11 The Empress's New Clothes

"You want to use a murderer as our guide?" Catherine asked perplexed.

"Well, at the very least he can give us some intel about the area," Joshua replied.

"Leave it to me," Eric said, "Considering he fainted just from seeing that ridiculous costume, I'll have no trouble extracting some knowledge out of him."

"He's speaking Easan, though. Do you need help with translating?" Catherine inquired.

"I think it will be all right as long as I'm in range of Luna."

"Actually, this will be a good opportunity to see how well a conversation with a native goes using Luna's instant translation," Joshua remarked.

Eric nodded and headed downstairs. Boris followed carrying the two corpses, they decided to put them in the basement for the time being. Unfortunately, they couldn't afford to organize a proper burial for them. Cynthia soon left as well and resumed searching the place. When they were alone, Catherine sat on the bed and sighed.

"Seriously, what kind of mess did we just step into?" she told Joshua.

"I have to admit, even I am starting to find the whole situation pretty absurd," he replied.

"We've barely arrived and everything is escalating to ridiculous levels. We haven't even tried to enter the city! Do you honestly think we can enter that place unnoticed?"

Joshua remained quiet for a moment, seemingly lost in thoughts. Finally, he replied: "I see, you're considering Eric and Cynthia's suggestion that we should head back for now?"

She nodded and said: "I don't want to abandon the other parties and I know you're the one with the most to gain from this place. But you said it yourself, there are thousands of things that could go wrong once we approach. We just got lucky this time things turned out so well."

Hearing this, Joshua sat next to her and put his hand on her shoulder.

"What we're currently doing is probably foolish and you're right to have doubts."

"...But?"

"Heading back would definitely give us some short-term benefits. Your body is evolving on its own now so in theory, you should reach the max rank a few years from now. As Cynthia suggested, we could expand this to your whole family to start with, and you'll undoubtedly become a very prominent figure. However, you'll hit a wall someday. If I get stuck at my current rank. I won't be of any use if you ever face much more powerful opponents. Same for you, your soul reached rank four which is great, but we all know our enemy is much more powerful than that. With the method you taught me, it would take forever for you to gain another rank up. It might take a few years, even a few decades but we'll only be able to delay the inevitable. A slow burn leading to certain defeat. That's what awaits you if we head back."

She vaguely smiled and said: "And how would you describe staying?"

"I would say it's a beacon of hope surrounded by whirlpools of despair. The probability of failure is very high and whether positive or negative, we'll know the end result fairly soon."

"So, you describe it as a high risk, high reward situation?"

"Pretty much, of course, if everything gets too dire, we can still abandon ship and run back to the surface."

She grinned and replied: "It's a plan that fits you, that's for sure. But you're right, I don't want to spend the next few decades in fear while pretending to lead a peaceful life. Enough meandering, we should help the others."

Catherine stood up and moved toward the closet. With the corpses gone, they could finally check the inside without worries. The female corpse they had found was fairly tall, about the same size as Catherine, so Joshua left the room and closed the door, assuming she would try on some clothing.

###

Catherine began browsing to the closet as she let Joshua's words sink. She had a bit of trouble to follow all his talk about grandeur, but she instinctively could tell he was right. Backing out was not an option, all they could do was move forward, one step at the time.

Opening the door, she first saw her own reflexion, as a mirror built-in the inner side of the door, which was pretty handy. Turning her gaze to the clothing, she saw that both male and female apparel were unlike anything she was familiar with. Since the place was technologically very advanced, she half expected to see a casual clothing style similar to Joshua's world, which she had grown familiar too by consulting Luna. However, the clothes she found appeared to be pretty formal. Similar to the man they had captured, the male attire consisted mostly of suits while the female ones were rather extravagant dresses. Being a noble, Catherine did possess a few fancy dresses for grand occasions but the ones in front of her were borderline ridiculous. Did people really wear those in their everyday lives? It looked very silly in her mind and yet part of her was actually looking forward to trying it out. She was a woman, after all, trying out nice clothes did tickle her fancy. She picked a dress and saw that a pair of gloves, shoes and a bizarre hat came along with it as a set. She quickly put the dress in front of her and looked at her reflexion in the mirror. Satisfied by the look, she smiled and proceeded to undress and try it on the full attire.

###

After leaving the room, Joshua observed the hallway. There was one more room on this floor he hadn't checked out, leading to a study. He saw that Cynthia was already inside, reading a book. Thanks to the system, she was able to instantly translate the content, and share it with everyone. It turned out to be a novel so she stopped after a few pages, however, Joshua told her to continue. The added value of a novel was low, but languages evolve over time, there might be new words or grammatical rules that have changed compared to the texts they found in the lab. They needed as much information as possible, so Joshua told her to read everything she could find. Cynthia took a glance at the bookshelf that was in the room. It was pretty packed but with Luna's speedreading, she could get through them in a few hours. She nodded toward Joshua and resumed her reading.

Climbing down the stairs, he saw that Boris was busy removing his armor. It was a good move, full plate armor wouldn't help with what was ahead anyway. Lydia was in the kitchen, checking out how the rune-based furniture worked. To her delight, it was near identical to ones they had found in the ruins, although Joshua frowned upon hearing that. In any case, Joshua considered three items that could help him gather a good amount of info: the television post, the dweeb they captured and the vehicle he came with. Eric was about to start his interrogation, so he headed for the basement.