小嫂子的味道

Disintegrating the ice wall, I moved forward, ensuring that I didn\'t step on Challes\'s gut, stomach, brain, or anything else left in a single piece.

This wasn\'t really a surprise, in fact, I\'d sent him to take out the sword precisely because I knew about this trap, and that the only way to disarm it was to trigger it. Or you could say I didn\'t know of any other way.

In the novel, Leon had also fallen for the trap but didn\'t die because his system helped him to absorb the energy the sword forcefully injected into him. After that, he didn\'t use any other trick and the sword came out easily, hence I also didn\'t know of any other way to disarm it.

I could\'ve tried using my own brain but I was not in the mood to accidentally kill myself or destroy the sword, so using the straightforward method was the best and safe option.

I stood near the sword and looked down at it. \'I hope there\'s not a second trap,\' I thought before I put my hands on the hilt.

And…

That was the only trap, I didn\'t explode. I tightened my grip, placed my hand on the crystal, titled my body backward, and pulled the sword back. One minute passed and it didn\'t come out, then one more minute, then another, and keep in mind I was B rank and was pulling the sword with that much strength.

But after a good five minutes I heard a crackling sound coming from the crystal, the sound increased, and then the crystal broke. It happened by surprise and I stumbled a few steps back but reimagined by balance soon.

The sword was in my hands now, the sword which I\'d been looking for all this time.

"The Requiem," I whispered quietly, that was the sword\'s name; Requiem.

Suddenly I felt a strong force sucking my mana, it was flowing into my palms and getting absorbed by the sword. This was something I could not stop, I tried but wasn\'t able to. It was sucking my mana even harder than the Book of Sight.

Although it only lasted for a few minutes and then stopped. I heard a crisp sound, and it came from a crack that formed on the sword\'s blade. A few more cracks appeared all over its body and bright light passed through the cracks.

Soon the cracks covered all of the sword and one by one, the stone pieces fell and crumbled. In less than a minute the whole stone layer of the sword dusted away and a new, shining, sword was revealed.

The blade was the sword was thin and straight like a katana, colored in deep, ocean-blue it was reflecting only so much light as it had a matt finish. The hilt was pure black with bronze detailing on it. All in all, the sword looked so much like a katana but it was different since the blade was not curved but straight as a line.

This was the Requiem, sealed in this labyrinth for thousands of years. It was an ancient sword with a special quirk that no other sword had.

The blade shone brightly, so bright that I had to narrow my eyes, then it flew away from my grip and levitated in the air. The glow and brightness of the light increased and increased and increased until it dyed the whole area in white.

I put my hand before my eyes and blocked some of the light so I don\'t have to close my eyes completely. And then, as the light faded away, a new object came into sight that was anything but a sword.

Long and deep, ocean-blue hair, pale white skin, and a well-proportioned face. It was a girl that levitated in the air…more like a naked girl levitating in the air.

She lifted her eyelids gently and opened her eyes. They were dark and beautiful like black opals, but along with being black, she had a tinge of red in them that was only visible when the light fell on her pupils directly.

She looked at me, with interest, like humans observing animals in a zoo, like she\'d found something unusual and interesting and out of place.

Her first question to me was… "Why aren\'t you having a fountain of a nosebleed and getting red as a tomato? As Leon did," she asked as she leaned closer to me, her face an inch away from mine; her breasts hanging down as she did so.

"Because I have other things to do…important things to do," I replied, calmly.

However, she was right about one thing. This does sound like something Leon would do, he\'d done the same in the novel, after all…wait for a second, what?!

"How do you know about Leon?" I asked, and even though I tried to control my expressions and hide them, there was a hint of panic in my voice.

This was really weird. How can she know about Leon, his coming here and acquiring her was a reality that happened in the novel, not here. She shouldn\'t be aware of it. Either I\'m tripping or heard her wrong. But soon both cases were proved wrong.

"Huh?" she made a noise as she leaned back and folded her arms as she levitated, also giving me a look like I was asking something oblivious. "I mean, he\'s the one who was originally supposed to take me, right?" she said.

Man, now I\'m really trippin\'.

This came as a major shock, but one of the things I\'ve learned through experience in my former world, and this too, was that keeping your calm even in the worst situation really helps. I was good at it too since I was using this for quite a long time.

I took a breath and regained my composure, clearing my head and focusing on what is in front of me right now. I thought of a few possibilities in which she can know about Leon, but none were hundred percent convincing. Hence I decided to try a different route.

"Yeah, that\'s true. He\'s the one who was supposed to acquire you, but now that I have taken his place and the reality had changed, how do you remember what happened in a reality that was "supposed" to happen but didn\'t actually occur," I inquired, my words were calm and composed like everything was according to my plan—which really wasn\'t, by the way.

"Oh that?!" she snapped her fingers in the air. "That\'s one of the powers I gained when I was sealed here. I could see the future the path has chosen for me, I was able to see it till the end. From the point of who released me from the seal, to how I was used and how the user\'s journey ended or died."

This was new, I didn\'t know she had an ability like this. I knew about her changing into a girl because loli_pop had done this so he can add a new harem member in the story, but when the readers didn\'t like her—didn\'t simp for her—he made Leon forget about the sword and she rusted in his inventory for the rest of the novel.

However, I don\'t remember him adding anything similar to this power.

"Can you tell how my journey is going to end?" I appealed.

She shook her head, "From the point, you entered the labyrinth, my memories of the future begin to fade. And now that you have freed me from the seal, the memories have completely blanked out. No new future has emerged in my memories," she explained.

I nodded in response.

So this is how it works, huh? Her ability is not exactly to see the future of whoever frees her from the seal. Rather than that, it is more like a pre-planned future planted into her memory of what happened in the novel.

That\'s why when I changed roles with Leon, her memory began to fade because things didn\'t go the way they were supposed to. I see, it isn\'t hard to grasp when you try to think about it deeply.

"Complicated stuff I know," she acknowledged with a tired expression on her face, but then her face suddenly bloomed. "Leave all, what\'s done is done. Let\'s start from new. If you are my user now then that is the reality now, so be it. What\'s your name?"

I wasn\'t going to fall for it. In the novel, Leon had given her his name and because of some twisted logic, his name became the reason she fell in love with him. I didn\'t want any of that trouble.

"You don\'t need to know my name, you can call me anything else," I stated.

Only then, maybe it was just my imagination but I saw a vein popping up in her head as she made a stiff expression. "That…won\'t do. You have to tell me your name, how\'ll I call you otherwise?" she insisted.

For a moment, some part of mind said that she hadn\'t forgotten all of her future memories yet. As she said, they were "fading", so that meant they didn\'t vanish in an instant. I had a bad feeling that she remembered the part about falling in love with Leon.