At the end of the passage was an elevator that reminded me of an automated parking garage. Its enormous doors came into view, wide enough for a truck with room to spare. They must have used it to bring creatures up from the floors below and send them into the arena.
The button glowed red, half buried in rubble. I studied the enormous button marked with an inverted triangle. Anyone could tell it was an elevator button...
“Shall we go down?” I murmured, relieved that Riccardo was safe. “Though there’s no guarantee it’ll be any better down there.”
“No guarantee we’re better off staying here, either...”
Thankfully, he answered. I nodded in agreement, then listened closely.
A rumbling sound. It came from the rubble opposite the elevator, toward the arena. A bomb had definitely gone off there. The force of the earlier blast had struck my back. It sounded as though more of the structure was collapsing near its source.
Were Bobby and Achille safe? I suppressed the anxiety welling up inside me and spoke.
“I’ll go down first and take a look.”
Now that I had come to the point, Riccardo stared at me in silence. His utter lack of expression frightened me.
“Sit wherever looks least likely to collapse. I’ll be right back.”
“Does this behavior of yours all stem from that view of yourself, too?”
I didn’t think this was the time for that sort of question. I wasn’t certain I understood him correctly, but he was probably referring to my recklessness.
I straightened my knees and slowly walked over to the elevator button.
“Probably,” I murmured, pressing it. “Though I’m being perfectly rational right now.”
DING!
The elevator arrived quickly. Its enormous doors opened with a heavy rumble, spilling a fan of light across the corridor.
The sudden brightness hurt my eyes. Squinting, I leaned inside and looked around without taking my hand off the button.
The control panel was simple. There were only three floors: Level A, Level B, and the arena.
After explaining what I saw, I turned back to him. “I’ll try Level A first.”
“No...” Riccardo said, unsurprised by my description. “Go to Level B... They usually keep the nastier creatures on Level A...”
“Oh.”
I’d forgotten how often he had done missions like this. I nodded, but didn’t get into the elevator just yet. Could I leave him alone?
After a moment’s hesitation, I took off my varsity jacket. “Um, at least take this.”
Riccardo grabbed the jacket I held out and flung it onto the floor.
THUD!
The jacket landed in the passage. Bobby had given me grief over it, but I’d secretly liked it anyway. I knew perfectly well that wearing it wouldn’t help him, but it still made me sad.
My varsity jacket...
Dejected, I entered the elevator with my head down. “I’ll be back...”
“Keep your wits about you.” His scolding voice was sharp. “You do realize you’re not in good shape yourself?”
Once inside, I pressed B, then hammered the close button like mad. I intended to check Level B and return as quickly as possible.
The elevator didn’t move nearly fast enough for my liking. The doors closed slowly, and the elevator moved just as slowly. I chewed my lip all the way down to Level B.
DING!
[Warning. Cage 27 is open.]
[Warning. Cage 33 is open.]
[Warning. Cage 21 is open.]
Darkness. As soon as the elevator doors opened, the AI’s clear voice rang through the darkness beyond. I frowned, holding down the door-open button.
Were cages 21, 27, and 33 the ones that had held the creatures I’d faced? Or had the force of the explosion buckled them open? If it was the latter, there would be creatures roaming that corridor. Assuming they were alive.
I stayed in the elevator and examined the corridor. Cold air washed over me, carrying a mixture of smells. On this floor, too, the area near the elevator was relatively intact, while the arena side appeared to be blocked by rubble. Though the darkness obscuring the far end made it hard to see.
Cages lined both sides of the corridor. I sharpened my senses.
“Huh.”
They’d caught quite a lot. Or had they bought them?
I could sense the creatures behind the bars. Since these were creatures armed civilians could subdue, they didn’t feel as intimidating as the ones I’d encountered outside the core. Still, there were too many for it to be safe. And one of them was coming this way...
[Specimen 33, prepare to board.]
“Oh!” I raised my voice at the sight of something floating in the darkness. “That thing!”
A white mask. A plaster mask with dark, hollow eyeholes drifted toward me. The mask floating all by itself in that dark, eerie corridor made for a bizarre sight.
The instant I saw that familiar movement, a memory burst forth from somewhere within me. I used to encounter these often in the old castles of my former world. Commonly known as death masks.
“Hey, good to see you!”
Death masks were easy to catch if you knew how to deal with them.
“You’re a slow one, aren’t you?”
The fast ones were difficult to catch, though. This one was slow—so slow that it looked almost cute as it drew closer, growing larger. I held down the door-open button and waited for it to come close enough.
Death masks attached themselves to living things and sucked out their nutrients until they withered and died. But you could capture one as long as you avoided touching the inside of the mask. Some were incredibly fast and hard to catch, but this didn’t appear to be one of them.
Smashing them wouldn’t kill them. You had to melt them with heat. Not that the information was any use right now.
The moment the mask reached the elevator, I jumped and stretched out my arm. “Got you.”
My chest hurt. The injury from Arthur’s shock wave throbbed. I winced slightly and looked down at the captured death mask.
I’d caught it properly. As long as I made no mistakes, it would come in handy.
Ignoring the death mask trembling in my palm, I stepped into the corridor.
I quickly finished checking Level B. As I’d suspected, rubble blocked the far end of the corridor. Creature 21 seemed to have been buried and killed beneath it. Creature 27 appeared to have been the spider. I spotted what looked like a baby spider crawling inside an otherwise empty cage near the elevator.
I stomped it to death and hurried back to the elevator.
“Sir.”
DING!
The elevator doors opened with a cheerful chime. Thankfully, Riccardo was still sitting where I’d left him.
“I don’t think we can get out through Level B. The end is blocked, just like this corridor.”
“What have you brought back?”
Riccardo shot an incredulous look at my right hand. I raised the death mask squirming in my grasp a little.
“A creature.”
“Why would you bring that?”
“I’m going to use it as a weapon.”
My hand was spread wide over the front of the plaster mask. All I had to do was hold it like this and press it against a living thing, and the death mask would become a vacuum cleaner for living organisms. The larger and stronger the life it absorbed, the stronger the death mask itself became, so it wasn’t suited for prolonged use as a weapon. But we had no choice.
Ignoring his incredulous stare, I asked, “I’ll go check Level A. Is A below B, or the other way around?”
“A is closer to the ground... They’re difficult to handle, so moving them to a higher floor is hard...”
“Oh. Then there’s a better chance it’s still intact.”
The bars would mostly be intact, too, wouldn’t they? His answer gave me hope and lifted my spirits a little. Having something to do that took my mind off my self-loathing was nice, too.
“It’ll take a little longer this time, but I’ll still be back soon.”
I bent down and picked up the varsity jacket lying nearby. “If it’s in decent shape, we can...”
BOOOOM!
The noise was loud enough to split my eardrums. The corridor toward the arena was caving in, its floor collapsing. Rubble and Mari, who was still faintly breathing, plummeted out of sight.
I dropped the jacket and ran to Riccardo, grabbing him and hoisting him up as he sprang to his feet. Damn it!
“Let go.”
I practically slid into the elevator. Riccardo spoke as soon as I felt the solid silver floor beneath me. I set him down without much care and hammered the close button.
“You’ll break the button doing that...”
Level A. I pressed the button without answering. Level B was out: it was too close to the arena. There was no guarantee it wasn’t collapsing, too.
The elevator clunked, then began operating normally, to my relief. It descended for quite a while, just as Riccardo had said.
But was he all right in here?
“Are you okay with this?”
I’d already been punched in the face and had my varsity jacket rejected. No longer feeling particularly cautious, I asked as I checked his condition.
Riccardo understood what I meant at once. “It isn’t claustrophobia...”
His face did indeed look composed.
“It’s just that a building collapsed and my whole family fucking died...”
Oh. I hadn’t expected him to suddenly tell me so much. Flustered, I briefly forgot how to speak.
“I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
He asked with a smile, so I shut my mouth. I must have made a strange face. He looked at me and gave a small laugh. It was different from his earlier derisive laughter.
Leaning against the wall, perhaps because of his ankle, he smiled, his eyes narrowing.
“During the First War... An air raid brought it down.”
“...”
“I bet someone was glad, don’t you think? As you heard, that man I called my father was Mafia...”
His voice dripped with bitterness. I couldn’t tell whether that sharp emotion was directed at himself or at his father.
“My mother and siblings had nothing to do with it, though...”
No. Listening more closely, he seemed angry at both.
“But, well, Father always liked me, his eldest son. I loathed the man, so I was the only one in the family who rebelled.”
His tone was cold.
“I hardly ever came home. I wandered around, looking for a way to leave for somewhere else.”
He slowly turned his head, averting his gaze. “I should’ve known when to stop rebelling...”
DING!
The elevator stopped.
I watched him as the heavy doors slowly opened. He stood leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, watching the doors, a bitter smile on his lips.
“That day, too, I stupidly stormed out, saying I was leaving for somewhere else...”
[Warning. Cage 1 is open.]
[Warning. Cage 2 is open.]
[Warning. Cage 4 is open.]
[Warning. Cage 10 is open.]
[Warning. Cage 12 is open.]
His words broke off. The clear voice pulled us back to reality. We had arrived at Level A.
