by Fujino Omori
“Eep?! Noooooooooooooo!”
“Whoa, hey, adventurers?! Over here! Over here!!”
The howls of the monster’s advance were without end, and its piercing wails echoed all around. With the others, Lefiya became uneasy as they witnessed weeping prostitutes and their children clambering to escape before them.
Their group accelerated, stepping out onto a straight road.
“There it is!”
They confirmed the sight of the vouivre’s titanic body in the distance. And just before it, the back of a white-haired boy as he pursued the monster.
“We’re going to circle around! Lefiya, hit it with your magic from here!”
“Yes, sir!”
The other three people in her cell moved ahead as Lefiya raised her staff, Forest Teardrop. She could see that the vouivre had already been injured—the adventurers lying in wait must have hit it with their own attacks. The dragon tail hanging from its lower body had a javelin sticking out of it, and from its slender back sprouted arrows.
The monster unleashed a pained roar as Lefiya prepared to chant when she saw something unbelievable.
“Firebolt!”
It was magic.
The boy had cast magic—at the adventurers.
“?!”
She couldn’t believe her eyes. The electrical fire crackled, blowing away the adventurers trying to intercept the monster.
“Wh—?!”
“Arrrrrgh?!”
None of them were able to deal with it—because none of them expected to be attacked by a fellow adventurer, not here, not now. Their weapons were shattered while their bodies suffered burns as they plunged from the collapsing rooftop. Lefiya was at a loss for words at his eccentric behavior—something that far surpassed simple barbarism.
Bell Cranell’s magic was a menace.
He didn’t have to worry about chanting to unleash the Swift-Strike spell, which had the force of a short-trigger cast to match. But it was a Level 3. After becoming a second-tier adventurer, he had magic on par with a Level-2 mage. Its firepower was not an insignificant thing. It shot off at a speed that hardly anyone could hope to block—the members of Loki Familia focused on the monster were no exception. They took a direct hit when they were about to attack the vouivre, and their heads smacked into the wall and the ground upon impact.
“Wh—?”
What are your intentions?!
What are you doing?!
If you do that…!
As her mind fogged over, Lefiya’s apprehensions became reality.
“Little Rookie, you piece of shit!”
“Are you out of your damn mind?!”
“You want the rare drop that badly, you greedy rat?!”
“At a time like this?!”
A violent swirl of rage and abuse welled up among the adventurers.
Lefiya’s hands started to tremble, feeling as though the abuse and slander hurled at Bell was aimed at her. The residents who had been desperately trying to flee froze in place, dumbfounded, and the children started to bawl at an increased urgency, adding to the chaos of the situation.
But despite all of that, Bell kept firing off magic.
He was pushing everyone away from the vouivre as if to protect it while chasing after the rampaging monster.
“Ngh!” Gripping her staff, Lefiya sprinted with all her might.
Taking the shortest path along the top of the roofs, she finally raced fast enough to line up alongside him.
“Bell Cranell!! What are you doing?!!” she screamed.
“Gh…!”
He glanced over at her once, but that was the limit of his response. His twisted face didn’t allow for a dialogue as he sped up, trying to leave her in the dust.
—Are you ignoring me?! Lefiya seethed.
“Wait! Answer! My! Question!” she huffed, shouting over the wind whipping against her body.
But the boy refused to meet her eyes. He was focused on the monster making its escape, and he’d discarded everything except for that.
“Why? Why…?!” Lefiya growled.
Why do you look like you’re suffering?!
Look at me!
Explain yourself!
If you don’t, I won’t be able to understand anything!
She screamed in her mind at the boy whose face was clearly conflicted and distressed.
What happened to your usual excuses? Turn red already while you shout You’ve got it all wrong! Hurry up and say something! Just like when you make excuses after angering me by getting involved with my beloved Aiz! Do it now, and I’ll get a little mad, lecture you, give you a warning, and then forgive you—just like usual!
Don’t make a pitiful face!
That expression doesn’t fit you at all!
She couldn’t hold together the list of all the things filling her heart. Lefiya certainly didn’t want to see him in this sad state. It wasn’t disappointment or despair but unpleasant.
As a competitor, as a rival, as an adventurer aiming for the same aspiration, she wanted to ask about his true intentions. At this point, she wasn’t even chasing the monster.
She was chasing him.
“Guaaaagh?!”
“—?!”
With the screams echoing around her, she had no choice but to give up on questioning him. Adventurers kept collapsing, blood flowing freely from their wounds, and the vouivre continued to rampage. Without the red stone on its forehead, the dragon had become entirely indiscriminate, no more calculating than a storm now.
Her eyes wavered, and Lefiya had to destroy the monster.
“—Unleashed pillar of light, limbs of the holy tree. You are the master archer!” She cast concurrently, sprinting at full speed.
Bell’s shoulders quivered as he felt the magical energy building, and he looked back at her for the first time. He hesitated to fire off a spell—possibly because she was an acquaintance—then he began screaming as if he were being split in two.
“Please stop!!”
Don’t be unreasonable!
If I let it go, more people will get hurt. In the worst case, the ordinary civilians will get tossed around like the adventurers are now. This is long past the point of trivial grievances.
If I fail to stop it, you’re the one who’s going to face a tragic future!
“Loose your arrows, fairy archers. Pierce, arrow of accuracy!” cast Lefiya, thrusting out her staff and firing her spell with a contorted face.
“Arcs Ray!”
A single shot of magic homed in on its target. After it was released, the missile would not disappear until it hit home. This was an arrow that would never miss.
The ray of light shone with enough power to lay low a large-scale monster.
Upon seeing that dazzling light, the boy turned around in despair.
“?!”
He leaped into the path of the magic, spreading his arms, trying to intercept the ray of light before it hit the vouivre.
Lefiya gazed in wonder as he attempted to physically shield the monster.
“A-Alio?!” He immediately chanted a spell to disperse it.
When it was hit by the homing spellkey magic, Arcs Ray scattered just before reaching him.
“Grrrrrrrrrrrm?!”
Even though he wasn’t directly hit by it, Bell was blasted away when it exploded directly in front of him. With smoke rising from his armor, the battered boy leaped to his feet and resumed his chase of the vouivre.
Lefiya was left behind, dumbfounded.
“…Why?”
In the middle of the road, the legs of the elf stopped moving.
Why would you go that far?
Why would you go to such lengths to protect a monster?
Why do I feel this way about you when I’m right and you’re wrong?
She couldn’t wrap her head around it.
“…Wait, Bell Cranell!” she screeched at the back moving away from her position on the street.
But the boy didn’t pay her any
heed. It was as if he didn’t want to waste a second in his pursuit of the vouivre. He persisted in playing the fool.
Lefiya clenched both fists, ignored again and again, her body starting to tremble. Her long ears turned red to their tips, and as if she could bear it no more, she closed her eyes, roaring as loudly as she could.
“Your reason! Your situation!…Explain yourseeeeeeelf!!”
The sun dipped below the city walls. As dusk set in, the screams of the bright-red elf echoed across the evening sky.
CHAPTER 3
THE MELANCHOLY OF A HERO. THE ANGUISH OF THE SWORD PRINCESS.
“Lord Ikelos, we don’t have time to go back and forth here. Just answer our questions,” demanded Finn, face-to-face with the god.
The location was a run-down, deserted house. The red sunset was visible through a hole in the wall, lighting the rubble on the floor. It was evening, immediately after the battle with the armed monsters.
The black minotaur and all the other monsters managed to escape by using clever ploys. Loki Familia was dealing with the cleanup—repairing the destroyed street, keeping watch for monsters, assisting and guiding the residents.
The vouivre had been killed at the hands of adventurers. The ashes from its corpse had been found in a secret underground path. A more detailed investigation was ongoing.
While the familia members were carrying out their duties, Finn had Loki with him as he questioned one of the persons of interest connected to the incident.
“You say that, but you guys already know about Knossos, right? That means there’s not much for me to talk about.” The god chuckled, which echoed through the dilapidated house.
He had navy hair, dark skin, and was wearing mostly black clothes. His face was well proportioned—a clear indicator that he was a god—with an insincere, superficial grin etched onto it. It was the smile of a hedonistic, ephemeral, destructive, stubborn god.
He was Ikelos, the patron god of Ikelos Familia, captured in the dragnet that Finn had asked Gareth to set up.
“When the folks from the Guild get here, they’ll arrest ya. Once they do, we can’t twist your arm anymore, so cough up what we want now.”
“Don’t glare at me, Loki. And twisting my arm? I’d never have guessed you to act that way.”
As Loki glared down at him, Ikelos responded playfully, perched on an uncomfortable-looking piece of rubble. He locked eyes with Finn, who was sitting in an ancient-looking chair in front of him.
“Do you have a key to Knossos?”
“I don’t. Come on, I swear. After the thing with Ishtar, the Evils took it when we went outside.”
As a key witness to this event, Ikelos would undoubtedly be taken away by the Guild. And he would be dealt with: sent back to the heavens or banished from the city for eternity. Either way, if Loki Familia let this opportunity slip by, they would not see him again.
Finn intended to get information out of him before they handed him over to the Guild.
“What’s the size of the remnants of the Evils? How many familias are there?”
“No clue. It’s just the odds and ends that Thanatos managed to draw to himself. I was just using them to get a place to sleep, so I didn’t have much interest in them at all. It was just in passing. But if you’re thinkin’ about them in terms of familias, then it’s really just Thanatos’s people.”
“‘Enyo’…Do you know a god going by that name?”
“Oh, the city destroyer? I don’t remember any god going by such a stupid name,” Ikelos answered Finn and Loki.
His responses were all along the lines of I don’t know. He apparently amused himself by watching over his own familia—making them put on interesting performances—and was not at all connected to the plot to destroy Orario. At the very least, Loki could vouch for the fact that he wasn’t lying.
“Why’d you join up with the Evils?” Loki spat.
“Just the way the cookie crumbled,” he responded with a shameless grin.
Ikelos Familia spearheaded the plans to smuggle through Meren as a way to fund the construction of Knossos. When asked why they were smuggling monsters, his answer was that they sold for a high price to aristocrats with an interest in monsters.
They ended up with information about things they already knew, and they made paltry progress on the parts they didn’t know. But—they did learn the origin of that strange man-made labyrinth.
It was a monument to human tenacity, dreamed up by the great craftsman Daedalus and built by his descendants.
Loki visibly grimaced while Finn managed to hold in his astonishment when they heard that Knossos had been built over a span of a thousand years to reach its current scale.
On that fateful day when Knossos first beat them, they realized it was extraordinary the moment they set foot in the area. And it was apparently connected to a deep-rooted delusion far greater than they’d imagined.
“That’s how that den of devils originated…Then, where is the notebook that fascinated Daedalus’s family and compelled that madness? Is there a blueprint mapping Knossos?”
“Heh-heh…Braver, do you really intend to clear that absurd labyrinth?”
“Just answer Finn’s question already, dumbass.”
“I don’t have it. Really. Dix had it. But if there aren’t any traces of his Blessing anymore, he must already be dead.”
“…”
“Maybe someone took it. Or maybe it just fell somewhere in Knossos.”
Finding a single notebook in the middle of that complicated and mysterious labyrinth…It was a dizzying prospect. A metaphorical needle in a haystack.
“But if it’s been burned into the heads of the other descendants of Daedalus, you might find it if you pry open their skulls,” Ikelos joked, earning a kick from Loki.
“…Lord Ikelos, final question.”
The sun was sinking, and the sound of footsteps was getting louder outside the deserted house. Guessing that people from the Guild had arrived, Finn narrowed his blue eyes as he broached the subject.
“The armed monsters…Just what are they?”
“…Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. What do you mean by that, Braver? What are you tryin’ to ask?”
Ikelos’s smile broadened, and he seemed to enjoy himself from the bottom of his heart as he peered into Finn’s face.
“Do they have emotions? Do they possess not only cognition but some kind of higher reasoning? Have they formed a community of sorts?” Finn continued probing, approaching the crux of the matter.
They were speculations that an ordinary adventurer—no, that anyone living in this world would laugh off. He was assigning savage monsters traits that should never describe them. But that was exactly what Finn was suggesting in all sincerity and earnestness.
Aiz had sensed that the monsters were cooperating, too. Despite the fact that they were all different species, they were supporting one another in a way comparable to humans, fighting to achieve a goal that went beyond simple slaughter. Specifically, they were fighting in order to buy time for the vouivre to get away.
Finn was the only one who had fought them in the Labyrinth District, observed them in detail, and still attempted to broach this topic.
“Is it possible for people and monsters to come to a mutual understanding?”
The dilapidated building was silent. Loki watched Finn silently. Ikelos smirked, his lips curling into a crescent.
“No clue.”
“…”
“When I tried to hold a conversation or wave at the monsters locked up in the cages, they wouldn’t respond at all.”
He wasn’t lying.
Certainly, he wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t being honest, either.
It was as if he was saying, Why don’t you see for yourself? His navy eyes narrowed, and he looked back at Finn with a smug grin. Finn’s face became expressionless, and he was silent for a moment.
“Is Hestia Familia…Is Bell Cranell connected to them?” Finn spilled out unconsciously, asking t
he question before he realized it.
“Who knows?” Ikelos played dumb, blowing smoke as before. “Maybe he’s friends with that vouivre?”
“Isn’t that the magic blade you made?”
Tsubaki’s mouth curled down in distaste. Her visitor was Riveria, the jade-haired high elf. They were in the workshop in Hephaistos Familia’s branch store on Northwest Main Street.
Riveria placed a certain item on the workbench between the two of them: a bloodstained battle-ax with gold ornamentation—an ax-style magic blade.
“…Where did you find this?” Tsubaki responded slowly.
“I’m sure you’ve heard about the incident the other day on Daedalus Street. We recovered it there,” Riveria answered smoothly.
She closed an eye, peering with the other at the face of the master smith trying to conceal her agitation.
“I know Gareth has a direct contract with you, and he said it was one of your works without a doubt.”
“Hmm, I see…And what of the dwarf?”
“Right now, he’s completing a high-priority construction project— in the middle of it and unable to leave. Hence why I came.”
One day had passed since the armed monsters had emerged aboveground. The city was on edge, and the residents had been calling for the Guild to hold a question-and-answer session and present a response plan. The monsters had not yet been apprehended, either. The disturbance in Orario was ongoing.
“And this magic blade is one of yours, correct?”
“Yes…It’s from my smithy. There’s no way I could mistake one of my own creations. Its name is Kaminari-Ikazuchi-Maru. I started by attempting to copy an impertinent magic blade smith to surpass him. For starters, I studied that unintelligible naming sense of his, but good grief, now I just regret—”
“Tsubaki.” Riveria softly cut her off, silencing the smith. “This was used by the armed monsters…by a black minotaur. Because of it, several in our familia were more than a little injured.”
Her tone of voice was vaguely accusatory.
Or was it just Tsubaki’s imagination hearing it that way?
“Can you explain why a monster would be using this?”
