The railing on the second floor of the half-destroyed tower was cold and rough.
Catherine pressed the telescope to her eye.
Captain Hyun and the expedition members entering the Sanctuary looked like dots.
“They made it in safely.”
Her voice flowed low.
Her face remained as cool as ever.
She steadied her trembling hands by gripping the railing.
A road of blood led all the way to the tower.
She could not tell whether she should be grateful that more than half had survived, or furious.
There were wounded inside the tower as well.
The wounded were only a handful compared to the dead.
Sterling was among them.
“A pity. If this were a place where regeneration worked, we could have asked Captain Hyun.”
At David’s words as he wrapped the bandage, Sterling grinned.
“At least it wasn’t a leg. I still have one arm left, so I can still use magic.”
“Enough. The wounded should return first. Catherine and I will confirm the withdrawal.”
David sent Sterling down to the basement with the other members.
In the basement, the technician who had temporarily become the administrator was continuously transporting people through space.
Their destination was the tower west of the mountain range.
It was more than a thousand kilometers away from here.
That place was outside the hydrogen bomb’s range.
They had to move everyone before the bomb went off.
The number of people dwindled rapidly.
But time was tight.
“We should go down too.”
“Yes. Let’s go—”
The moment Catherine nodded at David’s words.
Kraaaang!
A monster’s roar rang out.
They had heard it many times, and it was no different from the cries of other monsters, but the sound came through distinctly.
The telescope turned toward the source of the sound.
Down below the mountain, a monster was raising its head.
A massive body, a powerful shell, a heavy jaw.
A defensive monster had burst out of the ground.
The place it had emerged from was where Hannah had made a hole in the shield.
The hydrogen bomb was buried there.
A metallic gleam flashed inside the monster’s mouth as it rose from the ground.
What it held in its jaws was a cone-shaped lump of metal.
There was no need to confirm it through the telescope. It was the hydrogen nuclear warhead Hyun had buried.
Gulp.
The monster swallowed the nuclear warhead.
“No!”
Catherine tried to throw herself over the railing.
Unlike usual, she was agitated.
David seized her by the shoulder.
“We have to get it out! They said defensive monsters survived nuclear explosions. If the bomb is inside the monster’s stomach…”
Even as she shouted, David did not let go of her shoulder.
“That’s a hydrogen bomb. Nothing can stop that.”
He did not know monsters as well as Catherine or Captain Han, but he knew the power of weapons made on Earth.
As far as he knew, unless it was the one called the Demon King, nothing could withstand a hydrogen bomb.
At David’s words, Catherine came to her senses.
“You’re right. It’s already too late. Let’s hurry. It’s time.”
With those words, she ran down the broken stairs, and David followed behind, shaking his head.
Past the first floor, into the basement.
Only the technician remained in front of the shelf, waiting for the two of them.
“Hurry! It’s time for it to detonate!”
The detonation time Hannah had calculated.
Perhaps because the Prophet had gotten it right, it was truly cutting it close.
Together with the technician, the two stood before the shelf, and the technician operated it.
It was a simple task of activating the magic circle Soph had set in advance.
Perhaps because he knew there was no time, the technician was sweating like rain.
“It’s done!”
Woooong.
A portal formed in front of the shelf, and the technician leapt into it first.
Next was David. Before entering, Catherine turned back one last time.
At that moment.
Boom.
She felt an impact as if the world had flipped over.
She threw herself into the portal.
The next instant, the portal was forcibly closed.
As David had said, the defensive monster’s body could not withstand the hydrogen bomb.
That monster had been made to prepare for nuclear bombs, but before a hydrogen bomb, it was useless.
The defensive monster evaporated in an instant, and the explosion erased the colors of the world.
The sky tore open, and the dried lake heaved like a sheet of paper.
Half the lake exploded outward in an instant, and a waterfall of dust surged up.
Even the magic tower, far away, was caught in the explosion.
All surface structures were ripped away and scattered into the sandstorm, and even the spatial transfer device underground was struck by the shock and stopped.
Fortunately, the underground facilities seemed intact, but whether they could be operated again was unknown.
The swarm of monsters that had gathered around the Sanctuary evaporated on the spot or was torn apart beyond recognition.
Several times more monsters had gathered than when the last bomb had gone off, but all that changed was the number that died.
The control entities and defensive monsters that had endured the atomic bomb could not endure this time.
Monsters melted, tore apart, and burst open.
There were monsters that survived this time as well.
The monsters that had been contaminated by nuclear explosions. Those monsters endured even the hydrogen bomb and continued to transform into something even stranger.
They changed so much that their former appearances could no longer be remembered, and they devoured radioactive corpses as they grew larger.
Kwaaang! Kurururung!
The impact overturned the entire mountain.
The walls and floor of the passage rippled like waves.
With tremendous noise, I sensed the shield surrounding the mountain undulating.
We pressed ourselves against the wall and waited for the shaking to subside.
“As expected, the shield held.”
At my words, Hannah nodded.
If the shield had not held, it could not possibly have ended with only this much shock.
While everyone waited for the impact to pass, Hannah placed her hand on the magic circle drawn on the wall.
Energy flowed from her body and seeped into the magic circle on the wall.
Hannah’s eyes narrowed.
“The magic circles that make up the seal have loosened. The seal itself hasn’t weakened, but the gaps have grown larger.”
I had been relieved that the shield was safe, but it wasn’t entirely unharmed.
Then again, a hydrogen bomb had gone off right in front of it. There was no way it would be fine.
“Then what happens?”
At Margretta’s question, Hannah answered.
“It has become easier for the Demon King to extend his power outward. Controlling monsters and spreading contaminated energy should have become easier too.”
In other words, it had become harder to reach the place where the Demon King was, and it also meant we had less time.
But it was not something to worry more about.
It had only gotten a little faster. It was something we had expected.
The members seemed to think the same, but their expressions were bad for a different reason.
“Is it because the ground shook? I don’t feel so good.”
Hearing the members’ expressions and Tom’s words, I immediately spread out my senses.
The air was as heavy as lead. Damp air clung to my body.
Contaminated energy was blanketing the passage.
[Terrible. To think so much contaminated energy has pooled here. I’ll have to strengthen the shields.]
Soph strengthened the shields he had placed on the members once more.
This time, into a version specialized for blocking contaminated energy.
Only then did the members’ expressions relax.
Everyone rose and began walking down the passage again.
The passage leading underground was full of scars.
They were wounds left long ago by the Demon King and the monsters, back when they had invaded the Sanctuary.
Between the old, deep scars were shallow scratches that looked as if they had just been scraped in.
When I brushed over a scratch, powder came off.
Damp powder. Powder that was not old.
“There are things roaming around in here.”
Sergeant Woo, who had been examining the opposite wall, reached the same conclusion as I had.
The Sanctuary where the Demon King was sealed was not an empty ruin.
“Do you happen to know what happened?”
At my question, Hannah shook her head.
Of course she would not know.
Hannah was Earth’s Prophet. There was no reason she would know what was happening right now in the Sanctuary of this planet.
As I scratched my head, thinking I had asked a pointless question, Soph sighed.
[This is truly frustrating. I don’t know why I can’t remember coming here. I thought once I entered this place, the memories would return, but there’s no news at all.]
Soph’s memories were a safe that opened only when needed.
The reason they were not opening now was because there was no fitting key.
[You’ll remember when the time comes. The fact that you don’t remember may also mean it’s safe for now.]
Most of the times Soph recovered his memories were when major incidents occurred.
Like the other ruins of this planet, the passage toward the Sanctuary was extremely long and deep.
We walked down the broken, scarred passage and continued descending.
After going down for quite some time, a stone chamber connected to several passages appeared.
Was it because this had originally been a religious facility?
For a terraforming ruin, the Sanctuary did not smell of metal.
After checking the passages with my senses, I told the members.
“The passage straight ahead leads underground. The passages to the left and right are connected to empty stone chambers that appear to be lodgings.”
Anyone else would have had to check every passage, but I did not need to.
It was thanks to my senses.
My super senses were a great help at other times too, but in ruins like this, they shone especially brightly.
“Then we’ll keep going.”
At Margretta’s words, Tom looked at the other passages with a trace of regret.
“What a shame. We came all the way to the Sanctuary ruins, but we can’t even explore.”
Hannah consoled the regretful Tom.
“Don’t worry. We can search it after we defeat the Demon King.”
At her words, Tom’s eyes widened.
“Is it okay for a guardian to say something like that inside a Sanctuary?”
“It isn’t my Sanctuary. So what?”
We were having that conversation as we entered the front passage.
Suddenly, an enemy burst out from another passage.
Kikikikik!
“Danger!”
Sergeant Woo, who spotted it first, shouted to everyone, and I instinctively rushed out and struck the enemy with my spear.
Puak!
Torn bandages and hardened skin burst apart before my eyes.
The enemy shattered to pieces under my spear.
“Huh? It’s a mummy.”
Tom said that after seeing the monster I had destroyed.
Just as he said, what had burst out of the passage was a mummy.
That was truly fortunate.
I had been shocked by how an enemy had sprung out without registering in my senses.
If it was a mummy, a dead corpse, then that made sense.
Until a mummy moved by dark energy, it was no different from an ordinary object.
When it was still, it did not register in my senses either.
If I checked every shape one by one when spreading out my senses, I might be able to notice them, but doing so was difficult.
“It looks like the corpses in the lodgings became mummies. Since they might get behind us, let’s deal with all of them before moving on.”
At Margretta’s words, everyone nodded, and we changed direction.
When we headed toward the passage connected to the lodgings, there were more mummies there.
We continued forward while taking down mummies.
The mummies inside the Sanctuary were closer to dried-out corpses.
Dry corpses, different from the hardened bodies outside the Sanctuary, inside the lake.
There were mummies with sagging bandages that seemed to have been tied before death, and there were mummies with severed limbs.
One, three, five.
Groups of mummies greeted us.
As we fought the mummies, the members frowned.
“They’re trickier than I expected. They’re not using any particularly impressive abilities, but they’re hard to kill.”
At Margretta’s words, everyone nodded.
“If Captain Hyun hadn’t been here, someone would have been injured.”
Sergeant Woo said so as well, and Hannah went one step further.
“They’re better at fighting than their abilities suggest. They seem good at making strategies too. More than anything, they’re predicting our actions.”
“You mean they fight well enough to predict our actions?”
At Tom’s question, Hannah shook her head.
“No. I mean it literally. The mummies knew how we would act.”
As everyone wore puzzled expressions, the sound of clapping came from the lodging beside the passage.
A person—no, a mummy—walked out into the passage while clapping.
The clapping mummy was dressed like a mage.
Looking at us, the mummy opened its mouth.
No words came from that mouth, but a voice rang inside my head.
[I have been waiting. Guardian of another star, Mage of Prophecy. And it has been a long time, Archmage Soph.]
Then came Soph’s startled voice.
[It can’t be… Lord of Prophecy?]
Fwaaaak!
The moment Soph spoke, the world turned white.
I had entered Soph’s memories.
Lord of Prophecy (1)