Isagi's next objective was to conquer the final boss of the lower levels, the [Empress].
Judging from his several earlier attempts, Isagi felt he and his companions would all have to reach Lv.8 before that was realistic.
Until then, however, they could go explore the deep levels.
After all, the ordinary Monsters down there sat at around Lv.6, and the usual bosses were Lv.7 to Lv.8 — still within what the group could handle.
But that was a matter for the next adventure.
Isagi was working through his plans that afternoon when a knock rattled the door outside — thump, thump, thump.
Autumn stayed dim and cool.
The wind blew softly, streaming past the window in silence.
In a season like this, living outside the city really did lift the spirits more than staying inside Orario. He couldn't say why.
This was, of course, Goddess Demeter's farmstead beyond the walls, and with the harvest season in full swing, everyone came out to help whenever they had a day free.
Isagi had slept in today.
By the time he woke in the afternoon, the girls and goddesses of the household had all gone out, leaving him alone in the house.
He had just finished a bath and was eating a late lunch when Miss Heith turned up at the door.
"You only just got out of bed?!"
"What's wrong?"
"This morning, Ottar and Leon had a fight!!"
"Huh?"
"Lv.8 adventurers really are terrifying. The goddess was very pleased — she even said Ottar still has a whole lot of strength he hasn't brought out at all. You know, for an adventurer, going from Lv.7 to Lv.8 is actually a really important... um... what do you call it? A wall? Anyway, it's like the gap between Lv.4 and Lv.5, except even bigger than that—"
Chatter, chatter, chatter.
Miss Heith buzzed on in her noisy way, exactly like a little bee darting back and forth in front of his eyes.
It took Isagi quite a while to piece together what had happened that morning while he was asleep.
With the Guild's excavation of the Artificial Labyrinth and its follow-up construction plans for the [Elevator], they naturally needed more of the hardest metal there was, Orichalcum. So they had summoned the Academic District's representative — the adventurer once ranked alongside Ottar as the strongest, the [Knight of Knights], Leon — to discuss the matter.
And he had seized the opportunity.
This very morning, Leon had issued a challenge to Ottar, who was now Lv.8.
"Leon challenged Ottar? He made the first move?"
"Mm!"
Strange.
Isagi wasn't exactly unfamiliar with Leon. The man was Lefiya's teacher, so he often heard the Elf girl talk about him, and once he'd grown closer to Ottar and the rest of Freya Familia, he occasionally heard their assessments of him too — a fair number of which had reached him as gossip from Miss Heith.
Leon was called an adventurer, but in practice he spent most of his time teaching students in the [School District] and dealing with the [Visiting Dragon] problem.
He almost never adventured in the Dungeon.
In a certain sense, he wasn't really an "adventurer" at all.
Ottar had said more than once that he — Leon — had already forfeited any claim to being one of the strong, because he simply did not pursue greater strength.
The [Greatest of Knights] intended to raise new [Hero]es. Isagi had heard as much from the goddesses.
It was hardly a secret; the fact that he was in the [School District] at all said most of it.
Heith had said the same thing.
Back when the two of them had both been Lv.7 adventurers, the strongest in the world, Ottar had never once regarded Leon as a rival.
Which was why Isagi found this so surprising.
By rights, now that Ottar had climbed to Lv.8, he'd be even less likely to treat Leon as an opponent — the Goddess of Beauty's champion was not the sort who took pleasure in bullying the weak — so how had the two of them ended up fighting?
Isagi hadn't expected it at all.
Leon had been the one to issue the challenge.
Why?
Had something finally clicked for him? Did he want to grow stronger after all?
Or maybe he simply didn't believe Ottar had truly reached Lv.8.
Or maybe...
"Who knows? Either way, watching it was pretty fun."
Leon had fought with everything he had.
"He pulled out all Thirteen Swords, every last one! Man, it was a frightening sight! But to Ottar it seemed like it barely counted as anything, and after the fight Ottar himself looked a little puzzled, like he didn't quite understand why he'd gotten that strong—"
Heith waved her arms about, trying to paint the scene for him, but what Isagi was thinking about was something else.
Was the gap between a Lv.8 and a Lv.7 adventurer really that enormous?
Now that he considered it properly.
When he'd crossed blades with Ottar before, he had been Lv.6 and Ottar Lv.7. There had been a gap between them, but nothing so absurd.
And yet it also made sense.
Because adventurer levels came with their own thresholds.
Lv.1 to Lv.2, and Lv.4 to Lv.5 — on paper, a single level each time, and yet each was a ridiculous qualitative leap.
On top of that, there was what Heith had said.
Goddess Freya was certain that Ottar hadn't even fully drawn out the strength of Lv.8.
Isagi was obviously thinking of himself, and of Lefiya and Ryuu and the others. Lv.8 was the next step for all of them, after all.
Right now there was no one to use as a reference. They would have to would have to find their own way through trial and error.
Or perhaps—
A single person came to Isagi's mind.
Alfia.
As the genius who had once belonged to Hera Familia, even though she herself was a Lv.7 adventurer, she would certainly know Lv.8 — even Lv.9 — adventurers well.
Perhaps he could get some "words of experience" out of her.
Come to think of it, a long stretch of time had passed since she left the city, and there was no telling when she'd be back. She had said she would return, though.
And precisely as Isagi was thinking it, the farmstead's door was knocked on again.
It was Miss Asfi, delivering a letter to him. It was from Alfia — and strangest of all, it asked him to meet her in the City of Castings. What on earth was going on—
—
In the endless black desert stretching before her, virtually nothing existed.
[Desert of Death].
Just like the barren waste beyond the [Dragon Valley], it was a place where no life remained.
Flowers, grass, animals, insects, birds...
Nothing at all.
Absolute silence hung over it day and night, together with the thin purple mist in the air and the black haze that blotted out the sky.
In the past, Alfia could never have come here.
The Desert of Death, reduced utterly to wasteland by Behemoth's death, still carried in its air the incurable toxins that had filled the Overlord of the Land's body.
Even a slight exposure would leave an ordinary person with lifelong respiratory illness that no medicine could cure.
All the more so for someone like Alfia, whose body had always been frail — someone who, it could fairly be said, had spent every day merely clinging to life.
Fortunately, her new life had granted her a perfectly healthy body.
And so, as a Lv.7 adventurer, so long as she didn't press deep into the desert's heart, to the place where Behemoth had died, she would be fine.
She left the greatsword in her hands — Zard's greatsword — standing there among the sands.
That counted as fulfilling an old friend's dying wish.
Alfia gazed into the distance for a while, as if searching for the spot where Behemoth had stood when they subjugated it, but in the end she couldn't find it.
The Desert of Death was spreading. Slowly, yes, but it was eating away at the surrounding land bit by bit.
The same as the [Dragon Valley].
An "isolation belt" hundreds of kilometers wide had already formed along its edge, and every nation and city that had once stood there had relocated.
The cause was unknown. The solution was unknown. And in any case, now was hardly the time to be discussing it.
There were still so many troublesome things in this world left to settle.
She sighed at the thought.
On her way here, Alfia had gone to visit that old man, and when he learned that a new [Hero] had appeared in the city, the old god had worn a look of genuine relief. He'd even murmured to himself that the duty of his and Hera's era was finished, and that the world to come belonged to the young.
Then let her go and bear witness to it as well.
And at the same time—
"I'll help you out. I'll go take a look at the Dragon Valley, and see just what kind of thing that Black Dragon really is."
She patted the body of the great black sword gently.
As though she had just bidden a friend her final farewell, Alfia walked away without looking back. She intended to head straight back to the city — and perhaps, before the subjugation of the Black Dragon, she might even manage to level up. Stranger things had happened.
Carrying that thought with her, the woman set off at an unhurried pace. She had walked for who knew how long, and was nearly out of the Desert of Death, coming up on its edge, when—
She saw dust rising in the distance beneath the black canopy of the sky.
Several enormous carriages of steel. Except the horses drawing them weren't living creatures at all, but constructs of some kind — Alchemy Puppets.
Alfia felt no surprise at the sight. As a mage, she had naturally had dealings with the Magic Kingdom, and she knew perfectly well that in the application of magic power, generation after generation of their artisans had produced any number of marvelous creations — no less impressive than the works of those with the [Mystery] Development Ability.
Alchemy Puppets of every sort were only one example.
A strange radiance shimmered above those steel carriages: Defensive Magic, spread wide. And mounted on them were many thick, black cannon barrels — presumably contraptions for firing bombardment magic.
Alfia didn't think much of them.
Much the way most mages tended to turn up their noses at "Magic Swords."
She was merely curious.
Why had the artisans of the Magic Kingdom come all the way out here?
Then she watched the steel carriages halt at the edge of the Desert of Death, and figures climb down from them — marching in neat step, dressed in immaculate crimson uniforms, gas masks strapped over their faces.
Soldiers.
One look at them and it was obvious: well-drilled soldiers.
They carried complicated instruments and began searching for something around the parked carriages. Alfia watched for a while and realized they were collecting the Magic Stones scattered through the sands.
No life existed in the Desert of Death.
And yet.
It held what could only be called an ocean of "Monster remains."
By what principle, no one had the faintest idea. But ever since Behemoth was subjugated and died here, poisoning this land, the Monsters across the continent — the ones that had escaped the Dungeon back in the ancient age — would come to this desert to wait for the end whenever death drew near, and leave their Magic Stones behind in the sand.
As if they regarded it as their own graveyard.
Many animals had similar customs, and adventurers and the Guild guessed the reason was probably that Behemoth was the [Overlord of the Land].
Just as the Black Dragon could command every dragon-kind Monster.
Behemoth, likewise, could command the "Monsters of the land" — though it had never used any such power during the subjugation. Not that it would have mattered much if it had. Things were not as they'd been a thousand years ago.
The Monsters on the surface now were, for the most part, feeble things; an ordinary second-tier adventurer was enough to deal with them. And the force that subjugated Behemoth back then had been the elite of the [City's Strongest] Familia — Zeus Familia — where even a plain Lv.5 adventurer could serve only as second-line logistical support.
For that reason, the Guild had never taken the matter seriously. It cared about it less, even, than the Academic District and Poseidon Familia cared about the "Dragon Palace" that Leviathan's corpse had become.
So what sort of investigation were these people here to carry out?
Alfia, who had no interest in the Magic Kingdom — or in any nation outside the city, for that matter — frowned faintly.
She held certain prejudices against the rulers of those countries.
Once, long ago.
After Hera Familia subjugated Leviathan, the nobles of the nation that had lived off Leviathan's presence had actually come to Hera Familia to haggle, demanding compensation.
They had been nothing so pitiable back when they leaned on the might of the [Overlord of the Sea] to swallow up smaller nations, forcing them into submission, extracting tribute — even human sacrifices, delivered every month of every year.
Goddess Hera had humiliated the lot of them thoroughly on the spot, and Alfia along with her had come away disgusted by these so-called rulers.
What they pleaded for had never been the welfare of ordinary people, only their own authority.
Far off, the soldiers of that "Magic Kingdom" seemed to notice the woman standing there as well.
They froze for an instant, then, warily and with a trace of panic, looked away and went back to their work.
Anyone capable of walking through the Desert of Death without a scrap of protective gear had to be a high-tier adventurer.
And high-tier adventurers came mostly from the city, so presumably they had no intention of causing trouble.
Neither did Alfia.
Still, something like a woman's intuition stirred in her.
She watched them gather Magic Stones from the area in short order, climb back into their steel carriages, and press on deeper into the Desert of Death.
After a moment's thought, Alfia crouched down as well, and there among the ashen-black, faintly purple-tinged poisonous grit beneath her feet, she dug out a handful of Magic Stones — tiny, charred, dull and lusterless.
Wretched quality.
Over a thousand years of breeding outside the Dungeon, the Magic Stones inside Monsters had grown steadily smaller and far less pure. In some creatures the stone had shrunk until the naked eye couldn't detect it at all — practically "nonexistent."
But!.
With a mage's intuition.
Alfia distinctly sensed the presence of something inside these Magic Stones that looked no different from garbage.
Something exceedingly small was contained within them. Of that she was certain.
The woman's brow furrowed slightly.
Then she went on searching the sands at her feet for the Magic Stones buried there.
____
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