Author's Reincarnation in a Fantasy Setting

Chapter 168 Requiem [2]

"I'll call you by your name!" her cheeks puffed up as she said it out loud.

"No, you won't."

"I will!"

I shook my head, her expression growing more irritated as I denied her request.

"Tell. Me. Your. Name!" She held me by my shoulders and spoke while staring directly into my eyes.

I shook my head again, or I should say that I was going to shake my head, before she held my head with both of her hands and forced me to look at her.

I knew what she was trying to do here; it was an old-fashioned trick. To try and make me nervous by closing the distance between us, in doing so she hoped that I'll trail off, and my concentration will break, then she can make use of it to make me agree with her. In short, she was making full use of her being a girl and the fact that she was completely naked right now.

She stared at me, a sly little smile surfacing on her face.

Unfortunately for her, these petty tricks weren't going to work on me. My expression remained rigid, it wasn't a blank face, but I wasn't smiling or panicking either. It was just… I don't know, normal you can say. Due to the practice in both my former life and this one, I'd gained perfect control over my expressions.

I can smile when I want to, I can cry, I can remain stoical when I want to, and I remain as expressionless as a wall too, if that's what I want. This, however, doesn't exactly mean that I'm feeling the same way. I can be panicking badly from the inside, but I'll seem calm on my face.

But here at this moment, I was calm from the inside too; there wasn't anything to throw me into a panic. Maybe by this time, she understood this too because she put her hands off me and leaned back with a disappointed sigh.

"So it's no use, huh…" she murmured to herself. But she was loud enough for me to hear, so I replied with a "Yup".

"Why did I want your name so badly, anyway?" she asked, but it was more like she was thinking to herself.

'It's kicking in sooner than I expected.' This was bound to happen sooner or later. After all, she wanted to know my name because she still remembered some pieces of her memories of the future. But as she'd said herself, they were fading. So it was only natural that those pieces will fade away too, and she will forget about it.

"You can call me anything you want," I suggested. I mean, I can't have her call me by my pronouns only.

"Hmmm," she put a finger on her lips and thought for a while before she opened her mouth. "You're my owner both formally and literally, so I'll address you as master."

Ah, well…fuck. There we go.

"Can't you settle on anything else?" I appealed.

"This, or your name," she implied.

I let out an exhausted sigh, this was so bad to my ears that I might die from the cringe. But after giving it a thought, it was probably better than having her fall in love with me.

"Fine. Call me whatever you want," I replied. And for just a moment I saw a wide grin of amusement spread on her face.

"Should we get out of here now?" I suggested, and suddenly the air darkened.

She gave me a serious expression, and then I realized I haven't asked for her name and was addressing her by her pronouns, exactly what I didn't want to happen to me. And if you are gonna say I should call her Requiem, then let me tell you that Requiem is the sword's name.

She is not the sword, she can transform, but the sword and the girl before me are two different things, bound together due to a curse. But this was not the right time for it, I'll get into that story later. We had more serious trouble on our hands.

"You do know that you can't go back the way you came from, right?" she queried, trying to know that we were on the same track; I nodded.

"This labyrinth was built to seal me, and the ones who sealed me didn't want anybody to take me out. The floors to enter the labyrinth were not that hard because the way out makes up for it…" she looked at me, and I had a curious expression.

"It was defined this way because even if someone were to unseal me, I will again get sealed if I don't get out of the labyrinth in the next thirty minutes. It would've been an even shorter period, but that was the minimum time the spell takes to reload."

They sure wanted to keep her in at all costs, and I'd have to say this was new to me. I knew about what we had to face to get out, but her backstory was never really described in the novel.

"We've got to fight something to get out, right? Something insanely strong," I said, she looked at me with disbelief. "Just a guess," it was not.

"You're right about that, and that something is stronger than you can imagine," she replied.

"Well, it's not like we have any other way, let's go," I brushed off the air.

"You sure?" she implored, I gave her a nod. "Let's go then," she said and turned around. Her eyes focused on the crystal in which the sword was stuck a few moments ago.

She held out her hand in the air and the same sword that I'd taken—the one with a dark, ocean-blue blade, materialized in her hands as she gripped its hilt.

"You can use it too?" I already knew that, but no pain in asking again. "Of course," she claimed. "It was my sword, to begin with."

Well, that was some news.

She pointed the tip of the blade down at the crystal and snuck the blade back into the gap from where I'd pulled it out. After that, she twisted it. The crystal cracked then broke, revealing a slot where she'd put the sword. She twisted it one more time, nothing happened for a while, but then the ground shook intensely.

The wall that was at a distance in front of us, split apart and opened into two compartments, leaving a large gaping in between. It was like a door had opened, and I think it was a door.

However, looking inside the gaping, I wasn't able to see anything. It was dark, plain dark, pitch black; nothing was visible.

"Let's go," she said as she casually pulled out the sword, it vanished in the air afterward. "Just to be clear, I won't be fighting for you. The sword is now yours to use, and my job is only to assist you," she announced as she stopped levitating and came to the ground.

I walked beside and we both started wandering off in the gate's direction. The wall was at a distance of around twenty meters away, so it was probably gonna take a while, and that time was filled with awkward silence.

"You know," I begin, she looked at me with innocent eyes. "It would be nice if you made yourself a set of clothes. I know you can."

I mean, she was completely naked. I didn't have any problem in particular, but it just felt weird to the eye…a naked woman fighting a beast.

She giggled at me evilly, "Someone's getting uncomfortable, huh?" Teasingly, she snuck near me and glued herself to my right arm. Another cheap trick. Leon would have blushed badly, had a nosebleed, and had his face red like a tomato.

"It's not like that. It feels weird, that's all."

Disappointed, all the bloom on her face faded; probably because she didn't get the reaction she was expecting. She moved to the side and sighed. A black shadow formed around her before it morphed into a pair of clothes on her body.

It was nothing fancy. A black loose t-shirt, trousers, and gloves without fingers in them.

"That's better," I complimented, but she didn't reply.

We reached close to the gate, hesitated for a moment, looked at each other, and then entered the darkness together.

Unsurprisingly, the interior was nothing like what it looked from the outside. Sure it was dark, but it was dim at max. I was able to see my surroundings, however, I wasn't able to see any walls, ceilings, or floors. Probably because there weren't any.

"Are we in a different dimension?" I appealed, casually.

"Of course, we are; the whole labyrinth is made in another dimension. Did you think that someone could dig this deep into the earth? I mean, this is even a smaller one, but there are ones with a thousand floors, they are bound to be built in a different dimension," she explained, but I felt it was more like mockery.

But our talking came to a halt when we heard a loud, flapping of wings. I knew in an instant…this was our enemy.

It was a klauth.