Cadel tensed, neither pleased nor relieved to see the familiar walls surrounding him.
「Congratulations. You have cleared the ‘Trial of Trust’!」
He had cleared the trial, but he didn’t know what the criteria were for passing.
They had succeeded in subduing Lumen and Lydon, but by then they hadn’t concluded whether they were real or not.
Nothing was resolved.
“……Commander. Check this out.”
Where Van pointed, Lumen and Lydon lay unconscious. Their flesh remained after the trial was over. Were the bodies real? As soon as Cadel thought that, their bodies began to disintegrate. One by one, their toes and fingertips disintegrated and scattered into the air.
“So……they were fakes.”
Cadel reflexively touched his chest and breathed a sigh of relief.. And then, just like that.
Rumble—
The temple walls collapsed. A shuddering vibration was felt, and a cloud of stone dust fell from the ceiling.
“Why is it collapsing everywhere I go!”
“Commander! Be careful!”
Van wrapped his arms around the terrified Cadel, shielding him from the falling debris. With nothing but walls around them, there was nowhere to hide, and all they could do was try to deflect the falling debris over their heads.
The ceiling and walls collapsed in an instant, leaving only the ground to support them.
Cadel pulled his head out of Van’s arms and looked around cautiously. Everything had collapsed, including the ceiling, so surely the outside must be visible. At least the sky should be visible, or at least the rock wall that had engulfed the temple.
But what Cadel saw before him was the interior of the same temple he’d seen earlier.
Everything was the same, except for the size of the room. Cadel stuck his tongue out at the bare brickwork that surrounded him on all sides.
“What the hell? It’s not some kind of matryoshka……. Wait. Looking from here, doesn’t the view seem strangely floating?”
They were clearly stuck to the ground, but the height of the forward-facing view was different than usual. Fumbling to his feet, Cadel slowly made his way toward the hump in the ground.
“Uh…….”
Cadel soon realized that the ground he was standing on was up in the air. It was even quite high.
Van, who had followed him, also looked down, his expression vague. It looked like they could easily break a limb or two if they fell recklessly.
The two men exchanged looks of disbelief.
“What’s going on?”
“Is this a trial……?”
What kind of trial is this, a bungee jump to test my courage? As Cadel stood speechless in disbelief, he heard a high-pitched voice in the distance, as if waiting for him.
“You’ve been waiting a long time, haven’t you? I’m sorry, we’ve been having such a great time talking.”
“Stella……!”
“Wow, Cadel! It’s good to see you too!”
She hovered higher, above the ground where Cadel and Van were standing, looking down at them. Cadel looked up sharply at her timely appearance.
“Where on earth are we? And is the final trial going to be on this ground?”
“Nuh-uh. If I secretly tell you this and that, I’ll get scolded.”
“I’ll know all about it when the trial gets underway anyway, so why not just tell me ahead of time…….”
With that in mind, Cadel rushed to ask questions, but his urgent voice was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a heavy voice.
“Hold your tongue, Trial Challenger. All you are allowed to do here is ‘prove’.”
The mere sound of the man’s voice shifted the weight of the air around him. Cadel’s brow creased at the intensity of his words, like a stab in the flesh.
His gaze flicked over the shoulder of Van standing in front of him. What he saw there was.
‘……Hesonia.’
It was ‘Hesonia’, one of the Seven Knights, hovering to Stella’s left, at the same altitude as her. And it was surprisingly far away for a clear voice to reach this far.
But his overwhelming presence, his flowing dark green hair, his expressive eyes, and the powerful aura that coursed through his entire body were unmistakable.
“This woman and that man, they must be legendary…….”
Van’s voice trembled slightly. He, too, seemed to sense Hesonia’s unusual aura and tensed up.
The Seven Knights and their guardian deity were an integral part of this world.
They took the names of the knight ‘Hesonia’ and the goddess ‘Stella’, and even their appearance was similar to the records. They exuded an aura that made it impossible to think of them as not the same person, and their role was to impose trials. Even Van, who had been skeptical at first, now thought that they might actually be the characters of legend.
And Cadel sensed something bad about the appearance of ‘Hesonia’, who had not been seen before.
‘Stella kept mentioning Hesonia, so I assumed he was in the same space, but if he’s in the temple, I thought his role would be to give Lumen and Lydon their trials…….’
Hesonia appeared, but Lumen and Lydon were nowhere to be seen. Was he wrong? Or had something happened to them?
Cadel chewed on his lip in growing anxiety, and Hesonia slowly extended his arm. He pointed to a spot on the floor next to where Cadel stood, and in front of him.
Stella, who had been watching the action, said with a pout.
“Are you going to start already, Hesonia? I’d love to talk to my challengers a little more!”
“I apologize, Stella. This ‘descendant’ is unusual, and if I don’t hurry up with the trial, I’m afraid it will be disrupted. Will you forgive me?”
“Hmm, well, that’s just the way it is. I forgive you!”
At the end of the gentle conversation, unlike his previous heavy tone, Hesonia clasped his outstretched hand in front of him. Then, out of nothingness, a blurry puff of smoke rose, growing thicker and thicker as it blew across the area until it finally took a clear shape.
And finally.
“……Huh? That!”
“Why are they here…….”
A ground identical to the one they stood on was created, and Lumen and Lydon appeared. The two men stood there, looking around in confusion.
“Lumen! Lydon! Are you guys okay?”
Two sets of eyes moved simultaneously at Cadel’s call. Cadel’s complexion darkened rapidly as he quickly assessed their condition.
From the looks of it, they were pretty tired. Their armor and clothing were torn and tattered, and their hair was disheveled from who knew where they had been rolling around. Their skin was also marked with raw marks, with Lydon, in particular, showing clear signs of rubbing blood around his nose and mouth.
‘Don’t tell me he has run out of mana.’
As a fellow magician, Cadel knew the pain of mana being drained to the bone. One of the symptoms was nosebleeds and blood clots. If Lydon was running out of mana, he had to take a break right away.
“Lydon’s in bad shape, but he’s not going to die anytime soon. What about you, Leader? Are you okay?”
“Cadel! We just had a great fight! Ah, you don’t remember because it was fake?”
As soon as Lumen and Lydon spotted Cadel, they moved toward him. The ground they stood on was at the same elevation, but the distance between them was significant enough that they couldn’t cross to the other side in the usual way.
But the winged Lydon was the exception. Without hesitation, he stretched his feet into the air over the outer edge.
Rattling!
But before he could power his wings, dozens of strands of chains fell in his path. Lydon’s brow crinkled as he reflexively stepped back, and Lumen’s gaze turned to the ceiling as they stood outside together.
A small black sphere hovered and pointed exactly at the center of the ground. Chains stretched out from within it, filling the left and right sides of the floor, forming a massive triangle.
And so was Cadel’s side. Cadel’s mouth fell open, looking up at the chains falling at an alarming rate and the sphere, the starting point.
‘This. This shape is…….’
Cadel was convinced when he noticed a long bar that appeared across both teams’ spheres. A double pan balance scale. Now they were on top of a giant scale that Stella and Hesonia had created.
Once the chains were evenly anchored to the ground, the sphere stopped pulling at them. A brief silence filled the space where the loud friction had ceased, and soon Hesonia’s hard voice rang out clearly.
“Before we begin the final trial, I’ll show you the results of the second trial. Confirm your trust in each other.”
The result of the second trial.
“The second ordeal was far from over—”
Cadel was about to question Hesonia’s statement when he suddenly felt an excruciating chill run through his body. Nothing, nothing was happening, just intermittent pains as his skin heated up and cooled down.
Cadel staggered and clutched at his chest as a strange, unrelenting pain swept through him.
“What the……!”
It felt like he was being beaten nonstop by an invisible man. All he could do was cry out in pain in an unintelligible language, and while Cadel stood there in agony and wonder.
Van, kneeling on the floor, was in the midst of a hellish agony.
“Cough……! Cough…….”
The arms that supported his upper body shook and twitched. His guts felt like they were being ripped out, and regurgitated blood soaked the floor. A cold sweat and bloodshot eyes attested to the intensity of the pain he was feeling.
Cadel, belatedly realizing his condition, took a shaky step.
“Va, Van…… Why you…….”
No one attacked them, they were just standing there.
Cadel knelt down in front of the writhing, agonized figure. Van, who was on the ground, was alternately spitting up choked breath and blood. His stomach looked worse than his body. Helplessly, Cadel ran a hand up his drenched back. Even the lightest touch sent a violent shiver down Van’s spine.
And as Stella watched them, the corners of her mouth and eyebrows drew together in regret.
“I told you, Cadel. There are no fakes there. The comrades you fought with and the scars you carved on each other. An illusion that is all real.”
Cadel lifted his head with difficulty and looked at Stella, who stretched out her arms toward him. As if she wanted to hug poor Cadel, she slowly drew him in and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.
The sadness that was so clearly visible was swallowed up by the soft smile that followed. Stella’s lips curled into a thin arc.
“But hang in there, I want you to see the results of this ‘trust’.”
