Before them stretched a slope with no end in sight.
As they pressed on, Isagi and Ais and Riveria gradually came to understand what Mam and Airon had meant — that the Dungeon of this age had no concept of "floors."
The Great Pit of this era was more like an incomprehensibly vast cavern system carved deep into the earth.
Passages leading ever downward appeared almost everywhere — and they bore no resemblance to the orderly, structured corridors that connected floor to floor in the Dungeon Isagi knew. Here, there were cliff faces. Sinkholes. Sloping ramps. Even naturally spiraling mountain paths that wound steadily downward as though carved by the earth itself.
The Dungeon before them was one single, immeasurably enormous whole.
It brought to Ais and Riveria's minds the lower floors' [Great Waterfall] region — the area officially described as comprising the 25th through 27th floors, but which was, in truth, a single unified expanse. The great Azure Waterfall began at the 25th floor and tumbled all the way down to the base of the 27th, forming a lake of unfathomable depth — and within those waters, the Floor Boss, the Monster Rex · Two-Headed Dragon Amphisbaena, would rise.
This was exactly like that.
At the same time — probably because of Isagi's own presence — the entire journey had become extraordinarily grueling.
At some point, an impossibly dense shroud of fog had rolled in around them.
No — "fog" wasn't quite the right word. It was more like a blizzard. Or something even more extreme — a brutal, bone-cutting natural fury that made even Isagi and the girls quietly lament the fact that they hadn't brought ice-Spirit wraps along.
Fine hailstones rained down in a relentless torrent, each one striking like a tiny flung stone.
The savage conditions dropped visibility to almost nothing, and if that weren't enough, the slope beneath their feet was slick and treacherous — one wrong step and you were going down.
For seasoned adventurers, all of this still fell within the range of "manageable."
However.
The monsters that kept materializing without warning out of the thick fog were another matter entirely.
The worst part was that not just Isagi and the girls — even Mam and Airon had never laid eyes on any of these creatures before.
Goblins astride enormous wolves.
Giant Kobolds standing over two meters tall.
And from somewhere even deeper — a dinosaur-type monster whose twin claws were honed like blades, moving at speeds that defied belief. Even Isagi, if he wasn't paying close attention, could barely catch more than a blur — clearly a creature built for pure velocity.
Poisoned vines that shot from unknown positions. Pitch-black arrows loosed from invisible archers. Magic spells of every conceivable variety.
"What in the world—" Mam cursed under his breath, raising his great crossbow over and over, loosing bolt after bolt — and somehow, each one found its mark the instant a monster emerged from the blizzard, blowing it apart before it could fully appear.
Even so, some targets proved too resilient to drop in a single shot.
Whenever that happened, Airon's follow-up arrived without hesitation. He swept his staff in a wide arc, chanting in the ancient, complex tongue of the elder Elves.
Black liquid coalesced in the air, shaping itself into countless blades and spears — tearing the monster apart at every joint while simultaneously driving clean through its body.
"What happened to this Dungeon?" Airon muttered, his voice tight with unease. "Did Albert and the others do something, or is it—"
Isagi offered nothing in reply. Explaining the truth was, frankly, far too much trouble.
All things considered, the journey had been grueling — but they'd managed to avoid anything truly catastrophic.
The one nagging exception was the Skeleton King, Udaeus, which had been trailing the group ever since they'd left it behind. The Dungeon seemed to be actively cheating on its behalf.
Its massive body moved slowly. Agonizingly slowly. And yet it ignored every obstacle the terrain threw at it — because new pits kept opening up everywhere, from below, from the sides, from angles that made no sense, and every time one did, that vast ashen-gray skeletal hand came scraping its way back out.
Fortunately, the thing's movement was so profoundly clumsy that no matter how relentlessly it tried, and no matter how much the Dungeon reshaped the terrain in its favor, it simply couldn't close the gap.
But that was still enough to ensure the group couldn't stop. Not for even a moment — because the second they did, they'd have no choice but to actually fight the thing.
Mam and Airon never complained. They simply kept walking — until at last, the slope ended.
Beyond it stretched a vast, desolate wasteland.
The blizzard still howled, making it impossible to distinguish any direction. Even Isagi, Ais, and Riveria found themselves at a loss.
The Elf and the Dwarf beside them were hopelessly directionally challenged — they'd said they wanted to return to the old [Front], but neither of them had the first idea how to get there.
Not a good sign.
The most pressing concern, though, was supplies.
They had only just entered the Dungeon, so that wasn't yet a crisis. Before they'd set off, Wishe and the others had packed them provisions — food and water loaded into large packs that Riveria, as the party's mage, carried. Enough to last well over half a month at normal consumption; stretched carefully, perhaps a full month.
Mam and Airon were each carrying their own supplies as well. Between all five of them, eating and drinking comfortably for a month or two wasn't out of the question. For now, there was nothing to worry about.
But if they needed to press deeper, those supplies would eventually run dry. When that came up, Mam and Airon's answer was straightforward enough: there were wild fruits to forage and edible animals and fish to catch inside the Dungeon — and the camps and fortresses built by the heroes and soldiers of old should still have provisions stockpiled within them.
Monsters, it turned out, paid no attention to such things. They would devour the corpses of fallen adventurers without hesitation — but the packs and weapons and equipment left behind? Those they ignored entirely.
"There's always a way," Mam said, sounding utterly unbothered. "Worst case, we turn around, take down that big ugly thing, and climb back to the surface."
The Dwarf's optimism was almost absurd. Though what he left unsaid was this: even if their supplies ran out completely, the two of them would almost certainly find a way to keep pressing downward regardless — because finding Albert and the others was the reason they were here.
Because every person who had come to this city — heroes, followers, soldiers alike — had entered the Great Pit without any expectation of coming back out.
"Do you know what the survival rate is," Airon said, his voice cutting through the air without warning, "for soldiers who enter the Great Pit?"
The question caught Isagi and the girls completely off guard.
"Zero."
"An ordinary soldier who enters the Great Pit will be dead within roughly three days. Even those who survive that long — not one of them lasts a full week."
"The heroes aren't much better. A month, maybe two — that's all most of them can manage. Only a hero like Albert, one blessed by a Great Spirit, can endure any longer than that."
"Our role here is simply to buy time."
It was a brutal thing to say aloud. The most brutal kind of truth.
And yet.
"Someone has to."
"People have come from every corner of the world. Ordinary soldiers follow heroes. Heroes follow those greater than themselves. On and on, year after year, for more years than anyone can count — right up to this moment."
"We keep the Dungeon suppressed. That way, the monsters never spill out across the continent. They never reach the hometowns and nations people left behind. They never hurt the innocent."
It was worth everything.
So from the moment they stepped into the Great Pit, they had never once thought about leaving it alive. Fulfilling their purpose mattered more than surviving. Or perhaps, more precisely — finding Albert and the others, and keeping a hero blessed by a Great Spirit alive, was worth more than their own lives.
That was why Airon would not relent. He had to find Her Highness the Saint — because she would surely be with Albert and the rest.
Isagi, Ais, and Riveria understood. Of course they did.
As they'd said before — the relationship between the people of this age and the Dungeon was not "adventure." It was war. An age of pure desperation, where the only choice was kill or be killed. And yet despite understanding that, neither Isagi, nor Ais, nor Riveria could quite make it feel real.
Were they just passing through?
As far as Isagi was concerned — yes. His reason for entering the Dungeon was still, at its core, "adventure" — the desire to see what the ancient-era Dungeon looked like from the inside. But more than anything, what he actually needed to do was find the way home.
And as they'd walked, he had already spotted several respawn points along the route. Each one felt like a waymarker pointing the path forward — almost every single one had appeared at the threshold of a descent: at the top of a slope, at the edge of a cliff, at the mouth of a spiraling mountain path leading downward.
Isagi had a feeling. As long as they kept moving, he would eventually find it — that respawn point ringed with pure-white butterflies — and it would carry him and Ais and the girls back to their own time.
And so, that feeling gave everything before his eyes a quality of... distance. A slight detachment, like watching events unfold from a step removed.
This ancient-era Dungeon is disturbingly intelligent, Isagi thought.
Just from what they'd gathered so far: it had all begun when Albert and his company launched their expedition into the previously uncharted [Deep]. After they pushed through, the Dungeon had gathered its strength and unleashed a devastating counteroffensive — demolishing every fortress and forward camp the heroes had built inside the Great Pit, and driving the assault all the way to the city above. Severing Albert's supply lines. Cutting off any possibility of retreat.
And then — it had begun gathering power once more. According to Mam and Airon, aside from the initial wave of monsters that had smashed through everything, they had gone a long time without any monster encounters before crossing paths with Isagi's group. Which could only mean one thing: the Dungeon had stopped producing more creatures. It was stockpiling. Building toward something.
The strongest thing it had.
The Black Dragon.
It looked, Isagi thought, like the buildup to a final battle.
But then his group had appeared — an unexpected variable — and forced the Dungeon to divert a fraction of its attention. Which meant that in some roundabout way, they might actually be doing the Great Hero Albert a favor. They were drawing off part of the Dungeon's focus.
Fair enough.
And from there, Isagi's thoughts leapt further — to something larger. If they actually managed to defeat the Black Dragon here, in this time... would the Black Dragon that had never been defeated in his own world simply cease to exist? Would the Zeus Familia and the Hera Familia — annihilated in the failed subjugation — survive instead? What would Orario look like in that case?
A changed timeline.
It was a natural enough thought to arrive at. Ais and Riveria might have had trouble following the logic, but to Isagi it felt almost ordinary — the stuff of any story worth telling.
Or maybe this was a parallel world? Maybe nothing they did here would ripple outward to affect the future they'd come from?
It made him genuinely curious. Intensely so.
He shared his musings quietly with Ais and Riveria. As expected, Ais didn't quite follow — but Riveria, the High Elf Princess who was, after all, very much in the prime of her youth, grasped the thread of his reasoning well enough.
And she sensed something larger in it. Something vast and immovable — like fate.
They were not tourists from the future.
Everything happening here was bound, in ways she couldn't yet fully see, to the world they had left behind.
Of course — for a Princess who had always loved exploring the unknown, who had once left her home in the royal forest alone simply to see what lay beyond its boundaries, she was also deeply, genuinely curious about what lay at the bottom of this ancient Dungeon.
Then let's go.
Keep moving forward.
No matter how many ways you turned it over in your mind, that was always where you ended up. Whether this was war or adventure — the only answer was to go forward. Whether you were a soldier or a hero or an adventurer from another age entirely, standing before a Dungeon that defied all understanding, what you could do — what you had to do — was the same.
At that moment, all three of them glanced toward Airon — still walking ahead of the group, leading the way — and in their eyes was something that looked like compassion.
Whatever came next, there was no question about how it ended for this Elven man. His fate had already been decided — he would die inside the Dungeon. If that weren't true, Isagi and the girls could never have encountered him in the distant future. Even if he had long since made his peace with it, that knowledge still carried its own weight of sadness.
And even if they told him right now, it almost certainly couldn't change anything.
"Found one! This is a marker left by one of the others."
Out in the wasteland, the Dwarf walking ahead of the group crouched down and lifted something from the ground — a cloth bag reeking of an extraordinary stench. For a split second it looked uncannily like the kind of bag Isagi used to carry around Kobold dung pellets.
Hm.
The Dungeon was sly about this. Any markings left on walls, floors, trees, or stones — the Dungeon would silently erase them all. But in a labyrinthine world like this, no adventurer could navigate purely by memory and a hand-drawn map, and unexpected accidents were always separating companions from one another. Leaving markers was an absolute necessity.
The standard solution the heroes of this age had landed on was these bags — packed with carefully blended medicinal herbs whose overwhelming stench would last for years without rotting, spreading a smell so brutally sharp it could be detected hundreds of meters away. Monsters despised the odor and refused to touch them.
In short: the perfect marker.
Seeing it, Ais couldn't help but think of the fact that even in his own time, Isagi used Kobold Dung Pellets as trail markers when exploring the Dungeon.
What exactly did it mean that heroes across different eras had arrived at the same solution?!
"Great minds think alike," Isagi said simply.
They worked, after all. That was enough.
Mam's delight, however, came from something else — the marking on the bag indicated it belonged to the logistics unit assigned to Albert's company. Which meant—
"Whatever else happens, finding your Saint is starting to look a little less hopeless."
____
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