“Boyfriend… What boyfriend? Do you really think there are any humans left in a hellhole like this…? Are you kidding me?”

“You got stabbed, remember? Your guts spilled all over the ground! This isn’t the Smoke-Free Zone from over twenty years ago anymore!”

Merka’s expression turned ugly at once. He stopped pounding on the wall, tilted his head, and turned toward Oedipus with an unfriendly look.

Before Merka stood Oedipus, just a little taller than him, her body huddled slightly against the frigid wind.

Her body trembled faintly as she hugged her arms tightly around her figure, which was noticeably more developed than that of girls her age. She lowered her head pitifully, her two pairs of toes pressed together and rubbing against each other, making her look completely unreliable.

Merka was practically going insane. With Turing in danger, the last thing he wanted was to take care of an idiot as well.

“Forgot? I didn’t forget!”

“My head was a little scrambled just now… but I remember everything now!”

“I came to the Smoke-Free Zone for one reason—to protect its secrets!”

“You know the Taboo Orchestra, right? They’ve already infiltrated the laboratory. All this chaos in the Smoke-Free Zone must be their doing!”

“I may not have much authority in the Smoke-Free Zone, but my mother is the vice dean. You should believe me based on that alone, right?”

“Come on, follow me. You’ll understand when we get there.”

As soon as Oedipus finished speaking, she grabbed Merka’s hand and started sprinting madly through the ruined β-level.

Passing through the β-level, Oedipus and Merka rapidly made their way toward its center.

Her little feet struck the ice again and again, and a thick layer of frost formed over them and her little leather shoes.

Pale, feeble wisps of white smoke spilled from her mouth. Thin frost gathered on the ends of her brows, yet even so, she showed no sign of slowing down, as tireless as a robot.

Merka was secretly startled. He knew that if he didn’t have magic protecting his body, this blade-like chill would probably freeze him to the point where even walking became difficult.

And yet Oedipus, who had no magic at all, could still pull him along at a run.

Merka almost suspected that she was one of the imprisoned angels in the Smoke-Free Zone… But what confused him even more was why the laboratory would create an angel with such an awkward memory. What benefit could that possibly bring them?

The silent contemplation calmed Merka down a little.

After thinking it over carefully, Merka decided that Turing, whose power was enough to turn heaven and earth upside down, probably couldn’t have been killed by a few simple chunks of ice.

For the time being, he decided to follow the little girl and see whether she really had a way to deal with the ice bees.

“We’re here, we’re here… Huff, we finally made it.”

They ran for quite a while. Just as Merka was growing impatient and wanted to pull his hand free from Oedipus’s grasp, she suddenly stopped on her own.

She walked straight toward a mirrored surface covered in thick ice, but the instant she touched it, the mirror turned into an illusion and vanished.

With Oedipus leading the way, Merka entered an office that seemed to have been deserted for a very long time, utterly devoid of human presence.

There were plenty of technological devices here, and unreadable books were scattered everywhere. Most of them were in German, though there were some in English as well.

Merka was about to pick up a random book and take a look, but all he got was a hand covered in dust.

Clearly, no one had set foot here for a very long time.

“Cough, cough…”

Merka choked violently twice on the dust he’d inhaled.

He opened his magic vision to its fullest extent, but there didn’t seem to be a single person in the room.

“Honey… Prometheus…? Are you here?”

Oedipus was acting as if she were calling for a pet cat in an empty room.

She raised her voice as high as she could and called out gently. But in the empty room, aside from Oedipus’s own echo, there was no response from anyone.

“How could this be…”

“Could the Taboo Orchestra have taken Prometheus away too?”

“H-How could that be possible!”

“No matter what, there’s no way Michael and the others would do something like that, even if they were taking my feelings into account, right?”