INTERLUDE
THEY BEGIN TO STIR
“It has stirred.”
The elder god’s soft-spoken words echoed through the darkness.
Ouranos’s bulging eyes were fixed on the Dungeon spread beneath his feet.
“Stirred? Surely you don’t mean…the Juggernaut?”
The reply came from a fist-sized crystal.
It was an oculus, and on the other side of the magic item was Fels.
The oculus was in the Chamber of Prayers beneath the Guild Headquarters. Ouranos—the god who prayed to the Dungeon—may not have been perfect, but he did have a grasp of the general situation. Or more accurately, he sensed the presence of a certain monster there.
The ruinous Juggernaut had risen again after an absence of five years. The presence of this “apostle of murder” that had massacred Astrea Familia, to which Gale Wind belonged at the time, was enough to fill Orario’s founding god with extreme foreboding.
“Yes…it has strayed far from the zone where it emerged and is descending the floors.”
That ruinous creature had begun to move.
And not merely within its own floor. It was crossing multiple floors, so many that Ouranos could discern its movements from the surface.
A terrifyingly rapid dive ever downward from the Water Capital where one would have expected it to emerge.
“I can’t believe it…Considering its origins, the chances it would leave the floor where it spawned are…!”
Fels—who at the moment was accompanying the Xenos in the fight to capture the man-made dungeon Knossos—sounded puzzled.
For the Juggernaut to appear, the Dungeon had to suffer massive damage.
When that happened, the living Dungeon responded defensively by summoning its antibody. In other words, the point of the Juggernaut’s existence was to obliterate any traces of the invading pathogen—adventurers—on the floor where it had spawned. Under normal circumstances, even if the monster’s targets fled, it would never travel several floors to pursue them.
“…What is happening?”
The reality was that the delusions of a tamer were causing the monster to pursue a certain boy and elf.
But even an omniscient god, and the founding god of Orario at that, could not parse the details of what was happening in the Dungeon when it fell so far beyond established understanding. Ouranos and his companions on the surface were able to grasp only that an irregularity was occurring.
“And this response…a Monster Rex has appeared in the Water Capital? Did the Dungeon ignore the regular spawning interval and dispatch it…?”
Ouranos also noticed another action by the Dungeon that was impossible to ignore.
The face of the wizened god, who was mockingly called the “immovable one” by the other deities, twisted into an unmistakable grimace.
“What will you do, Ouranos?”
“…Send reinforcements to the Water Capital. Even if they are unable to resolve the situation, we need to know what is happening.”
“But we are still fighting to capture Knossos. Few forces are available to have Loki Familia take the lead. If you order a mission and the regular procedures are followed, they’ll never make it in time!”
The voice emanating from the crystal was filled with anxiety. Ouranos realized that when Fels said the troops wouldn’t make it in time, the immortal mage was talking about the safety of Hestia Familia. Ever since the incident with the Xenos, Fels had been willing to risk everything for the sake of Bell Cranell.
The same was true of Ouranos himself.
“I will do all I can…even if it ends in failure.”
The four torches surrounding the altar swallowed up the will of the deity.
From his throne, Ouranos turned his blue eyes toward the darkness above.
“The rest depends on whether there is anyone besides us who will take action…”
Crash!
A cup slid off the table with a clatter.
“Hey, Syr! Are you okay?”
“…”
The waitress Runoa rushed to the girl with the blue-gray hair, who was surrounded by ceramic fragments. The item that had fallen did not belong to the bar; it was instead the favorite cup of one of their coworkers.
It belonged to the elf who was no longer there with them.
Syr shifted her gaze from the smashed pieces of pottery to her hand. Drops of red blood were seeping from her slender fingers.
“…I’m sorry everyone. I’m going to step out for a minute.”
“Syr! Where are you going, meow?!”
Syr ran out the back door, ignoring the words of the catgirl Ahnya. She and the other waitresses were left behind in the quiet bar, which hadn’t opened yet.
“Think she went to look for Lyu, meow?” asked the catgirl Chloe as she turned over a piece of the cup in her hand.
“Can’t think of what else she’d be doing…even though we have no idea where that girl could be.”
Runoa, the only human of the three, frowned as she answered. Her words were devoid of conviction. The same went for the kitchen workers. But Mia, the owner of The Benevolent Mistress, did no more than watch and sigh as her employees went about their work completely distracted.
“Meow…It’s all Lyu’s fault, meow! The fact that Syr’s acting strange and also Mia and the others being so worried, not to mention the gloomy mood around here—it’s all her fault!”
Ahnya shrieked her words at the ceiling.
Before Lyu up and vanished, she had been tense for days on end, and her fellow waitresses suspected she had gotten wrapped up in something bad. It was only a hunch, but one based on a long friendship.
They couldn’t explain it, but they all felt it in their bones.
“Excuse me, is anyone in there?!”
Just then, as if trading places with Syr, someone else arrived.
“Meeeow?”
“A goddess? A customer?”
“No, it’s the boy’s patron deity…Lady Hestia, meow.”
The goddess, who could easily have been mistaken for a regular girl, was standing in the doorway of the bar. Judging by her panting and how hard her black pigtails were bouncing, she must have run there. Without stopping to properly catch her breath, she rushed up to Ahnya, Runoa, and Chloe.
“Were you guys close with the elf? Close enough to know what she’s up to?”
“The elf…? You mean Lyu, meow?”
“Yes! And this is the most important question: Are you guys as absurdly strong as she is?”
“Just wait a second, Goddess. What are you even trying to find out after barging in here like that?”
“Yeah, meow. First you should explain why you’re asking that question, meow.”
As Ahnya tilted her head quizzically and Runoa worked herself into a fluster, Chloe alone coolly demanded an explanation.
Hestia, who had been leaning eagerly toward them, clammed up.
“…Look at this.”
Instead of answering, she held out a letter. Ahnya took it, while Runoa and Chloe peered over her shoulder from either side.
“It’s a letter my supporter sent from the eighteenth floor…”
The message contained an explanation of Gale Wind’s current predicament and a request for reinforcements.
Although the three women were supposed to be no more than ordinary waitresses, the looks on their faces were as sharp as that of hardened warriors.
Crack!
A fracture raced down the hammer with a loud pop.
“Huh…?”
The cracked tool was in Welf’s workshop in the rear garden of Hearthstone Manor, the Hestia Familia home. The woman who had been using the hammer to forge a sword, helping herself to it even though she wasn’t its true master, stared in disbelief.
“Did it get too hot? No way, must be Welf’s fault for not taking care of his tools with the proper smith’s spirit! It’s definitely that! It can’t have been my fault…Is it my fault? Uh-oh, this is bad…He’s gonna be so mad at me.”
Clutching her head as she muttered, her curvy upper body wrapped in a single strip of bleached cloth, the woman was undeniably suspicious. She glanced back at the ruined hammer.
“Or is it…a bad omen?” she muttered.
As she stood staring at the hammer in the now-quiet workshop, the door opened behind her.
“What, the owners are back already? Or could it be a thief in the Hestia Familia home…?”
“Calm down. Just like Hephaistos kept you behind, we’ve been asked to watch the place while everyone’s gone.”
“Oh really? My bad, my bad. Now that you mention it, you do look familiar…the god Miach and his follower, if I remember right.”
The woman let down her guard as Miach entered the workshop, Nahza following close behind. She laughed nonchalantly and was about to make small talk when she noticed their expressions and wiped the smile off her face.
With Hestia having run off to The Benevolent Mistress, Nahza was the one who spoke up.
“Um…I know it’s a terrible bother, but can you do us a favor, Cyclops?”
The woman’s nickname echoed through the room along with the word “favor.”
Tsubaki Collbrande, captain and Master Smith of Hephaistos Familia, narrowed her patchless right eye.
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