“Ottar’s somewhere in the middle levels?”
Raul Nord, member of Loki Familia, spun around.
It was evening, only two days remaining until the expedition.
They were in Guild Headquarters, currently teeming with adventurers on their way back from the Dungeon. Armor-clad demi-humans bustled around the wide marble lobby as they went about their business, whether it be cashing in their monster loot, reporting to their advisers, or collecting rewards for completed quests.
Standing in front of the giant bulletin board that was decorated with official Guild proclamations and quest notices, Raul turned his gaze toward the incoming bearer of information.
“Is that true, Aki?”
“Yes. Well, at least that’s what a couple of adventurers were saying earlier. Not sure how much stock you put in it, but quite a few folks have seen him now.”
The cat girl in black—Aki—flicked her slender obsidian tail that was the same color as her waist-length hair.
A number of Loki Familia adventurers were at the Guild collecting intel that could prove useful during their upcoming expedition.
Irregulars along their planned route, overlapping schedules with other factions, potential presence or absence of floor bosses—investigating these things was important work and couldn’t be neglected if they wanted to ensure their expedition’s smooth progress.
And it was this exact job that’d been entrusted to Loki Familia’s lower-ranking members.
“Mister Rauuuuuul! Looks like ol’ Goliath’s reared his ugly head on the eighteenth floor again. Everyone’s just lettin’ him be, assuming we’ll take care of him as we go through.”
“The Guild’s saying Babel can’t get all the salamander wool and undine robes we ordered! What should we do?”
“Just…just hold on a second, will ya? Give me a moment!” Raul thrust his hands out to stop the barrage of incoming information, his brow furrowing in overwhelmed aggravation as he pleaded silently for a chance to collect himself.
Raul Nord. Human. Twenty-one years old.
His big forehead was crowned with a crop of spiky black hair. A man of medium build and average stature, his features only further emphasized his humanness and utter ordinariness. Even now, standing flustered in front of his companions, he made for a fairly boring, uninteresting addition to the familia.
That being said, he was still a Level 4, second-tier adventurer.
Born the third son of a poor farming family, before he was even eight years old Raul made what he called “the biggest decision of his life” by leaving his country home. Like so many others, he arrived at Orario filled with big dreams and just a little manly ambition. Before long, he found himself inducted into Loki Familia.
He turned out to be a natural, and by forcing his way onto the battlefield behind Finn and the others, Raul got to where he was today. For a reason even Raul himself couldn’t fathom, first Finn, then the other elites in the familia began putting a great deal of trust in him, which was why he often found himself tasked with supervising other lower-ranking members, whether in administrative tasks like this or dealing with issues in the Dungeon.
That same human, so scatterbrained when compared to the pioneers of such a great familia, was currently attempting to prioritize the incoming information from his fellow familia members one at a time.
“Uhhh…Right! Aki! We were talking about Ottar…”
“He’s been spotted hunting monsters around the seventeenth floor these last couple of days. Right, Leene?” Aki turned to glance at her colleague next to her.
The bespectacled girl with her hair pulled back in a braid responded with a nod and a hesitant “Y-yes.”
Ottar the Warlord…captain of Freya Familia and the strongest warrior in all of Orario.
At the same time, he was one of Loki Familia’s longest-standing foes.
Ottar had commanded the top spot on the familia’s blacklist for as long as Raul could remember.
It seemed a bit strange that Freya Familia’s captain, of all people, would be camping out in the middle levels where he’d overpower every monster he came across…
“…What’s that guy up to, I wonder.” Though even as he muttered it under his breath, Raul knew there was no one in the vicinity who could supply him with an answer.
The other familia members around him glanced back and forth at one another, starting with Aki, who simply shrugged her shoulders.
“What’s goin’ on here, huh?”
“Ah! Sir Gareth!”
The dwarf made his way through the hustle and bustle to where they were standing next to the giant bulletin board.
Gareth was one of the heads of Loki Familia, and the great dwarf warrior exuded the aura of a seasoned soldier. He naturally drew the gazes of the nearby adventurers, their eyes filled with a kind of awe.
Raul filled the dwarf in about Ottar.
“So the old bloke’s muckin’ about the middle levels? Hmm…Bah! I wouldn’t give it a thought!”
“Really?”
“That’s right! Don’t let it bother ya, yeah? Even if the fella’s there on official orders, he’s not one to favor plannin’ ’n’ all that. I don’t think we’ve got to worry about him interferin’ in our expedition,” Gareth mused. “’Sides, what with the Guild encouragin’ exploration in the depths, he’d be takin’ a risk himself attackin’ a familia doin’ just that,” he continued, running a hand through his beard.
Raul and the others found themselves agreeing with the old dwarf—he was one of their familia’s leading authorities. Of course, thanks to Aiz’s silence, none of them knew about the vicious attack against her that had occurred just the night before, which meant they weren’t particularly on guard when it came to Freya Familia.
“What brought you here, then, Sir Gareth?”
“Right! Got done carryin’ everything back to the manor. Expedition’s gonna start right on time the day after tomorrah. Gotta inform the Guild, y’know?”
Raul and company followed Gareth to the counter in the lobby as the dwarf filled them in on the familia’s preparations. It seemed everything was in order, including the weapons—and the magic sword—from Hephaistos Familia.
When a high-ranking faction such as Loki Familia went on an expedition, it was essential that they report the details to the Guild—everything from their start date to how long they planned to stay down in the Dungeon. They were a valuable military power to Orario, after all.
If something happened to them and they didn’t return from the Dungeon, the Guild would oftentimes send in search-and-rescue parties.
“By the way, how’re you kids doin’, huh? Restin’ up properly ’n’ all that?” Gareth turned toward Raul and the entourage of other familia members trailing behind them.
“Ha…Ha-ha-ha…Ha-ha-ha-ha-haaa…” Raul laughed weakly.
Even with the expedition right around the corner, he and the other low-ranking members were finding every chance they could get to train, none of them wanting to look bad in the face of Aiz’s recent level-up. As they walked, Aki looked purposefully in the other direction, and Leene refused to meet Gareth’s eyes.
Gareth, in turn, could do nothing but sigh, the same as a certain high elf had earlier.
“I’ve already gotten an earful from Mister Bete, actually…” Raul admitted. The memory of the werewolf standing over him with a sardonic laugh as tears pricked the corners of his eyes was still fresh in his head.
“Ain’t gonna do ya any good now, moron!”
“He and Miss Aiz…they went up against some pretty powerful enemies down on the twenty-fourth floor, didn’t they?” Raul whispered quietly in Gareth’s ear.
It took Gareth a moment, but finally, he nodded. “…Aye, they did.”
As one of the familia’s elites, he’d already heard all about the incident a few days prior.
“Bete hasn’t changed a bit since they got back,” Raul muttered, thinking back to his show of arrogance—par for the course for him—back in the manor.
Gareth, however, remained quiet. He knew that the werewolf had actually been training harder than anyone else the last few days.
Blaming himself entirely for what happened, and stubbornly hating to lose, he’d been exercising on his own in secret, careful to make sure Raul and the others had no idea what he was doing.
And Gareth had been helping him train in a little shed just outside the city in the wee hours of the morning.
“Haah…Kids these days…”
“?”
Gareth let out a deep sigh, to which Raul eyed him curiously.
Before long, they made it to the counter where a young receptionist sat waiting.
“Report from Loki Familia. Just wanted to let ya know we’ll be settin’ off on our expedition in two days like we tentatively reported. Here’s our application.”
“Wonderful! Understood.”
Misha Frot cheerfully replied as she accepted the application parchment from Gareth.
She was a short little thing, reaching only 150 celch, topped with a mop of pink hair. Answering Gareth with a youthful voice that matched her cherubic face, she rose from her chair and straightened her posture.
Placing one hand over the other with a smile, she gave the dwarf a deep bow.
“We will be awaiting your safe return. May the fortunes of war shine upon you.” It was a prayer for the brave adventurers’ triumphant return, spoken not only as an employee of the Guild but as a fellow citizen of Orario.
Then she stamped the expedition application form with the crimson Guild seal.
“Loki Familia’s expedition will be carried out as planned.”
The nearby torchlight responded with a spark.
The voice of the elven Guild master, Royman Mardeel, echoed throughout the dim underground space. The floor was covered in large slate blocks and four torches illuminating its large altar, giving off the feeling of an ancient temple.
His corpulent, fleshy body, completely unbefitting of an elf, knelt in front of the colossal two-meder figure of Ouranos. The old god nodded slowly from his seat at the center of the altar.
“You may leave.”
“Y-yes, my liege.”
As the austere voice of Orario’s founding god boomed around him, Royman’s bulbous body quivered. Silently, he stepped back from the altar, making his way out of the chamber and back up the stairs to the surface.
Ouranos remained motionless in his spot atop the great stone pedestal, his blue eyes staring after Royman’s retreating form long after the other man had left.
“…They’ll be going through with it after all?” came a voice from the darkness once Royman was out of earshot.
It was Fels who stepped forward, dark robe slicing through the veil of concentrated darkness in the corner of the chamber.
Blackness shrouded the cloak all the way down to his ornately patterned gloves, leaving absolutely no skin visible. Fels was like a ghost in the flickering torchlight—appearance, race, sex, every possible aspect was left as an enigma.
“Indeed. It would seem Loki, too, desires information on the recent string of violence,” Ouranos replied without even turning his head.
Thus began the colloquy between the venerable god and his closest adviser, deep in the prayer room below Guild Headquarters.
“What do you think, Ouranos? Could the key to everything truly lie within the Dungeon’s depths? On its fifty-ninth floor?”
“That is what I believe, though I cannot be certain.”
“A god’s hunch, sir?”
“Yes.”
Their words were short, punctuated with flickers from the nearby torches.
At Ouranos’s terse response, Fels nodded.
“Understood. Shall I arrange for a set of eyes to watch them? I’m sure whatever is down there will be of great interest to us.”
“See that you do,” Ouranos replied to the black-robed Magus’s suggestion.
“Allow me to go over all our information. Let me know if I’m missing anything.”
At the old god’s nod, Fels continued from within the folds of the shadow-filled hood.
“First, we have what was revealed to us on the twenty-fourth floor by that creature-woman with the red hair, Levis.”
“The one manipulating the viola and protecting the crystal orb…”
“Indeed. In addition, if we believe what we learned from the ringleader of the Twenty-Seventh-Floor Nightmare, the reanimated Olivas Act…both the fetus and the vibrant magic stones within that new species of monster all originate from the being referred to simply as ‘her.’”
“She” was the one who had revived Olivas Act from the abyss of death by implanting within him a vivid magic stone, giving birth to a new human-monster hybrid. The red-haired woman, Levis, was also such a creature. By assimilating magic stones, she and her kind could morph into all-powerful enhanced species—beings that surpassed the limits of both mortal and divine knowledge.
It seemed these creatures, “her” especially, had used their ability to control monsters and set off this string of incidents dating all the way back to the Monsterphilia.
“‘She’s sleeping deep within the earth,’ ‘She wants to see the sky’…That is what Olivas Act said according to Hermes Familia. From that we can infer ‘she’ inhabits the Dungeon’s lower depths…”
“Then is she like the monsters of the Ancient Times, craving the light of the upper world?” Fels responded to Ouranos’s words with a well-placed conclusion.
There was a high chance that whatever awaited Loki Familia on the fifty-ninth floor, where the creature Levis had directed Aiz, had something to do with “her.”
“The relationship between Aiz Wallenstein and the crystal orb is but one piece of the puzzle.”
“…”
Aiz had reacted so strongly upon first coming into contact with the fetus back in Rivira on the eighteenth floor, she’d collapsed. The fetus, too, had responded to Aiz’s magic.
At Fels’s words, Ouranos ever so slightly averted his eyes.
Enshrouded in deep shadows broken only by the flickering torches, he stilled his tongue as though searching his thoughts for an answer.
Fels continued in spite of the old god’s brooding silence.
“Next, we have the remaining Evils. While we do know they’re ghosts from ages past, we don’t know who is leading them. All we can confirm is that they were seen capturing violas on the twenty-fourth floor and carting them off to who-knows-where.”
The many factions that sided with both them and the Guild had conspired against and destroyed this radical group.
Under the direction of gods who referred to themselves as “evil,” they’d stood for the downfall of order, inciting rebellions all across Orario with schadenfreude as their one clear objective. They simply wanted to watch the world burn.
The Evils familias had been eradicated, and every single one of the “evil gods” sent back to the heavens. It wasn’t clear whether these newly discovered “remnants” were actual survivors of the group or simply recent followers eager to carry on their work.
Everything about the group remained a haze—how many familias were connected to it, the organization’s scale, and even the gods leading it were a mystery.
“Forces on the surface cooperating with ‘her’ and her followers below to obliterate Orario…Could this be what’s tying all these events together?”
“It would come as no surprise to me if the remnants of the Evils had an alliance with the underground powers…or perhaps were being used by the underground.”
Fels’s voice reverberated across the altar, then Ouranos’s.
It could very well be that the two groups, Levis’s followers and the Evils remnants, were both using each other, but before Fels and Ouranos could reach a conclusion, there was an interruption.
“…May I ask you something, Ouranos?” Black robes swishing, Fels turned toward the venerable god in his spot atop the altar.
Ouranos replied affirmatively with a simple turn of his head.
“During the incident on the twenty-fourth floor, the red-haired woman uttered the name of a person…Well, the name sounded very much like that of a god—Enyo.”
It had been among the information they’d received from the chienthrope.
“—While not complete, it’s grown enough! Take it to Enyo!”
That was what Levis had said to that figure in the mask and hood—possibly one of the Evils—upon acquisition of the crystal orb.
“This ‘Enyo’ is probably an important character. Does the name ring a bell?” Fels asked in an attempt to confirm Lulune’s report.
“…I don’t recall ever having heard of a god by that name,” Ouranos replied before continuing. “However…the word enyo does exist in the language of the gods.”
His blue eyes narrowed.
“It means ‘destroyer of cities.’”
It was the day before the expedition.
Which meant it was the last day of training.
Two shadows overlapped atop the stones of the great wall on the city’s outer rim, bathed in dawn’s first light from the east. The woman, long golden hair spilling out behind her, struck forward again and again, and the boy, white hair fluttering this way and that, followed her every movement in fierce pursuit.
They performed violent back-and-forth offense and defense between scabbard and dagger as they had each day before.
As the magnificent dawn cresting the far mountains painted Aiz’s face, she studied the boy in front of her.
Each time she went for an opening, he blocked.
As she raised the speed of her attacks, the number of his blocks increased.
It was the defensive technique she’d taught him.
Repelling enemies’ attacks from the side or an angle, rather than from the front.
In terms of defense, he’d certainly met his goal for their training.
The boy put everything he had behind his strikes, behind the technique he’d seen, felt, and learned over the course of their duels.
“—Nngh!”
There was a kind of brazen vigor imbued in his skill with the dagger.
Even as the relentless string of attacks carved away at him, he kept up his blocks, deflecting blow after blow.
And then.
The boy did more than defend. He attacked Aiz for the very first time.
“…!” Aiz’s eyes opened in surprise.
Bell’s dagger streaked at her, its blade flashing beneath the morning sky.
It was easy to block, but that didn’t change the fact that the boy had been able to get a strike in at all.
Aiz stared at him wordlessly. The boy’s breathing was haggard, and his dagger arm hung limply at his side.
His body was littered with bruises, but his face held the same look of determination he’d had since their first day, rubellite eyes shining with an unfading brilliance.
All of a sudden, the morning sun beamed toward them, the resulting radiance flooding Aiz’s field of vision with white.
The boy stood there, haloed in pure-white resplendence. A sort of euphoria escaped Aiz’s lips at the sight, and she smiled from the bottom of her heart.
“That’s it, then, I guess…” Aiz whispered with a sigh.
The sun was already peeking over the majestic mountains of the eastern sky, almost like a signal that their week of training had come to an end.
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