Dawn pierced the pitch-black night, scattering the darkness and letting the sun's light spill across the earth, slowly illuminating the city-state that sat there like a towering colossus.
It was a city ringed by sturdy, massive walls, with many tall buildings around its outer edge. The closer to the center, the lower the buildings became, until at the very heart of it Babel rose, piercing the clouds.
The city was largely circular in shape, radiating outward from Babel at the center in eight directions. Eight orderly main streets divided it into eight districts. A single glance was enough to tell it had been planned with real order.
At the northernmost end of this city, set some distance from the main avenues, on a quieter road, stood a manor that towered above the surrounding buildings, long and large in its build.
The bulk of the manor consisted of several tall towers stacked layer upon layer like a forest of spears, each filling the gaps of the others, so that the rooftops together formed something like a bed of swords. Though these towers weren't as tall as Babel at the city's center, craning your neck to look up at them was still enough to leave it sore. The tallest of all was the Central Tower at the heart of the cluster, its blackened spire stained in the colors of dusk, looking as if it had been carved out of flame. Atop it stood a jester's banner, fluttering in the wind in a way that seemed almost mocking, brimming with irony.
And yet the eyes of the people passing by this stretch of road were full of either reverence or longing as they looked at this oddly shaped manor.
Anyone living in this city... no, anyone living in this world, basically knew what that jester banner meant.
It was the banner of one of the strongest Familias in the world, one of the two adventurer groups hailed as Orario's Two Great Powers: Loki Familia.
And this place was Loki Familia's headquarters in the Labyrinth City of Orario, Twilight Manor.
Twilight Manor was a structure formed from a cluster of high-rising towers. Aside from the thickest, largest Central Tower in the middle, seven spires surrounded it.
The lower halves of these spires, varying in both height and shape, were all connected to one another. Only the Central Tower, encircled by a ring-shaped courtyard, stood alone. In the upper halves, sky corridors built of stone stretched between the other towers, letting people move from one to another.
Of these seven towers, three were for Loki Familia's male members and the remaining four for the female members. Public facilities like the library and the main dining hall weren't gathered in one place either, but scattered across the various towers, which made the whole place pretty disorderly.
When night faded and the dawn light fell across the tops of these spires, in one of the towers used by the male members, in a room furnished with the bare minimum, a young man slowly woke up.
He was a youth with black hair and black eyes, handsome features, and a deep gaze, dressed in black clothes and black trousers that hugged his slender frame. He carried a bright air, with just a trace of childishness still on his face.
He looked about fifteen or sixteen, but the eyes slowly opening had a depth that didn't match his age, lending his still-boyish face an unspoken sort of stillness.
"...Morning already?"
He glanced out the window. The sky had brightened, but the sunlight hadn't reached his room yet.
That meant it was still early. A lot of Orario probably hadn't woken up; most households wouldn't be open for business yet. The perfect time to roll back over and go to sleep.
Unfortunately, he'd forgotten how long it had been since he'd slept in.
"Time to get up."
After muttering that, he slapped his own cheeks to clear his head a little, then rolled out of bed.
He picked up his washing things and walked straight out of the room into the hall.
Outside was a long corridor, along with the sky corridors stretching to the other towers, all of it tangled and complicated. One wrong turn and you'd end up somewhere you really shouldn't, like the female members' dorms.
He'd actually taken a wrong turn once before. The commotion it caused was still occasionally brought up to this day, and he'd lost count of how many times he'd died of embarrassment over it.
As the saying goes, you learn from your mistakes. Ever since, he'd carefully memorized every route in Twilight Manor and watched his surroundings closely, making sure he never went the wrong way again.
"Yo, Leo, morning."
"Morning, kid."
"Already up? Hardworking as ever!"
"Good morning!"
Along the way, the male members who had come out of their own rooms greeted him with easy familiarity. Some were Humans like Leo, but others had animal ears and tails. Some wore very little, some were small enough to look like children, and some had pointed ears and long flowing hair. They were all humanoid, but clearly not the same race as Humans.
"Morning to you too."
Leo greeted them back, unfazed by sights that had once amazed him but had long since stopped being remarkable.
When he got to the washroom, he chatted with the other male Familia members while quickly cleaning himself up.
The people around him noticed he was moving faster than usual, as if in a particular hurry today.
"You got somewhere to be?"
A young man who had come up beside him at some point asked, puzzled.
The young man was a Human like Leo, with unremarkable looks and nothing especially striking about his presence. He looked like one of those background characters you'd see anywhere, the kind of guy you could drop on a street and almost no one would notice.
And yet this utterly unremarkable young man was one of Loki Familia's mid-tier members ranking just below the leadership and executives. The captain valued him highly and was grooming him as the next generation's leading figure. He was a second-class adventurer at Lv.4.
"Mr. Raul."
Leo addressed him that way, at least for now.
"Didn't I tell you, just call me Raul?" The young man scratched his head, exasperated. "I'm not some big shot. You don't need to be formal with me."
Leo didn't quite agree with that.
"You're five years older than me, and you're a senior in the Familia, the next-generation leader the captain's grooming. By any measure I really should be calling you 'Mr.'" Leo shrugged. "And on top of that you're a second-class adventurer at Lv.4. That's way higher than someone like me, who hasn't officially joined the Familia yet and hasn't even received Falna. I'm still just a trainee."
"Don't say that. Our Familia doesn't go in for that strict-hierarchy stuff. Don't pick up that nonsense from other Familias." Raul clapped him on the shoulder with a harmless smile, looking a little goofy. "Honestly, if you hadn't said anything, I'd almost have forgotten you weren't an official member yet. You've been here a whole year already."
Hearing that, Leo felt a little dazed.
"Yeah... it's already been a year."
Leo let out a small sigh.
A year ago, he had inexplicably been thrown into this world. Not only had his body shrunk back down to fifteen years old, he'd been treated to a high-altitude drop, slamming into a pool of water and very nearly drowning.
That alone would've been bad enough, but the problem was that the pool he'd fallen into hadn't been empty. There was someone else there.
If that person hadn't pulled him out of the water and dragged him onto the shore, he really might have drowned in that pool, never to see the sun above again.
Afterward, Leo learned that the pool he'd fallen into hadn't been aboveground at all. It was underground.
It was a corner of the safe floor on the 18th floor of the Dungeon, known as the Under Resort.
Yes, Leo had transmigrated straight into the Dungeon, and onto the 18th floor of the Middle Floors at that.
An otherworlder who hadn't received Falna, had no Status, and had never been in a single fight, with his body reduced to that of a fifteen-year-old, suddenly appearing on the 18th floor of the Dungeon... even though it was a so-called safe floor where no monsters spawned, it still felt to Leo like the sky had fallen the moment he arrived.
To put it bluntly, Leo had basically wanted to die at that point.
Luckily, what he ran into wasn't a man-killing monster but the angel who saved his second life...
"...Don't you have anywhere to go?"
That voice, flat and toneless, without a trace of emotion, like a doll's, yet sweeter than any heavenly music, still rang in his ears as clearly today as if she'd just spoken.
"Then... do you want to come back with me?"
It was that line that had saved Leo back then, and given him a second life in this world.
With nowhere else to turn, Leo had grabbed the hand reaching toward him without hesitation, followed her out of the Dungeon, and come to Twilight Manor.
After that, Leo had moved into Twilight Manor, into Loki Familia's headquarters, and spent a full year here as a trainee.
As a stray man brought back from outside, with no known background, by the girl the Familia universally regarded as their "goddess," their "idol," their "object of admiration," Leo's presence had unsurprisingly caused an enormous uproar within Loki Familia, even something close to actual unrest. In the end, on the recommendation of the goddess and the upper ranks, he was kept there temporarily to handle logistics work. Only once it was confirmed there was nothing wrong with his background could he be accepted as an official member.
Leo had felt some regret about that, but no real disappointment.
He understood perfectly well that someone of unknown origin suddenly claiming he wanted to join one of Orario's strongest Familias was, from any angle, a problem.
Even setting suspicion aside, Loki Familia wasn't something you could just walk into.
In the original work, after the protagonist came to Orario, he was repeatedly turned away even from ordinary Familias, let alone Loki Familia, on the grounds that he was too unremarkable, just a Human with no real strengths to speak of.
Compared to the original protagonist, Leo's situation wasn't much better. Aside from being passably good-looking, he had no special talents to show. Someone like that walking up to the door on any ordinary day would absolutely be turned away by Loki Familia, so how could they possibly just let him join?
The fact that he was even allowed to stay in Twilight Manor as a trainee was entirely thanks to the face of the one who'd brought him back.
So Leo wasn't bitter about his situation. He honestly did his job as a trainee, handled logistics at the Familia headquarters, and stayed put in Twilight Manor.
A year had passed now. Leo was still a trainee, but the people in the Familia had gradually come to accept him.
And...
"After today, you won't be a trainee anymore, right?"
Raul was smiling brightly, as if happy for Leo's sake.
"Yeah." Leo smiled back, a hint of anticipation in his voice. "The captain sent someone yesterday to tell me my observation period's over. Today I can go to the God's Chamber and have the goddess inscribe my Falna."
That was why Leo looked a little impatient today.
He could finally officially join Loki Familia, receive Falna, and become an adventurer.
"Then get going, fast."
Raul had finally figured out that Leo wasn't in a hurry to head out somewhere, but in a hurry to get his Falna.
So he urged him on with that.
"If you go too late, our goddess might've already wandered off somewhere to drink."
That was exactly what Leo was worried about.
He knew all too well how unreliable and how unserious Loki Familia's goddess could be.
If she'd been drinking heavily last night, she was probably still snoring away in bed, nowhere near getting up.
If she hadn't been drinking, she was probably already plotting where to go for a proper bender, and the fate of some trainee wouldn't even cross her mind.
"I'm off, then!"
With that, Leo cut the conversation short, scooped up his washing things, and hurried out. He stopped by his room to drop them off, then ran down the tower stairs and out into the courtyard.
The God's Chamber sat at the very top of the Central Tower, and the Central Tower was the only one not connected to the others. To get there you had to cross the ring-shaped courtyard first before you could enter.
But the moment Leo reached the courtyard, he came to a sudden stop.
Because someone was already there.
A blade cut through the air with a sharp hiss, the sound ringing clear through the morning, crisp as rolling beads.
Beneath the tree's shade, alone, a girl held a glittering silver rapier, swinging it with focused intent.
Like a conductor handling a baton, like she was cutting down enemies no one else could see, the girl performed her solo of flashing strikes. The slender blade became silver light, slicing again and again through the air, cleaving the cold wind, focused and serious.
Vertical cut, horizontal slash, diagonal cleave, upward flick, straight thrust... simple but practical moves bloomed in her hand.
Leo just stood there in silence, as if he'd forgotten how urgent he'd been only moments ago, watching the girl's swordwork from where he was, unmoving for a long time.
After a while, the girl stopped. Then, as if she'd sensed Leo's gaze, she turned and looked at him.
In that instant their eyes met, and time itself seemed to freeze, suspended in that single moment...