Isagi chose not to give up.
Faced once again with an unknown situation, this time the boy's choice was not to retreat — but to observe first.
The goal of this adventure was to defeat [Alfia]: a boss fight, not an especially long one by any measure.
In theory, the whole thing — travel time included — should wrap up in two or three days at most. Which meant supplies were remarkably generous. During normal leveling runs, Isagi's group could operate inside the Dungeon for up to half a month at a stretch, and now the party was even larger than usual.
The amount they could carry had grown accordingly.
At this rate, everyone could stay in the Dungeon for a full month without issue — and with Rivira available for resupply, they could stay as long as they liked.
After confirming that neither the tower nor the [Holy City] outside it contained a single monster, Isagi made a bold decision: he would use his daily revival count to probe Alfia and Absolute Evil's attack patterns — alone, ahead of the rest.
The woman he faced now was completely unlike the one from before. What strategy to use, and how to go about dismantling her — that required careful planning.
Naturally, none of the girls objected to his decision.
Even so…
"Isn't this a little too brutal," someone murmured.
The group had temporarily commandeered a room — or rather, several rooms — in one of the inns of Rivira, the adventurer's town suspended in the air above the Great Tree Labyrinth.
"Inn" was a generous word for it. The rooms were narrow, the wooden walls offered absolutely no soundproofing, and the beds — little more than stacked stone and brick — could not be called comfortable by any stretch of the imagination. Still, they'd brought their own fresh bedding, so lying down was bearable enough.
Whatever the case, it was better than sleeping rough in the open or huddled in a tent.
Inside the rooms, the girls — lacking any nightwear — sat on the edges of their beds or on cushions spread across the floor, snacking and talking quietly among themselves.
Isagi had already fallen asleep next door.
After reaching Lv. 6, his daily revival count had climbed to six — but against Alfia and Absolute Evil, the final bosses of the middle floors, each life lasted only a few minutes at most.
So today, in under an hour, the probing session had already concluded.
Now they simply had to wait for tomorrow.
The boy was obviously exhausted, and he hadn't said a word about what had happened in there. But Riveria could sense something from him — some indescribable quality of hardship that lived just beneath the surface.
Dying over and over again to map out a monster's attack patterns. Building the final battle strategy from the wreckage of each failed attempt.
This was something Isagi did all the time, of course. Ryuu, Lefiya, and even Ais were all well acquainted with it.
But for the Azure Princess, this was the first time she had ever truly witnessed it with her own eyes — not just heard about it secondhand.
To say she was shaken would be an understatement.
Fearlessness in the face of death is easy to say. But when the fangs and blades of a monster are actually tearing into your flesh, feeling no fear whatsoever is simply impossible.
Riveria was a deeply seasoned adventurer. She had wandered the world before coming to Orario, and since then, she had pushed into the Dungeon time and again. Loki Familia had reached as far as the 50th floor of the deep levels — and she had been there for every single step of it.
The number of times she had stared down the razor's edge between life and death was not small.
Which was precisely why she understood, better than most, just how terrifying this was.
Death — the encroaching shadow of it — had a way of announcing itself. No, that wasn't quite right: death was always already part of life, woven into it from the very beginning. Inescapable. Always coming, in the end.
But to face that fact with genuine composure — that was something most people could never manage.
Technically, Isagi wasn't actually dying, strictly speaking. What he suffered was — at most — a pain that was equivalent to dying. But even that was frightening enough.
Adventurers battered time and again tend to go numb. It was one of the most common traits among the veterans of Loki Familia. Yet on Isagi, Riveria saw nothing of the sort.
If anything.
She had originally thought she might say something to him — offer some kind of words when he returned from the tower. But the moment she saw his face, she realized there was simply no need. No point. What she found written there was nothing more than the expression of someone who had finished a minor chore. An ordinary part of his day.
The boy had long since made his peace with death.
And that was exactly why she found it so brutal — and why she felt, somewhere underneath it all, a kind of quiet awe.
It left her feeling slightly deflated.
After all, by any normal measure, she was the "senior" in this group. Not that she wanted to put on airs or assert any kind of authority.
It was more of a sense of responsibility — the same feeling that Ryuu often wrestled with. Elves were like that: conservative, traditional, prone to this instinct that as the elder, one ought to shoulder certain burdens.
So what Riveria felt now was a kind of quiet loss — because she had realized she was completely useless here.
Even more so.
She had originally imagined she might at least get to trade blows with Alfia. But after actually coming face-to-face with "the woman who was once the greatest mage in the city" inside the Church, Riveria had come to understand: she hadn't the faintest chance of winning.
With the rule-breaking magic of [Garden of Stillness] in play, no mage in existence could defeat Alfia. It was simply absurd.
Magic was entirely useless against her. Unless that problem could be solved, Riveria's contribution to the fight was no different from Heith's or Haruhime's. She could fight in close quarters, yes — but in a battle where even Ais and Tiona weren't enough, her "close combat" counted for nothing.
And it wasn't only her.
Right now, Lefiya and the others were wrestling with the same question.
The girls had grown accustomed to exercising their own initiative in moments like this — throwing out ideas, proposing answers, slowly piecing together a battle plan out of whatever they had. Even wild, half-formed thinking was fine. It broadened the horizon of what was possible, at least in some small way.
That was why they were all still awake and gathered together instead of sleeping.
Not that the discussion had produced anything useful — but then, it was only the first day.
Everyone understood. What lay ahead was going to be a long campaign. The opening phase, however, belonged almost entirely to Isagi.
All they could do was keep waiting.
Time moved slowly forward.
Rivira had long since lost any sense of day or night.
The Dungeon had no such concept to begin with. In the past, the brightness or dimness of the enormous crystal clusters hanging overhead had served as a rough substitute for distinguishing day from night — but it was never accurate, and it often ran completely contrary to the rhythms on the surface. That was perfectly normal. There was no sky in the Dungeon, so why would there be a sun, or stars, or a moon?
Riveria stepped out of the inn.
The discussion had gone on for a long while. The other girls had gradually given in to exhaustion and drifted off to sleep.
The town was now drowned in absolute, all-encompassing darkness — only the Holy City above and below still glimmered with the faint light of crystals.
It was a wholly strange and otherworldly sight. Something utterly impossible to see on the surface.
Riveria stood quietly in the feeling of it.
She drifted silently to the slope on the side of the floating island, stepping up to the edge of the cliff. One hand resting against the crude wooden railing, she gazed into the distance — at the crystal towers that joined from above and below, fusing together in a single great pillar that stretched between worlds.
They shimmered with a dim, hazy silver-grey radiance, like some colossal column of light descending from the heavens.
[How extraordinary.]
Standing here now, she truly felt it — the difference of Isagi's peculiar Dungeon.
The adventurer's town before her was as foreign to Riveria as anything she had ever encountered.
As an adventurer, she had come here more than once, and left again more than once. But she had never once imagined there would be a day like this.
A day when she would face Alfia here again — along with Absolute Evil, the being that the Dark Familia had once summoned in their bid to destroy the city and bring Babel crashing down.
Her thoughts drifted toward the past, toward memories that had grown hazy and disordered in the tangle of so many timelines.
Among all those branching possibilities — the images of mountains of corpses and rivers of blood rose again to the surface. The Under Resort as it had been then: a place as terrible as any vision of hell.
The Dark Familia had attacked here. Most of the adventurers who had been in Rivira at the time were slaughtered.
And then — Absolute Evil had appeared, and cut down the Dark Familia's officers and the remaining adventurers alike. The Dungeon's monsters didn't care whether you were righteous or a member of a Dark Familia. If you were an adventurer, you died.
Screams. Raging fire. Flesh and blood.
Those had been the colors of Rivira in that moment. Compared to the stillness around her now, the memory was genuinely horrifying. And then there was… wait.
Wait!
Riveria's eyes blinked — something had just clicked into place. She bowed her head and turned it over carefully, thinking hard.
She had caught hold of something important.
And not long after, she felt an urgent need to go wake Isagi — who was already fast asleep — and tell him immediately.
____
👻🔥Seek: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Uchiha Reborn in Jujutsu Kaisen: The System Thinks I'm in Konoha, but I'm Not
Let's hit these goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = 1 extra chapter for the public!