Orario was bound to be sleepless tonight.
Stirred up by that overly dazzling return light, the whole city fell into a brief confusion.
Countless citizens came out of their homes and lingered in the streets, talking with one another, asking around, wanting to know what on earth had happened to make a god suddenly get sent back.
Countless gods and countless Familias also went rushing one after another toward Daedalus Street, where the "scene of the crime" lay, until the scouts and spies of every major power turned up there in a steady stream.
In the end even the Guild was roused and sent a good number of staff to Daedalus Street to investigate, and Ganesha Familia, the city's guards, mobilized nearly every member, all of them hurrying to Daedalus Street, and after a night of hard work they sealed Daedalus Street off, no longer allowing anyone to set a single foot into that labyrinthine street.
All sorts of talk and even the wildest rumors began to appear in the city, leaving people uneasy.
"A god sent back... how long has it been since something like that happened?"
"The last time was five years ago, wasn't it?"
"The ones sent back then were the patron deities of Evilus, the ones who caused the Dark Age that lasted a full ten years for this city. Those characters who called themselves Evil Gods were driven into a corner one by one by the Familias' patron deities who joined forces to wipe out Evilus, and in the end every last one of them was sent back to Heaven."
"Right, I still remember what it was like then. That day one return light appeared after another. It was quite a sight."
"Five years on and there's a god being sent back in Orario again..."
"Who could it be..."
The people talked like this, pushing the topic straight to its peak, and the earlier discussion of the great feat Loki Familia had achieved was pushed down and no longer mentioned by anyone.
By this time, though, Loki Familia had already pulled out of Daedalus Street and returned to its home base.
Twilight Manor was ablaze with light tonight as well, with countless members going in and out through the main gate, running back and forth, their expressions urgent. One look was enough to know something had happened.
"Hurry! Go to the nearest potion shop and buy back every supply they have!"
"We don't have enough High Potions or Elixirs for treating the wounds!"
"Go and ask the Saint of the Battlefield to come!"
"Treat the seriously wounded first, the lightly wounded can wait!"
Voices like these kept coming from Twilight Manor, leaving the whole manor in an atmosphere of unrest.
Finn's office was likewise lit up bright.
Finn, Riveria, Gareth, Ais, Bete, Tiona, Tione, and finally Leo, all the Familia's executives were gathered here once again, and Loki stood there with her arms folded, which left the air in the office feeling somewhat oppressive.
Everyone's positions were much the same as at the last meeting. Finn still sat behind the desk with Riveria standing beside him, Gareth sat off to the side, Bete leaned in a corner, Leo and Ais sat side by side, and only Tione was no longer wrapped around Finn but standing with Tiona instead.
And Loki, who was not sitting on the desk this time but standing directly in front of everyone, her face for once without a smile or any playfulness.
"Let's hear it."
Loki spoke to Finn and the others.
"What exactly happened?"
The oppressive air in the office deepened another notch.
Leo and Riveria, who hadn't taken part in the operation, aside, everyone who had, Finn, Gareth, and Ais included, wore an especially heavy expression.
It was the expression people wore only after they had witnessed something transcendent and beyond imagining.
"...Then I'll go over it briefly."
In the end it was Finn who broke the silence first and began to tell it.
He told them what they had run into inside that man-made labyrinth, Knossos.
"Knossos?"
Loki caught the name.
"That's what the enemy told us."
Finn wasn't thrown off by Loki's interruption and went on telling it in clear order.
He started with what they had encountered after going through that orichalcum door.
"The enemy's secret base is basically built in imitation of the Dungeon, which is why it's called a man-made labyrinth."
"Although when we first went in there was only a single one-way path, as the party pushed deeper the terrain quickly turned into a labyrinth of complex construction."
"A path would split in two as you walked it, sometimes there would be a crossroads, but more often it was a branching, and the paths branching off it clearly kept increasing, forcing us either to choose one or to split into several groups."
Caught in an underground labyrinth whose complexity was fully the equal of Daedalus Street, Finn at first could still choose routes by sending scouts to probe ahead, screening out the dead ends and picking the passable ones, but as the branches multiplied Finn and the others, with no map, had no choice but to split into two groups.
"We considered whether to destroy the passages, but not only was there a door of orichalcum, the hardest metal, every so often, even the passages themselves were made of Hardsteel, the ultra-hard metal, with stone slabs covering the outside."
At that, Loki's and Riveria's faces changed on the spot.
"The passages of the entire labyrinth... are made of Hardsteel?"
Riveria looked stunned.
"Hey, hey, hey, is that for real?"
Even Loki couldn't stay composed.
That was the ultra-hard metal Hardsteel. It didn't measure up to orichalcum, the hardest metal, but it was still an extremely rare refined metal, and its price was outrageous.
Tiona's great double blade Urga was made of the ultra-hard metal, and the final price came to 120 million valis, from which one could imagine that even just as material, the Hardsteel in that double blade was worth at least tens of millions of valis.
A precious material so extravagant that using it to forge a single weapon already felt wasteful, and now someone had used it to build an entire labyrinth of extreme complexity?
No matter how much money you had, you couldn't burn it like that, could you?
Still, it had to be said that this man-made labyrinth, built of Hardsteel throughout, was without question maxed out where durability and defense were concerned.
If the thickness weren't high it would be one thing, but once the thickness was too great, then even Gareth, the Dwarf great warrior with a Strength parameter beyond the norm, probably couldn't break it.
Faced with a situation like that, Finn and the others had no way to open a hole through by destruction, and even if they could, it would waste a considerable amount of time.
That was something they couldn't afford at all.
Later they also discovered that the walls had Obsidian Soldier body stone mixed into them, material dropped from the Obsidian Soldiers that appear on Floor 37 of the Dungeon, whose bodies have a magic-weakening effect. This material carried the same magic-weakening effect, so the passages wouldn't collapse even if you blasted them with magic, and Finn and the others could only push forward along the route the enemy had laid out.
"From that point on we understood that what we had entered was a fortress where both escape and invasion would be extremely difficult, easy to defend and hard to attack."
And then...
"We ran into the remnants of Evilus."
Finn told them that the first thing they had encountered was an old enemy from the past.
Evilus, those terrorists who had already been wiped out with only remnants left, had all turned up in a swarm this time, and they weren't like the fanatics Leo and Ais had met in the Pantry on Floor 24, the sort who could only take an opponent down with them. These were the small number of elites who had survived after the Dark Age ended five years ago, and among them were even leader-class figures and senior executives who had crossed swords with Finn and the others directly.
They had once lost their Status because the patron deities they served were sent back, and could only hide in the dark day after day, until they met the last surviving Evil God and took back their power by joining that deity's Familia.
Of course, having been no match for Finn and the others five years ago, they were even less likely to be a match now.
After all, compared to five years ago, Finn and the others had without question grown a great deal stronger, unlike those remnants of Evilus, whose highest-leveled were no more than Lv.5.
Five years ago, Ais and the other Familia executives hadn't even been Lv.5, and now they were all Lv.6 across the board, while Finn and Gareth were only a step away from Lv.7. Add to that the growth of the Familia's members, with even Raul, who had joined only seven or eight years ago, now at Lv.4, and how were remnants of Evilus with at most Lv.5 supposed to contend with Loki Familia as it was now?
And yet, facing this crowd of Evilus remnants, Finn and the others still ended up in danger.
"First the orichalcum door was lowered and the path was sealed off. We had nowhere to retreat and were forced to fight, but the battlefield had square vertical shafts opening all over it, bottomless pits below. Those pitfalls opening at random meant we had to watch our footing at every moment, which restricted us considerably."
"Then those brightly colored monsters, the Violas above all, came in enormous numbers, all of them crowded into a single battlefield to swarm us, and there were even new species we hadn't encountered before."
"And last, the most lethal thing of all..."
Finn spoke of the thing they had run into in the calm tone of a bystander, as though he weren't recounting what had happened to him.
Curses.
Curses referred to another kind of supernatural power distinct from Magic.
As the name said, it was power used to curse a target.
The user had to pay a certain price first, such as a permanent reduction of some part of their own Status, but in exchange it could produce effects Magic could not, effects that even a Development Ability like Abnormal Resistance couldn't resist, and that could only be defended against or dispelled by limited means.
In the original work, Ais had once run into a curse with a "magic sealing" effect. This sort of curse could seal the magic of the one afflicted, leaving Ais unable to invoke Ariel while the curse was in effect.
That curse was the absolute bane of a Mage. If the one afflicted were a pure Mage like Riveria or Lefiya, or a figure like Leo whose magic capability was beyond specification, the impact would be nothing short of fatal.
What Finn and the others had run into in the man-made labyrinth Knossos was even more fatal than that. It was a curse with an "incurable" effect. Once someone afflicted by it was wounded, the wound couldn't be treated with healing magic or healing potions, and they could only watch themselves bleed to death. An extremely vicious curse.
And of all things, those remnants of Evilus had gotten hold of a large batch of superior equipment infused with this curse, the so-called cursed weapons, arms and armor made by hand by curse casters possessing the Mystery Development Ability and shunned by people, and because their nature was so peculiar they counted as exceedingly rare even among superior equipment, yet the remnants of Evilus were using them freely.
"Thanks to that, people in the party gradually took wounds from the cursed weapons, caught the incurable curse, lost too much blood, and ended up unable to fight."
"We first-class adventurers barely held on, but then the enemy's executives used curses that could weaken our strength, so the longer we fought the more restricted our movements became and the weaker our strength grew."
"And the worst of it was that in that situation those Creatures showed up too."
At those words, Ais, sitting beside Leo, lowered her eyes.
Leo knew then that the Creature Finn had mentioned was without question Revis.
"...She's gotten strong."
Seeing Leo look over, Ais clenched her fist and said it with complicated feelings.
"Stronger than I am now."
Leo narrowed his eyes.
He knew Revis would get stronger.
These Creatures were fusions of human and monster, and possessing a monster's properties, they naturally also possessed a monster's ability: devouring magic stones.
By devouring magic stones, a monster becomes a more powerful individual, an enhanced species.
It was the same for Creatures. They could grow stronger by devouring magic stones.
Last time, on Floor 24, Revis had been suppressed one-sidedly by Ais, which had unquestionably dealt a huge blow to her pride.
After going back, she was certain to find every possible way to grow stronger, to devour as many magic stones as she could regardless of the cost, making herself stronger and stronger so she could take revenge the next time she faced Ais. Leo had anticipated this long ago.
In the original work, Revis also devoured the magic stone of that white-haired man from Floor 24, and by the time she appeared again in the man-made labyrinth Knossos, she already had the power to take Finn down in a few moves and leave Ais with no way to fight back.
Revis at that point was already recognized as having strength equivalent to Lv.7.
Now Revis hadn't managed to devour the white-haired man's magic stone, since Leo had destroyed it back in the Pantry on Floor 24, so she probably didn't have the strength she had in the original work, and yet it seemed she was still stronger than Ais was now.
That only meant one thing.
Revis's latent capability had very likely reached Lv.7 as well.
Otherwise Ais, who held a cheat-tier magic like Ariel, couldn't possibly say the other side was stronger than she was.
So after Revis appeared, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse, and Loki Familia fell into a true crisis.
"At the last moment it was Leo's star beasts that stepped in and helped us break out of it."
At that, everyone present looked at Leo.
Meeting their gazes, Leo said one thing, quite calmly.
"So the Star of the Virgin worked?"
Clearly Leo had anticipated something again.
Which stood to reason.
Whether it was the enemy using curses or Revis growing stronger, along with the arrangements and capabilities of the Evilus remnants, Leo knew all of it from the original work.
That was exactly why he had specifically summoned the Star of the Virgin and sent this light-attribute star beast along with them.
"The Star of the Virgin's power really was key."
Finn said it with a smile.
"She purified the curses for us."
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This side story is now COMPLETE at 191 chapters.
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