“By the way... before the mirror broke, did either of you hear... any other sound?”
Walking down the sprawling, dim corridor, Greg suddenly asked the two girls behind him without looking back.
His voice rang out with extraordinary clarity in the hollow passage.
Although Silvia was skilled in light-attribute magic, she had little resistance to the undead or weird, unnatural phenomena.
Hearing Greg suddenly bring this up, her face immediately turned slightly pale, and her voice quivered:
“W-What other sound? I... I didn't hear anything... Don't tell me, Senior Greg, you heard... something... unclean—”
“That's enough, Greg.”
Victoria interrupted her, crossing her arms as her gray eyes scanned the overly quiet surroundings.
“Don't go telling creepy ghost stories in a place like this. You're giving me goosebumps.”
“...Fair enough.”
Greg replied and said no more.
Although they hadn't answered directly, their reactions said everything.
They hadn't heard it.
“Hey, Hajimi.”
Greg called out to Nightmare in his mind:
“When the mirror shattered earlier, was that you speaking to me out of nowhere, trying to jump-scare me?”
“Hmm?”
Nightmare's voice carried a rare trace of displeasure:
“What do you mean by that? Though I indeed enjoy stepping on your face with my paws while you sleep soundly, I have never taken the initiative to interrupt you while you are handling serious matters. I possess at least that much discretion.”
“Right, sorry, my mis—wait!”
Greg snapped to attention.
“What did you say? You enjoy stepping on my face with your paws while I sleep?! No wonder I sometimes wake up feeling strange indentations or itchiness on my face! It was your doing all along!”
“Hmm?”
Nightmare's voice returned to its usual laziness:
“Did I say something just now? I have no memory of such a thing. Perhaps your sleeping posture is simply atrocious and you pressed against it yourself.”
“Damn it! Don't play dumb! You just admitted it yourself!”
“Are you speaking? How strange, my mana connection seems a bit unstable, and I can hardly hear... It seems the environmental interference here is too strong. Well, nothing can be done about it then; I shall return to rest.”
Facing the goddess-cat who had grown adept at playing dumb, Greg was truly powerless to do anything to her right now.
After all, he couldn't very well stop abruptly, summon a black cat out of thin air in front of Victoria and Silvia, and introduce her by saying:
“This is the Goddess of Night I worship, who likes to step on people's faces with her cat paw pads,” right?
The reliable image he had worked so hard to build would likely collapse in a single instant.
“Senior Greg, ahead... seems to be the end of this corridor.”
Silvia's voice pulled Greg's thoughts back. She pointed to the faint outline of an exit ahead that was slightly brighter than the corridor.
Though he had yet to figure out the source of that voice, now was clearly not the time to investigate deeply.
“Yeah.”
Greg composed himself, stopped in his tracks, and turned to face the two girls with a serious expression.
“Get ready. Silvia, cast a layer of 【Light Shield】 on the three of us first.”
He then looked at the gray-haired girl. “Victoria, you should have more or less mastered 【Flame Storm】 by now, right?”
Victoria paused in surprise.
How does he know I barely managed to master this high-tier fire magic just two days ago?
Though filled with doubts, she still nodded. “I can cast it, but it requires a long charging time and consumes a lot of mana. I can only do it once at most.”
“Once is enough.”
Greg continued:
“Once we step inside, begin charging immediately. Silvia and I will cover you and create an opening. After I successfully weaken the target with a potion, find the right moment to launch a saturated attack and try to finish it off in one blow.”
“Got it.”
The two girls nodded and immediately sprang into action.
Silvia chanted softly, and a gentle white light enfolded the three of them one after another, forming a faint luminous barrier.
Victoria began adjusting her breathing, silently recalling the complex mana circuit of 【Flame Storm】 as she prepared for the upcoming burst.
“One more thing.”
Before officially stepping into the space ahead, Greg turned back and added solemnly:
“Once we enter this room, we won't be able to make any sound. It isn't soundproofing, but rather a kind of... rule-based silence.”
“This means I won't be able to direct you in there. All real-time judgments and coordination will rely entirely on our own observation.”
He met the eyes of the two girls. “I believe you can definitely do it. After all, one of you is a Hero and the other is a Candidate Saintess... So, are you ready?”
Victoria and Silvia exchanged a glance and nodded firmly, their gazes hardening with determination.
“Let's go.”
Greg took the lead and stepped into that space.
The space was a spacious circular stone chamber, several times larger than the altar room before.
The ceiling was high and vaulted, with faint, crude murals depicting people of another era kneeling before a certain entity, though the murals were badly peeled and cracked, making them hard to make out clearly.
The stone walls were a dull gray-black, etched with even more eerie symbols and patterns related to the faith of Fragmentation.
However, the most uncomfortable aspect was indeed the environment's absolute silence.
The sound of Greg's footsteps vanished the instant he stepped inside.
Victoria's breathing, the rustle of clothes, and even the internal sounds of her blood flowing and heart beating—every perception belonging to the realm of sound seemed to be wiped away in an instant by an invisible hand.
She opened her mouth, but not even the faintest hiss of airflow escaped.
Silvia seemed to want to say something, her lips opening and closing, but it was met with the same dead silence.
It was a state of absolute silence that transcended physical soundproofing, operating almost on a conceptual level.
Sight, touch, and smell remained normal, but hearing alone was completely stripped away. This deprivation carried over into a strange sense of spatial distortion, instinctively inducing irritability and a faint wave of panic.
Just as the three were slightly distracted by this abnormal silence—
In the center of the stone chamber, where the ground was smoothest, the air warped ever so slightly.
A figure slowly transitioned from Insubstantiality into solid reality, revealing itself.
It was a tall, slender humanoid creature standing nearly two and a half meters tall.
It wore a tattered, gray burlap robe stained with dark brown patches, the hem shredded into hanging rags.
In its hand, it held a strange weapon that resembled some kind of ceremonial scepter, but the scepter itself appeared to have been forcefully snapped multiple times and crudely pieced back together. Its body was covered in cracks, and the gem embedded at its tip was dull and shattered.
Furthermore, its face possessed no features or outline, containing only a constantly twisting darkness.
The Silent Penitent.
This was the name that had popped up when Greg encountered it in the original game.
Unlike monsters like Thirsting Maw that possessed instant-death skills, although it couldn't cast powerful magic, inside this domain of absolute silence over which it reigned, it was the most lethal hunter of all.
Rate on N.U.
