A short while later, all the monsters lay dead, and the Firebird Hunter came over beaming. She hugged me so tightly that my face was buried against her stomach. With the difference in our heights, it must have looked ridiculous. And her arms were incredibly strong.

"W-wait! I can't breathe!" I had to flail my arms several times before I finally broke free. She stepped back, apparently realizing she was still in her underwear, and hurriedly pulled on her outer clothes and armor. After roughly wiping the water from my face, I said to her,

"Wow! All you did was pick up a shield, but you're completely different from before!"

"Before?"

Oh, right. I was the only one who'd experienced that.

"I mean compared to when you fought with just a sword at House Hierro's estate. Have you gotten stronger since then?"

"Oh, you saw me then. I haven't gotten stronger. It's the shield, just like you said." She smiled and stroked it.

Thankfully, she seemed to have accepted my explanation. I needed to watch what I said. After living through the same stretch of time over and over, I was starting to slip up. My body was fine, but the repeated deaths and pain seemed to be wearing down my concentration.

"Oh, that's right. Look at this." Still stroking the shield, she hurried toward the reservoir. A sizable iron chest sat half out of the water at its edge.

Could it be?

I followed her to the chest.

Unlike the shield she carried, the chest was made of ordinary iron. Long years underwater had left it rusted and corroded. If it hadn't been made of thick iron, it would have fallen apart ages ago.

"Was this down at the bottom?" Had the lamp that stayed lit underwater helped her find it? I hadn't seen the chest when I searched.

"There must have been more, but I could only find this one chest. Maybe the others spent too long underwater." She pushed mana into her sword and struck beside the chest's ruined lock.

SLICE

The lock came away easily. "Shall we see what's inside?" She threw open the old chest.

FLASH

A brilliant light dazzled me as the chest opened. I rubbed my eyes against the sudden glare before I could make out its contents. The first thing to catch my eye was the thick layer of gold coins covering the bottom—coins from the old empire, worth several times the market price.

"Did they use gold coins to line the bottom?"

But the Firebird Hunter merely nodded, looking unimpressed by the coins. Come on, a mercenary shouldn't react like that. With the tension gone, she was letting her true nature show without realizing it. I pretended not to notice.

Other objects lay half buried in the coins: a small sword that looked like a dagger, and an old booklet. She picked up the booklet with a delighted expression and handed me the dagger.

Huh. It had the same bird-in-flight emblem.

"There's an emblem on this too."

The artifacts bearing that emblem and a book were what she'd wanted. Under our contract, everything else went to me. Thinking about it now, I'd begun to feel I'd gotten the worse end of the deal...

"With the other things falling into the water, the contract has ended up far too favorable to me. The shield and the book alone are more than enough."

Well, the fight just now had made it clear that the shield and sword were a pair. The remaining book was probably about the inherited ability that had supposedly been lost. But the dagger she'd given me bore the same emblem. If it had been with the book, surely it belonged to the same set as the sword and shield...

"That dagger is also known as part of the inheritance, along with this sword and shield."

See? I was right.

"To anyone else, it's just a sword that cuts a little better than most. But it's proof that I—no, that my family owes you a debt. If you bring it back someday, my house will repay you."

She really was an earnest sort. It wasn't a bad arrangement for me, but... By "my house," she surely meant a noble house, and she seemed unusually earnest even for a noble. I shook my head inwardly. Well, people were different. There were bound to be some like her.

With that thought, I asked, "Will you tell me where to find you when the time comes?"

She nodded, her expression turning grave. That was fine by me. The reward mattered, but honestly, I was most curious about who she really was. Besides, all the gold coins lining that chest were mine, and there were surely more things we hadn't found at the bottom of the reservoir. It wasn't going anywhere. I could take my time searching it later.

"The place you should come to is..." She began to speak, and I focused so intently on her words that I even sent mana into my ears. But just as she was about to tell me—

RRRUMBLE

A deep rumbling came from the reservoir. Then a column of water shot into the air.

ROOOAR

It rose past the ceiling and into the hole above.

SPLAAASH

In an instant, we were both soaked.

"What in the world..." Dumbfounded, I stared at the Firebird Hunter. "Why is the reservoir suddenly doing that?"

She frowned at my question, tilted her head, and muttered,

"The chest was wedged between some rocks, so I broke them..."

"You didn't hit an underground water channel, did you?"

"Did I? It did seem oddly easy to swim up, even carrying the sword and iron chest in both hands..."

She'd definitely hit one!

The rock she'd broken must have blocked the reservoir's waterway when the ceiling collapsed. Breaking it had reopened a passage that had been sealed for hundreds of years.

ROOOAR

The water that had surged up like a fountain came crashing down. As it poured in, the reservoir spread wider. No, its water level was rising.

The Firebird Hunter and I looked at each other.

"We should run, shouldn't we?"

"What other choice do we have?"

There was no chance now of luring the monsters out to defeat them in smaller groups, or waiting for an opening to deal with the big ones. All I could do was trust the Firebird Hunter, stronger now than before, and escape the surging water. I stuffed as many gold coins into my pockets as I could and started running with her. She dashed into the nearest cave first. I jammed the dagger into my belt, slung my greatsword over my shoulder, and followed.

ROOOAR

The sound of rising water followed us as we ran. Perhaps because of the shaking and the noise, the monsters blocking our path behaved differently this time. Far from surrounding us or setting a trap, they seemed even more startled than we were when we ran into them.

The Firebird Hunter couldn't know how they'd acted before, though, and she wasn't about to spare them. Her shield and sword swept out, cutting down the monsters in our path or knocking them aside. We left the ones she'd knocked away unfinished and kept running. The torrent behind us would take care of the wounded. We fought past the monsters and continued upward.

The whole way up, I never even had a chance to swing my sword. The coins crammed into my pockets and inside my clothes got in the way, and the greatsword's weight slowed me down, but more than anything, she moved too fast. She had kept growing stronger since picking up the shield. As she fought, she grew more accustomed to using it alongside her sword, and her mana flowed more smoothly. By the time we escaped the caves, she'd surely be twice as strong as she'd been without it.

I had no complaints about simply following her. Unlike her, I'd already fought these monsters more times than I cared to remember. Unless I could grow stronger by fighting as she did, stopping for no good reason would only risk getting swept away. I wasn't going to die again for something that stupid. This time, I was getting out.

After running hard, we reached a different cave altogether.

"Wait. This place looks like people have worked on it."

She was right. From here on, it was a man-made underground passage—the one leading to the treasure vault.

"Ah... So this is the passage connected to the vault?" She recognized it quickly, but unlike last time, she was remarkably calm. She knew the vault had been wrecked. She was about to walk on, looking unperturbed, when I stopped her.

"Just a moment. I think we should be more careful from here. I don't think all the monsters have come out yet..."

The two big red ones still hadn't appeared. I didn't think we'd killed all the gray ones, either. Unless they'd drowned, they were bound to be waiting somewhere nearby. But that was hardly an adequate explanation. As long as I couldn't tell her my secret, it was difficult to give her a proper one.

She studied me for a moment, then nodded. "All right. Your instincts seem pretty good."

Thankfully, she listened.

She held her shield and sword ready and spread out her mana. I retied the makeshift coin belt I'd made from a monster hide we'd picked up along the way, then slung my greatsword across my back and took the dagger in hand. The passage was too narrow for me to use the greatsword without getting in her way. I'd be far more help supporting her from behind.

She smiled when she saw me take up the dagger. She seemed to approve. Together, we advanced slowly down the passage.

Before long, the iron door we'd seen before came into view in the distance. As expected, monsters had gathered in front of it: the gray ones we'd been killing all this time, and behind them, two red ones that looked twice as large. Red Mice that actually lived up to their name stood before the treasure vault.

But from the look of things, they hadn't gathered there to stop us. Ridiculously enough, they too had come to escape the rising water. Perhaps they intended to deal with us while they were at it, but either way, a fight was unavoidable. Not that we had any reason to avoid one.

"I thought it was strange that the Red Mice weren't red. Were the others mutants born to those two?"

Unlike in my previous life, when she'd told me to run, she showed no fear at the sight of the two monsters.

"Watch my back! Let's finish this before the water reaches us." She spoke to me with renewed energy.

But I couldn't answer.

At that moment, I was too distracted by the vision before my eyes and the voice in my head. The vision had begun when I took hold of the dagger and pushed mana into it. Flames had appeared bit by bit in midair, then taken the shape of a bird. They passed through everything around them, translucent, so I knew at once they weren't real. Besides, the Firebird Hunter hadn't noticed a thing.

The vision had grown, and now I could hear a voice as well. The vision of the flaming bird beat its wings and opened its beak. Then words sounded inside my head.

"Do you desire power?"