Chapter 5
Jake prepared to draw his sword and followed Judas into the corridor.
Judas had lied first.
He had already prepared to betray Jake.
Their alliance was over.
It would probably take some time before the runaway mana caused the knight to explode.
But Jake could not remain there.
The moment he entered the corridor, however, Jake realized Judas had betrayed him yet again.
Judas, who had gone ahead, was already closing the tower's iron entrance door.
"Stop!"
Jake rushed toward the door.
Judas was faster.
Click.
The iron door slammed shut.
Judas, who now possessed the key, locked it from the outside.
BANG! BANG!
"What the hell are you doing?!"
Jake pounded on the door and shouted.
It did not open.
"I do feel a little sorry about this."
Judas's meaningless apology came from the other side.
BANG! BANG! Thud!
And then...
Even the sound of Jake striking the iron door disappeared.
Before leaving, Judas had cast a soundproofing spell on the entrance.
"As expected of a spy mage. He really does know some interesting spells."
Once Jake could no longer sense anyone beyond the door, he immediately calmed himself.
He had half expected something like this.
He was not especially disappointed.
Judas was an enemy spy, after all.
Jake had never truly believed they would escape together until the end.
He simply had not expected Judas to solve the problem by blowing everyone else up.
"Did my mind become younger along with my body?"
Jake tapped his head a few times.
Then he immediately ran in the opposite direction.
There was no telling when the mana bomb would explode.
He needed to escape using the route he had personally investigated.
"Ugh..."
From Jake's room, the sleeping knight groaned while clutching his stomach.
The red glow that had surrounded his abdomen had already spread to his chest.
Jake passed the knight's room and headed deeper into the tower.
The two soldiers who had been guarding the other boys' rooms were still asleep on the corridor floor.
Jake checked the room Judas had escaped from.
Then he stopped in front of William's still-locked room.
"What's happening out there?!"
William had been shouting from inside for some time.
With such a commotion outside, he could hardly have remained asleep unless magic had been used on him.
Still, William was an obedient imperial squire.
Or rather, a future knight.
He had not recklessly smashed his door and come out.
"It's me! Jake!"
"Why are you outside?"
"Judas put the knight and soldiers to sleep and escaped!"
Jake had helped Judas escape, of course.
There was no reason to tell William that part.
"That lunatic! Does he think getting out of the tower means he can escape? What's he going to do about his family if he runs away?!"
William was not entirely thoughtless either.
Or perhaps he had simply accepted reality.
Unlike him, Judas was a spy.
And Jake had no remaining family.
"Come out! Judas locked the front door with the key! And he cast some kind of spell on the knight. He's in terrible pain!"
"He ran away with the key? Damn it! This is a mess. Move aside!"
At William's words, Jake stepped away from the door.
Then...
BANG!
William smashed the door apart and charged into the corridor.
As expected. Someone who experienced being a knight in the future wouldn't fail to awaken his mana again.
Jake nodded as William emerged through the shattered door.
William quickly surveyed the corridor.
"Where's the knight?"
"Inside my room!"
William rushed into Jake's open room.
"Damn!"
Slap! Slap!
"Sir! Wake up! Sir!"
William was shocked when he saw the red light coming from the knight's stomach.
He slapped the knight's face repeatedly, trying to wake him.
The knight did not move.
After trying several methods, William finally gave up and ran toward the tower entrance.
Clink! Clink!
Just as Jake had done earlier, William struck the iron door.
He quickly realized that magic was blocking even the sound.
William frowned.
Then he gathered mana again.
His memories contained years of mana training.
His current body, however, had only just begun experiencing mana.
Forcing out so much mana so suddenly caused pain throughout his body.
"If we're unlucky, we could get blamed for all of this. We barely had a chance of getting out safely to begin with, and now he's caused even more trouble. Mages really are bastards, whether they're kids or adults."
With a statement overflowing with prejudice against mages, William wrapped his body in mana and charged the iron door.
BOOM!
A dull impact echoed through the tower.
Unfortunately, the iron door did not move.
But knights were not the kind of people who gave up.
William charged again.
BANG!
The door remained intact.
This time, however, the impact was far louder.
The spell on the door was beginning to break.
"One more time!"
William charged.
BANG!
While William repeatedly slammed himself into the iron door, Jake was busy searching William's room.
Jake had not brought William out of his room for no reason.
There was something inside he needed to find.
Jake possessed neither combat strength nor magic.
His greatest asset was the memory he had accumulated over decades as a scribe.
That was why he had been placed into the underground ruins' magic circle in the first place.
And now those memories might help him find a way out.
During the two days he had been trapped inside the tower, Jake had secretly investigated it whenever possible.
Normally, a tower like this should not have existed inside the Imperial Capital's inner palace.
The old tower did not match its surroundings at all.
Like the underground ruins, it was one of the structures that had existed even before the Imperial Capital was built.
Unlike other ruins that had weathered away or been destroyed, this tower remained almost completely intact.
It had been preserved by the imperial family as a type of cultural relic.
In reality, they had probably avoided destroying it because it might have been connected to the underground ruins.
Jake had not known that at the time.
Still, he had focused on the fact that the tower itself was an ancient relic.
In his memories of the future...
When the empire fell and the Imperial Capital collapsed...
Some surviving members of the imperial family escaped the encirclement by using hidden passages connected to ancient ruins.
Jake later met some of those imperial fugitives outside the capital.
One of them had told him about the secret tunnels.
At the time, Jake had simply listened to the story out of curiosity.
But after carefully digging through his memories, he had remembered one important detail.
The entrance to the underground passage had been inside a tower.
Unfortunately, Jake had found no entrance in his own room.
Nor in the corridor.
Nor in the lobby in front of the iron door.
And when he had checked Judas's room earlier, he had found nothing there either.
That left only this room.
"Found it!"
After searching William's room, Jake finally pushed the wooden bed aside and exclaimed.
A faint symbol had been carved into the floor like graffiti.
It resembled the letter V.
At this point in history, even the imperial family did not yet know about the hidden passages inside the ruins.
That was why they had chosen this tower to imprison the boys.
According to what Jake had heard in the future, the entrances to the underground passages could be opened and closed with mana.
It seemed strange that powerful imperial mages and even an Archmage had failed to discover them for so long.
But the magic used by the Ancient Magic Empire functioned differently from modern magic.
Modern mages created mana circles inside their hearts and used them to cast spells.
Ancient magic worked differently.
It imposed a powerful will upon the world around the caster...
And caused a miracle.
My hand can sense mana!
Just as he had done a few days earlier, Jake imposed a powerful intention on his hand.
Mana gathers in my hand!
A faint blue light began glowing from Jake's hand.
He placed the glowing hand over the symbol.
"You will open the door and show me the truth."
A quiet but powerful incantation.
The words carried Jake's will.
The mana gathered in his hand transformed that will into a miracle.
Hummm...
A quiet vibration spread through the floor.
The symbol and the surrounding area began to glow faintly.
This was an ancient mana technique discovered by the future Archmage Dverman and later spread throughout the world.
Thanks to that very technique, the imperial family had eventually discovered the secret underground passages beneath the Imperial Palace.
That information had eventually reached Jake.
And now...
It had revealed the magic circle before him.
"So it really is like touching a password screen, just like she said."
The light on the floor formed a square.
Two vertical and two horizontal lines divided it into nine smaller sections.
It looked remarkably similar to a password keypad Jake had seen in his previous life.
Following the instructions he remembered hearing, Jake pressed the glowing buttons.
Unlike the devices from Earth, there were no sounds.
Still, the input seemed to work.
Click!
A sound like a lock releasing echoed through the room.
The stone floor bearing the symbol slowly sank downward.
A hidden underground passage appeared.
A staircase descended endlessly into darkness.
"Whew... Thank goodness."
Jake had been reasonably confident.
Still, he had been extremely worried.
His left hand had clenched so tightly that it had turned white.
Cold sweat continued flowing down the back of his neck.
"There's no time."
Jake quickly came back to his senses.
He grabbed a torch from the corridor.
Then he started back toward the room...
And stopped.
BANG! BANG!
"Damn it!"
William was still throwing his body against the iron door.
The soundproofing magic had already broken.
The loud impacts echoed repeatedly throughout the tower.
Yet no one had arrived yet.
Jake frowned as he watched William.
Then he shouted.
"William! I found another way out!"
William turned at Jake's shout.
"Another exit?"
"It's a path underground! I think it leads outside the tower!"
William frowned.
"A path underground? How did you find something like that? And if we use it, doesn't that mean we'd be running away too?"
As he spoke, red light began pouring from the room where the knight lay.
There was truly no time left.
"I learned about it in the future! We need to run first! The magic on that knight is an explosion spell. This entire place is going to blow up!"
Jake had no choice but to quickly reveal what he knew.
Unfortunately, the explanation had the opposite effect.
"You said you didn't know anything earlier! And there's a spell that makes people explode? Wait... why is that knight lying inside your room?"
The problem Jake thought he had successfully avoided suddenly returned.
"That's right. Something felt strange before. You two kept secretly communicating while leaving me out. You were both planning to escape together, weren't you? But then he abandoned you?"
Somehow...
The muscle-brained knight had transformed into a master detective in an instant.
"Aha! So you were trying to trick me into escaping too! You two must have thought I was an idiot. Did you really think you could look down on an imperial knight? Once the other knights arrive, I'll tell them everything. Just wait right there!"
William becoming a brilliant detective was annoying enough.
The real problem was that, in his excitement, he ignored everything Jake had said.
Jake no longer had any way to convince him.
Jake stared at William in disbelief and tried to speak again.
Unfortunately...
There was no more time.
FWOOSH!
The red light coming from the knight's room suddenly flooded the corridor.
At the same moment, tremendous heat erupted from inside.
"Damn it!"
Jake immediately threw himself into the underground passage inside William's room.
At that exact moment...
The knight's swollen body exploded.
BOOOOOOM!
The blast swept through the soldiers lying unconscious in the corridor.
It swallowed William, who was standing in front of the iron door.
Then it tore apart the walls, ceiling, and the entire tower.
RUMBLE...!
The last surviving surface ruin from before the construction of the Imperial Capital collapsed.
Destroyed by the man who would one day become one of the future's most infamous terrorists.
