“Any ideas?” asks Gottlieb as Grunheide waddles after him. She’s still having some trouble adjusting the tiny boots of her new spacesuit. “I mean, I guess being alive is new to you and all, but… you know, the sun is kind of an important thing.”

Grunheide thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. “The actions of the gods are beyond my understanding,” says the goblin. She looks up at one of the emergency lights above her head in the hallway and lifts a hand over her face, obscuring her sight of the bulb. “Perhaps there is something blocking it from our view?” she suggests.

Gottlieb shakes his head. “That’d have to be a pretty big something,” replies the man. “You think we’d have seen it by now if that’s the case,” he adds. “From the observatory.”

Grunheide lowers her hand and looks at him. “If the lights are out, how can you see something that’s the same color as the darkness?” she asks.

The man looks at her for a moment, pondering the surprisingly terrifying question.

— Could there be something physically blocking the sun? Just, purely logistically, ignoring the questionable reality of such a theoretical creature even existing.

Or is the issue grounded in something more fundamental? Some misfiring in the sun’s constant thermonuclear reactions?

Hell, now that he thinks about it, this isn’t the same sun as it was back in his old universe, right? It can’t be. If there’s a whole new world, then it stands to reason that it has a new sun too. This sun is an entirely different sun than the one he had experienced during his old life. So maybe it runs on ‘magic rules’, like the rest of the world, rather than pure, gritty, physical reality?

Could it be that there is some odd, magical influence affecting the sun then?

It’s another theory.

There just isn’t enough data yet to be sure. What matters most right now though is getting the station patched up, so that they don’t become a useless heap of space junk waiting to crash down in a raging fireball into the world below.

“Come on,” says Gottlieb, nodding his head toward the door to hydroponics that they’ve arrived at. He readies the rifle that he had slung over his shoulder. “Ready?”

“Ready,” replies Grunheide.

Gottlieb opens the door, expecting to see some fresh wave of zombies or some slimes or whatever — some kind of monster that is contaminating the station’s supply.

The door hisses, reaching its apex. The dimly lit metal of the corridors, washed over in a sickly orange tone that looks much like rust, paints a vision of something unexpected.

“…The hell?” mutters Gottlieb, looking into the room.

He turns his head, looking at the signage by the door

‘Hydroponics’.

Gottlieb looks back into the space, confused. Hydroponics was always just a fairly simple room. There were basins on either side of it with a row in the middle that two robots, one on each side, went back and forth through. That was about it, barring a desk and some stuff of that nature.

However, instead, he sees something that was clearly never here before.

The ‘room’ behind hydroponics stretches on further than he can see in a long corridor that breaks off in many directions. It’s a labyrinth.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

He can’t explain it, but it certainly lends some weight to the magic universe theory.

Grunheide stops him. He looks at her, and then his gaze follows her pointing finger toward a message scratched into a wall by a fearful hand.

‘Beware the minotaur’.

Gottlieb lowers the rifle. “Grunheide” says the man, looking down at her as he gives her the gun. “Take this and go back to the others,” he orders.

“Huh?” asks the goblin. “You’re going in there?” She looks at him and then at the rifle. “I was born a few weeks ago, but even I know that minotaurs are super dangerous,” she explains.

Gottlieb stops a few steps down the corridor and looks back over his shoulder at her. “Grunhausen,” says the man. “All of us have a dream. This one is mine. If I don’t make it, take care of Blauhausen and Rotwald.”

“- Heide,” she corrects.

“Yeah, sure,” replies Gottlieb, waving her off.

She tilts her head. “This seems a little dramatic. If I could make a suggestion?” she offers.

Gottlieb lifts a hand, stopping her.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Our friendship was short, but good,” he says, looking up toward the ceiling. “Mourn me if I die, Grun,” says the man, turning to walk down the labyrinth, his steps echoing out as he vanishes into the darkness.

The door closes behind him.

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[Auxiliary Gunner Grunheide]

She looks at the door in confusion for a moment, then around herself.

The human-god is a most confusing entity.

The goblin looks down at the rifle, which is definitely a bit too large for her to use well.

What she wanted to suggest is that she just crawls through the vents to see what’s going on in there, without them having to go inside.

But what does she know?

The goblin shrugs and scans the area, making sure there are no monsters, before heading back to the gunner’s bay to wait.

The human god surely knows what he’s doing. She had him pinned to be a crude idiot for the longest time, having been fairly confident she had him wrapped around a finger. However, it seems that she was mistaken. As far as she can tell, this behavior was all part of some game that the two gods were playing with one another.

She sighs, shaking her head.

Even with all of her intelligence and wisdom points, she is apparently just a strange, silly goblin. She will have to watch the gods closely, observe them, and learn from them so that she too can grow in her role as a representative of her species in the heavens, if not their custodian.

She wonders how many more points of intelligence she would need to even come close to the human god’s true nature when the facade of his games and silliness is dropped.

----------------------------------------

[Gottlieb]

“Moooo~” calls out Gottlieb into the darkness, his hand cuffed by his mouth. He listens to his voice echoing down around the labyrinth of metal corridors.

No response.

The man moos again, walking down a direction at random.

If he remembers his ancient mythology, one does not need to find a minotaur in a labyrinth. Usually, they go out of their way to find you. But he’s just hoping to sweeten the deal a little, that's all.

Mooing, he wanders off into the endless darkness, not thinking too deeply about how this change in the station’s shape and form after all of this time could even be possible.

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[Azimuth]

People clear the streets, taking shelter inside their homes as another great darkness comes over their world.

Azimuth looks up towards the empty sky, wondering about the nature of the gods.

How can it be that the sun vanishes so abruptly?

It is a question that is simply beyond the comprehension of simple mortals, like chicken farmers like herself. In fact, she doesn’t even really want to know. Honestly, she just kind of wishes it would stop.

But she knows it won’t just stop.

Each successive darkness lasts longer than the one before. The ‘night’ becomes colder with each iteration. Across the world, crops are dying in incredible numbers. Harvests are failing. Food is running scarce, and even if people had enough to eat with the supply of monster meat coming from the dungeons, fear is nonetheless spreading like wildfire and for obvious reasons.

She sits in the open carriage, looking around at the houses and the people looking out towards the lights that come, moving down the street past their home as her caravan travels. She’s not allowed to go anywhere alone. There’s always a procession of people with her, dozens of them, with titles she’s never even heard of, responsible for niche political tasks that she can’t even begin to understand. She doesn’t interact with most of them, but they’re always kind of there.

“Stop the carriage,” says Azimuth.

The carriage comes to a halt, and she grabs a lantern from its side, stepping out. “Where are you going?” asks an attendant.

“Home,” replies Azimuth, lifting the lantern over her head as she walks.

“Miss, that was our direction. Please return to the carriage,” asks the attendant.

Azimuth looks at her and shakes her head. “I know. I’m walking home,” she says, looking at the lit windows all around them.

It’s an uncertain time for everyone.

But maybe if she leads by example, walking through the darkness and proving to the others that there is nothing to be afraid of in the night in their own cities, barring the cold, that she can be a beacon of normalcy for everyone.

She doesn’t really feel like a hero, despite everyone saying she is one.

So maybe she can at least do something small like this for them.

Anyway, she prefers walking. Riding in carriages makes her dizzy.