Chapter 135: The Wrong Direction
The celebration was still running when Kai stepped out the next morning.
Mythal was not treating the Territory Commander’s defeat like a normal dungeon clear. Training facilities full before eight. Guild halls packed. The restaurants near the central district running low on seating before the lunch rush. Every conversation he passed had the same center of gravity.
"Western B-rank is next," someone said outside a café.
"No chance," someone else said.
"Why not?"
"Because if the strike team splits up, the city has a collective breakdown."
Laughter from the group around the screen.
Kai kept walking.
Three days ago the conversation had been about whether a B-rank gate was survivable. Now it was about which one came next and how to coordinate the approach. That was a bigger shift than the words made it sound.
The park where Kai went to meet up with the other was quiet by comparison, which was immediately suspicious. Kei was reading something at the bench.
Kai raised a brow.
"Morning," Kei said, without looking up.
"That’s it?"
"I’m trying restraint."
Rin made a sound that was not quite a choke. Lina looked away while she was still stretching. Dorn was watching the sky with the expression of someone witnessing a natural phenomenon.
Kai sat down.
He took out the marker and saw the marker was still pointing towards somewhere.
Kei looked over the top of his reading material. "Did you get a compass?"
"It’s a drop from the dungeon. It’s supposed to help me find... Treasure maybe?"
"Haha, so the description is weird."
"Yeah..." Kai frowned before asking. "Do you guys think the Territory Dungeon would know about Mythal?"
Lina blinked before saying. "No way, it has only been around for a few days. And there was no sign of any monsters invading the city from it."
Kai looked at the marker.
They were right but this made the Marker even more confusing. Why did it act like there was a connection between it and Mythal? The system only appeared this year and shouldn’t have a connection with the city.
He put the object in his inventory and went to find Lily.
...
Lily was in her office at her guild headquarter under a depth of paperwork that looked like it had developed over several days. She did not look up when he came in.
"What’s wrong?"
"I need your help with something."
Kai quickly explains to her everything about the Marker. Lily paused before glancing at him with her brows furrowed. "Yeah that shouldn’t make any sense... Unless the item is similar to an object finder."
"You mean like a metal detector?"
"Yeah or quest finder like in video games. It might just be pointing to things that reveals the past of... Let’s say maybe the city?"
Kai’s eyes widened before saying. "That could be true..."
"I think it’s unrelated to the territory," Lily said. "Similar to odd weapons we have, the Marker is no different."
Kai didn’t answer.
"You disagree," she said.
"I want to eliminate the possibility," he said.
"That’s different from disagreeing."
"Slightly."
She looked at him for a moment. "If you follow it and it leads nowhere, you’ll have your answer."
...
Kai left headquarters twenty minutes later with the object in his inventory and a route that the marker was projecting inward toward the city rather than outward toward where the territory had been.
"You weren’t going to tell me."
Kai froze before glancing at her. He hadn’t noticed her until she was already beside him.
"The artifact," he said.
"You took it and left without saying anything to anyone."
"People leave headquarters."
"With the B-rank artifact that everyone else decided was a mapping error."
He glanced at her.
"That narrows it down," he said.
"It really does," she said.
Neither of them mentioned turning around.
The route moved through the older districts, the sections of Mythal that predated the gate phase and the gate phase’s predecessors.
Storage buildings.
Maintenance access corridors. Old maintenance tunnels ran beneath the city. Some were planned. Others had simply appeared as Mythal grew.
It felt ridiculous.
Following a faint light through maintenance tunnels while the city celebrated above them.
Forty minutes in, Sera said, "I hate to admit it."
"But?" Kai said.
"I’m starting to think this might be a wall."
"Optimistic," he said.
"Thank you," she said.
The route turned a final corner and stopped.
A stone wall. Solid, weathered, no distinguishing features. The kind of wall that was part of a corridor’s end rather than a barrier placed across one. The marker on the object pointed directly at it.
Sera looked at the wall. Then at him. "Congratulations," she said. "You found a wall."
He looked at the corridor around the wall. At the ceiling. At the floor. At the junction where the corridor’s older construction met the stone of the wall itself.
Something was wrong with the ages.
Not dramatically. Easily missed. But the wear patterns on the wall did not match the wear patterns on the surrounding structure. The corridor was old in the way of something that had been here for a long time and had been used and weathered accordingly. The wall was old. But it was not as old as what surrounded it.
Someone had placed the wall here after the corridor already existed.
"Wait," Kai said.
Sera’s expression shifted. "You found something."
"Maybe."
He crouched and looked at the base of the wall where it met the floor. The seam had almost no evidence of construction except in one section near the left corner where the mortar had a slightly different texture from the surrounding material, consistent with a later application rather than original construction.
The object pulsed.
Both of them went still.
The metallic surface lit up. The route projection appeared, not spreading outward the way it had before but converging, every line running inward toward the wall, the marker brightening until it was clearly visible rather than barely there.
The stone trembled. A grinding sound started, deep and slow, the sound of mechanical systems that had not operated in a very long time being asked to operate again.
"What did you do?" Sera said.
"Touched the floor near the base," Kai said.
"Remarkably unhelpful."
The wall split down the middle like a curtain being drawn. Stone slid apart with a deep grinding sound. Cold air came through the opening with a bad scent like this passage hasn’t been open for centuries.
The object in Kai’s hand went dark.
The marker disappeared.
The projection faded.
Destination reached.
Beyond the opening was darkness. The corridor extended downward at a shallow angle, the floor of it visible for a few meters before the available light from the maintenance corridor ran out. The walls visible in that range were cut stone, different in character from the construction above.
Sera looked at the passage and then slowly at Kai. "Tell me this isn’t another one of your instincts," she said.
He looked at the darkness at the bottom of the visible range and what little he could see of the walls. "No," he said.
She looked at him. "Then what is it?"
He looked at the stonework. At the age of it. At the specific quality of deliberate concealment that the sealed wall had represented, constructed over something that already existed rather than as part of it.
"Someone hid this," he said.
Sera looked at the passage and then back at him. Then she stepped forward and went in.
He followed.
The opening remained behind them. The cold air wrapped around them as they descended. The city above disappeared as the passage curved, the light from the maintenance corridor no longer reaching far enough to be useful.
Then, at a distance that was further down than the passage’s angle should have allowed relative to where they had entered, a faint light appeared. Not artificial. Not the blue of the system. Something older than either of those things, a pale ambient glow that came from the walls themselves.
Neither of them stopped.
The real discovery had never been inside the territory.
It had been under the city the entire time.
