After that, everything raced along as though covering a thousand li in a day.
As I gradually grew accustomed to the cave environment, nothing stood in my way anymore.
I followed the path for a little over ten minutes, cutting down the bats andGoblins that appeared at scattered intervals.
“…When are these Shamans finally going to show up?”
I must have cut down around ten of them. Just as the complaint escaped my lips, the narrow passage suddenly opened wide.
“Hmm…?”
And there it was: an enormous cavern.
“Ah, the ceiling suddenly getting this high makes me uneasy.”
At the center of the cavern stood theGoblin Shamans who were my Mission Objective.
They encircled an altar that radiated some sort of sinister energy.
‘…What are they doing?’
TheGoblin bastards babbled incomprehensible nonsense and chanted around the altar, apparently as part of some sorcery.
It sounded like an eerie song and a grotesque incantation at once.
It was not pleasant music by any measure.
“Hey, I don’t know what you bastards are doing, but that’s enough. It feels like something’s about to pop out.”
Normally, they should have rolled their eyes back and charged at me by now. Instead, they ignored me entirely, busy with their quartet.
The whole thing felt ominous, so I immediately drew my sword and charged.
“Fine, you do your thing. I’ll do mine.”
Only when I was right under their noses did the bastards finally come to their senses and clumsily attack with daggers, staves, and whatever else they had.
“SKREEK! KREEK─!”
“I told you to stop singing, and now you’re screaming instead.”
But it was nothing more than a futile struggle.
SLASH─!
An ownerless head flew through the air along an ink-black arc.
“That’s one.”
What followed was no different.
One per stroke.
They were so pathetically weak that they even felt more sluggish than theGoblins on the first floor.
I had been tense because this was supposedly the final stage of the fifth-floor Basic Mission, but the battle ended anticlimactically after exactly four swings of my sword.
“…What? Why was that so easy? Was getting here the real challenge?”
The only thing left was the altar emitting its sinister light.
‘Can I just leave that alone?’
The original Mission had nothing to do with the altar.
It had not been mentioned in so much as a single word.
‘But it keeps catching my eye.’
Considering that every Trial so far had been an extension of the Basic Mission, leaving the altar intact did not sit right with me.
‘It feels like the Trial is planning to use this for something… Should I destroy it first?’
I used Flash and sliced through the stone altar.
SLASH—!
Unable to withstand the Mana-infused slash, the altar collapsed into a rumbling heap.
At that very moment, a familiar message rang out.
[Challenge the fifth-floor Trial?]
“Yes, I’ve been waiting.”
Immediately after hearing my answer, the System displayed a new warning message.
[Commencing ‘Gaze's Trial’.]
[Warning: The dormant entity awakens.]
[Warning: The summoning ritual ends incomplete due to its medium’s destruction.]
‘Incompletely?’
Before I could even question it, the ground beneath the shattered altar rumbled and split apart, and a gigantic arm abruptly jutted out.
‘Why is one arm so huge?’
I had felt uneasy for a reason. The ceiling had not been made so high for nothing.
The enormous monster used that massive arm to haul itself out of the pit and reveal its form.
“GROOOOOOAR─!”
It had gray-green skin and stood tall enough to nearly touch the high ceiling.
Its body was so densely covered in muscle that it looked as though it wore a suit of armor.
I had never seen one in person, but I recognized its identity at once.
‘An Ogre…?’
An Ogre on the fifth floor.
I had heard they normally did not appear until around the thirtieth floor.
‘That’s too much. Seriously.’
Right. The fourth-floor Trial had merely been on the easier side. Trials were always this unreasonable.
‘But what’s wrong with its body? Did they resurrect a corpse?’
Was this what incomplete meant?
Clear severance lines and the marks where they had been stitched together covered its body.
Some patches of flesh had even rotted away or were missing entirely.
I did not know where they had obtained it, but theGoblin Shamans I had just slaughtered appeared to have found an Ogre corpse and resurrected it through the power of sorcery.
[Mission Objective: Defeat the awakened entity, ‘Resurrected Ogre’.]
It was an Ogre, after all.
Unlike its dead eyes, which resembled rotten pollock, the fearsome vitality radiating from its enraged muscles was real.
‘It’s coming straight at me!’
The moment the Mission Objective flashed before my eyes, the creature charged, shaking the earth beneath it.
THUD, THUD, THUD—!
It moved with unbelievable speed for something so massive.
‘Fast!’
WHOOSH—!
A heavy fist came at me, tearing the air apart.
If that hit me, I would explode with a BANG and not even leave a corpse behind.
It was an attack I had to dodge.
That was the natural course of action.
My former self would have considered evasion the best move.
Meeting such a crude attack head-on was something I would have done only when I had no choice, like swallowing mustard through tears.
But.
‘Not anymore.’
I aimed Nocturne at the monster and confronted its attack head-on.
WHOOSH─!
The killing intent bore down on me.
A feast of gray-green filled every corner of my vision.
And before it, a single ink-black blade calmly held its ground.
CRAAASH─!
The instant all of it interlocked at a single point, a deafening blast erupted, and the fierce wind pressure sent my hair flying.
“Ngh…!”
The heavy impact transmitted through the blade left my palm tingling, but I somehow managed not to lose my grip on the sword.
Rather than simply blocking it with brute force, I had deflected the straight punch with my blade held at an angle.
The monster’s fist skimmed past the blade and struck nothing but the innocent floor.
“Grrrk…?”
Bewilderment spread across the half-dead creature’s eyes.
The result must have been quite different from what it expected.
A maggot slid out from between its pupils, and I grinned right in front of those eyes.
“That’s got a fair bit of spice. Is that all?”
A System message flitted past.
[Growth Condition met.]
[Skill ‘The Beginning of Training (D―)’ evolves into ‘Introduction to Swordsmanship (D)’.]
What a shame.
“I’m only just warmed up.”
***
The Skill had already evolved the moment I completed the fifth-floor Basic Mission.
The Skill evolution notification had merely been pushed back for a moment by the messages concerning the Trial.
That was precisely why I had not dodged the attack just now.
‘It’s different. No, it looks different.’
My vision opened, and I began to see things that had been invisible until now.
The faint contraction of the monster’s shoulder muscles before it attacked.
The trajectory of its fist.
Even where and how I needed to strike to alter that trajectory.
Everything became clear.
‘Ah, until now, I really was swinging my sword on instinct without knowing anything.’
At D- Grade, I had instinctively sensed what to do. Now, I felt as though I also understood why I had to do it.
‘I’m a little slower than it, or perhaps about equal. As long as I don’t stupidly turn this into a contest of strength, there’s nothing difficult about it.’
I could tell from a single exchange.
If what it had just shown was its full power, the monster was no match for me.
‘Now it’s my turn.’
My counterattack followed.
TAP-TAP-TAP—!
I drove deep into its reach and slashed at its massive forearm.
The creature threw another crude punch.
It seemed intent on bursting me apart with a single blow, but….
“I told you, that isn’t enough.”
I turned my body halfway to evade it, then drove Flash into the monster.
The blade traced a semicircle while radiating searing heat.
SLASH—!
I felt the blade catch on something, and then the monster’s wrist struck the floor with a THUD.
Normally, it should have screamed and gone berserk at this point, but the creature paid it no mind.
‘Does it not feel pain either?’
It was exactly like the characteristics of the Undead I had once heard about.
‘It feels no pain and does not fear death… This is a little troublesome.’
Yet, for some reason, the creature picked up its severed hand and pressed it against the stump.
“Hey, that isn’t going to reattach just because you put it there… It reattached?”
The wound bulged and writhed, and the severed hand soon fused back into place.
I had heard about Ogres’ regenerative abilities several times, but I had not realized they were this powerful.
“Do I need to mince you into pieces… or should I burn you?”
No. At this rate, neither would work.
‘Simply cutting it isn’t enough.’
Ordinary sword strikes alone were insufficient to inflict a fatal wound.
I could wildly unleash Flash until my Mana ran dry, but I had no confidence that even that would kill the monster.
If my Mana ran out in the process, I would be in genuine danger.
Then there was only one method.
‘Flame Flash. I’ll go with that.’
It was the strongest technique I could currently perform: setting the blade ablaze, then imbuing a slash with Flash.
It was not an official Skill guaranteed by the Tower’s System, but judging by its firepower alone, it could easily be considered a new Skill.
Right on cue, a tiny flame sputtered to life at the tip of the blade and vanished.
‘It’s almost here.’
It was the signal that Crescendo’s heat was about to reach its limit.
‘I need to buy some time first.’
From that moment, the nature of the battle changed.
I no longer needed to aim for a fatal blow.
Flame Flash was what I was after anyway.
Instead, I slowly circled the creature and shaved away its flesh as though peeling a potato.
SLASH—! SIZZLE—!
Like Hercules facing Medusa in myth, I continued cutting and searing without pause.
Even searing the wounds could not stop the regeneration, but my sword was still slightly faster than it was.
The monster faltered beneath damage that accumulated little by little, like clothes growing soaked in a fine drizzle.
In the midst of that, I gained an unexpected harvest.
“Ha, so this is where it was?”
The creature offered up its other body parts as though they were nothing but a nuisance, yet desperately blocked every attack aimed at its solar plexus.
A place even an Undead that did not fear death would protect on instinct?
‘There’s definitely something there.’
The ‘sorcery medium’ that had imbued the corpse with vitality had to be there.
At that very moment, Nocturne finished its preparations as well.
FWOOSH—!
‘It’s here.’
Nocturne seemed to catch fire, then transformed into flame itself in the blink of an eye.
‘I’ll finish it with this.’
“GROOOOOOAR─!”
The monster seemed to sense the danger when it saw Nocturne become a pillar of flame. It used both arms as a shield and hurled its massive body at me.
After I repeatedly dodged its attacks, it appeared to have given up on hitting me and decided to crush me beneath its weight instead.
That was exactly what I wanted.
“All right, then. I’ll cut you clean through!”
TAP-TAP-TAP—!
I readjusted my grip on Nocturne, kicked off the ground, and plunged inside the monster’s reach in an instant.
“Haaah!”
Beyond my heat-warped vision, the enemy’s enormous body blurred, and only the burning blade remained vivid, as if carved into the world.
‘Become ash.’
The blade swept from left to right, drawing an arc.
Flames scattered in a flurry along its trajectory.
In the red-tinted world, it looked as though a burning crescent moon had risen inside the cavern.
It was a red moon, shaped by the sword’s tip and sculpted from a trail of flame.
FLASH─!
The light swallowed the enemy.
***
My entire body was assailed by weakness as my Mana ran dry, and a ringing echoed in my ears.
Even my vision had blurred out of focus, so I waited for the dust to settle.
‘Did that do it…?’
The blade had undoubtedly landed properly.
I had worried whether that would be enough to kill it, but those fears were unfounded.
The four-meter giant had collapsed.
I had not managed to cut it in two.
But it was a fatal blow.
The chest Flame Flash had swept through had barely escaped being split in half and was left hanging together by a thread.
“…Hey, you’re still not dead after that?”
Its hold on life was astonishingly tenacious. Even when it could not move so much as a finger, it remained alive.
“Grooooooar….”
However, its momentum had waned, and fire was slowly spreading across its entire body.
Earlier, it had refused to burn no matter how hard I tried to sear it, but it seemed the attack had landed properly.
A pitch-black stone was visible between the two halves of its split solar plexus.
‘So this was the sorcery medium?’
It was clearly not an ordinary stone. Should I call it a Magic Stone?
The Magic Stone also appeared to have been broken in half by the aftermath of my attack.
If I shattered it completely, the monster’s second life would end as well.
Nocturne still held lingering embers even after releasing that torrent of flame, and I drove it straight into the Magic Stone.
CRUNCH—! FWOOSH—!
Flames instantly engulfed the monster as though it had been doused in oil.
“…Ngh.”
The fire spread so quickly that the creature soon became a gigantic pillar of flame.
Watching that enormous body be swallowed by the flames and blaze away drew an involuntary exclamation from me.
“Whoa… it burns well.”
Soon, the monster crumbled into a handful… no, a truckload of ash, leaving behind a solitary ash heap befitting the size it had possessed in life.
[Defeated ‘Resurrected Ogre’.]
[Special Mission ‘Gaze's Trial’ complete.]
Only then did the message I had been waiting for appear.
“Phew… it’s over.”
I had just caught my breath and was about to check the rewards when my shadow caught my eye.
‘What? What’s wrong with it?’
My shadow was thrashing wildly, completely independent of my will.
Like a predator that had starved for days, it coveted the shadow of the ash heap.
It kept squirming toward it so insistently that I felt my shadow might cease to be mine at any moment.
Thinking there might be something there, I went over to check, but it was exactly as it looked.
“It’s just ash…?”
At that instant, the shadow beneath my feet gulped down the shadow of ‘what had once been the Ogre’ in a single bite.
‘Bite?’
No. This was different.
I had not even used the Skill in the first place.
‘The shadow… disappeared?’
For a moment, I wondered if I had seen it wrong, but I had not.
Even after I looked again, the ash heap’s shadow had vanished without a trace.
The ‘Bite’ I knew was a Skill that tore off and ate pieces of a shadow. It was not a Skill that erased the shadow itself like this.
No, was erasing a shadow not strange in itself?
I could not believe it even with the sight directly before my eyes.
The ash heap before me had lost its shadow.
“Hey, why aren’t you saying anything? Give me some kind of explanation, Gaze.”
Usually, when something this bizarre happened, my friend who went by either ‘Gaze’ or ‘Tower’ would appear and explain what had occurred.
But this time, there was no word at all.
“…Uh, is anyone there?”
At that exact moment, a message window that could explain the situation popped up before my eyes with a DING.
[Shadow Devour complete.]
The problem was that the message window was a color I had never seen before.
Cold white letters glowed against a black background.
‘…Black?’
Something was different.