episode_0002

***

A day when strong winds blew under the night sky.

Inside the old, creaking hut, a young boy’s dry cough echoed.

“Cough, cough! Alright then.”

Rub rub-

Roland rubbed his hands together, his brown eyes shining.

“Shall we see how much we harvested today?”

Clink-

With those words, Roland placed the enchanted antique he had brought onto the table.

And…

Thud-

Seeing something covered in blood and flesh, Roland flinched and stumbled backward.

“Damn it! Ugh, f**k… Hey, didn’t I tell you not to just toss those bloody food pouches around like that?”

With those words, Roland poked the food pouch with the back of his hand as if he’d seen something disgusting, pushing it towards Agapé.

“You said anything edible was fine, remember?”

“Would you like it if a peerless beauty ran at you covered in poop? I like food, not food pouches smeared with blood and guts. So just take out the contents and give them to me.”

“You’re so demanding.”

Rustle-

I poured all the old food from inside the food pouch onto the table.

“Oh, ohhh…!”

Then greed gleamed in Roland’s eyes.

Roland Narci.

That was the name of the brown-haired boy with lung disease.

He was a close friend who had teamed up with me, who had lost my mother and was left alone, to climb up from the bottom together, and he was also the only person I truly trusted and relied on in this city.

Furthermore, he was also the greatest genius in this city.

“One, two, three, four… thirty enchanted preserved foods! Phew~ This should last us a month, seriously! Cough, cough!”

Roland couldn’t hide his joy, even as he coughed dryly.

Then, he began to lecture about how long this amount of food would last and what else they could buy, essentially giving a long speech about how much food I had brought.

But, unlike the highly excited Roland.

“……”

I lay on the sunken sofa with a blank expression, saying nothing.

Only then did Roland notice his friend’s state and asked with a worried tone.

“Why are you suddenly so gloomy? Is something wrong?”

“…Roland.”

“What, you idiot.”

“We’re Fallen citizens, right?”

“Of course. What kind of nonsense are you spouting?”

“……”

Creak- Creak-

I lay on the sunken sofa.

And letting my body sway with the creaking of the sofa, I was lost in thought for a long time.

“Is there any hope in our lives?”

“Hope?”

At my words, Roland wore a completely bewildered expression.

“What hope?”

“You said it yourself. That we’re Fallen citizens.”

Fallen citizens.

The city wasn’t originally named Fallen.

The city was once called Ember, the City of Fate, founded by the great first prophet Feanor, and at one time it boasted a reputation as the largest and most developed city after the capital.

But fourteen years ago, that reputation was cast down to the depths beneath the ground.

Because a foolish and arrogant former king awakened something slumbering beneath the city.

A cursed power.

It was the root of all evil that had reduced the city to this state.

This wicked power, belonging to neither divinity, aura, nor magic, strengthened the power of those who possessed it, yet slowly gnawed away at the human body.

It was like a lump of curse that even killed the ‘stars’—symbols of potential held within human souls.

‘If it were merely a lump of curse, that would have been fortunate.’

This power was even contagious, so healthy people would become contaminated by the cursed power if they encountered Fallen citizens like us.

That was why the city had been sealed off fourteen years ago.

Because if this contaminated power were to spread across the world, there would truly be no solution.

“Honestly, what’s the difference between us and rats trapped in a jar?”

No matter how hard we live, we are destined to die within Fallen.

Not in vast plains, nor in lush forests, nor in civilized cities, nor by the endless horizons of the sea.

Within this narrow city, teeming with filth and corpses, no future existed other than slowly wasting away and dying.

“No, actually, we’ll probably die from this before we starve to death.”

With those words, I raised my left arm.

On the forearm of my left arm, a ‘brand’ was etched—too black and large to be a mere mole.

Scorching.

The scorching. A mark proving that the cursed power was gnawing away at our lives, and indicating how much of that power resided within our bodies.

Because the unknown entity awakened by the former king continued to emit that cursed power in the center of Fallen, the scorching grew larger with age.

Eventually, the body, unable to withstand the power, would turn to ash, starting from the extremities.

“You know, Roland. I want to become a knight.”

For the first time, I spoke about my dream.

“You might think it’s childish, but I want to become a great knight, a hero who saves the world.”

I had never met my father, but my mother told me he was a knight admired by everyone.

That’s why, having heard stories about my father since childhood, I had harbored a fantasy of becoming a knight for a long time.

But it was an impossible dream.

It wasn’t a matter of talent; it was my circumstances, having been born a Fallen citizen.

Roland knew that fact too, which was why he was giving a bitter smile.

“It’s an impossible dream. We, who can’t harbor ‘stars’ in our souls, couldn’t possibly raise our mastery or wield aura or magic like the people outside.”

Because of this cursed power.

This cursed power not only isolated us from the world.

But also stripped away the ‘potential’ we could possess as humans.

Roland and I simultaneously looked out the window at the night sky.

Only darkness filled it.

In this city, located at the eastern edge of the continent, famous for its clear view of the Milky Way waterfall, that beautiful Milky Way was completely invisible.

It wasn’t that it couldn’t be seen from this city.

It was because the cursed power had taken root, causing our souls to lose both the ability to harbor ‘stars’ within them and the right to see the ‘stars’ embroidered across the night sky, rendering them invisible to us.

“It’s dark.”

“Yeah.”

Just like our future.

“Roland.”

“What.”

“To be honest, I don’t think our future is very bright.”

“I agree with that.”

“Then-”

My gaze met Roland’s.

“Have you ever thought about getting out of this city?”

For the first time, I proposed escaping the city.

***

To be honest, among the hundreds of thousands of Fallen citizens, not a single person had ever escaped the city.

Had no one ever tried? Not at all.

Many had tried. Very many. Not just many, but an overwhelming number.

Yet, the reason no one had escaped was due to Fallen’s city walls, boasting an absurd height of tens of meters.

Whooshhhhh───

The Wall of Fate.

That’s what the city dwellers once called the wall that encircled all of Fallen.

What do they call it now, you ask?

Slaughterhouse.

They call it by such a name.

At one point, Fallen’s population ranged from hundreds of thousands to millions.

When disaster struck the city, those who wished to live broke open the city gates to escape, while outside, numerous soldiers and killing machines were deployed to prevent citizens from fleeing.

Including those who opened the gates and escaped, and those who tried to open them again.

Even those who attempted to climb the walls were all killed.

That’s why, even now, ten years later, the city walls are still covered in the rotting corpses of people.

Dried and twisted, like indelible scars, bloodstains soaked the walls as if painted in gore, and countless mountains of corpses piled up at the city gates, creating a terrible stench.

That’s why we started calling the Wall of Fate a slaughterhouse.

Because that wall was what reduced the millions of citizens to mere hundreds of thousands.

And even now, at the top of that wall, human grinders were constantly on standby to prevent citizens from escaping.

“So we have to escape through the underground.”

At Roland’s words, I immediately voiced my doubts.

“Underground? Is there an underground in this city?”

“Think about it.”

Rustle-

Roland spread an old map on the table.

It was a massive map depicting the entirety of Fallen.

“Do you know where people like royalty or knights who worked in the palace are buried?”

“How would I know that? Don’t they usually just get buried in cemeteries?”

“Exactly. But these were knights who served in Ember’s royal palace. Would they have buried palace officials and those knights in just any visible cemetery in the city? No, and in the first place, have you seen any large, well-maintained cemeteries that would suggest such important people were buried there, while roaming around the city?”

There weren’t any.

I had roamed every corner of the city, leaving no stone unturned, but while I had seen graves of nobles, I had never once seen a single tomb where past kings, royalty, or knights and palace officials loyal to them were buried.

“Then where might they be buried?”

At Roland’s words, I shook my head.

“They wouldn’t have been buried in just an ordinary place, at least.”

“Right.”

Rustle-

Roland spread another piece of paper on the table.

It was a torn-out page from an old book taken from the Lucas Feanor Library, the former royal library.

Roland pointed to a paragraph written in that book.

Tap-

“Ember is the city that most perfectly inherited the technology and culture of the Golden Age, more so than any other city on the continent. That’s because, situated at the eastern edge, it was able to avoid many dangers even amidst numerous tumultuous times.”

“So?”

“That means the royal family also strongly inherited the culture of the Golden Age, and one of the most representative cultures of the Golden Age was…”

Tap-

“Instead of burying bodies in coffins as they do now, it was burying them collectively in a ‘vast space’.”

Catacomb.

“Instead of today’s cemeteries, this burial method was prevalent during the Golden Age.”

Knights, commoners, nobles, even imperial and royal families.

During the Golden Age, based on overwhelming technology, people were buried in vast underground spaces.

Hearing that, I realized what Roland was trying to say.

“So there must be a vast underground space somewhere in this city where all those people were buried.”

“Right.”

Roland pointed to the royal palace with his fingertip.

“And I believe that place is beneath the royal palace. It’s probably spread throughout the entire city, centered around the palace’s underground.”

The palace underground.

“Anywhere else would be fine, but it just had to be the royal palace.”

“……”

The origin of the cursed power that spread throughout the city was the royal palace.

If one were to carelessly step into that place, which even now was emitting vast amounts of cursed power, they would undoubtedly meet a dog’s death [a figurative expression for a meaningless or shameful death].

However, from the moment I decided to escape this city, I had resolved to take on a certain level of risk.

I thought it would be much better to die attempting an escape than to die a dog’s death [a meaningless or shameful death] in this screwed-up city, so I nodded in agreement.

Then Roland marked a few spots on the map with graphite and spoke.

“First, let’s find an entrance to the catacombs.”

From the next day, we dedicated ourselves to finding an entrance.

***

“There’s nothing. No matter how much we search, there’s nothing.”

It had been about a week since we started searching for an entrance.

We searched every corner of the city for places with entrances to the catacombs, but not a single suitable entrance was found.

“It didn’t make sense from the start, though.”

It’s been almost a thousand years since the city was founded.

During that time, it had undergone repeated expansions and dozens of redevelopments, so it was impossible for the city to have only one secret passage leading to the catacombs.

There were also unexpected secret warehouses.

An armory, a potion storage, and even a separate, very small underground tomb, distinct from the royal catacombs.

“At this rate, we have no choice but to enter the royal fortress.”

At my words, Roland, who had been searching every nook and cranny of the alley with a cigarette in his mouth, spoke.

“You know that would be a dog’s death [a meaningless or shameful death], don’t you?”

The royal fortress was the only likely place for a catacomb entrance, but it was also where the cursed power was most deeply rooted, making it impossible to carelessly enter just to find an entrance.

“What should we do?”

“……”

At the same time as Roland spoke, we stopped walking.

“Isn’t there any good idea?”

“If I knew that, I would have escaped this dreary city long ago. I’m just starting to dig through old documents and search for promising locations myself.”

“How many promising locations have you found?”

“3,827.”

“……”

Damn it, we’ll die looking for all that.

“How much can you narrow it down?”

“This *is* narrowed down. You know how massive this city is, don’t you? It was a city inhabited by millions. It’s an incredibly huge city, so vast that people said it rivaled Sirius, the capital of the Shahlnu Stellarum Empire. Three thousand is a small number compared to the city’s size.”

“……”

Rounded up, that’s four thousand.

And in a week, the number of secret passages we found by sweating all day was about twenty.

Since we couldn’t just do this until we dropped, if we combined this work with food procurement, it meant we could find about thirty secret passages a month.

‘Thirty per month, and approximately four thousand secret passages presumed to exist right now.’

If we do the math, that’s roughly 130 months.

Since a year is twelve months, it would take roughly eleven years.

In other words, it meant we would have to waste eleven whole years just finding secret passages, not even escaping the city.

Even though finding that secret passage to the catacombs wouldn’t guarantee escape from the city.

As I felt despair at that fact, Roland, who had been quietly watching me from beside, exhaled a puff of cigarette smoke and said.

“Still, it’s too early to despair blindly. What’s certain is that if we just find the catacombs, we’ll definitely be able to escape the city.”

“Is that true?”

“Someday, I mean.”

“……”

“I’m not playing word games.”

Gaze shifted-

Roland’s gaze turned towards the blood-soaked city walls.

“At least if my prediction is correct, the catacombs’ scale must be even larger than this city. That means if we just head towards the catacombs’ periphery, we’ll reach the underground outside the city walls.”

That meant, in other words, that if we reached the periphery and then dug diligently, we could emerge above ground.

“So let’s just keep searching diligently, my friend. We still have plenty of time.”

Pat- Pat-

Roland patted my shoulder and started walking.

Though I felt a sense of helplessness, I had no intention of giving up, so I took his words as comfort and moved with Roland again to search for secret passages.

“By the way, all the buildings have collapsed, so it’s not easy to find anything.”

“Exactly.”

Since isolation, the city had experienced dozens of uprisings that flared up and died down repeatedly, so most of its buildings had collapsed.

Searching for secret passages among such ruined buildings required a lot of time just to find one, unless one concentrated intently.

Just then.

“Huh?”

“What’s wrong, Agapé?”

When I suddenly stopped walking, Roland, who had been following me, asked what was wrong.

“Don’t you hear that sound?”

“What sound are you talking about?”

“Be quiet and listen carefully.”

Fearing I might have misheard, I brought my index finger to my lips and listened intently.

“……”

“……”

…Thwack-

…Thwack- …Thwack-

“This is…”

Only then did Roland, having heard the sound, speak.

“That’s the sound of a beating, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

It was the sound of someone being beaten.

“Did a fight break out?”

“No. If it were a fight, the beating sounds wouldn’t be so regular.”

This is a one-sided beating, with multiple people ganging up on one.

At those words, Roland and I slowly followed the sound coming from the right fork ahead.

Heading towards the source of the sound, we saw about three delinquents beating up a young child.

Thump- Thump- Thump-!

“Aren’t you going to hand that over?!”

“You dog-like bastard! You should have handed it over when we were being nice about it…!”

The vicious delinquent was beating the child relentlessly.

Seeing that, Roland wore a disgusted expression.

“Won’t that kid die?”

“Indeed.”

Agreeing with Roland’s words, I quietly shifted my gaze to the piece of cloth covering the child’s body.

“That, it’s enchanted.”

“Enchanted?”

At my words, Roland’s gaze also turned to the piece of cloth.

“It really is?”

“Yeah. What kind of enchantment do you think it is?”

“Hmm, let’s see… it seems to have a warming effect, doesn’t it?”

Enchantment was a lost technology from the Golden Age.

As it was an item rarely found in Fallen, which held the most artifacts from the Golden Age, one could find it easily with enough luck.

“Wow, but that’s a bit too much.”

Roland’s gaze fell upon the child being beaten.

“That kid’s going to die at this rate, aren’t they?”

“……They probably will.”

Though I had killed countless people myself, this was excessive.

“What are you going to do?”

“About what?”

“The blanket, I mean. Are you going to take it, or just watch?”

I wondered what he was going to say, but it seemed he had no concern for the child at all.

His obsession with material possessions was typical of a Fallen citizen, but this time, Roland’s words couldn’t help but make me frown.

Whoosh-!

I threw my outer garment to Roland.

Roland, who was leaning on his staff, hastily managed to catch my outer garment with both hands, then spoke to me with a bewildered expression.

“Whoa! Hey, what are you doing?!”

“What am I doing?”

Clang-

“I’m going to save that child.”

I drew the gladius from its scabbard at my waist.

***

Thrust━!!

Slice━━!!

“Ah, it’s Agapé! It’s Agapé! Everyone run!”

As soon as I sliced down the one who seemed to be the leader, the remaining two fled in fear.

Sheathing the gladius, I approached the child.

Thud- Thud-

“Hey, hey! What do you think you’re doing all of a sudden?!”

Roland, who had been speechless at my sudden actions, finally leaned on his staff and tottered over.

“I told you. I’m saving this kid.”

“No, why would you suddenly save a kid you have no connection to? What good is that?!”

Roland, who couldn’t even comprehend the idea of saving another person, wore an incredulous expression.

I understood. In Fallen, a place where people even preyed on each other, saving another person was an unimaginable act.

Therefore, I didn’t bother to react to Roland’s words and spoke to the child instead.

“Hey.”

Poke poke-

Flinch!

As I poked her with my finger, the child flinched and ducked her head even lower.

She seemed more afraid than I expected, so to reassure her, I spoke with what I considered my utmost kindness.

“I’m not going to eat you, so let me see your face.”

At my words, the child’s trembling intensified.

“With that tone, she’s not likely to show herself to you.”

“You shut up.”

Fortunately, it seemed my sincerity was conveyed, as the girl, even while trembling.

Slowly-

Peered out from between her legs, where her face had been hidden.

“Hic…sob…”

Underneath her dirty, dust-covered hair, chicken-droplet-sized tears streamed from her indigo eyes.

“Don’t just cry, let me see your face, okay?”

With those words, I removed the blanket covering the child.

Flap-!

And then.

“Wh-what is this?”

A startled Roland stumbled backward.

A constellation tattoo.

On the left arm of the girl with indigo eyes, a tattoo depicting a beautiful constellation was etched.

And upon seeing that constellation tattoo.

Throb-!

A sudden pain began to surge through the scorching brand on my left arm.