Even from several floors away, Leon's perception allowed him to witness the clash between Ais and the Corrupted Spirit on the 79th floor.
This was his first time seeing the Corrupted Spirit. Despite its monstrous origin, the entity possessed a strikingly humanoid appearance. Had it not been for its entirely verdant, emerald-green skin, it would have been indistinguishable from a normal human woman.
As Leon had calculated, the Corrupted Spirit's raw power sat firmly at Level 10. Ais, bolstered by Haruhime's dual amplification of Uchide no Kozuchi and Hero's Power, had also ascended to the Level 10 threshold.
The moment they collided, a battle of cataclysmic proportions erupted. The violent explosions from their duel traveled upward, reaching the 75th floor as deafening, rhythmic thunders.
The resulting shockwaves were so powerful they penetrated several layers of bedrock, causing the entirety of the 75th floor to tremble violently.
Finn and the others, still locked in their own desperate struggle, were startled by the continuous commotion.
It wasn't just occasional tremors, the ground shook as if half the world were being uprooted, disrupting the flow of their combat.
'Ais, have you already clashed with the Corrupted Spirit?' Finn thought to himself, sparing a frantic glance toward the vertical shaft while parrying a giant Minotaur.
'What terrifying fluctuations! The scale of that battle is beyond reason!'
—
On the surface, the gods watched the blurred images with bated breath.
Since Fels' transmission bead was currently positioned near Haruhime, they couldn't see the 79th floor directly, but they could guess the intensity of the fight from Leon's reactions and the environmental upheaval.
"Loki, your Ais-tan is truly impressive. To actually trade blows with the Corrupted Spirit of that caliber..." One god remarked with a strained smile
"Hehe! You flatter me." Loki replied, though her smugness couldn't entirely hide her own nerves.
"You really hit the jackpot, Loki." Another deity added with visible envy.
The Loki Familia's growth had been vertical ever since they began acting alongside Leon.
Before his appearance, Ais was a Level 5 adventurer—top-tier for Orario, certainly, but still dwarfed by the Level 6 and 7 veterans. Now, under Leon's influence and with Haruhime's support, she had taken flight like a dragon, soaring through Levels 6, 7, and 8 to finally challenge the Corrupted Spirit at Level 10.
"Speaking of which, why has Leon gone silent?" A deity suddenly asked, drawing everyone's attention.
While Ais and the Corrupted Spirit were locked in a death match, Leon didn't seem to be watching them at all. Instead, he stood at the edge of the breach with a deep, contemplative frown.
In reality, Leon's focus had shifted to a new, rising threat. After the Black Dragon had blasted through the floors, those lower levels seemed to "activate." A massive surge of monsters was being born in the dungeon's womb—creatures with auras no weaker than the giant Fomoires and Minotaurs, and in numbers that doubled the population of the 75th floor.
Ordinarily, these monsters could have easily leaped between the shattered floors to swarm the expedition but they didn't. They gathered in silent, disciplined ranks near the vertical cavern created by the black dragon, refusing to cross an invisible line as if they were being held back by a singular will.
This was the source of Leon's silence. If this tidal wave of monsters broke free, it would create a tide that Finn's group—currently without Haruhime's Hero's Power boost for the Level 7s—could not possibly survive.
"Is the Dungeon itself influencing them?" Leon murmured softly, Veins of Light tracing the movements of the gathered horde.
"Leon-sama, what did you say?" Haruhime asked, her voice filled with confusion.
Lacking Leon's advanced detection magic, she was blind to the gathering storm below.
"Haruhime, go stay with Tione or Tiona. I am about to make my move." Leon instructed.
He placed a shimmering light-attribute defense spell over her for extra protection.
"Yes, Leon-sama."
Haruhime didn't hesitate or question him. She spread her wings of light and flew toward Tione and Tiona.
'Now that the Corrupted Spirit is Ais's responsibility, I'll use these monsters as my own training ground.' Leon thought, his eyes turning toward the abyss.
'It's the perfect timing to further refine my abilities.'
Watching Haruhime reach safety, Leon took out several monster-luring items. Despite the heavy, cloying scent they emitted, he carried them on him.
Then, he vanished, flashing downward into the hole.
Lyra's props were peerless. Even though the monsters on the lower floors seemed to be under the Dungeon's command, the overwhelming allure of the bait snapped their leashes. Legions of monsters leaped from their positions, rushing toward Leon as he descended.
Leon landed in the heart of the 76th floor and immediately unleashed a whirlwind of destruction.
As the battle for Leon began anew, something shifted even deeper in the earth.
Unbeknownst to anyone, on the 80th floor, a pair of scarlet pupils slowly opened in the absolute darkness.
"Set off... go find your other half."
Deep within the suffocating, absolute darkness of the 80th floor, a voice that belonged to neither man nor woman echoed through the silence.
In response to this command, a creature of nightmare—a titan of scales and malice—slowly sat up from its eons-long slumber.
If Leon had been standing in that lightless void, he would have recognized the silhouette instantly, yet he would have been struck by the sheer scale of the terror. This was another Black Dragon, but it was not the one he had just slain on the floor above.
It was a true Level 10 entity. Its aura was so crushing that it made the previous Black Dragon look like a mere hatchling. The existence of such a being would have sent Orario into a state of total collapse.
To think that while the surface world struggled to recover from the loss of the Zeus and Hera Familias, the Dungeon had been quietly gestating a second, far more powerful Black Dragon within its deepest womb.
The voice that spoke to the monster was one that the gods above, particularly Ouranos, would have identified with a shudder. It was the voice of the "Sentient Labyrinth" itself—the consciousness of the Dungeon that some deities whispered was an "Evil God."
Just as Ouranos had long suspected, the Dungeon was not a mindless hole in the ground. It was a plotting, reactive organism. And its current plot centered entirely on the fusion of its greatest creations.
As the command faded, the dark ceiling of the 80th floor—the very floor of the 79th—was forcibly torn asunder. A jagged, glowing crack appeared, rending the boundaries between the levels.
The terrifying aura of the Level 10 Black Dragon surged upward like a volcanic eruption, sweeping through floors 79, 78, 77, 76, and 75 in a singular, deafening wave of dread.
The fierce, surging pressure was so immense that it halted the duel between Ais and the Corrupted Spirit on the 79th floor.
Everyone, adventurers and monsters alike, was frozen by the sudden manifestation of this ultimate predator.
"How is this possible?" Finn's voice trembled, his face pale and his pupils shrinking to pinpricks. "Such a terrifying being... it's appeared again?!"
Even Leon, occupied by a sea of enemies, felt his heart hammer against his ribs at the sensation of that aura.
But as he fought, he noticed something deeply unsettling about the battlefield dynamics.
On the 75th floor, the monsters fighting Finn and the others had been stunned into a temporary truce by the aura of the Level 10 Black Dragon. They stood paralyzed by the "Fear" of their superior.
However, the monsters Leon had lured with his items did not stop. In fact, they became even more frenzied. They ignored the terrifying aura of the new Black Dragon and redoubled their efforts to bury him under a mountain of claws and teeth.
'They are deliberately trying to pin me down.' Leon realized, his eyes narrowing.
In normal circumstances, even a monster lured by a magical item would possess a survival instinct. If a Level 10 predator appeared, they should have scattered or cowered. But these monsters fought with a suicidal, mechanical precision.
This was not a natural reaction, it was a direct intervention. The Dungeon was using these expendable pawns to cage Leon so he could not interfere with what was happening below.