He had suffered mental contamination from the effects of the magic circle, and the shield had vanished as well, but that had not been the magic circle’s main effect.
Ten thousand years ago, the original purpose of the magic circle laid here had been to absorb energy and keep the Prophecy Lord alive after he lost the black stone.
Now that the magic circle was gone, there was no way the monster would remain unharmed.
Crack, crack.
The pieces of the monster that had jutted out from the walls began to shatter and break apart.
[Ah, impossible. This isn’t the future I saw!]
The fragments screamed as they crumbled.
Tentacles broke apart, and pieces of limbs collapsed.
But even then, the creature did not simply let it end.
[You must go no farther. You must not stand before the Demon King!]
A magic circle formed before the collapsing fragments.
From the floor where the magic circle had vanished, tentacles made of stone burst forth.
Boom! Crack!
Magic came flying, and tentacles shot out, but they were spells and stone tentacles that had already lost their power.
Neither the tentacles nor the magic could pierce the double-layered shield made by Soph and Hanna.
The squad members inside the shield attacked the monster with all their might.
In the meantime, I slipped out of the shield and stood before the wall.
Not the wall where the fragments were collapsing, but an ordinary wall.
I aimed my spear at one spot on it.
Even when I checked it with my supersense, this place was no different from anywhere else.
But I knew this was the monster’s core.
The fact that I had made a backdoor in the magic circle meant I knew where the energy gathered by the circle was headed.
And the place that energy flowed to was right here.
I thrust the spear filled with energy with all my strength.
Puuuuuk!
Like cutting through tofu, the spear drove into the wall.
The instant the spearhead and even the black stones were buried inside the wall, a scream rang through the entire hall.
Kiiiiiik!
It was not a human voice, but the ear-splitting shriek of a monster.
Along with that shriek, all the fragments collapsed.
Rumble.
After the fragments fell, the magic stopped as well, and no more tentacles emerged.
The hall fell silent.
At last, the monster was dead.
Even after the monster died, the party remained tense for a long while.
Everyone kept looking around from inside the shield.
“It’s over. The Prophecy Lord is dead.”
Only after I declared the end of the battle did the others let out a sigh.
“This one was really hard. Mental contamination is seriously nasty. I really thought people were actually blaming me.”
Tom sank down onto the floor and began grumbling.
At least Tom could still complain, but Margretha and Sergeant Wu looked as though even that was difficult.
The two of them only shook their heads with dark expressions.
Seeing that, I said to the others,
“Let’s rest for a bit.”
At my words, the others also sat down on the floor.
Of course the three who had suffered mental contamination were exhausted, but Hanna was no less worn out.
Her prophecies had not worked, and the shield had disappeared midway, so the stress must have been tremendous.
As I watched Hanna sit there stroking her ring, I heard Soph speak.
[Would you tell me what happened?]
Come to think of it, Soph did not know the full situation either.
Instead of seeing what I had seen, Soph had merely recovered his memories of the past.
He had only placed his hand on the ground at Shamara’s words; he did not know that there was a magic circle, nor that I had left a backdoor in it.
[What happened was…]
I told Soph everything.
That I had discovered the magic circle in what I had thought were his memories of the past and left a backdoor, and that I had used that backdoor to bring down the Prophecy Lord.
[…I’m not certain, but I think my mind itself moved into the past. I’m weak on theory, so I don’t know how only my mind managed to spatially move into the past.]
After hearing my explanation, Soph let out a sigh.
[Truly absurd. To think spatial movement could be used to travel through time… This is not something one can find a method for simply by being well-versed in theory.]
That did seem to be the case.
I had never heard Soph say that a mage had succeeded in time travel before.
[Good heavens, time and space are the same thing. We never even considered that time travel might be possible through spatial movement.]
Well, the Magic Kingdom was a place where science had failed to develop because of magic.
Magic, in the end, was made through a mage’s imagination.
Magic that could not be imagined could not be created.
[This is the victory of physics. Of science.]
I said it proudly.
After all, it was magic I never would have understood if not for Earth’s science.
Soph snorted.
[It is magic either way. We were merely lacking a bit in imagination. Besides, your time travel has nothing to do with science, does it not? It seems to be because of that sense of yours.]
As expected, the archmage did not let it slide.
Since he was not wrong, I had no choice but to accept it.
[That’s true. And maybe because it was done through my sense, I can’t use that magic now. I don’t know if it only activates under special circumstances, or if it requires some proper theory.]
I had hoped for a proper answer from Soph, but this time too, all I got was a blunt reply.
[It seems you will have to conduct that theoretical research yourself. I still cannot even begin to guess how such magic is possible.]
No, if even an archmage didn’t know, who was supposed to?
Was I really going to have to research it myself?
[Your time-travel magic is an incredible achievement and a powerful weapon. But if you cannot use it as you please, it is nothing more than a chicken rib.]
I knew that well too.
This time, it had been a gift, but there was no guarantee it would be the same next time.
In the end, I had to find a way.
Even as Soph and I discussed time travel, we deliberately avoided bringing up one particular issue.
Right now, I did not know whether I had changed the past, or whether the past I had changed had always been the original past.
If I had changed the past, I did not know what happened to the original past, nor did I know what would happen if the past was changed incorrectly.
There were surely many other problems as well, but we decided to ignore all of them.
This was not the time to worry about such things.
If we could not stop the Demon King anyway, this planet and humanity were finished.
The side effects of time travel were something to think about after all the fighting was over.
A while later, the party recovered its strength, and we set out again.
The path leading beneath the sanctuary was behind the shattered fragments.
We passed through the smashed pieces and entered the passage once more.
As we headed downward, the passage grew wider and wider.
The walls, which had been made of stone, gradually changed into an unknown metal.
Then a new underground plaza appeared.
Its atmosphere was entirely different from the hall we had seen above.
“This place is really huge.”
Tom looked around the plaza in surprise.
As he said, the plaza was large enough to combine several soccer fields.
It was not as large as the underground city on the ice planet, but considering where this underground plaza was located, its size was astounding.
Still, the size of the plaza did not seem strange.
“This feels less like a sanctuary and more like a giant factory.”
As Margretha said, the plaza was packed with all sorts of equipment.
They were not buildings where people lived, but complex, enormous facilities made for some other purpose.
Massive metal pipes and rotating devices, buildings wrapped in magic circles, and flues that looked like chimneys.
Just as she said, this place was like some kind of factory.
[It is part of the terraforming facility. A place that draws out the dark energy beneath the planet and creates terraforming magic.]
Soph, who had been quiet until now, spoke again.
I relayed his explanation to the squad members.
After hearing me, Sergeant Wu pointed to one side of the terraforming facility.
“Then this whole place is a factory that’s been strangely altered.”
As he said, the factory had been altered in a bizarre way.
The magic circles drawn on the building walls had changed, and the pipes and chimneys were exuding a dreadful aura.
All of those auras were contaminated dark energy.
Energy the Demon King had transformed.
The energy contaminating the sanctuary and this planet was being created here.
“Destroying this won’t make the contamination disappear, will it?”
At Tom’s question, Hanna and I shook our heads.
It was not something that could be destroyed so easily, and destroying only this place would not eliminate the contamination.
The root of it all was the Demon King, who was producing contaminated energy inside the seal.
We had to defeat the Demon King.
“Then there’s no need to clear out all of them.”
Mummies—or rather, dried corpses—were pouring out from the place Sergeant Wu pointed to.
Corpses wearing clothes reduced to rags, or wearing nothing at all, came running toward us.
[They were the people who managed the terraforming facility. They too were believers who followed the Prophet.]
The believers charging at us were nothing like Soph’s explanation.
They were undead who thought of nothing but killing us.
Watching the corpses run toward us, I answered Sergeant Wu’s words.
“Yes. Breaking through is enough.”
At first, we had cleared everything out for fear of being attacked from behind, but we did not have enough time to keep doing that.
Because of the Prophecy Lord, who had stood in our way to prevent us from reaching the Demon King, we had to go as quickly as possible.
Crack!
We dealt with the charging mummies as we advanced.
There were many of them, but mummies of that level could not stop us.
After passing through the hall like that, we continued descending.
Time passed after that.
One day went by, then two.
During that time, we encountered halls of different forms and faced different mummies and monsters.
After that long journey, we finally reached our destination.
Even the passage here had a different atmosphere.
A corridor made of white stone, with beautiful paintings.
It truly felt like a sanctuary.
Rooms lined the sides of the passage.
Rooms where people had once lived.
As we passed by the empty rooms, Hanna stopped.
The place where she stopped was in front of a room that looked the same as the others.
There seemed to be no difference, but Hanna entered that room.
[Let us go in.]
When Hanna entered, Soph also told us to go inside.
Though puzzled, my companions and I stepped into the room as well.
Even after entering, it was no different from how it had looked from outside.
An empty room. The only things left were a metal chair and a single table.
Lastly, a metal sphere rolling around on the table.
The only thing different from the other rooms was that metal sphere.
Looking at the metal sphere, Tom said,
“It looks like one of those crystal balls fortune-tellers use.”
Now that he said that, it did seem similar in size to the crystal balls I had seen in movies.
While all of us stared at the sphere, Hanna placed her hand above it.
Wooooong.
At that moment, the ring on Hanna’s hand began to glow, and at the same time, a hologram rose above the metal sphere.
A three-dimensional image floated before us.
In that image, people could be seen faintly.
“Is it like a projector?”
“It seems to have stored a video.”
When an ordinary image appeared, we relaxed and watched the three-dimensional footage.
The image gradually grew clearer.
The people’s appearances became distinct.
There were five people in the image.
“Huh? Isn’t that woman a spirit?”
Tom asked after seeing the only woman among them.
As he said, the woman in the image looked very much like a spirit.
The others thought she was a spirit, but Soph and I knew she was not.
I told them,
“She is not a spirit. She is Shamara, the former Prophet.”
The people shown in the image were Shamara and her companions.
Zafmel and Esh.
Gibor, the martial artist waving one arm.
And lastly, a handsome man stood beside Shamara.
It was Soph.
This image was the final record left by Soph’s party before they fought the Demon King.
In the image, they were smiling brightly.
Seal (1)