Is it Wrong for a Sword to Remain
Sheathed Against Injustice?
Story Starts
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Chapter 4.4
Descent, and Escalation
The passage from the seventeenth floor to the eighteenth opened onto chaos.
Riveria Ljos Alf descended the final stretch of carved stone with her staff already in hand, Magna Alfs planted firmly against the ground with each step, its emerald-set head catching the firelight that spilt upward from below. For a disorienting moment—the roar of combat reaching her ears before her eyes could make sense of the light—she'd nearly begun chanting her full aria against a Goliath. Then she remembered. Dionysus Familia had reserved the seventeenth-floor spawn this cycle.
The seventeenth had been bad enough. A tide of monsters had clogged the passage to the eighteenth—minotaurs and hellhounds pressing upward in a stampede that had nothing to do with natural spawning patterns. Her group had cut through them in tight formation, Alicia at point, the other elves rotating flanks, but the sheer density of bodies had cost them nearly twenty minutes they couldn't afford.
What waited below was something else entirely.
The eighteenth floor spread before her—the false sky overhead dimming to its nocturnal cycle, its artificial constellations barely visible through columns of smoke rising from Rivira. The settlement was burning. Not in the isolated, accidental way of a potion mishap or a drunken brawl gone wrong, but systematically—structures on the perimeter had been struck first, their collapse funnelling defenders inward whilst creating channels through which monsters poured.
Minotaurs. Hellhounds. Trolls. Sword stags. Firebirds. Bugbears. They came from every direction—north, south, east, west—in waves that crashed against the settlement's meagre defences like surf against eroded rock.
And amongst them, scattered like poison seeds in a wheat field, the telltale hooded cloaks.
Evilus.
Finn's analysis had been correct. The pallum captain had spent three days cross-referencing Guild reports, patrol schedules, and intelligence gathered from Hermes Familia's network before presenting his conclusion to the command group: Evilus would strike simultaneously. Two targets. Rivira below. Orario above. A hammer-and-anvil designed to stretch the city's defenders past their limit.
Gareth had taken the surface team—his dwarven bulk and unshakeable temperament perfectly suited for holding ground alongside Ganesha Familia's numbers. Riveria had drawn the Dungeon assignment. She'd have preferred to choose her own squad, but every elf in Loki Familia had volunteered before she'd finished briefing the operation. Not that she was complaining—their skill was beyond question—but the reverence her kin showed her, the way they orbited her like a moon, still made her uncomfortable after all these years. She'd also requested Rakta and Line. Non-elves. Balance.
Astraea Familia had joined them at the twelfth floor—summoned by one of Finn's runners, though you wouldn't have known it from their captain's demeanour. Alise Lovell had simply grinned and said, "Fancy meeting you here," as though they'd crossed paths at a market rather than deep inside a monster-infested labyrinth. Kaguya had given a curt nod. The elf, Ryuu Lion, had said nothing at all.
Now they stood at the threshold of a warzone.
"Formation!" Riveria's voice carried the particular resonance she'd cultivated over decades—not shouting, but projecting, the way her tutors in the royal forest had taught her to command. The sound cut through the din of combat like a blade through sinew. "Defensive ring. Protect the chant."
The elves moved. They'd drilled this hundreds of times on the floors above, and the pattern was etched into their muscle memory. Alicia took point, her longsword drawn and angled across her body in a high guard that covered both her centre and the space to Riveria's left. The remaining elves fanned out in a crescent—blades and staves forming an interlocking barrier of steel and enchanted wood. Two of the younger mages slotted in behind Alicia, their own staves raised, lips already moving through the opening stanzas of supportive incantations.
Riveria planted Magna Alfs and began.
"Unleashed pillar of light, limbs of the holy tree—"
The words of power rolled from her tongue in the ancient language, each syllable precise, each pause weighted with the accumulated mana of a Level 5 mage who had spent the better part of a century refining her craft. The air around her shimmered. Temperature dropped. Frost crystallised on the stone beneath her feet and spread outward in fractal patterns.
A minotaur broke from the western pack and charged the formation. Seven feet of muscle and horn, its breath steaming in the sudden cold, hooves cracking the stone floor.
Alicia met it.
She stepped forward—just one step, but timed so precisely that the minotaur's momentum carried it directly onto her rising blade. The longsword entered beneath the jaw and punched upward through the roof of the skull. Alicia twisted, withdrew, and was back in position before the corpse had finished collapsing. Blood and ichor ran down her blade in dark rivulets. She didn't wipe it.
"—you are the master archer—"
Two hellhounds flanked left, trying to circle the formation. Rakta intercepted the first—a low pivot, weight dropping into her hips as her curved blade swept upward in a rising cut that severed the creature's foreleg at the shoulder. The hellhound's momentum carried it tumbling past her, and she reversed into a downward stroke that split its spine before it could rise. Line caught the second with a thrust through the open mouth as it lunged, her spear's point emerging from the back of its neck in a spray of dark ichor. She planted a foot on the creature's chest and wrenched the weapon free.
Riveria's chant continued, steady as a metronome.
"Loose your arrows, fairy archers. Falling rain of arrows—"
She didn't need the full aria. Not here, not for this. The stampede was massive in scale but composed of middle-floor monsters—dangerous to lower-level adventurers, certainly lethal in these numbers, but individually beneath the threshold where her most devastating magic was required. What she needed was volume. Coverage. Suppression.
She broke the chant at the second verse and released.
"Wynn Fimbulvetr."
The spell erupted from Magna Alfs in a cascade of luminous green-white energy that arced overhead and descended upon the western approach like judgement. Dozens of ice lances materialised from the magical energy, each one driving downward into the packed ranks of charging monsters. Minotaurs staggered as crystalline spears punched through their torsos, pinning them upright where they stood. Hellhounds were driven into the earth, their bodies freezing solid around the points of impact—legs still extended mid-stride, jaws locked open around snarls they'd never finish. The front rank of the western charge simply ceased to exist, replaced by a field of ice sculptures that the second rank crashed into. Bones snapped. Horns shattered against frozen flesh. Their momentum broke against the frozen remains of their vanguard, and for a precious handful of seconds, the western approach choked on its own dead.
Riveria was already moving. She spun Magna Alfs in a tight arc, the staff's weighted end catching a bugbear that had somehow flanked the formation through a gap in the crescent. The impact caved in its ribcage and sent it tumbling backwards into a sword stag, tangling both creatures for the half-second it took Line to finish them—one thrust, two bodies, the spear finding the bugbear's stone first and punching through into the stag's throat behind it.
"Burn, crimson—"
A tier-one fire spell. Quick. Brutal. Efficient.
"Rea Laevateinn."
The incantation required barely a breath. A lance of concentrated flame erupted from the staff's head, punching through a cluster of five minotaurs that had been forming up for a coordinated charge from the south. The fire didn't simply burn them—it detonated their magic stones from the inside, the sudden thermal shock cracking the crystalline structures and causing chain reactions that tore the beasts apart in explosions of light and dissolving flesh. The concussion wave scattered the monsters behind them, buying the formation another few seconds of breathing room.
Ahead, Astraea Familia hit the monster ranks like a blade driven into the flank of a beast.
Alise Lovell led the charge. Her sword caught fire—genuine fire, wreathing the blade in spiralling tongues of orange and gold that trailed behind her swings like banners. She cut a path through the monsters with a ferocity that bordered on reckless, her footwork carrying her between enemies at angles that shouldn't have been survivable. A minotaur swung its fist downward. She sidestepped, let the blow crater the ground beside her, and drove her burning blade upward through the creature's armpit into its chest. It bellowed once before the fire ate it from within.
Kaguya followed three steps behind, her katana a silver blur. Where Alise was fire and fury, Kaguya was water—flowing, relentless, filling every gap the captain left in her wake. She moved through the battlefield with an economy of motion that Riveria, as someone who appreciated precision in all its forms, found genuinely impressive. A hellhound leapt for Alise's exposed back. Kaguya's blade separated its head from its body without breaking stride. A troll raised its club overhead. Kaguya cut the tendons in both its ankles, and when it collapsed forward she was already past it, letting the creature's own weight drive its face into the stone.
Ryuu Lion operated on the periphery of the formation—not behind Alise, not beside Kaguya, but moving in parallel, a separate blade cutting the same wound from a different angle. Her wooden sword traced paths through the air that left faint luminous trails, each strike precise enough to target the junction between a monster's magic stone and its surrounding tissue. She didn't waste strikes on limbs or torsos. Every blow was aimed to kill, and very nearly every blow did kill. A bugbear lunged for her from behind a collapsed stall—Ryuu pivoted without looking, her blade catching it across the throat in a backhand stroke that opened the creature from ear to ear. She'd sensed it. Or heard it. Or simply known, in the way that veterans knew, that something was coming from that angle at that moment.
Behind them, the remaining members of Astraea Familia fought in pairs. Iska and Maryu covered each other's blind spots with an almost choreographed synchronicity—one high, one low, their weapons describing complementary arcs that left no safe approach angle. Iska caught a hellhound mid-leap on her blade's edge, using its own momentum to split it open from sternum to tail, then spun the weapon in a reverse grip to deflect a minotaur's backhand. Maryu was there before the minotaur could follow up—her curved blade hamstrung the beast's right leg, and when it dropped to one knee she drove the point through the gap between its sixth and seventh ribs into the magic stone. Noin and Neze had linked up on the right flank, Noin's heavier blade creating openings that Neze exploited with quick, surgical thrusts. They moved back to back when the press of bodies grew too thick, covering each other's six with the wordless trust of long partnership.
Lyra hung back. She hadn't moved more than three steps from her initial position, and to a casual observer she might have appeared to be doing nothing at all. But her throwing arm worked with lazy, devastating accuracy—a weighted blade arcing across thirty medr to bury itself in a firebird's wing joint, sending the creature spiralling into a pack of hellhounds below. A potion flask, repurposed and filled with something volatile, lobbed in a high arc toward a knot of bugbears—the detonation scattered them across the hillside in a bloom of violet fire. She converted the right flank into a killing ground without raising her pulse.
"Breath of the verdant—"
Riveria cast again. Tier two.
"Veil Breath."
A shimmering wall of wind-aspected mana sprang up across the northern approach, its translucent surface rippling like heat haze. The wall didn't block—it deflected. Monsters that charged into it found their trajectories bent, their momentum redirected into each other. Two minotaurs collided at full speed and went down in a tangle of horns and limbs, one's horn punching clean through the other's shoulder. A firebird slammed into the barrier and ricocheted sideways, tumbling end over end before smashing into the ground in a burst of sparks and broken feathers.
Riveria's eyes swept the battlefield even as she continued to chant, to fight, to direct. The Dionysus Familia was holding their sector—she could see their barrier flickering on the far side of Rivira, near the northern passage where the seventeenth floor's descent opened onto the eighteenth. The ordered cadence of their mages' rotational chanting carried across the distance. Good. That was one quarter secured.
A sword stag burst through the gap between Alicia and Line.
The creature was fast—faster than the minotaurs, its antlered head lowered like a lance, the single blade-like horn at its crown aimed forward, hooves hammering the earth in a rapid staccato. It had timed its charge to coincide with a momentary widening of the defensive ring as both elves dealt with separate threats.
It was heading directly for Riveria.
She was mid-cast. Her lips shaped the syllables of another Rea Laevateinn, fire already gathering at Magna Alfs' tip, mana flowing through the staff's channels toward the focal point at its emerald head. The spell was aimed south, where a fresh group of minotaurs had crested the ridge above Rivira's eastern quarter. She couldn't redirect in time—not without losing the spell entirely, and those minotaurs would reach the undefended civilian shelters in seconds.
She completed the cast. The fire lance screamed southward and detonated amongst the minotaurs, scattering them like leaves.
The sword stag was fifteen medr away. Close enough that she could see the dull red glow behind its eyes, the foam flecking its muzzle, the way its muscles bunched and released with each stride.
Riveria turned to face it, bringing Magna Alfs around in a guard position. She wasn't truly worried. Level 5. The creature could hurt her—anything with sufficient mass and velocity could—but it wouldn't kill her. She'd take the hit, use the staff to deflect the worst of the impact, and counter before it could disengage.
Ten medr.
"Lady Riveria!" Alicia's voice, sharp with alarm. The blonde elf broke from her position, longsword raised, feet already driving her forward in a desperate sprint to intercept.
Five medr.
Riveria braced.
The sword stag's head disintegrated.
The creature's body continued forward for two more steps, momentum carrying the headless corpse in a stumbling, directionless lurch before its legs folded and it pitched sideways. Then it dissolved. The flesh went first—evaporating into motes of pale light that drifted upward like luminous ash. The bone followed, then the hide, then the hooves, until nothing remained but a fading constellation of particles and a small, dark object that clattered against the stone at Riveria's feet.
A magic stone. And beside it, embedded point-first in the ground precisely where the sword stag's chest had been a half-second prior—a projectile.
Alicia skidded to a halt, sword still raised, eyes wide. She stared at the dissolving remnants of the monster, then down at the projectile, then up at Riveria.
Riveria met her gaze briefly—later—and resumed chanting. The abbreviated second verse rolled from her lips, mana gathering once more as she directed another Wynn Fimbulvetr toward the western approach where the monster ranks had reformed.
But even as the words of power left her tongue, her eyes dropped to the projectile lodged at her feet.
Steel. Good steel—the kind of dense, well-refined metal that marked the work of an accomplished smith. The flat of the blade showed a clean, even grain, the hallmark of proper folding and tempering. But the shape was wrong for an arrowhead. The proportions were off. The taper of the blade—and it was a blade, she could see that now—flowed into a truncated grip wrapped in leather cord. A handle.
This wasn't an arrow.
It was a sword. A sword that someone had modified into a projectile—the blade's tip reshaped into a bodkin point, a shallow notch cut into the base of the grip where a bowstring would seat. Practical. Deliberate. Whoever had made this hadn't repurposed a weapon out of desperation. They'd designed it from the start to be launched.
And they'd fired it with enough force and accuracy to strike a sprinting sword stag directly through its magic stone from—Riveria glanced toward the northern edge of the settlement, where the Dionysus Familia's camp sat near the passage entrance—at least two hundred medr.
"Oh, Shirou's here!"
The voice was bright, incongruously cheerful given the circumstances. Alise Lovell had just bisected a minotaur from shoulder to opposite hip, her flame-wreathed sword parting flesh and bone in a single diagonal stroke that left the two halves toppling in opposite directions. She stood between them, hair plastered to her forehead with sweat and monster ichor, grinning at something above and beyond the Dionysus Familia's camp.
More projectiles struck. One, two, three in rapid succession—each one finding a monster in the packed ranks of the eastern charge, each one hitting with unerring precision. A fourth followed almost immediately, this one aimed higher, catching a firebird mid-dive and sending it cartwheeling into the dirt. A troll that had been bearing down on Iska and Maryu simply collapsed mid-swing, a steel blade protruding from the centre of its sternum. A firebird pinwheeling through the smoke overhead jerked once and fell, trailing feathers and light.
"Wow, I didn't notice he was this good a shot," Alise added, somewhat wonderingly, as she drove her blade through a hellhound that had tried to capitalise on her moment of distraction. The creature yelped and dissolved around the burning steel.
Ryuu Lion didn't comment. She was three monsters deep in the eastern flank, her wooden blade carving methodical ruin through a cluster of bugbears. One reached for her with clawed hands—she ducked beneath its grasp, drove the pommel of her weapon into its solar plexus to double it over, then brought the blade down across the back of its neck. The bugbear dropped. Ryuu stepped over it and engaged the next without pause, her expression utterly blank. But her eyes, Riveria noticed, had flicked briefly toward the source of the projectiles.
Kaguya materialised beside a sword stag that had been circling for a flanking charge. Her katana entered beneath its jaw and exited through the crown of its skull in a single vertical stroke delivered with such speed that the creature's legs continued pumping for a full second before the body understood it was dead. She flicked the blade clean and moved on, her attention already fixed on a pair of minotaurs attempting to reform their line.
Riveria unleashed another spell—Wynn this time, the first-tier ice variant, a focused lance of frost that punched through a minotaur's chest and flash-froze the three hellhounds packed behind it. Quick. Efficient. She was conserving her Mind for the possibility of a prolonged engagement. The hooded figures hadn't committed yet—they lurked at the edges, and that meant this initial stampede was the opening act, not the finale.
Her group pushed deeper into Rivira. The combined force of Loki Familia's elves and Astraea Familia carved a corridor through the monster ranks, and as they advanced, Riveria continued to observe the steady stream of projectiles arcing from a fixed position near the Dionysus Familia's camp on the settlement's northern edge.
The rate of fire was remarkable. Not rapid in the way a repeating crossbow would produce—this was measured, deliberate, each shot separated from the last by perhaps two or three seconds. But every single projectile found its mark. Every single one struck a magic stone. The accuracy was almost offensive in its consistency—there was no deviation, no correction between shots, just a metronomic sequence of perfectly placed kills that thinned the monster ranks with surgical efficiency.
Riveria stooped mid-stride and pulled the blade-arrow from the ground where it had lodged near her feet. The weight surprised her—heavier than she'd expected, dense enough that the steel had genuine heft when she gripped the handle. She turned it in her fingers. Good steel. Well-balanced despite the modifications. The edge along the flat was still sharp, the tempering even, the grip wrapped tight and functional. A smith's honest work—but shaped with a purpose no conventional smith would have considered.
A minotaur charged from the ruins of a collapsed building to her left. Riveria drove the blade-arrow into its eye socket, felt it punch through the thin bone behind and into the creature's brain. The minotaur dropped. She pulled the weapon free, examined it again.
Not single-use.
She'd just driven it through bone and brain matter, and the edge remained intact. No chips, no deformation, no loss of structural integrity. Whoever had forged this produced work that rivalled Goibniu Familia's best output.
She tucked it through her belt and continued forward, using Magna Alfs to shatter a bugbear's knee before driving the staff's ferrule through its throat.
The projectiles continued to rain down. Another troll—dead. A sword stag that had been circling toward the undefended northern quarter—dead. Three hellhounds that had broken through a gap in Alicia's formation—dead, dead, dead, three shots in under four seconds, each one finding the magic stone with mechanical precision.
The archer's position hadn't shifted. Whatever elevation they were firing from, they had clear sightlines across most of the settlement. Riveria estimated the range at somewhere between two and three hundred medr for the closest targets, stretching to perhaps four hundred for the ones on Rivira's far side. Consistent accuracy at that distance, with projectiles of this weight, against moving targets in a chaotic combat environment—
Riveria was no stranger to ranged combat. She'd trained with the bow in the forests of her homeland, had spent decades refining her eye and her form until she could thread an arrow through a gap in leaves at a hundred medr. She understood the mathematics of trajectory and windage and the thousand small adjustments that separated a competent archer from a superlative one.
She also understood why the bow had fallen from favour in the Dungeon. Arrows ran out. You could carry thirty, perhaps forty if you packed them tight, and then you were done—reduced to scavenging spent shafts or hauling bundles of replacements that added weight and reduced mobility. On the lower floors, conventional arrows lacked the penetrative force to threaten monsters with armoured hides. Enchanted arrows solved the penetration problem but introduced another: a single magic arrow cost between five and twenty thousand valis depending on the enchantment. At those prices, every shot was a financial decision as much as a tactical one, and most Familias concluded the investment was better spent on reusable melee weapons—and if they were going to invest in something enchanted, they'd rather go with a magic sword where you can get more than one use before it breaks.
But these blade-arrows bypassed the equation entirely. Steel construction meant retrieval and reuse. Their weight provided penetrative force conventional arrows couldn't match. And whoever was launching them had solved the final variable—the bow required to propel something this heavy at this velocity would need to be extraordinary.
Riveria wanted to see it.
She turned her attention to the broader tactical picture. The Dionysus Familia held their sector with professional discipline—their barrier had stabilised, their melee fighters had pushed the perimeter outward, and the black-haired elf Riveria had noted earlier was somewhere in the eastern ruins, her distant lightning flashes the only indication of her continued engagement. Good. That was the northern quarter secured.
But the southern quarter of Rivira was exposed. The settlement's permanent residents had barricaded themselves inside the stone-built structures near the centre, but the wooden buildings on the southern edge had collapsed or burned, and the monsters filtering through those gaps were meeting no organised resistance. She could see individual adventurers fighting—a dwarf with a war-hammer holding a doorway, a human woman casting barrier spells from a second-floor window—but these were isolated efforts, uncoordinated and ultimately unsustainable.
"Alicia."
The blonde elf appeared at her side in seconds, longsword still dripping.
"Take Rakta and Line. Coordinate with the Dionysus Familia—find their captain, Rienne Arvel. Establish a unified perimeter on the northern and eastern approaches. I want overlapping fields of fire between their mages and ours."
"Understood." Alicia's fist pressed to her chest. She hesitated. "The projectiles—"
"I noticed. Go."
Alicia went, gathering her assigned members with quick gestures as she moved toward the Dionysus Familia's camp. The archer's projectiles continued to arc overhead, each one a streak of dark steel against the dimming false sky.
Riveria turned to find Alise already looking at her, the Astraea Familia captain's grin replaced by something sharper—the expression of someone ready to receive orders she'd already anticipated.
"We'll push to the centre," Alise said. It wasn't a question. "There are civilians in there, and those hooded bastards aren't charging in with the monsters for no reason. They're after something."
"Agreed. Take your Familia through the central thoroughfare. Clear and hold."
"Right." Alise's flame-wreathed blade rose. "Everyone! On me! We're going in!"
Kaguya was already moving before the words finished, her katana a drawn whisper at her side. Ryuu fell into formation—third position, outside flank—her wooden sword held in a low guard that could transition to any angle in a fraction of a heartbeat. Iska and Maryu flanked wide. Lyra brought up the rear, her thrown weapons already reshaping the terrain ahead of the advance into a killing ground of unseen hazards.
They pushed forward, and Riveria watched them vanish into the smoke-choked streets of Rivira's interior. The sounds of their combat—steel, fire, spellwork, the brief sharp cries of monsters dying—grew muffled by the intervening buildings.
Riveria gathered her remaining elves—four, plus herself—and directed them outward around the settlement's perimeter. Expand the secure zone. Thin the incoming ranks. Buy time for Alise's team to reach the centre and for Alicia to establish the northern perimeter.
She raised Magna Alfs and began another chant. The words flowed from her with the ease of long practice, each syllable a key turning in the lock of the world's fundamental forces.
Through the smoke and the firelight, the blade-arrows continued to fall. Riveria felt the weight of the one tucked through her belt—good steel, impossible accuracy, a question she didn't yet have an answer for—and filed it alongside every other mystery this night had produced.
There would be time for answers later.
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End