In Orario, any adventurer who had reached Level 2 had, to one degree or another, crossed blades with the Floor Master of the upper floors.
Since it stood squarely on the only road to the safe floor, Floor 18, the Guild had never been stingy with information about the Goliath, handing it freely to any adventurer capable of descending that far.
In other words, for adventurers whose whole trade was exploring the depths and guarding against the [unknown], a giant whose every detail had been catalogued was no longer something worth fearing.
And yet parties sent to subjugate the Goliath still came back with dead and wounded, again and again.
The reason was simple: the [individual variance] between monsters.
“CRAAASH — !” With a deafening roar, a boulder weighing several tons dropped with perfect precision, sealing the passage down to Floor 18 completely.
The Goliath had not attacked the two of them the instant it was born.
Its very first act was to tear rock from the wall and wall off the entrance to Floor 18 behind it.
“Blocking the road before anything else?
This just got troublesome.” Looks like I hit the jackpot, Alise Lovell thought.
She and Artorias had almost certainly run into one of the strong individuals among Floor Masters — far more intelligent than the average Goliath.
[If you do not strike me down, I will never let you pass.] That was the message she read in the monster’s deep crimson eyes.
“Before we start, one question.” “Ari, do you have anything like a finishing move?
Something that settles a fight in one blow?” “Huh?
I do, but after I use it I’m stuck in a weakened state for a while.” “Good enough.” Alise didn’t look back.
She only dropped her center of gravity a fraction lower, and the [Crimson Vow] in her hand blazed hotter still.
“I’ll find a way to make you an opening.
The moment you see your chance, don’t hesitate — hit it with everything you’ve got.” “You’re really fine leaving that to me?” Artorias had already sprung out of the pack and shifted into the form best suited for the fight ahead — [War Shadows], the balanced state that married speed to strength.
“You’re an upper-floor monster, after all.
If you charged the front line like I do, a squishy little thing like you would just die, wouldn’t it?” Alise said, half joking, though a thread of real concern ran under the words.
“It’s fine, don’t worry.
It’s just a Goliath.
My Familia and I have put them down more times than I can count.” “And if the worst does happen, I’ll grab you and run.
Trust my speed!” With that, the red-haired girl’s expression turned serious again, and a dazzling flame erupted from her body.
[Burn bright, burn bright, burn bright — flame power, full throttle — !] [Magic: Crimson Flower Stitchwort (Agaricus arvesis)]!
“Though if I happen to knock him down myself and hog all the experience, you won’t hold it against me, right?” She left the teasing line hanging in the air.
Fire exploded beneath her feet, and the thrust turned a single forward step into a crimson meteor that shot straight at the towering giant.
….
Among adventurers, Alise Lovell of Astrea Familia was uniquely gifted at winning fights she should have lost.
Part of it was simply that she always stood at the very front of the war against the Evils faction, which meant she inevitably crossed blades with opponents stronger than herself.
But the [Skills] she possessed played just as crucial a role.
[Righteous Blossom, Crimson Bloom] and [Righteous Battle, Righteous Flame].
In battle, a correction to Strength.
In adversity, a double correction to Endurance and Dexterity.
Against a superior foe, the remaining Agility and Magic receive the same boost.
And should all three conditions be met at once, Strength, Agility and Magic gain a further small increase — one that climbs steadily the longer the fight drags on.
The latter Skill amplified both the former and her innate magic whenever the fight closed to melee range.
As for this frankly cheat-tier system of Skills of hers — “Isn’t that perfectly normal?” “After all, only what refuses to bend before overwhelming evil deserves to be called [justice], right?” — so said Alise herself, the woman in question.
Facing a giant dozens of times her own size, Alise showed a frightening amount of tactical sense.
She knew her raw stats couldn’t match a Floor Master’s, so she never tried to meet it head-on.
Instead she used every advantage her small frame and speed gave her, weaving around that colossal body at blistering speed.
“Haaah — !” Her blade flashed.
Flame burst open at the giant’s ankle.
That thick stone hide was tofu against an enchanted longsword.
The wounds weren’t deep, but every stroke severed a tendon or a nerve with surgical precision.
Ankle, then knee, then thigh.
The girl ran across the ground as living fire and never once stopped moving, whittling away — slowly, faintly, but surely — at what little mobility the giant had to begin with.
“RRROOOAR — !!!” Beaten one-sidedly, the Goliath bellowed in fury, enormous palms sweeping everywhere, trying to crush the irritating red insect at its feet.
But at the last possible instant Alise always used the recoil of her flame jets to twist impossibly in midair, and blow after blow whiffed, leaving nothing but a row of craters punched into the rock wall.
Realizing that brute physical force would never catch her, it sucked in a great breath, its chest swelling.
“ROAR ROAR ROAR — !!!” A visible shockwave of sound rolled outward in every direction.
That Roar carried more than intimidation.
It slowed Alise measurably — and as it echoed, countless small monsters from the nearby floors began crawling out of the cracks in the rock walls, with no small number of Minotaurs among them.
“Tch.
So it called for backup after all.” Alise’s eyebrow arched.
If that swarm closed in, she’d be caught between two fronts and lose her edge in agility bit by bit.
Nor was she willing to dump the whole horde of monsters onto Artorias alone.
This was no longer a situation where she could afford to wait and manufacture an opening for him.
The circumstances had changed, and so Alise changed her approach.
She stopped carving the giant down through sheer speed.
She deliberately slowed instead, and met head-on the swinging fist she could easily have dodged.
How stupid.
A mere adventurer, trying to settle things with a Floor Master by raw force.
The girl below almost thought she could read that sneer off the giant’s ugly face.
CRACK — And then came a sound that should never have been made, and with it a stomach-turning loss of balance, and before that beast’s brain could grasp what had happened, the world in the Goliath’s vision had turned completely upside down.
The towering giant had been knocked flat, head-on, by the little bug at its feet.
Battle, superior foe, adversity — all three conditions had converged, pushing the [Crimson Blossom]’s stats to their present peak.
And having given up the magic bonus to her Agility, pouring everything into a pure test of arm-wrestling strength, Alise in that instant genuinely surpassed the Floor Master before her in raw power.
“AAAAAAAH — !!!” And a veteran of a hundred battles does not let a fleeting opening go to waste.
“[Flame Blossom — !!!]” Facing prey that had lost its footing, Alise chose to spend everything she had.
She compressed her magic power to the tip of her sword in an instant, flipped herself up over the giant’s most exposed target — its upper torso — and released the final verse of her spell.
BOOOOM — !!!
Ferocious fire detonated along the line where her blade pierced, erupting into a vast pillar of flame.
The direct hit blew away the giant’s entire right arm along with half its shoulder.
Deep inside the charred cross-section, the faint glow of the magic stone core was visible.
“Did I win?” But just as Alise was sure the fight was decided and moved to land and reset her stance — the giant that had lost half its body did not fall.
Worse than that.
At the blackened wound, countless strands of new flesh were writhing and interlacing at a horrifying, visible speed.
In mere seconds a brand-new arm had regenerated, sheathed in an even harder shell.
WHAM!
The reborn right fist came screaming through the air.
Alise, still locked in the rigidity that followed her ultimate attack, had time only to widen her eyes and bring her sword flat across her chest.
THUD!!!
The impact tore through her and flung her like a cannonball, slamming her deep into the distant rock wall.
Rubble tumbled down.
Dust boiled up.
“Cough — cough…
hey now, nobody ever told me the Floor 17 Goliath came with regeneration like that…” Alise wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth and dragged herself out of the white wall, staring at the monster roaring as it repaired itself, and outright shock spread across her face.
She had misjudged this.
The two of them alone could not bring down the Solitary King of the Labyrinth in front of her.
Having faced Goliaths countless times, she reached that verdict almost the instant she confirmed its regeneration.
This was not an enemy you could finish with coordinated follow-up strikes.
Once it was clear that [Flame Blossom] couldn’t kill it in one hit, the only option left to them was retreat.
“Ari, get ready —” And just as she raised her voice, Alise saw that her animal friend, who had been waiting for his moment, had finally moved.
….
Hanging upside down from the tip of a stalactite, Artorias watched the Floor Master rage below him.
“Self-regeneration that only triggers under lethal threat?” “I see.
Its hair didn’t change color, so I nearly forgot about that.” The Elephant God’s Bite Adi had given him was already gripped in his hand.
According to Alise, the Level 4 Solitary King of the Labyrinth on the upper floors was a big dumb brute — thick-skinned and nothing more, with little else worth watching out for.
She had certainly never mentioned the [regeneration] happening right now.
And as for a Goliath with regeneration, Artorias knew of exactly one: the [Assassin] the Dungeon had deliberately birthed back in Season One, aimed at the busty l0li goddess who had displayed divine authority underground.
But unlike that thing’s regenerative power, which let it keep struggling stubbornly even with its whole upper body blown off, what was happening here felt closer to the same category as that Killer Ant that had used Cero.
Which meant this creature, carrying divine will directly on its back, was in a certain sense the same [kind] as him.
[As an Apostle who carries out the Dungeon’s will, you must never show us any sign of betrayal.] Artorias still remembered that so-called piece of advice the god who was not Tiamat had left him before departing.
So, then — did the Floor Master in front of him also count as part of the Mother Goddess’s will?
Artorias had no idea.
What he wanted to do right now was simply obey the instinct in his gut, and make this low-witted beast understand one fact: that he, who could grow without limit and hear the Dungeon’s voice directly, stood far above the likes of a so-called enhanced Floor Master!
[For this moment alone, I pledge this body as the blade of the Mother Goddess’s will — with the strength of instinct, I shall trample the enemy before me into nothing —] He murmured the words of the chant, and the mask of Phasing surfaced over his face.
Wreathed in ominous magic power, the black shape that was Artorias fell from the sky.
Alise saw only a blur — a black-and-red afterimage had already swept across the giant’s body.
“So fast!
And…
what a sharp cut!” Alise realized with astonishment that ever since he’d put on that mask, Artorias moved at a terrifying speed.
Having watched her fight, he was imitating the exact method she’d used on the Goliath at the start.
But there was a difference.
Artorias, with that eerie magic power coiled around him, attacked without her flames’ spectacle, and with somewhat less raw force — yet his strikes shut down the wounds that had been sealing themselves shut, firmly and completely.
“The wounds…
aren’t regenerating?!” Alise’s eyes went wide.
“I see.
So this is what a difference in compatibility looks like.” Artorias, who had turned himself into a spinning top and carved X-shaped wounds all over the Goliath, was now perched atop the head of the blinded giant, musing aloud.
Slashes and claws that should have done almost nothing were proving devastatingly effective, and the healing he’d been a little worried about earlier had stopped working entirely.
Just as his instinct had told him from the start: in terms of the Dungeon’s divine will, he thoroughly outranked the Floor Master before him.
“It’s over, big guy.” Artorias’s silhouette halted in midair, facing the giant’s right shoulder stump — half-regenerated, and its weakest point in defense.
He tilted back slightly.
Beneath the mask, his mouth opened.
The dark red magic power drifting loose through the surrounding space rushed madly into that mouth, compressing into a wildly unstable black sphere.
[Cero] BOOOOM — !!!
A thick beam of dark crimson light, carrying the momentum to annihilate anything in its path, punched precisely into the one wound the Goliath could not regenerate!
This time there was no explosion.
Only erasure.
The beam bored clean through the giant’s shoulder, drove downward with the angle, and swallowed the enormous magic stone hidden deep in its chest in an instant.
Crack.
With that crisp shattering sound, the once-invincible giant froze mid-motion.
A second later, its massive body burst into a sky’s worth of black ash and collapsed with a roar.
….
The battle was over.
Silence returned to the vast expanse of Floor 17.
“So that’s it.
As long as an adventurer and I enter a floor where the Solitary King of the Labyrinth dwells at the same time, it always produces a special individual with boosted level and abilities, like that one?” Standing atop the thick heap of ash, Artorias turned the thought over.
At that moment a black vortex denser than anything he’d known before was wrapping itself around him.
The Magic Devourer was doing its work, and this surge of power was heavier than any devouring that had come before.
The enormous experience fed back to him after consuming an Enhanced Species Floor Master, and the information it carried, had led him to that conclusion.
And then, to his surprise, he noticed that his body — which in [War Shadows] form had always been nothing more than a vague black silhouette — had changed without his ever noticing.
The black shadow was solidifying, gradually building out clear lines of muscle, the outlines of bone, even genuine tactile sensation.
“…Did I just…
level up?” Surveying the wreckage in front of him, Artorias spoke slowly, unsure.
It seemed his vessel as an adventurer had not yet reached its limit.
But as a monster, he had just broken through the shackles of Level 1.
Walnut-chan🔥👻 🔥 New history: Zenless Zone Zero: