by Fujino Omori
The monster before his eyes was catastrophe incarnate.
It was an apostle of murder let loose by the Dungeon.
Like a marionette with its strings cut, Bell was performing a clumsy dance. A black shadow was corroding his heart, even though he had managed to stay alive this long.
He could practically hear his heart being crushed.
It was the sound of a despair far deeper and more devastating than what he had felt when he faced the one-armed minotaur.
Pitilessly, the Juggernaut swept its tail—that all-destroying weapon of death—toward the prey that had stumbled in its battle stance.
It landed on Bell’s neck.
“—”
A cracking sound came from a place that should never have made that sound.
—Death.
Bell heard the sound of his own life coming to an end.
He lost consciousness.
Launched into the air by the monster’s tail, the boy’s body flew forward like an arrow.
Blood flying from the joint where the severed arm had been, it rolled over and over across the floor and finally came to a rest where land met water.
It lay there completely still.
“…Mr.…Cranell!”
Standing stock-still, Lyu was barely able to whisper those two words.
Time slowed to a crawl.
The world went flat—the scene before her very eyes, a lie. Even the water seemed to have stopped flowing. The screams of the other adventurers and the sound of her own heartbeat grew distant.
Only the horrible figure of the boy lying faceup where he had landed was fresh and bright.
“—Bell?!”
Lyu’s scream was like silk being ripped. Tearing off the chains of trauma that had held her back, she half dove, half ran toward him.
“…?!”
She kneeled beside him, dumbstruck.
In addition to the severed arm, his whole armorless body was covered in deep cuts and bruises, indicating broken bones. Blood dribbled from his mouth. There was no sign of consciousness in the pair of eyes behind his bangs. Still, it was a miracle that his head was even attached to his body after suffering that fierce blow from the monster’s tail.
The word death flitted across Lyu’s mind.
Shivering and pale, she placed one finger on Bell’s neck.
“…! He’s still alive…?!”
Surprised, she leaned toward him. She could just barely make out the faintest sound of breathing.
The Goliath Scarf had allowed Bell to take the massive blow to his neck without suffering even a scratch. The material fashioned from the giant’s wall of steel had stopped the deadly blow and saved the life of its wearer.
Although it had repelled direct damage, however, it had not been able to soften the impact. That alone had inflicted enough damage to make Bell himself think he was dying. Most likely, some of the vertebrae in his neck were fractured.
I have to stop the bleeding from that arm! No, I better do something for his neck first!
Dripping sweat, Lyu began to chant a spell.
“I sing now of a distant forest. A familiar melody of life!”
She had used up all her potions during the battle for Knossos and her pursuit of Jura’s gang. The spell felt like it stretched on forever, but it was the only recovery magic she had on hand.
“Noa Heal!”
A gentle light like the dappled sun of a forest surrounded the base of Bell’s neck. It was an all-purpose magic with the power to heal surface wounds, as well as other types of damage, and restore strength. However, it did not work immediately like a potion; the length of time required for full recovery was its main drawback.
As she waited for it to work, Lyu used her teeth and one arm to tear off a piece of her cape and tie it around Bell’s right arm to stop the bleeding. Cursing her own failure to act at the crucial moment, she tended to the boy as if she was paying off her sin.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!”
“!”
Having put an end to Bell, its first target, the Juggernaut had turned its attention once again to the remaining adventurers. The reason it turned toward Bors’s group rather than toward Lyu or Jura was simply that there were more of them.
The storm of slaughter rose again.
“H-h-help!!”
Lyu’s heart trembled at the pleas for assistance.
—I want to help them, but if I leave Mr. Cranell now—
Lyu was unable to finish her anguished thought.
In an interval too short even to call a moment of hesitation, the monster had finished its massacre. Aside from Bors and a few others who had run in the opposite direction, all the adventurers were now no more than gruesome corpses. Among them were the animal-person siblings and the Amazonian warrior Bell had tried to save.
Lyu hadn’t even been granted the opportunity to make a choice.
“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”
The moment the healing light faded, Lyu howled and dashed toward the monster, which was turned away from her. Like an insane animal, she charged forward and drove her wooden sword into its purple-blue back.
“—”
The Juggernaut responded simply.
Releasing the energy stored in its back-bent knees, it leaped momentarily out of sight. Then, clinging to the side of a crystal column, it peered at her with glowing crimson eyes as if to say, You next?
The next instant, it was charging her.
She dodged the razor-like claws by planting her hands on the ground.
As the hem of her long cape was shredded, she pushed away her panic and flew beast-like toward the monster, which had just landed back on the ground.
It blocked her blow with its tail, but she aimed relentlessly for its chest, drawing close to the body that caused her such powerful physical revulsion.
Tucked in where its long arms could not easily reach, she jabbed the monster again and again with her sword.
“!”
“—!”
But the extraordinarily agile monster leaped from side to side and then backward, lashing out at her in return, and very soon Lyu found herself on the defensive.
This was the reason she had so stubbornly avoided Bell at first. If the Juggernaut was once again spawned, she didn’t want him to become its target.
It was a passive strategy totally unlike the normal Lyu. This was the underside of the terror that had been imprinted onto her very core. This was how deeply she was tormented by the calamity that had stolen everything from her five years ago.
“Aaaaah, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
The ashen scene rose before her eyes once again.
Her companions were collapsing.
Their weapons crushed, her friends were being ripped to shreds.
They screamed as the monster ground them between its fangs.
The vicious claws had torn through the bodies of her companions.
The scenes seared into her brain, stirring up her terror and crushing her will to fight.
And so she screamed.
She screamed to cheat her fear, to obliterate the past, and to spur her body on to action.
When this scream, this outpouring of raging emotion, went dead, Lyu would no longer be able to fight. Her heart would collapse before this overwhelming being, and she would hug herself and sob like a helpless child.
Because she knew that, she flourished her wooden sword and screamed her battle cry.
“—Ha!”
The Juggernaut responded with a short breath almost like a sigh and a fierce swipe of the claws on one hand.
It was enough to send Lyu’s sword flying.
“—”
Alvs Lumina, her second-tier weapon fashioned
from the branch of a holy tree, burst into pieces. Following the same path as Bell’s armor, it bid her good-bye.
The merciless strength that had destroyed her weapon generated an impact that fractured the fingers gripping the sword’s handle. Lyu went flying through the air and landed with a crash on the crystal floor, faceup.
The breath was forced from her lungs in a single gust.
“Gaaarrr! Now! Now’s your chance! Get that bastard!!”
Far away from her, Bors let out a battle cry.
The remaining adventurers knew escape was hopeless. In the time that Lyu had bought them, they began to chant—in other words, to release a Concurrent Bombardment. Bors, too, took part, wielding his magic blade even as terror pulled him downward.
“No, stop!!”
Lyu’s words did not reach them. She could barely even breathe.
As her futile cry faded, the purple-blue shell encasing the Juggernaut’s huge frame glowed.
Just like a replay of what happened when Bell tried to use a Firebolt on the monster, the magic attack bounced back toward its source. Only this time, it was not a single Firebolt but a far more powerful Concurrent Bombardment.
“—”
It hit them head-on.
The Juggernaut’s protective shell had the power of magic reflection. It was the sole shield of this monster that had traded defense for the power of annihilation. Even if an adventurer was to release automatic homing magic, which was ordinarily a fail-proof method of hitting a target, it would not make contact with the Juggernaut.
The adventurers were thus cut off from the magic they had counted on as their ultimate safety net. Anyone would lose heart under these despairing circumstances, just as Astrea Familia had done five years earlier.
Fortunately, Bors was at the back of the party and avoided a direct hit. He stared in a daze at his charred companions. His eye patch had been torn off and his empty left eye socket was exposed, but he had no time to worry about that. The monster was bearing down on him, its own eye sockets glowing.
“Stoppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp!!” Bors sobbed.
Thrusting both hands in front of him, unable even to stand up, he pissed his pants.
Even for a second-tier adventurer like Bors, this monster was too much to face.
The claws descended toward him.
“—aaa.”
Drawing a vivid arc, they moved from the top of his head straight down.
He didn’t even have time to think back on his life. But his brain registered the sound of his own body splitting into two halves. He heard his head being crushed, his flesh being torn, and his bones being pulverized.
It was over in an instant. Bors was dead.
“Stand up!”
“—!!”
The fog of hallucination cleared.
As Bors recovered from the vision his petrified brain had produced, he found himself alive, with an elf fighting in his place. Before the all-destroying claws had reached him, the elf had intercepted the blow with one of her own, delivered to the monster’s forearm. She was now fighting it desperately with two daggers.
At that very moment, the elf was protecting Bors.
“Escape, quick!”
“Y-you…”
Bors’s word trailed off as he stared at the profile of the female adventurer, from which the hood and mask had fallen away.
It was the very same brave elf he had seen before on the eighteenth floor. The precise elf who had fought single-handedly against the terrifying black giant.
Just then, the monster brought up its claws with ferocious speed.
Lyu bent backward, just barely avoiding a direct hit, but the claws nevertheless grazed her, ripping open her shoulder.
A geyser of blood spouted from the elf’s thin body.
As the warm liquid spattered Bors’s face, Lyu clenched her teeth and resisted her body’s urge to crumple to the ground.
“Hurryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!”
Bors fled, his feet flapping noisily against the ground.
Stumbling repeatedly over himself, he was making no progress whatsoever. To protect him, Lyu—her face covered in a gory makeup of blood—took the brunt of the Juggernaut’s attack herself.
“!!”
“Oof!”
Its long tail beat against her legs.
Although it lacked the menace of the claws, the hard appendage covered in its black and purplish-blue shell was no different from a cudgel.
Lyu’s right leg, encased in its long boot, snapped like a twig under the blow. Her shinbone let out a dry popping sound as she flew into the air.
“Ah—!”
Lyu gripped her awkwardly bent leg with one hand as she cried out in wordless agony.
She felt she would faint from the unbelievable pain. But she knew she could not.
Stomp! The horrifying sound of the monster’s immense body advancing toward her rang through the room.
“No…!”
As a crystal fragment bore into her left cheek, she lifted her trembling face.
Aside from her writhing form, there was no other sign of life in the sprawling room. Even Jura was gone. Had he escaped? She could no longer fully understand what was going on.
Destruction advanced.
Despair bore down on her in the form of the Juggernaut.
She was covered in wounds from head to toe. As it landed before her eyes, she realized she had no way left to defend herself against it.
I couldn’t stop Jura’s schemes, and now here I am, my shameful failure exposed…
She felt humiliated. She wanted to scream and cry. She wanted to place a deadly curse on herself for once again making a mistake that led to calamity.
She still hadn’t explained anything to Syr and her coworkers. She hadn’t done anything to repay them for giving her a home. She had to survive, if only to explain herself to them.
…Oh, but…
If I die here, I can be with Alize and the others…
At last, she could be beside her companions once again.
At last, she could apologize to them.
At last, she could let them castigate her.
Finally, this sin of killing them will be…
At last, she would be free of the guilt she had hidden in the furthest depths of her heart.
For Lyu, that would be a kind of salvation.
It would be a sort of ceremony in which she buried the self whose dishonor had been exposed.
A smile of resignation curled her lips.
A tear fell from one sky-blue eye.
The scale of her heart tipped from attachment to life toward the peace of death.
“Huh?”
Just then, something caught Lyu’s eye.
Shrieks were ringing out—the death songs of adventurers.
Screams were echoing—the will of the elf who fought and suffered yet refused to succumb to fear.
Bell’s finger twitched at the sounds of the battlefield.
A tremor slightly stronger than the others carved a crack in the crystal ground, shattered it, and sent Bell’s body sliding from the border between water and land into the water.
Below the surface, sounds were muffled. A crimson fog spread from his severed arm. He sank toward the cold depths of the waterway.
“—Bell.”
A tearful voice reached him as he drifted slowly downward.
Her emerald-blue hair swirling, the mermaid reached out her hand toward the pitifully wounded boy. She was hugging his right arm, still gripping the knife, to her chest. She sank her teeth into her own wrist. As she pressed the arm against the surface
from which it had been severed, it absorbed her lifeblood.
Healing bubbles floated around Bell’s body as it regained its missing limb.
“Bell…Bell.”
The mermaid’s tears were unending.
Placing a hand on the cheek of the boy whose eyes remained closed, she took his knife and slashed herself over and over again. She held the sinking body tight against her own.
Her blood ran into Bell’s wounds, melting into him. Surrounded by a haze of crimson produced by their intermingled blood, his battered body began to recover.
“Live,” the monster girl whispered over and over again.
“Open your eyes,” she murmured into his ear.
He responded.
“Oh!!”
He clenched his hands into fists, opened his eyes, and spewed out countless bubbles.
The black knife glittered with renewed life.
He stared into the tear-drenched eyes of the mermaid, so close to him their foreheads were touching.
Thank you.
I’m sorry.
I have to go.
The boy who mouthed these words, the boy whom Mari loved, was not a prince on a shipwrecked boat.
He was an adventurer.
For the sake of his companion who was still fighting, he had to revive his despair-riddled heart. He had to light the flames of recovery.
Tears trickling down her cheeks, Mari reached out a hand to stop him and then drew it back.
The boy was stubborn. He was an adventurer. Mari would do the same thing to save the family she loved. So instead of holding him back, she hugged him one more time. Then, quietly, she let him go.
Released from the mermaid’s arms, Bell kicked and surged upward.
“Promise me—”
Mari cried as she watched the figure move farther and farther from her. Reaching her hand toward him, she sent her wish into the world of water.
“—Promise me you won’t lose.”
Bell extended a fist and broke through the water’s surface where the light filtered in.
Lyu saw everything.
She saw the drops of water flying, the form bursting powerfully through the water’s surface, and the foot stepping firmly onto the crystal ground.
