Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken (LN) - Volume 12 - Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

THE IMPERIAL GUESTS

Three people stood there in the lavishly decorated room, all looking nervous and standing straight-backed as they awaited the chamber’s owner—Yuuki, the man who came to the Empire and immediately shot up to the rank of commander.

To them, the story of Yuuki was not any sort of surprise. After all, Yuuki was their boss, the leader of the Cerberus secret society.

“Hey,” he said when he finally came in, “sorry to keep you waiting! You could’ve sat down, you know.” With him was Kagali, standing politely toward the rear like a secretary.

“Not at all, Sir Yuuki,” one man among the visitors said. “We remain your faithful servants. You hardly need to be considerate of us.”

This man was Damrada the Money, one of Cerberus’s three boss-level officials. He was a hard man to grasp, all greasy and shady-looking. The other two were Misha the Lover—a beautiful woman with a strange air about her, at times looking like both a young girl and a mature woman—and Vega the Power, whose supple, well-balanced, carnivore-like body dominated anyone who laid eyes upon her. This was the trio at the top of Cerberus’s operations.

They all saluted Yuuki before sitting down.

“First, let us congratulate you on reaching the rank of commander.”

“Yes. As someone who survived an encounter with the demon lord Guy, I was sure you could do it, Sir Yuuki.”

“Pfft! Let me at that force, and taking over a division would be child’s play.”

Damrada and Misha expressed their good wishes to Yuuki. Vega, at the end, didn’t seem so impressed. But Yuuki didn’t let it bother him.

You’re right, I think, he pondered with an internal sneer. You really could be part of the hundred…but after that, you’d never hold out. No way anyone could ask you to command anything. You wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Well, I have to thank you, Damrada,” he said, changing the subject, “for intervening on my behalf with Lord Gadora.”

“Oh, don’t be silly! It was all in anticipation for this moment, Sir Yuuki. All I did was introduce Lord Gadora to an otherworlder you secured for us, so there’s hardly any need to thank me that much.”

“Ha-ha-ha! You’re always so stiff, Damrada. Why don’t you just accept my gratitude for a change?”

“I am afraid I cannot, sir. I don’t want you to expect more from me than I can provide.”

“Ha-ha! That’s a funny joke.” Yuuki looked at Damrada and grinned. That brought the point across well enough. After many years, they each trusted in the other’s abilities.

After a shared laugh, Yuuki moved to the main topic. “Now, Kagali, brief us on what the demon lord Rimuru is doing.”

“Yes, Sir Yuuki. The demon lord Rimuru is currently—”

With his order, Kagali began her briefing. Her information mainly came from members of the Free Guild who remained in the West. The majority of Yuuki’s agents there had fled, but several had used that as a cover to become underground spies.

Kagali went over everything in her clear voice. Rimuru had total control over the Western Nations and was using it to form an army of fearsome size, preparing for an imperial invasion. She covered all of that and more, alongside some unbelievable phenomena occurring in the capital city of Rimuru.

“Oh… So they’ve designated the lodging town along the Great Ameld River as a military base?” said Yuuki. “Yeah, if they’re going to put defensive lines in their own nation, they’d have to do that, huh?”

“Indeed,” Kagali replied. “There are already nearly twenty thousand troops stationed at that base. They are using something called magitrains for material transport, so they likely stored up enough food resources to survive a siege.”

“That’s Tempest for you. The Empire’s not gonna have an easy win there.”

“I agree. They’re importing food supplies from Farminus, so they’ve got enough to feed a population of several million. The nation as a whole is far more powerful than it was a year ago, and I’d say they could fight off the Empire all by themselves. Plus, the Council of the West is now entirely controlled by the demon lord Rimuru. If they can collate the West’s forces into a cohesive whole, that would be substantial, too.”

“You think so? I’m sure Rimuru tries to be thorough with everything, but he’s pretty naive, as far as I’m concerned. He probably figures that pitting numbers against numbers will just lead to more casualties, so I bet he wants to chase off the Empire with just his elites.”

“That’s ridiculous…”

“I doubt someone like a demon lord would attempt something so foolish…,” Damrada added.

He and Kagali discounted the idea, but that didn’t change Yuuki’s mind.

No, seriously, he really is that naive. But between that and how freakishly strong he is, I feel like he could actually do something…

Despite his thoughts, he asked Kagali to keep going.

“Thank you. Continuing with the briefing… The capital of Rimuru has a force of over fifty thousand on standby, and reinforcements are streaming in from the former Eurazania. Their total fighting power will likely surpass one hundred thousand in the end.”

“That’s pretty amazing, but it still gives the Empire a big advantage.”

“Certainly, the numbers don’t compare. The Empire has over a million, and their foot soldiers have been undergoing some kind of weird modifications, too. I think even the lowest infantry would rank at least a C. And consider all their bizarre armaments as well—honestly, I don’t think they stand a chance.”

Those were Kagali’s honest feelings. Yes, a hundred thousand pairs of boots on the ground was impressive, especially given their expert training and high morale. Normally, Tempest would be worthy of high praise. But compared with the Empire’s full outfit, it simply paled by comparison. Even the defenses Kagali built for her castle back when she was the demon lord Kazalim wouldn’t hold out against the violent charge of the Empire’s numbers. A mere one hundred thousand, faced with that maelstrom, meant nothing.

But Yuuki had different ideas. “I’ll keep your advice in mind. Keep going.”

“Right. Now, moving on to their nation’s technology…”

Kagali continued reporting the facts.

Tempest had suddenly begun offering a variety of curious goods for sale—tools to make life more convenient, for example, and fancy high-end weaponry; they served different purposes, but all were very effective gadgets. A lot of buyers wanted to sign exclusive contracts with the developers of these goods, but try as they might, none of the merchants had figured out where they’re coming from. Their origins remained a mystery.

“…The magitrains I mentioned are another example, but as with the Empire, we’re seeing a wave of technological innovation. Unfortunately, they are doing a thorough job with preventing information leaks. The Free Guild members weren’t able to trace these goods back to their creators.”

They were probably being developed internally. That much was clear, but nobody had any idea where. It frustrated Kagali as well, but they couldn’t send her out to deal with the demon lord Rimuru herself. If she arose suspicion again, it’d be all over, so Yuuki couldn’t push his inner circle like that.

Then Kagali suddenly recalled something.

“If you think about it, they must be developing new kinds of weapons, too. Considering that, perhaps we should be concerned about more than the size of their armies.”

Yuuki gave this a grin. “I thought you’d notice that. You’re right, though. I was surprised to see the Empire developing tanks, but Rimuru’s not far behind with his trains, either. It’s not like the Empire has an exclusive license for scientific weaponry, so it’d be stupid to look to that for an advantage.”

No, the Empire wasn’t the only side of this fight with otherworlder tech. Rimuru retained all his otherworlder memories, so there’s no telling what kind of weapon he might decide to fund.

If the Empire were fighting any normal nation, that opponent would have been shaken to the core by all its mysterious firepower. Even if that opponent had otherworlders, the knowledge they’d learn from them would only add to the despair. The difference in fighting ability would become clear as day, and they’d understand that there was no chance of winning. But what if the other side had the technical skill to develop the same kinds of things? They’d immediately work out countermeasures, and any advantage would be evened out in the blink of an eye. In fact, if one side trusted in their tech too much, they’d have the tables turned and lose terrain on their foe so quickly that it’d make their heads spin.

Yuuki had seen all this, and by his estimate, he thought Rimuru’s chances of victory weren’t at all minor.

“Ridiculous!” interjected Vega. “Just crush them, then! If you’re that worried about that stuff, just tear it all down! Problem solved!”

Whether it was a weapon or an army, the eminently confident Vega thought, all you had to do was trample over everything in your way. His observation demonstrated a critical lack of comprehension across this whole conversation. It made Yuuki rub a hand against his head.

This guy… He’s strong but so stupid. Too stupid, even…

If he had even a bit more brains in his head, he could be useful for so much more.

Yuuki sighed. “Well, if it comes to that,” he said, “you can be sure I’ll ask you for it. But we can’t misread the enemy here.”

That bit of ambivalence ought to have shut Vega up. Besides, he thought, in this world, quality counted for a lot more than quantity. No matter how big an army you assembled, you’d never beat the demon lord Guy—an example that proved you could never deride the power of an individual.

To reach your strategic goal, it was important to master the information war and fully gauge your opponent’s abilities. The easiest way to do that was by throwing someone decently strong against your foe and seeing what happens. In addition, abandoning an unwinnable battle was a proper practice to employ. And no matter how powerful an individual foe might have been, attacking with multiple forces at once could let you overcome them. In other words, looking at a side’s overall war power was meaningless. What mattered was tactical skill—how well they could effectively operate the forces at hand.

Along those lines, Tempest was a troublesome enemy. Rimuru was far from the only threat—that nation had a ridiculous number of powerful magic-born. Even the Big Four—Benimaru, Diablo, Shion, and Gobta—were like four tactical units of their own. Defeating any one of them was a highly difficult mission.

I doubt it’s just a matter of tech. They got a lot of tough people on their side, so sheer numbers aren’t gonna matter with them. Guess it shows how right I was to capitulate to Guy earlier, huh?

As far as Yuuki knew, there were several people stronger than Gobta, which meant at least a few others were as powerful as the Big Four.

“My real concern is the magic-born comparable to Saints or demon lords,” muttered Damrada, apparently in agreement.

“You’re right. Because it’s not just the Big Four with them,” said Yuuki. “There’s magic-born like Geld and Gabil as well. It’s hard to understand why all these demon lord–class people keep coming over there.”

The more Yuuki thought about it, the stranger it seemed. Multiple people, each with strength on the level of Clayman, in the service of Rimuru, a lone demon lord. If you were aware of that, you’d almost wish it were a joke.

“Lucky for us that the demon lord Rimuru isn’t our enemy right now.”

Everyone except for Vega quietly nodded at Yuuki’s statement. Now they had a sort of agreement with Guy that placed them under his affiliation. Anyone who messed with Yuuki and his team would be inviting the wrath of Guy upon them. With Yuuki uninterested in challenging Rimuru, they were at an armistice, more or less—and Yuuki was selfish enough to try using this situation as best as he could. Even if they faced off sometime, it’d only be after he regained his losses in the West.

With that resolved in his mind, he returned to the main topic.

“Does that complete your report?” he asked Kagali.

“We weren’t able to obtain detailed military information, so that’s all the accurate intel we have. But there is one curious topic I’d like to bring up.”

“What’s that?”

“In the capital of Rimuru, there’s been ongoing disaster training taking place, but the local government recently added evacuation drills to the schedule.”

This training involved pretty sensible matters—running into sturdy buildings, putting out fires, that sort of thing. But the evacuation drill this time had citizens practicing fleeing into town from outside the four main gates. It didn’t make much sense.

“Fleeing into town?”

“Yes. Our investigators weren’t sure what it was about, so they decided to split up and take a closer look.”

“One on the outside, one on the inside?”

“Exactly. Then, they said, they saw something—a strange sight that looked like a dream—”

“A strange sight?”

“Yes, Misha. There was an announcement, and exactly ten minutes after that, the entire town vanished without a trace. All that remained was one single gate.”

According to the investigator left outside, there were some security personnel left by the gate, guiding any stragglers into a nearby cave. Once the coast was clear, the investigator braced himself and went through the gate—only to find himself in a mazelike chamber of stone walls. He quickly fled back out the gate in a panic, proving that it had two-way access.

“That might be their Dungeon, I think…,” said Yuuki.

“Do you know what it is, Sir Yuuki?” Damrada asked.

“Yeah. I think Kagali knows, too, but there’s a tourist attraction in town called the Dungeon, right?”

“Correct. A structure with wandering monsters for adventurers to challenge themselves against.”

“It’s probably that. I heard a rumor that there’s a whole city inside that Dungeon, so…”

“A city inside it?”

Damrada didn’t seem ready to believe that, but Yuuki and Kagali were serious. It was hard to explain to someone who didn’t already know, but that was the reality.

“Yeah. It’s a little crazy to think of normally, but… You know, it takes someone like Rimuru to make it possible. The Dungeon goes down a hundred floors, after all, and it’s guarded by Veldora at the bottom.”

“…Is that really true?” Damrada questioned.

“Of course. I heard it from Veldora himself.”

That shut up Damrada pretty quickly. Kagali felt a little bad for him.

“But if you think about it,” she said, “it makes sense. Do you think this Dungeon city might contain vital infrastructure for Tempest—for example, their technological development site?”

“Ah, I see,” replied Yuuki. “I can believe it… In fact, it makes good sense.”

There was no limit to what Rimuru would try. Yuuki didn’t even let it faze him any longer. If anything, it excited him. And while this was only a guess, he doubted he was wrong. If it was Rimuru, he concluded, it had to be true.

“What does this say about the war, then?”

“That I really don’t know. I always thought you couldn’t take those guys with a normal approach, but handling a city defense like that? I’m sure it’s gonna shock the Empire.”

Yuuki had assumed that Rimuru wouldn’t fight the final battle on his own turf—he’d never let his citizens become casualties. But what if he had a surefire method to ensure every single civilian was out of harm’s way? If he did, the enemy would have to rewrite their entire strategy.

“Yeah, so maybe they’re taking a wait-and-see approach with the lodging town—see if they wind up fighting there or not. Maybe they’ll fight the real war around their capital. If the Empire forces miss the gate and pass right on by, there could be a surprise attack from the rear, kinda thing.”

“And then the Western Nations’ army can pin them down from the front.”

“They could send an advance team to examine and analyze the Empire’s fighting power. Then, while the Western Nations and the Empire are fighting a war of attrition, they can take their time crafting a response.”

“What a terrifying approach to think of. He really is a demon lord.”

Once they understood Yuuki’s thoughts, Kagali, Damrada, and Misha all showed visible surprise. They knew conventional warfare wouldn’t be enough to stop the demon lord Rimuru, but they hadn’t thought this far. Just imagining having to fight him gave them all headaches. It’d just be too hard—and now, the fight between Rimuru and the Empire was starting to sound like a lot of fun to watch.

“So, Sir Yuuki, what’s your next move?”

Misha was waiting for the right time to ask. She and her cohorts knew Yuuki took on the demon lord Guy and lost. They remained loyal to him anyway, but they still weren’t sure what exactly was on his mind.

The Cerberus trio was fine with the Empire giving Rimuru and his friends a hard time, but no matter what, they wanted to avoid playing a role in that. Yuuki promised Guy that he wouldn’t seriously support the Empire—but if he was a commander now, there was every concern he’d get caught in his own trap. For Cerberus, having an imperial commander on their side was extremely attractive, but it also came with the danger of getting involved in military affairs. That was an eat-or-be-eaten world; one wrong move and they’d face annihilation.

Those were the motives behind Misha’s question, and Yuuki was fully aware of them.

“You don’t have to worry. If Rimuru holds out for me, that suits all of us just fine. I mean, if we want to make our ideals a reality, the Empire gets in the way of that, don’t they? I want to send them to their ruin someday, and not just because Guy told me to… And now that I’m a commander, I get to control the timing. Just think of it like that.”

Now that Yuuki was one of the Empire’s three top commanders, he knew all about their internal operations. Getting an inside view of their military strategy even let him read into the common ground he shared with them. Naturally then, when they went on the move, he’d be able to predict the size of their forces—as well as when defenses in imperial territory would be the lightest. If the Western Nations put up a tough fight, the Empire would have to deploy that much more firepower against them. Then, no matter how stout their defenses, Yuuki was sure he’d find an opening.

“And we’ll hit them where they’re open!” Yuuki said, smacking the table for effect. Kagali smiled, still standing up straight, while Damrada and the others grew excited in their seats.

“Are you suggesting a coup…?” Damrada asked.

“Ah, I love it,” Misha gushed. “Now that’s the Sir Yuuki I know.”

“Heh-heh! Sounds like a lot of fun. Empire, demon lord, I’ll crush ’em all!”

Vega was a little too excited, maybe, but Yuuki decided not to worry about it as he got back to the point.

“Well, that’s my final goal anyway. Part of my promise with Guy was to stir up trouble with the Empire, too, and I gotta live up to my end of it. I’m gonna mess around with the West, too, but I don’t think anyone’s gonna complain about that, so…”

He smiled warmly. Guy hadn’t warned him against that, so Yuuki was free to do what he liked.

“Are you talking about having the Empire fight the Western Nations, then taking the Empire’s head in the meantime…?” Damrada inquired.

“Vicious as always, huh?” said Misha.

“Oh, not really,” Yuuki answered. “I think it’s a plan pretty much anyone could come up with.”

They would, maybe, but few would actually go through with it. Or maybe they’d try but not be powerful and talented enough to make it happen. Yuuki was the exception.

“Lord Gadora gave me a lot of information, too. That old man loves anything novel, and he’s got a flexible mind, but for some reason, he just hates the Western Nations. Like, to an obsessive level. It’s a lot of the reason why he’s developed all these weapons and contributed them to the Empire.”

“Ah yes, that’s a famous story,” said Damrada. “Even I was aware of that.”

“Right? ’Cause if he’s looking for things that could crush the Empire’s ambitions, you’d think he’d see the demon lord Rimuru as that. I’m sure it’ll dawn on him once he starts messing with the guy.”

“…And then what will happen?”

“Well, Lord Gadora has a ton of influence with the imperial military, but in terms of actual power, he’s got almost none. That’s because he’s more interested in revenge than anything. So if I can lead him the right way, I think I can pit him against Rimuru himself.”

At the same time, thought Yuuki, he’d like to have Gadora poke around for information about the Dungeon.

“This is your way to hassle Rimuru and weaken the Empire at the same time?”

“You got it!”

Yuuki briskly nodded at Damrada. He wasn’t going to touch Rimuru, but if someone else wanted to challenge him, they were perfectly welcome—hence all his conniving plans.

He took this opportunity to discuss his thoughts in more detail.

“The way I see it, there are three people we need to watch out for in the Empire. One of them is Lord Gadora himself.”

Gadora was a master sorcerer, a magic-born who had lived for many, many years. People saw him as a mystery figure who knew everything that went on behind the scenes in the imperial capital, and he was also a hero in his own right, one of the few survivors of the previous invasion attempt against Veldora.

“Who are the other two?” a curious Kagali asked behind Yuuki. He gave her a frustrated scowl in response.

“Well, I don’t know much about them yet, exactly. That’s why I know they’re so much trouble.”

Even with his extensive intelligence network, Yuuki hadn’t found these two. Just hearing that indicated how slippery they were.

“Are they among the Imperial Guardians’ upper ranks?” Misha asked, perhaps suspecting something.

Yuuki gave this a vague consent. There were rumors around military circles that certain Imperial Knights—referred to as the Single Digits—were even stronger than the three division commanders. In Yuuki’s opinion, this was more than just a rumor. He could feel it. Here he was, a full-fledged commander, but his own numerical ranking was still in the double digits. He could try challenging someone higher up to a ranking duel, but he’d have to figure out who to challenge first. Becoming a Single Digit required winning a battle staged in front of the emperor, and even that fact was revealed only to those very close to earning a shot.

“I’m thinking that I can beat any Single Digit in the group, but I don’t wanna reveal my best moves in front of the enemy, so I haven’t sent a request to the emperor yet.”

Yuuki became a commander despite that, thanks to some lucky connections with Lord Gadora.

“Thing is, though, even if you try taking someone on, maybe the real boss will be someone else the whole time, huh? You can’t be sure about anything. So what I guess I’m saying is: There’s at least nine people you gotta watch out for, sort of.”

Vega had a good point. It surprised Yuuki as he nodded at him.

“Yeah, you’re right. There’s a chance my real nemesis is hidden among those nine. But I can’t watch out for someone I’ve never seen before, you know? So right now, I’m looking closely at someone who’s a more public figure than that.”

“Who?” Damrada asked.

“His name’s Tatsuya Kondo. He runs the Imperial Information Bureau.”

“Ah yes. He is hard to grasp, isn’t he?”

“We know his name and face but nothing else about him,” said Misha. “It’s bizarre.”

Tatsuya Kondo, as the name suggested, was an otherworlder. Any more personal information than that was a complete unknown. Rumors pegged him as a “mysterious figure stalking the halls of information.” His rank was first lieutenant, but none of the unit commanders had the right to give him orders. The Imperial Information Bureau, in other words, was higher up the hierarchy than the military itself.

“Yeah, it’s freaky, isn’t it? My guess is that he’s one of the Single Digits, too,” said Yuuki.

“…I see.”

“Put it that way, and it makes sense.”

Damrada and Kagali deeply nodded. Misha pondered this as well but had no objections.

“So who do you think the other one is?” Vega asked, already sounding disinterested and hoping to hurry Yuuki along.

“Ha-ha-ha! Patience, okay? The first thing is to meet up with this Tatsuya Kondo. I’ll see if I can request a meeting with him. So as for the second person, she’s also kinda a mystery.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Calm down, Vega.”

“Ah… Sorry.”

The tone of Yuuki’s voice as he gave Vega a light warning was warm, almost gentle, but it made Vega break into a nervous sweat. It showed, in that moment, just how wide the chasm was between those two.

“The second person is someone who sits next to the emperor. I don’t know who it is, but she strikes this incredible presence. I can feel her even with the imperial set of blinds between us.”

“““…?”””

Nobody knew who it was—or really, nobody except Yuuki even realized someone like that existed. That made the potential danger crystal clear.

“…So there’s someone like that, always with the emperor?” Damrada asked, speaking for his companions. “I haven’t heard anything about it…”

“I didn’t think so. She felt so present in the room, but nobody notices her at all. That has to be bad news.”

The room fell silent for a moment.

“And you’re sure she was there? I haven’t even heard rumors of such a figure.”

“Well, look at it another way—if we heard that from anyone except Sir Yuuki, we never would’ve believed it, right?”

“…”

Yuuki smiled at his doubtful underlings. “Eh, it’s no big deal. Just remember—if I attempt to stage a coup in the Empire, those three are probably gonna get in our way. I’ll eliminate Lord Gadora first, so…Damrada, can you look into Tatsuya Kondo for me?”

“Absolutely.”

“And, Misha, keep up with your current mission.”

“Understood. I will continue engaging the commander of the Armored Division.”

“What about me?” Vega asked.

“You’re going to go undercover in the Magical Beast Division. With your muscle, you’ll get in the Imperial Guardians in a flash. But whatever you do, don’t kill the division commander, all right?”

“Sure. I’ll try not to.”

Vega flashed a ferocious smile, glad to finally be on duty. Is he really gonna be all right? fretted Yuuki, but he decided to trust him anyway. If the leader did get killed, that’d delay the Empire’s entire military operation, which was a concern… But Yuuki opted not to worry about it unless it happened.

The three heads of Cerberus left the chamber, leaving Yuuki alone with Kagali.

“Sir Yuuki… Do you think they’ll all pull it off?”

“Who knows? I thought I was being pretty careful, and then I caught a tiger named Guy by the tail. I’m not in any position to say this, but I sure hope they can.”

Damrada was off investigating Tatsuya Kondo. Misha was attempting to inveigle herself with the Magical Beast Division commander. And Vega was about to embark on a standout career in the Composite Division. These were dangerous missions, and they were doing them all for Yuuki’s sake. As their leader, he’d have to trust in their success.

“But we’ve finally made it to this point, haven’t we? The battle’s about to begin.”

“It sure is. It’ll be fun to see who wins.”

“As if you can just sit back and watch. Even if you pull off that coup, the hard part comes after that.”

“Yeah. I have Laplace and the gang working on that for me. I got everything covered.”

The two shared a smile.

Their mission wasn’t to have the Empire win. The longer they could drag out this upcoming war, the weaker the Empire would become. That’s what they wanted, and the fate of Yuuki and Kagali’s plans rode on whether the ensuing coup attempt succeeded or failed.

“First, we make the emperor our puppet and establish a new Empire. Then…”

“…Why don’t we forge a peace treaty with the Western Nations?”

“And then…”

“…We’ll have the emperor assassinated!”

If the demon lord Rimuru proved too hard to kill, there was no need to force that. Guy had defeated Yuuki fair and square, and with that, Yuuki gave up on conquering the world in the short-to-midterm time frame. Until he had the kind of absolute power he needed, he now realized, trying to get his way with violence was the height of folly. For now, he thought, adding more winning cards to his hand needed to be his focus.

And if the war kept raging, and more blood could be shed…

“…Then I’ll awaken to a true demon lord once more.”

“That’s what I’m hoping to hear from ya, Kagali. And by then, I oughtta be able to fully use all the new powers I got.”

Yuuki had awoken to an ultimate skill. Already, he could feel his life span extending. And now he knew the truth: There were those greater than him—people like the demon lord Guy, ruling over the world with absolute force. Conquering that world without addressing them would be a fantasy.

For now, best to slip under Guy’s radar and build up force. He’d stir up the Empire, keep the war going, and weaken both the East and the West. Once pessimism set in, and everyone was weary of war, if he could take that moment to assassinate the emperor…the world would face an even more appalling age of chaos. They could ride that chaos, he and Kagali, and awaken yet more within themselves…and that, in essence, was the plan.

“Well, keep being careful, though.”

“Of course, Sir Yuuki. Keep being careful.”

Once more, they looked at each other and smiled.

…Even two intelligent schemers like them didn’t see the Dungeon as a very important factor. They just saw it as a neat way for Tempest to hide their top-secret facilities—even a town, for that matter—and they figured bringing it to Lord Gadora’s attention would be a good way to drive Rimuru nuts. They may be visiting it themselves someday, so they figured it’d be a good idea to have it checked out for clues on how to crack it—but neither of them spent much time thinking about it.

Thanks to that, when their dungeon runners came back with a rather unexpected report, Yuuki paid it no mind.

Upon learning what Yuuki showed him, Lord Gadora wrenched up his face, deep in thought.

Hmmm. Right when it’s time to put our Empire on the move and defeat the god Luminus, too…

With Veldora resurrected, they had to embark on a major rewrite of their plans. That couldn’t be avoided. The last time they staged a campaign this large, the Storm Dragon crushed the whole thing.

Now, in order to ensure their plan was impenetrable, some wanted to wait until the Storm Dragon fully disappeared from existence. Some wanted to tame him with the power of the new weapons they successfully developed. Others wished to point their armies around the Forest of Jura to avoid riling the Storm Dragon.

Opinions were split evenly among the three factions, delaying the Empire’s movements—and thanks to that, they went and let the Storm Dragon revive itself. This greatly angered the war hawks in the “tame the Storm Dragon” faction, but the more mainstream minds in the other two groups didn’t give them room to speak. If those “new weapons” didn’t work, after all, their hopes were dashed a second time.

In Gadora’s mind, the Storm Dragon didn’t really matter. His mission, the reason he kept living, was to eradicate Luminism from the West and take revenge against the Seven Days Clergy who killed his best friend.

A newspaper he ordered from the West contained an article outlining the Seven Days Clergy’s evil deeds, under the headline THE HEROES’ DECLINE. He also knew, at the same time, about reports that the Seven Days Clergy were slain. But Gadora refused to accept this at face value. At the very least, he was sure Gren, the Sunday Priest, was alive and lurking in the muck somewhere.

Over the past few months, information from the West had grown garbled and entangled, and it was hard to investigate much of it. Thanks to that, he had no way to confirm it—but there were rumors that the Rozzos had been toppled as well.

Ah, but it’s all rumors. I’m sure Gren was what ultimately became of that one Hero. He may have been old, but he was no adversary to sniff at.

What’s more, while the Council seemed to be on sure footing, Gadora had confirmed some serious goings-on behind the scenes. Nothing he heard, however, indicated that the Western Holy Church had weakened at all. That was proof positive, in Gadora’s eyes, that Gren was alive.

It’d be so easy to ignore the Storm Dragon and just invade the West, but noooo…

Gadora’s thoughts were along those lines, but even he knew how difficult that would be.

So the Storm Dragon is teaming up with a demon lord? It would be sheer stupidity to position an army against a monster like that, living outside any sort of reasoned magic. I helped construct the theories behind our new weapon, and it should be possible to stop him in his tracks, at least—but destroy him? That’s another story. And forget about ever taming him…

As a survivor of the Empire’s last campaign, he had personal insight into the threat Veldora posed. The experience taught him that the war hawks were being far too rash.

Those fools completely fail to understand how hard it is to rule over a spiritual life-form with a spirit of your own!

It wasn’t impossible. They had conducted experiments on demons along those lines, and some of the results had been encouraging. Gadora knew that well enough—he came up with the theory for the work, so of course he would. But based on their verified results, he concluded that Veldora was strictly off-limits.

He had submitted a report to the emperor along those lines, but sadly, he was shut down. “If someone wants to try it,” he was told, “let them.”

Regardless, the problem now was Rimuru, a demon lord who built a nation and unified the Forest of Jura at an astonishing pace. If he had teamed up with the Storm Dragon, attacking the forest would have been nothing but foolish. If the entirety of the Empire’s military were deployed for the effort, that would be one thing—but to make the most effective use of such a force, they’d need to lure the enemy into more advantageous terrain, and that was an impossibility.

What, then, if they must fight the enemy on their own turf?

“The Dungeon, eh? And they might be developing otherworld weapons as well? We must investigate this. If we could defeat Veldora and Rimuru while losing less than, say, a third of our force, I’d call it a fine job. Otherwise, we have no chance of winning against the Western Nations, at the end of it.”

The words were mostly directed at Gadora himself. But he was making a mistake. He thought that Luminism, and the Western Nations supporting it, would be where they’d make their stand—not Tempest. And whether he picked up on this error in judgment would be key to deciding his fate, going forward.

Following Yuuki’s orders, three people were put on assignment—selected for their spots in the Composite Division and having an acquaintance with Lord Gadora. They would all be meeting today, and Yuuki had invited Gadora to his personal chamber for the occasion.

The first was Shinji Tanimura, formerly a college student in Japan who spent most of his days holed up in a university research lab. He still retained his beloved white lab coat, which had become his trademark here. The second was Marc Lauren, a muscular, brown-haired man in his midtwenties; he was the oldest of the trio, a buff bodybuilder type who’d go around in a tank top and jeans even in winter. The third was Zhen Liuxing, young and taciturn; it was hard to gauge his thoughts, but he always did what he was told. His long, braided black hair ran down his back, and he preferred comfortable, traditional Chinese-style clothing—under which, it was said, he hid a litany of assassin’s weapons.

Shinji had evolved to become the leader of this group, Marc and Zhen taking orders from him, and now they stood up straight before Yuuki and Gadora.

“It is an honor to see you after so long!” said the dark-haired Shinji, speaking for his group.

“Yes, long it certainly has been,” said Gadora. “And, Marc and Zhen—I trust you two are doing well?”

“Yeah, really well. Glad you’re still okay, too, old man.”

“…I am not feeling that well, my lord.”

Gadora cheerfully smiled at Marc and Zhen. “Good! The same as always, then. I understand you’re working hard in your squadrons as well. It’s quite a relief to hear.”

Shinji and his friends were otherworlders placed under Yuuki’s guidance. He provided care for people like them from all over the world; they were sent to the Empire to live, whether they had skills suited for battle or not. There, they’d be received by the Cerberus secret society, and then Lord Gadora the sorcerer would see to them. His mission was to gain what otherworld information he could, and if the otherworlders had a talent for combat and were interested in pursuing it, Gadora would also train them.

This was what chiefly constituted the Composite Division—well-trained otherworlders with a litany of skills. Of course, simply being from another world didn’t guarantee you a top officer rank in the Empire. They became excellent soldiers because they knew how to correctly harness their powers—the unique skills they manifested for themselves. And Shinji had used his own unique skill to establish a firm, secure role in the military.

“Yeah, these three are frontline talents in my Composite Division. I think they’ll be perfect for this new investigation.”

“If you believe so, Sir Yuuki, then I have no complaints. Please, all of you, have a seat.”

The trio meekly took the austere sorcerer’s advice. Gadora looked at them, smiling a bit. Seeing these full-fledged soldiers still act so nervous around him was an amusing sight. But he couldn’t sit there grinning about it forever.

“Now, Sir Yuuki, you’re going to let me borrow this trio for our investigation?”

“Yeah. I wanted to go there myself, but I can’t really show my face around Tempest at the moment, you know? And I’d be anxious about sending just the three of them over, so I was hoping you could oversee them for me, my lord.”

“Mmm. I had a look at the report you sent. If what’s written in there is true, I think we do need to examine this in more detail before launching our full campaign.”

Gadora eyed Yuuki, sizing him up and awaiting his reaction. Yuuki, aware of this, nodded back.

“It’s all true, every word of it. I’ll be briefing all three of you on this in a moment, but this is gonna be kind of a unique mission. Basically, there’s this labyrinth I want you to investigate for us.”

“Whoa, hang on! You called us all here for some kinda obstacle-course thing? Is that how little you trust us? Even if Lord Gadora’s enlisting us, I really don’t think this is something we need to do before a full-scale military invasion!”

Marc, the most short-fused of the group, was the first to flare up. This was common enough to see. Yuuki encouraged them to ask questions on matters until they had an answer they were satisfied with.

“Calm down, Marc. This is important.”

“But…!”

“Wait a sec, Marc. I’m sure Yuuki’s got a good reason for this, so let’s just hear him out, okay?” Shinji said before facing Yuuki. “Would you mind filling us in, then?”

“Of course…and trust me, once you hear it all, you won’t be complaining.”

So Yuuki carefully went over the trio’s assignment.

………

……

…

Gadora had already given his approval beforehand, so he silently listened, making sure there weren’t any discrepancies. Shinji and his friends were shocked.

Across the force, Yuuki had his protégés in place, well trained and blessed with unique skills, and they had laid low in their respective posts up to now. The idea was that, when the time came, they’d bare their fangs and take over their respective squadrons. Yuuki hadn’t filled them in on the details, but everyone thought that the moment was near. Shinji and his friends were part of this, and now that Yuuki had full control of the Composite Division, they figured it was just a matter of time before the order came.

World conquest.

When Yuuki first told them about this childish-sounding dream, nobody thought he could actually do it. But as they polished their skills and learned how this new world worked, they all began to think it wasn’t so impossible after all. Shinji and his team practically adored him at this point. Everyone was eagerly awaiting the moment—and then this “Dungeon” assignment arrived out of nowhere. The trio couldn’t be blamed for their confusion.

But as Yuuki explained matters, they began to reconsider. Out of all the preparation and investigation they had done for this upcoming war, only the Dungeon remained unexplored, and it was likely that some kind of important secret was being hidden in this maze. If word had it that an entire town was hidden deep in its chambers, they weren’t going to take that sitting down.

………

……

…

“I see now… So the Empire can’t ignore this Dungeon in their operations, huh?”

“And there’s a town inside? I’m never gonna believe that until I see it.”

“…And we’re going to go in there?”

Shinji’s team had to accept it.

“So that’s the long and short of things. You see what I mean now, though? If the Empire’s campaign takes it into the Forest of Jura, we’re planning to stage our military coup once the front lines are stretched out far enough. When we do, we’re hoping to attract as much of the army as we can. The demon lord Rimuru and the Storm Dragon aren’t enough to make the Empire deploy the total brunt of their forces. I want a stronger reason for them to do that.”

Maybe the labyrinth could be that reason. Or not. If it didn’t live up to the hype, Yuuki explained, they’d fabricate something else—and with the time that’d buy them, Yuuki and his personal team would seize the imperial capital.

This came as a surprise to Shinji’s trio. They had seen a coup attempt coming, but this was the first time they were let in on the details. Plus, Gadora himself was in the room. Wouldn’t talking about it right in front of him cause a leak?

“Y-Yuuki?!”

Shinji tried to stop him, but Yuuki just smiled and waved it off. “No, no, don’t worry. Lord Gadora knows all about my plans.”

“Huh?”

“Heh-heh-heh! And why wouldn’t I? I have a personal obligation to the emperor, but his Empire? That means nothing to me. My mission is to destroy Luminism. I had no idea the demon lord Luminus led that religion herself; it took me completely by surprise. I have zero interest in Luminism’s followers, but I will never rest until I personally take down those who killed my friend. I’d like to begin by taking care of the demon lord Rimuru; they say he’s close friends with Luminus. That is why I’m planning to join you in this labyrinth conquest.”

Beyond that, Gadora said with a crazed grin, he didn’t much care what happened.

He had, of course, heard the stories about Rimuru. One year earlier, the Kingdom of Farmus was toppled after it attracted the ire of Veldora. A fit of rage drained the Storm Dragon’s energy and allowed Rimuru to recruit him for his own purposes. Gadora didn’t know whether this was a master-servant relationship or more of a cooperative arrangement, but the Storm Dragon had shown no signs of activity since, his massive aura no longer detectable. To Gadora, the rumors seemed plausible to some extent.

There were also moves being made among the other demon lords. Several had dropped out of the Ten Great Demon Lords, the remainder regrouping into the so-called Octagram. They had notified human society of this, and Gadora was positive the demon lord Rimuru played a major role. After all, Rimuru joined their ranks just as Clayman, one of the former Ten Great Demon Lords, disappeared. It proved that, in the end, Rimuru was simply more powerful than him. Clayman was a crafty demon lord, one you underestimated at your own peril, but Rimuru as a demon lord was an even greater threat.

What’s more, Rimuru had opened up diplomatic relations with humanity, strengthening his influence within the Council of the West. Gadora couldn’t say what the Western Nations thought about this, but he knew that riling Rimuru would be a very dangerous act.

But something else was also on his mind. Farmus, he knew, sent an army of some twenty thousand soldiers to attack Tempest—and only three of them survived. One had since been killed, so that left no one but the former king and Razen, his ex-apprentice.

I will need to question Razen about this, Gadora thought, making a mental note. But there still remains far too much that’s unclear with this demon lord Rimuru…

Gadora wasn’t about to let his guard down. Farmus’s forces were wiped out by the Storm Dragon, the reports said, but there was no physical evidence backing this up. That, in itself, was unnerving. In normal wars, a warring faction would generally be considered to fail its objective if it lost thirty percent of its personnel. That’d be the point a commander would issue a surrender, but there was no record Farmus ever attempted one.

One could interpret this as the Storm Dragon refusing to take prisoners, but Gadora saw that as unlikely. He was a survivor from their past campaign, after all, and he knew Veldora’s personality well. As a fighter, he was, in a word, imprecise. He wasn’t the type to pursue fleeing foot soldiers; he’d cause huge amounts of damage, but it’d all happen in one big wave with no follow-up. Considering this fighting style, a force of twenty thousand being 99.9999 percent annihilated was a bit too much to swallow.

So did Rimuru do something? Based on what Gadora knew about his personality, that seemed unlikely, too. In his mind, this was one demon lord who spared the lives of those who gave in to him. This, on the other hand, was a massacre.

I suppose Veldora really did do them all in, then, before they had a chance to surrender.

It was honestly a terrifying thought. The exact reason why a full frontal conflict had to be avoided—and he had a plan for that. Rimuru was another worry for him, but he was about to investigate him, and they could work out a response after that. That was enough to reassure Gadora for now. He had no personal vendetta against Rimuru, but if he was working in tandem with Luminus, he was an enemy.

He had to be defeated…though Gadora had no intention of reckless attempts on his life. Gadora had spent many years honing his plan, and now he’d move the Empire toward invading the Western Nations. They were one step away from all that—he couldn’t afford to rush this part and send everything crashing down. He was careful, very careful, with every move he made.

Gadora and Yuuki shared the same interests, and after conversing about them, they agreed to work in tandem, sharing information with each other and becoming comrades in arms.

But Shinji was still shocked at how casually Yuuki revealed such secrets. He wanted everyone to take a step back, and it was obvious why.

W-wait… If this goes bad, we could all be rubbed out…

Shinji, being no fool, didn’t think his group was being trusted that much—but he didn’t think they were seen as disposable pawns, either. They were being tested, he believed, and Marc and Zhen felt the same way.

“All right! We’ll investigate as best as we can.”

“This’ll be fun, old man! And I promise we won’t drag you down in there.”

“…I’ll do my best.”

This was clearly an important mission. They had to produce results—in fact, as Shinji now realized, producing results was how they’d guarantee their survival.

“Right. Then let me ask you all: Do you know how many demon lords there are?”

“Sure. Eight, right?”

“…Huh? Weren’t there ten? Or did it go up to eleven?”

“The lineup changed a year ago, Marc…”

Gadora sighed. “Shinji,” he said, raising his voice, “you need to make sure that fool receives the right information. Any soldier who can’t gather intelligence is going to wind up on the chopping block first!”

He took a moment to catch his breath.

“There are eight demon lords in an arrangement known as the Octagram. They style themselves as akin to eight stars in the sky, and with at least some of them, it’s not far from reality. I bring this up because your target here is Rimuru, the so-called Newbie of this Octagram. You must never let your guard down around him. Furthermore, there is another demon among this group known as the Labyrinth Master. What do you make of that?”

The trio nervously gulped. Even Yuuki looked at Gadora, surprised.

“Are they involved,” Shinji carefully asked, “with the labyrinth we’re exploring?”

Gadora nodded gravely, then handed them a book. It spoke of a labyrinth, a safe haven for spirits, located in the Republic of Ur-Gracia to the west. The stories told of a vast maze under the ground or in the sky, but this was correct and incorrect in equal measure. What this book revealed was that this haven was home to more than spirits—it also housed a queen who had transformed her body from a spiritual form to that of a fairy.

“That fairy queen is Ramiris the Labyrinth Master—one of the oldest demon lords.”

The facts hit Gadora’s audience like a ton of bricks. But he wasn’t done yet.

“The door to this labyrinth of hers was located in Urgr Nature Park, but now it has vanished. I investigated this myself, so there is no doubting it. Based on what I was told, it disappeared at around the same time Rimuru declared himself a demon lord. Soon after, his nation revealed their own Dungeon…”

“Well,” chimed in Yuuki, “that pretty much settles it, huh? I was wondering how they built a labyrinth like that, but now I’m positive the demon lord Ramiris created it. She and Rimuru must be allies.”

Yuuki was sure of it, and he gave a bracing smile. No one on Shinji’s side had the words to deny it—and that brought them all down. Now it felt like this mission just became far more difficult.

“I’ll be counting on you,” said Gadora.

“Make sure to stay on your guard, okay?” Yuuki reminded the trio.

Then, after another warning about the terrifying craftiness of the demon lord Rimuru, the three of them left.

The day after this meeting, Yuuki’s secretary, Kagali, guided Shinji and his friends to the outskirts of Tempest.

Ten days after that, Gadora set off by himself to another destination. After seeing Yuuki admonish the three of them, he figured he’d let them handle the mission solo to start with. He didn’t think Yuuki really saw them as disposable—it was just a little tough talk to put them in the right mindset.

Sir Yuuki’s not exactly an honest man, either. He thinks he’s so talented, and he expects the same from everyone else.

That much was clear to Gadora—and it was true for himself personally as well.

Gadora had no intention of sending his apprentices out to be killed. If they got in trouble, he could reach out to them. But he never actually voiced this. Instead, he just silently menaced those around him, making people think he was a scary old man.

But Gadora was blissfully unaware of all this as he headed for the former Kingdom of Farmus. He had recalled an old apprentice of his, and he decided to call on him to gather information about Rimuru. Flying over to the old Farmus capital of Maris, he promptly headed for the palace.

Razen, working in his office, practically shot out of his chair when he found out. Long before Gadora even reached the palace, he picked up on the nearby presence of his great master, a man he thought died long ago.

“I…I can’t believe he’s alive,” he muttered—and as he did, he realized this was going to be trouble. Even if he didn’t know Gadora’s intentions, Razen knew Gadora had come here to see him, and it clearly wasn’t just to rekindle an old friendship. And there was another problem: The Farminus palace guards didn’t know Gadora. If something wasn’t done, he’d doubtlessly start a scuffle at the palace gates and kill anyone who defied him. And should Razen himself ever get on Gadora’s bad side…

No, no, no… If that ever happened, I could never hold back Sir Gadora myself.

Quickly reaching that conclusion, Razen sprang into action, making a magical call to one of his new apprentices.

“You can hear me, can’t you?”

“Tch… Don’t call me out of nowhere like this.”

“You must’ve noticed what’s going on, too.”

“Yeah. Grigori hasn’t yet, but I felt this foreign presence out of nowhere. It’s gonna reach the palace gate, you know.”

“Well, if you know all that, join me at the gate now.”

“…All right. I owe you one, after all.”

Razen had recently taken on two new apprentices—Saare and Grigori, former Battlesages and part of the Master Rooks assigned to the Papacy in the Holy Empire of Lubelius. He came to know the two men as he went around the country on inspection runs; they had committed mistakes that made them no longer welcome in the Papacy, so he picked them up as new disciples. This wasn’t because they particularly hit it off. Razen just had a lot of sympathy for them—especially Saare, who had to admit his epic defeat to newspaper reporters from around the world. It was Diablo who handed him that defeat, and to Razen, that struck too close to home.

Saare could be a hothead, but he still accepted Razen as his master. Grigori, for his part, had spells where he’d be struck by terror about something, but over time, his natural fearlessness was coming back. In terms of pure strength, they were attractive talents, so Razen planned to train them as behind-the-scenes agents in the future. Handling potentially dangerous incidents like this was part of that training.

Me, Saare, and Grigori? If I can have Sir Gruecith join us, that should be enough to handle Gadora.

Regular infantry would be useless against such a uniquely powerful sorcerer. The Kingdom of Farminus lacked champion-class talents at the moment, a major weakness. Chief Folgen of the former Farmus Knight Corps and his men were now a thing of the past, and Farminus’s major issue was finding people to replace them.

Being reminded of this made Razen grit his teeth over how late he was to react.

By the time he reached the palace gate, Saare and Grigori were already there—and already in a stare down with Gadora on the other side.

“Hey, man, I don’t know what brings you to this castle, but this is where we live, all right? You know we can’t let strangers inside, okay?”

“He’s right, old man. Take it from us—you’ll wanna be on your way for now. If you’re here to see someone, ask a clerk, and you’ll get a response in two or three days.”

The two of them were rather polite (by their standards) as they blocked Gadora’s way. The sight made Razen feel like years were being taken off his life.

“Stop!” Razen hollered. “Let that man through!”

“Huh? You don’t want us to stop him?” said Saare.

“What’d you call us for, then?” Grigori demanded.

They didn’t appreciate the order much, but Razen didn’t care.

“How nice to see you again, Sir Gadora. I’m afraid I was unaware you were still alive. I apologize I was not worthy enough to call upon you earlier.”

He took a knee in front of Gadora as he spoke reverently.

Razen had a motive for wanting to stay on good terms with Gadora. If push came to shove, he’d put everything he had in stopping him—but it didn’t seem like it’d come to that.

“It has indeed been quite a while, Razen. You look different, but it seems it really is you, eh?”

“Yes, sir. Unlike you, I have survived thanks to taking on a new body—”

“No need to be so formal. I’m not chiding you. I’ve come here today because I need to ask you about some matters. And you, the beastman hiding over there—there’s no need to be so wary of me. If I was hostile to any of you, I wouldn’t have come here by myself.”

Gadora’s words finally eased the tension. But Razen and his apprentices didn’t let their guard down, asking for time to set up a conference space before taking their leave.

The next day, their conference began at a room inside the palace. The attendees were Yohm, Gruecith, and Razen, with Saare and Grigori standing nearby as Yohm’s bodyguard detail.

Mjurran wanted to join as well but was turned down—she had only just given birth, and Yohm insisted she stay in bed and rest. Their newborn was a girl named Mieme, cute and resembling Mjurran. Prince Edgar was giving the little one all his doting care.

“So, Master, what did you want to ask me about?” said Razen.

“Mmm… Well, before I broach the subject, I’d like to point out a few things first. You… Saare, was it? You seem decently strong…but magic is a weakness of yours, isn’t it? Casting magic isn’t about memorizing a spell, you know. You must learn how to correctly manage the magic force inside you. And this beastman, Gruecith—as for you…”

Thus Gadora began pointing out the weaknesses of everyone in the room. Gruecith, as he said, needed to learn how to gauge the capabilities of his foes before attacking them. “Transforming in front of your enemy,” as he sternly put it, “is all but ceding the first strike to them.” For Yohm, while he was “more powerful than the average person, by the looks of it,” he suggested focusing more on protecting his own body, as overreliance on his weapons and armor would be his downfall. With Grigori, on the other hand, he struck a bitter tone, simply ordering him to polish his skills more.

Finally, Gadora’s eyes settled upon Razen.

“Razen, I see you’ve been quite diligent. Your magic is possession-based, is it not?”

“Yes, Master. The Secret Art of Possession, based on the theory behind your Mysterious Art of Reincarnation.”

“Mmm. A very interesting experiment. Unlike my spell, it doesn’t require the target to spend time as a weakened, defenseless child.”

“It is an honor to hear—”

“But it is all pointless unless you make the best use of it. You went through all the effort to seize that body, and you’re not extracting everything you can from it.”

“Yes, Master!”

Razen bowed at the advice, breaking into a sweat. This was something he already knew about himself. It forced him to admit that Gadora was probably right about everyone in the room.

Truly a fearsome figure. In the space of a day, he’s perfectly judged every aspect of our abilities…

He fell silent, unable to put anything into words. But Saare and Grigori were less appreciative.

“Whoa, where do you get off lording it over us like that? How can you take one look at me and spout off all that nonsense?”

“Yeah! I owe a great debt to Sir Razen, but I ain’t got no reason to kowtow to his master, too. If you’re that confident about yourself, how about you and I have a little lesson together, huh?”

Now they were ready to duke it out. Razen wanted to scream at them to shut up, but seeing the look in his master’s eyes, he refrained. To Gadora, this much was expected, and he fully anticipated showing off his skills to Saare and Grigori.

If so, Razen thought, perhaps there’s still an amicable end to all this. Let’s play along with my master.

So in a sort of warm-up before the meeting, Gadora fought a battle against Saare and Grigori. This was held in the palace’s training grounds, and Gadora naturally destroyed them.

“N-no way…”

“This old man is crazy… He didn’t even break a sweat whipping both of us…”

Gadora’s overwhelming strength completely smashed their pride as former Battlesages. His intention was to show off his might, then use that to smoothen their negotiations, and Saare and Grigori reacted exactly as he had hoped. What happened after that, however, didn’t follow the script.

“But you’re not as good as that demon,” said Saare.

“That bad, eh? Then again, I’d say that dog I fought is about as strong as you, old man,” Grigori added.

“…Hmm?”

They had just lost big but seemed oddly accepting of it—and despite seeing Gadora’s strength, they didn’t act too surprised.

…As strong as me? And a demon out there is more powerful than me, even…?

The unexpected reaction confused Gadora, but it didn’t seem like Saare and Grigori were being sore losers. They must have really meant it. And Gadora wanted to inquire in more detail…

“We can discuss this later, Sir Gadora. For now, allow me to answer your original questions.”

…but Razen put a quick end to the proceedings.

Returning to the reception room, the meeting was picked up anew.

“Man, you really are Razen’s master,” a jovial Yohm began. “What a monster! I don’t think I could ever beat ya.”

Gruecith nodded excitedly. “Yeah, the magic-born Razen’s made a big name for himself around here, but we never hear many stories about his instructor. Mjurran said you crafted a new system of magic theory, and the way you fought, I believe her.”

Gadora’s magic was stupendous, as expected. He interfered with the magical energy of his opponents, blocking their spells as he launched two of his own simultaneously, both with punishing force. It was a spectacular feat, one designed to serve as a dazzling demonstration. Saare and Grigori were much more powerful than even a charged-up, ready-to-rock Gruecith, and Gadora treated them like playthings. There was no doubting his strength.

Thus, while Yohm and Gruecith enjoyed the spectacle, the losers seemed pretty discouraged as they dutifully returned to guard duty.

“So,” Razen asked, “what is it that brought you here?”

“…I wanted to show you my strength to make sure nobody tried pointlessly resisting me. As I believe Razen knows, my anger is entirely directed at Luminism. I have no interest in anything else, so I cannot bear to have this nation exposed to an imperial invasion and untold casualties.”

It was an ominous statement despite Gadora’s casual tone.

“Imperial—”

“For real? C’mon, man,” said Yohm. “Don’t go barging in here while I’m the king.”

“You said it. We’d never beat you, and I don’t want Mjurran or my baby girl exposed to danger,” added Gruecith.

“She’s not yours, dammit. Get that through your head already. She’s my treasure!”

“Ah, shut up!! She’s not mine by blood, but she’s my daughter. I’ve decided I’m gonna live like a father from now on.”

“That’s not for you to decide!!”

It was a pretty painful argument, waged between Yohm and Gruecith. Razen cleared his throat to shut them up.

“Right. Now I see, Sir Gadora, why you came here. You’d like Farminus to switch sides to the Empire, in exchange for not being touched during the war?”

“Quite so. You know perfectly well how powerful the Empire is, I imagine? I am part of that package, of course, and should Farminus join our forces, capturing Dwargon would be a simple job. That nation is extremely vulnerable to being starved out. Keep anything from entering or leaving, and they’ll quickly throw in the towel.”

Of course, that would only work if something was done about Tempest. Razen was quick to point that out. “I’m afraid, Sir Gadora, that is not possible. A railroad has been built between the Dwarven Kingdom and Tempest that allows for high-speed transport. Even if we halted all food exports today, they can supply themselves well enough via that route.”

“And that’s why I’m asking you to betray them. Tempest itself is not terribly self-sufficient foodwise, either. What you grow here could—”

“Sir Gadora?”

Razen interrupted Gadora, as rude as he knew it was. He had realized Gadora was relying on outdated information—he wasn’t keeping up with the times. World trends were operating much, much faster than they used to. If they turned traitor to the Western Nations at this point, they’d be banned from the world economy, and that would spell doom for their kingdom. Even if the Empire offered them protection and generous support, they couldn’t expect as much luxury as they enjoyed at present. That was how much Farminus was now influenced by the West—or really, by Tempest.

“…I see,” Gadora said after Razen explained all this. “I was aware, although I wanted to hear about it straight from the horse’s mouth. But you truly think the demon lord Rimuru doesn’t fear the imperial force? I suppose, of course, that he could even defeat an army of angels with his power, but it would cause untold damage to everything he has built up. The Empire has been considering a train system of its own, but we’ve taken a wait and see approach for just that reason…”

That was how he responded to the news of a rail network linking the world’s bigger cities.

“Sir Rimuru, I assure you, is not afraid of collateral damage.”

“Nah, not at all. The guy hates losin’ people, but anything else, I don’t think he really cares that much.”

“Yeah. And hell, maybe he likes it. It gives people more work to do.”

Razen, Gruecith, and Yohm all lobbed out their opinions. Yohm’s words, in particular, had real weight behind them. People find happiness in being relied upon; they want to use their skills to help others out. If there’s no work and nothing to do all day, that’d take the wind out of anyone’s sails. Some of them might turn to crime. It was thus the job of a leader—or employer—to find new work for them.

“Once all this construction work is wrapped up in each country, that’ll just leave repair and maintenance. My pal Rimuru’s been frettin’ over what he’s gonna do after that. We were drinkin’ together a while back, and he was all like ‘Ohhh, I wanna do this, I wanna do that, but our technical skills aren’t keeping up…’”

“And if the angels attack at a time like that, it’ll breed a huge demand for rebuilding and recovery. I bet Rimuru’d act pretty pissed off about it, but maybe he’d actually be glad, deep down.”

Even Gruecith was agreeing with Yohm. Saare and Grigori looked exasperated, but they didn’t seem eager to refute them.

“But even if he’s a demon lord, if he starts meddling too much in the human territories of the West, the Rozzos won’t take that sitting down, will they?”

Razen’s story was generally a match with the information Gadora assembled, but some pieces of the puzzle were still missing. Gadora wanted to use this occasion to milk Razen for as much intelligence as he had. The Rozzos wouldn’t wait for things to unfold; they’d take action to protect their investments. If economics get involved, Gadora reasoned, they’d engage in nonmilitary sabotage to get their way.

His question for Razen, of course, was framed so he could learn as much as possible about the Rozzos’ current state. Razen, correctly reading this, gave Gadora what he wanted.

“The Rozzos, my master, are finished. The Kingdom of Doran is still going strong, and the survivors are gathered inside it, but they will never hold sway over the Council at this point. The surrounding nations continue doing business only because Sir Rimuru allows it. King Doran has surrendered to him as well.”

As Razen explained this, he decided to divulge the truth behind why the Farmus military lost so badly. That was the first revelation of the day that truly surprised Gadora.

“…So the demon lord Rimuru laid waste to the Farmus army all by himself? And the Rozzos are no longer…? But hold on one moment! If those are no mere rumors, then what of Gren—of Granville Rozzo?!”

Granville the Hero was, in Gadora’s mind, the most powerful man in the world. He had been so careful in his campaign plans against the West because he knew he led the Seven Days Clergy. But now Razen claimed the Rozzos were gone.

“So the rumors that the Seven Days Clergy were killed…?”

“They are also true, Master. The Seven Days Clergy opposed Sir Rimuru, so they attempted to pit Hinata of the Crusaders against him. But the plot was discovered, and they were destroyed soon after.”

Now even Gadora was stunned into silence. Razen had clearly stated that everyone in the Seven Days Clergy was dead. Even Gren, the Sunday Priest, met his doom at the hand of Cardinal Nicolaus. It made Gadora realize just how feeble his intelligence network was. If Granville was dead, that lent credence to the reported fall of the Rozzo family. If he had learned that sooner, Gadora thought, he could have greatly revised their plan for this campaign.

And also:

“That little sneak… He knew it all along, and he never told me…”

Gadora recalled the face of Yuuki as he bitterly intoned the words. Perhaps the young man thought telling him would damper his lust for revenge; if so, Gadora didn’t like it one bit.

“By ‘little sneak,’ are you referring to Yuuki Kagurazaka?” asked Razen. “That man’s taken advantage of us as well, so I think I understand how you feel.”

Being comforted by his apprentice put Gadora in a mood that was difficult to describe—half frustration, half embarrassment. And the way Razen put it, Yuuki was a thorn in Rimuru’s side, too, although the demon lord chose to see how things unfolded before declaring Yuuki his enemy.

Damn you, Yuuki… Hiding things from me yet again, are you? You know full well I’m here to destroy Luminism, and you give me nothing but the vaguest reports from the Western Holy Church. Is there something that would cause you trouble if I heard about it…?

Now Gadora realized he was being used—and there, in front of Razen and the rest, he found himself unsure how their future would unfold.

“What a pickle this is. Now that I know all this, I really must reconsider our approach to this Rimuru.”

The demon lord Rimuru was a greater threat than Gadora pictured. What was the correct way to address this? Gadora had his friend betrayed and killed; he wouldn’t stop his crusade against Luminism now. But now everybody in the Seven Days Clergy—the most urgent target of his revenge—was already dead.

Now there was no reason to advocate for the West’s fall so passionately. Gadora and the Empire worked together because they had common goals…and if that was no longer on the table, Gadora had no real obligation to the Empire.

…No. There is still another. The god, the one at the top—the demon lord Luminus remains.

His friend’s belief in their god killed him. There was no way a demon lord borrowing the name of a deity could be allowed to stay alive. The realization made Gadora renew his drive to soldier on.

Or it made him try to.

“Sir Gadora, forgive me if I am out of line, but I feel that stopping this campaign is your best choice.”

“Hohh?”

But the sight of Razen looking concerned for him made Gadora doubt his resolve all over again.

“Even now, my master, I see myself as nothing more than your faithful servant. However, I have now devoted even more of my loyalties to another. And if you are going to wage war against his country, it will force me to become your enemy as well.”

“You don’t mean Rimuru…?”

“No. It is Sir Diablo, one of many serving him, who is my master now.”

This more than surprised Gadora a bit. Razen was his apprentice, one he was quite proud of, and hearing him serve someone who himself served a demon lord was a hard pill to swallow.

“I hate to interject,” Saare said without prompting, “but I’m gonna take this opportunity to say something. Diablo’s the guy…um, I mean, the demon who defeated me.”

The demon who was stronger than me? I have a hard time believing it, but if Razen serves him now, I can’t discount it as a lie…

He still didn’t think he’d lose, but Gadora made sure to keep the name Diablo in his mind.

“And let me tell you this as well, Sir Gadora,” added Razen. “Sir Diablo is one of the old demons.”

“I’d imagine so. If you lost to him, he’d have to be an Ancient. Maybe even a Prehistoric—a rare breed indeed.”

If he was both that and a named creature, his powers could easily surpass a demon lord’s.

“No, nothing of that level,” said Razen. “He is far, far above that—”

“He said he was a Demon Peer,” Saare cut in.

“That…?!”

That’s ridiculous, Gadora almost shouted. Demons could only evolve up to a set level—that was a hard rule, and as far as he knew, only one demon had ever defied it. This Arch Demon found a way to enhance himself up to Demon Peer, and it made him the most powerful, most villainous of all demon lords—Guy Crimson, the Lord of Darkness.

“Sir Gadora, the life span of my master, Sir Diablo, is not a matter up for debate. I trust you understand what I mean by that?”

Razen’s words seemed a planet away to Gadora. He couldn’t believe it; he didn’t want to believe it.

“A—a Primal?” he mumbled.

“Yes.”

The affirmation cruelly reached his ears. He tried to calm his heart as he discerned how truthful this was.

There certainly seemed to be ample reason to doubt Razen. If a Primal Demon had taken physical form anew, it wouldn’t be strange at all to see one reborn as a Demon Peer. If Razen was being truthful, it’d mean a massive rewrite of the Empire’s campaign. Looking at Blanc, the Original White, and the headaches she’d caused the Empire, there was no need to explain just how dreadful a threat this was.

But…wait a moment. If a Primal has acquired a physical body, why hasn’t any tragedy ensued?

Gadora had composed himself now. But even he knew the question wasn’t important.

Now hold on just one minute. Does it even matter whether Diablo’s a Primal? He’s certainly taken Razen as his disciple—that much is obvious—and that could very well mean he’s at least a Demon Peer already…

Then, hearing Yohm and the others chat among themselves, he froze.

“Yeah, but isn’t that Sir Diablo guy the butler to Rimuru or somethin’ like that? Like, when I went to the opening ceremony for our railroad earlier, I heard he didn’t want to deal with Rimuru’s personal stuff on his own any longer, so he scouted some friends and brought ’em on board.”

“Oh yeah, I caught sight of one of ’em! Rimuru made her his special diplomatic envoy, so we met at the Council. She’s got this snow-white hair, these deep-red eyes… Like, crazy hot.”

Gadora sank weakly into his seat.

It—it can’t be! Those are the exact physical traits of Blanc…

It was looking more and more like the truth, but to Gadora, it was nothing but a nightmare. He looked at Razen, currently sagely nodding to himself.

“This is all true?”

“I would never lie to you, my master.”

Then Gadora realized something. Razen and his cohorts were being truthful. And it was purely out of concern for Gadora’s health that they urged him to stop this war.

“It’s that bad?”

Gadora’s question was greeted with silent nods across the room. And when he saw this, a new thought made the blood drain from his face.

Ah! Shinji’s group might already be out on the field!

The Tempestian capital of Rimuru was teeming with people. It was a real metropolis now, experiencing a major boom—and even to otherworlders like Shinji and his friends, there was nothing rustic and unsophisticated about it. The capital in the province of Nasca wasn’t so bad, but the surrounding towns still had a barnyard-animal smell to them. Nothing so unpleasant here. It was an incredible surprise.

“I thought they razed this whole city and left nothing but a gate in place. Guess that was wrong, huh?” said Shinji; Marc and Zhen responded in kind.

“I doubt it, man. Maybe they can flip it on or off, or maybe our agents saw an illusion or something.”

“…We must remain on guard.”

The trio looked at one another and braced themselves once more.

They had been transported here via the elemental magic Warp Portal by Kagali, who had visited Tempest before. She left before very long, but they were due to meet Gadora here later, so his magic would drive their return trip. Until then, they were ordered to investigate as much as they could without exposing themselves to danger—and Shinji’s band, being no fools, intended to stick to that.

“Ms. Kagali sure was pretty, huh?”

“Whoa, Shinji, you wanna get dumped?”

“Dumped? I’d need a girlfriend first. It’d make for a more exciting life if I had one, but…”

“Huh?”

“…Forget it, Marc. He’s too slow on the uptake.”

Marc and Zhen shrugged at the whining Shinji. As they continued entertaining each other, they reached the town entrance and underwent the entry inspection. They had Free Guild ID cards provided by Yuuki, so the process went surprisingly fast—a basic rundown, and they were on their way.

So they procured an inn, then started touring around town on their “intelligence-gathering” mission. It was all quite a surprise.

As otherworlders, they enjoyed great physical strength and generally good treatment wherever they went. This, however, didn’t mean they did whatever they wanted, the way the demon lord Rimuru did, and they probably couldn’t anyway. Yuuki had worked hard to improve their diets and living environments in general, and that was starting to trickle down across the Empire, but this city was well beyond that point.

Shinji knew a fair bit about this already, so he was more amazed than surprised. There was takoyaki, okonomiyaki, yakisoba…even desserts like crepes and cakes. They also found places offering incredibly high-end meals, making them wonder how they ever tracked down the ingredients. From street stalls and cafés to restaurants and fine dining, Tempest had it all. Everyone seemed so passionate about their food, and so much of it re-created the tastes and aromas of their old world. The locals must’ve been flummoxed at first, but now they were used to all the variety. Shinji, for his part, cried literal tears of joy when he saw the curry rice on offer at one eatery.

Even the bathrooms were first-rate. And their inn was nice and comfy, too—complete with an open-air bath, added as entertainment for the masses.

“Hey, you guys mind if I live here?” said Marc. “Like, how about we just don’t go back to the Empire?”

“Whoa!”

“Uh, my bad… I’m just kidding. Don’t get so angry, Shinji!”

“I’m not angry, I’m just…like, seriously ready to consider it and stuff.”

“…I want to live here, too.”

They all exchanged glances, then sighs. Until now, they thought the Empire was the world, running at the bleeding edge of civilization. Now that they knew about Tempest, they realized how wrong they were. The town was alive with energy; there was tons of good stuff to eat. It was comfortable to live in, it seemed like a hub for entertainment and civilization, and new games and diversions were being invented every day. These games were all very familiar from their original world, and after the harsh environment they had been living in, such pleasures left the trio feeling nostalgic. The Empire had culture and entertainment of its own, but that was strictly for the nobility. It wasn’t as free as this town, and it wasn’t priced low enough for common people.

Meanwhile, look at this place.

“No, no, no, we really can’t…”

“Yeah. I’m sure Yuuki would be pissed, and I’d be scared of Lord Gadora, too. There’s about to be a war, besides…”

“…Desertion’s punishable by firing squad.”

They were right. War was fast approaching. This town was a clear target, incapable of avoiding the storm of battle. The three knew all about the Empire’s military might, and thus it hardly seemed worth the time to consider Tempest’s chances against their enemy.

So without anything else to do, Shinji and his friends gave up on the idea—and then, following their orders to the letter, they began challenging the labyrinth.

………

……

…

“Y’know,” Shinji began, “they said the Hero Masayuki just beat Floor 50, but this is actually pretty damn easy, huh?”

“Ha-ha!” Marc laughed. “Of course it is! Remember what Yuuki told us? He said Masayuki wasn’t actually anything that special.”

“…But you can’t play down his skill,” Zhen pointed out.

“Yeah, all the more reason he was super-careful, I bet. It took him over half a year, after all.”

This lively chat between Shinji and his pals took place as they advanced through Floor 40. They began their journey through the Dungeon on high alert for anything in their way, but the intensity was starting to wear off. It was just too easy.

Before going in, they gathered as much intel as they could to avoid needless danger, but as the trio saw it, this was like a game packed with tons and tons of side quests and bonus content. Zhen grew up without much in the way of video games, but Shinji and Marc were hard-core gamers—Shinji was a big fan of RPGs in particular, finding time between research stints in college to play through the big franchise titles.

Pooling their knowledge, the trio concluded that this Dungeon was a huge joke. Whichever sadistic maniac designed it was clearly out to destroy the challengers—but if you were familiar with video game tropes, a lot about it was familiar. This held especially true in one way—Zhen Liuxing was gifted at detecting traps, and with his advice, they could find them all with surprising accuracy. And in this labyrinth, if you could deal with the traps, the monsters just weren’t all that strong.

“I bet a lot of challengers had trouble getting far in this just because it’s too new. Like, nobody’s got the right knowledge for it.”

“Yeah. I called it an obstacle course earlier, but that still sounds pretty right to me. Once you understand how the creator’s twisted, evil mind works, it’s actually pretty doable.”

“…And we don’t die, either.”

They found out about the Resurrection Bracelet in their prior research. The admission desk even gave them one for free. With it on, if you died in the Dungeon, you’d be warped back to the front door safe and sound. When they heard about this, Shinji’s team exchanged quizzical stares. It was really hard to figure out how to take this. Here was this dead-serious world they lived in, and now someone had created this wacky comedy world inside it.

Now the main issue they faced was not knowing just how deep the Dungeon went. They could keep advancing all they wanted, but they could only hold so much food at once. Shinji wasn’t sure how best to prepare for this, but over at admission, the guy at the desk told them about something unexpected.

“Oh yeah, no worries about that. When you reach a stairway, you’ll see an entrance to the inn. It’ll cost you money, but you can stay in there all you want. You actually don’t have to worry about food that much, either. Sir Rimuru said all refreshments are ‘under three hundred yen’—his words, not mine. I dunno what he meant by yen, but I’m sure it’s something important, you know? Oh, and there are merchant traders stationed at the inn, too, and they’ll buy anything you find but don’t need.”

They literally thought of everything. Shinji cared a lot more about buying actual food than just light refreshments, but he didn’t want to shout that out and be accused of insulting the leader of Tempest, so he kept that frustration to himself.

………

……

…

It had now been a week since they began navigating the labyrinth. The three of them were at a room in the inn, relaxing as they gazed at the booty they won.

“…You know, is it me, or are we making a ton of money the past few days? And this inn’s supposed to be a bare-bones joint, but it’s actually pretty nice. Cheap, too. And the money from the equipment we don’t need has to be really adding up now, huh?”

Marc was clearly enjoying himself.

Zhen lifted his head up a bit at this, a little curious. Shinji, in response, took a roll of gold coins out of his bag, their golden shine attracting the eyes of everyone in the room. This wasn’t just the money they earned for selling items from monsters and chests; between that and the reward money for bounty hunts and the like, they had obtained several dozen gold coins and even one stellar. It was a laughably high pay scale.

“Yeah, we’ve saved up quite a bit. And from what I’ve heard since, not even the frontline dungeon runners have made it past Floor 50 yet. Only Masayuki’s party has reached that point, so that makes us number two.”

Even Masayuki and his team were reportedly stalled at Floor 60 right then, and everyone else was getting blocked by the boss monster on Floor 40. Thanks to that, Shinji’s party had won the Dungeon Party of the Month award.

“Oh yeah, that’s where that tempest serpent is, right? He was pretty strong, but still, y’know, nothing we couldn’t handle.”

The tempest serpent was an A-minus foe in rank, one that’d give even seasoned adventurers fits. Its dangerous ranged-breath attack was a menace in cramped quarters. There was nowhere to run, so you had to face up to the monster—but the snake’s body was tough as metal, and if he coiled it around you, it was all over. You’d normally want to be on high guard against it, but Shinji’s team managed to defeat it without too much of a fuss.

What amazed them wasn’t the monster’s strength but what they obtained after defeating him.

“So what’s with this weapon? The one with a slot in it? Because it got appraised for this crazy high price…”

So high, Shinji noted, that he was too afraid to sell it.

These weapons with slots began to appear around Floor 40, and they were like nothing they had seen in the Empire, so Shinji’s party couldn’t understand the premium. They could sell them for a high price, but they honestly weren’t sure whether they should.

“These recessed slots, though… My appraisal magic didn’t turn up anything. Maybe we better keep ’em until Lord Gadora shows up.”

“Yeah, we didn’t find any until Floor 40, so…”

“…Right, yeah. We’ve only seen them in boss chambers and as drops from the stronger monsters around Floor 50.”

“Y’know, though, we saw them around town, too, didn’t we? They were pretty rare, but they’re circulating. People say there’s a tiny chance you’ll find them in chests from Floor 30 on.”

“Yeah. And it’s clearly a good make, but is it really worth those prices?”

“…Is there some secret to them?”

“I’d guess so. The merchants don’t tell us anything, either. They just kinda smile at us.”

“That is so suspicious. We better not pull the trigger until the old man shows up. But hey, look at this thing!”

Marc picked up his Minos Bardiche pole ax and showed it off to his friends. It gleamed a beautiful silver, an exquisite showpiece made of mithril. This put it in the realm of Unique weapons; they’d picked it up from a treasure chest guarded by the Floor 50 guardian.

“This is a Unique, y’know? You don’t even see these in the Empire too much.”

He must’ve liked it a lot. His companions wondered if he’d start hugging the pole ax and bringing it to bed with him. But it was a nice piece. Becoming an Imperial Guardian granted you access to a set of Legend-class gear, but any officers and enlistees below that got normal, sturdy, non-magical equipment. Unique gear was hard to find even for career officers, so Marc could be excused for his excitement.

“Yeah, Yuuki told me the Empire mass-produces its weapons, so… And we hardly even get to see it, but supposedly the Legend-class gear is all identical.”

“…Is that even possible?”

Zhen was asking Shinji, in essence, whether it was possible to manufacture Legend gear on any kind of scale. Logically, it was said to be unthinkable.

“That’s kinda jumping the gun, isn’t it, Shinji? Just because it all looks the same doesn’t mean there’s a factory or something.”

Marc laughed off Shinji’s idea, perhaps a bit miffed the subject was turning away from his new prize. If there was a factory, he thought it’d lower the value of the Unique in his hand.

“Well, you couldn’t manufacture these any normal way. Lord Gadora told us how hard it is to produce a lot of magisteel at once, even. But if you can keep things under the right conditions, it’s not impossible.”

“…The right conditions?”

“Yeah. Basically, you need someplace with a super-high concentration of magicules. Like, enough that it’d instantly kill most people. Even if you’re B rank, it’d kill you given enough time—if you’re above an A rank, all it’ll do is make you really sick. So if you can put a sword or armor in there for a long time—like, hundreds or thousands of years—those are the right conditions to make it evolve. Then, once the equipment finds an owner it accepts, it’ll start doing its own unique evolution.”

“Oh, like you’ll find that kinda place.”

“…Yeah, I doubt you would, either.”

“Right? But Yuuki and Lord Gadora said they exist.”

“…Okay. But so what if it’s just ‘possible’?”

“Well, you know, I’m starting to wonder if this bardiche was mass-produced, too…”

“No way.”

“You wouldn’t think, would you? But there’s a slot in this ax. Have you ever seen one of these out in the wild?”

“No. What’s with that anyway?”

“…It’s a pretty weapon. Kind of eerily shaped, but…”

Shinji wasn’t out to complain. He wasn’t jealous of the overjoyed Marc. Neither he nor Zhen could wield large weapons the size of bardiches anyway. But:

“But the way they’re just giving these weapons away to people… Is it me, or is this nation more insanely powerful than we thought?”

Marc and Zhen fell silent. They were feeling the same way—after he won that Minos Bardiche, Marc was even worried they’d confiscate it at the front counter. They knew the rules dictated that anything you found in the labyrinth belonged to the challenger—but a weapon this strong? Would a nation really allow you to waltz out the door with it?

If Tempest took it away, Marc and his friends were prepared to accept that. They were beholden to Tempest at the moment, and they had to respect the nation’s decisions. That’s something that applied anywhere. Besides, they were technically spies, and no spy would go out of their way to stir up trouble.

But the reception they got was beyond any expectation. All the employees in the front-desk area applauded them, shouting “Congratulations!” in unison. Even more astoundingly, they gave the party another cash bonus. The party didn’t really need any more evidence by this point—Tempest really was a crazy land.

“And even outside of the weapons, this whole nation’s nuts, isn’t it?”

“It’s a shock. I mean, we could earn a ton more money just beating this Dungeon, and it’d be more fun that way, too. Like, do we really stand to lose anything? If you’re a wimp, it’d be hard to make a living off this, but with us…”

“No, Marc. Remember what Zhen said about desertion?”

“…Firing squad.”

“…Right, yeah, there is that. But still, I think it’d be so much more fun to live here.”

Shinji and Zhen nodded at Marc’s words. But reality didn’t work that way. It was certainly an inviting idea, but they couldn’t go pursuing this pipe dream all day.

“And you know the war’s gonna wreck this place anyway.”

“…Yeah. I mean, if Tempest does win, I’ll gladly switch sides. But what kinda nation’s gonna accept a deserter and a traitor, y’know?”

“…I don’t want to lose everything.”

They all sighed, figuratively abandoning their sweet dreams.

It was time to mentally switch gears, and soon, their thoughts shifted to the next day’s dungeon hacking.

“Okay, so we’re gonna head for Floor 51 tomorrow. That point on, people call the Haven of the Dead. Marc’s Minos Bardiche is made from mithril with the holy attribute, so it oughtta perform well against undead and ghosts and stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s the other weird thing, y’know? This whole place really is set up like a video game. Like, having the boss guard the one key thing for tackling the next section…”

“…And the challenge amps up step by step.”

Shinji picked up on this as well. He was the biggest RPG player in the group, so it occurred to him long before anyone brought it up. But he tried to banish the thought. It was just too creepy, because a lot of it was so familiar. And if anything, the boss monsters stationed every tenth level were getting harder way fast.

First was the B-rank black spider, then the B-plus evil centipede. Floor 30 featured a B-plus ogre lord leading a small force of minions working together, making it more than a test of brute strength—this was a choke point for many parties. Floor 40 had an A-minus tempest serpent, and finally, Floor 50 had Bovix, a talking magic-born tauroid. By this point, you were now talking about monsters who maybe showed up once every hundred years—a Hazard, to use the danger level Yuuki devised, which made it an A ranker. Certainly, Bovix was a menace, the kind of magic-born you’d expect to be serving a demon lord…and while Shinji’s team had trouble, they still beat him. If they were really serious, chances were just one of them could’ve done it—besides, since you didn’t die in the labyrinth, you had the freedom to try some pretty reckless tactics.

“Right, if a monster that class is guarding Floor 50, I can only guess that the next one’s gonna be that much stronger.”

“…Might even be the last battle.”

Marc agreed with Shinji, Zhen brooding hard over the future. Things had gone smoothly up to now, but all three agreed that it’d turn into an uphill battle pretty quick.

“I think Marc’s gonna remain the key to our offense. You got a Unique with special buffs, so let’s just see how far it’ll take us.”

“…Yeah.”

“And I don’t think you can collect many more monsters this powerful, either. I think Floor 60 is the bottom of this thing, but if it’s not, that’s just scary.”

“Oh, no way,” said Shinji—but he’d heard ominous rumors. Rumors he had no intention of telling Marc or Zhen. He was sure it’d lower their morale if they heard this labyrinth might actually have a hundred floors.

It’s crazy, he concluded. The next boss was concerning for him, but he wasn’t going to get worked up about it. He figured they would win at the end of it—they couldn’t die, after all—but it was likely to be a long, hard ordeal.

“But hey, we can’t die either way. Let’s just try to keep our guard up.”

Marc and Zhen nodded at this. Their goal was the very bottom—and to find out about the top-secret research facility there. Once they went over everything a final time, they retired for the night.

Three days passed. After conquering a poisonous swamp and a corroded wasteland, Shinji’s team finally discovered the stairs to Floor 59. They were a short trip down to Floor 60 and that much closer to the boss’s chamber. It had taken a week to reach Floor 50, but nearly half that again to get to 60. The size of each floor was shrinking, but the difficulty had ratcheted up to overdrive.

“You guys ready for this?”

“Yep.”

“…Yeah.”

They had rested up the previous night. They were fully prepared, ready to take the challenge.

“So they say the boss here is another guardian type, like on Floor 50. We can expect another sentient monster.”

“Right. A lot more trouble than the Death Lord yesterday.”

“…Gotta go all out from the start.”

As long as they kept their cool, this boss would go down like the others—all three thought so as they quietly nodded. Then, ever so carefully, they opened the door and swarmed inside.

Going back a little bit…

I was in my chamber, debating with myself over our surveillance system.

Right then, Soei’s and Moss’s agents were on standby at important points across the Forest of Jura. We were also covering the entire coastline from Farminus to northern Englesia—and even the mountain peaks in between. But despite that, I was still anxious about our intelligence gathering.

For me, the time lag was the scariest thing. Our agents were spread out in teams of two, but there was every chance they could both be killed at once. If so, all intelligence would cease from that location. I’d hate to lose those people, but the resulting delay in transmission could put the entire nation in danger. I warned Soei about this in no uncertain terms.

Even if our monitors were found, whether they were killed or not, they might be forced into battle. That, again, would cause delays, so I was feeling around for a way they could work while keeping themselves safer. As I did, I stumbled upon the idea of using magic to surveil our lands. Distant-view magic like this existed in the shamanistic family, but it turned out to be kind of tough to wrangle—all you could really do was view a target, and it didn’t give you too much information about them. It could also focus only on a single point, so you had to cast the spell again to watch somewhere else. This took valuable time, and your target could slip away in the meantime—the magic just wasn’t flexible enough for the job. Besides, if the target put up a magical barrier, the distant-view spell would simply bounce off it and dissipate.

Thus, I concluded, the spell was useless since you couldn’t observe foes above a certain level of power with it. But I had another idea—the physical magic Megiddo.

Megiddo uses collected water droplets as a lens to focus sunlight on a single point. Reworking this magic, I thought, could make it work as a kind of surveillance spell. For example, what if we floated up balls of water across the land that reflected the area below it? If we could transcribe that somehow, we could easily check on faraway scenery. If not, perhaps we could project an image through a high-altitude lens, expanding and broadcasting the signal through a monitor. We’d need a combination of a telescopic lens, photograph device, and a system for transmitting the information. Essentially, it was like building a monitoring satellite entirely with magic.

Making all the required core magic work seemed like a hassle, but Raphael stated that with physical magic, spirit magic, and Dominate Space, it’d be possible to implement. After that, I just needed to work out the little details with Raphael—and with that, I had the complete magic I wanted.

Once this monitoring system was finished, it’ll be a lot easier to gather information. It was safe, reliable, collected a massive amount of data at once, and made it a breeze to keep up with enemy movements, no matter what they did. You might be wondering why I was wasting time during such a busy period with this, but this was actually really important. “Those who control information control the world,” as they say, so I was sure I could control a war with it, too.

During the Russo-Japanese War, Admiral Heihachiro Togo commanded his naval forces as it destroyed Russia’s Baltic fleet in the Sea of Japan. In this fight, the key question for Togo was whether he’d have a chance to encounter the enemy fleet. He had to guess at where he’d intercept the enemy and be in position to engage them; if he messed that up, the battle never would’ve been fought, and Japan likely would’ve lost the war.

That, I felt, was similar to my current situation. If I spread my forces too thinly, there was a good chance I’d lose, given how much I was outnumbered to start with. Victory came down to whether I could read the Empire’s moves and concentrate our forces at the most suitable point of land. Meanwhile, if the Empire spread itself too thin, I could work out my plans in further detail and destroy every pocket of resistance. But if I wanted to work the battle to my advantage like that, and (most of all) if I wanted to be sure of victory, I absolutely had to complete this monitoring magic.

…Which, you know, I tried to build up the drama there, but we actually had a test setup already complete. What I was asking Raphael for now was extra frills—the little things that’d make it easier to use.

What? Why don’t I do it myself? Don’t be silly. Raphael is my skill, so by anybody’s definition, I’m putting in all the hard work.

You know what? If you put it that way, I think I’ve been overworking myself a little. I think I’ll take a quick rest to soothe my fatigue.

I had my first cupful of Shuna’s tea in a while, savoring the moment.

As I relaxed, wondering if I should give my completed monitoring magic a shot—

(Sir Rimuru, I have an urgent report for you!!)

—Beretta’s strained voice came in through a Thought Communication.

………

……

…

He had quite a surprise for me. It turned out a second party had made it past Floor 50.

The first one, it goes without saying, was led by Masayuki. They were taking a break from the Dungeon as we prepared for war, but they made it as far as Floor 59—and thanks to them, our labyrinth was running a brisk business. Tons of challengers used our services on a daily basis, filling up our coffers—and they got a lot out of it, too, of course.

Over the past year, our regular customers had really been stepping up their game. Little by little, we had begun to see more people take on levels in the 30s. Some were coming up with strategies that took advantage of the “no death” rule, such as “zombie attacks” (continually dying and coming back to fight the enemy again) and “sacrifice runs” (leaving someone behind to get preyed upon as the rest of the party forged onward).

Once you were into the 30s, though, you had more than just unfamiliar insta-kill traps to deal with. The monsters there began working in teams, and gimmicky tactics weren’t as effective any longer. But some of our dungeon runners really were up to the challenge. Parties taking a strictly conventional approach still struggled to keep up, but they were honing their skills, and their equipment was improving by leaps and bounds, too. That, in turn, helped to strengthen them further. It’s funny what your body can get used to—some runners began to develop instincts for traps, dodging them no matter how vicious they were.

Thanks to all that, the front-running parties had started reaching the boss monster on Floor 40…but as of now, that was the last stop for most. The monster they faced there was a tempest serpent, an A-minus creature. This was the very same black snake I first ran into way back when, packing an effective breath attack that just annihilated parties. Many of them got destroyed, lost all their equipment, and tearfully trudged into the shops to buy more. We’d be kind enough to lend them Tempest-brand equipment and the like—on a “you break it, you bought it” policy, of course, and that turned into another nice income stream.

So yeah—thanks, black snake! That little reptile was great for shaking our challengers down for all the profit they made up to that point. He was such a wonderful, reliable, moneymaking guardian for us…but ohhh, death should not have taken thee, black snake!

That—and even our guardian on Floor 50 got done in. With Masayuki’s party, we were admittedly cheating a little bit, so this new party must have been real legit. We had to award them the bounty as well, but it was more than worth it for all the free advertising. The entire labyrinth lit up again upon the birth of a new set of heroes, and now things seemed busier than ever before.

Floor 50 was defended by a pair of sentient magic-born, Bovix the tauroid and Equix the equinoid, who took turns serving as the boss. I ordered them to the job, and neither was a pushover at all, so seeing someone pull off the upset amazed me. After all, if nobody was around to challenge them, they usually sparred each other, helping add more creativity to their battle approach. I was witnessing some real intelligent strategy in their fights now—they weren’t just big brutes any longer. What’s more, they had become best friends, no longer snapping at each other all the time.

This second party’s success reminded me that I put a frankly pretty awesome prize in place for beating Floor 50. You only got it the first time you beat the boss, but it was a guaranteed drop from the treasure chest—one item, picked at random, from the Unique-class Minos series. I named this after the mythical labyrinth-guarding minotaur, and they were both completely insane-looking and stupidly powerful. In the weapons department, we offered the Minos Bardiche and the Minos Trident. There was no shield, and armor filled out the rest of the list. I figured it’d be a while longer before someone made it this far, so I don’t think I had more than, like, ten complete sets made yet—but this was definitely top-of-the-line gear, a team effort crafted by the best of Kurobe’s apprentices.

Losing one of them was a problem, but what impressed me more was this party’s fighting skill. Bovix and Equix got a lot stronger when I named them, and if they managed to beat one of them, I’d honestly wanna recruit them for our nation. If they said no, well, they might be our enemy someday, and that would kinda suck, so I planned to keep them under surveillance.

That was why I left instructions to inform me immediately if Bovix or Equix ate it, and that’s what I got from Beretta just then.

………

……

…

(Who are they?)

(The winning team is a party of three people, all possessing unique skills.)

Maybe I know them?

It turns out I didn’t.

So here we had a set of just three guys, unique skill users, who beat Bovix…and they were pretty brand-new to the Dungeon, too, not veterans at all. In times of peace, I’d just sit back and marvel, but we were at war’s eve right then, and in my eyes, they were likely spies picking at low-hanging fruit.

We needed more intel on them badly, so I delayed my magic-monitor practice and headed for the command room inside the labyrinth.

I found Ramiris and Veldora already there.

Deeno and Vester had the day off, apparently. Vester really had been looking haggard lately (Deeno, not so much), so I wanted him to get as much rest as he could. Ramiris and Veldora, meanwhile, couldn’t have been better. I’m not sure they even knew how to be tired. They never stopped—like children, if something had their attention, they just kept going.

“Well, look who’s here! Hello, Commander!” chirped Ramiris. “No changes to report yet!”

No changes to what? Ah well. I’m sure she’s just playing navy captain in her mind.

I looked at the large screen set up in the room. It currently showed three young men, the group who had been storming through the labyrinth.

Their fighting style, I have to say, was extremely unique. One of them seemed to be grabbing the air itself, gathering and throwing it with intense force. Maybe some kind of air-compression blast? Definitely not something a normal person could pull off. The man was large, firmly built, with brown hair and a chiseled face, and he had on a tank top and jeans. You read that right: a tank top and jeans. Definitely otherworlder fashion, I thought.

Now for the other two. One was small, skinny, and mostly hidden inside a large black robe. The other was a young man wearing chain mail with a lab coat over it. Yes, a lab coat—the kind you see in labs and hospitals, although not at all in this world. His face suggested he was Asian—and almost certainly Japanese. I couldn’t guess about the dude in the robe, but Lab Coat and Tank Top sure seemed like otherworlders to me.

Regardless, they were still fighting as I watched on-screen. They were facing a pretty tough challenge—a pack of six death wolves, lunging at them faster than a normal person could respond. They must have calculated that remaining far away would leave them open to attack with no way to respond. Once you plunged below Floor 50, even the minion-level foes had real intelligence.

A death wolf, by the way, was a B-plus monster, and that was for a single one of them. Six at once was an extremely dangerous encounter—and being a ghost type, they were impervious to melee attacks outside of holy or magic weapons. Their bodies were made entirely of magicules, so even if you sent them flying, they’d just regenerate themselves and jump right back in. Unless you had a good way to handle them, you couldn’t win—show any weakness for a moment, and you’d be torn apart.

But:

“Don’t mess with us, you stupid mutts! Hraahh!!”

This was Tank Top the air-thrower. Now he took out the ominous-looking battle-ax on his back and started swinging. A single swipe took out three at once, their bodies fading into particles of light.

…Whoa, that ax! I remember that ominous-looking thing. It’s the Minos Bardiche, isn’t it? Once you got into the realm of Uniques, magical force came with the package as a given. That made this a type of magic weapon, easily capable of damaging ghost types; the magic alone could hurt monsters all by itself. We also worked hard on the materials for that bardiche; if I recall, we made them out of mithril, a special mix of magisteel and silver. That instilled the holy attribute, geared for mowing through undead and ghost enemies.

“Man, the Minos Bardiche can take out those death wolves in one hit,” I muttered.

“Yes, I believe Bovix drops that,” Veldora replied with a nod. “And look at how used to that weapon he is, so soon after picking it up. He’s got a good head for battle.”

As I watched the trio fight, I listened to Veldora and Ramiris recap this party’s progress for me. Would’ve been nice to have had some fries to snack on as I did.

From how they put it, Tank Top had been defeating most of the monsters so far, and looking at him, I could believe it. He was strong.

What about the traps, though? The guy in the black robe had a knack for quickly finding them, tipping off his two companions. Our trickier, more ingenious traps began popping up on Floor 51, but as I looked on, Black Robe accurately marked out the positions of each trap they encountered. It must’ve been his unique skill—he was the ideal man to bring with you on a Dungeon run.

Finally, Lab Coat had only taken action once, really, according to my partners, during the battle against Bovix. Veldora’s description of events was too cryptic to understand, so I asked Raphael to read out the labyrinth’s past memories for me. When it brought them up, well, yeah, it was strange. All he really did was take a syringe out from a pocket, inject both of his partners—and then Bovix visibly slowed to a crawl. Was this some kind of status ailment?

Understood. According to an analysis, the attack sustained by the subject Bovix involved a nerve poison. The room was filled with poison gas, preventing the movement of those not resistant to it. It is no longer in effect.

Oh, poison gas? And it looked like they could customize this gas for maximum lethality on the target, too.

Heavily slowed, Bovix was easy pickings for Tank Top—but Lab Coat delivered the final blow, removing a silver scalpel from a shirt pocket and slicing through the jugular vein. Lab Coat was the leader, it seemed, playing a control-tower role instead of getting involved in actual combat much. He was good at it, too, capable of fighting if he needed to, so Tank Top up front was pretty much free to go wherever he wanted. It was a really intelligent, well-balanced party.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. It quietly opened up, revealing Shuna; she had brought along a file with information on these three people.

“Here’s the immigration data we have on this trio.”

With a light bow, she handed me the piece of paper.

Shingee: age twenty-three, magician

Marc: age twenty-six, warrior

Zhen: age seventeen, huntmaster

It contained a brief list of their names and professions. Their profiles listed them as being from a small province of the Empire. When asked what brought them to Tempest, they said a merchant told them about the Dungeon, and they came over to test their skill. Yeah, right. That was such a lie.

Raphael, meanwhile, was giving me its own analysis. As Beretta said, each one of them had their own unique skill. The idea that these three just happened to come together at the same time and form a party sounded pretty farfetched to me.

That, and their listed professions piqued my interest. The term magician was reserved for advanced casters who learned at least two families of magic—in Shingee’s case, this was spirit and elemental magic. Smart young man, for sure. A warrior, meanwhile, had to be a master of both weapons and martial arts—to be exact, one core martial art and at least one weapon. This could be a sword, a bow and arrow, or even throwing weapons like knives or stones; you were free to pick the one that suited you the most, but you then had to master the deepest levels of it. In Marc’s case, he was a brawler with throwing-weapon and pole-arm proficiencies, a real multifaceted talent.

Finally, a huntmaster was the moniker applied to those at the pinnacle of the hunting profession. It required a mastery of bowhunting, as well as Formhide, one of the more difficult Arts to learn. You also had to master the Detect Danger skill, and overall, it took a lot more than raw talent to become a huntmaster. In a hunting guild, they were revered as reliable partners. There just weren’t many people with trap and monster discovery skills, both a vital part of any search mission. Huntmasters pretty much always came from hunting-oriented clans, and it was an extremely difficult job to get into otherwise.

So here we had three people with three esoteric, high-level jobs forming a party. It was all but asking us to suspect them of something.

“These really look like spies who took the bait.”

“Indeed…but would spies so blatantly take center stage like this?”

Diablo, standing unnoticed in the background, picked up on my muttering. He had offered me assistance in magical development, eagerly awaiting my new ventures in monitoring magic, and me canceling our next meeting about it really set him off. His eyes told me he was resenting the on-screen trio for it, but I think he was judging them correctly.

“Oh, I was wondering that, too. I thought it might be a diversionary tactic, but things are calm around town right now.”

It was certainly a very suspicious party, but all the information they gave seemed to be the honest truth. Would they be stupid enough to not cover their tracks at all? Or was this a clever feint, devised to make us start suspecting everything except for them?

“I’m sure you’re overthinking this, Rimuru,” said Veldora. “Aren’t you always telling me that honesty is the best policy?”

“Well, it is. But we need to figure out how we handle these challengers!” replied Ramiris.

Glad you guys don’t have a care in the world. I truly began to envy Veldora and Ramiris for that. But oh well.

No matter who they were, we had to watch out for them. Shingee was the black-haired man in the lab coat—I’m just gonna assume he’s using a fake name, and his real one is actually Shinji.

Marc was the brown-haired tank top guy, and he did more than throw air around. Whether it was a monster corpse or a pebble on the ground, he could throw anything you could grab. I saw him throw a (still-alive) monster at a pack of skeletal warriors, crushing two of them, and it almost made me spit out my tea. He probably wasn’t lying about his warrior job; I could tell by the way he expertly wielded his Minos Bardiche, taking down one ghost after another.

Zhen was the black-robe dude, and I was sure he could use his eyes to detect traps. I thought it was Detect Danger at first, but judging by how he could avoid any dangerous place before it triggered, I figured a unique skill was granting him that. For most parties tackling Floor 50 and below, not even the monsters were as vicious a danger as the traps. The undead didn’t need to breathe, so we adjusted the air in those floors to make sure everything was normal. There were some oxygen-free chambers as well, ensuring a quick death even if you just stumbled in unawares. To this we added poisoned lakes, acid swamps, rooms with corrosive gas, and so on and so forth. They’d damage both you and your equipment, making for a truly atrocious gauntlet for challengers to gnash their teeth about.

These were all ingenious traps that said a great deal about their creator’s personality, and the whole concept of the floors past the fiftieth was to use them to keep people from advancing. But if someone could see through all of them, they were useless. What’s more, Zhen had an excellent sense of direction; he could easily find the shortest route through something, not letting rotating floors or anything else stop him.

This whole labyrinth was meaningless to this trio. If anyone got hurt, Dr. Shingee could heal them. They could even disable poison, so I couldn’t expect that to work too much. They may have only been a trio, but they couldn’t have been better suited for deep dives.

Three days passed. Veldora, Ramiris, and I squealed with glee as we watched Shingee’s party press on. No, we weren’t watching for hints we could use for our own conquest. Really, we weren’t. We were just watching them in awe, is all.

Diablo was sitting in a corner of the room reading while Shion was learning some new baking skills from Shuna, who poured out more tea for us—black tea, with a pleasant apple flavor.

“By the way, Rimuru,” Veldora began, “you mentioned that they ‘took the bait,’ but what did you mean by that?”

Huh? …Oh, wait, you mean our conversation three days ago? Veldora’s brain ran about as quickly as a dinosaur’s sometimes, but then, that made sense for him.

“Ah, don’t worry about that.”

“Oh, don’t be a stick in the mud. Tell me!”

He never usually cared about stuff like this, but today he just wouldn’t get off my back. Whatever.

“Okay, well, to tell the truth…”

I decided to lay it on him. When I said they took the bait, that’s exactly what I meant.

We had added some evacuation training earlier because it had become possible for us to—as nutty as it seemed to me—sequester the entirety of the town inside the Dungeon. Ramiris’s intrinsic skill Mazecraft really was amazing. I knew she could freely reorder and rearrange each floor, but it turned out she could treat the ground level above the Dungeon as another “floor” for her purposes.

Once the town was quarantined inside, it’d remain in there for twenty-four hours, but things like air and water supply weren’t an issue. In fact, we could still see the sun, so I figured this “quarantine” wouldn’t put much stress on our citizens at all. This took a gigantic amount of energy, of course, but so what? We got Veldora.

So essentially, we were crafting our war plans based on the assumption that our town could be stowed away for safekeeping. This was something we tested out several times, and that was the bait meant to catch imperial spies. All we left behind on the surface was the labyrinth’s entrance gate, which had to look incredibly suspect. In my talks with Benimaru and the rest of my cabinet, we concluded that someone from the opposing side was bound to investigate.

“Ah, I see! Boy, my master’s really powered me up, too, huh? Glad to see I’m pitchin’ in a little!” said Ramiris.

“Heh-heh-heh… So this is thanks to me, is it? Heh-heh…”

Veldora looked at me, blatantly fishing for compliments. It drove me up the wall, but it really was thanks to him.

“Yeah, you’ve been a huge help to all of us, Veldora.”

“Kwaahhhh-ha-ha-ha! Yes! Yes, I imagine I have been! So may I have some of that cake?”

No!

I was looking forward to that slice.

“Please, take mine.”

Ahhh, thank you, Diablo!

“Sorry about that.”

“Not at all. If it will aid you, Sir Rimuru, this much is nothing.”

Such a big help, that one. Might as well indulge his graciousness this time.

Savoring my slice of cake, I looked up at the screen. The party was about to take on the guardian at the end of Floor 60.

“Well, if we know they’re spies, shouldn’t we detain them?”

“Nah. I wanna test them out, so I figured we could see how far in they make it. I hate paying out so much money to them, but it’s generating a lot of buzz, so I can live with it.”

If worse came to worst, I could always arrest them and confiscate their winnings. I wanted to look incredibly generous for now, paying what I promised, and then wring whatever I could get from them in exchange.

“A fine plan, Rimuru.”

“It’s so dirty! You’re a true genius, y’know that?!”

Veldora and Ramiris also had kind words for me, although I can’t say they made me feel too happy. Shuna, meanwhile, just rolled her eyes at us.

“I have to say, though, this didn’t turn out like I meant. I didn’t expect him to score a Minos Bardiche on the first try,” I said. “That’s a holy-attribute weapon, and it just rips through ghosts and undead.”

“We shouldn’t have offered that guaranteed drop the first time around…,” Ramiris lamented.

Floor 60 was guarded by Adalmann. I had him go by the moniker the Immortal King in the hopes that he’d drive away challengers like back in his wight king days…but really, his strength lay mostly in commanding armies. He was weaker than Bovix or Equix solo, and I had a suspicion we’d be disappointed once more today. As a wight, too, he was laughably weak against the holy and light elemental attributes. As long as Marc bandied that Minos Bardiche around, I really didn’t like Adalmann’s chances.

I had given Adalmann as much advice as I could, but the traps were supposed to be the main performers in this group of floors. I never expected a blockbuster performance from the boss himself, and that was why I felt okay with giving challengers a weapon that struck at his weak point. Now I felt like I wasn’t fair to Adalmann.

Sad to say, I didn’t see him stopping this trio. I’d like to think I’m just assuming the worst…but yeah, I hope he won’t have a grudge against me for this. So I turned my expectations toward the guardian of Floor 70 instead.

Upon realizing there were intruders in his domain, Adalmann the Immortal King let a smile cross his fleshless lips. His teeth softly scraped together, making a light clattering sound. It might’ve been hard to tell, but this was Adalmann’s take on a villainous grin.

“You seem to be in a good mood, Lord Adalmann.”

This was Alberto speaking, a former paladin and Adalmann’s closest associate, following in his footsteps even after his boss fell into a trap and died. After joining Rimuru’s force, Alberto had been demoted all the way down to skeletal fighter, about as low-level a monster as you could be, but at least he wasn’t rubbed out entirely. He normally wouldn’t be able to speak at all, but he demonstrated perfect fluency. Why? Simple—the Alberto of right now was no longer a plain old skeleton. He wasn’t even a death knight, several rungs up the ladder. No, he was a Death Paladin, far above either of those—and while he was a wight and possessed no material body, he looked just the same as before death. True, he was rather pale, and there were blue will-o’-the-wisps floating around him, so it was clear he wasn’t living and breathing, but regardless.

Adalmann, meanwhile, had no particular attachment to his flesh body—in fact, he rather liked being nothing but a skeleton. But Alberto didn’t share his view, and given how his magical force far surpassed a regular death knight’s, he had the ability to freely construct whatever body he wanted from magicules. And Alberto had both an affinity for and a sense of pride in his old appearance, a fresh and energetic-looking (or as energetic as a ghoul could appear) young man. This body was protected by an ominous-looking set of armor, making it clear at one glance that Alberto wasn’t to be trifled with.

“Yes, Alberto. A very good mood. It seems we have guests.”

Alberto nodded gleefully. “Ah. So our moment is here at last?”

They knew each other so intimately by this point that few words were needed.

“Indeed. The time has finally come—time to serve the demon lord who granted us this peaceful abode. With as much power as we’ve been given, you know that mistakes will not be permitted.”

“Of course not. I, Alberto, am fully aware of that.”

“Hee-hee-hee… Forgive me for repeating myself, then. All this excitement must be loosening my tongue.”

The two looked at each other and smiled. Then another joined in.

“Groorrrrggghh!!”

A bloodcurdling scream echoed across the city of the dead.

“Ah, I see we’re not the only excited ones here. Very well. Today you will have an occasion to fully unfurl your powers. Prove your loyalty to our god!”

Quietly, but thickly, the area was awash in the incoming trio’s ardor. Adalmann’s faith had died once, only to be reconquered by his new god—the demon lord Rimuru. It had been several months since tasting bitter defeat. He hoped fervently that he could help Rimuru, and so in just those few months, Adalmann had regained his powers as a wight king, more powerful than even at the pinnacle of his career. That was how deep his faith extended.

To Rimuru, of course, this faith was as excessive as it was stifling. In fact, he had already thought Sorry, guys, but you don’t have a chance and pinned his expectations on the next guardian—but Adalmann didn’t know that, and he was eager to fight.

This time, for sure—and every time after this—defeat was not an option. He had to win—and continue winning. And so Adalmann and his cohorts waited for the foolish intruders who would come at any moment, carefully discussing their strategy as they anticipated what was to come.

An intense battle began…and ended in an instant.

Well, really, I’d like to call it intense, but in fact it was so one-sided that it left my mouth agape. I’d even brought along a deck of cards in case things got boring midway, but I never had to bust them out.

In the end, Adalmann simply dominated. It was a stark, vivid victory, one I could hardly believe I was watching. The challengers were hardly pushovers; they weren’t sick or injured. They were in perfect health and enthusiastic to start fighting…but Adalmann’s team performed above them in every way.

Statistically speaking, this wasn’t a mismatch. I had finished analyzing the challengers’ skills, and they looked stronger than Adalmann. All three of them merited an over-A rank, and each one boasted their own unique skill.

Shingee’s in particular was Restorer, quite a rare one. It granted him control over the structures of tiny viruses, letting him destroy living creatures from the inside. He could even modify the composition of the air around him to create lethal, contagious viral clouds. It was pretty crazy, really. Could any living thing deal with that? Like, unless you could detect these clouds of pathogens you’d need a microscope to see, you had no chance of beating Shingee. That, and he could use this to heal people, too, even more efficiently than medical nanomachines. The all-purpose flexibility Restorer offered was just amazing.

Next, Marc’s power was derived from his unique skill Hurler. It allowed him to throw anything he could hold in his hands like a javelin—really, anything he could lift up, including monsters. Combine it with gravity-control magic, and he’d be more of a threat than nearly any mass-based weapon; I’d say the skill was more suited for effectively taking on entire armies instead of single targets.

Finally, Zhen’s unique skill was a kind of mix of useful tools. The unique skill Observer allowed him to instinctively dodge threats, detect danger and traps, and discover monsters and other presences before they appeared. He could even pick up on Shingee’s viral clouds. All this was combined with Zhen’s own fighting abilities, which made him capable of evading or fleeing just about anything. He was fast, he was nimble, and traps basically didn’t work on him—the mortal enemy of any labyrinth.

That about summed it up. It was a real buffet of sweet-looking skills, and I’d definitely be gaining some inspiration from them. Each one was a huge boon by itself, but they also worked so well with one another—the real key to this trio’s record-making run. I don’t think I could be blamed for assuming they’d steamroll right over Adalmann.

But I was wrong. Turns out Adalmann had spent the past few months getting buff, so to speak.

I mean, normally, a non-sentient monster would never really change in terms of fighting ability from what it’s originally granted. If it could survive several decades or so, you’d see some improvement then, but the process took more than a few years, at least. And then we have Adalmann and Alberto here.

“…Like, what is this? How did these guys get so powerful?!”

And also, what the heck’s up with that dragon?

Peeking into the boss chamber, I spotted Adalmann, Albert…and an evil-looking dragon I had never seen before, nearly forty feet in length and oozing a deadly looking miasma from its mouth. Who the hell dragged that in? Something clearly had been going on while I was out on my international tour.

“Heh-heh-heh! Surprised, aren’tcha? I kinda kept this from you on purpose, but y’know how you gave those guys some new equipment? Well, they really dug that stuff, so they’ve been working extremely hard on their training! And um, you know how high the magicule levels are across the Dungeon, right? Well, they’ve been absorbing some of it, and now Adalmann and Alberto have regained their old powers!”

Ramiris sounded like a guy on a prank video revealing everything to the victim. And—yeah, taking a closer look, Adalmann had evolved from wight to wight king. He was still a skeleton, and his gear was just as gaudy as ever, so I didn’t notice at first, but his magical power was off the charts now. Alberto, meanwhile, had skipped death knight entirely and now was a Death Paladin, a super-high-level monster.

“Wight kings and Death Paladins have magicule levels about even with an Arch Demon, don’t they…?” I said.

“Kwaaah-ha-ha-ha! Look at these meek little underlings, striving so hard to be of aid to us!”

They made evolution sound so easy—and what’s more, they powered up beyond anything I could’ve guessed.

“What about that dragon?”

“Oh, didn’t you know, Rimuru? That’s Adalmann’s pet!” Ramiris announced.

Pet…?

Hmm… Come to think of it, I did remember Adalmann talking about keeping a pet, maybe. I just didn’t expect it to be this wicked-looking dragon. It was, in fact, a death dragon, the alpha predator of the undead-monster hierarchy. Shuna and the rest of the cabinet were familiar with it, apparently, so Ramiris honestly thought I knew as well. That was my fault, I suppose. It’s so important to have everybody on the same page in upper management.

So as for how this battle unfolded… Well, there’s really not much to say. In fact, Adalmann didn’t even move an inch from his throne, and the death dragon stayed ensconced on his left side. Only Alberto stepped forward, and he beat all of them himself. Marc’s Minos Bardiche wasn’t even given the time to strut its stuff—it was stopped in its tracks by the similarly Unique-class Cursed Sword, and Marc was promptly slashed down afterward.

The sight stopped Zhen in his tracks, leaving him open for a moment, and Alberto seized the opportunity. His speed made him almost seem to disappear for a moment as he unleashed upon Zhen, and that by itself spelled the end for him.

This made Shingee mutter “Huh?” in surprise. He scrambled toward Alberto, blasting out a Holy Cannon magic spell. This was a common ability among paladins, but not many civilians had access to it—Shingee didn’t mention any paladin training in his immigration papers, so I imagine it was a hidden last resort for him.

This spell was suited for speed, and it landed a clean, direct hit on Alberto. It seemed like he dodged it for a moment, but maybe Alberto let his guard down—or so I thought. But I had no reason to worry. Alberto simply didn’t move, because he had no need to evade it.

Shingee managed to squeak out an “Oh, come on!” before Alberto swung his sword down upon him. Then it was all over.

But… I mean, Alberto’s still undead, right? Isn’t he weak against the holy attribute? I know I’m not the only one to think that—but Alberto was kept safe, and it was entirely thanks to Adalmann. It turned out to be his previously hidden extra skill, known as Holy-Evil Inversion, at work.

Report. Holy-Evil Inversion is a secret skill crafted by the subject Adalmann. It has the effect of swapping the holy attribute with the evil one and vice versa.

Adalmann used this to change Alberto’s attribute from evil to holy. The effect didn’t extend to his equipment, but since Alberto was undead, there wasn’t any life force for his cursed gear to suck away, so his elemental attribute didn’t matter along those lines. Plus, if an ally applied that skill to him, there was no chance of his body resisting it.

A holy undead? What kind of joke was this? It was unholy, if anything, but Adalmann’s Holy-Evil Inversion made it a reality. And as a spiritual life-form, Adalmann had natural resistances to each kind of elemental attack. Most melee strikes didn’t work on him. As a duo, they had also overcome their weakness against holy attacks. Really, I didn’t see how any normal dungeon-runner team could take them.

So Adalmann won, and without even using any of the magic I taught him. Shingee’s team was defeated in truly anticlimactic fashion, fading into clouds of light before departing the chamber.

“Rimuru, my lord, were you watching us? We dedicate this glorious victory to you!!”

Watching Adalmann shout this dedication at the top of his nonexistent lungs, a thought occurred: Isn’t Adalmann’s gang a little too much force to bust out for Floor 60?

I mean, yeah, I did tell him that if a party approached, he should fight back with a party of his own. He certainly took that advice to heart, and he certainly didn’t try to outnumber his opponent, no. But this is getting pretty close to fraud. Like, come on! If you have a special-A monster, a Calamity-level threat—and three of them at once—you could destroy a lot of the smaller kingdoms out there! And by the looks of things, they still had some other tricks they were hiding, too.

So I decided to interrogate Ramiris about that later. For now, I needed to offer Adalmann my congratulations.

“Well done, Adalmann! Why don’t you come up to the control room? No need to talk through the screen like this.”

“Oh, ohhhh…! Such a joyous honor! I will be by your side posthaste, my lord!”

As stiflingly formal as always. Well, that’s how he is, I suppose.

“And Alberto can talk as well these days, huh? Can you bring him along?”

“Very well. As for my death dragon…?”

“Um, let’s have it keep guard over there, okay?”

“Yes, my lord!”

The death dragon whimpered a bit about that, but I had to stand firm on this. I mean, it’s freakin’ forty feet long. Maybe we could fit him in the special chamber we made for Veldora on Floor 100, but this control room just ain’t that big. I felt kinda bad for the guy, but he’d have to give up on that.

So I ordered Shion to make some tea for Adalmann and Alberto.

“Can he drink it?” she asked. “He’s nothing but bones.”

“…”

Rrrrr…ight. Yeah. Looks like Alberto found a body, kind of, but Adalmann’s still nothing but a skeleton. Maybe he can enjoy the aroma, at least?

“Well, this is… You know. A polite gesture for him.”

“I see. Very well!”

We chatted a bit more as we waited for their arrival.

“We are here, Sir Rimuru!”

“I offer you my sincere gratitude for the honor of personally experiencing your holy visage.”

Adalmann and Alberto both kneeled before me. In person like this instead of through the screen, I realized just how much more powerful they were now—I could hardly believe they were the same people as before.

“Yes. Well done. Alberto was your name, was it? You have proved to be quite an effective fighter. And, Adalmann—you have done an exemplary job as a guardian. Keep up the good work!”

“That’s right! Keep it up!”

Veldora and Ramiris heaped praise on them before I could speak up. If they got to give out all the praise first, I wasn’t too sure what I should follow up with…but let’s just keep it benign.

“Yeah, I tell you… It’s been a while since I’ve seen you guys, so I’m kinda shocked at how much you’ve grown.”

Grown…or I suppose “evolved” is the right term, isn’t it? That trio was pretty strong, so I seriously thought they’d struggle…but no, I better not say that. Sometimes, there are things better thought than stated out loud.

““Yes, my lord!!””

Both of them were visibly moved. I had them sit down, trying to hide my pangs of guilt.

“Truly… Truly a fine aroma,” said Alberto. “If offered by anyone else, I might have taken it as sarcasm, perhaps…”

Oh yeah? Hmm. Shoulda seen that coming. If you can’t drink it, it’s just unfair, isn’t it?

“…but when offered by my lord, I find the scent deeply satisfying for my heart. It has truly rejuvenated my body.”

Well, great, but Shion made it, so…

“…How delicious. Sweet—and fragrant like nectar. I, Alberto, cannot offer enough gratitude for this wondrous moment of bliss.”

Geez, don’t lay it on too much…

I guess Alberto had built a physical body for himself with magicules—a kind of temporary vessel, made possible inside the labyrinth.

“Why don’t you take on a full body as well, Adalmann?” I asked.

“…Pardon me?”

“Well, I mean, then you could enjoy that tea more, so…”

“Y-yes, perhaps, my lord, but in my case… Well, I prefer to project a certain image, you could say…”

Uh-huh. That was kinda over my head, but if it was important to Adalmann, it’s nothing I have a right to comment on.

“Fair. No need to force it, in that case.”

I changed the subject.

“By the way, I was really impressed by how you approached using Holy-Evil Inversion. The fact that you developed it at all shows me how hard you’ve been working.”

“Thank you very much! Sir Beretta provided me with some assistance. And also…”

I asked about Holy-Evil Inversion as a quick way to shift the topic, but this was actually pretty surprising. It turned out that even Luminus lent him a hand.

“Lady Luminus taught me Day-Night Inversion, one of her secret techniques, you see. An ‘apology,’ as she referred to it. Sir Beretta then applied his unique skill Reverser to modify it, and then I was able to master it.”

And there you have it. I suppose Luminus was “apologizing” for letting the Seven Days Clergy act out of line.

Why was Granville trying to kill someone as talented as Adalmann? I had my own reasoning for that. Outside of Granville, the Seven Days Clergy members were all obsessed about keeping their positions safe from threats. They were all trying to eliminate Adalmann, but Granville must’ve reasoned that he’d only be useful if he could overcome the trap they set for him. Instead, Adalmann and that dragon zombie killed each other off—something Granville may not have intended. Maybe his perspective was along the lines of “Well, if you can’t beat an enemy at that level, you’ll never become a guardian of humankind anyway” or the like. Seeing Granville’s final moments—supremely proud but all alone in life—I couldn’t help but think that.

Still, it wouldn’t be right to bring it up with Adalmann. It’s something I’d like him to realize himself someday—but for now, time for another subject change.

“Well, that’s wonderful! I’ll have to send Luminus my thanks later on. But, Adalmann!”

“Yes!”

“At this point, you can beat the guardian of Floor 70, can’t you?”

“…How do you mean, my lord?”

He seemed confused, so I spelled it out for him in detail.

………

……

…

Currently, Floors 61 through 70 were nicknamed the Golem Zone, filled with inorganic, tirelessly working sentries. Some of the specialized area bosses on those floors even wielded test versions of the firearms we were working on. There were also a lot of brutal traps, headed up primarily by land mines—but none of them were particularly lethal. The zone was overall meant as a trial for people playing the healer role in adventuring parties.

The main boss of this zone was a new machine, a modified version of the Elemental Colossus. Vester had finally completed it with the help of Kaijin. It still boasted the high defense magisteel offered, but now it was lighter and more compact, making it mobile while keeping the pilot’s seat fully protected. It wasn’t sentient, but it had room for a pilot inside, although it could also run on the thoughts of a remote pilot.

At the moment, I believed Beretta was operating it remotely. I liked that—it certainly eliminated the threat of viral cloud attacks, and not even a Minos Bardiche could cut through a magisteel body. Its armor also featured a layered structure, the shielding scales from Charybdis granting it the powers of Magic Interference.

It was a completely invincible metal guardian—once the Elemental Colossus, now called the Demon Colossus. And I was fully sure Shingee’s party would never make it past Floor 70.

………

……

…

However, after seeing how Adalmann fought today, I was starting to reconsider matters.

“Veldora, who do you think’s stronger—Adalmann or the Demon Colossus?”

“Hmm… Adalmann, without a doubt.”

“Right? So you see, Adalmann, we’re going to promote you to Floor 70.”

There you go. If Veldora agreed with me, I couldn’t be mistaken.

Understood. The power comparison between the subjects Adalmann and the Demon Colossus is—

Oh, um, I don’t need the numbers, thanks. This is more about image, so…

“Ah, ahhhhhhhh…!! I, Adalmann, promise to expend every effort to live up to your expectations!”

“And I, your humble servant Alberto, promise to support my master, Adalmann, with every fiber of my being.”

They kneeled before me again as they made their pledges. They had changed so much when I’d taken my eyes off them. The Demon Colossus was hardly any slouch, but honestly, it didn’t really have the gravitas a boss needed. That, and if it got broken again, it’d just break our hearts. We have to implant it with a soul, or it wouldn’t be subject to Ramiris’s powers in the Dungeon, so we can’t experiment to see if it’d get resurrected after being smashed up. Maybe with a soul, things would be different—or if there was a pilot inside it, would that work? Oh, but if someone was possessing it, maybe it wouldn’t be treated as an item any longer…

Regardless, we sadly had no plans along those lines yet. I thus saw no reason why we shouldn’t promote Adalmann and his crew.

“All right! Then as of today, I want to have Floors 51 through 60 switched with Floors 61 through 70.”

“Roger! You got it!” said Ramiris.

And so we restructured the labyrinth right then and there.

Following Adalmann’s exemplary performance, the Dungeon had a new hierarchy. That took care of matters for now, so I was about to order Adalmann out of the control room when the previously silent Diablo spoke up.

“We seem to be at the end of the conversation, so I have something I’d like to report to you.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, my servant Razen sent a magical call stating that he has something to urgently discuss with you. It seems his former instructor or the like called upon him, and now this man is asking for an audience with you, Sir Rimuru. His name is Gadora.”

Hmm… Never heard of him.

Report. He is listed as the author of a number of books on sorcery.

Oh, he’s famous, huh? I thought Razen was a pretty well-known and talented sorcerer himself, but his master must be even more so, huh? Kinda interesting. I wouldn’t mind meeting him, but…

“Wouldn’t that be a trap, though? We’re on the eve of duking it out with the Empire, so a meeting at this point seems really suspicious, I think…”

“Exactly! There is no need at all for you to meet with such a dubious person, Sir Rimuru!”

Shion was even more doubtful than I was—and I could see why. Given the times we lived in, if my personal guardian wanted to keep me away from danger—well, she was just doing her job. I wasn’t nearly as wary as her, so I figured it was better to listen to my advisers for matters like these.

“Indeed… I see no need to lend an ear to the opinions of someone on the level of Razen. In fact, I hardly even need to listen to him at all.”

Diablo made this sound like an accepted fact, but I was sure he just wanted to be excused from all this. Regardless, if both of my personal secretaries were advising me against it, I was ready to call this off—but then I noticed Adalmann fidgeting a bit. Yeah, I understood how he felt. Sometimes, just when you’re about to leave your boss’s office, a phone call or unexpected visitor comes along. You don’t want to interfere, but you don’t want to just walk out on the boss, either…so you’re stuck there, helplessly watching the clock tick away. Or is it just me?

Regardless…

“Sorry, Adalmann. That’s all I needed from you, so you guys can leave.”

“N-no, my lord! There is no need to be concerned about us. But apart from that…”

“Hmm?”

“To tell the truth, I…um…”

“Yes?”

“This man, Gadora, that you speak of…”

“Mm-hmm?”

“I believe this may perhaps be a friend of mine.”

“Huh?”

I turned my eyes to Adalmann. He was shifting a bit in his seat, looking flustered. I almost wanted to say No, Adalmann, you’re allowed to have friends. I don’t think you’ve betrayed me…

So I asked Diablo to hold his opinion for now while Adalmann gave me more details. He and Gadora, as he put it, were close friends over a thousand years ago. I figured he’d have to be long dead in that case, but Gadora was a master-level wizard, so it wouldn’t be unheard of if he wove his own magic to extend his life. After all, this was the very man who cast Reincarnation on Adalmann to save him.

Adalmann also recognized the name Razen; as he recalled, he was one of Gadora’s primary apprentices. We kept discussing them for a while, and as we did, it was increasingly clear this Gadora wanting to see me was the exact same guy.

“Diablo?”

“Understood. I will arrange a date and time.”

Such a talented secretary. All I had to do was call his name, and he instantly recognized my intentions. My not-so-talented other secretary had no objections, so I decided to go ahead and give Gadora a tryout.

With their defeat on Floor 60, Shinji’s party got to experience returning from death for the very first time. They woke up to find a large audience thanking them, cheering them, booing them, even reassuring them that they couldn’t have avoided that loss. Their battles in the labyrinth were broadcast live, and Shinji’s conquest was turning into a popular diversion.

Dungeon challengers, of course, had the right to turn down any recording or broadcast of their exploits—it was a purely optional contract to sign. But Shinji had two reasons to go through with it—one, they got a cut of the broadcast fees; and two, they figured becoming famous would help keep them safe. They were in enemy territory, so if they became known names, it’d be that much harder for someone to assassinate them—and since the contract only allowed their boss fights to be broadcast, they didn’t have to be on edge the entire time.

It looked like the contract would be pretty lucrative for them, besides, so Shinji had no reason to turn it down. The same was true for his companions, so Shinji signed on the dotted line…and the result was this huge crowd greeting them now.

“Boy, that was too bad! Hope you train up a little more and try again!”

“Man, those guys never stood a chance. What kind of monsters were those anyway? He swung that sword like it was a twig…and what about that skeleton on the throne? Some kinda legendary monster?”

“It was probably a wight king. The earth-shattering ruler of the dead. Not even an Arch Demon could take him!”

“Whoa. So was that dragon alive or not, though? It didn’t look like a statue or anything, but if it could’ve joined the battle, too, I don’t think any human being had a chance in there.”

The questions came hard and fast from the audience. Shinji’s party just smiled and waved as they found their way out of there.

“Well, I’m gonna keep my eye on you heroes!”

“You’re all gonna be in the record books alongside Sir Masayuki now! If you wanna beat that boss, you better find a way quick while Sir Masayuki’s preparing for the war!”

“Yeah, I got money down on you guys doing it, so keep it up!”

The voices remained just as loud behind their backs as they retired to their inn.

Once they reached their room, the three of them flopped down on their beds.

“So now what’re we gonna do?” Marc asked.

“Who cares?” an utterly exhausted Shinji replied. “Just lemme rest a bit.”

They put everything they had into that boss battle…but it made everything up to Floor 59 look like preschool. On Floor 60, even the non-boss adversaries worked with a clear command structure—the sentient Death Lord they encountered led a team of fighters into battle. They managed to beat him and make it to the boss chamber, but what ensued in there was just wretched.

“…You gonna report back to Yuuki?”

Zhen’s reminder made Shinji get up. He sat down on the bed, sighing, as Marc and Zhen picked themselves up and sat around him.

“I don’t really know what we can report. We had no idea that side-quest zone was gonna be so hard.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t too bad up to Floor 59, but what the hell was up with 60? A Death Lord with a whole platoon of death knights—like, they had a whole army loaded up for us in there! Any normal soldier would’ve had his ass kicked in the blink of an eye!”

“I know.”

“…That was awful. Everything got so well defended on that floor. And those three bosses—not just the knight who beat us, but the skeleton on the throne and the dragon… Those had to be secret bosses, I think.”

Now they were lost in conversation, too excited to worry too much about each other. The easy-breezy atmosphere up to yesterday had disappeared in under twenty-four hours.

“And that boss sittin’ on the throne… That was a wight king, you know. I guess someone with high-level appraisal magic managed to identify it…but it’s so different from how it looks on-screen!”

“One hundred percent,” Marc said in agreement with Shinji. “Having that show up when we were totally unprepared for it… How could we even deal?”

“…Honestly, I never wanna see it again.”

Zhen’s companions were on the same page. And the wight king didn’t even participate in the battle. It didn’t move from the throne—just sat there, exuding royal dignity.

“I mean, that minotaur guy seemed like a ‘regular’ boss, y’know? He was around an A in strength. But wasn’t Floor 60 way too much of a step up?”

“…Yeah. Too much. I’m starting to think everything up to Floor 50 was meant to put us off our guard.”

“But now I’m really sure of it,” avowed Shinji. “If monsters that strong are protecting it, there’s got to be something in that maze.”

“Yeah. That Alberto guy was just way out of our league.”

“Even his equipment! I tried appraising it while Marc engaged him, but it was all Unique from head to toe.”

“Ah, that explains it. I came in figuring my Minos Bardiche could cleave right through all that.”

“I guess weapons you pick up from treasure chests work well on the next boss only in RPGs, huh…?”

“Well, yeah. I think we got too full of ourselves in there.”

“…Yeah.”

They looked at each other and heaved a sigh in unison. Now they were a bit calmer. It was time for some tea and a moment to catch their breath.

“Wanna try again tomorrow?”

“Are you serious?”

“…Not against them. We’d lose every time.”

“Yeah…”

“Also, that ‘hero’ talk… Yuuki mentioned Masayuki to us before, right? Like, that kid who has incredible good luck and nothing else? And he took on Floor 60?”

“I don’t think he has yet, no. His party advanced down pretty easily as well, but they say he’s never died yet in there.”

“Oh. Has any other party tried it?”

“The chatter I heard said the top runners are all tackling Floor 50 at the moment, but none of them signed broadcast deals, so until now, Masayuki had the best public record. Beyond that, there’s a few broadcasting parties stuck on Floor 40.”

Signing a contract didn’t mean you were watched inside the Dungeon at all times. The cameras were only situated in the boss rooms every ten floors, and occasionally camera crews would follow you around for special events and so on. Thus, thanks to being the first team to Floor 60, Shinji’s party became the big celebrities of the moment—and with the way they kept rewriting records, people were starting to place bets on them.

“Y’know, I’m willing to bet Masayuki got tipped off. He probably knows Floor 60’s home to a secret boss.”

“I guess we shoulda expected to lose, then. Like, two guys at that level, plus a dragon? This labyrinth is so unbalanced.”

“…It was pretty well-balanced until Floor 50. I really do think that was meant as a hidden boss. The hidden town’s probably right past that.”

So they continued talking and consoling themselves for a while, before moving on to their future plans.

“You know, guys, if we’ve got crowds cheering for us in this city, I don’t think we can really do any kinda spy work.”

“Nah, nah, that’s not a big problem. Like I said, we’re safer this way.”

“…All we’ve done is go into the labyrinth so far.”

“So should we wait for Lord Gadora to show up? Because I think we hit a pretty big dead end down there. Or,” Marc said with a grin, “you wanna try training or something?”

Shinji chuckled. “Well, there’s definitely something past that chamber, and the guardian’s way stronger than anything else we saw. I think I can report that much to Yuuki.”

“Tell him how big the labyrinth is, too. It must’ve been magically expanded or something, because it’s way too large and deep to be man-made.”

“…And don’t forget, he was far stronger than anything on any other floor.”

Shinji meekly nodded at Marc and Zhen. “Right, right. Okay, once I’m done with my report, you guys wanna tour around some more?”

There was no need to spend any more time talking about it. The three of them mentally flipped the page as they went out into the night.

Their first stop was a secluded spot outside of town, where they made their report as agreed upon. After sending the summary report to Yuuki, they received a magical call from him about ten minutes later.

“Hey. Glad you’re doing okay.”

“Well, we were until last night, but today was awful for us.”

“Ha-ha-ha! Yeah, sounds like you guys got your asses kicked. So what are you up to next?”

“I think it’ll depend on Lord Gadora. We’ve got no way to pass Floor 60 by ourselves, and the labyrinth’s not really set up so we can sneak our way around it.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. All right. Now, lemme ask you something else…”

“Yes?”

“Can you go into more detail on just how strong the Floor 60 boss is? Just, like, anything you felt in there is fine.”

Only Shinji and his friends understood the angle of this question. What Yuuki asked, basically, was how high up in the Imperial Guardians this opponent would be.

Shinji thought it over a moment. The imperial army’s ranking duels held little interest to him. He didn’t care much about working his way up the military ranks, so he had never tried challenging anyone before. He owed Yuuki for picking him up and taking care of him, so he just served him as a way to pay back the debt—in the military, though, since he didn’t like lending a hand to organized crime. The moment Yuuki began leading the Composite Division, he transferred over there from his original assignment in the Armored Division.

He wasn’t the only otherworlder in the East to think along these lines, either. Quite a few of them avoided making shows out of their power, dodging major responsibilities and just living normal lives. That made it harder to accurately gauge their strength, so nobody could really say whether the Imperial Knights were truly the strongest or not. They were by name, at least—and in a way, it was natural that they were ranked on such a detailed basis.

“I’d say he’d at least make it into the top fifty. I don’t think anyone lower than that would stand a chance.”

“Are you talking about Alberto alone?”

“Yes. Oh, and I dunno if this helps, but I was deployed as an army medic for an anti–Arch Demon mission once. I only got a quick look at that fight, but the wight king I saw today had pretty much the same magicule count, I think.”

“Do you mean the Crimson Shore disaster?”

“Oh, um, yeah.”

“Roger. Okay, thanks for the guidance. You guys can go on R & R until you regroup with Lord Gadora.”

With that, the magical call ended.

………

……

…

The Crimson Shore disaster was considered among the most ignoble events to ever occur on imperial soil. It had its origins in a beautiful lakeside province that rebelled against the Empire and declared independence. They were at a military disadvantage, of course, but what their king did to make up the difference wound up triggering a catastrophe. He had tapped into secret demon-summoning arts—an all but forbidden taboo.

His orders were to summon the most powerful demon they could manage, and his court sorcerers did his bidding. The Arch Demon they summoned wound up laying waste to the entire province.

This was a small province, its total population less than ten thousand, and it had no chance of outgunning the Empire. But the king still had good reason to go rogue—his only daughter, the princess of the realm, was being claimed by an imperial noble as his concubine.

With the Empire being as vast as it was, the emperor didn’t waste his time in the nitty-gritty dealings of the tinier provinces. All imperial territory belonged to him, its management left to the nobility, and so nobles had free reign to treat the provinces as they pleased. It was thus common to see a frontier earl use the emperor’s authority to act like a brutal tyrant over the region he ruled.

What the demon wanted, however, was the splinter kingdom’s princess. The king steadfastly denied this request—but once his head sorcerer caught sight of the demon’s full glory, he went mad, his spirit crushed forever, and he agreed to the demand. Thus, with an evil smile, the demon possessed the princess’s body. The king was enraged, but that rage was soon replaced with terror—for once the demon had a body, that was when the massacre began.

When the Empire was informed that the province was leveled, they decided to send out a force to subdue this demon. They were fortunate they did, for if they had acted any later, it could have been the birth of a second Guy Crimson.

This force arrived to find the beautiful lake turned a deep shade of red, dyed by the blood of the province’s citizens. It was a black mark on the history of the Empire, the worst thing to happen to it in centuries.

It was ultimately the Armored Division, its bases located across the Empire, who put an end to the Crimson Shores incident. That’s what the history books said. But the truth—as Shinji was witness to from far away—was that a small group of soldiers defeated the Arch Demon all by themselves.

The whole affair struck Shinji as fishy, really. Clearly, the nobility was oppressing the countryside—but once the demon aimed its terror at the Empire’s own citizens, Shinji began to wonder if the truth was as cut-and-dried as reported. For one, the Empire reacted almost too quickly. In the time it’d take to report the incident to the imperial mainland, debate over countermeasures, and form an expeditionary force, the demon could’ve easily completed its full manifestation. Instead, the Empire stopped this just in the nick of time—thus proving, in Shinji’s mind anyway, that they were tipped off in advance.

He had no intention of telling anyone else about this. When he saw the strength of the demon his deployment was fighting, it taught him that some things were better off left unexplored in his life.

I have to imagine those guys had to be at the top of the Imperial Knights…

No matter what he did, Shinji doubted he’d ever have a chance against them. It truly felt like they belonged to some other world—and that’s when he stopped caring about his army rank.

………

……

…

Shinji breathed a sigh of relief as Marc and Zhen eyed him carefully.

“You done?” asked Marc.

“…Thanks for handling that,” said Zhen.

“Sure. I think that about covers it. Now we get to chill out until Lord Gadora shows.”

“All right. But damn, you survived Crimson Shore?”

“…Good thing you did.”

“Yeah. By playing possum. One of the better decisions I made in my life, I think.”

“Aw, hell, you deserve a medal just for making it out. Didn’t like two-thirds of that force get killed off?”

“That’s right. I never wanna join anything like that again. I mean, I was an army medic, and I couldn’t even do anything.”

“…Oh?”

“Yeah, every attack killed its targets instantly, so healing didn’t matter. That’s why I bugged out real early on.”

“Wow. That sounds rough. Arch Demons are really that bad?”

“Well, the one I saw was. Beyond bad. And plus, I swear we made eye contact once, but if you ask me, I think she let me go. Her eyes were, like, bloodred. Just remembering it makes me wanna piss my pants.”

Shinji gave his surprised-looking audience a smile.

“But if that skeleton’s on the level of an Arch Demon like that, there’s no way we can take him.”

“…It’s really on the same level?”

“The magicule counts are anyway. They say that the longer a demon’s existed, the stronger they are…and I think the one I saw was pretty old.”

It had to be, or else the highest echelons of imperial government wouldn’t have taken such drastic action. But Shinji stopped himself from saying that.

“But there’s no point dwelling on it. I heard they’re working on a machine that can tabulate the power of your adversary, but I don’t really see the point. Even that knight Alberto—based on his magicules, I can’t even imagine how strong he is. And do you remember back in our classes? How good you were in a fight involved a lot more than just how strong you were.”

“Right. I get what you’re sayin’.”

“…Yeah.”

“That sort of thing. Some demons are just beyond anything we can measure. That’s all I want you to remember.”

The way Shinji put it, they couldn’t even begin to work on that level. The other two took that to heart.

With the worst of the day behind them, the trio hurried over to the Free Guild office before it closed and sold their magic crystals and extra equipment to the resource department.

“Whoa, these crystals are from really deep down, aren’t they? The quality’s completely different.”

“Another slotted weapon? And pure magisteel? They’d never let these out in public in other countries.”

The Guild staff members were pretty impressed. Shinji’s party could’ve fetched higher prices if they shopped around, but they were here on an undercover investigation, so they didn’t want to expand their social network that much. Besides, the Guild paid well enough. Their mission was at a standstill, but the past few days alone ensured they were damn well funded, at least.

In the army, they were paid an annual salary, all in advance; if you got promoted in rank, you’d receive the difference in salary the following year. Even if you were penniless upon enlistment, you’d get a reserve fund based on how many days remained in the year. Thus you really couldn’t lose money in the military—even if you died in combat, the advance salary would be treated as part of your family’s consolation payout.

Foot soldiers ranked up to private received a base salary of around ten gold coins, equivalent to approximately ten thousand dollars a year. The army covered your room, board, and clothing, so this pay was still a blessing for the lower classes. To this, enlisted men could add rank pay, hazard pay, and a lot of other side bonuses, depending on their duties.

Marc and Zhen were both first lieutenants, while Shinji was a major with a medic qualification. None of them had the authority to give orders, but their rank still afforded them a few nice perks. Otherworlders, in general, were treated well in the Empire—at least on the level of a second lieutenant—but Shinji was ranked higher than his companions.

Regardless, though, all of them were on a much higher pay scale than rank-and-file infantry. A first lieutenant’s rank earned them thirty-six gold coins, while a major netted forty-four—every rank promotion meant an extra four golds a year. Combined with the base pay and other income, Mark’s and Zhen’s yearly salaries were around fifty golds, while Shinji’s usually broke seventy.

A military salary gave you an income above the imperial average, but you still weren’t living like a tycoon. You’d be rich by rural standards, but in the capital, the cost of living was sky-high. Still, life could be tough in this world if you decided to go it by yourself. Having a stable career, whether in the military or elsewhere, was a godsend.

Now, though, this trio knew better. They didn’t need to cling to the army at all. They could just live in that city within the labyrinth, and they’d be just fine.

Their confidence chiefly stemmed from the fact that today’s trip to the Guild alone earned them over three hundred gold coins. That well outpaced what a year in the army would earn them all combined. That, and unless the Empire handed it out to them, they’d never have a chance at scoring Unique-class equipment in their lives. It was a huge windfall.

All three of them realized this well enough, but all three hesitated to say it out loud. They kept their silence as they headed to their next destination.

Once in Rimuru, the monster city, they chose a fairly high-end restaurant for dinner, enjoying the kind of luxury they hadn’t experienced in ages.

“…Is this really okay?” Zhen timidly asked. “Selling equipment like that?”

Shinji and Marc were unmoved.

“Of course it is! We didn’t sell all of it. We kept some samples.”

“Yeah, and it’s not like we can take it all home anyway. As long as we keep the good stuff, nobody’s gonna complain.”

Unless they received permission to loot it, anything procured during a military operation belonged to the armed forces. In this case, none of them would have any right to protest if everything they earned was taken away. At the same time, though, they were asked to investigate the labyrinth. They were posing as adventurers, and selling booty on the market was perfectly normal adventurer behavior. It seemed safe to take this as a nice side benefit. Besides, it’s not like Yuuki would demand this stuff from them anyway—he was bound to let Shinji’s party have it all, except for what he personally needed.

“But y’know… If they do confiscate all the money we’ve made, you gotta start seriously thinkin’ about moving here, don’tcha?”

Shinji finally said it first. Nobody disagreed.

One gold coin is equivalent to around a thousand dollars, a ballpark conversion that applied just as well in the Empire as it did here. Minted in the Dwarven Kingdom, they circulated around the world, and the Empire recognized them as official currency. Whatever they earned here, they could bring home and use like any other money.

“I think that’s totally doable.”

“…Yeah. I was just joking about it earlier, but now I feel like working here would be a lot more fun.”

Shinji only half meant it, but Marc and Zhen were more up for it than he anticipated.

Yes, the Empire was on the cutting edge of culture and technology. It boasted a fine capital, the food was good, and they lived comfortably. As long as they had money, they could enjoy life well enough, even compared with their former world. But they were in the military, and that always came with the potential for death.

Meanwhile, the Dungeon offered everything they could possibly want. You never worried about dying—something they didn’t quite believe at first, but now that they’d experienced it once, they were convinced. And if death wasn’t a concern, wouldn’t it be better to just earn what they could in there and party it up in town? That was the conclusion Shinji and his friends made, and no one could blame them for it.

Money, of course, was meaningless without entertainment, something the monster city of Rimuru offered lots of. There was a battle arena open to the public when events weren’t taking place, giving citizens a nice, well-maintained space to play and relax. Sports like soccer and baseball were starting to spread, and some of the dungeon runners were forming teams. And then there were the hot springs—and the theaters, which housed a flourishing drama scene that played to big crowds on a regular basis, something they already witnessed for themselves. The food was just as good—no, even better than the Empire’s, featuring familiar Japanese specialties, desserts, and a dizzying range of adult beverages. They were re-creating cuisines that didn’t even exist in this realm, and an Earth native like Shinji found it all hopelessly attractive.

Plus, when you really got down to it, their only obligation was to Yuuki—and Yuuki didn’t look like he wanted conflict with the demon lord Rimuru. It didn’t even seem like they’d be betraying anyone if they moved here.

“I know desertion gets us the death penalty. But we’re not at war, are we? Not yet anyway.”

“Right? I was just thinking about that, too, Shinji. ’Cause we can still request a discharge, yeah?”

“…That’ll depend on Yuuki.”

Desertion was a crime only when the nation was in a state of war. That didn’t apply at the moment, luckily. Depending on how you interpreted this, an honorable discharge still seemed possible.

“But the problem,” muttered Marc, “is this war.”

That was the whole reason they couldn’t commit to abandoning the Empire. War was obviously looming on the horizon, ready to rise up on them, and it’d leave its scars across this entire region. If it weren’t for that, they’d be house hunting right now.

“Who do you think’s gonna win?”

“…Like, before that, if we’re ordered to attack this city, what’re we gonna do?”

The trio exchanged glances. It was an excellent dinner, but suddenly it tasted bland to them. Attacking the city was the last thing they wanted, in a couple of ways.

Shinji’s group had stayed here only a little while, but they really liked it. They’d hate it if this city got wiped off the map. That was one reason. The second—as their imaginations ominously suggested—was that if the labyrinth bosses were any indication, the strongest of Tempestian fighters had to be absolute beasts.

“I mean, of course they’re gonna have someone really strong defending their important facilities, right?” said Marc. “But their troops have to be weaker than that. Or I guess we hope they are, huh?”

“I agree,” Shinji replied with a nod. “I think once you get to the level of Rimuru, at least, it’s a whole other ball game. There’s a story about how Veldora razed an entire city long ago, and now I really don’t think that’s a joke at all. I mean, that wight king could do it, even.”

The monsters who called Tempest home certainly seemed capable of disasters like that.

“You know, the way I see it, Arch Demons are kind of like nuclear weapons back home. They’ve got nuclear magic here, even.”

“Yeah. ’Cause we’ve seen how war is all about numbers…but with a boss like that, all the numbers in the world wouldn’t do a thing.”

“…You’d need dozens of fighters as good as us to stand a chance.”

All of them scowled…and the magical call from Gadora came shortly afterward.

An elderly man was prostrated before me. Behind him, the trio I had been watching on the control room’s big screen were following his lead.

The man’s name was Gadora, the very one who went through Diablo and Razen to request an audience with me. He wasn’t gaudily dressed, but he had an expensive-looking magic robe on, his eyes sharp enough that I doubted his age a little.

Shingee, as I surmised, was actually named Shinji—Shinji Tanimura, to be exact. The other two put their real names on the processing form. All three were apparently assigned to Gadora here, a master sorcerer; they usually worked under Yuuki but were serving as assistants to Gadora in their current investigations.

They had explained all this to me, and after Gadora was done, he took this pose, Shinji and the gang copying him. We weren’t gonna get anywhere like this.

“Yeah, um… That’s about what I figured with you guys, I guess. But we can’t really get comfortable and talk if you’re posing like that, okay? Let’s move somewhere else.”

Shion nodded. “Lift your heads,” she intoned, sounding grumpy for some reason. This is why I hate royal audiences like this—I know I’m gonna mess up my manners somehow. I’d prefer to just skip the whole thing.

“A-as you wish!!”

Given all that exaggerated shouting, I was starting to dread our meeting.

So we relocated to a reception room—a plainer one. I tended to prefer this one; over in the fancier chamber, the furniture and stuff were so high-end that I was afraid I’d break or ruin something. One false move with a full teacup, and it’d be liable to stain the fancy carpet we had in there. In my heart, I was still just another common peon, and I preferred surroundings within my means. It appeared Shinji’s party was the same way; they looked a bit more cheerful than before.

“Which do you like more,” I casually asked, “tea or coffee?”

“Uh, um, coffee, please.”

“Shinjiiiii!!” Gadora shouted. I spent a few moments calming him down.

“And you, Gadora?”

“M-me? Well, um, I’ll have what Shinji’s having.”

Oh? Don’t they have coffee in the Empire? I figured they would, but maybe there’s not that much in circulation. Turning toward Marc and Zhen, they simply nodded back at me—they were okay with the same thing, I supposed.

“Okay, four American blends, Shuna!”

“A-American?!” Gadora yelped.

“Oh, did you want something stronger? Dark roast, maybe? Or you wanna try it Tempest style?”

“N-no, um, I didn’t mean it like that, but… Ah…”

“Oh?”

“S-Sir Rimuru, would you happen to be…an otherworlder?”

“Um, yeah…?”

That’s the question he has? Because if so, he clearly hasn’t done his homework. I sized the four of them up, but only Gadora had an “oh crap” look on his face. I guess the other three knew but forgot to tell him. Ah well.

“Now, how about we get down to business?”

Shuna laid out the coffee cups on the table, along with enough milk and sugar for everyone. Leaving Shinji and his friends to watch in wonder at this, I decided to address Gadora first. He gave Shinji a spiteful look after he exclaimed “Oh, this coffee’s really good!” but I was kind enough to overlook this.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I am something of a veteran reincarnate as well.”

…Hmm. Lord Gadora certainly kicked things off with a bombshell. The other three turned toward him, looking just as surprised.

Apparently Gadora, in his mission to master the magical arts, had reincarnated himself many times over an untold number of years. With every rebirth, he’d read through the secret libraries of this or that royal palace, allowing him to build a vast store of knowledge. He came to know Adalmann in the midst of this clandestine sorcery research, and the two became close friends.

“As I mentioned earlier, I had a personal vendetta against the Western Holy Church—one I kindled after my best friend Adalmann was killed. Thus, over the course of centuries, I crafted my plans and coaxed the Empire into doing my bidding.”

Gadora gave me his personal history. After Adalmann was put into a trap, he swore revenge, headed into the Empire alone, and gradually built up his reputation. He had experienced battle against Veldora as well—certainly, he’d led a far more eventful life than I thought.

“In hindsight, I’m honestly glad I completed my reincarnation ritual before we challenged him. I always wanted to see for myself the ultimate in evil, the worst nature could create…”

Only four True Dragons had ever been born. They sat at the precipice of monster-dom, the most powerful beings on the planet. Based on his experience battling one of them, he didn’t think the imperial army was likely to ever beat Veldora. He was, of course, saying this right in front of the guy, who was already shooting me gleeful sidelong glances. I wish he’d stop. Yeah, it’s amazing and all, but it’s not like I was obliged to keep praising him over it.

“I do think, mind you, that we could have scored a tactical victory against Sir Veldora. But those fools in the Empire insisted on trying to win that beast over to our side. I warned them, time and time again, that it was an impossible waste of time.”

Gadora’s interests were fixed squarely upon the West and his revenge against Luminism, and he didn’t want to waste good soldiers on pointless campaigns. He attempted to prevail upon his superiors how unrealistic their hopes were, but the commanders refused to listen, overvaluing themselves far too much.

Hearing all this, Gadora sounded like a pretty stand-up guy. But Gadora was also the one who fanned the Empire’s lust for expansion, it seemed. I asked him to spare me all the details and skip to more recent trends.

“So for the most part, the Empire’s trying to start a war because of you?”

“That… That’s part of it, you could say…”

No, old man—you can try talking your way around it, but you had to be the cause. He quickly began making excuses, perhaps sensing my displeasure.

“But… But no! The Empire has always had that will to dominate, you see. If I didn’t give that lust for power a direction, they would’ve fanned the flames of war all over the world. All I did was turn their eyes toward the West. Their goals matched with mine, you could say. It was a good arrangement…I thought…”

Oh, like hell it was! And now we’re mixed up in it for no reason?

“And let me tell you, I was against invading the Forest of Jura. It is the domain of Sir Veldora, the Storm Dragon, and I didn’t want to repeat our mistakes from before. I suggested they devote their efforts toward scheming against the Dwarven Kingdom instead, but they can be so stubborn, all of them. They try to use military might to solve all their problems…”

Gadora sounded pained about it. I didn’t care.

“Wait a minute! So the Empire does want to hit the Dwarven Kingdom?!”

I had pretty much discounted it. But did we need to consider a campaign route through Dwargon after all?

“You thought about that, too? Well, it’s nothing as concrete as wanting to ‘hit’ them, exactly. My suggestion was to propose an alliance with King Gazel, so he’d allow us to march through the kingdom. My only grudge was with the Western Holy Church, remember…”

The old sorcerer was already aware that Adalmann was safe. They would be meeting after our talk was done—and that’s why Gadora, realizing just how badly he whiffed on all of this, had switched to an antiwar stance. He was on friendly terms with the emperor, he claimed, but not even he could ask him to withdraw their military plans. Instead, he kept pleading his case against the war in subsequent government-level meetings.

This attitude seemed a little too convenient for my tastes, but if Gadora could help us avoid war, I was willing to bite my tongue. Either way, I wanted to get as much out of him as I could right now. As I did, Benimaru and my other officers were in the next room over, listening in and holding their own strategic conference. My job was to make Gadora as comfortable—and loose-lipped—as possible.

“I imagine King Gazel turned you down, huh?”

“As one would expect, I suppose. Some of our commanders considered an assassination attempt, but I spoke up against that. If we were prepared to do that, I said, we may as well crush them with an all-out assault!”

It didn’t strike me as anything to be proud of. He was more of a warmonger than I thought.

I rolled my eyes a bit but kept extracting more info from him. The Empire’s military structure, the thoughts of their leading officers…even the astonishing news that Yuuki was planning a coup. All this assured me that I was getting pretty much everything Gadora could provide.

Finally, seemingly at ease, Gadora opened up to me.

“Let me assure you, Sir Rimuru, that I bear no particular sense of duty toward the Empire. They broke up the army division I personally built from scratch and took all my men away from me. This group with me—Shinji, Marc, and Zhen—are my personal apprentices, so I’m allowed to turn to them as needed. But in the end, if Adalmann is alive and well…or um, well, at least…then I have no attachment left to the Empire.”

He was an egocentric, self-centered old man, not a shred of loyalty in his heart, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it. I had to hand it to him—I wasn’t about to say it out loud, but I kind of respected that attitude.

“So with that in mind, Sir Rimuru, if I may have the honor of joining your cause, I am ready to exert myself as best as I can!”

Right after admitting his utter lack of loyalty, he was courageous enough to ask for a spot in my administration. I gotta admit, I liked the guy. But Benimaru and some others were in the next room hearing all this. I could already picture them losing their temper over Gadora’s attitude. It was gonna be hard to calm them down later.

Still, that didn’t stop me from bringing Gadora on as a guest adviser, albeit on a probationary basis. If he wanted to join me, I’d make him work for the right. He certainly wasn’t gonna be too loyal to me, but I’d see how he could pitch in.

For now, I was okay with him meeting Adalmann and using a Transport spell to access Floor 70. His knowledge could help us out a lot—maybe he could assist Ramiris. But before he settled down in Tempest, I planned to have him return to the Empire and do a little job for me.

As for Shinji and company, I’d allow them to remain here in Tempest. They told me they’d take it easy for a while as they figured out what they wanted to do. This was their request, made under Gadora’s advice, and I had no reason to turn it down. If they turned traitor, I could always banish them—but I guess they really didn’t want that, because they readily pledged their loyalty to me. However, they also professed a great respect for Yuuki and asked not to be involved in any hostilities against him. I was okay with that.

“Really,” I said, “the relationship between us and Yuuki’s people is so complicated. We kinda have a truce for the moment is the way I’d put it. He’s pissed me off a lot, and I’d like to get back at him, honestly, but I can’t really will myself to hate his guts, either.”

Despite it all, Yuuki was still Shizu’s student. And whenever I recalled how happy Shizu seemed when she talked about him, I couldn’t help but cut the guy some slack. Maybe I was too soft on him, but hey, we’re fellow countrymen. There’d be no more second chances, but for now, I’d put our past history on ice. If you asked me to trust him, however, that was another story. Trusting that bastard at this point was nothing but a death wish.

“And you know, guys, I don’t think you should trust Yuuki too much, either.”

Gadora nodded at this, interestingly enough. Guess he had his own thoughts about Yuuki, too. They were acquaintances and partners at one point, so maybe Gadora could be a good go-between for us. I was starting to think recruiting him was a pretty smart idea. If he didn’t excessively trust Yuuki, either, I could at least believe him on that point.

Later, I reunited Gadora with Adalmann, the two of them fondly reminiscing. Adalmann consented to take him in, so for the time being, I’d let them live together.

But before he did…now that I had all the info I wanted from Gadora, I ordered him to return to the Empire and follow my instructions. First, he’d advocate against the war for me.

“You think you can do that?”

“By all means, Sir Rimuru. I am used to behind-the-scenes maneuvering, trust me.”

I’m sure he was. But normally, it’d be impossible for a single person to stop the will of an entire state. It’s not that I didn’t believe Gadora, but I figured it best to give him a plan B as well.

“If you can stop the war, that’d be best…but from what I’m hearing, that sounds like an uphill battle. You said the Empire’s got an expansionist streak, right? If they’re on the move, we can’t really stop them now.”

“But…”

“So if that winds up not working out, I want you to point ’em at this labyrinth.”

“How do you mean?”

In the labyrinth, we could take all the casualties in the world and still not have a problem. That led me to this idea.

“I see… So you’d use the labyrinth to chip away at the imperial forces and break their morale?”

“Pretty much. And I’m sure Yuuki’s gonna use that opportunity to act as well. If he starts a riot back home, the Empire can’t really keep a war going, can they?”

I wasn’t sure how well it’d all work out—but in the labyrinth, at least, we were guaranteed not to lose anyone. I explained all this to Gadora, giving him some labyrinth equipment and three Resurrection Bracelets. He could use this, I figured, to sell the Dungeon to the commanders for us. No army wanted to be attacked from the rear. I doubted they were going to ignore the labyrinth and march on to the West, but if we could dangle some rewards in front of their eyes…

“Ah, I understand. A very astute way of thinking—and I know a few commanders greedy enough to take the bait. I think you can expect results from this scheme, Sir Rimuru.”

So Gadora accepted it with full confidence. If possible, we’d stop the war. If not, we’d divert them into the labyrinth. The rest was up to him.

Thus I granted Gadora and his three apprentices asylum—and with these new, unexpected allies, the incident came to a close.