The reason Hajime was currently whacking weeds out of the way as he ran for his life was—
“Shaaaaaaaaa!!!” Because he was being chased by two hundred monsters.
Once they finished their preparations, Hajime and Yue had set out for the bottom of the labyrinth. They’d cleared ten or so floors with ease already. His new equipment and improved skills had been part of the reason, but another important factor was Yue’s devastating magic.
She could cast any elemental spell nearly instantly, and supported Hajime from the rear. Though she was unparalleled when it came to offensive magic, it appeared Yue wasn’t very skilled with barriers or healing. Perhaps it was because she unconsciously regarded them as unnecessary since she was able to automatically heal any wounds. Furthermore, Hajime had his Ambrosia with him, so he had no need for healing spells either.
That was why their travels had progressed smoothly until now. When they had first descended onto the floor they were currently on, they had been greeted by a massive sea of trees. Each tree was over ten meters tall, and they were packed together tighter than sardines. The entire floor was extremely humid as a result. However, unlike the jungle floor he had traversed earlier, it wasn’t sweltering hot.
As they had been searching for the next staircase, they suddenly felt a huge earthquake. Seconds later, they had found themselves face to face with a huge reptilian monster. It looked just like a Tyrannosaurus rex.
The only difference was, for some reason, it had a beautiful flower adorning the top of its head. Its sharp fangs and overflowing bloodlust clearly marked a dangerous foe, but the sunflower resting atop its head made it seem more comical than deadly. This was quite possibly the most surreal monster Hajime had faced thus far.
The Tyrannosaurus roared angrily and charged the two of them. Unfazed by its onslaught, Hajime calmly moved to draw Donner... only to be stopped by Yue, who raised her hand.
“Crimson Javelin.” A spear of whirling flames formed out of thin air, then shot straight through the mouth of the T. rex. The heat melted the T. rex’s entire head, leaving him dead in seconds. The ground shook as the beast crumpled.
The flower perched on the remains of its head came off with a plop.
“......” Hajime stared on, speechless.
She’d been asserting her strength more and more aggressively recently. Originally she had just supported Hajime from behind, but as time passed she eventually just started preemptively one-shotting anything that intended to do him harm.
He had fewer and fewer opportunities to show off his skills, and was starting to feel rather useless. Is she just one-shotting them because I’m nothing but a burden to her in combat? he began to think worriedly. If she really told him that he’d probably be depressed for weeks. And so, he holstered Donner and awkwardly asked Yue the question on his mind.
“Umm, Yue? I’m glad you’re pumped to fight, but... I feel like I haven’t been pulling my weight recently.” Yue turned back to Hajime, and despite her poker face, he could tell she was rather proud of herself.
“...I want to be useful. Because I’m your partner.” It seemed she just wasn’t satisfied with only covering Hajime from behind.
He certainly did recall saying a while back that they would need to rely on each other in fights as partners who shared the same fate. It had been just after one of their fights. Yue had overextended herself and collapsed after running out of mana. Hajime had to rescue her, and she was beating herself up over it pretty bad, so he had told her that to comfort her... but it seemed she’d taken those words to heart. She wanted to show Hajime she was a partner worth relying on.
“Haha, trust me, you’re more than useful. But even though your magic is ridiculously strong, you’re not good at close combat, which is why I asked you to guard my back. Being the frontliner’s my job.”
“Hajime... Fine.” Yue looked a bit glum as she listened to Hajime lecture her.
Hajime just didn’t want her to be hung up on the idea that she had to somehow be useful to him. He smiled reassuringly and gently stroked her soft hair. That was all it took for Yue’s mood to improve, and Hajime lost the heart to keep lecturing her when he saw her contented expression.
He didn’t want her to end up dependent on him, so he tried to warn her from time to time, but in the end he was just too soft on her. He was actually disgusted at himself for how weak-willed he’d become in that regard.
As the two of them were having their faux lovers’ spat, Hajime didn’t neglect to continually use Sense Presence, and he suddenly realized there were enemies approaching them.
About ten of them were circling around to surround them. If they’re coordinating their movements, does that mean they hunt in packs like the Twin-tailed Wolves? Hajime thought warily to himself as he motioned to Yue and began retreating. If they were outnumbered, it would be in his best interests to at least move to more advantageous ground.
As they began to close their encirclement, Hajime chose a point to break through and charged. They pushed their way through a dense copse of trees, and as they finally jumped clear, they found themselves face to face with a massive, two-meter-large, raptor-like monster. This one had a tulip blooming on its head.
“...Cute.”
“...Are those in fashion or something?” Yue blurted out those words before she could stop herself, and Hajime found it hard to take the raptor in front of him seriously. As he stared at it, an impossible hypothesis came to mind.
Like the T. rex, the raptor’s bloodcurdling howl was at complete odds with the cute flower on its head. Everyone began getting ready for combat. The flower fluttered peacefully on the raptor’s head, but...
“Shaaaaa!” It paid it no mind, and leaped at the distracted Hajime. The twenty-centimeter-long talons extending from the raptor’s feet glinted cruelly in the dim light as it attacked.
Yue and Hajime both jumped in different directions to dodge.
Not content with simply dodging, however, Hajime also used Aerodynamic to leap multiple times through the air, until he was directly above the raptor. As a test, he shot off the tulip poised on its head.
His bullet passed effortlessly through the tulip, scattering its petals in all directions.
The raptor spasmed momentarily, before tripping over itself and somersaulting into the trees, where it lay motionless. A moment of silence descended. Yue tottered over to Hajime, and they both stared at the tulip petals scattered across the ground.
“Is it dead?”
“Doesn’t look like it to me?” As Hajime had so astutely observed, the raptor wasn’t dead. It twitched for a few seconds before slowly standing up and examining its surroundings. When it noticed the tulip petals, it padded its way over and started crushing them underfoot, as if the tulip had done it some great harm.
“Huh, what on earth is it doing? Why’s it crushing the petals?”
“...Maybe someone put it on its head as a prank?”
“I’m pretty sure the monsters around here aren’t some elementary school kids that go around sticking ‘kick me’ signs on everyone they see...”
Once it had finished grinding the tulip into dust, it looked up contentedly at the sky and let out a high pitched screech. It then finally spotted Yue and Hajime, and jumped with a start.
“Looks like it just realized we were here. Just how absorbed was it with that tulip?”
“...Maybe it’s being bullied?” As Hajime marveled at its inattention, Yue looked at it with something akin to sympathy. The raptor stood there for a moment, overcome by shock, before suddenly lowering its stance and bearing its claws. It let out a low roar as it rushed Hajime.
He calmly pulled out Donner, and shot an electrically accelerated taur bullet right into the raptor’s gaping maw.
It made mincemeat out of the raptor’s head, and bored its way through a few of the trees behind it before vanishing from sight.
Carried by the force of its own charge, the dead raptor slid a few feet across the ground bef
ore coming to a stop. Yue and Hajime both stared down at the raptor’s corpse.
“Seriously, what was all that about?”
“First it was bullied, and then it got shot... Poor thing.”
“Can we just drop the bullying part? I’m pretty sure that never happened.”
He had no idea what had just happened, but the monsters on this floor made no sense to him anyway, so he just stopped worrying about it. Their encirclement had started closing in on them, so they quickly moved to find more advantageous terrain.
As they pushed forward, they found themselves surrounded by a sea of trees, each five meters wide at the base. The trees were packed so closely together that their branches were entwined, making a natural pathway through the sky.
Hajime used Aerodynamic while Yue used wind magic to hop from branch to branch. He planned to shoot down all the monsters that came after them from above.
In less than five minutes, the ground below became a hive of activity as one raptor after another poured into the area. He was about to throw down an incendiary grenade when suddenly he stiffened. Next to him, Yue also stiffened, her hands still outstretched to cast magic. The reason for their sudden hesitation was none other than...
“Why the hell do they all have flowers on their heads!?”
“It’s one big garden.”
As Hajime had so eloquently stated, the dozen or so raptors all had flowers adorning their heads. All of varying shapes, sizes, and color.
His outcry had alerted the raptors to their presence, and as one, they all turned to face him. Each of them got ready to leap.
He quickly threw his incendiary grenade and began shooting down the raptors outside its range. After each gunshot was a brief red flash, signaling that Donner had torn the head off its quarry. At the same time, Yue used her Crimson Javelin to take down raptors one after another.
Roughly three seconds after the battle began, the incendiary grenade exploded. Burning hot tar splashed everywhere, incinerating a swathe of raptors. Hajime breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that his other weapons were still effective on this floor. It appeared that scorpion had just been exceptionally strong.
The entire flock of raptors was taken care of in less than ten seconds. But for some reason, Hajime’s expression was still grim. Yue saw the look on his face and tilted her head in confusion.
“...Hajime?”
“Don’t you think it’s strange, Yue?”
“Hm?”
“They’re too weak.”
Yue was taken aback by that unexpected response.
It certainly was true that both the raptors and the T. rex had moved in very simplistic patterns and had been easily defeated. On top of that, though they exhibited a fair amount of bloodlust, they had felt almost unnaturally mechanical in their actions. Especially when compared to the raptor whose flower Hajime had blown off. The way it had ground the flower to dust had felt far more natural.
Hajime turned to Yue, but before he could say anything, his Sense Presence detected a new wave of monsters. There was a veritable army of them closing in from all directions. His Sense Presence had a radius of twenty meters, and there were already more monsters than he could count heading their way, with even more pouring into range every second.
“Yue, we’re in trouble. There’s at least thirty, no, forty monsters heading our way. They’re surrounding us from all sides too. It’s almost like someone’s controlling them.”
“...Should we run?”
“No point. With how many there are, we won’t escape. It’d be smarter to climb to the top of the tallest tree and pick them off from there.”
“Okay... I’ll ready a big spell, then.”
“Yeah, let ’em have it!”
They sped through the branches, searching for the tallest tree in the area. Once they found it, they hopped onto one of its branches and destroyed all of the surrounding footholds, making it harder for the monsters to follow them.
Hajime held Donner at the ready as he waited. He felt a slight tug at the hem of his shirt, and realized Yue had grabbed onto him. That restricted the movement of his arms a little, so he leaned into her to free them. Her grip strengthened as he did so.
Finally, the first wave of enemies appeared. It was a mix of raptors and T. rexes this time. The T. rexes started ramming into the trunk over and over while the raptors used their claws to make footholds and leaped up the tree.
Hajime squeezed Donner’s trigger. Chunks of flesh rained down to the ground below as one of the raptors had its head blown off.
That had been the last of his clip, so he detached the revolver’s cylinder and spun it to dislodge the empty shells before sticking it in his left armpit and reloading. The entire process only took five seconds.
But he had still made sure to drop an incendiary grenade in the downtime to keep the raptors busy. A curtain of flame fell to the ground below. Seconds later, a barrage of bullets followed. Hajime had already killed fifteen of them, but there was no time to rest.
A group of thirty raptors and four T. rexes had formed down below, and they were frantically trying either to climb the tree or just topple it outright.
“Hajime?”
“Not yet... Wait just a bit longer.”
He replied, without taking his eyes off the enemies he was shooting at down below. Trusting in Hajime, Yue concentrated only on pouring more mana into her spell.
Finally, when there were more than fifty creatures swarming around the forest floor, Hajime decided that must have been all of the enemies he’d detected and he gave Yue the signal.
“Yue, now!”
“Okay! Frost Prison!”
The moment Yue unleashed her magic, the ground all around the tree began to freeze. In the blink of an eye, all of the monsters had been encased in tombs of pale blue ice. They dotted the frozen landscape, looking like crystal blossoms.
Trapped in their pretty frozen coffins, the light of life soon drained from their eyes. The field of frost expanded fifty meters in all directions. Her magic really was a weapon of mass destruction.
“Haah... Haah...”
“Nice job. I’m so glad I have a vampire princess on my side.”
“...Gufufu...”
Hajime couldn’t help but marvel at the frozen hellscape Yue had created with a single spell. But casting such a high level spell had drained her of all her mana, and she was panting heavily. She had completely exhausted herself with that attack alone.
Hajime gently supported her with one arm and bared his neck. She’d recover her mana if she drank his blood. The Ambrosia could heal her exhaustion too, but perhaps because she was a vampire, it took a lot of time to fully take effect on her. He supposed it made sense that blood was the best remedy for a vampire.
Yue smiled faintly at Hajime’s praise before sinking her fangs into his neck. A slight flush crept up her cheeks as she drank his blood.
Before she could finish, however, Hajime suddenly dislodged his neck and stood back up. His Sense Presence had discovered another hundred monsters heading their way.
“Yue, we’ve got twice as many as before heading our way.”
“Wha—!?”
“There’s definitely something strange going on here. We just wiped out a huge group of them, didn’t we? But they’re still rushing us anyway... It’s like they’re being controlled. Don’t tell me those flowers are...”
“Parasites?”
“You think so too, Yue?”
Yue nodded in agreement.
“...It should have a main body somewhere.”
“Yeah. If we can’t get the bastard that stuck those flowers on everyone, we’ll have to fight our way through every single monster on this floor.”
They decided to look for the mastermind behind the flower parasites before they got overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Until they defeated the puppet master, they wouldn’t be able to do a proper search of the floor.
As they no longer had time to let Yue leisurely suck his b
lood, Hajime tried to pass her a vial of Ambrosia. However, she didn’t take it. He tilted his head, puzzled. Yue was holding both her arms out to him instead of taking the vial.
“Hajime... carry me...”
“What are you, five!? Wait, don’t tell me you expect me to carry you and run while you suck my blood!?”
She nodded emphatically. He supposed Ambrosia would take too long to take effect, and in a pinch they would need Yue’s magic to save them. However, he wasn’t thrilled about the idea of fleeing from a monster army while she sucked his blood. I suppose drastic times call for drastic measures... In the end, he agreed and lifted Yue into his arm... and then realized that would hinder his movements too much, so he slung her over his back instead. His preparations complete, he leaped down.
And so, we return to the earlier scene, in which Hajime was being chased down by 200 monsters. Hajime hacked his way through a dense clump of weeds with Yue still clinging to his back. Though she had finished sucking his blood, she still hadn’t gotten off.
As he ran, he heard a massive rumbling noise behind him. The entire floor shook as the army of dinosaurs charged toward him. The raptors hid themselves in the tall grass and threw themselves at Hajime from all directions. He killed the ones that managed to reach him and ignored the rest as he ran as fast as he could. He was currently making his way to what he thought was the most obvious hiding spot he could think of. Yue launched magic projectiles left and right, keeping the monsters at bay and preventing them from getting completely hemmed in.
Sluuuurp. She sucked his blood again as he ran. Their destination was the dungeon wall located at the other end of the sea of trees. On that wall was a massive fissure that opened into a cavern.
The reason he had chosen to investigate that location first was because of a peculiarity he had noticed in the monsters’ behavior. While Hajime had been running through the forest, it was only when he had headed in a certain direction that the monsters’ attacks became more frantic. As if they were trying to prevent him from going that way. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was all they had. Besides, if they took too long they’d be overwhelmed anyway, so they had no choice but to bet it all on whatever clues they managed to find.
Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest Vol. 1 (Premium) Page 22
