The four of them—now including Squirrel, which lowered the “human ratio” of the group even further—stood dumbfounded in a silver-white corridor. For a moment, no one spoke.
After a long pause, Foxy was the first to break the silence. “Benefactor, so this is what’s behind the ‘stage’?”
“This isn’t what I pictured,” Irene mumbled. “I thought there’d be tentacles, flesh, eyeballs, and creepy chanting everywhere… Wasn’t that how it always looked before?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t know what’s going on either,” Yu Sheng said, waving a hand. Then he pointed at a sign on the wall. “But we’re definitely inside Anka Aila… um, inside its ‘interior.’ The sign says so: ‘Anka Aila—Maintenance Passage.’”
Foxy’s eyes went wide. “Benefactor, you can read the words here?”
“I understand what they mean, but I don’t recognize the letters themselves,” Yu Sheng replied with a frown. He glanced down at his hunter outfit. “Maybe… it’s connected to the Hunter’s perspective?”
Irene blinked, then quickly caught on. “Maintenance passage? As in, inside Anka Aila’s body?”
Yu Sheng had no answer. He only motioned for the group to stay alert as they ventured deeper along that mysterious “maintenance passage.”
What was this place? Was it truly inside Anka Aila? Or just a path leading to it? Why would the space behind Fairy Tale’s “stage” turn out to be such a clearly man-made corridor? And at the heart of it all: What exactly was Anka Aila—the entity called a “Dark Angel”?
The Hunter’s bullet was still giving off a faint warmth, guiding him toward a hazy destination. By sensing the bullet’s heat, he could at least tell he hadn’t gone off track.
From time to time, they heard a low humming noise from beneath the floor or above the ceiling. It sounded like machinery in operation, yet it was strangely unreal, like a distant echo of some ancient memory in a dream.
Suddenly, a wave of dizziness overcame Yu Sheng. He looked ahead on instinct.
In one flicker, the brightly lit white corridor turned into a fractured, twisted wreck. Jagged dark-red shadows pierced the walls and floor, and a muddy, pulsating substance gushed from broken pipes. It smothered everything in sight. Above them, a massive hole yawned open in the ceiling, revealing outside light that shifted in a wild dance. It looked like distorted stars stretched to infinity—
Squirrel gave a tiny shriek. Even Irene yelled, “What the—!” Yu Sheng and Foxy stopped at once, muscles tensed.
Foxy was already hugging both of her tails, ready to unleash a round of “Fox Carrot Gatling” at whatever horror lay ahead. But in that same moment, the terrifying vision vanished. The corridor became pristine and well-lit again.
Yu Sheng and Irene exchanged a look. After a moment of silence, the little doll spoke first. “Do you think that was the past… or the future?”
Yu Sheng’s voice was grave. “It could be the present—its real appearance.”
“…You’ve definitely become a professional Spirit Realm Detective,” Irene remarked with a twitch of her mouth. “You know exactly how to suggest the creepiest possibility.”
“Benefactor,” Foxy said nervously, still holding her two tails, “I suspect some kind of illusion is at work here. I saw a scary movie when I was little.”
Yu Sheng couldn’t help asking, “A scary movie? Which one?”
“I forgot the title. It was about a person on a boat. Halfway through the journey, everyone else on board died in an accident, but he didn’t realize it because he had Observer Effect Displacement Syndrome. He kept sailing along with the wrecked ship. As the journey continued, he sank deeper and deeper into ‘another world.’ Eventually, he reached a timeline where all life had been wiped out. That’s when he finally snapped out of it and went insane…”
Irene’s hair practically stood on end. “Why are you telling us that here of all places?”
Foxy sounded aggrieved. “Benefactor asked me to talk about it…”
Just then, Yu Sheng raised a hand, cutting off the doll and the fox girl. “Shh.”
The corridor fell silent.
They heard footsteps.
Many footsteps. It sounded like a squad of people running toward them from behind. They were very close.
Yu Sheng’s eyes narrowed. He spun around to face that direction.
He saw nothing. The corridor was still empty.
Yet the footsteps persisted, as if that group was hurrying right past him—completely invisible. Like the humming in the background, they carried a dreamlike quality.
In those unseen steps, he heard mechanical hisses of pressurized gear and the clank of equipment bumping together.
“Sounds like about a dozen people ran by,” Irene murmured, gripping Yu Sheng’s hair nervously. “They’re invisible.”
“Hey, you’re supposed to be a cursed doll,” Yu Sheng muttered, peeling her hand away. “Try not to be more on edge than me. And stop pulling. I’ve already started losing hair lately.”
Foxy’s ears twitched at the air. “They seemed to go that way,” she said, pointing down the corridor toward a branching path. “But the sound vanished after they turned right.”
Yu Sheng frowned, then made up his mind. “…Let’s follow them.”
They raced along the corridor, took the turn Foxy indicated, and walked a bit farther. There, a pair of damaged silver metal blast doors blocked their path.
Yu Sheng hesitated, about to walk up to the doors, when those invisible footsteps rose again.
It sounded like the same group had reached this big door. Then came low voices, speaking hurriedly in bursts. Static made it hard to make out the details, but Yu Sheng could pick up bits like “break it open,” “lost contact,” and “continue the mission.”
Then came an explosion, a piercing tearing sound, a few startled shouts, and a distant, fuzzy alarm.
Yu Sheng’s brow furrowed. In that moment, he felt a sudden spark of understanding.
Irene looked puzzled. “Them? Who’s ‘them’?”
“That Deep Dive Squad from seventy years ago.” Yu Sheng ran his hand along the blast door’s damage. “We’re hearing their echoes.”
He set Irene on the ground and crouched to slip carefully through a gap in the twisted door. Irene and Foxy followed. Together, they gazed at the space beyond.
It was a large hall with a sunken center. A massive support pillar stood in the middle, wrapped in countless pipes and cables. Many old, inactive screens hung around it. More cables dangled from the ceiling like long-dead nerves or veins. All around the hall stood rows of strange devices—some shaped like rectangular cabinets, others like cylinders. Each had openings and monitors, though none of them were lit.
“…Looks like some kind of control center,” Irene whispered.
Yu Sheng didn’t respond. He carefully surveyed the area, then walked toward the center of the hall.
But the next second, the same slight dizziness struck him again. He halted abruptly and saw the hall twist into a hideous, decaying ruin. Darkness and rot clung to the walls and floors. Those cables overhead turned into throbbing veins and nerves. The devices around the hall swelled and pulsed like hearts. The giant pillar in the center became a massive, tentacle-like shadow, its lifeless monitors transforming into countless cold eyes that blanketed its surface…
That shadow curved downward as if to reach for Yu Sheng and the others, sprouting more tendril-like growths at its tip.
But in another blink, the vision vanished. The room went back to normal.
Yu Sheng steadied himself and kept moving forward. Foxy followed close behind, her tails floating defensively in the air.
The footsteps rose once more, this time confused and frantic. The invisible Deep Divers from seventy years ago must have run into trouble. Yu Sheng heard gunfire, panicked voices, and unsettling static woven with low, chaotic murmurs. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a figure wearing heavy protective armor stumble by, only to vanish again in an instant.
It felt place was a warped nexus of space and time, layering different timelines on top of one another—and maybe even overlapping different layers of reality itself.
All at once, Yu Sheng felt a surge of heat.
He lifted his hand. The bullet from Hunter lay there, trembling. The warmth in its casing grew stronger, like it had just been fired from a chamber. In a heartbeat, it turned searing-hot, too intense to hold.
His hand jerked, and the bullet clattered to the floor.
He bent down to pick it up. The moment he reached out, the color drained from everything around him.
Then a distant, muffled voice reached his ears:
“…Final report. This is the Deep Dive Squad, Operation ‘Coming of Age’…”
This novel is translated and hosted on bcatranslation