Chương 23: 09-1: Evacuate, Loot, and Teleport

I quietly sidled over to Matthews, dropping my voice to barely above a whisper.

"... Old man. No—Matthews." He turned his head just enough to look at me. Under the torchlight, those winter-gray eyes looked like they'd been soaking in rusted water for decades.

"What." I glanced around at the walls—too straight, too mechanically precise, too coldly indifferent to the concept of human existence—and at that massive installation crouching in the far darkness like something that had given up pretending to be furniture. My throat felt inexplicably dry.

"This place... makes me deeply uncomfortable." Matthews made a sound—low, brief, carrying the finality of a stone dropped into a very deep well.

"Good," he said.

"Fear means you understand limits. Nothing shameful about that." His gaze drifted, without any particular hurry, toward Jessi and stayed there.

"The dangerous ones are people who don't know they have any." I offered a dry laugh, completely incapable of formulating a counterargument. If the proverb 'people die for wealth, birds die for food' ever needed a living, breathing illustration, Jessi could stand on the pedestal. They wouldn't even need to engrave a caption.

At this precise moment, the woman who perfectly embodied 'profit over pulse' was hanging from an impossibly high crossbeam like an unrepentant black cat, studying a metal seam with the focused devotion of someone who had converted avarice into a spiritual practice. Several seconds later, she cursed with profound reluctance, released her grip, and dropped cleanly to the ground. She landed almost without sound. Light as a cat. And just as dangerous.

"Giving up." Jessi shook her cluster of lockpicks with the expression of someone personally offended by the universe.

"This place is cursed. Every metal seam has another layer of completely different metal wrapped around it. There's nowhere to even get a pick started." As she complained, she pointed toward a nearby wall.

"And look—those freaky totems are plastered everywhere. This whole place screams 'cult headquarters.'" I followed her finger. Affixed to the edge of a translucent quartz panel was a symbol in aggressively bright colors. Yellow and black. Three curved sectors arranged into a disturbing inverted triangle. I had no idea what it meant, but something older than literacy looked at that symbol and issued very strong recommendations about maintaining distance.

"Complete financial ruin." Jessi sighed with the mournful gravity usually reserved for actual funerals. Just then, Lucas emerged from a half-open side chamber, clutching two boxes, wearing the expression of a man whose family had been bankrupt for three years and had just discovered a silver coin in the gutter.

"I, however, have results." He puffed out his chest with unprecedented confidence.

"Oh?" Jessi eyed him with deep suspicion.

"Found something valuable?" Lucas opened the first box like a priest presenting sacred relics. Inside lay neat rows of cylindrical metal components. Every single one identical. No burrs, no irregularities. The threading was microscopically precise, the hexagonal heads perfectly formed—not the crude output of a blacksmith's hammer, but something that had been replicated endlessly from a single, flawless template. Jessi stared at them. Her expression collapsed like a demolished building.

"... A box of fancy nails?"

"Fancy nails?!" Lucas nearly levitated with academic outrage, eyes blazing with the fervor of an overcharged mana lamp.

"Do you understand what this represents? This level of precision! This consistency! Stored here for potentially millennia with virtually no oxidation!" Jessi remained entirely deadpan.

"Still nails."

"That is fundamentally not the point!" I looked at the box, understanding both positions completely and having no energy to mediate between profit margins and academic revolution.

"We're leaving," Matthews said. He raised his torch toward the deeper passage—that darkness still perfectly, unnaturally still, like a well with no bottom waiting for someone curious enough to lean over the edge.

"This place shouldn't be occupied." No objections. No one had the psychological reserves left for debate. Even Jessi only cast one last, mournful look at the luminescent formations in the walls—the tender farewell of someone parting with a fortune that had never technically been theirs. We retreated toward the surface. Before ascending, Lucas insisted on crouching in an inconspicuous corner to inscribe a small locator sigil, muttering about future reference coordinates.

I watched him work and had one coherent thought: Nothing in this world or any other could compel me to return to this place voluntarily.... Of course, fate has always maintained a particular fondness for collecting on statements like that. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. By the time we pushed back through the obsidian hall, events had already resumed their natural trajectory toward familiar catastrophe. Because Jessi saw the blue-white crystals in the wall. And stopped.

Not casual hesitation. The complete systemic shutdown of a compulsive gambler watching a treasure chest overturn in slow motion—every faculty suspended, every system redirected toward a single, blasphemous objective. I didn't even get the warning out before she was moving.

"Get back here!"

"Little young master, you don't understand, first-contact mineral deposits of this caliber—""I understand nothing except that if you touch those we are all dying in this hole tonight!" I grabbed her around the waist from behind and hauled. In retrospect, this was a purely tactical decision with no other dimensions worth examining.

What I hadn't anticipated was the reality of physically restraining someone who fought with the focused determination of a feral cat and the complete moral flexibility of a career criminal—and who also, apparently, carried the scent of ice and leather and something else I was absolutely not cataloguing right now.

"Stop crying like I'm selling you!" I snarled through gritted teeth, both arms locked around her while she kicked at empty air.

"Lucas and I are rescuing you, not—""Little young master~" Jessi, suspended approximately half a meter off the ground, turned to look at me over her shoulder with an expression of serene, devastating composure. Several strands of hair had escaped across her flushed cheek during the struggle, creating an overall effect that was unreasonably problematic given our current circumstances.

"If it's you doing the holding... I wouldn't be entirely opposed to negotiating the arrangement somewhere more comfortable~" The heat that hit my ears was immediate, involuntary, and infuriating. I nearly dropped her on pure reflex.

"Do you possess any shame whatsoever?!"

"Of course~" Eyes curved into crescents, utterly unrepentant.

"I just don't offer it as a complimentary service."

"Hey!" Lucas, still clutching both boxes of irreplaceable pre-civilization artifacts, made a sound of wounded protest.

"Why does this conversation keep circling back to humiliate me?! And what do you mean you'd consider it if it's him? What exactly is my disqualifying factor?!" Jessi looked at him. The look contained a quantity of honest pity that was almost more devastating than contempt.

"You'd start explaining history halfway through."

"That is not a valid reason!"

"And it would go on for quite a while."

"That's even less of a reason!"

"It is to me," Jessi said, and then—with the timing of someone who had been waiting for the optimal moment—shifted her entire body weight deliberately against me, settling in with the comfortable ease of someone who had decided the situation offered entertainment value. Her fingertips brushed, apparently by accident, across the back of the hand I had pressed against my sword hilt. Her voice dropped to something warmer and considerably more dangerous.

"Speaking of which, little young master." She tilted her head—close enough that I could feel the warmth of her breath against the cold air.

"That was quite a firm grip earlier. Almost made me think you'd finally decided to keep me for yourself~" The vein at my temple was now visible from a tactically significant distance.

"That was to prevent you from dismantling a high-tier monster habitat!"

"Mm-hmm~" Transparently unconvinced.

"Your hand placement suggested otherwise."

"JESSI!"

"Jessi!" Lucas's voice cracked with genuine anguish.

"Even if you have no respect for my magical abilities, could you please refrain from also destroying my dignity and masculine self-worth?!" I had exhausted my remaining capacity for coherent response. I peeled Jessi off me with the energy of someone defusing an explosive device and pushed her firmly toward Lucas.

"Here. You hold her."

"Why is it me?!"

"Because if I keep holding her, the Rosa family line ends tonight!"

"There's something structurally wrong with how you phrased that!"

"She's what's structurally wrong!" I turned toward the rear of the group.

"Miss Erina! Move faster! Have a purification miracle ready—the moment we're out, I want my eyes, ears, and the entire memory of this evening spiritually cleansed!" Erina Eckhaus, carefully managing her skirts at the rear, blinked those impossibly sincere eyes and gave this genuine theological consideration.

"Of course, Mr. Cedric. Though Sacred Rain typically cleanses physical impurities... For spiritual corruption of this magnitude, I believe Miss Jessi would be better served by the confessional at a proper temple."

"If she enters a confessional, she'll scrape the gilding off the saint's statue on her way out."

"Little young master, that's hurtful." Jessi's voice carried zero evidence of being hurt. She smiled like a cat that had discovered an unguarded treasury.

"Is that really all you think I am?"

"Not 'all.'" Flat.

"More like 'conservative estimate.'""Aww. You know me so well~""Involuntary expertise. You've swindled me enough times to constitute a complete education."

"That's almost devoted of you~""That's called catastrophically bad luck." Matthews stopped walking. The veteran—shackle-scarred, built like someone the world had tried to discard and failed—looked back at me. Then at Jessi, who was straightening her skirt with the serene expression of someone who had not just been physically removed from a potential crime scene.

Then he dragged one hand slowly down his face, producing a sigh of such profound, bone-deep exhaustion that it seemed to carry the weight of every poor decision he had ever witnessed. He pushed open the snow-drifted exit. Northern wind came through immediately. Cold. Biting. Carrying pine resin and ice and the promise of a world that was still alive. After the dead air of that pre-civilization facility, it felt like being handed proof of continued existence.

"One last piece of advice, little young master." Matthews didn't look back, his voice roughened further by the night wind.

"If you ever inherit the Rosa estate—""What?" He turned his head just enough to show the edge of that weathered face—the old scar, the hard jaw, the eyes of someone who had learned things the expensive way and was choosing, unusually, to share the lesson.

"Have the treasury keys melted down first." I blinked.

"... Why?"

"Because otherwise," he said, with genuine, veteran-grade sincerity, "one day you'll wake up and that woman will have talked you out of your last pair of trousers."

"Uncle, you truly understand me~" Jessi immediately directed an appreciative whistle in his direction.

"You. Quiet." When we finally emerged, the storm had eased—marginally, grudgingly, in the way northern weather concedes ground only after making its point thoroughly clear. The sky was still dark, but not the absolute, lightless dark of before. Wind moved through the rock formations carrying ice and pine resin, scraping our faces raw, and driving the last of that eldritch metallic staleness out of our lungs in one long, involuntary exhale.

I was preparing to simply stand still and breathe when Matthews called out from ahead.

"Lucky night, little young master." I looked up. He stood in the snow, one hand extended forward. Not far ahead, several horses—Ravens' mounts, still tethered to the rock face—shifted and stamped in the cold, breath steaming, not one having broken free. Their owners had achieved a permanent change of address. Lucas adjusted his grip on both boxes of pre-civilization high-specification metal fasteners and, in a development that suggested the evening had genuinely improved his disposition, attempted comfort.

"Don't grieve, Jessi." He nodded toward the ownerless horses with uncharacteristic satisfaction.

"At minimum, these should offset your emotional damages from tonight." Jessi, who had been wearing the expression of someone mourning a significant inheritance, brightened with the immediacy of a lamp being lit. I was becoming increasingly convinced this woman's cardiovascular system ran on currency rather than blood. Matthews turned to look at me. In the wind and snow, that face—old scars, shackle marks, the geography of a life that had been difficult on purpose—looked harder than before.

And somehow, for the first time, like the face of someone who might actually stand in front of something to stop it reaching the people behind him. He pulled one corner of his mouth sideways. Not quite a smile. More like someone who had decided to deliver unpleasant news in a slightly less uncomfortable format.

"Well then, little young master." The rough voice carried over the wind without effort.

"Did I pass the interview?" I looked at him. Then at the ownerless horses. Then at the collection of individuals behind me—each one a unique and ongoing contribution to my personal stress load—and arrived at the conclusion that I should, by every reasonable metric, say no. Normal people would say no. Unfortunately, I appeared to have misplaced all the normal people sometime earlier in the evening. Two seconds of silence.

"... Get on." Matthews smiled. Faint. Brief. The kind of expression that doesn't advertise itself. But for the first time, that face—which had the natural resting state of a stone wall in winter—looked something other than cold. I stood in the northern dark and looked at this increasingly questionable company I had somehow assembled, and arrived at one question that was entirely honest and entirely without answer. At exactly which step did my journey go this catastrophically wrong?