"...How deep do you think it goes?" asked Elena as she gingerly stooped down at the edge.
"I don't think we should be trying to find out," murmured back Milo.
Daisuke pinched and pulled Rexar's garb as he attempted to test the integrity of the flooring with a daring leg. "That may not be such a good idea," he warned.
Crouching beside Elena, Milo cautiously lowered his index finger toward the flooring. But instead of touching the light blue... phenomenon, his finger went right through.
"Huh?" Elena exclaimed with a frown. "What exactly is happening right now?"
Milo looked to Daisuke questioningly.
"...Maybe some kind of barrier that rejects organic matter?" he replied as he tried to conjure up another theory. But nothing else came to mind.
"Is that even possible?" queried Milo.
"Shouldn't our focus right now be finding a way around it?" argued Rexar with evident impatience. "I'm really sick of this place."
"That makes two of us," agreed Daisuke while pointing at the eastern wall. "Elena, I want you to use your Wind Cutter to rip down those two tapestries."
Elena didn't ask any questions; Daisuke's brilliance during the guild assessment and his performance in the dungeon was enough for her to confide in his judgement without hesitation.
"You haven't steered us wrong yet," she said as she aimed a crescent moon-shaped gust of wind toward the upper threshold of the tapestry.
The carefully measured projectile sliced through the embroidery with ease, sending them pooling to the ground without a sound. On the gray cobblestone wall where they once hung, two intricate circles roughly a meter in width were inscribed in black ink.
"Are those... magic circles?" Elena asked with a frown.
"It seems like they have something to do with the chamber," guessed Milo. "The question is, which one do we trigger?"
Through the Eye of Verity, Daisuke noted that one of the circles radiated a grayish-silver glow while the other—the one on the right—exuded a pale light blue.
Employing a simple method of visual matchmaking, Daisuke deduced that the circle on the right radiated the same blue color as the tightly-knitted flooring.
His other assumption was that mana needed to be remotely injected into the magic circle to activate its effects, but all four of them were amateurs at that level of mana manipulation.
But Daisuke had a theory.
When he was younger, his father used to have him sleep in the dark whenever he had been a bad boy. Instead of getting out of bed and risk being pulled underneath it by the boogeyman or worse—that one clown from a scary movie, Daisuke would hurl his stuffed animals at the light switch until one of them hit its mark.
"Milo," Daisuke called, shifting his attention. "Being a healer demands pretty delicate control, so I'm pretty sure you have a better grip on your mana than the rest of us."
"...I-I'm not sure I like where this is going," Milo murmured back.
Daisuke frowned, conveying the criticality of the imminent request. "I want you to land a Magic Missile in the center of that magic circle without damaging the inscription."
Milo turned toward his objective, measuring its feasibility. "W-Wouldn't Elena be better suited for the task?"
"He's right," the pouting Rexar agreed. "Mages are always firing off spells, so her aim will be way better."
YOU ARE READING
Hacking the Game Didn't Go as Intended
FantasyWhat would you do if you found yourself trapped in a video game as an NPC with seemingly no hope of returning to the real world? Having grown up without parents, Daisuke finds himself in a perpetual cycle of poverty as he tries to survive in the bot...
