[Miranda]
'What… is that?'
For once, Miranda genuinely didn't have words.
Not far from her…maybe a dozen meters stood the strange man she'd met barely half an hour ago. Nyrel. He was on his feet, posture steady despite the beating he'd taken, his face completely hidden behind that mask. She couldn't read a single thing from him. No tension in the jaw, no twitch around the eyes.
It was the ground around him that made her catch her breath.
A circle drawn in blood...
Not random splashes, not battlefield mess. A ring traced with care, thick lines of drying red looping around him like a boundary. She remembered catching glimpses of him earlier, half-slumped, smearing something on the floor with his own blood.
She merely thought the poor guy had turned insane.
Who does something like that when they're half-dead?
Now the circle pulsed faintly.
A red light began to stir along the lines, following the path of the blood as if something invisible was waking up and remembering where to flow. The shine grew brighter, bathing Nyrel's boots, throwing strange shadows on the cavern walls.
He turned his head toward her, and a cold unease slid down her back. It wasn't anything obvious—just an instinct that whatever he was doing wasn't normal.
She wasn't the only one who felt it.
The kangaroo in front of her stopped mid-movement, wild eyes snapping toward him. Across the cavern, the other beasts and even her teammates shifted, weapons and claws lowering by a fraction. The whole battlefield seemed to… pause.
Nyrel slowly lifted his hand.
From the blood circle, something answered.
Iridescent energy bled out along the lines, rising in threads of shifting color to blue, violet, sickly green, colors Miranda couldn't easily name. It twisted together above the circle and then sank toward his outstretched palm.
"Mary," he said quietly. "Heed my call."
-BOOOOM!
Light detonated out of the circle in a blinding flash.
Miranda flinched, throwing her arms up over her face, mana flooding to her senses as she instinctively sharpened everything else—hearing, perception, the feel of the ground under her boots.
'What is that energy…?'
She had never felt something so dark…
Slowly, the light faded.
"…"
The temperature seemed to drop.
Every single person and beast in the cavern tensed at the same time. Even the kangaroos' fur bristled, muscles coiling, eyes wide.
A woman stood in the middle of the circle.
She was… simple at first glance. A black tunic that fell to her knees, cinched with a plain belt. Pale hands slipped out from the wide sleeves. Bare feet, skin almost white against the stained stone. Long, dark hair spilled over her shoulders and partially veiled her face.
But what Miranda could see of that face was pretty. Delicate features, soft lines.
And absolutely no expression.
Her dark eyes were flat, empty of anything human. They didn't glow, didn't narrow, didn't widen….they just looked. And right now, they were looking in Miranda's direction.
Nyrel's voice came from behind the mask.
"Mary."
Miranda's confusion spiked.
Did he knew her?
The girl clearly stood in front of him. Clearly came from his circle. Clearly followed his call. But Miranda hadn't seen her before…
A summoning?
Her mind tried to fit the pieces together.
A human summoning?
Is that even possible?
Before she could chase the thought, movement tugged at her attention.
From the scattered mirror shards on the floor, the ones that had just saved Miranda's face—something pale pushed through.
A hand.
Thin and olorless. It calmly gripped the edge of a shard and pulled as if the glass was a doorway instead of a broken surface.
Miranda instinctively stepped back. She knew on some level the girl wasn't coming for her, but her body still reacted—chills rising along her arms.
She glanced toward the circle again.
It was empty.
The summoned girl wasn't standing by Nyrel anymore.
Of course.
She was climbing out of the mirror fragments at Miranda's feet.
The nearest kangaroo snarled, startled, and lashed out with a brutal kick, claws flashing. The girl barely seemed to register the attack. A mirror simply bloomed in the air between her and the incoming strike like it had always been there.
-BOOOM
Claws tore through glass and shards exploded outward.
When the pieces fell, the girl was gone.
"…"
Miranda's eyes darted around, searching—
There.
The girl slipped soundlessly from another shard that had been flung behind the kangaroo, stepping halfway out of the glass like liquid before solidifying onto stone. Her movements were beautiful and fast.
The shattered mirror around the beast responded.
Shards rose into the air, dozens of them, orbiting the kangaroo like razor stars. Then they shot forward all at once.
-SPURT. SPURT. SPURT.
They punched into the monster's skin, slicing through fur and flesh with ease. Blood sprayed from a dozen cuts, dark and hot, dotting the stones.
But it wasn't enough.
The beast staggered, roared, but didn't fall. A
The girl's empty gaze slid to Miranda.
And suddenly Miranda understood.
There was no voice, no gesture.
Just that hollow, expectant look. It said, clearly: Finish it.
Mary wasn't strong enough alone right now. She could bind, wound, trap. But the killing blow had to come from someone else.
Miranda didn't hesitate.
She nocked an arrow, drew her string back as far as it would go, and poured mana into the shot. Wind gathered at the arrowhead, swirling in a tight vortex that whipped her hair and tugged at her clothes. This was way beyond anything she'd fired during this fight so far.
-BOOOM!
-SPURT!
The arrow left her bow with a roar, pierced straight through the kangaroo's forehead, and exited out the back before the monster even finished turning its head.
Its body stiffened. Then collapsed.
Blood and bone and brain matter spattered the ground. The cavern went quiet in the way only a room full of people catching their breath could.
Miranda's gaze swept the area automatically, searching for the girl.
Mary was already standing beside Nyrel again, silent as a shadow.
Nyrel leaned in slightly and said something too low for Miranda to hear.
The girl didn't answer out loud. She simply slipped an arm around him, lifted his weight against her like he weighed nothing, and stepped backward into a mirror that hadn't been there a blink before.
The glass swallowed them whole.
And they vanished.
Miranda stared at the empty space for a second, then exhaled slowly. She didn't even have the energy left to be properly shocked anymore.
Instead, she turned, scanning for her comrades.
They were still standing. Tired, bloodied, bruised but alive thankfully. Each of them had managed to bring down their own opponent in the chaos.
Miranda's legs felt heavy as she walked toward the spot where Nyrel had disappeared. A discarded object caught her eye on the ground.
His mask.
She crouched, brushing dirt and dust off the strange, cracked surface with her thumb.
"Who are you…"
***
[Nyrel]
-CLANK!
The guild's wooden doors flew inward under my kick, both panels slamming against the walls with enough force to rattle the frames. One of them actually cracked halfway down.
I didn't care.
Every bone in my body felt like it had been put through a meat grinder and then loosely reassembled by someone who'd only skimmed the manual. My muscles ached. My skin burned. Even breathing felt like it required conscious effort.
I'd made it out of the twenty-fifth floor by the skin of my teeth, riding on Mary's ability and a whole lot of stubbornness. The moment we were clear, I'd ordered her to rest. Spirit contract or not, she wasn't a machine, and I'd called her right after binding her. She was exhausted. So I sent her back.
That left me to stumble the rest of the way through the dungeon alone.
Mary had at least escorted me to the tenth floor. From there, I managed the remaining climb myself. 'Managed' being generous actually. It took me four hours of dragging my half-broken body up and out, step by miserable step!
People stared at me.
Not so much at me as at the girl in black who'd been with me earlier, even with her face covered. Summoned spirits weren't exactly common, and she had presence. When she vanished and I kept going alone, the stares didn't exactly stop either.
At some point on the way out, I ditched that ridiculous mask and wrapped a strip of cloth over the lower half of my face instead. Less flashy. Less annoying. Less reminder of how stupid this day had been.
What really put me in a bad mood, though?
The bag.
The bag with all the stuff I'd looted from the hedgehugs.
Gone.
Lost somewhere between a teleport I didn't ask for and a boss fight I almost died in. All I had left were the spines I'd kept on me.
What the hell was I supposed to buy Aunt Belle with just that?
As if on cue, someone in the guild lobby decided to try me.
"Hey, brat, the door nearly hit m—"
"Scram," I said without looking up.
The man in front of me was huge, more muscle than brain by the look of it. Under normal circumstances, he might've tried to puff himself up, throw his weight around a little.
Tonight, I wasn't in the mood.
He must've felt it.
Because he shut up and moved.
The noise level in the guild dropped hard. Conversations trailed off. Cutlery on plates stopped clinking. For a second, all I heard was my own footsteps and the faint creak of the damaged doors behind me.
Yeah, okay. Maybe kicking the entrance in the middle of the night wasn't subtle.
But still. No guards stepping up? No annoyed staff member scolding me?
Weird.
I ignored the stares burning holes in my back and made my way straight to the elevator that led to the fifth floor, the one where you sold monster materials. I hit the button and stepped inside as soon as it arrived.
The staffer inside went stiff the second the doors slid shut.
He shifted his body as far to the side as possible, shoulders hunched, eyes very not on me. It was like he was trying to merge with the wall.
Did I really look that scary?
Whatever.
A weird tickle on my calf made me glance down.
Right.
Blood.
A thin stream of it was trickling from somewhere under my clothes, running down my legs and dripping onto the tile. My hands weren't much better, small cuts, bruised knuckles, places where the skin had split and hadn't decided to close yet.
There was a faint, dark-red trail leading all the way from the dungeon entrance to the guild doors.
Even with Miranda's healing vial, a worrying amount of it hadn't fully patched.
What the hell?
[Your already battered body has taken the after-effect of your first spirit contract. It's already a miracle that you can move.]
Ah.
That explained it.
I didn't think too hard about it. Overthinking while my body felt like this wasn't going to help. The elevator dinged, doors opening, and I stepped out.
"H-Have a good night," the staffer blurted, fingers jabbing the 'close' button.
I didn't bother replying.
The fifth floor was lined with counters and queues, each manned by a different clerk ready to assess, weigh, and price the day's haul. I headed to the nearest line, stepped in, and let my eyes drift closed. The lights were a bit too bright for how fried I felt.
Just a minute. I'd rest them for a minute.
"Hum, Sir?"
I opened my eyes.
The line in front of me was empty. Completely. At some point, everyone else had cleared out and I hadn't moved.
…Right.
Guess I'd been standing there longer than a minute.
I stepped up to the counter.
The woman behind it wore the standard polite guild smile, though it faltered a little when she got a good look at me. I ignored it and started digging through my pockets.
Like some blood-soaked beggar, I pulled out the hedgehug spines I'd managed to salvage—thick, sharp, glossy—and set them on the counter one by one. My fingers were numb and clumsy, and more than once I jabbed myself. Fresh blood smeared the pristine white surface, turning it blotchy red.
Two minutes later, there was a small puddle of blood and a neat pile of about thirty spines in front of her.
Only thirty. But they were the best of the batch—the ones I'd grabbed on purpose when time was tight. Not all hedgehug spines were equal; I'd picked for quality.
I fished out my guild card from my breast pocket and slid it over.
"…"
She didn't move.
"…"
We stared at each other.
"…What's up?" I finally asked, frowning under the cloth.
Her eyes weren't on the blood. Or the spines.
They were locked on mine.
Amber. A rare color around here. Rare enough to be memorable. Rare enough to be dangerous.
Great.
I dragged the cloth up a little higher, shadowing more of my face.
Amber eyes were extremely rare in this kingdom. To my knowledge, I might actually be the only one walking around with them. It didn't take a genius to connect that and the name Edward Falkrona if you'd ever seen my real face.
God…
I really didn't need that tonight.
"Y-Yes!" She squeaked, snapping out of it at last. She grabbed the spines, started counting and checking their quality with exaggerated focus.
Please don't recognize me….
Please just see the 'weird injured guy'.
"Sir Nyrel, right?" She asked after a moment, glancing at the card.
"Yeah," I said.
"Your share has been credited to your card," she said, slotting it into a small device. "You can use it to purchase anything in affiliated shops. If your card is stolen, please inform us immediately so we can freeze your account."
She handed my card and a receipt back with both hands.
I scratched at the golden ED symbol then turned away from the counter.
"In the hope of seeing you soon, Sir!" She called out, voice a little too bright.
I waved lazily over my shoulder and left the floor, then the guild.
The night air outside felt cooler, at least.
I wanted somewhere quiet. Somewhere nobody was going to stare at my face, or my blood, or my spirit, or my name. Somewhere I could just… be alone.
My first day in the [Enigma Dungeon] had been… a lot.
You could call me weak for how much it took out of me.
I wouldn't agree.
Drop any random person from Earth into this world and into that dungeon, and see how well they do.
DING.
"Jarvis?" I raised a brow..
[Good news.]
A translucent screen shimmered into view in front of me.
[Congratulation! Successful Challenge!]
[10 Affection Points obtained from Miranda Stormdila!]
[Hidden Heroine: Miranda Stormdila.]
[Reward: Memories of Edward Amael Falkrona obtained!]
[Do you want to acquire them?]