Isagi wasn't entirely sure whether he had pushed Udaeus straight into his second phase right from the opening blow.
The Skeleton King, once pitch-black, now looked like a bucket of paint that had been dissolved and flung apart. The massive bone sword he swung was indistinguishable from a paint-soaked brush — worm-like streaks of color splattered outward, dyeing the surrounding meadows, along with the corpses of monsters and adventurers strewn across them, in every hue imaginable.
The Judgment Flames that had rained down from the sky, the azure crescent that could have cleaved heaven and earth in two — none of it had been enough to bring him down completely.
And now, things had gotten considerably more complicated and troublesome.
The monsters and people who had already died began to stir. Touched by those spreading colors, they rose back up — twisted, lurching, grotesque. They no longer resembled anything they had once been. Garish, viscous, deformed things, they stretched and merged with one another at random, fusing into bizarre aberrations of all shapes and sizes.
What in the world is this?!
Udaeus was the legendary king of the Dungeon's underfolk. His original domain had been the center of the [White Palace] on the thirty-fourth floor, surrounded and guarded by throngs of underfolk and skeleton soldiers.
To be perfectly honest.
Isagi had once visited the deep levels of the Dungeon — transformed as they were by his own Skills — but he had no knowledge of the lore attached to this place. He didn't know a thing about what these "colors" actually were.
In the fragmented scraps of plot he had once glimpsed, he vaguely recalled them being described as some kind of... contamination?
So how was he supposed to deal with this?
For now, he had no particular solution. It seemed the only real option was to destroy Udaeus's Magic Stone — which at this moment was embedded directly in the center of that dazzling, multicolored greatsword, pulsing like a heartbeat.
The surroundings were completely swallowed in viscous color, but the back of Udaeus's body still retained its original, perfectly pure pale blue. One glance was enough to tell it was the real deal. Felt like a shame to destroy it — maybe there was another way?
The colors kept spreading.
Ryuu-senpai attempted to neutralize them with magic. The elven girl put her mind to work, trying to determine whether the writhing, multicolored tendrils before her were some form of "creature," some "material substance," or simply "magical energy."
As one of the midguard — alongside Miss Heith, covering Haruhime and Goddess Artemis and the others — she had more time than most.
Time to observe how these colors appeared and transformed into what they now were. And then to begin testing her theories.
The first thing Ryuu noticed was that the colors spreading across the Skeleton King's body seemed to possess some kind of "volitional" force.
She confirmed it clearly during the fighting against those reanimated aberrations crawling up from the ground.
Every magical attack she launched seemed, on the surface, to shatter and destroy them with ease — reducing them to fresh puddles of thick color. But in truth —
Each time, a split second before her magic detonated, they burst apart of their own accord, as though preemptively scattering themselves to evade the blast.
"Wandering wind, wayward traveler. Fly across the heavens, race across the wasteland, move with a swiftness that surpasses all things."
The sound of spell-chanting continued without pause.
The girl in the deep-green robe sprinted across the battlefield like a gale, starlight scattering in her wake as the deep-green orbs orbiting her detonated one after another.
It was unmistakable now.
Ryuu watched it happen — before her magic could explode, those contorted color-beasts pre-emptively detonated themselves first. This rendered her magical attacks nearly entirely useless.
The same went for the longsword in her hand. When her blade — wrapped in starlight and flame — swept through them, the monsters' bodies had already voluntarily severed themselves ahead of the strike.
Were they dodging?
But back when she and Isagi had been in the deep levels, Ryuu clearly remembered these things — soft-looking, wriggling like slime — were actually impossibly hard. No matter how hard you struck them with a weapon, you couldn't leave so much as a scratch.
So this was different?
She shook her head. Now wasn't the time to be puzzling over that — focus on what's in front of you!
If that was the case, then these colors weren't indestructible — they were actively evading damage. Which, in a strange way, meant they were afraid?
The problem seemed to have shifted entirely to: how do you land a hit that they can't escape?
Ryuu relayed everything she had observed to the others, while simultaneously turning her mind toward how to leave these things with nowhere to run.
The answer was still magic.
Different types of magic had different properties.
"Wind" was swift and vast — and when compressed to its absolute limit, it became razor-sharp and lethal. "Fire" carried searing heat that could melt and incinerate everything around it, igniting most materials and inflicting ongoing damage. "Ice" brought cold, could freeze targets, form blizzards or crystalline sheets, and physically obstruct an enemy's movement.
And beyond those, there were many other more unusual properties.
Take "light," for instance.
Light-attribute magic was generally known to carry a "blinding" quality, and beyond that, most people assumed it had nothing particularly special about it.
But that wasn't quite true.
Lefiya's [Arcs Ray], for example, actually carried a significant degree of extreme heat.
What Ryuu wanted to exploit right now was a different property of light-attribute magic entirely — its "range," or more precisely, its "coverage."
Beneath a flood of light, nothing could hide. And therefore, nothing could dodge.
Ryuu's magic [Luminous Gale] was a dual-attribute spell — light and wind combined. Under the girl's control, the orb that was normally the size of a basketball began to expand without limit.
Like a tiny sun about to fall from the sky.
From within it, she compressed and stripped away the howling "wind" as much as possible, then preserved the power of pure "light."
The most blinding, pure radiance swallowed everything and consumed everyone's field of vision — but it still wasn't enough. Not yet.
Under that flood of light, the colors blanketing the hillside had nowhere to hide — but it hadn't inflicted any real damage on them.
And so, Ryuu guided the light orb downward.
In a sense, the destructive power of "magic" — beyond its inherent elemental properties — came almost entirely from either "explosion" or "penetration." The former had already proven difficult to use here. The moment it detonated, those colors would scatter and fragment, splitting into countless tiny — even microscopic — particles and evading every last bit of the attack.
So if she wanted to leave them with no way out, there was only one method remaining. The most fundamental form of attack there was.
Crushing.
The light orb descended in earnest, sinking lower and lower — even the ground itself was swallowed by the surging magical force, pulverized into dust and erased.
And when the orb finally dissipated —
Ryuu was breathing hard, gasping for air, when she finally saw it: in the circular crater left where the orb had landed, the brilliant colors that had blanketed it before had been reduced to a charred, crumbling, jet-black grit.
Just now, she had genuinely killed a portion of the "colors" — as though she had crushed an impossibly soft insect beneath a grinding weight of magical force.
Effective!
Ryuu's attack inspired the others.
More importantly, Heith quickly realized that her own magic also had a powerful effect on these writhing colors — or to be more precise, it was the attack magic she could now wield by converting her healing magic, made possible by the new equipment Isagi had given her, that proved highly effective against them.
On the whole, healing magic was "light"-attribute.
But through the book Isagi had provided — the one called [Toxic Milk] — after conversion, it became dark-attribute magic.
"I am named Gold. Sworn never to rot, arm of the goddess. Thrice scorched in flame, eternally pierced and tormented. With a spear of fire as the cage, radiance is born — consuming death, consuming burning wounds —"
The chant hadn't even changed.
"[Soul · Gullveig]!"
A golden magic circle blazed into being, directly blanketing the wide area before her.
Only now —
The once-broad healing magic became a cascade of rapid corrosion. That brilliant gold transformed into pitch-black sludge, which then surged forward and swallowed everything in its path.
The effect was even greater than Ryuu's light orb.
It directly covered all the vivid, swirling colors in the vicinity — and then, astonishingly, swallowed them whole, assimilating them entirely, until at last they became nothing but filthy black mud.
And what surprised Heith even more was her other healing magic, [Asa · Gullveig] — a spell that continuously regenerated its target over time.
Now, after conversion through [Toxic Milk], it had transformed in an instant into a spell that continuously inflicted damage on the enemy instead.
She aimed it directly at Udaeus in the distance.
The massive skeleton, once entirely coated in color, was gradually consumed by the black sludge. The brilliant hues that had blanketed him faded at a visible rate, disappearing before their eyes.
At that same moment —
Goddess Artemis perceived the true nature of these writhing "colors."
"They're monsters!"
There was no doubt about it.
Physically, her body was no different from that of an ordinary person's. But as the goddess of the hunt, Artemis possessed archery skills that were nothing short of transcendent — enough to match a Lv. 4 adventurer on technique alone — and yet her greatest strength was, in truth, her five senses.
Eyes, ears, nose —
The goddess's perception far surpassed imagination. And so only she had seen it: in the moments just now, when Ryuu's and Heith's magic had done their work —
What had supported these "colors" in their very existence, just before they vanished —
Were Magic Stones. Tinier than specks of dust.
In essence, whether it was the light orb or the black sludge, both worked by destroying the Magic Stones housed within them — and that was how these "colors" were successfully killed.
"I see!"
Isagi nodded to himself, then swept a hand out and released Saika!
If they had Magic Stones, this was simple!!
He had Haruhime cast the enhancement magic on Saika as well.
The little jellyfish — who had been happily devouring Magic Stones all across the meadow even before this — obeyed Isagi's command without a moment's hesitation and hurled herself at the strange, still-writhing color aberrations.
The little creature eliminated them at a tremendous pace.
Perfect!
Now that they had found a solution, what came next was simple enough.
The others switched their focus to supporting Ryuu-senpai and Miss Heith — and little Saika the jellyfish.
If those colors were monsters, then they could always be wiped out eventually. After that, they could circle back and deal with the Skeleton King.
The new combat strategy was established, and they moved quickly to execute it.
Some time passed —
With a thunderous crash and collapse, the Skeleton King's massive form — his body now almost entirely swallowed by black sludge — crumbled completely apart. The vast stretch of meadow surrounding him began to dissolve into ash.
And among the remains —
The great ancient sword, with its pale blue Magic Stone embedded at the center, dropped to the ground as a "material drop."
Isagi picked it up. He had assumed at first that it was a weapon — but it wasn't.
[Divine Body Made Sword — Eternal Night's Color:
The Dungeon has no concept of sky. It should not know what the sun is, nor the moon. It should not know what day means, nor what night means.
And yet, strangely —
Every monster born within the Dungeon carries within it a longing for the sky — a yearning that comes from the dark mother herself.
In a distant age long past, monsters too once walked beneath the open heavens.
This is the foundation of all things.
And it is said that night always comes with stars. The king carved this truth into his heart, and upon it, built an empire.]
Isagi looked at the great bone sword in his hands. Fissures still cracked open along its length from time to time, leaking thin, tendril-like wisps of color from within.
He had no idea what kind of weapon this thing could even be forged into. Still, a few ideas were already forming in the back of his mind.
He stowed it away.
Then he called out to Saika — who, in a rare display, had eaten her fill and was clutching her belly with an expression that said "I can't eat another bite, not one more bite" — along with the other girls who had traveled with them, and they prepared to leave.
The battle had taken less than an hour. Isagi wasn't sure whether staying longer would cause the Dungeon to keep spawning more monsters to "hunt them down."
But regardless.
They still had to keep pressing deeper.
Having arrived in this Dungeon of a thousand years past — whether he explained it or not — the other girls, even including Goddess Artemis, all wanted to see it for themselves.
To see how the Black Dragon had first come into being.
____
👻🔥Seek: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Oshi No Ko: Co-starring with Kana Arima
Let's hit these goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = 1 extra chapter for the public!