Properly speaking, the orthodox approach would be to solve the puzzles and quizzes and break through the labyrinth that way.
'Why wouldn't I destroy it when I can?'
Unthinkable for me, with the spirit of a Korean pursuing maximum efficiency rooted in my bones.
'Good. We take the shortest route.'
And the shortest route is the road to first place.
Fortunately, the day before the Baptism Rite I had packed the fountain pen full of Elly's divine power.
They're holy-power demons made to frighten candidates, so they can't be all that strong anyway.
'If I'd known the Baptism Rite had an event like this, I'd have made a few more pens.'
A shame, but nothing to be done. There's never any occasion to use them normally.
I tucked the fountain pen securely against my chest and patted it.
Reassuring.
“Now then! Next up! Group 13, entering!”
“Whoaaaa! Lian, crush them!!”
“Show them the standing of House Ludersk!”
“Whoaaaa!”
Thanks to the showing so far, perhaps. I entered with the crowd's tremendous cheering at my back.
“Nnnngh... I'm nervous...”
“It's fine! I'm nervous too, you know?”
“Greenhorns, the lot of you. I'm not nervous in the slightest.”
The micro-brats each threw in a line as they went through the shimmering portal.
And then I put my own foot in.
A shimmering white aurora wrapped around my body, a sensation like down brushing my skin, and then the surroundings changed entirely.
-We're in!
-We're in!
“Whoaaaa...”
The first thing I heard was the spirits who had come in with us flying about in excitement. Followed by Corin's dazed exclamation.
Before us was a sight fully deserving of a dazed noise.
A maze of light spread out above a pure white space.
The light's true nature was holy power.
'The whole space is packed with holy power.'
As a rule, children born in the Elion Holy Empire have high affinity for holy power.
Talents receiving the Baptism Rite naturally have higher affinity still.
“Wow — this is a warm sort of space, isn't it?”
“Mm-hm... it feels kind of like home.”
The children felt holy power as something familiar.
With no idea what mission was coming, their guard was already beginning to come down.
-Right, watch closely? A demon is about to show up and bewitch the children.
The moment Elly finished speaking, a haze of light glittered and gathered in midair, and then something popped out.
“Hello!”
The small being fluttering glittering wings was a fairy.
Not a steamed-bun pebble like the spirits, but a very small, pretty fairy of the kind we all know from Tinker Bell in Peter Pan.
“I'm the guide fairy who'll be showing you the way today!”
Every time the fairy's wings beat, glitter crumbled down through the air.
The sight blended well with this space full of holy power, and looked positively holy.
However.
“A fairy? Don't make me laugh.”
SHUNK!!
My fountain pen split the air.
“Kyaaaaagh!”
Strike first, win for certain. A truth of fighting that holds anywhere.
***
“W-wait! What is happening!”
Bishop Daniel, who had run the proceedings smoothly until now, stammered in his confusion.
“Young Lian has dispatched the fairy in a single blow! This is a strategy that has never once appeared before!”
Bishop Daniel quickly operated the panel to show children from other groups moving under a fairy's guidance and solving the labyrinth's puzzles.
“What you see on screen now is Group 8. Every candidate in Group 8 is passing through the maze by following their fairy's guidance.”
The candidates of Group 8, following their fairy, met their first obstacle.
Flustered by a marsh that had appeared out of nowhere, they were solving a 'puzzle' with hints from the fairy.
“As you see, the orthodox strategy for passing the labyrinth maze is to follow the fairy's guidance through it. But the fairy, you see.”
The screen zoomed in close on a fairy flying near a candidate holding a Sacred Flame.
“Is not a perfect ally. The fairy is both guide and trial-giver. And if the powder the fairy scatters touches the Sacred Flame!”
The fairy's wings fluttered and glittering powder fell over the Sacred Flame. The Sacred Flame's light wavered uneasily the instant the powder touched it. At the same moment a number popped up on the screen.
“The Sacred Flame's power weakens!”
The instant Bishop Daniel finished, the number, which had started from 100, began dropping alarmingly.
“As you will have guessed, this number expresses the Sacred Flame's power as a percentage.”
The number dropped each time the fairy's powder touched it.
“What did I tell you? Yes, exactly! The fairy is not an ally! The powder of the fairy they took for a helper is weakening the children's Sacred Flames!”
The panel's screen split and showed several other groups. All of them plainly showed the Sacred Flame's power shaved down, in figures.
“The numbers for every group including Group 8 are dropping and dropping! But everyone! Look at this!”
In time with Bishop Daniel's words, the panel showed Group 13 again. The Sacred Flame in Lumiel's hands was burning whole and intact, exactly the shape it had started in.
“Only one group is different! Thanks to young Lian's swift judgment, Group 13 is maintaining the Sacred Flame's power! Unlike the other groups, a full 100... hm?”
CRUNCH!
On screen, Lian's fountain pen had just punched through the face of a lion-shaped demon.
And at the same moment, the number surged.
“Whaaaat! What is happening! The Sacred Flame's power has gone past 100 and is still increasing!”
““Whoaaaaa!!””
Daniel and the crowd alike shouted, filled with excitement. A scene never once witnessed at a Baptism Rite was unfolding.
'Of course it is! Who in all this time has ever killed the guide fairy of the labyrinth maze!'
Lian led his party along, driving the fountain pen into every labyrinth demon they met and growing the Sacred Flame steadily larger.
Goosebumps rose along Daniel's forearms.
A stratagem he had never expected out of a candidate. An ingenious, forceful method of cracking the labyrinth maze that nobody had ever so much as considered.
'Naturally! Which candidate could kill a labyrinth demon!'
Aside from Lian Ludersk, perhaps Lionel Rondoa, and even that was doubtful.
Daniel caught hold of a mind about to go blank and continued his commentary.
“Never once in all our history! An unprecedented situation! And the one causing his second anomaly already is none other than Lian Ludersk!”
““Whoaaaaa!!””
At Daniel's generous appraisal, the crowd's roar climbed higher and higher.
A candidates' Baptism Rite contest was normally watched for its charming, small-scale flavor. Content perfectly suited to viewing with family at year's end.
But Lian had suddenly gone on a rampage. In a stimulating, entertaining direction!
“Wow! I've followed the Baptism Rite for years and this is the first time I've seen anyone crack the labyrinth this cleanly!”
“What did I tell you! I said Lian Ludersk would do something one day!”
When a man with a bandit's face waved a blue handkerchief over his head and shouted, the spectators around him began to copy him.
Before long the stands were filled with a wave of blue handkerchiefs.
'This year's rookie is already decided.'
The mood had come over completely.
The stands were a blue sea, quite literally. Who else could stage a sight like this at a Baptism Rite.
Watching Lian darting about the screen and the crowd cheering, there was no room for dissent.
By the time the arena was filled with the crowd's heat and roar.
Lian was breaking through the labyrinth maze at high speed.
SHUNK!
“Kyeeeek!”
SHNK!
“Kraaagh!”
SHUUUNK!
“Kuaaagh!”
He drove forward, smashing the various obstacles blocking the maze with his fountain pen.
The labyrinth mission really must have taken a sphinx as its motif. Every time we met one it was desperate to ask a question.
Question demons or something.
“U-um, Lian... is it all right to get through like this?”
“Yeah, you saw it too, Corin. Those are fake demons the labyrinth constructed on purpose to give us trials.”
There was worry, but no objection. Because every one of them, the moment the pen went in, turned into a demon's shape and vanished.
'As expected, they're not strong. At this level a single fountain pen will hold out to the end.'
-If they'd been real demons the pen would have shattered right away. Lucky for us.
I soothed the worried Corin and took the lead.
'What's at the next fork?'
-Mm, there's a trap. Better to go around this one. It takes too long.
'Right, we'll pass on that.'
Elly Navigation was pleasant. Far too pleasant.
Skip the annoying traps and go around by another fork; break straight through the paths that can be broken.
You might think we'd be better off avoiding the annoying holy-power demons too. But we kept catching them, because of what Corin said when I dispatched that first fairy.
'The Sacred Flame seems a bit sturdier.'
Thanks to Corin's remark, I was able to work out exactly what role the ones hiding and appearing in the labyrinth played.
'Weakening the Sacred Flame, presumably.'
Just take the fairy that turned up offering to guide us: think how much it would have clung to us while it guided.
In that process it would have had a great many chances to quietly tamper with the Sacred Flame.
So then, conversely, if we caught them? Wouldn't the Sacred Flame's power be added to?
The guess proved correct. Our Sacred Flame was now blazing in a form completely unlike the one we entered the labyrinth with.
It was past the point where calling it a candle flame was even decent. Enough that half of Lumiel's face was hidden behind it.
'Shortest clear time, highest-powered Sacred Flame. Isn't first place a lock at this rate?'
Heh heh heh heh.
Throwing the fountain pen and clearing several more forks like that, we reached what looked like the final stretch, a large cavern.
“What is it this time.”
I spun the fountain pen around my finger and looked about. Despite this being a space made of holy power, an oddly chilling atmosphere hung over it.
'Hold on. Chilling?'
There's no way a space full of holy power gives off an aura this unpleasant.
-Lian. Hold on, something's strange.
“U-um, over there.”
The instant Elly's and Corin's voices came at the same moment.
“Ugh!”
“Urk...”
Something appeared in the air above our heads.
A mass of wings descending slowly, pressing down with an enormous weight of presence. It was a shape one would ordinarily take for an angel.
“Urk. Wh-what is that...!”
Seeing the something in an angel's shape, Lumiel trembled, gripped by fear. The other children were the same.
The air grew thick and heavy enough to make breathing difficult in an instant.
“An... angel?”
Adrian froze with a blank expression, head tilted back, looking up. I could see the goosebumps risen on his forearms.
'A real angel wouldn't give off a feeling like this. And they'd construct an angel of this level in a labyrinth maze holding only candidates?'
It made no sense.
The 'something' that had settled completely above Adrian's head slowly began to spread its wings.
“Th-that's not an angel!”
Corin, seeming to have sensed something, shook all over as he dragged Adrian away.
“Hurk!”
The moment Adrian escaped the wings' influence, he gasped for breath like a man who had just come ashore after nearly drowning.
'If not an angel, then?'
There was only one possibility. Even if it made no sense.
“Corin, what can you feel?”
Corin had called out to us the moment we arrived at the cavern. Like someone who could sense something.
“Take your time and tell me everything you felt.”
“Nngh... this is different from the aura of a real Sacred Flame or a fake one. And different from the faintly different-feeling Sacred Flames I picked in the Sacred Flame hunt too. It's the first... ugh, the first time I've felt an aura like this!”
What Corin was saying was that this was a new aura, entirely unlike divine power, holy power, or a spirit's aura.
Surely not.
[-A chick not even properly ripened yet. Quite a commendable observation.]
“Nngh!”
“Khh...”
Before I could reach a judgment, the wings slowly, mockingly, began to change their shape.
The pure white wings gradually stained black.
“!!”
An angel, messenger and herald of the god of light, gives off a holy white radiance in itself. The color of its wings is the white that symbolizes sanctity.
But the angel before us now had deliberately stained that white black.
As though to blaspheme against the god by showing the shape of a fallen angel.
'Surely not, a real demon?'
-I think the surely-not is correct.
The wings, now turned completely black, spread slowly in every direction. The dozens, the hundreds of eyes set into three pairs of wings slowly opened as well.
“Haha. That is hideously ominous-looking.”
The eyes of the wings, every one of them now open, were a vivid blood color.
“Eek!”
“Uuugh...”
The children trembled, feeling anxiety and terror at the sight.
And now, felt vividly, this filthy sensation. An aura only a real demon can give off.
'Demonic energy.'
That's a demon, no question.
I grip the fountain pen tight in my hand.
'Damn it.'
Haa. No wonder I felt uneasy.
Like Murphy's Law, an incident only ever happens when you're short of something.
I lowered my gaze to the fountain pen in my hand and the letters I had written were already half faded.
The divine power I'd charged it with was already half spent. Plainly nowhere near enough to deal with that enormous mass of black wings.
I glanced around. Children frozen in panic, and a labyrinth sealed on all sides with no way out in sight.
My specialties are talisman arts and physical exorcism. With no proper weapon to hand, what I can do right now is.
'Run my mouth.'