The Girl Who Crushes Monsters with Axes
I flicked the blood from my blade with a light swing and glanced sideways.
There stood Aspilia, already done reducing the monster to pulp, calmly retrieving her axe.
“……”
The sight left me speechless.
It wasn’t a clean cut. The creature had been crushed flat by the flat of her axe, its shape so mangled it was barely recognizable.
A chill crawled up my spine.
If I botch the persuasion, I could end up just like that, couldn’t I?
Aspilia’s reverse scale is romance.
Her romance is the double-edged axe, and if you trample that dream, she goes dark. She won’t flip from good to evil, but her relationship with the player gets utterly wrecked.
Right now she’s showing me a strange curiosity and we’re slowly building a decent rapport.
But if I try to persuade her while things are still half-baked, the relationship will collapse beyond repair.
Even so, I couldn’t give up on convincing her.
With the right weapon, Aspilia could become several times stronger than she is now.
I couldn’t put an exact number on how much stronger, but one thing was certain—if she kept using that double-edged axe, we would never clear the game. Her choice of armament was that critical.
Would she become a reliable, unbreakable vanguard, or just a half-baked one with raw destructive power? Everything hinged on that single decision.
“……Done.”
I didn’t know why giving even one piece of advice had to feel like staking my life on it, but I shoved the resentment down.
This wasn’t the time to dwell on it.
If I get a little closer first, build more trust, she probably won’t turn me into paste when I finally speak up.
Probably.
“All right. Shall we go deeper?”
Aspilia nodded with a blank face, wiping a few specks of blood from her cheek.
For a moment I saw my own future self in that gesture and quickly shook the thought away.
She moved as if the earlier fight had been nothing more than a warm-up, following me with an indifferent nod.
The pattern continued after that.
We dismantled traps as we advanced. Whenever monsters appeared, we split up and handled them separately.
The sight of Aspilia mercilessly slaughtering monsters with her double-edged axe was downright terrifying.
But at the same time—
This is comfortable as hell.
The ride was practically Ace-bed level.
It felt far more stable than clearing a dungeon alone. So this was why people partied up.
The sense of security was on another level.
Solo runs demanded constant vigilance. Even against weaker monsters I had to stay cautious. Adding just one more person had drastically reduced the mental load.
The saying that a trustworthy companion increases a party’s stability wasn’t wrong after all.
“Let’s focus from here on.”
The early and middle sections of the dungeon weren’t particularly difficult. I could have reached this point alone without much trouble.
But the deeper we went, the closer we drew to the inner depths, the difficulty spiked sharply.
“Got it.”
Aspilia could have questioned why a dungeon this easy even existed, yet she simply followed behind me in silence.
Her stoic personality was genuinely convenient at times like these.
We continued deeper with Aspilia nodding quietly at my side. Soon a fork appeared to greet us.
“……Left? Right?”
Normally it wouldn’t matter which path you took to clear the dungeon.
Both eventually led to the boss room.
The only difference was that the left path was packed with traps while the right was swarming with monsters.
But neither of these paths would take us where I wanted to go.
So how could we reach the place I needed?
“……Let’s head back.”
The answer was to retrace our steps.
Someone unfamiliar with the strategy might simply pass by, but the floor here was made of tiles rather than ordinary cave stone. That meant patterns applied even in this section.
“Just follow exactly where I step.”
“Yeah.”
Aspilia showed no doubt even when I suggested turning around.
At this point I was starting to wonder if she was even capable of curiosity toward anything that wasn’t herself.
……Focus.
I erased the stray thoughts and began stepping on the tiles with care.
Coming here hadn’t required thinking about the pattern, but going back did.
And when that happened—
“Huh?”
Aspilia’s bewildered voice came from behind as she followed my exact steps.
With every tile we pressed,
Rumble……!
the floor could be felt sinking little by little.
Following the correct pattern lowered the floor, revealing the dungeon’s hidden area. Stepping on the tiles in reverse would cause the floor to rise instead—
—and crush us against the ceiling.
We would end up just like the monster Aspilia had turned into paste.
Since I knew the original story, I wouldn’t make such a mistake. But anyone who came here blind could easily fall for it.
After all, faint mana flowed through the tiles on the floor. It was weak enough that experienced dungeon explorers would notice, though ordinary students might not.
This trap existed precisely to deceive people like that.
Rumble rumble rumble!!
Even while my mind wandered, I stepped on every tile correctly. Aspilia and I finally felt the floor settle completely against the level below.
We stepped off the stably lowered platform and looked around, soon recognizing the now-familiar dungeon scenery.
“……So a place like this existed.”
Aspilia murmured quietly, gazing around with open interest.
I gave her a small smile but gripped my sword hilt tighter.
“We need to be careful from now on.”
This was the so-called underground first floor.
No more traps from here. Only monsters. The true dungeon was finally revealing itself.
Aspilia nodded silently at my words. With her detection ability, she had surely already sensed the horde of monsters waiting ahead.
“Let’s go.”
“Yeah.”
Whoosh……!
I kicked off the ground hard.
No traps and nothing but monsters meant constant combat. But on the flip side, nothing would slow us down, and we no longer had to watch our step for traps. In other words—
—we could go all out from here.
I closed in before the monsters could even register our presence and slashed downward.
Leaping sideways to avoid the gushing blood spray, I thrust my sword again. Aspilia began swinging her massive double-edged axe beside me.
Whoooong.
Unlike the sound of my sword, her axe tore through the air with a savage roar that echoed brutally.
While swiftly dispatching the monsters, I watched Aspilia fight in silence and swallowed dryly.
……I had better be extremely careful with the persuasion.
I repeated the vow to myself again and again.
I tried to remember how long it had taken to clear this dungeon in the first timeline.
Roughly three to four hours, I thought. Considering it was reality and not a game, and that we had taken occasional breaks, that seemed like a reasonable pace.
The dungeon itself wasn’t very long, and the main annoyances were simply the traps and the number of monsters. So the time had felt appropriate.
Now I realized how wrong that assessment had been.
One hour.
That was how long it took for Aspilia and me to reach the boss room door.
No matter how well I already knew the trap locations and strategies, the speed was absurdly fast. I couldn’t deny it.
……So this is why you party with the main cast.
The heroines really were on another level. Looking at it objectively, Aspilia and I weren’t even a balanced party.
We had two pure vanguard fighters and nothing else—no rear guard, no support. Just two people swinging weapons at the front.
Of course our individual specs were overkill for this dungeon. Even taking that into account, the time reduction was dramatic.
I was already curious how much faster it would be with a perfectly balanced main-cast party.
……Well, even if I don’t want to find out, I’ll learn soon enough.
This timeline, I had decided to party with the main cast no matter what.
How exactly I would befriend them could be figured out later. For now, I was genuinely excited to see the synergy we would create together.
I’d have to push them pretty hard in the process, though.
Watching Aspilia reminded me once again that the main cast in the first timeline had been absolute garbage. No, even calling them trash was too generous—they had been disposable waste.
With talent like this, they had only grown that far before being swept away by the cult’s underlings.
This life, I would give them some harsh lectures to straighten their heads out and train them mercilessly until they reached their full potential.
I would probably lose some favor with the heroines in the process, but that didn’t bother me much.
Since we’re going back anyway, what’s the point of raising favor?
It did sting a little to be hated by characters I liked.
But I wasn’t going to date them or spend the rest of my life with them, so there was no reason to cling to such things.
It wasn’t as if a quest had appeared like in other novels, and there was no guarantee that clearing the game would send me back to my original world…
Still, in most stories like this, clearing the game usually meant returning home.
Which meant the people of this world and I were fated to part ways eventually.
Building appropriate trust and reliable camaraderie was important, but there was no need to struggle desperately for anything beyond that.
“……Shall we go in?”
“Ah, yeah. Let’s.”
I had been too lost in my own thoughts. Aspilia’s voice pulled me back, and I nodded, refocusing.
No matter how easily we were clearing the dungeon, letting my guard down was forbidden. Especially not right in front of the boss room.
“Then I’ll open it.”
“Yeah.”
I exhaled calmly and placed my hand on the boss room door.
Aspilia did the same. A familiar message window rose before us.
Boss room challenge confirmed. We wish you good fortune.
Minimum one person, maximum eight.
The boss room could be challenged. There were only two of us now, but that didn’t matter much.
“This place……”
“Yeah. It’s the one.”
Aspilia murmured in a daze, as if sensing something different. I answered while looking at the message floating before me.
This was the true boss room of the dungeon.
To be precise, it was one stage higher in difficulty than the boss room on the surface first floor.
The real boss room.