Below the pit, the Dungeon continued on as always.
Isagi had a strong suspicion about what had just happened. The terrain and the monsters it had thrown at them had both failed to do the job — so the Dungeon had simply cracked open a hole and sent the Boss crawling out directly.
This Dungeon is way too smart.
And then there was another problem.
The Udaeus in front of them wasn't nearly as powerful as he'd expected — and that didn't sit well with him at all.
It might mean the Dungeon had the ability to regulate its monsters' strength. Not the crude, floor-by-floor system he was used to — where each level had a fixed power bracket — but something dynamic. Something intelligent. Something that could read the strength of its opponents in real time and calibrate its creatures to be just strong enough to kill them.
Why bother doing that?
Isagi's best guess: the Dungeon was currently building up toward something enormous — the Black Dragon — and didn't want to waste power on anything less critical. So when three uninvited guests suddenly appeared, it responded cleverly: dispatch purpose-built special monsters at precisely the right strength to dispose of them, and nothing more.
But this wasn't the moment to be thinking about that.
A voice was echoing up from somewhere below the pit. Isagi turned it over in his mind for a moment, then caught Ais's eye. A silent exchange — and the decision was made. They were going down to take a look.
Worst case, they could always fly back out.
With that thought in mind, the two of them plunged straight through the gap the Skeleton King had climbed out of, passing through a stretch of lightless dark that wasn't quite as long as it had felt — and quickly reached the bottom.
Another cavern chamber opened before them, bathed in the same faint, bioluminescent green glow. It looked no different from the familiar upper floors of the Dungeon they knew.
And then Isagi spotted two figures on the far side of the chamber.
A Dwarf and an Elf. Both young.
"Hey, hey, over here! You can fly? That's incredibly convenient!"
The voice was brimming with unabashed admiration.
The Dwarf was surprisingly young — no beard to speak of, nothing at all like the image Isagi had in his head of gruff, barrel-chested old men like Gareth. He looked almost like an ordinary human boy, except that he was built with a density that made him look almost as wide as he was tall, the effect compounded by a suit of thick, heavy fur armor.
At a glance, he looked remarkably like a small bear.
...Somehow, inexplicably, kind of cute?!
The other figure — the Elf — was someone Isagi, Ais, and Riveria all recognized. You could even call him an old acquaintance.
Dawn-Dark Moon. The Nameless Hero — Airon Delmos.
"What happened up there? Damn it, that huge thing that just crawled up looked wrong somehow — Ai, did you... uh... sense its name? Because I feel like I've known what that thing is called since the moment I first saw it?!"
"Quiet."
For an Elf, Airon's personality was almost a caricature of the stereotype — cool, reserved, and quietly imperious.
"We need to go find Her Highness the Saint. — You people, I don't recognize you from the city. Are you newly arrived heroes?"
Polite enough, though.
"I am Airon Delmos."
"Just call me Mam! The one and only [Beast King] Mam — heard of me?!"
No.
Faced with the collective blank expressions of Isagi and the girls, the young Dwarf looked decidedly uncomfortable.
But there was no time for introductions.
A thunderous roar began to roll down from the pit above them. The Skeleton King's howl was growing louder, and that vast ash-gray hand was already reaching back down toward the opening.
"This way!"
Mam immediately waved everyone toward a corridor branching off to the side. Isagi followed without hesitation, the girls close behind.
In short order, Udaeus was left behind.
Its movement speed is terrible, but it's completely blocking the way back up. Getting back to the surface is going to be a pain.
"We have to regroup with Her Highness the Saint!"
"Yeah yeah, but how are we supposed to know where Albert and the others went? Can you at least let me figure out where we are first?"
"Hmph!"
The Dwarf and the Elf bickered the entire way — but despite the noise, their teamwork was seamless.
Mam didn't appear to be a frontline fighter. He carried a strangely shaped large crossbow that seemed to have been assembled from beast bones, and he stayed consistently behind Airon, each of them covering the other's blind spots with practiced, instinctive efficiency. These were clearly experienced adventurers.
Isagi used the time to give the two of them a brief summary of his group's situation.
Naturally, he left out any mention of coming from the future Orario — that would take far too long to explain. He simply told them that the three of them had just arrived in the city, accepted a commission from Wishe, and come into the Great Pit looking for Albert and the others. He also relayed the current state of things on the surface.
"So that much has happened up there... the surface really is in bad shape. Hey, Airon, maybe we should go back first—"
"We find Her Highness the Saint first."
"Fine, fine... sigh, do all Elves have something wrong with their heads... sorry, I didn't mean — wait—"
Mam caught himself mid-sentence.
After a brief pause, the young Dwarf turned to look at Riveria with an expression of genuine amazement.
"The resemblance is uncanny. I mean — who are you, exactly...?"
"Riveria."
The Princess made her introduction with natural, unhurried composure.
"Riveria Ljos Alf."
"A Princess — forgive my rudeness, Your Highness."
"Think nothing of it."
Airon turned and bowed to Riveria in a single swift motion. Both Isagi and Ais were used to it — this was simply how Elves were. An instinctive, bone-deep reverence for royalty.
Swiftly, the two groups exchanged information.
Isagi learned that Mam and Airon were members of Albert's company who had entered the Great Pit together — but they belonged to what amounted to a rear support unit.
The ancient heroes' expeditions into the Dungeon were far more complex than he had imagined.
For many reasons.
The most important was this: the Dungeon as it existed in this age was utterly unlike the one Isagi knew.
The most immediately obvious difference was the complete absence of numbered floors.
According to Mam and Airon, the Dungeon of this era was divided roughly into three distinct regions:
The [Border] — territory already mapped and claimed by the city's heroes, riddled with camps and fortresses.
The [Front] — defended by a rotating force of soldiers and heroes, holding the line against waves of encroaching monsters.
And the [Deep] — utterly unknown territory, never yet explored, from which more monsters poured forth without end.
And here was the thing.
The Dungeon of this era did not respawn monsters.
Both Mam and Airon confirmed it. Every monster inside the Dungeon surged up from the deeper regions — which was why the city's heroes had been locked in an endless war of attrition. Step by step, pushing the monsters back into the Great Pit, then sending forces in to sweep and clear, then holding the line further and further down.
Isagi, Ais, and Riveria all found this difficult to wrap their heads around.
So every single monster originated from the [Deep]?
"After all these years, we'd pushed the [Front] a long way down — and now it looks like it's all unraveling..."
The Great Hero Albert's group weren't just trying to advance the [Front] — they had also pushed into the [Deep] to gather intelligence on what lay beyond.
According to Mam and Airon, not long after they departed the [Front], a tide of monsters that defied counting had come crashing through, obliterating the heroes' fortresses and sweeping all the way to the surface. Mam and Airon had fought in that chaos, but were separated from the main force — and then gotten hopelessly lost, unable to determine their location, wandering blindly through the caverns.
"Lucky we ran into you lot!"
Mam laughed with enormous good cheer.
Isagi had also quickly worked out that these two were, without question, completely and utterly directionless — couldn't tell left from right, let alone north from south.
Hopeless.
Their current objective was to return to the former [Front], and from there push into the previously uncharted [Deep] to find Albert and the others. For Airon specifically, the priority was Her Highness the Saint — faced with a crisis of this scale, an Elf could not rest until her safety was confirmed.
But they had no sense of direction whatsoever.
"We just keep going deeper, right?!"
"..."
Mam kept that broad, sunny grin plastered across his face — cheerful enough that it had, at some point, made even the stoic Airon look faintly embarrassed.
Isagi, for his part, had his own curiosity gnawing at him.
So in the ancient era, monsters spawned from the deeper regions and surged upward — that was the rule. But then... what had that been?
Those skeleton soldiers from before had definitely spawned around the three of them directly. And that went for Udaeus too. Was that because of his own Skills?
Or—
Did the Dungeon have ideas of its own?
____
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