Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? On the Side: Sword Oratoria, Vol. 11

by Fujino Omori

  “Aiz, don’t worry if we start to get separated! Just run wild!”

  “Okay!”

  This force was made up of only members of Loki Familia —consisting of elves, including Riveria, all Level 3 or higher and nimble on their feet. Aiz pushed ahead by herself in front of that party, which had been formed for its dexterity, opening the doors she came across and slicing deeper into the labyrinth with unbelievable speed.

  “Don’t overlook even the slightest abnormalities! If something reacts to Aiz’s wind—that’s our number one priority!”

  Aiz’s role in this operation was to act as a radar. The one who inherited the blood of spirits was unleashing her magic over a wide range, running around through the labyrinth in order to catch any reaction by the corrupted spirit.

  Finn predicted the demi-spirit would be somewhere on the eighth, ninth, or tenth floor…! In Knossos’s middle levels!

  Finn had calculated that it was likely that the demi-spirit was tucked away somewhere on Knossos’s middle-level floors, based on the reports from Riveria’s Fairy Force. When she had broken through all the way to the twelfth floor, she had noticed that the enemy soldiers and monsters were deployed with the greatest density on the eighth through tenth floors.

  Along with Finn, the rest of the fighters and the Xenos were the units charged with clearing the labyrinth and chasing the ringleaders, while Aiz and the others were the secret squad searching for wherever the ticking time bomb of a demi-spirit was hiding.

  They let some time pass after Finn invaded before launching their surprise attack from the entrance on the Dungeon’s twelfth floor that they had already found.

  —Listen up, Aiz.

  —It’s imperative to find the demi-spirit, but in the worst case, it’s fine even if you don’t find it.

  —All you need to do is…

  Aiz remembered the orders Finn had given her before the operation. In addition to acting as a radar, she had another crucial role.

  “I will…lure her out!”

  “Aria?” Levis furrowed her brow. She was getting ready to go out and annihilate the invaders when she received this report.

  “Y-yes! The Sword Princess and Nine Hell’s party has come in from the twelfth floor!” The soldier sent by the Evils prattled on in a mix of fear and impatience. “Lord Thanatos has declared th-that they should be prioritized…!”

  “…Oh, that’s what he’s after,” she spat back in annoyance.

  She understood what the soldier was saying before he could even finish. She correctly realized that Aiz was trying to uncover where the spirits were located. Levis knew that Aiz’s wind at full power could act as a radar. Once, during the last time she was in Knossos, Aiz had done the drastic move of summoning an unbelievably strong wind to let her scattered comrades know where she was. The spirits would react to Aiz’s wind, even from all the way across the floor. And once they started bawling, they were not easily calmed, giving the enemy a critical hint as to where they were located.

  From Knossos’s perspective, letting Aiz’s squad move as they pleased was not an option. And no one other than Levis would be capable of dealing with her.

  “Is drawing my attention to Aria part of their plan…?”

  Levis, who had been heading toward the adventurers running wild on the upper floors, changed course.

  This is definitely one of that prum’s schemes.

  Picturing the face of the man who had stood against her several times, Levis scoffed and darted to the twelfth floor toward Aiz’s squad.

  “The Evils and the creature will be forced to respond to Aiz,” Finn explained as his group rushed along. “In fact, that was precisely why I had Riveria take command of that team. Both as someone who has rampaged in this labyrinth before and as someone capable of taking the reins and guiding Aiz, she was the only one who could lead them.”

  “That means Aiz and the others are…”

  “They will effectively be bait. If the creature heads out to counter them, the risk of the other squads getting defeated decreases considerably.”

  Finn revealed his plan to Amid, who was dashing next to him. With Tione taking the lead of the vanguards and Tiona and the others promptly mowing down the monsters coming out of the countless crossroads, his brain kept spinning in thought.

  “If the creature comes to us, then we’ll retreat at full speed. If we can stall for time, Aiz’s wind will be able to find the location of the demi-spirit.”

  Finn had left Thanatos and Levis with one of two choices. It was up to them to decide. Finn judged that they would choose the former and counter Aiz, but in the event they lost their cool , he could not be sure what they would do. That was why he had prepared the parties for suitable responses. The initial preparations were to avoid getting wiped out even if they were routed.

  He wasn’t pursuing a result with minimized losses: He was aiming for one with no losses at all. He was not planning to abandon anyone. He could not say whether that change was growth or regression. But the precipitous tightrope of chasing ideals was far more difficult, stressful, and meaningful than the easy route of assuming they would sustain casualties from the start.

  In the event that he failed, no losses would turn into minimal losses. And if he succeeded, he would achieve his ideal. That was why Braver chose the harder route. After everything that had happened, that was how Finn was thinking now.

  If Loki were there, she would surely have said that it was a definite growth on Finn’s part.

  “Either way, it’s going to be a race against time.”

  The man-made labyrinth, Knossos, stretched all the way down halfway through the Dungeon’s middle levels. Faced with that enormous amount of ground to cover, Finn had not chosen a drawn-out battle or a war of attrition—he had chosen a short, decisive battle.

  “Run! Advance! As far and as fast as you can! This will chip away at the enemy’s life span!”

  ““Sir!!””

  Finn shouted encouragement to the whole group while keeping the healers in reserve, ready to spring into action.

  “I found an entrance to the Dungeon!”

  “Keep pushing! Calculate where we are, you useless rabbit!”

  “Y-yes, sir!”

  A single blow crumbled the rock face, opening a stone path to the real Dungeon. Bete howled at the adventurers who had reached the open gate first while Rakuta scrambled to open a map of the Dungeon. Based on the characteristic terrain, she narrowed it down, announcing, “We’re on the Dungeon’s third floor, the northeast section!”

  Knossos’s third floor. The animal-people squad, which was centered on Bete, had rushed down the floors at a wild pace, making it “outside.” It wasn’t a path leading to a lower level or the location of the spirits but passages connecting to the Dungeon that would be helpful when it was time to withdraw. Bete was making sure to increase their options.

  They’d connected to a part of the Dungeon that was a simple light-blue labyrinth. Considering where they were on the Knossos side, it was almost certainly the third floor.

  The small room that the passage opened into just happened to have some lower-class adventurers hunting monsters at the edge of the floor. Everyone was dumbstruck seeing Loki Familia appear from the broken wall and stood there slack-jawed, paralyzed, including the goblins they were hunting. As the Level-1 party crumbled into confusion, the Level-6 werewolf roared, “This ain’t a damn show! Scram!” sending them scurrying from the room screaming “W-we’re sorrrrrrrrry?!” They were shoulder to shoulder with the monsters as they ran.

  “I’m going ahead! You take care of this shit! If you’re useless and can’t catch up, you’ll get left behind!” barked the werewolf.

  “Geez, I got it! Morel! Head aboveground from here and contact the Ganesha and Hermes Familia reserves! Prepare to run a supply line through this area!”

  “Understood!”

  Bete’s instructions hurled abuse at her, causing the catgirl to snap back at him.

  W
hile Bete stayed at the leading edge of the squad, wielding his savage breakthrough ability, the second-in-command and effective leader, Anakity, fired off orders in his stead. While setting up pillars so that the gate could not be lowered, she sent a Level-2 member of Loki Familia ’s reserves to deliver the message. Not watching as Morel disappeared into the Dungeon, she chased after Bete, who had already started pushing forward along a different route.

  “—Please accept this offering! Lord Thanatooooos!”

  Meanwhile, in the trailing group behind Bete’s advance.

  Before Raul could direct his team, one of the God of Death’s followers set off a chain of suicide bombs.

  “Urgh…?!”

  “Gaaaaaaah…?!”

  Because they had thoroughly prepared for suicide bombings beforehand, there was no direct damage. However, after the explosion died down, the smell of burned flesh wafting up, the scattered limbs and the horrific corpses left behind caused some of the younger girls in the familia to hunch over and start vomiting. The same was true for some of the members of Dionysus Familia who had joined them as mappers.

  “Gah…Don’t throw up! Stand! If we slow down, that will affect Bete and his squad! Don’t look away! Fight!” bellowed Raul, in charge of this group, as he clenched his fists, struggling to find the words to say.

  Yanking the arm of a familia member on all fours on the floor, he forced the squad to keep moving. He was desperate to accomplish his assigned task, even as he fought the nausea choking him at the back of his own throat.

  This is different from a battle in the normal Dungeon or a fight between familias…! This is the real Evils! The enemy who clashed against the captain and the others! The battlefield where so many…so many of the people in the familia before us perished!

  When he had first joined the familia, the rookie Raul had not been sent out to fight during the most heated period of the clashes with the Evils. By the time Raul and Anakity had started being part of the fighting forces, it was the end stages of the Dark Ages, after the alliance of familias had been formed under the Guild’s jurisdiction.

  Raul had never known such an inhuman battlefield. Lives were mercilessly cast aside. Rendering the enemy powerless without killing them was an impossibility. The battlefield did not tolerate hypocrites.

  He rushed through the charred passage.

  It was almost like an actual war where trench warfare, sieges, suppression, and everything else was abound. They would be forced to pay the price in order to bring down the enemy’s base. The work of men was all around them, even though it should have had nothing to do with adventurers whose job was to scour the Dungeon.

  “Set up the pillars! Monsters are coming from the path to the right! Walls assemble! Stall for time! Ines and the other mages, start casting! Watch out for the violas!”

  Despite all that, Raul put his all into maintaining control of the situation. He knew that if he was shaken, the party would lose steam. He trusted that his desperate voice would be a source of courage for the other familia members.

  In truth, Raul’s quavering orders and his face, which was as pale as anyone else’s, could not even remotely be mistaken for those of a charismatic commander, but—they gritted their teeth.

  If even Raul can still be in high spirits, then so can I. That thought pushed the young familia members to roughly wipe the vomit from their mouths, raising their spirits and bringing them to start moving again.

  It gives me courage, too…! Seeing the captain’s back when he leads everyone!

  Raul tried to embody the small back that was always in front of him with his own, raging as he cut down the enemy’s resisting forces.

  “Shield me, cleansing chalice—Dio Grail!”

  A shield of white light cut off a violent explosion closing in.

  “Filvis, speed up your casts! What if Lord Dionysus got injured?!”

  “I’m doing it as fast as I can! Why don’t you try counterattacking some while mapping, Aura?!”

  “S-stop it, you two! Don’t fight each other—fight them, please!”

  As Dionysus Familia ’s leader and second-in-command argued, Lefiya shouted back with a hint of grumbling in her voice as she fired off a blast. They were on the third floor of Knossos on the front line, where the number of Evils members and monsters was gradually increasing, and the counterattack was getting more intense.

  “Raaaaaaaaaah!”

  Leaving aside the elves who were on edge from the increased resistance they were encountering, the stout dwarf Gareth pushed forward.

  Faced with Loki Familia ’s strongest wrecking ball charging at them with two great shields at the ready, other than catching the tiniest fear of death, Thanatos’s followers did not hesitate to set off a chain of explosions.

  “Tch , I really hate this kind of fight…but at least it’s easier to keep moving when they’re quick to give up on an actual battle.”

  Not shaken in the least as he withstood the explosion blasting against his shield, Gareth was furious at the enemy force for not even trying to face them. But from another perspective, if the enemy blew themselves up, they were as good as abandoning the battle.

  The force of the explosions was menacing, but those same ones caused a battle line to crumble that otherwise would have been able to hold out longer. Their advance was still moving smoothly, albeit in proportion to the damage that their squad was taking from the enemies.

  “…They’re reeeeally consistent about blowing themselves up. As soon as we get a certain distance away, it’s an insta-boom.”

  “Yes. They must fear us capturing them. It might be to prevent us from learning the key points in Knossos…”

  Loki and Dionysus stood in the rear guard, behind stout soldiers. Their gods’ eyes saw through what the Evils were trying to accomplish. When aiming to get a grasp of all the enemy’s infrastructure, the simplest method was to get it from interrogating captives. It didn’t matter if the enemy was tight-lipped; there would be someone who would break if they were willing to use whatever methods were necessary.

  Thanatos was removing that possibility at the root by using suicide bombs as an attack and means of silencing them. It was a desperate measure to prevent more information from getting out, but it was also causing real damage to his forces. It was a tactic that could be used only by the God of Death, who had promised his followers a future beyond their demise.

  “Finn said that speed was going to be crucial, but…we’re taking casualties just pushing forward. We might run out of ways to recover at this rate. Guess we won’t be able to make our way across that tightrope.” Loki licked her lips as she slightly opened her crimson eyes.

  “But the same goes for them, too.”

  “—Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

  “Gah?!”

  The vargs flinched at the thunderous sound wave. The lizardman with a sword in either hand mercilessly cut into the vividly colored monsters that continued gushing out, as if trying to stop their charge or at least slow their advance.

  “There, next!”

  “Advance! Advance!”

  “Aaaaaaaaaaah!”

  The group of armed Xenos was fighting, unleashing an unending stream of shouts mixed with human words. Wielding a strength that could easily slaughter the vargs and violas, they were undoubtedly a menacing enemy to the forces defending Knossos. They were just a single party, but they were advancing even faster than Loki Familia .

  “Rei, which path?!”

  “Right at the next crossroad! That leads to a new room!”

  The monsters’ senses surpassed the average adventurer’s, but the main reason they had an acute awareness of their surroundings was thanks to the echolocation that the siren Rei was using. With the ability to create high-frequency sound waves, her inhuman technique let her understand the complicated construction of the labyrinth. She led the band of Xenos farther and farther, unstopped by doors and never caught by the roaming swarms of enemies. Conveying what she said, the lizardman Lido
at the front of the group had his comrades swing around.

  “—! Lido, a plant!”

  “Great! Let’s crush it!”

  A grotesque organ in the shape of an upside-down funnel was enshrined in the middle of the large room. Composed of a green meat, the plant had crystals that resembled the ones on vargs scattered through it. The inner part in the center was giving off a flickering light with the appearance of a living organism’s beating heart, like a crushed pomegranate or an egg.

  There was a green carpet unfurled across the floor, and several vargs were born from the sticky ooze seeping from the egg in the center. The gargoyle’s voice and the lizardman’s order overlapped as the red-cap goblin, harpy, troll, and all the monsters proceeded to overrun the room.

  But it didn’t matter how many vividly colored monsters it could produce—the plant did not have any real means of defending itself, broken beyond repair in the blink of an eye.

  “That’s the fourth one! There’ll be no end to it at this rate…!”

  The Xenos burned with rage. Their grudge against the brutal hunters of Ikelos Familia —who had captured their brethren and were the root of all that evil—was in some ways even greater than the adventurers’ own. That was the cause of their billowing force, which surpassed even Loki Familia ’s.

  Because Loki Familia ’s attack was splitting up the Evils’ human forces, it was mostly just monsters positioned in the lower levels of Knossos. Put another way, because the Xenos were taking on all the monsters themselves and cutting off the supply lines from the lower levels’ side, the burden on the adventurers rampaging through the middle levels and higher was significantly lessened. The unstoppable wave of the invasion teams composed of adventurers was an effect of the Xenos taking part in the fight.

  The result of the incompatible monsters and humans fighting on different battlefields was greater than the sum of its parts, giving a glimpse of the tactical planning prowess of Finn, who had orchestrated all of it. With Finn and Fels working together, their prepared pincer attack was incredibly damaging to Knossos.