KUUUUUUNG-!!!
“W-What the…?”
“Enemy attack?! Get up!!”
Ex and Circe shot to their feet at the sudden impact.
While Ex was still shaking off the last traces of sleep, Circe instantly readied herself for battle and swept her gaze across their surroundings.
There was nothing around them.
Even the warning magic Circe had set up hadn’t been triggered.
And yet the impact made its presence unmistakably clear.
KUUUUUUNG-!!!
“What the hell is this… Ex! Do you know what’s happening?”
“No, I don’t know anything about this! I already used up all my bombs!”
“Bombs?! So that explosion yesterday really was your doing!”
KUUUUUUNG-!!!
The mysterious impacts continued to reverberate through the ruins at regular intervals.
“Could Leon be smashing through the walls?”
“Leon isn’t capable of doing something like that yet!”
Even trying to trace the source of the impacts was pointless. The direction of the echoes and the volume of the sound kept changing.
The ruins themselves were constantly shifting, after all.
While Circe struggled to make sense of the conflicting information, Ex came to a firm decision.
“Circe, we need to move right now. If it isn’t Leon, then there’s obviously a third party in here. Whoever they are, they must be planning to reach the final reward even if they have to tear down the Ancient Ruins to do it.”
“Can we really get there before that monster does?”
“As far as I know, nobody in the world can clear a place like this faster than you. We’re already down to three-digit room numbers. An hour at most should be enough.”
“D-Don’t flatter me! You think sucking up to me is going to make me happy?”
KUUUUUUNG-!!!
“Let’s just hope whatever’s causing that doesn’t get there within the hour.”
Ex and Circe hurriedly packed their belongings.
Thanks to Circe’s magic, it took less than five minutes.
“Can you teach me how to do that later?!”
“If you’ve got time to joke around, then run!”
The moment they finished packing, the two of them took off.
Circe led the way, searching for rooms with smaller numbers and opening their doors.
Once they entered a room, it took her less than five seconds to locate the next one.
They kept that pace for five minutes.
Then Circe started slowing down.
“Huff, huff…”
“What’s wrong?!”
“I-I’m out of stamina… I’m a mage, remember…?”
“Then I’ll carry you! Just tell me where to go!”
“What?! Eek…”
Ex slung their luggage around to his front and hoisted Circe onto his back.
Circe found herself clinging to him before she even had time to process what was happening, leaving her both flustered and embarrassed.
Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined she would someday be carried on the back of a student who was mentally younger than her.
Of course, Ex’s soul was actually older than hers.
“Circe, which way?!”
“You, you seriously…! Left!”
“Hold on tight! I’m going to run!”
Ex reinforced his legs with internal energy, sharply increasing his leg strength.
Once Circe pointed somewhere out, he could reach it in five seconds.
“Left! Straight ahead! Right… No, that one’s left!”
“This is way more confusing than it looks!”
Controlling his internal energy while following Circe’s rapid-fire directions was enough to make his head spin.
More importantly, they absolutely had to stay ahead of whoever was causing those impacts.
Under circumstances like these, there was no longer any point trying to hide the fact that he could use internal energy.
“You can use internal energy, can’t you?! Right!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about!”
“So the rumors about you using internal energy and mana at the same time were true?! Left!”
“Would you believe me if I said no?!”
“Do you seriously think I would?! Straight ahead!”
The room numbers dropped at a visible rate.
Three-digit numbers became two digits.
Every now and then, even a single-digit room appeared.
‘We’re almost there…!’
Then another problem arose.
WEEEEEEEEENG-!!
A shrill alarm suddenly screamed throughout the entire Ancient Ruins.
The torches inside the rooms changed to a harsh red glow bright enough to hurt their eyes.
At the same time, an unfamiliar voice began echoing from every direction.
Circe frowned as she listened.
“Ancient Language…?”
It wasn’t anything like the common language used throughout the Empire.
Strangely enough, however, Ex understood the meaning perfectly.
「Structural damage exceeding 10% detected.
Initiating intruder elimination and restoration procedures.
300.
298…」
An ominous countdown began.
“Circe, we’ve got a serious problem.”
“What now?!”
“It says the intruder elimination procedure starts in five minutes.”
“Y-You can understand Ancient Language too?!”
“I only just found that out myself…!”
They didn’t have to wait long to learn what exactly an intruder elimination procedure involved.
GIIIIIIING— THUD, THUD, THUD!
Geometric structures pushed their way out from the walls.
The structures shifted and reconfigured themselves, steadily taking shape.
Once the transformation was complete, it became painfully obvious what they were.
“…Those are some impressively sturdy-looking golems.”
Each golem was so enormous that merely standing upright brought its head to the ceiling.
And twenty of those golems had appeared in this room alone, all in the blink of an eye.
If they tried fighting them head-on, they would be turned into ground meat.
‘But if they’re golems, Circe should be able to disable…!’
That was when Circe delivered the devastating news.
“Something’s wrong with them! I can’t interfere with their mana!”
“Interference blocking…!”
Thinking about it, there was nothing strange about that.
The Ancient Ruins had been thoroughly suppressing the flow of mana from the very beginning.
Of course its security golems would be protected against magical interference.
“Then we’re just running for it…!”
Ex immediately took off again.
They were short on time, but they were also almost at the end.
For now, the golems were only standing in place. They weren’t moving yet.
There was no question they would attack the instant the countdown reached zero.
「100. 99. 98…」
“How much time is left?!”
“Less than a hundred seconds!”
When thirty seconds remained, the golems’ eyes began glowing red.
Their heads were already turning, tracking Ex and Circe as they moved.
In particular, the hostile red gazes seemed to focus on Ex.
“If they’re security golems, they should only be attacking actual intruders…!”
“…I did smash through a wall too.”
“Y-You little…!!!”
Then only five seconds remained.
“Room 1, straight ahead!!”
Circe pointed directly forward.
There it was.
Room 1.
Their final destination.
“Hold on tight…!!”
The moment they clung tightly to each other, Ex explosively released the internal energy reinforcing his legs.
With a single leap, he crossed an enormous distance in an instant.
「…3. 2. 1. 0.
Intruder elimination procedure initiated.」
WHOOOOOOSH-!!
All twenty house-sized masses of stone moved at once.
The golems charged in, intent on crushing Ex flat.
GOOOOOOOO-!!!
The golem beside the door directly ahead raised both hands high into the air.
It predicted where Ex would land and brought its hands crashing down.
Circe, having anticipated the attack, hurriedly threw up a defensive barrier.
But it was nowhere near enough to withstand that tremendous weight.
The golem’s hands came down with monstrous destructive force.
KWAAAAAANG-!!!
The impact was powerful enough to shatter the floor of the ruins itself.
Dust and debris exploded everywhere.
“…That was way too close.”
There was nothing beneath the golem’s hands.
Ex and Circe had barely managed to slip into Room 1.
Circe stared blankly for a moment before finally snapping back to her senses.
“Stay alert! There might be security golems in here too…!”
“I already checked. We’re safe in here.”
This place was silent and dark.
There were no flashing red warning lights and no deafening alarms assaulting their ears. There was no sign of danger whatsoever.
A long space stretched out before them, seemingly deep enough that the far end disappeared into darkness. Dim torches burned at regular intervals, casting just enough light to faintly illuminate the surroundings.
This was it.
The final destination where they could claim the reward.
“W-We made it…”
Only after realizing that did Circe finally let herself celebrate. She grabbed Ex and shook him, her excitement overflowing through her entire body.
“We made it! Ahahaha!!”
“I’m glad you’re happy.”
Ex lowered Circe along with the luggage he had been carrying, but she was still too excited to calm down and immediately began talking again.
“It’s been so long since I’ve done anything like this! I finally feel like I actually accomplished something! Even in my previous life, I used to dream about going on adventures like this!”
“Hm? Didn’t you spend your whole previous life going on adventures?”
There had never been any proper background information about the Reincarnated Heroes’ previous lives.
Their pasts had been mentioned a handful of times midway through the original story, but the details themselves had never been fully developed.
Circe remembered her past and let out an irritated sigh.
“Adventures? Don’t make me laugh. There’s nothing romantic about wandering through ruined countries and the Demon Realm looking like a bunch of beggars. Do you have any idea what it’s like when eating monsters becomes an everyday thing because there’s literally nothing else to eat?”
“Ah, yeah… That does sound pretty bad.”
“And then there was Leon and that personality of his, picking fights every other day. Scarlett was constantly getting caught stealing things, Johannes would donate our emergency funds, and Artemis would get lost because she wandered off to pick up her arrows!”
Circe’s complaints continued for quite some time.
In the original story, Circe had been both the brains of the Hero Party and the one responsible for keeping everyone rational. It was only natural that she had constantly been under tremendous stress.
Maybe it wasn’t surprising at all that after reincarnating, she had become so irritable that people called her a “mad dog.”
‘Sounds like her previous life was exactly the same… Oh, right.’
That reminded Ex of something he needed to check.
“I heard a rumor a while ago that Leon punched a girl in his class. What happened with that?”
Leon had never done anything like that in the original story.
He caused plenty of trouble, but none of it involved hitting girls.
When Ex first heard the rumor, he had brushed it off as another malicious story nobles had cooked up about one another.
The rumors surrounding Ex himself were far more bizarre, after all.
At the question, Circe’s expression darkened sharply.
“It wasn’t a rumor. I stepped away for a little while, and Leon hit a noble girl from his class. He punched her with his fist.”
“What? That doesn’t make any sense! The Leon I know would never…”
“The Leon I know absolutely would. Everyone seems to have the wrong idea about him, but Leon’s personality is nowhere near as good as people think.”
Ex already knew that much.
Leon was upright, honest, and uncompromising.
Put another way, he was inflexible and severely lacking in social awareness.
Even when compromise was perfectly reasonable, he refused to compromise.
‘A great personality for a hero, but an awful one for an actual person.’
His personality had caused plenty of problems and incidents in the original story, but he slowly improved over time.
Even then, though, there were lines he never crossed.
If the rumor was actually true, that changed things.
“Can you tell me exactly what happened?”
Circe sighed again and again as she explained the entire incident.
By the time she finished, Ex was frowning.
“He’s been anxious and restless lately… But why…?”
“Isn’t it obvious? He got chosen as the Hero all over again, but if he isn’t doing something, he starts crawling out of his own skin. That’s why I brought those kids here in the first place.”
“…Ah!”
Ex finally realized the root cause behind Leon’s behavior.
‘Don’t tell me… It’s because I got rid of the conflict with the Sword Gang…?!’
If that was true, Ex had made a serious mistake.
There was a reason Leon’s personality had never caused a problem like this in the original story.
He had never had the luxury of obsessing over trivial matters.
But Ex had already dealt with the incidents Leon was originally supposed to face.
With nothing to occupy him, that personality had slowly festered until it finally burst, resulting in the incident from the rumor.
The moment Ex reached that conclusion, a wave of unease washed over him.
“…Lola’s going to be okay, right?”
Even if Lola was together with Leon, Ex couldn’t help worrying that their personalities might cause trouble.
Leon’s personality was a problem.
Lola’s personality was also a problem.
‘Leon’s the kind of protagonist who treats ruthless comeuppance as the answer to everything.’ (TL Note: New word for ya'll! It means a fair and deserved punishment or penalty for bad actions)
Leon’s personality had been designed around the trends of the time.
Man or woman, anyone who got on his nerves was supposed to receive a satisfying dose of “justice.”
‘And Lola has a much nastier temper than she lets on…’
Back at the start of the semester, when Roxwell threatened the students, Lola had been the only person willing to stand up to him.
Lola was also the kind of person who would set off explosion magic the moment someone pushed her a little too far.
“Hmm… I don’t know that little kid’s personality very well, but…”
Circe thought deeply for a while before continuing in an uneasy voice.
“I warned Leon once already, so it should be fine… probably…”
“Probably…”
“Frey’s right there with them too… so they should be okay…”
“You mean the ‘Two-Faced Saintess’…”
“So you know about that too…”
An ominous sense of dread settled over them, and both fell silent.
KUUUUNG…
In the awkward silence, only the mysterious impact continued to echo through the ruins.
“Hey.”
Circe was the first to speak.
With a serious expression, she raised her head.
She seemed to steel herself before looking Ex directly in the eyes.
Then Circe made a proposal he had never imagined hearing.
“Why don’t you join our party?”
–TL Notes–
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