"These marks are fresh. The battle must have occurred within the last half hour."
Robin closed her eyes, seemingly sensing the lingering aura. Opening them a moment later, she analyzed with certainty, "This was... a one-sided slaughter. Judging by the slashes on the walls and floor, the wielder was using a two-handed greatsword. The strikes were wide and sweeping, yet flawlessly precise."
She moved to another spot, pointing at a thin layer of frost on the ground that had yet to completely melt, as well as the biting chill still lingering in the air. "Moreover, there are traces of freezing. Extremely powerful ice magic—wide area of effect, highly concentrated power. It froze the monsters' movements almost instantaneously."
Standing up, Robin surveyed their surroundings and delivered her final conclusion. "An adventurer wielding a greatsword and mastering powerful ice magic encountered a monster horde here alone, achieving an overwhelmingly dominant victory."
Her reasoning for assuming it was only one person was because, aside from the traces of the greatsword and ice magic, there were absolutely no signs of other weapons or spells—only the footprints of monsters and the claw marks of their dying struggles.
"If it was an adventurer, why didn't they take the Magic Stones?"
Tifa brought up the most practical question. To any adventurer, these Magic Stones represented a significant sum of wealth.
"It might have been inconvenient," Jeanne guessed. "If they really were alone, their carrying capacity is highly limited. In the face of more valuable materials, abandoning these Magic Stones is a reasonable choice."
"But how did a single person make it down to the deep floors?"
Daphne frowned deeply. "How is that any different from courting death? You have to realize, even a Level 4 adventurer would never dare to charge into the deep floors alone. Unless... they're a First-Class Adventurer, Level 5 or higher?"
This hypothesis made the air grow a few degrees heavier.
Level 5—that was an existence standing at the very top of Orario's pyramid.
As for an adventurer daring enough to undertake a solo expedition, in everyone's collective knowledge, aside from the one known as "Warlord"—the city's strongest Level 7, Ottarl—they had never heard of a second person.
"Speculating here won't do us any good."
Aiden stood up, ending the discussion. "The battle traces are this fresh, which means they couldn't have gone far. Let's follow them and see."
Having made the call, he led the team forward along the tunnel.
Sure enough, along the way, they spotted several more clusters of scattered Magic Stones, evidently left behind by the adventurer ahead of them.
And the deeper they went, the more piercing the chill in the air became.
Finally, sounds drifted from up ahead.
It was a chaotic, unnerving symphony.
There were the agonizing roars of dying monsters, the dull thuds of blades tearing through flesh, and underlying it all was an increasingly terrifying wave of cold. It washed over them like a tangible tide, causing everyone to shiver in unison.
Crack... crack...
The already damp cavern walls, eroded by this freezing air, rapidly began to condense into a thick layer of frost.
The group exchanged glances, the gravity of the situation reflected in everyone's eyes.
Lightening their footsteps, they followed the source of the noise, slowly stepping into a cavern that was unimaginably massive.
The ceiling was a full hundred meters high, and the width stretched for thousands of meters, looking like the hollowed-out belly of a mountain.
A wide underground river flowed through the center, and in the distance, a tributary of the Great Fall could be seen cascading from above.
Right in the middle of this vast space, a brutal siege was unfolding.
Hundreds of flying monsters shrieked and circled in the air, while aquatic monsters continually roared and leaped from the water. They all shared a single target—the solitary blue figure standing in the center of the battlefield.
It was... a breathtakingly beautiful young woman.
She possessed deep, ocean-blue hair that fell to her waist, fluttering like water ripples amidst the fierce battle. Her golden eyes, shining brighter than any crystal in the dim cavern, held absolutely no fear—only an icy, hollow emptiness.
Her figure was staggeringly alluring, every curve seeming to have been meticulously sculpted by the gods. The knight's uniform she wore—primarily blue and white, accented with gorgeous gold trim—flawlessly blended the elegance of a noble with the sharp edge of a warrior.
In her hands, she tightly gripped a massive, equally blue two-handed greatsword that completely contrasted with her physique.
Yet, this heavy weapon seemed utterly weightless in her grasp.
She danced with graceful posture. Every spin, every slash, looked like she was performing a resplendent, yet lethal, court dance.
Wherever the blade passed, ice shards sprayed outward. One hideous monster after another was either instantly frozen into an ice sculpture or cleanly torn to shreds by the biting sword wind.
The entire process of slaughter lacked even the slightest hint of gore or clumsiness. Instead, it brimmed with unparalleled elegance and beauty, making it feel less like witnessing a life-and-death struggle, and more like admiring the peerless performance of a master dancer.
The moment Aiden laid eyes on the girl, his pupils shrank violently.
Beside him, Jeanne also trembled in shock.
The two subconsciously exchanged a look, seeing the same astonishment mirrored in each other's eyes. The figure of the young woman before them began to perfectly overlap with Cassandra's prophetic dream—the one everyone had dismissed as nonsense—about "that dancing blue-haired woman."
Within the party, Cassandra's eyes were already wide open. She pointed a trembling finger at the figure, her lips quivering, unable to articulate a single word.
The prophetic dream had been validated once again. They had indeed encountered the figure from her vision. The frozen waves were the splashing water of the river; the dancing blue-haired woman wielding a sword in the center of the battlefield undoubtedly had blue hair, and her current posture was exactly that of a dance; the frozen ground and monsters all aligned with her prophecy.
Only Robin, Tifa, and the others, who had entirely ignored Cassandra's prophecy earlier, now looked on in utter confusion and awe at the blue-haired girl single-handedly slaughtering the monster horde.
"Blue hair... a greatsword... swordplay that looks like a dance..."
Aiden muttered these keywords under his breath, an existing suspicion in his mind receiving its final confirmation.
The Spindrift Knight, Eula Lawrence.
"Aiden, do you know her?" Hyacine and the others, hearing his murmurs, looked at him curiously.
Aiden slowly nodded. Gazing complicatedly at the elegant blue figure in the distance, he spoke in a low voice, "If my guess is right... she isn't an adventurer. She was born from a Ley Line Blossom. Just like what we encountered on the 19th Floor, she was birthed by this Dungeon."
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