How to Redeem a Trashy Side Villain

Chapter 143: Go Home Gary

"My eldest brother is still in the military. He's currently set to be promoted to the demon king's army in a few years at this rate."

An hour or so had passed since I had told Gary about the story of Bob when we finally entered a space that resembled an actual room.

Compared to the twisting corridors that we had been walking through, this room felt spacious and like a fresh breath of air after being in this labyrinth for so long.

The walls here were a different color from the corridors. It was smooth and a light grey.

The red crystals embedded in the wall were releasing a much brighter glow than the ones out in the corridor. In the center of the room stood a large stone platform and on the other end of the chamber was a massive gate.

The gate must've been at least fifteen meters tall and twice as wide. It was carved from a dark stone that resembled obsidian, though the surface of it was covered in strange markings and runes that glowed faintly with a crimson hue.

Between us and the gate sat a circular pedestal.

Gary stopped walking beside me.

"That looks important over there," he said the obvious.

"You think?" I muttered while rolling my eyes.

We approached the pedestal cautiously.

On top of it was a flat stone tablet covered in the same ancient language that had been written on the map I found earlier.

Gary looked down at it and frowned, "Ahh… this ancient language again."

"How long will it take you to decipher it?"

"Give me a few minutes," he replied while squinting his eyes.

"Take your time. There's no rush here."

Gary began tracing the runes with his finger while muttering to himself under his breath as he translated the words over to the demon language and then translated once more into the human language for me to understand.

"'Those who seek to pass… must first prove their worth.'"

I folded my arms and thought to myself that this wasn't exactly original.

Gary kept reading.

"'Only those who possess wisdom may step beyond this gate.'"

Even though he finished the phrase, nothing happened and we stood there in silence for a while.

"How are we supposed to prove ourselves worthy if they're not going to give us any trial?" Gary pondered.

After thinking about it for a moment, I asked him, "Are you able to read it out loud in the original language?"

"Uhm… sure, I guess. I won't have the best pronunciation, but here goes nothing." Then he began saying the entire phrase out loud.

The moment he finished saying the last line, several parts of the chamber suddenly shifted.

Panels slid out of the walls, and runes across the floor lit up. The gate behind the pedestal gave a low rumbling noise as if it had just awakened from a thousand-year nap.

Gary jumped slightly.

"Oh. Smart thinking there," he said while giving me a thumbs up.

I raised an eyebrow as I observed the changes in the room. " Is this a… puzzle?"

"Oh! I like puzzles. That's better than having to face more monsters," Gary said as he walked over to where the panels had moved. There were now three empty holes in the wall where the panels had once been.

Inside the holes was a smaller hole that was too thin for my finger to reach inside. I could stab it with Gon but I was worried that I might break it.

Gary leaned forward to observe the holes.

"…I think these are sockets."

"For what?"

He looked around the room.

"Probably something we're supposed to place here."

No shit Sherlock.

"Helpful. Shall we get looking then since neither of us seems to have a clue on what is supposed to be inserted?"

We searched the room for a few minutes.

Eventually, Gary found one key hidden in a small recess in the wall. It had a symbol carved into it that matched one of the symbols that was faintly visible on the three panels.

"It seems we're looking for keys," he said as he handed them over to me. "Should we insert it?"

I shook my head. "Let's find all three first. The keys might need to be inserted in a certain order. If we fail to get it right, that might be our only chance to get it right."

Gary nodded slowly.

"That makes total sense."

Although there was a chance that I was being overcautious, it is always better to be safe than to be sorry. And if there was some sort of defensive measure waiting for us if we got the order wrong, I did not doubt that it would be something extremely unpleasant to deal with.

So it was better not to deal with it entirely.

We resumed searching the room and although the space wasn't enormous, the designer of this labyrinth had gone out of their way to hide the other keys very well.

Several recesses turned out to be empty and the only thing we pulled out was dust and grime.

More than once, Gary excitedly called me over only to realize that it led to nothing.

"How about we find something definitive next time before calling each other over?" I said as I resumed searching.

About five minutes later, I was the one who ended up spotting something.

There was this faint crack in the wall near the gate that looked slightly deeper than the others. As I pressed my fingers into it and pulled, a small stone piece slid free.

I looked into the gap in the wall and was unable to see anything.

"Hmm…"

But once I picked up the stone, there was the key at the bottom. Picking it out with my fingers, this one had a symbol of three overlapping circles.

"Found the second key," I said.

Gary walked over and examined it with great interest.

"It matches the one on the right," he said as he pointed at the last panel on the wall.

"Just one left to find."

We kept looking.

The third and final key ended up being the most annoying one to locate.

Gary eventually noticed a loose tile near the pedestal and he called me over. I pried it open with my sword and beneath it was a small box that had nine smaller squares on each face. The squares were all single-colored and there were a total of six colors.

Is that… a Rubik's Cube?

"...What's this?" Gary uttered as he grabbed the cube.

Handing it over to me, I told him, "I got it. Give me some time."

It has been a while since I've solved one of these.

"Make the cross… then get the corners… now what?"

If it were a couple of years ago, I might've been able to solve it in less than a minute. But I'm washed now.

"Can I try?" Gary asked.

"I got it. Just… wait a second. Do this. And that. And that. Uhm…"

After five or so minutes, I finally completed the cube.

"Yes. I still got it," I smirked as I watched the cube open up like a box, revealing the content hidden inside. It was the last key.

Pulling it out, I placed the key down on the pedestal as well as the other two.

We now had all three keys. Each had a different symbol carved into it. One showed a spiral. One had three overlapping circles. And the last one looked like a lightning bolt.

Gary stared at the keys, then the sockets in the wall, then back at the keys, then back at the sockets.

"Soooooo…" he said slowly, "which one goes first?"

"That's a good question."

"Perhaps there's another clue in the room that will tell us the order."

Gary scratched the side of his horn.

"Or maybe there is no order."

"That might be true. But let's brainstorm first before falling back on that because if we try it now and it turns out that there was an order…"

I gave him this look.

"W-What?"

"...Nothing."

Gary coughed awkwardly as he must have picked up what I was putting down. "Right. Bad idea. Let's keep looking?"

He walked over to the three holes to see if he had missed anything.

While Gary was doing that, my attention had drifted back onto the stone tablet on the pedestal. I picked up the three keys and put them into my pocket in the meantime.

Although I couldn't read the ancient text, perhaps there was something here that I would be able to find even if I was unable to understand the language.

My eyes lingered on the letters that made up the language.

I went over it once. Twice. Then about a dozen times.

On the thirteenth time, something clicked.

"...Gary," I called out.

"Hm?"

"Come over here," I said, gesturing for him with my hand.

He quickly ran over, excited to see that I might've made a breakthrough.

"Look at the three symbols on these keys," I said as I pulled them out of my pocket. "Don't they also appear in the text here?" I pointed at the tablet.

Gary's face moved so close to the text that he was basically making out with it.

His eyes widened as they read along the lines.

"...Oh. Oh. Oh!"

"See it as well?"

"Yes! Yes! I see them. If we remove the vowels and focus only on the consonants, there is the spiral symbol. And over here are the three circles. And over there is the lightning bolt."

He straightened up slowly, looking at me as if I were a genius.

"They also only appear once each."

His eyes then darted back to the text. "If we were to look at the letter next to them, the order they would be found in the alphabet is one, two, and three, which coincidentally is the order we are searching for."

That I wouldn't have been able to discover on my own.

"What's the order then?"

"Lightning, spiral, and lastly, the circles."

"Well, I might be counting my chickens before they hatch but I think we solved it."

Walking over to the wall, I inserted the lightning bolt key first.

Click.

I twisted it to the right.

The runes across the floor flickered faintly.

Then the spiral key.

Click.

Lastly, the three circles.

Click.

A deep rumble echoed through the room and the massive gate trembled slightly. The runes were now flaring across the floor like burning veins.

Dust rained from the ceiling.

Gary laughed, "We did it!"

The rumbling didn't stop immediately.

Instead, the runes continued glowing across the floor as if molten lines had been carved into the stone. The massive gate shuddered once more before finally settling into place.

But it didn't open.

"…Huh?" Gary tilted his head. "I thought we solved it? Were we wrong?"

Thankfully, his answers were answered a second later.

The red glow across the gate intensified, and new markings began to appear across its surface. The ancient runes shifted like ink spreading through water until several lines of text revealed themselves across the center of the gate.

Gary stepped closer.

"Oh, great. More reading," I sighed. "What does it say?"

"Hold on. This one is a little longer and more complex."

He slowly tapped his foot on the ground as his lips moved silently while translating the text to himself. Then he translated into a language I could understand:

"Those who seek the path beyond the gate must offer a sacrifice."

One of my brows raised.

"Only through the loss of one, in the face of fresh blood drawn, while the gate opens itself. The soul of the betrayed will feed the soul of the traitor, as they will gain what they desire most from the one who is sacrificed, be it power or knowledge."

Oh? Interesting…

I grabbed my mouth with my hand, hiding the large smirk that had grown on my face.

"If that's all the text has to say, then I think we have a problem," Gary sighed as he scratched his horn.

"Why is that?"

He looked at me as if he was confused why I had asked that. "Obviously, because there are only two of us here."

He began pacing around and I could see the gears in his head turning. When he suddenly stopped pacing, he snapped his fingers.

"Ah!"

"You figured something out?" I asked, still hiding my smirk.

"Yes," he responded while turning toward me with a confident nod. "We should go back."

"Back?"

"Yes," Gary said. "We could return to the entrance and bring a third person with us. Since we have the line guiding us, we can just follow it back. I think we'll be able to retrace our steps when we come back."

He seemed quite proud of this solution.

"That way, we can decide the sacrifice fairly instead of being forced into a bad situation. Beat the labyrinth at their own game."

Fairly? Hahahaha!

I stared at Gary while he continued thinking out loud.

"Although convincing someone to come all the way down here might be difficult… perhaps we could offer them some sort of lie or you can just kidnap them…"

He rubbed his chin again.

"Yes, that should work."

Then he looked back at me.

"What do you think, Bob? Should we head back and bring someone el—"

Shhk.

The sound was quiet.

Gary's sentence stopped halfway through. For a moment, he remained standing there.

Then the upper half of his body slid sideways.

His torso separated cleanly from his legs. Both halves collapsed onto the stone floor.

Blood began spreading across the chamber.

Gary's eyes were wide. He looked down at himself in confusion before slowly turning his head toward me.

"…Bob?" his voice trembled as he called out to me. "…W-Why?"

I flicked the blood off Gon before resting the blade on my shoulder.

"Why?" I repeated.

Gary stared at me with disbelief.

"…I thought…" Blood bubbled in his throat. "…I thought we were friends."

I looked down at him, then sighed. "Gary. Did you actually think we were friends?" I asked. "You're a demon and I'm a human. If it wasn't for your knowledge of linguistics, I wouldn't have kept you alive for so long. But… I think that will no longer be a problem."

The soul of the betrayed will feed the soul of the traitor, as they will gain what they desire most from the one who is sacrificed, be it power or knowledge.

Aka, Gary's knowledge of languages.