Every Morning, My Mirror Saves the World - Chapter 26

Chapter 26

“It was my mistake, my lord.” The Black Knight knelt on one knee before Ruiyin and lowered his head, his voice grave. “That prison chamber was built from Black Magic Crystal. It can erase all magical fluctuations inside the room. That is why the contract did not take effect.”

“It’s fine.” Ruiyin waved a weary hand. “If not for that, we never would have found the real passage. It was thanks to Lars understanding what I meant right away.”

“It was nothing.” The Little Knight kept his face taut, but he could not stop the pink spreading across his cheeks. “Since the contract magic had lost its effect, that Dark Elves was probably misleading us from the very beginning. It’s just… I’m sorry! I took so long to find the passage. If it weren’t for you, Ruiyin, we would definitely be…”

The Black Knight calmly concluded, “It was all thanks to my lord’s plan. As expected of my lord. Truly wise, brilliant, and accomplished in both letters and arms.”

Ruiyin said modestly, “Oh, not at all, not at all.”

Everyone: wiped brows in relief, praised one another, celebrated like officials gaining promotion, how delightful, how worthy of congratulations, clap clap clap…

Until a voice wreathed in black mist drifted over faintly. “Hey…”

Ruiyin looked up in confusion and was surprised to find that the Black Knight’s armor was not leaking.

“Uh, this is weird. I keep feeling like something isn’t quite right.” Lars scratched his hair and looked around. “Huh? Right. Where’s Galahad?”

“I am right behind you…” A resentful, desolate mist slowly rose behind Ruiyin, and two paper-thin arms slowly settled on her shoulders.

“I have been… right behind you this whole time…”

…Was this really a western fantasy world and not a Japanese horror film?!

I have a comrade. Normally he looks like ┗(｀ー)┛. When he fights, he looks like ψ(*｀ー)ψ_. But after battle, he almost always turns into _(:з)∠)_…

In the end, Galahad forced everyone to sign a Soul Contract stating that they would “absolutely never abandon the great Silver Knight at the rear of the battlefield,” and only then did the team’s internal conflict barely ease.

“So that Dark Elves was lying to us from the start, and Vigia was never here at all?” Galahad said viciously.

“No. At least half of what he said was true.” Ruiyin shook her head. “Even inside a room built from Black Magic Crystal, Mordova’s magic power would have been enough to maintain the contract’s effect for a short time. On top of that, the contents of the Memory Crystal couldn’t have been forged, so you don’t need to fool yourself into thinking Vigia wasn’t that embarrassing.”

How the hell did that chain of logic connect from beginning to end?!

Lars said slowly, “In other words, Vigia did arrive at the temple one day ago and did find a passage. And this passage really is a forbidden zone ordinary Dark Elves cannot set foot in, correct?”

“Most importantly, the path Vigia took is fundamentally different from ours. The route the Dark Elves opened for us, the one Vigia discovered, may very well lead us straight to a demon spider nest,” the Black Knight added coldly.

Everyone once again applauded this civil-servant-like capacity for logical reasoning. Clap clap clap!

“Hey, I’m going to activate the contract!” Galahad, who had once again been excluded, had veins bulging on his forehead. “What are you people even talking about? And before that…”

He angrily reached out and jabbed toward the venue where the three-person squad had just held their mutual-praise conference. His hand extended thirty centimeters before it was instantly swallowed by darkness. Even the radiance of his silver armor vanished into that boundless black.

“Don’t you think figuring out where we are should come first? Up until now, I haven’t even seen a single one of your faces!”

Classic western fantasy interior design: premium black.

The conference venue fell silent for a long time. Only then did Ruiyin’s voice come from her patch of darkness, sounding so casual it was almost deliberate. “Oh. Galahad does occasionally put forward constructive suggestions. So, do you have any guesses as to where this is?”

“No idea. We seem to be by a wall. The wall is uneven, and the ground is piled with trash. Right, I remember there was a Great Light Spell in the knight training manual. The incantation was…” Galahad groped along the wall, hooking his fingers into two holes to keep his balance.

While he was thinking hard, there came a soft strike-like hiss beside him. Lars silently lit himself up before everyone like a light bulb.

Galahad was closest to the light bulb, so the first thing he saw was the wall that had helped him keep his balance: uneven, smooth in texture, sharply contoured, and very obviously human… a skull. And his two fingers happened to be inserted in the skull’s two eye sockets.

He calmly withdrew his fingers, bent at the waist, and performed a solemn Silver Knight’s bow. “I apologize.”

Then he shot behind Ruiyin at top speed, pulled sandpaper out from inside his armor, and scrubbed those two fingers and every goosebump on his body as if his life depended on it.

Lars slowly walked a few steps forward with a stunned expression. Without walls to reflect the light, the bulb-like glow of the Great Light Spell only illuminated a small area around him. But that was already enough for everyone to understand their surroundings. Within sight, they saw at least several dozen complete skeletons. Some had been discarded on the ground, some nailed to the stone walls by axes and halberds, and some cut into pieces by blades and scattered in corners… Small fragments of bone that Galahad had mistaken for trash littered the floor everywhere. And in the vast darkness the light could not reach, who knew how many more identical horrors were waiting.
“They are corpses of the Dark Elves. The strange thing is that roughly half of the remains belong to the Orcs as well,” the Black Knight said after examining the white bones scattered nearby. “There are strong residual fluctuations from dark-element magic. A large-scale battle once took place here. Almost all of the Dark Elves died from physical trauma. And judging by the style of these giant axes, they were clearly weapons of the Orcs. This was at least two hundred years ago.”

They clustered around Lars and slowly moved forward with the light. Aside from the place where they had set out, the heavy darkness revealed no boundary and no ceiling, only endless bones stretching on and on. Skulls smashed apart by giant axes, bodies twisted into deformity by vicious dark magic, remains crushed flat by the strength of massive beasts… Every corpse had already become a skeleton. Looking at the white bones carpeting the ground, it was not hard at all to imagine how brutal and magnificent that battle had been several centuries ago.

“A battlefield between the Dark Elves and the Orcs…” Ruiyin murmured. Then, as if she had suddenly remembered something, she whipped around. “Mordova, you said two hundred years ago. Could this have happened during the last ‘War’?”

The Black Knight did not answer, but that silence plainly revealed the truth of what had happened back then: during the last War, the Dark Elves and the Orcs had clashed violently and suffered heavy casualties, which was why they had chosen to avoid the gods’ conflict. Only, even such a perfectly justified avoidance still had not saved them from being punished by the teacher and locked in the little black room… Just how petty was that guy, exactly?!

The Forbidden Land where only priests and the Elf King could set foot, the bone-burial ground from a century ago, finally reached its end as the intruders’ faint light slowly pushed forward a century later. It was a stone wall whose top could not be seen. The largest skeleton they had seen along the entire way was nailed hard to the wall by several battle-axes.

Ruiyin measured the Black Knight’s height with her hand, then moved it level with the skeleton’s thighbone and fell silent.

…That completely unscientific height was definitely the result of taking too many growth supplements, right?

“This member of the Orcs… looks kind of familiar.” Lars looked up doubtfully at the bull-headed skull, then suddenly ran over to Galahad and rummaged wildly through his backpack. After quite a while, he pulled out a book that was shedding gray dust, flipped through it like mad, and shouted in delight, “That’s it! It’s him! This is the legendary ancient King of the Orcs, Kandaru!”

The others all gathered beside Lars. On the old, yellowed page was a boldly sketched picture: a bull-headed member of the Orcs with a humanoid body, tusks bared in rage, carrying a giant axe as he glared at everyone with scarlet eyes and snorted steam. The caption beside it explained how many races this figure had wiped out and how many cities he had destroyed. A smaller line at the very bottom gave a friendly reminder: not suitable for beginner leveling.

Incidentally, the title on the book’s cover was still Knight Training Guide.

Too drained to comment on this bizarre crossover of RPG, anime, and epic literature, Ruiyin stared blankly at the scale marker beside the giant axe in the guide, then glanced at the skeleton on the wall and asked, “…Hey, does this guide mention whether Kandaru shrinks after he dies? When he was alive, he was more than ten times the size he is dead, okay?!”

Lars was obviously the kind of honor student who excelled at textbook theory, while Galahad was the kind of failing student who had never even touched the book. During finals, they could still show off their respective divine skills of memorizing the text and making cheat sheets, but now that they were facing the actual lab bench, both of them could only stare.

The Black Knight’s hand lightly brushed over the stark-white bones. Suddenly, he said, “He is not dead.”

“Not dead?”

“Correct. There are still signs of soul activity on the bones. He was probably only temporarily sealed by Undead magic,” the Black Knight said. “Besides, how could King of the Orcs, Kandaru, be the sort of character who could be killed so easily? I do not know how much effort the Dark Elves spent to accomplish this, but for this point alone, I will grudgingly offer them some praise.”

That tiny arrogant tone fully displayed the Black Knight’s disdain for the Dark Elves, while also subtly implying that he had never actually been here before. And so, one hour later, after circling the entire area, the group once again returned to stand before the Orc King’s white bones.

Perhaps it was her imagination, but Ruiyin felt that the black fog around the Black Knight, the kind thick enough to grow mushrooms in, had become even denser.

Lars shifted uneasily beside Ruiyin. Ever since they had started circling the area, something about him had seemed off. Several times during the trip, he had whipped his head around so violently he nearly snapped his own neck, only to turn back again with a puzzled look on his face. Ruiyin leaned closer and asked in a low voice, “What’s wrong?”

“No… it seems like nothing.” Lars looked like a young beast with all its soft fur standing on end as he anxiously scanned their surroundings. “I keep feeling like someone’s been watching us this whole time. Who’s there?!”

He shouted and whipped his head around once more. However, aside from the sharp crack of his neck twisting too hard, there was still nothing in the darkness.

“Is it just your imagination?” Galahad looked uneasily toward the unseen field of white bones in the distance. “In a place like this, maybe illusions popping up now and then wouldn’t be that strange…”

“It isn’t my imagination.” Lars clutched his neck and forced himself to look up through the pain. “It seems like… that person is up there.”

Ruiyin froze. Then, by reflex, she raised her head along with everyone else.

The place where they had gathered to discuss things happened to be directly in front of the slumbering body of Orc King Kandaru. When Ruiyin looked up, what she saw were two vivid crimson points of light slowly kindling in the hollow eye sockets of that stark-white bull skull.