"This is iron ore."
"Yummy!"
"This is a diamond."
"Yummy!"
"This is Black Star Ore."
"Yummyyummyyummy!!"
Nom nom nom!
Inside one of the Academic District's alchemy laboratories, the little jellyfish Saika drifted back and forth through her glass tank — and every now and then, she would devour, completely and without hesitation, whatever minerals the girls tossed in after her.
That's right. This creature didn't just eat monsters. She ate all manner of materials.
Whether it was drops harvested from monsters, or raw ore pulled from the earth, or wild plants and fruits — she ate absolutely everything without exception.
This, too, was something they had only discovered after arriving at the Academic District.
The moment Lefiya and Haruhime had boarded this impossibly vast, island-like vessel, they had made a beeline for one very specific person — an old classmate of Lefiya's.
There was nothing else pressing to do, after all. Loading and unloading Adamantite wasn't something that required them to be on-site to supervise.
And so Lefiya had taken Saika along with her and tracked down Alisa — her very best friend from her school days.
The girl was now an assistant in one of the alchemy labs. She'd been run absolutely ragged until recently, but now that the latest batch of Adamantite was ready for delivery, she'd finally managed to catch a breath.
"Lefiya, you have no idea — when all of this first started, the whole school was in an absolute uproar."
"About what?"
"About the Guild throwing its weight around and demanding our Adamantite — apparently Goddess Hephaestus herself, and the Guild's president, came all the way out here for a long round of negotiations. There were meetings and everything..."
"Weren't you at school? How do you not know the details!"
"I was in the lab the whole time, I didn't have a moment to pay attention to any of that... Oh — what in the world is this little darling? Hmm... she's so entertaining!"
Her name is Saika!
The moment the two girls saw each other, they fell into a rapid, cheerful chatter. Lefiya didn't forget to introduce Haruhime to Alisa as well, gesturing to the fox girl standing quietly at her side.
"How do you do."
"Oh, oh, oh — hello!"
She kept the introduction simple — just a junior member of her Familia.
Leftiya wasn't naive about it. Haruhime's magic was far too extraordinary and unusual to be announced in polite company, let alone in a public setting — but more than anything, the real concern was Alisa herself, who had a notoriously loose tongue.
As a dear friend, the Elf girl held absolutely zero confidence that Alisa could keep a secret.
This girl gossiped about everything. Tell her, and within a matter of days, the entire world would know exactly what Haruhime's magic did.
Fortunately — the girls' attention right now was directed entirely at the little Saika floating in her tank.
Alisa had initially assumed the creature was some rare and exotic monster. In various parts of the world, it wasn't unusual at all for nobility to keep tamed monsters as pets, and the city even had its share of beast-tamers.
But something didn't add up. Since when did monsters talk?
Leftiya and Haruhime themselves weren't quite sure how to explain it — after all, Isagi had called her a "yokai" or something to that effect, and neither of them had ever heard such a term before.
Regardless, that wasn't the important part.
Alisa was completely fascinated by Saika. She had noticed that the little jellyfish seemed to be slowly growing larger — her body, as she continued to eat without stopping, had begun to shimmer with a faint, soft luminescence.
Saika seemed as though she would never be full.
No matter what the girls dropped into the tank, she would chomp away at it tirelessly, without pause.
It almost made one genuinely worried — could she really keep eating like this with no ill effects?
She even ate Adamantite.
As a test, the girls dropped a small fragment of the hardest metal in existence into the tank. The little jellyfish didn't even hesitate — she snatched it straight up with her delicate tentacles and stuffed it into her mouth without a second thought.
Chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp.
"Hey, hey, hey — have any of you noticed that something seems to be changing about Saika?!"
At Alisa's words, Lefiya and Haruhime both looked — and sure enough. There, growing between the fluffy, mushroom-cap folds of Saika's cherry-pink bell, a pair of unbearably adorable large eyes had appeared.
— ◇ —
"Hello, Isagi. I am Baldr."
The God of Light — and the administrator, or perhaps more accurately, the headmaster, of the Academic District.
After boarding the vessel, Isagi had been led by one of the teachers who came to receive him — through corridors and up stairwells to the very highest floor of the main academic building, to a room at the end of a long hallway.
The rain had stopped.
A somewhat dim afternoon sun was descending on its slow arc, casting its light from the distant edge of the sea horizon into the room where they now stood.
God Baldr had a head of brilliantly radiant golden hair that spilled down past his waist. As a male deity, his face wore a perpetually gentle smile — the sort of expression that told you at a single glance you were looking at someone truly, genuinely kind.
Isagi had no idea why the god had called him here.
"I simply wished to meet the future [Hero]."
"...?"
"Loading the Adamantite will take a few days. You're in no hurry to return, I imagine — could I ask a small favor of you while you're here?"
With that, Baldr shifted his approach entirely, and put a direct "commission" to Isagi.
"What would it involve?"
"Going to the deep sea."
"...?"
That made even less sense.
The deep sea?
"Not the [Deep Sea] zone we are presently situated within — I mean beneath the ocean itself."
Baldr moved to the window in silence.
Isagi noticed it then — the God of Light spoke with almost no inflection at all. His voice was perpetually, utterly calm, like the faint afternoon sunlight pouring softly through the glass beyond him. Eternal. Unceasing. Unchanging.
"Does Isagi possess the [Underwater Combat] development ability?"
"No."
Even after leveling up to Lv.5, he had never acquired [Underwater Combat] — there had simply been no opportunity for underwater combat.
Obtaining it, in theory, wasn't difficult. All it would take was spending time at the port city of Melen, regularly sailing out on cargo ships, and jumping into the water alongside the sailors and crew to fight monsters for a while.
Tiona and her sister Tione both had [Underwater Combat]. The reason was straightforward — back in their homeland, they had often gone out to catch fish, and even after leaving and wandering the continent, they had frequently dived into rivers and lakes to catch their meals. The skill had come to them naturally.
Beyond that, the ability wasn't all that vital in the first place.
Inside the Dungeon, [Underwater Combat] was only relevant in the [Great Waterfall] region spanning the 25th through 27th floors. And even then, it only truly mattered when fighting the Floor Boss that resided in the lake at the base of the 27th floor — the Monster Rex · Two-Headed Dragon Amphisbaena.
Being a water-type monster, it never left the great lake at the bottom of Floor 27. To subjugate it, one had to either enter the water directly, or freeze the entire lake's surface solid with magic.
According to Guild guidelines: when fought on the surface, its combat power was roughly equivalent to that of a Lv.4 adventurer — but in the water, it fought at the full strength of Lv.5. Conversely, an adventurer without [Underwater Combat] couldn't draw out their own full power either. The gap between the two sides made subjugation enormously difficult.
For that reason, acquiring [Underwater Combat] was a considerably hot topic among Lv.3 and Lv.4 adventurers.
And yet here Isagi was, already Lv.5 without it.
But he would need to pass through the lower floors eventually. Watching Baldr's quietly smiling, wordless expression, Isagi turned the matter over for a moment — and concluded that choosing [Underwater Combat] when he leveled up to Lv.6 wasn't a bad idea at all.
"This seems like a fine opportunity to try it out."
Isagi had the distinct feeling that the god had planned exactly this from the very beginning. This was not a spontaneous idea on Baldr's part.
Not even close.
In fact — Isagi suspected that the reason the Academic District had deviated from its usual route and come all the way out to this remote [Deep Sea] region in the first place was connected to this very matter.
And Baldr made no attempt to hide it, explaining everything in plain, direct terms.
"It is a commission from the Poseidon Familia."
The Poseidon Familia — formerly the administrators of the port city of Melen — were now sailing the seas and conducting continuous patrols, culling sea monsters in an attempt to preserve the ocean environment. A hopeless endeavor, of course, like bailing out a flooding ocean with a cup.
Even so, as fellow wanderers of the open sea, the Poseidon Familia and the Academic District had long maintained ties with one another.
"They discovered a [Dragon Palace] in the depths of the ocean, but had no means to explore it themselves. I had originally intended to ask Leon to take a look — but as you know, things have been complicated lately."
"Something happened in the north again — Leon needed to go deal with it. Which means I have no choice but to ask you instead."
Not the future. Not a candidate. But truly, right now — [The Hero].
From the moment he had laid eyes on the young man.
Baldr had known with certainty — this was indeed the [Hero]. Ouranos's judgment had not been wrong. The judgment of the gods who gathered in this city had not been wrong.
And now.
Only one question remained.
And that question was this —
[Even if a Hero exists — can he truly save the world?]
Among the gods, those who held any real confidence in that answer were... very few indeed.
____
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