"Could it be?" I muttered under my nose, raising my hand to rub my chin as I scanned the walls with an extreme degree of interest.
The room that was hidden behind the fake wall turned out to be empty. In other words, it consisted of just three more walls that demarcated its size... and nothing else.
But it would be a massive understatement to claim it was a worthless finding.
'This is even harder to believe than the involvement of the sigma company,' I thought, noticing the markings that decorated the walls.
Sure, this room was empty when it came to secondary objects. But as it turned out, this empty room wasn't about keeping something in but about hiding yet another passage.
Otherwise, why would there be a need for the cryptic text covering the walls and indicating it was all but a puzzle for one to solve?
"Let's see..." I muttered under my nose as I took a closer look at the drawings that covered the walls.
Sure, some of them formed some kind of language I couldn't understand at all... but some others, while still hard to figure the meaning of, somehow brought forth a certain idea in my mind.
An idea that befitted the situation I found myself in yet at the same time an idea so stupid that I was hesitant to even consider it.
I then raised my hand and brought it to the drawing located at the leftmost wall of the hidden room.
'It's warrior, no matter how you look at it,' I thought, hanging my head low as a feeling of depression settled in my soul.
I could accept a company from back on earth somehow spreading its influence all the way to this world. I could even accept the fact that apparently, the ruins that we were inspecting right now were as old as Egyptian pyramids were for me.
I could accept all of that... But acknowledging what likely was the puzzle of the room, I just found, was too much.
Yet, as my hand traced down and rubbed past the several lines of text below the image, I concluded to depict a warrior...
"Those are status windows, are they not?" I muttered, more to myself than to anyone else. This fact was only further reinforced by how only people from the earth like me could understand the meaning of my words.
The situation was pretty simple.
On the wall to the leftmost side, there was a status card of a warrior.
By analyzing the text for a short while, I managed to make out the potential meaning of several marks, all of which depicted either numbers or letters that could be later arranged on a scale.
"But how the hell am I supposed to guess the name of each stat?" I kept the tradition of muttering to myself, given how that was the best I could do for now.
Because no matter how hard I tried to figure it out, I couldn't associate value that could serve as an arranging key for our scale if I didn't know what each of those statistics said!
That's why, rather than trying to forcibly solve the issue with the limited amount of information I had, for now, I decided to look for some more clues.
"Huh?" I shrugged a bit when I looked into the room, only to notice a weird peculiarity.
It was something that escaped my attention before, given how I didn't pay much heed to the small details.
But this empty room that I found... actually had more walls than just the standard four for a square with the entry embedded into one of them.
To the back of the room, its shape would change a little, adding two more corners and two more surfaces for the ancient creators of this place to paint more status cards.
Yet, even after analyzing the situation in every possible way, I couldn't notice a single detail spare for the text itself that could help me to figure out what I needed to know.
There was only one thing that confirmed all my guesses about this place so far.
A single wall. On its top, the picture was too hazy and corroded for anyone to understand it. Yet, if there was one thing that I could say for sure, it was how the character in the said picture...
Was t-posing.
'Give me a break,' I thought, hanging my head low as an exhausted sigh escaped from my mouth.
Whoever was behind making this strange place surely knew how to annoy any and all that would come here!
Yet, as my eyes moved down, I realized that there was another peculiar element about this part of the wall.
Below the picture, the places where I guessed the rank of each of the pictures were described; there was no text at all.
Or rather, the wall itself turned out to be actually a bit more interesting, as instead of the same letters or numbers that marked those parts of the status card on the other walls, a strange, black mass filled those places instead.
"Is it asking for a supreme build?" I thought, rubbing my chin as I attempted to cast aside all the imperfections to my thinking bestowed upon me by my very own perspective. Rather than assuming I was perfectly right, I simply threw one idea after the other before the scrutiny of my mind in an attempt to find an explanation that would fit.
Yet, before I could figure anything out, my hand moved on its own. It raised and then landed on the wall, only to slide down a little and then gently touch the black matter I noticed before.
Because I finally noticed one more familiarity. One more detail that, just like before, was staring me right in the face. Yet, only when I took a step back and looked at the situation from a greater distance did I realize its presence.
'Wait a second,' I thought, feeling my entire body freezing when the potential meaning behind my realization struck me.
'Isn't this status window...' I thought, gulping down my saliva as I called forth my own system and took a glance, just to make sure, 'pretty much the same as my current status?'
This was too damn impossible for it not to be true.
I personally believed that stuff that was unlikely could only be like that to a certain degree. Because once the odds were to get too unfavorable and the strange event would still happen, it would mean that I still didn't fully understand the connection that made it happen.
In other words, it wasn't the math that was wrong with the odds, but it was the observer who misunderstood the earlier data.
'Or, in plain English, there is no way for this similarity to happen for no reason at all,' I thought, allowing my body to move on its own as my fingers pained the same numbers that I could see on my status into the black mass of the empty status card on the wall.
And bit by bit, the information that I could see in the corner of my eye ended up written in that black mass on top of this otherwise empty wall.
"Arty?" Mia muttered, getting a bit closer.
Seemingly, she did it out of nowhere. But as a bad premonition filled my heart, I could tell the same happened to her.
Then, the writings on those walls suddenly turned red. The small yet strange structure of four cubes and a perfect ball lying on them covered in the same hue, indicating that they were all part of a greater system.
"Come here," I shouted, grabbing Mia by her wrist and pulling her into my embrace.
Whatever was going on, I had to make sure Mia was close enough for me to protect her. And in the worst-case scenario of something wrong happening, now she was near enough for me to not let her go.
Just like I promised, I wouldn't let her go anywhere!
"Host accepted," a voice suddenly appeared in the room. Then, the walls turned completely red, flashing brightly to the point of nearly making me go blind.
Yet, as the light subsided, I realized that there was a small difference in my surroundings.
"Mia," I muttered, looking down. Yet, with my eyes still overwhelmed by the explosion of the red from before, I couldn't really rely on my eyes to provide me with any information.
Thankfully, I could still feel Mia's soft body within my arms, just like I could feel her squirming, proving that while affected by the light, she didn't seem to be injured.
"Now, then," I muttered once I ensured the most important point. I then raised my slowly recovering eyes to confirm what I could already tell from a feeling alone.
The central wall that I just filled with my details has disappeared. Yet, as if it wasn't all too easy, a new wall appeared... right where the former fake wall was.
"We are trapped," I muttered, running my hand up and down Mia's back in an attempt to preemptively calm her down.
"But you know what you are doing?" Mia asked, raising her eyes to look up at my face. "You look like you are awfully aware of what's going on here," she added, squinting her eyes as she put an adorable expression of suspicion on her face...
Only to quickly get rid of it and replace it with a wide, amused smile.
"Well, not like it matters," she added, shrugging her shoulders only to climb on top of her feet and offer my lips a small peck. "You will tell me in due time, won't you?" she suggested before turning around and looking ahead.
Mia then turned her face back to me and extended her arm toward me.
"Well then, shall we go?"
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