Chapter 36
***
They arrived in front of the second banquet hall once again.
As soon as Segleninde gave the door a slight push, it opened immediately. Cynthia cautiously peeked inside, sticking her head out beside his arm.
What appeared before them was an antique, elegant space—old, but apparently well-maintained. A chandelier studded with jewels sparkled above, and there were large tables and chairs set out for guests throughout the hall.
And on the floor…
All of that was a trap.
The ground was filled with evenly arranged square tiles.
The square tiles were a mix of white, red, and black in a crisscross pattern. Of these, the white tiles were perfectly safe and didn’t trigger anything, they were just ordinary floor tiles.
In other words, by stepping only on the white tiles and searching for clues, you had to step on the black and red tiles in a specific order to make it through the banquet hall area. If you made a single mistake in the sequence, the entire banquet hall would lock down and poisonous gas would be released, melting your entire body away.
These rules applied only to intruders. That meant, right now, the guests dancing in the hall were exempt.
Squeak, squeak-squeak.
Amid the elegant music filling the second banquet hall, there were paired figures dancing. They were jointed wooden mannequins dressed in gowns and tailcoats. The mannequins seemed to be enjoying the banquet in place of guests who had died long ago.
Their faces had crude, childlike drawings of eyes, noses, and mouths in place of real features. Sometimes the eyes and mouths were switched, making Cynthia shudder involuntarily.
Now they would have to go in. Cynthia said to Segleninde,
“There should be the next key we need inside. Ah, don’t look at me like that. I know. After all that trouble to move the statues and open the door, now we have to find yet another key. Annoying, right? But that was all set up by you, before you lost your memories.”
“…I don’t get it. Are there any warnings or special instructions?”
“See those tiles on the floor? The ones with different colors? For now, just step on the white tiles as much as possible. Never step on the black or red tiles.”
The tiles were fairly spaced out, but Segleninde’s long legs would let him cross without much trouble.
Luckily, there was a set pattern to the second banquet hall’s tiles, and Cynthia—having died countless times early on in the game—still remembered that pattern even after some time had passed.
Rather than explain the pattern to him, it was better to just move herself, since she knew it. But she didn’t want to leave him outside, so she decided to go in with him.
He moved just as she told him, stepping only on the white tiles, and Cynthia followed him, also stepping only on white tiles, until she spotted a red tile up ahead. The colored tiles were scattered haphazardly, but only the ones forming a path toward the center could be stepped on.
‘Red goes right, left, left, right. Black goes left, right, right, left.’
At the end of the convoluted path of mixed-up tiles, there was a large grandfather clock in the center of the hall. The key was inside.
As Segleninde moved aside to step onto the next white tile, Cynthia took a deep breath and stepped onto the red tile.
‘If it’s the same as before the update, you have to step alternately on red and black tiles.’
After stepping onto the red tile on the right, she tensed up and glanced around, but nothing happened.
Cynthia let out a sigh of relief. Then she stepped onto the black tile to the left, and still, nothing went wrong.
After stepping onto the white tile directly in front, she gathered up the hem of her dark green dress in both hands, lifting it to her ankles, and prepared to step onto the next tile.
Thunk.
“Ah.”
An ominous sound rang out.
Cynthia froze just before stepping onto the next tile and turned toward the direction the sound had come from.
Segleninde was standing on a red tile with a dazed expression. Judging by his position, it seemed he had tried to move to a white tile three spaces ahead of a black tile, but stepped incorrectly.
“…I stepped on it. The red one.”
“You idiot…!”
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