"Attention! Attention! All of you—!!"
"Do not attack any monster wearing a bright red strip of cloth!"
At that same moment, at the mouth of another main avenue.
The guard captain, fresh from Shakti's latest orders, sat high in the saddle and bellowed the command at the men holding the line against stray monsters around him, and at the adventurers scattering in panic through the street.
"Attention! Attention!!"
"Do not attack the monsters wearing bright cloth markers!"
"I say again!"
"Do not attack the monsters wearing bright cloth markers! They are not the enemy! They are reinforcements sent by the Constable, Lord Haimer!!"
"All guardsmen, cooperate with them! Once you've heard it, pass it on!"
At first.
The men, women and children who had crawled into the sewer vents when their houses came down around them.
The commoners crouched at the corners of their own back alleys, rusted pitchforks in hand, ready to fight monsters to the last.
The lower-class adventurers whose formations had been shattered by the sudden assault, grinding their teeth through a losing battle.
When they heard that utterly absurd announcement, the first thought that rose in every single head was oddly identical.
The officer giving orders up there had gotten his skull cracked open by a monster. He'd lost his mind and was raving.
But not for long.
Because as they huddled in their dark corners, they watched it happen with their own eyes.
A black-furred Hellhound with a crude, brilliant red rag knotted at its throat came padding past a huddle of unarmed refugees — and never opened that furnace of a maw that could melt bone.
Instead, it sprang, landing between a fallen old woman and the thing coming for her.
Flame hot enough to bake iron plate red poured out with perfect precision onto the man-eater about to sink its teeth into her.
The heat sent the man-eater rolling and thrashing across the stones.
Then the hound wheeled and charged off toward another street where a running fight had broken out.
More than that. All along the way, even when surface-dwellers passed within arm's reach of it, it showed not a flicker of aggression toward them. It slipped through the crowd with real cunning instead, screening the retreat.
In that moment, the iron law bred into the bones of every generation of Orario's people — that anything crawling up out of the Dungeon is a bloodthirsty mortal enemy — cracked for the first time in this night of blood and fire.
"A monster from the Dungeon... it really can speak like a person? And order other monsters to help us?"
A grocer's fruit stall on a street corner.
The owner, sheltering under his overturned cart with a long gash torn open in his right arm by falling rubble, leaned against the mud-brick wall and stared like a man witnessing a miracle at the red-haired harpy gliding lightly over the eaves above his head.
The view swings back to the heavy dark of the night sky.
The harpy Fei circled low and fast.
She was not only serving as high-altitude eyes for Rania and the other Xenos squads working the streets below, tracking the enemy and plotting their routes.
At the root of one wing, bound tight with a strip of canvas, hung the voice-transmission orb.
And now that orb had finally lit with a faint blue glow — the color of a connection.
"Reed! Grosse! Do you hear me? Can you hear me clearly!"
The moment the link opened, Fei's voice went out laced with the roar of high wind.
At that same moment, far below, inside the Xenos' deeply buried stronghold on the twentieth floor — the Hidden Village — Reed, Grosse and a crowd of Xenos sat gathered in a circle.
On the other end of the orb, Fei rattled out the crisis that had erupted on the surface at breakneck speed. And with it, Lord Haimer's purpose: that he was running an enormous risk for one reason only, to push them, the Xenos, out into the sunlight and overturn how every resident of the city saw them.
When she was done, not one whisper passed among the Xenos there.
Not one of them hesitated.
Grosse's stone body came up off the ground at once, his heavy clawed feet grinding faintly against the rock floor. Beside him, the same fire had kindled in Reed's eyes.
Grosse turned on the spot, facing the center of that vast cavern where several hundred monsters of every shape and kind had gathered.
By the light of the roaring bonfire, he lifted that head of grey stone grain and let out the deepest, most earth-shaking roar of his life since the day he was born into this lightless underworld.
"Everyone who can fly! Everyone who can climb walls! Everyone with quick legs!"
"Step out here and charge with me!!"
"For even a sliver of a chance to stand under the sun and stop hiding like rats in the gutter!"
"To repay Lord Haimer, who remade heaven and earth for us!"
"Charge!!!"
He was the oldest of them all, a stone dragon who in ordinary times was cold to the point of cruelty and wanted nothing to do with humankind.
And now Grosse had volunteered without being asked, taking command of this first relief column bound for the surface.
In those muddy yellow slit pupils there was nothing left but resolve.
Years of crawling and fighting through the Dungeon's lower reaches had given him an almost unnatural familiarity with every hidden passage, down to the abandoned ventilation shafts no ordinary person could ever hope to find.
Grosse drove that handpicked band of relatively small, nimble flying monsters straight up a long-dried, long-abandoned vertical air shaft.
An army on the march, climbing hard for the surface.
…
And on the surface, at that same hour.
The lowest defensive line in Babel Tower.
Dozens of meters underground, the corridor ran all the way down here from the main avenue.
At the end of that passage, laid course by course in unbreakable black granite —
— stood the direct gateway between the Dungeon's first floor and the surface.
The refined steel portcullis, several tons of it, built to hold against the impact of a large beast surge, had already dropped and locked.
And on the outer side of that grate, dozens of heavy-armored guardsmen, pulled here on Shakti's emergency orders half an hour before, had thrown up an airtight blockade.
Shakti had ridden here without a moment's rest from the far end of the city.
She strode straight through the ranks to the very center of the formation.
Her eyes stayed fixed on that wide stone passage sloping down into the dark, still breathing cold subterranean air up into the corridor.
The minutes crawled past.
And then, as if answering her rigid vigil.
At last.
The passage filled with the sound of beating wings.
Closer and closer. So fast there was no time to redeploy or fall back.
The heavy infantry in the front rank knew that sound the instant they heard it, from long years of killing. A large flock of flying monsters, closing in.
Every breath in the corridor caught.
And then—
The Lv.5 stone dragon Grosse tore into view.
"..."
The monster that came up to the front of the line was one of the Dungeon's most notorious.
A dragon-type beast sheathed in hardened grey rock shell, beating a pair of enormous wings, capable of flattening this row of barricades with one idle sweep.
And behind him, packed close, came more than a hundred monsters of wildly different shapes.
Faced with a sudden charge of giant monsters coming up through the passage from the Lower World — and with Shakti having told the ordinary guardsmen nothing of the truth —
a squad captain in the front rank, a man who had lived through several fights to the death, gave the defensive order on pure instinct, at the top of his lungs.
"All hands ready — heavy shield wall, lock it tight!!"
The words were barely out before every great shield in the front row slammed down and interlocked.
"Spearmen, prepare to engage!"
The spearmen, already braced, began to level their weapons.
"Hold!"
But at the last possible instant, Shakti's shout cracked through the corridor.
Under the eyes of every guardsman there, she walked out alone past the shield line and planted herself less than half a meter from the steel grate.
"C-Commander!!"
The captain who had given the order jumped, staring at her back.
"Save your breath and do as I say," Shakti snapped, cutting him off.
Through the metal bars of the Dungeon exit, she met the muddy yellow slit pupils of Grosse, the largest creature there, head on.
Grosse stood steady on the far side of that refined steel gate.
Things had come this far.
To make up for the offense he had once given Lord Haimer.
And so that every Xenos might one day see daylight.
Grosse set aside his usual arrogance and lowered that huge head under its thick stone armor toward Shakti. He spread the claws he was so proud of, claws that could shred plate steel, wide to either side of his body.
In that corridor where the air had gone so tense it might have frozen solid, he held a posture of yielding, the posture of the strong showing a fragile human that it meant no harm.
…
"Good evening, human officers with the sour faces."
And then something even more astonishing happened.
Grosse had spoken first, greeting the crowd in front of him in perfectly clear, standard Orario common tongue.
That one sentence made the guardsmen behind the shields, every one of them holding his breath, drop their weapons on the floor.
"Deep in the earth below, we received a message sent down from above by our surface companion, Miss Fei the harpy."
Grosse ignored the stares fixed on him like he was some beast on display, and went on.
"It said Lord Haimer had given an order — that we Xenos were to take the short way through the Dungeon and come help put down the riot on the surface."
Confronted by a dragon-type monster that could wipe out a full adventurer party in a heartbeat.
And then told, out of nowhere.
That it speaks fluent human language?
That it has no intention of killing anyone, that it is bowing its head and greeting you politely, and that it means to go out and protect the civilians of the surface city that treats its kind as sworn enemies?
Every guardsman there nearly dislocated his jaw.
And what they expected even less.
Commander Shakti, who ruled her men with an iron fist and put Orario's safety above everything, nodded and granted the request.
"If it is Lord Haimer's order."
"Raise the winch!! Open the gate!!" Shakti turned and roared.
Several of the burlier beastman guardsmen, minds still blank from the whole chain of events, could only stumble forward on shaking legs and seize the handles of the great gear capstan.
With a grinding, ear-splitting shriek of metal hinges dragging against one another, the heavy refined steel gate began to rise.
Once that boundary opened, inside and outside were only a few steps apart.
…
"This time, Lord Haimer has staked his own name to vouch for you," Shakti said, looking at Grosse behind the rising steel.
"But."
"Once you pass through that gate, faces like yours — faces that hush a crying child at night — will set off panic no one can control, however careful you are."
"So keep it in mind. Do not go off alone into empty districts to act on your own and give people something to whisper about."
"And if any one of you slips and kills or maims an unarmed civilian."
Shakti leveled her spear.
"Then even if Lord Haimer blames me for it, I'll tear up our understanding on the spot and take every last one of you monsters into custody!"
Faced with a warning that harsh, Grosse, who had once loathed humans above all things, did not lash out.
What he showed instead was the devout loyalty he held for the Kami-sama who had given them new life.
"You need not trouble yourself over that, human guardsman."
Grosse's enormous voice set the guardsmen behind Shakti trembling.
"After all that has happened, we Xenos would sooner be ground to dust than do one stupid thing that harms Lord Haimer's peerless name."
"And if there is truly some blind fool among these whelps I've brought who harms the people of the surface and does grave damage to Lord Haimer's reputation."
Grosse turned his head, that savage gaze sweeping over the restless ranks of Xenos behind him.
"You won't need to lift a finger."
"I will clean my own house, and tear the offender into ten thousand pieces."
"And then I will carry the remains to Lord Haimer myself and atone with my death!"
The words landed like stone on stone.
Behind him, the flying Xenos who owed their salvation to Haimer beat their wings and roared their answer.
"We swear it! If Lord Haimer's honor is ever stained by our hand, we will cut ourselves off in this sunless Dungeon for the rest of our lives and never again long for a glimpse of the stars above!"
At that flat, unhesitating oath from the whole assembly, even Shakti, whose nerves had been drawn tight all night, raised an eyebrow.
She was wary of the Xenos, but she was not a woman blind to plain sense.
This vast, brutal stone dragon.
He had not hidden his contempt for her as a human especially well. But the moment Lord Haimer's name entered his mouth, his manner stopped looking like an act.
And so, once every calculation had settled into place, Shakti finally set her prejudice down. She swept a hand through the air.
"All right."
The cold had gone out of her voice.
"In that case — you can fly. In the collapsed districts your mobility will be far better than ours!"
"One more thing. Remember to wear bright cloth on your bodies. That is your mark as our allies!"
"Don't worry!"
"We've already seen to it!"
And with that, Grosse held up the strip of vivid red cloth tied around his arm.
"RAAAGH!!!"
With one roar from Grosse, the Dungeon's refined steel gate stood fully open.
CHARACTER DETAILS — Adventurer — Skill C
[All Allies] Defense Rate +100% for 3 turns. [Self] Strength greatly increased on activation only.
Special Skill: Evil-Warding Gargoyle — MP cost 64
[All Enemies] Fast activation, 65% chance to inflict Taunt. [Self] Fast activation, for 4 turns Strength, Defense Rate, Counter Rate and Physical Resistance up 60%. Beginning next turn, for 4 turns, grants one use each of the following additional action: [All Enemies] low-power, high-critical-chance earth-attribute physical attack.
And so it was.
Grosse spread his wings first, leading that dense dark mass of elite flying Xenos up into the open night sky beyond, climbing hard for the heavens.
When they saw the surface's true, unbroken field of stars with their own eyes, more than a few of the flying Xenos who had never once stood above ground wept where they flew.
…
At the same time.
Under the cover of night.
Inside the Pleasure Quarter.
The high walls here held the chaos outside at a slight remove, but the roaring from not far off still carried over them.
On the prominent spire crowning the twenty stories of the Temple of the Divine Courtesan, the goddess of beauty Ishtar lay draped against a gilded, carved railing.
She looked down from on high at an Orario swallowed in chaos, the night wind stirring her brilliant violet hair, distant points of firelight reflected in eyes like amethyst.
And above all, at those flying monsters crossing the sky over Orario.
"Aisha."
Ishtar bit at the purple-lacquered nail of her thumb, suspicion threading through her voice.
"Do you know which remnant of Evilus dreamed up a monster riot on this scale? Did they clear it with us?"
"No." Aisha shook her head flatly.
"If it were the Thanatos Familia remnants we keep contact with, the old arrangement says they'd have sent word ahead."
"But the sisters working the streets haven't caught a single rumor about an uprising tonight either."
Given nothing she could use, Ishtar's face darkened and she clicked her tongue coldly.
Her gaze went back to those creatures far off in the night sky — ranks in order, movements deliberate.
The warning bell inside her would not stop ringing.
Because the Xenos were the channel through which Evilus earned its dirty money.
Which meant that even the Ishtar Familia, longtime partners of the Thanatos Familia remnants, knew almost nothing about them.
"Lady Ishtar, shall we go out and help bring the situation under control?" Aisha stepped forward. "The streets are in a terrible state."
"No need."
Ishtar shook her head without a moment's thought, lifting a wrist to prop up her chin, and there was nothing but self-interest in her tone.
"So long as it hasn't reached our Pleasure Quarter, whether the people out there live or die is no concern of ours. That's business for the Guild and those champions of justice."
Then Ishtar paused.
Tonight's upheaval was far too large. Haimer had been in the Lower World for less than two months, and he already had this many cards to play.
At that thought, the light of profit and loss kindled behind Ishtar's eyes, and she crooked a finger at a lean, capable Amazon waiting in the shadow of the corridor a little way off.
"Samira."
The Amazon called Samira came forward at once with quick strides.
She wore her silver hair short and spiked, striking to the eye; her frame was straight and solidly built, two heavy gold hoops hanging from her earlobes, and nothing on her body but a scanty white bikini, bare feet on the floor tiles.
"Here." Samira inclined her head.
"Take a few of the nimbler battle courtesans, the ones who don't draw eyes."
"While the streets are boiling over and everyone out there is running themselves ragged, go and quietly look into the members of that Haimer Familia for me."
"Whatever it takes. This is a perfect window while no one has attention to spare, and I want a clear picture of exactly where the Haimer Familia's true strength bottoms out."
"And while you're at it, keep a close watch on Freya's side as well."
The moment that hateful woman's name crossed her lips, Ishtar found herself grinding her back teeth.
"Listen well. The instant you find anything unusual, any gap in their guard, come straight back and report to me. And don't let them catch you."
____
👻🔥P-a-t-r-e-o-n: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Natsuki Subaru From Honkai: Star Rail to Re:Zero — new on The_Mikudayo
📚 40 chapters ahead over at Walnut-chan — your support is what pays for the translations
Help us hit our targets:
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 free chapter for all