Outside the ruins, the organisers were notified of the missing investigation unit. They requested a rescue team from headquarters through a magic solar disc they'd set up at the camp.

 Thus, the news arrived at Rigeld's office, and an old friend of his from the guild had arrived with a report. He sighed as he looked at the paper he'd received. Not only was Alum in that group but also some very important researchers.

 Seeing his old friend in the corner of his field of vision, he put down the papers, leaned back, and looked up at the ceiling.

 “Again…” he said with a sigh.

 “Well, it seems like your favourite always gets into some sort of trouble.”

 Rigeld frowned at his friend's words.

 “You know… is this the time to be slacking off?”

 He glanced at Alver, and he nodded in agreement as well.

 “I agree with Sir Rigeld. Sir Ateles should be more serious about the matter.”

 “Oh, no need to actually worry. They have Sarie with them, so it was fine.” He said while drinking coffee.

 “So… are you just here to inform me directly? There’s more, right?”

 “You see, while it's true that there are no worries since Sarie was with them. We needed your help to withhold the information….”

 “.....”

 “... You see,” Ateles said while scratching his head.

 “We wouldn't want to cause a huge panic if it was revealed that two of the most successful researchers went missing, right?”

 “.....”

 Rigeld just listened quietly as he already knew of this fact. Not only that, but Alum was with them as well. He wasn’t sure why they had gone undercover, but he wasn’t going to try and understand how their mind worked.

 “Fine, I will withhold the information for a while, and if they’re not found by the end of this week, it will go public.”

 Ateles smiled and let out a sigh of relief.

 “Phew, they explicitly told me to keep the fact that they joined the expedition a secret, you know?”

 “... So that’s why.”

 Rigeld got up from his seat, and with a slight headache, he joined Ateles on the couch.

 “Well, this ‘Sarie’ you keep mentioning, she’d been taking an S-ranked exam, right?”

 Ateles grinned.

 “Yes, but how did you know? We were going to announce it once she was back from protecting the VIPs.”

 “Well, I have my ways,” Rigeld said while grabbing a cookie.

 “That so? Oh well, it was going to be a surprise too.” Ateles said as he shrugged his shoulders.

 Rigeld fed the cookie to his bird friend, who was standing on his shoulder, and looked out the window.

 (Seriously… I just had a talk with the Saint about Al, and now the boy is in another mess?)

 A few days back, Alum had asked him how the real estate market worked and that he was looking for a place. Rigeld wasn’t sure why but answered briefly on how it worked.

 He noticed a strange thing about the young man, and it was the fact that he had used a skill inside the barrier.

 Rigeld was caught off guard by this but didn’t ask anything since Alum probably didn’t know himself.

 He had asked the Saint about it and if she knew anything; apparently, she had noticed it as well.

 She got permission to access the internal Diloth Sphere’s data.

 However, she and the operators didn’t see any strange data. The only spells accepted were those of instruction magic tools. If the instructions did not match the ones in the database, it would be destroyed like any other form of mana.

 And the mystery deepened.

 Rigeld thought about it while looking out and sighed again.

 (Well, first, we need him to come back alive and safe….) he thought and looked at Ateles.

 “Tell me, Atel, you don’t mind if we send the Saint, right?”

 With wide-open eyes and a mouth hanging, he stared at Rigeld.

 “.... Can you even do that? This would go international, you know? The forest is close to the Benadel’s borders. Besides, will the church even allow that?”

 Rigeld shrugged.

 “Why not? Her sweetheart went missing, and so did her parents.”

 “That… is still a problem….” said Alver.

 “You do know how aggressive Benadel’s rulings are, right…? That was a dumb question, you know for sure.”

 “Oh, come on, they’re always like that. Luckily, we have ‘that’ forest for a border.”

 “... You’re right. Had it been another forest, it would worry me,” said Alver.

 Ateles stared at them.

 “Here, I thought I was being the lax one.”

 Rigeld frowned as he heard the comment.

 “Anyways, they should be fine with Sarie, right?”

 Turning his head, reaching out his arm, and signalling Rigeld’s phoenix to sit on his finger, Ateles replied with a lighthearted remark.

 “I can wholeheartedly vouch for her. Dare I say she’s as strong as Princess Luna?”

 Ateles knew Rigeld put his niece on a pedestal, hence the comparison.

 “Hmm, is that so?” Rigeld asked suspiciously.

 Ateles had a serious face, and it looked like he wasn’t just saying that to reassure him. It was a fact.

 “*Sigh, right, but we’re still sending the Saint.”

 “C’mon… the other Adventure’s branches will bombard me with paperwork for involving such a powerful individual under the state….”

 “Would you rather we send the Hero?” Rigeld asked while grinning.

 “... No, that would be way worse,” Ateles said in a defeated voice.

 …

  …..

 …

After some rest and everyone was back on their feet, investigation unit A moved along the corridors. And although there was a lot of treasure in the chamber, they didn’t have the storage capacity to bring any of it.

 Right now, finding a way out of this ruin was essential, and the only path was leading them deeper. They knew they had no choice. At first, they waited for the shifting corridor to alternate back to where they came from, but that wasn’t happening.

 So far, they hadn’t encountered anything special, not even a single trap.

 Alum looked around and saw a depiction of a construct in the skies. Beings descending and the descriptions of an all-out war.

 Morphed beings crawled out from what seemed like an underworld. The races classed as a part of humanity were depicted to fend off both the descenders and ascenders.

 Not only was that happening, but the depicted sky was ripped apart and had a huge void rift eating the world as mass collapsed into the void.

 This seemed like a fairy tale to him, although the story felt oddly real. He asked the researchers and the historians who were with them.

 And they would only shake their heads.

 It sounded like gibberish, but they all still listened intently, as no one could understand the language under the depictions except for Alum.

 There was confusion, but through Alum's explanation, the depictions on the walls did make more sense to them.

 For them, this was unknown; it was either a giant hoax, or they might have found the origin of the Horizon star.

 After a long walk, they arrived at an empty room; no traps were detected, and there was nothing except for more depictions.

 This time, the backstab of a human warlord and an angelic celestial. For some reason, Alum felt pain in his chest and was oddly sad.

 It depicted them being betrayed by their own kin and sent down to the underworld.

 His own people feared him since he was the one opening the giant rift void in the skies. He defended them from celestial attacks and absorbed the miasma from the underworld. Still, his people did not know of his good deeds.

 The angelic celestial was betrayed by her closest friends. They were consumed by jealousy, for she was loved by their god. They plotted against her for a long time. Now was their chance to get rid of her as they signed a contract with humanity to kill the two of the most powerful beings alive.

 After their betrayal, humanity and the celestials worked together to seal the underworld to keep them locked there for eternity.

 As Alum told everyone this story, they were all speechless and no one had noticed… but the exit had been sealed off. The way they came from was gone.

 Suddenly, everyone felt heavy as the mana was being sealed off, and the next instant, everyone fell down and lost consciousness.

 …

  …..

 …

 Alum woke up, and everything was so strange. He could not move, nor could he see. It was all dark. He felt uncomfortable and in pain, feeling suffocated and miserable. He finally opened his eyes.

 He was in shackles and in a cage. Looking around, he could see many others in his situation.

 A person was walking around in uniform, and they stared at him. Their eyes were filled with bloodlust as they kicked the cage.

 “How pathetic for a Prince. To fall into a deteriorating state of slavery, and no one wants to even buy you! Hahaha!”

 Alum could feel his body move on its own as he attempted to hit the man who had just insulted him, but he was in shackles and in a cage, which only made his attempt a funny joke to the man.

 “Oh? What’s this?” the man asked with an evil grin.

 He opened up the cage and kicked Alum into the wall, feeling pain run through his whole body as he coughed blood while his vision was blurry.

 The man looked at him again and over at the cage across him. There was a girl who seemed malnourished and had empty eyes. He looked back at Alum and had a grin on his face.

 “You who are a tool should stay down, or perhaps do you want me to break this?” As those words were spoken, his world fell into the dark once more.

 The next instant, he was awake. There was a girl in his arms; it was raining, and everything around him was destroyed.

 The other slaves had escaped while he was here with this frail girl in his arms.

 Seeing his reflections in her eyes, Alum finally realised why he had no control.

 This wasn’t him.

 The girl reached out and caressed his cheeks or the cheek of the person he saw this through.

 Her hoarse voice could not make any sentence understandable. She coughed blood but still gently reached out her hand to stroke his hair.

 “Br…oth…er… I…lov…e y…ou, plea…se. l…ive.”

 After those words, her hand slammed onto the ground, and she became unresponsive.

 Feeling overwhelmed and losing strength in all his limbs, he collapsed on the corpse, and before he knew it, he was on a battlefield.

 Killing morphed monsters of abominations while they echoed the sounds of his dead comrades.

 He killed and killed, and there was no end to the bloodshed.

 Using magic to make all his attacks hit. Bending the space around him, making nothing reach him, he conquered all the human territories.

 Killing the abominations crawling out of the dark chasms and slaughtering the celestial angels that tried to invade and control humanity.

 Although he wasn’t a benevolent ruler, he still protected the people he ruled, only to be faced with betrayal and sent into the depths of the dark realm along with a despicable angel he had been fighting.

 The next instant, Alum woke up. He was back, had a slight headache, and his body felt strange.

 Looking around, there was only one person besides him, a woman with pure white hair who was unconscious.

 She was one of the researchers, and he could not see anyone around them.

 There was only a wall behind them and a path forward.

 The situation did not look good as he and this woman had been split up from the rest. Or maybe they were all split up. He wasn't sure why he ended up with her since he was standing close to Lyn and Sarie when they all lost consciousness.

 He scanned the surrounding area for traps and monsters, but there seemed to be nothing in this corridor.

 He waited for the white-haired woman to wake up as he prepared something for them to eat. Luckily, they didn’t store all the food in a single storage bag.

 And after a little while, the woman woke up to the aroma of food. She looked around, and she saw Alum and no one else.

 She panicked a bit and backed away, but Alum didn’t move a meter. But instead, calmly cooked the food.

 Realising that Alum hadn’t done anything to her, she seemed apologetic.

 “I-I'm sorry,” she said in a low voice.

 Alum was trying not to scare her and spoke softly and gently with as much emotion possible in his voice.

 “No worries, we were separated from the rest. How? I don’t know, but you were already beside me as I woke up.”

 He now had a good look at her face; it was well-defined, and she had lush green eyes. It's strange… Alum thought, and he felt oddly captivated by her.

 He wanted to hit himself for thinking that, after all, he had Ame and only Ame, so there wasn’t a place for someone other than her in his heart.

 “I… I see, oh? H-How rude of me. My name is Emerine… I-I am married and have kids! S-So please don’t try to hit on me!”

 Alum's eyes widened in surprise and then let out a small chuckle. After all, he has never met anyone who introduces herself like that.

 “Please don’t worry about that. I have someone I love as well, and I wouldn’t do anything to betray her. Right, my name is Alum, an adventurer from Ilifel.”

 Emerine gasped and covered her mouth.

 (Black hair, golden eyes, reside in Ilifel… and a lover he loves dearly…)

 “Is… she perhaps the Saint?” Emerine asked with a shaky voice.

 Alum was embarrassed and scratched his cheek.

 “... Yes.”

 By that time, Emerine had gotten closer to him, and unexpectedly, she hugged him and buried him in her chest.

 “Kyaa~! I didn’t think I would meet you this soon, future son-in-law!”

 Alum finally realised why he felt strangely attracted to her; she looked like Amethely, or it was rather the other way around.

 (This reaction… is she going to act like big sis Chely?!)