Previously, Ryota had led the elites of the Loki Familia and the Freya Familia deep beneath the fifty-ninth floor of the Dungeon, entering the interstitial zone known as the Thalia's Ice Garden.
That time, it had been Ouranos himself who entrusted the mission to him.
So, once the quest was completed, Ryota had chosen to end that joint expedition.
The sixtieth floor had become their stopping point.
But now, the time had come.
This time, they crossed the Thalia's Ice Garden once again and stepped onto the sixty-first floor.
Everyone understood—this was neither a Guild mission nor some token expedition.
Their target—or rather, Ryota's true target—was the Black Dragon.
The same calamity that had destroyed the strongest Familias of Zeus and Hera in the Dungeon's history, and which still lurked deep within the abyss.
The sixty-first floor wasn't as strange or extreme as the group had imagined.
In fact, its terrain was quite similar to that of the fifty-ninth floor—
An endless expanse of snow and ice.
Blizzards howled across a world of white, the ground beneath them a layer of ice several meters thick.
In the distance, they could faintly see ruin-like landforms of glaciers, cliffs, and crystalline formations. The sky was shrouded in a silver-white mist, like an eternal polar night.
But the more "familiar" it seemed, the more it set everyone on edge.
Finn stepped forward a few paces, standing in the heart of the snowstorm, and spoke in a low voice:
"According to all current Guild records, the Black Dragon's lair should be on the one-hundredth floor."
"But starting from the sixty-first floor down, the data is almost nonexistent."
"No maps, no monster information—not even surviving eyewitnesses."
He paused, turning to Ryota.
"Ryota… how do we proceed?"
That question made everyone turn their eyes toward the black-haired boy.
They all knew full well—this young man was the true core of the party.
Gazing out over the frozen wasteland where time itself seemed to stand still, Ryota thought for a moment before speaking:
"It's not all the way down to the hundredth. I've got a feeling the Black Dragon is somewhere within the next few floors."
"So… we explore one floor at a time."
"Skipping floors isn't realistic—it'll provoke the Dungeon's retaliation."
The moment his words landed, everyone froze.
Floor-skipping was not an unfamiliar term to adventurers.
In the middle floors, for example, around the thirteenth and fourteenth floors, there were natural "traps" that sometimes caused the unlucky—or lucky—to drop straight from one floor to a deeper one.
Some even did it intentionally to dive faster.
It was dangerous, sure, but the Guild had long since categorized it as a known variable.
But here…
This was the sixty-first floor!
The deeper you went, the more unknowns there were.
To skip floors here? That was the kind of idea only a lunatic would suggest!
And yet—
Hearing it from Ryota somehow made it sound reasonable.
Even if the words themselves still sounded insane, the way he said them, calm and matter-of-fact, made it feel like just another viable option.
"Don't give me that look."
Noticing the way everyone was staring at him—like he was some rare monster—Ryota gave a helpless shrug, a faint smile on his lips.
"I was just talking off the top of my head."
After a pause, he glanced out over the empty ice plain.
"For now—let's clear this place first."
The words had barely left his mouth when—
Thud… thud… thud-thud-thud!!
The ground began to tremble slightly, followed by a deepening rhythm of heavy impacts, like countless massive weights slamming into the earth.
Everyone's expression hardened as they braced themselves.
"They're here," Finn murmured.
Following the source of the vibrations, they looked up—
And through the swirling snow and mist, a pair of scarlet eyes emerged.
A moment later, a hulking monster, several meters tall, with enormous stone wings and a body formed entirely of layered gray-white rock, burst forth from the blizzard.
Its jagged stone face twisted in a snarl, and its mouth let out a low, guttural roar.
"Gargoyle!"
Finn's eyes narrowed in instant recognition—
But then his pupils contracted sharply.
Because following behind it wasn't one… but many.
Not a dozen. Not dozens.
Hundreds. Thousands.
A tide of gargoyles poured from the snow and fog, their wingbeats sending waves through the snowdrifts, their rocky bodies thundering as they charged.
Those red eyes, burning like countless candles, stretched in unbroken lines across the frozen plain, a sea of crimson light that seemed to swallow the land whole.
Lefiya's jaw dropped.
"This scale… this isn't just group behavior—it's an Irregular?!"
Ryota stood at the very front, tilting his head slightly toward someone not far beside him.
"Madara—"
"Handle it."
Uchiha Madara stepped forward.
But just as his foot touched the ice, Finn's voice rang out sharply from behind:
"Wait, Ryota!"
His brow furrowed.
"Tell him to hold up—there are too many!"
As soon as Finn spoke, the others joined in.
"He's right—this is an Irregular-scale monster tide."
Riveria followed with a grave expression.
"We should deal with it together."
"The numbers are… off," Ais said, her golden eyes narrowing with both battle intent and caution.
"It's like… the entire sixty-first floor has been mobilized."
Ryuu, standing beside Ryota, spoke softly.
"You're not seriously thinking of having him take on a monster tide of this scale alone, are you?"
All eyes were on Ryota, waiting for his answer.
Ever since they had entered the Dungeon, Ryota hadn't used Flying Raijin to leap between points. Instead, he'd opted for a more… straightforward approach—
Madara at the front, bulldozing everything in their path.
They had all seen his power firsthand.
From the very first floor, Madara alone had been enough to sweep it clean.
When his Susanoo manifested, not even magic stones remained in his wake.
But this was different.
This wasn't a "fight."
This was an Irregular on the deep floors—a living tide of gargoyles surging across the cracked ice fields, so massive even the blizzard parted before it.
Ryota just smiled faintly at their concerns.
His gaze stayed fixed on the front, where the towering blue chakra giant had already begun to take shape amid the flying snow.
"Relax," he said softly.
"He enjoys this kind of warm-up."
And just as his words fell—
Whoosh—!
A muffled burst of energy exploded across the snowy plain.
In the next instant, blue chakra erupted violently from within Uchiha Madara's body.
A towering blue war god, more than ten meters tall, appeared out of thin air.
Within the colossal silhouette of Susanoo, Madara stood at its core.
Before anyone could even take in the details of Susanoo's form—whoosh!
Madara's figure vanished in a blur.
In the blink of an eye, he was above the swarm of gargoyles surging toward them like a black tide.
The gargoyles instinctively sensed the presence of a monster so terrifying it made their very souls tremble.
One by one, they lifted their heads toward the black-haired, armor-clad figure in the sky.
As intelligent creatures of the sixty-first floor, a few reacted first, roaring as they lunged at him.
But they were far too slow.
With just a casual swing of Susanoo's massive blue arm—
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The three gargoyles that had leapt up never even got close; they were crushed into pieces midair, ground to dust in an instant—no screams, no struggle, only immediate annihilation.
"Oh? Attacking me first?"
"You… want to dance too?"
Madara laughed, then drove Susanoo into a dive straight toward the ground.
BOOM!!!
The impact of his landing obliterated over a hundred gargoyles at once, carving a crater a hundred meters wide into the icy plain.
There was no flourish to his movements—each strike was swift, clean, and absolute: a swing, a sweep, a stomp, an explosion.
Susanoo's arms swept through the monster horde, each blow harvesting dozens of lives.
Like waves cleaved apart by a blade, the dense mass of gargoyles was cleared away in swaths. Shattered stone, broken wings, and powdered magic stones drifted in the wind and snow.
This was no battle.
It was slaughter—pure and one-sided.
One minute in, nine-tenths of the monsters were gone.
Two minutes in, the remaining gargoyles were in total disarray.
The coordinated swarm from moments ago was gone; none could even step within half a pace of Ryota's group.
Snow still fell. The wind still howled.
But the monster tide—an apocalyptic sight moments before—was wiped clean in less than two minutes.
The ground was fractured. The air shimmered with the glittering dust of shattered magic stones, the debris drifting like a snow of death.
And everyone… stood silent, mouths agape, words frozen.
"Th-this…"
"Just now… was that…"
Lefiya's voice had gone beyond awe into utter speechlessness.
Even the three leaders of the Loki Familia stood petrified, dazed beyond thought.
Monster?
No—
This was something more monstrous than any monster.
"That was… an Irregular."
Finn bit down on his thumb.
"And not just any Irregular—the most dangerous kind… a Monster Tide."
"And it's… just gone?"
Ais gazed silently at Madara standing in the center of the icefield, Susanoo's blue form still looming above him.
"I've never… seen anyone fight like that before," Ryuu murmured, her voice so soft it was nearly swallowed by the wind, yet everyone heard it.
She had once thought Ryota was the limit of what she could comprehend.
But now she realized—
Ryota wasn't the limit.
He was the one who commanded the limit.
Boom!
With a soft rumble, the towering Susanoo began to dissolve, blue chakra scattering into the air like rain of light.
Madara stepped forward into the snowstorm.
A moment later, he was beside Ryota again.
No words.
Just standing there, like a mountain none could climb.
Everyone's gaze shifted to him, their expressions tangled—shock, fear, curiosity, awe—but most of all, silence.
This man radiated an indescribable pressure. His mere presence could crush the will to fight from an entire squad.
And the most chilling thought of all—he was merely one of Ryota's subordinates.
They could not forget: Ryota didn't only have Uchiha Madara.
He also commanded the Deva Path, the Third Kazekage, the Asura Path, and the Animal Path—capable of summoning eight giant beasts at once.
Each one was a walking calamity.
And all of them belonged to Ryota.
To that black-haired boy who always wore a lazy smile.
As for Ryota himself?
There were no words left to describe him. Genius and monster were far too small.
No one knew how many trump cards he still held.
The silence stretched, the memory of the impossible battle still hanging over them—
Until Ryota turned his head and said,
"Let's go."
The long silence broke.
Everyone stirred as if waking from a trance, nodding mechanically and adjusting their gear in numb motions.
No one spoke further.
They all understood—when traveling with a companion like this, every tactic, every plan, every preparation had to be redefined.
Perhaps… this was what it felt like to travel with a monster.
Because of the recent Irregular, an entire Monster Tide had been wiped out by Madara, cutting the monster density on the sixty-first floor to a fraction of normal.
The icefield that should have been filled with ambushes was now eerily quiet.
They advanced quickly to the floor's end with almost no resistance.
Ryota stopped at the edge, glancing down into the depths.
"The sixty-second floor, huh…"
He stepped forward without hesitation.
Madara followed.
Then the three captains, Ais, and the others.
Ryuu was last to enter.
She turned for one last look at the sixty-first floor, her eyes complicated.
"No wonder Finn called it a stroll…"
"This was even easier than a stroll."
Upon entering the sixty-second floor, Ryota—leading the way—frowned, his gaze sweeping the surroundings.
"The air… feels wrong."
This was no icy wasteland.
No wind. No snow. No landmarks.
Only endless darkness, as if the space itself had been swallowed by something that devoured even light.
A realm utterly different from the frozen plains above—like stepping from the Arctic into a bottomless abyss. The air was still, heavy, and cold with death.
Visibility was near zero.
Unconsciously, the group slowed their pace, following Ryota deeper in.
Then—
ROAR!!!
A dragon's roar thundered from the depths.
Low. Furious. Overwhelming.
The sheer pressure shook the sixty-second floor itself.
Everyone froze, instinctively looking toward the sound.
"...What was that?!"
"A… dragon?!"
Finn was first to speak.
"Could it be… a Valgang Dragon?!"
"No."
Ryota shook his head.
"It's not the Valgang Dragon."
Finn blinked, startled.
"…Not it?"
"If not… then who—"
His thoughts cut off abruptly.
That pressure—both familiar and alien. That roar, like a bellow at fate itself. That deep, soul-piercing voice…
A chilling thought struck him, his pupils contracting sharply.
"—Impossible…"
"Could it be…"
"…the Black Dragon?!"