by Fujino Omori
I watch his receding form in surprise, but Bors’s party is doing the opposite: Weapons raised, they’re licking their chops at Gale Wind, who’s broken through the wall of adventurers.
“She’s using some kind of magic or skill! Stop her! If we can just slow down her momentum, we can beat her with numbers!! Don’t let her take advantage of us!”
Bors is not only the head of Rivira, he also displays the confidence of a top-grade Level Three adventurer, and his commands are swift and precise. He’s confident that with this many resources on our side, we can beat her. His orders fuel the fighting spirit of the animal-person siblings and the Amazon, who rush forward.
But.
“—”
The instant before they make contact, the elf’s body shifts suddenly from a full-force forward charge to a whirling maelstrom.
As she spins around like a top, her cape letting out sharp popping sounds as it cuts through the wind, she slips splendidly past their outstretched arms. Then, as they stand dazed at having been played this way, she hits them on the back of the heads with her wooden sword as she completes her turn. They go flying, knocked unconscious.
Her skill is so tremendous, it takes my breath away and makes me gape in a way that’s not quite appropriate for the current situation.
“What, you think you’re in Loki Familia or something?!”
Bors, who’s rapidly becoming the last man standing, flings spit and curses as he brandishes his huge battle-ax. But just before he’s about to bring the blade down on this extraordinary elven warrior, who truly embodies the storm and drive that inspired her nickname—
“—? Huh? You’re the same elf who…Ergh!!”
Bors pauses for an instant as if he’s remembering something—most likely the battle they fought side by side on the eighteenth floor. In that moment of hesitation, Lyu brings her wooden sword crashing mercilessly into the side of his face.
My own face twitches as I watch his massive body crash against a wall, blood spurting from his nose as his face meets the hard surface.
“Uh…wait! Please wait!”
I’m left alone now, and I cry out as Lyu charges toward me.
I don’t want to fight. I want to listen. I want to hear your story in your own words.
Those are the only thoughts on my mind as I stand blocking her way forward.
“You’re in my way.”
She doesn’t seem to have the time for any of that.
She narrows her blue eyes deep within her hood, and the next moment, the delicate foot inside her boot is stomping the ground.
“?!”
She’s just leaped over my head.
—She’s outwitted me!!
I’m amazed that she was able to take the last of her momentum and use it to clear my head, barely grazing my hair. She doesn’t turn around when she lands on the other side—just takes off running like the wind.
“After her, Rabbit Foot!!” Bors yells as he peels his head from the wall.
I hear his angry voice battering my back; I have the highest ability of anyone in the hunting party, and he wants me to pursue her.
Practically before he’s finished his sentence, I’m kicking my own feet against the crystal floor to pursue Lyu for my own reasons.
“Yaaa!!”
Already, I can barely make out her long cape. I race after her as she chases the catman. A moment later, she disappears, probably because she’s turned a corner in the passageway.
I come to a halt before the multitude of branching passages, unsure where to go. Very quickly, though, I make my choice. The one I choose echoes with the menacing roars and screams of monsters. Following what I assume to be the cries of the beasts that have met with Lyu’s sword, I keep running. As if to confirm my guess, I pass the writhing bodies of monsters she has cast aside and piles of ash arranged like footprints.
There’s a limit to this method, though, and soon enough I’ve completely lost track of the incredibly fast elf within the massive Dungeon.
“Where did she go…?”
My sense of urgency increases the panic I feel, and an uncomfortable sweat covers my body.
At that very moment, I hear a song.
“Now, far away—in the infinite heavens—”
I stop in my tracks.
The fragments of song continue to echo from somewhere in the Dungeon, unconcerned with me.
“Come to my foolish self—to the one who has abandoned you—”
Magical power swells.
My adventurer’s intuition quivers in fear as the reverberations from some kind of bombardment reach me, even from a distance, like water overflowing from a vessel.
And then, it is clear that the magical power has reached its critical point.
“Pregnant with the light of stardust, defeat your enemy!”
No way!!
My intuition was right.
“Luminous Wind!!”
There’s a thundering noise, and the passageway in front of me is blasted apart.
“?!”
A huge ball of light crosses the path before me, bringing with it a storm of wind.
I throw my arms in front of my face as a meteor shower of debris flies from right to left.
Along with the savage roar of magical power, the Dungeon fills with screams.
“…It pierced the Dungeon walls?”
I shake off my surprise at this ridiculous power and walk into the newly formed tunnel. Strangely enough, the track of the explosion leads me to Lyu.
Once I make my way past four crumbled crystal walls, I find myself in an enormous room. There’s a lot of dry land, but a number of waterways also flow into the space. Perhaps due to the lingering heat from the huge ball of magical light, steam is rising from the water and forming a light mist.
As I burst through the broken wall into this room, I find the catman at my feet, curled insect-like into a ball.
“You…”
“…R-Rabbit Foot? H-help me! Save me from her!!”
Of course I don’t need to ask who he means by her.
All of a sudden, the faint shadow of a humanoid form steps out of the mist in the center of the room and comes into focus.
It’s an elf, a wooden sword in her hand and a perilous look in her eyes.
“Miss Lyu…!” I cry out, squinting.
“…So you’ve followed me here, have you, Mr. Cranell?”
Lyu looks at me with her sharp gaze, as if she’s just noticed I’m here.
That alone is enough to make me unsure what to say. I almost miss the words she whispers from behind her mask.
“…Why are you always doing this?”
Then, more loudly—
“Move over. You’re in the way. I can’t get to him with you there.”
She looks past me to the catman.
Brandishing her bloodied sword, she slowly approaches us, her long boots scraping the ground loudly.
The catman, still crouched on the ground, groans at the terrifying sight.
“My only mistake was that I didn’t put an end to you last time. I was arrogant to assume I’d killed you without properly checking, and I regret that.”
Lyu’s voice is full of resentment as she curses her own poor work. The whole time she’s reciting this monologue, her eyes are piercing the catman.
“…I should have made sure you were dead that time.”
As the word dead falls from her lips, I almost faint. Like her cold, clouded eyes, her face has changed.
It’s not the face of the serious elf who worked at the tavern nor of the gallant adventurer who came to our rescue so many times.
It is the face of an avenger.
Is this really Lyu?
No, this is…
…Gale Wind?
When we were on the eighteenth floor together, she told me something about her past. Now the character from that story seems to have appeared before me. A different elf, one I’ve never met before.
“But we’ll clear
that debt here and now—your calculations and all,” Lyu says resolutely as she pulls the mask from her face.
The catman screams as she walks steadily toward him, as if he can no longer stand his own terror.
“Rabbit Foot! Kill her; I’m begging you! It’s awful; my whole body hurts; the blood won’t stop…! The arm she cut off…!”
He seems to be in anguish as he hugs his bleeding body with his remaining arm. I shiver as I stare at Lyu’s dagger.
“I-is it true? That you cut off this man’s arm…?”
“…Yes, I was the one who severed his arm. I sliced off his ear, too. And what of it?!”
Anger and regret are blended inseparably in her voice. She has clearly confessed her deeds. I sink to the floor as my knees collapse beneath me.
“Move aside immediately!”
“M-Miss Ly—”
“I said move!!”
The tip of the wooden sword is pointing at me.
Her rage is enough to make me shrink, Level Four or not. The heartbeat thundering in my ears and the sweat pouring from me are near their peak.
“If you interfere, I’ll throw you aside, too…I don’t have time for it.”
Her words freeze my throat.
“Please, Rabbit Foot…Save meee…!”
The catman’s wail drives my anxiety even higher.
In front of me is an ultimatum, behind me a plea.
It’s just like a scene in a drama. There’s the criminal starving for blood, and here, facing her, is the detective, and there the victim pleading for help.
It’s me, in the role of detective, who’s been driven relentlessly into a corner. What a poor actor I am. Or to borrow the words of the deities, how wretchedly I have been miscast in this role.
I can hardly bring myself to watch.
“…Please tell me.”
Although I feel on the verge of being crushed, I draw up all my emotional strength and speak.
I have to know. I have to understand.
The whole story, and Lyu’s true intentions.
If I don’t, I’ll never be able to arrive at an answer.
So I buck this tremendous pressure and ask her.
“Did you kill the man from Rivira?”
“I don’t have time to answer your questions!”
“A body was found outside Rivira! People saw you fleeing the scene!”
“How many times do I have to say it for you to understand?!”
She’s full of irritation, determined not to give in.
“Miss Lyu, I’m begging you! Please answer me!!”
I pour all my yearning to hear her side of the story into my next four words.
“Did you kill him?!”
“It wasn’t me!!”
We’re yelling so loudly it’s like we’re fighting.
My eyes meet the sky-blue ones that have lost their calm.
Her shout is like that of a frenzied criminal.
The bitter words hurled at me contain no explanation or excuse, only emotion.
But—it’s enough.
“…I understand.”
At least for me.
“Rabbit Foot, what are you doing? Hurry up and save me! Hurry up and…?”
The catman is screaming at me as I let the tension drain from my body.
My physical body is still standing opposite her, but in my heart, I’m no longer opposing her.
Jura notices the change.
The scene is no longer composed of a criminal, a detective, and a victim.
Instead, there are two detectives and one true criminal.
And Jura knows it.
“Will you show me your wounds?” I ask him calmly.
“Huh? What are you talking about…?”
“Please show me where your arm was cut.”
It just so happens that I very, very recently saw a man whose arm had been cut off—the elf Luvis, who had been attacked by the moss huge.
I didn’t want to look at it, but the wound where the monster tore his arm off was really awful. The endless blood, the clothes and equipment stained deep red, the overwhelmingly strong smell of fresh blood.
The sight of his severed arm was so awful I felt the blood drain from my head the moment I glimpsed it.
But this guy doesn’t have any of those symptoms.
Sure, his clothes and equipment are covered in blood, but not so much that it would cause irreversible necrosis of the upper arm. The smell of fresh blood that invades one’s nostrils is missing, too.
That’s what my memory has been trying to tell me all along. That’s the sense of incongruence that was flashing in my mind.
Until a minute ago, I’d been so upset I hadn’t realized.
But now I see.
That missing arm—
“That wound…It’s old, isn’t it?”
He glares at me angrily.
Lyu said she herself severed his arm and sliced off his ear. But what if she did it in the past, when she was fully consumed by her desire for revenge—during that regrettable period of time she told me about with such grief on the eighteenth floor?
It makes sense. And it explains a few things.
This catman got upset and refused treatment for his wounds. Could that have been because he was worried about what we would discover if we examined his body? Was he afraid we would notice his wounds were old?
In other words, he inflicted his fresh wounds himself.
Lyu hasn’t even attacked him yet.
There are some other odd things as well.
Actually, quite a lot about this whole situation strikes me as unnatural.
If Lyu was using magic to cause explosions, then her victims would all have burns on them. But that didn’t hold true for one of them: the dwarf I encountered.
He alone was marked with dagger wounds and nothing else.
I’m guessing that dwarf was the only one of Lyu’s enemies whose whereabouts she discovered. And she probably took out her weapon because he resisted.
“I’ve been thinking this for a while now…but your claims don’t add up.”
“What are you talking about? I explained…!”
“Okay then, why are you alive right now?”
“…?!”
“If your arm was cut off, your ear was cut off, and you were the victim of magic…why are you not dead?”
His opponent is Gale Wind.
She destroyed a massive faction single-handedly. She is a legendary Level Four warrior with a bounty on her head.
It doesn’t make sense that she would capture him but let him escape in the end.
“At first I thought maybe she was deranged…because there’s no way Lyu would leave that place where Bors and the other adventurers had gathered after she had attacked you.”
That is, if they were indeed attacked, as this man claimed.
Why would Lyu create an explosion but then purposely not put an end to things?
—Because she hadn’t been attacking anyone in the first place.
Why hadn’t we found any signs of magical power or heard any spells, like I did this time?
—Because she hadn’t been blowing up the floor.
So what’s the big picture?
Even this miscast detective can figure that out.
The answer is simple.
Everything is a performance created and acted out by these people.
“I found this in the other passageway.”
I flip the scarlet fragment toward him. It’s still giving off heat, and I’ve seen that before.
“It’s an Inferno Stone, isn’t it?” I say.
I think back to something that happened four months ago, right after I met Welf. He’d brought me to see his workshop, and he showed me a device made for use in the furnace. In order to forge minerals from the Dungeon, he had to use a powerful explosive that enhanced the heat of the flames.
The catman’s face twitches.
“Miss Lyu said she didn’t kill anyone…and I believe he
r.”
The only thing I still don’t understand is the murder on the eighteenth floor.
If her rage truly drove her to kill that man…
I need to know the answer to this last question.
If she has once again reverted to a blood-soaked avenger, then all my reasoning will crumble under the force of her overwhelming desire to kill.
—It wasn’t even justice.
Lyu once said those words to me, her voice filled with regret.
“Mr. Cranell…”
But Lyu said she didn’t do it.
She told me that with unclouded eyes—eyes filled with an elf’s fierce pride, hatred of lies, and strong sense of duty. With the sky-blue eyes I know so well.
That was enough. More than enough.
With my back to the catman, I turn my face toward him and stare intently.
“If Lyu isn’t the one who caused the explosions…then it could only have been you and your gang.”
All the explosions so far have been their destructive work.
I still don’t know why they’re blowing up this floor. But finally, all the different strands have come together in a single rope.
“Please show me the wound on your arm.”
If he shows me that, I’ll feel sure.
Show me the wound she gave you as proof of her guilt.
I’m aware that my own eyes are cold, red, and glittering.
I scowl at him, speaking in a tone that leaves no room for argument.
Lyu is staring at me, the one person who believes her.
The catman gulps.
Then, unmistakably, he clicks his tongue.
As he glares at me, the drained face of a severely wounded victim transforms into that of a brutal villain.
The next instant, the hand that had been stretched out by his side flashes forward.
“So I’ve been discovered!”
“Ah!”
I fly back to avoid the stroke of red that suddenly cuts through the air.
He is gripping a scarlet whip in his left hand.
“You and those idiots from Rivira are worthless! Even if you didn’t kill Leon, I thought you’d at least slow her down!”
“Jura…!”
Lyu and I are standing side by side facing our opponent. He rests the whip on his shoulder, then draws an elixir from his pouch, deftly removes the lid with his single hand, and pours it over his head. The top-grade item heals his bloody self-inflicted wounds and sends smoke rising from the scars.