Isagi found himself thinking back to the first time he had come to Orario — the first time he had ever set foot in the Dungeon.
It had been late at night then, too.
Of course, once you were inside the Dungeon proper, the distinction between day and night ceased to exist. Not like now, where tilting your head back still showed you the deep dark of the sky overhead.
Even so, the corridor stretching before them gave him that same feeling of strangeness — and beneath it, that faint, restless excitement at the battle drawing near.
"...Phew."
Ais and Riveria felt the same.
One carried hatred for monsters in her chest.
The other carried curiosity for an unknown world.
Isagi took the lead, Riveria behind him, and Ais bringing up the rear. The three of them held their formation and stepped into the cavern ahead.
At first — it didn't seem so different from the Dungeon they knew.
Faint bioluminescence drifted along the walls, radiating a dim greenish glow. The corridor was uneven underfoot, sometimes wide and sometimes narrow, winding and curving rather than running straight ahead.
At least there were no forks in the path, which gave the comforting illusion that getting lost was impossible.
The air, though, was thick with the reek of blood and the distinctive foul stench unique to monsters — that nauseating blend that clung to the back of your throat.
And yet — no monsters had respawned. Not a single one.
That was not a good sign. Thinking back to the Great Hero Albert's party and their expedition, he had to wonder: was the Dungeon right now gathering all of its strength to gestate the [Black Dragon]?
At irregular intervals along the way, he could still make out the traces of fortifications. In the wider stretches of corridor, walls of stacked timber and stone rose several meters high — though of course all of them had already been smashed to rubble.
Before long, Isagi and the others reached the first chamber.
The ruins of a small camp occupied the space, collapsed into rubble and debris. Several corridors branched off in different directions from its edges.
This ancient Dungeon bore no resemblance to the one Isagi had memorized. Every map and route stored in his memory was completely useless. Which left only one option: cover as much ground as possible, as fast as possible.
"Let's speed up."
"Yeah!"
At full sprint, a first-tier adventurer moved at speeds that defied belief.
The world blurred.
Everything around them began streaking backward in a rush, pulled into thin lines like sheets of driving rain — until, without warning, the scenery ahead shifted.
"Wait!"
Isagi stopped dead. He and the girls behind him watched together as the cavern corridor ahead began rapidly — impossibly — becoming something else.
The narrow tunnel stretched outward at speed, and within moments the walls and ceiling had receded to distances that swallowed all sense of boundary. Withered brown weeds pushed up through the ground, followed by black reeking bog, and twisted trees that loomed like something out of a nightmare.
It took only a few seconds.
The cavern was gone. In its place stood a vast, desolate expanse — no leaves, no life, only the skeletal forms of dead and rotting trees stretching endlessly in every direction.
A faint crimson light bled down from above, draping the entire landscape in a thin shroud of haze.
Right then.
So even in the ancient Dungeon, his Skills had taken hold. And this wasn't the Goblin Kingdom — this was somewhere he had never seen before.
There was no need for him to say a word. Both Ais and Riveria had already snapped to a thousand-percent alertness. Just because they had only recently entered the Dungeon was no reason to get careless.
Isagi was no different.
No one understood better than he did how terrifying a Soulsborne-style Dungeon could be.
And because of that — no reminder was needed. The moment Isagi moved to take his next step forward, his iron-plated spike-armored boot still suspended mid-air, he noticed the withered grass ahead rapidly transforming into black bog — shot through with flickering, unearthly deep-violet light. Clearly toxic. A single misstep would swallow him whole.
"?"
But just as his foot hung frozen in the air — from within the swamp, pink, needle-thin tongues came lashing out. Like vines. Like tentacles. They swept across the distance in an instant, coiling around him and yanking him forward with violent force.
Fortunately, both he and Ais reacted in the same breath.
Several flashes of cold steel — and the pink tongues erupting from the bog were severed simultaneously by the Sword of Despair in her hands and the Blade of Ten Thousand Bones in his.
Immediately after.
Isagi and Ais both vaulted into the air.
If lethal bog was going to materialize beneath their feet at any moment, the obvious answer was to stop using their feet. The wind spiraled and golden wings unfurled, lifting both of them skyward — and Ais reached out and grabbed Riveria's hand in one practiced motion, swinging her "mama" onto her back without missing a beat.
The Dungeon had finally bared its fangs — and it was even more incomprehensible than anything they'd faced before.
The instant they took flight and pulled back —
From the dead trees on either side, dense thickets of thorn-covered briar erupted outward, branches crossing and interweaving like a web of needles, and in a single moment both Isagi and Ais were ensnared where they hovered.
And then.
In the darkness ahead, something opened its eyes.
They were orbs — floating in mid-air — and from within them, deep-crimson beams of searing light lanced outward.
"!!"
Ais instantly shifted the sword in her hand to a shield, deflecting the beams, while her right hand raised the enormous lance-cannon she carried.
It bore a spear's sharp blade at one end — and at the other, a black, gaping barrel.
Fire coalesced.
Then, with a thundering boom, a burst of orange-yellow flame erupted outward, torching the briars and the dead trees in an instant. The searing heat shattered and melted every one of those floating eyes lurking in the dark.
[What terrifying magic!]
Riveria blinked, somewhat dazed. She had the distinct impression that her "daughter" had just launched an enormous fireball.
But it wasn't magic.
It was the cannon built into the weapon itself — the power of steel and gunpowder.
Isagi and Ais moved in perfect sync, weaving through the burning dead forest. Isagi still held his long blade, and also called upon the power of [Furnace of Many Forms] to coalesce a massive dragon's tail behind him — sweeping it through the surrounding trees and leveling everything in its path.
At the same time, his left hand formed a great Carian greatsword from pure magical energy, and the two weapons scissored through each other in a crossing arc, reducing every last tree in the vicinity to splinters.
Ais, meanwhile, defended against the ranged attacks from afar with one hand while returning fire with the lance-cannon in the other.
They held the line — waiting for Riveria to finish her chant.
"— Thou art the embodiment of the consuming flame, sweeping away armies, bringing the great wars to their close. Burn all that stands — Sword of Surtr — I am of Alfr!"
"[High-Class · Sword of Victory]!!"
Heavenly fire descended and reduced everything in the surroundings to ash.
Riveria had already begun training herself in the same technique as Lefiya — using concentrated mental energy to control her magic with surgical precision.
The result was this: what had once been [High-Class · Sword of Victory] — a conflagration of blade-shaped flame that crashed down from directly above the target and radiated outward from the point of impact, a wide-area annihilation spell — could now be controlled with perfect accuracy. The pillar of fire that descended from the heavens now excluded the three of them entirely, expanding outward in a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree ring, incinerating everything else in its circumference.
Isagi had no idea how she was managing it.
When that impossibly crimson blaze had erupted right before his face, he'd honestly felt a flash of fear. The pitch-black forest vanished completely, and for dozens of meters in every direction there was nothing left but empty, scorched wasteland.
But then —
From the ground, monsters began to crawl upward, slowly coalescing into form. They looked exactly like the skeleton soldiers Isagi had encountered on the 34th Floor.
"?"
They'd only just entered the Dungeon, hadn't they?!
Theoretically, this was Floor 1. So why were Deep-Floor monsters spawning here?!
The humanoid skeletons clutched a variety of weapons — blades, clubs, halberds — and were wrapped in crumbling armor or tattered robes. They launched their assault immediately.
They couldn't fly. But they could leap — and simultaneously, the ground itself began to surge and rise beneath them, forming platforms that elevated the skeletons to where Isagi and Ais floated in the air.
Ha?!
Isagi stared in disbelief. The terrain and the monsters were coordinating with each other?
No — wait.
That had been happening from the very beginning, hadn't it.
The thorned briar web erupting from the dead trees, and those things launching eye-beams from the darkness — wasn't that exactly what that was? The environment and the monsters working as one?
His thoughts were still processing it as he was already fighting.
The instant he made contact, Isagi was certain: these were Deep-Floor monsters — and not ordinary ones. Not the standard Lv.4 variants from a normal Dungeon. These had been enhanced by his own Skills, pushing them to at least Lv.6.
The moment of engagement brought the memories flooding back — of the time he had fallen to the Deep Floors long ago.
These things fought with skill that rivaled first-tier adventurers. Swords, knives, spears, hammers, axes, daggers — every weapon type, wielded with devastating competence.
And that wasn't all. In the distance, there were skeletons using bows and staves — but these things couldn't speak. How were they even chanting magic?!
When that tiny point of light suddenly appeared in his blind spot —
If Ais hadn't called out, Isagi wouldn't have caught it in time. The magical orb flared into existence and detonated an instant later.
Right now.
The boy and the girl could only fight back to back.
The advantage of staying airborne was meaningful — even as the monsters used the terrain's shifting contours to close distance and appear right in front of them, they couldn't properly pin the two down. That gave Isagi and Ais meaningful room to maneuver, engaging while steadily pulling back.
And buying time for Riveria to chant.
The princess had already shifted tactics, beginning the rapid chant for her first-stage magic, [Ecstasy · Fimbulwinter]. And at precisely the right moment — the instant the monsters launched their assault on Isagi and Ais, the exact moment the boy and girl were poised to deliver the killing blow — a frigid breath swept in, draped in brilliant cold, coating the monsters' bodies in a sheen of crystalline ice. In seconds, each one was encased in a solid block.
Unable to attack. Unable to defend.
Then Isagi and Ais shattered them.
Despite having never adventured together as a group before, the three of them worked in effortless harmony, clearing each newly spawned monster in turn — until across the heaving, desolate terrain, all that remained were scattered fragments of ice crystal and shattered bone, and one by one the glittering Magic Stones dropped to the ground and dissolved into nothing.
...That wasn't easy.
This ancient Dungeon was absurdly powerful?!
This is ridiculous, he thought.
And right as that thought crossed his mind — the scenery changed again. The dead forest vanished entirely, and the ground began to sink at tremendous speed. No — it was cracking open.
With Isagi, Ais, and Riveria at the center.
The earth directly beneath them split open into a vast, lightless pit — like a mouth suddenly thrown wide. And from within it, something was struggling to claw its way out —
[Progenitor of the Eternal Night Empire · Divine Miracle of the King · Udaeus.]
"?"
An ash-grey skeletal hand emerged from the darkness. It scrabbled at the rim of the enormous pit, and then — as though hauling up a body of incomprehensible size — a crowned skeleton giant pulled itself free. Adorned with exquisite jewels and gold decorations, it dragged itself up from below.
There was no mistaking it. That was Udaeus.
The exterior was considerably more ornate than he remembered, but the fundamental shape was the same — an enormous humanoid skeleton, upper body only.
This is a Lv.6 Monster Rex!
And right now — if his Skills were empowering it, what kind of nightmare would it become?!
Wait — what is this ancient Dungeon even thinking?!
Completely throwing the rulebook out the window, wasn't it.
This was Floor 1. They had only cleared two waves of monsters. And already it was sending out a Boss of this caliber?!
Does it hate us that much?!
[Retreat!]
The Skeleton King opened its jaws wide. The ash-white beam that erupted from within threatened to swallow their entire field of vision.
Fortunately, Riveria had already begun chanting her most powerful defensive magic in anticipation.
"— Dance, spirits of the air, sovereign of light. I have made my covenant with the guardian deity of the forest — let the song of the earth ring out and enfold us, shelter us, I beseech thee to become the great wall of forest-light and protect us — I am of Alfr!"
"[Dimension · Severance]!"
A curtain of deep emerald light sealed everything away.
The elven princess raised her staff high, and the nine Magic Jewels set into it blazed with blinding radiance.
She poured enormous magical power into it.
But almost immediately, she sensed something was wrong —
She had experienced it firsthand — the special changes Isagi's presence had brought to the Deep Floors of their own Dungeon, where even ordinary monsters ran at around Lv.6, and even standard Bosses — the gatekeepers — sat at roughly Lv.7.
By that logic, as a Monster Rex, Udaeus here would be at minimum Lv.8. That wasn't even an exaggeration.
Riveria had already braced herself for several more of the Magic Jewels in her staff to shatter.
But... it wasn't as strong as she'd feared?
"...Hm?!"
Isagi and Ais seemed to have noticed it too.
The creature's massive body moved with considerable clumsiness. After several exchanges, the three of them reached the same conclusion: this thing's level was somewhere in the Lv.6 to Lv.7 range — not unconquerable.
What was going on?
Hadn't it been enhanced by the Dungeon — or was it something else entirely —
Before any of them could finish that thought, a voice drifted up from the depths of the enormous pit that Udaeus had climbed out of.
"What's going on?! It just — suddenly — huh?! Hey! You lot, where did you come from?! Get down here, now!!"
____
👻🔥Heey! Walnut-chan for more chapters!🔥👻
🔥 New history: Group chat of the Dead
✅ Unlock a 40-chapter backlog for ALL my series.
✅ Receive exclusive content and regular updates!
Help us reach these goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 universal bonus chapter
👻 P - Walnut-chan