Dungeon Raid (7)
"Bedeia, do you know something about this?"
She showed no sign of speaking first, so in the end I asked her directly.
"…"
For a long while Bedeia stood motionless, as if she hadn't heard me at all. Then, belatedly, she opened her mouth.
"I believe I should ask you something first. I've heard things, but nothing certain enough to…"
She had kept her face completely blank, expressionless as always — but her silence, it seemed, had come from deliberation rather than indifference.
She chose her words carefully, hesitating a moment, then met my gaze head-on. For the first time she stepped away from Ren's side, turned, and walked off toward a quieter corner. A slight tilt of her head and a glance back at Ren and me made her intent clear enough: she wanted to talk somewhere out of earshot.
It was a heavily abbreviated form of communication, but Ren and I got the message and followed her.
"As you already know, we have always classified dungeons like these as pure evil."
"Yes, I'm well aware of that."
Ren answered briefly.
"I don't know if I should even say this, but… certain voices within the Order believe that the higher a dungeon's rank, the more deeply the influence of the Outer Gods seeps into it."
"You're saying… that dungeons themselves are created by the Outer Gods?"
"We still lack the evidence to state that with any certainty. That's why I can't give you a definitive answer."
"So for now, it's all speculation."
"Yes."
Bedeia's words might have been pure hypothesis — but the scenes we had encountered so far were anything but ordinary.
That was probably why she had bothered to pull us aside in the first place.
If the entire dungeon was structured as a place of worship for a single Outer God, then its current state made a certain kind of sense.
The Outer Gods… they might be reaching far deeper into this world than I thought.
As Bedeia said, nothing was confirmed. But ever since setting foot in this place, I had heard the Outer Gods mentioned more times than I could count.
To dismiss it all as the Order's colored lens would be too convenient — too many inexplicable, alien phenomena kept surfacing. This dungeon itself was one of them.
Once the conversation ended, I stepped forward again and faced the knight-beasts before me.
I didn't smash them all at once.
I wanted to see for myself what kind of swordsmanship these knights actually used.
Like the raid party, they had formed something resembling a proper formation. If I wasn't going to tear through them alone in an instant, I needed people who could match them head-on.
Ren agreed without hesitation. I took my place among the Deep Night Clan's ranks and faced one of the knight-beasts myself.
The way it held its sword, standing shoulder to shoulder with its fellows — the posture looked convincing enough.
But after a few exchanges, watching how it moved, the truth became clear. Was this truly a martial art refined for human use? More than that — was it designed for fighting people at all, or had it been honed solely for slaughtering monsters?
The more I watched, the more it became obvious… the form looked right, but there was no depth to it.
How to put it. It felt like a jumble of miscellaneous techniques thrown together.
More precisely, it didn't feel like something learned through the body. It felt planted — as if the creature were awkwardly following commands injected from the outside.
Once I realized there was no coherent form to find, I began cutting the beasts down in earnest.
Their movements were clearly sharper than the Flamekind we had fought before, and their armor-like hides were unmistakably tougher.
The adventurers fighting alongside me looked rattled by how even their aura blades left barely a scratch.
But in the end, they were only slightly stronger than the Flamekind.
Once every knight-beast filling the plaza had been put down, the battlefield fell quiet again.
I immediately set out looking for the next entrance. Having finished them all myself meant I didn't need to worry about anyone else's stamina — which made pressing on considerably easier.
Fortunately, from this point onward my senses spread out clearly again, so finding the entrance didn't take long. Strangely, nothing blocked it — no powerful beast, no trap or mechanism of any kind. Seeing that, Ren spoke up as if he recognized something.
"This… might be a good omen."
It wasn't just Ren whose face brightened. Every member of Deep Night lit up as if they'd forgotten they were soaked in sweat.
By contrast, the faces of the other clans lingering in the rear darkened considerably.
"Why now, of all times…"
"How can their luck be this good?"
"Those Deep Night bastards… heaven itself is on their side."
The opposing reactions told me there was definitely something to it.
As the muttering spread, I looked at Ren.
"Usually, after a floor like this, you find various treasures sleeping inside the dungeon. There might even be things you've been looking for, Bell."
So this was it — the moment adventurers dreamed of when they raided dungeons. The jackpot.
That was the omen he meant?
If so, the other clans' disappointment made sense. They hadn't accomplished anything of note getting this far, so they had no grounds to claim ownership of whatever treasure lay ahead.
I stretched my senses past the entrance into the floor below. Sure enough, there was no trace of any beast. Just a vast, empty space holding its breath.
With lighter steps, I descended to the next floor alongside the Deep Night Clan — and found myself facing a sprawling chamber lined with dozens of rooms.
"Jackpot!"
"It's real. There's got to be at least one treasure in here, right?"
To the naked eye it was nothing but a barren expanse, yet the clan members couldn't hide their excitement, as if they already knew what this place was.
"Sometimes a dungeon has one of these, though more often it doesn't… We call this a Reward Chamber. Or, as slang goes, a Tomb. There's a high chance the boss is on the next floor, so it's also a good place to rest and reorganize beforehand."
Ren added the explanation calmly.
"We'll follow your lead, Bell. You can scatter the members to search each room, or go in yourself and check first. Whatever you choose, the others will follow without complaint."
There were far too many rooms for me to inspect alone, so I decided we would all fan out and comb through the space together.
I stepped into one of the nearby rooms myself.
The interior was startlingly empty. A hollow space with no discernible purpose or function.
I tilted my head and checked two or three more rooms nearby. All the same.
Treasure was supposed to come from here?
Still puzzled, I was about to enter another room when my eyes met those of a blond man approaching from the opposite direction.
It was Rice.
The moment he saw me, he froze mid-step. His body locked up, and he started glancing around nervously.
"…Want to go in together?"
"Y-yes… of course, sir."
…Why had his speech changed like that? He'd always given off such a taciturn impression.
Anyway, the room Rice and I entered was just as empty as the others.
He tried to hurry out first, but I stopped him.
There was something I'd been curious about.
"Do you… happen to know someone named Pon?"
At my words he blinked once, looking at me.
"Pon… you say?"
Pon was Arnen's father's name. A man who had accepted a commission to raid an Apocalypse-class dungeon and then vanished without a trace.
According to Arnen, he had been a top-tier adventurer, one who could wield an aura blade with complete freedom.
And for an Apocalypse-class commission — a rank above Catastrophe — to come his way, his skill had to be at least on par with the Five Stars. So Rice, who carried that same title, ought to know something.
He thought for a moment, then nodded as if something had come back to him.
"I know of him, yes. They called him the Swordsman of Light… He was already making a name for himself long before I joined the Five Stars."
"He's not counted among the Five Stars now?"
"No… He's been missing for too long. Most people assume he's dead."
"Do you know anything about how he disappeared?"
"Well, I ran into him a few times at the Adventurers' Guild… From what I heard, back when everyone was talking about the need to clear that Apocalypse-class dungeon, he claimed he'd figured something out on his own and went to check it."
As Rice kept talking, the tension seemed to ease out of him. Before long he had slipped back into his usual self — that slightly arrogant edge layered over his taciturn face.
"In my opinion… well, everyone thought the same at the time — Pon never intended to enter that dungeon alone. He wasn't the reckless type. Most likely he just went to scout the area around it as preliminary research."
Never intended to go in… So he really had only meant to investigate, and then simply vanished?
That alone wasn't enough to decide whether he was still alive or already dead.
Had he discovered something during the investigation and disappeared because of it? Or had he gone to confirm whatever he'd claimed to figure out, only to run into something he never saw coming? There was no way to know.
And what exactly had he claimed to discover? What had been worth going all the way to the vicinity of an Apocalypse-class dungeon to verify?
Somehow, I couldn't shake the feeling that it had something to do with the Outer Gods.
But Rice didn't seem to know that much.
"Any adventurers who were close to Pon?"
"Uh… I know of one adventurer who had close ties with him. Whether that person knows the details of Pon's disappearance, I couldn't say. I heard someone already asked, and they gave no answer at all."
"Is that so?"
Talking with Rice, I naturally moved on to another room. And this one was different from the start — the atmosphere alone set it apart.
The moment I opened the door, a chill air spilled out from within.
And there, at the center of the room, something seized my vision.
Traces remained, as if a ritual had been performed.
The floor was stained with scorch marks and strange patterns, smeared as though someone had hastily tried to erase them. At the heart of the chamber stood a low-tiered altar.
And resting alone atop it —
Blackened as if half-burned to ash, yet shot through with a lingering red glow… it was a chalice.
The cup of that chalice was filled to the brim with a black liquid.