Squeezing through a narrow gap between rocks while carrying a torch was exhausting. Thoughts kept flashing through my mind: Where did it end? Would the gap narrow until we couldn't move? Would we suffocate along the way?

“Hah... hah...”

Thankfully, the ragged breathing behind me helped drive off the fear creeping over me. It didn't make the journey any less grueling, though.

“Hah... hah... Do you think they're both safe?”

“Phew... How much farther do we have to go?”

“...”

Adria kept talking between ragged breaths.

She was having just as hard a time as I was following behind me. No, with her slightly larger build, it had to be even harder for her.

“A little kid younger than you isn't complaining. Keep going.”

“Hmph. You act like an old man...”

She grumbled, but my words seemed to give her some strength.

After a while, she seemed to get used to moving through the narrow cave. Her breathing grew steadier, and she began speaking more often instead.

Was she scared?

“Is this the sort of thing knights have to go through? Seeing Sir Hugo and Bianca has shaken my confidence.”

I knew exactly how she felt. In a stable country without wars, like the one in my previous life, soldiers and knights might be little more than civil servants. But this world was far more frightening than I'd expected. In my previous life, political strife meant legislators grabbing each other by the collar in parliament. Here, people didn't stop at cutting off their opponents' heads; they marched in with an army to kill an opponent's daughter.

But that was all the more reason to grow stronger.

“If I hadn't learned swordsmanship, I wouldn't even have been able to escape.”

“Maybe. But Alex, you didn't have to come with me.”

'Because you kept dragging me around.'

“More importantly, how did you know I was learning swordsmanship?”

“When Simon... when the young master visited our territory, the knight commander who came with him saw me training with a sword and told me.”

Don't tell me the knight commander was the source of that “ducal house's hidden blade” business! He always looked displeased whenever he saw me, and then he'd gone to the marquis's house and spread strange rumors about me...

I'd thought he'd been warming up to me lately. Apparently not.

Once she got started, Adria began telling me about herself.

“Suddenly I was engaged, and soon after that I took refuge at my fiancé's home. Now I'm running away again...”

Was it because the cave was dark? Her voice grew more subdued.

“I learned the sword because I wanted a different life from the other noble ladies, but this isn't any different. No, maybe it's worse.”

As she went on, her words turned into a full-blown lament.

I understood, but I wasn't about to listen to her lament forever. I was her guard, not her therapist.

I was just about to ask her to stop when a faint whistling came from ahead.

WHOOO.

Then a light breeze stirred my hair. It wasn't the stale air we'd been breathing all this time.

“Oh! There's a breeze!” Adria noticed it at once. “It must be the exit!”

Her gloomy voice brightened in an instant. We hurried on. The farther we went, the fresher the air felt. There was still no light in sight, but the air alone gave us hope that the passage connected to the outside.

A little later, we finally emerged from the narrow passage. I raised the torch and looked around.

“We're not outside?”

Adria was right. We hadn't reached the outside, but we weren't in a cave hemmed in by rock, either. The walls, floor, and ceiling were made of fitted rectangular stone blocks.

“An underground stone chamber?”

A large iron door stood in the middle of one wall, and a large coffin rested on an altar at the center of the chamber. Adria's eyes lit up at the sight.

“Could it be a tomb from the old empire?”

I didn't know if it dated back to the old empire, but the coffin made it look like a tomb.

We would have to pass the coffin to reach the iron door anyway, so I approached it cautiously with the torch.

“Do you think we're the first to find it?” Adria asked from behind me, her voice full of hope.

She really wasn't suited to being a marquis's daughter. Seeing how excited she got over ruins and tombs, I couldn't help thinking of a character from a game in my previous life who raided tombs with a pistol in each hand.

“There's no way we're the first.” I shook my head. I wasn't the sort of person who stumbled upon a miraculous opportunity.

We were only following a route someone else had taken. There hadn't been any forks, so we couldn't possibly be the first here. The coffin lid had been pushed aside, too. Our predecessor had apparently robbed the tomb already.

“Looks like it was a grave robber, not a hero.”

Only scraps of clothing and fragments of bone remained inside the coffin.

“They really took everything,” Adria said regretfully after looking inside.

“There might not have been anything there to begin with. Anything buried that long ago would probably be useless now anyway.”

An old relic might have been worth money, but given that these ruins had been left neglected even during the Great War, I doubted it would fetch much. Besides, during the war itself, it might have been more trouble than it was worth...

“Why would it be useless? All the famous weapons and armor considered divine relics came from the old empire. The relics the heroes used during the Great War did too. No one's been able to make things like that since the old empire fell.”

Lost technology? Was this a world where ancient ruins were packed with the stuff?

Ugh, I needed the internet. The books in the study and my lessons with the scribe weren't giving me nearly enough information.

“Oh, there's something like a keyhole here. Could there be a mechanism?”

Adria inspected the coffin more closely and found a hole in its base. It looked like a short slot about a finger's length long. Above it was a small version of the symbol we'd seen on the door and at the cave entrance.

“A sword would fit right into it...” She examined the hole from every angle. “Then maybe the sword buried with the body was the key? You slide it into the slot, the mechanism activates, and a hidden treasure chest appears!”

She poured out every thought that came to mind.

“The person who got here before us couldn't see the hole because the body was in the way, so they just took the sword. Then the body rotted away, and we found the hole!”

I gave her a round of applause in my head. Lady Adria had gone from queen of grave robbers to master detective.

I had a mountain of objections, but instead I took her arm and headed for the iron door.

“This isn't the time. We need to go.”

“... Okay.”

For all her cheerful talk, Adria's hand was trembling. Other people had sacrificed themselves, she'd been caught up in all this, and there was still more to come. Adria was only a teenage girl, and right now she was terrified.

But we couldn't stop because we were scared.

CREEEAK.

Thankfully, the iron door opened easily. It didn't seem to be a door that normally opened so readily, but at least it didn't prevent anyone from leaving.

“So this is the proper entrance. The route we took was a side passage formed by a split in the rock.”

I'd spoken deliberately to distract her, but she didn't answer. She didn't seem to have collected herself yet. I decided not to press her.

Another cave lay beyond the iron door. Fortunately, this one was spacious enough to move through without difficulty. Unlike the earlier passage, animals lived here: large blind rats, moles with enormous claws, and insects as long as my forearm. I'd never seen any of them before. Thankfully, none were more than Adria and I could handle, but it was in this cave that I truly felt, for the first time, that I'd come to another world.

After a long trek through the cave, we finally reached a place with light. We looked up and saw the sky at the top of a vertical, cylindrical shaft.

“It's a well.”

“An abandoned one.”

We immediately began climbing its walls. We were both still children, but we had strength and skill beyond that of adults. Hooking our fingers and feet into gaps between the earth and stones, we climbed steadily upward. Soon we emerged safely outside. We were covered in dirt, but neither of us cared as we soaked up the warm sunlight.

Trees surrounded the well. Here and there, I caught glimpses of old house foundations, but the forest seemed to have swallowed the village long ago.

“A village lost to memory...”

I couldn't tell whether it had been destroyed during the Great War or abandoned even earlier, but surely no one remembered it now. Few people would know that the abandoned well here led through a cave to an ancient tomb.

“One person must have known.”

But finding out who it was would be difficult now, and I had no intention of trying. What mattered was rejoining the territory's forces as soon as possible.

“If this is the forest near the fortress, it must be Ons Forest. It's west of the fortress, so we should head northeast.”

“Okay! Let's hurry.”

Adria answered energetically. Thankfully, she seemed to have recovered her composure. We brushed the dirt off ourselves and set out carefully. The territory's forces might have dealt with the enemy and begun searching for us by now, but we still had to be cautious. I considered hiding in the forest until they found us, but we had nothing we needed to spend the night there. Honestly, the odds of meeting an enemy were almost nonexistent, so it was better to leave the forest as quickly as we could.

But odds were never to be trusted. How could I have forgotten that game where a shot with a ninety-nine percent chance to hit missed every single time?

“Ho ho. I've caught you this time.”

At the sight of the mercenary who had appeared out of nowhere, I cursed the god of dice.

“You really surprised me. I had no idea there was a cave leading all the way here. I'd have lost you if it weren't for my ability.”

Oh, she'd tracked us with an ability? In that case, I took back the curse.

While she spoke, I looked around, but I couldn't see a way out. Mercenaries had already surrounded us.

As I searched for an escape, the woman held up a handkerchief between two fingers and waved it.

“How did you get my handkerchief...?” Adria groaned at the sight.

Adria's handkerchief? Was it what she used to track people? Tracking us with a handkerchief—what a doglike ability.

“Someone close to you got it for me, my lady. That's how I was able to keep following you.”

“I'm not close to anyone who would steal my handkerchief!”

“Surely you are. They've just become the new head of House Hierro, you know.”

The woman delivered the unbelievable news with a smile.

* * *

The bodies of mercenaries and territorial soldiers lay scattered around the fortress. The duke frowned at the sight of a battlefield, something he had not seen in a long time.

“We've dealt with most of the enemies outside. Some mercenaries fled, and we're pursuing them,” a knight reported at his side.

“And underground?”

“The knight commander went in himself. You should hear the outcome soon.”

The duke nodded.

Simon was nowhere to be seen. The duke had sent him back to the mansion with a group of soldiers.

The duke looked toward the fortress. Once everyone heard that the main enemy force had gone underground after the children, they had given up hope. The knight commander had gone in himself, determined at least to exact revenge, but rescuing the children would be difficult.

The duke still clung to a sliver of hope, though another question occupied his mind.

Why had they sent a force so large it was practically an army? He couldn't understand why they had committed so many fighters of knightly caliber just to kill one little girl.

Fortunately, he didn't have to wonder for long.

“Urgent news!”

A messenger rode up with the answer.

“The House Hierro mansion has burned down. The family has been wiped out. Count La Palma arrived with knights and installed the marquis's surviving illegitimate son as the new head of the house!”

“So that's why they wanted Adria dead?”

The duke knitted his brows. They hadn't merely been trying to prevent an engagement. They intended to seize the entire marquisate.