Dungeon ni Deai o Motomeru no wa Machigatte Iru Darou ka - Volume 13 - Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5 

CALAMITY ARRIVES 

“Bors, this is bad!” 

“I’ve never heard the Dungeon make this noise before! Let’s get outta here!” 

The adventurers had gathered together again after being scattered by their encounter with Gale Wind, and they were now chasing her and Bell in a group. 

They were determined to kill the legendary fugitive with their own hands. She had managed to get away after the surprise attack, but they were sure that with a group this big, they would be able to take her down. 

Things were changing quickly, however. 

There had been the tremendous explosions on the twenty-fifth floor, and now the wails that were unquestionably coming from the Dungeon. Everyone guessed that the high-frequency sounds, so loud they could not stand to leave their ears uncovered, signaled an irregularity. 

The upper-class adventurers knew something unprecedented was about to happen, and without exception they petitioned the head of Rivira to evacuate the party from the floor. 

“Hey, Bors! Bors!” 

“…Wait.” 

“Huh?” 

They stopped moving as Bors thrust his palm toward them. 

He removed his other hand from the side of his giant eye-patch-adorned head and muttered. 

“The sound…has stopped.” 

The mermaid wrapped her arms around her body. 

Ugh…I hate this sound…! 

She was deep underwater, surrounded by bluish darkness. 

She had dived down to escape the horrible cry of her mother, the Dungeon, trying to hide in the water. Her body curled like a fetus, she desperately pressed her hands against the fins that served as her ears. 

I’m scared, scared, scared…! 

It had happened before, just once. 

It had been five years ago, she was sure. 

She had heard her mother’s lament coming from far deeper in the Dungeon. Of course, that time it had nothing to do with Mari, who could not leave the Water Capital, but still, she had been frightened. 

Something bad had been born that time, too. She didn’t know much, but she knew that. She understood. 

Mari pressed her hands to her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. 

She had escaped to the depths of the water in an attempt to separate herself from the terrifying reality. But behind her shut eyelids, she saw her friends and her family—the Xenos. 

The Xenos, and an image of the back of the boy she had met so recently in the Dungeon. 

That boy, who was as important to her as her own family, was here. 

He was already among her most prized treasures. 

Bell…! 

She pushed away her fear and forced her eyes open. 

Her tears spilling into the water and her tail beating against it, the mermaid swam toward the surface where the light filtered in. 

“That was close…” Lilly muttered, ignoring the bead of sweat that was dripping down her chin. 

Before her eyes was a collapsed crystal floor. Far below, she could see the raging waterway. 

Her party had barely managed to escape disaster thus far as they ran through the crumbling twenty-fifth floor, explosions ringing out all around them and destroying anything resembling a road. 

They didn’t know how extensive the damage was, but they knew it was bad. In any case, it was no time to be fighting monsters, who were in the same situation as they were. 

The water paradise had become a ruined capital, and some routes were now impassable. Lilly feared that until the Dungeon finished repairing itself, they would not be able to make it back to the passageway that led to the twenty-fourth floor. 

“I’m worried about these explosions, but…!” 

“That insanely high-pitched noise just a minute ago…Was that from the twenty-seventh floor?!” 

“If that was an irregularity, then Sir Bell…?!” 

Aisha, Welf, and Mikoto were equally distraught. 

“Cassandra! Cassandra! Pull yourself together!” 

“Lady Cassandra?” 

But the healer was more upset than any of them. 

She was collapsed on the floor, unresponsive to Daphne, who was kneeling by her side and shaking her shoulder, or Haruhime, who was frantically calling her name. 

The strength had drained from her legs, and she gripped her head in both hands. Her face was white. Her blood had drained away to the point that her companions wondered whether it was possible for a person to sink that deeply into despair. 

It was strange. 

Lilly couldn’t understand what had happened. 

Ouka and Welf felt the same as they looked on, holding their breath nervously. 

Their ability to think was dulled in the midst of the chaos. 

Lilly could barely make out what Cassandra was saying. 

“…n…un…” 

She was shrieking something over and over. 

“Run…!” 

As the sound of shattering crystal rocks rang out, it silently appeared from within the fissure. 

Spawned from the wall of the cavern, it fell into the plunge pool with a tremendous splash. 

Its newborn cry was an unpleasantly warm sigh. 

As the crashing sound of the Great Falls beat against its skin, the white mist veiled its silhouette. 

It neither howled nor roared a battle cry but instead swished its long tail and moved its two legs, sending ripples across the water’s surface. 

Deep in its eye socket, a sinister crimson light glinted. 

At the edge of the plunge pool as broad as a lake, it bent its joints, and its knees creaked. 

The next instant, it disappeared. 

It had burst from the water’s surface and into the floor’s internal maze. 

“Hey, shouldn’t we try to meet up with Bors?” 

“Idiot. We save our own skins first!” 

The small band of adventurers was on the twenty-seventh floor, but they had been unable to meet up with Bors’s main party. Instead, the four-man party comprised of humans and animal people had hurriedly turned back up the road they came down. They had lost their nerve in the face of the Dungeon’s irregularity. 

For a bunch of hooligans who made their living by exploring the Dungeon, it was the obvious course of action. 

But things didn’t go as they expected. 

“…? What’s that noise…?” 

Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam! 

A strange sound was coming from behind them. 

It sounded like something was jumping up and down. The adventurers stopped and looked over their shoulders. 

The noise was quickly approaching them. 

A shadow flickered in the depths of the passage. 

“Huh?” 

“Something’s com—” 

Pop! 

There was a rather pleasant sound, and then the adventurer’s head burst open, so that he could not finish his sentence. 

Even when his final moment came, he did not know what had happened. 

He had become a silent lump of flesh, with fountains of blood spurting from him as his knees sank to the ground. 

It happened four times. 

They were annihilated. 

It ignored the fresh blood dripping from its claws and trampled on the adventurers’ corpses. 

As its massive shadow fell over the maze, the monster reversed course. 

It was headed toward its next prey. 

“A…Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” 

A scream echoed through the Dungeon. 

It was the wail of a weeping lancer. 

His small party had been demolished by a sudden attack. 

The elven sorcerer had been killed first. She had been determined to purge her shameful fellow elf Gale Wind from their race, and her pridefulness verged on bragging, making her an unpleasant woman to be around. Still, although she was not docile, she was thoughtful in her strange way, and he had thought her something of a good woman. She was the first to fall victim to the claws. Her body was ripped in half at the waist. Her guts spilled out and blood dripped from her vacant eyes. She had died in a way no proud elf would willingly allow. And so the man had lost control of himself and thrust his sword forward. But it met only air. Everything before him went black, and his head split open. 

When he fell, his hand brushed the cheek of the elf who cried tears of blood. 

“What is this thing? I don’t know…What are youuuuuuuu?!” 

The fifth adventurer, a half elf and the last one left standing, pulled out his magic blade. 

There was an explosion followed by flames. 

When the smoke cleared, it had disappeared, leaving the burned corpse of the fifth adventurer sprawled in the passage. 

The shadow ran and danced, and then the next one did, and the next. 

The Dungeon filled with screams. 

Screams of agony were joined by fountains of blood. 

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” 

Faster and faster, so fast it was unbelievable, the corpses multiplied. 

It had a merciless sense of where the adventurers were, and it snuffed out their lives one by one. 

Its slashing claws tore apart whatever they came in contact with. Its biting fangs chewed through flesh and armor alike. Its thrashing tail knocked blood from the mouths of adventurers. 

There was nothing the fifty-some adventurers on the twenty-seventh floor could do. They were simply slaughtered. 

“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!” 

All who saw it cried out. 

“What is that huge thi—?!” 

All who saw it trembled with fear. 

“The t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t t-t-t-t-teeth are…” 

All who saw it were destroyed and devoured. 

Their screams echoed. 

Their weapons shattered. 

They tried to run, but they could not. 

“Bors, save us!! Sav—Aaah!!” 

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!” 

The banquet was unending. 

There were many “wails” as the “road of viscera” was built within the crystal maze. 

The “azure current” now “ran red with blood.” 

As the corpses of the adventurers multiplied one by one, the monsters—the “grotesque horde”—rejoiced. 

They drank the blood of the humans that stained the waterways as if it were fresh dew, and they greedily devoured the bodies the water carried to them as if they were the finest meat. 

Some adventurers bloomed into “flowers of flesh.” 

Some were “swiftly torn asunder.” 

Some were “shattered.” 

The dignity of some became as “playthings.” 

Those who tried in desperation to escape were knocked down by other monsters, who swarmed around them and tore them apart with “countless fangs and claws,” and they were “mourned” all the more miserably. 

Those who died and left their comrades behind “imparted sorrow.” But those who mourned them soon followed the same path. 

The Water Capital had transformed into the stage for a massacre. 

“Oh my…!” 

“This is…” 

When they saw it, Chigusa trembled in fear and Ouka was stunned. 

They were in the cavern on the twenty-fifth floor. 

Lilly and the rest of the party stood on the cliff at the mouth of the waterfall, near the passage leading to the twenty-sixth floor, and looked down on the scene as the falling water thundered in their ears. They had just emerged into the cavern. 

The Great Falls ran red. A faint, fleeting red. 

The cascade, which was directly connected to the waterways within the maze, was spitting out a river of blood produced by the monsters’ feast. The emerald-blue of the plunge pool on the twenty-seventh floor was but a faint memory. 

Bobbing in the water far below, so distant they looked to Lilly and the others like black specks, were the dismembered legs and arms of the half-devoured corpses. The pitiful fragments of weapons and adventurers floated and sank at the lowest level of the water paradise. 

The “depths of hell” overflowed with corpses, returning all to the “mother,” the Dungeon. 

“No way…Is that all…blood…?” 

Welf could not conceal the shaking in his voice. 

“It’s insane; how many adventurers…? Not everyone who went to the twenty-seventh floor…?” 

Mikoto’s voice, too, faded away as she contemplated the possibility. 

“Please stop joking around!! Mr. Bell is still alive! Mr. Bell is…!” Lilly said in a panic. 

Haruhime, even more panicked than Lilly, had gone completely white. 

“Ah, aaah…!!” 

Even Aisha was in a daze. 

“…What the hell is happening?” 

The second-tier adventurer shifted her gaze from the bloodred plunge pool to the fissure opposite it. 

For a moment, she forgot to breathe as she imagined what had been spawned from that all-too-deep crevice. 

“…Let’s go to the twenty-seventh floor! I don’t know what’s happening, but we have to save Mr. Bell!” Lilly shouted. Far above her, standing on the cliff by the passage leading to the twenty-fourth floor, another group of adventurers was screaming. 

The tunnel leading to the inside of the twenty-sixth floor was on the southeastern side of the cavern where Lilly and the others stood now. For Hestia Familia, the floors below were an unknown world, but all nodded back at Lilly. Neither Welf nor Mikoto nor Haruhime hesitated for even an instant. 

Lilly was about to take off running through the cavern with the others in tow when Cassandra, who had been silent up to that point, grabbed her hand. 

“!! Miss Cassandra! This isn’t the time to play arou—” 

She broke off mid-word when she looked up at the face of the girl grasping her small hand in both of her own. 

“Cassan…dra…?” Daphne said, standing as still as Lilly. 

Welf and the others had stopped as well and were staring silently at Cassandra. 

“I’m sorry…I’m sorry; I’m sorry; I’m sorry…!” 

She was sobbing, but she would not let go of Lilly’s hand. 

Her face was filled with despair. She hung her head as tears overflowed from her eyes. She was apologizing to those who were not there. 

“I’m sorry; I’m sorry…!!” 

She was apologizing to the countless adventurers she had given up on because they would not believe her. 

And also to the boy she had allowed to go to the place of disaster. 

She could not stop apologizing. 

This was the “banquet of calamity.” 

The Dungeon said nothing. It merely accepted the blood that flew onto its walls, as if this was the proper course of events. The crystals that had sparkled blue before were stained with blood now, transforming the fantastical scene that had struck Bell’s party with wonder into a picture of hell. 

The Dungeon knew how their journey would end. 

No one would return alive. 

The crystals on the ceiling have dimmed now, like magic-stone lanterns about to run out of energy, because of the explosions on the twenty-fifth floor. As the room grows ever darker, sounds reach our ears. 

“This is…?!” 

The chaotic howls of monsters. 

The sound of something shaking the Dungeon. 

And mixed in with it all, distant but distinctly human screams. 

The sounds intertwine in a strange, unsettling melody. 

What are these sounds? 

What are these screams?! 

As I support Lyu’s body, I cannot prevent myself from screaming at the man in front of us. 

“What did you do?!” 

“It’s a ceremony, you see!” 

He smiles with deep joy. 

“A ceremony to wake me from my nightmare!” 

“Nightmare…?” 

His sunken eyes shine glassily, as if he’s gone mad. 

It’s hopeless. I have no idea what he’s talking about. 

What spurs on my panic is the fact that this guy standing in front of us grinning is in just as bad a situation as we are. He’s dripping sweat as monsters keep howling and the Dungeon shakes, and he looks like his teeth are about to start chattering. 

As if he, too, is heading toward the jaws of death—. 

But what worries me even more than that is the way Lyu—who’s always been so calm and cool—is acting right now. 

“Jura…!” 

She steps away from my arms and tries to calm her ragged breath. But her small frame will not obey her will. As if she is battling a fear on the verge of overflowing or, more likely, because she cannot escape the chains of trauma that bind her, she continues to shake violently. 

She wraps her arms tightly around her chest and glares piercingly at the catman. Far from shrinking, however, he seems to find the situation enjoyable. 

“So you still haven’t figured it out, eh, Rabbit Foot, even though Leon is so upset she’s practically dying?” He jeers at me. “I’ve called it here to the twenty-seventh floor!” 

“Stop!!” 

He ignores Lyu’s plea and merely shouts again. His next words leave me speechless. 

“I’ve summoned the beast that butchered Astrea Familia!” 

“!!” 

Ouranos rose from his throne. 

“Ouranos, what’s wrong?” 

He was in the Chamber of Prayers beneath the Guild, a stone room reminiscent of a temple. Four torches set on the altar of the underground room threw off a red glow. Standing in the center of the shadowy space, the god widened his blue eyes. 

Even via the oculus, Fels sensed the gravity of a situation that prompted the aged deity to rise from his chair. Under ordinary circumstances, he scarcely moved. 

For Ouranos, time stood still. He spoke gravely. 

“That thing has come out…” 

“Thing? What are you referring to? What are you saying, Ouranos?” 

Fels’s voice rose in panic in response to the god’s strange behavior. 

Ouranos gazed through narrowed eyes toward the underground world spread beneath his feet as he spoke into the crystal ball. 

“The monster that decimated Astrea Familia five years ago…” 

“…?!” 

Ouranos continued to speak solemnly to the dumbstruck Fels. 

“The calamity has begun again…” 

“Five years ago, my familia, Rudra Familia, was in a feud with Astrea Familia, you see! I don’t know who was in the right or whatever, but they were getting in the way of us Evils and we couldn’t stand it! So we decided to trap them in the Dungeon!” 

Bell gaped in shock as Jura’s words echoed through the room on the twenty-seventh floor. 

A signal throbbed in the back of his mind. 

What he was hearing now was linked to the story Lyu had told him on the eighteenth floor. 

“Just like today, we collected a whole lot of fire bombs! We thought we’d lure Leon and her familia down there and bury them alive! But those tough bastards didn’t die. We actually ended up on the defensive!” 

Fear and anger rose in Jura’s eyes as he recalled that day. Suddenly, though, his emotions seemed to cool, and an unsettling smile curled his lips. 

“But then…something happened that we hadn’t expected.” 

Lyu’s face distorted, and Jura flinched. 

“Unexpected…?” Bell asked, sweat dripping down his face. 

The catman went pale, but all the same, he continued to grin. 

“A monster spawned from the Dungeon, you see.” 

“When excessive damage occurs, it provokes a self-protective instinct…The Dungeon’s lament was so terrible even my prayers could not reach it.” 

Ouranos spoke sorrowfully as he listened to the continuing voice of the Dungeon. 

On that day five years ago, Rudra Familia had recklessly brought masses of Inferno Stones into the Dungeon, causing huge explosions to erupt on one of the floors. 

The damage had been so extensive the term maze no longer held any meaning. 

And then the Dungeon had sent out its warning signal. 

“If they had simply damaged the structure of the maze, nothing much would have happened. The Dungeon would have repaired itself and regenerated. It has such great power that the children call it an ‘infinite resource’…” 

“But if destructive behavior is so great, so excessive…that the regeneration cannot keep pace…” 

“Yes…The Dungeon chooses not regeneration but elimination of the source of the damage.” 

It was quite simple, really, if one thought of the Dungeon as a living creature. 

When a foreign organism attacks a human internally, the immune system acts to kill the invading pathogen. This is the natural self-defensive instinct of all living creatures. 

The same holds true for the Dungeon. 

As the adventurers say, “The Dungeon is alive.” 

When the womb of all monsters is attacked too fiercely, the living underground maze activates its defensive instincts and spawns a being that serves as its immune response. 

This being that kills foreign organisms—in this case, invading adventurers—can be thought of as the Dungeon’s apostle. And it shakes off even the will of Ouranos, whose role is to hold the Dungeon in check. 

“Are you saying that the same level of damage that occurred five years ago has happened once again?” Fels asked. 

“That seems to be the case…” 

The being the Dungeon spawned five years ago was an Irregular. 

Ouranos had not anticipated it, meaning neither had Astrea Familia or Rudra Familia; it was a truly unknown monster. 

Loki Familia had never seen it, nor had Freya Familia, nor had either of the two largest familias at the time, those of Zeus and Hera. Which is to say, in the thousand years since the deities had descended to the mortal plane, the phenomenon had been observed only once. 

Only Ouranos, who prayed to the Dungeon for mercy, had noticed it. 

And only the victims of this nameless monster had ever laid eyes upon it. 

“Except for me, everyone was killed! That shitty woman from Astrea Familia and me!” 

As Bell listened to the full story that Lyu had kept from him, everything but shock drained from his mind. 

Beside him, Lyu’s face was filled with pain. 

“For the past five years, I’ve been looking into what happened! I investigated all the details of what caused it and how I could summon that monster again! I didn’t ask any of the Evils’ Remnants—I did it all myself!” 

Bell could not believe his ears as he listened to Jura’s overheated explanation. His head still swimming with astonishment and his lips trembling, he finally spoke. 

“Why? Why did you want to summon that thing again…?” 

“So I could train it, obviously!!” Jura snapped back instantly. “Even though I was pissing and shitting myself that time, as a tamer I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Leon, did it look like a monster to you? Not to me! To me, it was more beautiful than a goddess!!” 

Lyu returned Jura’s glance with an indecipherable gaze. 

For the first time, the catman’s voice was trembling. 

A monster lover. 

The phrase rose to Bell’s mind. 

“Its presence was overwhelming, killing everything, destroying everything! I wanted it; I wanted it all for myself!!” 

Perhaps because he was a tamer, his eyes glittered like a child’s, and his voice throbbed with a perverse joy. 

At the time, even though the overwhelming awe and fear had made his whole body tremble, he had earnestly longed to possess the monster. Jura had, in a sense, deified and worshipped the horrible creature. 

In other words, the one-armed tamer had been enraptured by the beast whose overwhelming power gave rise to such tragedy. 

Lyu glared angrily at Jura as he revealed his deepest motivations. 

“Idiot! That monster is different! It’s not like that! It’s not something that can be tamed!” 

“Not by ordinary methods! But I have this!!” 

Jura pulled out an expandable collar. By resonating with the whip, the magic item fashioned by the Evils could tame even monsters from the deep levels. 

“And with it here, I’m not afraid of anything!! I cannot be threatened!” 

“…?!” 

“Not even by you, Leon!” 

Jura pointed at Lyu with his remaining hand, his loathing burning high. 

“Until now, there hasn’t been a single night when you didn’t haunt my dreams! Yes, they were nightmares! But when I summon that monster…Yes! I will overcome the nightmare of that day!” 

As Bell listened to the furious stream of words, the meaning of nightmare and overcome were clear to him. Lyu was the embodiment of Jura’s trauma, and he planned to use her personal trauma to humiliate and erase her. 

There was no room for sympathy toward this man. 

All the same, Bell could see that he, too, was another individual tormented by the past. 

“It’s mine! I’ll never give it up!” he howled, looking toward the ceiling. 

Five years of investigation and research had led Jura to two conclusions. 

First, no matter how much damage was inflicted on the upper levels, the Dungeon would not let out its “wail,” or even so much as a warning. This was because the zone near the surface was heavily affected by the will of Ouranos. Therefore, he determined, the monster could not be summoned to that area. 

His second conclusion had to do with the conditions needed for the nameless monster to appear. The damage to the floors had to be so severe, the Dungeon could not keep up with repairs. If that level of damage was inflicted, the monster would be spawned on the same floor. The monster could not be summoned without taking certain measures. By comparing the number of Inferno Stones his familia used five years ago and the data on damage to the Dungeon against hundreds of locations on maps, Jura had determined that approximately 20 percent of a given floor had to be destroyed. In other words, the very structure of the Dungeon had to be undermined. 

Jura had tamed and then sacrificed a large number of monsters during his five years of experiments in destruction. Based on the minute reactions of the Dungeon, he had finally concluded that the Dungeon viewed the entire Water Capital as a single floor. 

“No one knew of this Dungeon taboo. If we had issued some sort of regulation, we would have ended up revealing that something was there…So we had no choice but to keep quiet and suppress the truth,” Ouranos said. 

The assumption was that under ordinary circumstances, no one would be able to cause large-scale damage to the sprawling floors of the middle levels or below. Who, after all, would risk their own life to do such a thing? 

Astrea Familia, which had witnessed the monster, had been wiped out, and Rudra Familia had been exterminated to the last man by Gale Wind. 

Lyu was the only one left who knew the truth about what had happened, and Ouranos had not thought that she—having experienced tragedy so directly—would ever test the limits of the taboo. 

In other words, it should never have spawned again. 

That would have been true, if Gale Wind had not failed to kill Jura. 

“I revealed everything to the Xenos. They sensed the Irregular five years ago and were terrified of it. I sought their help in ensuring such a thing would never happen again. But…” 

“Right now, Lido and the other Xenos are participating in the invasion of Knossos…!” Fels groaned, the blinking crystals illuminating the mage’s face through the oculus. 

Ouranos nodded gravely. 

“Yes. There is no way to respond swiftly to the situation.” 

“And it’s happening in the middle—no, the lower levels…Just where the expedition headed…It can’t be! Hestia Familia is down there?” 

“Taming a monster…? A monster so horrible it wiped out Lyu’s whole familia…And you called it to this floor?” 

Bell could not piece together all the information that had been thrown at him so quickly. 

It’s no use! I can’t keep up. 

As the sound of his own heart pounded unpleasantly in his ears, Bell frantically tried to understand. 

So the monster that Jura intentionally called here by destroying the floors is Lyu’s true enemy… 

That nightmare was never supposed to return. 

But now it was rampaging through this floor, exterminating what it viewed as a virus. In other words— 

“—Bors?!” 

Having finally figured out what was going on, Bell turned toward the entrance of the room and the maze beyond, where he could still hear monsters howling as if in celebration. 

The faces of the adventurers in Bors’s party rose before his mind’s eye, and he was about to take off running in their direction when Lyu grabbed his arm. 

“Miss Lyu?!” 

“No…!” 

Her delicate elf’s hand was as white as snow. 

“You must not go! If you try to fight that thing…!” 

For the first time, Bell saw a look of pleading fill her face. Her normally resolute blue eyes wavered with despair. It was as if she was crying without any tears—as if she was looking through him and pleading with some phantom of the past not to go forward. 

Bell was torn over what to do. He said nothing. 

“That’s right, Leon! You can’t let it go, can you?! You fought that monster yourself, and you know even better than I do how terrifying it is!” 

Once again, Jura cackled. 

“Not to mention…” 

Bell gasped at the catman’s next words. 

“…the fact that you don’t want to butcher more of your friends with your own hands!” 

Lyu’s face seemed to crack. 

“Oh yes, that’s what you did!” 

“Shut up.” 

“To save your precious self!” 

“Shut up!” 

“By sacrificing your friends, you were finally able to drive off the monster!” 

“Shut uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup!!” 

The catman laughed. 

Bell stood rooted to the ground. 

Lyu threw her head back and howled. 

The three of them were trapped in the chaos of their entangled emotions. 

Just at that instant, a roar thundered through the Dungeon. 

For a moment, after the hair-raising roar died down, the entire floor was silent. 

Bell couldn’t breathe. Lyu stood frozen. Jura shuddered. 

Both the carefully cultivated senses of the three adventurers and their most basic animal instincts were screaming warning signals. 

The tremor of horror lasted for only a second. 

The floor quaked in unison, and when the momentary hush was shattered, a mad rush of men and women flooded into the room where Bell stood. 

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!” 

The pack of adventurers arrived with Bors at the head. 

It was the hunting party that both Bell and Lyu knew so well. 

Only now, its size had clearly shrunk. 

Those who remained were spattered with copious amounts of blood—and it was not their own. 

Bell gaped at them. 

“Mr. Bor—” 

His scream died mid-word. 

A pair of bloodred eyes floated faintly in the darkness beyond the entrance to the room. Icy claws gripped his heart. 

…There it is. 

An instant later, the shadow disappeared into the darkness. 

“—” 

Bell heard the sound of crystal being crushed underfoot, and then a flash of movement grazed past Bors and his party as they tried to flee. It continued on without stopping, whizzing at a slant over Bell’s head. 

He didn’t even have a chance to react. 

By the time he whipped his head around, one member of Bors’s party was missing. 

Gripped by terror, still not understanding what had happened, he scanned the room behind him. 

Nothing was there. 

“Aa…Aaaa…” 

It was above him. 

Like a giant spider, it clung there gripping the joint between the wall and the ceiling. 

The ill-fated missing adventurer was clenched between its jaws. 

“—” 

The form illuminated by the light of the crystals was huge and thin. 

It had two arms and two legs. The long, thin arms were bizarrely out of proportion with the body. The legs, too, were long and thin but bent backward at the joints. Oddly, the bony, nearly fleshless form was covered in a shell that at first glance looked like a coat of armor. It glinted with a strange dark-purplish-blue light. From the base of its back extended a hard four-meder-long tail. 

Its bumpy head was identical to a beast’s skull, except for the crimson light that glowed within the two empty eye sockets. The color was deeper and far more malicious than that of Bell’s rubellite eyes. 

If Bell had to describe the monster’s overall appearance, he would have called it a “dinosaur fossil wearing armor.” 

Even among the innumerable monsters inhabiting the Dungeon, it was clearly an Irregular. 

“—” 

Its body, suspended upside down as it gripped the crystal wall with the claws of its feet and stared down at Bell and the other adventurers, measured three meders long. There was no question this was a large-category monster. 

Its most conspicuous feature was its fang-like claws. Extending from the ends of its bony six-fingered hands, the disproportionately long claws glittered deep purple. At the sight of them, Lyu sank into despair and Jura smiled twitchily. 

The monster that inflicted such tragedy five years ago had appeared once again before the two adventurers, and now for the first time, Bell was seeing it, too. 

Its crimson eyes scrutinized the remaining adventurers. 

“H-help m—” 

Crunch. 

Before the eyes of the stunned Bell, the monster bit through the adventurer it held between its teeth, as if doing so was the most ordinary thing in the world. 

Here was the prime culprit behind Astrea Familia’s suffering. 

At the time, people had said it would only be a matter of time before the young female adventurers who made up the familia attained first-tier status. But this one monster had decimated them, erasing their future in a matter of minutes. 

Two had been Level Three. Eight had been Level Four. 

This nameless monster had wiped out all ten of these second-tier adventurers. 

Although the Guild’s records made no mention of the beast, Ouranos had bestowed a name upon it. 

Juggernaut. 

The destroyer. 

The adventurer’s head quietly fell from between the monster’s fangs and split open on the ground. 

Bors and the others went pale as they watched. Bell’s mind went blank. 

The monster moved again. 

“—” 

Its knees bent backward, extended—and once again it vanished. 

“—?!” 

It moved with unbelievable speed. 

The wind it threw off was so strong it blew back the adventurers’ hair. 

Bell dodged the streak of purple just in the nick of time. 

A second later, someone screamed. 

“Gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” 

An animal person had been torn into several pieces. 

The claws, moving so fast they left behind a deep-purple arc, had murdered him. 

It had taken only a single swipe. 

The massacre continued unabated. 

The beast pulverized a pair of dwarves with its long flail-like tail. They collapsed, vomiting blood. Then it brought down its hand onto an elf, crushing her into the ground. Still gripped within its hand, she fell prey to the fang-like claws. Her arms and legs dropped away from her body, now no more than a mangled lump of meat. 

It devoured a human from the head down. 

Within a window of time so brief that Bell’s mind could not keep up, a chain of five deaths had taken place. 

“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” 

Half-crazy with fear and anger, the three adventurers in the front guard rushed forward, swinging their greatsword, mace, and battle-ax. 

The instant before the weapons landed on their target, the monster crouched nimbly on its backward-bent legs, crushing the crystal floor beneath it, and leaped to the side. The three weapons met nothing but air. The Juggernaut landed beside a huge cluster of crystals, sending up a spray of debris. 

It dashed forward again, and the upper bodies of the three adventurers flew into the air. 

The purple-blue form did not stop. 

Springing from one crystal column to the next, it began its mad dance of death. 

“Aaaaaah!!” 

Each time it passed, fresh blood spewed from adventurers and shredded armor flew toward the ceiling. Like a spider weaving its web, the monster surrounded Bors and his party with intersecting flashes of purple. Caught in this web, the prey vomited blood, lost limbs, and fell to the ground one after the next. 

The calamity Cassandra had foreseen in her dream was made real. 

What allowed the monster to carry out this slaughter that not even a floor boss could have managed was its ability to move at super-high speed. Normally, large-category monsters could not move this fast. 

Using the insane power of its legs, it sped like a missile from one corner of the fifty-meder-wide room to the other, efficiently wiping out the virus—that is, the adventurers. It ricocheted off the floor, ceiling, and walls in a continuous series of leaps, swiftly and cruelly massacring the large group of adventurers who had gathered in that chamber of death. They didn’t even have time to understand what was happening. 

As she watched her nightmare rise to life once again, Lyu’s voice caught in her throat. 

Even Jura, who was the originator of all the horror, found his legs shaking beneath him. 

Bell stared in disbelief. 

Adventurers collapsed. 

Brave warriors were torn to pieces along with their shields. 

Cowards were pierced through as they tried to flee. 

The wavering chants of sorcerers turned to requiems as they were murdered. 

The rampage wasn’t even a battle. 

The spectacle of so many deaths in such a brief period of time defied the limits of emotion. As Bell watched the merciless slaughter unfold, he felt neither terror nor despair; instead, it was as if he had been cut loose from all feelings. 

“—!!” 

Suddenly, he exploded. 

With eyes wide open and a wordless roar on his lips, he leaped into the midst of the massacre. 

“Mr. Cranell?!” 

Perhaps it was fortunate that Bell had not ventured out into the maze and witnessed the deaths of the other adventurers. After all, just the deaths inside the room had been enough to make him lose his cool entirely. 

Ignoring Lyu’s shout, he accelerated. 

“Uaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” 

The savage claws and fangs bore down on the adventurers who not long before had made up Bell’s party—the animal-person siblings, the powerful Amazon, and the ax-wielding Bors. 

You think I’ll let you get away with that?! 

Channeling his raging emotions into a roar, Bell scooped up a greatsword that had been dropped by its original owner and charged toward the speeding purple blur. 

“!!” 

The sword resonated with a low bovine clang. 

Purplish-blue fragments scattered onto the ground. 

The light within the Juggernaut’s eye sockets focused in on the boy. It had suffered a direct blow to the side, which forced it to abort its attack. Bell’s rubellite eyes had perfectly tracked the high-speed movements of its huge body and responded with an equally accelerated sword blow, which the monster had blocked with one of its long, bony forearms. 

“Rabbit Foot?!” 

Drenched in blood and sobbing, Bors and his three companions cried out in joy as the Juggernaut stopped in its tracks. For the first time, the unstoppable torrent of violence was momentarily stalled. 

Bell’s gaze met the glow of the monster’s eye sockets. 

In those brief few seconds, he sensed the unfathomable depth of his enemy’s skill, and he shuddered. 

For its part, the monster recognized the creature in front of it as a menace, and it automatically shifted its priorities so that Bell was now at the top. 

Each saw only the other. 

The fight to the death between adventurer and monster began. 

“Aaaaaa!!” 

“!!” 

The boy swung his greatsword, and the monster swiped its left forearm. 

The whining metal sent fragments of the enemy’s armored shell flying into the air. Bell staggered from the Juggernaut’s brute strength, yet even as he dripped sweat at the thought of its overwhelming force, he had discovered a point of attack. 

Its defenses are weak! 

His opponent’s shell had cracked under a single blow, and a faint fissure had run down its thin arm. 

An instant of battle was enough for Bell to understand. To the extent that the monster’s strength and speed had evolved far beyond ordinary limits, its endurance in the face of attack had declined. 

Whoever struck first would win! 

Having reached this simple, clear conclusion regarding the conditions for victory, Bell spurred his body to even more energetic movement. 

“Yah!” 

Using the energy from the foot he planted on the ground, he abruptly twisted his upper body to deliver a fierce spinning blow with the greatsword. 

The arc of the black scarf around his neck mirrored that of the silver blade. 

“—” 

In response, the Juggernaut’s reverse joints creaked, and it sprang forward. 

“Huh?!” 

The blow Bell had delivered with all his strength met thin air, and for a moment his enemy vanished from view. He looked up as he heard it land above him. 

The Juggernaut was suspended upside down from the ceiling. 

No way! 

Could it really have leaped twenty meders upward in a single bound? 

Nope, no way. 

There’s no way something like this can exist. 

On the one hand, it was an insane large-category monster strong enough to kill an upper-class adventurer with a single blow, but on the other, it had the unparalleled speed and agility to easily dodge its opponent’s attacks. 

Everything Bell thought he knew about monsters was being turned upside down. Still, the knowledge and experience he’d gained so far gave him parallels to work with. 

This thing is like a floor boss that moves faster than an iguaçu! 

You’ve gotta be kidding me. What is this? I can’t win. It’s impossible. I’ve gotta get out of here. 

Bell pushed away the thoughts blaring inside his head, rejecting what both logic and instinct told him. 

There’s no way I could escape anyway. 

He pushed down the fear and unease surging inside him with a ferocious determination to fight, gritting his teeth with an iron will. 

“!” 

The Juggernaut exhaled a hot breath, fixed its glowing orbs on Bell, and launched itself off the ceiling with a powerful kick. 

“Whoa!” 

Bell dodged by a hairbreadth the massive arrow of destruction that came hurtling toward him. 

The shock waves followed fast and furious. Adventurers who had been standing rooted to the spot were blown backward as the ground burst open to form a crater. Crystal fragments bombarded Bell like scattershot. 

The greatsword—which he had pulled aside just a moment too late—was half-demolished. 

“What the…?!” 

Bell skidded across the ground, tossed aside the greatsword, and thrust out his left hand. 

No matter how fast the enemy was, Bell figured it would be no match for the speed of his electrifying flames now that he’d leveled up. He’d use his Swift-Strike Magic to break through the monster’s vulnerable defenses. 

“It won’t work!!” 

Lyu’s all-out scream came just as Bell opened his own mouth. 

“Firebolt!” 

Electrical fire spouted from his fist. 

The instant before the scarlet lightning bolt exploded into its target, however, the purplish-blue shell encasing the silent Juggernaut pulsed with light. 

Instantly, electrifying flames exploded into Bell’s own body. 

“Owww—!” 

He stumbled backward, not grasping what had happened. 

Smoke billowed from his breastplate. 

A power and heat so strong they took his breath away told him his own magic had struck his chest. The sparks danced uselessly before him. 

It rebounded—? 

As flames he had never expected to experience burned his body, he stared at the being standing in the distance. 

Even now, the ominous beast’s armored shell was glowing. 

Light rippled out from the spot on its stomach where Bell had expected the electrical fire to make contact, but there wasn’t the faintest trace of a wound. 

“—” 

The blank incomprehension in Bell’s mind lasted only an instant, but the Juggernaut seized that moment. 

Crushing the ground underfoot, it launched its body forward at top speed. 

“Whoaaa!!” 

As the monster bore down with its right arm raised above its head, Bell switched into defensive mode just a second too late. 

The long, glittering claws swept through the air. 

Bell whipped the Hestia Knife from its hilt with his right hand. 

The knife’s purple arc mirrored that of the monster’s claws as Bell tried to block the blow. 

“No—” 

Just as he made contact, Bell heard someone behind him whisper. 

It was the despairing whisper of an elf, like a bird that had lost its wings. 

Then came a blow so powerful the whole world quaked before Bell’s eyes. 

The next moment, he felt a lightness in his right shoulder. 

“—?” 

Something was spinning through the air. 

It was as vibrant as a songbird, spraying specks of liquid that looked like blood. 

It was sheathed in a gauntlet. 

It was gripping a black knife. 

It was Bell’s right arm. 

“Aa—” 

He had lost one of his arms. 

His right one, sliced off at the elbow. 

It took a second for the reality to hit him. 

The next instant, what remained of his arm flared like it was on fire. 

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!” 

A scream ripped from his throat. 

As if to restart the temporarily frozen flow of time, a fountain of blood spurted from the exposed flesh of his right elbow. 

The pain was so intense he thought his nerve endings were going to burn out. His eyes were bloodshot to their very core. 

The arm drew a parabola through the air before landing—still clutching the knife—in the waterway. 

“Mr. Cranell!” 

He could hear Lyu screaming his name. 

But it wasn’t a cry of grief—it was a warning. 

The enormous shadow covering Bell flickered. 

He looked up in surprise and saw the silhouette of the monster with the claws of its left hand raised like a guillotine above his head. 

The fear that flooded his body at the sight of those claws that had ripped off his arm, protector and all, was enough to make him cry. Nevertheless, he raised his gauntlet-clad left arm to block the blow. Its dual adamantite flashed. 

An instant later, the gauntlet met the claws, and it was destroyed. 

“—” 

That armor was supposed to be unrivaled. 

At the very least, Bell had believed it was. Certainly, it was the strongest armor Welf had ever forged for him. But now the dir-adamantite shield that had withstood even the blows of the black minotaur was demolished. 

It couldn’t fend off the blow. 

Bell had intended for the claws to slide along the metal, but the moment they made contact, the force of the blow had crushed the armor. 

That was how strong the Juggernaut’s claws of destruction were. 

They extended ominously from the end of the six fingers that signaled a monster. The fingers themselves were as thin as bones, but the tips were thick and sharp and curved. They glinted like purple jewels, just like Bell’s Divine Knife. 

Only Lyu and Jura knew the truth: that one must never tangle with those claws. One had to somehow fight without letting them bite into one’s flesh. Only they, paralyzed by the return of their worst nightmare, knew that defense against the claws of destruction was completely impossible. 

Shaped more like fangs than claws, they were a gift from the Dungeon, stronger than any armor and honed to points sharper than any weapon. 

“—” 

The monster advanced mercilessly on Bell as he stared in a daze at the crushed back of his left hand. 

It brought its claws up into the air, then down. 

That was enough to split open his armor. 

Somehow managing to avoid a direct blow, his one-armed body crumpled. All hope drained from his heart as he watched the fragments of silver swirl in front of his eyes. 

His shoulder guards, his hip guards, his knee guards, and his chest guard all split into fragments and flew off him. Even the leg holster on his left leg burst off, spraying blood into the air. 

Whether from the extreme pain or from fear, Bell realized something through the haze of blood and tears. 

The reason the monster’s defenses were so low was that it had no need for them. 

It had magnificent strength, all-destroying claws, and an overwhelming, unparalleled ability to kill. Why would it need to defend itself against prey it could slaughter in a single second? The entire purpose of its specialization in offensive attacks was to crush its enemies. 

The monster before his eyes was catastrophe incarnate. 

It was an apostle of murder let loose by the Dungeon. 

Like a marionette with its strings cut, Bell was performing a clumsy dance. A black shadow was corroding his heart, even though he had managed to stay alive this long. 

He could practically hear his heart being crushed. 

It was the sound of a despair far deeper and more devastating than what he had felt when he faced the one-armed minotaur. 

Pitilessly, the Juggernaut swept its tail—that all-destroying weapon of death—toward the prey that had stumbled in its battle stance. 

It landed on Bell’s neck. 

“—” 

A cracking sound came from a place that should never have made that sound. 

—Death. 

Bell heard the sound of his own life coming to an end. 

He lost consciousness. 

Launched into the air by the monster’s tail, the boy’s body flew forward like an arrow. 

Blood flying from the joint where the severed arm had been, it rolled over and over across the floor and finally came to a rest where land met water. 

It lay there completely still. 

“…Mr.…Cranell!” 

Standing stock-still, Lyu was barely able to whisper those two words. 

Time slowed to a crawl. 

The world went flat—the scene before her very eyes, a lie. Even the water seemed to have stopped flowing. The screams of the other adventurers and the sound of her own heartbeat grew distant. 

Only the horrible figure of the boy lying faceup where he had landed was fresh and bright. 

“—Bell?!” 

Lyu’s scream was like silk being ripped. Tearing off the chains of trauma that had held her back, she half dove, half ran toward him. 

“…?!” 

She kneeled beside him, dumbstruck. 

In addition to the severed arm, his whole armorless body was covered in deep cuts and bruises, indicating broken bones. Blood dribbled from his mouth. There was no sign of consciousness in the pair of eyes behind his bangs. Still, it was a miracle that his head was even attached to his body after suffering that fierce blow from the monster’s tail. 

The word death flitted across Lyu’s mind. 

Shivering and pale, she placed one finger on Bell’s neck. 

“…! He’s still alive…?!” 

Surprised, she leaned toward him. She could just barely make out the faintest sound of breathing. 

The Goliath Scarf had allowed Bell to take the massive blow to his neck without suffering even a scratch. The material fashioned from the giant’s wall of steel had stopped the deadly blow and saved the life of its wearer. 

Although it had repelled direct damage, however, it had not been able to soften the impact. That alone had inflicted enough damage to make Bell himself think he was dying. Most likely, some of the vertebrae in his neck were fractured. 

I have to stop the bleeding from that arm! No, I better do something for his neck first! 

Dripping sweat, Lyu began to chant a spell. 

“I sing now of a distant forest. A familiar melody of life!” 

She had used up all her potions during the battle for Knossos and her pursuit of Jura’s gang. The spell felt like it stretched on forever, but it was the only recovery magic she had on hand. 

“Noa Heal!” 

A gentle light like the dappled sun of a forest surrounded the base of Bell’s neck. It was an all-purpose magic with the power to heal surface wounds, as well as other types of damage, and restore strength. However, it did not work immediately like a potion; the length of time required for full recovery was its main drawback. 

As she waited for it to work, Lyu used her teeth and one arm to tear off a piece of her cape and tie it around Bell’s right arm to stop the bleeding. Cursing her own failure to act at the crucial moment, she tended to the boy as if she was paying off her sin. 

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!” 

“!” 

Having put an end to Bell, its first target, the Juggernaut had turned its attention once again to the remaining adventurers. The reason it turned toward Bors’s group rather than toward Lyu or Jura was simply that there were more of them. 

The storm of slaughter rose again. 

“H-h-help!!” 

Lyu’s heart trembled at the pleas for assistance. 

—I want to help them, but if I leave Mr. Cranell now— 

Lyu was unable to finish her anguished thought. 

In an interval too short even to call a moment of hesitation, the monster had finished its massacre. Aside from Bors and a few others who had run in the opposite direction, all the adventurers were now no more than gruesome corpses. Among them were the animal-person siblings and the Amazonian warrior Bell had tried to save. 

Lyu hadn’t even been granted the opportunity to make a choice. 

“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” 

The moment the healing light faded, Lyu howled and dashed toward the monster, which was turned away from her. Like an insane animal, she charged forward and drove her wooden sword into its purple-blue back. 

“—” 

The Juggernaut responded simply. 

Releasing the energy stored in its back-bent knees, it leaped momentarily out of sight. Then, clinging to the side of a crystal column, it peered at her with glowing crimson eyes as if to say, You next? 

The next instant, it was charging her. 

She dodged the razor-like claws by planting her hands on the ground. 

As the hem of her long cape was shredded, she pushed away her panic and flew beast-like toward the monster, which had just landed back on the ground. 

It blocked her blow with its tail, but she aimed relentlessly for its chest, drawing close to the body that caused her such powerful physical revulsion. 

Tucked in where its long arms could not easily reach, she jabbed the monster again and again with her sword. 

“!” 

“—!” 

But the extraordinarily agile monster leaped from side to side and then backward, lashing out at her in return, and very soon Lyu found herself on the defensive. 

This was the reason she had so stubbornly avoided Bell at first. If the Juggernaut was once again spawned, she didn’t want him to become its target. 

It was a passive strategy totally unlike the normal Lyu. This was the underside of the terror that had been imprinted onto her very core. This was how deeply she was tormented by the calamity that had stolen everything from her five years ago. 

“Aaaaah, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” 

The ashen scene rose before her eyes once again. 

Her companions were collapsing. 

Their weapons crushed, her friends were being ripped to shreds. 

They screamed as the monster ground them between its fangs. 

The vicious claws had torn through the bodies of her companions. 

The scenes seared into her brain, stirring up her terror and crushing her will to fight. 

And so she screamed. 

She screamed to cheat her fear, to obliterate the past, and to spur her body on to action. 

When this scream, this outpouring of raging emotion, went dead, Lyu would no longer be able to fight. Her heart would collapse before this overwhelming being, and she would hug herself and sob like a helpless child. 

Because she knew that, she flourished her wooden sword and screamed her battle cry. 

“—Ha!” 

The Juggernaut responded with a short breath almost like a sigh and a fierce swipe of the claws on one hand. 

It was enough to send Lyu’s sword flying. 

“—” 

Alvs Lumina, her second-tier weapon fashioned from the branch of a holy tree, burst into pieces. Following the same path as Bell’s armor, it bid her good-bye. 

The merciless strength that had destroyed her weapon generated an impact that fractured the fingers gripping the sword’s handle. Lyu went flying through the air and landed with a crash on the crystal floor, faceup. 

The breath was forced from her lungs in a single gust. 

“Gaaarrr! Now! Now’s your chance! Get that bastard!!” 

Far away from her, Bors let out a battle cry. 

The remaining adventurers knew escape was hopeless. In the time that Lyu had bought them, they began to chant—in other words, to release a Concurrent Bombardment. Bors, too, took part, wielding his magic blade even as terror pulled him downward. 

“No, stop!!” 

Lyu’s words did not reach them. She could barely even breathe. 

As her futile cry faded, the purple-blue shell encasing the Juggernaut’s huge frame glowed. 

Just like a replay of what happened when Bell tried to use a Firebolt on the monster, the magic attack bounced back toward its source. Only this time, it was not a single Firebolt but a far more powerful Concurrent Bombardment. 

“—” 

It hit them head-on. 

The Juggernaut’s protective shell had the power of magic reflection. It was the sole shield of this monster that had traded defense for the power of annihilation. Even if an adventurer was to release automatic homing magic, which was ordinarily a fail-proof method of hitting a target, it would not make contact with the Juggernaut. 

The adventurers were thus cut off from the magic they had counted on as their ultimate safety net. Anyone would lose heart under these despairing circumstances, just as Astrea Familia had done five years earlier. 

Fortunately, Bors was at the back of the party and avoided a direct hit. He stared in a daze at his charred companions. His eye patch had been torn off and his empty left eye socket was exposed, but he had no time to worry about that. The monster was bearing down on him, its own eye sockets glowing. 

“Stoppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp!!” Bors sobbed. 

Thrusting both hands in front of him, unable even to stand up, he pissed his pants. 

Even for a second-tier adventurer like Bors, this monster was too much to face. 

The claws descended toward him. 

“—aaa.” 

Drawing a vivid arc, they moved from the top of his head straight down. 

He didn’t even have time to think back on his life. But his brain registered the sound of his own body splitting into two halves. He heard his head being crushed, his flesh being torn, and his bones being pulverized. 

It was over in an instant. Bors was dead. 

“Stand up!” 

“—!!” 

The fog of hallucination cleared. 

As Bors recovered from the vision his petrified brain had produced, he found himself alive, with an elf fighting in his place. Before the all-destroying claws had reached him, the elf had intercepted the blow with one of her own, delivered to the monster’s forearm. She was now fighting it desperately with two daggers. 

At that very moment, the elf was protecting Bors. 

“Escape, quick!” 

“Y-you…” 

Bors’s word trailed off as he stared at the profile of the female adventurer, from which the hood and mask had fallen away. 

It was the very same brave elf he had seen before on the eighteenth floor. The precise elf who had fought single-handedly against the terrifying black giant. 

Just then, the monster brought up its claws with ferocious speed. 

Lyu bent backward, just barely avoiding a direct hit, but the claws nevertheless grazed her, ripping open her shoulder. 

A geyser of blood spouted from the elf’s thin body. 

As the warm liquid spattered Bors’s face, Lyu clenched her teeth and resisted her body’s urge to crumple to the ground. 

“Hurryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!” 

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!” 

Bors fled, his feet flapping noisily against the ground. 

Stumbling repeatedly over himself, he was making no progress whatsoever. To protect him, Lyu—her face covered in a gory makeup of blood—took the brunt of the Juggernaut’s attack herself. 

“!!” 

“Oof!” 

Its long tail beat against her legs. 

Although it lacked the menace of the claws, the hard appendage covered in its black and purplish-blue shell was no different from a cudgel. 

Lyu’s right leg, encased in its long boot, snapped like a twig under the blow. Her shinbone let out a dry popping sound as she flew into the air. 

“Ah—!” 

Lyu gripped her awkwardly bent leg with one hand as she cried out in wordless agony. 

She felt she would faint from the unbelievable pain. But she knew she could not. 

Stomp! The horrifying sound of the monster’s immense body advancing toward her rang through the room. 

“No…!” 

As a crystal fragment bore into her left cheek, she lifted her trembling face. 

Aside from her writhing form, there was no other sign of life in the sprawling room. Even Jura was gone. Had he escaped? She could no longer fully understand what was going on. 

Destruction advanced. 

Despair bore down on her in the form of the Juggernaut. 

She was covered in wounds from head to toe. As it landed before her eyes, she realized she had no way left to defend herself against it. 

I couldn’t stop Jura’s schemes, and now here I am, my shameful failure exposed… 

She felt humiliated. She wanted to scream and cry. She wanted to place a deadly curse on herself for once again making a mistake that led to calamity. 

She still hadn’t explained anything to Syr and her coworkers. She hadn’t done anything to repay them for giving her a home. She had to survive, if only to explain herself to them. 

…Oh, but… 

If I die here, I can be with Alize and the others… 

At last, she could be beside her companions once again. 

At last, she could apologize to them. 

At last, she could let them castigate her. 

Finally, this sin of killing them will be… 

At last, she would be free of the guilt she had hidden in the furthest depths of her heart. 

For Lyu, that would be a kind of salvation. 

It would be a sort of ceremony in which she buried the self whose dishonor had been exposed. 

A smile of resignation curled her lips. 

A tear fell from one sky-blue eye. 

The scale of her heart tipped from attachment to life toward the peace of death. 

“Huh?” 

Just then, something caught Lyu’s eye. 

Shrieks were ringing out—the death songs of adventurers. 

Screams were echoing—the will of the elf who fought and suffered yet refused to succumb to fear. 

Bell’s finger twitched at the sounds of the battlefield. 

A tremor slightly stronger than the others carved a crack in the crystal ground, shattered it, and sent Bell’s body sliding from the border between water and land into the water. 

Below the surface, sounds were muffled. A crimson fog spread from his severed arm. He sank toward the cold depths of the waterway. 

“—Bell.” 

A tearful voice reached him as he drifted slowly downward. 

Her emerald-blue hair swirling, the mermaid reached out her hand toward the pitifully wounded boy. She was hugging his right arm, still gripping the knife, to her chest. She sank her teeth into her own wrist. As she pressed the arm against the surface from which it had been severed, it absorbed her lifeblood. 

Healing bubbles floated around Bell’s body as it regained its missing limb. 

“Bell…Bell.” 

The mermaid’s tears were unending. 

Placing a hand on the cheek of the boy whose eyes remained closed, she took his knife and slashed herself over and over again. She held the sinking body tight against her own. 

Her blood ran into Bell’s wounds, melting into him. Surrounded by a haze of crimson produced by their intermingled blood, his battered body began to recover. 

“Live,” the monster girl whispered over and over again. 

“Open your eyes,” she murmured into his ear. 

He responded. 

“Oh!!” 

He clenched his hands into fists, opened his eyes, and spewed out countless bubbles. 

The black knife glittered with renewed life. 

He stared into the tear-drenched eyes of the mermaid, so close to him their foreheads were touching. 

Thank you. 

I’m sorry. 

I have to go. 

The boy who mouthed these words, the boy whom Mari loved, was not a prince on a shipwrecked boat. 

He was an adventurer. 

For the sake of his companion who was still fighting, he had to revive his despair-riddled heart. He had to light the flames of recovery. 

Tears trickling down her cheeks, Mari reached out a hand to stop him and then drew it back. 

The boy was stubborn. He was an adventurer. Mari would do the same thing to save the family she loved. So instead of holding him back, she hugged him one more time. Then, quietly, she let him go. 

Released from the mermaid’s arms, Bell kicked and surged upward. 

“Promise me—” 

Mari cried as she watched the figure move farther and farther from her. Reaching her hand toward him, she sent her wish into the world of water. 

“—Promise me you won’t lose.” 

Bell extended a fist and broke through the water’s surface where the light filtered in. 

Lyu saw everything. 

She saw the drops of water flying, the form bursting powerfully through the water’s surface, and the foot stepping firmly onto the crystal ground. 

She saw the boy standing on land. 

She saw the light of determination in his rubellite eyes. 

“Thank you, Mari.” 

Mermaid lifeblood. The mysterious drop item was said to have the power to heal wounds. And truly, Bell had fully recovered. Smoke rose from the wounds that had been bathed in the blood of her self-sacrifice. 

To Lyu’s eyes, the scene looked like a beacon for a counterattack. 

His right arm restored, Bell steeled his will and tightened his grip on the black knife. 

“—” 

Behind the Juggernaut, who stood stock-still, before Lyu, who looked on in astonishment, and beside Mari, who poked her face from the water, Bell flew into a rage. 

“!!” 

He raced toward the Juggernaut, his body—just moments before on the verge of death—transformed now into a speeding bullet. 

“!!” 

The monster spun violently around as Lyu watched. It had determined that this revenger, whom it had destroyed beyond all recovery but who now came dancing back to life, was no mere bit of prey but rather its prime enemy, worthy of complete annihilation. 

As the boy charged toward it with terrifying speed, the monster flourished its claws powerfully, as if to say, This time, you must be crushed. 

“—!!” 

Faced with this deadly blow that approached at lightning speed, Bell chose not escape but direct advance. 

He tore the scarf from his neck, wrapped it around his left hand, and shot forward. 

“?!” 

Astonishment flickered in the Juggernaut’s glowing orbs. 

The black scarf that Bell had wrapped around his hand in place of the demolished gauntlet threw off a shower of sparks as the monster’s claws slid over it. 

The devastating weapon bestowed upon the monster by the Dungeon was deflected by the ultimate defensive armor born of that very same Dungeon. 

As if to pay back the monster in its own currency, Bell snatched its brief moment of hesitation to attack. 

With a suddenness and speed that left no room for escape, the Hestia Knife glinted backhand toward the monster’s chest. 

“?!” 

Next it was Bell’s turn to be astonished. 

He had ripped into his enemy’s chest. Yet the response did not suggest he had crushed its core. 

In other words, it had no magic stone?! 

Shuddering at each other’s menacing presences, boy and monster slid cleanly past each other. 

Instantly, both turned on their heels. Their gazes clashed. Their respective blows met thin air. 

This was when the life-or-death battle truly began. 

“—!!” 

“Yah!” 

As the Juggernaut howled murderously, Bell gave a spirited shout and charged head-on toward the monster, Goliath Scarf and Hestia Knife at the ready. 

The monster sprang away rapidly with a series of jumps fueled by the energy stored in its reverse-joint knees. 

I’ll be slaughtered before I can blink if I let it use those legs to its advantage. 

Bell chose instead to engage in a bullfight. 

Pouring every drop of his strength into the opening blow in hopes of getting a head start on his opponent, he turned his body into a pure-white arrow of light. 

“—?!” 

The monster charged forward even as its enemy’s lancing attack shaved the surface of its neck and shoulder. 

Blood, flesh, and skin flew. 

As Lyu looked on, dumbfounded, and Mari clapped both hands over her mouth, Bell launched a special attack propelled by his surging blood. 

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” 

The black knife was aimed at the monster’s right knee joint. 

With inhuman speed, the blade cut into its target. 

“?!” 

The Juggernaut’s right leg dropped slightly with a loud thump. 

Although its battle stance and ability to continue fighting had not been impacted in the least, it was no longer able to fly about at lightning speed like a hurricane. Bell’s single blow had landed perfectly on the source of those powerful jumps: the monster’s reverse-joint knees. 

It stared intently at Bell, who had already suffered serious damage in their clashes. Though the left half of his body was soaked in blood, the adventurer’s eyes sent a clear message: We’re just getting started. 

“Game on!” 

Bell raised his knife, his rubellite eyes flashing. 

“—Ooo!!” 

The monster’s crimson eyes burned. For the first time, it howled with rage. 

It charged forward, the exploding swirl of crystal fragments from the floor obscuring its opponent’s form. 

Just as Bell had anticipated, the close-range fight began. 

“Mr. Cranell?!” Lyu screamed as she propped herself into a sitting position, her broken leg beneath her, and watched his reckless venture unfold. 

Lyu knew the terror of the Juggernaut better than anyone else. 

What Bell was doing may have been his only choice, but nevertheless it was crazy to place oneself within the monster’s sphere of slaughter. Moment by moment, she could see his body being battered and wounded. 

Blood and chunks of flesh flew as his undershirt—stripped of its protective armor—was ripped to shreds. With every passing second, he was being shaved away. Mari watched in pale silence. 

But— 

“…?!” 

The claws of destruction did not pierce Bell’s body. 

Using the scarf wrapped around his left hand exactly like a gauntlet, he deflected the Juggernaut’s claws by sliding them over its tough surface. 

Again and again, the monster brought down its deadliest weapon, as if to say, Stop playing with me. 

But the scarf would not shatter. The number of scratches on its surface increased, but the armor of the Goliath—the “shield” that Cassandra had requested and Welf had made for him—did not break. 

And as long as it did not break, Bell could keep fighting. 

As long as he had the shield his friends had made for him, he could face this strongest and most terrible of calamities. 

If he could withstand the deadly blows that no adventurer was supposed to be able to withstand, then he could extract the tiniest of chances at victory, and therefore he could defeat his own despair. 

Screech!! 

The Hestia Knife let out its own battle cry as it deflected the course of the claws. A fountain of sparks danced into the air as the blade screamed. Still, the Divine Knife did not crumble. It continued to clash with the monster’s weapon. 

The Juggernaut was mad with destructive rage. Bell, too, was acting out a desperate battle armed with the strongest of all blades and shields. 

It’s just like I suspected. 

As his wounds spurted fresh blood, Bell squinted at his opponent. 

He’s faster than I am. 

He was not only stronger but also quicker. Compared to the Juggernaut, everything about Bell was inferior. In the past, no matter how much higher his opponent’s level had been, Bell had always had the upper hand in terms of speed and agility. Now even that advantage was gone. 

Yet he did not give up in the face of this hopeless analysis. Instead, his heart cried out unyieldingly. 

How could he resist this monster that surpassed him in every way? Of course, it was obvious. 

By using the skill and tactics he had cultivated so far. 

This was the true weapon and shield given to him as an adventurer—this determination burning in his chest. Adventurers took the trial called “despair” and transformed it into great achievement. 

Its power and potential are unbelievable for its size— 

If he had been asked to compare the Black Goliath and the Juggernaut, Bell honestly wouldn’t have been able to say which was superior. 

Comparing them was meaningless. 

They worked in entirely different ways. 

The Goliath had an extraordinary ability to suppress armies, while the Juggernaut was a slaughterer who excelled in inflicting deadly damage on individual adventurers. In terms of getting the job done with a single weapon, the claws of destruction most likely outdid the Goliath’s hammer and howl. 

On the other hand, in terms of ability to endure attacks, the Juggernaut couldn’t hold a candle to the floor boss. 

This monster was best able to exercise its full potential—its highly developed strength, speed, and ability to kill—not in a wide-open room but in the passageways and other closed-in spaces of the Dungeon. This made it the ideal apostle of murder, designed solely to wipe out “viruses” that damaged the Dungeon. 

Is it even faster than my greatest rival? 

There was the fierce, swift speed of its attacks and the constant vibrating shock waves that made his feet and hands go numb. 

In a corner of Bell’s burning mind, fragments of logic compared the beast he faced now to the black minotaur. 

In terms of destructive power, the Juggernaut was superior because of its claws. 

But perhaps Asterios was the victor when it came to physical strength? 

That time, the massive bull had been on the verge of death. His true strength was probably much greater— 

Bell cut off the irrelevant thoughts that flashed briefly through his mind. In this desperate battle, any unnecessary mental noise could lead directly to death. The tiniest mistake on the part of either combatant could cost them their head. 

“—!” 

Even as Bell’s storm of knife blows wounded its body, the Juggernaut showed no sign of easing its own attack. 

His whole body was screaming. His overheated limbs and trunk felt like they were about to burst apart. 

His left arm might as well be shouting its death cries. Inside the Goliath Scarf, his hand had been pulverized by the force of the repeated claw attacks it had deflected. Pain was the only sense he had left. The blood was sloshing around noisily inside the wrapping. Still, Bell knew that the moment he stopped deflecting the claws, he was done for. 

His shoulder and neck burned where the flesh had been gouged out. 

His once-healed wounds were torn open again, gushing blood. 

Still, the light glowed in his eyes, and he moved forward. 

If he fell now, he was sure the Juggernaut would kill Lilly and the rest of his party. Every adventurer in the Water Capital would be exterminated. 

He couldn’t let it happen. He had to defend them to the death. 

In other words— 

You’re going down!! 

Even if this monster had been called forth by an Evil and Bell had never wanted to fight it, he could not leave something so destructive to its own devices. 

Was he going to let it kill more people? Was he going to let the death continue? 

Bell donned the mask of the hypocrite. 

For the sake of the people he wanted to protect, he would kill the being in front of him. 

“!!” 

His enemy’s attack began. Crystal fragments flew. Bell was forced into a defensive stance. 

Claw swipe, dodge, biting fangs, intercept. 

A counterblow from Bell, blocked by the enemy. Too shallow. Not yet. Another blow. Pieces of the enemy’s shell fell away. I’ll bury it in blows. 

Bell Cranell still has fight left in him yet. Yes! Go on! For her sake! Why did I come to this floor in the first place? 

In a moment that stretched on for an eternity, Bell speeded up at the literal cost of shaving away his own life. 

Faster, faster, faster! 

He was determined to put an end to her nightmare. 

“AAAAAAA!!” Bell howled, blood streaming from his entire body. 

He slashed toward the hurricane of death, a single piece of cloth—his only safety net—wrapped around one hand. 

He faced head-on the beast that for Lyu symbolized pure despair. 

He understood only a fragment of the suffering she had endured. But it was enough to set his own once-despairing heart on fire. 

He howled a long howl, because that sound was the flame of his spirit that would burn away tragedy and calamity. 

“Mr. Cranell…” 

Even the rather insensitive Lyu knew who he was yelling for. The hotness in the depths of her chest expanded. 

“…You’re so much…” 

Her final whispered word—“stronger”—disappeared into the din of the battlefield. 

She felt pitiful lying there doing nothing. But still this feeling burned in her heart. 

For the first time, she understood why Bell liked those hero’s tales so much. For the first time, the elf saw how noble heroes looked when they challenged despair itself. 

“…?” 

The Juggernaut was puzzled by this totally new feeling it was experiencing. The white flame that had been extinguished roared back to life, had been slashed but was now charging forward, had been beaten down but rose once more in defiance. The newborn monster was unable to grasp the fact that its enemy’s spirit was dominating its own. 

Finally—either because it recognized the unending series of slashing attacks as a menace or because it was overwhelmed by the boy’s determination—the monster for the first time retreated. 

It had folded first in the life-or-death contest of endurance. 

Perhaps it was due to instinct, or perhaps it was the inevitable outcome. In any case, it saw no need to risk its own life for a bit of prey that had nearly died once and was already half-dead again. And so, the monster stepped back from the close-range fight into which it had been tricked. 

It was, without a doubt, an advantageous move. But Bell saw a chance for victory. 

It’s retreating. 

Delirious and covered in blood, he nevertheless felt his hunger for battle burn with fresh ferocity. He let his mind follow the path of that desire. 

His greatest rival had not retreated. 

His idol would always fight to the end. 

The monster before him was neither warrior nor adventurer. Bell smiled. 

He had lured the Juggernaut into close combat in order to wrench this one moment from it. Although it was faster than Bell, it had been forced into the defensive for the first time in order to retreat. 

He thrust his scarf-wrapped left hand toward his backward-leaning enemy. 

“Firebolt!!” 

Seventeen successive shots. 

He concentrated his mind into those seventeen shots, loading every last drop of magical power he had into the rapid-fire attack. 

The all-out, instantaneous firepower erupted before the eyes of the surprised monster. 

“!” 

Of course, the Juggernaut pulsed its shell to exercise its power of magic reflection. Bell’s magic was pitilessly repulsed by the invincible shield. 

“Yeah!!” 

It fell for it! 

Letting out a yell of victory, Bell dove toward the whirlwind of electrifying flames that came hurtling back toward him. 

“?!” 

Lyu couldn’t believe her eyes. Mari yelped, and even the monster stared in shock. 

The barrage of seventeen Firebolts sped toward him. An instant later, his body was engulfed in deep-red light. 

Even as his own fire seared his flesh and pierced his flank, Bell sped forward, shouting victoriously. 

A single shot. 

A single, carefully aimed Firebolt exploded into his black knife. 

He was charging his weapon. 

The Juggernaut saw it—saw that instead of scattering like it should have when it hit the knife, the Firebolt was pressed into place by a white light and focused. 

A Dual Charge. 

Bell had anticipated that his Firebolt would be repulsed and used that to prepare for his deadly strike. 

The massive barrage of fire provided a cover. In the moment that the raging electrical fire obscured his body from the enemy’s view, he drew close to its massive frame. 

The Juggernaut, frozen for just an instant, understood everything. 

It had been lured into using its magic reflection by a barrage of firepower strong enough to inflict deadly injury even on a monster. It had been attacked with the aim of provoking that tiny moment of immobility caused by the use of its armored shell. 

Time froze for the Juggernaut as it stared at the raging Divine Knife encased in an armor of flames. 

It knew it was in a bad situation. Things were moving fast. Still, it had time. If it gathered all its strength, it could intercept the attack, defend itself, and escape. 

But a kind of static was interfering with the monster’s instincts. 

Was that magic, or was it a knife attack? Should it deflect it with the invincible armor or destroy it with the deadly claws? 

The apostle of murder was confused. 

It chose escape. 

Using its one remaining reverse-joint leg, it sprang forward—not perfectly but adequately. 

“—” 

To get straight to the point, the monster of calamity lost its bargain with the adventurer. 

The second or two it spent deciding what to do was, for the Juggernaut, a most regrettable opening that it should never have yielded to the lightning-fast rabbit. 

“—Yaah!” 

Bell suddenly unfurled the scarf wrapped around his left hand, launching it forward. 

Unlike the Firebolt, this was a midrange, indirect attack. 

The black strip of fabric undulated through the air like a whip, landing on the monster’s long tail. 

“?!” 

There was a tremendous shock as the scarf unfurled to its full length and Bell planted both feet on the crystal ground. 

The Juggernaut froze unnaturally in midair. Then inertia brought it hurtling toward Bell’s left hand, which still gripped the scarf. 

There was the sound of muscle ripping and the snap of an arm bone popping out of place. 

Bell’s eyes bulged. 

Still, he gathered his remaining strength and drew his left arm in toward his body. 

“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!” 

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 the 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.