With a thunderous crash— As the last heavy body struck the ground, the dust billowing through the air slowly settled.
A colossal thing sheathed in pitch-black carapace now lay quietly across the grass of the tenth floor.
And beneath its belly, heavy enough to grind stone to powder, several smears of dark red that no longer held any recognizable shape spoke silently of the slaughter that had just taken place.
“That’s it?” Artorias let the transformation go and returned to Goblin form, staring down at the remains of the Evils faction members who hadn’t even had time to raise a hand in resistance.
What rose in him was a strange, absurd sense of unreality.
As his first real engagement against adventurers, it had been such a crushing win that it was almost dull.
Honestly speaking— When Kaguya had told him the enemy was an elite squad made up of one LV3 and five LV2s, Artorias had braced himself for a grueling fight.
After all, judging purely by levels on paper, the Evils faction were the ones with the advantage.
What actually happened was a near-total one-sided massacre.
Kaguya removed an LV2 with a single burst of illumination, so fast that the squad’s leader never even glimpsed the shape of his own death.
Adi, LV2 herself, gave no ground at all against multiple opponents of the same level.
Which left him, from start to finish, in charge of clearing out the small fry who tried to wander into Adi and Kaguya’s battlefield, plus finishing off a few LV2s already hanging on by a thread.
And at the very end he had used the sheer mass of his transformation to drop on them like a falling mountain, turning these so-called elites into fertilizer for the grass.
So that was all they amounted to.
It really was a mistake to use anyone connected to the main storyline as a yardstick for strength.
Artorias shook his head with a touch of self-mockery.
When he first ran into Adi, and again when Kaguya’s Five Lights left him stunned, he had felt keenly how weak he still was.
But measured by results, both Kaguya of the just Familia of Astrea and Adi with that gentle smile always on her face stood at the very apex of the pyramid among adventurers of their level.
Ordinary Evils faction members, who did nothing but crouch in the gutters spinning schemes, were as fragile as paper toys before genuine strength like that.
“Not bad at all, as a closing act.” The cool voice at his side cut through Artorias’s thoughts.
Kaguya flicked the blood from her blade with an elegant snap and strolled over to the great iron cage that had come through the fight untouched.
“Right.
Now that the trash is cleared away, let’s see what kind of monster these rats were willing to die escorting.” Kaguya flipped aside the heavy black cloth draped over the cage, and a creature of bizarre build was laid bare before them.
Skin as pale as an invalid’s, though it did nothing to diminish her beauty — if anything it complemented the pair of crimson eyes glaring out from beneath knitted brows, all of it set atop a woman’s body voluptuous enough to show every curve.
Among adventurers, the thing before them counted as a fairly famous monster.
A creature of the lower floors: the Arachne Xenos.
A rare monster with the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a spider, native to the lower floors.
Her innate stats fell a step short of the Dragon Maiden (Vouivre), another rare species, yet she still carried a threat rating equivalent to LV3 potential — and once you factored in the natural venom that ordinary healing potions could not easily cure, a Arachne Xenos was arguably more dangerous than a Vouivre.
“I see.
No wonder they needed an LV3 adventurer to handle the escort.” Seeing the cargo they had been transporting, Kaguya finally understood why the Evils faction, hardly flush with manpower, would assign an LV3 member to a job like this.
Monsters were graded differently from adventurers.
Without reason, and without the skills and magic that came from a god’s blessing, fighting on raw talent and physique alone, they often came off worse against adventurers of the same level or against a coordinated party.
But this Arachne Xenos locked in the cage was clearly something else.
Her upper body was clad in adventurer’s armor, her face sealed behind a visored iron helm, her human hands and spider limbs bound fast by chains anchored around the cage, and wounds left by weapons marked her all over.
Even so, the moment she sensed adventurers drawing near, unmistakable defiance radiated from that tightly bound body.
“Ssshhaaa—!!” The monster, dragged back into the light, let out a hiss brimming with hostility.
Eight compound eyes fixed on the living creatures before her through the gaps in the helm, and she hurled herself against the cramped cage again and again with a deafening clang of metal.
“An armed monster?” Adi came up beside them and took in the creature’s wretched state, a flicker of pity crossing her eyes.
“Forcing equipment onto a monster — were they planning to tame it and use it as a weapon of war?
The Evils faction really are—” But where Adi felt anger, what Artorias felt was far stranger.
The instant he laid eyes on this monster, an inexplicable familiarity washed over him, something he could not put into words.
A tremor that came from the depths of his soul.
Different species, wildly different shapes — and yet he could feel it clearly.
The thing in that cage resembled him in some fundamental way.
She possessed reason.
Buried under fear and fury, and plainly not the same as his own reason built on memories of a past life and human logic, but the light glinting in those compound eyes was nothing a beast that knew only killing could ever hold.
And the moment she noticed him approaching, the frantic battering against the bars stopped.
“Xenos.” Reaching a hand toward the cage, Artorias softly spoke the name by which her kind was collectively known in his memory.
That word from the original story, the one that always left an unhealed ache, surfaced in his mind.
Not being ordinary monsters, they had no patch of ground to call their own in a Dungeon that walled itself in on every side.
Their inborn longing for the sunlight of the surface was never understood by the people who lived up there.
They spoke human words while wearing monstrous forms, and in the end neither adventurers nor monsters would accept them.
They could only scrape out a living in the narrow gap between.
Adi had the order backwards.
It wasn’t that this one had been fitted with weapons after her capture.
It was because monsters like her had taken up weapons that the Evils faction had come to seize her.
“Hm.
I’ve no idea where the Evils faction dug up a rare mutant like this, but a monster is a monster.
There’s no reason to just let it go.” While Artorias was still turning it over, the crisp ring of a tachi leaving its sheath reached his ears.
Higanbana flared crimson once more in Gojouno Kaguya’s hand as she regarded the spider woman in the cage with cool detachment, the way one might appraise a magic stone or a rare material laid out at the Guild’s exchange window.
“Hey, Artorias.” She turned her head and asked it casually.
“This thing’s a rare beast from the lower floors.
It ought to be worth quite a lot to you.” “The Evils crowd have it caged and helpless as it is, so — do you want to eat it yourself?
Or shall I do the honors and cut out its magic stone for you?” To Kaguya this hardly qualified as a question worth dwelling on.
Unlike Adi, who was watching the caged monster with sympathy in her eyes, whether a monster was pitiable or not had never entered her calculations to begin with.
The air seemed to freeze for a moment.
The Arachne Xenos in the cage seemed to feel the lethal killing intent rolling off the strong woman before her, and her bound body began to tremble without her willing it.
“…Let her go.” After a few seconds of silence, Artorias lifted his head and said it plainly.
“Huh?” Kaguya’s sword hand stopped in midair, those wine-red eyes widening slightly, as though she’d just heard an unbelievable joke.
She turned and looked him up and down with a scrutinizing gaze, searching his face for any sign that he was kidding.
“You’re serious?
This is a monster from the lower floors.
It’d be a huge help to you, wouldn’t it?” Monsters grew differently from adventurers.
For creatures that only had to devour magic stones to keep getting stronger, the concept of a comrade barely existed.
“I don’t need it.” Artorias shook his head, offering no elaborate explanation, only meeting Kaguya’s eyes quietly.
“We came all the way down from the seventh floor to the tenth.
I’ve taken plenty of spoils already.
And besides — I don’t want to eat her.” Why?
The question filled Kaguya’s wine-red eyes as she stared at him, and Artorias didn’t answer.
He would have struggled to put the feeling into words.
That sense of kinship, as though something in her blood ran in his own.
Unlike the monsters that charged him mindlessly on sight, he had no wish to treat a being like this as prey.
The two of them held each other’s gaze for three seconds.
In the end it was Kaguya’s sharp stare that softened, and she let out a resigned sigh.
“Tch.
What a strange creature you are.” She slid her beloved blade back into its sheath in one clean motion and stepped aside.
“If the interested party — the one who could actually get stronger by eating it — has no objection, then it’s hardly my place to argue.” “You were a real help in that fight just now, besides.
I’m not so destitute that I need to fight a monster over its own kill.” “I agree with Mr.
Artorias’s decision as well.” Adi, who had said nothing all this time, stepped forward now.
She walked up to the cage with a gentle smile on her face.
“She seems quite calm at the moment.
I’m in favor of letting this monster go.” “And if Mr.
Artorias chose this, he must have his reasons.” The girl who had been the first to deal with Artorias crouched down and studied the Arachne Xenos in the cage in silence.
She kept feeling that the creature behind those bars and the Artorias beside her, whose every word and gesture was indistinguishable from a human’s, had something in common.
“Of course.
Only you could get along best with that pigheaded elf…” Watching Adi extend her trust without a moment’s hesitation, Kaguya rolled her eyes, exasperation coloring her voice.
“Adi, you idiot, learn to doubt people once in a while.
If you swallow a monster’s judgment that easily, one of these days you’ll be cheated out of everything down to your bones.” Sharp as her tongue was, she made no move to stop Adi from swinging her sword through the cage’s lock.
A snap, a flash of silver-white light.
The chains hit the ground and the cage door swung wide.
The trembling Arachne Xenos poked her head out with great caution, turning her compound eyes over the three of them one by one, and finally holding a long look on Artorias, who stood closest.
No attack.
No hissing.
As though she understood human ways, the monster lowered her head to them in what could only be thanks, then set her eight long legs moving and vanished like a black shadow into the thick white mist of the tenth floor.
… The battle was over, which meant it was time to part.
Kaguya left first, citing the need to check for any other lingering traces — and to strip the battlefield while she was at it — leaving the space to the two cross-species friends who clearly had things to say.
Time passed.
The mist of the tenth floor was as dense as ever, but the smell of blood in the air had thinned considerably.
“Um… Mr.
Artorias.” At the moment of departure, Adi stopped short in front of the passage back to the upper floors.
With her back to him, fingers twisting awkwardly against each other, the girl’s voice came out low.
“Thank you.
Truly, for today.” “If you hadn’t stepped in at the last moment and dealt with the man holding the Flame Stone, I might have been badly hurt.
Kaguya-chan could have been in danger too.” She turned around, and those eyes as blue as the open sky shimmered with something complicated.
Gratitude.
Guilt.
And, faintly, a trace of confusion.
“And… I’m sorry.
I made you do something you didn’t want to do.” Adi bowed her head, her voice dropping further.
“Up until today you’ve been avoiding killing people wherever you could, haven’t you?
But because of me—” Adi’s weapon, Sacred Oath, was a second-grade armament deliberately reinforced along the utterly impractical line of [not killing].
As a member of the city’s peacekeeping force, the girl had hardly kept her hands clean of blood through this particular Dark Age.
Even so, by nature she disliked conflict, and she instinctively shied away from the fact of taking a life.
Up in Orario she could still focus on stripping an opponent of the ability to resist, on incapacitating a target rather than ending them.
But here, far from the city, in a Dungeon bristling with danger, there was no room to keep to a no-kill principle while facing multiple enemies at once.
And the one who had filled every hole her naivety opened was Artorias, carrying out the role of the cleaner.
So Adi was apologizing for her own weakness, and blaming herself for staining Artorias’s hands with blood.
This was getting troublesome.
“…” Artorias was quiet for a while.
He didn’t much care for this heavy mood hanging over a situation that had, after all, ended perfectly well.
But having never once dated a woman in his previous life, he had no idea how best to comfort her.
After turning it over and over, he settled on the simplest, most legible form he could manage.
A flash of white light, and his appearance shifted from the cute rabbit that women found so easy to like into the Goblin shape he had worn when they first met.
Artorias stretched out a green hand and scratched his head, speaking in the rough tones of a Goblin rather than his own voice, keeping it as light as he could.
“There’s nothing to apologize for.” He pointed at his green face, then at the corpses of the Evils faction members on the ground, and gave a careless shrug.
“I’m a monster, after all.” “In the eyes of the world, we’re humanity’s enemies to begin with.
A byword for evil.” “A monster killing people is simply the natural order of things.
And from the moment I became a monster, as far as anyone else is concerned, my hands were already stained with human blood.” The monster playing the role of villain laid out his self-evident reasoning.
“So you don’t need to carry any of this.” “If anything — if a price this trivial is all it takes to buy the help of an adventurer from the surface,” “then as far as I’m concerned, that’s a very good deal.” Both of them knew perfectly well that it was a lie neither could believe.
It was also the clumsiest and most sincere kindness Artorias had to offer.
“…” Adi stared at him blankly.
At this Mr.
Goblin with his fearsome face, telling a lie he couldn’t even sell to himself with the most earnest expression imaginable.
And then— “Pfft.
What is that?
That’s far too convenient a way of looking at things, even for an adventurer.” Having listened to the end of an argument that was frankly pure sophistry, she finally laughed out loud.
It was a laugh from the heart, the kind that comes after choosing, of your own will, to accept something clumsy.
Adi wiped the glimmer from the corner of her eye with a finger and straightened her back, her voice full of feeling.
“Mr.
Artorias… you really are a very strange monster.” There was relief in the girl’s words, the ease of a weight set down.
She crouched, reached out, and gently ruffled the top of Artorias’s head.
“I’m so glad it was you I met back then, Mr.
Artorias.” “I’m so glad I could become friends with someone of another race like you.” “Hey, what’s taking so long?
Haven’t the two of you whispered at each other long enough?” In the distance, Kaguya had run out of patience and was waving at Adi.
“Coming, Kaguya-chan—!” Adi waved back in the same manner, then, just as she was about to leave, turned around once more and left behind one last question with a hint of pleading in it.
“If there’s a chance… may I come find you on the upper floors sometime, Mr.
Artorias?
To spend time together?” “Whenever you like, if that’s what you want.” Artorias gave her the answer she was hoping for.
“Mm.
I’ll definitely come back to the upper floors to find you.” The girl nodded hard, and on her face as she turned to go was the same smile he remembered from the very first time they met.
… Incidentally, Adi Varma — who had skipped her patrol without permission, run off into the Dungeon, and gotten herself tangled up with the Evils faction — was caught red-handed by her sister Shakti Varma the moment she returned to the surface.
Sentenced to the iron-claw skull-squeeze, the girl had to apologize nonstop for ten solid minutes before she was released from her big sister’s enormous hand.
Gojouno Kaguya, who knew the whole story from beginning to end, remarked that she had enjoyed the show tremendously — and did not put in a single word on the girl’s behalf.
Walnut-chan🔥👻 🔥 New history: DanMachi: