Chapter 880: Thirty‑One Days to Escape
"Wyndella, didn’t I say I had stuff to deal with before I could take the trials? What gives?" Arthur asked the dragon with a frown the moment he stepped out of the cosmic gate, completely ignoring the star going supernova in the distance for some reason.
"This location was about to change to something else," she said, her gaze on the giant sinkhole in the ground that looked like a portal into endless darkness.
"What?" Arthur asked, his brow raising while his expression stayed in a frown.
Wyndella finally turned to him, pointing at the dark portal in the ground.
"That thing’s gonna close up soon, and the current set of pathways inside it’s gonna change to a different set I won’t like."
"That’s it? You could’ve just paused time or changed it back to what you want. I know you’re not Barda, but you’re still 10D or something, so freezing the time of a..." Arthur paused, glancing at the dark portal with a strange expression before finishing. "Whatever that is, shouldn’t be hard for you."
"That’d count as interference. Did you forget I’m not supposed to interfere with the trial grounds in any way?"
"..."
Arthur went silent, his brow twitching in annoyance as he remembered that this was indeed one of the rules the Levites had set for themselves concerning his trials.
Rishia arrived in time to catch his strange expression, before shooting him a questioning look that he ignored.
"Tsk... like it even matters, you all pick batshit crazy locations anyway," Arthur muttered with clear exasperation.
Wyndella ignored his comment, twirling a finger in the air as she spoke.
"Anyway, you know the drill, all Authorities sealed except your weapon Authority."
As she spoke, a tiny orb of white light gathered above her finger, and once she finished, she flicked it toward Arthur, the orb phasing into his body and applying artificial limiters on all his Origin Cores except one.
A feeling of weakness washed over Arthur, making him frown lightly, and his frown deepened when he immediately noticed that Wyndella had done more than seal his Authorities.
"Did you do something to my perception?" he asked with narrowed eyes, and before Wyndella could respond, Barda’s voice echoed from behind him.
"Told you he’d notice."
Arthur turned to see the blue-haired dragon scratching one of his horns with a pocket knife, or at least a cosmic weapon that looked like a pocket knife, and Wyndella simply shrugged before speaking.
"Doesn’t really matter," she said before focusing on Arthur, "You’re a lot stronger than you were for the others, so I limited your perception a bit to even the playing field."
"That’s affecting my detection and response to enemies. There were so many other parameters you could inhibit," Arthur shot back, though Wyndella clearly had no intention of reconsidering anything.
"Well, I ended up choosing perception. Deal with it, it’s a ’trial’ after all," she said.
Arthur gave her a deadpan look for a solid minute before sighing with exasperation and turning around.
"Let’s just get this over with," he finally said.
Wyndella glanced at Barda and quipped, "Told you he’d just want to get it over with."
She stepped forward while Barda silently shook his head, and upon reaching the edge of the portal in the ground, she pointed at it and spoke.
"You’ve gotta get out of this section of the Labyrinth. There are about 10 levels, floors, whatever you wanna call them, in this section. The pathways will shuffle in a month’s time, so you have to get out before that happens."
The portal she pointed at was one of the entrances leading to the real Abyss Labyrinth that this region of the Valmone universe was named after, a labyrinth with entrances so deep one would think they were falling into an abyss of endless darkness.
"You’ve got 30 days, and time starts once you go in," Wyndella said, stepping back.
Arthur didn’t immediately dive in, choosing instead to stand there in silence for a moment before responding.
"31 days."
"Huh?"
"A Draco Sirus average day is longer than one here in Valmone, so I should have 31 days instead," Arthur explained as he turned to Wyndella.
The dragon just blinked quietly, and Barda, who was scanning the section of the labyrinth, spoke.
"He’s got a point."
Wyndella waved her hand dismissively and said, "Fine, you have 31 days, get going already."
Having received confirmation of the extended time, Arthur nodded silently before turning back to the dark portal.
A moment later, he stepped forward, dropping into the portal, his descent speed picking up rapidly. Within seconds, Arthur was falling at nearly 10,000 m/s, and he still didn’t seem anywhere near the bottom.
His body passed through multiple layers of spatial law energy barriers, and soon he phased right through a wall of cosmic energy he was certain wasn’t meant to let anything through.
Of course, that meant nothing when a Levite was involved.
Not long after passing the cosmic energy wall, he spotted faint traces of light in the distance, literal lights at the end of the tunnel.
Just as he was about to estimate the distance to them, he abruptly crashed onto solid ground with a loud noise, cracking a small crater in the marble-like floor.
"The heck was that?!" he cursed, forcing himself to his feet, dusting off his clothes, and scanning his surroundings.
Given the name ’Labyrinth’, Arthur had expected to find himself in some kind of maze.
On both sides were red brick walls that emitted a strange aura, though Arthur couldn’t quite pinpoint what made them unusual because of the limits on his perception.
’So it affects my ability to properly sense law energy too...’
He frowned deeply at the thought, glancing upward to see nothing but an arched ceiling.
"Tsk."
Arthur silently decided to take all the time he had to make sure Wyndella didn’t win the contest.
Extending his right hand, he condensed the energy of the only law he could freely manipulate to summon a solid whip. Infusing it with cosmic energy, he swung it at the wall, but the moment the whip struck, the energy inside it was absorbed and reflected back toward him.
Arthur easily dodged the rebound, but when he saw the mark left on the ground, he immediately realised the power behind it exceeded the amount of energy he’d put in.
"So the walls reflect attacks, huh? Gotta be careful."
Just as Arthur noted this, a roar came from up ahead, and he turned his gaze down the hallway before muttering, "And I should assume my opponents know this feature and can use it against me."
With that, he walked forward, the roar growing louder as he moved.
He turned right at the T-junction ahead, swinging the whip to release an echoing pulse of energy that let him conjure a rough mental map of the paths in front of him and estimate how far he needed to go to reach the source of the roar.
Eventually, he turned a corner and saw what would have been a dead end, if not for a large hole in the wall at the end of the hallway.
Arthur stepped back to the corner and peered through the hole, his eyes landing on several fat humanoids, each at least 2 metres tall, all with large stomachs and pig heads.
’Orcs?’
Arthur hadn’t expected to find a race considered one of the most basic ’Monster Races’ here, but it didn’t take him a second to realise that underestimating these orcs would be the death of him.
After all, each of them was at least a Low-Tier Deity, and on top of that, their state wasn’t normal.
’Their eyes are all red, and their auras are off. Are they in some kind of berserk state?’
They were just standing around staring, but Arthur was sure the moment they detected him, they’d all come after him.
’Let’s backtrack for a bit.’
Deciding that, Arthur turned and headed back down the path he’d come from. However, he’d just rounded the first corner of the maze when he came face to face with an Orc dragging a glaive.
"..."
[...]
Both of them stared at each other in silence for a moment.
Then the Orc’s mouth opened as if to roar, but before a sound could escape, Arthur’s hand moved, the whip in it tearing through the air and snaking around its neck.
He pulled his arm back, dragging the creature’s body forward and down into his rising knee, crushing its nose.
It groaned lightly, and Arthur grabbed the top of its head with his left hand, pulling on the whip still wrapped around its neck with his right, applying enough force to crush its fat neck.
He gently lowered the corpse to the floor, carefully glancing behind to make sure the group following him didn’t notice anything.
However, things rarely went as planned, because the moment he set the orc down, a loud roar came from in front of him, not behind.
Snapping his gaze forward, he saw another glaive-wielding orc charging at him with maddened rage, swinging its weapon down with all the strength in its muscular arms.
Arthur immediately leapt to the side to dodge the initial strike, and as it split the ground behind him, he swung his whip, wrapping it around the orc’s leg and pulling, sending the monster tumbling down.
He then dashed behind it and delivered a kick to its back before it could rise, sending it rolling forward toward the end of the hallway where the other orcs from the open space he’d retreated from were charging in.
The berserk monsters all collided and tumbled to the ground, and Arthur infused law energy into his whip, making its crack as sharp as a blade.
He swung it wildly, the whip slicing through the air at hypersonic speed and tearing through the thick hides of the orcs as they tumbled over one another.
Arthur wrapped the whip around one of their glaives, pulling it toward himself and then punching the butt of the weapon to send it flying like a projectile.
It pierced the chests of two orcs before embedding itself in the heart of a third, and immediately after, Arthur turned and retreated.
The berserk orcs stomped over the corpses of their comrades and chased after him, but when they rounded the corner, they found nothing but an empty hallway, no sign of the silver-haired godslayer.
Just then, a thumping sound echoed, and Arthur, hanging from the ceiling, dropped down behind them, cosmic energy swirling around his whip as he unleashed a wide swing.
The swirling energy acted like the flutes of a drill saw, shredding their flesh and painting the hallways with blood.
As pieces of their corpses fell to the floor, Arthur swung the whip again, sending another set into the afterlife, dodging a few glaive slashes and spear thrusts before using the whip to pull the weapons from them and delivering swings that split their skulls in two.
Once he finished eliminating them all, he swung the whip, a cracking sound echoing as the blood and organ fragments clinging to it fell away.
"That wasn’t as hard as I thought," he muttered.
He unsummoned the whip, glanced at the carnage around him, and shrugged. "Oh well, this is just the first floor."
Cracking his fingers, he stepped over the scattered body parts and continued in his original direction.
