Isagi returned alone to the plaza where they'd started.
Without Lefiya, Ryuu-senpai, and the others, the trip back had certainly been something of a hassle. Still, since he had Teardrop Big Bro with him, he wasn't exactly reduced to fighting all on his own.
And after he'd come back here—
he actually noticed a few peculiar things instead.
These hunters' corpses had been placed here on purpose. It was as if they were both a warning to those who came after, and a kind of guidance, exactly as he and Ryuu-senpai and the others had guessed earlier.
That SS-rank hunter's twisted mask was looking off to one side, and over in that direction, scattered along the long street, lay quite a few fragments of hunters' corpses.
Like the little dried fish used to lure in cats, or the coins scattered to tempt the greedy.
Isagi stepped forward.
This time he'd come because he wanted to do the same as before—ideally, find this place's final BOSS first, see just how strong it really was, and confirm what level the squad would need to reach in order to conquer it—
And so.
Soon enough, together with the [Soul Teardrop], he pressed onward.
Along the way, the plazas guiding him forward grew more and more numerous. In themselves they weren't much different from one another, but the hunters' corpses heaped up in them kept growing more numerous as well.
Until.
He arrived before an enormous plaza, one that seemed to be the very center of the entire [Golden Kingdom].
How long had he been walking?
Even Isagi himself couldn't remember. If he wanted to go back, it would take quite a bit of effort.
Just how vast was the space beneath the desert of this 33rd floor? He couldn't really say, but that it was larger than Orario—that much was certain.
And his earlier conjecture had been confirmed as well.
That being—
Floors 33 through 36 were, in all likelihood, "interconnected."
Though you couldn't tell from the surface, right before his eyes, another massive pit had already appeared.
The scene before him bore some resemblance to the Goblin Kingdom of the past.
In the deserted center of the town, on a vast plaza, a huge hole several dozen meters across simply loomed abruptly into view.
Only.
There was no lift of any kind here.
On the contrary, along one side of the sandpit's cliff face, there still stood houses rising and falling one after another, just like tree houses built up in a great tree.
Arranged in a jumbled, staggered pattern, descending ever downward, they even gave the impression of having formed a "staircase."
Isagi couldn't recall whether he'd ever passed through a pit like the one before him.
In truth, from the moment he'd entered this "Golden Kingdom," he'd felt that something was a little different.
Until.
When he came to the edge of the great hole piled high with countless hunters' corpses and looked down below, he finally realized where the problem lay.
The sand—it was melting.
Or rather, it was flowing, like a long river or a mountain stream, sliding ceaselessly toward the deeper darkness, giving off a faint rustling sound.
And it seemed that because he was staring at it—
the speed at which the sand slipped away increased.
Slowly, the houses set into the cliff walls began to peel away, dissolving, turning to dust that scattered down. Then the once-motionless rock walls turned into a waterfall of flowing sand, transforming that previously delicate rustle into a noisy clamor.
Then it continued to spread, until it reached the top of the pit, drawing in the entire plaza and the houses around it.
The corpses heaped at the pit's edge were no exception.
As the sand flowed, they too gradually tumbled into the pitch-black hole—silently, as if devoured by some great maw.
Isagi still stood where he was, letting the town around him "melt."
When the Dungeon changes, it certainly isn't for the sake of looking pretty.
Mm.
It's probably also meant to intimidate.
After all, when a formidable foe makes its entrance, there has to be some atmosphere to it.
You can't very well just be walking along, run into some knight crouched under a tree, get one-shotted with a single slash, and have him declare himself the big BOSS.
And right now, it was obviously telling him to jump in.
Then in he'd go.
Directly unfurling the golden wings on his back, Isagi flew without the slightest hesitation toward the pit below, and once again arrived at "another world"—
Beneath the sand, of course, there was still more sand.
But it was more cramped.
Everything before his eyes was pitch dark. Isagi could feel that this space wasn't very large.
Overhead, the flowing sand still poured down, like a curtain of fine rain.
But strangely enough, by the light of the Magic Stone lantern at his waist, Isagi could see that the sand beneath his feet was "receding."
More and more sand was falling from above.
Yet the sand piling up under his feet grew less and less, and then, the things it had buried began to reveal themselves.
Weapons, armor, skeletons.
This place seemed to be the ruins of an ancient battlefield.
Humanoid bones were everywhere, and there were enormous ones too—one glance made clear they belonged to monsters.
Isagi had at first assumed the former belonged to those "hunters."
But on closer inspection he realized that wasn't right, because even when a hunter's corpse weathered down to bone, it would—like the monsters' remains—have a "Magic Stone" embedded among the bones.
[When a Magic Stone leaves the body or is shattered, the monster's very existence directly weathers away and vanishes.]
This was one of the Dungeon's rules, and it held true even for those he'd specialized.
So.
These humanoid bones weren't monsters—they were adventurers.
Over the city's thousand years, how many adventurers had died in the Dungeon?
That number was simply impossible to calculate.
Take today's Orario: the total number of adventurers was at least in the tens of thousands, upward of a hundred thousand, and of course the high-level ones—those capable of reaching this place—would at minimum be Lv. 3 or Lv. 4 tier-two adventurers.
That was probably somewhere from a few hundred to over a thousand people?
But the city as it was now was far from its most flourishing era—you could even say it was at its weakest.
Before the Astrea Familia, or rather before he himself had come to the city.
Tier-one adventurers of Lv. 5 and above numbered barely ten or twenty, and Lv. 7 was already the [City's Strongest], of which there was only one.
But back when the Zeus and Hera Familia, along with the gods who dwelt in the "Pyramid," were all present, Lv. 5 and above alone numbered at least in the hundreds, and adventurers of Lv. 7 and above numbered a dozen or more.
That was the truly most flourishing era of the City of Adventurers.
And Orario's decline was inseparably tied to the total annihilation of the two great Familia, Zeus and Hera, in their expedition against the [Black Dragon].
But before that.
There was a stretch of history already forgotten—a past that even a goddess like Astrea, who'd come to the city later, knew little about.
Isagi had heard of it from the goddess Demeter.
And from Chloe as well.
As one of the mainstays of the burger shop now, the black-cat girl was long past being the Lv. 4 assassin she'd once been. But her origins lay with the Familia of the goddess of murder, Sekhmet, and within that Familia she was "a cut above the rest"—had she not run off, she might even have become an officer, or even the captain.
She was Lv. 4, after all.
Isagi remembered that back when they'd conquered the Artificial Labyrinth, the remnants of the Dark Familia had used cursed weapons to summon the full-force backing of the goddess of murder. Yet even so, the assassins who came to the city were only around Lv. 2 and Lv. 3.
There was no helping it—outside the city, cultivating powerful adventurers was simply too difficult.
And Sekhmet, it was said, had once been one of the gods of the Pyramid, and was also one of the deities driven out of Orario by the Zeus and Hera Familia.
In that far-distant age.
The city's two strongest Familia had waged "war" against the gods of the Pyramid.
After that battle, Osiris, Set, Sobek, and many other gods were expelled from the city, and the many Lv. 5-and-above adventurers who served as their Familia officers all perished as well.
That was clearly a great war.
A battle involving tier-one adventurers, of course, could not possibly be fought within the city.
You have to understand.
Even during the [Great Conflict], with only a handful of Lv. 5 Dark Familia officers on the surface, the fighting against the adventurers all but destroyed a full third of Orario.
So that battle against the gods of the Pyramid was carried out down in the Dungeon.
This matter.
This was what Isagi had heard from the goddess Demeter.
Because the gods of the Pyramid had not chosen a [War Game]. Instead, over a long span of time, they had quietly cultivated their Familia's strength and concealed their members' levels, then suddenly launched a surprise attack against the Zeus and Hera Familia.
The gods waited on the surface for their children's "results," while the combat among the Lv. 5-and-above adventurers unfolded down in the Dungeon, so the surface was left entirely unaffected.
It was said that when the sun rose.
The people saw only the adventurers of the Zeus and Hera Familia striding home drenched in blood, while the Familia of the Pyramid's gods had been slaughtered to the last.
It was this battle, too.
That cemented the Zeus and Hera Familia's position as the [City's Strongest].
The Orario of old had been that bloody.
Isagi recalled that whether it was Riveria, or Ottar and the others, or even Astrea herself, they all rarely spoke of the past deeds of the Zeus and Hera Familia.
Because in that era.
It truly was a time where the victor was king, and where even the conflicts between adventurers were struggles to the death.
It was said that the adventurers who died at the hands of their "own people" typically far outnumbered those killed by monsters.
Ganesha's "guards" simply did not exist.
The city maintained only the barest minimum of peace, and as for the strife among adventurers, it was left entirely to be settled on their own.
Whether the Dark Familia.
Or those merchant guilds and mercenary bands prowling the gray zones.
Including the Pleasure Quarter.
They were all remnants of that era.
And now, Isagi seemed about to witness with his own eyes the "ferocity" of those days.
For the Dungeon to dredge up the bones of so many adventurers—of course it wasn't merely to have them serve as backdrop and mood-setters. Rather, it was—
[to kill.]
What Isagi felt in this moment was a bloodlust so thick it was suffocating, utterly undisguised.
Bloodlust this intense—it was even the first time he'd ever seen it.
So direct.
Was it because this place was a [battlefield]?
Those long-dead humanoid skeletons were struggling, rising, groping about, taking their old weapons back into their hands.
And then, they launched an assault upon him.
The humanoid skeleton gripped a longsword, and at a speed simply unbelievable, its technique was no slouch either—for an instant it even gave him the illusion of fighting Ais or Ryuu-senpai.
And what's more.
There were skills and magic too.
The very first skeleton to reach him began to give off a faint glow all over. Then, he watched as it swung its right leg while its head thrust forward, and an arm gripping a longsword reached out from its chest, biting toward him.
"?"
It was an illusion.
A bit like his own [Moonlight Greatsword]—the perfectly ordinary humanoid skeleton had its body twist into something utterly grotesque, its neck stretching long, a leg growing from its arm, an arm growing from its chest, constantly shifting, baffling the mind.
That's right—mainly, it made you "think."
Think, "What's going on?" "How did it turn into this?" "So what do I do now?"
Isagi couldn't help but freeze for a beat, and only then did he realize this was the skeleton's skill or magic.
Fortunately, a pause in his thoughts could no longer affect his perception.
Years of combat experience had long since honed his body to "move on its own" in a fight like this—simply stitching together the sound of the wind and his instincts, he caught its true attack.
"Interesting."
Because this skeleton didn't yet have a name.
Isagi lowered his eyes slightly, understanding that this was only the appetizer.
These clumsy-looking little skeleton grunts actually possessed considerable skill, and it wasn't as if he'd never dealt with their kind before.
On the 37th floor, there were quite a lot of monsters just like this. Back then they'd given him and Ryuu-senpai a proper bit of training, in fact.
After all, those were at least Lv. 6 foes.
And now, the skeleton adventurers before him were about the same—probably Lv. 6 as well—only with a few peculiar skills and spells added on.
As well as—
Coordination.
In the distance, the other skeleton adventurers that had clambered up were already preparing to begin their assault on him.
Longbows, magic, and fellows wielding great shields and spears.
It was just like an adventurers' squad.
But in truth, an adventurers' squad conquering monsters in the Dungeon and adventurers fighting against other adventurers were still quite different things.
Monsters really do get their aggro pulled by the [Vanguard].
But adventurers don't.
So, upon hearing the whistle of arrows cutting the wind from afar and the skeletons' "clack-clack" clattering—
Isagi had already leapt into the air, and relying on his advantage in speed, he charged toward the distant "archers" and "mages."
Of course.
The skeleton adventurers that had just been gripping longswords, along with the several that had clambered up one after another, still tried to block his way.
But very soon.
They discovered that the youth clad in pitch-black giant-wolf armor "split off" from behind himself an identical [Soul Teardrop].
It wasn't even a turnabout counterstrike.
Rather, it was a sudden pair of great hands reaching out from behind him, along with the utterly pitch-black [Moonlight Greatsword].
Once, facing a single Lv. 6 skeleton monster, he and Ryuu-senpai had had to exhaust every ounce of strength, battling it fiercely for who knows how long, before seizing the right moment to destroy the Magic Stone and finally bring it down.
But back then he'd been Lv. 5.
And now.
He was Lv. 6, and his [Stats] had long since reached the point where he could level up. Even among adventurers of the same level, he could be counted as a "strongest" existence.
So, monsters of the same level, before him and the [Soul Teardrop] that was completely identical to himself—
could only be instantly annihilated.
It took just one strike.
The pitch-black Moonlight Greatsword swept across, and in an instant it reduced the several skeleton adventurers that had caught up with him to drifting ash.
Right now Isagi was only curious whether they counted as monsters.
Or whether they were merely—
phantoms?
No Magic Stones dropped, so they weren't monsters.
Isagi twitched the corner of his mouth, thinking to himself that the Dungeon was getting a bit stingier and stingier, wasn't it—killing monsters and not even getting a single drop, huh?!
____
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