After returning to the present, Isagi noticed that something about Alfia was off.
He had no idea what had gotten into her.
And asking wasn't really an option, because she wouldn't talk. She just stayed silent, brow faintly creased.
Solingen's night was unchanged.
After crossing back, it was of course still nighttime here — only two days had gone by, that was all. That was how crossing through time worked: wherever you were when you left, that was where you returned, and if you crossed over again, you'd still be standing exactly where you'd been before you came back.
The next order of business, naturally, was returning to the city.
Isagi and Cecil waited until the following morning, then went over to the green woods to collect the little Spirit Yufi — and to put a stop to her ongoing boasting to her playmates back "home" about how much good food she'd eaten in Orario and how much fun there was to be had there. Several days had passed already; how she still hadn't run out of material was anyone's guess.
They simply hauled her off and made her turn back into a Unicorn so they could ride to Orario.
Alfia did travel along with him and Cecil.
She wouldn't get on the horse, though. She kept relying on her adventurer's "body" instead, and after the better part of a day they reached the city, at which point she left him a slip of paper with the address of the inn she was staying at and a way to contact her.
"Call me the next time you go into the Dungeon."
"Sure."
Alfia clearly had a great deal weighing on her. Isagi didn't press. He nodded his agreement and got ready to head back to the Garden of Stars with Cecil.
Meanwhile, elsewhere—
Alfia had deliberately picked lodgings at the far end of South Main Street, well away from the clamor of the Pleasure Quarter and all its entertainments, set among the small islands scattered along both banks of the long river.
Taverns and inns were plentiful here; it was one of the areas of Orario with the pleasantest natural surroundings.
She ate something without much thought and took a bath, and by the time she sat down on the edge of the bed to rest, evening had already fallen.
Perhaps it was the effect of having gone back into the past.
Alfia found that her sense of time had turned hazy. She couldn't pin it down properly.
And then there was the Empress's voice, still circling in her ears.
[Why won't you speak?]
[Or is it that you can't?]
[Does Hera know about you?]
[Ah… she probably doesn't. Otherwise she couldn't have sat there with that perfectly calm face, drinking a cup of hot milk and then going off to bed. Knowing her, if she knew about you she'd have snuck out to dig for gossip.]
[It does feel a little unbelievable, and yet—]
[You've grown weak, Alfia. Is it because you got yourself a healthy body?]
[To think that I would ever see you turn timid.]
"!!!"
It was like waking with a jolt from a dream.
Alfia rubbed her temple and said nothing, staring at the floorboards lit by the glow of the Magic Stone lamp.
Had she grown weak?
She couldn't quite make sense of it, and she couldn't judge whether the Empress's words were correct either.
But that wasn't what mattered.
What mattered was this.
By the other's reckoning, she would lose her qualification to obtain that kind of "Strength."
[The happy can never become [Hero]es.]
"…"
The truth was that the Alfia of the past had been able to feel it, dimly — that Strength called "wish," the very thing Isagi had only just come to understand.
It was something purely of the spirit, something even the gods could not explain and could only file away under [Possibility].
It was that sensation of "I must accomplish this," erupting out of the deepest despair.
That was exactly how it had been when she went to subjugate Leviathan.
Knowing her body was already close to death, knowing she was someone whose days were numbered, knowing she had no future whatsoever — and then, in that one instant—
Alfia had understood something. She had overdrawn her body once more, as though to seize everything still to come and drag it all forward, so that she could die there in splendor.
In that instant, she had known for certain that she was about to die. And yet there had been no sorrow, no pain, and certainly no resentment.
The only thing the woman carried within her was a beauty so radiant it went past every limit.
[It's finished.]
Alfia had been filled with joy as she went to meet her own death.
What she had never once imagined was that she would come back to life in the end — and now there truly was no way to catch hold of that feeling again.
Not the faintest trace of it.
It was as though it had quietly slipped away long ago: along with her body turning healthy, something that had once driven her on without pause had vanished as well.
She could understand what the Empress had said.
Even if, seen from where she stood now, the understanding of "losers" wasn't necessarily correct.
Yet at this moment, Alfia believed the other had spoken the truth.
"…"
Thinking produced no answer.
The woman sat there blankly for a long while, then left the room and walked with no destination along the bank of the long river near the inn, until the dim autumn night deepened and the scattered Magic Stone lamps along both sides of the street burned brighter. Only then did she return to her room, wash up again, and fall asleep—
[Abandoned Land of Filth · Old White Blood Cathedral].
Coming back here again, Isagi still felt a kind of awe he couldn't put into words.
And he wasn't alone in that.
That such a magnificent [Realm] should exist in the deep levels of the Dungeon.
If the Goblin Kingdom from before had merely been a city built in imitation of a real one, then the cluster of buildings before them was a genuine "nation."
As mentioned earlier.
As things stood, for Isagi and the adventurers of Loki and Freya Familia — Ottar excepted, since he had already reached Lv.8 — everyone's goal was, naturally, to get themselves to Lv.8 first.
The gatekeeper boss down in the lower levels, the Empress of the Amazon tribe from a thousand years ago, was one Isagi also planned to subjugate only after leveling up.
Which made coming down to the deep levels now to grind levels exactly the right call.
The group had prepared thoroughly.
They had even built a small supply base inside the passage connecting Floor 36 and Floor 37, and stored the mass of provisions they'd hauled down there.
Only then were they ready to set out and formally begin the expedition.
The outermost edge of the "White Blood Cathedral" was a massive stone bridge joined to the cliff face.
There had originally been a gatekeeper boss at the center of that bridge, but it had been subjugated long ago by Isagi, Ryuu-senpai, and Riveria together.
The wreckage from that battle still remained, in fact — over half the bridge, blasted away by the woman's enormous emerald wave of light, had vanished entirely, leaving the great span in a decidedly bizarre state.
Why the Dungeon didn't repair it, no one knew.
The same went for the huge hole in the distance, the one bored out back then by the [Great Serpent Well] off to one side. That was still there too.
Strange, but it hardly mattered.
After all, the god that had been born from it and parasitized by the Jewel Fetus had already been struck down in the Corrupted Spirit subjugation battle.
Even from far away, everyone could see them: the rising and falling walls, the towers, and at the end of the connecting walkways, soaring impossibly high, a pair of blood-red doors that stood at the limit of sight like a sun.
"Are we going there?"
"Probably."
Isagi only shrugged, because he genuinely didn't know.
"It's easy to get lost inside. Everyone leave markers, and if you run into danger, fall back here and regroup."
The passage leading back to Floor 36 would serve as their temporary rally point.
On this expedition, Loki Familia and Freya Familia were of course operating separately from Astrea's group. Everyone had come to train their [Stats], and if they all stayed bunched together the chances to fight would only dwindle.
Alfia had meant to move on her own, but for whatever reason she chose to stay beside him and the girls instead.
The woman still had her hood up.
Everyone already knew who she was, but she liked keeping up the air of mystery, and there was no helping that.
Before long the group crossed the great bridge, parted ways, and began their expedition through this chaotic, patternless sprawl of towers and passages.
The most important thing for now was, of course, finding the road to the "blood-red doors" at the far end. Pushing deeper into the Dungeon later would require it.
They pressed on. Since they were reasonably familiar with the Monsters here, the going was tense but never truly dangerous.
Towering skeleton soldiers that looked utterly unremarkable yet fought with a skill that rivaled elite adventurers. Bone-masked Barbarians of enormous build. And the ethereal Bone Wraiths.
Monsters that had once forced him and Ryuu-senpai to go all out just to barely bring down a single one.
In front of the party now, they had become easy work.
Especially after Alfia joined them. Her anti-magic domain was simply too dominant.
Against Bone Wraiths, which could teleport and unleash invisible, formless magic, she picked them off effortlessly. And Isagi and the girls discovered something else: the woman's anti-magic domain also affected this floor's special "mechanic" — the dazzling, many-hued "color" that always poured out of a Monster once it was wounded.
Like the [Soul Teardrop], that too seemed to be something made of Magic.
Inside Alfia's magic, the "Garden of Stillness," it would slowly disperse, dying like a writhing creature struggling to stay alive.
That sped their advance up enormously.
The real nuisance about the Monsters here, after all, was that indescribable "vitality."
Unless you destroyed the Magic Stone inside a Monster's body in a single instant, any wounded Monster would bleed that brilliant color out of the wound. Not only would it recover completely, but the areas the color covered became nearly impossible to damage again, even for a party currently at Lv.7.
Only bombarding them with magic had any real effect, which made them troublesome in the extreme.
With Alfia along, though, things really did get much simpler.
And once the Monsters stopped posing a threat, the next problem for the group was the terrain of the "kingdom" in front of them.
It made no sense whatsoever. Intricate, tangled, up and down, left and right, corridors twisting like a snarled ball of yarn. You never knew where the road ahead actually led, or whether it was a dead end.
They had the ability to fly, sure. But the moment anyone took to the air, arrows came at them from every direction, fired by skeleton archers who could be anywhere. Troublesome in the extreme.
And even setting that aside, with so many towers and corridors the "kingdom" formed an intensely three-dimensional shape, which meant flying left their line of sight completely blocked anyway. They still couldn't find the right road forward.
Unless they flew straight for those giant blood-red doors in the distance — but there was no point in that. What everyone wanted right now wasn't to reach the next floor; it was to keep running into Monsters here and train their [Stats]. Ideally they'd stumble across a few ordinary mini-bosses while they were at it.
Far off, Isagi could make out a tall tower standing against the sky.
What was certain for now was that they were indeed drawing closer to those blood-red doors — just very, very slowly.
Isagi's mind wasn't really on that, though.
As he'd just said, the most important thing for everyone at present was memorizing the way back, and, ideally, running into a few mini-bosses.
Wandering around at random obviously wasn't the answer.
Isagi's idea was to look for any "landmark" structures nearby. Wherever there was a boss, after all, there had to be something distinctive.
All around them, a single glance took in nothing but pure white and silver-gray towers, and a dense weave of suspended walkways, large and small, crossing one another.
But there really were a few peculiar buildings to be seen.
Down below in the distance, for instance, stood a huge domed structure that looked like some kind of museum or theater.
The trouble was that no one could find a route to it either.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, Lefiya had turned up a few threads to follow.
Along the way the group occasionally came across dead "adventurers" — most likely genuine adventurers who had died in the deep levels once, only for the Dungeon to drag them back out to play the role of "NPC" here.
These ones lay where they had fallen, long dead, nothing left but pale gray bones.
Aside from a few Plot Devices and supplies (the Dungeon was oddly generous about it, though Isagi didn't dare eat or drink any of them), the most valuable thing they carried was map fragments.
Like treasure maps.
Some of the maps these adventurers had left behind were extremely abstract, but once you found a certain pattern to them — as if cracking some kind of "code" — and compared them against the map the party was drawing as they went, you could piece together scraps of information.
One such scrap led the group onward until, deep between one tower and the next, a perfectly straight corridor opened up before them.
It had no branches at all.
When that corridor appeared, even Isagi felt slightly dazed by it.
They'd spent so long winding through twists and turns that he'd never imagined a place like this existed here.
More importantly, at the end of the road stood a small castle.
It was a location utterly unlike anything around it, and there was obviously something inside. Well then, what more was there to say? GO!
Isagi took the lead, holding formation with the girls as they advanced.
And very soon, they ran into an entirely new Monster — skeleton knights mounted on tall horses, clad in iron armor, brilliant color streaming from their bodies.
They'd found the right place.
Far down that straight passage, a long row of knights was plainly about to come charging at them, and they were clearly no pushovers. Even so, Isagi and the girls were thrilled.
Change was a good thing. It meant they'd found the right place.
____
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