From the moment Ex declared that he would enter the political arena, he had expected all manner of fraud and scheming to run rampant.
The nobles of this world were the sort of people who would be nothing but corpses if you took their power away, after all.
Even so, wasn't this happening far too soon?
Ex was dumbfounded by how calmly they had done something that, if anything went wrong, could be treated as an attempt to assassinate an imperial family member.
Wasn't there a single sane person in power anywhere in this world?!
And who had made them that way?
Yes. This, too, was Ex's own karma coming back to him.
Having suddenly acquired ten students to shepherd around, Ex advanced without hesitation toward the place where the screams had come from.
They overwhelmed the training monsters they encountered along the way with sheer numbers, too, defeating them in no time at all.
It didn't take long to reach the place where they had heard the screams.
The moment they arrived, a raw, metallic smell reached them, making Ex's group shudder.
Circe was the one who knew best what that smell meant.
"I smell blood."
They hurried forward and located the source of the smell.
Four students lay unconscious on the floor there.
That was… Gausolt, the son of a count, wasn't it?
Ex remembered him because he was one of the few high-ranking nobles in Class F.
"Tene, please treat them."
Tene nodded without a word and immediately began helping to treat the students.
Ex had the others keep watch around them, then surveyed the area with Circe.
It didn't take them long to notice what was strange about this place.
"Those wounds on the students were made by blades."
"It looks as though they were attacked without even getting a chance to resist."
One glance was enough to tell that this was the work of a human. An assassin, at that.
Nobles might live under constant threat of assassination, but Ex hadn't expected anyone to try something like this at the academy, where security had been tightened.
Leaving aside why they had done it, there was one thing he couldn't explain. If this was an assassination attempt, why was Gausolt still alive?
…Bait?
Who were they using him as bait to draw in?
There was no one that could mean except Ex.
One thing was certain: they had to get out of here quickly.
"Those of you in the martial arts track, carry the fallen students on your backs. Then we'll leave immediately. For now, everyone follow me…."
"Ex, duck!"
Along with Circe's warning, something shot toward Ex's head.
The instant he heard the warning, Ex realized he was being ambushed. He immediately ducked his head and avoided the hidden weapon.
Gausolt's wounds were stab wounds made by a blade. The hidden weapon should therefore be a blade as well.
But that was a mistake.
The object that had flown at him began to whine. It wasn't a hidden weapon with a blade or anything of the sort.
It was some kind of magic device, giving off a powerful mana reaction.
"Ex!"
"Ex! Get away!"
Circe and Lola, reacting quickly to the mana, ran toward him. But the magic device activated before either of them could reach him.
Before Ex could make any hurried attempt to respond, light burst from the magic device and swallowed him.
* * *
The chain of events that had led to this was complicated.
It had begun when Ex falsely announced that he intended to claim the imperial throne in order to keep Leon at the academy.
All the nobles, whether they belonged to the imperial faction or the noble faction, had discussed Ex's declaration in depth.
Emperor Drakan's revival had brought stability back to the empire. Now the winds of a new civil war might be about to blow through it.
For the nobles of the imperial faction, this was a deeply unwelcome possibility.
They knew all too well how difficult the struggle for power had been when they had to suppress the noble faction that rose after Emperor Drakan lost his strength.
Now that the Emperor had awakened, they absolutely could not allow another conflict to break out.
The first subject the imperial faction discussed was this:
Could they assassinate Ex?
In practice, it was almost impossible.
Ex already held control over part of the Imperial Bodyguard, and he was under their protection.
Any half-baked assassination plot would clearly fail. The moment it was exposed, the family behind it would be finished that very day.
Many nobles in the imperial faction wondered why Darius had remained silent in response to Ex's declaration. The hard-liners, meanwhile, loudly insisted that they needed a countermeasure as soon as possible.
Ex had only just become an Imperial Prince. He had no power base of his own yet, so they had to crush him in these early stages. That was the thought they all shared.
Ex was only an adopted son, anyway. He wasn't a pureblood who had actually inherited the blood of the imperial family. He was nothing more than a mongrel of commoner birth.
Then, just in time, a good opportunity arrived to ensnare Ex in a plot.
They quickly made a plan and put it into action at once.
The plan was simple.
Killing Ex in a public place would be dangerous. If he disappeared instead, however, everyone's attention would turn to finding him. They would therefore forcibly teleport Ex away and assassinate him.
To carry out that plan, assassins concealed by invisibility magic went into action with the help of an academy professor connected to the imperial faction.
To make certain of carrying out their mission, the assassins ambushed the children of nobles from the noble faction when they encountered them in the labyrinth. They used those students as bait.
Ex took the bait, just as the assassins intended.
While the injured students were being treated, the assassins successfully threw a magic device that would transport Ex to a designated location and struck him with it.
The teleportation activated successfully.
Now all they had to do was leave the rest to the execution squad waiting at the destination. The three members of the assassination team could withdraw.
But there was something they hadn't anticipated.
The movements of the noble faction.
Prince Ex was their only opportunity. They had to seize it, no matter what.
Five years earlier, after Emperor Drakan lost consciousness, the noble faction had tried every means it could to take power. But it had failed.
Darius had stubbornly survived the noble faction's attacks, then turned the tables and attacked them in return.
That very day, the noble faction's standing had been utterly destroyed.
The imperial faction, which followed Darius, had secured its position completely. As a result, the noble faction had grown more powerless with each passing day.
Then a person named Ex had appeared.
Seeing him as their one and only opportunity, the noble faction decided to win Ex's favor. It prepared several ways of doing so.
Among those preparations was disabling the safety devices.
The safety devices were magic devices of the teleportation type, designed to move a person to a designated place in an emergency.
If they could disable them, they could carry out their plan.
It was a plan born of a shallow idea: put Prince Ex in danger, then rescue him from it.
The noble faction succeeded in interfering with the safety devices and disabling them. It had never imagined that doing so might cause a problem.
The imperial faction had to act faster than the noble faction.
The noble faction had to finish before the imperial faction made its move.
In this way, the imperial faction and the noble faction each carried out operations within the academy to serve its own purpose.
Each faction had forces hidden inside the academy, and those people had made it possible to prepare their plans.
By an unfortunate coincidence, the plans were put into action at the same time. Each plan ended up affecting the other.
A sharp crackle erupted.
"What…?"
The teleportation magic device thrown by the imperial faction's assassination team malfunctioned the moment it came into contact with the safety-device magic item that the noble faction had tampered with.
And interference from an unidentified being was added to that as well.
As a result, the two types of teleportation devices interfered with one another, tangling up the coordinates to which Ex was supposed to be transported.
And so, now, Ex had ended up in a labyrinth.
"…Where am I?"
In a real labyrinth, rather than some labyrinth made for training.
* * *
"Nothing ever goes right. Nothing."
At this point, perhaps Ex's life was simply riddled with malice.
Just when he thought his life in the empire had finally settled down, this happened.
Couldn't he be allowed to rest for a little while?
It wasn't as though he wasn't making an effort.
So where was he, really?
Ex got up and looked around.
There was nothing to see in the pitch-black darkness.
He could smell damp moss.
The hand he'd had on the floor still felt cold and damp.
He didn't know why his attackers had teleported him here.
But he couldn't simply stay where he was.
The Cat Eye spell had already ended, and Ex didn't know how to cast it himself.
He needed to be able to see something before he could decide what to do next….
Making a light in an unknown place was a dangerous thing to do, but he had no choice.
Ex created a sphere of light with magic.
Taking that risk and lighting the area let him see his surroundings.
…Brickwork?
He could see walls and a floor made from stone cut into rectangles.
This was an artificial structure, rather than a natural cave.
Fortunately, there was nothing dangerous within sight.
Ex quickly began checking his equipment.
His Mana Phone… wasn't working. He had brought the Dragon Sword, but of all things, he hadn't brought a teleportation scroll.
Who could possibly have expected to get caught up in something like this during an assessment? Even a god couldn't have anticipated it.
If Elysia had intervened, the system would have told him. But the system was silent. That meant this wasn't Elysia's intervention, either.
He would move for now.
Having more or less finished assessing the situation, Ex headed forward.
If this was a man-made structure rather than a natural cave, there had to be an entrance or an exit. In that case, he only needed to keep a hand on one wall and follow it.
Along with a cold sense of tension, a worry began creeping up on him: had the other students been caught in this, too? Remembering that Lola and Circe had run toward him at the last moment made that worry deepen.
But this wasn't the time to worry about that.
Something moved in the darkness beyond the reach of the light, making a clanking sound.
The instant Ex heard what sounded like pieces of metal striking one another, an attack came whistling at him. This time, it was an ambush filled with the intent to kill.
"What the…!"
He immediately ducked and rolled to the side, avoiding the attack.
It was moving far too fast for him to have any time to knock it aside.
After dodging that first attack, Ex looked at what had embedded itself in the stone floor and realized it was an arrow.
An arrow had lodged in the stone floor…. Was his attacker a person?
If it was a person, he could explain his circumstances.
Ex spoke before the next attack could come.
"Wait! I ended up here by accident! I didn't mean to trespass. Please stop attacking!"
The answer to his urgent explanation came immediately.
In the form of an arrow that came shrieking through the air.
"Wait…!"
Ex cast a shield spell to block the arrows and dodged again.
The force carried by those arrows was so great that the shield shattered after only two struck it.
Even one hit would have had enough power to leave him in pieces.
He hadn't wanted to say this…!
Ex resorted to a measure he found deeply unwelcome.
"I am Ex de Dritania, an Imperial Prince of the Dritania Empire! Attacking me could constitute an attempt to assassinate an imperial family member. Stop your attack while you still can!"
He used the authority of his position to threaten his attacker into stopping.
The claim might sound like someone impersonating a prince. Even so, no citizen of the empire could hear those words without reacting.
"…"
That was true of his opponent as well.
After a brief silence, his opponent answered.
An arrow came shrieking through the air again, this time carrying an unmistakable resolve to kill him.
"Damn it…!"
Ex cast another shield and dodged. This time, a single arrow destroyed the shield.
Its speed was extraordinary as well, and an arrow grazed Ex's arm.
That alone split open the flesh there as though it had been torn apart.
The attacker had been trying to kill him from the very beginning.
Was someone trying to kill him simply because he had trespassed?
Or was this an assassination attempt against an Imperial Prince who sought the throne?
If the mysterious teleportation had been the work of these people, that wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption.
As he thought that, however, something puzzling occurred to him.
Had those arrows flown at him simultaneously?
It felt as though several people had fired at once, rather than just one.
A stone structure built like brickwork.
The clanking of pieces of metal.
Coordinated arrow attacks that made him think of a military unit.
At that moment, one possibility came to mind. Ex threw the sphere of light far ahead of him, illuminating the darkness.
At last, the attackers hidden in the dark revealed themselves.
"…It's really them? This isn't really that place, is it?"
There were roughly ten attackers, a whole group of them.
Some wore the crude armor of common soldiers. Others wore proper suits of armor. That was why he had heard the pieces of metal clanking together.
And their identity was the greatest problem of all.
Inside the helmets, instead of human faces, there were bare skulls with empty eye sockets. Only a cold blue light in those sockets stared at Ex.
Long bones without a scrap of flesh formed the arms and legs that supported their bodies. The armor they wore hung off them as though it were only getting in the way.
There was only one kind of being in this world that could look like that.
"Skeletons…."
They were an armed unit of skeletons.
And quite powerful skeletons, at that.
Ex quickly assessed the situation.
Skeletons could form naturally, or they could be created by a caster. In the latter case, the caster could have communicated through the skeletons. But since that hadn't happened….
It meant that the skeletons in front of him had formed naturally.
Naturally formed skeletons weren't actually all that powerful in themselves.
They were closer to a phenomenon caused by concentrated resentment and mana gathering together. There were simply absurd numbers of them.
But these skeletons weren't remarkable for their numbers. Instead, each one was incomprehensibly strong, as though many skeletons had been condensed into a single body.
There were even occasional individuals that felt as strong as knights.
Whatever else might be true, these were not opponents Ex could defeat.
He would run.
The best thing to do with a fight he had no chance of winning was to avoid it.
Divine power might be the perfect counter to skeletons, but Ex hadn't learned enough sacred arts to use them in combat yet.
More than anything, ten skeletons were simply too many.
Right now, fleeing was the correct choice.
Ex formed a Fireball so that he could escape in the opposite direction. He intended to use the commotion created by the Fireball's explosion to make his getaway.
But pieces of metal clanked against one another in that direction as well. Soon, those responsible showed themselves.
It was another unit of skeletons, roughly the size of a platoon.
"Oh, come on! Does nothing ever go right?!"
Even his route of retreat had been completely cut off.
Ex didn't have the ability to break through either side.
While he was wondering whether he should at least put up a desperate fight, the skeleton units on both sides slowly drew their bows.
Their target was Ex, standing between them.
The moment those arrows were released, he would have no way to avoid becoming a pincushion.
In this moment, Ex's rank, his way with words, and everything else he had were useless.
Would it work?
Wasn't there a saying that when a person was about to die, they searched through all their memories for a way to survive? One possible method flashed through Ex's mind.
It was something he had never tried even once before.
It wasn't something he could attempt carelessly, either.
But he was on the verge of death. Surely he had to try something.
The drawn bowstrings creaked. The skeleton soldiers were about to release their arrows.
"Hup…!"
Ex dropped flat and made his final attempt.
A black mist hissed out of Ex's body and covered him entirely.
For a moment, the place where Ex had been standing turned pitch-black, as though darkness itself had settled over it. Darkness that even light couldn't reach protected Ex like a curtain.
It was the power of lies, one of the demonic abilities he possessed.
He had tried to imitate what Berith did as closely as he could…. Would it work?
He had recalled the way Berith, the true Demon of Lies who had appeared back then, wielded the power of lies. Now he was trying to apply it himself.
A sword of white light formed from demonic power… his Stealth Sword… had such a faint presence that it was difficult to notice. Couldn't he do the same thing with his body? He had considered that possibility before, but this was the first time he had put it into practice.
And his opponents were skeletons that acted on simple instinct. If it worked, perhaps he could avoid the fight entirely.
As he thought that and checked the result, the arrows were released with a whistle.
They were shooting anyway…!
Apparently, this much wasn't nearly enough.
With no other choice, Ex raised his sword and prepared to fight.
Now that it had come to this, he would have to fight and force his way through one of the units.
But at that moment, the arrows crossed one another in midair.
They hadn't been fired at Ex. The arrows flew toward the opposing side instead, smashing the skulls of skeletons who were supposed to be their allies.
"…Huh?"
That marked the start of the battle. The surviving skeletons drew their swords and charged fiercely forward.
As the skeletons collided, mouths open in soundless battle cries, a violent fight erupted.
Not a single skeleton paid Ex any attention.
They only fought like berserk warriors, intent on destroying the opponents in front of them.
"…Did the demonic ability work? I should get out of here for now."
His decision was quick, and he acted at once.
Keeping the black mist wrapped around his body, Ex moved cautiously to leave the battlefield.
But their battle ended sooner than he had expected.
The surviving skeletons abruptly turned their heads toward Ex. In that moment, Ex sensed danger.
Until they did something entirely unexpected.
"They knelt down…?"
The five or so skeletons that had survived knelt before Ex, like soldiers who had found their commander.
"Hah… why are my worst guesses never wrong…."
This strange situation made Ex certain of where he was.
It was a place that had appeared in the original novel as well.
It was a place where simply making it through would grant him power.
To gain that power, though, he had to endure the trials that went with it. It was an unreasonable dungeon.
"Why did I have to end up in a Hero's Trial…."
This was one of the Hero's Trials.
–TL Notes–
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