Darkness surrounded Olivas as he plunged down, arms spread, his melted face nearly healed. Air roared against his ears, an oceanic pressure that rattled his frame.
His eyes were closed, as if trying to listen to something only he could hear.
Jutting stones whipped past his periphery, brown blurs that snapped in focus for a moment before ripping upward and out of sight. The massive ceiling of the eighth floor above compressed into a flat line, then a thread, then a mere grey speck, all in a single breath.
"Why have you gone suddenly quiet!?" He snarled, and wind shredded the words, his voice splintering into distorted echoes.
"You can't leave me too! You can't!"
A pinpoint of golden radiance blazed in the darkness above. It swallowed that grey speck of the eighth floor, then kept falling, cascading down faster than his fall. Its light washed over the jutting stones around him, and they unraveled, brown blurs dissolving into amber sand.
He snapped his head up, both healed eyes constricting.
"What... is that?"
That speck enlarged into a pond of molten glow, and that pond stretched into a horizon of golden flakes, and right in the middle of it all, a weapon of brilliance plunged down.
Above was a sky of gold. Below was a sea of darkness.
Olivas was an ant between both.
The sky fell down. The earth rose up.
That weapon became a single string of light punching through Olivas' chest, diving into the darkness even further down, the golden horizon still catching up from above.
It started from his chest. The wound there crystallized, brilliant fractures spreading outward across his ribs, threading down his arms, climbing his neck.
His fingers came apart first, each one unraveling into a stream of luminous specks that his fall left behind, and his arms followed, dissolving into glittering trails that curved upward.
He couldn't scream. His mouth opened, but his jaw was already gone, glowing dust pouring from where it had been a second before. His legs held on for one more heartbeat before they too surrendered, scattering into a bright cloud that trailed behind the weapon like a tail.
One eye remained.
And that eye saw it.
... Ah.
Past that horizon of specks. From the seventh floor to Babel's surface, golden petals drifted down.
A petal landed on the crushed arm of a woman pinned beneath rubble, and her bone mended, blood seeping back in. She gasped, fingers flexing around a sword she thought she'd never hold again.
Two petals settled on a pallum's shattered legs, and the muscles there stitched, fractures fusing back. His eyes snapped open, wet with tears that hadn't come even under pain.
More petals. More bodies. Across every floor Olivas had plummeted through, along every corridor that had been torn apart in Bell's climb.
And then he saw them.
His own specks.
The golden dust that had been his fingers, arms, and body. It drifted through the corridors of the dungeon, carried on no wind, falling on other broken adventurers.
His dust mended them.
What he wanted to destroy, his remains restored.
Bell Cranel. You won't even let me die in peace?
No one answered.
And he was gone.
The weapon didn't stop and traced a path floor after floor, dungeon curling around it.
Floor nine. Floor ten.
On the tenth, a corridor had become a slaughterhouse.
Monster parade.
The walls were split open, spawning a tide of Silverbacks and Minotaurs into a narrow passage where thirty adventurers had been trying to evacuate the wounded.
Now they were pinned, flanked from both ahead and behind, their blades out.
A Minotaur led the charge, eight feet of muscle and instinct, club in hand, already mid-swing.
An adventurer with a tower shield caught the blow and his legs buckled, steel screeching against wood, knees hitting stone.
Ouka.
"Hold!" He dug his shins deeper into the ground, shoulder braced against his shield, pushing back. His axe was still in his other hand, buried in a Hellhound's skull.
Another Minotaur rushed at Ouka from the left, its hoof screaming toward his head.
A band of golden light from above reflected off a katana, flashing across that hoof.
Shing.
Blood sprayed as an edge severed it at that exact point, sending the monster's leg spinning end over end.
That Minotaur howled and launched its club toward a far-eastern woman with long straight hair who was falling back, blood dripping down her katana.
Mikoto.
At the same time, a Silverback and Hellhound pounced toward her from both sides. Further back, Chigusa aimed her arrow at the club, then shifted it toward the Silverback, then that Hellhound.
"Mikoto!"
Ouka tried to hurl his axe at the second Hellhound, but the Minotaur shoved him back, and his balance broke, sending him tumbling, shield dragging with him.
Mikoto clutched her katana's hilt. A strip of luminescence from above hit her blade's edge, throwing another band across the Silverback's neck. She glanced behind her once at Chigusa and the other wounded grouped together.
Clenching her teeth, she swung her katana, muscles tensing, bracing for pain.
One inch before the Hellhound's teeth sank into her—
A golden light flooded everything.
They were forced to shut their eyes, and by the time they jerked them open, that whole monster parade was gone. Only petals drifted down from where the ceiling used to be, slow and silent.
Mikoto felt a single petal settle on her crown, warm and unfamiliar.
Somewhere far below, the weapon kept falling.
Floor thirteen—Through.
Floor fifteen—Left behind.
Floor seventeen.
The Wall of Grief lay shattered. Cracks split across whatever was left of its surface, venting heat that melted rocks into sludge, and from the largest fissure, something was climbing out.
Black bones unfolded limb by limb, each segment interlocking with a click. Claws first, then thin, calcified arms, followed by a bare skull.
Its first step cracked the whole floor's base. Its second detonated the debris skyward, crushing it into fine dust.
A third step.
And the ceiling came down.
Juggernaut snapped its skull up, crimson eyes widening.
The weapon descended, its tail stretching from the seventeenth floor, through every floor in between, all the way to the surface, past thousands of adventurers, revealing blue sky overhead.
Before that weapon reached Juggernaut, sunlight did.
It froze.
Brilliance impaled it, and dragged it down.
Floor eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty.
Juggernaut screamed. Three whole floors following its fall.
Stone, trees, and rubble tore free around it, slabs of the twenty first floor's ceiling rained down alongside it, walls peeling away from walls, entire corridors ripping loose and tumbling in the dark.
Then the gold bled in.
It started at its entry wound. The crack in Juggernaut's torso where the weapon had impaled began to glow, amber fractures racing outward across black bone.
A broken pillar from the nineteenth floor spun beside its spine. Then radiance reached it too, and that stone softened, its edges blurring, mass thinning, until it was no longer stone but light, howling down alongside the creature.
That weapon kept going, tearing through floor after floor, showing no signs of halting.
Taking Juggernaut with it.
...
..
.
[Author's Thoughts]
Yes, this was the person Bell was saying the last line to. Hey, Juggernaut bro, keep holding on, don't die on us yet! You have to hold on!
And the final fight of this small arc is coming soon. It'll be hella fun.
Anyway, have a fabulous day, everyone.