The child watched the sunset. Bathed in its light, he sat up in bed with a happy heart.
With exaggerated gestures, the child dashed across the living room; to anyone, he looked brimming with joy.
As on any other day, the crystal-clear sky and the fresh scent of green foliage seemed quietly to welcome him, who had escaped that stifling place.
Even gazing at the early dawn and sipping a warm cup of tea wouldn't usually fill one with such happiness, but perhaps because he was a child, he was brimming with energy at times like this.
"Dad! Did you sleep well?"
The child burst through the door and ran to his father, who was sitting on the sofa.
"Haha, Sti. Did you sleep well?"
Called by the nickname "Sti," the child wanted his father to ruffle his hair.
When his father did just what he wanted, Sti answered with a smile.
"Yes. I slept well. What about Shiro?"
He also wanted to see his younger sister, who often kept him in line.
"She's still sleeping. Seems to be in a deep sleep, so don't wake her."
Shiro.
A dear younger sister who, whenever someone picked a fight with Sti at the Academy, would quickly take care of it just as she heard it.
He was eager to see her, but this wasn't the time.
"Ah, Dad. What's for lunch today?"
Sti's eyes shone bright with expectation.
"Meat today. The kind you often had."
"Ooh…!"
Given the answer he wanted, he bounded toward the dining table.
As always, it would be lavishly set…
"…"
No. That was long ago.
The air reeked of rot from melting flesh.
Not even the warm words "Welcome home" could be heard.
Eye sockets stared at him, and a maw split into six told him as much.
Horrible as it was, he'd been holed up here, always eating this.
He turned around.
"Stja…rna..."
His father, coughing up blood, was crawling toward Stjarna with one arm.
In that sight, feelings like "Where are you?" and "Did you abandon me?" seeped deep.
He wasn't here. He had merely been cut off from the world because of his older brother and sister.
When was the last time he'd seen another person? The last time he'd eaten a proper meal?
"…Sigh."
Stjarna Alheimsins awoke from the deep sleep he had fallen into by mistake.
…
"How many times has it been now?"
He had long since forgotten the first night he had a nightmare, and he had stayed up so many nights that it hardly counted as a problem. It was just persistent.
He dusted off the clothes made from the hides of monsters he had slain, rose to his feet, and roughly set to rights his black hair, which had once glinted with a silvery sheen.
Then he looked around the place he was in.
A cave covered everywhere with quivering red flesh and green eggs, as if the whole place were alive.
With a sigh, the man began stomping on the green eggs whenever he saw them, greeting a time he couldn't even tell was morning or night.
That kept the monsters from hatching and rampaging.
"How long have I been here again?"
The Hive. A space-shaped giant organism that the world called a "dungeon," and the prison that had become his new home.
Age twelve. An age too young to have even graduated the elementary Academy, and the time he was forced to move here.
Seven years had passed since then, but all he really knew was that it had been quite a while since the one trapped here had last seen his family.
Even if he had awakened his mana on the brink of death, he himself wondered how he had survived from that age until now.
He decided it must have been luck and let the thought go.
"Doesn't matter. I'm ready."
He looked behind the campfire.
There were stone tools and weapons he had painstakingly made from rock and monster bone. The traces of trial after trial were obvious.
He planned to leave this place. Simply because it was uncomfortable.
He had no lingering attachment to the outside. No matter how many times he dreamed of his memories by the fire's warm glow, reality would always douse them in the end.
So he resolved to sever his feelings from those memories altogether.
"What I need to bring is… this."
He had a pack for that goal.
He put a stone axe, a waterskin made of hide, and dried monster meat inside. The rest, he could more or less handle with magic, so he didn't pack it.
"All right, then."
He stretched and, as if warming up his hands, held them out to the end of the torch.
"Ignite."
When he spoke the single word in his heart, the unlit torch flared to life.
It was a basic fire spell cast by imagination incantation.
"Shall we go?"
And like the flame that rose from the torch, he filled himself with resolve.
---
The torch pushed back the fathomless darkness.
The one holding it looked around. Monsters could ambush him from anywhere; he needed to be on guard.
He had the power to kill and eat most monsters, but it was wise to watch out for variables that could turn very dangerous.
It would have been nice to simply set fire to the Hive's surface and burn it all down, but the place wouldn't even char, so it was pointless.
"Come to think of it, I haven't been this far before."
He recalled what he had read in books at the Academy library.
"They said this dungeon supplies outside air to its heart through tiny pores."
If you destroy that heart, even without outside interference the "mouth," the exit located opposite the direction the air flows, can open.
In short, Stjarna was heading that way.
He kept going down paths he'd never taken—again and again.
"If you can't leave without destroying the heart, then starting with the heart is right, but…"
That was when it happened.
Footsteps of something—or somethings—were converging on the spot where he stood.
In that instant, they revealed themselves.
"——"
A massive insect covered in eyes, an abomination with countless human arms and tendrils—shapes unworthy of being called living things.
Letting out eerie cries, they surrounded Stjarna.
"They did say there were lots of monsters living near the heart."
Monsters. The number easily exceeded ten; Stjarna was in a bind.
There were limits to driving them back with a stone axe or a torch.
"…Hey."
He knew that weakness, too.
The moment he reached his conclusion, he released a wordless blue energy from his body.
Mana. He sheathed his axe in it.
"Move."
In the meaty warren, the bell of battle rang.
The monsters answered with the first strike. Rather than hunting their prey, they moved to protect the heart from the intruder.
—Slash.
The intruder replied by quartering two of them in a single motion.
They charged on.
From east, west, south, and north. With them coming from every direction, retreating and sacrificing a limb would have been the rational choice.
"As if."
But that applied to low-tier mages or swordsmen, not to someone who had survived seven years in a nest of monsters after the age of eleven.
Stjarna focused mana into one foot, kicked off the ground, and vaulted over them.
He thrust out his hand toward the monsters as they turned to face him.
"Shock."
A current sparked from his palm into one monster's body.
The current jumped from that one to its kin nearby, and then to another, until a chorus began whose lead instruments were the sound of electricity and a scream like a human voice.
A few rude ones not joining the chorus rushed him, but he ignored them and put them to sleep forever with his axe.
At last, the instruments and the slumbering horrors finished their finale.
Perhaps because the performers had been too enthusiastic, their red sweat stained Stjarna's clothes.
"Maybe I should thank the swordsmanship I learned to enter the Academy."
Without a complaint, he brushed himself off and moved on.
"…Something's off."
He glanced behind him from time to time where there was nothing.
A feeling that something was missing. That sort of thing is best not ignored.
Monsters occasionally attacked in packs afterward as well, but to him they were just electric instruments.
He stopped at a certain point.
"This should be it."
Something ahead pulsed, over and over.
It was several times bigger than a large monster; it looked like the Hive's eggs but was excessively red.
"Where the heart is."
He had found the Hive's heart.
If he pierced it, branch-like veins would appear on the surface, revealing the open exit.
"First…"
Stjarna took a deep breath and used Shock on it the same way he had on the monsters he had reduced to scraps moments ago.
"…Looks like that won't do."
Nothing much changed.
A second time, a third—he continued until he had spent all his mana.
"Hm."
Despite the effort, only bruise-like marks formed on the heart. It was still beating.
Stjarna sat where he stood and thought.
"Has the heart hardened because it's exposed? I'm out of mana, so what I can do now is…"
He disassembled his stone-and-bone axe.
After a moment, he struck the bone haft—the axe handle—with the stone blade that had served as the edge.
The end of the torch handle sharpened like a spear.
He felt around the ground as if searching for something, circling the heart.
"…Found it."
He found the spot that pulsed in a repeating pattern and set the torch handle against it.
"Then never again…"
A sound like hammering a nail rang out, again and again, for a long time.
In answer, a trembling vein's thrum echoed through the place.
A moment later, a bursting sound silenced the tremor.
"Let's not look."
The one who quieted a living body wore no expression.
He didn't so much as glance at the heart, now burst and hollowed into a shell, and simply went on his way.
"Since it's dead, the brown veins should show."
As he walked, the human's body grew weary from the long march.
Stjarna didn't care. His face didn't change; he didn't pant. He kept his silence.
"I brought water, so it's fine."
That was all he thought about water.
Sweat ran down him as if he'd been splashed, but he merely wiped it roughly with his hand and drank a few mouthfuls.
He wasn't thinking about his body.
"This suddenly reminds me of the old days."
Even if he had cut his feelings off from those memories, his mind still held them.
Long ago, how he—once the very floor the lowest of the low stood on—was adopted into a ducal family.
After that, though he had no mana and only basic swordsmanship, he showed curiosity about everything and read book after book in all kinds of places.
And—
"…!"
All at once, the light ahead grew unusually strong. The farther he went, the brighter it became.
"Is that outside?"
Following the light, he reached the end of the path and felt an emotion he couldn't name at what he saw.
He didn't remember the name, but he knew it was something he hadn't felt in a long time.
"…It's been a while."
A blue sky, green leaves, and countless brown trunks.
The surface. For Stjarna, it was both the terminus of a life in the Hive and the starting point of setting foot there again.
"…A chill from behind—"
Having looked back after so long, he thought it was a good thing he did.
Whoosh—
He kicked back and avoided the nameless claw that scythed through the air toward him, then landed stably.
He raised his head to look at the owner of the attack.
A wolf-like form with no face and huge, wing-like claws.
Not merely a vile appearance, but a being of an entirely different order.
"Commonly called an 'Elder Entity.' Not one I wanted to meet."
Elder Entity.
The single monster born first in a Hive, the one that reigns at the top.
It always resides within the Hive.
"Did it just come out because its home stopped functioning?"
This one, fitting the latter case, had been secretly following Stjarna from the moment he tried to leave, waiting for a chance.
The feeling that came when he played the monsters with electricity was the proof.
"Following me in secret and waiting for a moment… so it's an intelligence-type. If it had been agility-type, I'd have been cut down immediately."
Elder Entities were divided into four highest-level types:
durability-type, strength-type, agility-type, and intelligence-type.
Even so, it was still stronger than most monsters.
Stjarna felt the flow of mana in his body.
Half. That was how much had filled. Ideally, it should have been about two-thirds.
"Did the long walk slow the recovery?"
He kept dodging the claws scything down from all directions and ran through every tactic he could think of.
Wherever the claws swept, trees were cut and toppled helplessly; each swing cleaved the air and made it hard to keep his footing.
He tried attacking with Shock and Ignite, but he managed only scratches—no real help.
"Damn. Now my stamina…"
His breath grew ragged.
His usually impassive face scrunched as sweat stung his eyes.
He tried to dodge with a desperate backward push to the side—
"My whole body's numb. I can't move…!"
Now he was rigid. There wasn't even a mouse hole to escape through.
He could only look up at the savage claws descending from above his head.
Ssshk—
"…?"
Another sound cutting the air.
It was a clean, neat sound that neither the claws before him nor the stone axe in his grip could make.
Thud.
The difference was that the Elder Entity—about to enjoy a delicacy that had wandered outside—was split cleanly, and yet the silence continued.
"What—"
As the upper half of the Elder Entity blocking his view toppled backward, Stjarna's eyes widened at what he saw.
After all this time, a being with two eyes and ears, a single nose and mouth, standing on two legs.
A woman with purely white-tinged golden hair and eyes like the sky.
There was no mistaking it—
"…"
A human.