Authors Note: Surprise bonus chapter! Just felt like it, no special reason. Well, I guess if you needed one, it's because we're still maintaining first place on the power stones ranking, so gg
--------------------
The alley left behind him was clean, but the feeling wasn't.
Over a few hundred years of living was long enough to kill the guilt that came with taking a life. These people were predators who made a living hunting the vulnerable. He'd dealt with worse without batting an eye, so he wasn't about to lose some sleep over a group of waylaid bandit adventurers who abused people in dark alleys, and he doubted he was the first victim of theirs.
What he couldn't shake, however, was the irritation.
He thought back to the children playing in the alley just a few streets back, remembering the wariness in their eyes when they looked at him. It was reserved just for strangers alone. He had seen those kinds of looks often enough from communites back on Earth.
Daedalus Street wasn't just neglected, it was practically forgotten, tucked away in the cracks of the city that thrived on adventurers and Gods while the people here were left to fend for themselves. He couldn't sense any guild patrols or a Familia overseeing this place.
Orario was a city built on the backs of adventurers, funded by the Dungeon's resources and overseen by Gods. Yet, Daedalus existed in the gaps between all of that.
'At least the Dungeon doesn't pretend to be something it's not.'
Yuji thought to himself as he continued on, rounding another corner that led into a slightly wider stretch of road. He passed by an old man sitting on a stool near a wall, puffing on an old, thin pipe but not paying Yuji any mind.
The further in he went, the more familiar the atmosphere of the street became to him. It reminded him of the outskirts of Shibuya, after the incident, once upon a time.
Eventually, he came to an area where the streets widened enough to form a small clearing where several paths converged. A few residents moved through the open area, carrying water or baskets of produce, just going about their everyday lives.
Yuji came to a stop near the centre. Something had been nagging at him after his brief encounter with the would be ambushers.
After he used a variation of a barrier technique, imbued with a binding vow, he had extended his awareness outward and downward, instinctively mapping the terrain. In doing so, he'd caught something brief. It was faint, but unmistakable.
There was a hollow space down below.
Not in the way that a naturally formed cave would feel like, but it was something more structured and vast, sitting deep beneath the surface of Daedalus Street.
Now, standing still in the clearing with no immediate distractions, he let his senses reach downward again. With his hands still in his pockets, he connected his thumbs to his ring finger, activating another type of veil meant to map out an area. A large volume of shadow grew from beneath his feet and dug deep into the group without anyone noticing.
'Much bigger than what I initially caught.' These were the first thoughts that came to him as he slowly tried to sense what was beneath him, closing his eyes to fully concentrate.
The structure extended deep and wide beneath Daedalus Street, with the layout being deliberate and precise. Numerous corridors branched and split off in every direction with a systematic form that you would see from a planned construction. That ruled out being a mine, and it definitely wasn't a sewer.
'A labyrinth.'
He started feeling out the walls, noticing how dense they were, absurdly so. They were constructed from a material he didn't recognize, and something his senses registered as being abnormally resistant. It wasn't made out of the same material as the Dungeon's natural rock, but it was something more manufactured and refined to an extreme degree.
However, what drew his attention most wasn't the walls. Placed intermittently throughout the corridors were barriers even thicker and denser than the walls. They were colossal in size and made from a material that even he couldn't sense through. He was able to sense around them, but not through, which was a first for him.
He retracted and concentrated his veil more on the subtle presences he felt within the structure.
They were people, and more than he had expected.
Most were clustered in groups at various parts throughout the labyrinth. Some were standing stationary, while others moved slowly through the corridors. From what he could tell, they were all spread across multiple levels, with the structure descending far below the district's foundations.
Something… Interesting, caught his attention.
A few of the presences felt different, and not just in the distinction one would make between someone strong and weak. They felt fundamentally off, like looking at a painting where one color had been mixed in wrong.
The first thing he noticed about them was the slight familiarity they bore to the large monster he had encountered on Floor 50, the one with the strange magic stone. Except these were smaller and more contained, like fragments of a whole piece.
He could feel the structure descending far below the city, perhaps even towards the Dungeon itself. If that was the case, then this was a path that bypassed Babel entirely.
Tilting his head, he retracted his veil and cut off his technique before walking off. The residents had given him passing glances but didn't make an effort to interfere or go out of their way to talk to him.
Whatever was happening down below had existed for a long time, especially one with a construction of that scale. He could rip through those doors and investigate it all himself, but it would also announce his capabilities to every party involved. To allies and enemies alike.
Ouranos had asked him to keep his eyes open.
Well, they were open. Whether or not that old seated God would be pleased with what Yuji had found was a different matter entirely, but it wasn't his problem.
-----------------------
The deeper stretch of Daeadalus street eventually thinned out as the buildings became more spaced apart, with some showing clear signs of abandonment.
Yuji followed a downward slope that levelled into another small clearing, but this was quieter than the last one he had encountered. A modest building resembling a church sat at the far end, with its exterior worn but maintained with delicate care despite where it was.
The front door was open, and from inside, the sounds of children echoed out into the street, ranging from laughter to bickering. The occasional sounds of something being thrown and caught echoed out towards him.
A faded sign hung above the door, reading 'Maria's Orphanage'
Yuji stopped walking for a moment, looking at the building that stood out sorely within the district.
An orphanage in Daedalus Street made a grim sort of sense, he figured. Children without parents or guardians put into the one district cheap enough to sustain them, but also maintained by someone who cared enough but lacked the resources to do more.
A ball rolled out from the open doorway, bumping unevenly along the cobblestone street before rolling to a stop at his feet.
A small boy with a messy head of brown hair appeared from the entrance, his eyes scanning the street before landing on the ball and the hooded figure standing over it. The kid froze it place, and Yuji could see his fingers tightening as he held onto the doorframe.
Yuji crouched down and picked up the ball, holding it out.
"Here."
The boy stared at him quietly at first, then to the ball, then back up at him. After a moment's hesitation, he darted forward and snatched the ball from Yuji's grip, quickly stepping back and clutching it to his chest.
"... Thanks." The boy muttered out, looking at Yuji from the corner of his eyes, half his body turned and ready to dart back inside.
"No problem." Yuji replied, yet stood standing as the boy made no move to go back in. Instead, he tilted his head, eyes slowly filling with curiosity instead of caution as he tried to see past the shadow over Yuji's face, covered by the hood.
"Are you an adventurer?" The boy asked him.
"Something like that."
"Hmm… Did you get lost?"
A corner of Yuji's mouth lifted slightly, "Maybe."
That seemed to relax the kid, a small grin appearing on his face, "Everyone gets lost here, even the people who live here! Maria says Daedalus Street has a mind of its own."
"She sounds like a smart woman."
"She is! She makes the best soup, too!" The boys grin widened before he seemed to remember something, pointing down the street. "Oh! If you want to get back to the main streets, follow the red arrows painted on the walls. They'll take you back out."
From inside the orphanage, an older woman's voice called out, "Rye! Dinner's almost ready, come inside!"
"Coming!" The boy shouted back before giving Yuji one last look. "Don't stay out too late, Mister. It gets scary around here at night."
He turned and bolted back inside, closing the door behind him.
Yuji watched the doorway for a moment, listening to the muffled sounds of children arguing over where they wanted to sit and an older woman trying to settle them down.
For a moment, his grandfather's face surfaced. The wrinkled smile and a laugh too loud for their small house. He remembers the way his hands would shake when he ruffled Yuji's hair, always a little too roughly.
'Still working on it, gramps.'
He looked at the faded sign above the door one last time before turning away, following the red arrows the boy had pointed out for him.
The transition from Daedalus Street back into what was more typical of Orario grew more and more apparent, and soon he was back out onto the main road. It was late afternoon, and an orange hue enveloped the city from the setting sun off in the horizon.
He still had a tailor to find, so off he went once more.
----------------------
The rooftop offered a clear line of sight over the southeastern edge of Daedalus Street.
Fels stood motionless in the shadow of a chimney stack, their skeletal frame hidden beneath layers of black fabric. The empty sockets beneath the hood tracked the hooded man as he merged from the district's maze and rejoined the flow of the main streets.
They had been following Yuji since the Guild, rotating between vantage points and maintaining what they considered an acceptable distance. The man was perceptive, Fels admitted that much, and knew they were long detected by the man.
But Ouranos's orders were clear. Observe and report. Do not engage.
What they had observed today had been, to put it as conservatively as possible, alarming.
The encounter with the adventurers was the first point of concern. Fels had arrived too late to witness the act itself, only catching the tail end of it. A thin black veil spreading from beneath the man's feet before contracting and leaving behind nothing. Seven people, gone.
It wasn't magic, that much Fels recognized, and they had spent over eight hundred years studying every branch of the arcane this world had to offer. Whatever the man had done operated on an entirely different set of principles.
That wasn't the most concerning part of the day, however.
Instead, it was what Fels noticed in the clearing.
When Yuji had stopped, Fells had felt a pulse. It was subtle, extremely so, but unmistakable. Something had passed through the earth beneath them, sweeping outward and downwards before retracting. It all took a few seconds.
Then the man continued walking on, as though he had only stopped to look at the people in the clearing for a moment.
But Fels knew what was beneath that clearing.
Knossos.
It was the man made Labyrinth that Ouranos had been monitoring for years. A structure sealed behind doors of orichalcum that had resisted every form of intrusion the Guild could conceive of. The Evils' hidden stronghold, they suspected as much. It was a labyrinth constructed from adamantite walls, connecting Daedalus Street to the Dungeon itself.
It had taken Ouranos decades of careful observation and divine intuition to be able to piece together the labyrinth's existence. The Loki Familia, the strongest Dungeon crawling faction in Orario, had still yet to discover it for themselves. Even fells, with their eight centuries of accumulated knowledge and Mystery development ability, had been unable to bypass what lay behind those orichalcum doors.
Yuji Itadori had detected the entire structure during an afternoon's stroll.
The fact that he hadn't acted on the discovery of the labyrinth was, in some ways, more troubling than the discovery itself. It implied to Fels one of two things.
Either he was exercising remarkable restraint, or he considered whatever lay beneath Daedalus street beneath his concern.
Given what Fels had seen this man do in the alley and the accounts from Loki Familia during their Dungeon expedition, both explanations could ring true.
Fels turned from the rooftop's edge, their robes barely making a sound as they began their descent.
'I need to report to Ouranos. Everything.'
-----------------
Authors Note:
Hope you enjoyed! The plot thickens, the set up is strong, the agenda must be maintained.