by Fujino Omori
She pretended not to notice that her hand, the hand that had gripped theirs, was throbbing as if weeping.
Only the most skilled adventurers in the hunting party and those with a certain amount of experience in the Water Capital have been selected to continue on to the twenty-seventh floor.
I am joining this elite group led by Bors as a representative of Hestia Familia. At first, he looked upset that I was the only member of our group to volunteer, but when I explained about needing to move quickly—and after Aisha gave him a few threatening words—he agreed.
I head out of the twenty-fifth floor, the Goliath Scarf from Welf and Cassandra wrapped around my neck and the parting words of Lilly and the others at my back.
“UOOOOOOOOOO!”
Atrocious roars echo through misty air.
Monsters rush toward us, their yellow eyes flashing.
Mermen.
The half-fish, half-human monsters are covered in blue scales. Like humans, they walk on two feet, and their hands with fins running down the backs skillfully handle landforms, the nature weapons of the Dungeon. With scales covering their whole body, the monsters remind me of an underwater version of lizardmen. They’re among the stronger opponents we’re likely to encounter on the twenty-sixth floor.
The half-fish warriors scramble out of the stream that runs through the passageway and climb onto land one after the next, gripping crystal maces, a type of lower-level nature weapon.
“Errrgh!”
I leap aside to avoid a mace that smashes into the crystal floor and bring down Hakugen above the merman’s head.
The blindingly quick blow I release as I twist my hips away easily slices through its neck.
The featherlight, glittering knife continues in a perfect curve, like it’s swimming through the air, and knocks down the other crystal maces on their way toward my body.
“?!”
I dive into the center of the horde, and the mermen flinch at my acrobatic battle moves. I take advantage of their momentary weakness to place a hand on the ground and let loose a spinning kick that all but skims the ground.
The kick lands powerfully on the legs of several mermen, causing them to stumble to the ground, tangled together.
“Bors!”
“Yeah!”
An instant later, Bors and the other adventurers are beating their weapons against the collapsed mermen. The rain of greatswords and hammers literally beats them to a pulp.
Essentially, the battle strategy of the mermen is to move in groups. But once their leader is killed, the group falls into chaos!
This is my first encounter with mermen, but thanks to Eina’s lessons, I already know about their habits and attack methods. I’m putting into practice the textbook methods for taking them down, but I also add in my own lightning-quick attacks.
My eyes zero in on the leader, who is being protected by other mermen, as he lets out a series of hideous screeches. I head straight for him.
Is the Goliath Scarf slowing me down? Maybe, but not too much!
The item is the polar opposite of Hakugen, and I can sense it pressing down on my body as I kick into gear.
Ignoring the reactions of the monsters surrounding me, I head for the gaping merman leader, drawing the black knife from my waist as I move.
“Yah!!”
“Gya?!”
The Divine Knife that I’ve slipped from its sheath rips through the leader’s body. The fierce blow lands like a spear piercing his chest, and the mermen’s kingpin disintegrates instantly into ash.
“Shit, it’s a light quartz!”
“!”
A second later, I’m whipping my head around in response to Bors’s yell from behind me.
Several purple crystal forms about the size and shape of bucklers are floating in the passageway, which is around five meders tall. In the center of each one is a single pale-yellow organ that appears to be an eye.
Light quartzes are inorganic monsters that float about adventurers’ heads, and as their crystalline outer appearance would suggest, they have no means of engaging in close combat. Instead, their single but extremely menacing means of attack is to shoot out beams of light!
“!”
“Ack!”
We leap back in unison as a light quartz shoots a narrow beam. The amber ray of light burns a line into the Dungeon’s crystal floor and walls as it passes over them. Bors and the others scramble for shelter. Then they wait for their chance.
The typical way to defeat a light quartz is to get it to emit all its power, then attack it while it’s recharging. And indeed, no approach could be more correct.
But me—I fly right into the gushing beams of light.
I figure the golden beams are never going to end.
“Hey, Rabbit Foot?!”
As the confused voices of the upper-class adventurers beat at my back, I speed up.
My enemy is floating in midair.
It’s too far to reach with my knife.
A Firebolt might work…
I think I’ll try something else first.
Obeying the voice in the back of my mind, which is almost like a flash of inspiration, I put my right hand on the scarf around my neck.
The next instant, I’ve ripped it off and am swinging it through the air like a weapon.
It’s sure heavy enough!
I’m wielding it like a whip, or rather a chain.
It blocks and repels the beams from multiple light quartzes before crashing straight into them!
“—?!”
The black scarf accelerates like a whirlwind, smashing some crystal forms to smithereens and sending others crashing to the floor.
The crushed light quartzes either go silent as the light disappears from their eyes or lose their magic stones and turn to ash.
“Yesss…!”
This protective gear fashioned from the Goliath Robe is really something. It’s so tough it can defend against anything, be it blade or flames, but on the flip side, it can also be turned into the toughest of weapons. I silently cheer the scarf for the excellent job it did in repelling every single one of the light-quartz rays.
“Ouch…”
I rub my right arm as I continue to grin excitedly. The unaccustomed movements and weight of the scarf may have injured my tendons. As I rub a generous amount of potion onto my arm, I tell myself it might be best not to use this particular weapon too much until I’m used to it.
In contrast to the Firebolt, which is a long-distance weapon that moves in a straight line, the scarf is a midrange, indirect weapon. It just might help me add variety to my attack methods. I feel slightly bad about using the item Welf made as a protector in this way, but…
“Hey, Rabbit Foot…is this really your first time on this floor?” Bors asks, walking up to me.
Since I’ve killed all the monsters, the other adventurers are putting down their weapons and squinting at me like the sun is in their eyes.
“What can I say…? You’ve gotten stronger. I’m gonna move you up to the front guard. I’m sure you’ll do a great job!”
“Bors…”
“Go get ’em! I’ll leave all the tough work to you. Oh, and we divide rare drop items fifty-fifty.”
“Uh, sure,” I answer, breaking into a sweat. The sincere, fatherly look on Bors’s face has been replaced by a sleazy smile, like he’s just stumbled upon a lucrative windfall.
Around us, the other adventurers are cleaning up from the battle. In order to prevent the emergence of enhanced species and other Irregulars, the supporters hastily collect magic stones. I look around at their faces.
There’s a wicked-looking elf with a double sword, an ax-wielding animal person with a piece of cloth covering his mouth, and a dwarf with a massive shield and battle hammer.
They demonstrated plenty of battle prowess on our way through the middle levels…But even if their Statuses are higher than that of Welf and the rest of our party, they definitely aren’t working in sync with one ano
ther.
That’s one reason I risked making the call to take on the monsters myself. In such a quickly formed party, the shifts between offense and defense, fast and slow don’t play out how I’d expect. Sometimes we’re even holding one another back.
Once again, I realize just how skilled and valuable Lilly, Welf, and the other members of our party are in the way they adjust to support me.
Plus, the monsters here…they’re just different from the ones in the middle levels.
The long-distance light-quartz attacks were a bother, and totally different from the flames that hellhounds release…But more importantly, the monsters down here, like the merman leader, are really intelligent. Way more so than in the upper and middle levels.
They may not be very good at it, but the fact that monsters here can coordinate their actions at all makes them an immeasurable menace.
I absolutely can’t let myself get overly confident.
“Okay, I’m gonna split up the party again! We’re too inefficient when we move as a single group! If anyone finds Gale Wind, try to drive her into the cavern! Worst-case scenario, we confirm she’s here and pull back to the twenty-fifth floor! If we take up positions there, Aisha will have to come help us at some point!”
Bors shouts these commands as we pass through the tunnel connecting the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh floors, bypassing the plunge pool on the twenty-sixth floor, which forms the middle step in the three floors connected by the Great Falls.
We’ve charged down to the twenty-seventh floor all at once, and now it looks like we’ll be splitting up to search for Gale Wind…that is, Lyu.
“You, Rabbit Foot! Come with me!”
“Uh, um, okay.”
Bors makes the executive decision to take me, a Level 4 adventurer, along with him. The other adventurers boo and jeer disapprovingly.
Is he using me as a kind of all-rounder?
In any case, our group of five turns off onto a side passage. It’s one of several main routes leading to the passage that connects to the twenty-eighth floor. This part of the Dungeon is comprised of faintly striped deep-blue crystals. A wide waterway flows directly next to the dryland path. It’s flowing way faster than the rivers on the floors above us. A dim light emanates from clusters of white crystal, illuminating the darkness.
Everywhere we go, I see the remains of old passageways that have collapsed in on themselves, and piles of crystals that appear to be the result of cave-ins block our way. This must be the aftermath of the explosions we heard earlier.
I’m leading our group, but all of us are constantly on the lookout for monsters. We press forward as the path leads down countless stairways and slopes winding through the multilayered floor.
“Hey, Bell Cranell. Do you remember when we fought the Goliath?”
“Yeah, we charged that whopper with you.”
“You can count on us, Rabbit Foot!”
“Uh, yeah. That’s great!”
The skilled upper-class adventurers in our group are bantering back and forth to keep us all from getting too tense.
There are a pair of cheerful animal-person siblings and a masculine Amazonian warrior. I really admire their friendliness.
Probably thanks to the battle with the Black Goliath, residents of Rivira have tended to treat me amiably. The other upper-class adventurers often ask me about my epic clash with the minotaur Asterios in Orario and generally seem to admire me.
It’s a huge honor to be accepted in this way by the senior adventurers, and I can’t help smiling to myself about it…But I also feel bad that I’m going to have to slip away from this group in the near future.
I need to do it, though, for Lyu’s sake.
I think it will be easier for me to move around if I look for a chance to break off from them…But I won’t find her by searching at random…
The long series of explosions we heard on our way here has fallen silent now.
The roar of the distant Great Falls echoes even here, drowning out softer noises that might give away her location. Finding Lyu alone on this immense floor is going to be extremely difficult.
Still…it’s not like I don’t have a goal.
I convinced Aisha and the others to let me go alone, and it would be wrong to say I have no strategy whatsoever. I’m leaving it all up to manpower…or monsterpower?
I’m busy thinking about how I can get them to find her when—
“B-B-Bors?!”
One of the animal people, who has been peering into a passageway that branches off our current route to the right, shouts out.
He sounds terrified, like something unusual is going on. We rush to his side.
“What…?”
I lose all words when I see it.
“What in the world is this?”
Bors and the rest of us look up.
We see a hole.
A huge vertical hole leading to the floor above us.
It’s not a tidy hole like those in the Stone Cavern Maze. Instead, it looks like something has forcefully dug its way through the ceiling.
A stream is trickling noisily down like a miniature waterfall.
“…I’ve never seen a huge hole like this on the twenty-seventh floor…” Bors groans in a low voice.
Something unusual is happening in the Dungeon—something even these upper-class adventurers who have passed through the Water Capital many times have never seen before.
In a corner of my mind, an alarm bell starts to chime softly.
“I don’t mind staying back…but it sure as hell looks like we’ll be camped out here for a while.”
Welf rubbed his throat as if to thaw it.
He was standing on a cliff at the far southern end of the twenty-fifth floor. The space was about the size of a small “room,” big enough to fit several dozen adventurers. In fact, it was the exact spot where Lilly had suggested setting up a base when she and the others had been separated from Bell by the moss huge, and indeed, it was plenty large enough for that purpose. It was also a perfect location for fending off attacks by winged monsters.
Several hours had passed since the hunting party, including Bell, set off in pursuit of Gale Wind. Now, the adventurers who had stayed behind were each absorbed in their own tasks.
Which is to say, they were either arguing over who would be on guard duty or relaxing.
“They don’t have much fighting spirit, do they? Of course, I suppose that’s to be expected.”
“Well, it would be hard to find something to do right now. You wouldn’t want to go off hunting monsters to kill time and then be too tired to help at the critical moment.”
Mikoto and Ouka were chatting as they watched the other adventurers. Those remaining on the twenty-fifth floor represented the group Bors had not selected for his elite hunting party, and some were sulking over their exclusion. These individuals did not think they were Gale Wind’s equal in battle, but they had hoped to somehow steal a portion of the spoils. It wasn’t hard to guess how they felt about being made to wait for the prize that had been dangled before their eyes. Most didn’t know what to do with themselves in the meantime.
For Lilly, Mikoto, Chigusa, and Daphne—who weren’t yet accustomed to the Water Capital—just gazing out from the cliffs at the magnificent Great Falls was enough to keep them from getting bored.
“…”
Normally, Cassandra would have felt the same, but now, tormented by her prophetic dream, all she could do was pray desperately for the future and for Bell’s safe return. And so she stood by the edge of the sheer cliff, gazing out at the Great Falls that continued on to the twenty-seventh floor.
“…Nothing suspicious so far, it seems,” said Welf, who was sitting down.
“You’d better not be too obvious about it; he might notice you,” Lilly warned casually as she distributed travel rations.
Welf had been watching the werewolf who Bell was concerned about.
“His name is Turk Sledd. I asked around a bit, and it s
eems he’s been living in Rivira for about three years,” she said.
“What’s his Status?”
“Assuming he hasn’t made any false reports, he’s a Level Two. He hangs around second-tier adventurers, but I hear he’s been down to the lower levels himself a bunch of times,” Lilly said unhesitatingly in response to the question from Welf, who along with the others was tearing off pieces of the salted meat with his hands to eat.
The residents of Rivira seemed to place a certain degree of trust in Turk, she added.
The others didn’t know quite what to make of this information. Suddenly, Aisha—who had been lying down with her eyes closed—jerked up.
“I’ve rested enough…Should I attack?”
“What are you talking about?”
The whole group was staring at Aisha, whose words seemed completely nonsensical.
“We’re just wasting time sitting around being suspicious of people. Don’t you think the fastest solution is for me to beat him to a pulp?”
Ouka and the others grimaced uncomfortably at the unreasonably aggressive words of the Level 4 Amazon, who was clearly the strongest adventurer present.
“Whew, that’s a real Amazonian way of thinking…But if he’s actually hiding something, I doubt you’ll be able to torture the information out of him. And you’ll probably turn his buddies against us, too,” Daphne said in a bored tone.
“All right, I don’t have a choice…The rest of you keep a watch.”
“Wh-wh-what are you planning to do?” Mikoto asked tensely, once again having a bad feeling about Aisha’s intentions.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m gonna pull him into that cave and devour him. His lips will be looser after I’ve straddled him and made him howl—”
“Aiii! Aiii! Aiii!”
Tossing aside her manners, Haruhime—who was blushing to the tips of her ears—let out a series of shrieks and flapped her hands in frantic denial of Aisha’s suggestion. Aisha clicked her tongue in dissatisfaction.
Not only Mikoto, Chigusa, and Cassandra but even Lilly and Daphne were blushing. The two lone males, Welf and Ouka, looked extremely uncomfortable. The other adventurers standing around nearby shot the mixed-faction party dirty looks for making such a ruckus.