Dungeon, Floor 18 – Inside an Inn Room “It’s barely dawn…
what’s gotten into you?” The shriek went off right beside his ear, sharp enough to punch through an eardrum.
Artorias jolted upright, half convinced he’d just gone deaf, whatever drowsiness had been left in him blown clean away.
Ears clamped under both hands, he stared in complete confusion at the red-haired girl who had already retreated to the far corner of the bed.
Last night she’d clung to him shamelessly, nuzzling and squeezing him without a shred of restraint.
Now, one morning later, her attitude had swung a full one hundred and eighty degrees, and she looked for all the world like someone who had just seen a ghost.
It wasn’t as if they’d been drinking last night, he thought.
Heh.
Fickle women.
The sheer gap between last night and this morning earned a dry remark from him, though he kept it to himself.
Alise’s reaction, however, was far more extreme than anything he’d imagined.
“You…
you…
you…?!” Wrapped tightly in the blanket, curled into the corner of the bed, Alise had her eyes stretched wide and round, her cheeks as red as an overripe apple.
She stuck out one trembling finger, aimed it at Artorias, and worked her lips for a long while without managing a single complete sentence.
“What about me?” Artorias tilted his head, baffled.
Hm?
Wait.
Something did feel off.
Only now, under Alise’s horrified scrutiny, did it dawn on the freshly woken Artorias that something about him was not quite as usual.
His line of sight sat considerably higher than it did when he was perched on top of a girl’s head as a Stitch Rabbit.
Beyond that, though, nothing seemed particularly strange.
“Y-you – look at yourself!” Alise had clawed back a sliver of composure, and though the crimson hadn’t faded from that stunningly beautiful face of hers, she could at least string words together now.
The red-haired girl scrambled off the bed in an ungainly tumble, tore through the drawers in the room, and finally dug out a bronze mirror, which she shoved straight into Artorias’s face.
“Look at what you look like right now!” Artorias looked into the mirror.
What stared back was no longer the little white ball of fluff with long ears that a certain girl had refused to let go of all last night.
It was a familiar face – a black-haired, red-eyed boy with clean, delicate features.
That face, roughly as he’d looked in high school, had been subtly refined somewhere along the way.
It looked finer than the version of himself he remembered.
Of course, for Alise, the fact that he had turned human wasn’t even the most devastating part.
The bigger problem was that the boy in the mirror, the one who had just crawled out from under the covers, wore absolutely nothing, his lean body and clean-cut lines on full display.
“This…” Artorias froze too.
He looked at those five familiar fingers, then touched his own face without thinking.
The sensation at his fingertips was warm, utterly real, nothing like the cold, hard monster hide he’d worn every other day.
“You get it now, don’t you!” Alise had both hands over her eyes, and yet she kept sneaking looks at Artorias’s new human shape through the gaps between her fingers.
Honestly speaking, Ari had already been plenty cute as a rabbit, and he looked rather good like this too – No, no, what was she even thinking!
That was completely beside the point!
“Anyway – so that we can have a normal conversation – Ari, y-you put some clothes on first!” Alise shouted, wrenching her gaze aside.
Artorias didn’t move.
He simply looked back at her with the same steady stare, one that carried a faint note of innocence.
Faced with that considerate little look that said do you think I own any clothes, Alise’s brain, which had crashed under the shock, finally rebooted.
“…Oh.
Right.
Ari used to be a monster.” Where would a monster keep a spare change of underwear!?
A veteran of countless battles who had never once faced a situation like this, the young adventurer seemed only now to grasp the plain, awkward reality in front of her.
“I’ll go into town and buy you something right now!
You – you just stay in that blanket and don’t move!
Absolutely do not move!” With that incoherent order, Alise blew out of the room like a whirlwind.
The door slammed with a bang hard enough to shake the dust off the frame three times over.
Quiet settled back over the room.
Alone at last, Artorias spread his fingers and stared at the palm and skin he knew so well, a dazed disbelief still lingering in his eyes.
“So…
I’m human again?” A thought crossed his mind.
White light shifted.
The boy’s body shrank all at once, returning to that harmless little white rabbit.
Aside from the transformations that simply wouldn’t fit in a room this size, he cycled through every form he possessed, one after another.
The conclusion: he was still the same Apostle of the Dungeon he’d always been.
His abilities and his magic hadn’t changed in any meaningful way.
Apart from this human form that had arrived without warning, everything was exactly as before.
As for who was responsible, that wasn’t a hard guess.
Artorias thought at once of that unexpected meeting with a certain goddess in his dream last night.
Odds were this was the quiet handiwork of that doting Tia-Mama from the dream, arranged as a surprise for him.
After all, Tiamat was the only god in this world who knew him inside and out well enough to conjure the shape of his previous life out of thin air.
Though a surprise for him translated, for the entirely unprepared girl in front of him, into pure fright.
The corners of the black-haired boy’s mouth curved upward.
“Still, whatever else, thank you, Tia-Mama.” “Thank you for this gift.” Feeling out this hard-won, familiar body, Artorias murmured his gratitude to the Mother Goddess who was not present here, and he meant every word of it.
…
With a high-level adventurer’s speed, a little errand like shopping in town didn’t take long.
Some twenty minutes later, Alise came back to the room with a brand-new set of men’s clothing, the flush on her face mostly gone and her composure more or less restored.
“Um…
I don’t know if the size is right.
I just guessed and picked out a set.” “Try it on first.
If it doesn’t fit, I’ll go exchange it.” Alise tossed the clothes to Artorias and turned her back.
Only after the rustle of dressing behind her stopped did she turn around, a little stiffly, to study the boyish figure she’d been so carefully avoiding looking at.
Artorias had already changed into the simple linen shirt and trousers.
Rivira-made goods, built above all to last.
The fabric was ordinary enough, but on this black-haired boy with his peculiar presence, the shirt hung remarkably well and made him look sharp.
“…Whew.
Looks like a decent fit.” Those few minutes of cooling off had done their work; Alise could finally meet Artorias’s eyes without flinching.
She glanced at his face, then looked him over from head to toe now that he was dressed, undisguised curiosity in her gaze.
“Amazing…
there’s not the slightest trace left of the monster Ari used to be.” “If I hadn’t fought a Floor Master alongside you and gotten some impression of that unique aura of yours, I’d never have recognized you.” So Alise said.
Setting aside what she already knew going in, she doubted she’d ever connect the boy standing in front of her – who looked about her own age – with a monster born inside the Dungeon.
For Artorias, meanwhile, this side of Alise was just as novel.
Whether at their first meeting on the upper floors or when the two of them brought down a Floor Master together, what Alise Lovell had shown him was always the confident, unruffled, faintly slapdash bearing of a seasoned adventurer.
It took seeing her like this – face burning, hands fluttering, at a complete loss – for Artorias to truly register that, once you stripped away that formidable shell, she was really just an ordinary girl who didn’t look very old at all.
“It’s probably a new ability I got from devouring the Floor Master.” Artorias flexed his arms and legs, getting used to this long-lost human body, and offered the explanation casually.
“I didn’t expect it either.” “A transformation ability, huh…
I never imagined it went beyond monsters.
Humans too.” Alise nodded thoughtfully, then, as though something had occurred to her, went red again, her eyes drifting anywhere but at him.
“That, um…
since you can turn into a human now…” “…Ahem.
I think from now on we should be a little more careful about, you know, physical contact.” “Because…
well, a boy and a girl shouldn’t get that close.” Because last night she’d hugged him like a body pillow in her sleep.
She’d even thrown a leg over him…
One flash of that sensation, that image, and all the heat she’d finally chased off her face came roaring back.
She could die of embarrassment!
“I wonder who it was last night who kept holding on to me even after I told her I was male.” Artorias delivered that without an ounce of mercy.
“That doesn’t count – !” Alise shot back, half frantic.
At the end of the day, it had never once crossed her mind at the time that Artorias, being a monster, might have a gender worth worrying about.
He shared a bond with both Adi and Kaguya, and after actually spending time around him, her instincts told her that this monster called Artorias was a companion worth trusting.
But that trust had been formed entirely from the standpoint of a comrade-in-arms.
Alise had never in her life considered that one day she’d have to deal with the boy in front of her as a member of the opposite sex!
“Apart from everyone in the Familia, I’ve never once shared an inn room with another adventurer, let alone one of the opposite -” As captain of an Astrea Familia whose current roster was, without exception, beautiful girls, she had zero experience with that sort of grown-up relationship.
Even if he looked like a perfectly harmless ordinary boy, if word of this got out it would probably touch off an uproar among her comrades.
Halfway through the sentence, inspiration struck.
Alise’s eyes lit up.
“Wait.
If that’s the case…” A bold idea had taken shape in her head.
“If you can turn into such a flawless human form, Ari, one even I couldn’t see through…
doesn’t that mean you could pass yourself off as an adventurer and slip up to the surface for a look?” The moment the words were out, both of them went still.
It was true.
On appearance alone, Artorias as he was now looked like the most unremarkable human boy imaginable.
Carrying that bold notion with them, the two packed their things and stepped out of the room.
Two people emerging from a single room did draw its share of stares.
Most of them landed on Alise, captain of the Familia of Justice.
The rest were curious, appraising looks aimed at the rookie adventurer walking beside the red-haired girl, wondering just who on earth he was.
Exactly as Alise had predicted, not one person entertained the possibility that the boy walking shoulder to shoulder with her might be a monster hiding in plain sight.
Worth mentioning, though: When Artorias and Alise came down into the inn’s ground-floor lobby, the owner, who had been wiping down the counter, raised his head and saw the black-haired boy trailing behind her.
A single room.
That unexpected scream in the morning.
The owner paused as he took in the pair, his eyes moving from one to the other, then nodded like a man who had just understood everything.
A knowing, thoroughly amused smile spread across his face, and he even threw Alise a wink.
“Well now, Captain Alise.
Looks like you rested well last night.” “Will you two be extending the single room?” The owner leaned deliberately on you two and single room, his eyes brimming with mischief.
“N-no, no, that won’t be necessary.
We’re checking out and heading back to the Familia.” Knowing full well that explaining would only dig the hole deeper, Alise didn’t dare try.
She grabbed Artorias by the arm and bolted out of the inn like a fugitive.
“My, my, so that’s the flavor of youth?
Ah, to be young~” Alise could only pretend she hadn’t heard the owner’s wistful, been-there-myself commentary drifting after her.
“Nnngh…
why is it that everything’s going smoothly, and yet I feel like I’ve lost something important?” Once they’d put some distance between themselves and the inn, Alise pressed both hands to her burning cheeks and let out a thoroughly undignified whimper.
It was as if she could see the captain’s dignity she’d spent years cultivating drifting away on the wind, gone to who knew where.
____ 👻🔥Seek: Walnut-chan on P a t r e o n🔥👻 🔥 New history: Zenless Zone Zero: