“Okay then. I’d thought we could muscle our way through whatever traps came up, but a teleportation trap is a different matter,” I pondered. If this had been a pit trap or something like that, it wouldn’t have given Raphtalia and her party any trouble. We didn’t even know if her instincts had worked here, or if they had failed her.

Still, with the sirens ringing out like this, Raphtalia and the others must have been stripped of their concealment and the trap teleported them away.

“Here goes nothing,” I said and reached to open the door.

“Raph?!” Was Raph-chan surprised by something? That meant . . . the trap was responding to us. It was likely designed to activate across a wide area and catch up everything within its range.

The ground flashed, and in an instant everything around us changed.

Fair enough. Pretty much the only way to deal with this would be to run from the effect of the trap the moment it was activated. But that was hard to do in a narrow passageway.

“Mr. Naofumi!” I heard someone shout. I looked in the direction of the voice. There was a Japanese-looking guy holding a weapon like a violin, five women, and Raphtalia and Glass standing opposed to them.

“So you’re the hero with a holy weapon from another world,” the guy with the musical instrument muttered. He was wearing clothing that was mainly black, black hair, and had an uppity-looking attitude. He was likely in his teens. Rather than the youthful coolness of Ren, he had a slightly more mature-type cool about him.

To put it more nastily, I didn’t like the look of his face at all.

These guys always liked black. Were they all mentally stuck in middle school? My experience up until now was telling me he was going to be immature. This looked like it might be a bigger pain than expected.

“And you must be this Miyaji guy, huh? The one selected in this world by the musical instrument vassal weapon?” I said.

“My, my . . . an honor to meet you. I am Hidemasa Miyaji, the musical instrument hero,” he replied, bowing his head. He just came off as false and slimy. That look on his face, like he saw through everything, really got me riled. Kyo had been similar, with his belief in his own intelligence. But this one looked to be feigning politeness even harder. He started to speak. “I was aware of you since your entry to this underground facility. Fighting a whole bunch of you at once would be most inconvenient, so I decided to split you up,” he said. I looked around. We should have all been teleported together, but there was only Itsuki here from my party.

That meant Shildina, Filo, Raph-chan, and Ethnobalt were missing. That also meant Raphtalia and Glass had been split off from Rishia, Sadeena, and Chris. Damn! This complicated things.