“Before moving 10 meters from the starting point, you may not steal another person’s token or combine token numbers. That makes twenty people up to here. We will now enter.”

There were still participants lined up in front of the other entrances. Because only a set number could go in at fixed intervals, the wait had grown fairly long. Even so, the group that had once been fourth from the back was only just now stepping into the maze.

Since the match ran for eight hours based on one’s time of entry, going in late did not place them at a disadvantage compared to those who had entered earlier. If anything, there was a view that it was strategically superior, since they could infer the situation inside by listening to what leaked out, or the stronger participants might already have escaped the maze by then.

Most of the remaining participants were people who had deliberately held out in hopes of exactly that advantage. And just as they had hoped, the entrance area of the maze was now quiet to an extreme.

Boom.

With roughly three groups left before entry closed, a mysterious tremor rang out from inside the maze. The heavy vibration spread through the ground in all directions, making its presence known beneath the participants’ feet.

“What was that?”

“Why?”

“The ground’s shaking.”

At first only those with especially sharp senses noticed it, but the waves gradually grew stronger. Participants who sensed that something was wrong began staring into the entrance one by one. The League operations staff controlling them were no exception.

“The next five rows, forward—”

Boom, boom.

The two Council legionnaires standing at the entrance giving directions stopped speaking and turned around. At first they had taken it for the aftershock of a battle or perhaps some mechanism in the maze moving, but the frequency kept increasing, and the vibrations themselves were getting stronger.

Soon the two legionnaires looked at each other. At the ominous reverberation, dust that had collected on the maze walls shook loose in soft trickles. Pebbles rolling on the ground rattled and shifted little by little to the side. Something was coming this way.

Sensing the ill omen, the operations staff pulled the participants back. Then, just as one of them pressed the button on his radio to check the situation inside—

Kwaaang!

“Aaaah!”

With an enormous crash, fragments exploded outward from a point barely seven meters from the entrance. The wall was so hard that even scratching its surface was difficult, so the sight of that fortress-like barrier being half-destroyed felt almost unreal. The legionnaires and participants stationed nearby all ducked their heads at once.

Beyond the pale cloud of dust, a dark shadow could be seen, seeming to be the one that had broken the wall. At the same time, a low animalistic growl rolled out. It was such a chilling low-frequency sound that for an instant it nearly froze the body in place.

The shadow looked to be well over three meters in size, and to the participants it did not look human at all.

It resembled something like a minotaur escaping from somewhere deep in the maze. Startled rigid by the sudden appearance, the onlookers began backing away step by step.

But then someone jumped down from on top of it, and it was Beatrice, clutching a leather leash in one hand.

“I’m first!”

She caught the brim of her fluttering hat and raised the hand holding the leash high into the air. The other end was looped around the neck of the panting beast inside the dust cloud. Smiling brightly, Beatrice turned to look at Gillian, whose body had grown enormous, and Morboin, who was sitting on his shoulder.

“Looks like I’m going to win the bet easily.”

Before long, Morboin also hopped lightly down from atop Gillian. In his hand was an umbrella with a pattern similar to Beatrice’s dress. Thanks to the umbrella shielding them from debris and dust, Beatrice and Morboin looked neat aside from their clothes being slightly disordered.

But Gillian, with tufts of fur sprouting here and there from his skin and the °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° whites of his eyes swallowed by expanded blackness in a way that called to mind the uncanny valley, looked little different from a beast even while standing on two feet. The monster claws sharpened at the ends of his fingers, and the thick tail protruding over the back of his trousers, were proof enough.

Two Council operations staff members drew their swords and hurriedly stepped in front of the participants in a guarded stance. Then they shouted toward Beatrice, who at least looked the most human.

“Please return to the match area immediately! This is not an escape route!”

The two who had spectacularly burst through the wall—no, three, including Morboin—turned three pairs of eyes toward them. Beatrice braced the back of one hand on her waist and dragged out an incredulous, “Huhhh?” as if asking what they were talking about. Gillian’s eyes, covered in widened blackness, swept across the terrified faces of the participants.

Then the thick palm of his beast-like hand tapped Beatrice on the back. In a voice that had grown even deeper, he muttered,

“Guess it’s not here.”

“What!?”

***

Usually, when an opponent encountered in the maze charged first, it meant their token number was ten or less. And those numbers mostly belonged to participants who lacked the skill to steal someone else’s token, or who had wandered around for a long time without finding the exit.

Leonardo Blaine and Ero classified the kinds of participants they met that way, avoided the paths those people had come from as much as possible, and inferred the location of the exit.

One participant sat with his back against the wall, bound by vines, glaring at Ero as he collected the token from the man’s pocket. The plant tendrils wrapped around that participant’s body were Ero’s handiwork as well. Today he was getting excellent use out of his weapons. Most of the competitors they had run into inside the maze had been subdued by Ero alone, without Leonardo Blaine’s help.

“Heh heh, and there’s one more here—”

Each token had two sides, side A and side B. Ero brought the A side of the newly acquired token against the B side of his own. The two tokens snapped together like magnets as they combined.

After that, the combined token shrank in bulk until it had the same thickness and weight as a single original token. The number on it, however, rose by the total value of the combined tokens. Even a token whose number had become 0 because all movement counts were exhausted would become +1 if another person stole it and combined it with theirs. It seemed they valued a player’s life at least that much.

The farther in they went, the more participants they found sitting blankly on the ground after exhausting all their chances. Even among them were people who still had not given up and, while remaining under the five-meter movement restriction radius, aimed for the tokens of other participants passing nearby. As a result of diligently gathering even those tokens, the number displayed on Ero’s token had already reached 82.

“Tch, with this much, I’d still have plenty left even if I ran in circles.”

At that, the bound participant sneered at him outright, his grin not fading for even a second.

“You’re all smiles when you only won because of your weapons, small fry. How long do you think that’ll last? Yours will get taken soon too. Do you even know who’s in this maze right now?”

The tone was ridiculously full of swagger for someone in his current situation. Ero, who had been about to stand after finishing the token count, paused.

“Because of my weapons?”

He’s not wrong.

Agreeing almost at once, he jerked his chin and asked,

“But who’s in here?”

“Thanatos. He made the League main tournament the year before last.”

“What? Thanatos?”

Ero put on a look of shock. Apparently pleased by the reaction, the participant delivering the news gave a crooked smile.

“Yeah, him. He’s in here right now. One idiot already tried to fight him and got his ribs broken. Everyone else wanted to get out with all four limbs intact, so they paid up their tokens and barely lived.”

“Wow... then what happened to you?”

“With this excellent brain of mine, I slipped out by exploiting an opening. I’m probably the only one who met him and survived. If you want to live, you’d better run. His token count is already in the triple digits. He’s probably already escaped, or he’s somewhere around here.”

“Hey, you...”

Ero, who had been listening with apparent admiration, covered his open mouth with his palm. Then he bent one leg and crouched in front of the man. Gathering up the exaggerated emotional performance he had been laying on until a moment ago, he continued in a dry voice.

“You escaped with that amazing brain of yours, and then got beaten by me and now you’re whining that it was all because of my weapons?”

“You little—”

The participant flared up at the obvious mockery, and Ero chuckled as he stood back up.

“Oh, spare me, Thanatos or Thanos or whatever. Even if Kazard of the Council showed up here himself, my boss would still be stronger. Ah, right. Shouldn’t say things like that.”

Muttering that to himself, Ero bent at the waist and shoved his body into a hole near the bottom of the wall. His token number dropped to 71, but he did not care about that anymore. More than that, even though he had only crossed a single wall, the air felt blazing hot.

“Boss! Recovery complete—waugh!”

A huge body was sprawled right in front of the crawl hole. Startled, Ero snagged his foot on the opening and tumbled awkwardly onto the floor. Letting out a pained groan, he lifted his head, and an unusually bright light poured in from one direction. Squinting against the glare, he glanced sideways and saw a golden magic circle spread out across the dead-end wall far away. And yet its size and majesty were on an entirely different level.

The magic circle was not merely grand but almost holy, rippling in midair like a mirage wavering beyond heat haze. Looking more closely, it seemed that magic circle itself was the source endlessly breathing out the hot wind.

Below it fluttered the hem of his boss’s cloak—his boss, the strongest mage of this age, who was presumably the caster of that spell.

“Wow...”

The eyes of Ero, who had gotten to his feet in a rustle, flashed gold in the light pouring from the magic circle. But when he came to his senses a beat later, the path stretching toward it was no less extraordinary.

As he looked from side to side, he saw at least fifteen participants collapsed unconscious on the ground. The bulky body that had startled him also seemed to be one of them.

When did he take care of all of them?

He definitely had not heard a thing, so Ero had no idea how it had happened. Full of pure admiration, he brushed off his clothes with a few pats. He had seen his boss snap a man’s neck and knock him out in an instant during the Division One match, but if handling this many people so quietly was a skill too, then it was some skill indeed.

As Ero’s eyes moved, his gaze suddenly shifted to the nape of the bulky man sprawled beside him. There was writing carved there like a tattoo.

“Tha... na... tos. Thanatos?”

It seemed even that terrifying bastard had ended up as a sacrifice to Lion. Maybe because of all the buildup beforehand, Ero felt newly impressed by how incredible his boss was, and at the same time by how absurdly empty the loser’s end felt. Swelling with pride as though he were the one who had won the fight, Ero hurried toward the one destined to become champion of the new age, leaving behind the League main tournament qualifier from two years ago.

Around then, Leonardo Blaine, who had been using the wind to adjust their route, sensed him and glanced back.

Ero broke into a wide grin and held out the tokens he had set aside separately as Leonardo Blaine’s share.

“Boss, these are yours.”

Those golden eyes dropped to the palm thrust toward him. The token had the number 17 engraved on it.

Leonardo Blaine turned his head away again and said lightly,

“You keep it.”

“Pardon? But... we still have to split it in half to keep moving together!”

“I’ve got plenty.”

Leonardo Blaine pulled out his token from his pocket and showed it to him. The number 543 came into view. It was such an overwhelming number that comparing them was almost embarrassing, and Ero lost the ability to speak. He quietly withdrew the token he had been holding out.

“I got a pretty good haul from catching all these bastards. Anything you catch from here on, you keep.”

“Ah, yes. Thank you...”

“And there’s something I need to say.”

The tone was serious enough that Ero instantly tensed, afraid his boss might tell him they should split up. Leonardo Blaine placed a hand on his shoulder and lowered his voice.

“I think we’ve already been here.”

“...What?”

“We’re lost.”