by Fujino Omori
The Juggernaut—its tail entangled in the scarf—was pulled toward him. As the enormous form landed at Bell’s feet, it shuddered. The monster realized the nature of the emotion it had been feeling for the past few minutes.
This was the terror that its prey experienced.
“—?!”
As if to shake off the feeling, it pulsed its shell with purplish-blue light. In the face of the flaming knife in its enemy’s right hand, it brandished its own weapon—its all-destroying claws, the claws that nothing could withstand.
A moment earlier, it had wondered whether the knife would deliver magic or an ordinary slashing attack. The answer was neither. The deadly blow it held in wait would allow for neither reflection nor defense.
It was a sacred flame that would turn all to ash.
Bell had charged it for nine seconds.
As the Juggernaut towered over him with claws bared, Bell unleashed the blow.
“Argo Vesta!!”
A blast of light.
“—”
Thundering flames swallowed the enormous fang-like claws.
A flare extinguished the flashing purplish-blue light.
The claws of destruction shattered. Black and purple fragments flew everywhere.
Bell had been thrown backward, but he kept his right arm extended. This time, it was the Juggernaut’s right arm that would be obliterated.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!”
The monster wailed.
Its right arm had vanished, claws and all, in the roar and flash of the sacred flame. The shock reverberated through its shoulder and into the right half of the towering body.
Its speed and aggression were extraordinarily developed, but its endurance and defense were correspondingly low. Fissures ran down its flank and back, and chunks of shell clattered onto the floor. As its fossil-like form crumbled, the Juggernaut crashed into the crystal floor.
Its right arm blasted off and its tail finally freed from the bonds of the scarf, it rolled and scraped across the floor, finally coming to a halt in the center of the room.
For the first time in its life, the Juggernaut howled in grief.
I didn’t charge enough…!
Bell squinted at the writhing, shrieking monster. Although it was inevitable due to the short amount of time he’d had, the blow hadn’t been deadly.
But he could do something about that. He could bury a silver round in the hideous beast.
“Owwwwwwwwww…!!”
A terrifying jolt of pain shot through Bell’s left hand.
His mind had robbed his body of strength in its tremendous effort to achieve both Swift-Strike Magic and a Dual Charge. His legs were shaking. His arms felt like they were about to be torn from his shoulders. He now couldn’t feel his left hand.
But he had to fight. He had to pull together his last drops of strength. He had to put a stop to that monster and its whirlwind of calamity.
As the maelstrom of pain forced a tear from his eye, Bell gripped the Hestia Knife and turned toward the Juggernaut, still prone on the floor.
“—Mr. Cranell?!”
Lyu, who had been watching in a daze as this scene unfolded, shuddered and let out a cry.
Bell noticed, too, but it was too late.
A one-armed shadow leaped from behind a crystal column and fell over the Juggernaut.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!! I did it!”
It was Jura.
The tamer had been hiding and waiting for this moment to reappear.
The magic collar, still encircling the monster’s thin, bony neck, pulsed with a strange crimson light.
“I didn’t expect you to bring it to its knees like that!”
“Jura…!”
“But with this, it’s mine!”
Trembling with joy, the catman grinned at the dumbfounded Bell and Lyu.
This was the long-cherished moment he had been waiting for. Sneering, he pulled out his crimson whip and lashed it powerfully against the ground.
“Stand, monster of mine! Kill Leon and that brat!!”
The collar pulsed with a bright light in response to the whip. As the magic item flashed wildly, the Juggernaut’s half-destroyed body convulsed again and again…until finally, slowly, it rose.
The crimson light in the depths of its eye sockets bore into Bell and Lyu.
Bell grimaced, unable to hide his fear in the face of a monster whose eyes—as if insensate to all the injuries it had suffered—were filled with pure bloodlust.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Yes, kill them! Kill them both! With those claws of yours—”
The next instant, the monster swung the remains of its tail, as if in irritation.
Chunks of flesh flew. The catman’s body was cleaved in two.
In the end, Jura never knew what had happened. The upper half of his body flew through the air and landed with a splash in the waterway flowing through the room. As if realizing its fate, the lower half toppled over. Red bubbles frothed as the upper half sank into the water.
Bell and Lyu gaped in silence.
The end of the Evil had come so abruptly.
“—, —, —…!!”
But the collar kept pulsing with light.
As if illuminated by the dead man’s last wish—or, rather, his rancor—the collar continued to flash, animating the Juggernaut’s body. The battered legs took a step toward Bell.
“Uh…!”
In the face of this destroyer who seemed to take no notice of its own injuries, Bell flourished the Hestia Knife. He let out a battle cry, as if to whip his exhausted body toward one last battle.
“Huh?”
Just then, he heard a crumbling sound. Or more accurately, the sound of piled-up rubble being swept aside.
Something pulled at Bell’s mind. Even though the Juggernaut was right in front of him now, he obeyed his adventurer’s instinct and turned his head toward the sound that indicated something abnormal in the Dungeon.
Directly behind him was Lyu, still unable to stand.
Behind her, slithering from the pile of crystal rubble, was a giant serpent monster.
“—”
The lambton was supposed to be dead.
But there it was, as huge as ever, the pulsing collar around its neck clearly responding to the tamer’s command. Its multiple bloodied eyes glared as it obeyed the last command of its master.
Kill Leon and that brat!
The near-dead serpent roared and bore down behind Lyu, scattering crystal fragments as it approached.
“Miss Lyu!!”
Her eyes widened as she realized what was happening, but it was too late. The lambton was charging forward, its enormous maw wide open.
Bell ran toward it.
With the little energy he had left, he accelerated, grabbed Lyu’s outstretched hand, and pulled her close.
A moment later, both adventurers were engulfed in the serpent’s mouth.
“Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!”
As it bellowed, the lambton burrowed its sharply pointed head into the ground. Its corkscrewing body crushed through the bedrock as it drilled and gouged downward.
“—!!”
The Juggernaut followed. Roaring and scattering pieces of shell from its fractured body, it dove into the hole that the lambton had made.
The heroic battle that had unfolded in the crystal room was over.
“Bell…Beeeell?!”
Just one living being remained.
The mermaid’s sorrowful cry echoed through the now-quiet space.
“Please let me go, Miss Cassandra! Enough already…!”
Lilly’s shout disappeared into th
e din of the Great Falls.
They were in the cavern on the twenty-fifth floor. Standing on the cliff near the mouth of the falls that overlooked the cavern on the floor below, the adventurers argued among themselves.
“No, you can’t go…! Not to the twenty-seventh floor…!”
Cassandra was holding on fiercely to the prum’s arm. She pushed away Mikoto, who was tearfully trying to hold her back, and gripped Lilly’s small hand. Her face was so transformed as she struggled to keep Hestia Familia from moving on that they didn’t know what to make of it.
My dream has come true after all! I can’t let them go! Their deaths have been foretold…!
All her actions were driven by that one thought. Guilt and despair overwhelmed her. The countless souls she had abandoned to death were tormenting her conscience and weighing on her heart. Her chest felt tight and warm, like her own thoughts were chewing away at her. Tears spilled from her eyes.
But, but, if they don’t go…
She could save them. As long as they stayed there, the people Cassandra cared about would be safe. This would not absolve her of her sins, but the thought nevertheless brought Cassandra some relief.
If she kept them there, she could avoid total destruction.
But then, as if the Dungeon were sneering at Cassandra, a tremor shook the ground.
“—”
An earthquake? No, a shaking caused by the Dungeon.
Welf and the others, who had been so troubled by Cassandra’s strange behavior, froze.
The sound was unmistakable.
“Hey, that noise…!”
“You’re kidding me…!
“It’s impossible. I mean, one was just spawned two weeks ago!”
The Dungeon ignored the sudden paleness of Ouka’s, Welf’s, and Lilly’s faces and continued its groans.
It had only one thought.
It had sent out its apostle of murder, its equivalent of an immune system, yet the virus remained alive. Even worse, the child of calamity had left the floor, despite the fact that the contaminants destroying its mother’s womb remained in the Water Capital.
Not just one or two but a number so large it couldn’t be ignored.
The Dungeon could not overlook this.
So it made a completely improbable decision. Raising its voice in a howl, it spawned that thing.
“Th-th-this is…”
Lilly and the others recognized something—something in the signs that an unbelievably huge being was about to be spawned, in the tremors that shook the floor and the sound of enormous fissures splitting the walls.
“It’s coming!” Aisha screamed.
The next instant, the Great Falls on the twenty-seventh floor exploded. Huge jets of water spouted up to the twenty-fifth floor, beating down onto the cavern like a pounding rain.
This subterranean rain poured onto the thing that burst through the falls on the lowest floor, wrapping its form in smoky white mist. Slowly, it sank toward the bottom of the plunge pool.
A moment later, it burst up again.
Then it began to literally climb the several-hundred-meder-tall column of raging water that was the Great Falls.
“—”
As Cassandra looked down on the chilling form that rose from the twenty-seventh to the twenty-sixth floor, and then toward the twenty-fifth, she remembered something.
Oh, don’t worry, monsters don’t climb up the falls.
Well, most don’t.
A certain Amazon had said those words just a few days before. The very same Amazon who stood beside her now, podao at the ready and eyes filled with astonishment. Cassandra finally understood what she had meant.
“Get baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!!” Welf screamed. The entire group sprang away from the cliff’s edge that formed the mouth of the falls.
No sooner had they done so than it shattered apart. The tsunami that surged from it swallowed them all and carried them toward the back of the bank.
One by one, they stood up; raised their drenched, coughing faces; and looked at the two-headed dragon before them.
“The Monster Rex of the twenty-seventh floor—” Lilly whispered in a daze.
Aisha spit out the rest of the sentence.
“—Amphisbaena.”
As if answering its mother’s call, the huge floor boss writhing in the center of the twenty-fifth-floor plunge pool looked up.
“Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”
The Amphisbaena was an anomaly among floor bosses known to the Guild. Contravening the rule that confined Monster Rexes to the guarding of a specific floor, this one was mobile.
As her companions scowled and brandished their weapons, Cassandra stared absentmindedly.
This was the Dungeon, the crucible of monsters.
The limitless Dungeon, for which the rebellion of a prophetess of tragedy was a mere trifling matter.
The two-headed white monster roared with the will of that Dungeon.
Cassandra’s face froze.
She and her party may have escaped catastrophe, but they were now facing—yes, despair.
CHAPTER 6
AND SO THEY SPIN THEIR CRUEL FATE
The sound of bedrock being shattered rang out.
The huge form descended in a rain of rock and stone.
The terrific sound of that form ripping through the air was succeeded by that of it crashing into the earth.
The whole floor shook.
Beyond the veil of smoke, a long bluish-white body writhed in the newly formed depression.
It was a wormwell, that enormous serpent monster.
“—Aa!!”
The lambton raged.
Its multiple eyes crushed and bleeding, it flailed as if it was suffering the cruelest torment imaginable. A red-streaked liquid spilled from its enormous jaws as its long body floundered on the ground.
It looked precisely like a child who had eaten some foreign object guaranteed to cause it a royal stomachache.
Suddenly, its body convulsed with a loud thump. It happened again and then again, four times in total.
Each time, its cries grew more desperate. The bluish-white surface of its body glowed pale pink, as if it were being illuminated from inside by a lamp. Finally, tremors overtook its whole body, and the light of an electrifying flame pulsed forth.
Once, twice it pulsed, and still it did not stop.
A blazing column of electrical fire rose from the flank of the lambton’s body.
With a roaring crash, the monster—burned open from the inside—rolled over sideways, sapped of all strength.
And then, from the center of the beast’s long form, a black knife burst through the skin. It was as if a sword were growing from the inside of the wormwell’s body. The hieroglyphs engraved into the blade glowed with light. With a horrifying sound of ripping flesh, it sawed ever downward.
A vertical slash appeared in the skin.
The monster’s guts tumbled out with a gush of crimson water. They were followed by a pair of hands, which grabbed the edges of the wound and pulled with all their might to the right and left.
“Uwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!”
A white-haired boy appeared.
Squinting, steam rising from his body, Bell screamed. He stumbled forward a few steps from the prison of the lambton’s body, then fell flat on his face into the puddle of reddish liquid.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!”
His entire body was melting. His exposed skin and parts of his adventurer’s gear seemed to have
dissolved, and his white hair was smoking. The only part of him that was unharmed was the black scarf wrapped around his left hand and the weapon that had been protected by its sheath.
He had been burned by the potent poisonous acid inside the stomach of the monster that had swallowed him. As the cool air bathed his skin now that he had finally escaped, a searing pain engulfed his whole body. And since he was lying facedown in a pool of blood mixed with stomach acid, his skin was being burned all over again.
Despite the pain, he planted his hands on the ground and pushed his body up, then stood unsteadily.
“Miss Lyu…Miss Lyuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu?!”
Prying open an eyelid that had been glued shut and looking around at the blurred scene in front of him, he turned toward the monster. Then, with an earsplitting moan, he plunged back into its stomach.
A moment later, he emerged again, an elf wrapped in his arms.
“Blehhhhhh!”
Had they been ordinary people, they would long ago have melted together into a single amiable puddle in the monster’s gut.
But they were not ordinary people. They were upper-class adventurers who had been elevated three times to a higher level. They had been able to withstand the bath of powerful stomach acid.
Bell dragged Lyu—who was half-sitting, half-standing, and entirely helpless—around the puddle of blood and then collapsed onto the ground.
Lyu was completely drained of strength. Although Bell had protected her after they were swallowed by holding her close to his body, her long cape and battle clothes were partially dissolved. Her pliant elf’s skin, too, was horribly marred by burns. Her eyes were shut tight as if in eternal sleep.
A tear fell from Bell’s eye. By now he was moving through pure effort of will. He knelt beside her and lifted her body in his arms.
“Miss Lyu, Miss Lyu?! Please, please open your eyes…!”
With shaking hands and fingers that sloughed off skin, he gripped her shoulders. Again and again, he called out her name, as if to tie her to the world of the living.
Whether in response to his pleading it was not clear, but the lashes of her tightly closed eyes trembled.