by Fujino Omori
“!”
I shake my hair back to stop the thought in its tracks.
I’m being tormented by these speculations that appear and disappear in the back of my mind, by this illusion that I’m being strangled by my own hands.
If I don’t get a handle on myself, I’ll drown in my own thoughts.
As if the Dungeon is jeering at my inner conflict, another explosion thunders in the distance.
“…?!”
I change direction and head toward the explosion.
The roars of monsters mingle with shock waves. And was that a human scream I heard very faintly just now?
I have a bad feeling about this. The uneasiness won’t go away. I want to tear out my heart as it beats so harshly and noisily. I readjust the dwarf under my arm and rush toward the echoing explosions.
Mari struggles to keep up with my anxious steps as she swims along the waterway beside the path.
“Mari, you can’t come with me!”
“I want to come!”
Mari shakes her head like an unreasonable child in response to my warning.
I’m painfully aware of how concerned she is for me because of my strange behavior. But her concern is a problem right now. I can’t drag her into a dangerous situation.
I frown, then sadly make up my mind to change course, heading toward a passageway where the dryland path continues but the waterway dead-ends.
“Oh!”
Mari gasps in surprise. Her jewellike jade eyes pool with tears.
“Dumb Bell!”
Her words fly at my back as I continue to run forward, whispering my apologies to her. I’m encountering so many monsters, it almost feels like they’ve caught wind of the explosion and are heading for it themselves. Devil mosquitoes, blue crabs, and even large-category crystal turtles block the road.
Aside from the winged harpies and sirens, the aquatic monsters of the Water Capital are scarcely impacted by fire-type magic. I limit my use of Firebolt to keeping them in check, but while my left hand is closed in a fist, my right hand grips Hakugen and slices through the enemies in my way.
Having dodged the monsters bearing down on me, I arrive at my destination…and see the same scene I came across a little while earlier.
“…!!”
A wall has been deeply gouged out, and crystals are raining down from the cracked ceiling.
The only difference from the earlier scene is that a large number of adventurers are screaming and shouting.
“What is going on?!”
“Everything is totally destroyed…What could have done this?!”
The site of the explosion is hellish.
The various hunting parties that split up on the twenty-seventh floor have followed the sound of the explosion and gathered here. They are clustered around an adventurer lying on the broad main route, which is scattered with crystal chunks of varying sizes.
“Eh…? He’s been killed.”
“But I don’t recognize him from our hunting party!”
Sharp claws grip my heart at the word killed.
The victim is either a human or an animal person, covered in blood and severely burned all over his body. His charred eyes will see no more. The smell of burned flesh invades my nostrils, and a wave of nausea overtakes me.
My hands and feet are cold.
My chaotic emotions are making my brain go haywire.
I reel backward in shock.
I feel like I’m being baptized by the lower levels. This is different from the middle and upper levels—to have this many encounters with death.
Incoherent thoughts are born and die as I try to escape from the reality confronting me.
“…?!”
A victim here as well?
Was this, too…the work of Lyu?!
The dwarf under my arms seems to have grown heavier. Suddenly I notice that my body is covered in sweat.
“Rabbit Foot! Where the hell did you go off to?!”
“…Bors!”
As angry howls fly back and forth in the Dungeon, a voice even louder than the others calls out to me. I put the dwarf down and turn to Bors and the rest of our group, who have walked up to me.
“I’m sorry for going off on my own. But what is going on…?!”
“…We just got here, too, so we don’t know, either. But it’s obviously not the work of a monster. The only one who would go and do something like this…”
At this point, Bors notices the dwarf lying on the ground covered in wounds from some sort of blade.
“Hey, what’s with the dwarf?”
“Th-th-this guy—”
“Don’t tell me Gale Wind got to him…?!”
“Uh…”
I can’t confirm or deny Bors’s guess.
I find that I’m unable to stand up for her this time.
But what should I have said? “Lyu inflicted all these wounds, but she’s not a bad person” probably wouldn’t go over very well.
All I can do is stand by as Bors and the others snatch the injured adventurer away and begin treating him.
“It’s no use; he’s not opening his eyes. Is there anyone around who can tell us what happened?”
“Bors! There’s a survivor over here! He’s coming to!”
“!”
Bors and I both go pale at those words. We rush toward the adventurer who shouted to us. Collapsed on the ground next to a crystal wall is a catman.
“—”
I’m so shocked at the condition he’s in that my stomach seems to flip upside down.
First of all, he’s missing an arm.
Where a forearm should be protruding from the blood-soaked sleeve beneath his mangled upper arm, there’s nothing.
His face is covered in burns, slashes, and blood, and as for the ears that mark him as an animal person…one is missing.
He has so many wounds I want to turn my eyes away.
“Hey, can you talk? What happened here?”
Bors’s question is more like a shout.
The animal person has the fingers of his left hand in his mouth, dulling the chattering of his teeth. He looks up at Bors as if he’s just noticed he’s there. Then he curls his body—which is extremely tall and thin even for a catman—into an exaggerated cat’s pose.
“G-G-Gale Wind…Leon did…”
“You say it was Gale Wind?!”
“She threw her magic at me, and I saw a flash of light, and everything went white…!”
“…!”
Bors is fixated on the second name the catman mentions, while I’m in shock over the rest of what he said.
As I stand there frozen, Bors leans forward and is about to ask where she is now when our Amazonian party member stops him.
“Wait, Bors, we should treat him first—”
The catman widens his eyes as she reaches out a hand.
“Don’t touch me!”
“?!”
“Don’t touch me, please…!”
He collapses farther onto the ground in an attempt to move away from her. With his one remaining hand, he clutches his head and repeatedly flinches as if in fear. It makes for such a miserable sight that Bors and the others are at a loss for what to do.
They seem to have descended into chaos…No, more like panic.
“…? Hey, aren’t you…Jura Harma of Rudra Familia?”
As the catman rubs his disheveled hair against the floor, a vulgar ear ornament made from a monster’s bone comes into view, and Bors widens his one eye as the catman’s identity dawns on him.
The catman jerks in surprise, too.
“Bors, you know him?”
“Yeah…He usually goes by the name Slaver Cat. He belongs to a gang of Evils called Rudra Familia…The faction that entrapped and slaughtered the very same Astrea Familia that Gale Wind belonged to…”
My heart gives the loudest thump it’s made all day.
So this is the enemy of Astrea Familia…of Lyu?
“Five years ago, when Ga
le Wind went wild, she annihilated Rudra Familia. Massacred all their members. At least we thought she killed them all…but it seems this one survived.”
Bors ignores my dumbfounded look and glares down severely at the man he called Jura.
“Y-yeah…I was the only one who survived her attack—the attack by Leon, that piece of shit!”
The catman, who’s shaking violently, doesn’t deny he’s an Evil.
He seems upset, but he looks at Bors and the rest of us pleadingly.
“But I haven’t done anything bad since then…! Honestly, I’ve just been hiding out in that gloomy dungeon…!”
“…!”
“But then Leon found me, and I fled here…!”
As Bors and the rest of our group digest this surprising information, I’m the only one who seems to realize that the “dungeon” he’s referring to is not this one. It’s Knossos.
Just like the violent hunters of Ikelos Familia said, the man-made dungeon was both a breeding ground and a hideout for Evils. And this guy was hanging around down there.
But…Oh, okay…Now things are falling into place.
Even I can make a guess at what this whole thing is about.
Lyu discovered that an enemy of her former familia was alive, and as the flames of rage flared once again, she gave herself over to the desire for revenge.
And now she is pursuing him exactly as her wild emotions dictate: not with tears or blood but instead with the cold cruelty I witnessed on her face.
“Was Jan killed in Rivira because he was connected to this guy…?”
Bors and the others have their hands over their mouths, like they finally get it. I replay in my mind the scene we’re all imagining.
“I’m begging you—help me…! I won’t do any more evil. Hand me over to the Guild, anything, just protect me from her…!”
The catman flattens himself to the ground in prostration and entreaty. It doesn’t look like a performance. No, that terror of Gale Wind and those quivering eyes and body are definitely real.
I’m stuck between the reality before my eyes and the scene playing in my mind.
I can’t decide what the truth is.
I just keep asking the image of Lyu that floats in my mind, Is it really true?
“…You’re still following us?”
“Stop it with your weird questions. We’re gonna beat Gale Wind to a pulp, right? Obviously it’s better to move in a group.”
Aisha smirked, unembarrassed, as the werewolf Turk craned his neck around to look at her.
They were on the twenty-fifth floor.
Lilly and the others had started out following Turk’s group of four, but very soon they had merged together.
Following someone undetected in the Dungeon was just about impossible. As soon as a monster discovered an adventurer, it would start howling and thrashing, which put an end to any sneaking around. It might have been slightly more possible for a solo adventurer, but Lilly and the others wanted to avoid splitting up their party, so that option had been ruled out.
The simplest option was just to join up with the group they wanted to follow. That way, if the group did anything suspicious, they could monitor them or rein in their actions.
“After all, we’re hunting a Level Four adventurer,” Aisha said, driving home her point.
Turk turned back toward the path ahead of him. The other adventurers in his group kept throwing suspicious glances backward and whispering.
Lilly’s group was following Turk’s through the Dungeon at a distance of about three meders.
“They’re definitely watching us, too.”
“Well, it’s only natural to be irritated when another party latches on to you like this…But still, the way his temper flares up worries me.”
Welf and Lilly were speaking in low voices. Meanwhile, Ouka was keeping half an eye on Turk as he watched for monster attacks. The whole group had a nervous tension about it that was different from usual.
Cassandra alone was sunk in thought.
She was thinking of Bell on the twenty-seventh floor.
I wonder if I should have told him about my dream…But if he knew the contents of the prophecy, he would definitely…
The reason she hadn’t told him was that she had sensed she wouldn’t have been able to alter his strong will, which was equivalent to his destiny. Plus, there was something else.
If Gale Wind is at the root of everything…
Cassandra’s thoughts grew frightening.
Gale Wind—“the fairy fated to guide all to ruin”—seemed to be the prime source of the misfortune in her dream. And indeed, weren’t her actions behind everything from the murder in Rivira to the “great calamity”?
If Gale Wind was the cause of all misfortune, then Bell’s attempts to save her would be meaningless. Even worse—the person he had believed in would betray him, and he would face a harsh reality.
It was truly a cruel fate for the boy.
It’s always the same. I worry, I waffle, I suffer, I fail…and I regret.
Anxiety and sorrow filled Cassandra’s face as she stared absently at the waterway running through the Dungeon.
No one noticed her, and no one understood.
What should I have done to help him?
No answer came to her.
The adventurers around me are still in an uproar.
The assembled group winces at the smell of burned flesh. The whole passageway is in ruins, a testament to the destructive power of the violent explosion. Some monsters seem to have been caught up in the disaster as well, as evidenced by the corpse of a merman lying on the ground, its upper body crushed.
Some adventurers are hurling abuse at the monsters that wander in from other passageways, but those of us gathered around the victim are cloaked in heavy silence.
The catman called Jura is still terrified of Gale Wind. His actual age is unclear, probably due to the effects of his Status, but he looks to be in his mid-thirties. Perhaps from exhaustion, he has sunken black circles around his almond-shaped eyes, which are filled with fear.
“Bors…Wh-wh-what do we do?”
“Not much, I’d say…If we turn him in to the Guild, we’ll make off with a tidy bundle of reward money and that’s it. If he’s killed by Gale Wind, it all disappears,” Bors answers boastfully, as if proclaiming his disinterest in justice. “What are we here for? To kill the elf who murdered our fellow townsman, right? Our job hasn’t changed. Just a question of whether we get more money or not.”
Bors’s firm stance wipes the indecision from the faces of the other adventurers. For me, though, it’s a terrible decision. My face stiffens.
But I, too, am wavering.
I can’t read Lyu’s true intentions.
Has she really been overtaken by her desire for revenge?
Was she driven by rage to kill these adventurers?
And…
My mind is catching on something else.
I don’t know what it is…but something about this situation, this course of events, makes me feel sick to my stomach.
In the back of my mind, a voice is shouting that something here is off.
A memory is struggling to rise to the surface of my consciousness.
…But I can’t grab hold of it.
My thoughts and emotions are all mixed up. I have no idea what is true or what I should believe!
However much the deities have told me I’ve grown, I’m still the same old Bell Cranell.
I get confused easily and can’t make decisions on my own. I’m still the same old pitiful me, constantly unsure what to do—
“—?”
As I press my hand to the side of my head to push out this feeling of despair, I stamp my boots on the ground—and hit something.
“It’s a…”
Scarlet fragment.
It seems to have originated inside the Dungeon.
I pinch what appears to be a small piece of deep-red crystal between my fingers and stare at it
intently. Finally, I open my eyes wide.
“It’s—Gale Wind?!”
At almost the same instant, someone thunders out Lyu’s name.
“?!”
I whip my head around toward source of the yell.
Far in the distance, down one of the many side passages, I glimpse something flying alongside a waterway.
It’s a long cape, whipped by the wind, charging at lightning speed toward us.
“Get her, troops!!”
Bors is yelling so loud, his veins are popping out. He seems to think the critical moment has come.
I have no time to stop them. No one is about to listen to an excuse or explanation. In response to the order from their leader, who’s just spit on the ground, the adventurers raise a battle cry and flood toward the lone elf.
But she doesn’t even glance at them. Instead, she roars straight toward us, a bloodcurdling expression on her face.
“JURAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!”
It’s hard to believe such a massively powerful roar of anger could have come from such a delicate form.
Her cry reverberates all the way to where we stand, quite a distance from her. It shakes the Dungeon’s crystal walls.
Although she might not have intended it to, the sound makes every one of the adventurers who had been racing toward her tremble with fear, as if they’ve just heard a monster’s roar.
She keeps charging straight toward the man whose name she has screamed.
“Get out of the way!!”
““Aaah!!””
The scene before my eyes is unbelievable.
Gale Wind pierces the wall of upper-class adventurers—including some Level Threes—like an arrow.
Her wooden sword topples a dwarf on the front line and then, on its return blow, smashes against a wall an animal person who was flying toward her. Amazons and humans alike are trampled as they try to hold back her charge. The sword literally throws off a blue-green glow. It pulses along with the light of her sky-blue eyes, and each time it does, another hardened warrior is thrown into the air.
Is she going to take down all twenty upper-class adventurers…?!
“JURAAAA!”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!”
As the masked elf glares fiercely from the depths of her hood and repeatedly screams his name, the catman goes as pale as if the world is ending. Then he turns away from her and flees.
