CHAPTER 5 FINAL WAR
In contrast to the adventurers’ cries and the intense thundering of their advance, the start of the battle was silent. The adventurers descended directly to the ninth floor of Knossos using the shaft that Ganesha Familia had tirelessly excavated.
Some used the prepared ladders, some leaped through the air, but all descended straight down. The adventurers landed in a chamber, a giant space packed with a forest of pillars. There was a clump of green flesh, gnarled like the outline of a person’s body, where Thanatos had turned his blade on himself and returned, creating the giant shaft. The location where a certain God of Death had come to the aid of Loki and her familia.
Because Thanatos had shot through to Daedalus Street to return to the heavens, his shaft was the shortest route from aboveground to their target on the tenth floor, allowing them to pass through directly to the ninth floor.
Looking around, Finn glanced at the Thanatos Familia flag that had been deformed almost beyond recognition. Suppressing his welling emotions, he dashed forward.
“The flesh has ceased all activity! There are no monsters, either!” Shakti said as she joined Finn.
Her voice encouraged the others, creating an avalanche of adventurers pressing in behind them. Immediately afterward, they entered the labyrinth master’s room. It was the large chamber that Thanatos and the Evils’ Remnants had used as their base, but it had now lost all meaning. The enemy’s true core had moved below it to the tenth floor.
“The first squad to the north! The second to the northeast! The third to the southeast! Advance to the chambers where each demi-spirit is hiding!”
Faced with the diverging paths forking off from the labyrinth master’s room, Finn quickly fired off orders.
Three squads had broken into the ninth floor from the pit that connected to the surface. In addition to Finn’s first squad, there was the second led by Riveria and Aiz and the third, led by Gareth.
Over a hundred and fifty adventurers, supporters, and healers were moving in coordination with each squad, advancing down the passages that Ganesha Familia had already cleared.
“Gareth, Riveria! I’m counting on you! Don’t screw up!”
“Worry about yourself, Finn!”
“Let’s toast with some of Loki’s secret stash when we get back!”
The three comrades taunted one another as they went their separate ways, sharing one smile before they left.
“Finn, Gareth! Don’t lose!” Aiz called out as she left with Riveria, setting off the other adventurers laughing, taunting, and wishing one another luck.
Each squad had their own path to follow, avoiding and passing by the green flesh without difficulty. The sounds of boots and greaves scraping against one another filled the passage.
The grotesque mass was still clinging to the ceilings and walls as the elite squads proceeded. Finn resumed his commander’s attitude again and roared into the crystal he took out of his pocket as he ran along with Shakti and the rest of the first squad.
“Every squad needs to follow their predetermined routes and head for the tenth floor! We’re going to press in from all six directions!”
“There are six demi-spirits on the tenth floor! We have to take care of all of them! Pay attention and follow the shortest routes as we discussed!”
Listening to the captain’s voice from the oculus, the fifth squad charged into the remade Knossos with Lefiya.
The location was the entrance connecting to Knossos on the Dungeon’s ninth floor.
Using a Daedalus Orb, they opened the orichalcum gate and rushed inside. This route had not been dug by Ganesha Familia but by Magni and Modi Familias as part of the Guild’s mission. The other two routes on the ninth floor had also been dug by other familias under the utmost secrecy.
There was no connection between Knossos and the Dungeon between the ninth and twelfth floors. There were field notes about gates on the tenth and eleventh floors in Daedalus’s Notebook, the labyrinth’s blueprints, but those entrances had been removed, as if Enyo had already foreseen this future. Because of that, the fastest possible route to Knossos’s tenth floor was through the ninth floor of the Dungeon or through the shaft created by Thanatos’s return.
“Hey, don’t hold back on me!” Bete warned.
“How could I?! Not after the captain set the stage!”
At the head of the fifth squad, Bete’s comment warranted an angry shout from Anakity without even a second glance. “I came here to win!”
As the squad’s second-in-command and de facto commander, she was the one who had received the oculus from Finn. With her eyes flaring at the scene before her, she blew off the werewolf’s needless concern. Anakity’s improved mood naturally strengthened the familia’s resolve.
A wide passage spread out beyond the opened gate. It was the location of their heartbreak, the place where they had turned their backs on Dionysus Familia . It was also the place where an elven girl had lost her arm before being mercilessly torn apart by monsters.
“…”
Everyone’s gazes turned to Lefiya. Ignoring the concerned looks from the rest of Loki Familia , she stopped for only a second. Filvis’s arm was nowhere to be seen. It must have been swallowed up by the green flesh. Instead—
“This is…”
“A sword…and a wand?”
The ownerless weapons were lying limp on the floor. Filvis Challia had wielded sword and staff in either hand when she flew into a rage and suicidally rushed toward the masked creature. The magic swordsman had dropped the weapons when her neck had been cruelly snapped.
“Gh…”
Lefiya picked up the sword and wand, pressing them to her cheek. She closed her eyes tightly, as if the feelings she had sealed away were starting to seep back through.
The other familia members, even Anakity, could not find the words to say to her in that moment.
“—Quit slacking, slowpoke! We’ve gotta hurry up and kill that damn spirit! If you’re gonna hold us back, I’ll leave you behind!”
It must have been expected that Bete would take the initiative, hurling his bile at her. His words were rough but intent. He kicked any weakling’s ass, just like always.
Anakity glared at him, but Lefiya herself was grateful for his unchanging demeanor and words.
“Sorry! I’m coming!”
Looking up, she started running. She stashed away the sword and wand. At the head of the group, Bete snorted, Anakity smiled, and the rest of the adventurers continued their advance.
“Nine Hell! That’s the gate!”
“Got it. Leave it to me.”
In the northeast of the ninth floor, Riveria’s second squad advanced. From Ganesha Familia , Ilta the Amazon called out. At the edge of their vision was a mass of crimson tentacles that seemed to be overlapping like a multilayered spiderweb. This was the one gate that Ganesha Familia had not been able to break through when they were excavating. According to the blueprints of Knossos, it was also the point where the stairs leading down to the tenth floor were located.
“Harbinger of the end, white snow. Gust before the twilight—”
As Riveria stopped and readied Magna Alfs, that highest-tier magic staff, the crimson tentacles peeled away from the gate. The speared tendrils rushed toward the high elf, drawn to her powerful magic.
“Ha!”
As they flew toward her, Aiz suddenly twisted and severed them all—three slashes in the span of time that it took a single tendril to approach. It was a high-speed series of attacks, and her unbreakable sword, Desperate, became a blur to those watching. As if a knight protecting her queen, she created a barrier with her sword. While Ilta and the others from different factions were in awe at the tremendous display of swordsmanship, Riveria finished her spell.
“Wynn Fimbulvetr!”
Three arctic gusts blasted out. When the bunch of tendrils were hit with the blast that froze everything in its path, they held on for a moment, but by the next instant, they burst open, as if crying out in agony. They froze and then shattered into countless fragments of ice, revealing the staircase leading to the next floor.
Aiz, who immediately dashed through like a whirlwind, was at the head of the squad, and the others poured in behind her with a roar. And then—
“—!!”
The tenth floor of Knossos—the castle of demons.
As Aiz stepped onto the stage of the decisive battle where their target lay waiting, before anything else could happen, her eyes opened wide.
As expected, the tenth floor was covered in the green flesh, but unlike the other floor where it was flabby, almost like a lesion, here it had been formed into a proper passage.
It was as if a thin layer of green carpet had been laid over the original stone passage. The surface looked smooth. There were no visible gaps. It perfectly covered the floor, the walls, and the ceiling, as if a master stonemason had constructed it. Ironically, its outrageous beauty proved that it had not been crafted by people.
The color was not the poisonous dark green of the other floors but sea-foam. The green passage gave off a dim light that seemed almost mystical, evoking the image of a holy altar.
“…It’s almost like the Dungeon.”
That was how much the scene had changed. It was reminiscent of the Dungeon that left adventurers in wonder at the scenes of the unknown. While Aiz murmured to herself, the others from Loki Familia and Ganesha Familia were dumbfounded.
“…?” When Aiz glanced around her, she noticed something.
There were several veins of light running through the pale-green flesh on the ground beneath their feet.
“…A light strip?”
It looked almost like the circuits in magic-stone items. There were many straight lines and some curves, combined like a coded pattern. Some adventurers shuffled their feet and looked down as they tilted their heads in confusion.
“—No. This is a magic circle,” Riveria declared as she came up from behind them, cutting through their doubt.
“A magic circle…?”
“It must be the ritual that Loki spoke of…The great ring that the six spirits are creating.”
Everyone understood at once. This was the bypass that each spirit was creating. A giant ring for the magic to circulate. It was the foundation of the enormous ritual that would erase the Labyrinth City from the map.
“Then if we just break up this magic circle…!” Ilta leaned forward.
“No, attacking it and trying to cut off the flow of magic won’t work. What we see running through the floor is nothing more than the outer layer.” Riveria shook her head. “It’s not just the floor. The entire spirit composition covering the whole labyrinth is a giant magic circle.”
Riveria jabbed the bottom of her staff into the floor, removing a chunk of it, but in an instant, the light-green flesh covered that wound as if nothing had happened. As if it had an abundance of magic to spare, as if it was using the nutrients it had absorbed from Dionysus Familia .
“The structure of the flesh on this floor is clearly different. The magic particles filling the air are terrible…As soon as I stepped onto this floor, it made me a little dizzy,” Riveria spat as her thin eyebrows warped in disgust.
It was bad enough that it felt like it might get her magic drunk. Looking around, she could confirm it wasn’t just her. The other mages were all looking a little pale.
“…This must be a container of magic powerful enough to destroy Orario,” said the high elf, which caused Aiz and the others to forget the situation for a second and pause. They did not know what to say.
It was a powder keg about to explode, strong enough to blow away Orario above them. A dastardly minefield. The subtext of what Riveria had said caused them to gulp.
“…A song…”
And when she realized it, Aiz had been the one to break the silence. From deep in the passage, she could hear a high-pitched singing voice, like that of an innocent young girl.
“The spirits’ chanting, huh…?!”
At the same time, the Xenos had reached the tenth floor of Knossos from the Dungeon’s ninth floor, and they could hear the chanting, too.
“Even though I can’t use any magic, I know this feeling! Something reaaally bad is about to happen!”
“That voice is…scary and disgusting…”
As the monsters were perturbed, Lido and Wiene both trembled. That uninterrupted spell—one far surpassing the longest-cast magics—was proof enough of the boundless supply of magic.
It was bewitching and beautiful, repulsive yet pure, a devilish and corrupted spirit that would bring about the destruction of humanity. Something neither human nor monster, that disgusting voice sounded heretical to the Xenos.
“If it reaches the end of this spell, we lose! Hurry! Get to the source of the chanting!”
The rest of the Xenos shouted in response to Lido’s roar. The group of monsters rushed in the direction of the song of destruction.
“—Huh?”
When, all of a sudden, Wiene looked up, her dragon’s ears trembling. Just as she did that, there was a sparkle in the depths of the passage ahead of them: from the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. Magic circles of all sizes filled their field of view. Magic that had already been loaded, just about to fire.
“? ”
The other Xenos noticed, but too late. The magic circles activated all at once.
“Doooooooooodge!”
When the lizardman’s warning boomed out, the explosion flared.
“Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah?!”
In the fourth squad, led by Tiona and Tione, a number of adventurers screamed out. A sudden blaze had started.
“The walls are blowing fire?!”
“You guys!”
A complete and utter surprise attack. Right after they thought they heard a high-pitched whining, magic circles appeared on the pale-green wall of flesh, unleashing flame magic.
“A surprise attack?! Were they aiming for this?! Where’s the enemy?!”
It was an entirely different magic circle from the giant ring running along the floor that the demi-spirits were creating. Tione was rightfully confused by the sudden activation of these spells. There were no suspicious mages around. It was as if the passage itself had used magic—
“—Tione, up ahead.”
She was shaken for a second but, drawn by her sister’s stunned voice, her head snapped up, and she was at a loss for words.
Red, blue, and gold. Dozens of magic circles in every color imaginable. A magic cannon was set up at the end of the passage. They took aim for Tione’s squad as they called forth sparks of flame, freezing tremors, and crackles of electricity.
It was an enormous deployment that not even a squad full of mages would be able to pull off.
Tione had finally come to the answer.
“Are you telling me the Dungeon itself is using magic?!” she shrieked.
As if to say she was right, the magic circles sparkled and fired off a fusillade that seemed to scoff at their resistance.
“? Ghhh?!”
A whirlpool of light poured down on the adventurers. It was a wide passage, but it was an intricate barrage of spells in a limited space. The animal-people adventurers were blown away by the bombing while the human healers were frozen and the dwarf tanks were bathed in lightning.
Fire, ice, and lightning. It was a flood of magic with no commonalities. The force behind each spell was equivalent to that of an upper-tier mage performing a long chant.
“Is the spirit doing all this?!” Tione’s scream was tinted with anger as she barely managed to dodge blasts. The tenth floor had become a container charged with magic, a terrain that the spirits had absolute control over.
Circulating an exorbitant amount of magic, the beings at the cores could cast spells remotely. Tione realized that was why they had not seen any trace of monsters and why there had not been any efforts to slow them down before now.
With such an absurd trick up their sleeve, who would need gatekeepers or fodder soldiers? The entire floor itself served both as a counterattack installation and the field on which intruders would be executed.
“I didn’t think they’d just let us pass, but this is crazy!”
Hail poured down from above, a spear of lightning bolted from the side, and a pillar of flame burst up from where she landed. The adventurers fell into a panic in the blink of an eye.
The Dungeon itself is using magic.
For adventurers who explored the Dungeon, the deadly implication of that phrase needed no explanation. It would be fair to call it “absurd.”
“This is way worse than a swarm of monsters!”
Even a first-tier adventurer like Tiona could not help but scream at it. A barrage of magic. A never-ending attack. The menacing assault from every direction caused one adventurer after the other to fall. In a short amount of time, the squad was on the verge of losing half its fighting force. Faced with an inexhaustible supply of spells, defending and dodging were both impossible.
“At this rate…?!”
We’ll get killed.
And it wasn’t just Tione and Tiona’s fourth squad, either. That thought crossed the minds of everyone who had charged into Knossos.
“Use the spirit cloth!”
Finn’s shout roared through the oculus that each squad was carrying.
“““!!”””
“The spirits cloths should resist the spirits’ magic! Each squad needs to deal with the barrage using the spirit flags prepared by the smiths!”
Finn shouted his orders into the oculus in his hand as he avoided the blasts from all directions with divine precision.
The members of the first squad he was leading, particularly the members of Loki Familia , responded to his orders almost reflexively. The supporters tore the poles from their backpacks and passed them to those in the middle guard. Taking the poles, the middle guard moved in front of the struggling vanguard, gritted their teeth, and mowed down the incoming fire magic with them.
“Raaaaah!”
The poles had a flag stuck to them made of spirit cloth—in this case, salamander wool. The flames entwined with the flag and then burned out with a sizzling sound.
“It…it worked!”
“We can cancel out the magic with these flags!”
In an instant, the adventurers started to cheer. The flags were one of the pieces of equipment that Finn had prepared and passed out to every squad in the lead-up to the second assault.
Spirit cloths. Fabric infused with the protection of spirits, they had high defensive capabilities against certain elemental attacks. For example, the salamander wool was imbued with fire resistance, undine cloth with water resistance, and so on. On top of that, when used against a spirit’s magic, it created a massive repulsion, negating the magic.
Since it was clear that the remaining enemies were the demi-spirits, it was the optimal answer. Knowing from experience just how powerful spirit magic was from the encounter on the fifty-ninth floor, Finn had gathered up countless spirit cloths to raise the squads’ survival rates as much as possible. He had used the Guild’s cooperation to its utmost, incurring a bill for the battle preparations high enough to almost cause the Guild head, Royman, to collapse as he clutched his stomach.
The battle clothes that the adventurers were wearing beneath their armor were made using a blend of all the different types of spirit cloths.
“Gather the squads into a tight formation! Don’t spread out! Vanguards, take the spirit flags and defend against the enemy’s attack!”
The spirit flags were a custom defensive gear created by Hephaistos Familia . They were not shields but flags. Salamander wool was crimson, undine cloth was blue, and so on. By using the matching cloth, they wielded a tremendous defensive ability against spirit magic. But the one difficulty was that unlike a shield, they could not just be held up to receive the attack. Instead, they had to be swung into the oncoming magic. But the effects were just what the adventurers had demonstrated.
They were matching the storm of counterattack spells filling the passage.
“Observe the color of the magic circles! Be decisive and defend with the appropriate spirit flag! Don’t let me down!” Finn fired off.
The orders were extraordinarily difficult, but the adventurers could not help but smile as they tried to meet his expectations.
The people were all warriors with plentiful experience. Top-tier adventurers chosen from each faction who were all confident in their abilities. They had both the dynamic vision to determine the magic circle’s element in an instant and the strength to swing the flag before the magic landed. The combination of those two made it possible to shoot down the incoming spells with ease.
“Don’t fall behind Loki Familia ! Show them you can do this much without breaking a sweat!”
““Yes, ma’am!””
The members of Ganesha Familia roared at Shakti’s words. Everyone was a fearless veteran of the deep levels in the Dungeon, so they readily put their all into fulfilling Braver’s orders.
“Advance! Advance to the hall where the spirit is waiting!”
Even in the extremely dangerous area where a violent storm of magic was swirling, even in the midst of a deadly scene, the indomitable adventurers wielded a frightening level of adaptability and escaped the rain of counterattack magic.
“To think the armor Finn ordered would be useful here!”
In the southeast of the tenth floor, Gareth was laughing ferociously in the midst of the third squad. He had a gnome toga spirit flag in his right hand and a Tonitrus mohair spirit flag in his left hand. Wielding the both of them to deftly cancel out earth- and lightning-element spells, the dwarven leader’s daring charge raised the squad’s morale.
“Ugh, Finn! You forced me to make this boring-ass item, but at least it’s not totally wasted!”
In response to Gareth, Tsubaki had only venom for the tiny hero. Because the spirit cloths themselves were the main source of the defensive ability, they were basically unmodified. As a smith at heart, it pained her craftsman’s soul that the cloths were basically untouched, only blended together, yet they still had produced this powerful item. The effectiveness of the equipment wounded the pride of the craftsmen of Hephaistos Familia even as it let them breathe easily. It created a complex feeling.
“As if that impertinent little prum would ever make you put together something that useless!”
“That’s true enough! Argh, this is awful! I’m going to have to vent all this frustration with Finn by making him into my body pillow when we’re done!”
Between the dwarf and half-dwarf’s hard-charging advance and their fortresslike defense, the third squad was closing in on the source of the chanting faster than any other squad.
“It’s trying to cast magic, but it’s not any different from the Dungeon! Anywhere works, but just hit it!”
“Follow Bete’s orders! The attack is weakening!”
“Y-yes!”
And there were some adventurers who were using methods other than what Finn had said in order to get out from between a rock and a hard place.
The fifth squad centered around Bete and Anakity. The werewolf used the spaces between attacks to move in and smash the green flesh on the walls where magic circles were forming. The wounds immediately started healing, but until they were fully healed, no new magic circles could form.
When the Dungeon took damage, the structure prioritized repairing itself to creating new monsters, which was the same system in this demon’s den. Until the wounds were fully healed, it would not form new magic circles. The sharp-eyed werewolf did not overlook that similarity. With the labyrinth prioritizing healing to attacking, the fifth squad set out to attack back.
“Lefiya!”
Ignoring Bete, who was leading the vanguard destroying the labyrinth’s walls, Anakity was giving out instructions—in charge of orders back in the middle guard. The ace up their sleeve—the one who had just reached Level 4—was Concurrent Casting to keep up with Bete’s counterattack. Lefiya was moving and dodging, in no need of anyone to protect her. She ground to a halt, stopping her attack on the structure of the floor while simultaneously summoning a bright-yellow magic circle.
“Fusillade Fallarica!”
She unleashed a scattershot of fireballs. A ferocious hail of fire that went far beyond mere intimidation. The thunderous boom resembled a giant cascade as she unleashed a tremendous attack that even her comrades struggled to endure. It was a raging bombardment. As the arrows of fire arced, they brought destruction wherever they landed. Beneath that unending onslaught, the demon’s lair cried out in anguish.
“That’s crazy…”
As the sparks and smoke cleared, the flesh walls covering the passage were strewn all around, and the original stone labyrinth was laid bare. There were gleams of adamantite shining from behind the battered and collapsing stone from obsidian soldiers—the stone slabs that diminished the effect of magic.
To repair the significant damage dealt there, the labyrinth diverted its resources to recovery.
“Keep moving!” Bete shouted.
The fifth squad picked up the pace, dashing through the passage that had fallen silent.
Bete did not concern himself with Lefiya, who had unleashed her magic with impeccable timing. He had finally acknowledged her growth—recognized that she was not just a weakling anymore. Oddly enough, Aiz had felt the same way before the operation had begun.
I’m fired up, but my head is still clear.
There was resolve hidden behind her eyes. Her focus was keener than anyone else’s as she followed after Bete.
“…!!”
And so, the first to reach their destination was Gareth’s squad. Before them was an absurdly large space. The ceiling towered over fifty meders above, and the width was easily more than twice that. Just like everywhere else, it was covered with a layer of pale-green flesh.
And it was there, waiting at the back of the chamber, an enormous trunk like a pillar. A shining, poisonous deep-purple magic circle seeped on the floor as the upper body of a woman continued to chant sonorously.
“The demi-spirit!”
The adventurers’ final target.
The demi-spirit that was trying to destroy the city.
“What even is that thing…?!” There was an audible tremor in Tsubaki’s voice.
In the simplest terms, what they saw was an impossibly large pillar of green flesh. Glued to the wall, it extended all the way to the ceiling, its imposing form easily surpassing the sizes of Goliath and the other floor bosses. The entire body was undulating as venomous red, purple, and black rings bloomed from it, like parasitic flowers. On top of that, it had several tentacles the size of full-grown tree trunks wriggling ominously.
The thing that caught everyone’s eye was not far from the floor—the bottom half of the pillar, for simplicity’s sake. There were three different faces. The faces were oriented to the left, right, and straight ahead, the very image of a hideous monster. They did not have eyes, housing a vaguely inorganic feel, almost as if they were only masks.
One had a smile, another a frown, and the last one was crying. Its fleshy lips were a deep red, creating an eerie contrast with the pearly teeth. The mouths were large enough to swallow a large-scale monster in a single gulp.
The three repulsive, gigantic sets of features filled the adventurers with an instinctive hatred and dread.
“How could something be so hideous…?!” Even Gareth couldn’t conceal his disgust, even though he had seen more than his fair share of variant species.
The faces and tentacles made it look like a three-faced creature with a bunch of arms. A three-faced monster that used its giant tentacles to mow down any enemies who approached.
That was the entirety of the bottom half of the spirit pillar.
“The crystal orb fetus is parasitizing a Grand Treant…! Not just that…From the looks of it, it’s drawn in three different bodies!”
It was a monster from the deepest regions of the Dungeon, an extremely large tree monster with a face, similar to titan alms, which had been host to the demi-spirit they had encountered on the fifty-ninth floor. It was a trap monster that had no way of moving itself, so it must have been offered up as a sacrifice to become the spirit’s stout, gigantic body.
“It’s certainly repulsive, but…the real target must be up there!”
In the fourth squad, Tione looked up with narrowed eyes as they reached their target. In the middle of the pillar was a female body.
“Distant destruction, the promised land, the salvation of heaven, summoned by the words of God—” sang out a beautiful voice, conducting a lovely melody of destruction from a three-meder-tall upper body.
Its skin was pale green, its eyes a stagnant golden color. Its long pale-green hair billowed. It was a transformed spirit.
“The demi-spirit’s actual body…! As the captain predicted, it’s preparing for its ultimate spell!”
The giant female body protruding from the pillar’s flesh had its eyes glued to the ground as it continued to sing its song. Its gaze seemed almost innocent, as if it were anxious to finally be able to see the sky again. Like an innocent child who breaks its toys, it was trying to reach the sky even if it destroyed everything in the process.
“We have to destroy that as soon as possible! I’m going, Tione!” Tiona bravely dashed off.
Several other adventurers roared and followed after the Amazon wielding her enormous Urga. Even though they had lost a not-insignificant number of people on the way there, they valiantly charged forward to take down the enemy’s pillar, supported by the healers.
“Pierce, spear of lightning. Your envoy beseeches thee, Tonitrus. Incarnate of thunder! Queen of lightning ? ”
“Gh?!”
While the spirit’s real body continued the ritual, a spell resounded from one of the three faces.
Tiona recognized the rhythm, but it was already too late by then. It was a high-speed cast conducted at the approaching squad. The gigantic lips blasted out a different spell from what the spirit’s upper body was chanting.
“Thunder Ray.”
A golden magic circle appeared in response to the hair-raising voice, unleashing a lance of thunder. Right before it was about to activate, the hair on Tiona’s body stood on end, and she barely managed to evade it safely with an animalistic leap, but it landed squarely in the ranks of the squad, who were seconds too late to avoid it. The victims were scorched and thrown back against the wall before helplessly crumpling to the floor.
“Are there two different chants…?!”
With the rest of the sixth squad, Lido was taken aback when one of the faces on the bottom part of the pillar unleashed a spell instead of from the demi-spirit’s main body. The Xenos were blown away that the pillar’s upper and lower parts continued to double cast.
“The main body of the spirit is continuing to chant the spell to destroy the city…”
“And if anyone tries to stop it, those repulsive faces will eliminate them!”
Fia the harpy and Lett the red-cap spoke in fluent Koine, comments tinged with fear. Their lizardman leader, Lido, saw through the enemy’s structure with his orpiment eyes.
“One monster filling two different roles, huh?!”
With dozens of requests under their belt from Ouranos regarding Irregulars in the Dungeon, the Xenos had developed very discerning eyes, and they were correct.
The spirit’s upper body was gathering magic for the ritual to destroy the city while the three faces at the bottom counterattacked to deal with any enemies. It was a massive fortress, exterminating the enemies even as it prepared the enormous spell worthy of being called an “ultimate attack.”
“Freeze over as though the eternal permafrost, untold blades. Your envoy beseeches thee, Undine. Incarnate of water. Queen of aqua—”
“Flash, rays of light. Tear through the darkness. Your envoy beseeches thee, Lux. Incarnate of light. Queen of luminosity—”
“Run wild, darkness. Devour the light in night’s peace. Your envoy beseeches thee, Shade. Incarnate of darkness. Queen of shadows—”
“What?! All three at once?!”
Three different high-speed chants had been sung without a moment’s hesitation. While Lido and the Xenos turned pale as they realized the three big faces were all casting spells, the spirit pillar mercilessly let loose its magic.
“Icicle Edge.”
“Light Burst.”
“Dark Roar.”
A blade of ice. A flash of light. Oncoming darkness. The wave of blasts swallowed up the monsters.
“AAAAAAAAH!”
As the group of Xenos desperately evaded with perfect coordination, the dragon girl shrieked in the arms of the lizardman who carried her.
“Disperse!”
The first squad was enduring the enemy’s bombardment, but Finn’s orders were even more precise than his opponent’s barrage. He immediately started firing off orders to the adventurers who had just barely managed to drop to the ground to avoid the blasts.
“Every squad needs to split into parties of five and move separately to attack! Don’t give the enemy an easy target by bunching together!”
His orders were transmitted through the oculus to all the other adventurers. He was able to come up with guidance fast enough that the squads who had almost been blown away by the enemies’ absurd triple cannon were still able to keep up and stem the losses.
Against a powerful enemy and a preposterous situation, the most effective weapon was the commander’s loud voice. A brave command was as reassuring as any weapon or magic to subordinates dealing with adversity. Braver’s immediate orders nipped the loss in morale and avoided the worst result.
Finn himself was enduring the enemies’ fusillade using the spirit flags while simultaneously taking command and raising his soldiers’ spirits.
She broke free from the magic cannons’ encirclement, leaving it behind in the blink of an eye. As the accelerating shock wave from impact spread outward and the hundred magic circles were being shredded to pieces, Aiz appeared directly in front of Levis.
“? Gh?!”
From a close range, the black storm brought Levis back to her senses. The girl was expressionless as she prepared to attack. She held her sword raised high above her head. And then she swung it down with a single vertical slash. It was a stance for striking down an enemy who had left themselves open to attack, and she was using it despite the fact that she was assaulting Levis head-on. But even that meant nothing to Aiz now.
In truth, Levis was not able to fully respond to it in her current state. Using the wind pressure that was brutally blowing right in front of her, the creature used all her strength to retreat as the blade swung down.
And it broke .
“What?!”
Aiz’s sword broke the adamantite floor—and the structure of Knossos was supposed to be indestructible.
Green flesh splattered. Fragments of stone and metal blasted through the air. The floor shattered, making a giant crater like a meteorite had fallen there. And a hole opened.
Levis was struck by a sense of weightlessness. And then she was swallowed up by the darkness leading to the next floor, still shuddering as she fell.
“I will beat you.”
“—Ghhh, Ariaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Levis screamed as the girl leaped into the hole to pursue her. Using her black storm, Aiz accelerated in midair, closing in on the creature who had no foothold, mercilessly hitting her with a slash.
The splattering of flesh and shattering of bones were melodic.
Losing an arm to a single blow, Levis crossed blades with Aiz at a disadvantage. But if she had not done so, she would have died.
As the creature took the brunt of that charge, the top half of the cursed sword broke off, but she still desperately swung it. She was able to avoid lethal blows; however, there was a lot of blood pumping from her stomach. Her lips were red with fresh blood. With one exchange, Levis fell, and Aiz used her wind to kick off the wall and immediately chase the creature. Levis would not be allowed to escape. The black wind billowed, lashing out.
Overpowered by the wind, her sword broken, tossed about by the gale, she was pierced through while in the air.
One, two, three, four. As Aiz’s sword transformed into wind and roared, she broke through four adamantite walls and then through the floor again.
Despite being in an underground labyrinth, Levis was experiencing the weightlessness of free-falling through the air. As rage and fear filled Levis’s eyes, fragments of metal and thousands of bits of green flesh filled her vision, making it hard to see. She fell and fell and fell some more. She fell to a far deeper floor as pieces of her body were carved away.
And then…
“Gaaaah?!” Levis slammed into the floor of a big chamber with a resounding boom. It was a wide area blanketed in green flesh. Levis could immediately guess it was the twelfth floor due to the distance from the demi-spirits.
“This will do.”
After knocking Levis down through two whole floors, Aiz landed gently using her wind as a rain of adamantite and flesh crashed down around her. This would be the true location of their final battle.
“Aria, you bitch…”
Levis no longer had her right arm; her gnarled left foot had lost all shape and form. Anyone who did not know better would surely believe she was down for the count. She had been stretched to her limit by the sword’s wind, and her whole body was covered in lacerations. There was nowhere on her without some open wound.
With a face warped in rage, Levis got up, wounds giving off a hot steam as the creature’s regeneration kicked in. The severed right arm was quickly mended. She slammed the last bit of her sword’s hilt that remained into the ground.
“Where were you keeping that monster?! Why haven’t you used it before?!”
“I couldn’t use it. Because I was always imagining you were human. Even though you have extreme power, somewhere in my heart, I thought you weren’t a monster, since we could communicate with each other.”
Avenger. According to Loki, it was an incomparably powerful rare Skill—the most potent one, even among all her followers. The effect was a strong increase in power based on the strength of her desire for revenge. Its target was hideous monsters.
Until now, Aiz had not been able to view Levis as a monster. Or, rather, Levis did not fall into the neat box that the girl had created to define them. But she had overcome this obstacle by training with a certain strongest.
“But after fighting him…after fighting Warlord, he taught me: I need to use everything I have to beat you.”
And more importantly…
“…There are monsters who can speak human words. There was a dragon with a human heart.”
A troubled look appeared on Aiz’s otherwise expressionless face as she put her heartbreaking thoughts into words. The image of a single vouivre crossed her mind. Under that moonlit night, there was the dragon girl who had been protected by that boy, who then had protected him—the dragon girl who had cried as she pleaded with Aiz.
“The exact opposite of you. You have a monster’s heart.”
Aiz did not know the answer to this question: If a monster could reason and cry, could it really be a monster? Or was someone in a human shell committing atrocities the true monster?
She had been at a loss after meeting the Xenos. Were monsters an absolute evil that needed to be destroyed or not?
“I’ll be the one to decide who is a person and who is a monster.”
And now, she finally spoke the answer she had been avoiding.
“I’ll decide with my own eyes who to use this power on!”
That was the answer Aiz had reached after the chance encounter with the Xenos. She would not burn everything down indiscriminately with that black blaze. She would not become a puppet to the raging howls of her Skill. Instead, she would use her golden eyes to direct her sword. Even as she was eaten away by the black flames, her eyes were lit with the light of that resolve like a sword.
Levis stood dumbfounded as the girl’s glare pierced her.
“…Bh.” Finally, air passed through the creature’s lips. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Levis laughed. It was the first time Aiz had ever heard her chuckle.
“You’ve changed, Aria…Yes…you’ve changed.”
“…”
“Compared to our first encounter…Your eyes never looked like that before. When your eyes were black all the way to the bottom, it was similar to ours.”
While the creature’s body was recovering, giving off a hot steam, Levis compared a scene from her memory with what stood before her now.
“What changed you? How did you become that strong? For the first time, I’m a bit curious about you.”
True to her words, her eyes were filled with interest as she ran her fingers over her wounded stomach that had fixed itself, up across her own voluptuous bosom, her neck, and then her cheek.
“Aria, until today, you were my everything. Stealing you away was my job.”
“…”
“Everything in this world is worthless. I’m not even sure what meaning there is in doing this. Even though I have something that I must protect at all costs, it’s really just inertia pushing me forward.”
The pessimistic creature finally unveiled her own thoughts for the first time. Stowed away in her gradually strengthening tone was a fighting spirit that did pale in comparison to Aiz’s.
“But when I’m chasing you! When I’m facing off against you! When that happened, surprisingly, that might have been the only time I was happy! When I was crossing blades with you, it might have been the only time I could forget myself!” Levis howled, as if her withered emotions were returning with their full force.
“That must be why I’m so happy to face off against you now that you’ve changed into this!”
“That’s not how I feel.”
And on the other end, Aiz stared down the monster before her, her eyes giving off a sort of black glint.
—Don’t be consumed by it. Control it. And remember.
The enemy facing you now is…
Aiz had an enemy she needed to defeat, a being that could not be forgiven. She had an irreplaceable wish. However, her target was not Levis.
“You are my enemy. And a stepping-stone. I will defeat you and then go fulfill my wish.”
Levis cackled even more maniacally.
“That’s in your nature, Aria! A dollish face and a childish determination not to lose! How horribly impertinent! But that’s fine. You are fine just the way you are!”
In the next instant, her eyes flared as she stuck her arm into the green flesh on the floor.
“Come, you useless fragments!”
“!!”
Shock flashed through Aiz’s eyes. Starting where she stuck her hand into the floor, the green flesh began to gradually rise, eating into Levis. It was a flesh brimming with magic, an armor created by the corrupted spirit that granted power beyond human understanding.
Crawling from Levis’s right hand, arm, and shoulder, the green flesh violated Levis’s right side, synchronizing with her and turning a crimson color. It became an armor of flesh bonded to her body.
The red surface was gnarled with vessels like leafy veins adhering to her skin. The enormous, eyelike organ embedded in her right shoulder stared at Aiz.
“If you’ve changed, then…I have to change, too.”
As Levis stood up from her kneeling position, she withdrew something as she pulled out the arm she had thrust into the floor.
She drew a crimson longsword from the floor with a ghastly burbling sound. The sword was steeped in magic, the spirits’ corrupted sword.
“Let’s begin. This really will be our final battle.”
There was a popping sound as the vessel running along Levis’s cheek burst, letting out an explosion of magic that her body could not contain. The wound was immediately healed by her regeneration, but there was just another pop in a different location as boiling blood splattered across the floor.
The creature’s body was gradually self-destructing. However, Aiz was in the same position. The black wind blasting all around her was steadily eating away at her slender body. Levis was not the only one summoning a power beyond what her body could withstand.
“…”
“…”
They both quietly readied their blades. The violent waves from the black wind whipped their hair through the air, and the unsightly flesh armor trembled in the face of its prey.
This was the fourth time. The fourth time that they had crossed blades. When one lost, they would train to win the next time, causing the other to go off in search of strength.
To stamp the last ticket in that unending relationship, they both rampaged wildly.
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
With a howl, the creature sprinted, tearing up the floor where she’d launched off. Aiz responded by lowering her body and disappearing. The black wind shattered the ground in a single blow as she accelerated even faster than the monstrous woman, closing the distance between them.
The monster howled against the roar of the black wind as they clashed.
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