Inside Goliath's colossal room.
The battle between Leon's team and the Monster Rex had already reached a white-hot pitch!
"Ufufufufu!"
Ten ice clones were scattered across the hall like points of starlight, resonating with one another, forming the vast nodes of a Transcendent Magic Circle. Magic surged without pause, sustaining the super-wide-area annihilation magic that blanketed the entire field: Blizzard.
Amid this shrieking "Winter Wonderland," holy light, silver gleams, flame, frost... dazzling, lethal streams of magic, interwoven with peerlessly sharp flashes of blade and sword and gale-driven arrows that tore the air, hammered without end at the surrounded Monster Rex, Goliath, from every direction.
"Grrraaagh!"
Goliath's roar shook the crystalline air.
Bang after bang rang out. Sprinting flat out, Kureha held her sword out horizontal at her side in her right hand, scabbard clutched tight in her left, body pressed low, threading and swerving through the falling stones and spraying rock shards on footwork that pushed the very limits, her sharp eyes locked dead on her target the whole way.
"Holy Sword!"
With a crisp shout, she moved with bold abandon, completely ignoring the risk that a single graze could leave her Lv.2 body gravely wounded in an instant, closing in like a tightrope walker. One flick of her blade and clear, keen radiance coiled around it; the next instant, lightning erupted!
The blade slid through Goliath's rough hide armor and thick, tough flesh with ease, drawing out several dark sprays of blood.
Persephone shot a glance at Kureha's fighting style, one that kept vaulting back and forth across the line between life and death, and frowned despite herself.
"Le..."
"Hm?"
Before she could say more, she suddenly sensed something and whipped around toward the entrance of the passage to Floor 18.
"Jeanne, someone's coming!"
"Probably that Rivira crowd."
Expressionless, Jeanne took one of Goliath's heavy kicks head-on, her war boots carving two deep gouges across the ground. She expelled a heavy breath, voice crisp and cold: "I was wondering when they'd finally make a move. Slower than I expected, even."
Rose knocked a giant fist aside with her shield, rode the force into a backflip, and landed lightly beside the two of them. "Should we humor them a bit? They've always seen Goliath as their own property. We're hogging this kill all to ourselves, and those guys might come make trouble for us..."
Persephone swept her gaze around, lingering a moment on Leon, the one who'd been sustaining Blizzard this whole time, and then the corner of her mouth curled into the faintest smile. "Humoring them and all that is a waste of time. We don't need to do a single thing. As long as those guys aren't idiots, they'll pull back on their own... Who knows, before long they might even line up at the entrance to 'welcome' us."
"Oh?" Rose raised an eyebrow.
Jeanne's expression blanked, half a beat slow to catch on. "What does that mean?"
"Heh..." Persephone and Rose traded a glance, their smiles touched with something deeper.
...
...
Floor 17, inside the floor passage linking the Monster Rex's room to the Under Resort.
"I'd damn well like to see which bastard grew the balls to kill-steal our monster without so much as a word!" Cursing up a storm, Bors charged out of the passage first, his bald head gleaming slick in the dim light. "They don't put us Rivira adventurers in their ey..."
"Holy shit!"
The words died on the spot.
Bors had only just stepped out of the passage, only just poked his head out, when snowflakes came drifting down onto that glossy, gleaming bald head.
He shook all over, mouth hanging wide open, pupils snapping tight.
With a crackle and a series of sharp snaps, bone-deep cold shot up from the soles of his feet, frost climbing him at a speed you could watch.
When the underlings a few steps behind came rushing up after him, the sight that greeted them dragged a sharp gasp out of every last one: before them stretched a kingdom of ice and snow without end in sight. And there, right in front of them, Bors, still frozen in his lunging, mid-roar pose, had already become a startlingly lifelike ice sculpture. A single snowflake drifted slowly down onto the tip of his frozen nose.
"B-Boss!!!"
The scream was swallowed by the howling blizzard and the distant roars of battle.
...
Leon's brow creased. Mid-beatdown on Goliath, he paused and looked toward the source of that off-pitch shriek.
"Who's there?"
Persephone landed lightly at his side, a smile on her face. "It's Rivira's people."
"Rivira's?"
The moment he heard it was Rivira's people, the knot in Leon's brow came undone.
He'd thought some other adventurer party had blundered into the battlefield. If that were the case, with his indiscriminate Blizzard causing casualties, word would reach the Guild the moment he returned to the surface, and the blame, one hundred percent and beyond all doubt, would land on his head. Even if it weren't entirely his fault, there was no question he'd end up shouldering a share of it. Stumbling into that kind of undeserved disaster, all he could do was quietly count himself unlucky.
But Rivira's people... that was another story altogether.
That crowd of black-market dealers held no recognized standing on the surface at all. Aside from the Goddess Alliance administrators possibly mixed in among them, Rivira was full of creatures who couldn't stand in the light: desperados, smugglers, spies, killers, information brokers... Anyone who could make it down here without a few problems attached was, if anything, the rare kind.
If he clipped people like that by accident, it wouldn't stir so much as a ripple in him.
"Rivira's people, huh." Leon pulled his gaze back, tone flat. "Then they can stay frozen. Perfect for making an example of them, a warning for anyone else thinking of crowding in to gawk."
He turned to Persephone. "Let's continue."
The aloof beauty fought down a smile and nodded. "Very well."
...
Inside the passage.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!!"
"What's happening up front?"
"Huh? Why are you all..."
"Back! Back back back back!!"
"Huh?"
"Out of the fucking way! I don't wanna die!"
"...?"
The crowd packed onto the narrow stairway stared blankly as their companions up front came tumbling, scrambling, faces twisted, charging back toward them, question marks floating over every head.
Didn't the boss say he was going to teach those rule-breaking bastards a proper lesson?
So what was this supposed to mean?
What kind of act were they putting on?
"Stop fucking bunching up here, fall back!" the men fleeing back shouted themselves hoarse.
"R-Run! Ruuun!"
"Hey, what happened?" A cloaked figure with a rasping voice snatched one of them by the arm, quick as a flash.
"I-Ice and snow... it's ice everywhere!" The man's teeth chattered as he pointed down the passage. "Goliath's room... it's turned into a frozen hell! B-Boss Bors poked his head out... and got one-shot!"
"Nani!?"
"Run!"
"Don't push me!"
"Dammit, who's stepping on my foot!"
"The boss got one-shot." Those words fell like ice water into boiling oil, and panic exploded.
Boss Bors was Lv.3, and he hadn't even lasted one exchange. If he couldn't survive a single face-off, what were they, a pack of small fry, supposed to do?
The group that had been bristling with menace moments ago now jammed into one writhing mass, shoving, cursing, trampling... wanting only to get a little farther from that terrifying room of ice, and farther still.
...