swallowing nervously at these first-ti experiences, I glanced around at the group.
Everyone exchanged looks and nodded silently, signaling that preparations were complete.
“Just in case, should we hold hands?”
If we were to scatter, it would be a disaster. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one thinking this, as the three others willingly extended their hands.
Including , the four of us linked hands, and with our remaining hands, we grasped the doorknob.
“Here we go, then.”
Creak-
The door opened with the sound of a hinge creaking, and a deep darkness poured out and enveloped us.
Or rather, it seed we were being pulled into the darkness inside the door.
It was a mont later that I grasped the situation. A strange landscape illuminated the surroundings.
“Ah.”
It was different from Earth, and unlike the current Pangrave. Yet instinctively, I knew what era it was.
A thousand years.
A landscape from much, much longer ago.
Sure.
It was the appearance of the land during the War of the Fallen Gods.
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