Dungeon ni Deai o Motomeru no wa Machigatte Iru Darou ka Gaiden – Sword Oratoria - Volume 3 - Chapter Pr

PROLOGUE III OMEN 

A cacophony of screams echoed through the air. 
The deep, angry roars of men mixed with the high-pitched, shrill shrieks of women. The ferocious howls of countless monsters drowned out the overlapping sounds of metal and leather boots. 
They were deep in a labyrinth that looked as if it had gone astray and wound up inside an incredibly massive tree. Patches of moss clung to the walls and hung from the ceiling, emitting blue and green light that made the surroundings seem like a fantastical, unspoiled frontier. Adventurers raced through the wide hallways of the giant tree dungeon with a frantic pace that didn’t suit the idyllic scenery around them. 
One could tell at a glance that their equipment showed their owners were experienced—the weapons and armor clearly belonged to upper-rank adventurers. Even streaked with the blood of their enemies, the weapons shone brilliant and sharp, as if to display their owners’ valor. The armor protecting their bodies was much the same. 
They possessed abilities that all lower-class adventurers strived to achieve. But now, they were tripping over themselves in a panicked rout. 
These men and women turned tail and ran from an immense swarm of monsters that would make anyone shut their eyes tight in fear. 
“Why are there so damn many?!” 
“Shut the hell up and run!!” 
The advancing monsters were so numerous that their procession filled the entire hallway. 
Members of a variety of familias, swept up in this mess together, called for retreat with little regard for who belonged to which party. A token amount of resistance could be heard as blades slashed monster flesh and waves of arrows whistled through the air, but the innumerable multitude snuffed them out. The scarce few adventurers desperately trying to stem the inexorable tide dwindled, as one after the other showed their backs to the enemy and fled. 
The horde pushed forward and fell upon a new party that happened to be in the way. Their screams quickly added to the pandemonium. 
“What idiot drew all these monsters to us?!” 
Deadly hornets, lizardmen, swordstags, dark fungi. One adventurer took a look at the terrifying host of middle-level monsters and snarled with certainty that it was a pass parade—someone had led the beasts to this location and left this party to deal with them. Everyone could tell from the overwhelming number of monsters alone that this could not be a natural occurrence. 
The grotesque mass crashed through the halls like an oncoming tidal wave. 
“This floor’s been so out of whack…! The encounter rate’s too damn high!” 
This was the Dungeon—twenty-fourth floor, deep in the middle levels. 
Even the parties accustomed to roaming this area couldn’t contain their fear and screamed at the top of their lungs once they saw a new swarm of monsters approaching from another adjoining hallway. The two swarms merged, forming the world’s most terrifying parade. The monsters’ ghastly howls tore into the adventurers’ ears, deafening them to their own screams in a matter of moments. 
“They got my buddy!” “Anybody, please! Help me!!” “Damn it!” 
Enveloped by the swarm, doomed adventurers called out to their allies as the myriad claws and fangs tore them apart. The survivors ran, the cries of their companions at their backs. The sight of all the monsters jostling one another to get their jaws closer to their prey drove them to coax every last bit of speed from their legs. 
“What the hell’s going on?!” 
Still yelling in terror, the surviving adventurers barreled up the stairs to a higher floor. 
“—Monsters have overrun the twenty-fourth floor!! Do something about it!!” 
Wham! 
A clenched fist slammed into the reception counter. 
A bright, glistening moon lit up the night sky above Orario’s northwest block. Guild Headquarters was almost deserted. The only exception was the area around the reception counter, where a human adventurer was aggressively posturing to get his point across. 
His angry voice roared through the late-night air in the lobby, startling the receptionist behind the counter, Misha Frot. 
“Run-of-the-mill upper-class adventurers can’t do jack shit about this! At this rate, the casualties are only going to keep climbing!!” 
“I-I’m so sorry!! I’ll get on it right away!” 
The intensity in the man’s eyes made Misha squirm under his gaze. 
The hour was quite late. It was her turn to cover the night shift, so most of her coworkers had already gone home. To have an adventurer issue a claim like this—luck was not on Misha’s side. It was all she could do to hold back the tears welling up in her eyes. 
Her 150-celch frame, dressed in the black uniform that all Guild employees wore on duty, bowed again and again. 
“Do you have any idea how many died today and how many of them were my friends?! The hell with issuing quests, that takes too long! Declare a mission! Get exterminators down there NOW!!” 
“Y-yes, sir!!” 
As soon as the adventurer finished his rage-filled request, he slammed a completed document with the details onto the counter and turned on his heel. 
“Uwaa…” Misha, completely exhausted, fell onto the counter as she watched the man shrink into the distance as he left the Guild. 
Incapable of working for a while, she picked up the document and made her way to the office behind the reception counter. Asking someone else to cover her post, she went to her desk. After setting down the document, she stepped away, thinking a drink might help settle her nerves. 
“Well, that was rough.” 
“Chiiiief.” 
Misha was halfway to the break room when one of her bosses came down the hall from the other direction. She looked up at him, unable to keep the tears back any longer. The section chief, a slender chienthrope, sympathetically handed her a wooden cup full of steaming-hot tea. 

“Thank you, sir…Waahhh, I was so scared.” 
“So are the adventurers. They can’t keep their cool when their lives are in danger.” 
Misha held the cup with both hands while she sipped the tea. Shrinking in on herself, she gave her boss a small nod to let him know she understood. 
“I couldn’t help but overhear, but is this another request for the twenty-fourth floor?” 
“Yes. He says there are too many monsters…Do you know anything about it, Chief?” 
“The Guild has issued several quests on that floor over the past few days, all of them concerning the unusual amount of monsters appearing on the main route through floor twenty-four…It hasn’t even been a day yet, but it seems nothing has been reported on the upper levels.” 
Misha’s superior explained that their information on adventurer activites mostly came from upper-class adventurers who ventured into the lower levels from the town of Rivira on the eighteenth floor. 
The developments on the twenty-fourth floor were so recent that the Guild had not yet identified this as a bona-fide irregularity in the Dungeon, nor had they considered them significant. 
The chienthrope adjusted his glasses, standing in front of the mostly empty office. 
“Judging by the adventurer just now, the situation may be more serious than we previously thought. Yes, we should treat this matter with the utmost care.” 
“I-I think so, too. Everyone upstairs needs to know as soon as possible.” 
Misha quickly shuffled her feet back to her desk and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper to draft a document to present her superiors with the information she received from the adventurer. But she suddenly stopped. 
“Huh? No way!” 
The adventurer’s document was nowhere to be found. 
“Frot, don’t tell me…You lost it?” 
“O-of course not!!” 
Misha started to panic as her stunned boss watched from beside her desk. 
The surface of her workspace was poorly organized, with papers heaped in great mounds. She lifted several stacks and sifted through pile after pile but couldn’t locate the wayward document. Even crawling around the desk on all fours to make sure it hadn’t fallen off yielded no results. 
Her pink hair swayed from side to side as she climbed back to her feet, a bead of sweat rolling down her cheek. 
“…Th-this has to be the work of the ghost!! I definitely didn’t lose it!” 
She did her best to avoid the boss’s eyes and tried to pin the blame on something else. 
“What did you say…?” 
“You mean you don’t know, Chief? There’s a ghost that appears at Guild Headquarters! There has been for a long time!” 
Her boss regarded her with extreme suspicion, but Misha pressed on. “It’s not just me! I heard other employees working security have seen it! Night after night, the mysterious shadow appears, wearing a pure-black robe that covers it from top to bottom! No matter how many times they try to chase it down, it always leads them to a dead end, disappearing without a trace!” 
Misha used her small body to tell the story, wildly flinging her limbs about. “Some people say it might be an adventurer who was killed by a monster but came back to haunt the Guild…! That ghost must’ve taken the paperwork from my desk…!” 
Even her voice adopted an otherworldly tone as the tale continued, but her boss only stared with a doubtful expression. He chose to not play her game and sighed softly. 
“You know, your love of gossip has caused problems for Tulle before as well. Find that document—I don’t care what you have to do.” 
“Ch-Chief, I told you I haven’t lost it!!” Misha kept insisting that she had put the paper on the center of her desk. 
He turned his back and walked toward the office, ignoring the girl chasing after him with a fresh wave of tears running down her face. 
Amid the echoes of Misha’s voice… 
Far away from the office on the opposite side of the deserted hallway, something glided along. 
The dark shape warped with a small noise, and a black robe dissolved into being, apparently from thin air. 
“……” 
The figure completely draped in the dark cloth—Fels—took a look at the piece of paper in his grasp. It was the document submitted by the adventurer that Misha “lost.” Having taken the document completely unnoticed, the “ghost” Misha talked about was now reading everything written on it. 
“This is…It can’t be…” 
Twenty-fourth floor, swarms of monsters sighted…As more and more details came to light, an androgynous voice mumbled in the darkness. Before long, the space beneath the hood lapsed into shocked silence. 
Fels tucked the piece of paper into the robe’s sleeve almost immediately. 
“…We must play our hand.” With that, the black robe once again dissolved into the shadows. 
Ouranos’s confidant disappeared into the darkness, and not a soul noticed. 
Two days had passed since Udaeus fell at the hands of the Sword Princess.