Ero blinked, then asked back in a dazed voice,

“We’re... lost?”

“Yeah.”

Answering flatly, Leonardo Blaine rubbed the crease between his brows with one hand. Then he leaned his back against the wall blocking their way and dropped to the floor with a thud. As his concentration broke, the magic circle suspended in the air turned transparent and gradually faded from sight. At the same time, the hot wind that had been stirring his clothes died down at once.

Staring blankly at the scene, Ero turned in a circle and looked over the path where the participants were strewn across the ground once more.

Honestly, once you wandered around inside the maze long enough, every place started to look the same, so it was hard to tell whether this was a path they had already taken or not. On top of that, he had done nothing but trail after his boss the whole time, so he had not left any markers behind....

“Even with that magic circle from earlier, you still can’t figure it out? It was that huge.”

“The size of a magic circle has nothing to do with finding the way faster.”

Leonardo Blaine answered in a tired voice and tapped the ground beside him with his hand, telling Ero to sit down. Ero dropped so heavily that it almost looked like he had broken his legs. Then he shuffled closer to Leonardo Blaine on his knees.

Leonardo Blaine’s heated fingers were dyed a reddish color. Both of their gazes gathered at the tips.

“Look carefully. Something’s strange here.”

His fingertips, heated enough to melt the dirt floor, dragged across the ground in intricate lines. Ero followed the trail, glanced at Leonardo Blaine, then lowered his eyes to the floor again.

“What do you mean?”

“This is where we first entered, and this is where we are now.”

Leonardo Blaine began sketching a rough map of the maze as he remembered it in his head.

It was surprising enough that he had noticed they had passed through this place before, but the fact that those complicated corridors were being reproduced at his fingertips as though he had taken a picture of them left Ero stunned. What was strange, though, was that the maze in the drawing looked unnatural somehow. The paths did not connect smoothly and instead broke off in pieces, like a shattered puzzle.

Bracing himself with one palm and leaning his upper body in to inspect it, Ero tilted his head.

“You can’t get here from the entrance... can you? In the drawing, the middle is blocked, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. The paths don’t connect. They’re out of alignment. The structure here is also subtly different from before.”

Leonardo Blaine lifted his head and stared at the path they had come through.

“Whether the dimension is twisted or there’s some other device at work... earlier, there was definitely a path nearby where air was flowing through. But the moment we got around here, the current just cut off. Suddenly.”

“What are the chances... you’re remembering the path wrong?”

Watching his expression, Ero asked cautiously. The moment a sharp look swung toward him, he clamped his mouth shut.

“Well, that could happen. A person’s memory isn’t perfect.”

But Leonardo Blaine simply muttered while looking up, as if it were nothing.

“Even someone that smart can’t remember a little brat he met a few years ago.”

At that generous yet vague answer, Ero scratched the back of his head. Leonardo Blaine, resting his chin on a hand with his elbow propped on his knee, looked at him with only his eyes shifting.

“So, do you remember anything? I even drew you a picture myself.”

“Ah... well, the thing is...”

Ero was about to admit that he had been so busy collecting tokens that he remembered nothing at all, but if he said that outright, he was afraid his boss would abandon him, so he could not tell the truth. Instead, he desperately racked his brain for another approach. Then a thought flashed through his mind, and he clapped his hands before springing to his feet.

“Boss, would you like to meet a guy who claims he’s got a great brain?”

“What?”

“What kind of trick are you trying to pull now, coming back here as a pair after mocking me like that?”

Still bound in vines, the participant looked up at the two shadows falling over his face and asked boldly. Of course, he kept the stone shard he had been sawing at the vines with hidden tightly in his trembling hand.

He had been just about to cut through them completely, but then suddenly it was one against two. It had become hard to expect any /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ chance of winning. Ero shoved the barrel of his gun against the participant’s head and said in as vile a tone as possible,

“Hey, put that brilliant brain you were bragging about to work. Which way did you run after meeting Thanatos? Start talking now, or Joker here’s going to put a bullet hole in your head.”

So he has picked up a few things from somewhere.

Standing beside him, Leonardo Blaine watched Ero’s act with a displeased expression. The performance was awkward, and the bastard tied up in front of them did not look all that helpful anyway.

“One, wow. After taking my token too, why would I tell you that? Joker or joke or whatever, you idiots, this is where you make a deal, not a threat. I’ve got nothing left to lose.”

Just as expected, the participant who looked so pitiful in his bindings had no intention of cooperating.

“Well, if you hand over around ten tokens, I might tell you.”

“......”

“Looks to me like you bastards are trying to avoid Thanatos, but if you keep dawdling, he’ll be coming this way—”

At that moment, Ero grabbed the participant by the back of the neck and hauled him to his feet, then dragged him off somewhere. Right after that, he forcibly shoved the man’s head into a hole in the wall. With his hands bound, the participant flailed and shouted, “Wh-what is this?” but once half his body had been pushed into the crawl hole, his struggling quieted for a moment. Then suddenly he screamed.

Because of the convulsion, the stone shard in his hand dropped and rolled across the floor by his feet. About five seconds later, deciding that was enough, Ero pulled him back out of the psychological torture chamber.

“So. Again. What were you saying?”

The participant’s face had come back pale as a sheet.

“I-I’ll talk! I said I’ll tell you! If you keep going straight this way and keep turning right, there’s a wide open space!”

At the smooth stream of directions, Leonardo Blaine and Ero exchanged glances. Then Leonardo Blaine’s flame shot out like an arrow and raced along the route the man described. But the flame, which seemed like it would advance smoothly, soon struck a wall again and burned out.

When the magical power he had sent out came back as wind, Leonardo Blaine frowned and took a step forward, tilting his head.

“Hey, it’s blocked.”

“Wh-what? That can’t be right! Do you know how brilliant this brain of mine is? I can remember most paths. More importantly, how do you know that when you haven’t even gone there?”

“You’re telling me it’s blocked.”

Giving a short laugh, Leonardo Blaine rolled his eyes upward and replied coldly.

“So what, now I’m lying?”

The instant the mood shifted, the other man’s tone turned markedly polite.

“No, not that...! Ah, then maybe the path changed!”

“The path changed?”

That last question came from Leonardo Blaine and Ero at the same time. Seeing their interest, the participant nodded quickly and added,

“Sometimes walls that were blocked open up... or open paths get blocked instead! Two or three of the guys I was moving with said they experienced the same thing too, so I don’t think I was just seeing things...”

The participant explained that the deeper one went into the maze, the more rarely that kind of phenomenon appeared. He said they had also kept hearing the sound of something heavy dragging across the floor, and pounding impacts that made the ground tremble. He added that sometimes when they passed through holes in the walls, the token count would drop sharply in a way that was nothing like the average amount.

Listening in silence, Ero habitually pulled out his token to check it. Then his eyes widened.

“Huh?”

Eighty-one, no. Since he had passed through the wall where Thanatos had been leaning and then come back again, his token number should have been 80.

But the number displayed on the token now was 60.

“Boss, the number—”

Leonardo Blaine, who had pulled out his own token at almost the same moment to check it, likewise wore an odd expression. His token now read 532. Compared to when he had last shown it to Ero, it had dropped not by 1, but by 11.

The two of them looked back at the barrier standing firm across from them. They had only crossed this single wall, and it deducted the equivalent of eleven movements at once? That was suspicious.

Before Ero could stop him, Leonardo Blaine moved first. He lowered his head and shoved himself into the hole.

“Boss, you need to conserve your tokens!”

Minus eleven in one go. Unable to recklessly follow him, Ero waved both hands in protest, but Leonardo Blaine had already passed through the wall. Once he had fully crossed and checked his token again, the number had become 521. It was not a coincidence. If so, this wall itself might have been the cause of the unnatural flow of the maze.

“Wait a second.”

After that brief warning, Leonardo Blaine tapped the surface of the wall.

... ?

It was still hard, but the nature and density of the material making up the wall were subtly different from the others. To break or melt through a wall in this maze would require considerable force and magical power. He had tried once earlier, but it had taken too long, and since he had no idea how the match would unfold afterward, he had quickly given up to conserve energy. But this time, it felt like he could melt it more easily than he had during that earlier attempt.

Sure enough, when he gathered heat into his palm and pressed it to the wall, his hand sank in along its exact shape. Soon the melted stone dripping down from above looked ready to engulf his wrist, so he hurriedly pulled back.

“This might be...”

Shaking the lava-like stone from his hand, Leonardo Blaine looked around once more. Then he shoved aside the participants collapsed near the wall and loosened up his body with a few simple stretches. Raising his voice toward Ero, who was still on the other side of the wall, he shouted,

“Ero, get back from there!”

For someone telling him to move, he did not leave even a moment’s gap. Leonardo Blaine sprang forward powerfully and drove a spinning heel kick straight into the center of the tall barrier.