A One-Way Ticket to the Sky

[Tier-Group 3 Rooftop Garden]

In the end, it was decided that Doctor Hamada, the most muscular of the Shiso (Asura), would carry Marie up on a carrier-frame, with Rāja assisting.

"Marie-san, stairs are more dangerous going down than going up, so this'll be a one-way ticket."

"○ up dnt ned a bed to slep"

(If I'm joined to the World Tree, I won't need a bed at all, really. And if it doesn't work out… I'll just not think about that.)

Having to use that bothersome gaze-input device is, for Marie, a considerable strain on the nerves.

"You won't need a bed, you say?"

"○ undr the tre"

"Then what about at night?"

"jus leve me ther"

"I won't stop you. True, there are no mosquitoes in the dead of winter like this, but catching a cold… will you be all right? The climate's mild up on the rooftop, sure."

(With humans and beasts it's only the female mosquitoes that are the trouble, but for an Asura it's both sexes, you see. This.)

By the dungeon's functions the climate was, if anything, milder than the desert down on the ground, and the third tier-group was a garden both outside the first floor and up on the rooftop. Of course, in the otherworld the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are two different things.

Rāja and the others loaded Marie onto the carrier-frame, and since her head wouldn't hold steady, they fixed that to the frame as well, then slowly climbed the stairs.

(To think I can't so much as sit up. The situation does seem rather bad. Is it better to hope for recovery, or, failing that, to transplant my memory into a clone… is such a thing even possible? An ordinary clone, granted, would be a separate individual merely identical in its genes. But this body and the World Tree are one and the same individual, so where exactly is the line drawn?)

Clone plants exist all over the place, but each of them is, of course, a separate individual.

[Tier-Group 3 Rooftop Observation Deck]

The observation deck, in the otherworld, is an "emergency rescue space," meant for a helicopter to hover over during a fire and carry out firefighting or rescue. In this world, however, no helicopters exist, so it had been packed with soil and the World Tree planted in it, a walkway and railing built from dungeon structures around the perimeter, making it an observation deck.

The "moving-in operation" was completed without mishap. They laid Marie down on the fallen leaves at the foot of the World Tree and set one of her hands against the trunk. By the dungeon's power the World Tree had grown to four or five meters, a size impossible for a rosemary, yet it bore no flowers.

(What's the best way to go about this, I wonder. Is merely touching it enough? I need more information on the "true-body" of an Asura and the human-bodied offshoot.)

She had the contents of the Encyclopedia Dungeonica more or less committed to memory, but a case like this one was, naturally, nowhere in her recollection.

(But I'm tired. I'll just sleep, for today.)

Once Marie had fallen asleep, Rāja draped nothing but a thin quilt over her and withdrew. The Dungeon Master and the others headed home as well.