Countless tombstones stood across the Wilderness.
"Haruin, I came here of my own accord."
Sitting cross-legged atop the grave mound to suppress it with his body, Lan looked up at the others beside him and began to explain.
"According to my original plan, I intended to find an opportunity to infiltrate the dining hall and rescue them. But when I left the World Tomb back then, I encountered a Mysterious Person..."
For World Guardians like them, leaving the World Tomb was no easy matter. Only through his many years of experience as the Manager of the Mysterious Shop on the World Tomb's surface had he managed to work out a way to leave.
Though it required paying a certain price, it was worth it in the end.
What he had not expected was that the method he had spent so long devising was nothing more than a joke before that Mysterious Person. The other party had merely waved a hand casually and granted him the authority to enter and leave the World Tomb at will.
After witnessing the power the other possessed and the promise he had made, Lan had willingly become his chess piece. The source of the changes on Haruin's side had actually begun with him.
It was precisely because he had walked into the trap himself that the consciousness of the Apostle hidden within Haruin had awakened ahead of time. And it was because a certain underlying security mechanism had been activated along with that prematurely awakened fragment of consciousness that the subsequent chain of events had occurred.
As for what that underlying security mechanism was... before the Apostle fully awakened, eliminate at all costs any existence that had seen the secret.
"...So you willingly became a chess piece?"
Looking at the Monster before her, the pink-haired