After Mira and Hebi thoroughly looked through the control room without finding any usable leads, they returned to the earlier room, where the two searching the bodies were, expecting them to have found anything.
Back in the strategy room, Arlon and Sasori were squatting down while discussing something.
「So, did you find anything of use?」
Mira spoke to Arlon, while Sasori began talking to Hebi.
Arlon looked at her for a bit before replying 「Yeah, look at this」 before looking at the ground again.
The items carried by Chimera were all laid down there. Three black daggers with strange carving on them, many small bottles with liquid in them, cloth with magic circles drawn on them, eight maps, and a pass to enter the dungeon.
Mira took one of those maps in her hand.
「There’s eight of them, but they’re all copies of the two same regions.」
Those maps were much more detailed than those used during the game time, so Mira struggled identifying the region at first, but after squinting a bit it finally clicked with her memories.
「It appears so. One of them is of here, the Libra Fortress, the other one-」
「The Mirage Maze.」
Before Arlon could finish, Mira recalled a dungeon with a similar layout to the map and finished the sentence with a sharp glint in her eye.
「Exactly. And they had one copy each. Also, here are their permits.」
As he spoke, Arlon showed her the cards lying on the floor.
「All four of them had one?」
Mira asked as she picked up one of them. If they were acting as a group, only one of them needed to have the permit after all.
「Yeah, one permit for every member. Though considering how unique their way of operating is, I don’t think that’s too weird. These four were probably assigned the same mission independently.」
「That makes sense. It would stand out less as well.」
「Precisely. Anyway, how did it go on your side? Found anything?」
Arlon’s eyes were brimming with expectation as he asked, but Mira just had a strained smile as she plopped down next to the gathered items and shook her head.
「Nothing much, to be honest. Only the fact that the orbs that should be embedded on the pillars are gone, I guess. Though it’s hard to say if it was them who did it.」
Replying like that, Mira returned the map and heaved a pouting sigh.
「Hmm, the pillars… pillars…」
Hearing her, Arlon began muttering that to himself. Then after pondering for a while he took out a bundle of papers and handed it to Mira, saying 「Look at this.」
Mira took it and quickly glanced at the pages.
「Is this a sketch of those pillars?」
All the pages had drawings of a place she was familiar with.
It was a sketch of the control room she was in earlier with Hebi. There were many pages, starting with a bird’s-eye view of the room, to sketches from different angles and viewpoints, all throughout many pages. On top of that, everything was numbered neatly and the bird’s-eye view listed from where each drawing was made.
「It seems so. I don’t remember much about any orbs being here, but if those pillars are connected to the Spirit King then there has to be some form of connection between the two.」
Saying that, Arlon took out another bundle of papers, quickly leafing through it. There he found another sketch of a similar pillar.
「There are similar drawings in this one too, huh.」
Mira peeked into the second set of sketches Arlon held, comparing it to the one she was handed earlier. They appeared to be drawn by different people, the artstyle and viewpoints differ vastly, but both were numbered in a similar way.
「Yeah, and we found two more. I’m not sure what meaning these sketches hold, but now that we have them we might have stopped something from happening.」
「Seems that way.」
Their use was still hard to pinpoint, but since Chimera Clauzen was targeting the Spirit King, they had to serve some purpose with locating him. Mira returned the sketchbook to the other items found, then took another one to look through it.
They all were drawn in different ways, but all of them contained at least one sketch of the pillars.
In other words, that was the most important place.
「Hmm, I’ll go check something out.」
Mira took the drawings and headed back to the control room. Arlon could sense she was on to something, so he silently followed her, full of expectations.
After a quick look around, Mira began cross checking the room with the drawings. She matched the numbers to the bird’s-eye view and stood in those spots.
Spending a few minutes doing that with the different drawings, eventually she said 「I see now」 to Arlon, a big grin on her face.
「Did you notice anything?」
「Only a vague guess.」
Arlon seemed in a good mood as well, Mira sitting on the floor as she replied.
「Put plainly, these drawings were made to triangulate the exact position where the orbs went.」
Mira looked straight at Arlon, who sat down in front of her, then went back to looking at the sketches.
「The position of the orbs you say? So there was some special meaning to where they went?」
「Yeah. It was easy to notice with how much emphasis they placed on them, this is my forte after all. From what I can tell, those pillars all represent different spirits.」
「They represent spirits? I figured there was some form of meaning to them, but I still don’t get it.」
He groaned as he examined the drawings more, knitting his brow as he focused. Arlon had the incredible talent of memorizing anything he saw once, but since he was unable to see spirits this was a tricky subject for him. Then again, bettering that knowledge was why he began helping the Fifty Bells.
「Well, that’s understandable. At first I also had a hard time grasping this, but the more I look at it the more familiar it seems.」
She could understand why Arlon had a hard time getting it, so she resumed explaining with a proud voice. As a warrior, there were invisible things to Arlon, but Mira as a summoner had seen them countless times in the past, and wondered about them each time.
「By the way, do you know about the Skill Tree?」
Before plunging into the actual topic, Mira prefaced it with that question.
A Skill Tree was something common in games, an easy way to display many layers of complex skills all linked together.
「Skill Tree? I feel like only smart people use complicated words like that, but I never heard of it.」
That system was also partly present in Ark Earth Online, but apparently Arlon had never heard of it. Hearing his response, Mira muttered to herself 「So he really didn’t know」, spreading out one of the drawings in front of them.
「So in simple terms, it’s a way to easily visualize how low level skills lead to higher level ones. With that in mind, take a look at this.」
At the end of her sentence, Mira pointed at the hole in the pillar of one of the sketches.
「Summoners gain the power of spirits that one made contracts with, and the order in which those contracts are made can be drawn out like a Skill Tree. If you look at the holes in this pillar, they overlap with the shape of a Skill Tree. Though there are still many paths that I don’t know myself, since I haven’t formed contracts with all the spirits out there.」
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