When Sora opened his eyes, he couldn't see anything but darkness.
He stayed still for a while.
There was no sound and no smell. There was no wind. All he could feel was that there was ground beneath his feet.
He raised his left hand and touched his right wrist.
His senses weren't wrong. The watch was gone.
Before he fell asleep, he had put on that watch with the thin black strap Rosalind had given him. Now there was only his own skin under his fingers. He slowly ran his hand up his arm, his shoulder, his chest. His black jacket, his shirt, his belt, everything was in place. Everything he was wearing was just like it had been before he fell asleep. The only thing missing was the watch.
Sora guessed that this was the place called the Dream Realm.
Apparently, these strange watches didn't follow their user into the Dream Realm the way other clothes did.
Everything was a strange darkness.
When he raised his hands in front of his face, he could see his fingers. He could even make out the lines on his palms and the texture of the fabric on his jacket sleeves. He lowered his gaze. His chest, his stomach, his belt... Then his legs.
His legs marked the outer limit of his field of vision. Roughly a meter or so of visibility.
From a little below his knees, his legs looked like they had been dipped in dark ink.
Vampires were creatures of the night. He should have near-perfect vision in any darkness short of pitch black. Ordinary darkness couldn't limit his vision this much.
In that case, what surrounded him couldn't be darkness.
Maybe fog.
A dense, black, motionless fog. So thick that it swallowed light and hid even part of his own body from his eyes.
Just as he was about to shift his weight forward to take a step...
Something touched his back.
Sora's body moved without thinking. He spun on his heel, his right hand rising into the air curled like a claw, his fangs starting to sharpen and lengthen. He was about to swing his hand to find the throat of whoever was behind him when...
Pink eyes.
Sora's hand stopped in midair, a few centimeters in front of the girl's throat.
Elena blinked. Her vision was far more limited than Sora's, but she could see the hand in front of her eyes.
She realized Sora had acted on reflex, so she changed the subject.
"Good thing I caught you before you wandered off."
Her voice was shaking, but her hands were still gripping the hem of Sora's jacket tightly.
Sora slowly lowered his hand. His fangs pulled back in.
Elena let out a deep breath. Then she lifted her head and looked at him, her voice more serious this time.
"Please don't move without me. This is the first floor of the Endless Tower," she said. "Everyone starts here. Luckily, the first floor's thing doesn't involve fighting. The way out is pretty well-known too. We got trained on this at school. You could say I know everything about the first ten floors."
Sora thought for a moment, then guessed that this was probably baseless confidence.
There was no way the bourgeoisie and the nobles, who saw themselves as more noble than everyone else, had given the children of ordinary people everything they knew.
In Sora's experience, even if the human race were going to be wiped out tomorrow, some people would still keep being selfish just to stay above everyone else.
There was probably plenty of information about the first ten floors that the children of high-ranking people knew and ordinary kids didn't.
The best thing to do was probably to learn the basics from Elena while also exploring on his own, as if he had entered the tower knowing nothing.
Elena pointed her finger somewhere into the fog. To Sora, that direction was just as pitch black as every other direction.
"In a little while, this fog will pull back and a sea of sand will appear. Like an endless desert. Beyond that sea, we'll see the figure of a statue. A figure wrapped around a sword, or more like holding a sword taller than a person, stabbed into the ground. Our goal is to reach that statue. Once we pass through the point where the statue's sword meets the ground, we'll find a spatial rift that leads to the second floor."
She paused for a moment.
"But the statue could also be a mirage."
"You might never reach it, even while it's standing right in front of your eyes," Elena went on.
"Some people walked for days and realized they were still in the same place. The sand looks the same everywhere, and the statue always stays the same distance away. So you have to be way more careful while you're watching the statue. The only way to tell whether it's a mirage is to catch the moments when the statue faintly disappears and reappears."
Then she dragged her right foot back and forth inside the fog.
Sora heard it. The faint, dry rustle of sand being scraped.
"That's why we have to drag our feet along the ground while we walk and leave tracks in the sand." Elena dragged her foot once more, longer this time. "It's the only way to find your direction here. If you need to, you bend down and follow the tracks you've left behind. There's no other way to tell whether you're going the wrong way or walking in circles." Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Sora looked at the girl in silence for a while.
This girl was the same girl who, a few hours ago, had asked whether he could have kids with a bat.
Apparently she had paid attention in class at school.
On top of that, when Elena talked about the tower, she strangely didn't give off her usual air of stupidity.
Sora thought that was a good trait.
You could call it a mercenary's temperament.
Right then, the fog stirred.
At first, it was only a very slight movement. As if someone somewhere far away had taken a deep breath, the black fog was drawn inward for a moment. Then, slowly and heavily, it began to thin out.
Sand. Sand that started at Sora's feet and stretched as far as his eyes could see. Its color was somewhere between dark honey and burnt copper. The grains glowed faintly, as if each one carried a tiny ember inside it. The track Elena had just dragged with her foot lay across that smooth surface like a thin, dark line.
Then the sand began to ripple.
There was no wind, but the sand was moving. In the distance, the dunes slowly rose and fell like the waves of a real sea. The sky was dark brown, turning amber as it neared the horizon.
In the air, thin veils of gold and copper that looked like clouds of dust drifted, curled, and swayed this way and that. Tiny sparks flew between them. It was as if what floated in the air wasn't sand but gold dust.
And beyond that sea of sand, a hazy figure appeared.
A colossal statue.
It was a figure wrapped in a long cloth. The cloth that blindfolded its eyes wound around its entire body, covering it like a dress.
The cloth poured down from its shoulders, wrapped around its waist, and its ends blended into the veils drifting in the air and vanished. Its face couldn't be seen. Its head was tilted slightly to the side, hidden among the folds of the cloth.
It held a sword with both hands.
The hilt was above its head, between its hands. The blade ran straight down, passing in front of the figure's body and stabbing into the sand. The sword was so long that it looked even taller than the statue itself. A small light burned at the top of the hilt. A yellow, warm, almost living light.
Sora thought about all the worlds he had traveled through and admitted that in his entire life, he had never seen a work of art that came anywhere close to this statue thousands of meters tall.
Elena slowly let go of Sora's jacket. Her eyes were locked on the statue.
"There," she whispered. "That's the place."