The three of them chose to go back into the past. After all, they had come all this way already... no, that wasn't quite it. The opportunity had presented itself, so how could they not go and look?
And the result was that they really did end up almost twenty years in the past.
"Isagi, Isagi, Isagi! Look over there! That's Dad and Mom when they were young, and my big brother... ugh! How was this guy so filthy as a kid?! His snot's about to slide right into his mouth!!"
Late night, in Solingen.
Cecil had just seen her father and mother as young people, along with her newborn brothers, and the whole thing struck her as impossible.
But the three of them didn't linger. They prepared to head back to the city that same night.
Solingen wasn't far from Orario.
By carriage or by ship, though, they'd never make it in time. Their trip into the past gave them only about two days.
Which left just one option: an adventurer's "Divine Power."
"Let's run it."
Isagi said it flatly, and had Cecil climb onto his back.
Alfia didn't need carrying. She was a Lv.7 adventurer herself, and her [Dexterity] and Agility were frighteningly high, both sitting at the "999" mark.
"Hold on tight."
"Mm!"
"!!!"
In an instant, they were tearing along like wind and lightning.
Cecil had thought she was prepared. She was not!!
It was too fast!!
The wind hammered into her, stinging her pretty face raw, and its roar swallowed every other sound.
Her long hair whipped and thrashed behind her. There was no doing anything about it now.
All she could do was bury her small face as deep as she could into the crook of Isagi's neck, feeling the boy's warmth and the faint scent of soap on his skin.
Nngh! Why did this feel like some kind of good ending?
Her arms tightened around him. Cecil's mind had gone completely blank, and she simply clung there without moving a muscle.
How exactly the boy and the woman crossed plains and long rivers, mountains, forests, hills and valleys, no one could say.
Truth be told, Isagi was still going easy on Cecil's account. Otherwise, when a "shortcut" presented itself, he could have simply smashed straight through. For an adventurer at his level, nothing in the way would have mattered.
As it was, they still traveled faster than they had on the way out, riding the little Spirit Yufi. It took only a few hours. By the time the night thinned and the stars grew sparse, and the pale blue-grey morning haze over the distant horizon had begun to brighten,
they were already standing atop that impossibly high, weathered old city wall.
Orario twenty years ago felt no different from the Orario of today. Babel, the Colosseum, the Bridge of Heroes, the Pleasure Quarter with its lamps burning all night long. Every landmark was in place.
But the colossal "I Am Ganesha" was missing from the riverbank, which likely meant the city's "peacekeepers" hadn't risen to prominence yet in this era.
And there on West Main Street stood the tavern everyone knew best: the Hostess of Fertility.
At this point in time, Mama Mia would still be captain of Freya Familia, wouldn't she? Though perhaps she was close to retiring.
Standing on the towering wall, Isagi set down a dizzy, unsteady Cecil, letting the girl go limp and prop most of her weight against his shoulder.
Beside them, Alfia seemed to have something weighing on her.
She looked at the tall bell tower rising in the distance, and at the little chapel that still stood half in ruin, said only, "I have something to do," and went off alone.
Hmm. Not that it mattered.
Isagi had a plan of his own. Namely...
Orario twenty years ago really did have a different atmosphere.
During the day, walking the streets with Cecil, Isagi could feel all manner of ill-intentioned stares coming at them from every side.
So he deliberately steered the girl into a narrow side alley.
A great many of them followed the pair in. And soon enough...
When Isagi and Cecil strolled back out of the alley without a scratch, the stares around them thinned out noticeably.
Public order in the City of Adventurers at this point in history really was in a sorry state.
With no Ganesha Familia and no Astrea Familia, the city right now was exactly what Miss Riveria had once described: a place of pure "might makes right," where the strong devoured the weak.
As they neared Central Park, Isagi could feel it too, some absurdly exaggerated "presence" radiating down from the top of Babel.
A gaze from on high, as though it were appraising everything beneath it.
Interesting.
Isagi didn't look up to meet that gaze. Not because he couldn't, but because it would have made him far too conspicuous.
He wasn't stupid. At his current strength, running into an ordinary member of Zeus or Hera Familia, even a young Zard or Alfia, wouldn't be a problem at all.
But against the captains of those two Familias, he'd most likely lose.
Still.
He wanted to test their strength all the same. So what to do?
He'd been chewing on the question the whole way here, and he already had his answer: use Divine Power to manufacture an abnormal Nightmare.
"Let's wander around for a while."
That was what Isagi told Cecil at his side. All that remained was to wait for night to fall...
Zeus Familia's home grounds were vast. In this era they and Hera Familia had carved up nearly the entire city between them, and ever since they'd driven the gods of the Pyramid out, there were no "rivals" left at all.
Hera's women always kept themselves lofty and remote, perched at the summit of their high tower.
Maxim thought little of it.
Once night fell came the usual carousing in the banquet hall, drinking until his head swam.
For an adventurer of his caliber, sleep had long since ceased to be a necessity, yet when it came time to rest he still liked a warm, soft bed. The strong possessed everything, spent freely, and indulged to their heart's content.
A Familia's members always shared a certain "base color" with their god, and as captain, Maxim's temperament matched that of the great god Zeus almost perfectly.
But the moment he staggered drunkenly through his own bedroom door, the haze in his eyes sharpened into something no word could quite capture. Amusement. Interest.
"Oh?"
There was an extra "person" in his room.
Not a woman.
It was a black silhouette clad in vicious, spike-covered armor.
Interesting.
Even in the chill of autumn, the man wore nothing but a plain tank top and shorts. His swollen muscles rose like ridges of mountains. He looked like a great golden-furred bear reared up on its hind legs.
Crack, crack. Maxim rolled his neck out of long habit, and the pops that ran through his body rang out like thunder.
On a rack along one side of the room sat a heavy, unadorned suit of silver-grey armor.
The man stared at the black figure in his room for a long while, and the longer he stared, the wider his grin grew. In the end he walked over to the armor and took it down piece by piece, putting it on.
This was respect.
Ambush, assassination, or challenge, it made no difference. Anyone with the nerve to walk into his room in the dead of night earned the admiration of Zeus Familia's [Hero] for their courage.
More than that, the composure the intruder displayed and the cold indifference hanging off it spoke of genuine "strength."
Not a bad one at all.
Maxim reached that judgment in a single second, and so he would go all out, to give his opponent the respect owed to a [Warrior].
With the last piece strapped on, a human-shaped fortress of steel stood there in the night. But he didn't take up a weapon. He raised his fists instead.
"This is the first test."
A brilliant grin split his face.
When Maxim's fist came roaring out, the entire room, no, an entire section of the building, shattered along with it. The terrible force it unleashed came wrapped in golden thunder, blowing open in an instant and carving a vacuum several meters wide around him.
Detonation!
One punch landed, and after it came an unbroken cascade of thunderclaps that battered the ears without pause.
Those rolling, bursting reports kept sinking lower and lower.
By the time the dust settled, the two who had been in the room stood, somehow, out in the garden, at the bottom of a wide, scorched crater smashed into the ground.
And behind them,
a portion of Zeus Familia's enormous headquarters lay utterly broken open, as though half of it had just taken an artillery shell.
Maxim stopped.
Not to go easy. He'd noticed something was wrong.
He had started a fight inside his own Familia's headquarters with no warning. By now the others should have been covering the second-line units and the support staff, pulling everyone back several hundred or even a thousand meters, and evacuating the city residents from those areas along with them.
The brats of his Familia were long since used to this sort of thing, but the beginning of it always stirred up at least some measure of chaos.
And yet.
This autumn night was uncannily quiet.
No commotion. No curious stares, no shouting.
The mansion behind him still blazed with light, and yet it was far too still. So was the city all around, sunk into a silence like death.
The place Maxim now stood in was not reality, of course. It was a "Nightmare."
And the black figure before him was, naturally, something Isagi had created with his Divine Power:
the [King of the Night].
The strange name rose unbidden from somewhere inside him. Maxim couldn't make sense of the situation, but he didn't care.
Because a fight was a very pure thing.
Win, or lose.
Live, or die.
That was all.
And wasn't the current situation better, at that? It meant he could cut loose completely and really let go.
As a Lv.8 adventurer, even one who was no mage, he was never permitted to fight at full strength on the surface. The city would be flattened far too easily. But here, clearly, that no longer applied.
"With ability like that, I hope you're more than just a first-tier adventurer."
Thunder cracked again.
This time, though, it didn't come from Maxim. It came from the sky.
Through the pitch-black night, serpents of lightning coiled and slithered among the boundless clouds, churning, roaring, gathering together at last as though they might come pouring down at any moment.
Every peal of it shook the air hard enough to conjure the illusion that eardrums were tearing and hearts were about to burst.
At that very moment.
In an inn room not far from Zeus Familia's headquarters,
Isagi, the one who had set all of this in motion, watched what was unfolding inside the Nightmare and felt his own pulse falter.
So this was the power a Lv.8 adventurer displayed.
Isagi could feel it now.
Maxim and that [Empress] of the Amazon tribe from a thousand years ago both looked like lightning users, but in truth they were nothing alike.
Lady [Empress]'s lightning came from within her own body.
It was merely the form her Strength took when it manifested. Treating it as "light-attribute" magic wouldn't have been wrong at all.
Maxim was different.
His "lightning" came from the heavens and earth themselves.
He was only borrowing that Strength.
Which of them was stronger, Isagi couldn't say. But judging by the "tension" the Zeus Familia captain was giving off right now, the [King of the Night] likely wasn't his match.
And for some reason,
though the fight had barely begun, a trace of "fear" had already surfaced in Isagi.
"?"
Even he found it hard to credit.
Since when did facing a powerful enemy make him afraid?
Was this some trait of Maxim's, a Skill of his, or some magic?
Or else...
was it that incomprehensible "Strength" Alfia had spoken of?
Interesting.
The fear was everywhere, with no intention of fading. It kept swelling inside him until the strain on his mind and that bone-chilling illusion of cold were impossible to miss.
The thunder rolled on without pause. It fell like rain, its boom never once leaving the ears, as though it would go on forever.
By now the original "Nightmare" had even turned into Maxim's own "domain," which was exactly why Isagi had just realized the [King of the Night] might not be able to win.
By rights,
the [King of the Night], his own avatar within the Nightmare, should have been invincible.
Because no one can defeat the thing they fear at the deepest level of themselves.
The only time it had gone off the rails
was in Ais's dream that other time, and the reasons there had been complicated. The Strength the girl carried was itself the very thing she feared, and on top of that, that thing's "trait" was absurdly powerful, which led to the accident.
And right now, the situation looked pretty bad all over again.
So this was the so-called Strength of a Lv.8 adventurer?
Isagi's body shook. The fear was real. So was the excitement.
The stronger Maxim was, the better.
Because
it meant that once he himself leveled up to Lv.8, the Strength waiting for him would only be greater!
Then it was time to begin the "trial" in earnest.
Perfectly composed, beneath the dark of night, Isagi issued his order to the [King of the Night], and at the same time reshaped it a little.
This was Maxim's Nightmare.
But his Divine Power could influence everything within that dream, making it take whatever form he wished.
And so,
the [King of the Night] began to change.
At first it had been nothing more than something like a [Soul Teardrop], a creation modeled entirely on himself. Now, though, it swiftly began to take on a "shape" of its own, becoming a "form" that belonged to it alone.
And it became, in the truest sense of the words, exactly what it was called:
the [King of the Night].
____
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