"I don't know!"
"But—"
Then her tone shifted, and the beautiful woman's lovely face broke into a distinctly coquettish expression, quite unlike her usual deliberately stern, mock-serious look.
Isagi, familiar with Amazon customs, knew this meant she had accepted him—at the very least, considered him a "friend." Of course, Isagi suspected it went further than that; she was very likely thinking of something else entirely!
"I never expected you'd be just like Aria, Isagi—the type who likes mulling over questions like this," she said.
"Let me think... ah, Ailiya said something like this before."
What follows are Ais's "mother's" own words.
"There was once a time when some regarded the Great Pit as a 'god,' but that proved meaningless—whether holding rituals or making any manner of offering to it, nothing ever changed."
"So many people began to wonder whether the Great Pit was simply some natural phenomenon of this world—like rain, like falling snow, like the occasional earth tremor or tsunami. The Monsters born within the Great Pit might, in truth, just be a kind of natural disaster, an inevitable, naturally occurring thing."
"Once we understood this—we, meaning the [Hero]es, the Spirits, and the soldiers garrisoned in the city—we gradually came to accept that the Great Pit likely could never be fully resolved. There would never come a day when the Monsters simply vanished. So in all likelihood, this is a long, eternal war."
From Isagi's perspective as an adventurer of the future, what Aria said really held up.
He himself, though, had never stopped to consider what the Dungeon actually was.
But perhaps, just as this Great Spirit said, even the gods of the future had never destroyed the Dungeon, nor offered any way to permanently stop it from producing Monsters. All the gods asked of adventurers was to complete the Three Great Quests.
Subjugate Behemoth, Leviathan, and the Black Dragon—the three strongest Monsters the Dungeon had ever produced, from ancient times to the present.
Even so, though the gods remained tight-lipped about the exact nature of the so-called [Appointed Time], Isagi felt he was starting to understand what it really was.
Something like a scheduled duel, maybe.
If adventurers could clear the Black Dragon, the Dungeon would stay quiet and behave itself for a while longer.
In fact, in a certain sense, the Dungeon of the Adventurer Era had already become "harmless."
Adventurer casualties certainly still existed, of course.
But that was simply the inevitable risk people faced once they chose, for whatever reason, to venture in of their own will. To ordinary citizens, the Dungeon and its Monsters had become something of a "distant" topic—what actually touched their daily lives most directly were the countless everyday tools and goods crafted from Magic Stones harvested from the Dungeon.
Aria and the others probably felt the same way. So beyond continuing to explore the Dungeon, the most important task was cultivating "successors" like Ais.
Building on that, Aria and the others believed something more: unlike ordinary natural phenomena like wind, rain, or snow, the Dungeon clearly possessed some form of intelligence. Which meant there might exist some entity—the Dungeon itself—that could actually be communicated with.
They wanted to find it, to establish even the most basic channel of communication. That was exactly why Albert Waldstein and the others were now pushing deeper into the Dungeon.
That matched Isagi's own "guess" perfectly.
He clearly remembered what he had once seen in a dream—at the far end of that boundless, pitch-black depth, something stood... or rather, something was being gestated there.
Was that the Dungeon itself?
And the Empress, along with Aria and the others, now understood that the Great Pit—the Dungeon—was an entity of immense danger.
Isagi knew it too, of course.
This era probably didn't have a word yet for "yandere."
But he could feel it—the Dungeon was pretty much exactly that kind of thing…
They talked on for a long while, and before either noticed it, the night outside had slowly given way to pale gray dawn light. The small winter sun rose bit by bit, lighting up the huge banks of snow clouds overhead.
The Empress stretched lazily, looking like someone who had eaten her fill and lost all urge to sleep.
Then, with a suddenly serious expression, she asked if he had anything to do.
Isagi, of course, didn't.
So she dragged him outside, saying something about going on patrol.
Come to think of it, this was the first time Isagi had seen the ancient city, a thousand years in the past, in ordinary daylight, going about its everyday business.
It looked nothing like he'd imagined.
Originally founded as a fortress to hold back the Monsters of the Great Pit, the city had, over centuries of growth, gradually become what it was now.
There weren't actually many soldiers patrolling the streets—most of what filled them were ordinary residents and merchant caravans.
Wagons of every kind, hauling goods and supplies, rolled back and forth, threading through the long avenues.
As mentioned before, present-day Orario received support from a fair number of nations, so supplies were never scarce—which in turn drew orphans, refugees, and the homeless from across the world to gather here.
Some of them became soldiers.
Others worked all sorts of logistical jobs around the city.
Reclaiming wasteland to farm outside the city, smithing, weaving cloth, and so on—looking out over it all now, one almost got the sense that the whole of Orario was thriving and flourishing.
And with so many people gathered, some "less savory" things naturally cropped up too.
But that wasn't what the Empress's patrol was actually for. Public order in the city was now mainly handled by the knightly orders organized under the various "churches."
People from different nations, regions, and ethnic groups had different faiths and ways of life, making it hard to govern by any single standard.
As Isagi walked, listening to the Empress ramble on, he gradually gained a more concrete sense of what this thousand-years-past Orario was actually like.
Of course, there being people to maintain order didn't mean much different from the future's City of Adventurers. As long as nothing too serious happened—like a death—ordinary brawls, petty theft, and all manner of business operating in the gray zone were simply unavoidable.
Even the Empress walking right beside him was, well, one of those things herself.
Hmm.
This time, tagging along with her, Isagi discovered that her so-called "patrol" actually consisted of helping other Amazon girls beat down the men they'd taken a liking to, then hauling the knocked-out guys straight home.
Isagi was floored!
He thought, how could something this absurd actually be happening.
At one point, Isagi even found himself wondering—this woman was supposedly the Amazon tribe's Empress... surely that title hadn't come about this way?!
After all, the Amazons currently had no formal nation to speak of. There had to be some real reason everyone recognized her as their "boss."
Ah, so that explained it. No wonder. No wonder at all!!
____
📢 WANT MORE CHAPTERS? HELP THE STORY GROW!
💬 Reviews: Leave your review! Every 5 REVIEWS unlocks 1 bonus chapter.
💎 Power Stones: Reach 100 POWER STONES and another bonus chapter drops!
🚀 P@treon: Want to read ahead? Support on P@treon (Walnut-chan) to access over 60 stories and 40 chapters ahead!
🔥 New history: DanMachi: Inheriting the Legacy of Alternate Versions — posted on The_Mikudayo