"Leave it to me."
Samira didn't waste a single word answering.
Then she turned and called to the handful of Amazon subordinates waiting at the outer gate in their revealing dancer's costumes. They formed up fast and slipped out of the Pleasure Quarter without a sound.
As for Ishtar.
She leaned back against the stone pillar and turned her venomous gaze once more on the Labyrinth City, thick with smoke.
At that same moment. In a dark alley mouth off West Main Street in Orario.
A party of five short-haired women adventurers was being driven backward by a mid-level lion monster the size of a small house, its whole body bristling with white, needle-like mane.
They had already been forced to the dead end of the alley.
Stinking drool ran down the beast's fangs and spattered on the flagstones, punctuated by deafening, savage roars.
The women's legs shook. Their eyes had gone ashen, and they were ready to shut them and let death come.
And then.
Just as the white lion braced its hind legs and opened that huge red maw to lunge -
a small figure dropped lightly from the broken wall above.
- It was Inaba Tsukuyo.
The pale moonlight fell at her back. Her eyes stayed shut, and she wore loose, worn shrine-maiden robes, the red and white of them starkly bright in the pitch-black alley.
Her toes touched the stone.
And she was on the beast in that same breath, like a petal blown in.
"Shrrng."
The nameless katana came free of its sheath. This first-class weapon, forged by Haimer's own hands, drew a keen silver line through the dark.
The blade sank into the monster's chest with perfect precision and shredded the hard crystal structure inside.
"Crack."
A crisp shattering sound.
The Magic Stone destroyed, exactly as intended.
The huge body that had radiated menace a heartbeat earlier came apart in midair, collapsing into black ash that scattered on the wind.
The women who had survived by pure luck shivered in the night breeze and looked up at the small girl now standing on a stone post.
When they recognized those signature closed eyes and the red-and-white miko robes, they swallowed and spoke in trembling voices.
"L-Lady Pale Cherry Blossom Demon..."
As a newly minted Lv. 2 adventurer and a member of the [Haimer Familia] whose name shook Orario, Tsukuyo's title had spread far and wide.
"Tsukuyo has cleared the obstacles from this street."
"Three people are trapped in the basement of the abandoned clock tower on the left, and two are pinned under the collapsed second floor of the general store on the right."
"You still have plenty of strength left. Go and pull them out, all of you."
The women blinked at that, then nodded hurriedly, clearly overawed by her calm.
The female Swordsman at their head worked up the nerve to ask, "Then... Lady Pale Cherry Blossom Demon, what about you?"
"Tsukuyo will keep pushing east and clear out the stragglers."
Having said it, Tsukuyo didn't wait for any reply.
Her body sprang up lightly, and in a few bounds she was gone among the maze of high walls, leaving only the memory of a slender back.
The scene shifts to the far end of the street.
"Whoosh!"
A vast, matchlessly keen half-circle of Sword Aura tore up off the flagstones at an angle and shot into the night sky!
"Shk—"
A ripping sound followed.
A four-meter troll.
That thick hide, which lower-class adventurers could barely scratch with everything they had, split like nothing before the edge of the Sword Aura.
Foul blood fountained, the massive body fell into two badly uneven halves, and the whole of it dissolved into black ash.
Tendou Kisara held her long blade.
A twist of the wrist, one careless flick, and the filth was gone from the steel.
Her all-black training uniform snapped in the night wind.
And this was only the beginning.
Around the corner, not far from Tendou Kisara.
"Bam! Bam!"
A thick-set bugbear, red bloodlust in both eyes, was swinging its heavy, fur-covered arms into a tottering three-story house of brick and timber.
Plaster fell from the walls in sheets. The load-bearing pillars were giving out.
From inside came the shrill, hopeless wailing of ordinary townsfolk.
The house was one blow from coming down.
And then a piercing shriek of split air came from above.
The bugbear's arms stopped mid-swing, and it looked up on instinct.
Only to see -
the stone dragon Grosse plunging down out of the high dark, wings dragging the air behind them.
Stone talons clamped around the bugbear's skull.
"Crack!"
Another explosive report followed at once.
Grosse's claw closed, all five talons shutting without mercy.
That hard skull could do nothing against such raw strength.
The bugbear's head burst on the spot like a soft melon.
The headless body swayed twice, dropped hard, and crumbled to black ash.
Grosse snorted, beat his wings, climbed back into the air, and went looking for the next target.
Rescues just as impossible were unfolding half a street away.
Ahead lay the edge of a ruin where an overturned gas lamp had set the wreckage alight; the blaze now climbed toward the sky.
Orange snakes of fire danced along the fallen beams.
Timber cracked and popped.
Heat warped the air.
A little girl.
She still had a charred cloth doll clutched tight in one hand, and the raging fire had her boxed in dead center among the broken walls.
Burning debris ringed her on every side. Her small legs couldn't carry her a single step.
Rolling smoke set her coughing hard. Her little hand waved weakly.
"Mama... my legs hurt so much..."
The childish plea was so faint that the roar of the fire swallowed it whole.
Above her head.
A load-bearing beam as thick as a man's thigh, burned black and half severed, snapped through - and started down toward the crown of the girl's skull.
If it landed, nothing would save her.
"Kreeeee!"
At the last possible instant.
A soaring bird's cry, high enough to split cloud and stone, tore across the burning night.
A hugely powerful griffin Xenos, its upper body sheathed in golden feathers hard as iron, wings rising from an eagle's back.
It ignored the scorching heat.
It dropped low and cut a slanting glide right across the top of the wall of flame.
Its hind legs extended, thick lion's claws spread wide.
As it swept past the girl's side -
it caught both sleeves of her cotton dress in one pass.
And in the last moment before the beam crashed down, blasting a charred crater into the ground and throwing up a fresh surge of flame that would have swallowed everything -
that overwhelming grip hauled the little girl clear out of a fire meant to kill her.
"Whoom—"
Air churned.
She was out of it.
With an aerialist's balance, the griffin beat those broad wings steadily.
It carried the girl - who had fainted from terror - over a curtain of fire dozens of meters high and several meters thick.
Then it came down.
Riding the updraft, it set her on the flagstones of a nearby patch of open ground the fire hadn't touched. Steady, and so gentle that the motion suited nothing about its savage shape.
The tips of its talons hadn't scratched a single patch of her skin.
That done, the griffin tilted its huge head down.
With the front of that hard beak, it nudged the shoulder of the girl whose legs had gone to water.
Then it drove those wide, gold-feathered wings down again, kicking up a hard gust of wind.
It turned.
Eyes fierce, it lifted off without hesitation and plunged straight back toward another quarter of the city where screams rose and rampaging monsters ran loose.
Watching it happen -
whether they were pressed to the cracks of their shutters or hiding behind collapsed cover in the street,
commoners of the surface or adventurers who spent every year of their lives in the Dungeon, every one of them stared.
More than a few jaws hung open.
Their lips moved and moved, and not a sound came out.
The iron short swords and rough wooden clubs they had been gripping to save their own lives -
clattered down into the mud and rubble.
None of them even noticed their hands were empty. The sight had taken everything else away.
This can't be...
One man reached up in disbelief and scrubbed hard at his eyes.
Monsters were killing monsters?
And not only that - monsters were pulling people out of a fire alive?
Every one of them stood there dumbfounded.
Meanwhile.
On a high roof of blue tile, not far from Northwest Avenue.
The core officers of the [Loki Familia]'s first regiment, whom Loki had sent out in a rush to help suppress the chaos across the city.
Tiona and Tione stood at the edge of the tiles, one to each side.
"Whoa..."
Tiona's eyes went wide, her mouth open enough to show two small fangs.
Standing on the eaves, she watched a griffin sweep across the block on huge beating wings barely a dozen meters over her head, and she pointed at it in wonder.
"So these..."
"these are the Xenos Lady Loki was just telling us about?"
"There are way too many of them!"
"Come to think of it, back when I ran into griffins in the Dungeon I'd just take their heads off with Urga in one swing. Never really looked at one."
Watching the griffin dwindle into the sky, Tiona lit up with excitement.
"I've wanted to ride one for ages. I wonder if Lord Haimer would let me get up on their backs and give it a try."
"Shut up, you idiot!"
Beside her stood Tione, arms folded, brows knotted tight over the fires spreading through the city.
Hearing her sister chase after nonsense at a moment like this, she smacked the back of Tiona's head without ceremony.
"Is this the time to be thinking about garbage like that? Can't you see the entire city has come apart?"
And she finished with a vicious glare.
Below the two of them.
On a gray brick street strewn with rubble.
"Fwsh!"
A sharp shriek of parted air.
Ais, face blank, drove her arm forward.
She swung the Sword of Despair.
Cold light flashed through the dark and passed cleanly across the neck of a thickly muscled mid-level sword stag.
Blood sprayed.
The great antlered head rolled aside and struck a barrel at the corner.
Then the whole body, head and all, went to ash in an instant.
Standing nearby with her staff in both hands, on high alert from all the noise around them, Lefiya let out a long breath at the sight.
"Th-thank goodness. That's this side handled at last..."
Lefiya hurried over.
Ais stayed where she was, flicking her wrist to shake the last traces of blood from the blade.
She lifted her fair, delicate face toward the Amazon twins above.
"Tiona!"
"What's up, Ais?" Tiona leaned out over the edge.
"Can you see whether anything is happening over by Lord Haimer's residence?"
With the tearing and snarling of monsters rising from every quarter of the city, Ais's fingers tightened a little on her hilt.
She knew perfectly well that Lord Haimer should be in no danger.
But the thought of that many monsters flooding the streets stirred something in her she couldn't put down.
Crouched on the roof tiles, Tiona dropped her usual bickering with Tione at once.
She put a hand above her brow, narrowed her eyes, and fixed her gaze in that direction with the vision only a high-level adventurer had.
The blocks in the distance were still a weave of firelight and moving shadow.
And then.
Not five seconds into her staring -
the easy grin drained out of Tiona's face, replaced by something like alarm.
"Hey. Hey, hey."
Tiona leaned forward without thinking.
"Hold on, something's not right over there!"
Tione frowned. "What are you shouting about? What do you see?"
Tiona pointed at a few street corners in that direction.
"It looks like a whole lot of monsters with red light coming off them, all packed together like they've gone mad."
"And it looks like every one of them is charging for the upscale residential district where Lord Haimer's manor is!"
At those words, Ais's expression hardened where she stood below.
She didn't hesitate for a heartbeat.
Ais kicked off the weathered wall with the toe of one boot.
Light as a swallow.
She flipped up onto the high eaves and landed beside Tiona.
She took a hard look.
Sure enough.
From the highest point the view opened wide.
By the light of the burning buildings in the distance -
a black mass of monsters was surging through the streets like water through a broken dyke, heedless of everything in their way, all of it pouring toward that upscale district.
Ais pressed her lips into a thin line.
The moving air began to gather at her sides.
"Awaken."
Her red lips barely parted.
And in that same instant -
a visible storm of pale green magic wound itself around her slender, balanced frame.
Crushing wind pressure spread outward with her at the center.
The tiles around her rattled, and several cracked apart and slid off the roof.
- [Ariel], activated!
"Lady Ais!"
From the street below came Lefiya's shrill, frantic cry. "What are you doing?!"
Ais gave no answer.
Under Tiona's and Tione's startled stares -
brows drawn tight, Ais turned into a green whirlwind.
Wrapped in a howling green gale.
She ran the sloping tiles of every building in her path and shot off in that direction.
"Honestly, that girl. Just throws herself at it without a second thought..."
Tione put a hand to her forehead and was about to set off after her.
Then she turned her head and caught Tiona frowning, her gaze fixed on the top of one conspicuous building near Haimer's manor.
"Hey."
Tiona reached over and tugged the hem of Tione's clothes.
"Why haven't you gone after her?" Tione pushed her hand away.
"No, that's not it."
Tiona pointed at the tall chimney. "Look over there... aren't those four the ones from the [Freya Familia]?"
"Hm?"
Tione followed the line of her finger.
And saw -
under the cover of the dim night, four small figures standing in a neat row at the rim of the chimney.
"That's those four from the Four Warriors of Flame Gold, right?"
Tiona rubbed her chin. "What are they doing skulking around Lord Haimer's house in the dead of night?"
Tione narrowed her eyes as well.
"Who knows. That crowd of lunatics with the goddess of beauty at the center of it never does anything the ordinary way."
"Leave them for now."
Tione clamped a hand on Tiona's shoulder. "Get moving. If Ais gets buried in a pile of monsters on her own, that's trouble too."
With that, neither of them wasted another second. Tiona hooked the panicked, helpless Lefiya under one arm, and they ran the length of the eaves, chasing that streak of green light.
At the same time.
The upscale residential district. Haimer's manor.
Even with the heavy iron gate to blunt it, the hammering of the crazed monster tide converging outside came through clearly into the second-floor room.
In the master bedroom -
a deliberate cut lay open across the palm of Haimer's right hand, dripping Divine Blood.
- One he'd opened himself, to get Divine Blood in a hurry.
On the bed, Kikakujou Mary and Rei the siren were still sunk in unconsciousness, the fronts of their clothes eased open.
Haimer worked with total focus.
With his index finger wet with Divine Blood, he drew intricate figures at speed across the bare white of their collarbones.
Stroke after stroke.
As his finger kept moving, the crimson blood on their collarbones slowly resolved into lines of dark gold.
The lines flickered and dimmed on Kikakujou Mary's skin, and on Rei's.
"This will have to hold them for now."
Haimer lifted his finger from Rei's skin and let out a resigned sigh.
This really had been an oversight, all things considered.
His girls almost never took this kind of directly inhaled neurotoxic mist down in the Dungeon.
Which was why the manor didn't keep even a basic suppressant antidote for it on hand.
And the situation was far too urgent.
Poison meant nothing to him one way or another, but Mary and Miss Rei couldn't afford to wait it out.
So Haimer had no choice but to substitute Divine Blood for Divine Power.
In order to work a Forbidden Art of the Heavens.
Much like Freya's secret rite of the Heavens - God-Shifting Magic, which let her trade places with anyone she had exchanged true names with, an effect so strong that not even gods could see through it -
forcibly remaking two bodies was one of the Forbidden Arts of the Heavens that Haimer had mastered.
But.
Although this forbidden art could rebuild the internal circuits inside Kikakujou Mary and Rei the siren -
and might even turn misfortune into fortune, letting the two of them, still at the innate stage where they had never grasped "Magic" at all, open up their bodies and gain an exceedingly rare foundation of "magic power" -
the problem was this.
Substituting Divine Blood for Divine Power came with a drawback.
Namely, once Mary's and Miss Rei's bodies had been forcibly remade -
from then on the two of them would have to replenish their magic through direct contact with his own body.
And there was one more thing.
Mary was one matter.
But Miss Rei was a monster of the Dungeon, a creature driven by a Magic Stone, which meant he had just converted her, thoroughly, into a member of his own Familia.
"Does this count as poaching from the Dungeon?"
Haimer murmured.
Still.
That was a question for another day.
For now.
Haimer glanced at the wide patch of dried blood left across his palm.
That much tracing over that much skin had cost a fair amount of blood.
He pulled a clean cloth off the table beside him, wiped his hand down roughly, and tossed it into the wastebasket.
"Whuum - crash!"
With senses as sharp as his, Haimer had already heard the expensive wrought-iron gate in the manor's front courtyard take a heavy hit from a monster.
"No peace at all around here."
Haimer rolled his stiff neck.
"Though I suppose the mess outside is partly on that stone getting triggered."
"Which means going out and cleaning it up isn't optional."
Who would ever have guessed Orario had that many smuggled monsters sitting around unprocessed.
With that thought, Haimer moved, reaching out for the silver spear that had stood in the corner of the study all this time.
He pushed the study door open, went down the stairs in long strides, and on the ground floor swung open the manor's oak front door.
"Hnff! Hnff!"
Outside stood a battle boar from the Dungeon's mid-levels, eyes bloodshot, white foam at the corners of its mouth, driving its tusks again and again into the swaying courtyard gate.
Luckily the gate was built from excellent stock, and it could still take everything a mid-level battle boar with roughly Lv. 2 strength had to give.
"Can't even break down an iron gate. And that's supposed to be Lv. 2?"
Standing on the steps, Haimer muttered it out loud, distaste heavy in his voice.
He watched the battle boar still grunting away, shoving at the gate with its tusks, and rolled his neck again.
His right hand dropped, five fingers closing precisely around the middle of the silver shaft.
The rough surface of the haft rasped against his palm.
He gave his wrist a lazy, careless flick.
"Vnnnn—!"
The spear let out one shrill, roaring note.
It left Haimer's palm in an instant.
Flying forward.
In that heartbeat the heavy shaft carried terrifying force.
The point moved so fast it left nothing but a smeared afterimage in the dark.
And then.
"Shk!"
A dull sound of flesh punched through burst outside the gate.
The sharp blade went home without a hair's deviation, straight in through the left eye of the boar that was still ramming the gate.
That skull, hard as it looked, was so much crumbling bean curd before a spear carrying that kind of force.
Ground apart on the spot.
With a gush of red blood -
the spear blew a spray of bone and gore out through the back of the boar's neck.
In the next second, the enormous battle boar didn't get out so much as a squeal.
The whole body collapsed like a tower of sand.
It became black ash whirling through the air.
One light breath of night wind, and it was scattered across the flagstones for good.
As for the silver spear that had gone through the boar's brain -
it had met almost no resistance at all.
Its momentum hadn't fallen off in the slightest.
It flew straight on over the street.
With a heavy thud.
Most of the spearhead drove itself into the gray brick wall across the way, leaving half the shaft standing out and humming faintly as it trembled.
Haimer brushed the dust off his hands.
He started forward on long legs, meaning to pull open the two slightly warped gate panels.
So he could cross the street and get his weapon back.
And then it happened.
Out of the night sky, a wind wrapped in pale green light came diving down from above without warning.
"Tap."
A pair of light boots came to rest on the high wall of the courtyard.
- It was the "Sword Princess" Ais, drawn by the noise.
She stood steady on the wall top.
The hard wind up there had pulled her signature long golden hair into disarray.
Strands of gold clung across her fair, delicate cheeks and danced with the wind.
She had clearly run the whole way at full speed over the rooftops.
Ais's breathing was slightly heavy.
From up there, her gaze first passed over the drifting cloud of black ash, a little blankly.
As if she were sizing up exactly what grade of monster had just been killed in a single stroke.
Then those clear golden eyes slid slowly down and settled on Haimer.
And finally her gaze locked, as though a magnet had caught it.
Fixed on that right hand he had thrown the spear with, now hanging at his side.
On it was the cut he had opened to work the forbidden art, the edges still stained with dried, darkened blood.
"Lord Haimer."
Ais said his name softly.
Her heel touched the top of the wall.
And she dropped off that high wall as lightly as if gravity had let go of her.
She landed without a sound.
Ais didn't pause once she was down. She walked straight over, a few quick steps, and stopped in front of Haimer.
She halted at half an arm's distance.
Then, entirely naturally, she put out both hands in their thin bracers.
One on either side, she lifted his right hand with great care.
"Lord Haimer, your hand is hurt."
His hand rose in hers before he knew it.
The suddenness of it left Haimer briefly at a loss.
He looked down at the girl in front of him.
Ais had her head bent slightly, staring at the blood across his palm with absolute concentration.
Her hands hovered just above the edges of the wound.
They stopped there, not daring to touch, afraid of hurting him.
"So even Lord Haimer can be hurt?"
"Of course I can." Haimer found that a little funny, and he didn't pull his hand back.
"If I'm going to walk around in the Lower World, it stands to reason this flesh takes wounds."
"Don't imagine gods in this world are blocks of iron that can fall off a cliff and stand up dusting themselves off."
"Even the pain of a blade opening skin is exactly the same for me as it is for you."
Haimer shrugged, looking into her eyes.
Hearing that, Ais stayed exactly where she was.
She held his hand cradled between hers and said nothing for two full seconds.
Then she blinked, thinking something over.
Her long lashes flickered.
And then it seemed she had remembered something.
____
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