The bridge hatch swings open. Clione strides in with Vesta on his heels.
Melinoë hovers at the center of the bridge, a holographic mermaid with a sleek orca tail, her face settled into its usual existential gloom. Halia's face fills one of the monitors, her features rippling and resettling like a stream of data that never quite holds still.
Clione reports, "Got her."
Bianca's voice comes through the speaker. "Like cool. So like we have this seal thing that we have to like unseal with like music and stuff. Charlie is like going to say a bunch of like confusing stuff to like tell you like what we like need to do."
Smirks travel around the bridge as Jean Bart, Uni, Clione, Hakugan, and Vesta swallow their laughter.
Charlie clears his throat. The line hisses. "Thank you, Bianca. I will do my best to try and keep this as simple as I can."
KATCHA!
BZZZZZT... crackle... krrrshhh...
Charlie pinches the bridge of his nose, and his round wire-framed glasses slip farther down its sweaty slope. He jams his vintage pith helmet tighter onto his head and all but flings himself at the microphone, his satchel—stuffed with crumbling field notes—thumping against his cargo vest.
"Ahem! Testing! Is this transceiver operational?!"
The wireless relay sputters, then opens onto three distinct feeds.
"Charlie-chwaaaan! Can you hear that?!" Vesta Lavana's voice bursts through with enough bubbly, theatrical vibrato to rattle the speaker cone. Behind her, a sharp, rhythmic riff rings out—followed by an indignant yip. "Ow! Mikasi, stop nipping my fingers! Bad boy! He shifted his tuning pegs into coyote ears again because he's excited!"
A second voice follows—melodious, warm, and maddeningly serene. On the Pluton's monitor, Halia's avatar shimmers in time with each syllable, her vocal matrices steeped in maternal patience. "Charlie, telemetry from our long-range resonance sensors indicates a massive density anomaly at your coordinates. The Great Kingdom's records classify that corridor under emergency quarantine protocols."
"Oh, wonderful," sighs the third voice. Melinoë's deadpan seeps through the comms like cold water through a cracked hull, heavy enough to sink the mood of the entire bridge. "A quarantine gate. We are communicating via shortwave radio to disassemble an ancient apocalyptic acoustic entity. We are all going to suffer catastrophic cellular liquefaction, and my existence will end having spent four hundred years listening to a man in khaki shorts pontificate over a walkie-talkie. Shall I queue up the funerary dirge now, or would you prefer to die in silence?"
"Silence would be an unprecedented luxury from all three of you!" Charlie snaps, screwing his loupe into place to glare at the blank stone wall before him. "Ahem! Listen to me very carefully! You cannot see what I am seeing! This barrier is carved from an alchemical composite of vitrified celestial salt, pyrobloin, and raw Sea-Stone slurry! The compendiums call it the Seal of the Veiled! It does not swing! It does not unlatch! And if you fire a single brute-force resonance blast at it from the dreadnought's cannons, you will atomize this entire tectonic plate!"
"Fascinating," Halia offers gently. "The macroscopic lattice must be utilizing a kinetic dampening matrix. Similar to the early harmonic dampeners developed during the Void Century's Reconstruction Era..."
"It is a Monochordia Mundana!" Charlie cuts across her triumphantly, brandishing a stick of seismic chalk at the dark stone like a professor addressing a packed lecture hall. "The Macrocosmic Monochord! Proved that creation is held together by divine Pythagorean string ratios! Carved into this rock face are seven concentric tracks strung with microscopic electrum wires! If anyone hits this door with kinetic force, the shockwave is divided into octaves, fourths, and fifths, and grounded directly into the continental crust! It is an acoustic cancellation ward! And behind that sits the Sigillum Dei Aemeth—the Seal of God's Truth, chiseled according to scrying geometry!"
"The Seal of God's Truth?" Melinoë drones over the static. "How quaint. Even the Almighty couldn't design a door that doesn't involve suffering. If they designed the perimeter, it means forty glyphs are currently siphoning the atmospheric medium to maintain an absolute vacuum. Meaning, even if we sing, the sound waves will starve and we will asphyxiate in absolute dark. A fitting end, really."
"Will you stop seeking validation from the void for five seconds?!" Charlie shouts, yanking at the strap of his satchel. "That is why this is a coordinated acoustic operation! We aren't picking a lock! We are performing the fixation of the volatile and the dissolution of the fixed! Tot Musica is an acoustic parasite—pure and volatile! The seal keeps it frozen in crystal! To liquefy the wall, we have to introduce a contrapuntal three-part fugue across three exact keys simultaneously!"
"A three-part fugue?!" Vesta gasps, her platform boots clomping against the floor plates loud enough to carry over the radio. "A trio?! Oh! Oh! Like Uta's triple-tracked vocal layers in 'I'm Invincible'?! Wait, who's singing what?! Mikasi just shapeshifted into an electric bass and he's wagging his tail! Who gets the spotlight?!"
"Nobody gets the spotlight, this is not an audition!" Charlie mops his forehead with an ink-stained handkerchief. "Ahem! Pay strict attention to your harmonic allocations! Because you cannot see the floor, I am timing the ignition from the glyph alignments!"
He thrusts his chalk toward the stone, his voice swelling with authority.
"Vesta! You take F Major! You must play a rapid, running melody across the strings! Light! Nimble! The legend of Atalanta fleeing through the forest! That frequency will dance across the face of the stone and pull the frozen acoustic demon out of stasis toward the threshold!"
"F Major, running tempo, totally flashy! Got it!" Vesta chimes, strings shimmering through the radio as she tunes. "Mikasi, behave! No jazz solos! We are channeling pure classical elegance!"
"Halia!" Charlie turns toward the transceiver. "You have the bridge's acoustic synthesizer! You must broadcast in B-Flat Major, exactly two measures behind Vesta!"
"Understood, Charlie," Halia replies, each synthesized word clipped and precise. "Calibrating sub-wave emitter to B-Flat Major (460.8 Hz). Historical cross-referencing indicates B-Flat is required to resolve the Pythagorean tritone—the Diabolus in Musica. By introducing the celestial major third, I will ground the ward and prevent the runes from reflecting our vocal frequencies inward. A most elegant failsafe."
"Precisely!" Charlie beams, nudging his spectacles up his nose with smug satisfaction. "Charlie's taxonomic brilliance strikes again! Which leaves you, Melinoë!"
A long, weary exhale hisses through the radio. "Do I have to? It sounds like an awful lot of effort just to open a tomb containing an eldritch abomination."
"Yes!" Charlie barks. "You must route the Pluton's deep-sea transducers to hold a continuous, sub-harmonic pedal point in D Minor tuned strictly to four-hundred and thirty-two hertz! That is the exact resting frequency of the Sea-Stone lattice! If your drone wavers by even half a cycle, the acoustic pressure will destabilize the monochord and drop eighty thousand tons of basalt on top of my pith helmet!"
"Understood," Melinoë murmurs. "Locking transducer array to D Minor at 432 hertz. Preparing to vibrate the bedrock. If the cavern collapses and crushes you, Charlie, I promise to log your final academic credentials in the lost archives under 'Died of Excessive Jargon.' Ready when you are."
"Hold your positions! We aren't done!" Charlie calls out, rapping his seismic chalk against the stone face. "Once the three keys interlock—D Minor grounding the earth, F Major spinning the volatile current, and B-Flat Major resolving the tritone—the electrum wires in the outer ring will reach thermal saturation! The obsidian center will begin to boil! When I give the signal, you must cut the music, and all three of you must repeat the dissolution formula through the broadcast array!"
"A chant?!" Vesta squeaks. "Is it catchy?! Can I harmonize on the third?!"
"No harmonizing! Exact phonetic pronunciation only!" Charlie clears his throat with an ear-splitting "AHEM!" straight into the mic. "Repeat it after me so you don't trip your vocal tracts!
'MADRIATZ... IAD BLIOR... SOLUTIO CORPORIS... UNAL EN TETHYS!'
Say it!"
The three voices come back over the radio in a chaotic tangle:
Vesta belts it out like a stadium anthem: "Mah-dree-AHTZ! Ee-ahd Blee-or! Soh-loo-tee-oh Kor-por-ees! Oo-nahl En Tay-tees! Woo! That rolls off the tongue!"
Halia's vocal processor renders it with clinical perfection: "Phonetic vectors mapped: Madriatz... Iad Blior... Solutio Corporis... Unal en Tethys."
Melinoë simply mutters with hollow indifference: "Madriatz... Iad Blior... Solutio Corporis... Unal en Tethys. We sound like deranged cultists. How wonderful."
"Acceptable!" Charlie yells, his pulse thudding in his ears as he faces the pitch-black obsidian heptagram. "On my mark! Melinoë! Vesta! Halia! Three... two... one... ENGAGE!"
Sound erupts from the baby snail's shell, enormous and many-layered.
First comes Melinoë's D Minor transducer pulse, a tectonic groan felt more in the teeth than in the ears. The loose gravel around Charlie's boots hops and skitters in mid-air. The airless weight of the corridor shifts as the Sea-Stone inside the rock finds its sympathetic match.
Then Vesta's rainbow-tinted energy pours straight through the acoustic feed. Mikasi's strings cry out in fluid F Major arpeggios, darting up and down the octaves like swallows chasing each other. Across the face of the dead rock, the seven concentric grooves of electrum begin to glow a dull cherry red.
Two beats later, Halia's B-Flat synthesis enters, clean as a struck tuning fork. The moment it locks between the low D and the soaring F, the dark obsidian heptagram does not shatter—it screams.
The forty characters carved seven inches into the rock flare pearl-white, bright enough to sear afterimages into Charlie's vision. He leans in, eyes huge behind his wire rims, a shiver racking his spine as the ancient geometry wakes.
"It's working! Look at the counter-rotation! Charlie triumphs again!" he roars over the shriek of grinding stone. "The electrum is overheating! The Pythagorean comma is tearing the crystal lattice apart! CUT THE SOUND! CHANT NOW!"
The music cuts off with a sharp, airless snap.
Across the radio link, four voices strike the silence in perfect unison:
"MADRIATZ! IAD BLIOR! SOLUTIO CORPORIS! UNAL EN TETHYS!"
The floor answers at once.
The center of the Sigillum Dei Aemeth does not crumble into rubble. Obeying the laws of dissolution, the rock face clouds, clears, and turns translucent, then slumps into a silent cascade of emerald-green vitriol that draws apart like a theater curtain.
As the green vapor thins, it reveals a spiral staircase hewn from ancient black stone, corkscrewing down past the reach of any light—silent, cold, and leading straight toward the music beast's crystal tomb.
Charlie misses his footing and tumbles down the steps, screeching the whole way. Landing in a heap at the bottom, he calls out, "I am okay!"
The speaker clicks.
"Oh," Melinoë sighs. "We didn't die. How thoroughly disappointing. Charlie, your heart rate is currently one-hundred and forty beats per minute. Try not to faint down the stairs."
"WE DID IT!" Vesta's shriek blows out the radio's audio limiter entirely. "CHARLIE! Did you hear that sustain?! Mikasi just shapeshifted into a celebratory trumpet and blew confetti out of his bell! That was totally Soul King level! What's down there?! Is the demon wearing cool merchandise?!"
Charlie slowly straightens his glasses, clears his throat with a raspy "Ahem!", and peers into the darkness ahead.
"No, Vesta," Charlie whispers, his voice cracking as a draft that has waited since the Void Century creeps up his sleeves. "It isn't wearing merchandise. It's waiting."
The Den Den Mushi's eyes droop shut, and the line goes quiet.
Click.
---
Bianca peers down the spiral staircase and calls into the dark. "You like okay?"
Charlie's reply floats up from far below. "Fascinating!"
Bianca smirks. "Like cool." She cups a hand to her mouth. "I am like going to like get the others. Like, be like, right back."
She hurries back the way she came.
---
Wrecked automatons lie heaped shoulder-high across the chamber, brass limbs and snapped keys bristling from the piles like ribs from a picked-over carcass. Aurélie, Limejuice, Building Snake, and Yasopp carry on with their game.
Yasopp fires. An automaton crumples. "That's 45 for me."
Another clatters down at Limejuice's feet. "This is 48 for me."
Aurélie drops a third. "52!"
"56!" Building Snake calls as a fourth topples.
Building Snake smirks over his shoulder at Yasopp. "Looks like someone is going to have to swipe the Chief's sake."
Yasopp scoffs. "We will see about that."
He squeezes off another round.
Bianca's voice rings through the chamber. "Like yo!"
All four pause and glance over.
BANG! Another round fires.
Yasopp grunts, "What is it, kid? We are in the middle of something here."
Bianca points a thumb over her shoulder. "That's like cool and all, but like we opened the door and stuff, so we should like go."
Limejuice calls out, "No can do, sweetheart. Have to hold these things off."
"58!" Building Snake adds as another automaton crashes onto the pile.
Bianca arches a judgmental brow. "Like really." She crosses her arms. "Because like you don't like look like you're like even trying or anything."
Aurélie fells another. "55!" She looks over her shoulder. "I assure you this is quite rigorous."
Bianca tilts her head, her face blank. She sighs. "Like whatever."
She fishes a palm-sized disc from her pocket and thumbs a button. It begins to beep, a red light blinking with every tone. She lobs it. Mid-flight, spikes snap out from its rim, and it bites into the doorframe with a metallic thunk.
Yasopp yells, "What is—SHIT! Cover!"
The four scramble back, arms thrown over their faces.
BOOM!
The doorway caves in behind a rolling burst of fire and smoke.
Coughing, the four pick themselves up and step out from cover.
Yasopp snaps, "What the hell, kid?"
Bianca smirks. "Like 100! So like let's go."
The four glare at her back as they follow.
Building Snake mutters, "You lost that one, Yasopp."
Yasopp grumbles, "Yeah. We will see about that."
---
Bianca leads Aurélie, Limejuice, Building Snake, and Yasopp down the spiral. Each turn leaches more warmth from the air, and the walls narrow until shoulders brush stone. Nothing breaks the quiet but the scuff of boots on worn steps.
Yasopp remarks, "Oh yeah. There is nothing about this that says this is a good idea."
Aurélie asks, "Where is Charlie?"
Bianca replies, "He like fell down the steps and stuff, so he should like be at the bottom."
At the bottom, a corridor stretches into blackness. Moisture beads and trickles down the walls. The air tastes of rust and wet mineral, and beneath that, something stale enough to have been sealed away for centuries.
Bianca pulls a flashlight from her pocket and clicks it on. The beam stretches down the passage, picking out a long row of sealed doors.
Limejuice asks, "So where is he?"
Bianca shrugs. "Like no idea."
Aurélie points out, "There is only one direction to travel."
They nod and set off.
They stop short. Screaming—and it's rushing toward them.
Charlie skids around the corner, pith helmet knocked askew, satchel flailing at his hip, face drained to the color of chalk.
"Turn back! Turn back!"
The four plant their feet and tighten their grips on their weapons.
Yasopp crows, "Good! I still have time!"
Limejuice smirks. "We will see about that!"
Automatons flood the corridor—massive, antlike things built in the shapes of musical instruments. Brass-and-iron bodies. Piston legs that hiss with every stride. Mandibles of clacking keys. They charge straight at the group.
Building Snake glances at Bianca. "You aren't..."
Bianca cuts him off. "Like chill. If I like use bombs and stuff down here, it will like cause a cave in. Like help yourselves."
Building Snake nods. The four charge past Charlie, slashing and shooting their way into the swarm.
Charlie dives past them for cover and sprawls at Bianca's feet, wheezing.
From the floor, he gazes up at her.
Bianca peers down at him. "Like what happened? You were like supposed to wait and stuff."
Charlie gulps air, the words coming out in ragged pieces. "I found a Poneglyph. But not just a Poneglyph—it's the Poneglyph we are looking for. Then those things chased me away."