Among the upper-floor adventurers, the Killer Ants were infamous, yet a single one of them wasn’t really that strong a monster.
Their natural red carapace was hard, but not so hard that an ordinary blade couldn’t pierce it.
Their sharp mandibles and claws were genuinely keen, yet they carried no debuff of any kind.
This was the sort of monster that dominated a region purely through overwhelming numbers, which made it, for someone like Artorias with a mob-clearing magic like [Devourer (monster eater)], an opponent of undeniably excellent compatibility.
If it were just these ordinary Killer Ants, no matter how many came, he could hum a tune and turn them all into stir-fried ant legs without breaking a sweat.
“So then, what happens if it’s a special Enhanced Species instead?” Artorias’s throat bobbed.
As he tightened his grip on his weapon, beads of sweat, a mix of tension and excitement, slid down from his temple.
Estimated level: LV2, the same level rating as the Minotaur that lived on the deeper floors.
The air trembled.
The cavern shook.
[Gaaaaa—] The massive Masked Killer Ant let loose a roar that rang through the entire floor.
The physical shockwave of sound stabbed at Artorias’s eardrums, and as it left every other monster on the floor quaking in terror, this pitch-black war chariot, wearing its white bone mask, lurched into motion.
With a thunderous crash—!
No fancy technique at all.
What came charging straight at Artorias was the simplest, most direct feral ram, weaponizing its enormous size and weight.
Given the terrifying stats on that thing’s status panel, a clean hit would, without question, snuff out the fragile life of a lowly Goblin with ease.
“But no matter how powerful an attack is, if it can’t land, it means nothing.” Matching strength against the colossus before him was clearly hopeless, but in speed he held an overwhelming edge.
Boom— Rock scattered.
Reading his opponent’s movement, Artorias dodged the direct hit and rolled nimbly across the ground, swinging his frying pan at the ant claw that had missed his standing spot by a hair.
Clang— A metallic ring came back, one that sounded nothing like striking flesh.
That hard?
The webbing of both hands gripping the handle went numb, and the frying pan nearly flew right out of Artorias’s grasp.
The six ant claws propping the creature up bore only a shallow white scuff, not even a crack.
It seemed that against this thing’s defense, the poor-quality blunt instrument in his hand had already outlived its usefulness.
The moment he grasped that fact, Artorias set his old companion aside.
“If the blunt weapon’s no good, then I’ll use a blade to cut away your mobility.” The Goblin’s fist slammed into the wall again, and what he pulled from within was an exquisite shortblade radiating a cold gleam.
This gift from a human, this small kindness from Adi Varma, revealed its edge in Artorias’s hand for the very first time.
A massive feeler swept past, grazing his scalp, and Artorias ignored the searing pain across his brow.
With practiced ease he dropped into a ground-hugging slide, riding the momentum, pouring every ounce of strength in his body into the blade’s tip, and thrust sharply upward!
His target was the exposed flank of the creature’s abdomen, laid wide open by its own attacking motion.
Riiip— Silver flashed, and foul-smelling blood sprayed from the wound.
The stung Killer Ant began thrashing its limbs wildly, clearly never having expected that the trifling Goblin before it could breach its defenses.
But even with the strike landed, no flush of victory rose in Artorias.
That last attack had indeed sliced across the ant’s flank as intended, but the feel was wrong.
Too light.
Too shallow.
The little knife was sharp, but for an Enhanced Species of that colossal size, its weight was far too slight and its edge far too short.
The stubby blade had parted the surface layer of keratin, but had lodged between the deeper muscle fiber and carapace, unable to inflict a lethal, penetrating wound.
His attempt just now hadn’t so much crippled the prey as thoroughly enraged it.
Feeling the pain, the monster’s face flushed blood-red, and in an instant it switched to a different attack module.
Deep within the Killer Ant’s black mandibles, an ominous crimson began to glow, searing heat gathering into light in a frenzy.
[Cero] “Oh no—” A red beam heavy with the reek of death swept across the entire floor.
Only Artorias, who knew what a Cero was, sensed the danger at the last moment and threw himself into a forward roll, tucking beneath the creature’s belly to barely escape with his life.
And behind him, several unlucky monsters, freshly born from the Dungeon walls and not yet given a chance to glimpse the world, were swallowed whole by the scorching red bolt of light, reduced to ash along with their magic stones.
Turning back, Artorias looked at the aftermath, nothing but magic stone dust and bare crystal-blue wall, and felt his scalp prickle.
You call that an estimated LV2?
A Minotaur would probably turn to ash on the spot from a charged Cero like that.
And if he took a hit like that head-on right now, he’d likely go straight to HP -1.
The Killer Ant, having just cleared the field, didn’t even pause after that attack.
Sensing that the annoying prey was hiding beneath it, it swung its claws in fury, backhanding a horizontal sweep.
“Ngh!” Gripping the little knife in both hands, Artorias barely parried the frontal blow, but another claw was already bearing down from his blind spot.
A chunk of flesh was mercilessly gouged from his abdomen, blood staining the Goblin’s green skin red.
“This is trouble now.” The situation was dire in the extreme.
If he kept hiding beneath it, sooner or later those flailing claws would tear him apart.
But the moment he left the underside and opened up distance, he’d almost certainly eat a point-blank Cero to the face like the last one.
Either way, certain death.
The shortblade in his hand could only barely manage to break its defense, and his opponent was an Enhanced monster with the [Heal] trait.
His only supplies were the healing potions Adi had given him, and most of those were sitting beside the wall (Mother), so a war of attrition was a guaranteed loss too.
If he couldn’t find its weakness in time, then at this rate his defeat was clearly a foregone conclusion.
So then, its weakness… or rather, what was the weakness of ants, no, of insect-type monsters?
Facing a life-or-death crisis, Artorias kept his eyes everywhere at once while his mind launched into a frantic storm of ideas.
The first thing that came to mind was type matchups from the Pokémon world.
Bug types, which had real-world models, were weak to Fire, Flying, and Rock.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t devoured a lower-floor Hellhound with a fire ability, nor did he possess a bird-featured Flying-type transformation, and Rock weakness seemed out of the question too.
So was there some more obvious vulnerability?
Artorias’s mind spun at full speed, countless anime and game scenes from his past life flickering by.
Against an enemy clad head to toe in heavy armor, a head-on clash was the dumbest possible move.
That’s right, heavy armor!
A single image froze in his mind, the scene of a certain Seated Titan, hailed as Marley’s Shield, beaten down by the protagonists until it was reduced to a roadside dog forced to call for help.
The keen armor plating truly couldn’t be pierced by any blade, yet there were weak points it could never protect no matter what.
Those were the joints.
No matter how hard the shell, to keep its movement flexible, the joints where carapace connected to carapace were inevitably soft.
Especially for an insect-type monster like this, the leg connection points and the gaps in the head-and-thorax were, in biological terms, its sliver of remaining HP.
Take the gamble.
Steadying himself, Artorias changed his approach.
His attention no longer fixed on defense; instead he watched, studying the exact shape of every claw that swung at him.
Size, color, and most crucially, the notches at the connection points.
With the smallest possible steps he dodged the wounds that would mean instant death, and to keep the healing potion from hampering his movements, he splashed it across his body the moment injuries appeared, almost wastefully.
One— Not enough.
This method would probably only work once.
Two, three— He’d found half the joint points.
One step short of complete.
Four, five, six.
All the weak points were identified, but he had to wait a little longer.
Striking now would leave a fatal time lag.
Whew— All he could hear was his own breathing, his heartbeat gradually settling.
Sunk fully into a state of self-forgetting, Artorias concentrated with everything he had, pushing his speed to its limit, letting neither the death-claws rushing at him nor the chance of victory slip past.
In the brief instant when all six insect claws crossed in interlocking attack and overlapped one another, he seized that opening.
“Heh—” He smiled.
The next second, the shortblade capable of piercing the [Toughness] trait lashed out in a six-hit combo of godlike speed.
Shk, shk, shk, shk, shk, shk— The six strikes, as precise as a master butcher’s carving, destroyed every joint support point at the exact same moment.
Unable to comprehend what had happened, the Human-Faced Killer Ant’s enormous body lost all its footing at once.
Its upper limbs, no longer able to bear its massive weight, tilted aside, and the monster that a moment ago had thought victory was in its grasp instantly lost even the ability to stand.
Unable to properly control its own body, the creature froze up like a crashed machine.
Piercing its abdomen with the keen shortblade, Artorias slid the whole length of the body clutching the blade, then flipped up in one continuous motion.
Standing above the Killer Ant’s head, unable to find any trace of a magic stone because of its sheer size, Artorias finally aimed at the crack in the mask, the head weak point shared by all living things, and brought the blade down hard.
The giant ant beneath him twitched once, then went still.
Won?
Panting heavily, Artorias hoped it could just end smoothly like this.
But— green light blazed from the wound he’d made beneath him, that damned [Heal] trait lighting up.
The Killer Ant’s severed tendons were reconnecting at a visible pace, its pierced abdomen swiftly staunching the bleeding.
“So this recovery is even automatic?” Truly enviable.
Faced with the overwhelmingly unfavorable situation before him, Artorias found himself growing calm instead.
Superb defense, monstrous strength, its own built-in healer, and even a ranged attack.
After just a few exchanges, Artorias was certain of one fact: As he was now, on his own, he could not bring down this Enhanced Species.
That didn’t mean he had no chance of winning, though.
“GAAAAA—!!!” The thoroughly enraged Killer Ant no longer cared about the damage to its body.
Forcing its not-yet-fully-repaired frame upright, its mandibles gaped wide once more.
What surged from those keen mandibles was a red flash brighter than before, breathing an aura of annihilation.
The Cero.
No way to avoid it, exactly as he’d predicted.
A lethal attack that meant certain death on any hit, yet one that also held the seed of victory within it.
Artorias recalled the scene he’d witnessed during that first Cero: the red breath of tremendous destructive power had pulverized every monster and magic stone in sight, leaving nothing on the floor behind him but crystal-blue wall and a carpet of debris.
So, thinking it through in reverse, why was it that every monster had been wiped out by the Cero, yet the wall behind them hadn’t suffered the slightest damage or destruction?
Artorias had a bold, as-yet-unproven idea: the [Rare Enhanced Species: Human-Faced Killer Ant] was a trial monster produced by his own skill, the Power of the Beast (over beast), and so was inherently a part of the underground divine will.
That being the case, the very thing he’d been the first to give up on ought to share a similar resistance to it.
“I’m betting on it!” He chose to trust his own instinct and reasoning.
As Artorias stepped back, his heel bumped against something familiar and hard.
The fully charged, maxed-out Cero blasted from the Killer Ant’s maw with all its rage, and then— it was blocked, right in front, by a trifling, unremarkable frying pan, and by Artorias, who gripped the handle with all his might, jaw clenched, face twisted with strain!
“Catch this.
I’m giving it back to you—” The furious, tilted Killer Ant froze.
Its feral instincts couldn’t help it understand why the creature before it hadn’t been vaporized by the crimson pillar of light like all the others of its kind, nor why that weapon, the one that at first hadn’t posed any real threat to it, could now block its Cero.
It only saw the Goblin, straining to hold that frying pan, make a strange motion, and then the next moment, the red flash that should have devoured its foe had somehow arrived right before its own eyes.
Boom— The violent red light flashed by in an instant, a piercing detonation ringing out through the Dungeon.
[Hssss—] Its carapace shattered, half its head blown away by its own Cero, the Killer Ant sprawled on the ground in utter disgrace.
That ruined body still twitched, and the single remaining eye still radiated a vigorous breath of life, but clearly, no matter how hard it tried, wounds this ghastly could no longer sustain it.
A red flash even stronger than before began to flicker across the floor.
“You’ve still got one breath left in you… this Enhanced elite really is hard to kill.” “So the result of the first trial is mutual destruction?
For punching above my weight, I guess that’s acceptable.” Watching the faint green glow of healing light up on it once more, Artorias, long since spent and his arms gone numb, let a bitter smile show.
Now there really was nothing to be done.
He’d done everything he could do, and he felt a stir of pride at this hard-won result and at the wretched state of his foe.
The emerald-green radiance shone on, holding the dying body together until the last of its fireworks burned out.
Its healing worked in a frenzy, and the scarlet insect eye was no longer merely the light of a predator, but shimmered now with a far clearer killing intent and rage.
It could not accept that though it had held the advantage in every respect, in the end it had lost to a weakling who was supposed to be trembling before it, and so, even in death, it would drag its enemy down with it!
But then— —[Calamity Lycoris] A woman’s voice, chanting an ultra-short incantation, sounded abruptly through the wreckage-strewn corridor.
“Iai Tachi—Five Lights.” No warning at all.
Artorias hadn’t even caught sight of when that figure had appeared.
It was violence and skill far surpassing any monster’s, an art belonging to the very pinnacle of technique.
Five crimson trails of sword energy split the air like blooming lycoris flowers, weaving together into a beautiful sword dance that cleanly severed the last green light of healing along with its massive body.
Squelch.
This time, there was no chance of regeneration.
The Human-Faced Killer Ant’s enormous body was torn into pieces in an instant and, along with its stubborn vitality, snuffed out into the ashes of the Dungeon.
A woman in a deep-red kimono, black hair cascading like a waterfall, stood quietly behind the monster’s corpse.
The tachi in her hand wasn’t stained with even a trace of blood, and with a crisp “click,” she silently slid the blade back into its sheath.
———————————————— [Author’s Note: In truth, because Kaguya despises her family, she rarely uses Five Lights, her strongest magic-and-swordsmanship technique.]