Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? On the Side: Sword Oratoria, Vol. 10

by Fujino Omori

  “If I was to freeze up because of one person, because of a single threat—I wouldn’t be standing here.”

  Raul shivered, getting goose bumps—at Finn’s quiet face, at his cold eyes, at the magnificence of his resolve.

  Yes, Finn had called himself the name “Braver.”

  He was a hero who’d put up a front, a man-made hero calculated from the very start.

  Finn had borne the weight of that second name from the very beginning. He had always carried that pressure, enough to crush a normal person, on his small back with his immeasurable determination to turn a lie into reality.

  What was brave about fearing a single creature?

  How could he call himself a hero?

  He would never have taken the name Braver if he cowered before them.

  “Besides, Raul, you’re not taking Riveria seriously enough.”

  He’d put trust in his friend, layered and heavy.

  “If it’s Riveria—she can drive back something of that level.”

  What—?

  Levis’s discomfort grew at the constant hail of shots that the elves unleashed to keep her from approaching.

  Their effect was a little—no, a bit more than a little too much.

  It was enough for the shots to break through the wall of violas and graze Levis’s cheek, enough for her to slow her sprint, to prevent her from carelessly approaching them.

  The force behind the magic was intense, more intense than it should have been given that it was a short cast.

  They’ve been firing off their magic. Why haven’t they hit their limits?

  The elves had advanced through Knossos, reaching the depths of the Dungeon.

  It didn’t matter if they worked in recovery with items. With their output and number of spells, they should have reached the limits of their mental strength. And yet, they continued to bombard the enemy without stopping.

  By coordinating the front and back lines, the magic blades expelled their rapid-fire attacks to fill the gap between the blasts from the first row and those preparing their next round in the second row.

  The stone slabs of the passage burst apart. The wall and the floor crumbled, and the chunks were blasted away.

  They weaved together their chants in rapid succession, tens of spells overlapping, before destroying the wall of violas down to just a single monster.

  The moment the wall between her and them disappeared, Levis saw it.

  “”

  She saw the jade magic circle that all the elves were inside, illuminating the area beautifully, absorbing all the remnants of magic drifting around the hallway and returning them to the elves.

  It was increasing their magical strength, bestowing royal protection.

  A rare skill. Levis went bug-eyed. That was all she could determine.

  “Just as Finn underestimated you—”

  Using the time bought by the elves’ fusillade, the high elf had finished her chant, her voice ringing out sweetly through the passage.

  “—You looked down on us too much.” Riveria mercilessly spoke to the creature—one that hadn’t put in any effort or devised any sort of plan, trying to approach its prey head-on.

  “Blow with the power of the third harsh winter, advent of the end–––my name is Alf!”

  As she lined up with Lefiya, who’d chanted Summon Burst, Riveria readied her long staff. The jade magic circle gleamed as the voices of the two elves, master and disciple, overlapped with each other.

  ““Wynn Fimbulvetr!””

  Levis recoiled at the simultaneous frozen cannons—six blizzards in total.

  “Tch?!”

  Kicking off the floor of the main passage, she flew into a side path by a hairbreadth.

  Her left arm and the cursed sword couldn’t escape the firing line in time, swallowed up in the jaws of the blizzard. The eyes of the creature distorted as she made the instantaneous decision to abandon it, snapping off the frozen arm and narrowly avoiding getting dragged away by the explosion.

  Less than a second later, the loud boom of an avalanche resounded behind her.

  The twin cannons of ice froze everything, leaving a track of blue covering the entire main passage. The interior of the labyrinth was consumed unbelievably by an enormous cold wave.

  Levis persisted, even as her skin was getting frostbitten, managing to escape onto a side path…When she lowered her right arm from her face, the scene of a frozen passage unfolded before her eyes.

  The area was covered in frost, filled by a giant block of ice and icicles.

  There was no path through the ice cavern, defying all who tried to get past.

  “Insects…you’ve got some nerve!”

  When she pummeled the frosty pillar before her eyes in a rage, the surface cracked under the impact, but the enormous chunk of ice would not break. She was unable to proceed down the large passage. It was impossible to follow Riveria’s squad from there.

  The labyrinth was made with stones of the obsidian soldiers that diminished the effect of magic, and it was absolutely terrifying to see it entirely frozen over, albeit it was one section of the maze.

  It should have been impossible. It was a tremendous firepower, accounting for the Summon Burst and simultaneously firing identical magic.

  “As if I’ve got time to sit around recovering!”

  She’d lost an arm. With her left arm below the elbow severed and the wound frozen over, her prided healing skill was having trouble getting going.

  Done in by the elf master and disciple, Levis trembled in humiliation.

  “L-Lady Levis?! Wh-what happened…?!”

  “You guys do something about this ice. I’m chasing those elves by a different route.”

  After demanding that the Evils who’d gathered at the crash deal with the frozen passage, Levis went in the opposite direction.

  That high elf is a nuisance. If I’m not careful, this will happen again. Should I prioritize regenerating my arm?…Damn it. This is gonna take time.

  The recovery hadn’t started when she bitterly cursed to herself.

  The door slammed open with a loud bang! as if in response to her anger.

  “She left.”

  Riveria’s ears twitched when the violent door-slamming sound reached them.

  They hadn’t changed locations. They hadn’t thoughtlessly moved away, either. Instead, they’d hid themselves behind a bend in the passage and waited for Levis to leave. Lefiya and the others breathed a sigh of relief when their bold move paid off, gazing out at the hall covered in ice.

  “Don’t leave my magic circle. I’m retrieving the magic energy.”

  “Yes, Lady Riveria!”

  With Riveria at its center, the jade-green magic circle swept together the remnants of magic filling the passage, allowing them to absorb back into her and the other elves. That was the true nature of the skill that had astonished Levis.

  Alf Regina—a rare skill that none save Riveria had ever developed.

  The effect was an enhancement of her own abilities and the amplification of the effectiveness of magic wielded by fellow elves inside her magic circle by recovering the magic energy in the surroundings and converting it back to Mind.

  In other words, along with Riveria, all elves inside the magic circle would increase in magical strength and recover their deleted Mind.

  In particular, the latter effect was peerless. Even if it paled in comparison to the nonsensical recharge of the demi-spirit on the fifty-ninth floor, its recovery effect was significantly more pronounced than the Mind auto-recovery effect from Spirit Healing.

  Finn had ordered the surprise attack on Knossos because he knew of that skill. Alf Regina would allow them to enhance their magical abilities and recover their Mind as they ran around in a giant labyrinth of an unknown size.

  When she’d developed the skill, Loki had danced wildly, excited to create an elf-only squad centered around Riveria. Seizing the opportunity, Loki had even tried to give it a gaudy name like �
�Fairy Force,” but Riveria hated decorations and embellishments, and she’d rejected it.

  That said, the name had been surprisingly popular among the elves in the squad, who called themselves that behind closed doors.

  It was an incredibly valuable party skill befitting the image of Riveria, the city’s strongest mage.

  “Lady Riveria, what should we do from here?”

  “First, resupply. My skill isn’t all-powerful. It can’t heal you in full. Treat the wounded.”

  “Yes!”

  The squad had certainly been taxed, particularly Lefiya, who’d been firing off heavy blasts and even using Summon Burst. Alicia started the work of resupplying.

  As Riveria let them continue their work, she turned to a single girl.

  “Rakuta, the mapping?”

  “Y-yes, it’s coming along,” squeaked a single person, a girl of a different species amid a squad composed of elves.

  It was the hume bunny Rakuta. There was a reason why Finn had sent her along with Lefiya for their romp in the deep levels: her genius at mapping.

  “B-but it’s full of holes…! It’s not even a map…!”

  “That’s fine. It will serve us well when we challenge Knossos in the future.”

  Riveria took the map-in-progress as Rakuta’s rabbit ears twitched.

  True to her word, it was a fragmentary map, covering only the areas they’d passed through. That said, the number of doors and other openings were all noted in detail. Considering it’d been created in her spare time as Riveria and the elves were fighting around her, it was worthy of praise. In the Dungeon, they couldn’t use compasses due to a special ore running through the structure, but in Knossos, there was no such limitation. It was extremely valuable to deduce that their present location was to the south of Daedalus Street.

  It was more than enough to avoid needlessly wandering in circles.

  “Rakuta, I think we’ve gone down around ten floors’ worth of stairs. What is your judgment?”

  “I—I had the same feeling! Compared to the Dungeon, I think we’re around ten floors deep…” responded the mapper with her superior depth perception.

  Riveria started to think.

  That creature won’t fall for the same maneuver again…Next time we run into her, she’ll destroy the entire squad. If we’re to find an escape route, this is the time…

  Riveria had no intention of underestimating Levis. There was no way she could.

  They’d handled her well because she’d looked down on them. If the creature attacked them as seriously as she’d done to Finn, Riveria’s squad of mages would be wiped out as soon as she could get close enough to attack.

  And it wasn’t as if they could keep fighting the remnants of the Evils forever.

  In the end, the enemy could overwhelm them with their strength.

  It’s possible to…devise a means of escape…If the god in Aiz’s legend was a patron god of the Evils, one of the evil gods, then…Riveria thought for the briefest of moments before deciding on a course of action.

  “We’re going to find a path connecting to the Dungeon and move from the south to the southwest.”

  “Yes!” With Rakuta, the elves stood up and immediately began to mobilize.

  To avoid running into Levis, they distanced themselves from their battleground as much as possible. Following Riveria’s instructions, they quickly located a staircase leading down from the tenth floor and proceeded to it.

  And from the eleventh floor, they went down one more to the twelfth floor.

  They moved carefully—and quickly.

  When the monster attacks started, they had a lucky break with the help of Rakuta’s surveying techniques.

  “The Dungeon…!”

  “We did it!”

  A crash resounded, and the labyrinth wall gave off smoke, and there emerged Lefiya and the others. The group cheered as they saw the mist—it was unmistakably the twelfth floor of the Dungeon.

  “It seems the god used Knossos to set that wyvern after Aiz nine years ago…”

  Upon opening the connecting door and breaking through the wall of the labyrinth, Riveria looked back at the stone path leading perfectly into the Dungeon before turning away.

  She wasn’t sure whether all the floors were connected to Knossos. But Riveria had a clue. She knew the story of how Aiz had encountered a deity with the appearance of an evil god on the twelfth floor not long after she’d joined the familia. The god had disappeared from the Dungeon, even though he shouldn’t have had a path to escape. In other words, he’d used Knossos to leave, meaning there was a connecting path on the twelfth floor.

  Riveria finally caught her breath, but her thoughts were focused on how to fight.

  We retrieved a second key. It’s full of holes, but we have the makings of a map of the labyrinth. We found an escape route, too…But it’s not enough.

  Entrusted with the invasion, she felt she hadn’t produced adequate results.

  Find the location of the demi-spirit or strike the enemy facilities…That’s what I want.

  Now that the enemy fortress was thrown into chaos, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  Riveria could tell that the efforts of Loki Familia to cut off the enemy’s flow of supplies and monsters hadn’t been wasted, now that they’d raided this far into Knossos. Finn’s surprise attack plan was part of their success, but the enemies hadn’t been prepared for the battle at all. They would never get this chance again, and she wanted to obtain information about Knossos to render the hellscape as powerless as possible.

  I’m guessing the plant producing the inexhaustible supply of water spider monsters…is somewhere in Knossos. We’ve seen too many of them for it to make sense otherwise. If we can find and destroy it…

  If she was to point out an issue with that plan, it would be Levis.

  That creature is wounded…My magic and Lefiya’s took one of its arms.

  When they’d hit Levis with Wynn Fimbulvetr, Riveria was sure she’d seen her arm and the cursed sword plucked from her body and buried in ice. Levis would avoid an imprudent second assault and focus on recovery—or rather, if Levis actually wanted to come at them with half strength, Riveria would gladly perform her last rites.

  If the creature happens to approach, I can keep the second-tier attack spell Rea Laevateinn deployed and sense her before she comes near us. That would buy us enough time to retreat…Now that we’ve secured a path out, it’s not a bad gamble.

  Upon weighing the risks and returns, Riveria made a decision, raising her head to look at the elves.

  They were exhausted, but the light of battle in their eyes was still there. They remained in high spirits to avenge their comrades and crush the den of the demons. Riveria nodded at their morale.

  “We’ve obtained our escape route. Use this as a starting point. Let’s lay waste to Knossos once more. If time permits, of course.”

  She gathered the elves on the Dungeon side, announcing her intention to commence the assault again. As expected, no one voiced any opposition. From Alicia down, the elves renewed their desire to rampage.

  “Fortunately, we took possession of a second key. I want someone to take this, go through the Dungeon and Babel to Daedalus Street, and bring reinforcements.”

  Dropping to one knee, Riveria looked around at the girls sitting in a circle, scanning the group for someone to get back to the surface as quickly as possible. Considering the condition of their Mind consumption, her eyes stopped at a brilliant burst of beautiful yellow hair.

  “Lefiya, you go.”

  “!”

  Riveria chose their irreplaceable lance, the girl who’d put in so much effort in the labyrinth. Because she was the newest member of the Fairy Force, she’d shouldered the biggest burden.

  It was unfortunate to lose Lefiya’s firepower and Summon Burst, but Riveria judged she was the best choice.

  “This is a critical role. It will be imperative that we have support when we withdraw…Bring th
em as soon as possible, okay?”

  “Yes! I shall be back in three—no, one hour!”

  “I’m counting on you,” Riveria said, smiling slightly as Lefiya put her right hand on her chest and stood up.

  While the elves prepped for the second attack, Lefiya turned her back on them, dashing to the entrance of the room. After glancing at her once, Riveria looked back at the path leading into Knossos.

  “Let’s go!”

  “Yes!”

  The battle wasn’t over yet.

  Aiz sunk into despair.

  The clouds rolled through the sky, and she stood there alone, bathed in moonlight.

  As expected, the difference between her and the one she’d tried to believe in was like that between the foot of a mountain and the summit. As she’d feared, the boy had made her misgivings manifest. She shouldered an unbearable sadness.

  “…And the vouivre is alive,” Aiz whispered in the northwest of Daedalus Street, in a back alley that should have been empty.

  Agitation filled the air when she spoke the word vouivre before it settled into complete silence. Aiz stood in the center of the street, staring dejectedly at the empty space before her.

  “Come out…” she said.

  And all of a sudden, the empty space quivered, casting off its veil to reveal a single boy’s figure beneath the moonlight in the next second.

  His white hair shimmered like virgin snow beneath the light. The black undershirt and the plain iron-gray armor gave off a faint luster, piercing Aiz’s eyes.

  Bell…

  White hair, red eyes.

  He stood in the middle of the street.

  Aiz painfully murmured his name in her heart, as if whispering the name of a lover.

  And when she saw the monster—the vouivre—clinging close to him, her gold eyes looked down.

  “I’ve been thinking about…why you asked me that question…ever since.”

  Aiz had quickly started chasing Bell again after getting stalled by the masked adventurer.

  And when she caught up to the presence of the invisible boy, she saw what she’d pretended not to notice while chasing him. It was an unbelievable scene.

  Together with a renart girl, he’d been hugging the vouivre, a human and a monster sharing a moment of joy with teary eyes.