Aphrodite was frightened to tears.
"How can there be such a wicked god?!"
"That's absolutely terrible!"
"No, no — this is not a story fit for children!!"
Your stories aren't exactly fit for children either, you know.
In the end.
After the two of them talked it over at length, they settled on writing a love story about Zhu Bajie and the Spider Demoness.
How on earth did we end up here.
Well — because Isagi genuinely had no idea what the Goddess of Beauty actually wanted.
So, beneath the expectant gaze of that impossibly lovely face, Isagi recounted every story he knew that had anything to do with "love" — and in the end, this was the one Aphrodite chose.
Because it was the least heartbreaking of everything he had told her.
"How co none of Isagi's stories have a happy ending?"
"Hmm."
Now that she ntioned it — yeah, that was true.
Not that it had anything to do with him personally.
The idle chatter eventually ca to an end, and sohow, inexplicably, Isagi found himself cast by the Goddess of Beauty as the male lead of the whole production.
Wait — how did I suddenly beco Zhu Bajie?!
Never mind that woman.
What actually worried Isagi was what the young goddess had muttered on her way out — sothing about wanting to give the script a little "localization" before she was done with it.
As in, he really had reminded her of sothing.
He could already feel it — whatever she touched, the script was going to beco an absolute disaster.
And on the other side of things.
No sooner had Isagi seen that foolish goddess off than another goddess ca looking for him — one he hadn't expected at all.
It was Artemis.
The Moon Goddess put forward an extraordinarily bold proposal.
Naly —
"I heard that you're returning to the Dungeon of a thousand years ago next ti?"
"Yeah."
"I want to co with you."
"...?"
——
In the city, gods are forbidden from entering the Dungeon.
Not that Ouranos even needed to make such a rule — most gods with any sense at all would never want to set foot inside.
It was simple enough.
Up on the surface, even in the worst possible circumstances, death — for whatever reason — simply ant a return to Heaven.
But inside the Dungeon, any accident ant being swallowed completely. Gone. Forever.
And beyond that.
The Dungeon despised the gods with a profound and absolute hatred. The mont it sensed the presence of divine power, it would unleash horrifying black monsters specifically designed to target them — creatures immune to divine power, existing for the sole purpose of killing gods.
Of course, a sufficiently powerful god could suppress their own divine power and deceive the Dungeon — it wasn't an impossible feat.
But why would Artemis want to take that risk and follow him into the ancient Dungeon?
The answer, naturally, was —
She, too, wanted to witness a [Hero] with her own eyes.
The Moon Goddess was fiercely self-reliant — or perhaps one might say she had a singular force of character. She had never feared danger, and she would never ask anyone to protect her.
"Don't worry. I won't be a burden to any of you."
Artemis's expression was utterly resolute — the kind of stubbornness that no words could move.
Faced with that.
Isagi found there was nothing he could really say — and so, a few days later —
The day when enough divine power had accumulated again arrived on another cool autumn evening.
In the courtyard of the Garden of Stars.
This ti, the group making the journey through ti was considerably larger than before.
In addition to the original party mbers — Lefiya, Ryuu-senpai, Miss Heith, Tiona, and Ais — there were now Saika and Haruhi, along with Riveria, and lastly, Artemis.
What had once been a party of six had now beco ten — eleven, counting the little jellyfish.
Everyone fell in behind Isagi.
They waited as the boy's fingertips once again conjured those pure white dancing butterflies of light, a profoundly sacred aura rippling outward — enough to make one feel, for a fleeting mont, as though they had slipped into a dream.
And then, in that single instant.
A flash of disorientation.
Darkness swallowed everything — and when everyone ca back to their senses, they had already arrived in a forest of crystals.
Brilliant light rained down from above.
This was the place where they had parted ways with the Elf and the Dwarf last ti — Airon and Mam.
"This is Rivira, isn't it?"
Both Ryuu and Lefiya said as much.
The place looked very much like the Under Resort, though visibly far more vast.
Across the rolling hills, the trees grew in breathtaking abundance — thick enough that they seed to blot out the sky — and rising among them, crystal columns of all sizes let off a dazzling, glittering light.
It did indeed resemble Rivira.
Only —
When Ais took to the sky to get a wider view and serve as their scout, guiding the group forward —
It didn't take long for Isagi and the girls to notice sothing was wrong.
Pushing through a vast stretch of forest, the trees eventually thinned and fell away, opening onto a sudden, sweeping view — a flat, gently sloping expanse that descended without end.
And upon it.
Several tall stone fortresses stood, roughly four or five ters high — not exactly imposing in scale, but built with an almost abnormal solidity.
Their surfaces were slathered in the blood and flesh of monsters. Vast carpets of monster corpses lay strewn across the green grass, and with the crystal light falling down over it all, the scene took on a strange, incomprehensible quality that made the stomach turn.
Among them.
Were also the bodies of many adventurers — no, they should be called [Heroes] and [Soldiers] here.
This was a battlefield.
And not one of a day or two, nor of one or two battles — but a long, grinding war of attrition, sustained across countless years.
Monster corpses and human corpses piled together.
So were still in the process of rotting. Others had long since beco dry bones. And scattered below, impossible to count, were innurable tiny magic stones.
Saika's eyes lit up with undisguised hunger.
Isagi didn't bother stopping her — he simply let her loose. And so the little jellyfish set about the battlefield like she was scraping the ground clean, snatching magic stones left and right and cramming them into her mouth with gleeful abandon, looking for all the world like the happiest little jellyfish in existence.
This was probably what Airon and Mam had called "the front line."
Banners still flew atop the fortresses.
The farther forward they went, the more ruined the fortresses beca, and the more deeply the corpses of monsters and people intertwined.
A scene like this.
Even a goddess like Artemis felt sothing like horror creeping in.
From Heaven, the gods had no way of seeing what actually happened inside the Dungeon — and no ti to keep constant watch on the affairs of the mortal world below.
So most gods.
Knew only the broad strokes — that the people of the lower world, led by [Heroes], had pushed back the monsters rampaging across the land, gathered in Orario, raised enormous walls around the great pit, and slowly built the foundations of a city — "containing" the Dungeon.
No one had imagined that what lay within was this brutal.
Now, the seemingly endless slope stretched downward in eerie stillness.
No living person.
No living monster.
Everything seed frozen — and indeed, all along their journey here, Isagi and the others had not encountered a single new monster.
Did this an.
The [Black Dragon]'s hatching was most likely not yet complete?
Counting the ti — several months had already passed since they last ca here.
What the situation was right now, they still didn't know.
And there was only one option before them: while the twenty-four hours hadn't yet run out, press on downward and see if they could find anyone still alive.
Airon and Mam, especially.
With nothing else to do but move forward, they pressed on.
The slope seed to have no end — or perhaps it simply repeated itself — and the ruined stone forts around them grew ever more nurous, like broken giants standing atop mountains of monster dead.
Until.
At the very front.
Isagi saw a banner that was still flying.
"Goddess Fianna?"
A Pallum knight clad in golden armor — even in death — still stood upright, sword raised high, holding the banner aloft.
Around her, the ground was covered in the bodies of Pallum knights.
The crest of the Fianna Order of Knights on the banner, long since soaked through with blood, blazed with a startling, painful vividness.
The Pallum of the modern age no longer worshipped this goddess — one who had lived as a [Hero] in ancient tis and gradually ascended to divinity — but every Pallum who set their heart on becoming a [Hero] took Fianna as their model.
Ais and Riveria alike had heard Finn speak of her more than once.
And so had Ryuu.
Even the endlessly cunning Lyra — the mont Goddess Fianna's na ca up, her eyes would fill with nothing but longing and reverence.
And it was clear that even now, this [Hero] still served as the spiritual pillar of the Pallum people, standing at the very front of the battle line.
"Isagi — should we take the banner down?"
Artemis spoke up without warning, leaving everyone slightly at a loss.
But at the sa ti.
Isagi felt it too.
Upon this banner, sothing lingered — a force that could not quite be nad or described —
____
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