Dungeon, Deep Floors, Floor 37, the White Palace.
A group in matching wide hooded cloaks sat around a campfire, faces shifting and grim as they watched another group of their own in black cloaks a short distance away, laboring to set something up.
It looked like some kind of secret, dangerous ritual.
By rights this should have been the moment the job was nearly done, a moment worth celebrating. After all, apart from those First-Class Adventurers who had no regard for their own lives or were a little off in the head, nobody, the lunatics of Evilus included, enjoyed spending long stretches in this sunless Dungeon.
Especially not here, Floor 37 of the Deep Floors, a death trap whose name alone was enough to make a heart skip.
Here there was no sunlight, no breeze, no good food, and no women.
Even a peaceful night's sleep had become a luxury.
Every breath had to be taken carefully, for fear of disturbing the Spartoi drifting nearby, terrifying undead any one of which had Lv.4 power.
This was a sunless prison where even the freedom to breathe had been stripped away, like one enormous cage.
And everyone who had come this deep was a prisoner struggling inside it.
The campfire crackled and jumped, throwing the shadows of the men around it onto the wall, stretched and warped. Under the hoods, faces were hard to make out in the shifting light and dark, nothing but obscure shadow.
"Damn it... why did I have to be the one who drew this cursed job?"
"Floor 37! The Deep Floors, Floor 37! I'm an ordinary Lv.3 squad leader, why, why me?"
You could hear the unease and fear in his voice.
On the surface, wearing the skin of Evilus, they stirred up wave after wave of terror and chaos, feared by countless people, demons in the minds of ordinary citizens, an "evil" that the important figures had no choice but to take seriously.
But in the Dungeon, who cared whether you were the Order Alliance or Evilus? What was a mere Lv.2 or Lv.3 small fry worth here?
Just then a subordinate hurried over at a jog and bowed respectfully.
"Boss, we've got news!"
He was already restless from this thorny, dangerous job, his nerves stretched to the point of snapping, constantly on guard against a monster ambush, and the report lit the irritation that had been piling up inside him.
"...Talk."
"Uh... about that, things aren't looking good! The squad on Floor 28 failed their job too!"
Hearing the edge in the boss's tone, the underling spoke carefully.
"According to the guy who got out..."
"They failed even harder this time. The believers we had scattering the Monster Lure Powder deep in, one of them slipped up and somehow got caught in the target group's wide-area annihilation magic, and just... he's gone!"
The boss said nothing for a long moment.
Under the underling's nervous gaze, he slowly got to his feet.
First he paced back and forth beside the campfire with his hands behind his back, then raised a trembling hand and pulled off his hood.
And then a string of Orario obscenities, heavy on the mom insults, rang out through the White Palace.
"W! ! ! **?"
", , ! , !"
...
He swore for a full half hour, until his mouth was dry and his voice was hoarse, and only then did he stop.
He took a deep breath and held out a hand to the underling.
"Water!"
The underling handed over his own waterskin at the speed of light.
He tipped his head back and drained the entire skin, and only then did the churning rage seem to settle a little.
"I don't get it."
"Nobody asked you to fight them head on. Just some quiet interference from behind, slow their progress down, buy us a bit more time over here. How is something this simple so hard?"
"A pack of useless trash!"
"And that squad watching Floor 18, the ones causing trouble in the Great Tree Labyrinth, they're even more damn useless!"
"Can't even stall them for a single day..."
"How am I supposed to build anything with vermin like this?"
"A bunch of garbage, nothing in their heads but themselves!"
"Fuck!"
Listening to his leader's furious roaring, the underling bent his waist even lower.
He was afraid of hearing something he shouldn't, and being sent to meet his maker the next second.
"You. Yes, you! Get over here!"
"Boss!"
"Everyone except the ones we need on watch, call them all over!"
"Speed up the ritual setup!"
"I want it finished within five days... any problems?"
"B, but boss... if you compress it down to five days, we won't have enough time to pull out. We'll be stuck here ourselves!"
"Shut up. Tell them this: if they can't finish it in the time I've set, they can stay here and dance with the Spartoi."
The underling didn't dare say another word.
...
...
Floor 28, the Withered Bone Wasteland.
After more than an hour of fierce fighting, the Dungeon's "welcome ceremony for newcomers" finally came to an end.
The difficulty of the Withered Bone Wasteland was visibly a step above the Water City.
Although the monsters on this floor were still Lv.3 and Lv.4 in rank, as the saying went, there were gaps even among Lv.4s.
To use Adventurer grades as a comparison, the monsters of the Water City sat roughly at the I, H, and G levels, while the monsters of the Withered Bone Wasteland had generally jumped up into the higher tiers.
From the moment the fight began, whether it was the mages Leon and Margaret, the support pair Laurier and Aura, or the other members engaging in close combat, everyone noticed something off in the feel of it the instant blades met.
Strength, Endurance, Dexterity, Agility, the monsters here showed an across-the-board improvement over the ones in the Water City.
Add in the way the monster types combined with natural weapons and traps, and their threat multiplied.
Even at the same rank, the monsters of the Withered Bone Wasteland and those of the Water City were not fighting on the same level at all.
Dry branches and dead leaves crunched underfoot as Leon climbed a small rise on the wasteland. He reached up and pulled off the heavy hood, revealing black hair soaked with sweat, swept the hair off his forehead with a careless hand, narrowed his eyes, and looked out toward the far end of the wasteland.
"Whew, an open view like this. First time in the Dungeon."
"What's going on, why does this feel so refreshing?"
He shook his head with a rueful laugh, then took stock of his current condition.
"Whew... more than a third of my Mind is gone. Tch, first time since I got the Demon Lord's Crest."
"Not a big problem, though."
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