The eighteenth floor of the Dungeon, the forest.
The radiance pouring from the crystal dome scattered across this verdant sea of trees, and though most of it was blocked by the dense foliage, part of it still streamed down through the thinning gaps in the leaves, lighting up the surroundings, setting the blue crystal pillars around each tree glittering.
Having received Finn's special permission to leave the group, Leo had come here, wandering through it.
"A year now. This place hasn't changed at all."
Following that bit of memory still lingering in his mind, Leo walked through the trees, observing his surroundings while he picked out the path.
"Back then... I think this was the road I took to leave this place, right?"
Leo thought, a little uncertain, straining to scrape together memories that had already faded.
He still recalled that a year ago, it was Ais who had led him out of this forest, toward the corridor cavern to the south, and then climbed up to the seventeenth floor from there.
Now, trying to retrace the path he'd taken when he left was genuinely a bit of a struggle.
"After all, back then I wasn't in any state of mind to look around me or remember the way. The only thing on my mind was staying right behind Ais and getting up to the surface as fast as I could..."
Recalling how flustered and lost he'd been then, Leo couldn't help a small smile.
Looking back on the past with his current eyes, he surely found the version of himself from then a little embarrassing.
But he didn't think the person he'd been then was anyone to be ashamed of.
A young man of the new century who'd lived his whole life in a peaceful world, a peaceful nation, suddenly dropped into this other world without a single soul he knew, where deadly monsters might come bursting out at any moment, and he hadn't wet himself with fright on the spot. That alone was already pretty good.
Of course, if he hadn't run into Ais right away, he might have made an even sorrier showing of himself.
"Hope I'm not going the wrong way."
Still turning over those early days, Leo kept walking deeper into the forest.
As he walked, he began to come across babbling spring water and cool little streams, and here and there fruit trees bearing unfamiliar fruit started to appear.
"Roar!"
A massive bear monster appeared right there, pawing at the fruit on one of the trees, then drawn by the sound of Leo's footsteps, its gaze snapping over toward him.
"That's... a Bugbear?"
Leo stopped.
A Bugbear, a monster that only appeared from the nineteenth floor on, and a large-category one at that.
Its classification was Lv.2, and although it was somewhat weaker than the Minotaur, which only appeared from the fifteenth floor on, in Strength and Endurance, its Dexterity and Agility were both higher than a Minotaur's. It could often use a nimbleness that didn't match its huge bulk to corner its prey, then tear it limb from limb, making it in some sense a more dangerous and troublesome monster than even a Minotaur.
The eighteenth floor was a safe floor, where monsters weren't supposed to be born at all, much less a floor where Bugbears appeared. But monsters did sometimes wander over from other floors, and some even used this great forest and the wetlands in the northern part of the floor as a base of operations. The Bugbear was one of them.
The gourd-shaped red berries growing on those fruit trees were called Cloud Fruit, a wild fruit produced only in the Dungeon that Bugbears loved to eat, so Bugbears often came up here from the nineteenth floor for the express purpose of picking and eating it.
And now Leo had run into a Bugbear lurking near the Cloud Fruit trees.
"Roar!"
The instant the huge bear monster saw Leo, it let out a furious roar.
It abandoned the fruit it had been pawing at and charged at Leo with astonishing speed, kicking up a cloud of dust, fierce and aggressive.
Its speed really was faster than a Minotaur's. Once it got going, it was like a tank smashing wildly through everything, knocking down the trees in its path.
Facing that charge, even an adventurer in the back half of Lv.2 would probably have a hard time of it, right?
Pity. The thing had picked the wrong opponent.
The instant the Bugbear leapt high and slammed down hard onto the spot where Leo had just been standing, raising a dull boom like an impact against the ground, Leo had already sprung up into the air.
His form was like the wind. The moment he leapt, he landed on a branch of the tree nearest him, then stamped down with one foot, his whole body turning into an arrow loosed from a bowstring, shooting toward the huge bear monster.
He was faster than the Bugbear, and faster by a wide margin.
The Bugbear couldn't react to Leo's movements at all. Before it could even raise its head, a flash of sword light split the air.
The sword light, cold as a wintry moon, sliced through the Bugbear's hide and muscle in an instant, cut into its chest, and finally struck precisely on the magic stone in its ribcage, cleaving the stone and its entire massive body in two.
The Bugbear didn't even manage a death cry before its body split in two, and with the magic stone shattered outright, its slowly toppling corpse dissolved straight into ash, leaving nothing behind.
And Leo, who'd brought all this about, didn't so much as turn to look. He sheathed the sword he'd drawn at some point and kept walking forward.
After that he cut down quite a few more monsters from other floors, some large-category, some small-category like Almiraj, without a single monster getting in his way.
He went on like this for another half hour, until at last Leo heard the sound of water.
It wasn't the sound of a stream, but a gentle lapping, like wind passing over a water's surface and stirring ripples across it.
Hearing it, Leo's heart gave a slight stir, and he quickened his pace, heading toward it.
At last the way ahead was no longer the same monotonous trees but opened into a clearing, a pool.
It was a pool of very clean water, so clear you could see right to the bottom.
The pool sat just in front of a rock face, and crystalline water flowed out of the rock, plunging into the pool like a small waterfall, forming this pool that was more beautiful, clearer, and cleaner than any water source on the surface.
There were monsters about near the pool, too, heads bowed at the water's edge, quietly drinking, ignoring even Leo's arrival.
Looking at the pool, Leo smiled.
"That's right. This is the place."
The crystal water of this pool flowed out from the depths of the floor. It could not only be drunk straight to quench thirst but also heal the body's fatigue, a place only a handful of adventurers knew about.
Of course, Leo hadn't come looking for it to quench his thirst, much less to heal his fatigue, but because this was the place where he'd first come into being.
Leo remembered that day clearly.
Back then, he had suddenly appeared above this pool, as if some unseen presence had simply flung him here, plummeting out of the air and crashing hard into the water, sinking to the bottom.
The feeling of suffocation was vivid before his eyes even now, and the feeling of water pouring endlessly into his mouth and nose was even more unbearable, making him thrash at the bottom of the water instinctively.
A hand had seized hold of him as he thrashed for his life, dragged him up from the bottom, and broke the surface.
And then, coughing violently, Leo had been so stunned by the sight before his eyes that his pupils shrank and his head simply went blank.
That sight, even now, he still often saw in his dreams.
A golden-haired, golden-eyed girl, right there before his eyes, one hand gripping him, not a single thread on her body, in the wholly original state of a newborn babe.
The girl's skin was pale and soft and beaded with water, her figure slender, her curves distinct, her features so exquisite they seemed of no earthly making, beautiful beyond compare. The image of her soaking in that crystal-clear water carried a breathtaking beauty, calling to mind the fairy spirits of myth who dwelled in forest springs.
Leo still remembered that he'd simply stared, dumbstruck, blank.
Never mind that the girl was the most beautiful person he'd seen in his entire life, just that bare, fully exposed posture of hers, never mind a man, even a woman seeing it would surely have had her senses stolen away.
To be honest, back then he'd even had the feeling that maybe he was dreaming, the thought that maybe he'd actually just drowned and everything he was seeing now was nothing but a fantasy before death.
After that thought came to him, he'd even felt he could die without regret, which gives you some idea of how great an impact that sight had on him.
Lost in the memory, Leo found himself murmuring that name under his breath.
And the owner of the name answered him.
"...I'm here."
The voice came from right behind Leo, jolting him sharply awake.
Ais walked slowly out of the forest behind him, her gaze fixed on him the whole time, something flowing within it that Leo couldn't read.
"How are you here?"
Leo stared at her blankly, startled into speech.
"I followed you." Ais came to Leo's side and stood shoulder to shoulder with him, saying softly, "I saw you leave the group, so I came after you."
"Is that so?" Leo scratched his cheek, saying a little awkwardly, "I just wanted to come take a look here, that's all."
"I know." Ais seemed able to understand how Leo felt. Watching his eyes, she said, "This is the place where we first met."
"...Yeah." Leo nodded and gave a small smile, his expression hard to name. "It's also the place I came to when I first arrived in this world."
At that, Ais showed not the slightest sign of confusion.
"Back then, I'd just come up from the floors below." Ais looked at the pool before her, saying quietly, "I was filthy, so I came here to wash off."
Whenever Loki Familia came back from an expedition, most times they would stop on this floor, and the women among the Familia members, when they stopped here, couldn't resist coming to this spot to wash away the grime of long days of fighting and the weariness in body and mind.
Ais didn't often come when she went into the Dungeon alone. That day, she'd only gotten so filthy that she'd come over.
And in coming over, she'd run into a strange thing she had never encountered before.
"...You suddenly fell out of the air, and I didn't even have time to react."
Ais's tone became unlike any she'd had before, like puzzlement, and like wonder.
"Even if a monster had been approaching, I'd have noticed it right away."
Ais was, after all, a Lv.5 first-class adventurer, with extremely keen senses. If someone suddenly came near this area, unless they were a first-class or second-class adventurer with truly astonishing stealth, there was no way she could fail to notice.
But Leo was plainly an ordinary person without the strength to truss a chicken, and before he'd fallen out of the air, Ais hadn't sensed the slightest movement at all.
"As if... you'd appeared here out of thin air."
This murmur of Ais's was covered by a light breeze that suddenly blew past, hard to catch.
But Leo heard it all the same.
"Do you remember what I said back then?"
Leo suddenly said this.
"...I remember." Ais was silent for a moment, then said, "You said you didn't know how you'd come here."
"Right." Leo nodded. "And?"
"And..." Ais pressed her lips together, and her eyes as she looked at Leo turned complicated, making her expression hard to name once more. "You said you were someone who didn't belong to this world, didn't belong to this era."
Leo lowered his eyelids.
It was the truth, wasn't it?
The fact was, he hadn't meant to say it that way back then.
The matter of his crossing over to another world was the kind of thing best carried into the grave, never mentioned to anyone. But at the time he'd been utterly at a loss, and he hadn't dared come out and say that he was most likely someone who'd crossed over, so all he could do was stammer out that riddler's sort of statement.
Back then he'd never imagined that it was precisely that riddler's mystic-charlatan statement that had touched the heart of the girl before him, the girl who hadn't blamed him for seeing all of her, who'd saved him, and who, once he'd calmed down, had slowly asked him about where he came from.
Belonging neither to this world nor to this era.
Wasn't that the truest portrait of what lay in the girl's own heart?
Especially Leo's eyes back then, so lost, so helpless, like a child who'd strayed into some unfamiliar place, frightened of everything around him, treading carefully, not knowing where to go, the very picture of bewilderment about the future...
That look, how alike it was to her younger self from years ago...
And so Ais had said it almost as a reflex.
"...Have you got nowhere to go?"
That voice, lacking any rise and fall, carrying not a trace of feeling, like a puppet's, yet more lovely to hear than any heavenly music, held within it an empathy and resonance that no one had managed to notice.
"Then... do you want to come back with me?"
By the time the girl came to her senses, the words were already out.
No one knew why she'd said it back then. Even the companions who'd been at her side in the Familia for years were astonished. She who, apart from getting stronger, had never taken interest in anything, had actually brought a strange boy home.
And who would have known that when Ais looked at Leo back then, she was in fact, through Leo's figure, seeing her younger self?
That was why she hadn't been able to stop herself from reaching out a hand to Leo.
"I've always wanted to say thank you to you one more time." Leo gazed at the beautiful girl beside him and smiled faintly. "Thank you, for helping me find a place to belong, Ais."
At that, Ais lowered her eyelids too.
She said nothing, only stood with Leo, quietly gazing at the pool before them.
As if seeing the two who'd met here a year ago.
[Read 30+ chapters ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/NiaXD]