Seiya - Proxy Control Room

“I’m going to make you suffer hundreds—no, thousands of times more than I did!”

It’s a desperate situation...but at the very next moment, my face turns into sand and fades away. And it’s not just my face! My entire body turns into sand before collapsing to the ground.

“Wh-what?!”

Celemonic is taken aback. Jonde and Kiriko, who were nearby, have already turned into sand as well.

...And right now, Jonde, Kiriko, and I are watching everything that’s happening with a bird’s-eye view through the monitor in the bucket.

Standing by my side, Jonde finally speaks up.

“H-hey?! What is that room?! What is going on?!”

“It’s a fake control room that Seiya made with earthen dolls that look exactly like us.”

“I—I can see that...but I thought Celemonic gained new powers that allowed her to teleport through the earth serpent to where we were watching?! So why was it connected to that fake room and not this one?!”

“Read this.”

I show Jonde a scroll.

Celemonic might hijack a scout serpent to come crawling out of a monitor like a ghost. To prevent such a disaster, I will cut the connection by placing another relay point in between the earth-serpent cameras and earth-serpent monitors. By the way, the room you all are in is not the bottom floor of the under ground maze. You are in an isolated underground control room more than a few dozen meters away from the underground maze. In addition, all the  footage  you  are  watching  from  the  buckets  is  relayed  through  earth-serpent  cameras  in  the  fake  control  room,  and  the  video  circuits  are temporarily cut off before retransmitting the data.

I boast to the former general:

“This is the underground maze’s ultimate trap! The proxy room!”

***

After realizing it was a trap, Celemonic tries turning on her heel, but the room itself is instantly swallowed by a blinding light. It’s  an  explosion  so  powerful  that  it  makes  all  the  other  traps’  explosion sseem like child’s play. The monitor shows static, leading us to think that the earth serpent capturing the footage was destroyed in the blast as well. By the time another emerges from the ground in the proxy room and begins filming...

“Kff...! Hff...!”

Celemonic is lying facedown on the ground and twitching. In addition to the left hand she lost on the ninth basement floor, she just lost her right leg as well. She’s  barely  breathing.  Suddenly,  fire  spews  from  all  four  walls,  scorching everything in sight. The ceiling then emits a creaking noise before collapsing to crush Celemonic.

***

Volume 4, Chapter 42