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

by Fujino Omori

  “…As someone who’s argumentative, I’m sure my words are insufficient. I’d like you to hear it in their own voices,” Fels suggested, stepping aside to allow a single lizardman to move forward.

  Riveria couldn’t tell the expressions on the ugly faces of monsters apart from one another. But she could see the strain in its orpiment eyes that harbored the light of reason.

  “…We just wanted to help Wiene…to help our vouivre comrade. That’s all,” the monster said.

  The faces of Alicia and the others paled.

  “Did it just speak?!”

  “A monster…?!”

  “How…repulsive…!”

  The elves moaned. Each reacted in her own way, but they were all as one would expect: recoiling in disgust, or swaying, or gazing in agitation with eyes filled with fury. The elves had a reputation for being fastidious for a reason, but the reality of a monster speaking was shocking. They were all extraordinarily bewildered. All save Riveria, who’d already heard Finn’s speculations.

  “We came out aboveground because we wanted to get back our comrade. Not because we wanted to attack people and not because we wanted to kill them!”

  They were taken aback, unable to respond immediately to its sincere and earnest pleas. Without giving them any time to recover, the black robes quivered again in encouragement, and a single beautiful siren walked out—displaying golden feathers, golden wings, and beauty in no way inferior to an elf. It closely resembled a person.

  “Above all…we want to talk with you. We don’t want to trade blows but words…” She spoke awkwardly.

  The elves’ uncertainty increased at her words. Even without looking back, Riveria could tell that the elves were disturbed.

  The mage is good at this. And crafty. Riveria acknowledged their skill from an objective perspective.

  Fels was sending out the monsters that most resembled people at the perfect time. The elves’ confusion had already reached a fever pitch.

  “What are the monsters…?!”

  “But, Alicia, if they’re telling the truth…”

  “If we can’t respond to discussion…that would make us more barbaric than they are.”

  “Thinking back on the times when we fought them aboveground, it seemed like self-defense on their part…”

  “Gh…!”

  Wavering. The elves’ determination was wavering.

  This was what Finn had been afraid of. If they acknowledged that they could reach a mutual understanding with the monsters, the adventurers would begin to doubt their blades.

  They would no longer be able to strike down monsters.

  “Self-aware monsters…We call them Xenos,” Fels explained, looking at the confusion growing in the elves, Alicia, and Rakuta.

  “They’re our only hope.”

  “‘Hope’…?”

  “Yes—my patron god, Ouranos, wishes for people and monsters to live together peacefully.”

  Without missing a beat, Fels dropped another bomb.

  A shock ran through Alicia and the other elves unlike any other.

  “Wh—?!”

  “Are you crazy?!”

  “Our history has been fruitless. Always hating each other. Always killing each other…We want to bring an end to all that. The Xenos are our last hope.”

  Don’t listen. Ignore it. Riveria could have given that order as the girls shouted back at the mage, their faces changing color. But she couldn’t go against her own feelings. If she didn’t know the desires of the mage and monsters or their aim, if she didn’t know everything, she couldn’t come to an answer. If she just cut them down without question, that itself might make her a barbarian.

  After all, she was a trueborn elf.

  “The existence of Xenos has the potential to be a bridge connecting monsters and humans. Instead of brandishing fangs and claws, they want to use thought and words to get to know us people, to live together with us…That’s what they have been looking for.”

  “—?!”

  “They raised a prayer in the Dungeon, and the almighty Ouranos acknowledged it. The Xenos are an Irregular that even the Dungeon couldn’t have foreseen. A new possibility that the mortal realm gave birth to after all this time.”

  Alicia and the others gaped as Fels spoke of the monsters, including the lizardman.

  The power of Ouranos’s name was extraordinary. After all, his achievements had him praised as the ultimate god, even in Orario. It was enough for the elves to start to think about hypotheticals and the underlying truth.

  Their outlook was shaking. Their grasp on common knowledge was collapsing.

  Standing in the space between shock and hatred, the elven girls were pushed to the verge of mental shutdown.

  Above all, their greatest source of confusion was that they didn’t feel fierce hatred when faced with these monsters as they did when standing off against the normal ones. Fels’s case was all the more persuasive because these monsters didn’t evoke those feelings.

  If they’d felt hatred, they wouldn’t be struggling, choosing to cut them down.

  Riveria herself would’ve been the same.

  “It doesn’t have to be immediate. But to bridge the gap between the world above and below, to put an end to this chain of loss…we would like you to understand them.”

  The mage held out one hand.

  Please overlook them just this once, he was pleading. The eyes of the monsters behind the mage were boring into them.

  Their wish. Their yearning. We want to get to know you.

  The lizardman, the siren, the lamia, the unicorn, the troll, and many other monsters gazed at them without a roar.

  It was an impossible scene between people and monsters.

  It was heretical.

  The monsters before their eyes.

  That was Ouranos’s secret: the Xenos, different from people and from monsters.

  “…”

  Riveria closed her eyes as scenes flashed across the backs of her eyelids: setting off from her home forest, encountering the goddess and prum in the worst way possible, joined by the dwarf she found absolutely incompatible, journeying together until today.

  The image of her obstinate, audacious, tactless prum friend.

  And a glimpse into his worries and resolve as he sat on the bed and clenched his fist the other day—

  “…”

  Finally, Riveria opened her eyes.

  “Loki Familia, if you could somehow take this—”

  Interrupting the mage’s words, she rejected him.

  “Are ya stupid?”

  Everyone froze as Riveria spat out a refusal.

  “—our patron goddess would say.”

  Riveria shocked the other elves, glaring back at Fels in their quivering black robe, ignoring the resignation written on the Xenos’s faces as if they had lost count of how often they’d encountered something similar.

  “Can you prove it? Is there anything substantiating your claims? Do you have any plans? Any explanation that could convince people who’ve lost their families to monsters? Any way of showing their sincerity?”

  As Fels spoke of ideals, Riveria parried back with reality.

  Arching her brow, slightly raising her chin, Riveria narrowed her eyes coldheartedly.

  “Right now, I don’t want to hear your ideals or delusions; it’s a purely realistic discussion. Don’t appeal to our emotions with underhanded tears. Use logic.”

  “…”

  Riveria didn’t let up on her rebuttal tinged with denunciation, silencing the mage.

  “Unless and until you can do that, I can’t accept your argument.”

  “…Cap…tain?” Alicia murmured in shock at the sight of Riveria elaborating cogently.

  She couldn’t believe her eyes. The beloved and revered queen of her race was overlapping with the figure of a certain prum. Based on her speech and that unwavering determination, Riveria bore a strong resemblance to Braver.

  No, it was exactly like him. A mirror
image.

  “Mage, let’s test your resolve. Forget all this hypothetical talk about ‘someday’ and show me a resolve convincing enough to move me at this time, right now…Do you actually have that in those black robes of yours?”

  Riveria was Finn Deimne without a doubt.

  Out of respect for his determination, she channeled him, speaking on behalf of her friend who wasn’t there. She knocked away the monsters’ hands, word for word in the way of the revered Braver.

  “If there isn’t, then…” Riveria ruthlessly declared, “your story is a pipe dream more meaningless than the fantasies of a child longing to be a hero.”

  She put an end to their negotiations, slicing them down and spitting out her words almost venomously to prevent the morale of her team members from deteriorating further. At the unwavering pronouncement of the high elf, Alicia and the others swallowed hard and then cast aside their doubt.

  “…Riveria Ljos Alf. Or rather, Finn Deimne.”

  Both stood at the head of their respective groups. Fels looked closely, crestfallen, at Riveria, their black robes shaking.

  “You’re both wise. And you have the necessary elements of a hero…And a faith that doesn’t balk even when confronted with sacrifices that must be made.”

  Upon seeing the character of a hero in the high elf standing in the Xenos’s way, Fels responded in frustration.

  “I can’t help thinking…what would have happened if you’d been our ally.”

  “A meaningless hypothetical. Even if we were to talk with you, our position would not change.”

  “I suppose so. Then…to survive, we’ve no choice but to resist.” Fels reluctantly assumed a ready stance, jet-black glove shining.

  The faces of the Xenos behind Fels showed anguish, as if detesting the idea of people fighting against one another.

  Loki Familia and the Xenos were about to clash.

  “Get them—!”

  ““!!””

  The followers of the God of Death rushed in at top speed.

  “The remnants of the Evils!”

  “Now of all times?!”

  Alicia and Rakuta screamed as a large force of the remnants rushed them from the open doors and the ones that’d been closed. Riveria’s brow furrowed deeply.

  “It would take time to gather this many of them…I’m guessing they were stalling from the start, huh?!”

  Before Riveria could regret it more, Fels groaned.

  “This must be why they led us together…! To push both our forces to fight!”

  This had been Thanatos’s aim all along, the two leaders realized.

  With a firm grasp on the battle that had unfolded on Daedalus Street, the God of Death predicted that if Loki Familia and the Xenos encountered each other, a fight would inevitably break out. At the very least, they would both stop, which gave Thanatos time to pin Loki Familia down in Knossos and make them unable to retreat. With that in mind, he’d gathered his own forces on the twelfth floor.

  He was looking to profit from their conflict by turning it into a three-way battle.

  That was the situation Thanatos had wanted.

  “I can’t tell how many enemies there are!”

  “W-we’re being surrounded! There are monsters in the passages to the right, left, and behind us!”

  “…Gh!” Riveria tightened her grip on her staff as the elves cried out.

  She was confronted with the fact that she hadn’t been able to maintain her composure when faced with the extreme Irregular, the Xenos. Her guard had slipped in Knossos once and only once, and that had brought her to this predicament. The vision of a smiling God of Death, someone she’d never met, passed through the back of her mind.

  As she shelved the regret filling her breast, Riveria howled. “Break through one part of their formation! Ensure our path out!”

  “Lido, Rei! Intercept them! Loki Familia and the Evils, too!”

  Fels shouted again as the monsters reluctantly readied their weapons. The Evils’ forces surged into the passage with Loki Familia and the Xenos.

  “Kill! Kill theeeeeeeeem! Kill Loki Familia and the monsters, too! For Lord Thanatos and for our wish! Kill all of them!”

  “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” They let out a fiendish battle cry as their enthusiasm went off the rails all of a sudden.

  As the adventurers, monsters, and Thanatos’s followers mixed together, they commenced the three-sided struggle.

  “What’s the situation?” Finn asked the familia members who’d come first as he arrived from northwest of where the monsters had descended to the outer edge of the Labyrinth District.

  They were on the roof of a building that could look out over the whole area surrounding the plaza.

  “The evacuation of the residents hasn’t finished yet! Adventurers from other factions are fighting the monsters. And Little Rookie is…”

  As he heard the report, he saw the boy and gargoyle struggling against each other.

  You again, huh…Bell Cranell? Finn’s pupils narrowed as he watched the boy’s face lose composure from the side.

  As he thought, he tried to get a grasp on the situation: the swarm of monsters attacking, the residents of Daedalus Street falling into fear and scrambling to escape, the Guild members and other lower-tier adventurers trying to direct the evacuation. Ganesha Familia was prioritizing the lives of people as they made their way through the city. The top-tier adventurers were desperately fighting against the monsters and struggling to combat the strength of their enemy. There’d already been several casualties.

  And Little Rookie was clashing with a gargoyle while protecting a half-elf Guild member.

  “…Take your positions. Those on the ground, check them while we snipe at them from here so that they can’t escape into the sky.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  He handed out instructions as the leader of his faction, making snap judgments.

  The familia members dashed off to share his orders with the group on the ground while the remaining members readied their bows. Finn looked down at the prepared stage. It could hardly be called a battlefield.

  They don’t really seem to be Irregular…For monsters hidden away from people for this long to intentionally attack evacuees…They exposed themselves for the masses to see. The other monsters are keeping the other adventurers back; the gargoyle is ostentatiously fighting with Little Rookie…It’s too much.

  His strange feeling from before turned to certainty when he saw the scene unfold before his eyes. He could sense the intent of a third party—a divine will that had created the scenario, even manipulated the monsters to bring about this performance.

  Hermes Familia…?

  If it was a group with deep knowledge of the armed monsters and the ability to bend them to their will, there was no one else save those who’d sided with Ouranos as his faction had done. Had Hermes Familia been moving around behind the scenes as they were fighting Hestia Familia?

  The odds were that this was an action that went against Ouranos’s divine will.

  And Bell Cranell didn’t seem as though he was acting as he desperately tried to defend himself.

  An independent action. Hermes’s face came to mind. He was a god who Finn couldn’t quite grasp.

  Is that gargoyle…being manipulated? It’s only aiming for the Guild member Bell Cranell is protecting. Considering Perseus’s crazy magical items, I guess that’s believable?

  The half-elf girl was wearing a bracelet giving off a mysterious purple light. Utilizing to its fullest the enhanced kinetic vision of a prum, Finn easily saw through the events.

  A god was toying with the mortal realm, rewriting the plot to achieve his desired ends.

  “The plaza is a stage, the residents are the audience, and the monsters and adventurers are the extras to excite the crowd. And the star is…a single boy crossing blades with a reactive gargoyle,” Finn murmured to himself softly, so that the members readying their bows didn’t hear him.

  Below his eyes,
a stir rose from the residents who still couldn’t manage to escape the plaza, from the “crowd.” And it wasn’t out of fear.

  “Little Rookie…”

  “—Little Rookie? That one? Bell Cranell?”

  “He’s fighting…for our sake…”

  They were talking about the adventurer putting himself on the line to protect the half-elf under attack, the brave boy who’d gallantly appeared in their moment of need.

  How would it look in the eyes of the people who’d criticized Bell Cranell?

  “Bell…” murmured the orphans who Finn had met the other day in the crowd.

  Among a group of human, chienthrope, and half-elf orphans, Ossian the prum boy was there, watching Bell’s battle in shock. The disappointment in his eyes gradually faded as he struggled to understand what was going on.

  The crowd’s disapproval of Bell Cranell was dissipating.

  A farce…

  The crowd had been attacked, the heroine was in peril, and the hero protected them from the monsters.

  It was all drama.

  It was all absurd.

  Anyone would be drawn in by the performative manipulations of a god.

  Should he praise Hermes for his talent? Or should he be disappointed that the residents of the mortal plane were made to dance for him? Upon understanding the god pulling the strings behind the scenes, Finn alone looked at the “stage” with clear eyes.

  Other than him, the only ones who saw through the creation of the stage were gods.

  As he saw Hestia Familia arrive in the plaza with their patron goddess and stand there when they realized they were unable to do anything, Finn thought to himself.

  If his actions five days ago were a folly…this is a purification ceremony.

  A ritual to earn back the title of hero as a coda.

  The reaffirmation of a hero as arranged by a god.

  Did Hermes intend to force Bell into the role of a hero? Finn didn’t know his divine will, but that was his best guess.

  If I were in his position…

  If it were Finn, what would he do?

  Would he dance if he knew everything would turn out as he desired?

  Or would he brush it off, saying he couldn’t possibly stomach it?

  But in the end—Finn suspected he would prioritize his ambition.