They were back at the cliff from before.
Isagi stared at the massive hollow in the great tree ahead, gripped by a strange, hard-to-place sense of unreality.
He found a suitable spot and jumped down first, confirming that the platform formed by the enormous, gnarled branches below was stable, then called for the girls to follow.
After that, it was simply a matter of pressing on — deeper and deeper.
Every so often they had to leap from one level down to the next, because Isagi and the girls had quickly discovered something unexpected: the hollow of the Great Tree Labyrinth, when viewed from above, looked like a tangled weave of trunks and branches locked together — but once you were actually inside, it became clear there were no "paths" to speak of. At least, none made for human feet.
Looking down from above had been one thing. Being inside was something else entirely — it brought the strangeness of this place into sharp, unsettling relief.
It was like stepping into some primordial jungle. Not a single trace of human presence. Dense, canopy-blotting growth that swallowed all light, and a silence so complete it felt like death — broken only by a peculiar, pervasive smell.
The scent of monsters.
All manner of monsters — their stench, their sweetness, their indescribable reek — had all mingled together into something that made you wrinkle your nose. It had been settling and sinking into this place for untold years, and now it clung to the air, impossible to dispel.
From this point on, everyone could feel it — a silent warning, unspoken but unmistakable.
[This place is no longer human territory.]
It was a phenomenon that simply did not exist in the modern Dungeon — not even in the deep levels, where adventurers almost never set foot.
In fact, there was one rather curious detail that modern adventurers had always overlooked.
"Paths."
The Dungeon's terrain was endlessly varied — dense forests, caverns, deserts, even the interiors of volcanoes. By all logic, there should be no such thing as a "path." And yet paths were always there. No matter where you were, they simply existed — as if they had been laid out specifically for adventurers, guiding them ever forward, ever deeper, without end.
As if the Dungeon were inviting everyone to go further in.
There were no true "Dungeon scholars" in this world, so only a handful of adventurers ever stopped to think about it. And even those who did never found an answer.
But for now —
"Isagi, look over there!"
It was the goddess Artemis again — she'd found something new.
Pushing through the branches and leaves blocking their view, they soon spotted a hollowed-out cavity in the wood ahead. Such alcoves were common enough in the Great Tree Labyrinth — like little chambers, sometimes teeming with monsters, sometimes completely empty, offering adventurers an occasional resting spot.
But this one was different.
Inside was a small village.
A village. That was the only word for it.
Stone buildings stacked from rough-hewn rock — crooked, primitive, with no aesthetic appeal whatsoever, but undeniably the kind of structures you could actually live in.
Among them were also several large stone fortresses, looking remarkably similar to the ones they had seen earlier — the fortifications built by the city's heroes and soldiers on the frontlines.
Were these man-made structures?
The group approached with curiosity, and it didn't take long to reach a verdict: these buildings had been constructed by monsters.
Because they were hollow shells — impressive from the outside, empty within. And while they looked passable from a distance, up close you could see immediately that they varied wildly in size, nothing like something built to normal human proportions. The scent of monsters was noticeably heavier here as well.
Isagi studied the cluster of structures — this odd little facsimile of a village — and found himself less than surprised.
He just thought: could his skill be acting up again?
A few stone houses, after all — Goblins had been known to construct entire fortresses. That much, at least, was not beyond belief.
But if this wasn't his doing... wasn't it all a little too strange?
While he was still turning that over in his mind, Riveria and the others offered a different theory.
"Could these be from the Xenos?"
Xenos settlements within the Dungeon did sometimes look like this, so — could these be remnants of ancient Xenos from long ago?
After all, no one had ever proven that Lyd and the others were the very first Xenos to have ever existed.
Come to think of it, Isagi recalled that Fels had once asked Lyd about this.
But the Xenos' memories were always hazy at best. They almost never remembered the precise moment of their own "birth."
A typical Xenos would first appear somewhere in the Dungeon, then wander, and only gradually — over a span of time that could be called "awakening" — would they develop human-level intelligence. The reason Lyd and the others always pushed so deep into the Dungeon was, in part, to search for newly "born" companions who had only just come into being.
And since there was no concept of time inside the Dungeon, even the Xenos themselves had no idea how long they had actually existed within it.
"Even so, the resemblance is too close."
Ryuu-senpai murmured, her gaze fixed on the stone structures ahead. They really did look uncannily like the fortresses they had seen earlier.
And so it was that the elven girl — who had lately been spending all her spare time buried in books — proposed an unusually bold theory.
"What if the Dungeon is mimicking the fortresses the heroes built on the frontlines?"
Even as she spoke, Ryuu stepped forward and deliberately destroyed one of the stone houses. It didn't take long — the structure restored itself completely, without leaving a single mark.
That proved it. The stone houses were part of the Dungeon itself.
"Just as I thought... the same as the arena on the 34th floor..."
In Orario, every adventurer who had ventured into the deep levels knew about a certain hidden and extraordinarily dangerous location within the White Palace of the 34th floor.
It was called the Colosseum, tucked into one corner of that white expanse.
Inside, everything was singular.
Within those crumbling ruins, monsters fought and slaughtered one another without cease — and whenever one was killed, it revived immediately, rejoining the battle against its peers in an endless, unbroken cycle.
For adventurers, even a first-class explorer who stepped inside would face mortal danger — because the monsters' respawn rate was virtually constant, and no matter how powerful you were, their sheer numbers could overwhelm you.
But why did such an unusual location exist on the 34th floor of all places?
Since time immemorial, countless adventurers had formed their own theories. Many had even committed those theories to paper, leaving them behind in books.
Ryuu-senpai, who had spent a great deal of time recently in the library, had come across no shortage of such speculation — some written by the authors themselves, others passed along as hearsay.
A considerable number of them pointed to the same possibility: that the Dungeon was "imitating" adventurers.
Back in the city's earlier era — just over a decade ago, during the time when Zeus Familia and Hera Familia still "ruled" — adventurer training had been extraordinarily brutal.
Compared to that, even the Folkvangr of Freya Familia today would barely qualify as a warm-up. Adventurers fighting each other to the death as a means of self-improvement had been commonplace.
That culture inevitably carried over into the Dungeon itself — battles between adventurers inside were frequent, too. After all, the Guild could at least intervene in the city above. But down in the Dungeon, no one enforced anything.
"The Dungeon witnessed those battles between adventurers. It concluded that this kind of death-match made people stronger — so it replicated the concept and created the Colosseum."
"As for why it appeared on the 34th floor specifically — some have speculated that Ouranos's prayers suppress the Dungeon's power in the upper levels, and it is only in the deep levels that it can act on its own will freely."
One had to admit — in this moment, Ryuu-senpai actually looked rather learned. It was almost disorienting to see.
A brief but entertaining aside.
The group chimed in one by one, picking up the thread of the elven girl's theory and falling into a lively discussion — none of them noticing certain key implications hiding within it.
Only Isagi had a vague, indistinct sense that he was brushing the very edge of an answer.
[The Dungeon is alive.]
[It reacts to divine power — and can even generate those black monsters, entirely immune to divine power, specifically designed to kill gods.]
[The Dungeon's monsters share some kind of connection with the Dungeon itself — inheriting a fragment of its will, or perhaps more accurately, they are a part of it.]
[The Dungeon...]
They pressed on.
Descending further and further, step by step — until at last, the group reached the very bottom of the tree hollow.
The soft murmur of flowing water continued somewhere in the distance.
And at the same time —
Isagi and the girls all saw it at once: there in the depths of that dense forest, where the ground still stretched beneath their feet like a floor of laid timber, a colossal dragon's corpse lay in the distance — vast and motionless, utterly still, all life long since departed from it.
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