-Black Pit
“Everyone, be careful!”
Heimdall quickly turned back and shouted.
“What is it?”
“What’s wrong? Is there a black magician?”
“Could it be some strange creature…?”
Thor, Yantu, and I, who had been following right behind him, each threw out questions.
“No, it’s not that. It’s a cliff. Come look. It’s enormous. What kind of building did they make like this?”
Heimdall gave a brief explanation, then shook his head as if he couldn’t understand it.
We hurried over behind Heimdall and looked beyond the corner.
An unexpected sight unfolded where we had thought the corridor—where the inside of the building—would continue.
The narrow corridor did continue beyond the corner that bent at a right angle.
But the wall did not continue. On one side, there was a wall as expected, but the other side was simply a cliff.
There wasn’t even a railing, let alone a wall.
The dead-end wall we had seen while walking down the narrow corridor in front of the machine room had been torn away, leaving only part of it behind.
“What is this?”
“Looks like it was ripped out.”
“Did something happen here?”
Everyone was dumbfounded by the absurd, unexpected sight.
There was a path, but right beside it was a sheer drop a thousand fathoms deep.
The corridor had already been narrow, but now that part of it seemed to have been torn away, it had become even narrower.
“What should we do? Should we keep going?”
Heimdall asked, looking at me.
“We have to. There’s nothing but the machine room behind us. If we want to keep moving, we have no choice but to pass through here.”
“Understood. Then I’ll set out.”
Heimdall took the lead, and I followed behind him.
As I moved forward carefully and looked down to the side, I couldn’t even guess how far the cliff extended.
It was a dizzying drop. No end was in sight.
The cramped corridor continued for several dozen meters. We would have to pass through it to reach anywhere.
When I lifted my head and looked across, the opposite side also stood crookedly, as though one side of the building had been sliced away.
When I looked up, I could see blue sky through the tangled, piled-up buildings.
But below was a pitch-black hole. All that lay beneath us was a pit that dropped endlessly into nothing.
A dense ashen aura was flowing out from down there.
‘Was it always like this? But it looks as if it was violently torn open.’
It was something we hadn’t noticed from the outside. It even seemed like a pit that had formed recently.
Even if the Magic Tower had been built in an absurd shape to begin with, this was too incomprehensible to accept as its original form.
No matter how I looked at it, the narrow corridor we were walking along seemed to have originally been an ordinary corridor inside the building. The place where one wall should have been had vanished as if it had been cut clean away.
Even a cold wind blew through.
It felt as if we had suddenly been thrown from the interior of the building to the outside.
“Wow! What is this pit? Isn’t that down there a passage to the Demon Realm?”
Thor said, extending his hammer toward the cliff.
In fact, an ashen aura so dense it would not be an exaggeration to call it a passage to the Demon Realm was flowing out.
Far below, beyond even the ash-gray, a pitch-black energy seemed to be surging.
I also extended detection magic toward the pit.
That was when I sensed something new.
A dark aura was rising upward from below.
Perhaps this pit had not been dug downward from above or collapsed inward as one would normally think, but had instead surged up from below.
“Doesn’t it look like this pit was pierced upward from below?”
I asked Thor.
“What? From below to above? Is that so?”
After hearing my words, Thor stretched out his hammer and examined the drop below once more. Then his eyes widened as he answered.
“I think you’re right. Did something really happen here? Then did this hole form when something shot up from down there?”
“If so, where did the building, the ground, or the space that was originally here disappear to?”
I muttered the natural question that followed and looked up above the pit. I extended my detection.
Parts of the various buildings stacked in seemingly unstable layers had been cut away here and there. In some places, the interiors had been exposed to the outside, gaping open.
Looking closely, I could sense the movements of people in the buildings on the middle levels. There were even people standing at the edge of the cliff, looking down.
Of course, they weren’t looking at us. They wouldn’t be able to see us.
They were merely looking down into the black pit, just as we were. That alone was enough to tell that this pit had not been here for long.
“For now, let’s hurry across to the other side of the corridor. It’s hard to do anything on this cliffside corridor, and it’s inconvenient to move.”
I urged the group on.
The magicians, who had each been extending their detection and examining the lower area and the opposite side, quickened their steps at my words.
Even so, none of them were moving very fast.
In a narrow place where a single misstep seemed enough to send them falling down the cliff, humans were bound to shrink back.
But Yantu was the exception.
Yantu, being a dwarf, was accustomed to rough terrain and showed no fear at all.
His squat build also made him look far more stable than the humans.
“Magicians, you’re all having a hard time. Hahaha.”
Yantu even had the leisure to tease us.
So I gave him a mission.
“Yantu, if you have that much room to spare, take a good look at the pit. We have to walk in single file anyway, so you can’t go ahead on your own.”
“Okay. Got it.”
And so, except for Yantu, the rest of us focused solely on walking down the corridor.
Rather than investigating while we walked, it seemed better to get out of this precarious place as quickly as possible and move somewhere more stable.
At last, Heimdall, who was at the very front, reached the end of the corridor.
Heimdall craned his neck and scouted beyond the corner.
Soon, he turned back and nodded. It seemed there was no one there.
After watching Heimdall disappear around the corner, I signaled to those behind me and quickly approached the end of the corridor.
When I turned the corner, a fairly spacious hall with an elevator and stairs came into view. As expected, there was no one there, and it was quiet.
After briefly sweeping my gaze over the place, I went back to the corner to check whether the magicians following behind were coming along safely. Then Yantu, who had been walking around the middle of the line while examining the pit below, suddenly shouted.
“Huh? Something’s coming! Something’s coming up! Hurry and get away!”
At those words, the magicians all hastened their steps at once.
Yantu shouted while practically shoving the magicians in front of him.
“Faster! Hurry up and get away from this place with the wall!”
When Yantu urged them on again, the magicians following behind him began moving by activating kinetic magic.
Although we were cloaked in concealment magic and barriers, we were trying to use as little magic as possible inside the Magic Tower.
There was no need to worry about the mana we inherently held, since it wouldn’t leak outside the barriers, but if we used magic in earnest, mana would extend outward, creating the risk that our presence might be discovered.
But at the moment, no black magicians were visible nearby.
Also, judging from Yantu’s urgent shouting, it meant something even more dangerous than being discovered might happen.
Just in case, I layered another barrier around the magicians. Then I turned my gaze down toward the pit.
I did not use detection magic. I didn’t know what was coming up, but it seemed likely to be a living being with mana. I didn’t want to give it any chance to notice us.
Instead, I activated my golden sight and looked down below the cliff.
“Hurry, get inside!”
I immediately shouted to the magicians.
After looking below, I quickly understood why Yantu had shouted so urgently.
Hundreds of living creatures were climbing up the wall of the pit at tremendous speed.
They were coming up so fast they seemed to be sweeping over the wall. They looked like a swarm of cockroaches. But they were far larger than that.
“Hurry inside!”
“We’re in!”
“What the hell are they?”
Once everyone had taken refuge in the elevator hall, we were soon able to confirm the identity of the creatures climbing up the wall.
Goat-men?
They had two large horns on their heads and hoof-like things on both hands. But aside from that, they were a humanoid race.
They were leaping upward without hesitation, as if they were mountain goats running along a cliff as though it were nothing.
“They’re goat demons, aren’t they?”
Only after hearing Thor’s words did I learn their exact racial name.
Demons, yes. They were not goat-men, but goat demons. They were climbing up to this place from the Demon Realm itself.
This pitch-black pit truly was a passage leading to the Demon Realm.
“Goat demons?”
“They’ve appeared in Sweden before. They’re incredibly fast and powerful.”
The goat demons passed the floor we were on and continued climbing upward. As the magicians watched the black mass of them crawling up, they exchanged quiet words.
“So they opened this hole to let those things come up?”
“But for that many of them to swarm in… it’s overwhelming.”
“What exactly is that bastard Samir planning to do with them?”
“I wonder what kind of contract he made with the Demon Realm to summon so many demons.”
“This is serious. If those demons are released outside…”
Even though we were staring openly and even talking among ourselves, fortunately, the goat demons did not discover us.
The three layers of barriers were working properly.
However, a few among the goat demons did show interest in our direction. They sniffed, rolled their eyes, and looked around.
Whenever that happened, the magicians all shut their mouths and held their breath at once.
In the end, even those that had been sniffing climbed back up the wall.
“Whew… They’re all up now. To think we’d run into them here.”
Yantu said with a sigh.
It seemed they were a race familiar even to dwarves.
The movement that had flowed upward like a current running in reverse finally stopped. All the goat demons had passed by.
Only then did we press close to the cliffside and look up.
The goat demons that had reached the middle levels of the Magic Tower were disappearing into the interior of the building.
‘Around there, is that where the balcony Samir kept appearing on was when we looked from outside? That must be the center of the Magic Tower.’
Also, that was the place where people had been looking down the cliff just a moment ago. In other words, those people had apparently been waiting for the goat demons.
They were now guiding the goat demons somewhere.
I carefully extended my detection in that direction.
I could strongly feel an ashen aura. That was only natural, since black magicians and demons had gathered in one place.
In the midst of it, I could clearly see the pattern of an infinite pentagon floating.
Samir was there.