The gaping darkness at the bottom of the Floor 59 crater was no ordinary empty space. It was the throat of a giant monster swallowing all forms of warmth.
As Alfia and Aria leaped down, the air temperature plummeted at an illogical speed. This was no longer just freezing temperatures that could be withstood with thick cloaks or the physical endurance of a top-tier adventurer. This was an absolute cold that felt as if it wanted to freeze all existence. The air around them thickened, filled with microscopic ice crystal shards grinding against each other, creating a soft hissing sound.
Below them, a dark blue glow began to pierce the darkness.
Aria twirled her palm gracefully. The Wind element manifested into a gentle yet highly dense air vortex beneath their feet. The vortex acted as a giant cushion, slowing their free-fall momentum until the two women finally landed on the solid ice surface without making the slightest sound.
They had arrived.
Floor 60. The Glacial Territory.
The expanse before them made Floor 59 feel like a playground. This was a world made entirely of eternal ice. The cavern ceiling was hundreds of meters above them, supported by giant ice pillars that radiated a melancholic blue glow. The floor surface was as clear and slippery as a giant mirror, reflecting their images perfectly.
However, it wasn't that deadly beauty that made Alfia immediately channel mana into her left hand.
"Sylphie," whispered Alfia, her breath billowing thickly to form white mist in the air. Her heterochromatic eyes narrowed sharply, scanning the darkness behind the ice pillars. "We just landed, but I feel as if we jumped into an angry anthill."
Aria hovered a few centimeters above the ice surface, her face hardening. The spiritual dissonance on this floor was so dense it felt suffocating. The aura of parasitic rot they had encountered on the upper floors originated from here, flowing like an invisible river in the air.
"They have been waiting for us, Alfia," answered Aria coldly. "The anomaly knows we came for it."
CRAAAACK!
The ice mirror surface beneath their feet trembled violently. Giant cracks spread at lightning speed, branching out in all directions.
The next second, the white hell exploded.
From behind the ice pillars, from atop the frozen cliffs, and even bursting through the floor they stood on, a sea of monsters spewed themselves onto the surface. Their numbers could no longer be counted in the hundreds. Thousands of ferocious existences surrounded them in a 360-degree radius.
Two Frost Dragons—glacier dragons with bluish-white scales over twenty meters long—shattered the ice ceiling and dove down with ear-splitting roars. From the fissures in the floor, dozens of Giant Ice Worms, each the diameter of a train car, shot out, baring mouths filled with thousands of spinning buzzsaw teeth. On the ground, packs of White Sabers (Ice Sabertooth Tigers) and Crystal Bears surged forward like a raging blizzard wave.
And the most horrifying thing was—more than half of those original Floor 60 monsters were no longer pure.
The majestic bodies of the ice dragons were tainted by lumps of rotting blackish-red flesh. The giant worms had parasitic purple crystals pulsing along their bodies, dripping acidic slime that melted the surrounding ice.
"How much energy has that filthy creature sucked up to create a mutant army this large?!" growled Alfia.
Despite being faced with an army that could easily flatten the entire combined forces of Orario's current factions, the elite mage of the Former Hera Familia did not show a speck of fear. Instead, a terrifying, arrogant smile bloomed on her face.
"Perfect," hissed Alfia, stomping her foot hard until the ice beneath her cracked. "I needed an outlet."
The battle broke out like a supernova explosion amidst the silence of the glacier.
A half-rotting Frost Dragon spewed a breath of absolute-zero ice storm at Alfia. The mage darted sideways, dodging the deadly blast with a speed surpassing a bullet. As her feet landed on the side of an ice pillar, she used it as a foothold to leap straight toward the dragon's face.
"Gospel!"
One word spoken with simultaneous chanting. Alfia's left hand unleashed a close-range sonic blast right at the dragon's jaw.
BLLAAAAM! The shockwave shattered the ice dragon's skull into pieces. However, Alfia knew this anomaly would not die just by having its head destroyed. While twisting her body in the air, the magic-infused short sword in her right hand slashed straight at the lump of flesh at the base of the dragon's neck. The purple crystal hiding there shattered into pieces, turning the giant dragon into a pile of dirty ash instantly.
On the other side, Aria acted like an untouchable goddess of destruction.
Three Giant Ice Worms leaped from under the ice, trying to swallow Aria alive. The Great Spirit didn't even bother to turn her head. She simply flicked her hand elegantly.
"Severing Gale."
Three giant wind blades, each as sharp as a god-tier scalpel, shot crosswise through the air. The three giant worms were cut into six symmetrical pieces before they even reached the apex of their jump. Black blood and purple slime spewed out, but Aria immediately clenched her hand, condensing the air pressure around the blood until it froze and shattered into ice dust before it could soil her dress.
"Don't give them room to breathe!" shouted Alfia, who was now dancing in the middle of a pack of White Sabers. Her sword flashed, cutting, while her explosion magic destroyed every purple crystal she found.
"Focus your attention forward, Alfia! Let me clear the path!" Aria shouted back.
Aria's golden eyes shone brightly. She felt a point at the end of this Floor 60 expanse radiating absolute purity—a purity she knew very well. Her daughter. Ais was in that direction.
Aria brought both her palms together. The wind element across the entirety of Floor 60 suddenly churned, responding to the absolute command of its master.
"Step aside from my presence, you filthy pests."
A typhoon spun horizontally, stretching dozens of meters wide in front of Aria and Alfia. The storm did not suck; instead, it acted as a giant drill grinding anything in its path. Hundreds of mutant monsters attempting to block them were instantly ground up, their bodies shredded by millions of invisible wind blades.
Armed with the path cleared by Aria's storm drill, the two women ran at maximum speed, piercing the heart of Floor 60.
Every time a Frost Dragon tried to cut their path from the air, Alfia blasted it from the sky with Gospel. Every time an Ice Worm ambushed from below, Aria minced it with Severing Gale. The battle raged with suffocating intensity, but the physical resilience and Mind/Magic capacity of these two legends lay beyond the labyrinth's limits of reason.
After nearly twenty minutes of non-stop mass slaughter, the number of monsters charging forward slowly began to thin. Aria's wind storm had cleaved the army in two, and Alfia had vaporized most of their elites.
The two of them arrived in a giant hall located at the deepest end of Floor 60.
The temperature in this room was far colder than before, but strangely, the air did not feel piercing to the skin. This cold radiated a sort of gentleness, an absolute protection that rejected all forms of evil.
Alfia and Aria's steps halted simultaneously. Aria's breath caught in her throat.
In the middle of that incredibly vast hall, towered a giant prism-shaped block of ice radiating a holy blue glow. The ice was so clear, like the frozen tear of a god. There was not a single crack on its surface.
And inside that eternal block of ice, floated a little girl with beautiful, flowing long golden hair. The girl wore a simple blue dress, her eyes closed peacefully as if she were merely fast asleep. There were no signs of fear on her innocent face.
The Frozen Garden of Talia. Celdia's absolute sealing magic.
"Ais..." Aria's voice trembled violently.
All the resilience of the Great Spirit who had just mercilessly minced hundreds of monsters instantly crumbled. Tears welled up in her golden eyes. That was her flesh and blood. The reason she was willing to pierce through hell and turn the world upside down. Her daughter was there, exactly as the day Aria was forced to leave her thousands of years ago to face the Black Dragon.
Aria stepped forward unconsciously, her hand reaching out toward the block of ice.
"Sylphie, wait!" shouted Alfia, her combat instincts ringing with the highest level of danger warning.
A giant blackish-red tendril suddenly shot out from the darkness behind the ice block, striking toward Aria with lightning speed.
Aria, whose instincts were jolted back thanks to Alfia's shout, immediately manipulated the wind to launch her body backward. The disgusting tendril smashed into the ice floor where Aria had just been standing, creating a sizable crater.
"You almost lost your head because you were too emotional," grumbled Alfia, darting to Aria's side and taking a fighting stance, her eyes glaring sharply at the giant shadow behind Celdia's ice.
Aria steadied her ragged breathing. Her eyes turned back to being as cold as ice, looking straight into the darkness. "Thank you, Alfia. I lost focus for a bit. Something very disgusting is hiding behind there."
"Something? No. That is the 'mastermind'," corrected Alfia.
The giant hall room vibrated softly, accompanied by the sound of wet flesh rubbing against the ice surface.
Slowly, from behind the block of ice sealing Ais, the entity crept out and revealed its true form under the phosphor glow of Floor 60.
Alfia widened her eyes. Even though she was a veteran who had seen all kinds of Monster horrors, the sight before her managed to make her hold her breath due to a dark combination of disgust and awe.
It was no ordinary monster. The lower half of the creature was a walking nightmare—a mountain of pulsing blackish-red flesh, covered by hundreds of thorny tendrils, sharp purple crystals protruding from various angles, and deformed, eyeless gaping jaws. The size of its lower half alone was as large as a three-story noble mansion, covering almost the entire area behind the ice block.
However, what made the entity truly disturbing to sanity was its upper body.
From the peak of that mountain of rotting flesh, bloomed a structure resembling black lotus petals. And in the middle of those petals, horrifyingly fused with the parasitic flesh, was the upper body of a woman.
Her skin was as pale as a drowned corpse. Her moss-green hair hung long, covering part of her face and her bare chest, which was fused with crystals. Her pale, thin arms hung limply at her sides.
The woman slowly raised her head. Her eyes were empty, possessing no pupils, only radiating a purple light filled with absolute despair, madness, and pain that had lasted for thousands of years.
It was a Corrupted Spirit. A majestic existence swallowed by the Dungeon, not allowed to die, but slowly corrupted until its essence turned into a source of disease and a producer of anomalous monsters.
"Gods in Heaven..." whispered Alfia softly. "Your guess was right, Sylphie. This Dungeon truly is the entity with the sickest sense of humor in the whole world. Turning a Spirit into a monstrosity like this..."
Aria stood frozen. The wind around her stopped blowing.
The Great Spirit's face did not radiate fear, but a sadness so deep it could freeze oceans. Even though the spirit's face and element were no longer recognizable because they were covered by corruption, Aria could feel the groans from the remnants of the woman's soul in front of her.
"You... were trapped in this darkness alone," whispered Aria with a trembling tone, speaking directly to the half-body of the woman at the peak of the mountain of flesh. "The labyrinth chewed up your existence, but didn't let you be destroyed. You were used as its incubator of hatred."
The corrupted spirit entity reacted to Aria's voice.
The pale woman's head moved jerkily, turning toward Aria. Her pale green glowing eyes looked straight at the Great Spirit of Wind.
Suddenly, the black flower petals around her waist trembled violently. The fleshy tendrils on the lower half of her body writhed wildly, as if the creature was experiencing extreme confusion.
The pale woman opened her mouth. There were no normal vocal cords left, but a distorted, echoing magical sound wave filled the ice hall.
"Aaa... riii... a..." The voice sounded like thousands of women's screams fused into one heart-wrenching sigh.
Alfia narrowed her eyes, gripping her short sword tighter. "She knows you?"
"No. She doesn't know me personally," answered Aria, her face tense. "But as a fellow Spirit, she can feel my essence. The pure element of wind."
The corrupted spirit tilted its head with a very unnatural movement, until its neck nearly snapped. It turned its face away from Aria, looking straight at the block of ice in the middle of the room—at the sleeping Ais.
Then, it turned back toward Aria. Back to Ais, then to Aria again. Its movements grew faster and faster, accompanied by panicked vibrations from its entire monster body.
Why? The corrupted creature's ruined brain could not process the information it was receiving. Ever since the Corrupted Spirit awoke, it had been obsessed with the only source of pure light nearby: Ais. It craved the purity of the wind from the little girl inside that ice. Its parasitic instinct hungered for that essence. It used Ais's resonance to spread its disease to the upper floors.
But now, right in front of it, stood another figure possessing a resonance of purity identical to the girl in the ice. Not just identical, but far larger, more absolute, and more oppressive.
Ais was a speck of candlelight in that monster's view. While Aria, was a burning sun.
"Twoooo...?"
The distorted voice echoed again, accompanied by the sound of bones cracking from the pale woman's neck.
"Twoooo... liiights...? Two... wiiiinds...?"
That confusion quickly turned into peaking madness. The mountain of flesh on the lower part of the creature swelled. Hundreds of red eyes bloomed between its tentacles. A dense purple aura—a combination of corrupted spirit magic and the Dungeon's curse—exploded in all directions, cracking the ice pillars around the hall.
The creature could not comprehend the existence of two identical essences of purity. Its starving parasitic instinct was now replaced by an overwhelming sense of threat and unstoppable greed. It wanted to devour both. It wanted to swallow the light.
GROOOOOAAAAAAAAARRRRR!!!
The corrupted spirit threw its head back and unleashed a scream that came not from its vocal cords, but from all the fleshy crevices in its giant body. The curse-filled sound wave was so strong it created a purple wind storm inside the room.
"Cover your ears and protect your mind, Alfia!" shouted Aria, instantly creating a dome-shaped vacuum wall around them both to muffle the scream that could shatter sanity.
Alfia lowered her hands from her ears, her eyes glaring sharply through Aria's protective dome. "That thing has truly lost its mind. There is no consciousness left there, Sylphie. Only pain and the instinct to destroy."
Aria lowered both her hands slowly. The vacuum dome around them faded, replaced by the glow of the greenish-gold wind element surrounding her body like holy armor. Her eyes, which had previously radiated deep sadness, were now entirely replaced by absolute resolve.
As a mother, she was angry that this filthy creature intended to swallow her daughter. As a Great Spirit, she was angry that the Dungeon dared to treat a spirit's existence so despicably.
"You are right, Alfia," said Aria, her voice very calm, but its pressure made the ice beneath her feet crack into pieces. "There is no more conversation to be had. The only mercy I can give to my fallen kin... is a swift death."
Alfia smirked widely, a predator's smirk longing for a true battle. Her entire body was now cloaked in the glow of clashing black and white mana, distorting the laws of gravity around her. This was her peak combat mode, the mode she once used when leveling the Leviathan's neck.
"Then, let us finish this, Sylphie," said Alfia, her short sword resonating with sonic magic. "We destroy this labyrinth nightmare, and we bring your daughter home to the surface."
The corrupted spirit screamed again. Six giant tendrils tipped with magic-triggering crystals shot forward like spears, targeting Aria and Alfia simultaneously. At the same time, the pale woman atop the flesh began chanting magic in an ancient spirit language that had been distorted into a deadly curse.
The battle against the strongest entity in the depths of the Dungeon at this time—an anomaly that should not have existed in the records of history—finally began.
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