Chapter 195: Noon Infiltration
Erani and I walked into the guild lobby. We’d come up with a general plan of action on our way into town, and now we just had to do it.
The lobby was bustling with activity—it typically became most populated around noon, when most adventurers came in to accept jobs or hand in the ones they’d already completed in the early morning. As such, there was a long line headed to the receptionist’s desk, leaving the poor woman to handle several dozen impatient fighters all waiting on her to do her job faster.
So we both walked right up to her, skipping the whole line, and leaned over the desk for a short word.
“Hey,” I said to her.
“Hm?” she glanced over for a moment, her attention only partially on us as she was in the middle of explaining to a bronze-degree why he couldn’t, in fact, go and try to kill a full-grown Dragon in the mountain range.
“We’re just dropping by to speak to the guildmaster, Vanvol, about that exclusive job we turned in a little bit ago. You mind if you let us through? We remember where his office is, so no need to lead us there.”
“Oh, sure,” she said with a nod, reaching back to open up the door into the back area, where the offices were.
We stepped through, shutting the door behind us. That was step one complete.
Nobody else was in the hall we entered at the moment, leaving us alone in the walkway lined with unlabeled wooden doors.
“Y’know,” I muttered to Erani, “part of me feels like they should hire some help for her, if she’s so overworked during rush hour that she’s willing to let us back into this employees-only area just to get us out of her hair.”
“Well, technically, there’s not much to worry about us doing. In normal circumstances, that is.”
“Yeah, I guess. So, Index, you said you spotted where that room was the last time we walked through here, right? You’d seen it while flying through the walls?”
“Yep! Let me just find it in my logs…uh…There it is. Go ahead and start walking, I’ll tell you when you get there.”
“Great. Keep an eye out for anyone else that might be ahead of us though, alright?”
We crept forward, needing to stop a couple times because Index saw someone passing through the hallway ahead of us, and one time, we even needed to duck into one of the nearby unoccupied storage closets and let someone come through from behind us. But other than that, it went relatively smoothly.
“Here,” Index said, and we stopped. “That door to your left, the one made of the thicker planks.”
“Okay,” I whispered back. “So we just go through there?”
“I can’t see all of it—it’s too big—but from the looks of things, seems like nobody’s inside. Oh, but do be aware that once you go through, you’re pretty much one hundred percent committed to a use of Time Loop.”
“Why?”
“That whole place is rigged with Enchantments. The moment you enter, those Enchantments are going to send as much information on you as they can scrape to another location. From the looks of the Enchantments, it’ll be…written somewhere? A book, I think. So most likely, there’s a security log book kept someplace else, and when you go in the room, it’s going to write in the book the time you entered, where you entered from, how many people, draw depictions of what you look like, keep record of exactly what you did while inside, whether you took anything out…everything. And, obviously, since you’re trespassing and all, that’s pretty much as hard evidence as you can get that you’ve broken the law. So, yeah, you’ll definitely need to use Time Loop after this.”
“But nobody’s going to be coming after us right now, right?”
“No, nobody’ll even know you went in until someone goes and reads the log book. That could be something they only do once a day, week, maybe even more infrequently. And even then, they’ll have to report it to the town guards and go through that whole process before you actually have anyone hunting you down. You’ll have plenty of time.”
“Well, we only need six hours.”
I nodded to Erani and put my hand on the doorknob, silently turning it and opening the door.
The room inside was dry and dark, filled with what felt like hundreds of drawers. They were arranged in hallways you could walk down, and each drawer was filled to the brim with papers—at least, that was what Index had said. This was their documentation room, where they kept every single job that had been posted, completed, everything. And, most importantly, the jobs that they planned to put up in the future.
“Those papers are going to be in the back of the room,” Index said. “I can’t see them right now, but I spotted them before, when you guys were in the guildmaster’s office. Assuming the guild hasn't rearranged, they should still be there.”
I nodded, creeping down the main hall with Erani, glancing back and forth into the other halls of shelves as we moved. The room was dim, but not too dark to see. Still, we’d probably need some other sort of light to actually read anything on those papers once we got them.
Once we were around halfway into the room, Index suddenly called out, “Stop!”
I halted in my tracks, holding out a hand to silently tell Erani to do the same. She looked at me curiously.
“Someone’s in the room,” Index said.
I started glancing around, trying to find the unseen adversary.
“Not within line of sight,” Index continued. “But in the back, where you need to go. There’s someone crouched down near one of the drawers. He only just entered my sphere of vision.”
Does he know we’re here? I silently asked.
“No, seems too focused on what he’s doing to have heard your footsteps.”
Well, what do we do, then? Leave and head into some other unoccupied room and just wait for him to leave?
“I have no idea how long that’d take. From the looks of it, he’s sorting through all of the papers in the drawer, organizing them chronologically. No idea how fast he’ll go with that, or if this is the only drawer he needs to do. And you are on a time limit here, remember.”
Well then, shit, uh…
“You could just kill him.”
Index. I’m not going to—
“No, think about it. You’re going back in time anyway, right? So if you know this timeline isn’t going to end up being the final one, then your actions here are basically fake. What’s wrong with killing someone if you’ll just go back in time afterward and they’ll end up alive again? Effectively, you’re not actually killing him at all.”
That still feels like it’s pushing it. I mean, sure, maybe he doesn’t end up dead, but murder is still murder, right? We don’t perfectly know how time travel works, maybe it does matter. Maybe this world will continue on after we leave, and that guy will still be dead in this alternate universe. Feels like a bad idea to go murdering people without knowing how it could end up.”
“Actually, I do perfectly know how time travel works. At least, I know how your Talent, Time Loop, works. And no, that won’t happen. I can guarantee you that it will be of no consequence that you killed this guy.”
Wouldn’t you say that either way? You have no motivation to tell me the truth here, just to get me to make the ‘optimal’ decision. What you’re saying could be a complete lie.
Index sighed. “Look, I wouldn’t lie to you about that sort of thing. I know you don’t trust me to make moral decisions, but if you felt like you couldn’t trust me to at least give you truthful information, then I wouldn’t be able to help you properly, and you could die. And if I lie to you, you won’t trust me. I have no idea whether or not you’ll end up seeing through any lies I do tell, so lying to you is an extremely risky thing to do. Something which I don’t want to do. So there. You can trust me, because I do have motivation to tell the truth.”
I pursed my lips, thinking through what it’d said. It felt like sound logic, at the very least. After a moment, I took a few careful steps back, up to the doorway, and signaled for Erani to come with me. Once we were far enough from the man on the opposite end of the room that I was confident he wouldn’t hear us, I whispered to her, explaining the situation.
“What do we do?” she muttered once I’d finished.
“Index says we should kill him,” I said.
“Absolutely not,” she said.
“Yeah, I was kind of skeptical of it, too. Just feels kind of wrong. But I don’t know, Index kind of made a convincing point. We’re going back in time anyway, right? So if we undo the guy’s death, does it even count? He’ll be alive in the end, so we’ve effectively not taken his life at all.”
“No, it’s not even about that. Well, I mean, I don’t really agree with Index’s point, but even if we do say that’s totally true, and it’s how morality works, it’s still not worth it. I mean, sure, once we go back, he’ll be alive again. That’s fine and all, but we still keep our memories of killing him, right? And even if we can go through our logical reasoning about how it technically wasn’t bad to do that, or how it all turned out fine in the end, that’s not how emotions work. Your nose, smelling the stench of the blood, and your ears, hearing the pleas of a truly innocent man, begging you for mercy, they don’t care about whether or not you can mentally justify the act. They’ll remember all the same. I guarantee you, we don’t want that weight on our souls.”
I blinked at her heavy words. “I…Um, yeah, okay. You seem…personally invested.”
She sighed. “My sister, she was a researcher. Well, getting through that college costs a lot of money. Our parents weren’t totally prepared to pay for it, so…She got involved with some of the lower parts of Carth to get it done. Didn’t even do anything serious, and got out as soon as she got the money for her tuition. But she still never forgot it. Told me about it one night. Arlan, we don’t want to go down that route. Taking stuff that’ll be replaced when you use Time Loop, that’s one thing. That doesn’t leave a scar. But killing innocents is another realm entirely.”
I nodded. “Sure. We’ll find another way.”
“Hey,” Index said, “the guy’s moving.”
What? Where?
“Could be in your direction, I’m not sure. He’s got a piece of paper in his hands, looks like it was sorted into the wrong drawer? I think he’s trying to find where it goes.”
Do we need to leave?
“No, no, I think I came up with something that could work. And it doesn’t even involve murder, which I’m sure will please your girlfriend.”
Just tell me what I need to do. Is he close?
“Getting closer. So, I’ll tell you the moment he’s within thirty paces of you. When he is, I want you to prepare to activate Gravity Well targeting him. Don’t do it right away, just prepare it.”
Wait, what? How’s that going to work?
“No time to explain! He just got within thirty paces, so he’s in range of Gravity Well. Can you target him? Is your Spell ready?”
Uhh…I reached into my mind, frantically trying to find the target. It was difficult to do—typically, targeting someone was helped greatly by being able to see them, but just knowing that they were there was all you technically needed to cast a Spell on them. I fiddled around, and…Ready.
“Okay, and…” Index waited for a few seconds in silence, then, seemingly randomly, said, “now!”
I cast Gravity Well. For a moment, nothing happened, and I was worried Index’s plan hadn’t worked. Wouldn’t this do nothing but alert him to our presence?
But then, I heard a voice from within the room yelp in alarm, and then I heard the sound of something banging against metal.
“It worked!” Index said. “Hurry, go over there. He won’t stay out for long.”
“What?” I said. “He’s knocked out?”
“Wait, what’s going on? Erani asked.
“No idea. Let’s go see.”
What had ended up happening, it seemed, was that Index told me to activate Gravity Well the moment the man’s foot had gotten wedged into a crack in the floor. Something that would have been nothing but a minor inconvenience on its own, but when paired with the gravity-increasing and muscle-taxing effects of the Spell, it basically guaranteed he’d trip. And, since the crack was situated right in front of one of the many metal drawers filling the room, he proceeded to fall right into it, hitting his head and collapsing to the ground.
We walked up to him just as his eyes began to flutter open, his mind clearly still not all there.
“What the hells?!” Erani asked. “Arlan, what just happened?”
“Yeah, Index, what the fuck?” I demanded.
“Just tie him up! He won’t be out for long, and this was basically the only way to get him out of commission without him dying or calling for help. You should be thanking me!”
I exhaled a sigh and hurriedly bent over, flipping the man onto his stomach so I could pull his hands behind his back.
“...H-hey, what…” he muttered softly as I worked.
“Erani, do you mind gagging him?” I asked.
She shook her head and bent down, too. “You know, I feel like I dislike this Index thing more and more every time I work with it.”
“Yeah, well, it’s just something you get used to, I guess.”
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