I Thought It Was a Speed Bump (Bonus Chapter) 13: The Evils Faction?
I Thought It Was a Speed Bump (Bonus Chapter) “Ah, Mr.
Artorias just kicked the bucket!” Only when the rabbit in her arms let his head loll to one side did Adi surface from that heavenly sensation and realize her hands might have gotten a little carried away.
“Relax.
There’s no monster in the Dungeon so fragile that an adventurer could pet the magic stone right out of it.” Gojouno Kaguya, who had been watching the whole thing from the sidelines with great enjoyment, spoke up at her leisure.
“Adi, if you feel that bad about it, just set him down on your lap, stroke his forehead gently, and wait for him to wake up on his own.” A wicked little smile curled at the corner of her mouth as she added, with weight behind every word, “Trust me.
The moment he opens his eyes and sees that, he’ll be too happy to know what to do with himself.” “Eh?
That’s all it takes?” Adi, who had never heard of a lap pillow in her life, had no idea what magic such a simple little ritual could possibly hold.
“Of course.
This is a finishing move Lady Astrea demonstrated in person.
Even Lion, when she lay down on Lady Astrea’s lap, went red in the face and turned meek as a lamb.” “Even Lion?
That really is an incredible finishing move.” Still not entirely following, but finding the example far too persuasive to argue with, Adi obediently did as she was told.
She sat cross-legged on the ground, carefully settled the unconscious white rabbit onto her full thighs, and began stroking the faintly trembling forehead of the creature.
The Stitch Rabbit lying on Adi’s lap gave an involuntary little shiver.
Wine-red eyes slid sideways.
Kaguya saw through it, said nothing, and smiled.
“Artorias turning up here was an accident, sure, but you coming down has been a real help,” she said, and then, slowly, laid out the true purpose of her trip.
“Adi, the truth is I didn’t come down here to gather materials.
I picked up the trail of those gutter rats operating in the Dungeon.” “Rats?” Adi’s hand stilled, her expression hardening.
Even her fingers, buried in Artorias’s fur, stopped moving.
“You mean… the Evils faction?” “That’s right.
I got word recently that a group of unidentified types have been using the passages between the upper and middle floors to smuggle dangerous monsters up from the lower floors — maybe even the deep floors.” “Probably to hand off to the tamers inside their own Familia.” Kaguya jabbed a finger at the ground beneath their feet, her voice cold.
“Originally I was only going to come down alone, scout the situation, map out their base and their routes, then find an opening next time to wipe them out in one sweep.” “After all, judging by how the Evils faction always operates, the ones assigned to transport work are mostly low-level small fry — but there are a lot of them.
Letting even a couple slip away to carry word back would be a headache.” “I see.
So me coming into the Dungeon worked out perfectly?” Adi nodded, understanding dawning.
“Mm.” “With three of us, we can upgrade a reconnaissance job into an extermination operation.” So said the swordswoman who had once specialized in the way of Assassination.
“As for what comes next—” The black-haired beauty with the katana at her hip inclined her head slightly, then dropped her gaze to the white Stitch Rabbit whose eyelids were still twitching ever so slightly.
Kaguya crouched down and addressed the ball of fluff on Adi’s lap.
“Hey.
You should be awake by now, shouldn’t you, Artorias?” “How’s Adi’s lap pillow taste?
You woke up ages ago — your eyelids are twitching — and you’re still lying there playing dead so you don’t have to get off.
You lecherous little monster.” “Mr.
Artorias?” Adi tilted her head.
Caught out, Artorias cracked his eyes open in acute embarrassment and slid meekly off the finest pillow in existence.
“I wonder — any interest in the tenth floor?
You’ve never been there.” Under Gojouno Kaguya’s half-smiling stare, he ended up nodding.
…
The Dungeon, tenth floor.
Still within the upper floors, the tenth was a troublesome region with terrible visibility.
A dense white mist of unknown origin hung permanently in the air, and thick weeds grew waist-high across the ground — a perfect place for ambushes and for slipping away.
Escorted by two high-level adventurers and never running into anything special like a Human-Faced Killer Ant, Artorias got a taste of being power-leveled for the first time in his life.
Gorging himself on magic stones the whole way down, he infiltrated the target location practically unopposed.
Through a gap in the weeds, Kaguya narrowed her eyes at the camp ahead.
“Just as I thought.
Their deployment matches my estimate.” “Though I didn’t expect them to be extravagant enough to put an LV3 in charge of a simple transport job.
Five LV2s under him, and the rest are LV1 rabble.” “Kaguya-chan, look at those cages…” Adi kept her voice low, brows knitting.
“What’s inside them… monsters?
They look extremely agitated.” “Forget the cages for now.
Deal with the people first.” Kaguya divided the work with perfect calm.
“I’ll take out the LV3 leading them, immediately.” “Adi, you tie up the remaining LV2s.” “And as for you, Artorias—” Kaguya turned to Artorias beside her, already back in Goblin form and cracking his knuckles.
“Use your transformation and the fact that you read as a monster to begin with.
Take advantage of the terrain and cover Adi.
And if anyone slips the net and tries to run…” Smiling coldly, Kaguya drew a finger across her throat.
“Don’t let the fact that they’re human give you pause.” … With a low battle cry, that streak of deep crimson kimono tore through the mist like an arrow off the string.
Body dipping low, Kaguya unveiled a draw-cut of blinding speed.
[Iai Blade — Single Flash!] “Who’s there?!” The first Evils faction sentry had time for exactly one startled shout before a brilliant arc of steel split the white mist.
Blood sprayed in a fine mist.
With no mercy whatsoever, using the fastest opening technique in her arsenal, Kaguya took the head off one of the LV2 adventurers before the battle had properly begun.
“Tch.
Black-haired katana user — the stinking women of the Astrea Familia again?” The first of them to react, the LV3 adventurer, exploded with rage.
His spear stabbed out as he bellowed.
“Enemy attack!
Scatter—!!!” But it was already far too late.
As the strongest of the three at LV3, Kaguya shredded the Evils faction’s formation through sheer solitary violence.
The remaining members panicked.
Just as they tried to counterattack or reinforce their LV3 leader, another gorgeous streak — deep blue this time — came crashing into the battlefield right behind her.
“Sorry!
This road’s closed!” Sacred Oath, the one-handed sword in Adi’s grip, barred the way against every Evils faction member who thought about retreating.
Even facing multiple LV2s at once, she gave no ground at all.
…
“So this is what ‘cover her’ means.” Waist-high weeds.
White mist blanketing the floor.
And on top of that, the scent of monsters still being born somewhere below.
For hunting adventurers, there was no ground in the world better suited to Artorias than this wide, blind expanse.
A wet crunch— In Goblin form, he opened the throat of a fallen Evils Familia flunky with the Elephant God’s Bite and watched the hand the man had stretched out in his struggling go limp and drop.
Nothing stirred inside him.
Not so much as a flicker of the urge to laugh.
Maybe it was because he understood these were Evils faction members who had done nothing but evil.
Maybe it was because the body he wore was a monster’s.
Once a target had been clearly marked as something to be removed, Artorias’s mood stayed perfectly level.
And after he actually did it, nothing about it sat wrong with him either.
This mop-up job was no harder than blasting fish in a barrel on the upper floors.
Watching Adi work, though, Artorias quickly noticed something off.
“Ha—!” Adi, swinging that silver-white one-handed sword with a grim expression, was strong.
Her movements lacked Kaguya’s lethal fluidity, but that steady, unshakeable style made it obvious she operated on a completely different tier from the several LV2s she was facing.
And yet she never once did what Kaguya had just done — decisively kill any of them.
The LV2s at her own level were one thing.
But against the LV1 rabble, blows that should unquestionably have been fatal somehow always left the man barely clinging to life.
Anyone could see it.
She was pulling her strikes.
Kaguya, who had known her for years, must have understood her friend’s nature long ago — that innocence that couldn’t bring itself to kill even when the target was wicked.
Which was exactly why the monster had to be the one to do it.
“Not that it surprises me.” She was, after all, the sort of soft-hearted person who might well go easy on monsters too.
In that case, the part she was missing could simply be filled in by the one who’d been on the receiving end of her kindness.
Artorias was closing in on one of Adi’s opponents from behind, ready to strike, when the monster who worked the fringes of the battlefield — the one playing scavenger, far from its violent center — caught the first sour note.
He smelled something bad.
Amid the chaos of the Evils faction crowd, one small, scrawny member had a mad glint in his eyes as he furtively fumbled at something inside his coat.
“Adi!
Kaguya!
Something’s wrong—” Artorias was shouting on pure instinct before he even understood what the thing in the man’s coat was.
…
Hearing Artorias’s warning, Gojouno Kaguya turned toward the sound.
Her gaze met the sneaking man’s across the crowd, and she caught sight of one crimson corner of the object he was pulling from his pack.
“That’s—” Kaguya’s wine-red pupils shrank, and she shouted at the top of her lungs.
“Adi, break away from them!
These bastards have Flame Stones on them—” The [Flame Stone], a drop item from the monsters of the forty-fourth floor of the deep levels.
As an explosive it had the drawback of requiring manual ignition.
In exchange, if one went off at close range, not even an LV3 adventurer could walk away whole.
And the damned piece of filth in front of her had clearly realized she’d seen through their scheme.
He abandoned any thought of counterattacking and threw himself into pinning her down, keeping her too occupied to be anywhere else.
Damn it.
Kaguya clicked her tongue, irritation flaring.
This was a threat.
If her group didn’t pull back, they’d simply hurl the Flame Stone at her and set it off somehow.
If she were the target, she might manage.
But what if they turned it on Adi instead — Adi, who was only LV2?
What Kaguya feared, however, never came to pass.
“What… a monster… carrying a weapon—?!” A monster that looked utterly feeble had slipped soundlessly in behind the dangerous man holding the Flame Stone, and the short blade in its hand punched precisely through the spot where his heart was.
One strike, one kill.
Artorias snuffed out the dangerous spark and withdrew the instant the blow landed, vanishing into the floor’s white mist before anyone spotted him.
“Heh.” With nothing left at her back to worry about, a cruel and beautiful smile spread across Kaguya’s face.
“My thanks, Artorias.” With the crisis gone, there was no reason to hold anything back.
Higanbana’s deep crimson blade punched through the chest of the Evils Familia’s LV3 leader, who had traded wound for wound to reach her.
Then her hands slid down and drew the [Kodachi Futaba] hidden beneath her kimono.
The blades misted over.
Twin swords whirled.
[Iai Blade — Futaba!] An X-shaped sword dance severed what life he had left.
Once she confirmed that Artorias, his ambush successful, had already cleared the Flame Stone’s blast radius, Kaguya kicked the dead adventurer’s corpse away, snatched the spear from his hands, tensed the muscles of her arm, and hurled it at the body still clutching the Flame Stone.
BOOM—!!!
The spear struck the Flame Stone’s core dead-on, serving as the final firing hammer.
A superheated blast wave strong enough to scatter the white mist swept the entire camp in an instant.
With flame and smoke blocking her view, undisguised disgust rose on Kaguya’s face.
“Hiding the Flame Stones on the most useless rabble to save their own skins?
These scum are as sickeningly tasteless as ever.” The LV1 grunts at the center of the blast, the ones scrambling to pick up the stones off the ground, had been reduced to ash.
The several LV2s who knew their own side’s trump card and had braced for it were battered and filthy, but had scraped through alive and were now scattering in all directions.
Kaguya, with plenty left in reserve, didn’t give chase.
Her eyes went upward instead, and a mocking curve touched her lips.
“He really is a clever one.” Up there was a monster — one who had used his transformation to become a flying monster, hanging in the Dungeon’s sky, coiled and ready.
Kaguya’s stride slowed.
She knew perfectly well that the cleanup from here on required nothing from her.
“A monster?
Why is a Purple Moth from the upper floors on the tenth floor?” One Evils faction member, lucky enough to survive the explosion and now sprinting desperately toward the exit, heard wingbeats overhead and lifted his face.
Before he could grasp what was happening, the Purple Moth circling above him erupted in a burst of searing white light.
The creature’s body, no bigger than a human head, swelled and warped inside that twisting glare.
“Ah…??” Backed into a corner with nowhere left to go, the man’s mouth fell open and the terror in his eyes froze solid.
“AAAAAHHH—!?” It came from the powerful foe Artorias had only just finished devouring: the Human-Faced Killer Ant, its chariot-sized bulk plummeting out of the sky with all the horrifying momentum of a fall from that height.
CRASH— The colossus hit the ground and the earth shuddered.
A pitch-black shadow swallowed the handful of survivors trying to flee, delivering them their final despair — the end of every last thread of life.
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