[November 30, 1001 of the Lost Era, Golden Country.
Day 12 since entering the Ruins.
Wonderful. I was gradually coming to understand everything.
Through a tower that might once have soared into the clouds, we finally reached the dome of the vast chamber and glimpsed another landmass embedded in its ceiling-
I suspected it was a floating island that had circled the Golden Country like an accompanying satellite. Its purpose was probably to expand the country's already cramped territory and let its rigidly stratified nobility live beneath clear skies.
Then, after the distortions caused by the rules of spellcasting, it had fallen onto the Desert along with the Golden Country, sunk underground, and finally been buried deep beneath the windblown sand.
So the first place the adventurers had entered from the desert surface had not been the central portion of the Golden Country.
That was hardly good news.
An island of nobles meant defenses equipped with the most advanced technology in the entire country. They certainly had the money to buy themselves the finest armaments.
It also meant that, thousands of years later, anyone entering the Ruins would be up against the most sophisticated traps of a magnificent civilization.
"Adventurers aren't pushovers" was a saying that only applied to ordinary dungeons.
Against a country whose splendor had once been unmatched, a band of spellcasters still chanting Fireball in the old way was practically a group of barehanded monks joining the Second Magical World War. If you were genuinely a legendary monk who could split constructs with your bare hands, that was another matter. Nobody could catch you when you could leap dozens of meters into the air.
But if all you could manage was outrunning a dwarf, sorry, practically any adult could do that-let alone the war mercenaries stationed in