Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Vol. 13

by Fujino Omori

  Her face was filled with despair. She hung her head as tears overflowed from her eyes. She was apologizing to those who were not there.

  “I’m sorry; I’m sorry…!!”

  She was apologizing to the countless adventurers she had given up on because they would not believe her.

  And also to the boy she had allowed to go to the place of disaster.

  She could not stop apologizing.

  This was the “banquet of calamity.”

  The Dungeon said nothing. It merely accepted the blood that flew onto its walls, as if this was the proper course of events. The crystals that had sparkled blue before were stained with blood now, transforming the fantastical scene that had struck Bell’s party with wonder into a picture of hell.

  The Dungeon knew how their journey would end.

  No one would return alive.

  The crystals on the ceiling have dimmed now, like magic-stone lanterns about to run out of energy, because of the explosions on the twenty-fifth floor. As the room grows ever darker, sounds reach our ears.

  “This is…?!”

  The chaotic howls of monsters.

  The sound of something shaking the Dungeon.

  And mixed in with it all, distant but distinctly human screams.

  The sounds intertwine in a strange, unsettling melody.

  What are these sounds?

  What are these screams?!

  As I support Lyu’s body, I cannot prevent myself from screaming at the man in front of us.

  “What did you do?!”

  “It’s a ceremony, you see!”

  He smiles with deep joy.

  “A ceremony to wake me from my nightmare!”

  “Nightmare…?”

  His sunken eyes shine glassily, as if he’s gone mad.

  It’s hopeless. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  What spurs on my panic is the fact that this guy standing in front of us grinning is in just as bad a situation as we are. He’s dripping sweat as monsters keep howling and the Dungeon shakes, and he looks like his teeth are about to start chattering.

  As if he, too, is heading toward the jaws of death—.

  But what worries me even more than that is the way Lyu—who’s always been so calm and cool—is acting right now.

  “Jura…!”

  She steps away from my arms and tries to calm her ragged breath. But her small frame will not obey her will. As if she is battling a fear on the verge of overflowing or, more likely, because she cannot escape the chains of trauma that bind her, she continues to shake violently.

  She wraps her arms tightly around her chest and glares piercingly at the catman. Far from shrinking, however, he seems to find the situation enjoyable.

  “So you still haven’t figured it out, eh, Rabbit Foot, even though Leon is so upset she’s practically dying?” He jeers at me. “I’ve called it here to the twenty-seventh floor!”

  “Stop!!”

  He ignores Lyu’s plea and merely shouts again. His next words leave me speechless.

  “I’ve summoned the beast that butchered Astrea Familia!”

  “!!”

  Ouranos rose from his throne.

  “Ouranos, what’s wrong?”

  He was in the Chamber of Prayers beneath the Guild, a stone room reminiscent of a temple. Four torches set on the altar of the underground room threw off a red glow. Standing in the center of the shadowy space, the god widened his blue eyes.

  Even via the oculus, Fels sensed the gravity of a situation that prompted the aged deity to rise from his chair. Under ordinary circumstances, he scarcely moved.

  For Ouranos, time stood still. He spoke gravely.

  “That thing has come out…”

  “Thing? What are you referring to? What are you saying, Ouranos?”

  Fels’s voice rose in panic in response to the god’s strange behavior.

  Ouranos gazed through narrowed eyes toward the underground world spread beneath his feet as he spoke into the crystal ball.

  “The monster that decimated Astrea Familia five years ago…”

  “…?!”

  Ouranos continued to speak solemnly to the dumbstruck Fels.

  “The calamity has begun again…”

  “Five years ago, my familia, Rudra Familia, was in a feud with Astrea Familia, you see! I don’t know who was in the right or whatever, but they were getting in the way of us Evils and we couldn’t stand it! So we decided to trap them in the Dungeon!”

  Bell gaped in shock as Jura’s words echoed through the room on the twenty-seventh floor.

  A signal throbbed in the back of his mind.

  What he was hearing now was linked to the story Lyu had told him on the eighteenth floor.

  “Just like today, we collected a whole lot of fire bombs! We thought we’d lure Leon and her familia down there and bury them alive! But those tough bastards didn’t die. We actually ended up on the defensive!”

  Fear and anger rose in Jura’s eyes as he recalled that day. Suddenly, though, his emotions seemed to cool, and an unsettling smile curled his lips.

  “But then…something happened that we hadn’t expected.”

  Lyu’s face distorted, and Jura flinched.

  “Unexpected…?” Bell asked, sweat dripping down his face.

  The catman went pale, but all the same, he continued to grin.

  “A monster spawned from the Dungeon, you see.”

  “When excessive damage occurs, it provokes a self-protective instinct…The Dungeon’s lament was so terrible even my prayers could not reach it.”

  Ouranos spoke sorrowfully as he listened to the continuing voice of the Dungeon.

  On that day five years ago, Rudra Familia had recklessly brought masses of Inferno Stones into the Dungeon, causing huge explosions to erupt on one of the floors.

  The damage had been so extensive the term maze no longer held any meaning.

  And then the Dungeon had sent out its warning signal.

  “If they had simply damaged the structure of the maze, nothing much would have happened. The Dungeon would have repaired itself and regenerated. It has such great power that the children call it an ‘infinite resource’…”

  “But if destructive behavior is so great, so excessive…that the regeneration cannot keep pace…”

  “Yes…The Dungeon chooses not regeneration but elimination of the source of the damage.”

  It was quite simple, really, if one thought of the Dungeon as a living creature.

  When a foreign organism attacks a human internally, the immune system acts to kill the invading pathogen. This is the natural self-defensive instinct of all living creatures.

  The same holds true for the Dungeon.

  As the adventurers say, “The Dungeon is alive.”

  When the womb of all monsters is attacked too fiercely, the living underground maze activates its defensive instincts and spawns a being that serves as its immune response.

  This being that kills foreign organisms—in this case, invading adventurers—can be thought of as the Dungeon’s apostle. And it shakes off even the will of Ouranos, whose role is to hold the Dungeon in check.

  “Are you saying that the same level of damage that occurred five years ago has happened once again?” Fels asked.

  “That seems to be the case…”

  The being the Dungeon spawned five years ago was an Irregular.

  Ouranos had not anticipated it, meaning neither had Astrea Familia or Rudra Familia; it was a truly unknown monster.

  Loki Familia had never seen it, nor had Freya Familia, nor had either of the two largest familias at the time, those of Zeus and Hera. Which is to say, in the thousand years since the deities had descended to the mortal plane, the phenomenon had been observed only once.

  Only Ouranos, who prayed to the Dungeon for mercy, had noticed it.

  And only the victims of this nameless monster had ever laid eyes upon it.

  “Except for me, everyone was killed! That sh
itty woman from Astrea Familia and me!”

  As Bell listened to the full story that Lyu had kept from him, everything but shock drained from his mind.

  Beside him, Lyu’s face was filled with pain.

  “For the past five years, I’ve been looking into what happened! I investigated all the details of what caused it and how I could summon that monster again! I didn’t ask any of the Evils’ Remnants—I did it all myself!”

  Bell could not believe his ears as he listened to Jura’s overheated explanation. His head still swimming with astonishment and his lips trembling, he finally spoke.

  “Why? Why did you want to summon that thing again…?”

  “So I could train it, obviously!!” Jura snapped back instantly. “Even though I was pissing and shitting myself that time, as a tamer I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Leon, did it look like a monster to you? Not to me! To me, it was more beautiful than a goddess!!”

  Lyu returned Jura’s glance with an indecipherable gaze.

  For the first time, the catman’s voice was trembling.

  A monster lover.

  The phrase rose to Bell’s mind.

  “Its presence was overwhelming, killing everything, destroying everything! I wanted it; I wanted it all for myself!!”

  Perhaps because he was a tamer, his eyes glittered like a child’s, and his voice throbbed with a perverse joy.

  At the time, even though the overwhelming awe and fear had made his whole body tremble, he had earnestly longed to possess the monster. Jura had, in a sense, deified and worshipped the horrible creature.

  In other words, the one-armed tamer had been enraptured by the beast whose overwhelming power gave rise to such tragedy.

  Lyu glared angrily at Jura as he revealed his deepest motivations.

  “Idiot! That monster is different! It’s not like that! It’s not something that can be tamed!”

  “Not by ordinary methods! But I have this!!”

  Jura pulled out an expandable collar. By resonating with the whip, the magic item fashioned by the Evils could tame even monsters from the deep levels.

  “And with it here, I’m not afraid of anything!! I cannot be threatened!”

  “…?!”

  “Not even by you, Leon!”

  Jura pointed at Lyu with his remaining hand, his loathing burning high.

  “Until now, there hasn’t been a single night when you didn’t haunt my dreams! Yes, they were nightmares! But when I summon that monster…Yes! I will overcome the nightmare of that day!”

  As Bell listened to the furious stream of words, the meaning of nightmare and overcome were clear to him. Lyu was the embodiment of Jura’s trauma, and he planned to use her personal trauma to humiliate and erase her.

  There was no room for sympathy toward this man.

  All the same, Bell could see that he, too, was another individual tormented by the past.

  “It’s mine! I’ll never give it up!” he howled, looking toward the ceiling.

  Five years of investigation and research had led Jura to two conclusions.

  First, no matter how much damage was inflicted on the upper levels, the Dungeon would not let out its “wail,” or even so much as a warning. This was because the zone near the surface was heavily affected by the will of Ouranos. Therefore, he determined, the monster could not be summoned to that area.

  His second conclusion had to do with the conditions needed for the nameless monster to appear. The damage to the floors had to be so severe, the Dungeon could not keep up with repairs. If that level of damage was inflicted, the monster would be spawned on the same floor. The monster could not be summoned without taking certain measures. By comparing the number of Inferno Stones his familia used five years ago and the data on damage to the Dungeon against hundreds of locations on maps, Jura had determined that approximately 20 percent of a given floor had to be destroyed. In other words, the very structure of the Dungeon had to be undermined.

  Jura had tamed and then sacrificed a large number of monsters during his five years of experiments in destruction. Based on the minute reactions of the Dungeon, he had finally concluded that the Dungeon viewed the entire Water Capital as a single floor.

  “No one knew of this Dungeon taboo. If we had issued some sort of regulation, we would have ended up revealing that something was there…So we had no choice but to keep quiet and suppress the truth,” Ouranos said.

  The assumption was that under ordinary circumstances, no one would be able to cause large-scale damage to the sprawling floors of the middle levels or below. Who, after all, would risk their own life to do such a thing?

  Astrea Familia, which had witnessed the monster, had been wiped out, and Rudra Familia had been exterminated to the last man by Gale Wind.

  Lyu was the only one left who knew the truth about what had happened, and Ouranos had not thought that she—having experienced tragedy so directly—would ever test the limits of the taboo.

  In other words, it should never have spawned again.

  That would have been true, if Gale Wind had not failed to kill Jura.

  “I revealed everything to the Xenos. They sensed the Irregular five years ago and were terrified of it. I sought their help in ensuring such a thing would never happen again. But…”

  “Right now, Lido and the other Xenos are participating in the invasion of Knossos…!” Fels groaned, the blinking crystals illuminating the mage’s face through the oculus.

  Ouranos nodded gravely.

  “Yes. There is no way to respond swiftly to the situation.”

  “And it’s happening in the middle—no, the lower levels…Just where the expedition headed…It can’t be! Hestia Familia is down there?”

  “Taming a monster…? A monster so horrible it wiped out Lyu’s whole familia…And you called it to this floor?”

  Bell could not piece together all the information that had been thrown at him so quickly.

  It’s no use! I can’t keep up.

  As the sound of his own heart pounded unpleasantly in his ears, Bell frantically tried to understand.

  So the monster that Jura intentionally called here by destroying the floors is Lyu’s true enemy…

  That nightmare was never supposed to return.

  But now it was rampaging through this floor, exterminating what it viewed as a virus. In other words—

  “—Bors?!”

  Having finally figured out what was going on, Bell turned toward the entrance of the room and the maze beyond, where he could still hear monsters howling as if in celebration.

  The faces of the adventurers in Bors’s party rose before his mind’s eye, and he was about to take off running in their direction when Lyu grabbed his arm.

  “Miss Lyu?!”

  “No…!”

  Her delicate elf’s hand was as white as snow.

  “You must not go! If you try to fight that thing…!”

  For the first time, Bell saw a look of pleading fill her face. Her normally resolute blue eyes wavered with despair. It was as if she was crying without any tears—as if she was looking through him and pleading with some phantom of the past not to go forward.

  Bell was torn over what to do. He said nothing.

  “That’s right, Leon! You can’t let it go, can you?! You fought that monster yourself, and you know even better than I do how terrifying it is!”

  Once again, Jura cackled.

  “Not to mention…”

  Bell gasped at the catman’s next words.

  “…the fact that you don’t want to butcher more of your friends with your own hands!”

  Lyu’s face seemed to crack.

  “Oh yes, that’s what you did!”

  “Shut up.”

  “To save your precious self!”

  “Shut up!”

  “By sacrificing your friends, you were finally able to drive off the monster!”

  “Shut u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​u​p!!”

  The ca
tman laughed.

  Bell stood rooted to the ground.

  Lyu threw her head back and howled.

  The three of them were trapped in the chaos of their entangled emotions.

  Just at that instant, a roar thundered through the Dungeon.

  For a moment, after the hair-raising roar died down, the entire floor was silent.

  Bell couldn’t breathe. Lyu stood frozen. Jura shuddered.

  Both the carefully cultivated senses of the three adventurers and their most basic animal instincts were screaming warning signals.

  The tremor of horror lasted for only a second.

  The floor quaked in unison, and when the momentary hush was shattered, a mad rush of men and women flooded into the room where Bell stood.

  “A​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​a​h​!!”

  The pack of adventurers arrived with Bors at the head.

  It was the hunting party that both Bell and Lyu knew so well.

  Only now, its size had clearly shrunk.

  Those who remained were spattered with copious amounts of blood—and it was not their own.

  Bell gaped at them.

  “Mr. Bor—”

  His scream died mid-word.

  A pair of bloodred eyes floated faintly in the darkness beyond the entrance to the room. Icy claws gripped his heart.

  …There it is.

  An instant later, the shadow disappeared into the darkness.

  “—”

  Bell heard the sound of crystal being crushed underfoot, and then a flash of movement grazed past Bors and his party as they tried to flee. It continued on without stopping, whizzing at a slant over Bell’s head.

  He didn’t even have a chance to react.

  By the time he whipped his head around, one member of Bors’s party was missing.

  Gripped by terror, still not understanding what had happened, he scanned the room behind him.

  Nothing was there.

  “Aa…Aaaa…”

  It was above him.

  Like a giant spider, it clung there gripping the joint between the wall and the ceiling.

  The ill-fated missing adventurer was clenched between its jaws.